Wedding Crashers :)

HELLO :)

It has been a while! I'm sorry for not posting last weekend... it was a pretty uneventful weekend. The only thing interesting thing I did was hang out with my Ghanaian friend Abigail who showed me how to make Jollof Rice! It was super complicated though so I'm going to have her write everything down before I go because I definitely don't remember everything!! It was really good! Still a little spicy but the taste was a lot better than the jollof I buy at the night market for example. It was really fun to hang out and cook with her! I forgot to take my camera to her room though so unfortunately I don't have any pictures from that. The rest of last weekend was just hanging out with people, taking a practice GRE online, nothing too crazy. No trips last weekend!

This weekend has been fun. Friday was a Muslim holiday so we didn't have any classes or anything going on. I finally had a Ghanaian show me how he washes his clothes and got some tips. I washed today and I feel a lot more confident in it! It is really exhausting though--I only washed a few of my clothes because it was too much piled up. Also on Friday Despicable Me was on TV! I was pretty excited!! It was just a nice, relaxing day around the hostel :) I hung out with Abigail again so that was fun, too!

Saturday was my adventure day! My Ghanaian friend Joshua invited me to a wedding at the church that he usually goes to when he's not on campus. As far as I know he didn't know the people getting married, but everyone at the church was welcome.Well we ended up getting pretty delayed because Joshua was waiting for someone and they were late and all that so by the time we actually got to the church the couple was already married!! They had already done the vows and the rings and all that stuff. We basically were just there for the sermon and the offertory and the ending. It was still really cool though! There was SO much dancing and singing!! It was so spirited and colorful! I loved it!

After the wedding we went to Joshua's parents' house because it was nearby. We had lunch there and it was soup that had some sort of meat in it. I thought it was fish but I kept telling myself it was chicken. My trick worked and I ate it all. Then later I asked Joshua what it actually was and he said goat!!!!! So I unknowingly ate goat soup! I'm so glad I didn't know that beforehand! Then after lunch we met up with the guy that he was supposed to meet earlier and we went to someone's house. He's going to be tutoring a boy in French and this was the NICEST house I have seen in Ghana. It was so so beautiful! I wanted to take pictures but I figured that'd be weird. The mom was really nice and she gave me pretty tasty ice cream! They even had a pet dog!! It was the second pet dog I've seen in Ghana. The boy was surprised when I went to pet it instead of running away. He asked me... wait, you're not afraid of it??? It was kind of funny.

Well  then after that we left and came back to campus and that was about all of the excitement of my day. It was really cool to be able to see the wedding, even if we did crash it and miss the exciting part. But still, I enjoyed it.  And then it was great to be able to see people's homes. I haven't really gone to any Ghanaian's houses so that was a new experience. Both houses were really nice and comfortable :)  It was a great day!

Today I'm just doing homework and the like. We only have two weeks of classes left!! I start taking my finals the last week of November and I'm finished by December 10th. Hopefully this week we have less power issues. Last week was the same story-- almost every day we had either the water or the power go out for some period of time. Supposedly my hostel has a generator, but it's broken now. I'm hoping they fix it soon! It's all part of the experience, though. :)

Pictures from the wedding!!

That took FOREVER to upload, so here is the link to the updated album with some more pictures :)

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1971853938554.2054210.1309171199&type=1&l=023a493b19

Water Shortages

These past few days we've had the water at my hostel go out quite frequently. I've heard a rumor that there's a water shortage on campus, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is. All I know is that we'll go 24 hours or more with no running water. I think most of us are aware that there are people in the world who don't have running water but it's a whole other thing to experience it for yourself. The worst part is that people still have to use the toilets, especially when the water is out overnight. During the day you can try to be out of the building as much as possible, but eventually you have to come back and sleep... and use what have essentially become porter potties. It's been challenging for sure. Last week on Thursday we lost electricity all over campus for about 10 hours. I was in class when the two coincided but apparently there was an hour or so without running water or electricity!! Later in the evening it was super weird to be sitting in the dark in my room, with a completely dark building and people walking around with flash lights. Then, just when all of our electronics ran out of battery, the generator turned on! It's funny because you can hear people cheering all around the building any time the water comes back or the power comes back! It's definitely been a new experience.

