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.