Happy Nkrumah Day!

What a week! It’s been so busy that I haven’t had time to think about much at all!

We drove to the Volta Region on Friday morning. It used to be part of Togo back in the day, but Ghana claimed it in the 1940s when German Togo was split up as part of Germany’s war retribution payments. Apparently there are a select few elderly people who still speak German, but they are very few and far between. We travelled in what we’ve termed the ‘Obrunimobile’, ‘obruni’ being the Twi word for ‘white person’. It’s quite entertaining to see people on the side of the road do a double take when they see a bus full of obrunis drive past. Our first stop was the Akosombo Dam, on the Volta River. It was built between 1960 and 1963 and used to provide all the power for the entire country. It also created the largest man-made lake in the world, Volta Lake. As a result, thousands and thousands of people were displaced and lost their livelihoods. It’s kind of a sad story, but the dam is so successful in bringing electricity to Ghana and even to surrounding countries that there was not really another option. Also, the government warned the residents that they would be creating a lake and then they built rehousing settlements for the people who would be displaced. However, very few people actually moved because they didn’t have another way of life in the new spot. It’s a bit of a tragic story.

Next, we arrived at a Kente weaving village. Kente cloth is a traditional woven cloth from Ghana. It is  woven exclusively by men, and it actually originated in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Volta Kente is slightly different than the traditional Kente because of the colours of the cloth, but it is still absolutely gorgeous! The patterns vary, and some are very complex! Kente is woven in long strips, sometimes up to 10 or 15 feet long, and then sewn together to create a piece of cloth. It tends to be very expensive. There was a piece of Kente cloth that was probably about 10 feet by 15 feet and it was three hundred cedis, or about $210US! Still it’s very beautiful stuff, and I definitely bought some to take home!

On Saturday, we went to Laa Falls. They were absolutely amazing! The hike there was a flat trail that took about 45 minutes, and then we came upon the falls. The water level was quite high, so the falls were very powerful. We went swimming in the pool under the falls, and the water was so powerful that we couldn’t even get very close. The water was blasting out from where the water hit the bottom. Swimming in waterfalls is so exhilarating! It was pouring rain at the same time, so the feeling was even more exciting You just can’t keep a grin off of your face!!

On Sunday, Logan was feeling sick, so we went to the Nyaho Clinic in the morning. It turns out that he has a throat/sinus/ear infection, so he was prescribed antibiotics and sent home. The whole excursion took over 5 hours from beginning to end. Then, I had a lot of homework and laundry to do, so my Sunday was over! Monday, we had classes, but yesterday was Kwame Nkrumah Day, a brand new national holiday for which classes are cancelled. Kwame Nkrumah was the first President of Ghana after independence, and he was a wonderful politician. He is featured on the back of all the bills, and everyone still loves him. One of his biggest ideals was to unite Africa, or at least end inter-tribal tension. He has been described as being years ahead of his time. He also believed in empowering women, among other things. I feel like I want to read more about him because he sounds so interesting. Anyway, all week long there are awesome events going on in celebration. Last night, we went to the first screening of a Bob Marley documentary, another much-loved figured in Ghana. It was all about Bob Marley and Rastafarianism, which was very interesting. I looked up Rastafarianism during my lunch break today, and it seems like a very strange...religion/sect/movement/whatever you want to call it. People compare Nkrumah to Bob Marley because of his vision of a united Africa, but he really was not Rastafarian at all. For the next four nights, there are various plays going on, which I am looking forward to, and then on Sunday night there is a highlife guitar concert and storytelling time on campus. It’s going to be so cool!

Our Peoples and Cultures lecture today was by Professor John Collins, a British man born in India who has grown up in Ghana. He talked to us all about highlife guitar, which was absolutely fascinating! During colonization, the colonial powers squashed out much of the traditional African music because they were scared that it would permit uprising among the people as it did in Haiti in 1803. Instead, they trained people to play brass instruments in European styles. In Ghana, during the Ashanti Wars of the late 19^th century, Britain brought in soldiers from the Caribbean to fight because they were mostly immune to malaria unlike the white soldiers. These soldiers brought with them calypso music, which had been adapted from African music in the first place. This inspired these brass bands to bring African beats back into their music playing. Eventually, this African influence transferred onto the guitar, which created the highlife music style. Highlife is basically an overarching term for any Ghanaian popular music, but it definitely connotes an African rhythmic undertone. It is a wonderful music style, and I am definitely going to bring some of it back!

