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Election 2008 and a final post from Ghana

So the news of the day is that just now as I was typing, Ghana announced that there will be a runoff shortly after Christmas because neither of the candidates achieved the needed 50% plus for a clear victory, but they are neck to neck. Moreover, the election was peaceful and without incident, and it seems as though for the last three days since Sunday when people waited hours in line to vote(a friend waited two hours...) people have been glued to their televisions and radios as they hand counted and announced results for each polling station as they came in. Nobody is surprised that there will be a runoff though, and it is a great day for Ghana and for Africa that the election went so well. It is definitely a cool time to be here.

Meanwhile, for me, this week has been full of exams... one down, two to go... I should be studying right now... oh well. This week is also full of every last minute thing as I fly out Saturday evening. I can't believe this semester is over. It has been so full, and it has gone by so fast. It has definitely been a highlight in my rather excellent college experience.

Anyways, just a quick update, and now I need to get back to studying!

travels, life, politics... the end is getting near...

First of all, I feel like I am becoming quite lax on this whole blog thing, but in my defense the computers here are almost more effort than they are worth... and as it gets closer and closer to leaving, I feel less and less motivated to update... I leave in 11 days, and I am definitely in a place of denial. I talked to my Dad the other day, and he said I was probably feeling wistful as my time came to a close, and it was really a good word to describe my emotions, so let me plagarize and say I am wistful. While I am excited to see family and friends again, I know how much I will miss Ghana and my life here as well...

Not this past weekend but the one before I went back to Cape Coast, this time going to Cape Coast castle which was like Elmina castle a very sobering memorial to history. We toured it with a bunch of school children who weren't very old, and I couldn't help but wishing that little children did not have to be exposed to the atrocities people commit against other people, but it is better they know than not know. I think I really just wished reality could be different. Our guide gave a good conclusion to the tour though encouraging all of us to remember what we hold in common, our humanity.

Then from Cape Coast we went back to Green Turtle Lodge where I had stayed for a weekend in October, but it was a different group of friends this time. One highlight of being there were the other Obruni's we met, especially this one German girl. She has been travelling around Ghana for almost two months, just backpacking, as a single woman, and after Ghana she is going to go to Tanzania to visit her sister who is studying there and to travel around with her. She said she wants to go to all of the continents before she has children, and she said that in her travels in Ghana, she has never felt not safe. Another highlight was a beautiful hike we went on to the southernmost tip of Ghana with a guide, Victor, who was very knowledgable and chatty. He was clearly among other things a community leader, and had worked with a Peace Corps volunteer to bring tourism into that region and community. He went around and did community assessments and he said that it has helped the community with employment and also because Green Turtle Lodge funnels some of their revenue back into community. They are also working actively to save sea turtles which are endangered but are also hunted and fished by the locals. We saw a sea turtle one night laying her eggs and she was beautiful!

That said, one of the big things going on in Ghana these days is the upcoming election which will take place this Sunday on December 7. It is a very close race between the NPP who currently hold power and the NDC who the NPP took over from in elections in 2000. There is also the CPP, Kwame Nkrumah's party, and other smaller parties who will be vying for smaller seats, but the presidency is going to come down to either the NDC or the NPP. Everyone hopes and prays the elections will be peaceful, although most people acknowledge they will be tense, but with nobody encouraging violence and everyone advocating peace from pastors to politicians to football heros, it should remain at tense and not verge into violence.

It has been interesting observing the election season. Billboards with the candidates faces and slogos can be found all around Accra and Ghana. The NPP's slogan is Nana Akofo-Addo 'Best man for the job, We are moving forward' and the NDC's slogan is Atta Mills a 'Better man for a better Ghana, a change we need'. It is not uncommon to pass large political rallies of people out on the streets wearing party t-shirts and normally dancing down the streets. The most bizarre of these occurences was when we were on our way to northern Ghana to Mole national park and were watching a dvd on our bus of a very American to the point of making fun of America movie and then you look out the window and there are hundred of people rallying around the bus. It was a good premonition of the reverse culture shock I imagine we all will experience when we go home, for Ghana has become very normal despite all its idiosyncracies.

