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.