Monday, November 30, 2009

Your daily Ghanaian nonsense

On a trotro review mirror this morning:

Prosper Jingles
The Highlander

This makes even less sense than most broken English signs in Ghana.

P.S. For anyone who hasn't heard yet, I'm coming home in January to save money. I'm also going to Egypt, Thailand, and maybe South Korea on my way home. I don't know the details yet of when I'll be back in the U.S.A. but I'll keep you posted.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Thanksgiving



The kids from the other programs here get it easy. CIEE, the largest study-abroad program on campus, threw a Thanksgiving dinner for their students, featuring turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple pie. Our house had the choice of doing it ourselves or not at all, so naturally we took that as a challenge and decided to go all out on Thanksgiving dinner.

On Monday we invited everyone who works at our program, as well as friends and coworkers. Cooking started on Tuesday, and I worked on pie. I searched every grocery store in Accra (there are three, and they have pretty much exclusively white people in them at all times) for pumpkin, canned or otherwise, but to no avail. I did find granny smith apples, and Z found a canned “summer berry” mix that looked like it’d make good pie filling. Liz took pity on me and helped with the pie, because apparently she wanted pie that tasted good or something. This was good, because otherwise I’m not sure what we would have ended up with.

On Thanksgiving, Z went out to get a turkey, and we thought that there was some sort of “precooked” turkey available because he’d seen it. As it happened, it was basically turkey lunch meat in the shape of a whole turkey. Gross. We ended up buying a frozen turkey and started defrosting it at about 2, when it needed to be served at 6. I was excited, assuming that this would never happen and we’d all get tons of turkey for the next few days since our guests would be long gone by the time the turkey was done. As it turned out, the turkey fit in our microwave, defrosted quickly, and was tender and delicious.

We ended up with turkey, sausage-apple stuffing, green bean casserole, infinite mashed potatoes, fruit salad, sautéed vegetables, mushroom and chicken gravy, two apple pies, and a berry pie. Our guests all loved the food, which was great because previously most Ghanaians who have tried American food at our house or elsewhere haven’t been impressed. Dr. Williams, our program director, even came by, and talked about American football for much of the night, which made it a lot like American Thanksgiving. Three boys from Taryn’s school came as well and had a fun time making hand turkeys. Really, all of us college students had even more fun with hand turkeys.
After the kids took off, we busted out the alcohol, and ended up playing beer pong for most of the night, which is a hilarious thing to do in Ghana. Our security guard walked up to return his plate of food, saw what we were doing, and we were all a little concerned he’d tell us to keep it down or to not remove our closet door and use it as a beer pong table. Instead, he picked up a ping pong ball and sunk a cup with his first shot.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Party Time, excellent

After not being too exciting when we first arrived, my household has started to discover the charms of the Accra nightlife. Which is pretty much the only thing Accra has going for it. On Thursday night, we discovered a place called Ryan’s Irish Pub in Osu. I was expecting a typical Ghanaian spot with Guinness on tap or something, but instead it’s a huge, green farmhouse-style building set into a verdant lot. Inside it looks like you’ve wandered into a trendy Irish-style bar back in the United States. The almost complete lack of black people inside really helped with that impression as well. We spent most of our time inside giggling at the fact that this place exists. We also drank draft beer and Soco, so as much as I kind of felt bad for hanging out in the least-Ghanaian place in Ghana, it’s still fun. Watching the creepy old drunk white men hit on dumb sorority girls studying here was also entertaining.

Saturday night was my housemate Beth’s birthday (actually it’s Tuesday, but Saturday was the party.) Everyone dressed up and we went to this club called Cinderella’s. For some reason there was a club right next to Cinderella’s as well, and it didn’t have a cover, so everyone was in there and we ended up spending the entire night in there. I never go clubbing in the US, so I don’t know how it compares, but it was pretty fun. There were a lot of Ghanaians there, unlike at Ryan’s, and by American standards the drinks were cheap. The great thing about Ghana is that everything is really cheap, but when I want to splurge on things that are fantastically expensive by Ghanaian standards, I just say “This would cost twice as much back home!”

