GHANA!!!!!

Ghana rocks. They speak english there and the scenery is amazing. You should all think about going for your next vacation. This is just a brief summary of my trip to Ghana. Actually, there are three posts about the trip but this one is all-encompasing. Don't forget to check out my pictures. The link is on the left.



I went with three boys: Clay LaPoint (his blog link is on my blog page - i reccomend it, he's a great writer), Adlai Mast, and Mac Wisdom (his blog link is also on my page). Going from Ouaga on a volunteers budget meant, however, that i took a 20 hour bus ride to go from Ouaga to Takoradi (it's like going from Little Rock to Dallas). Whatever Africa! Takoradi is a really cute beach town - you know, cute for west africa. Most buildings were two-story, the bank was air-conditioned, all the buildings were painted bright colors etc. We just stopped there for an afternoon and ate our first Ghanaian local food and I got my Christmas present from the Western Union. Thanks Dad! From there we made our way to Ezile Bay.



When we arrived in the village of Ezile Bay - because that's what it was, a village (they didn't even have street food to buy) we had to hike to the resort. That was really amazing. There were mountains, colorful huts, wooden canoes, happy well-fed children, and pristine beach. Everything is cuter in Ghana: the poor villages, the goats, the dogs, everything! We only stayed there one night and then we moved on down the beach a little bit to Busua.



Busua Beach is . . . one of the best places in the world! We stayed at Dadsen's Inn and it was perfect. We had a huge room with a porch. That's where we celebrated Christmas. Our Christmas celebration was tons of fun but uneventful. We sat out on the porch and danced around, listened to music, took tons of pictures, and then went to the restaurant and ate tasty food. While at Busua Beach we frequented the Black Star Surf Shop and made friends with its lovely patron Charlotte. We ate fish burritos, Red Red, Jollof Rice, so much awesome food. The fish was so fresh and they have veggies there! It was heaven! Ghana!!!!!

We just sat around on the beach for the most part. Except one day we went to Butri Beach which was just down the beach from Busua. Our friend who worked at the Inn we were staying at knew a guy who would take us down the Butri River. So we climbed in a hollwed-out log/canoe and paddled down the river. It was pretty neat. We were surrounded by mountains and mangrove forest on either side - which is pretty cool if you are a bio nerd like me. There were beautiful birds and mudskippers and crabs. Then, when we were turning around the guy asked if we wanted to see where he makes palm wine. "Hell yes we want to see that!" I felt like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as we pulled over to a hole in the mangrove forest and followed a jungle path to the guys palm wine factory. It was pretty cool. They just take the phloem out of the palm tree and ferment it in barrels. The guy also takes the palm wine and distills it into a liquor that tastes like PGA. Yuk. I had a sip and lost a substantial portion of my brain cells. I'll never get 'em back. That was all we did in Busua and Butri because we spent the second part of our trip hiking and sitting on tro-tros.

Okey dokey . . . where to next? Wli Falls outside Hohoe. What a spectacular sight. Look at the pictures. It was essentially a one and a half hour vertical hike. It kicked my ass but it was sooo worth it. Those glasses you see me wearing in the pictures are Adlai's second pair because i lost mine in the ocean trying to kayak out to an island. That's why you bring a back-up pair. I look like a lesbian.

The next day we hiked Ghana's tallest mountain. It was actually a pretty easy hike compared to the Wli falls hike. I was the tallest woman in an entire country for about 30 minutes. That is a first and last for my five foot two inch frame.

The next day, I fed monkeys. They were swo cute! And that was the end of our trip. I am tired of writing now. So I will stop. Look at my oics. They will say it all.

What Can An Ocean Do For You?

Apparently, a lot! On the coast the villagers are plump. Even the dogs aren't starving. There is food and industry! It's kinda like how people shouldn't live in Nevada or Arizona - no water etc. but they have California and Iowa to help carry them. If only Ghana and Ivory Coast could help out Burkina.

The Mamba's Bite

This is a true story. I wish I was making it up but I'm not. Even Tom Robbins couldn't invent such ridiculousness.