Whenever an opportunity comes up, I am always eager to ask Ghanaians I meet about the election. True to the close nature, peoples answers consistently vary to who they support. In Volta region I found more people supporting the NDC and elsewhere a guide on a hike said that when the NPP candidate came to his village, they chased him away with stones... However, even if the rural might support the NDC more, citing unequal development under the NPP, if the urban areas tend towards the NPP, it will most likely win. The NPP also has significantly more resources(whether honestly or corrupting gained; whether from fundraising or skimming out of the federal budget, depending on who is asked), and so they are often predicted to win. Still, it will be close, and tense.

Another recent small controversy arose from a statement of Atta Mills that he would seek advice from the former president, meaning not current president John Kuofor but rather former NDC president and party founder Jerry Rawlings. This was controversial because it raised doubts of whether Atta Mills was really his own person or rather a puppet for Rawlings. People may have mixed opinions about Rawlings too, but he led Ghana for twenty years, starting with two separate coups around 1980 to mop up the rampant corruption(the second happening after he had handed the government back to others, only to see them consider business as usual). AFter his second coup he led the country in more of a military type government until 1992 when he transitioned into democratic elections, winning in 1992 and 1996, but then in 2000 the NDC lost to John Kuofor of the NPP.

December 7 we shall see what happens. I plan to keep my radio close at hands.

Thinking of politics, I had a rather entertaining conversation last night with a Ghanaian man who rather latched onto us. We talked some about Ghana's political situation and quite a bit more about America's political situation, and at the end of it, he told me that I should really consider running for president of the US when I get older. I couldn't convince him that I really had no desire to do so, and he was very insistent that I at least consider it. I told him I would, but that is not my life goal.

In the meantime, I have four exams coming up starting tomorrow and going all the way up to Friday the 12. Truly, my days here and fleeting and they have gone by so fast!

Backpacking...

So this past weekend, my friend Emily and I decided to get away from Accra and go explore the Volta Region which is the eastern region next to the Togolese border. It is one of the most beautiful areas of Ghana I have been to and host to many community based ecotourism sites. Community based ecotourism is a great way to go, for some of the villages are next to amazingly beautiful attractions like waterfalls, and they can make good money by charging a small fee to provide a guide or a meager lodging, and rather than being taken out of the community, that money stays to help further develop the community. In addition, it provides employment and I imagine a certain amount of pride. It also means you enter a village, hot, tired, sweaty and everybody greets and welcomes you. We decided that Volta region might be the most welcoming place we have been in this very welcoming county!

So yeah, Friday thru Tuesday we got to go on amazing hikes through the rainforest, saw and swam in our fourth, fifth and sixth waterfalls, sumitted our second and third Ghanaian mountain, visited a monkey sanctuary and got to feed monkeys. Overall, it was so beautiful!(so beautiful that I won't even really try and describe it because I know it would be a futile attempt).

It was also fun travelling just as two girls. We had no trouble from anyone. Like always, people are always so ready to be helpful(even if at times they don't actually know where you want to go they will still point you to the 'right' tro-tro; we use discretion...) One highlight was Saturday night we had a bat in our room when we came back to our hotel because we had left the window open. That same night there was also a dinner going on with speeches right outside our hotel window... it was pretty ridiculous and if we hadn't already paid we might have left... Otherwise, everything went so smoothly, and we kept running into our ISEP groups doing similar yet shorter treks through the Volta Region.

Other news from this week is Wednesday afternoon I went to a Black Stars football match which was pretty awesome. Ghanaians love their football(and by football I mean the real thing, not American football) The Black Stars were playing Tunisia, and neither team played very well, but still, it was a lot of fun. The game was a tie 0-0. We had awesome seats too, five rows up and close enough to see the players facial expressions when they were on our side of the field. They may not have been playing well, but their playing poorly is pretty intense!

