Thanksgiving at the Ambassodors

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving because I had by far my best one of my Thanksgivings spent away from home. All of the Peace Corps volunteers were invited to the Ambassador’s residence for a pool party. It was awesome we had free drinks for two hours before the dinner. We got a chance to see everyone we had not seen in a long time and it was really cool. It was the first pool party slash Thanksgiving day that I have ever been too it was also the first time had been somewhere it was 90 degrees on Thanksgiving. They had fans out in the yard so you could sit in the shade with a fan on you. So I played catch with a football in front of a fan which was another first for me. They also put us up in houses of Americans working at the embassy so we got to take hot showers and use an actual toilet. It was like being in America for a day. We even went to sports bar in Accra and played a trivia game and watched some football to really awesome things at the same time. This bar was just like being in America they oddly enough had a power cat flag up in the bar which I thought was awesome. It was just like being in America for a day without the 12 hour flight. Thanks for paying taxes everyone!

Torgbui Hatsu Festival

There has been a festival going on in my village the past two days for our chief. It is being put on by a woman from Togo who wants honor one of our chiefs Togbui Hatsu. It is only to honor him and his position. It has involved the whole town. The first day started with a ritual sacrifice of some animals. The first dug a hole in front of the chief’s palace. Then they dragged the cow in along with a chicken, turkey and Guinea fowl. The slit each animal’s throat and then poured the blood into the whole. The most disturbing was seeing the cow as it was trying breath and you could see the air being sucked in and out of its lungs. We actually had to move because blood was spraying. It was pretty crazy to see. They then butchered the animals and gave out the meat to different people in town. This took pretty much all morning long. Then after the meal was cooked they took some of the food and put it in the same hole and covered it with a basket and later with dirt. This is all for the gods of the land which were brought to the community at its founding. This was all followed by drumming and dancing pouring of libations and large amounts of Akpeteshie which is the local booze and gin being drank. It was a lot of fun. They are continuing today but I missed the sacrifices to the gods of two goats. The festival was meant to celebrate the one year anniversary of the death of the last chief. It was pretty cool and hopefully I will be able to put some video of it online.

Swearing in and Saying Goodbye to Addo-Nkwanta

Well we finally made it to swearing in, training is at times fun but mostly it was brutal. It lasts so long and there is so much stuff they try and teach you but it is impossible to teach us everything. I swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer on August 13 and it was quite the celebration I have put some of the pictures up online I suggest you check those out. The shirt I am wearing was given to me by my home stay and she made a matching dress in the same cloth so we could be wearing the same thing it is something else. We had a big party that night and I said goodbye to everyone that I had seen virtually every day for 3 months. Personally I was looking forward to not seeing some of them so I was excited. I did however have to say goodbye to Auntie and my adopted family in Addo-Nkwanta it was sad but I am pretty sure that I will go back to visit someday. It was pretty sweet when I was leaving I think Auntie was crying a little bit because she was sad that her “son” was leaving. I ended up going straight to site after swearing in some of my friends took trips but I was ready to get everything started and I was tired of most of the people.

Site Visit

So I finally got the chance to visit my site the place where I will live for the next two years. It started by us going to workshop where we met our counterpart and supervisor (C&S) to discuss the Peace Corps and everything that goes along with it. So the first night we got there we had not officially met our C&S yet. So some of my friends and I went to supper and there were some Ghanaians who had showed up but no one knew who each other was. So when we sat down we started to eat and then two men sat down at our table. We asked them where they were from and it turns out they were my C&S and when we figured it out they ran to me and both gave me a huge bear hug. It was really cool and could not have worked out better. They showed me a map of the area and that is when I figured out that I was going to be living on an island. It was really cool and all of my friends were jealous at how cool my C&S were. Then we finally got to site it was awesome. The first thing I did was meet about 15 of the elders of the community and I was introduced to them. Then we walked around it is a really beautiful place and it was the rainy season so there really was water everywhere. It actually is not a true island there is a road to it but it is a man made road so I call it an island. The next day though was perhaps the most interesting thing I have seen in Ghana. It was nothing special until about noon when I heard all kinds of drumming and chanting. I then went out and saw this group of people dressed up in their traditional clothes walking around the community. They were going around to the different idols or the statues to the gods on the island. At each place they would perform a little ritual. First the fetish priest would take a bowl of palm wine and make three pours of it in front of the shrine. Second he would take baby powder and spread it all over the shrine. Then he would take some gun powder pour some out and light it on fire. When the gun powder flamed and went up in smoke everyone would stop singing and do a little yell and raise their arms in the air in a grandma Burke Neato Neato sort of way. I really cannot describe how crazy it was I hope I will be able to get some video of online some time and let you know about it. It turns out that this area is one of the most traditional areas in Ghana and they have many people who still believe in shrines and their ancestors as gods. It is really cool and as it turns out it is much quieter than all the Christians. They do pretend they are catholic sometimes but I do not think anybody really believes here. Well since I will be writing much more about my site and you will get to know it well I will end this post.