We spent all night at the club, and ended up getting home around 5:30 in the morning. We ate canned spaghetti that one of my housemates thought was a good idea to buy, and then I walked around campus and watched the sun rise. It wasn’t very exciting.

From here on out, we’re planning to go out all the time. Also, I might skip out on most of my obligations next week to go to the Western Region of Ghana with some girls from another program at the university. Apparently the Western region houses the nicest beaches in Ghana, mangrove swamps, a stilt village in the middle of a lake, and an evergreen rainforest national park, so that sounds much more fun than going to class and my internship. Actually trying and behaving myself was fun for a while, but it’s officially party time now.

In spite of my last statement, I’m still reading books at an amazing rate. Here’s an update on what I’ve gotten through recently.
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (good until the climax which was stupid)
- Enduring Love by Ian McEwan (he wrote Atonement, and yet this book is still good. Who’d have thought?)
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (good drawings)
- Kafka on the Shore by a Japanese dude whose name escapes me (absolutely fantastic and I recommend it to everyone)
- My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (a little too much estrogen but not bad)
- Invisible Man by Ralph(?) Ellison (Kafka-esque and good)

Right now I’m at work on Ulysses again. I’ve totally got the first 3 chapters memorized since I’ve read them like 18 times now, and never made it much further into the book. Will I make it anywhere this time? Check back and see.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Building shit.

This last Wednesday we didn’t have classes and instead went to a school in an Accra suburb to help construct a library. This has been an ongoing project by the Aya Centre where they take whichever groups come through from the US and have them work on the library, which is getting built slowly but surely.

It was an interesting experience to build completely by hand. We spent our time mixing cement and then carrying the cement up to a worker who poured it into the frame that had been built. The building was about halfway complete and we were putting the final level of cement on above the windows, leaving just the roof to be done after.

Making the cement involved shoveling dirt into a large basin, mixing it with bags of cement, shoveling rocks on top, and then carrying water from a rainwater tank and pouring it on. After this we had to mix the cement with shovels. I couldn’t believe how inefficient this was, and at first I was thinking about how much a portable cement mixer would speed up the process, but I realized that just a wheelbarrow would have doubled the work we were able to do.

The main job that I worked on was standing on a rickety board supported by cement blocks and lifting very heavy metal bowls of cement up to the man who was pouring it. I got a lot of cement dripped on me, and nearly got hit in the head by the large rocks in the cement mix when it spilled over the frame. We didn’t really accomplish that much, which was discouraging, but at the same time it felt more gratifying than anything I’d done at my internship this whole term.

Speaking of my internship, I spoke to my program about how I hadn’t done anything there in a long time, and that what I had done was for my boss personally, not for the internship. So, I may end up with a different internship for the last month, unless AFAWI comes up with something for me. I really wouldn’t mind actually doing something, even if it’s just teaching math or English for a while. I’d even be happy doing construction compared to the sitting-around I do now.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Important News!

I may be returning from Ghana early. I was checking out my finances, and discovered that next term will cost me $11,500 here. If I return home, I discovered that due to the fact that I only need 1 class to graduate, it will cost me ~$400 to finish my degree. Including buying a new plane ticket home, I’d save about $10,000 bucks by coming home early. That’s infinite money back where I come from, but I’m still not sure what to do. I’m set up to take out the loans to pay for next term, but I just don’t want to be in debt.

I also go back and forth on whether I want to stay at all, as I’ve liked my experience, but I don’t know how much more I’d get out of it next term. I’ve been told that the classes at the university are mostly terrible. But if I stayed here, I’d be more comfortable and have chances to do new things in Accra and in Ghana. I also wouldn’t feel like I’m wimping out.

