Halfway...

So yesterday was the halfway point where I had been here two months and a day and still had two months and a day to go. It feels like it is going by fast, but it also feels like it will be the perfect amount of time. I know I won't want to go home until I do, but that I will be very glad when I do.

That said, I really haven't blogged in awhile, but I have been quite busy, or by busy perhaps I should mean away, for the last two weekends I went to the beach and that is anything but busy, rather relaxing and lazy and wonderful. With those two trips and then going to Boti Falls, I feel like I have been away from Accra more than in it recently, but that was the point.

Two weekends ago I went to a place called Ada Foah which is where the Volta River meets the sea and five other girls and myself stayed in grass huts(with mosquito netted beds) on the beach. I got sunburned, most painfully my lips... I didn't know one could sunburn there lips, but I now know that it is very unpleasant. This past weekend though I managed to avoid sunburn altogether.

Ada Foah was beautiful. We went Friday and came back Sunday which meant a full day at the beach. We had to take a canoe to get there, and because we arrived later than we had planned and after dark, that meant a canoe ride at night on the Volta River which was rather glorious. We probably made the boat driver think we were crazy with all our goings on, but I am pretty sure we provide a pretty constant source of amusement to Ghanaians. The beach right out side the place we were staying was pretty clean, but Saturday morning I walked down to where the river really does meet the sea and back again, a two hour walk, and we saw so much trash. It just washes up, but it was definitely discouraging.

Sunday morning was probably one of my favorite moments, for we got to witness the villagers at work pulling in their fishing nets and some men tryingn to get a boat out to sea. Whole families, men, women and children, would come out to pull the nets in. I wasn't quite sure how they were connected to both the land and the boats unless somebody swam the rope in, but that could easily be what had happened.

Another interesting thing about Ada Foah was the Peace Corps volunteer we met there. She had been in Ghana for more than a year and was at Ada Foah for a weekend away with her Ghanaian boyfriend. Her volunteering work was in a school in Tema(a city not very far from Accra with a big industrial port) and it was interesting to hear her talk about the schools. She taught JSS, Junior Secondary School, and she was pretty discouraged about the educational system. She said Ghana had only recently implemented educational reforms, but they did very little besides add additional demands to the teachers and students without reforming the educational system. To go onto Secondary School, the students needed to know a mass of information, and how they were taught it and learned it was pretty much direct memorization. There was next to no critical thinking, and seeing how so many of my classes are at university, it is not a very effective way to learn. however, she also said that if teachers or headmasters complained about the reforms, they were often demoted as had happened to one headmaster she knew in Tema. As a Peace Corps volunteer, she said she felt like all she could do was simply teach her students well; the only difference she was able to make was in their lives.

Skipping ahead, I came back Sunday, went to class Monday and Tuesday, and then Wednesday headed back to the beach with a different group of friends and a different location. Tuesday, like good Americans, we even watched the debate, staying up very late to do so; it started at one in the morning our time, ending around 2:30. It is crazy to think in a month we will know who are next president will be. I await my absentee ballot to do my civic duty. It is also crazy to be so far away when so much is happening in America both with the election and the economy. I am very thankful for my little radio and the BBC which do their best to keep me informed.

Anyways, moving on again, while my trip to Ada Foah took me east along the Ghanaian coast, my second trip took me west. Our ultimate destination was a place called Green Turtle Lodge, but we stayed the first night in Cape Coast. One of the guys I was travelling with has friends there who own a hotel, so we stayed in their hotel which was fun. They have a lake with crocodiles in it, so Thursday morning before heading out we were able to pet a sleeping crocodile which was pretty unnerving and also watch them get fed chicken scraps(they have sharp teeth!). Also, to add to our sighting of very old animals who have been around longer than the rest of us, we also were able to take a ten minute walk to a nearby ostrich farm. I have a very fond place in my heart from ostriches, probably from my time in South Africa where we got to visit the ostrich capital of the world and all attempted to master ostrich impersonations. Ostrich farming is not a very big industry in Ghana, but on our walk we also got to pass a lot of other farms, largely Casava which is a staple in the Ghanaian diet, making up both the beloved Fufu and Banku. My Twi teacher talks about Fufu all the time.

Green Turtle Lodge was amazing, the kind of place you don't want to leave and you want to go back to. It was quite far to get to. Our return trip took 10 plus hours, but mostly because we had to wait three hours for a bus because the one we were trying for was already sold out when we arrived. Our tro-tro also got a flat tire which was a first for us though obviously from the speed and ease that the mate and driver changed the tire, not for them. It was on one of the most rickety tro-tros yet. I think my favorite tro-tro moment was the time that the door was falling off so they had to tie it to the rest of the vehicle and then when the mate tried and open the door to let us out, it wouldn't open for five minutes... I digress...

It was also the cleanest beach I have yet seen in Ghana. Ada Foah was very much trash strewn. Probably part of it was that we were quite remote. The last leg of the journey was over a dirt road and so remote that they piled people on top of the tro-tro, a practice which is illegal but then when one is that remote, there are no police check points...

Here too there were a lot of intersting people to talk too. There appears to be a rather large population of obruni students and volunteers and we joked the other day about how we all thought we were so brave and cool and original to come to a place like Ghana... its all good though. There was a group of Australians who were volunteering as teaching assistants in a village and they had a lot of the same observations as the Peace Corps volunteers about the challenges facing the educational system. One girl I talked to said that the curicculum didn't teach phonetics which is the building blocks of reading...

Mostly I just listened to the ocean, went swimming, and read my book in the sun and shade depending on my mood. It was very relaxing and a wonderful get-away.

Now I am back to class and studying and the idea of doing homework and I will probably try and go to the oprhanage sometime this week. I decided to not continue trying to volunteer at the other place in Accra that did the reproductive rights education not because it wasn't amazing and I didn't want to but because it really didn't work with my schedule. I am trying to go to the orphanage more now though because they really do need the help, which was not true of Cencosad and was one reason stopping at the other place wasn't too hard of a decision.

In other news, the next few weekends I have ISEP program trips which should be fun and provide more for long and rambling blogs...