Happy Obama Day

Well as you may or may not know President Obama chose Ghana as the first sub-saharan African country to visit as President. We were lucky enough to be invited as Peace Corps trainees because we were not volunteers yet to go and watch him and the President of Ghana speak before he left on Air Force One. It took us 12 hours for all of us to get to Accra and clear security before we actually got to see him speak. It was totally worth it. It was really amazing to see our First black President on his first visit to a black country. His speech only last about 15 minutes and it was interrupted twice by us because he mentioned the Peace Corps. It was awesome my goose bumps were about the size of golf balls listening to our President talk about how proud he was of us and what we were doing. It was really amazing and I wish I could describe it better but again like always the vocabulary is not there for me. At the end of his speech he and Michele did go around and shake hands but I could not get close enough and the push of the crowd was already too much. Some of my friends shook both of their hands and I shook their hand so I guess I was one removed from shaking their hands. It was an amazing experience and one that I will never forget.

Field Trip

Well on our field trip to see various sites I got a chance to go with my fellow environment trainees to see different parts of the country and what volunteers are doing there. It was good to see the volunteers sites but I am going to talk about the fun parts. We started out by traveling clear to the north of Ghana it took us about 12 hours to get to the Upper East region. It was much different than where we were staying it reminded me more of back home because it was flatter and there where less trees. We got to go to a crocodile sanctuary in a town where they are revered and it is illegal to kill them and the roam the streets freely. Then just by chance we ended up going a little farther north to eat lunch and we noticed that we were literally on the border of Ghana and Burkina Faso. So we asked the border guard if we could just step across the border without our passports turns out that was no problem so technically I got to go to Burkina Faso on our field trip. We then went back south the next day and ended up staying at a Benedictine monastery in Techiman. It was a nice quiet place on a beautiful piece of land with trees and enormous rock formations to climb on. It was really awesome and the monks were really cool and they were amazing cooks. They were vegetarians and they had a huge organic garden. It was nice to be somewhere that was so quite because compared to the village where there are roosters, goats, and children and churches it was heaven. We then went to a monkey sanctuary where just like the crocodiles they are revered and protected. It was fun to feed the monkeys because they would come and take groundnuts right out of your hand. The next day we went to the Techiman market which is supposed to be one of the largest markets in West Africa. We played a fun game that one of my friends heard about. At these large markets they have tons and tons literally of clothes from America that were donated to someone and are now being sold at these markets. The locals call it Obruni Way wu which translates as dead white man’s clothes. So these shirts as you can imagine can be pretty interesting. So the game is that each one of us picked another’s name out of hat just like you do for Christmas and we had to buy a T-shirt for 50 Pesawas or less which is about 35 cents US. It was a lot of fun and the shirts were hilarious. These shirts are hilarious because most Ghanaians do not care or do not know what they say so you can see some funny things. For example one day I saw and old man with a shirt that said “I can only please one person a day and today is not your F#%&ing day” then there is a kid in my village who wears a shirt that says “It is all about me” but he is rarely wearing pants. It leads to some funny situations. Well that was our field trip at least the fun parts anyway.

Homestay Village life Addo-Nkwanta

I wanted to tell you a little more about my home stay life. First, thing food in Ghana is much different than any other food I have had. It is not generally good but I have gotten used to and have even begun to like some of it. The staple foods fufu and banku contain some sort of starch with a soup and most of the time some kind of meat. The starch component has the consistency somewhere between play dough and mash potatoes because it has been pounded to pulp and is made from Cassava, plantain, corn or all three. The soup is usually Palm nut, ground nut (peanut) or a light soup. You do not use silverware and you are only supposed to use you right hand because in Ghana using your left hand for almost anything is taboo especially eating. You are also not supposed to chew the fufu only put it in your mouth and swallow. This as you can imagine takes some time to get used to. The first time I ate it I did not care for it but after awhile I really started to enjoy. I ended up being able to eat two balls of it which are the size of large grapefruits. After you eat that much I swear your stomach expands to about twice its normal size. Second is the sanitation we used latrines which is basically a pit covered by some concrete I could actually sit down to use it so that was pretty good. It was usually pretty clean but they used newspaper for TP at my home stay which sucked. They of course had no running water but taking a bucket bath is not as bad as it sounds and sometimes it is incredibly refreshing. Probably the most inconvenient thing about sanitation in Ghana is that you must fetch your water from somewhere. This really does not affect me because I have always had people fetch water for me and every time I have tried to fetch my own water someone takes it from me and almost seems offended that I have even tried. Fetching water consists of walking anywhere between a 100 ft and a half mile to get large basin of water maybe three or four gallons worth. They carry all of the water on their head and the only women and children are the ones who fetch water. In fact they carry everything on their heads I saw one guy in Accra carrying car parts on his head. It does seem like a pretty good way to carry things and it gives everyone exceptional posture. These are just some of things I have experienced living in Ghana.

