jules and YAM FEST

julie is here! my best friend from summer camp. i havn't seen her in two years, and what better way to catch up than living and volunteering with her for two months straight in a developing country. she arrived three weeks ago and is teaching with us at akuffo tom and rooming down the hall in our house. it's awesome. we have been rehashing camp memories up the wazoo, as well as anybody under the sun that we both know from NPHS. she's fit right into our daily routine.... such as memorizing the world capitals (i have become unhealthily obsessed with studying our student atlas! i have mnemonic devices for all the hard to remember middle eastern and asian countries! my best one might be for achgabat, turkmenistan. i'll let you know sometime. i am a capitals queen! if only i was back in elementary school i could win some sort of geography bee).

we also have found a strong love for cards and contemplating our futures. we have been playing Big Two (chinese cards) and rummy every night the past week, as well as different versions of MASH (remember the middle school girlie pastime where you predict everything from your future hubby, color of wedding dress, honeymoon locale and number of children?). so now we're attempting to combine our favourites into one super fortune-telling card game. i'm sure one day we'll make millions from it.

the first week jule got here we had black outs almost every night (damn akosumbo dam is not doing it's job!), so she's gotten handy with lighting the lanterns. we've also hooked her on the phenom of Timeless, the phillipino soap opera i live for. i havn't felt this way about a tv show since dawson's creek in ninth grade. probably because both then and now i have a total lack of social/love life. hmm. anyway, it was really hard during the black outs when we were in timeless withdrawal (ok so it was only like one night). but the storyline is getting really intense! the father who was in jail for 15 years died in a train accident, Ara is now living on a plantation and pretending to be getting married to a hot artist named Leo, while her mother is still catatonic (sp?) and hidden away, and then her true love Christian is becoming a raging alcholic and falling for an annoying singer named Maryann. sound confusing and ridonkulous? cause it i, and i havn't even explained half the other crazy side plots.

there are even pamphlets being sold on the street about Timeless. it has the lyrics to the theme song, play by play of each episode, the actors real names, etc. we were dying when we found out the guy who plays Leo is named Diether in real life. how the heck do you pronounce that? we've already bought ourselves some hilarious ghanaian reading material. these pamphlet/paperbacks are hugely popular among students and adults, obviously because they are so cheap, around 3000 cedis a pop (30 cents) and they can be about any topic under the sun. they aren't copyrighted and have embarrassing grammatical errors but extremely entertaining. i bought one called the Life Guide from a man before getting on a tro. it had helpful information such as the Gender Determination Chart. apparently if you use this chart created by a Chinese scientist you can foretell your baby's gender. it all depends on the mother's age and the month of conception. creepily enough... it has been ON TARGET for everyone we can think of. i might attempt to upload the chart next time so i can get a larger survey of its validity! another pamphlet that we have perused and need to purchase was the How to Find Your Life Partner the Right Way Part Two.

the Odwira festival was two weeks ago! my students as well as all the townspeople have been raving about this event forever and it arrived! it is a celebration of the new harvest, the new yam, and a cleansing of the town in general. day one they cleaned the path for ancestor's spirits to make their way back to the town. day two they introduced the new yam of the harvest by having a mock battle between men in the street grabbing over a humungo yam. i forget day three... but day four was posessed women walking through the street with their faces covered in white powder. day five they carried the local chiefs around in palanquins (those big wooden seats that five men carry one large royal man on). the night of day six there was a Miss Odwira (beauty pageant! obrunis were welcome but we never made it! oh well, missed my chance).

there were SO many people, foreigners, cityfolk, anybody and everybody from ghana walking the streets of our town. it was like walking down Broadway in NYC! all the bars and restaurants were packed and had huge sound systems pumping RandB and hip hop! 2pac, 50 cent, akon, rkelly are big hits here, thought not as big as Celine! we even went "clubbing" one night. more like, after enjoying some club beer (another ghanaian brand but not as good as STAR) with some teacher friends we squished into this bar/one-room shack space down the street where all these adolescents were grinding with each other. i saw my 8th grader Ruth getting down! and then my previous 9th grader andy kwame sporting a do-rag outside! he's the class assistant prefect! whoa! i'll try real hard to post photographic evidence of these shenanigans next time:)

random others:
1. we started teaching art to primary classes. it was AMAZING! instead of whining and hitting biting, they were sitting quietly with their one sheet of white paper and sharing the crayons like angels! and they were so creative! we are attempting to try a new art/craft every week. we've already collected like 200 plastic bags that we buy the water in. there's got to be something cool we can get them to create with them.
2. i got sick two weeks ago and had all the major symptoms of malaria: nausea, fever, aches, the runs... but then it went away after one and a half days! and then liz picked up the bug the next day (probably because she was a wonderful motherlike friend and lent me her pillow) so... it was just a tease! my pop-up mosquito bed net has aided me in dodging malaria so far!
3. we still have 7 bottles of sunblock left, 2 full bottles of saline solution, and like 4 ziplocs full of tampons. whoops
4. i know this is about a month late but HAPPY BDAY CARO! it's our year, the year of the dog!