Advice for Future Travelers to Ghana

Reverse Culture Shock
Being back in America is definitely different. The first shower I took shocked me a bit with the hot water and high pressure. No more buckets! Pineapples don't taste as good here and I do miss Ghana (and speaking Twi and Ikpana), but I can finally eat cereal for breakfast again and I'm happy to be home.

I've graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and Honors in Multimedia Scholarship from the University of Southern California and am now looking for the next step (hopefully involving a job and then graduate school). Ending my undergraduate career abroad in Ghana seems like it was a good decision. I'm happy I did it.

Advice
I've had some people ask for recommendations for students who will be studying abroad in Ghana in the future. The most important piece of advice I could give is this: 

Go with an open mind! Before you leave and while you are there, if you have expectations they will only be disappointed, but if you are willing to accept new challenges and opportunities you will definitely have an amazing experience. It truly is what you make of it.

There are, however, a couple things you should know before you leave.

1) Bring large denominations of US currency if you want to exchange money over there. You get a much higher exchange rate for a $20 bill or a $100 bill than for a $1 bill (it is not even worth exchanging $1 bills, as you will lose money).

2) I'm not a doctor, so take my advice for what it is, but from what I was told by doctors in Ghana, Doxycycline is not the best malaria prophylaxis. It is an antibiotic which will reduce the effects of malaria on you should you get it, and it apparently helps slightly in preventing malaria, but I think that the majority of the people on both my study abroad program and the CIEE study abroad program who got malaria were taking doxycyline. Use a mosquito net/tent, and don't forget to take your malaria prophylaxis, whatever it is!

That's all. There's lots I could say, but I really believe that if you have the right attitude you will do fine, and learning the rest for yourself is part of the experience.

"Enjoy your life!" - Papa Attah

Blog
I will continue this blog, most likely with updates on my research plans and adventures. I've tagged all of the posts from this semester abroad as "Ghana" so they can be easily organized/found by clicking on the label "Ghana."

Feel free to check back in the near future! I've begun work on a potential project with some local Native American groups... I'm excited!

Photos

Unansanango (Paramount Ruler of Logba Traditional Area), Dela (his daughter), me, and his wife. Their son just got married today! This photo was taken right after they adopted me into the royal family and asked me to return to continue my research. They gave me the beads around my neck. I'm wearing the Essien football (soccer) jersey that Claire gave me.

Nat playing a kpanlogo at the Kotoka airport in Accra when she saw us off.

Paco at London Heathrow airport sporting the beads he made using the traditional Krobo method and the shirt he had sewn out of the batik fabric he made. Ismatu's foot is making a cameo.

Rachel being excited at London Heathrow airport. We had just watched her favorite movie, the Addyeboat video (of Claire's drunken basket-weaving instructor, Addyeboateng - o ha dwene! "He is trouble!"), which will be uploaded onto the Internet eventually...

Ismatu and I at London Heathrow Airport. Ismatu is rockin' her batik hoodie (yeah, I'm kinda jealous).

Growing Up In Africa

Leaving today!

I definitely have mixed feelings. I am completely drained. I managed to get sick with a persistent cough, probably from spending 9-11 hours every day in a cold computer lab then going outside into the heat, not sleeping much, and stressing about this independent study project. And here I thought that I was leaving all those fun habits back in LA. Thankfully, that wasn't characteristic of my entire time here - just the last two-three weeks. Overall, not bad!

However, the last two weeks I was pretty busy working on my research project, which instead of being a simple 30-page paper ended up being 111 pages (including the appendix, which was single spaced, but included over 50 pictures). Oi. But....it's all done now. Printed (the pictures didn't print so well), bound, and handed in. And we all presented. It was definitely really interesting to hear about all the things everybody else had learned about during their research time. One of my advisors came to my presentation, and then about an hour after I'd finished Unansanango (the paramount chief of the Logba traditional area) showed up, too. That was so cool!

I'd gone to speak with him earlier in the week about the project and he welcomed me warmly. He runs an NGO in Ghana which promotes the use of traditional medicine and educates herbalists about safe practices (for the people and for the environment) and his daughter got her degree in traditional medicine. They were very interested in my project, which was all about the names and uses of plants (the majority of the uses that people told me about were medicinal). Although my focus was more on the linguistic aspects of the plant names (especially how they relate to language loss), I gathered a good amount of information that's relevant to the community and put it all in my appendix. After explaining the purpose of the project and everything I had done and would be doing, he told me that although I called my project "small" it was very important to them. He seems to understand pretty well the issue of the children not being able to learn in their own language at school and told me that the names of plants weren't being taught to children in their own language, so having a resource like what my appendix now is will contribute to the development of teaching materials for Logba chilrden... in Ikpana (Logba). He is encouraging me to return and continue the project, since it's very much a preliminary study as it is.

After our discussion, he seemed very pleased. His daughter came out with a beautiful necklace of Krobo beads and put it around my neck as Unansanango declared me a part of the royal family of Logba and adopted me as his daughter. I was touched. And I really would like to come back and continue the project in the future. I have hundreds of ideas for research here. As one of my advisors, Prof. Dakubu, told me, the nice thing about doing research in a place like Ghana is that you will never run out of topics or new things to study. It's so true.

However, today is Sunday: the day most of us leave. Two people are staying longer and two already left. Sunday is my least favorite day of the week in Ghana. Nothing is open. Nothing happens. It's hard to find food... It's the worst. It probably wouldn't be so bad if I prepared in advance on Saturday and stocked up on food, but I usually forget and then spend most of Sunday morning wandering around with a sad, hungry look on my face trying to find any place that's open. It's tragic, haha.

Will I ever eat fufu again? That lovely blob of pounded cassava and plantain that takes 30-40 minutes of pounding to prepare. After it's been pounded that much, you actually don't need to chew it, so you just pinch off a little blob of it in your fingers, dunk it into your soup, and swallow it.

And kenkey? My regular lunch-time meal of slightly fermented corn dough. It's a big ball of dough wrapped up in leaves (corn husks or banana leaves). You pinch off a bit (carefuly - it stays super hot and I've definitely burned my fingers before), dunk it in stew (tomato sauce palm oil, with onions, pepper, and maybe some other vegetables), and eat it. Yes, with your hands. Everything is eaten with your hands. Salad, too. I've actually decided that kenkey is kind of like the Ghanaian equivalent of pizza. You've got the dough, the tomato sauce, the vegetables, and you can kind of count the palm oil as cheese (which doesn't really exist in Ghana). Anyway, I'm a fan.

There are plenty of other dough-like things to eat here. Banku, kafa, akple... it goes on and on. They're all a little bit different, but all are kind of the Ghana equivalent of bread. Carbs. We bake ours, they pound theirs.

I'll miss it. I'm definitely going to miss the readily available, cheap, fresh fruits, too. Less than 50 cents for a fresh coconut. I spent about $1.50 on five little pineapples yesterday that were deliciously sweet. Huge, juicy oranges for about ten cents or less. The oranges are green, and they cut off the outside skin with a knife so that the bitterness from the skin doesn't make the orange less sweet when you eat it. Except you don't eat it. You drink it. They cut the top off and you squeeze the orange and suck all the juice out. Then, if you want, you can split it open and chew out the remaining pulp. Kind of fun.

I bought a drum - a kpanlogo. Natalie (who is actually good at drums - and gave an awesome presentation from her research - ask her about it) has been teaching me kpanlogo rhythms to play on it, which I'm sure our neighbors really appreciate. Haha.

Last night we got to play drums while the other students danced, one last time. We had our going away party and were presented with beautiful kente stoles made by Kwakuche, one of the staff members who is also a kente weaver. My homestay family showed up to say good bye, which made me really happy. I hadn't gotten to see them since I left Accra back at the beginning of the program, because when we came back we pretty much all ended up staying in a hostel near campus because it was much more convenient to be close to campus than to have to commute for over an hour each way. I came back to visit once, but only my uncle was there so I didn't get to see my auntie and cousin.

I told a Ghanaian, "I wish I'd grown up in Africa, then I would know six or seven languages like you do." He responded, "Oh! You are still young. There is plenty of time to grow up in Africa! Stay. You will learn." He kind of has a point. When I first arrived in Ghana I didn't speak the languages (and I couldn't understand Ghanaian English), I couldn't find my way around, I felt really lost and uncomfortable most of the time, and I wasn't sure how to interact with Ghanaians in culturally appropriate ways (e.g. learning how to respond to marriage proposals and being called obruni). I was essentially a child. But, discomfort leads to growth. And I've tried to spend the last three and a half months "growing up in Africa."

My perspective has definitely changed, which makes me glad, since that was one of my goals in coming to Ghana. I've learned about therich cultural and artistic beauty that fills Ghana. I've learned to have an appreciation for "no rush." I've experienced a bit of the satisfaction (and frustration) that comes from doing everything by hand (pounding fufu, carrying water on your head, doing wash in a bucket or a sink) and hearing, "You have done well!" right after the encouraging, "Oh! You are trying!"  I've seen new places, had new experiences, met new friends, partially learned new languages, tried new foods, and found all sorts of inspiration for future research while being here.

I want to come back. I've barely even scratched the surface and it's been an intense past three and a half months. So, in spite of being sick and tired and missing home, I am definitely a little bit sad to leave. I hope that I've brought with me to Ghana (aside from the obvious economic benefits) a positive image of "obruni" (Westerner) as someone who is curious and friendly more than cold and aloof, and that I've brought a little bit of hope to the Ikpana/Logba language situation. I think that I'm taking with me (aside from the drum and the beautiful cloth) a better idea of what it means to me to be an American (it's much easier to appreciate the benefits after leaving the country), a bit of an understanding of this little part of Africa, and also a connection to Ghana, through the people I've worked with and the time I've spent here.

