An Update!
I really have no idea how I’m posting this. There’s WiFi here, but you have to go to the desk and get (pay for) an authorization code. I tried earlier and they told me the Internet was down. I just turned on my computer and Ubuntu told me it was connected, and, forgetting that the Internet was down and I hadn’t bought an access code, I went to check my e-mail… And it worked.
The connection here is crawling, but I want to post an update! We’re more than halfway into our journey, and I’m having a pretty good time. We’re currently staying in the nicest of the hotels, the Elmina Beach Resort. It’s right on the beach, and, unlike the other two hotels, is like a mid-range US hotel inside.
(While I’m waiting on some pictures to upload in the background…) The currency here just underwent a revaluation, so there’s currently two types of currency going around. The first is the cedi (”C-D,” like what I’m using to back up my photos). 10,000 cedis are (roughly) equivalent to $1 USD. The new replacement is the Ghana cedi, which is the same as 10,000 old cedis. (Ergo, 1 Ghana cedi is roughly $1 USD.) As if that weren’t enough of a problem, people will often, when saying a number, just drop the “thousand,” so something that costs 50,000 cedis (5 Ghana cedis) might be pronounced “fifty.” So there’s often an order of magnitude problem. And prices are really variable, too. For instance, soda is dirt cheap. (Except at hotels!) There are a lot of places in cities where you can get a (300 mL) bottle of Coke for 25 to 30 cents (Ghana pesewas) . (It’s about one Ghana cedi at hotels.) But cans of soda are inexplicably listed on the menu as “30,000,” which is $3: three times the cost of a (bigger!) bottle, and about ten times what the bottle costs in the city. I think a big part has to do with the fact that everyone keeps the bottles (which are glass): I think there’s a big deposit. Cans probably aren’t.
We’ve been eating mostly at the hotels, which offer an American-friendly fare. I did try fufu, the local dish. Just a tiny little bit. There’s a doughy thing, apparently a mix of maize and plaintain, heavily ground until it looks like cookie dough. It’s in a vat of red liquid, which is spicy. And there are meats mixed in: beef, chicken, grasscutter, etc. I’ve tried just a little, and didn’t really care for it. (Although it wasn’t bad.)
Okay, first round of photos uploaded!
An obligatory flag shot. It took this in the Nkrumah National Park, which honors Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah.
That’s a better picture. He’s entombed inside the big structure, and is depicted by the golden statue. The buglers (?) in the foreground are just ceremonial.
One of our course leaders is a Nigerian native, who, although he lives and works in the U.S., is still very knowledgeable about African culture in general. All the time when something seemingly crazy happens, he’ll often stand up on the bus and say, with a thick accent, “Is normal!”
So here are a few kids wheeling a beat-up car down the street on a cart. And really, it is normal. You don’t necessarily see that here often, but there are plenty of beat-up cars and car parts, and plenty of trade in them.
Ghana just celebrated its 50th year of independence. You see this symbol everywhere; the celebrations were apparently some of the biggest that nation has ever seen. The symbol on the right means “Accept God,” and is used frequently, too. (It’s a common item on necklaces.) I could talk a lot about religion in the country, but I’ll save that for another time. (More often than not, it says Except God, but I’m pretty sure Accept God is correct, especially given the way it was explained.)
Sanitation really isn’t that big of a deal in Ghana. It’s better than other parts of Africa (in the area we’re in, apparently the level of AIDS infection is around 3%: it’s upwards of 30% in many parts of Africa), but Monk would have a nervous breakdown here. In addition to them serving things like dried, uncooked fish with flies on them (we don’t eat at those places!), there are ditches like shown in this picture almost everywhere we’ve been. They’re usually filled with garbage in addition to wastewater. (In some areas, they’re covered, which is an improvement.)
This isn’t necessarily a good photo, but it’s an accurate representation of what most of what we’ve seen has been like. There are lots and lots and lots of small businesses selling out of these little shacks.
We’re traveling with a student who’s a native Ghanaian, so he brought us to a rural village where they held a celebration that they had ample food this year, having experienced famine in the past. We stopped to see the village leaders; in this case, the Queen Mother.
Here’s a shot of the celebration. (The crowd was much larger than depicted.)
Monkeys! We visited a monkey sanctuary, where we were able to feed them. (I chickened out and just watched.)
This was the view from our first hotel, Afrikiko. It’s not that great a photo, but it gives a good idea of how awesome the settings of our hotels has been. We ate breakfast and dinner in a nice little rotunda/gazebo sort of thing just out of frame to the right.
