beach week

the five of us on our last day at green turtle lodge... smiling but sad to leave the menu.

adam and lauren came to visit for ten days (liz's brother and gf). anyone ever visiting ghana MUST stay at Green Turtle Lodge. this cutesy place is on a deserted strip of sand in the western region, about 8 hours from akropong. opened by a british couple, it's super eco-touristy. you stay in huts constructed from local materials, all employees are native ghanaians, solar panels run your lights and fan, outhouses use self-composting toilets, and shower water is recycled for plants that thrive on soap minerals, they serve delicious fresh ghanaian cuisine (the brkfast special was french toast with honey and bananas. i don't even like french toast or honey that much but now i'm a #1 fan!), a fun happening bar with fruity alcoholic beverages, there are board games (SCRABBLE!) and books to swap. i'm a walking-talking advertisement for the place. i can't help it!

my sister vanna-whiting the outdoor shower (i vow to build my own one day cause their is no better way to get clean than under palm leaves)

solar-paneled beach hut

adam (sporting my patriotic hankerchief) and lauren enjoying lunch of guac and plantain chips

liz and i went back for four more glorious nights this past week. we just had to milk our holiday for all it was worth (school start tuesday ahh!). highlights this time around include:
1. met two hilarious brothers who graduated upper dublin HS (small world! hi nick/burt!) and made a day trip with them to a stilted village near the border of cote d'ivore.
2. played an international game of mafia on night with a group including a swiss couple, two german girls, a british couple, four loud americans (that's us) and a lone romanian. we discovered that the jack is called "boober" in german, which liz accidentally called the "booby" , which proceeded with ten billion jokes about whoever got the "booby" was the killer.
3. most memorable: one day a group of us visited a small village down the beach. tons of kids come out to greet us as usual. as they take our hands and say things like "my friend, what is your name? give me a pen. where are you going?" i'm practicing the local tongue on them with quasi-success. suddenly the 15 or so small ones crowded around me start yelling "book-a-son-eee". really loud. i have no clue what it means and tried asking the adults in the village (who would either snicker or give me stone-cold faces). the kids just kept on yelling it enthusiastically, so i repeated it too! that really did it. everytime i yelled the phrase, shouting it and rose my hands up, they shouted it too and rose their hands up! i was so curious. what crazy things was i saying? i finally found a ghanian with better english and he explained, laughing, "oh, they think you look like/are bruce lee". HAHAHAHA! yes, for years to come the kids in the akwiidaa village on the coast of ghana will be reminiscing back on the day that bruce lee came to visit them... even though he/she was sort of a short, long haired, skinny feminine version? i have made my mark!

other noteworthies during adam/lauren's stay:
the rest of the week we gradually made our way back to our region by stopping at all the hotspots along the coast. Elmina Slave Castle had a really informative and interesting tour (the guides at other sites have been way less than knowledgable). but at the same time it was extremely emotionally disturbing as we walked through the dark/suffocating dungeons that thousands of slaves were imprisoned and tortured before they were crammed onto boats across the atlantic.

the view from the slave castle of the ridiculous fish market below

we stayed at Hans Cottage Botel near Kakum National Park. this old place wasn't really a boat-hotel, more like a bunch of moldy 70's style buildings over huge decrepit fish tanks. it had a run-down summer camp feel, but did boast many crocs in the man-made resevoir! their rates were kind of pricey and lauren's dinner of beans and plantains tasted like a basement. literally.. if you could make the musty smell of a cellar into edible food it would be these beans. we were disappointed after seeing No wildlife at Kakum besides a squirrel (though the canopy walkway was thrilling) so it was a crazy suprise that behind the botel was a farm with 7 foot tall really ugly but wierdly mesmerising ostriches! i've never seen them so close. they resembled part gross-turkey/part creepy dinosaur with their goose-pimply skin and humongous talons.
getting nutty at the botel (this is pre-basement beans and lots of star beer)

the canopy walkway at kakum (it was richety and riviting!)