In other news, I am heading out today for my last trip of the semester before I settle down to do some studying for exams, and then I come home three weeks from tomorrow. I am excited to see friends and family, but I know I will miss life in Ghana! This weekend I am heading out to Cape Coast again and then back to Green Turtle Lodge and the beach. We will come back Wednesday, and then celebrate Thanksgiving Thursday at our program directors house.

Well, thats whats new from over here, and I hope all is well who reads this:)

Togo and Benin

This past weekend I went on an awesome adventure to Ghana's two eastern neighbors of Francophone Africa, Togo and Benin. It was a most excellent time. For those who think two countries in one weekend rather ambitious, Togo is, in the south which is where we traveled, a mere 57 kilometers across. They are small countries, but full of character and history.

I traveled with two friends who I had traveled with before when I went to the beach at Green Turtle Lodge(it is good to know who you are going with, and they are both solid travel companions; adventuresome but not foolish). We left Thursday morning catching the 8:30 bus to Aflao and the border, crossed without mishap(actually, we crossed three times because my friend Emily left her yellow fever vaccination on the Ghana side and they let us go back to get it), and were in Lome, the captial of Togo.

We had heard that Togo was nothing special, but I really liked Lome, it had more charm than Accra. One element of Lome was that its main road ran right along the beach and that at least in the touristy part of town, everything was within walking distance. I love just walking around a city, for one gets a much better feel of its that way. After checking into our hotel, we walked along the beach and then up to the market where while having much the same array as Ghana's markets, did not seem to have the same intense hustle and bustle of Ghana's markets. It might have been that we didn't understand what people said, but in Ghana, if you don't get out of the way, people run you over, while in Togo people did not seem in such a rush. Another element that sets Lome apart from say Accra is the traffic; traffic in Ghana is awful, but in Lome the preferred mode of getting around is moto-taxis(motorcyle taxis where you hop on behind the driver and hold on for dear life...) This seriously cuts down on congestion.

The taxi-motos, or zemi-johns as they are called in Benin, were one of my favorite parts of our trip. While probably not the safest mode of transportation, it is the only way to get around, and quite frankly, they are a lot of fun. Our first ride was after dinner when we took it back to our hotel, the ocean on our left, the stars above us, and the warm night air... It was rather magical...

Friday morning we headed up the the Independence Square; as far as I am aware, independence squares or monuments of sorts are a requirement to be a country in Africa... Ok, not really, but it is a symbol of their experience as individual countries but also as a collective whole. Across from the square was the congressional palace(a magnificent building but we were told not to take pictures of government buildings because the police don't like that and it is really best to avoid getting tangled up with the police) and in the back of that was the national museuem.

The musuem proved the be a lot better than I had anticipated. We had a guide who spoke English 'small small', but she did a great job of telling us with her limited English and her gestures about the history of Togo and the culture of the people. Togo was home to the Dahomey kingdom, a rival of the Ashanti and like the Ashanti quite involved in the overland slave trade, and was first colonized by the Germans, but after World War I the colony was divided between Britain(the western part of Togoland became what in Ghana is now the Volta region) and France(what is now Togo). They had the same independence leader for some thrity plus years of rule including at first a dictatorship and then after 1990 with French pressure for a multiparty system elections that were in all likelihood rigged. The president eventually left in a coffin, having died of natural causes, and today his son is the elected(fairly or not?) president.

After a picnic lunch on the beach, we caught a shared taxi(which means you cram as many people as possible in a car, generally four in the back seat and two plus the driver in the front seat) and listened to Dolly Parton all the way to the border(country music has made its way to Africa). The Benin border was as smooth as the Togo one even though I had to buy a visa there because I had run out of time back in Accra. The man might have been fishing for a bribe, but when we played dumb, he let us get them without any additional costs. There is something rather glamorous and adventuresome about walking accross borders; the whole weekend it never grew old. From the Benin border we caught another shared taxi to Cotonou.