Language Shift Gets Personal

As I write my final Independent Study Project report (which is not nearly as fun as gathering the data was, let me tell you), I occasionally have access to outside sources to back up the things I make up out of my head (not easy with limited Internet and no ability to check out any books). After reading a little more about language shift, I've realized that it doesn't just apply to indigenous languages being pressured by dominant languages. It actually also applies to immigrant families who move into an area with a dominant language, and the language shift which occurs with their children, grandchildren, etc.

In fact, it actually applies to me. And maybe even most Americans within surprisingly recent generations.

I was always a little bit sad when Grandma told me how she tried to learn Italian as a young girl from her uncle, who died before she could finish learning the language (Dad and Grandma, feel free to add more details - my memory is not so good). Her parents came from Italy and Ireland, making her half Italian and me (at least) 1/8th. It's entirely possible that if she had learned it, and taught it to my dad, he could have passed it on to me as well, and then I would know Italian, hurrah! Didn't happen, though, and the closest we got was my grandmother being able to understand "English with a really heavy Italian accent" (or so she jokes - I believe I've actually seen her translate letters written to her in Italian by relatives or other genealogical researchers in her quest to uncover the deepest roots of our family tree).

It's hard to say what all of the factors affecting a family's decision not to pass on the language to their children are, but for many immigrant families coming to a "land of opportunity" there are several major reasons. One, to get a good job in the US of A you usually have to speak English. Two, there is a widespread (and incorrect) belief that speaking another language limits a child's ability to learn English (which, as mentioned above, is number one priority). Three, there often is a lot of pressure put on immigrant families by their new neighbors not to speak their first language - this can be due to some sort of stigma attached to the language, or just unhealthy fears/paranoia that people often have when they can't understand what's being spoken around them. In this case, a  foreign language is somehow seen as threatening. Four, there may simply not be enough other people to talk to in the language. It's one thing for a child's parents to be able to speak to her/him in the language, but who is the kid going to talk to at school? The other children probably don't understand the language and are fairly likely to laugh and make fun of what they don't understand. Then, not only does the child not have anyone to speak to (other than Mom and Dad, but we all know kids go through phases of not really wanting to talk to them), but she/he also just got made fun of for trying to speak to her/his peers. Lack of domain plus negative stigma. Is there any hope?

Well, yes.

In Los Angeles, for example, Korean is actually making a pretty good effort, in my opinion, at fighting all of the above. There is a large enough population of Korean-Americans that the domain for language use exists (physically embodied in the form of Korea Town) and it is perfectly possible for a Korean immigrant to live her/his entire life without needing to learn English. However, the children of these families are still facing all the above pressures, and many grow up understanding Korean but not fluently speaking it. At some point, many of them (possibly at the insistence of their parents or grandparents) decide that they want to get more familiar with the language of their heritage and either take a class in it at school (that was the story of almost all of my classmates when I took Korean I and Korean II at USC) or at the Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles (KCCLA).

Personally, I think the KCCLA is amazing. I took part of the 8-week Korean language class they offer there this summer (it was cut short by me moving back to Walla Walla), which symbolizes to me the great community effort to share their culture, not just with Korean-Americans, but with anybody who's interested in it. When I took the class, it was $50 for eight, two-hour language sessions, including free parking, free food (if you got there early enough), and free teaching materials. The instructors are great (and there are many different levels offered, so you will definitely be placed in a challenging but not too-challenging section) and the homework isn't stressful (you're graded, but unless your university is somehow offering you credit, it really doesn't matter, does it?).

Is it working? I can't say for sure, but it certainly is a valiant effort and I really wouldn't be surprised if 4th or 5th generation Korean-Americans in the future are able to fluently speak Korean with their friends, family, and random people like me who are trying to learn Korean, too.

As for Italian, I'm still looking for the ICCWW (Italian Cultural Center, Walla Walla). Any suggestions?

Language vs. Dialect

There's a widespread misunderstanding in Ghana about what is a language and what is a dialect.

Linguists like to define languages as being mutually unintelligible, i.e. a speaker of A cannot understand a speaker of B and vice versa. Dialects, on the other hand, are mutually intellible varieties of the same language, i.e. speaker of A can understand speaker of B, although there may be some tricky differences (lorry vs. truck), and speaker of B can understand speaker of A. There are obviously some complications with this definition, as dialects often run along a continuum of sorts, where speakers of A and B can understand each other and speakers of B and C can as well, but A and C are just too far apart for there to be mutual intelligibility beyond a very minimum. Then there's also the difficulty of what political bodies define as a "language" and what they define as a "dialect," and those definitions may not line up with a linguist's definitions at all. It gets complicated.

But while I was in Logba, I had people come up to me (usually Ewe neighbors of the Logba) and say, "Oh! You are learning the dialect!" I would say, "I'm trying to learn the language, yes. I think it's very beautiful." To which they would respond, "Ah, yes, the dialect. The way they speak here is very different."

It was really frustrating to me, and I usually just ended up saying, "Well, linguistically it's defined as a separate language, not a dialect at all." But now that I've had some time to think about it I think I probably should have just said, "Menagu?" ("Where are you coming from?") or some other appropriate phrase for the situation, like "Ta awa" or "Abo?" perhaps ("Good morning [said to one person, literally: I give you the breaking, i.e. of the dawn/morning]" or "How are you? [I haven't figured out the literal meaning of this yet]"). From what I know of Ewe, the phrases would probably be completely opaque (correct me if I'm wrong, non-Logba, Ewe-speakers).

Hypothetical better ending to above conversations:
"It's a dialect."
"Menagu?"
"What?"
"You don't understand? I thought you said you spoke Ewe. I was just speaking the dialect..."

Lots of work left to do on my paper. But today is a nice day of rest. I'm enjoying it.

Happy Thanksgiving! (I am safely back from another awesome adventure)

Our lovely American Holiday is quite foreign in this Ghana, but Happy Thanksgiving to everyone anyway :)

I'm thankful for:

- running water

- a room with a light, chairs, a fan, and a decent bed

- internet

- kenkey (type of Ghanaian food, kind of a corn dough)

- learning new languages all the time
- learning so much all the time!
- having found an advisor who could help me do a research project in my field of study
- coming home in less than three weeks (although I won't be back in WW until a couple days after I get into Seattle)
- over 100 bananas?? read on below...

N.B. All italics are in the Ikpana language. Parentheticals are the phrases everyone else uses.

I'm back in Accra now and will be for the rest of the trip, but for the last almost two weeks I was living in the Volta Region in Abuda (Logba Alakpeti), meaning "under the mountain," one of the townships of the Akpanawo (Logba people) who speak the Ghana Togo Mountain language Ikpana (Logba). There are approximately 7,500 people living in the Logba cities/towns/villages (from now on just referred to as "Logba") altogether. Abuda, where I was, is considered the commercial center and has a major market day running on a five-day rotation (today is a market day). Ewe, the major language of the Volta Region, is used in the schools and churches, and most people who live in Logba speak Ewe as a second language. Ikpana (note: there should be a high tone marker on the final 'a') is used at home and in "traditional" domains (ceremonies, council meetings, etc.). The area is mountainous and the largest city, Ayotu (Logba Tota), meaning "above Aya (another town, called Akusame by others)," is at the top of the mountain, about 7 km away. Between Abuda and Ayotu is Klikpo, the capital.

This is a photograph of Abuda (Logba Alakpeti, left) and Aya (Logba Akusame, right) from the footpath between Abuda and Ayotu (Logba Tota).

I stayed with the catechist of the Evangelical (formerly, Ewe) Presbyterian Church and his wife and two-year-old granddaughter. I had my own room with a bed, a chair, a table/desk, a light, and electricity- everything I needed. My new co-advisor, Prof. Kofi Dorvlo, drove up with me to Logba, introduced me to people and explained my project and its purpose to people. He left his water heater and some tea with me as well, so I was really quite set.

This is my home stay family, Margaret, me, Etonam (sp?), and Nelson. The photographer was the only person standing around right then and warned me that he did not know how to work a camera before he took the photo. The second photo he took was worse and right after he took it my trotro back to Accra arrived, so this is what we get. I think it has character. The beads around my neck were given to me the night before by my research assistant to remember him by. The matching bracelet is hidden by the two-year-old, who, it seems, can touch her toes.

The drive up takes about three-four hours normally, but for us it took about 9. Prof. Dorvlo believes in "No rush!" We stopped to get gas, to use the bathroom, to look at the people fishing in Kpong and to buy some fish, to take tea at his house in Ho (I got green tea for I think the first time ever in Ghana! It was heavenly), to eat lunch, to visit with some people, to get his car checked, to buy some coconuts and drink/eat them, and then we finally arrived in Logba. We spent the rest of the day going around and meeting with people. There is no internet out there, and several of the towns have no cell reception (which is otherwise quite good everywhere in Ghana) due to the mountains, so arranging things with people ahead o ftime is quite important and must usually be done in person. We stayed at a hotel there and the next day continued making arrangements for my research: housing, food, assistants, etc. Everything went fine and by afternoon I was on my own in a new place.

Luckily, I wasn't really on my own at all. My research assistant, Mawuli, speaks English, Ewe, and Ikpana (his mother tongue), and also knows a great deal about plants, which was one of the major aspects of my project. My home stay family was wonderful and the kid even warmed up to me about halfway through the trip and would come over to my room calling "Ago!" (what people say when they arrive at your door - response: "Ame!"). I would let her in and teach her English while practicing my Ikpana with her.

