Ghanaian Diarrhee: Finding My Groove

Today I realized that I am really in Ghana now.  After 50 days in the Ghanaian heat, eating all Ghanaian food 24/7, navigating myself through the country and big cities, picking up some phrases in local languages, mingling with locals and making some genuine friendships, sitting amongst Ghanaians everyday in class and seeing what life is like here from the middle class down to the rural poor, the United States feels further away than ever.  And the best thing is that I still have four months left.  It was a hard transition this time, as I had to leave my family once again after a great Christmas, and also it was the end of my time at Berkeley and with my job College Track of Oakland.  I also had to say goodbye to so many special people to go and start a new adventure in West Africa.  After the transition period though, I am beginning to see how much easier it is for me to adapt to foreign places for long periods of time than it used to be.

After my first month in Ghana, I am starting to get the hang of things.  After a pretty thorough orientation for our EAP program that lasted about two weeks, there was a whole week on campus at the University of Ghana that felt lonely.  It was the week before classes had started, and no Ghanaian students had moved onto campus yet.  It was this weird space of random international students and employess of the university on a huge sprawling space made for over 35,000 students.  After just moving into our new rooms at Legon Hall, the other Americans and I were the only ones in the building!  Lost in an awkward transition period, I focused on the logistics of settling into a new room and navigating my way through the area.  After feeling out of place and impatient with how things were working out, I started to focus on my school schedule and working out things for my internships and research here this semester.  Within a week, more students came on campus and filled the empty streets and rooms, and I started classes!

Going to school here is way more complicated than back in the States.  Unexplainable bureaucracy, a very complicated registration process, ubiquitous disorganization, along with the fact that students and even professors randomly do not even show up for class make it pretty confusing for students from outside the school system to manage.  I am realizing that some of it is Ghanaian culture, and a lot of it is their own way of doing things at the University of Ghana.  For awhile, I was trying to feel out the campus and lectures to see what classes I would end up taking.  After exploring, going to so many lectures and talking to so many people about different classes, I decided that since I do not have the pressure of having to fulfill my requirements for Berkeley, I am going to balance my class schedule with a couple of academically stimulating courses that will give me some background of where I am at with mostly on Dance and Theater classes!  The Performing Arts classes here are really good and it seems like the best place to make a lot of friends and master African dancing (a newfound goal of mine here). I am also taking a Twi class to learn one of the languages most spoken here besides English.

I ended up having a Ghanaian roommate here, which is awesome.  He really loves nice clothes and dressing in “high fashion,” so he ha shown me all of the cool markets of Accra and where to buy some cool clothes.  The markets are so awesome to learn to manage and explore. They are nuts! Ghanaians dress really well, so I have discovered some pretty cool and cheap second hand markets.  It is unbelievable that they manage to dress so well and stay so clean since it is over 90 degrees everyday and there is always dust blowing around from the Harmattan Winds from the Saharan Desert.  I also have been trying to practice my dance moves and learn from locals how to get down.  It is crazy that everyone here knows how to dance, REALLY well.  Almost everyone has an amazing sense of rhythm and a collection of impressive steps.  Getting to know nightlife and mingling “spots” has been a really cool way to hang out with people from here. Being on campus makes me feel pretty isolated from the rest of Ghana, so I have been trying to get out and see what’s going on around Accra and elsewhere.  Two weekends ago, I took a trip to Wli Todzi. I will post info about that at the end of the blog. . . I was also able to meet Rita Marley (Bob Marley's wife) at a beach party for his birthday a few weekends ago.  La badi beach is a pretty fun place to go and meet random people, including guys to learn acrobats from!

One of my main goals coming to Ghana was to find opportunities for research and ways to execute projects on my own.  I was able to connect with the Street Children’s Academy last week to begin work on a photography project with poor street children of Accra and use funds from a small grant from the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley that was given to support the project.  I have a lot of work to do still, but it feels good that I got the ball rolling.  I am pretty skeptical on the project so far, but after meeting the kids and spending a days with the project, I am eager to do some work with them.  It is also a really good opportunity to be in touch with other social classe and cultures of Ghana outside of who I meet at the University of Ghana.  I have already become pretty close to some of the kids and have seen their amazing talent.  This past weekend I went to see a performance for and by the kids that included traditional and modern hip hop dance, boxing, music  and incredible acrobats.  I am still trying to arrange possibilities with an internship or NGO, preferably around health and development.  I have made my schedule pretty basic here, focusing all of my energy on performing arts!  It is something I have always wanted to try out and get more into.  I am taking two awesome African Dance classes and just got a small role in a play here called Attobra that debuts next month!  It should be interesting.

