Beginning of week 1

Well, I’ve been here 3 days and this trip is already crazy. The first day, we went to the bus depot and there were so many people I was a bit anxious. Then we got on a bus by ourselves (my friend Janelle, and I – she is from AIESEC San Francisco), for a ride which was supposed to be 3 hours and ended up being at least 4. Then, our NGO contact, Foster, was not there to pick us up. Taxi drivers and many men in general here are very aggressive (not physically), and when our bus stopped, they crowded the door and tried to take our bags and get us in their cabs. Luckily, we had the BEST BUS DRIVER EVER, and he let us stay for an hour in his air conditioned bus and looked out for us until Foster finally arrived. His name was Nanabopo, but he said to just call him Nana. And Nana means grandma in Italian, so I figured this was a good sign.

That evening we stayed at Foster’s home in his village (New Abrim)  and had the best Ramen-style dish EVER. I forget the name. But it was super cool cause this woman had a table outside her house with a gas cooker and supplies and made it for us there on the street. We met his lovely wife and his baby girl Chris-Love (people here have very original names).  (see below)

Despite the EXHAUSTING humidity, I slept very well until 4am when someone was blasting music and then 5am on, when the roosters would not shut the heck up. I HATE ROOSTERS.  The next morning I had this porridge cooked in a giant black cauldron by a woman on the street . Street food here is pretty legit. It was AMAZING. 

Obviously she used her witchcraft on her giant black cauldron to make porridge actually taste good! …Just kidding. 

Aside from those dishes, I'm practically starved. I realized I brought a pasta thing from home that you don’t have to heat, so I ate that one day when I was dizzy from hunger. I can’t cook any food I brought if there’s no power. It’s a bit frustrating, because I was scared that I would have problems with food and it seems like I do already.

 The house:

 Outhouse:

 The toilet, sans the usual bugs.

Our house is…I don’t know what to say about it really. 4 girls (myself, Janelle, Winnie from Hong Kong and Joyce from Hong Kong) share a room. Lan (from Vietnam/Singapore) shares a room with Deborah (from Ghana, works for the NGO) and the two boys, Kazou (from Japan) and David (from Ghana) share the other room. Deborah is leaving soon, and we are getting two more girls from the UK (I think...maybe not now).The power is unreliable, and as I type, we don’t have power. It went out this morning around 8:30am, and it is now 4:15pm. There is no A/C, though when the power is on we have a fan for our room. Imagine trying to sleep in 90 degree heat with 75% humidity.  In addition, there is no running water. Our toilet is an outhouse thing, and to use it I have to shove toilet paper up my nostrils because the smell is so horrendous. We shower using a bucket and the water is FREEZING, but sometimes it’s nice because it’s SO HOT HERE. The humidity is not treating me well, and I am having a bit of a hard time adjusting. I feel bad because it makes me complain and I probably sound rude. =/ Anyway, Kazou is going to Accra (the capitol) this weekend to see if he can buy Janelle and me a modem, so that I’ll be able to post this to the blog!

The toilet, we have learned, is really only available for use during certain hours. "But why?" you ask? Roaches and flys and spiders, OH MY! So, we can use the toilet from about 4am-7am, then from around 4pm to 630pm. If you have to pee in-between those times, you better be damn crafty to figure out what else to do. I usually just try to shower when I have to pee so I can just go in there and wash it away. Haha.

The economy here is quite curious. Everything is so cheap, even gas, and rides on the bus and Trotros (like a small bus/van with no A/C…they are not very enjoyable but we take them somewhere every day) are so cheap I don’t even know how the people afford gas or make money off of it. For example, that bus ride which was 4 hours on an air-conditioned bus was 9 Cedis (that’s the money here)…that’s about $4.50. For FOUR HOURS! The Trotros, even for 1 hour or so, only cost 2 Cedis, which is like $1. We bought 90 of these square bags of water (water generally comes in little bags here, probably 4x6x2”) for $1. ONE DOLLAR. Crazy. And a truck drove by and delivered them, so that was cool.

About my work…I start tomorrow at a junior high near our house (in Ofoase). It’s about a 20-30 minute walk, sometimes in the HOT HUMID sun, so it’s not easy. However, it is the closest school to our house so I got a good deal there. Janelle works in the school next to me and the other girls work a bit further away but they are in schools adjacent to each other as well. I will be teaching English and ICT, which is like technology. However, the school only has one computer, so I will be bringing the one my mom lent me, and giving it to them at the end. They definitely need it. I wish I had space to bring fun stuff for the kids but I didn’t. 

All in all, it’s really neat here. We are going to travel on the weekends, hopefully to Kumasi, Cape Coast and Accra, and then to a waterfall somewhere. Also, our last week we might be able to go to the very northwest of Ghana and go on a safari type thing. It’s 12 hours by bus…which probably means 13-15, so we shall see. It’s also like a 5-day trip. But hey, I WANT TO SEE ELEPHANTS!

Oh, one more cool thing. So chickens, stupid roosters, goats and sheep run amok here. I asked how people know whose is whose, and Foster said every night, the chickens and other animals RETURN to their homes where the owners are. Crazy!