My weekend in Cape Coast

It is Monday today so back to class, but this past weekend my program went on a trip to Cape Coast which is three hours away from Accra... Overall, it was a very fun experience...

We left Saturday morning and the first thing we did in Cape Coast was to go to Kakum National Park which is a rainforest. The main attraction there is a canopied walkway of swinging bridges high over the forest floor. The place was mobbed which was trying at times(one thing Ghanaians do not do well is wait in line). It was beautiful though and very cool to get to look down and see the rainforest spread out beneath you. We didn't see any animals(I heard they only come out at night) but this next weekend we are going to northern Ghana and will go to Mole National Park where I have heard we get to hike in and see elephants... very exciting...

We stayed in a sweet resort on the beach and got to play and hangout Saturday evening(college students are still quite good at playing...)

Then Sunday morning we had the more sobering experience of going to Elmina Castle which is a UNESCO world heritage site and I believe the oldest castle in Africa built in the 1400s by the Portugese, taken over by the Dutch, the British and finally with independence the Ghanaians. It was the last place many people were taken before being boarded onto ships and taken to the New World in what our guide called the Evil Trade, slavery. Our tour was deeply moving, the conditions there during the evil trade were awful, the Europeans treated the Africans worse than one would treat animals for where one will clean an animals stall, the slaves were left to waste away in their own filth... Only the strong survived to be boarded on ships and face the awful conditions of the Middle Passage... Our guide was right, it truly was an evil trade, and while some may say that slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of Europeans it was not that type of slavery but a slavery where the slave was treated with dignity and it is said that it was hard to tell who was a freeman and who was a slave... the slavery imposed by Europeans is a unique kind of evil...

On a happier note, we started our Twi langauge class last week so we will hopefully be able to communicate a little better with people we meet on the street in their own language. It is interesting to be in a country where the official language is English, a legacy from colonial days, but where that is nobodies first language. I believe there are around 70 different languages spoken in Ghana although Twi is the biggest especially in the Accra region. All I remember from the other nights class though is medi emo which means I eat rice, and as far as phrases go, that is a good one because it is very true and we eat rice every day...