Ghana overall is still pretty perplexing.  It is hard to figure out the average Ghanaian demeanor, as well as understand what is really socially acceptable and not.  I am starting to realize after many travels that you can not try to box up generalization about a place though, so what may be normal to one person here is not to the next.  What does seem to be pretty uniform Ghanaian is knowing how to dance (or basic rhythm), knowing at least three languages, having a very light sense of humor, being very religious or serious about beliefs in God, and LOVING Fufu (mashed up cassava with some sort of soup, an awesome Ghanaian food).  Christianity is pretty serious here, and is one cultural element that I seem to have the most issues with.  I am really learning a lot though about my values and views on spirituality and faith.  Right now, what I want to take away from Ghana are some new dance moves, acrobats, some meaningful relationships and a strong understanding of Ghanaian tradition in a modernizing world. Yɛbɛhyia bio!

A Weekend at Wli Todzi:

Two weekends ago, some friends and I left campus and traveled up to the Volta Region to stay at the village of Wli Todzi for three nights.  Wli Todzi is a community on the top of a mountain (about 1000 meters, high for Ghana), part of the Wli village network and near to the popular tourist site of Wli Falls and the Ghana-Togo border.  Most people know the village of Wli (named so as also part of the “Wli” villages) at the bottom of the mountain, as this is where a lot of tourists come to get to the lower Wli Falls.  Wli Todzi itself is pretty isolated from any outside contact, as no roads from Ghana access the village.  It has been in its current location for over 400 years since their earlier ancestors migrated from the foot of the hills to the higher spot for better hunting and agriculture opportunities.  I had heard about the place from a friend Jeremy Kirshbaum doing the same EAP program since last semester.  He and a local member from the village have been trying to establish an eco-tourist project for the village that would bring tourists to the village to stay with a local family and experience Wli Todzi daily life and all of the beautiful natural sites around, like a set of deep caves and the upper Wli Falls.

The short term goals for his project “Rise Up Wli Todzi” are to provide employability and income generation for the village, and also to support long term goals of funding the construction of a clinic and road that would lead to Hohoe, the nearest urban are and capital city of the Volta Region.  Currently, the only clinic available is a small and unmaintained structure that only provides basic services on limited days of the week, and a 13-year-old unfinished foundation for a new clinic that was initially funded, built and later abandoned by government agencies.  For serious medical issues, like pregnancy complications, people have to carry ill family and friends down the mountain 3 km (about 2 miles), through the brush another 4 km (about 2.5 miles) and wait for a taxi or trotro to get to the nearest hospital.  The road is desired for access to buying and selling products in the marketplace to also generate income and cash in the village.  The only road that they currently have access to leads to the neighboring country of Togo where they cannot cross the border to sell their goods.

The weekend was one of the most special experiences I have had so far in Ghana.  It started with a long 4 hour ride up to Hohoe, the capital of Volta Region, and then a hike from the Wli village.  We walked for about 5 miles total, 2.5 of which were straight up a mountain through a jungle green canopy and tall elephant grass.  The hike was strenuous under the blazing sun, but so worth it.  After about two and half hours, we landed in the village of Wli Todzi, where children and locals ran up to us and greeted us.  All of a sudden the sights and sounds of Wli Todzi village life sprawled out around us.  The bright orange clay dirt up against the sky blue housing structures stood out against the solid green backdrop of forest all around us. For the next few days, we stayed in a small hut with Yaw, one of the project leaders and village native, and his family.  The first night we relaxed around here as our home base and enjoyed some delicious food called akple (a cooked corn flour  mix) with hot ground nut soup.  After doing acrobats and playing drums with kids that had more beats and rhythm than most adults I know, we fell asleep to the sounds of nightlife around us.  Around the crack of dawn the next day, village life had already started bustling.  I woke up around 7:30, and during the two hours that our hosts had been awake before me, they had already continued the construction of a nearby house from clay that would be used for future guests.  People do not mess around here, and the amount of work that people do in villages never seizes to impress me in contrast to the easy lives we live in cities.  Watching people build houses from clay extracted from the ground, the intense labor that it takes to made food or execute simple chores like cleaning their homes or fetching water, also gave me a great relative perspective on how good we have it back at Legon at school in Accra.  Even though we take bucket showers everyday and carry water up four flights of stairs, we still have easy access to food and can find refuge in air condition from time to time in random buildings.