My travel plans for when this term finishes up are also a mess, whether or not I choose to come home early. I wanted to go to Spain and visit Erin, but getting there looks like it’d be way more expensive than I was thinking. I’d also like to travel around West/North Africa in general, but that requires money too. Finally, I really wanted to go to this music festival in Mali, which is a) expensive and b) in the very middle of an area where a group called Al Qaida in the Maghreb (a word meaning North Africa) has been kidnapping European tourists and attacking Malian and Algerian army posts very successfully. The music festival sounds amazing and like a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but making a video about how much I love Allah while someone points an AK-47 at my head would be a pretty unique experience that I don’t want. I normally don’t worry about stuff like this and just say “oh, you have to know what regions to go to in countries like that.” In this case, the festival is exactly where the kidnappings and attacks have been occurring. Still, odds are I wouldn’t get killed by Al Qaida and I really want to go. It just seems like a terrible idea.

In summary, I’ll be home
- In the middle of December, if I decide I don’t have the money/inclination to travel around Africa and I want to not spent next term here.
- In the middle of January, if I decide to travel somewhere and I don’t want to spend next term here.
- In the middle of May, if I want to stay here and decide it’s worth $10,000, whether or not I do any of these travels in December .

I have to decide about all this very soon, like this week. Input is appreciated, because I don’t have a clue what to do.

Friday, November 13, 2009

More pictures

Here's your 5,000 words for the day. There are better pictures of most of these things, especially the monkeys, but they're on other people's cameras, so I'll post 'em when I get 'em.





Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Picture Update

These are all from Mole. That's me and Tom with the chief and his translator, me inside a hollow tree, a big mosque in Tamale (not the really old once I mentioned in the post), an elephant, and our guide James leading us up a trail.





Monday, November 9, 2009

Last trip of the term

The last of our official trips was this weekend, and we traveled to the Volta region. It’s the easternmost region of Ghana, requiring a trip over the Volta River to get there. Sadly, I didn’t get to see the dam or lake, but the river is still large and impressive. This trip was also much shorter than the others, as everything’s closer and we didn’t do as much.

Our first visit was to Wlii Falls (pronounced “vlee”), where we parked and took a half-hour hike along a very pretty trail, crossing rivers and streams the whole time. All of us Pacific Northwest kids on the trip loved it, as everything was green and shady, as well as cooler than in Accra. The waterfall was pretty big, and Tom, Z, Beth, and I hopped in and swam around. We basically giggled the whole time because the mist was so strong that we couldn’t look at the falls, and it was like being in a wave pool. It was another of my favorite times here so far. There were also a multitude of bats living on the cliff next to the falls, and they were swooping around as we swam.

That was really it for Saturday, except we went to the hotel, swam, and played ping pong all evening. I surprised myself with how not-bad I was at ping pong after not playing for a while, but Z still won every game we played.

We left the hotel at 6:30 Sunday morning in order to make it to a sacred monkey sanctuary, because apparently the monkeys are only out near the village in the morning. There ended up being about 15 mona monkeys running around, and we had fun feeding them bananas. We met the “chief” of one monkey family, named Commando, who wouldn’t eat out of our hands but stole the bananas and then ran off to eat them with his back to everyone. I also managed to get a small monkey to sit on my hand while eating a banana. Pictures will come, I promise.

We ended up getting home around 12:30, making this trip the shortest and least educational, but nearly the most fun. I considered doing something useful yesterday like working on a paper or laundry, but instead hung out all afternoon reading and chatting, and then watched Superbad with my roommates.

Now, I’m at my internship again, and today is our monthly meeting with a group of HIV-positive locals, so maybe there’ll be something for me to do. Most likely not though. I need to remember to take this blog down before I start writing “Worked with a women’s NGO in Ghana doing all sorts of extremely important things” on my resumes and grad school applications; otherwise the truth will come out, which is that I haven’t done jack in about a month and a half.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

I'll take that meal Togo

Thus far the only things to have happened AFAWI (the NGO I’m interning with, for the latecomers) have been getting online and finding out about the Beavers and Ducks stomping the Angelinos over the weekend. Also, Liz works right near me, but her school wasn’t meeting today, so she came by my internship and sat around. Now everyone is convinced she is my girlfriend. There are worse things.

