More Pictures!!! Sorry they took so long in coming!

Pictures between Cape Coast and the Northern Trip

Fort William: A slave fort near Cape Coast that is under renovation. There were archaeology students from the United States working there.

My dinner one night. It was actually delicious! A lot of people were proud of me that I ate food with a face :)

The inner courtyard of Elmina Castle in Cape Coast. 

The Door of No Return

Me on the suspension bridges at Khakoum National Park. It reminded me of the Capilano Suspension Bridge, but way more awesome! They were built by British Columbians!

Visiting a kente weaving village. Kente is woven only by men, and it is done in long narrow strips. It's gorgeous!

Another view. This give an idea of how long the strips are.

One of the waterfalls we visited. We got to swim by these ones, and it was absolutely phenomenal. The water was so powerful that you couldn't actually get close to the falls themselves, and the mist from the impact of the water flew over the surrounding rocks. Amazing!

Me and Logan :)

Feeding monkeys at a monkey village!!!

A cute little puppy outside of someone's house

A fetish priest. Although African Traditional Religion has been somewhat ousted by the presence of Christianity and Islam, it is still a very strong undercurrent. People often believe both traditional religion and Christianity or Islam or else they sort of meld the two together. 

The Odwira Festival in Akropong. The woman with the bowl on her head is possessed by ancestral spirits and is bringing food to sacrifice to them. She is most likely carrying yams.

When chiefs and queenmothers are in festivals and parades, they always wear very beautiful, ornate, and expensive clothing and accessories. This is the chief of Akropong, and the boy in front of him is wearing the Odosu on his head. The little boy is there because his soul is pure.

South African Wine...enough said!

Baboons! These were friendly ones, not the scary ones you always read about.

The obrunimobile! ('obruni' is the Twi word for 'white person'). This is our Toyota Coaster bus that we have spent hours and hours and hours in. It feels like our home away from home!

We visited a witches' village. Women who are accused of being witches are brought here to live. They raise their families there away from the oppression of their hometown, so there are lots of kids around. One of the smallest kids decided that Logan was his favourite obruni for the day, and his hand barely wrapped around one of Logan's finger!

Roland and Tina watching a cute little kid while we were listening to the women talk about their experiences at the witches' village

A storm rolling in up north, just outside of Yendi

Shea butter! Handmade and unprocessed. It is so moisturizing! I bought a giant lump of it for only one cedi (about 70 cents).

Me, Katie, and Megan pretending to be the witches from Macbeth while stirring the shea butter.

Downtown Tamale on Canadian Thanksgiving. We were sitting at a rooftop restaurant eating chicken and yam chips with ginger malt beer as a semblance of thanksgiving food :)

A sheep at the market in Bolgatanga. He did not look amused.

The Ghana border from the no-man's-land between Ghana and Burkina Faso

The border of Burkina Faso! Technically, I have crossed it, but not into official Burkina Faso, just into the no-man's-land.

Me sitting on a crocodile. Isn't that wild? He was 98 years old, and we got to watch him swallow a chicken almost whole about 10 minutes after this video was taken.

Me and the elephant. We were actually that close to an elephant! So amazing! They are huge and they make such crazy sounds. This one didn't really follow any semblance of a path. He mostly just crashed through the bush, and it got out of his way pretty quick. So did we, when he started walking towards us!

Two Absolutely Amazing Tales of Wonder

So, I just want to share with you the crazy wonderful morning I just had!

It all started at 6:45AM when my alarm went off. I woke up early to catch the 7:30 bus to Akuafo Hall for breakfast and laundry. As I was sitting and waiting for the bus just outside of ISH, I could see a massive bank of grey storm clouds rolling in. As I was climbing onto the bus, the heavens let loose an absolutely torrential downpour! Water began streaming down the windows of the bus and it sounded like waves were crashing on the roof above me. Tina and I sat, grinning in awe of the rain and sat in the bus as it rolled slowly along the campus roads. After about 15 minutes, we were as close to Akuafo Hall as we were going to get, so Tina and I departed. We dashed off of the bus and sprinted through the rain about 100 metres to the hall. In the sixty seconds we were actually outside, Tina and I got completely drenched. We ran through ankle-deep puddles and arrived at Coffee Cue (a little breakfast stand behind Akuafo Hall) dripping wet.

