Feeling Settled

So our group took a hiking trip to Boti Falls on our free day our second sunday of homestay. It was awesome. Boti falls is pretty big. The falls are easily accessible by 99 stairs. Then there is also a long looping trail that we hiked, and it was very fun. The landscape for the hike was a mix of savannah and semi deciduous rainforest. The hike was even more fun because some of our trainers were on the hike with us and they are hilarious. During this one part of the hike we climbed a huge hill, almost like going to compression falls but there were more rocks to climb up instead of just dirt. At the top of the hill there were two men sitting there, and they tried to make us all pay to pass that part of the trail. (Which is absolutely ridiculous) Sooo our trainers and these two guys started yelling at each other and it was pretty crazy...i wish I had taken a video but I think one of the other volunteers did. Our trainer who is in charge of logistics is named Tony. Tony told us all to keep walking and was trying to settle it out with the guys, because they were wearing wellington boots (what everyone wears to farm) and they obviously did not work for the boti falls park, and also we had a guide with us who did work at the park. The men followed us as we walked away and followed us for a while until we got to the very top of the hill with this huge rock you could climb on. When we got to the rock the men started yelling it out some more so we didnt really get to climb on the rock but we did take some pretty silly group pictures. They are silly mostly because we were all sweating buckets and had just climbed up that huge hill.

At the end of the trail there was a village with a palm tree that had a trunk which branched three ways half up the tree. Under this tree there was a blessed stone with some carvings in it that apparently if you sit on it you will have twins. I sat on it.

Then for lunch we got pizza! And then we went to see akka falls, which is further down on the same river as boti falls. This waterfall was cool because you could stand at the bottom and get soaked. Boti falls is the area that my homestay mother came from.

So yesterday we had a day to learn how to cook like a Ghanaian. We had been learning about the names of foods and how to buy them in our languages. All of the volunteers along with our language trainers all piled into the peace corps van and went to the market in the morning. It was pretty fun running around market trying to find the ingredients for our local dish that we were going to make. The dish we made is called kontomre. It is made from the leaves of the coco yam. What we did was we crushed and ground a green pepper, onions, tomatoes, and garlic together. We halfway fried some chicken and then sauteed the crushed mush and added the coco yam leaves and chicken. I really dont think the description does it justice but it was our first time making a local dish. We had to cook over a coal pot, which is basically a metal thing that holds coal in such a way that it is ventilated and you can fan it to keep it going. We were in groups of five or six people for this cooking activity so there were a lot of us working together, which in my opinion made it chaotic. It was especially chaotic because we had two groups together so there were eleven of us cooking in a closed space. Also the local children heard all of us loud obrunis and they gathered around to see what we were doing. They actually did more than gather around, they helped us start our fire and were showing us how to do everything and doing it for us quite a bit. I had to pry the fan away from several children to make sure that I was helping our group effort. In Ghana the way to adjust the coals is to move them...with your hands. So that was an interesting thing to see my mother do. To get our coal going she picked up an already lit coal and then put it on our fire. My mom is hardcore. I couldnt tell if she liked having everyone over at our house to make food or not. I volunteered my house though because my father is always asking why I dont have people over more, and telling me about past pc volunteers that used to all hang out here at night. So there were eleven obrunis making food at my house and it got a little crazy. Between having too many cooks in the kitchen and having little kids tugging on us there was not really a dull moment. The other two groups were at Kendra's homestay house, and once they were done making their dishes they came to my house so that we could all eat together. Our language trainers judged the dishes and told us that our trainee group did better than any previous group of trainees. One of our groups made an awesome stir fry. There was a lot of left over food and so a lot of people were taking some home. This one volunteer, John, is always hungry and he brought a big soup thermos to take leftovers home. He filled it with red-red, which is a lot of beans and stuff (a local dish), and as he was carrying this thermos the handle broke and it fell to the ground, spilling beans all over the floor and Ed's backpack. We all yelled “Ohhhhhhh” and all the kids came running. I jokingly motioned to one of the kids to eat it and she immediately began to reach for some. We protested for a moment but all the kids jumped and fought over the beans on the dirty cement floor. The beans were gone instantly. It made me feel kinda bad but they seemed very happy to be getting the food. This one girl named juliana was on the front lines of the bean snatching, but she also was on the front lines of helping us in whatever way she could. None of us asked her to but she swept the area where we were cooking because there were ashes everywhere, and she and a couple other kids washed all the dishes when we were done. The kids work really hard here. In Ghana age is everything. You are allowed to boss anyone that is younger than you around. The younger kids dont seem to protest or mind either, because they will pay their dues and get to do the same when they are older. After everyone was done eating the volunteers were heading to the nearby place to hang out because it was Adam's birthday. We had just ate a ton of food but my mother had made me dinner...my favorite...banku. And she made me a new stew that I hadnt tried before...okro stew. So I had to eat again. It was moderately painful but I scarfed it down and then went to the spot. The spot was alright. Whenever the birthday boy got there we all let out an “Ayyyeee” yell and sang happy birthday and then all the kids in town knew where we were and they all hung all over us while we were sitting around talking. Several kids were standing behind me with a hand on my shoulder or holding my hand. Juliana was trying to get me to come home. I didnt realize why they wanted me to come home so badly and then I remembered that it was because I put up my eno hammock in my courtyard. The kids go nuts over the hammock. They love swinging in it. Whenever I ended up going home (it was about 8 oclock...which is late in this town) I let the kids play in it for a while before I went to bed. My dad said that they will continue coming every night just for the hammock now that they know I have it. Soo I consider my real friends to be the ones who came before the hammock, those three in the beginning (Vida Moses and Kobe) and then little Juliana because she is such a hard working tiny child and she is also kind of crazy and happy. The hammock kind of attracts some older boys that play rowdy and people get hurt when they are fighting over the hammock. So that is annoying...but the pure joy that I hear in the laughter of the kids that get in it for the first time makes it worth it. They dont have swings or anything here at their school. They just have a football (soccer) field. The school looks like it is not finished being built but I havent seen anyone working on it so I think thats just the way it looks. It is a building made of cinder blocks and the doors and the windows are just openings, and the roof is wood and tin.