Until my boss thinks of something for me to do, it’s Togo-writing time. I really enjoyed it there. I had wondered if the poverty would be noticeable, since by all measures they’re much less developed than Ghana, but it really looked exactly the same. The only sign of a difference was the border crossing itself. Aflao is on the Ghanaian side, and Lomé is on the Togolese side. It’s apparently one of the only national capitals which is also a border town, or so says my guidebook. At the actual border, the Ghanaian immigration agents have a building, while there are a series of broken down wooden shacks on the Togolese side. Except for that, Togo was quite nice, and had a good bit of colonial architecture – certainly more than Accra.

Taryn and I (the only two people on the trip) walked from the hectic border into Lome. It took me a while to get my French in order, but after a few random conversations with people I was doing alright. The road from Aflao goes right alongside the ocean and beaches, which were beautiful and strangely devoid of people. We wandered through the city, only knowing that eventually we needed to make it to the Station de Kpalime on the north side of town, in order to catch a car to Kpalime, about 3 hours away in the mountains.

The highlight of Lome was stopping in at a bar for a coke. As we sat there, various people came by to try to sell us things, and we declined. A man walked up with movies, we shook our heads, but he came over to show me one anyway. I looked down, and he’s holding out hardcore pornography for me, unsuccessfully trying to shield it from Taryn’s view. I busted out laughing immediately and apparently turned bright red as well, declining his offer.

We really did wander randomly for a while, and then eventually I stopped and asked a taxi driver where the Station de Kpalime was. I kept saying “gare,” French for “train station” rather than “station,” French for “bus stop,” so I confused him for a while, but we eventually figured out that it was about a block away and we’d wandered right to it. We got to Kpalime right around nightfall, so we couldn’t see much, and then got a shared taxi from there to Klouto, the village further up in the hills that we were staying in. There was a nice view of the lights from Kpalime on the ride, especially because the driver liked to go up windy mountain roads with his lights off, and at high speeds. Taryn was scared, but I thought it was fun.

We got dropped off outside a bar in Klouto, which turned out to be the bar in Klouto, and asked where the auberge we were staying in was. Two guys offered to take us, and figuring we’d either get mugged or actually get there, we followed. They did not mug us, and we ended up getting the cheapest room available (1 bed, 1 fan, 1 side table, cement floor, no toilet or shower or sink.) After a dinner of delicious spaghetti bolognaise, and staring at stars and fireflies, we went to sleep.

The next day was all hiking around Klouto, the main attraction. Our guide, a local 30ish guy named Apollonaire, took us all around to show us the cocoa and coffee farms, as well as a nearby small waterfall and to the top of a mountain for a nice view. It took about 6 hours and was a lot of fun, especially because in the mountains it’s actually cool. There were lots of butterflies and exciting plants, including two dye plants that Apo showed us, bright red and bright yellow. He also told us different medicinal plants. I don’t remember many details, but it was interesting at the time.

In the afternoon I discovered that Togo has delicious beer. They actually have some ambers and porters, something Ghana really lacks. Additionally, they have coffee in Togo, and good French-influenced food, so I wish I was studying there. Also, while drinking beer, when I went to grab another round, apparently Apo started telling Taryn that he wanted to marry her and they should meet and talk about their future together. This sucked for her, since he was one of the few African men who hadn’t done this to her. We decided to go to bed pretty early that night too.

The next morning was one of the highlights of my entire time over here so far. We were going to hike up the tallest mountain in the area (not what we Oregonians would call a mountain, more of a hill), and to get there we had to go down from Klouto into Kpalime and then up to the other village. Togo’s form of transportation for things like this is motorcycles that you just hop on the back of and go. I’d never ridden a motorcycle before in my life, and here I was riding helmetless down windy mountain roads, swerving to avoid potholes and the occasional herd of goats that ran out in front of us. They even cut the motors on the downhills to save gas, but then it got even more exciting once we got to the flat and they sped up. The view was fantastic, and I wasn’t even scared at all, which I probably should have been.

