It's Ghana Be Quite The Summer! - Part 2

Hello from Ghana!

I do realize that it has been exactly two weeks since my last posting so I apologize to all those who have asked for speedy/often updates! Needless to say it has been a crazy couple weeks full of ups and downs, new experiences, new friends and new languages! WARNING: This post is incredibly long. I will not be offended if you do not read it all... prepare yourselves.

The Wednesday after my last post I moved into my apartment with my roommate Emilie. She's an International Development Studies student at Ottawa University and is also working with me at Theatre for a Change. Our apartment is fantastic... we've each got our own rooms with a big bed and wardrobe and then we have a kitchen, living room and bathroom. Our place is situated within this little compound in a part of town called "La" where everyone is from the "Ga" tribe and so they speak Ga in La! The rest of the apartments in the compound are rented by one family -- every extended family member lives together in one small area... somehow I don't think the Joseph clan would be able to survive in such close quarters but hey - it works for some! Anyway, this family we live with has adopted both Emilie and I into their family and so constantly are looking out for us, rejecting marriage proposals for us, cooking us dinner and making sure we're up on time for work! Keep in mind that we ask for none of this! Unfortunately last week 3 members of the family came down with Malaria, Mama (who is - you guessed it - our mother here), Mario (her 7 year old nephew) and Roselyn (her 1 year old niece) have been quite sick so Emilie and I have been taking care of the other kids as much as we can to help the family out... we've also quadrupled our application of bug-spray as it is clear the mosquitoes in our compound are carriers of the Malaria virus!

The same Wednesday I moved into my home I also started work with Theatre for a Change! It's a great little NGO that works both in Ghana and Malawi promoting gender and sexual rights to marginalized and vulnerable groups through interactive and legislative theatre training. What we do is go into small communities and do surveys with the people to see which issues are most important to them. In some communities this may be HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, safe abortion, sexual assault, gender inequality etc. Once we know what their biggest concerns are, Theatre for a Change (TfaC) creates a performance directly around the community's concern. By doing this, the people in the communities can relate easier and see themselves within the performance. TfaC will run the performance once all the way through and then stop and have a discussion with the audience about what they saw. The performances that we create always end negatively so as to show a typically real situation. We then ask individuals what they would have changed or done had they been in the situation that the character was in. At this point, the performers run the performance again and when the show gets to the part the audience member would have changed, the audience member joins the troupe on stage, takes the place of the actor and attempts to try and change how the situation would play out. This allows for direct participation and hands on learning and is really incredible to watch! You see the kids/teens/young adults start to understand that they DO have rights and that they don't have to stay silent and just let injustices occur. I'm SO happy to be with this organization as it is exactly combining the two things I love to do - theatre and community development! I have also somehow become the office techie which blows my mind a little bit but none the less I have designed and created the new TfaC brochure (2000 copies printed for mass distribution) and have re-programmed, re-formatted and re-organized pretty much every document, work space, contract etc in this office! I've also become the office typer as I can type far faster than the rest of the staff members and so they come to me, dictate what they want in their emails and then I email them what they have said so they can send it out... it's a very bizarre system but they seem to really love it!

My second weekend here I made my first big adventure to a town called Cape Coast. This was the biggest slave-trading post during the height of the Atlantic Slave trade and needless to say it was very overwhelming. We went to the main castle where they exported over 16 million slaves to the new world and we toured through each of the rooms. In some of them we entered, we smelled this very foul scent which the guide explained to us as being the true scent of the millions of people, dead bodies, feces, blood etc that had seeped so deeply into the concrete that despite excessive cleaning still couldn't come out. It was a very emotional and eye-opening tour... if any of you ever come to Ghana, it is definitely something you should look into seeing.

After the castle and a night at a hotel where we slept 8 people in 1 room because there were no other vacancies in the town, the big group of us traveled to Kokum National Park and hiked through the jungle to do a canopy walk! We walked from tree to tree on these rope swinging bridges with 2x4s for our feet to slide along... it was breathtaking looking out over one of the last true jungles in Western Africa, listening to the birds and watching for monkeys! On our way back however our taxi hit a small dog which broke his leg (among other things)as well as our hearts and therefore ending our fantastic trip with tears and a man telling us "animals don't matter in Ghana, don't cry". Lovely hey?

My second week here was a bit of a whirlwind. On Tuesday we had a big meeting with everyone in the office and I found out that I would be working in the Greater Accra and Eastern Regions for June and July and that Emilie will be working in the Central region. This means a LOT of travel for the both of us as the Eastern Region is about 2 hours away and the Central region is close to 3 hours away. We will be taking trotros (little minivans that pile up to 26 people inside and fly along the highways at unmentionable speeds) to and from these areas and will be able to work with the communities in a hands on way. Unfortunately all the performances are actually done in a local language, Twi (pronounced chwee) so Emilie and I have been trying to learn as much as possible as quickly as we can!

Wednesday night was a very busy night as we decided to go to see Sex in the City at the only cinema in Ghana. After that we hit the beach for a big reggae night where Rastafarians from across Ghana gather every week to do what they do best... drink, sing, dance and smoke. We had a lot dancing up a storm until I was approached by one Rasta and it just got weird. He told me that I was the golden angel queen of Zion and that he was never letting me leave Ghana for I belong with him in this country. Needless to say we left shortly thereafter as we were extremely creeped out! I then was called by another volunteer who was in a panic and needing to go to the hospital right away. I taxied up to her hostel (1/2 hour away) and became an RA once again, calming her down and making sure she got to the doctor. We didn't leave the hospital until 3:00am, making the 7am wake up for work that much more excruciating.

This past weekend we (myself and 9 others) decided to venture even farther - in the opposite direction - and travel 4 hours to the Volta Region. We got up at 5:30, were at the trotro station by 6:30 and on our way by 8am (we had to wait for it to fill up before we left). Unfortunately, as luck would have it, we got on the WORST TROTRO EVER!!!! For those of you who thought MY car was unreliable, you clearly have never been to Ghana. Half an hour into driving the trotro broke down and we all got out to take a look. half of the engine had detached from the other half and the radiator (so the driver said) was spewing water all over the ground. A piece of rope, some water, a banana, a bar of soap and a prayer later we were back on the road... for a total of 10 minutes. Such was our life for the next 4 hours... drive a little, stop, shove a banana mixed with soap in the engine to stick it together, wrap the rope around it, fill the radiator with water and pile back on the trotro. Eventually the 10 of us gave up on the "Little Trotro that Couldn't" and convinced a man on the side of the road to take us the rest of the way to Volta in his minivan for 5 cedi (the Ghanaian currency). An hour and a half later we arrived (far later than we expected), checked into a hotel and spent the rest of the day wandering around the little town of HoHoe(said Ho-Hoy). The next morning we were up bright and early to visit a gorgeous waterfall called "WLI WATERFALL" (pronounced Vlee). This is by far the most gorgeous waterfall I have EVER been to. A 40 meter cascading waterfall, a fresh pool of water to swim in below and stunning vegetation all around. We had to hike an hour to get there but it was well worth it! I took a TON of pictures so any of you that have me on facebook, be sure to check it out! After that we traveled to this pathetic excuse for a monkey sanctuary where we paid 5 cedi to feed the monkeys and to walk through a jungle where we saw no more monkeys. We were not impressed but the memory of the waterfalls made it all ok :-)

Well, I suppose that's about it! I'm very sorry that it was SUCH a ridiculously long post... I will try to make the updates shorter and more often from here on out, I promise!

Thanks for reading post number two and I hope everyone is having a great summer so far!!