We sat down with Emily, who had been there for a while. Tina and I both ordered breakfast and then just sat, enjoying the raindrops plummeting on the canopy above us. We saw lightning and heard thunder as loud as gunshots. The three of us listened to ‘Wavin’ Flag’, which fit the situation perfectly. We sat chatting and smiling for about two or three hours, waiting for the rain to lessen. I was getting very chilly because my clothes were not drying at all, so I asked the man in the laundry shop if he could dry my shirt for me. He graciously agreed, and once it was dry, it felt so wonderful to put again. It was far too wet to make it to the Institute of African Studies for our 8:30 Literature class, so Tina and I watched the episode of the Amazing Race that took place in Ghana. When 10:00AM rolled around, Katie showed up with her laundry and told us that our Literature class had been cancelled because our professor was sick. It was a glorious, wet, exhilarating, free morning, and I loved every moment of it!

I also want to add one glorious story about one evening on our northern trip:

We spent a lot of time driving in the Institute of African Studies bus, which we have dubbed the Obrunimobile (‘obruni’ being the Twi word for white person). One evening, we were driving up to either Tamale or Yendiwe drove into an enormous bank of thunderclouds looming on the horizon. The northern part of Ghana is quite flat, and if Montana is considered ‘Big Sky Country’, it has nothing on Ghana! As we drove towards this huge bulk of storm clouds, an absolutely electrifying lightning storm began. It was incredibly amazing that I cannot describe it well enough to give you even the slightest idea of how beautiful and awe-inspiring it was. It completely engulfed us. There was lightning in front of us, behind us, and on both sides of us. My neck was actually starting to hurt from turning my head from left to right so that I would not miss any of the show. It was more beautiful than any fireworks I have ever seen. Bolts of lightning slashed across the sky, often branching into an electric root system stretching from heaven to earth. It was often so bright that I would have a bolt burned into my retina for a few minutes afterward. The show went on for well over an hour, and it never let up. I have never seen more lightning in my entire life! Nor have I seen anything more awe-inspiring or powerful in my entire life. It was a storm that I will never forget.

The Past Three Weeks

                Wow! It’s been a few weeks! We were in Akropong three weeks ago, then back for one week of insane amounts of homework, and then gone up North for another week. It’s been really busy, but really awesome!

                We were in Akropong for the annual Odwira Festival. The Odwira Festival is a festival of purification to renew the power of the town’s guardians, the odosu. The  odosu are fragments of skulls from the enemies of the Ashanti people that the people of Akropong stole hundreds of years ago. The people who are in possession of the odosu must perform the Odwira Festival yearly in order to maintain the power of the odosu. This is done by bringing food and drink offerings to the ancestors in the sacred grove, which is at the edge of town. The kind of scary thing about it is that most of the food-carriers (there are three from each of the 7 royal houses in Akropong) are possessed by ancestral spirits. They sort of run down the street and convulse violently. It was very unnerving, but I had a lot of good discussions with people about the existence and prominence of spirits. I still don’t really know how I feel about it, but at least I am better informed now.

                Akropong is a mainly Christian town (about 80% of the residents are Christian) and many people are trying to turn the Odwira Festival into a Christian festival of purification. Most people do not know anything about the odosu, however, so they end up supporting the festival without really knowing the outcome. It seems to be a very delicate thing. The Akrofi-Christaller Institute tries to engage in the festival as much as possible, but to use its message and ceremonies to a Christian purpose. The Presbyterian Teacher Training College right next door to the Institute does not allow their students to have anything to do with the Odwira Festival. I can’t decide which approach I like better. I love that the Akrofi-Christaller Institute tries to engage in the festival and discern right from wrong, but there is so much wrong with the motives of the festival that I don’t know whether engaging in it in the first place is a good idea. The week we spent in Akropong was far from settling.