We bought bananas, avocados, and bread for lunch, and then began to hike. It was market day, so we passed a long stream of women going the other direction down from villages located on the hill, all carrying large amounts of produce on their heads while we were huffing and puffing and barely staying upright. The trail was literally a 3 km long stretch of 45-degree rock steps, or occasionally just a rock face at the same angle. And it was about 9:30 in the morning, and about 100 degrees outside. We made it to the first village, which was most of the way up, and I had sweated out all my water and felt like I might vomit, pass out, or both. Taryn was about to kill me as well, as I’d been much more excited about this mountain than her, so we decided to turn back there. The village was pretty scenic, made out of rock and sitting at a steep angle on the mountain, but we didn’t really appreciate it at the time.

We caught a van from the village to Lome, and it had all the seats filled plus 5 extra people packed in. We were also dripping with sweat and exhausted, so it was not pleasant. In Lome, we caught motorcycles to a hotel on the beach we’d read about, Chez Alize. It was pretty fancy, so we again chose the cheapest room, a bungalow outside with no facilities, 1 bed, cement floor, etc. The rest of the day involved swimming in the ocean and laying on the beach, which was fantastic.

Various Togolese people came by and talked, and it was great how friendly they were. The Ghanaians are famed for their friendliness, but it mostly involves random strangers telling you that they want to be your best friend and then spending a long time trying to figure out how they’ll see you again. The Togolese are normal friendly, and will just have a conversation with you and then say “bye!” and walk off. It was really relaxing to not have everyone trying to stalk me, and I think Taryn only got the 1 proposal, as opposed to about 3/day in Ghana.

The only people at the hotel restaurant/bar in the evening were Taryn and I, and a number of older male expats and the Togolese women they’d clearly paid to be there with them. It wasn’t as creepy as it sounds, as we just didn’t interact with all them. We did meet the owner of the hotel, who was a crazy looking 50ish Frenchman with lank blond hair and an eyepatch. He would have looked equally crazy if he’d had a crew cut and no eyepatch, so everything else was just icing on the crazy cake. He was very friendly and read the entire menu and explained it to us, and I ended up with a salad and fish soup, which was much more delicious than the same thing I’d had in France.

The next day we were supposed to spend more time in Lome, but instead we’d run out of money, so we caught a barely-running taxi to the border and then reentered Ghana. They almost didn’t let Taryn back in, because she got a guard who I’m pretty sure couldn’t read, type, or think, but we got it figured out. We then took a trotro back to Accra, which took 7 hours instead of 3 and was full of Togolese women who screamed at the driver in French/Ewe the entire time. We were relieved to get home and fall asleep.

Now I’m all caught up on my trips, so the 2 of you other than my parents who read every word of these get gold stars!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Apologies

The last post was what I swore I'd never write - the kind of super long one that makes everyone not want to read it. So to make up for it, here's a sign that I saw on a trotro today:

Allah is the most greatest

Oh, Ghana.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Why is everything in the Northern region named after Mexican food

First things first – I got my midterm back from my sociology of development class, the good one taught by Dr. Williams, the program director originally from Washington DC.
I got 100%, and I’m pretty sure that I wrote less on the 5 essays than everyone else in the class. Win.

This weekend, we made a trip to Tamale, Larabanga, and Mole National Park this weekend. All are in the Northern Region of Ghana, which is not actually then northernmost region (Upper West and Upper East), much as the Eastern Region is not the easternmost region (Volta Region). Still, it was a 12-hour bus ride, so we left at 6:00 AM on Thursday. This trip wasn’t just Aya Centre folks, and included about 8 other kids studying at Legon along with one German student, Lisa, volunteering at a school in Accra who just happened to hear about the trip.

The ride up included the usual mix of smooth roads, smooth roads with speed bumps every 2 km, and terrible dirt roads that slowed us down a lot. We arrived in Tamale around 7 PM in the middle of a rain and lightning storm, which was exciting and gave us something to stare at for the last couple hours of the trip. After a dinner of spaghetti (ordered from the “Chinese” section of the menu at the hotel restaurant) we all crashed early.