the road to and from mole

1. us and our fully armed safari guide PK who's been working at mole for 20 years!
2. yours truly and ELEPHANT BEHINDS!

the elephants were worth it but wow, i am never going to northern ghana again! last tuesday morning liz, my sis and i woke at 5am to do some laundry and head off on our big adventure to the north. caught a 2-hour tro to accra and waited at the bus station for 3 hours (supposed to be 11am bus but it was delayed 2 hours for technical problems. didn't ask!). we sat on this non-AC overly stuffed bus from 2pm until 3am (yes! 13 hours of dusty bumpy grossness with pitstops at nasty urinals where i peed slightly on my pants and sandals a couple of times! i'm a pro at squat toilets in taiwan, but in africa, there aren't even holes, they are just...troughs with no stalls. it's hard going for girls!)

when we arrived in tamale it was creepy at 3am. we semi- slept for an hour on benches at the passenger waiting area and then walked to another bus station where crowds of people were already getting in line for the bus to mole. this ride was even sweeter: for 3-4 hours i sat on a metal bar, had to pee half the time going over even bumpier dirt roads, while a man sold crazy cure-all medicine in the front of the bus. he talked the entire time! i would fall asleep and wake up and he's still blabbering. his medicine could apparently heal blindness, baby's aches and pains, make your hair longer, make women's chests' bigger, as well as viagra-esqe effects for the men. the crazy thing is he made a killing on the bus! everyone was buying up the magic cream.

when we arrived at the town of larabanga there was no public transport to the national park. it was 10am. we had been traveling 24 hours ...and then decided to rent shoddy rusty bicycles from local boys for the 6km road to the park (it was either that or pay a LOT for them to take us on motorbikes). it was actually really nice! when you havn't slept properly and smell really bad, riding on a bike makes you feel light and breezy and delirious. shio's bike chain got detached of course but a nice man on the road fixed it. we took pictures as we biked and i fell from laughter in the process.

mole national park was wonderful! there was a platform over a high cliff where you could watch the animals congregate around two waterholes: antelope, elephants, warthogs, etc...like discovery channel LIVE next to your hotel! went swimming, ate yummy food by the pool, made friends with really nice british boys (we played cards and talked all night. taught them Da Er (big two) a chinese card game), and went on TWO safaris. the guided tours cost 14,000 cedis each time. that is not even 2 dollars to walk in big plastic booties through swamps and track large african mammals! the warthogs were hairy and hilarious. reminded me of pumba from lion king! liz and i decided we have to watch all the disney movies when we get home. the elephants as predicted were the prime attraction. they are larger than life and flap their ears making a fun "Thwack" sound and just so amazing! in the morning baboons were hopping around outside our window! it was a wildlife dream come true! we didn't want to leave. but...

the next morning we rode our bikes in pouring rain back to larabanga. got a quasi-tour of the oldest mosque in ghana (this random teenager spouted off facts in a hard to understand accent) the mosque was pretty. too bad we weren't allowed inside. we waited half an hour and a wonderful spanish woman with her ghanian bf let us ride in their taxi to a junction two hours away. without them...we might still be in larabanga. when they dropped us off at the junction it was late afternoon. we waited in the dry heat for over two hours (i showed the local girls how to shuffle cards and read a book).

GET READY FOR THE BEST PART OF OUR TRIP:
we were ridiculously happy when a tro finally arrived heading toward kumasi (8 hours away). when we crammed in the backseat (the tiniest seats ever, and i'm a small asian girl) we noticed that the window (a gaping 5 foot hole) had no glass. oh well, it was a nice breeze. about 30 minutes into the ride though, an enormous bucket full of liquid splashed in from the roof, hitting the old lady in front of us squarly in the face and splattering us. we were so confused. it wasn't raining. where did it come from? maybe it was just rain water. 20 minutes later, we hear baa-ing and hooves on the roof. omg there are live goats on the roof! they do this all the time up north, transport livestock on roofs of tros.