That day, we had an unforgettable hike to the upper Wil Falls.  Through the walk, we got to know all the local edible fauna to coffee beans and cocoa trees, bisi (cola nut), angla (or thaumatococcus daniellii, aka katemfe in Ghana or miracle fruit in other places) and all the fresh and wild mango, banana and pineapple that we could handle.  The pineapple was indescribably luscious.  We also were able to sample local fresh made akpeteshi (a strong Ghanaian liquor, fermented sugar cane or palm wine drink), palm wine (local wine that comes out of a palm tree alcoholic and carbonated! a gift from heaven . . . ) and fresh grubs (huge maggot like creatures from under a log!  Continuing on the hike, the landscape changed from tall thick yellow grass that grew higher than me, to banana and mango tree groves, and carried us to bamboo clusters and over rivers through swarms of butterflies.  We descended down a pretty steep dirt side of a mountain than dropped into thick jungle brush until we stepped out into a clear that revealed the gorgeous falls that dropped from 300 meters.  Once we returned, I met Jeremy and Yaw and got to meet the stool father.  This guy holds the power to enstool and destool the village chief.  The stool is the equivalent to the throne in Ghana for chiefs.  It was important to meet the stool father since the chief was not around to greet us.  This experience was great to understand social life in the village and how the village is organized in general.  After dinner, one of the local kids took me the big community church to watch a movie.  About 40 people from the village were crowded around the one small 20 inch television they have to watch a Nollywood (Nigerian) film.  They were seated on small wooden benches, in rows that emulated a movie theatre.  The simple and charming set-up humbled my spirit on the sense of community here.  After, we went to a small hut where people gathered in the darkest or dark to sing hymns and Christian songs in the local language of Ewe.  It was magical experience that made me smile from within.

The next day was a more relaxing day where we got to know village life a little more, making local food and going to church.  This has become a normal experience for me in Ghana considering it used to be a very uncomfortable one for me through my life.  Ghanaians love to go to church to celebrate God and life, and also to promote solidarity of community and wholeness.  It was even more unique in Wli Todzi where people did not wear the same flashy outfits they do in Accra, or donate large sums of money in the name of God and get praise from the whole church.  Instead, we went to a very little church, which was essentially a small thatched roof being held up by a few wooden beams with benches that sat at most up to thirty people.  We walked into singing and loud African drums, and were thrown into dancing with a bunch of women in long cloth dresses and matching hair wraps.  At some points, the energy from the people in worship actually made me feel goose bumps as people shouted from their souls with joy for life.  I loved seeing such boisterous celebration in Christianity, and the dancing and drums made it even more exciting.  At the end, as visitors, we were asked to stand in front as the people prayed for us behind our backs and shouting in tongues for our protection.  It was invigorating, and we took the energy they gave us with us through the rest of the day as we got a tour of the village and entered peoples homes, saw the unfinished clinic, and even got to check out the schools that local children were excited to show us. 

We got caught in a pretty heavy rain storm at the end of the day, which was perfect after some pretty hot and sweaty days.  Being the crazy Americans we are, we danced under the storm while villagers watched us.  They matched us later in the night though with an incredible drum circle they created with traditional dances, such as the unforgettable warrior dance. Practiced for centuries by the village, the dance is a proud custom performance by the village.  Basically, it involves a series of solo dances where a man displays a large blade that he uses to repeatedly cut himself on his head, arms, stomach and tongue.  The incredible part is that the blade never actually draws blood, and it is believed that the their ancestors are protecting them from actually being injured.  It was nuts to watch, and fun to mimic!  This ended our trip, as we went to bed and awoke in the morning to our last amazing meal by 'Auntie Charlotte.'  We finished up and said good bye to Wli Todzi for now as we walked back down the mountain for three hours.  I don't think that will be my last experiences with Wli Todzi. . . (for more info, visit: www.RiseUpGhana.org)

Akwaaba! You Are Welcome.

Since I walked out of the Kotoka International Airport at Accra almost one month ago on January 6, I have definitely felt Welcomed. "You are welcome," is a common phrase that you say to someone here in English. It is a translation from Twi, an Akan language widely spoken in Accra and around Ghana. "Akwaaba," therefore literally means that you are welcome to this place.

