Week 10

Madwo (Good evening) all! This week has been a good one, starting with a regular week of classes and ending with a little vacation for the three day weekend. Keep readin' for

Monday
Started out with soccer practice bright and early at 6 am. It was a productive morning; we worked on our passing and moving as a team and ended with a little 3 on 3 practice. After practice me and friend decided to go swing by the Accra Mall, as she wanted a pair of shoes and I have no class till 3:30 on Monday so I tagged along. We walked down to the Okponglo tro tro station at the corner of campus only to see a sea of deadlocked traffic. We quickly decided the mall wasn't worth it and decided to walk over to MaxMart (A small Lebanese chain of grocery stores, that are very popular here.) to grab some groceries and food since we hadn't eaten after practice. The journey was a hot one, but we rewarded ourselves with chicken shawarmas when we finally arrived. Picked up some little groceries and found chedder cheese sauce(a major success!) so I decided to make some mac n cheese for dinner that night. We headed back to campus and had Twi class later that afternoon. We spent much of class reviewing, practicing constructing sentences (Mine was Me kumm ntonton "I killed the mosquito") After  class me and a friend decided to get to work on our mac n cheese treat. We had also stopped by the vegetable market on campus on the way from Twi and grabbed some green onions, bell peppers squash to mix in there. The kitchen was busy that evening, another few of the Cali crew were making pineapple fried rice as well as a Ghanaian student making fresh banku, and right as we were all getting into our cooking, in true Ghana fashion, the power went off. It has become a regular occurance at ISH for the power to go off, so we all groaned and crossed our fingers that the porters at the front would spare us and turn the generator on tonight. We lucked out and they did, and there was mac n cheese for all!

Tuesday
 As I've mentioned before, Tuesday's are my lazy days and I ended up doing very little today. We had Twi lab in the morning where we watched a movie in Twi (a most ridiculous film whose plot twists would surprise even the most avid Hindi movie viewer) and then a few of us ended up being recruited by the International Programmes Office (IPO) to pose as student models for the admissions booklet for the University of Ghana. They took a picture of three of us sitting on the grass pretending to read and talk to eachother. SO any prospective UG freshmen out there, keep an eye out for me! ;) I wasted away the afternoon in the Study Center, talking to people as they dropped in and out and went down to Akuafo Hall (one of the residence halls) for some palava sauce for lunch and then headed back to the Study Center for ice cream and cake. The Program Coordinators at the STudy Center put on this event at the end of the month for who whoever had a birthday during the month. They basically buy American style cake and ice cream for everyone and we all come together and sing for the people whos birthdays occur during the month. It's an optional event but it is the one event that all 35 of us UNFAILINGLY show up for. Cali kids need our cake fix! Dance class that evening and our midterm was pushed back until next Tuesday, because the dance department is paying to take all of us to a performance at the National Theatre on Thursday! We're all so psyched to see some real dancing, not this simple (but fun) obruni style dance! It should be a lot of fun. Amusing anecdote from dance class: One of the student came up and asked me and another student to be in amusic video for her friend this week. From dance class to MTV? Deets next week on how that turned out. After Dance some of us went over to Volta Hall (some of the Cali girls live on the other side of campus in a local hall. We all lived at that hall for a week and half during orientation so it brings back memories of all hanging out during orientation.) to celebrate one of the girl's in my programs' birthday. It was a relaxing night, we all just hung out, played cards and drank some beers and then headed back to ISH at the end of the evening.