Moto-taxis in Lome are pleasant, but in Cotonou, a larger, more industrial city, they are absolutely terrifying, especially during rush hour. Trust me. Still, they get you where you are going, and so we caught zemi-johns to our hotel after the taxi let us off, were given a room with a dysfunctional fan, and went out in search of food, going to a nice French restaurant. When we got back later to our room, it was still stifling, so we set out in search of a nearby venue of live music that was mentioned in our guidebook... my guidebook was by and large our best friend because it was much easier to point to things in the book than to attempt to pronounce their names in a way that people recognized...

The music venue, a classy bar called Les Repaires de Bacchus, was excellent. There was a band playing something other than Ghanaian highlife(I don't know exactly how to classify the music, but it definitely had a latin sound to it; Benin has a Brazillian influence because after the slave trade was abbolished, many people who had been taken to Brazil as slaves returned to Benin.) And they were singing in French, which was cool. Also, and this is not something one really sees at all in Ghana, there was a table of young women, drinking and having a good time; in Ghana the only women one sees at bars and nightclubs seem to be prostitutes... I noticed this again the next day in Ouidah, men and women sitting and drinking together...

Saturday morning we set out early, found a patisierre where we had espresso and croussants for breakfast, and then caught a shared taxi to Abomey-Calavi which is the embarkation point for tours of Ganvie. Ganvie is one of the biggest stilt villages in West Africa(and possibly the world?) where people literally build their houses over the water on stilts. To visit ones neighbors, one would have to take a boat. People take their boats to go to market(and I heard there was even a floating market) and of course to fish, the communities main industry. It was really very remarkable, and I got some good pictures of the houses.

From Ganvie, we wanted to go to Ouidah, a much smaller city than Cotonou and one with a lot of history. We were told by a taxi driver who spoke English(English speakers were always much help and a relief in our travel attempts) that to take a taxi would take forever, and so we really ought to take a zemi-john to a place called circle and get a taxi from there. It was a terrifying ride to say the least. The drivers are crazy, and in their defense, they really know what they are doing and how to avoid the traffic all around them. Still, after that, we were not too keen to ride a zemi-john again for awhile.

Ouidah was charming. We were able to walk the length of it easily from our hotel on the outskirts. When we arrived we went to the museum which had a good exhibit of Benin's history and culture. In Benin, the big kingdom had beent he Abomey kingdom, and they like their contemporaries had been very involved in the overland slave trade. At one point, the king of Abomey started making female soldiers because he had sold so many of his people into slavery. The kings did not invent the slave trade, but they certainly profited from it... From Benin slaves were mostly taken to Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, taking their voodoo with them, and after the abolition of slavery in 1848 by the French(after four centuries) many families came back to Benin from Brazil, our guides family included.

From the museum, our guide led us down the Route des Esclaves, a 4km walk that the slaves were led down from the Portugese fort which housed the museum to the point of no return and the boats that took them out to the waiting ships, the middle passage, and slavery in the new world...

The guide told us some about the local practice of voodoo, a practice which has become a syncretism of voodoo and Roman Catholicism. The cathedral in the heart of Ouidah stands directly accross from the Voodoo temple of the Serpents, and according to the guide this poses no problems. The deities of the voodoo have each become associated with a Catholic saint, the most powerful deity, the Sea Goddess, becoming associated with the Virgin Mary. Ouidah is home to an annual voodoo festival each January, and in general, Togo and Benin are the birthplace of the practice. I have some serious reservations about voodoo, but it was good to hear what the guide had to say and I kept my reservations to myself. One thing he said, and I don't know if this still holds true or moreso historically, was that people thought you could summon smallpox upon your enemies, and when bad things happen to you, it is associated with voodoo. The worst thing the sorcery of bad voodoo can do is kill a person... but what of when bad things happen, and innocent people are blamed? Like I said, I have some serious reservations...