Addo-Nkwanta

Addo-Nkwanta is the name of the town we stayed in with our home stay during training. It is located in the Eastern Region of Ghana and is on a horrible road. One that I was told by auntie was great in 1972 until the wrong government came to power and it has disintegrated ever since. She is still upset by this and would mention it every time I brought up how hard it was to travel in the area. Other than the bad road it was great town I would say it had 1500 people and as many bars as churches which I think is the way it should be. It also had a mosque and Muslim section which was kind of cool to hear the call to prayer every morning in my opinion it was better than the singing coming from the CAC at 4:30 AM. On Sunday afternoon they play soccer at the local field against teams from surrounding small towns. This is always a big event with people lining the field and they are always enthusiastic about it. One time when I went one the players who was about 25 years old scored two goals and each time he did his mother would run out on the field and give him a kiss after every goal. It was hilarious but no one seemed to think it was too strange. The field is just a relatively flat area near the school which they trim with Machetes and carve the lines in the dirt. It is a scene that is replayed over and over in Ghana and the world and it was pretty cool. Another interesting thing was in the center of town they had a rock in cased in some cement. We had no idea what it was but we would always meet up near the area and all we knew was that you could not touch it. This made me very curious so I started asking around and ended up going to the Chiefs “palace” to talk to him about. It turns out that is juju rock which holds the power of the town’s ancestors. On occasion they make sacrifices to it on holidays and if someone happens to commit a crime in the community that the chief has to settle. If you do commit a crime you are the one who provides the goat to appease the ancestors. It is really funny especially when you consider how religious and devoted they seem to be to Christianity.

Christ Apostolic Church

My first night at home stay was great until I wanted to go to sleep. I had one of the busiest and most exhausting days yet in Ghana but when I lay down to sleep I was introduced to the CAC. This was a small unassuming looking church about 30 yards from my window. I did not even notice it when I was moving in it did not seem like anything special. That night at about 9pm which is when most people go to sleep in Ghana the church was just getting started. It was a revival night which meant they would be seeing and clapping about the Holy Spirit until 4 AM. It was terrible way to spend my first night but I will never forget it I was absolutely exhausted the next day. Church in Ghana is an event on Sunday it lasts for about 3 hours. It consists of singing, dancing, scripture reading, talking in tongues, being possessed by the Holy Spirit, preaching and finally an argument over money. One minute I was completely amazed and fascinated by what was going on and the other I was bored out of mind. It is quite an experience. One thing that boggles my mind is that for all of the great forms of music which have their roots in Africa such as Blues, Jazz, Reggae and R & B is that here they cannot sing. The singing is most generally horrible and lacks enthusiasm in my opinion but you can definitely see where the beats come into play. There is definitely a lot of rhythm and the dancing is always fun and entertaining it just the singing that is brutal.

Homestay

So I was assigned to live in the home of “Auntie” Faustina and Kofi Adu. They were retired school teachers so they from teaching. The reason she was so excited about having a Peace Corps volunteer is because back in the 60’s while she was going to teacher training school she had Peace Corps teachers. She had so many fond memories of those volunteers that when she got the chance to be involved with PC again she jumped at the chance.both spoke really good English. All of their children where grown but they did have two kids who lived with them and helped out with chores which is a common thing in Ghana. There was also young man who was not there biological son but someone who they had basically adopted since he was 6 years old. They also had a young lady who cooked for us and they took care of their two nephews who were mentally retarded none of them lived there but they were always around. If that family situation sounds complicated all I have to say is I had one of the most normal family situations of any home stay. Normal of course being what our interpretation of a family should be which is very different than what it is in Ghana. So it was a full family they had a nice home and I felt very comfortable there it really was a great place to have home stay. Auntie was great I think she enjoyed having me around because she like to speak English something she rarely did since she retired

