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.