I had a very short, but very interesting conversation with a Ghanaian student while waiting for my rice balls and groundnut soup the other day. He asked me what I was doing here at the University, and I told him that I was studying International Development. He asked me why, and the only reason I could really come up with was that I want to help fix the problems created by the West in the first place. He went on to say that Ghana and Africa in general don’t really need us to fix them. And he’s absolutely right! As I learned in Sierra Leone, the best way to help someone is not to enforce your own ideals upon them and control exactly what’s going on, but to walk beside them and do what they want to do. Work with the people towards their own goals, not to for their own good. Reading The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly really opened my eyes to the evil that foreign aid has done when we do it wrong. I feel like he didn’t offer enough positive examples in his writing, but it was a very disillusioning book. The idea that even if foreign aid doesn’t accomplish what we think it will that it is still better than nothing is a skewed idea. Foreign aid can contribute to corruption and dependence if we are not careful with it. There is a very fine line in foreign between help and harm, and it is difficult to discern that line and tread on the right side. As I predicted, my course on the Ethics of Foreign Aid is by far the most interesting class!

Keep commenting on my posts, and if you want to, send me an email or Facebook message. I am almost halfway done my trip! Can you believe it?

So another week has passed. Life is starting to feel more normal and scheduled here, which is nice. Although I miss Calvin and dorm life, especially with people updating their Facebook statuses all the time, life here is starting to feel more like home!

Last weekend, Logan and I made the trek back to Akropong. It was quite and adventure! We caught a trotro to Medina (which is a large market area and public transport stop). For one cedi twenty pesewas (about 80 or 90 cents) we went on an hour long trip up the beautiful highway to Akropong. It was a really nice restful weekend. We met quite a few interesting people. My roommate, for instance, was a kindergarten teacher at the Institute for her Masters of Theology so that she could teach her students from a Christian perspective. We also met a man from Northern Ghana who is translating the Gospel of John into his own language. Then, there was a student studying the use of the word 'logos' in John and comparing it with the equivalent of the same word in his mother tongue. There was also a retreat for students of a deaf school there for the weekend. I love the Akrofi-Christaller Institute. It's just such a restful place, and it has such a unique and wonderful mission. I love the variety of people that you meet there. It's just such an amazing place. We're going back as an entire group in two weeks' time, and I'm really looking forward to it. My one funny story of the weekend is that Logan and I both managed to lock ourselves our of our rooms within a span of about five minutes. Both of our doors were self locking, which didn't work so well. Then, the power went out, so we didn't really care anyway, and we decided to go explore Akropong. We walked down one of the streets, and found ourselves at a stream where people were doing laundry and gathering water. We followed the path down a little bit and found the school and football field. It was a really nice morning, all in all, regardless of the crazy things that happened!
I think my favourite two classes are the Ethics of Development and the Peoples and Cultures. I love discussing foreign aid. The book we are reading right now, The White Man's Burden, by William Easterly, is painting foreign aid in a very interesting light. It just shows how the West is trying to dictate what is happening in the Rest, and how we haven't even accomplished that much anyway. The best way to do aid is to listen to what the people want and treat them as equals instead of some receptacle for our money to help ourselves feel good. It's a very fine balance though. It is so difficult to discern where to draw the line. This class is fantastic, and I'm loving all the discussions we're having. I feel like I'm becoming so much more educated on foreign aid and all its effects. One of the girls in our group is doing an independent study on African impressions on foreign aid, and she said that I could come along on some of her interviews. I'm really interested to learn more about the recipient side of foreign aid! In our Peoples and Cultures class, we have guest lecturers in twice a week to tell us about different aspects of Ghanaian people and cultures. We've had lectures on chieftancy, funerals, traditional religion, beads and kente cloth, art, and so much more. This class also encompasses our weekend and week-long field trips. It's just such and interesting and informative class. I feel like I'm getting to know that culture here so much better. I am enjoying life here so much, and all the classes I'm taking are really helping that.
I think I'm going to describe a typical day for you:
7:30 - wake up and get ready for class. I usually get breakfast in the Night Market from a stall run  by Vivien and Regina, two sisters who are about 14 and 16. Usually I eat an egg sandwich, which is just an omelette on toasted bread. Then, comes the walk to the Institute of African Studies, where our classroom is located. It's about 10-15 minutes walking, and by the time we get there, we're all pretty hot and sweaty. Thankfully, our classroom is air-conditioned :)
8:30-12:00 - class time. We have Twi, literature, politics, drumming, dancing, Ethics of Development, and Peoples and Cultures. Classes are an hour and a half long with a half hour break in between.
12:00-2:00 - lunch break! Usually, we head to either the Bush Canteen or Akuafo Hall. The Bush Canteen is a bunch of different food stands around a large eating area. Akuafo Hall is a residence hall with a large cafeteria. My favourite meal right now is rice balls with groundnut soup. Basically, you get a large bowl with spicy peanut soup and then one or two balls of rice, which you eat with your fingers. It's actually a lot of fun!
2:00-3:30- class again.
3:30 - 10:30 - random time. Usually I'll do homework, or talk with people, or play card games, or go to the mall or the market. I like having a long afternoon to just do whatever :)