It was a cool evening at Busua Beach as myself and three buddies made our way up to the restaurant atop the peninsula. The place is called "The Black Mamba Corner" and I would rather face a black mamba than ever go to that house of insanity ever again. The place is run by a nutsy hefty German lady named Gabriella. She is about 50 and has a hunk of dread locks oddly extending horizonatlly out the back of her head. You can tell Gabriella is at least bi-polar if not also schizophrenic after about five minutes of talking to her. In the time it takes to place an order for pizza she could go from being whimsical and goofy(with hysterical fits of laughter) to deeply upset and irritable. She has one guesthouse that sits at the bottom of the peninsula and runs a small restaurant on the patio of her own house. Alex, her live in boy-friend, is a rastafarian Ghanaian who, as she told us, has wrecked three of her cars. I'm pretty sure he's always at least profoundly high if not on shrooms or "tse magic mushrooms" as Gabriella called them.

All we wanted was some pizza but what we got was something truly horrible. We tromped through the wilderness leading up to her crazy compound - at high tide it is about a 5 minute walk on a wilderness "path" to get to her peninsula from the road. When we arrive, we notice that Gabriella's rastafarian friend is acting really wierd. I thought: he's a rastafarian so he's probably just stoned. I wish. Then he got really angry and kept pacing around the restaurant (we were the only patrons that night) and shouting ridiculous things at what he kept referring to as "the foreigners." Really, it was a domestic squabble and we were just caught in the middle. The things he was saying were soooo hysterical. I kept almost spitting out my wine as he paced around accusing us and Gabriella. Here are some of my personal favorite Alex phrases (use rastafarian accent):
"Fuck you and your fuck money!!" (ew.)
"I am not a dog! I am a human being!"
"You and your fucking money eating pizza while i am eating this slop!!"
"You are not safe here!! She will poison you!!"
"Call the police!! She will poison you!!"

Yeah. We were FREAKED out. Gabriella did NOTHING to appease Alex's crazed state and only succeeded in antagonizing him. Gabriella is just as crazy as he is if not more. The conversation topics she chose as she joined us for dinner (damn it!) were things like this (use german accent):

"They hate us becasue of our skin. But look at their country. They are sitting on gold (gesture left)! They are sitting on diamonds (gesture right)! But they want to be white."

"I was twice in Mexico but I never eat the taco. What is this, the taco? Is it like pancake?" No you crazy bitch it's not a pancake! How do you go to Mexico and never eat a taco?

"I don't know how much I should tell you (Oh God! Don't tell us anything!) but he does the cocaine, the magic mushrooms, the marijuana." Please stop talking lady!! She talked the whole time (almost three hours) about ridiculous shit while Alex oscilated between tripping and being angry. I had multiple safety action-plans in my head. Honestly, I was afraid that if we just got up and left she would poison us or sick her 14 dogs on us and we still had to walk en brousse for 5 minutes before getting to the road.

Gabriella's idea of sensibilizing men on the role of women in African society is this: "I say to the men: why then do the men have the breast nipples? why? They have the breast nipples like a woman" Oh my God. Stop saying breast nipples, i'm trying to eat my pizza.

When it came time for the check she totally fell apart. "Please. You must help me! It is so difficult!" It took about an hour to add up the check and there were four of us and a calculator. I couldn't believe she didn't make the meal free considering there was a drugged rasta man and a loony german lady interrrupting our expensive meal. WTF?

Finally, we start back and we are all freaked out. We walked in silence for about a minute just in case she was following us with her 14 dogs. Then, there was some creature in the bushes staring at us and that just did us in so we ran the rest of the way to the road. The "Black Mamba Corner" was reccomended by our Lonely Planet travel guide as the best pizza in west africa. The pizza was okay but the ambiance freaked me out. If you go to Busua Beach, stay FAR AWAY from the Mamba.

Why Why Why Please!!

The official langugae of Ghana is English . . . supposedly. Indeed, you can get by in Ghana with English but most Ghanaians can't really converse in English - no talking about religion, postulating about philosophy, or indicating where the bathroom is. Actually, I understand about as much Burkina French as Ghanaian English. It was like another language sometimes. The phrases that they use were so funny to me as a native English-speaker. You can throw the word "please" in any sentence you want. For example:
"Do you have any bread?"
"No please"
"Wait . . . does that mean yes or no?"
"No please"
" . . . ok . . ."
When a taxi sped dangerously through the beach village a concerned villager shouted, "Why! Why! Why! Please!!" at the driver. You can't say they're not polite.