The second day I was there was Sunday and my home stay dad being the catechist, I decided it would be wise to attend church with them. They welcomed me in church and afterwards church members brought me over forty bananas. Yes, forty. Over the course of my time there, I was definitely given well over 100 bananas by the people living there, and I turned down several bunches more. They also brought me peya (avocado), omboe (orange, note that the "o" should be the backwards "c" kind of "o" but I don't have that on my keyboard), avi (groundnuts/peanuts), bafunuba (pawpaw/papaya), atoto (I have no idea what this fruit is in English - I didn't particularly like it. Both "o"s should be the other kind of "o"), and yavu avi (again, no idea what this is, but it's a type of nut from inside a big weird-looking fruit that grows in the forest - the name literally means "whiteperson's nut," which Mawuli suggested was maybe because the meat of the nut is white. Who knows? But I think it tastes pretty good.). I also got to try all kinds of different spices and another kind of fruit called onya, which is small and yellow when ripe and tastes yummy.

After church, Mawuli and I went to the "Linguist" (not what I would call a linguist, but historically they are called that. Really they are the spokesperson for the leader of the community... I may elaborate more later, but they are supposed to be eloquent and know a lot) to ask who in the community would know a lot about plant names in Ikpana. He gave us four names, and we spent the rest of the day finding those people, introducing ourselves, describing the project, and asking them if they would be willing to meet with us tomorrow to be recorded. It went well.

The next day, we met with the first, who is also the senior fetish priest of the area. He poured a libation to the ancestors before we began work to ask them permission for him to share his knowledge with us. They seemed to approve. The whole day Mawuli and I walked around town recording knowledgeable people telling us about the various plants that grew around there and their medicinal and practical uses, all in Ikpana, which I did not understand at all (other than the word for banana, which is similar to kodiatsya, but with several letters in it that I can't type on this keyboard). It was awesome!

I should point out that throughout my stay I didn't understand 95-99% of what was being said around me, at all times. Everything was either in Ewe or Ikpana. Mawuli was a very patient teacher, though, and by the time I left I could walk down the street and go through the whole greeting conversation (it's long) with people at morning, afternoon, or evening, and probably knew about a total of 75-100 words/phrases, plus quite a few other terms related to plants and cures, and could even generate several different permutations of those phrases. I am faaaar from fluent, and my Twi is definitely better, but when I got back to Accra at first I couldn't think of anything other than Ikpana. It was really difficult to keep from responding to people in Ikpana, and I couldn't speak Twi at all. After sitting on the trotro back to Legon for a while I was able to remember how to say, "I will alight here," but when he repeated the question back to me, "You will alight here?" I responded, "Yeah." He (in a very kind and friendly way) gave me a little Twi lesson, kindly explaining that the word for "yes" in Twi is "aane." It's coming back to me, now, though. The lady who works at the chop bar (eating place) near where I stay patiently practices Twi with me and teaches me words I don't know, like "fork."

But back to Logba. Like I said, Ayotu is located at the top of the mountain. On day two of our data collection, Mawuli and I hiked the 7 km up to "The Hill City of Ghana" to meet with a senior herbalist there. Unfortunately, the person we had sent ahead of us the day before to tell the herbalist of our coming was tipsy.

The day before:
me: "Mawuli, he's drunk."
Mawuli: "Yes. He has just returned from a funeral, I believe."
me: "Will he remember...?"
Mawuli: "Oh yes. He will."

Apparently, he did not, as the person we were supposed to meet had no idea we were coming. But after several hours of us meeting with people and holding lengthy discussions with them (and by us I mean Mawuli, since he was basically my "Linguist"/spokesperson - as I said before, all conversations were in Ikpana or Ewe, and very rarely were translations deemed necessary. Honestly, they really weren't, especially once I got over my paranoia that things weren't going well when the discussions seemed to be going on for too long without anybody smiling or giving any other positive, extra-linguistic cues), we were able to arrange for the herbalist to stay and work with us, after he poured a libation to the ancestors, of course. He ended up being a wealth of knowledge, and also a very eloquent Ikpana speaker (according to others who heard him speak). He poured another libation to the ancestors to thank them for a successful day, after we had finished. But, after trekking through the bush all day in the hot sun with not quite enough water carrying a video camera and hiking over 14 kilometers for the day, I was pretty tired when I made it back home that evening. I stayed tired throughout most of the trip, even when I got almost 8 hours of sleep at night.

The next day we trekked around Klikpo, and on our walk back to Abuda we happened to have the great fortune of bumping into the chairman of the herbalist association of Ghana, who happily shared his knowledge with us to the point of me needing to pull out another tape to record everything on. By then we had almost three hours of footage, with way more plants than I had originally set out to record (recorded: 120, original plan: 50). The next two days, and Sunday we spent just going through the footage we hadn't yet gone through.

Saturday, however, we took a break from research (but it was actually impossible not to learn a huge amount that day) and climbed the mountain to go to the waterfall: Akpomu Falls.

 
Akpomu Falls

Mawuli and our guides (there are guide fees and a "development" charge per person to go to the falls, but they're worth it) couldn't swim, but I was able to swim across the pool with a flashlight (wrapped in a plastic bag) in my mouth, climb up onto the ledge, and go inside the cave there where there lives a huge colony of little bats and inside of which stalagmites have met stalactites and grown together into solid pillars of rock. There used to be a wooden walkway over there, but now you have to swim (they assured me that the "development" charge went towards things like building a new one, which I wasn't terribly excited about since I can swim). It felt great after the long hike (I hiked probably about 20-22 kilometers that day in total), and don't worry, Mom, the guidebook said that it was safe to swim there. I checked first.

Looking up to the water at Akpomu Falls. Sorry, Mom, I left the waterproof camera pouch back in Accra so I couldn't swim with that in my mouth over to the cave. I recommend everyone go see it for themselves, though - it's pretty cool.

The water leading out of the pool at the base of the waterfall. We were definitely the only people there, but the guest book said that two people had come the day before and two had come a week or so before that. They say it's a pretty popular tourist place (meaning two-four people a week?).

I asked them what was above the waterfall. They thought for a minute and then told me that that was where the water came from. I thanked them for that helpful information (oh,Ghana) and asked what else was up there. They thought for a little bit longer and responded that there was a much bigger cave up there, that was of historical importance to the Logba people. I said, "Let's go!" And so we did.

The cave is called Bayenu Egbetsi, which means "The place underneath stone, near Baye."

Morpheme-by-morpheme breakdown for the Linguists out there:
Baye.nu Egbe.(e)tsi
Baye-in stone-under


Bayenu Egbetsi, from inside (note the big rocks on the floor and the large ferns growing on the walls)

It's the bedrock of the mountain, and you can hear the falls below it and see water trickling down the rock walls nearby on its way down to the falls. There are cool lichens and ferns and huge roots of trees coming out of the rocks. It's beautiful.

As we were about to leave, a man walking by on his way to his cocoa farm stopped and gave me a quick history lesson of the place (the guides were just to get us there). He said that historically the entire area was a fighting zone, and the Akpanawo (Logba people) took refuge in the caves, living there in safety while the warriors went off to fight. Once the area became peaceful (and as they said, "Civilization happened") they moved away and let the place go. He lamented the large boulders that had fallen down in the area, claiming that the roof of the cave had once reached out much farther, the floor was once clear and flat, and the area was kept very nice. I'm slightly concerned about how nice it would be to live in a place where boulders fall down from above, but perhaps they had some good way of dealing with them back then.

Another view from inside the cave, looking at the trail leading away from where we had come

I think it would be cool if there were some sort of Logba Historical Society set up or something to clarify the remembered history of the elders. I heard several different stories of where they came from, how long they had been there, and why they had left wherever they were before while I was there. One person told me they were living there maybe 400-500 years ago and went and brought their Ewe neighbors to the area so they could find shelter in the mountains as well, during the Notsie wars about 200 years ago. I'm not a historian and I don't know who to believe, but it's kind of interesting.

After our exhausting but really exciting hike on Saturday, we spent Sunday working (after church, where a lady gave me several ears of fresh corn - did I mention how good the corn there was? sweet and creamy and delicious.. yum) and Monday meeting with some of the leaders of the community to discuss some aspects of the project with them. The paramount chief was not in town (he's actually in Accra and I've arranged to meet with him tomorrow), so we met with the regent/stoolfather, the Togbe of Klikpo (Togbe, like Nana for the Akan speakers, is a title given to the ruler of a community, sometimes translated as chief. According to our professor, Rabbi Kohain, "chief" is kind of a demeaning term used by the British in Africa as part of their military psychology to take power from the people they were trying to control. He told us that Francis Bacon noticed a similar thing happening in America, with what were previously called "Nations" and "Kings" being reduced to "Tribes" and "Chiefs" as the US government tried to control the Native American nations), and an elder. Our meeting went really well, they seemed quite pleased with my research (hopefully the Paramount Chief, or Unansanango, thinks so, too), and afterwards we formed a small committee with several other members of the community to carefully go through the compiled list of the plant names we had recorded so far to check for all of the linguistic features I was analyzing. It took quite a while, but everyone treated it kind of like a puzzle and seemed to kind of enjoy the challenge, hopefully without getting too bored (boredom in informants can lead to very incorrect data, according to several horror stories I've heard from other field linguists).

Regent/stoolfather, me, Togbe, elder.