                We spent all of last week in the north of Ghana! We went so far north that we actually got to cross the border into the No Man’s Land of Burkina Faso! It was rather exciting! I like the north better than being in the south. Although there is no ocean and no beaches, I like the feel of being up north much better. Tamale is more what I was expecting of Ghana. It’s dry and dusty and busy, but it still feels like Africa. It reminds me of Kabala, actually. I am not much of a city person, so being in Accra is not really my place. I am definitely enjoying it, but I still don’t like cities a whole lot. I love being in the open, without being hemmed in by a giant city. Tamale was pretty much perfect. It was still big enough to have good shops and restaurants, as well as a wonderful market, but it was small enough to have a nice friendly feel. People would stop and ask how we were just because we were walking down the sidewalk. I love that so much!

                Our trip was a mixture of doing touristy things and visiting NGOs. We saw the crocodile ponds in Paga, which is basically on the border of Burkina Faso. I got to sit on the tail of a 98-year-old croc! We got to see a church that was made entirely out of mud, and attend Mass there one morning. We went to Mole National Park and went on two safari walks. On both of them we saw...AN ELEPHANT!!!! I was honestly like 25 feet away from a wild elephant! It was so exciting! I don’t think that I have actually seen an elephant even in a zoo before, so it was so exciting! We saw him both on the afternoon walk, and again on the morning walk. In fact, the morning we were there, the elephant walked right in front of our motel! We also saw warthogs, baboons, green monkeys, and three different kinds of antelope. It was so amazing to just walk through the African Savannah and see all these animals!

                We visited five NGOs on our trip too. We visited the Christian Children’s Fund of Canada, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, International Development Enterprises, and BIRDS, a local NGO. It was really interesting to see the similarities and differences between all of them, as well as the impact that they had on the communities they were working in. I think my favourite project that I learned about was done by Catholic Relief Services in the area of child nutrition. They worked in 108 communities. In 102 of these communities, they provided  access to a health and nutrition clinic and gave out packages of Plumpy Nut, which is a very nutritious meal supplement for children. In 6 communities, they sought out mothers whose children were very healthy and well nourished and provided tools for them to teach the rest of their community how to feed their children well. Once a week, all the mothers who wanted to got together and cooked a nutritious meal and were taught by the mother with the healthy children how to take better care of their own children. It actually reminded me of the muffin morning program at my church back at home. The greatest thing about this program is that the community started to take ownership of it. When families came back north after spending a season down south, many of the mothers helped them learn how to feed their children better too. The community now knows how to identify malnourished children and how to take care of them. I found this really exciting! There were many other interesting programs, but this one was my favourite. When we visited the NGOs, it was so cool to be able to ask them questions. We also got to visit a few places where programs had been put into place to see their impact on the community. It was just such an awesome experience!

                The past three weeks have gone by so fast! I can’t believe that it’s been almost 11 weeks! I have just over 6 weeks to go! Where did the time go? I am loving living here. Sometimes, I almost forget that I am in Ghana because life here just seems so normal. Tonight, we are going to have dinner at Prof’s flat, just like every Monday. We always have guests, so tonight our guest is our Literature professor, who I’m pretty sure is the ringleader of the current teacher’s strike on campus. Thankfully, the strike doesn’t affect us, as our professors are paid by Calvin, not the University of Ghana. Still, it’s been nearly two weeks since the strike started, and if it isn’t resolved by the end of the week, they have to start sending the Ghanaian students home. It’s really not fair because the students have to pay all of their fees at the beginning of the year, so basically they miss out on a semester of school both education and money wise. Anyway, hopefully it will all be resolved soon. After dinner tonight, we are planning on watching the second episode of the Amazing Race, which was in Ghana! We stayed tuned for scenes from the next episode and recognized Makola Market, and the coffins (we’ve seen a fish-shaped one!) and all the signs looked so familiar. Logan and I are looking forward to seeing how badly they get ripped off by the taxi drivers! I can’t wait!