The past Holiday season was spent traveling around some of
Northern Ghana with some other Volunteers.
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| My first kill. |
We met up for Christmas, shared presents, prepared a nice
dinner and were generally very Merry.
I achieved 2 firsts here:
My first kill (the guinea fowl we cooked for dinner) and my first bee
sting moments after I killed the bird.
Must have been the blood.
From there, we traveled to another Volunteer’s site and
relaxed for a few days and indulged in a few gallons of pito, the local millet
beer.
By the time New Years came around, we were in Tamale, the
regional Capitol in the Northern Region.
We had the very rare opportunity to go swimming in a real pool and took
full advantage of that for a few hours.
Plus it helped us all to get much cleaner than we would from a bucket
bath! We met up with even more
Volunteers and went to a local spot (bar) to ring in the New Year.
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| Fireworks in the street |
This New Years was interesting to say the least. Let me set up the scene: The only girls at the spot were the
Volunteers and some other white people in a corner that kept to
themselves. Ghanaian women pretty
much don’t party in public. The
rooftop of the spot (where all the fun was) was packed with men who were all
trying to prey upon the Volunteers.
At a few points, some of the guys were wrapping their arms around me and
another male Volunteer and trying to dance behind us. So that’s about when I stopped enjoying the night. I can remember all of this vividly
because I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t drink anything. By then our girls were loose and
allowing some of the Ghanaians to get away with way too much so I started to
step in and try to help them out.
Which led to a call to security and a few guys getting carried out. At 12:00 exactly, the woman that was
serving our group decided she needed to leave immediately and that I was in
charge of collecting all of our money and paying her. I didn’t even get to enjoy the first 10 minutes of 2014
because I had to pry money from all of my drunk friends which was no easy feat
since the music was incredibly loud and it was dark. And then fireworks started going off. In America there are rules about where
you can and cannot fire pyrotechnics but in Ghana it is all free game. Add to that the fact that there is
absolutely no security or crowd control and you are in for a show! Fireworks were being fired right into
crowds of people and into moving traffic.
I though there was going to be an explosion. Eventually, that led up to a huge street fight and at that
point I decided it was time for us all to go since most of our group was an
easy target at that point. We made
it back to our hotel safely and nobody got robbed or assaulted so all was
well.
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| Gotta love free rides! |
The following morning, I decided I had had enough fun in the
past week that I needed to go home.
Instead of paying 8 cedis and sitting in a crowded tro for 3 hours, I
decided to try and hitchhike the 3-hour trip home. The beginning of the trip was stressful. I watched so many really nice cars pass
me and when I finally found a ride, they were only able to take me a few
miles. I made it about a 30-minute
distance in just over an hour.
After sitting the in the bed of a truck, a cart, 3 other cars, and
walking a good distance, I finally got lucky and a couple that was going to
Bolga picked me up and I rode with AC for about 2 hours! Then a quick walk home and I had made
the trip for free in 4 hours. In
all, I was in/on a total of 8 vehicles.
The next 2 weeks would be very boring for me since school
was still on break and campus was dead so I watched way too many movies and
read a lot.
Once I got back though, I received my Christmas package from
home, which I think gave me temporary diabetes for a few days. I ate so much chocolate in a few days
that my legs were swelling, I was constantly tired, thirsty, and generally just
felt ill. But maybe that was the
Giardia I had for the 3rd time. Who knows?
Anyway, all of the scary symptoms left after a few days.
Second Term
The students finally started arriving back at school, and
with them, my social life.
Teaching didn’t really start until the 3rd week of school so
I spent a lot of time just sitting around with the kids and planning out the next
projects.
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| The day we finally made a new pole. |
In our spare time, I started bribing the students to come
and make football nets. Their
reward for helping was that I would open the computer lab in the evenings and
they could come in and play. This
was so successful that 2 nets were completed in 1 week. To put that in perspective, our first 2
nets took 3 months to finish… So
many kids were coming to help that I had to devise a system to limit the number
of kids in the lab (and prevent fighting) by handing out tokens to those that
were most efficient. That worked
really well and work continued for 2 weeks before all of our nets were
finished. Up to now, we have made
6 nets, using approximately 8000 water sachets.
The past week was devoted to the district sports competition
and our campus was packed with hundreds of kids from neighboring schools. To help keep my sanity, I pretended to
be deaf the entire week. If I had
been talking, the kids would follow me around shouting “HELLO!!!” and
“Salaminga!” which gets really annoying after the second time. This way, once they thought I was deaf,
they would leave me alone and I was at peace! I actually made it the entire week without talking to
anybody or reacting to any sound, which is much harder that it seems. Buying food was really fun because I
could only flash money and point to communicate what I wanted, which really
threw the market ladies. Then some
of the hearing students started to write notes to my kids and ask them
questions and they even started doing the same to me! The whole time, my kids knew I was refusing to talk so they
got a kick out of every interaction I had. On the last day, I bough food from one of the ladies again
and purchased it as a deaf person and then thanked her in Talensi (the local
language) and completely shocked her!
My kids were watching and all erupted in laughter and sign language
applause (basically jazz hands) and then the lady knew the past week was all a
huge joke. Best moment of my week!
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| Ghanaian Shuffleboard |
Since the kids have been pumping out the football nets, I
have been encouraging the school to try and sell them to neighboring
schools. By the end of the
tournament, one school had asked to buy 2 nets. I have no idea if they will actually follow through since
promises in Ghana generally tend to be casual in nature, but I am hopeful that
we can start a small business endeavor and start to support the kids more with
it.
During the tournament, I taught the JHS kids how to play
shuffleboard which turned out to be a life saver! Kids in Ghana have the ability to make games out of anything
so I figured we could draw the target zone on the walkway with chalk and use
lumpy stones at the pucks. As it
turns out, the inconsistencies of the stones adds to the challenge and makes it
way more exciting when you actually score. After a day of playing, I painted the stones and now it’s
way more official. It really is
the simple things in life that can make you the happiest.