After that, Mawuli and I went around photographing 50 of the plants we had recorded and interviewing a couple more people we needed to speak to (including a nurse tutor, who told us the medical definitions of some of the colloquial sickness terms that had been mentioned in the recordings). Then I went to my last dinner with the Time Tells family, who prepared delicious vegetarian dinners for me every night (including fufu with a soup that had big, white, edible mushrooms that Mawuli had brought for me, garden egg [small, white eggplants grown locally], okra, onions, and lots of hot pepper. Yummy! It's impossible to get vegetarian soup around here to eat fufu with.) and whose daughter lives in London but is home for a 6-month-ish holiday (vacation). It was nice to end the day just relaxing with good food and hanging out with them for a little while after I'd eaten. Then I'd go home every day and write for a couple hours or read the grammatical description of the language that Prof. Dorvlo wrote.

There's lots more I could write about (thankfully, since I have to write 30+ pages of a research paper about it, due in about a week), but I've already spent over three hours at the internet cafe and blogger has crashed about 5 times on me. Suffice it to say, my research went perfectly, Logba was beautiful, the people were wonderful, the whole area is full of huge, lush vegetation (the soil is very fertile), and I got to learn quite a bit of an endangered language while doing original research that counts towards my degree. Awesome!

I'm very thankful for all of it, indeed.

Logba - a new ISP topic!

I am leaving at 5 am tomorrow morning to go to the mountain village, Logba, to study the endangered language of the same name (although they call themselves and their language Ikpana). The language is being pressured by Ewe, mainly, but also to some extent Akan and English. I will be there for about 10 days, then I am headed to Cape Coast to celebrate Thanksgiving with the other students. Afterwards, I will head back to Accra to analyze my data and finish writing my paper.

I'm excited! I finally get to work on an endangered language after all. I also have an enthusiastic new advisor/co-advisor (Prof. Kofi Dorvlo) who seems to be quite happy to let me work on a language he has been studying for the last five years or so. "There is plenty left to study! You will find something. No trouble," he said, when I pointed out what little time I had to find something relevant to research. "If you want to study an endangered language then you will not leave my office without having the opportunity to do so." He gave me a pdf of the grammatical description of the language he wrote. Another student let me borrow her computer to read it and I couldn't put it down. I spent four or five hours going through it, and only stopped because the computer was overheating and all of my roommates had gone to bed.

Prof. Dorvlo is going to drive me and another student up to the village tomorrow morning (we're leaving super early to beat the traffic of Accra). He will introduce me to the people I will be working with, arrange for me to have a place to live (homestay), and show me around a little bit. Then he'll leave the next day and I'll do my research there (I'm back to plant names and uses, which I find interesting, hasn't been studied too much, and could be an indicator of the level of pressure that other languages are putting on the language depending on how many borrowed terms exist in the language). I'll be using my video camera (and possibly machete) a lot, and then when I come back to Accra I'll be able to analyze my data and hopefully have time to type it up into Toolbox or something to add to the corpus of lexical entries for the language. The research will be useful for the community, especially if the language loss becomes so severe in the future that the younger generation no longer remembers some of the terms that their grandparents knew. It will also potentially be quite useful for academics, either in Linguistics or in Botany, and maybe even Chemistry, according to Prof. Dorvlo, since a lot of the plants are useful as medicine and their chemical composition might be interesting to analyze. This is just the kind of project I've been looking for.

Hopefully the community will be accepting of a new student coming in to work with them on their language, and hopefully a week and a half is long enough to get everything done. If not, at least I've heard its beautiful there - there are supposedly caves and waterfalls and lots of fruit! Plus, it's on a mountain, so I can have all kinds of adventures exploring and hiking around.

Oh, and of course, I get to learn a new language! Suh-weet!

I wish I had a laptop, though. Then I could work on the analysis much more easily while I'm out in the field. But, oh well. I have a topic!

I have to go make dinner, pack, and write a new ISP proposal to give to the SIT staffmembers. I called Papa Attah today and told him I had changed my topic and location. He exclaimed, "WHY?!" in much the same way my homestay Auntie in Kumasi responded to me having shaved my head. Once I had explained it more he said, "Oh. That is okay."

Yemi (the Academic Director), as of yet, has no idea. He is traveling in Nigeria. But my original advisor, Prof. Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, said she would e-mail him her full support of my decision if he had any doubts. Hurrah! Plus, by the time he comes back from Nigeria there won't be much he can do to stop me. I'll already be there.

Today I was readily accepted as a "true Ghanaian," because I was wearing a football (soccer) jersey Claire had bought, decided didn't fit, and given to me. Who knew it was so easy? The cover falls when they start asking me about it though: "So, you like Ghanaian sports?" "Who is your favorite player?" "What team do you follow?" I try to find a way out before they can get me to admit that I don't know, I don't watch t.v. and I definitely don't watch soccer. Sorry. But, for anyone planning on coming to Ghana in the future, I think it is a good investment to learn a bit about the teams and buy a jersey or something to show your Ghanaian spirit. I now have a Ghanaian flag ready in case I need to run through the streets in celebration of another major victory (did I ever admit to the fact that I slept through the final goal of the under-20 world cup? My roommates woke me up and we all ran out into the street to join the crowd of happy Ghanaians, where I pretended I had been watching the whole match).

Oh, and in reading the grammatical description of Logba I came across a proverb which I feel explains my time in Asaam, the Ashanti village I stayed in for two weeks: However distant the time is, we say it is tomorrow. Yes, yes you do.

Appreciate the beautiful, my friends, and create beauty wherever you go.

Adamorobe Sign Language

Update (later in the day): Please read comment by Annelies Kusters - it provides much more correct and updated information.  You can find more info on her blog: http://adamorobe-valley.blogspot.com/


After digging through the entire SIT library at the University of Ghana, Legon for an Independent Study Project (ISP) that another student supposedly once wrote about their experiences learning Twi in Ghana (which I never did find), I came across someone's ISP about Adamorobe Sign Language. I had never heard of it before. After reading the ISP about it, I almost wanted to cry. Or throw something.

Here's what I learned from the ISP (I haven't actually done this research myself and I definitely don't have the internet time to do so, so you'll just have to deal with my second-hand frustration based on what this other student found during her research). Adamarobe is a village near Mampong in Ghana, notable for its great farms and female chief (a very rare thing in Ghana). It is also notable for its sign language. Adamorobe Sign Language developed within the community, possibly as far back as the 17th century, independent of the introduction of American Sign Language (which developed into Ghanaian Sign Language) by an African-American missionary within the last fifty years or so. The community has a genetic propensity for deafness, and reportedly up to 60% of the population may have been deaf at one time. In 1961 it was reported to be 10%. Now it is less than 2% (with the majority of those who are deaf being over 40). Why?

In the early 1970s, a team of Ghanaian and European doctors and scientists went into the village and discovered that the high incidence of deafness in the community was caused by an "abnormal gene" and gave their expert advice ("genetic counsel") to not allow deaf people to marry other deaf people.

Previously, the entire community was one: deaf and hearing seamlessly joined. All deaf members of the community were just as productive and welcomed as the hearing members. It was accepted and not considered "abnormal." There was a school for deaf children within the community, even.

Now, there are less than five children who are deaf (or there were 7 years ago when this ISP was done). The school has closed. All the deaf children have to travel to Mampong to the deaf school there, where they must then learn an entirely new language: Ghanaian Sign Language in order to get their education. Eligible young deaf men have difficulty finding wives (hearing, as is the law), because there is a commonly held belief that they will only produce deaf offspring. Deaf women don't seem to have such difficulty, as they are believed to be able to produce hearing children just fine. There is now a strong stigma attached to being deaf as the community tries to rid itself of the label "deaf village," which it has had for so long, and now perceives as negative.

And the language? Well, what hope does it have if there is no longer going to be a need for it, as the community does what it thinks is best for itself and continues to eliminate deafness from its population? It's clearly endangered. It's also not even listed as a language of Ghana (at least not on ethnologue's map of "the languages of Ghana" that I printed up as a reference one day in Kumasi... it is hard not having the internet at my fingertips).

I'm most frustrated just by the fact that someone (some people) had the nerve to go into a community and tell them in their professional opinion that they weren't beautiful. That they were abnormal. That there was something wrong with them and they needed to do something drastic to change it. What?? And now, thirty years later, the damage has been done and probably is permanent. The entire community's attitude towards its deaf population has changed.

I have to go get lunch and finish my pre-ISP research at the library before I leave tomorrow morning. Ghana is still beautiful!

Quick Update

ISP? I'm still in Accra - but since I cannot seem to make up my mind about where I'm going to do my ISP research, I'm going to Klikor (the area in the Volta Region we just left) tomorrow for an afternoon to discover if I can pull off my project there. What is my project, you might ask? Who knows! But I have to do it on something that counts as "Upper Division Linguistics" in order to graduate, so hopefully it will be related to that.

Right now the idea is: Resistance to Factors of Language Loss in Ghana, which means I would be looking at the various domains of language usage (media, education, politics, home, markets, traditional ceremonies and celebrations, etc.) and seeing how they resist or are pressured by other languages, mostly English, but also possibly Akan. If I do this project in Klikor, I will be working with Ewe speakers, primarily (I know about five phrases of Ewe, hah). Any suggestions are welcome, but please give them soon - I'm submitting my proposal on Friday.

Krobo I forgot to mention that I've been given two new names since coming to Ghana. One is my day-name, Yaa, which simply means I'm a girl born on Thursday, but I also have been given a Krobo name: Lako (non-linguist pronunciation guide: lah-koh. Linguist version: la-ko), which means strong woman who stands by her word and does not do wrong things. All of this was given to me as a name by the queen mothers of Krobo Odumase based on me saying that I have one older brother. There were two other girls who also have only one older brother and they were given completely different names. I like it, and sometimes introduce myself as Lako. "Lydia" is ridiculously easy for people here, though.