Wednesday
Started the day with my favorite class, Coastal Management. We leaned about Integrated Coastal Management, stuff i've learned about extensively in Santa Cruz but it's fascinating to hear it from a West African perspective. While I'm here in Ghana I'm writing a research paper comparing the increased intensity of tropical storms in Lousiana, USA and Ada Foah, Ghana and how they are a result of wetland destruction. My Professor for coastal management set up a meeting for me to talk to one of the other professor's here, Profoessor Appeaning, for next week so I'm looking forward to that! After that I had Twi class where we learned how to negate verbs, (Ex: Me ndi ankaa "I will not eat the orange") After Twi, our soccer coach wanted us to go watch a Champion's League game so that we could observe tactics and apply it to our own playing. We went out to one of the sports bars in town, right near Okponglo and grabbed some dinner and watched the Atletico Madrid v. Juventus game. The place we went to was really nice, it had great local food and a more laid back vibe then a lot of the bars in town. I will definitely be going back!

Thursday 
My class heavy day, I started teh day with socccer bright and early. Nothing too eventful, we just ran the usual amount of laps and did some drills and practiced in our positions. I have Management of NGO's soon after practice so I usually run back to ISH to hop in the shower and change. Ghanaians always look their best for class, so to avoid looking like even more of an obruni, we try and dress up best we can to fit in! NGO's is my largest class, about 70 people. Our professor, Justice (literally, in Ghana if you're not named Kofi, you're Justice or Wisdom!) is an animated man and gave an interesting background of the structre of NGO's. Our main project for the class is to construct our own NGO's and we're going to start that next week. After that I swooped by the Bush Canteen to pick up my fav, Palava Sauce w/boiled yams, and headed back to ISH. That evening, instead of Dance class, the Dance Department decided to take all of us to a performance at the National Theatre. It was an awesome experience to see a show and see the amazing dance moves and styles of the national theatre company!

Hope you all had a lovely week! See my next post for Friday - Sunday, which I spent traveling! 

Week 9

This week was a relaxing one. I'm finally starting to feel settled in and get into a rhythm of things, which is nice, and makes this feel much more like home.  I'll start by delving right into the week!

Monday
Monday was actually a national holiday for Kwame Nkrumah's birthday (first President of the free Republic of Ghana). A few of the us international students decided to take a trip up to the Aburi botanical gardens int he Eastern Region for a night. We went up on Sunday morning and stayed through Monday late afternoon. The gardens are absolutely gorgeous! I'd been to the gardens before with some of the Cali Crew, but it was nice to spend the night with some of the different international students for once. We stayed in two person chalets, which were surprisingly nice for only 20 cedi's (about 6 US dollars) a night. We spent the evening lazing around the gardens and had dinner in the beautiful restaurant on the grounds. The next morning, there were festivities going on for the holiday so we spent the morning walking around, eating ice cream and enjoying the different drumming and singing groups playing in the gardens. We headed back to Accra around 2 and had a pretty lazy Monday evening.

Tuesday
Tuesday's are my lazy days, and I spend it living up to that name. I went to Twi lab in the morning where we learning some bargaining Twi to help get better bargain for taxi''s and goods in the market. My favorite new line to use - Wo pe se wo sisi me! "Are you trying to cheat me?" It has worked gloriously on taxi drivers. Spend the rest of the day laying around in bed and then headed off to dance class at 6. Dance is easily my favorite class and it did nothing but live up to its name today. The energy of everyone in that class is enough to get anyone going. One curveball today though, we have a test next week! They're going to divide us up into small groups and grade us on the dance we've been learning the past few weeks! Update on how that goes next week!

Wednesday
This brings me to my second favorite class! Coastal Management. This class is literally what I want to go into when I graduate. After two years of oging through my ENVS major being confused about what I want to do, this has been great. We've been talking about coastal erosion and wetland destruction and how it relates to the coast and i literally get so pumped to talk about it. There's so much that can be done here and i'm so jazzed to start some owrk in the field. My professor for this class is also awesome and has organized a few field trips for the semester. Since this is a level 400 class, it's also pretty small - only 15 students. Since there's only two obruni's (foreigner) in the class it's mostly Ghanaians which is great. The Marine Science Department is one of the smaller one's on campus so this group of students is already pretty tight with each other, but they have been unbelievably welcoming to us. Many of them came up to me and asked me my name and they light heartedly laugh at my California accent whenever I speak in class. Looking forward to making connections and learning a lot in this class.
Wednesday also has Twi class, which is hands down my hardest class. We had our first exam today, which was pretty tough but I still have high hopes. Spent Wednesday night just chilling and got dinner from the lady who sits outside ISH for dinner (We call her Mama Tantalizing because she describes all her food as tantalizing. I'm pretty sure it's the only English adjective she knows. Nevertheless her food is cheap and delish, so it's a staple.)