Ok honestly I dont know how interesting this blog is going to be to people, but in this paragraph I will describe where I live right now. It is a village of about 1000 people. There are goats, sheep, chickens, ducks and sometimes a dog or pig that roam around the streets. The streets are orange clay. There are little children everywhere. The way I see it there is one main road and one main intersection where another street crosses with the main one. Everywhere else is a back way to get places. For the first couple weeks I was walking on the main road to get to my language class but after going to farm with my host family I now know the back way through the bush and can get to my teachers house in only 4 minutes. Quite an improvement. I live in the sub chief's house. My father is the sub chief. He had a stroke three months ago and it not feeling very well. He can get around okay and his mind is sharp but the left side of his body doesnt have fine motor skills. Sometimes he talks about when it will be his time to go and basically says that he is waiting to die. Downer. But I can see how it must suck to not be able to go anywhere and not be able to help out with any of the work. He is really nice and helpful to me though. Anyway so the sub chiefs house is super nice by Ghana standards. It is courtyard style, so all the rooms form a square around a big open area in the middle, and we have three shaded areas. One of the sides of this square is not rooms but is a place where my family dries coco and has a goat and a chicken coop and puts firewood and other random stuff. The kitchen is an outdoor kitchen and my mother cooks on the fire but for me she cooks on the coal pot. I was surprised when my father told me that the only cooked for me with the coal pot, they didnt use it for themselves. He said coal was too expensive. My bathing area and toilet are also within the compound. The bathing area is a linoleum lined room with a door, and the toilet is a really deep hole in the ground with a square thing on top of the hole and a toilet lid on top of the square. Both of these rooms are completely sealed and the windows are even screen so there arent many bugs in there. One time when I went to the bathroom there was a big spider on the toilet seat...it wasnt as big as ones I have seen in madagascar or vietnam but it was at least 6 inches in diameter. Now I am a little bit afraid it may live inside the hole. Our courtyard is also completely surrounded by wall or fence and we have a door that we close at night, and then we also have a gate that goes to where the bedrooms are, which we close at night. Then I also lock my door at night...sometimes. I really feel safe here and sometimes it is too hot to keep my door closed. My window has bars across it like I am in jail, but it is so that thieves cannot get into my room. My windows have screens over them to keep bugs out, but they also have a hole in them. This hole is so that I can open and close the wooden shutters with the handy metal rod that hangs from a nail right above my window. To open my window I push it with the metal rod. To close it I pull on a string that is tied to the bottom corner of the wood. Technology at its finest. My family has gutters on our roof that conveniently pour into several rain barrels, so every time it rains my mother runs around and removes the lids from the barrels so that they can collect water. There is also a bore hole located nearby for people to draw water from if they do not have this nifty system. We have a separate barrel for bore hole water but I havent really seen my mom mess with it. I use that water to fill up my water filter. My dad just drinks the rain water. I am not allowed to because of the many horrible things that could happen to me if I do, like schistosomaisis and guinea worms.

