8/17 – Registration, Art Gallery, and Aburi

Unless there’s something wrong that I don’t know about, which is entirely possible, I’m basically done with class registration. For now. Until I have to deal with figuring out which of the 10 or so courses I signed up for I’m actually going to take. Hopefully, when the timetables that were supposed to be up this week actually do come out, scheduling conflicts will do a lot of the decision making for me. Fridays are off limit by default. If I’m lucky, registration will be the most stressful event I have to deal with while I’m here. Particularly fun was a man at the Faculty of Science who refused to give me the form needed to register for science courses. It took two grad students arguing with him in Twi for me to get the stupid piece of paper (which I really could have just xeroxed from someone else if he hadn’t given it to me). I have a lot more respect for my parents’ generation now. The fact that any of you stayed in college through eight semesters of paper-based registration is incredible.

Still no roommate, but I do know that she’s friends with the roommate of another one of the Tufts students, who happens to live next door. The hostel is slowly filling up with people from other study abroad programs and African countries, and the campus is definitely looking more alive. Nothing about the registration process here is computerized, so all the residence halls on campus have lines of students waiting to register with the university and with their residence halls snaking through their courtyards and out the doors.

Moving outside the university…
Tuesday afternoon they took us to an art gallery in Teshie-Nungua, another neighborhood of Accra. There was some nice stuff there, and I’ll probably go back before we leave to buy stuff. I just got a kente-cloth bookmark this time around. Across from the art gallery was a place that sold custom made coffins. It’s a growing trend in Ghana, and possibly all of West Africa but I’m not sure, to be buried in a coffin that represents either the deceased’s favorite hobby or occupation. So a fisherman might be buried in a giant crab coffin, or a shoemaker in…you guessed it. Kind of morbid, but at the same time they seem to have a much different, and arguably, healthier view of death here then we do in Western culture. The spirit world and ancestors play a prominent role in everyday life, and ancestors are genuinely believed to have a direct influence on happenings in this world. Death certainly seems less threatening and final when you look at it that way. Either way, the personalized coffin thing is gaining popularity and its not uncommon here to see these, or the workshops where they’re produced, around.

Later on Tuesday, Vincent, one of the Ghanaian grad students who spent last year at Tufts as part of the exchange program took me and some of the other girls on our program out. We went to La beach, which has amazing sand and will be a nice respite from the heat once it actually gets here. There are rasta-hosted parties most nights there as well. After we went to this outdoor bar called Dreamers Joint, which is in East Legon, close to campus, and had really good, but insanely spicy food. It was definitely worth the ten or so minutes of suffering for food to have that kind of flavor. And for around 50 cents. Today was our third, and finally successful, attempt at a trip to the Aburi Botanical Gardens. There was less flower and more tree then I expected, but it was very cool nonetheless. A bunch of the lawn was covered with mimosa, which closes up when you touch it, and there were a lot of ants, some of them biting. One took a good couple of flicks to get off the sole of my foot. There was also a huge tree there which was really a parasite that had grown around and eventually choked another tree, and now stands in the other tree’s place. There are “holes” in its trunk where the branches of the tree it killed used to be. Its big enough for 4-5 people to climb in at once, and the inside is hollow all the way to the top, which was awesome. Also, the man who conducted our tour was a chief. He didn’t tell us flat out, but rather described how the enstoolment* process works, and then passed pictures out of the various stages of the process. He happened to be the one in the pictures.

*In Ghana, rather than having thrones or crowns as the sign of royalty, they use skins and stools. In the South, the chiefs sit on royal stools, and in the North chiefs sit on piles of animal skins. So a chief is enstooled or enskinned, rather than enthroned or crowned. Chieftancy is an important institution in Ghana, and almost all Ghanaians, even those who no longer live in their ancestral villages, are under and expected to demonstrate their allegiance to a chief. Class dismissed.

Anyways, we leave for the first of our three trips this semester to the Dagbe Center, which means I’ll finally get to do some drumming. And the center’s near a beach. Nice. Till next week…