so.. from them on... the goats would pee and splash into the window like every 30 minutes for the next 8 hours!! we would go over really big bumps and they were BAAAA and then PEE! and it was sooo disgusting. thank god shio had her ugly EMS rain hat to cover her, but it was still spraying us and all over liz's pashmena. we wanted to cry and sleep! but ended up just laughing hysterically while keeping ourselves covered.

to top it off when we finally arrived in kumasi at 1 in the morning no one would get off the bus. we were so confused. weren't we at our destination? turns out that kumasi is full of robbers at night. women and able-bodied young men alike warned us not to leave the bus: the taxi drivers would rob us, who knows what might happen. so that's how all 40 passengers (crying babies too) ended up sleeping (on a slant cause the bus was parked on a slope) with the smell of goat pee on us, as well as really pungent urinal smell in the station, in tight upright tro seats for 3 more hours. finally at 4am when mosque chanting could be heard we were told it was safe to go. a nice ghanian named Isaac who slept on the bus next to us walked us to the market (which was bumpin at 5am!). another warm-hearted stranger we met on the street when we asked for directions told us it was still too dangerous for us to walk alone. he drove us in his vehicle to our hotel. thank god for the kindness of strangers. when we arrived to the hotel with working AC and shower it was heaven.

school's out!

holiday
school vacated last week so we've been traveling every other day. liz and i have a month to explore ghana with my sister! last week we went to boti falls. took a nice hike for an hour or two through jungle-y scenes, anonymous caves (im not sure what that means), climbed an umbrella rock, and a three-trunked palm (once again, dad would have been jealous). next day went with two of our teacher friends to the akusumbo dam (a good 2 hours away). it's helpful to travel with ghanaians. they know the language and get better deals. we obrunis get jipped by taxis and ticket offices all the time. anyway, the dam was built back in the 60's and is basically the reason why volta river is the largest man-made lake in the world. kind of a let down. they made us pay an exorbitant fee to walk around looking at a couple huge pipes on the side of the river but wouldn't let us take any pictures of it (maybe they were scared we'd blow it up with liquid bombs? i hate terrorists. impressed that i actually heard about the latest world news? things make there way to akropong.. slowly)

we finally did our first overnight trip to a town 4/5 hours away called Ho (yes there was a YMCA Ho Branch). and then stayed the night at a monkey sanctuary and fed them bananas in the morning during a nice forest tour. this morning we stopped by another town called Ho-Hoe (you say the second hoe like hoi). we attempted to find another volunteer that my sister made friends with on the plane. he's a californian college kid named aryan. sounded like a fun obruni to chill with. it didn't work though. cause.. we didn't know anything besides the fact that he was working on a medicaly-sort-of facility near ho-ho. oh well! if you ever read this aryan! we tried!

tomorrow we are leaving for the north! it's supposed to be hot and dry, and maybe more poor because it's further away from the bustling south and capital? not sure. will see soon enough! we got tickets for an 11 hour bus ride to the northern city of tamale. (african travel consists mainly of sitting in the back of stuffy, bumpy, dirty vehicles, moving either too fast or too slow.) btw. two memorable phrases we read on the back of taxis recently were "black chinese" and "chicken georgia". hmm no clue. oh yeah, and restaurants are called chop bars. two to note are "Don't Mind Your Wife Chop Bar" and "Sweet Mother Chop Bar" as well as "All Class Chop Bar" which is a dilapidated shack. i read that tamale has an abundance of bicycle riders (as many as china?) and the street kids sleep overnight at the bus station:( then we'll take a four hour tro ride to mole national park. elephants, crocodiles, "water monitors" (these 1 meter long lizard things). wooohoo! i'm excited! i like wildlife. i think. we tried booking a room at the Mole Motel too but their email isn't working so we're just going to wing it. if it doesn't work a nice guest house run by twin europeans is also suggested and you can sleep on the roof!