Signs There is a sign right by our apartment building complex which reads as follows (not the line breaks):

NO PARKING ON
THE STREET OFFENDERS
WILL PAY A SPOT
FINE OF GHc10

We get a kick out of walking past it, wondering what the street offenders are up to today.

Papa Attah Quotes

• "I am a fufutarian. You eat vegetables and are a vegetarian, but I eat only fufu."
  
  
• On learning Twi: "If you want peace you must prepare for war." (what?)
  
  
• "You are full-grown mosquitoes!"
  
  
• "You can paddle your own canoe" (these last two are often used together)

Shop Names
The shops in Ghana have ridiculous names sometimes. Here are a few that we've noticed.

• "I'm Dependable On God Chop Bar" (a chop bar is a place to get food)
  
  
• "Talk About Jesus Beauty Saloon" (saloon?)

out of internet

I finally got to try Fufu!

I like it. But I haven't found a soup that I like it with yet. Yesterday I bought some fufu and asked for soup with no meat and no fish and was assured that the soup had no meat and no fish, but of course when I opened the take-away bag of it I discovered that it was fish soup. With an unidentified chunk of meat/fish floating around. Luckily, I discovered some delicious scone/muffins at the Internet cafe and I survived.

We are back in Accra for about a week. A bunch of us (10?) are staying at an apartment building right by campus rather than with our homestay families because it is so much easier to walk 15 minutes to school than to walk fifteen minutes to a Tro-Tro stop and ride for an hour (or longer) to another Tro-Tro stop then walk another 5 minutes to campus... then do it again to go home. I miss staying with my family here, though. I liked them a lot and Auntie Abigail is a great cook!

We are here in Accra (at the University of Ghana, Legon) to finish planning out our Independent Study Projects (ISPs), which we will begin in a few days. We wil spend a little over a month working on them anywhere in the country. We also have a big paper (10-15 pages) due in a couple of days, which I don't think anybody has really started. Hopefully the power works tonight. Handwriting 10-15 pages by candlelight? Not so fun.

Laura covered the last week or so pretty thoroughly, I think, so I will refer all of you to her blog for details on our pottery/bead making adventures with the Ewe and Krobo.

She left out what we did for class two days ago, though! We spent the whole afternoon relaxing on the beach near Aflao, right by the border with Togo (we were in the SE corner of Ghana). Coconuts cost 20 pesewas each, so I bought two (for roughly a US quarter). I wish I had a picture of us all just chilling there by the ocean with perfect weather, coconuts, and a nice clean beach covered in pretty shells and little (harmless) crabs that run ridiculously fast and blend right in with the sand. It was beautiful.

I'm exhausted after moving all my stuff to the apartment (we're on the fourth floor). It is nice (very typical Ghanaian phrase) - there are four beds (bunked up) in each room. We have running water (and theoretically electricity, but the power was out yesterday and all last night), a balcony, a small bathroom with a shower, and a little "kitchen" area which is just a counter, a sink, and some under-the-counter cupboards.

I'm off to go find lunch now. There used to be a delicious vegetarian stand on campus here at Legon, but apparently it was taking too much business away from the "night market" (an area with a bunch of food stalls and vendors) without being officially a part of the "night market" so they were driven off. So the rumor goes. It's very sad to those of us who spent the last two months dreaming of eating tofu sandwiches and actually-vegetarian soups.

But, that is Ghana. If we're learning one thing here it's to have no expectations.

Photos

Kester, Uncle Simon, me, and Auntie Abigail (My homestay family in Accra)

Me, Jessie, and Claire in the bush in Asaam (aka on Adgyeboat's farm)

A cute little warthog from Mole National Park

Me in Mole National Park

Megan Gurrentz (Colorado) at Antoinette's shop (Antoinette being Ghana's only female master drummer)

Laura, Mara, me, and Jessie having a drum lesson with Antoinette in her shop

Me, Antoinette, and Lisa (who was an SIT student 9 years ago, then did Peace Corps in Swaziland and is now making a documentary about empowering women - aka she is extremely badass, in a really humble and passionate way)

 

 

In other news, we're moving around a lot the next few days. We're in the Volta Region, just left the Central Region, and very very soon we start our 5-week independent research projects. Megan (Colorado) and I went running when we were in the Eastern Region and climbed a hill that overlooked the whole valley, including the river, as the sun was coming up. So beautiful. They speak Krobo in the town we were in. We got to see a really interesting ceremony commemorating when the Krobos were forced down out of the mountain they inhabited. Megan (Colorado) and I got to be within like two feet of the paramount chief.

 

We're working on learning Ewe now, which is what they speak here in the Volta Region (and by we I may actually just mean me... we're not being given any formal classes in it, I just ask people and take the time to talk to the locals, who usually say something in Ewe than say it in English when I don't get it, then teach me the response). We made clay pots the last couple of days - still not finished, but we're leaving tomorrow for a new place so we'll come back for them once they've been fired (on a bonfire of corncobs, grasses, bark and palm fronds). Before that when we were with the Krobos we made beads, since they are apparently master beadmakers there, so we're really getting all sorts of creativity going on.

 

Megan (Colorado) finally gets to enjoy mangoes, which she has been waiting for the entire trip. They've been out of season, but there are lots of ripe ones here in the Volta Region. Life is good.

 

Going back to Cape Coast: I did try to get the fishermen to take me out on the boat, but unfortunately the day I chose to talk to them about it was the taboo day, so I helped them pull in their nets instead. They pull them in by hand using a long thick rope and a team of men, pulling in rhythm to a song they chant. They have several different songs, and each has a different purpose depending on how they are pulling. They always have people in alternating positions on each side of the rope, but the two methods I saw were they either all pull together at a certain beat and then grab lower and then pull again, or they each grab on to a set spot and walk slowly backwards in time with the song. It was fascinating. My hand developed a nasty burst blister pretty quickly from pulling on the rope, though, and I had to go back to the hotel for breakfast (we'd come out to the beach to watch the sunrise again), so I never actually did see either of the two nets I helped with break water. Those ropes are long! It would be really interesting to study the fishing chants, though. Maybe I'd actually get to go out on a boat...

Cape Coast (sick of riding on the bus)

We are in Cape Coast right now. Laura's blog post is much more detailed than mine will be - I'm tired and sick of looking at this slow computer's screen. She wrote hers on a friend's Netbook.

I like it here, but the beaches are covered in poo. People poo, dog poo, pig poo, goat poo, you name it it's there. It's gross. We carefully picked our way over to some rocks this morning and watched the sun come up over the Gulf of Guinea as the fishermen in their long wooden boats (some with sails, most with outboard motors) made their way out to the best spots to cast their small-mesh, gill-nets with random pieces of cork threaded painstakingly onto a thin piece of rope on top and hunks of metal (lead?) strung on a little rope along the bottom of the net. I want to go out on one of those! I'm not sure how to convince the crew to take me out and then bring me back in, but I'm thinking.

One interesting thing about fishing, as well as most Ghanaian activities involving harvesting natural resources, is that they have a traditional method of conservation: taboo. There are certain days of the week for each activity (farming, fishing, hunting, etc.) where it is considered an offense against the gods/ancestors/spirits to go and participate in that activity. For a fisherman, it is fine to sit around mending your net or fixing your boat, but you must not go out and fish on that day, be it Monday or Friday or whatever it happens to be. Apparently the original purpose of these taboos has been lost - allegedly if you ask a Ghanaian why he or she does not fish/hunt/farm/etc. on that particular day, they will say it is because they will anger the spirit of their fishing/hunting/farming spot, or something. It's kind of like their built-in, superstition-based day of rest. Pretty cool.

Cape Coast is more touristy than most of the other places we've been. Everyone is extremely shocked if you speak Twi (especially since they speak Fante here, which is supposedly mutually comprehensible with Twi, but in my case the comprehension is a one-way thing, i.e. I can't understand them but they can understand me). At one of the Bush Kanteens we ate at (basically just a covered area with tables and various food vendors, usually on a college campus, where students go to get their lunches - you can buy fufu, banku, and other Ghanaian staples, as well as beans, rice, plantains, and all sorts of fruits) here I went to buy a papaya (medium-sized, soft not hard) and three bananas, managing the whole transaction in Twi, and as the lady was cutting everything up for me, she asked if I liked pineapple, too, and threw in a whole bunch of pineapple as a "dash" (more of that social capital I was talking about earlier) for free. It was a delicious fruit salad for 70 pesewas (about $0.50 or less). Today for lunch we went to a vegetarian non-profit NGO that had delicious food and smoothies. Megan (New Orleans) would be better at describing the food options, but it was wonderful. I got an orange, ginger, papaya smoothie (so much ginger - yum!) and split a spicy mushroom salad (they were weird mushrooms, and I actually didn't mind eating them with the cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes and onions they came on) and a tofu garlic sandwich (on whole grain bread!! unheard of here in Ghana). It was wonderful.


On our way there, some of the street vendors selling crafts and touristy things started talking to us as we browsed their shops quickly. I responded in Twi and they (again) got really excited. One of them kept exclaiming, "You have done well! Oh you have done very well!" in Twi, and then he declared that he was going to give something to me so I would remember him always and gave me a miniature djembe on a keyring (or "key holdah! You put your house key on it so that you will know it is there when you are opening your door and looking for where you have put your key," as he described it, in typical Ghanenglish). I feel kind of bad because I can't remember his name now, but it was something-boateng (non-linguist pronunciation guide: bwa-tang). Maybe all I'll need to do to get out on a boat is strike up a conversation (although really, what we know is pretty much limited to greetings, introductions, and bargaining, which we are now quite good at).

