Kumasi!

Sarah here: my travels are winding down. I traveled from Wa to Kumasi today, and will be heading back to homestay on Sunday morning, back to language/teacher training on Monday morning! I spent the past week in Wa for an HIV education project, where we were tearing up, re-concreting, re-painting the town's bball court, and then supposedly having a one-day education session, and then a basketball tournament. BIG goals. We got the court torn up, and by we, I mean we Peace Corps volunteers (all 6 of us) worked for a few hours on a couple of days, and then we got prisoners from the local prison to come out and work. By last night, 3/4 of the court was re-concreted. That's IT. So the week was spent sitting around in Wa (AND making good food with my friend Melissa who will be an art teacher at the Wa School for the Deaf. So not necessarily a boring week, just unproductive, and I was getting tired of sitting around.





I got to connect with Jordan last weekend for a couple nights in Wa before he left on Sunday for Techiman for two weeks of technical training. He is having a FUN time! In Techiman, they got to stay at a monestary for four nights where they make delicious food and learned all about composting and tree planting (I'm a little jealous). Now he's in Bolgatanga (in the Upper East, near the Burkina Faso border - WHICH, we learned they opened back up for travel for volunteers, but the Visa price was jacked up from 20 cedis to 250 cedis! So looks like we won't be trying to visit Burkina unless they reduce that!), and Sunday, gets to go to the Paga Crocodile Pond, feed a chicken to a crocodile, and then sit on it's back (yeah, very jealous). He'll have a lot of cool things to teach me though when he's done, and I can help him with a lot when we're at site.





To answer some questions you have had:





I've heard of a couple of people having trouble posting comments. When I posted comments to a blog a friend of mine had on blogspot, I just had to choose who I was signed in as, usually used my google id, but if you don't have that, you should be able to use open id. I haven't heard of this problem before, so I apologize, but I don't know if I have the answer for you - feel free to shoot us a quick e-mail instead of a post if it's not working!





Language learning has been going okay - we've been traveling so much through areas of different language that we've been practicing many, so it's sometimes hard to keep them all straight when moving so much. But knowing the different greetings in the areas where you are visiting is very important, since greetings are very important here. For example, if you wanted to ask someone for help with directions and were to just go up and be like, "Where's the lori station?", they would probably not answer you, tell you they didn't know engligh, walk away - all because you asked for something before you even had the decency to greet them. So we like to learn the greetings! You can greet too! At our site, we greet good morning by saying "Bey dia" and answer with "Bey dia pinnaa" (both spelled phonetically), and to say thank you is "Bey lo li". I'll let you know how my language is REALLY going when we have to take our test the end of August... :)





How to we get our food? Open air markets mainly - just like farmers markets in the US, except that you can find a lot more than vegetables, including packaged spices, silverware, cloth, used shoes and clothing, raw meat of many different kinds, and soap for laundry. They also have small supermarkets, where you can buy packaged goods, in the larger cities. There are a couple small shops in our village that sell some packaged things too. But basically, you go get everything fresh from the market and come home and cook it! We will be cooking with a propane stove, hopefully not with a coal pot, because I don't like the smell of the coals.





Do you feel relatively safe here? Yes! Larger cities will have their share of crazies, but so will every other big city, anywhere in the world. We feel very safe in Wa, and as a female, I just make sure I'm walking with someone if it's near dark, and don't walk after dark. Our village is very safe - everyone assured us that there's no crime, and people are very respectful. I'd feel safe walking in the dark, expect that without electricity and no lights, I am a scaredy-cat and am afraid of the pitch black dark, so I only venture outside at night to use the latrine.