Also, one does not "eat" in Ghana, one "chops." I don't know where it comes from . . . maybe chomp? Who knows. But yes, you "chop" bananas. When you are hungry, you want to "chop" chicken. There was even an official sign that said it was illegal to "chop" turtles.

The speech and grammatical patterns of Ghanaian English are also a source of amusement for the native speaker. Very often a sentence would be worded in a way that only Yoda could have understood. Here are some examples:
"Coming I am please!"
"Chop rice you want to."
"Good price I give you please!"
I had no idea Yoda was from Ghana. By the end of the trip my fellow travelers and I started talking like Yoda and interjecting please in every sentence. It was really nice however to travel and use English. There were some Ghanaians with pretty good English, but for the most part reversed the sentences were please.

Nasara Goes to Church

Many of my community members and students have been very concerned about my soul because of my lack of attendance at church. They know I am protestant and the Christian as well as Muslim students are all very concerned that I have not been spotted at any one of the four protestant churches, one catholic church, or even the one mosque. Actually, I find it crazy that any American would come here to prosyletize as the Africans keep prosyletizing me. I have, on a few occasions, tried to explain what I see as the difference between religious observations in America versus Burkina but it doesn't seem to make much sense to them so I just say to my students and neighbors, "nope. I havent gone to church yet." When pressed further i just shrug. There are so many differences that I like to really get into with Burkinabe: no, our black people are not slaves anymore . . . all americans are american and something else (chinese, german, mexican), there are more women in universities than men, women and men share work as well as household tasks, women marry around the age of 25-30 in USA (its more like 15-17 here) - you know things that freak them out and blow their minds. But, I didn't want to get into religion with them. Hah, everyone here is an animist as well as Christian or Muslim and they all really get along.

Anyway (en touts cas), one of my students mothers wanted to thank me for giving him a granola bar (thanks Katie and Sutton) after he cut this huge snake-bearing vine out of my courtyard. So, she invited me to church. And I went last Sunday. The student came to my house to show me how to get there. I put down my copy of Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion" and went to church in a tiny village in a remote country on a remote continent.

Imagine every stereotype you have in your head about what you think an African protestant celebration might be like . . . its all true. I arrived at 10 am and the men were seated on the right dressed in their sunday best: clean 'funtionaire' shoes, slacks, and shirts as well as some in the traditional full head-to-toe getup. The women were on the left with babies on backs and their wonderful african print matching outfits. Childen were at the front with the drum circle. I walked in the sactuary and immediately thought "yes! am i in a movie?"

The building is like all other African buildings: mud brick but then plastered on the outside and painted dark brown. There were a few windows and a small attempt at grand buttressed rafters. Or, you know, wood beams supporting the tin roof. Hanging in multitudes from the wooden beams were all these paper cut outs of flowers, spirals, shapes, stars, etc in colored paper that the children must have made. Purple, pink, white, yellow etc. Voila! The African equivalent of stained-glass. They were very sweet. There was one picture of a very feminine-looking anglo-saxon Jesus on the wall. A cross and plastic flowers in the shape of a heart framed the preachers head as he stood at the podium. A rose-window so to speak. We sat on small wooden benches - just typical african ones like i sit on when i wait for buses.

The service was in Moore so a really pretty and really nice lady sat next to me and translated the whole thing into french for me. Hah, wheni say "sat next to me" i mean in a Burkina way. Men and women - even married couples - NEVER touch each other in public. But, within the same gender there is absolutely no space. Men hang all over men, hold hands, wrap their arms around each other, touch touch touch. Women do the same with women. So the lady translating for me rested her arms in my lap and idly played with my skirt, knees, and hands. Which was very welcome because, since I work with mostly men I get almost no tactile comfort.

First, a man stood up front and would call out a phrase in Moore and we would sing the phrase together stepping and clapping with the drums and voices. Sometimes he would call on a member of the congregation for a song request. Men would sing something and women would respond. It was that kind of beautiful African singing where everyone is belting it out but no one is on the same key and yet it sounds so beautiful. As my translator wrote down the moore for me I would sing along with the whole group, about 50 people. It was so delightfully similar to being at camp mitchell in hoke right when all the campers are arriving and the counselors and CAs have to sing themselves silly.