Thursday
Another light day, Environmental Ecology was cancelled for the week and we were assigned groups for our group project in Management in NGO's, which is going to be to create our own NGO. Super stoked for that, it should be a great experience to have. I'm loving how practical this class is turning out to be. We had dance class that evening and practiced the dance we're going to be tested on on Tuesday in small groups and i'm feeling pretty ready! I'm gonna try and get a video, so stay tuned! For dinner, me and Emily made pesto pasta! The pesto sauce was pricey, but worth it and i'm sure we'll be splurging again. If only we could get our hands on some real cheese!

Friday
Only thing of importance today was soccer practice. Our coach finally assigned us positions and we spent the majority of the hour setting up and practicing moving from offense to defense. As usual, tiring, but rewarding! Always gets my day off to a jumpstart to have practice at 6am which is nice though.

Saturday
Today Auntie Rose and Uncle Albie (Two of our Program Coordinators)  took a few of us on a trip back to the Volta Region. She plans small trips for students throughout the semester and this was the one I chose to go on. We went to a village about 3 1/2 hours away and got to check out the progress on a rainwater cachment system a past student had set up there. The trip to the village was another adventurous one, as most of the roads had been flooded from yesterday's storm. We ended up having to wade through knee deep water to get to the village, which was unexpected but surprisingly fun. (Although Auntie Rose did scare us by warning us of worms that can burrow in to your feet that lurk in flooded waters.) After spending time in the village with some of the people, who were all amazingly friendly, as usual (Ghanaians don't have the reputation as the friendliest in Africa for nothing.) we stopped at a little resort on the Volta River where Auntie Rose bought us all drinks and we went out on a boat ride. It was beautiful and we all made plans to go back and spend a night there.
Pictures from the day:

Yebehyia bio! (Until next time)


  

Maakye! (Good Morning)

As promised, here's an update on the actual "study" part of this study  abroad experience!
I'm sure all of you (unless you've been living under a rock) have heard the unending reports on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. While Ghana remains unaffected, the surrounding countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria all have reported cases. As an one of the premier institutions on the African continent, The University of Ghana naturally gets student from all over Africa, including these countries. To stem the spread of Ebola (and any other infectious diseases) to the University and the rest of Ghana, the University suspended the beginning of the quarter by two weeks in order to do preventative screenings of inter African students coming to the university. In addition to all of this going on, there was also threat of a union strike by UTAG (the professors union) that threatened the start of the university by ANOTHER week or two. Long story short since many of you have heard this already, we had two weeks off for the Ebola screenings where we traveled a bit and then they set up some special classes for international students in case the strike dragged on. It ended up ending after a week and we were able to enroll in our actual classes. I'll be taking Twi (the local language), Tradtional African Dance, Environmental Ecology, Management of NGO's, Coastal Management and conducting a research project on coastal erosion here in Ghana. More on the classes to come!