I've started doing my interviews for the research project! It's been really interesting. I've talked both with Ghanaians and other international students and I just record their answers to a few questions then they fill out a questionnaire. It's been going well so far. The memory on the recorder is full though, so I'm waiting to get the USB chord so that I can download them onto the computer and keep going. For now I'm just sticking to people in my own hostel since I think the priority is to finish with the international student sample before we all leave. I have 9 weeks left here. Sometimes it feels like it's going by fast, but then for example when we have no water or the professor comes to class 30 minutes late (happened in my 7:30am class this morning) it feels like I still have forever here. I feel like I'm really making full use of the time I have here, though, learning and experiencing so so much. It really is very different from the life I live at home. I appreciate the differences and being able to see things first hand and experience them for myself. There are definitely struggles and sometimes I get really frustrated, but I think it's good for me. 

Well I don't have any pictures for this post, but considering it's largely about dirty bathrooms, I don't think you will be too upset  :) 

Aburi :)

Sorry about this post being a little late-- I've started to get quite busy here! I can explain that more later. I want to tell you about my trip to Aburi this weekend. Aburi is a village up in the hills about 45 minutes away from Accra. My roommate Kristen and I went together on Sunday and it was amazing! We first went to the botanical garden and it was soo nice! It was refreshing to be away from the city with all its people and noise and pollution. The air up there felt so crisp and clean! The garden wasn't all that big, but there were some pretty cool looking trees and plants! There was randomly a crashed helicopter in one part. We never found out the story behind that, but it was interesting. We both really wished we would have taken our journals up there because there were so many serene places that would have been perfect for some writing! Maybe next time we can do that. 

After we walked around the garden, we went on a bike tour! They gave us bikes and helmets and we set off to a waterfall! It was AWESOME!! We got to ride through a bunch of small villages and everywhere we went the kids would start jumping up and down, clapping and yelling OBRUNI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! at the top of their lungs! Here in Accra the kids say obruni, but there they were beyond excited!!! We were 4 in group counting Kristen and myself and then two other Americans that joined us, so we were a little obruni parade through the villages! They seriously loved it! The waterfall wasn't very big but it was still suuuper nice! We were deep in the vegetation and had to lock our bikes up then walk down to it because there wasn't really a trail or anything anymore. It was beautiful!!! We stayed there for maybe half an hour and we even got to get in the water!! It wasn't very deep so I didn't get my clothes wet, but it felt sooo nice and cool! I was really really happy to be there, it was incredible! 

After our time at the waterfall we rode back to the rental shop and it started POURING DOWN RAIN!!! We might as well have jumped in the waterfall because I was soaking wet by the end of it! It was so so so so fun, though!! I loved it! We ate lunch in Aburi and tried to dry off a little bit and then just came back to campus. I fell asleep on the trotro on the way home, so I even got a little nap in. It was the perfect day! :) 

I will try to post this week again to tell you about my weekday activities :) 

Kumasi!

This weekend I went to Kumasi!!! Kumasi is the second largest city in Ghana, with 5 million people. This was our ISEP organized excursion, so all 20 some of us went together in one bus and one small van. We left at 7:30am on Friday morning (thankfully I don’t have lectures on Fridays) and went to the Manhyia Palace Museum. Kumasi is in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, which was historically and populated by the Asante kingdom, nicknamed the kingdom of gold. The Asantes were very dominant and powerful and ruled their kingdom through chieftaincy until the British came to colonize. However, there are still chiefs today in this region although they don’t hold real political power. They settle disputes within the region and are more of a symbolic figure. If the president of Ghana comes to Kumasi, he has to greet and show respect to the Asantehene (the supreme chief of all of Asante) but ultimately the president is the one with power. Besides the chiefs there are also queen mothers, who have final say as to who is appointed the new chief. The Asantes have matrilineal lineage, so the queen mother has a decent amount of authority and women are allowed to own land, but from what I understand very few do. Anyways, the Manhyia Palace was where the Asantehene lived, but has now been turned into a museum and the chief resides elsewhere. It was really cool and I learned a lot. Unfortunately we couldn’t take any pictures inside, but there were even wax figures of the chief and the queen mother made by Madame Tussaud! It was pretty cool!