Food in Ghana. Ok so be warned in this section that I am normally pretty terrible at describing things. The food in ghana is not bad. My biggest complaint is that it is rich in starches. Every meal has rice, rice balls, yams, or an accompanying carb heavy food. My favorite of these is called banku. If you are really interested you can look it up online for probably a better description but it is made from corn and it is fermented. It is sticky mushy sort of dough that you pick a chunk off with your fingers and dip it into sauce or soup, depending on what you make with it. The sauces here arent really like a sauce you would imagine to dip your chicken fingers into. They are kind of like a stew. Banku tastes kind of like sourdough bread. It is my favorite. Tonight I had it with an okra stew. I have had fish with about every meal. I would say 60% of the time my meal has been rice and a spicy tomato sauce with fish in it. I am really tired of that one. Everything has a lot of palm oil in it. The fruit here is amazing though since we are in a rain forest climate. For breakfast I have an omelet or bread with peanut butter, which here they call groundnut paste. And of course my milo.

I have found a way to prevent myself from being shocked by my computer...i just have to pick it up using a cloth of some sort. And this works pretty well so long as I dont have it running while it is plugged in...that way just doesnt work, it will definitely shock me.

We went to the local bead market on thursday. I bought some really cheap bracelets, two for me and a couple to give to my favorite girls. This may have been a mistake, because once the other girls saw them they wanted one too and now when they see me wearing mine they ask for them. It sucks that when you give them something they dont seem to appreciate it, they actually just want more. I gave my favorite little visitor a couple pens for school, and then next day she asked for more, saying someone took one. And the other girl I gave a bracelet to was the one who was working so hard to clean up at my house when we all made food. I saw her yesterday and went over to chat with her and some ladies and I saw she was wearing the bracelet which made me happy. Then she disappeared for a moment and came back to me and showed me her wrist which now had no bracelet and she made a sad face and tried to get me to give her one of mine. Even though I had just seen her with hers. It kind of gets to me, they see me as someone who is rich and has plenty to share, but it makes me wonder if that is the only reason they even come around at all. They definitely ask for me to give them stuff. Or they will say something like I like your watch like they expect me to give it to them. I guess this is why we have a training village...to learn things like this. I think that it would be best to not give them anything at all. Thats not the reason I came here. The reason I came her was to spread knowledge and start grassroots efforts for sustainable projects. Even if I cant give these kids the world, I can still give them my friendship, and they are my friends. I know a lot of their names and they know mine. It really is a great feeling to come home at the end of the day and have a bunch of kids yell your name and come running to attack you with a huge hug and a huge smile. And they when I find an orange outside my room that they brought for me, it brings a smile to my face. I honestly have more oranges than I can handle right now...a man passing by on the road when I got home gave me a couple oranges and some guy I met on the street said he would bring me oranges...im not sure if it was the same guy...he knew my name so maybe it was but his name was different than I thought...his was bismah (or something like that) and the one I had met on the street was named kujo. Whooo knows but basically I wish I could make orange juice...i will have to invest some time in figuring that one out.