But during that two weeks of delay we took a trip to one of my favorite spots we've hit, the Wli Waterfalls in the Volta Region. To begin, the day started out at about 5 am on a wednesday morning. For once, all of the Cali Crew made it down relatively on time, so we were actually able to watch the bus pull up. I use the term bus loosely however. During the first two weeks we were here in Ghana we had a bus drive us around for orientation, an actual large, air conditioned bus. What pulled up, is best described as a large tro tro (high speed small mini buses, main mode of public transport here). We tentatively climbed in only to realize that not only was it a cramped space, there were also 5 unlucky poor souls that had to sit on these crickety fold out seats in the middle part. Thank the lord I got on early and did not have to sit on one of those, but I was in the back of the bus, which didn't seem to pose a problem at the time, but it would come to. We started out, a group of sleepy, excited and cramped Californians. It became evident early on, before we had even gotten out of Accra, that our bus driver was a bit of a dare devil. He was a particularly speedy one and liked to wait until the last second to hop back into our lane when passing other cars. As we left the Greater Accra Region behind us and booked it through the Eastern Region towards the Volta, the roads began to get worse and worse. Paired with our bus driver, the ride was quite an adventurous one. Every bump sent us in the back flying into the air, making for a harrowing five or six hour journey. As we pulled up to the start of the hike we piled out of the bus, thankful for some solid land. The hike to the waterfall was a pleasant one, through refreshing rainforest and across a series of 6 bridges. By the third or fourth bridge we could begin to hear the roar of the falls. As we turned the corner, the Wli falls loomed out above us. I don't know how many of you have seen anything quite like a waterfall rising up hundreds meters above you, but it is quite a humbling sight. We passed the first few minutes just looking up at the falls, so natural and mighty, falling down in front of us. Our tour guide informed us that we could all swim in the pool at the bottom so all us didn't hesitate to jump in. The water was so fresh and clean and all of together spent quite a bit of time right in the mist of the falls and traveled under them to this little cave in back and just sat in awe for a little while. Here's a pic of the Cali Crew in the pool

We ended up only spending about 2 hours in Wli before hopping back in to the bus for the rise back, but it was so incredibly worth the short amount of time we spend there. As we made our way back into the bus, I decided to be a nice person and take the middle "seat" on the way back. It was, believe it or not, even more bumpy on the way back and to top it all off, it got dark about half way back which made the whole ride that much more nerve-wracking. Highlight of the drive back was that once we got to the edge of the Volta, there was a considerable amount of traffic, so our driver turned into the jungle on a narrow path and decided it was in our best interests to take that road instead, to avoid traffic. Another hour or two of hair raising turns and bumps and we were finally in the familiar traffic of Accra (never thought we'd be so happy to be sitting still in traffic!).

Starting from now, I'll update this once a week, to fill ya'll in on my weekly goings ons!

Thanks for reading! 

Akwaaba!

Akwaaba! (Welcome)

After repeatedly typing out what i've been up to the past 2 months (holy shit I can't believe it's been that long.) to different people I have decided to start a blog to document my time here in Ghana. Since I've missed a little more than 7 weeks already I'm just going to roll these weeks into a few fun-sized posts.

Before coming to Accra I remember being told by a few people that men would readily propose to you or declare their love after knowing you for only a few minutes, mostly because they think you are a banking bank or a ticket to a visa. In other words, I was prepared (so i thought), but did not expect it to start literally the moment i hopped off that plane. I should also point out that walking up to the door of the plane was like being suddenly drenched in warm water. The humidity literally smacks you in the face faster than you can imagine. After the group of us Cali kids were shuttled into the airport we were, naturally, lost and confused. We had been told that the EAP would be there to pick us up but naturally, they were running on GMT (Ghana Mean Time AKA show up whenever the hell you please). And so, we wandered through customs, were continually yelled at in Twi and eventually made it out where we were immediately surrounded by no less than 50 people offering us various services, ranging from a cab ride to campus, an offer of a private tour of the country and a plea to "please leave the program and come to my brother's hotel, you will like it much better." A few of us got separated and were approached by 3 men wearing University of Ghana T shirts (still stand by the fact that this was what mislead us, they looked SUPER legit). Thinking we had found our people, but slightly confused that they didn't seem to be surprised there were 4 of us rather than 30, we followed them. 30 seconds later they were offering to marry us and take us on a private tour of the country.Quickly relaizing our mistake we dashed back ad found our REAL people who are quite literally the most welcoming and greatest people EVER. They all began introducing themselves as Auntie this or that which instantly makes you feel that much more at home, knowing that these people that are going to essentially be in charge of you are your Aunties, not just a program coordinator.

