Welcome to Ghana!

I arrived in Ghana on October 3, 2010 with limited knowledge of my purpose.  Thus far my experience in Ghana can best be described as a puzzle.  I am gradually finding pieces, but they don’t yet fit together.  Therefore, that is how I will share my adventure with you, in pieces.      

Language Barrier

True or false?  The official language of Ghana is English.  According to all known sources, the answer is TRUE, but in real life the answer is FALSE.  The people in my region speak Ewe, which I am attempting to learn.  Older kids and younger adults usually know enough English to say a few things.  The most popular phrases seem to be, “You are welcome,” as an introduction, “Good Morning,” in the evening and “Will you marry me?” all day long.  Even when they try to speak English to me I usually only understand about one in ten words.  I can’t even read English here.  Goefe is the name of my village but it is pronounced nothing like it is spelled.  If I were to spell it how it sounds it would be Guaype.  I don’t get it. 

Weather

I don’t really understand the weather here.  All I know is that it is hot.  In order to accurately describe my sweatage I would have coined the following terms: swack= sweaty back, boodre= boob drench and button pool= belly button sweat.  It is supposed to be the dry season now, but I have never seen rain like this before.  I got hit with a golf ball sized drop the other day that actually left a bruise on my knee.  No joke.  I can’t imagine the rainy season if this is the dry season.       

Caught in My Undercrackers

I live in a house with several rooms rented to different families.  My room has a window with colored glass panels that should but don’t open and a screen with holes in it.  Therefore, I can’t see out and the wind can’t pass in.  My room is literally a sauna and I rarely wear clothes in there for this reason.  The family that lives next to me is constantly making a ruckus outside my window.  The grandmother has crazy eyes, constantly sings/ mumbles, likes to bang her cane against my window and usually isn’t wearing clothes.  Little did I know that somehow from the outside you can see straight into my room.  Yep, I am pretty sure the entire village has seen me naked now!

Just Do It

The toilet and the shower were two of my greatest fears about living in a village and both have lived up to their infamous reputation.  The bathroom is by far the worst as it is simply composed of a wooden stall placed atop a cement platform with a hole in the floor.  I once made the mistake of going at night, but believe me it won’t happen again.  It is dark and creepy and the bugs swarm about your headlamp.  Ah, no thanks.  I will wait until the morning.  The bathing situation also has a learning curve.  I am not sure what I expected, but a bucket of water in a stall wasn’t exactly what I had imagined.  I learned quickly the order in which to wash different parts of your body.  For example, wash your face before feet.  I further enhanced my bathing experience with the purchased a small bucket to aid in the rinse phase.  I am getting better.  The goal is to one day actually get all the soap off before running out of water!

Carb Loading

Luckily, I haven’t been sick at all yet (knock on wood).  The food is very different, but they gradually introduce me to the local dishes.  Every morning I eat bread and butter for breakfast with tea or milo.  Milo is similar to hot chocolate.  Lunch and dinner are less predictable, but common trends include, few vegetables, few fruits, mounds of carbohydrates and a bag of water.  Christine fixes all my food and she has only just begun to let me watch her cook.  On Monday I got to watch Christine make banku, a local carb slime, in her smoke hut.  Maybe in a few weeks she will let me stir some boiling water. 

Piranhas and Spider Monkeys

To a child in Ghana, a Yavoo (“white person”) sighting is like seeing Santa Claus.  They yell and sing and dance for me with outreached hands expecting gifts.  I love kids don’t get me wrong.  I admire their curiosity, energy and innocence.  But, sometimes the shire number of children and their expectations are overwhelming.  On my first day I counted 30 kids on my porch.  They love the balloons, crayons and jump rope that I brought so much that they pounce on them when I bring them out.  They will dive, hit, scratch, bite, whatever it takes, to get what they want. 

I have managed to grow accustom to this type of play but, one day they caught me on the porch with some of my electronics.  That was the beginning of the end.  My iPod is now stuck on a playlist of two songs.  My camera is permanently on panoramic view and they erased all the contacts from my cell phone.  This was all within 5 minutes.    

Their desire for toys is surpassed only by their longing for attention.  For example, there is this one little boy at the orphanage that will literally fly at me from across the room to latch on to me.  He can scale his way into my arms in a blink of an eye.  They want to hold my hand, sit in my lap, touch my face and oddly put their hands down my shirt.  I wake up in the morning and go to bed at night with children sitting outside my door.

Just a Dumb Yavoo

I wouldn’t survive her without my jovial caretaker, Christine.  She shows me around and makes sure I have food and water.  She doesn’t really think I can do any task alone.  For example, I wanted to do my laundry on Wednesday.  She was going to do it for me, but I told her I wanted to learn.  While she thought I wasn’t watching she tried to sneak my clothes out of my room.  I caught her so she had to teach me.  She showed me three times how to do it then left me to work.  After two hours of hand scrubbing my dirty clothes in a bucket with lots of soap, I proudly ask for her approval.  She smiled and said I had done a great job as she proceeded to wash them over again.  Talk about a mixed message.

Lions and Tigers and Bears Oh My

When you think of Africa you think of predators lurking in a grassland plain while elephants graze peacefully.  Well, thus far the huge resident spider in my room has been my most exotic sighting.  He is my arch nemesis staring at me all night just out of reach in the tip-top corner of my room.  Besides the spider there are goats, sheep, cats, dogs and chickens.  I saw a cow once and it looked like it hadn’t ever eaten.    

Trotro

Imagine passing over a dirt road with ruts the size on the Grand Canyon in a 16-passenger van packed with 27 other people. There’s a baby in your lap and a goat under your seat.  You stop every 5 seconds it seems to drop someone off, pick someone up, pick up the market goods that fell off the roof or just to chat with a passerby.  Lack of AC and DO for the BO both leave you gasping for air.  Yep, that is just another day on a trotro.  Each time I travel anywhere this is my mode of transportation.  It is amusing and culturally enlightening to say the least.

That is all for now.  Sorry this entry was so long.  I will try to post updates as often as possible.  Until then, I wish each of you the best of luck.