Sunday morning we visited what was probably my favorite museum of our trip, the Casa de Brazil in Ouidah. Its exhibit deals with the many roles of women in African society. There was a poem at the beginning of the exhibit which listed off the different roles a woman performed, ending with the question, what don't you do? It is so true too, and you see it wherever you go, women work so hard, much harder I would say than the men... The exhibit also looked at different ways women were moving forward in Africa today, gaining more rights and freedoms, and how they were working in their communities with their resources to make their lives and taht of their families better.

After that museum, we caught a shared taxi to the border, crossed again without mishap or hassle, and caught another shared taxi to Lome. In Lome at the restaurant we stopped at for lunch we ran into a group of students from ISEP because ISEP had led a trip to many of the same places(we had largely stolen their itinerary but had also decided travelling independently would be more of an adventure and less expensive). Apparently we looked very hot and tired carrying our backpacks, but they seemed full of energy; perhaps the price of travelling solo, but I never once wished I had gone with them on their airconditioned bus... there is a lot to be said for walking accross borders...

After lunch we crossed our final border, back into Ghana, and it was amazing to be able to communicate again. The language barrier was by and far the biggest challenge of the weekend. Often we would talk in English, the taxi driver would talk in French and eventually we would somehow come to an understanding, haggle a price, and hope that the driver would in fact take us to where we wanted to go. It always worked, but it took a lot of patience and a lot of trust... And the tro-tro ride home after cramped shared taxis was a luxury. It was fun to go away, but it was lovely coming back to Ghana, a place that has truly begun to feel like home, and as we drove back to Accra and watched the sunset over the country, I could not help but think that I would truly miss Ghana when the time comes to go home...

Election 2008

So this post is really more a shout out to Obama and the election last night than anything else.

Here in Ghana, we stayed up until dawn to see the results and hear the acceptance speech. I went to a watch party hosted by the NYU program at the university. It was a pretty big event with American students, Ghanaian students and other members of the Ghanaian and American abroad community. Of course, the special attraction was the large screen CNN with their frequent projections of who gets what state and how things are going. And at 4am, which is what time it was here when the 11 o'clock polls closed, and CNN projected victory, the atmosphere was more than slightly euphoric. And for all of you in the rest of the world, there really is such as thing as the Barack Obama song, by Black Rasta, and you should all look it up. It might just be amazing, or hilarious, and is very fun to dance to when Obama has just been announced as president-elect of the United States of America(which is quite different, by the way, from President of the world, which is what one Ghanaian radio broadcaster was claiming today while I was on a tro-tro...).

We've been passing the day on a cloud. Its been a long eight years, most of my political consciousness, and it definitely feels time for a change, and what a change. I really hope and believe that if anyone can unite Americans, it is Obama. Even his acceptance speech was graceful(and props to McCain for a super gracious speech as well).

Obama did it, we the American people did it, and I have so much hope(and a good dose of realism) for the next four years! As Obama likes to say, "Yes we can!"

My trip up north

This past weekend we went on our long awaited and once rescheduled trip to northern Ghana. Our primary destination was Mole National Park which is the biggest park in Ghana and has elephants. However, especially with the condition of Ghana's roads, it is quite a trip to get up there... and that is assuming your vehicles don't break down or things of that sort, things which our vehicles did.

We left Friday morning in our very nice, spacious air conditioned bus which even had a dvd player. Watching an American movie and then looking out the window and seeing a NPP political rally is somewhat of an odd culture shock. Friday was our short day as we only were going as far as Kumase, and we arrived around five at our hotel, had dinner and a relaxing evening just hanging out. All good so far.