Linguistic note: Twi doesn't really distinguish between R and L. Most Ghanaians whom I have had the pleasure of meeting don't have much trouble with the two, but our beloved Papa Attah (SIT staffmember - the name Attah means that he has a twin, in his case a sister) has some really fun ways of saying certain things. Our favorites so far are: "Oh, she has been to the doctor. She is not well. She has typhoid and mararia," and "It is not raining very hard. It is just dizzling."


We also went on a canopy walk today and visited a slave castle. Both were interesting. We gave our mini-Independent Study Project presentations the last three days, showing everybody what we learned during our research projects in the villages. The power and water frequently shut off at our hotel, but oh well. It's comfy, otherwise. At first they brought out about half as much food for all of us as we needed for both breakfast and dinner, but they seem to have caught on (thanks to our leaders having a chitchat with the hotel, I think) and are now bringing out enough food to actually feed 15 hungry college students. The lack of food at the beginning sort of scared me a bit, though, and now I think I'm overly concerned about not having enough food while we're in Cape Coast... working on getting over that. Today we had a nice big breakfast with scrambled eggs that had peppers and tomatoes and onions mixed in, bread, hot beverages (Milo, Nescafe, and British-ish tea), and some watermelon/orange/pineapple. Dinner was beans, rice (plain white, of course, meh), plantains (I still can't eat them), and a big cabbage/tomato/pepper/onion salad. I can rest easy, I believe.


Ghanaian idea of a compliment to a woman: "You have become very beautiful! You have put on so much weight in such a short time!" Hahaha. Big women are attractive here, and almost all the men have no body fat and pretty defined muscles. It's funny watching all the African-American music videos they play on all of our many long bus rides (the roads are always wonderfully bumpy - if the road doesn't naturally have huge ruts and potholes, the government kindly adds large rumble strips at the entrance and exit of every village/town along the road, so you get the experience of driving on a more typical road anyway) and seeing how the beauty ideals are so different. I guess in theory muscular men are supposed to be attractive, but all the videos seem to show big guys strutting with ultra-skinny ladies. It's interesting.

I do not have malaria

Just to clarify, since I've been getting a lot of e-mails lately about this, I do not have malaria. The doctors checked my blood when I first had a fever, muscle aches, weakness, and exhaustion and there were no malaria parasites. They declared I had malaria anyway ("it just hasn't shown up yet") and treated me as if I had malaria. A few days later I was back to my old self. I went and had my blood checked again a week after I had it checked the first time - still no malaria parasites. I do not have malaria. Maybe I never did. Who knows. But the doctor told me that I will be able to give blood later in life (I think that there's an automatic wait period of a few months for anyone who has just returned from Africa) and that when I go to America I will not have malaria hanging over my head, waiting to pop up and manifest itself at any ol' time it feels like it. At least as long as I manage to not get malaria in the next two months...

We are back in Kumasi for a day before we head to Cape Coast.

This past week we went to Mole (pron: molay, for the non-linguist and exactly mole for the linguist) National Park. We got there Sunday, went swimming in a real pool (that involved some "chicken fighting"), ate dinner, and then went to bed to get up early the next morning for our trek through the park. Our guide was quiet and carried a tranquilizer gun. I wish that he had been more informative about the things we saw - but he basically just walked in front of us and told us that if we talked too much we would scare the elephants. We finally saw a water buck, an elephant, a bunch of monkeys, baboons, warthogs, birds, and bugs. There were way more rocks, including a lot of volcanic rock, in the north than in the other places we'd been. Our guide was not very interpretive (unlike Dr/Grandpa/Ranger Bob, as my Death Valley 2009 crew remembers), but I had fun!

Yesterday we went to Paga, which is in the north on the border with Burkina Faso. We saw Burkina Faso from our bus! It wasn't that exciting. We also got to pet live crocodiles at the crocodile pond. That was bizarre. One of them was supposedly over 80 years old. We were on the road driving for probably about 7 hours and only spent about an hour or so in Paga, but I think it was worth it. We saw some traditional painted mud houses, too, and I got to climb on top of a couple (they take naps up there to keep cool and get fresh air) and go inside of them, too. Other than the spider-friendly ceilings, I wouldn't mind living in one, I think. Although I'm starting to realize how wonderful running water really is.

Speaking of running water, we stopped at Kintampo Falls today on our way to Kumasi. I got to stand underneath the waterfall and look up at it pouring down over the rocks in all of its muddy glory. It was a little bit frightening seeing that much water threatening to land on my head and wash me away, but I survived.

We get a little food stipend when we go on trips away from our hotel (where we get fed normally). We can either spend it at a restaurant, which will cost anywhere from 3-10 cedis, or we can just go to a street vendor and get some delicious beans with hot pepper, onions, cassava flour, and yam chips (kind of like fried slabs/wedges of potatoes) for about 50 pesewas (0.50 cedis). You can also splurge and buy a soda or a Malta (non-alcoholic malt beverage with vitamins) for a cedi or less. It can be hard to find stews and sauces with no meat, but as long as there are those street vendors with rice, plantains, yams, beans, etc. it's really not at all difficult to be a vegetarian in Ghana. Most of our group is, actually. And there are stands of fresh fruit all over! You can get papayas, pineapples, oranges (which are green), bananas (some of which are some completely bizarre species), coconuts (hard ones like what we're used to or soft ones with more juice), watermelon (so sweet! they're a different color on the outside, though), and apples (which we are told not to eat since they don't have a thick protective outer coating) for really cheap. They're all fresh and ripe and delicious, and the vendor will chop it up for you right there. Megan (Colorado) bought a bunch of seven bananas for 20 pesewas today out of the side of the bus.

Oh, yeah - anything you could ever possibly want (except fast internet and fast computers, which exist NOWHERE) is available at your window when you ride in a bus or a tro-tro, usually. People carry unbelievable loads on their heads and conveniently arrive at your window, calling out in a nasal-y voice (that would be interesting to study) their wares: ice watah! plantains! oranges! pens! etc.

I bought two smocks. They're the kind that girls can wear, too, so I wore one to Paga yesterday. There was a guy named Achala with a woven, slightly conical hat who had one on, too (he showed us the mud-building village and taught me how to say thank you in Kasem, one of the languages spoken in that area). He got really excited when he saw me wearing it. Megan (New Orleans) got a really colorful one that she's wearing today. They're woven and thick, but baggy/breezy and really comfy.

Oi, it just started raining outside. At least the rain is warm here! Everything is warm. The cold bucket showers really aren't bad at all. Washing clothes by hand is. My knuckles still haven't adjusted and are red and raw again. Some day I will be a true Ghanaian and have hands of rock! Or I'll just return home to washing machines in all their (lazy) glory.

Walewale

The internet here is ridiculously slow. We are leaving for Mole National Park in an hour. We'll get to spend the night there, too. Yay!

The power went out for pretty much the whole day yesterday. The night before, Ghana won in soccer and the whole country ran out into the streets to celebrate. We ran out and joined them as they sang, beat whatever drum-like things they could find, and ran up and down the streets with joy. Everybody was really happy. We saw people driving like maniacs on their motorcycles and all the taxis were honking their horns. The livestock that wander all over everywhere (sheep, goats, even big cows) were all really confused and scared. They sort of just huddled together with perplexed/frightened looks on their faces.

Up north further there's a town called Walewale (non-linguist pronunciation guide: wall-ay wall-ay; linguist pronuncation: walewale). When people ask where I'm from and I say, "Walla Walla" they usually respond, "Oh! Walewale?" -pause- "You are Ghanaian?" -confusion-  It's fun.

The sky is beautiful here. It looks so big, and the clouds are gorgeous. There are frequent rain/thunder/lightning storms and then it's even more exciting, when the whole sky lights up with a big burst
of lightning.

Okay, out of time. I hope this posts.

Tamale! And no MPs (aka no malaria!)

We are now in Tamale, which I love (even though it's hot) and even though they laughed when we asked if we would have internet, it turns out we do! We're here for one week total (so like, 5 more days) and we're split into two groups - half live at a guest house near where we have class and half (incl. me) live a 7 minute taxi ride away at a hotel with running water and air conditioning! It's amazing. Megan (Colorado) and I got up early and did some yoga in the hallway, and a Ghanaian stopped and said, "No. This is how you do it. Stand with your legs together, do not bend, reach down, touch the ground. See, I help you." We nodded, he left, we did headstands (didn't know I could do that).

So, exciting news: I had my blood tested one week ago and there were no malaria parasites (MPs), but they still decided I had malaria and treated me for it. Today I went in and got my blood tested again (this time for typhoid too, just to be sure) and there were no MPs and there was no typhoid of either variety. They say I need to go in for lab work again right before I leave the country, but if there are no MPs then, too, then I'm set.

Less exciting news: Jessie got malaria and typhoid. She's back from the hospital and resting now.