But diving into the stay itself, we were taken on a campus and city tour the day after we arrived. I think it is truly amazing how much the campus here reminds me of Santa Cruz. It has the same nature-y feel and has made me feel right at home. Instead of walking on sidewalks there are dirt paths through gardens and trees that make walks to class that much better. We began dance class immediately which is hands down my fav class. Our Professor, Oh! Ni Sowah is such a passionate man and believes that everybody has the ability to "boogie" within their soul. Class is super energizing and fun and is something I look forward to every Tuesday and Thursday.

After a few days of dance class and speeding around town, our program took us on a multi day, multi city tour of parts of the country. We hit Cape Coast first, and our drive there proved to be quite an eventful one! About an hour and half down the Accra-Cape Coast highway everyone was drifting off into naps. Suddenly there was a lot of yelling and shouting and pointing and BAM we were sideswiped by a taxi! Our bus driver, Solomon, naturally charged out of the bus guns blazing, only to realize that the taxi in question was indeed empty except for a lady sitting in the BACK seat. It took awhile, but we learned that the taxi driver had stopped the car briefly to run out and grab something and the break had slipped. Pretty dramatic stuff! Both the lady and all of us were fine though and we continued on to Cape Coast. Upon pulling into our hotel (The Anomabo Beach Resort) , we were all amazed. It was literally this very fancy beach resort right on the water. The rooms were these awesome two person huts with the waves just beyond the window.

We headed out to the Kakum National Park the next day. If anybody has ever seen a picture of Ghana anywhere I guaruntee you it was a picture of Kakum. It is the number on tourist spot in Ghana for sure, and the iconic rope hung canopy walkway is the highlight of the park. I would like to emphasize the ROPE TIED idea of the canopy walkway. It is literally a series of 7 bridges that are about 10 inches wide and several hundred meters long that are held up by ROPES. Now i'm a fairly tall girl so I won't lie and say I wasn't a little freaked. Those rope nets on the sides of the bridges are pretty darn short in my opinion and I can't say I was totally convinced of their effectiveness. Take a look at that pic and tell me I wouldn't have totally toplled over the edge if I had slipped! But it was a great experience and I think anyone that comes to Ghana should hit the spot, because it is beautiful and exhilarating and amazing.

Last on our trip was a trip to the cultural capital of Ghana, Kumasi. Kumasi is home to the iconic Ghanaian Kente cloth. This is cloth grown, dyed and loomed right in the Ashanti Region and all peices of Kente tell some sort of story. They are highly intricately woven, colorful strip of fabric that are worn in a toga-like fashion by the chiefs (Asantehene) of traditional tribes. We had a good time touring the village of Adanwomase (and spending waaay too much on all sorts of fun Kente) and the adjacent cocoa farm (Cocoa is one of the most commonly grown goods here! Many people chew the seeds in the raw form. I, however, will stick to actual chocoate, the bitterness is definitely not my thing.) We also went to Mahyia Palace, which is where the current Asantehene still lives! Unfortunately, he didn't make an appearance, but we did get to tour the palace, which was fasinating to learn about. We ended our 3rd night in Kumasi with a trip to a local bar  called +2 Pub and then in the morning began the 5 hour drive back to Accra. It's funny how quickly we all have come to think of Accra and the International Student Hostel (ISH) as home. We had only been in Ghana for about a week and gone for about the same time but we were all saying things like oh i wana go home, but none of us were referring to the States.

Anyways tune in next time for an update on the challenges the Ebola outbreak has brought to us on campus and a crazy bus ride to the tallest falls in West Africa!

Yebehyia bio! (Until next time)