On Saturday we went to several craft villages. There was Bonwire, which is the Kente weaving village. Kente cloth is woven by hand and has very specific symbols. The cloth is a trademark of the Asantes and the most expensive kente is worn by the chief and queen mother. The village we went to was not very big but PACKED with kente. It really was pretty expensive if you wanted to get a few yards of it. They also have smaller strips that can be used to decorate clothing made of other materials or as a scarf. These were a little bit more affordable. It was really fun to barter with the vendors and I have to admit I came away pretty proud of my ability to get the price I wanted!

Then we went to Ntonso, an Adinkra Cloth Village. Here they had those same Kente strips, but you  could pick a stamp of an Adinkra symbol and print in on the cloth yourself! The adinkra symbols are also an Asante thing and they have a ton of different ones with different meanings. There were even some already made with Obama’s face! I thought that was pretty funny. They showed us how the dye is made, which was really interesting. There’s bark from a tree that is pounded and then mixed with water and then concentrated I believe until it turns into the ink. After we left I saw that the lady who was going to keep doing the pounding was doing it with a baby tied to her back!!! There are some strong women in Ghana!!

After Ntonso, we went to Ahwiaa where there is a lot of wood carvings. The vendors there were really excited to see us and my friend and I had guys waiting for us to finish at one shop so that they could take us to theirs. It was a little overwhelming, but we got to bargain again which was fun. Then we went to the grand central market which was ginormous. I just looked around a little but our bus was parked in the parking lot of their basilica. I climbed up in the steeple and got a really amazing view of the city. It was beautiful! That night we ate “the best pizza in Ghana”…… definitely not impressed. Oh well! We also got to reflect on our goals and talk about our experience so far as a group. It was really nice because we haven’t all been spending time together since orientation so there were people I really got a chance to catch up with.

We left this morning at 6:00am and made it back to campus around noon. We stopped for a kind of long breakfast, but it’s about a 5-6 hour ride. Actually, on the way there we stopped at a restaurant to eat lunch and I had fufu for the first time here!! I had it with ground nut soup and it was actually pretty good. Marty and I had made fufu in St. Louis before I came, but we used the flour mix that comes in a box. They have that same stuff here and they call it “neat fufu”. This one was the real deal and it was a LOT better than the one at home! It still wasn’t very tasteful, but when you mix it with the soup it was not bad. The soup, however, was extremely spicy! I had a runny nose and I drank almost a huge water bottle as I was having the soup!! I’m glad I got to try it here though, finally! Overall it was a really great weekend and I’m glad to be able to check Kumasi off my list of places to see. :) 

The fufu is on the left and the groundnut soup is on the right. The bowl of water in front is for washing your hands.

I used a spoon instead of my fingers because that kind of grosses me out. I only managed to eat about half!

Manhyia Palace Museum

Weaving village 

Kente cloth

This is what the dye is made out of!

Here's the lady pounding the bark with a baby on her back.

Obama! 

St. Peter's Basilica in Kumasi 

The view from the steeple!

Togo!

This past week was really interesting! I am officially working on a research project here! I am helping two psychology professors with their research on the perception of gender roles among college students. So far I’m just finding relevant articles and literature on the topic. It actually has been really interesting, especially when you read about cross-cultural studies. The professors are expecting to have the questionnaire ready this week so then I will be able to start interviewing students.  I am really excited about this!! One of the professors is a community psychologist, which is the field that I’m interested in so it’s working out perfectly! I’m meeting with them on Wednesday this week so I hope that everything is ready to go!