Friday morning we took a tour of Tamale guided by a member of the hotel staff, Mo(hammed, but he went by Mo.) We visited the regional chief’s village, a Dagomba chief. We brought him a gift of kola nuts and a few cedi, and we all removed our shoes and knelt down until he said we were welcome. The chief, very old, didn’t actually speak, but his spokesperson did, which is standard practice for royalty. The throne room, or whatever it was, wasn’t fancy, just large enough to hold 25ish people comfortably, along with a horse that was against one wall and decided to take a long, loud piss during our time there. The chief shared part of our kola nut gift with us, but I think I might have been the only student to try the extremely bitter nut. Mo spoke for us, and we asked questions through him about what region the chief ruled over, how the chief is selected, etc. Apparently relatives of the previous chief, both through matrilineal and patrilineal, put an ancient magic calabash on their head like a hat and then shake their heads, and the first person that it doesn’t fall off of has been chosen by the ancestor spirit to be the new chief.

Finally, we received Dagomba names from the chief, or his spokesman really, and mine was “Sonyuni,” meaning “one beautiful heart.” All the names were somewhat bland, except for one girl who got “chief’s wife.” All of us were hoping for “wrestles with goats” or something similar though. We then got to see the shea butter processing that takes place in the village as well as some of the compound in general, which was not too exciting, and a hollow tree that we could walk inside. Whenever we visit villages like this I feel somewhat ashamed, because a bus of white people just shows up unannounced and disrupts the regular goings-on. I always see the adults eyeing us ruefully, but the children love us, but then from what I hear those that ask for money or are too attached end up getting beat once we leave. It’s nice to see these places, and the money we bring certainly helps them, but I guess I just like to be aware of the effect it has on the place. In a lot of ways, it’s not too different from tourists taking over a resort town in the United States or anywhere else, and I don’t take that kind of locals’ complaints too seriously, so maybe I shouldn’t worry as much.

After this we dropped by a sacred baobab tree, though I forget for what reason it’s sacred. I believe they may have cut it down and then it reappeared whole the next day, which is a typical reason for things to be sacred or mystical around here. More importantly, we could climb the tree, so about half of us did and it was fun. I miss climbing things, since so far on this trip I’ve only climbed my house, while drunk, and now this tree. Next on our tour was a craft market, where I bought a couple things but I’m not telling what since they’ll be your gifts in 6 months. We had lunch, and I tried tuo zaafi, the northern specialty, which is corn mash with a spinach soup thing. It tasted just like fufu, banku, kenkey, omo tuo, and every other Ghanaian dish that is a ball of mushy carbs and a soup. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy them, they’re just pretty similar.

We stocked up on liquor at a store in Tamale, dropped Mo off at the hotel, and made for Mole, about 3 hours away. This was mostly on the smoothest dirt road I’ve seen, and we got to pass a number of communities with traditionally-built houses. I hesitate to say traditional villages, since everyone rides motorcycles and has cell phones and electricity, but they still live in traditional round clay/cob/somethinglikethat houses with conical grass thatched roofs. At 8 we arrived at Mole, and I managed to get us 2 rooms for 10 people, rather than the 6 that we told the hotel were in there, thus saving much money. It was dark and we were exhausted, so we skirted the warthogs hung out right outside the rooms and basically didn’t leave for the rest of the night.

Saturday was the big day at Mole, and we woke up early for the 7:00 safari. The hotel is built on a ridge overlooking the southern end of the park. The views were beautiful, as the savanna just stretches away as far as the eye can see, and it’s all part of the park. There’s also one other ridge a long way away, which is apparently a 2-day trip by motorcycle and only accessible in the dry season, but it contains a great waterfall. Right now it’s the wet season though, which means the animals are much harder to find since they’re spread out over the whole park rather than at a few watering holes that never dry up. It did, however, mean that the entire place was verdant and far more scenic.