FOOTBALLS!
big time loving and thanks to ct and k for sending the soccer balls! (and stickers and jump rope and wonderful notes). i had to travel to the larger town of koforidua 45 minutes away because akropong post office couldn't handle such happening packages! wow! it was so hilarious to open them in front of the customs/post office lady and show em off! even though school is out, the other guy teachers and us will try to set up a friendly match in a week or so with the students. i know the boys will FLIP OUT! on a side note, just wanted to put this out there to anyone who is feeling especially philanthropic. what the kids really need next are jerseys. they borrow the primary school kids' jerseys. they are dirty and smaller and not enough. and when they sub they have to strip off and run onto the field half changed. if anyone is interested in funding a new set of jerseys let me know! i'm assuming we'd need 11 tops and bottoms (at least). they could be all the same size. boys medium? i don't know details right now. but it would be so crazy cool for them! their season starts in the fall and they play 30 other schools in the surrounding area.

!@#$%%
notice the increase in updates lately? the training college in akropong opened up a computer lab for the entire community to use as an internet cafe! wow! this really changes things! it's interesting living in this village/town as it slowly but steadily modernizes. but it is slightly bittersweet. having internet only a 20 minute walk away could be deadly. i'm going to try not to come back here TOO often. it's nice breathing real air and looking at real things instead of the computer screen.

books
life in africa involves a lot of time for hobbies i don't usually set aside enough time for for like drawing and reading. Freakonomics was great (props to sahil for the bday gift:) i was especially surprised to learn that someone actually named their child shithead. okay there were other freaky economic theories mentioned like how abortion is the reason for decrease in crime, but the names section really struck me. also i 100% recommend How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer. interesting random tid-bity book. i'm not even a soccer or history buff but i REALLY enjoyed it. honorable mention goes to Things Fall Apart (sahil i should always shop in B&N with you). i never read it for school. and thank goodness because i don't think i could have appreciated it At All back in the day. but it is perfect reading material for anyone who is experiencing africa. they talk about pounding fu-fu and village life and not whistling after dark because of evil spirits (which is a real superstition here) AND yams! it's all about yams! okay not all about but a lot about. my favorite line is "yam is king of crops, a man's crop." it sums up a major portion of my time here...eating!! it's like my second growth spurt. i can't not go for second helpings. not that i really grew taller the first time.

it's august

the cute kids who live down the street


HIV sign on the campus of local school


apparently crap rhymes with top?! (one of liz's student's homework)

finals
last week we experienced the joys of organizing final examinations for the school. it was... a process. liz and i volunteered our stellar typing skills and typed most of the questions for all 8 grade levels. there are a load of subjects: english, math, science, religious/moral, catering, pre-technical, social studies, french, twi. they use windows 97 msword. the computers turned out to be not too shoddy though the keyboards are sticky. but there is only one old-school printer. we print the tests onto special stencil paper that is then put into a manually cranked copy machine. kinda like a ditto machine. we have to squeeze black ink for every new set of 40 sheets, re-insert them to print on the backs, and crank away! it took forever! about 4-8 pages for each test, 6 subject tests for a grade level, maybe 40 students in some grades...you do the math. at one point they had to print out in larger font because the ink was smearing, doing this lead to using a lot more stencil paper, which they ran out of, and then we had to ask the students to donate more money (liz and i put in a nice amount) to buy a new box of stencil paper. whew! today we finally gave our last exam. we've been marking them, recording their grades and ranking the students. tomorrow is "our day" where all the students bring in food and have a little party!

side-note: the funniest exam question i came across was while typing Mr. Kassei's P3 (third grade) English exam. they are learning reflexive pronouns. dude, if they found this in an american test, and the student answered correctly, they would probably put him in counseling! or maybe the teacher.