Tamale is great, though. People don't shout, "Obruni!" at you. They'll say, "Hello!" and "How are you?" but it's much more of a brief encounter like what we're used to. Much more relaxed. There are bikes and motorcycles all over though, so it's sometimes scary to walk along the pathway. Oh, and it's super hard to find vegetarian food that's cheap. Normally you can get a stew or a soup or something with no meat, but not in Tamale! "Vegetables? What do you mean vegetables?" An army man tried to help Megan (Colorado) and me find food today, but ultimately he didn't and we finally found a little stand that sold fried yams and beans and we bought some bread, too. Then we bought a bunch of bananas to split, too. Luckily we only have to fend for ourselves for lunch - we get served breakfast (omelette with vegetables, bread, peanut butter, bananas, and hot drinks [yellow label black? tea, Milo semi-chocolaty drink, or nescafe instant coffee-like beverage]) and dinner (hot vegetable stew on rice and sometimes yams with oranges on the side) at our hotel. It's pretty good.

Linguistic note: Almost everybody here knows English pretty well, but the primary language seems to be Dagbani, which is the language of the Dagomba people. I'm working on learning some while we're here, but we aren't getting any formal lessons, so I just ask people. Some know Twi, but I feel really weird using it because I never know if they know Twi or not, and if they do, they almost always know English, too, and just look at me like I'm assuming they don't know it. So I begrudgingly use English, and try to pick up more Dagbani where I can.

Today we went to a Women's Cooperative Shea Butter production place. They let me help grind up the shea nuts by putting them on a rock and hitting them with a little wooden mallet-like thing (it's more like a pestle but kind of hourglass shaped). That was cool.

The people in this area are predominantly Muslim. Dress is more conservative than it was in the south, and women usually wear head coverings. I do anyway, since my head still has very little natural sun protection (it's growing back fast, though!), but they have lots of really pretty scarves here so a bunch of our group got some. There are also traditional smocks (I swear they have a different name, but they won't tell us because they say we won't understand - I'll work on it) that are made of a thicker material which a lot of men wear, and supposedly women wear, also (but longer, dress-versions). I've never seen a woman wearing one, yet, but the men wear them over top of another shirt, which makes no sense to me, since it's way hotter here than it was further south and they're putting on a thick smock over top of a regular shirt, which is already bad enough. I asked one of our professors about it (he always wears one), and he said they're used to it. I like the feel of the material.

Yesterday we were instructed to find kola nuts (and their purpose), guinea fowl (and their purpose), and smocks (and whatever else we could find out about them) at the market. Kola nuts come in two varieties: red ripe ones and green unripe ones. Both are edible. They aren't very nut-like, but I'm not really sure how to describe them. They have the consistency of something like a really unripe apple. Apparently they have caffeine (or something - Yemi told us that they haven't been chemically analyzed yet, but people chew them to help them stay away on long drives) and they taste terrible (except to people who have been chewing them for 10 years or so) and if you chew them way too much for way too many years your teeth will start to be stained red or brown a little bit. We also heard a rumor that if you chew them and then drink water or pito (a locally-made alcohol made from fermented maize, millet, or guinea something grain) it makes the water or pito taste better. That one was unconfirmed. Yemi laughed at that and said, "Some of us put sugar into bitter things to make them taste better. Here they combine two really bitter, bad-tasting things (kola nuts and pito) and think that it is good. Oh, well, life is interesting."

And I've been asked what the currency here is, so here's a quick run down on that. They use the Ghana Cedi, or New Ghana Cedi, which is close to the value of a dollar. If you bring a $100 bill to a forex bureau they will give you a rate of about 1.60 (aka 1.60 Ghana Cedis for 1 US Dollar). If you bring in a $20 bill they will give you a rate of about 1.40. If you bring in a $1 bill they will give you a rate of 0.50 (aka 50 pesewas), which you could then exchange back for about $0.30 cents, which you could exchange back on and on until you had no money. What fun!

The single pesewa (like a penny) isn't really used. In the 1 1/2 months I've been here I've received one, ever, and I've never had any opportunity to spend it. Everything is rounded to the nearest 5 pesewa coin, including satchel water, which is actually only worth about 3 or 4 pesewas. If you buy a bag of 30 satchel waters, it costs one cedi. If you sold all of those for 5 pesewas, you'd get one and a half cedis. Good deal.

The currency recently underwent an overhaul (hah...) so some people still quote prices in the old cedi. It would take 10,000 old cedis to equal 1 New Ghana Cedi. So if someone says that a piece of candy costs 500, they actually mean it costs 5 pesewas. It gets confusing because sometimes they will drop the "thousand" and just say "150" meaning "150,000" which would mean 15 Ghana Cedis. Sometimes you have to just point at the amount of money that's meant, but really you just have to know what a decent price is to begin with. This is crucial in Ghana, where there are almost no fixed prices for things.

The traditional Ghanaian economy relied heavily on social capital (I have no idea if that's the right capitol/capital, but this computer won't let me have more than one window open at a time so I can't go check), and to a large extent it still does. However, in dealing with "the West" they are being forced more and more to revert over to a system based more on immediate monetary gain. The transition seems to be a bit difficult, as one can imagine. With the traditional system, the price can be reduced down to a monetary loss for the seller, on account of a buyer being their friend. This may seem like a bad way of doing business, but when there are five tomato sellers all sitting next to each other (which they do - that's a whole different story), that buyer will probably come back to the one who sold her/him tomatoes for a really low price based on friendship. Or maybe a banana seller will tell you the price is 20 pesewas for 3 bananas, but then when you pay she/he will throw in an extra one. They are building up relationships, which are more important than finances. Paco can probably explain the economics of it better (and maybe he has already?) - I just added his blog to the links on the left so if you have extra time to kill, you can read that as well.

Okay, out of Internet time. We go to Mole national park on Sunday and get to spend the night! Oh, and I'm feeling awesome. I was a little bit more exhausted than normal the first few days after my fever broke, but I'm pretty much back to normal now.

Tomorrow (or Two Weeks In A Rural Ashanti Village)

For the last two weeks our group was split between three rural villages. Five were in Benim. An hour and a half's walk away, five were in Asaam. Twenty minutes' walk away from Asaam, five were in Naama. I was happy to be in the middle village, Asaam. It was great to actually live close to the other students, finally, even if it was a little bit frustrating to be so far from Benim.

It rained alllll the time. Great rivers of mud would form throughout the village and then just as quick as they came, they'd dry up and the sun would beat down harder than ever (no clouds blocking it anymore). We spent most of our time at SIT headquarters, aka the Assemblyman's house. He's the government representative for the village to the district capitol. He's this super sweet 71-year-old man who sang us a song saying how much he would miss our smiling faces when we said good bye last night. He said to remember that we always have a home in Asaam.

My room was a little concrete thing with a dim blue light and a thin little mattress, but it wasn't so bad. The toilets were concrete blocks that each had a hole cut in them with a little toilet seat stuck on top.. All showers were taken by bucket. Water was fetched from a watering hole 15 minutes away, each way (usually the school kids fetched it for us, thankfully). And every time you walked anywhere you would have to greet and talk to five or six different people... there and back. In Twi. Oh, and at night all the little children in the village crowded around our window and stared at us, calling, "Obruni! How are you? Lydia! Lydia! Jessie! Grace! Abena (Ismatu)! Claaa-gurgle-phlegm (Claire...whose name is particularly tricky for the Ghanaian tongue)! Lydia!" My name was a favorite... it is apparently a common name in Ghana, so whenever visitors from the neighboring villages came to Asaam they were usually greeted with "Lydia! Lydia!" They always got my name right :)

Rather than taking classes, we worked on a miniature version of our future independent study projects. We learned a lot more Twi (informal classes in the evenings and talking to people all the time every day in it) and learned a lot about village life from talking to the Assemblyman and the villagers. Also, since everybody did different mini-ISPs we got to learn from each other, too. I did mine on plant identification (hah, Dr. Perez Perez, I finally got to take that class you never would let me take!) so I got to go out to the bush almost every day and film herbalists/farmers tell me in Twi about the plants and their uses. I now can cure impotency, menstrual cramps, headaches, fevers, and all sorts of other things. And I know five or six different ways to increase breast milk production. I'm a bit skeptical of the impotency cure since it involves drinking akpeteshie, which is an extremely hard alcohol made from distilled palm wine, but they say it works for sure. The Ghanaians also seem to really believe in enemas. About half the plants we found could be used for an enema, on top of whatever else they cured. Oh, I also know which trees are good for furniture, which sap can be used to make a ball, which leaves can be used for sandpaper/silver polish, and a ton of different and exciting fruits and other edible things (including the Asua berry, after which our village is named [plural of Asua is Asaam, I think], which makes sour things like lemons and sour oranges taste sweet after you eat it).

Here's a brief look at what the last 14 days were like, but first, the characters.

Auntie Afresh: Our SIT Queen Mother (has an adorable baby, Percy, and takes care of us)
Simón: Our SIT "buddy-buddy" (he translates for us and helps us with lots of other things. He's our age)
Auntie Cynthia: Our cook
Papa Attah: SIT staffmember (occasionally visited us in the village)
Jessie, Ismatu, Claire, Grace, and me: SIT students in our village

Day 1
We arrive at village. Village meeting is called. Villagers are asked to share fruits and vegetables with us (which they did!), not to propose marriage to us, and to call us by name rather than obruni. We meet everyone and say our names over and over. "Lydia' and "Jessie" stick. The meeting ends and all the village children follow us home shouting, "Lydia! Jessie!" and occasionally the others' names, and grab onto our hands.

Day 2
We visit a waterfall near Naama. It's beautiful. I spot a salamander.

I ask to try fufu. Am told, "Oh my sweet daughter. You shall try it tomorrow."