Site Placement and Vision Quest

We made it back to the training site to start our training for real. It was good to see everyone again but they made us wait 3 days in hotels before we found out where are site would be and what our home stay family would be like. First we got to find out our site place and region. They took us to a local school where they had drawn a huge map of Ghana on the floor. Then they read our names out one by one and asked us to stand on our region we would be living in for the next two years. It was all extremely exciting I really had no preference and was read for anything. I was assigned to Atiavi in the Volta region and I would be learning Ewe. I am actually living in Atiavi-Glime one of the towns which makes up the community of Atiavi. It is located near the coast and the town is something of an island in the Keta Lagoon which happens to be the largest lagoon in west Africa. I was really excited about it but I will tell more about my site and job description in later posts. Then it was on to our being matched to our home stay families. Home stay is where they put us in different communities centered around Kukurantumi to live during our language and technical training. We were grouped based on our assignments because I am an environment volunteer I was placed in Addo-Nkwanta the smallest, most remote town but I think the best community. This was more nerve racking than waiting for our site placement. Because the families had started to show up and everyone was wondering who would be living with whom for the next few months. While we were waiting I remember looking around at the different families and not having a clue who it could be and seeing a woman who looked really nice and thinking man I hope I get to live with her. Then sure enough they called her name and then they announced I was chosen to stay with her. I felt very lucky and then after I met her and her family I knew that I was.

Accra Phase Vision Quest

Third Post Accra Phase vision quest
After I got my medical stuff out of the way we did some training in Accra (pronounced A-ccra). It was just telling us some things about safety and health we also got too travel on our first tro tro the form of public transportation in the country. It is basically a really old Hyandai or Toyota van which they cram as many people in as possible. It is an experience I have ridden on tros with goats, crying children, blaring music, arguing passengers and once I saw child whose mother fell asleep breastfeed herself without her mother waking up. It is always an adventure. Last week my tro got a flat tire on the back to site from Accra and it was changed in maybe 10 minutes. In that time 3 other tros stopped to give our driver and mate tools. It is just one of the many well. Then we got to go on a vision quest were we get to see how a volunteer lives and what life is going to be like. It was good my original host was having trouble at site so went with my friend Mike on his vision quest. The volunteers site was great he had a really nice place to stay and he was in the “mountains” of Ghana which are not tall but it was much cooler there. I actually got to wear my sweatshirt. He was a great cook and we pretty much played cards and experienced site it was not too bad. We then made our way back to Kukurantumi to where our training would be located.

IN Ghana

Second Post Akwaaba and welcome to GhanaWhen I fly I am usually nervous but this time I was not for whatever reason right when we took off I got this sudden feeling of calm like this is what I was supposed to be doing. Now I do not believe in fate or any that mumbo jumbo so that was an interesting experience for me. Anyway we got to Ghana my initial impression stepping off the plane was it is Hot, Humid and Green. Even though mentally I felt good about the whole thing and was feeling amazingly comfortable in such a strange place physically I felt strange. While we were being welcomed at the PC office I started to feel light headed and my eyes started to flutter uncontrollably. I thought it was dehydration so I started drinking water like crazy. Which by the way in Ghana comes in a bag that you bite the corner off of and suck out the water. So drank about 3 of these and felt a little better. On our way to the hotel in the traffic and Chaos that is Accra I had to pee so bad I made the bus pull over and I peed on the side of the road. I had drunk so much longer that some people said it had lasted more than 2 minutes. Let’s just say everyone was impressed. I was feeling pretty good until we go to the place we were staying and started to play an ice breaker game. That was when the feeling came back of being light headed and my eyes started to move uncontrollably. This time however I could not solve it with water when I went to sit down I actually ended up having a seizure. I woke up about 10 minutes later in someone’s room with stiff jaw and a splitting headache. Luckily some people where trained EMT’s and they knew what to do. They told me that I seized fell to the floor then woke up spoke to them a little and then seized again. In case anyone is worried I have been thoroughly examine I have had a CAT scan and EKG and I am totally fine. They think it was combination of stress, lack of sleep and the malaria medication I had taken which I have since switched to another type. It was a rather exciting start to my Peace Corps service in Ghana and I will forever be known as the guy who had a seizure the first day in country.

New Postings

just want to put a little disclaimer in here that I am writing all of these first posts a couple of months after they all happened so I have the benefit of hindsight and an idea of how things worked out. So they may lack some of the excitement and enthusiasm of the actually time but they will also include the most important parts. I think they will give you a good idea of what the last couple of months have been like for me.
First Post Philadelphia
Philadelphia- Well I got to Philly late because of delays in Chicago of course. It was not bad by the time I got to the hotel it was too late to eat anything so I got supper from a vending machine but it was better than nothing. My roommate did not get in until midnight. His name was Jason George and was from California. Interesting thing about Jason is he played water polo at Yale where he went to school. The next day we went to orientation it was really boring and was all about cultural sensitivity and what to do and, and what not to do in Ghana. The night before we left I got to meet up with one of my friend Brian who I lived with in China. We went out and had two beers it was really good to see him and he took me by the liberty bell. The next day we went to the federal building/clinic down the street and got our shots. We then took about a 3 hour bus ride to New York City JFK airport which was cool because we got to see a little bit of the city. Then we went on a 10 hour plane ride to Ghana. This was not too bad when I compared it to flying to China or Korea although I did not get any sleep.