One thing I can’t get used to is that animals like goats, chickens, and turkeys just wander freely around villages. At one point we were sitting in one of the rooms at the school and a chicken wandered in. No one (besides us) even paid it any attention.
When I think of Africa, I think of dry, desolate places like the Sahara. I didn’t expect the nearly-tropical setting that is Ghana. (These trees were obviously planted in an arranged manner in the botanical garden, but still, they’re native plants.)
This was my shower at the first place. You had to hold the thing. (The next two hotels were a little more sane and had a normal showerhead.) What’s really more remarkable is that each bathroom has its own hot water tank with a switch: you turn it on when you want it to make hot water. It’s a real pain, because you have to get up and turn it on before you can take a (warm) shower. (It seems to me like there might be economies of scale in just having one big one like most normal places, but I digress.) All three hotels have been that way.
I got a little carried away with special effects, but this shows a place selling Coke for 25 pesewas (cents) a bottle. You’re only buying the contents of the bottle, and only 300 mL, but still, it’s a steal! (And when it’s 90 degrees and you had to get up early, you’d have paid $2 without flinching.)
I’m not really sure why I uploaded this picture, but as long as I did, I’ll tell the story that goes with it. (The picture isn’t necessary at all.) As a radio/communication geek and a business student, I found it kind of interesting. Ghana’s infrastructure isn’t so great. Landline phones seem fairly rare. It’s just a huge hassle to run copper to every building, especially with widespread poverty. Power is pretty much available everywhere, although it’s not so reliable: we’re staying in the nice hotels, and yet we’ve lost power at every single one. It’s kind of like the chickens: it’s shocking to us, but the natives hardly notice.
And yet the cell service in Ghana rivals that in the U.S., and nearly everyone owns a cell phone: not just the upper and middle classes, but even the people who seem really poor. It seems like it’s all prepaid cell deals. I’m using the school’s phone for hardware, but bought a SIM card for $5 and 75 minutes of time for $7.50. (So it’s 10 pesewas a minute.) What happened is that while there was next to no copper phone infrastructure, Adam Smith intervened: cell phone companies smelled opportunity and built cell towers. So, although there are very few landline telephones, it seems like everyone in Ghana owns a cell phone. Service is great, too.
As an interesting aside, no one told me the international rates. I assumed I’d pay through the nose to dial home. I called home and talked for 15 minutes. At the end I figured I’d nearly used up the $7.50 I paid. Someone asked to borrow my phone to call home, and I told them they could, but that it may well cut out when the credit ran out. They talked for 15 minutes, and a few days later, I made another 15 minute call. I still had $2.37 remaining. I did the math: it seems like it’s costing me about 13 cents a minute. Not bad!
One of the main reasons we come to Ghana is to help at a combination (primary) school and AIDS orphanage. It’s been running for a few years, and is growing rapidly, but they’re desperate for help. We, both as an institution and us individually, have been helping out; sharing hope (and giving time and attention) to the kids, and doing some work that they couldn’t easily hire help for. One of our projects was to help with painting a mural in what’s going to be new dormitories for boarding students. The equipment we had to work with was terrible, but we did the best we could. We didn’t get to finish (and “finishing” would have involved completely painting over things like the snake!), but I like to think we helped.
I feel obliged to mention that I decided recently that I needed to do more “enhancing” of photos in software; there’s sort of an ‘ethical’ line to me at which point ‘fixing up’ a photo involves adding things that weren’t there. But it’s a continuum. So I decided that I was being too conservative. So the colors in this photo are ‘enhanced’ more than I’d previously felt comfortable doing. But this is one of the many, many gorgeous views we’ve been faced with.
This is only half our group, and it’s not a great photo, but still… It’s awesome…
…because it was the most amazing waterfall ever.
See what I mean? (Okay, a little too ‘enhanced,’ given that the water wasn’t at all brownish-red, but I digress.)
Can you guess what these are for? I’ll mention it later on.
This photo doesn’t provide for scale, but suffice it to say that this spider, which was in my bathroom, was ginormous.
Anyway, I fly back on Friday, and will have many more photos when the connection isn’t abysmally slow.
Ethical disclaimer: Some of these photos were taken by others in my group. Also, for those of you who know me, I have many, many more photos. Part of it’s just bandwidth limitations, but I also want to shy away from uploading photos of people without their consent.