We are told that our resource persons for our mini-ISPs are all out to farm. Tomorrow we will meet them.
We go to the farm with a man named Addyboateng, or Addyboat (edge-a-boat) for short. I get to chop down a plantain tree with a machete to harvest the plantains (new ones will grow back in six months), help pull crabs out of a woven/basket-like crab trap, pull palm nuts from a palm tree, pull cassava out of the ground, and carry palm fronds back home to make baskets and a broom. Ismatu and I spend the rest of the afternoon preparing the leaves for the broom. Our three armfuls of fronds turn into a pitiful broom 1/4 the size of a normal broom. We are proud of it anyway.


Day 3
I ask to try fufu. Am told, "Yes. Tomorrow you shall try."
Three of us trek off with our SIT staffmembers to "tre-tre" (three-three), who is an expert on plant uses.We meet him and he is boozed and ornery. Tomorrow we will find someone sober. Instead of working with him, we trek off into the bush to find cocoa to try. We harvest four and return to Assemblyman's house.
Afternoon: I ask to try fufu. Am told, "Tomorrow."


Day 4
I ask to try fufu. Am told, "This afternoon you shall try."
They have found us someone new to be our resource person! However, he is busy today. We will meet him tomorrow. We return to the farm with Addyeboat to get basket-making materials for Claire. Simón comes along to translate, and I record more information about plants from Addyeboat. Simón tells us, "A day without Addyeboat is like a day without sunshine." And then, "A day when Addyeboat does not take a drink is like Africa without Madagascar." Later we learn the truth of this.
We ask when we can eat the cocoa we got. "Oh, you will eat it. Maybe tomorrow."

Day 5
We trek off to the bush to visit the akpeteshie distillery with one of our Aunties from the village, several SIT staff members, and Papa Attah, who has come to visit. We go the wrong way at first and decide to pick some fresh oranges instead. Simón climbs the tree and uses a palm frond split at one end with a twig stuck between the two splits to hold it open to twist the oranges from the branch. We enjoy fresh oranges as we continue our journey to the real location of the distillery.
We make it to the distillery, which is a group of drunk men who are happy to see us and demonstrate how palm wine is harvested by felling a palm tree. I ask if I can help, and they (being drunk and thinking anything is a good idea) let me try my hand at it. They seem to approve, and let me help chop off the branches, too. The oldest man begins referring to me affectionately as his wife. After he makes a comment about ants in his pants (literally, there were ants crawling everywhere because we accidentally stepped on their trail and they got angry) and how he is protecting "my property" I get a little annoyed and tell him (in line with Ghanaian humr) that he can only call me his wife if he's okay with being my third husband. I tell him that my first husband works hard and brings me money, my third husband is a hunter and brings me antelope, he can bring me palm wine (which should really just be called palm juice when it first comes out of the tree). He laughs and agrees. He later decides that Claire is also his wife (not sure if he just mistook her for me, since we both have shaved heads). He gives us some supua bark, which cures malaria/fever supposedly, and we return home.
Papa Attah stays with us for a while at the house. We ask again when we can try the cocoa. He grabs one, asks for my machete, splits it open, and gives it to us. Thank you, Papa Attah!
Cocoa pods are full of many little cocoa beans which are covered in slimy white fluff that is sweet/sour. The beans themselves are purple, bitter and taste nothing like chocolate. We wonder where chocolate really comes from...
I ask once more to try fufu. Simón is eating fufu and offers some to me, but it has two big pieces of meat floating in it. I gracefully decline.

Day 6
We finally meet Akwasi Antwi, our new resource person! He shows us a chameleon, then takes us to his house, where he has a chameleon he has already prepared for us by tying it to a stick and burning it into a powder. This mixed with shea butter can be rubbed on a baby who has a big head and miniature limbs to remove the evil spirits that have cursed her/him. We then go off into the bush to look at plants.
When we return, Addyeboat is at the house, drunk, asking for Claire (whose name he can't say), because he is teaching her basketmaking. He is a funny drunk, at least, but kind of annoying. Our Aunties chase him out with a boot.
In the evening, we have "drumming and dancing night." This turns out to be "drumming and large-crowd-of-Ghanaians (mostly children)-standing-around-watching-the-obrunis-dance night." At least the old women playing drums let me play for a little while. They even have a large metal pan filled with water, in which they put a half a calabash (large gourd-like thing that grows on a tree) and turn it while beating it to change the tone. So cool. They don't let me play that one.
I ask to try fufu again. Am told, "I will tell Auntie Cynthia (our cook). She will prepare you some, with no meat."

Day 7
We visit Mampong to get gifts for our homestay families. There are internet places! But the internet is down through the city. "It is really really unfortunate," Simón would say.
At the market, I walk around with Ismatu, whose father is from Sierra Leone, and everyone is surprised that I speak Twi. Ismatu stays quiet and they assume she taught me. I buy a coconut and a "duku" which is a headscarf type thing to protect my head from the scorching sun. It has hedgehogs (maybe?) on it. I approve.
Addyeboat returns. We learn how to say, "You are trouble!" in Twi. We also tell him, "You are an alcoholic." To which he responds, "I do not like alcohol! Will you buy me a drink?" Later he admits that he drinks Guinness, but still claims he doesn't drink alcohol. Jessie informs him that Guinness has alcohol. He's a character.
I temporarily give up on asking to try fufu.

Day 8
We return to the bush to look at some plants that Mr. Antwi had told us about that were too far to get to before. I ask Mr. Antwi to show me the Asua tree. He takes me to the Asua bush (whoops..) and then shows me two completely different trees that are both called "apple." The first has  large fruit that is covered in spikes. The second has a medium-sized fruit that looks like an artichoke. I smile and nod. He then takes me to a baby "moringa" tree. I have no idea what it is. I return home and ask about it (no interpreter was able to come with me on this little excursion, and Mr. Antwi only speaks a little bit of English and I only speak a little bit of Twi). I am told, "Oh! It cures many things. It clears your vision, it heals you. Yes it cures many sicknesses." Auntie Cynthia then brings a small bag of it out to show me. It's a bag of sesame seeds. They cure rheumatism, arthritis, poor vision, weake(?) and several other things. They also increase sperm production, sexual feeling in both sexes, and improve your memory!
In the evening we  have storytelling night and the old ladies of the village come and tell us stories with morals (and about why spiders hang on the wall). When it is our turn, Claire begins to tell her version of the Tortoise and the Hare. In the middle of her story, they start to admire her baskets that she and Addyboat worked on. Claire asks Auntie Afresh (who has been interpreting for us) if they actually want to hear her story. She says, "Yes. They are interested. But they like talking." Claire continues. The old ladies declare in Twi, "It will rain. (Literally: Water will fall)" and get up and walk out, wishing us good night as they leave. Claire tells us the rest of her story.
Day 9
We work on our ISPs. I have over forty plants recorded, so I compare notes with Jessie (who is studying herbs, specifically - my project includes all plant uses, and no chameleons) and we type up our findings.
Early afternoon: I start to feel a bit feverish. I tell Simón, since Auntie Afresh is gone. He suggests I rest. I spend the rest of the afternoon napping and shivering.
Auntie Afresh returns. We go to the clinic. They declare, "You are just tired. Go and sleep." I go and sleep.

Day 10
Still feeling feverish. Claire takes my temperature: 102. I go to the Mampong hospital where they declare, "You have malaria." The doctor says, "You have not been taking preventative malaria medication." I say, "Yes I have. I've been taking doxycycline." The doctor laughs in my face, "Then you have not been taking preventative malaria medication," and goes into a lengthy description of how doxycycline is an antibiotic and you cannot prevent malaria with an antibiotic, but you can treat chlamydia with it, and this and that are exactly what he would prescribe to somebody who came to him with an STI, but malaria... NO. He prescribes me with two different pills to take, some liver extract to drink (Jessie makes me feel better  by saying that it surely comes from the liver tree), and two shots in the glutes (aka my bottom). The first shot makes me stop shivering quite so violently. The second shot makes it difficult for me to walk for the next three days.
I go home and sleep. I have given up on asking for fufu.


Day 11
Fever still there. I'm very weak and can hardly walk, but I manage to get up and eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I spend the day sleeping. Naama students all come to visit me and everyone takes good care of me.
In the evening, my fever finally breaks and I feel much better.

Day 12
No more fever! But I can't get up. Ismatu had invited me to stay with her the night before so I wouldn't be alone and sick. She climbs over me and goes to breakfast. Auntie Afresh comes and says, "My sweet daughter, I am sorry you are not well. Please come eat smallsmall for me." I get up and stumble over to the house for breakfast. Mom texts me and says, "My friend told me that sucking on hard candy helps. Malaria uses up our glucose stores." No wonder I have no energy. Ismatu buys me some cookies that say, "GLUCOSE" on them. They taste stale (like everything in Ghana) but I hope that they will help. I go back to bed until lunch, which I nibble at, then back to bed again. I am bored out of my mind being unable to go out to the bush to work on my project. Lying in bed is dull. Naama students come to visit me again, which cheers me up quite a bit. I rest some more until dinner, which I eat, and then go back to bed until the next day.  

Day 13
I'm a little confused about what happened on what day... to be honest most of this is a little bit fudged, but I probably spent most of this day resting, too, but I at least was able to spend time at the house with people. We say goodbye to the village and Assemblyman sings us a song which almost makes us cry. We give our gift to the village (bags of cement to finish their school building that fell down) and to our homestay families. My headache has returned so I give up on packing.

Day 14       
Ismatu helps me pack. We eat and pack and say our final goodbyes (and have one last entertaining encounter with boozed Addyboat), then hop aboard the bus to Kumasi with all the others from their villages. Now we're here. Tomorrow we leave for Tamale. I never did try fufu.