So that's a pretty typical day. Not too exciting, but there's lots of opportunities to explore and talk to people and finish homework. Today, we're going to try swimming at the pool on campus. Should be fun!

Almost a Month!

So, time for another post! I’ll try and keep this one either shorter or better organized. I’m sorry that I write so much. I just love talking about my experiences so much!

The past two weeks have been crazy homework-wise.  We’ve had to read Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, The Blue Sweater, Sundiata, a number of chapters from The White Man’s Burden, and a number of chapters from our African Politics textbook. We’ve also had to write three journals, a reflection essay, and do a number of exercises in Twi. Not only have we had all this to do, we haven’t had a lot of time to do it either. We spent the weekend in Cape Coast, and had no free time to catch up. I’m finally caught up now, but I’m waiting for the next wave to hit!

Our trip to Cape Coast was very interesting. We started out by visiting Fort William, which was a former British slave fort. Right now, it’s an active archaeological site. We were toured around by one of the people in charge of the site, and we talked to some of the students working there. Most of the slave castles and forts were converted to other purposes after the slave trade. Fort William, for example, was a youth centre for a while, and then was converted to a prison. Now, the archaeologists (the leader of whom actually looked like Indiana Jones!) are working to restore it. It was fascinating! Next, we visited Elmina Castle, which was much larger. It was taken over by the Dutch in the 1600’s. I hadn’t realized that the Dutch had such a large involvement in the slave trade. One of the hardest parts of the tour was walking through the Dutch Reformed Church, which was located directly above some of the slave cells. It seemed so unimaginable to think that the people who go to basically the same church that I do had no problem selling people into slavery. It was also hard to go through the ‘door of no return’, but mostly to come back through it. Our guide told us that there was a ceremony where two bodies of slaves, one from the States and one from South America, were reinterred in Ghana after passing back through the ‘door of no return’, and that the door has now been renamed ‘the door of return’. It was such a strange and interesting experience to see slavery from the other side of the Atlantic.

After seeing the awful conditions that slaves were kept in (some of the cells still stank after over a hundred years), we went to our hotel. We stayed in beautiful rooms right on the beach. They were air-conditioned, we had hot water, there was a TV and a fridge, they were clean and quiet. It took us two minutes to walk down to the beach, which was well-kept and restful. We ate lobster, calamari, and cassava fish for dinner. It was amazing, and such a different situation than we had just been in. It was wonderful to relax and rest, but it felt sort of strange and out of place. I did enjoy the break though. We’ve been going and going and going for basically our whole time here! I can’t believe it’s been almost a month!