We did the stepping and clapping for about an hour and then the actual preacher got and said something about sin and prayer. Then the whole group, except the nasara, errupted into shouts and erratic mumblings in moore with hands in the air many gesturing wildly. I would have loved to see the look on my startled face. Haha. Then he asked them to pray for peace and they errupted again in a chorus of babbles. This time i was prepared. No one looked at me funny because their eyes were all closed. Next, there were 3 readings: corinthians, then peter, and dueteronomy. And the preacher . . . preached. Mostly, it was about peace and loving your neighbor and living like Jesus - no guilt or tons of talk about sin. Then more emphatic erruptions of "tongues- sounding" prayer and finally, the best part: eucharist.

The eucharist was kept covered until the time to partake at the end. Nothing would have prepared me for what was under the cloth. I am only amazed I didn't burst into laughter. The precher removed the cloth to reveal . . . bits of bread soaked in palm oil and . . . Coca-cola. yes, Coca-cola. He calmly picked up the bottle and popped the top leaving me struggling to keep from laughing as the cool "phfffff" sound reverberated around the sanctuary. I still cant believe it. Africa continues to surprise.

There was more step clapping after that and all-in-all it was an awesome experience and I will be going back for sure. The whole time I knew it was one of those events that would have had my Auntie crying to see all these sweet people gather and worship together. They were so joyful and happy as Africans almost always are. My Uncle Jon would have been inspired and humbled. My Nana would have loved it and felt connected. My Dad would have been uncomfortable as many strangers would have been touching him - but he'd like it anyway. It was pretty cool.

It's me, Eloise

There is a new addition to my family of termites, spiders, and geckos.

Thats her. Eloise. Those are my bed sheets. They have green apples on them and say Merry Christmas. I don't know why. Africa has taught me to quit asking why.

Isn't she cute!!! Awww!! I'm quite smitten.

Don't worry Nana, i have good stuff to feed her and she's had a rabies shot. I'm going to try to get her spayed or she'll get knocked up by some ruffian en brousse.

I am eat of the Sagbo

Test giving and grading is my least favorite teacher task. Truly, grading 300 tests in french is really, really . . . what's the word . . . oh yeah, it sucks. Tests in Burkina are called "devoirs" (confusing because thats the french word for homework) and they are out of 20 points. Quizzes are called, and i love this, "interrogations" which sounds really extreme and intimidating. "That's right!" i say in commanding tones "It's time for an interrogation!! What," i demand "is the air speed velocity of an unleaden swallow?" Some things just dont translate.

Of course all the students complain and say how hard the test was and "Oh Madam! Je suis malcontent!" Yeah, well i'm "malcontent" that i have to grade 300 freakin tests. Really though, I'm a total push-over and they know it. To appease their sad faces I give bonus questions on my tests. Usually, I ask the students to write a sentence in english. Their responses are HYSTERICAL. The bonus question entertains me while i grade all those papers. For the most part i get the same responses: "God is One" or occasionally "Good is One." "I love you" is a popular response. Sometimes they ask God to bless someone; this is often me because they think they'll get extra points, but usually it's various rastafarians and 50 cent who are the aim of God's blessings.

The last test I gave i asked them to write their favorite meal, in english if they could do it, if not french was fine. Most often I got this hysterical response "I am eat of the sagbo" which i'm still giggling about. I must confess as a person who gets laughed at continually for their misuse of language, its rather satisfying to get to laugh back. It's not just the double verb and extravagant use of articles in the sentence that tickles me, it's the reference to sagbo. Sagbo is the Moore word for to, that west african staple i have told you about - it looks, feels, and tastes like white playdo. Burkinabe eat it at least twice a day in village. They just do not understand that Americans dont eat to. That's the whole point of speaking english - you dont have to eat to! One student understood that sentiment and had this to offer for his bonus question: "I like some rice of America." Me too. One very ambitious student wrote this for her bonus question:

madam rebecca is the Bess Prof.
God Bless madam rebecca
madam rebecca Love the carote ou madam
rebecca Like the carrote
a cucumber

I gave her 3 points for that slice of awesomeness.

When you give back tests it is an hour long event called "reclamation" that i loathe. Anal retentivenss is at its most picky when grades are involved and at least half the students want to argue with me about what i've graded. In fact, it so annoys me that i dont want to talk about it anymore.

Have some rice of America on my behalf!