Last week I went to Global Academy on Tuesday and Wednesday and it was good. Working there is teaching me so much, too. I am still working with the same group of kids, but I am realizing how big the range of abilities is. There are some students who get everything done quickly and have to sit around and wait for everyone else to settle down and get started on their work. There are also a few students who are really struggling and I’m actually not sure how they have moved up through the grades. This week I’m going to talk with the director and see if maybe I can work with those few struggling students individually instead of teaching the whole class. There is one boy who hardly knows how to read at all! It’s so overwhelming to see him struggle with words like “dad” or “bad”!! I hope I can work with him specifically and really make a difference by the time I leave. Right now he’s just sitting through classes that are way too hard for him so he’s not getting anything out of it. I’m going there tomorrow so I’ll see how it goes.

We've discovered a new restaurant that is pretty close to campus. It’s called Cuppa Cappuccino and it has pretty good burgers and really good smoothies. As you've probably noticed, I eat burgers at every restaurant I go to pretty much! I hardly ever eat meat on campus because the conditions are not very sanitary and it’s overall just sketchy, so I try to get my meat in on the weekends if I can. Now that I know of this place I can go there during the week even. By trotro its only 30 pesewas one way, which is about 15 cents! So that’s nice :) I also bought a little pot so I can cook some. I pretty much just cook a little bit of spaghetti and eat it with butter. I've also started buying plain white rice and adding tomatoes and avocados! The avocados here are very good and super cheap too! My own meals aren't very exciting, but it’s nice to break up the Ghanaian food every once in a while!

WEEKEND!

This weekend I went to Togo!!! I went with two other girls from my program and we left on Saturday morning and came back Sunday afternoon so it was a pretty short trip. We took a bus from Accra to Aflao which is the last city on the Ghana side. To cross the border to Togo was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve had here! There are people all around you calling out to you, asking where you are going, whether you’d like to exchange money, if you need a taxi, if you need this, if you need that. It’s so much happening at once!!! Nothing bad happened, but when we got the hotel we definitely took some time to just settle down from that whole circus! Besides the chaos, we didn't end up having any problems getting our Togo visa-- we even got a marriage proposal from the Togolese immigration officer! By the time we got back to Accra, I was proposed to 4 times!! Well actually one guy offered to marry my daughters, but I’ll count it still!

But anyways, our time in Togo was pretty interesting. We went to the beach, but they have their sewage system that empties out right into the sand. There is a huge pool of sludge right on the beach! Needless to say, we didn't go swimming. We also went to the market and I bought a new head scarf! It was really cool because I was able to barter in French! I made use of my French the whole time and it really helped. I had a little bit of a hard time with their accents, but for the most part I was able to communicate with the Togolese. We went to a voodoo market but they wanted to charge us way too much to go in, so we ended up just looking around for a second and leaving. It was really small and actually quite disappointing! But it’s okay. We also found the Cathedral which was beautiful! The architecture looked very French and on the inside there were beautiful paintings. It was the first time I had seen a Black Mary and child Jesus! Pretty cool!

Togo is all about the motorcycles! They are EVERYWHERE! That’s their main form of public transportation-- you just hop on the back of a moto and go! They seemed to be pretty reckless though, so we stuck to normal taxis. The city had a different feel from Accra, both better and worse! The sewers are covered there, and there are a lot less abandoned, half-finished buildings. But there also isn't really a center or much for tourism that we could find. Instead of English they speak French and instead of Twi they speak Ewe. It was pretty different and I was actually really glad to come back to Ghana.

We left early on Sunday morning and spent the morning in a small village on the Ghana side. One of our friends had done a home stay before we all got to Ghana so she went to visit her host family. She took us around the village market and we got some really cheap fabrics! It was really nice! I enjoyed seeing a little bit of life in the small village instead of in the big city of Accra. Things even seemed to be cheaper out there.  After lunch we headed back to Accra and got to campus around 3:30. I went to church at 6pm and that was basically my whole weekend! The trip was different from what I thought it would be but I am glad I went and saw it!

I just uploaded 300+ pictures to Facebook, so you can check them all out here:

 http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1955897819661.2053967.1309171199&type=1&l=f77a2d9e47

Have a great week and thanks for reading my long post today :)