Friday evening we decided to try and get an early start for our long day Saturday and so started out an hour earlier than was originally planned. It was good we did because at around 10 in the morning, our bus came to a stop, and we spent the next three hours stranded in this random village. Actually, being stranded was one of the highlights of the weekend because we just wandered around the village and entertained the villagers with our very broken attempts at Twi. I walked around with three other girls and everywhere we went people told us to come and talk, and women and children would gather around and laugh at us but not in a mean way for we were laughing at ourselves. They were all very sympathetic of our stranded state. Still, even with those perks, three hours got long. Another bus was supposed to come, but to nobodies real surprise, it didn't show up and after three hours they had gotten the bus running again... We have come to the point where we are surprised not when things don't work but rather when they do or when things really are when they are supposed to be...

Our next stop was at Kintampo Falls; waterfalls are one of Ghana's most spectacular attractions. This was my third waterfall, and they never cease to grow old. Kintampo also had the perk that at the third of the series of falls, and the biggest, it was safe to go swimming. It was a spectacular waterfall, and I was able to climb up the slippery rocks and sit for awhile under the waterfall, listening to its roar and watching others less succesful attempts to climb up. The slippery rocks seconded as a rather lucrative waterslide, which was fun going down, but posed the danger of some potential bruises.

Then after waiting another hour for Vivian, our amazing leader of the weekend who despite all the mishaps with vehicles and everything else always had a smile, to bring our lunch and our new transport for the final leg of the journey, we were packed onto two very rickety tro-tros, a sad second to our airconditioned bus, and spent the next four hours bumping along dusty dirt roads. By the time we arrived at Mole, everyone was caked in dust and ready for bed.

Sunday was our day to actually be at Mole, and it was an excellent day although we failed to see any elephants which was rather disappointing. We made the mistake of coming during mating season, so all the elephants were off doing what elephants do... Still, we got to go on two safari hikes where we saw baboons, different types of deer and warthogs, and even without the animals, hiking through the African bush and savanah is pretty awesome in and off itself. The biggest concentration of animals we found was around the piles of burning trash on the outskirts near a village... it was a strange and somewhat depressing sight to see them scavenging the burning rubbish...

Then, after our first hike we got to excursion into the nearby village of Larangba where we visited the mosque which is quite probably the oldest mosque in all of West Africa and certainly in Ghana dating back to at least 1421. It was built by the spiritual adviser to the king of that area(the name eludes me, for there were a great many kingdoms in West Africa; the Europeans made up the idea that Africa had no civilization prior to colonization and it was a lie...) The adviser himself had come from Medina in Saudi Arabia. We also got to visit the Mystic Stone which marks the place where this same adviser first settled, and which according to local lore refused to be moved when they tried and build a road through it and so remains. We were told that we should place our hands on it and pray for good husbands and they would be waiting for us when we went back to America, but we were skeptical and just in case they were right, most of the girls refused to touch it... most people in my program aren't in the market for husbands as of yet... we were a little more receptive when he said we should pray for the American elections... The mosque was super cool though, quite unique architecturally.

So yeah, Sunday was a good day even though our beds were infested with little bugs that were rather unnerving, and Monday we set out at five for the longest day ever! WE took our cramped tro-tros along the dusty, bumpy dirt road for four hours, and were almost met up again with our bus when one of the tro-tros broke down... go figure... so the bus came rather quickly and rescued us... Then after awhile we got a flat tire and spent a fun hour with a bunch of banana sellers. One of them decided I was her friend and gave me a lot of bananas and when her husband stopped by he said I should become his second wife(he was joking, but it was my first polygamous marriage proposal). Then we kept on, stopping for a very late lunch or early dinner in Kumase(it was supposed to be lunch) switching vehicles again from our original bus to another bus, and getting back to our hostel at eleven. Like I said, longest day ever. By the end of the trip, I was afraid everytime the bus hit a bump that it would blow a tire and everytime it stopped because of traffic that somehow the engine was dying. I mean, something else had to go wrong too, didn't it?

So yeah, overall, a good, long and at times challenging weekend, and I think this weekend the plan is to hang around Accra because I for one don't feel up to travelling again just yet, and I haven't done everything around here anyways and really should...