Fighting off hangovers, we descended from the ridge down to the park, where we hiked around for 3 hours, guided by James, a park ranger who has been working there for over 30 years, and his rifle in case of emergencies. Between the morning safari and another that I went on at 3:30, we saw antelope, bush bucks (like deer with a few white stripes and spots), baboons, some sort of smaller monkey, warthogs, and 4 elephants. The elephants were happily eating some sort of leaves and fruit, and the pictures definitely don’t show nearly as much as we were able to see. The monkeys and baboons were my favorite to watch though, since they’re just so human in their mannerisms. They liked to stop by the hotel restaurant and steal food, and were quite successful at it. At one point a man shoed away a monkey from his stuff, and then the monkey came back and slapped him on the leg as hard as possible before scampering off, leaving a huge red welt.

Between the two safaris, we swam in the pool and then took the bus to Larabanga, the nearest town to the park. Larabanga contains the oldest mosque in Ghana, and one of the oldest in West Africa. It’s a traditional stick-and-mud building, which is still used for prayers. According to local tradition, the sticks were placed in it solely to mark where construction had reached, and each morning the walls were higher than they’d been left at night due to divine influence of some sort. We also saw the imam, who was quite old and sitting under a tree copying the Koran by hand. Also in Larabanga is the Mystic Stone, which is a large flat stone that was moved to build a road, but every night returned exactly to where it had come from, similar to the baobab in Tamale. They finally gave up and built a shrine instead.

In the evening we ate dinner at the staff canteen, which was where all the in-the-know visitors ate since it was cheaper and better than the hotel restaurant. I met a number of international travelers, including two Canadians who, unlike most white people in Ghana, are simply traveling and not volunteering or something. I liked the way that one of them, Josh, explained it, saying that he views that as more helpful than volunteering, since the more people viewing Africa as just another place you can visit instead of a place in dire need of outside help, the better. I ended up spending the night talking and drinking beer with the Canadians and two girls who came with us from the university, Naomi and Rachel. Naomi is in the university development program, which goes through the Aya center as well, so I see her plenty already, and she teaches with my roommate Liz at the same school, but it was nice to get to know her and a bunch of the other American girls who came with us. I say girls not because I was only macking on the ladies, but because every study abroad program here is 90% or more female. My house is 3 men, 6 women, but the CIEE students at the university number 48 girls and 7 guys.

I also found out some very good information. Josh, the Canadian, has traveled around North Africa and down across the Sahara through Mauritania already, and gave me a bunch of tips regarding my possible winter break plans, but he’ll also be attending the Festival au Desert in Mali in January, so now I know someone who will be there. In spite of how great the festival should be, I was starting to have second thoughts regarding the difficulties of getting there and the costs, but he answered a few questions for me, including telling me that the recommended travel packages on the festival website are a huge rip-off and I can sleep in a Bedouin tent for next to nothing. I took his email as well, so that was great luck and now going to the festival seems much less scary and more likely to happen.

Sunday morning came far too early, and we left the hotel at 8 AM. The bus ride back was uneventful, except at one point we stopped the bus to look at a chameleon on the side of the road, who refused to change color for us no matter how many times I implored him to. I finished The Confidence Man by Herman Melville, which I recommend to no one but now I can say that I’ve read it. I’ve been interested in it since junior year in high school when I did a report on Melville, and it’s basically an account of a number of conversations between men aboard a ship on the Mississippi in 1849, some of whom may be unsuccessful con men, some of whom may be the same man in different disguises. No character is in the book from beginning to end, or anywhere close to that, and there’s absolutely no plot. It’s described as “the first modern novel,” since nothing happens and they just talk about philosophy, but it’s a lot more like ancient writings in that respect than anything modern.
I did appreciate the philosophy espoused by the confidence men (or man, depending on your interpretation), which is eternal optimism in the human race, and that everyone should have complete confidence in everyone else. They’re clearly hypocritical, since they want people to trust them so their cons will work, but at the same time they’re gregarious, generous, and friendly to the point that their confidence schemes all fail. My general philosophy is to be completely trusting in and honest to absolutely everyone, so I liked reading about others who felt that way.

I still haven’t written about Togo, but I figured I’d get this trip recorded while it was still fresh in my mind, since Togo’s already stale. Sometime this week I’ll write about it. Next weekend is our trip to the Volta region, including a sacred monkey sanctuary, so I’d better catch up before then. And maybe start my huge term papers that are due in 6 weeks.