Today, we had a very interesting Peoples and Cultures lecture. It was on education in Ghana. Although Ghana is one of the most stable countries in Africa, it still has so many issues with education. The southern, more developed part of the country has relatively  good education. Private schools are much better than the government-provided free schools, but they’re expensive and very competitive to get into. In the rural north, the school system is failing. No one wants to go work in a place with no electricity (and therefore no TV or Internet) and no nightlife when they could stay in the south and still have a job. Teachers are also not paid very well, so no one really wants to become one. The ratio of teachers to students is supposed to be 1:35, but the actual ratio of trained teachers to enrolled students is 1:214. Even where there are trained teachers, the quality of instruction is not particularly high. The biggest problem that I’ve noticed is that reading is not taught with phonetics. Children are expected to memorize what a word looks like and figure out how to read all other words somehow. Reading is such a vital part of school and learning that when a student does not have strong reading skills, they will most likely struggle in school. As a result of this quality of instruction, the pass rates from primary school (grade 6) into junior high school is between 50% and 60%. This is what breaks my heart. The teachers who are teaching now are teaching the students the way they were taught as children. It is so difficult to change this cycle. Yet it must be done. Especially in the north, many parents are illiterate so not only are children growing up without books and other literature in the house, their parents don’t appreciate education as much as they could. One of the other problems with education in Ghana is something called ‘brain drain’. If a student is successful in their studies and becomes, say, a doctor, they try to get out of the country. For example, there is a city in Germany that has more Ghanaian doctors than there are Ghanaian doctors in all of Ghana. There are many opportunities in Ghana, and there is desperate need for professionals, but there is a far stronger draw from more developed, richer countries. I struggle with these issues because I feel like there is not very much I can do. The job of fixing these issues is so daunting, and I have no idea where to begin.

So far, my time in Ghana has been incredible. There is such a mixture of tradition and modernity. It’s very interesting to feel this tension, especially as an outsider who doesn’t really understand all that much. It’s a combination of malls and markets, plumbing that supplies non-potable water, Montessori schools and reading taught by memorization, washing things by hand and having conveniences like air-conditioning and Internet. It’s a very strange and intense life I’m living here, but I love it and all the challenges it brings.

Here is a small collection of pictures showing a bunch of the activities we've done so far. Enjoy!

Me and Logan in the doorway of a dungeon at a slave fort. It was a little short, even for me.

The view from the top of the toll highway to Akropong. The panorama of Accra is something else! This is just the very edge of the city, but I really liked the road and the hills in the distance.

A Kapok (or Silk Cotton) Tree. They grow enormously tall, and their roots are really cool. They're also sort of hollow sounding if you knock your fist on them. They produce a silk-like fibre that cannot be woven, but is used in pillows and life jackets.

A beautiful tree (I think it's a pine tree) at the botanical gardens we visited. It was over 150 years old, and it was gorgeous and gnarled and full of character (for a tree!).

The large black drums are only allowed to be played in the presence of the chief. 

People dancing to the drums. This is before any of the  dignitaries arrived. Many people got very into the celebration, and it was really fun to watch.

Two little boys at the Homowa festival who were sharing a chair. I thought they were adorable. Most people who were at the festival were either dressed in red, which is the colour of celebration, or else in their finest clothes. 

The Vice-President of Ghana! He came to the Homowa festival we attended in the Ga District. 

Some children on the road in Adenkrebi, a village in the Ga District which has been declared the 'Calvin Village'. We're going to be volunteering there over the semester in the school, the health clinic, and in construction sites. And Derek, note that the girl in the middle is wearing a Power Rangers tshirt :)

The inner courtyard of ISH 1, my home away from home. Each floor has about 50 rooms, a kitchen area, a laundry area, and a common area. Each room has its own balcony too, which a very nice, refreshing place to sit and chat or read in the evenings!

The night market, just down the street from ISH. This is where I buy my breakfast, which is usually a sandwich with an omelette on it. Mmm!!