Question: I want to kill _______.
a. ourselves
b. yourself
c. myself

malaria pregnancy and sheep
vera's friend's niece came to visit from the states a couple weeks ago. she's a 4th grader named barbara who was born in Ghana but has been growing up in the suburbs of Seattle. she came to school with us for a couple days while her mom went to visit other relatives. really mature little girl. we had interesting discussions about Harry Potter. but at one point she tells me she has a little brother and says, "yeah three years ago when my mom was visiting Ghana she got malaria and it made her pregnant." and i'm like, "umm, are you sure it was the malaria?" she assures me and replies "yeah, malaria can do crazy things." liz and i start grinning. barbara shares that she has also gotten malaria before. so i ask her if she is pregnant as well! and says "oh no.. it only does that to adults." thank goodness i havn't gotten malaria yet. pregnancy is not something i'm prepared for yet!

later on we take her to see waterfalls near school during lunch break. (how many elementary schools do you know are walking distance from waterfalls?) as we are going down this steep path we cross a big herd of sheep. they are sort of dirty and have lots of stringy thick wool. all of a sudden they start BAA-ing at us hardcore and walking toward us. so far all the sheep i've come across are scared of me or ignore me. but these were kind of belligerent and the BA's became really loud and persistent and souded more like BAA-UUUUUUUUUGHHH (like they wanted to throw up). barbara flipped out and started grabbed my arm really tight. i tried to stay cool but couldn't help laughing my head off. wow, my most memorable sheep attack!

willage people
couple weeks ago we met some austrian teens. there is an austrian woman who started an NGO called Help for Ghana many years ago. it sponsors local ghanian students as well as donates computers to schools. a few times a year she visits to check up on the students and brings interested austrian computer students from a technical highschool. we met them one day when they came to akuffo tom. they stayed in town for a couple weeks, getting computer facilities running at schools (i think they brought 180 pc's this trip) and setting up networks. they were staying at the house of the town nana (chief) so the teachers at our school were invited to a durbar (an event hosted by the chief where there is dancing, drums, official cermonial stuff). the last night they were here we visited the nana's house while they were getting their hair braided. it was pretty funny hanging out with 17 year old austrian boys who are into computers, horror movies, and punk music. we learned some austrian-german slang! "peepeefine" is "great" and "shizer" is "not great." the way they pronounced their v's as w's (example: willage instead of village) reminded me of my austrian friend in taiwan (Hi Kurt!) so i told liz and vera about it and one night vera jokes "are you visiting the willage people?" and she isn't even aware of the cultural reference to the disco era band.

shio in africa
my sister is here! we picked her up from Kotoka airport in Accra friday night safe and sound. since finals are still going on so we're sticking in akropong most of this week. saturday we did a little day trip to the Cedi Bead Factory (we are all about learning the bead-making craft) in a town not too far away called Somanya. it took a long walk after getting off the tro-tro so by the time we went through the tour, bought a couple nice beaded items and some fried sweet potato on the side of the street, we were pooped and came home. yesterday, vera's newly wed sister jane invited us to the methodist church in dawu (another town close by) so she got to experience an african church service with much singing, dancing and hankerchief waving. we brought her to school to meet the kiddies. we had to spell the difference between J-E-A-N and J-A-N-E several times when introducing her. today the three of us organized a scavenger hunt for the kids. big success! later this week we plan to travel a couple hours to nearby Boti Falls, a trip into the capital (mainly to go to the ATM for some cash), Akusumbo Dam (which is part of Lake Volta the largest man made reservoir in the world), a town called Ho-Hoe (where there is also supposedly a really great Kente cloth market) and a monkey sanctuary. Apparently there used to be an abudance of this species of mona monkeys. traditional religious believers protected the monkeys because they were thought to be the translators of tortoises. but then, monkey numbers dropped dramatically in 1980s as Christianity became popular. ha! churches killed monkeys!


"bead factory" more like huts behind a family's house where they fire crushed glass in kilns to make into pretty pretty beads

shout out to my lovely coworkers at TPR who sent me like 12 postcards! wo ai ni! thank you so much! i will make a collage of the scenic taiwan cards on my wall:) i miss the good ole' teacher-lounge-guffawing-at-random-stuff times:) oh gmail isn't working but i will see about setting up a taiwan-ghana pen pal exchange for the TL classes. that would kick butt!