Funny story about our latrine. It's great, and I'm actually glad we have a latrine, because sometimes when volunteers have flush toilets, and then they don't work, you're left with a mess. I don't have to flush my latrine! But we also share it with some friends: cockroaches! I wish I had my camera when I'd get up in the middle of the night to pee. The instant I shine my headlight into the latrine, they all scatter for the cracks and crevasses - dark areas. And one of these dark areas is under the lid you sit on. I didn't realize this until the third night, when I accidentally bumped it, and a cockroach ran out, and I liften the lid up out of curiousity, and 6 more scuttled down into the bowels of the latrine! I don't need a cockroach crawling on my butt while trying to do my business at 2am! So from now on, I will be lifting the lid and scaring all of my newfound friends out of the vicinity :)





Another funny story while I'm thinking about it: I was walking with my friend Melissa from the main city center of Wa a couple of days ago back to her place, and we had stopped to talk to a tail0r to get their scraps of cloth, since Melissa is teaching me how to make a floor rug. I was adjusting my bag strap as I was walking away, eyes on the group, and literally walked into a sign that was a foot long right into my forehead....in front of like, 40 Ghanians all sitting in their shops! I heard a collective "Oooohhhh!" from all of them, and turned around and tried to play it off, while feeling pretty embarassed...had a nice lump there for the past few days. As my dad would say, that's the "Klutz" in me (his grandpa's last name :)





Bug nets: We have a mosquito net we sleep under. Basically it is just a giant net that hangs from its four corners, and drapes over your mattress/bed. If it's in a bed, you tuck it in between the mattress and bed frame when get in to go to bed, if it's a mattress lying on the floor, you just tuck the edges of the net underneath the mattress. A few bugs may get in as you transition, but whatcha gonna do. It feels very exotic to sleep under the net - like when you're a little kid and you make a fort under blankets draped over the ping pong table and other chairs/tables and feel so cool :)





Basically, people at our village are VERY nice and excited to see us. When I visited site the week after Jordan, I had a great time playing with almost every kid in the village at some point during the week. A couple afternoons I had like, 30 kids in our compound, and I taught them how to play Simon Says (failure, they didn't get it, since they don't speak enough English and I don't speak enough Sisaali, but they were still having fun imitating all the funny things I was doing!), and Hide and Seek - they LOVED this! We have a bunch of good hiding spots in the compound, but once you play for a half hour, you've found them all. But they would still just shriek with joy/surprise when found. And they got a kick out of me counting in Sisaali from 1-20, and then they would imitate my exact intonations when they would count :) Then they showed me the games they liked to play, and got me to try some fun dances, but they were way better so I let them dance :)





I also had all of the women at the bore hole laughing at me when I carred a jerrican (probably 5 gallons of water) on my head back to the house. They were joking with me about doing it, and I threw it right up there and walked (haltingly) back to my porch, where I needed someone to help me take it down :) But aside from that, no one ever let me pump my own water, or carry it back, someone did all of that for me - could get annoying not being able to do it ourselves, but then again, it is heavy... :)





Last story - my hands are getting tired :) The school had a teachers vs students soccer game on the last day of school (which the teachers won, but the students should have but one of their goals was called back, go figure that the teachers would rig the game :), and then afterwards, the teachers had a dinner. We had goat - goat that I had watched that afternoon cook over an open pit to be able to burn/shave the hair off, and then watch get cut into pieces. So they cook this goat meat in a stew all afternoon, and when we eat it that night, it is delicious - but meat is not the only thing that is in my bowl from the goat. They served basically everything in the goat. I had something in my bowl that looked like liver (sorry Dad, I know you like liver, but I couldn't bring myself to try it), something that looked like brains, and something that looked like intestines...yum! So I ate my two pieces of actual meat, and then when the teacher next to me asked if I was done, I said yes and played it off that I was full, and he dumped the contents of my bowl into his, and proceeded to eat the brain! Food does not go to waste in Ghana, glad someone could enjoy it, since I wasn't about to... :)





Thanks for the comments! You have all been so nice to offer to send packages! We appreciate it so much! Right now, I think we're set (more so because it will be a lot to carry back to site come September!), but also because we have a lot right now, but BELIEVE us, we will take you up on your offers soon! Spices are hard to find here, and they MAKE the meal. So we will continue to scope out what would be good care package items, and let you know :)





Love you all, can't believe it's been two months here already - we will be sworn in as real volunteers in less than a month! Crazy! THANKS for the support from everyone, it means the world - miss you!





Love Sarah and Jordan