Cedis and Pesewas

It has been almost a month since I arrived in Ghana. On January 5, I packed as fast as I could, ran out of my house to the airport, and flew ten hours across the Atlantic to Ghana. I was a little more nervous this time leaving since it will be the longest time I will be abroad. Yet, I still was packing last minute. All the rush was kind of a nice distraction from all of the eager feelings of anticipation. It wasn't until my last hour when I was standing in line at Wal-Mart Pharmacy buying a 6 month supply of Malaria pills that I realized, "Shit! I am going to West Africa!!"

Ghana is a very unique place. For the first week I was here, I felt more like I was in Africa than Ghana. More specifically, I really felt like I was in sub-Saharan Africa. That may sound strange and might not make sense, but it's how I felt. I was seeing things that reminded me of the Africa that was always presented to me in popular media and public representations (and mis representations for that matter). Hectic traffic, bustling underdeveloped city centers, black Africans, poor African children jumping in front of my camera lens, shantytown and slums filled with poor young kids and adolescents playing soccer, small villages with mud thatched huts and nude villagers, slight signs of modernity next to old and outdated colonial architecture, hints of a rising and developing economy in city centers, bribing of police officers. . . These were my first impressions. I could have been anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa for all I knew. I was unaware of what Ghana is and where the divide between African and particularly Ghanaian lies.

Adinkra Stamping Village - Important Ghanaian symbols imprinted on kente cloth.

Kumasi Traffic

palm nuts! Used for palm oil, a MUST in Ghanaian food

I traded this girl my pen for a photo. Interesting. . .

The typical reaction from kids

Kakum Canopy Walk, Ashanti Region

Then it all started becoming Ghana to me. After arriving, I went to a small hostel on the beach in Accra. I was dropped off in what looked like a small slum neighborhood in Accra, only to find out that the hostel was a part of that neighborhood. After a very sweaty and dusty first night, I awoke early to jump aboard a 5 hour bus (that was 2 hours late) and two hour taxi across the southern coast of Ghana to the Western Region in search for a beautiful isolated beach near the village of Akwiida. I spent four days on an isolated beach that stretched miles in both directions to the plush green Ghanaian jungle. It was a nice way to dive into a new place and get over the cold Ohio winter I just came from (It was around 12 degrees when I left Cleveland, and about 95 degrees I got to Ghana). The most intriguing thing was how different the culture was here in Western Ghana then back east in Accra where I would be studying the rest of the semester. For example, most people speak Fante and a few other languages that are not spoken in Accra. It was a preview into the complexity of Ghana.



Coming back to Accra about a week after arriving in Ghana, I joined up with 26 other Americans from the University of California and so began my study abroad in Ghana. It was interesting to see the reactions and first impressions for students who just got off of the plane after being here for a week. I had already traveled across Ghana, learned a few Twi phrases, shopped around the markets, figured out transportation and even had my first "tro-tro" experience.  I was skeptical about doing another study abroad since I mostly just wanted to come to Ghana to do my own thing and pursue some possibilities of projects and research. But, right away the program seemed pretty legit. We had a two week long orientation that included hanging out with Ghanaian students, learning about and eating awesome Ghanaian food, touring the campus, visiting slave forts in Central Region, traditional African dance lesson, learning about the role of traditional chiefs and Asante culture in Ghana, going out in the big cities of Accra and Kumasi, a canopy walk through the rainforest, feeding monkeys, learning Twi, swimming under waterfalls in the Volta Region, learning about Ghanaian society through a roundtable conference, cooking lessons, managing and bargaining at the markets and going to the beach! I felt like I got my money's worth so far. My room is a little shanty, but it will be really interesting to live in a hall with all other Ghanaian students!

Right now I am still trying to get established and figure out my place in Ghana. I am trying to get a project started with photography with youth in a local shantytown, but things are moving slow. I am also trying to navigate my way through classes and registering at the University of Ghana. I am super intrigued by certain uniquely Ghanaian themes though, like Christianity in Ghana, the role of chiefs and practices of chieftaincy throughout Ghana, the layers of identity in Ghana -from national to regional to tribal, the impressive reduction in poverty over the past two decades, sanitation issues in urban areas, environmental and wildlife degradation in Ghana, the role of dancing and celebration in social affairs, and so much more! Right now though, all I really want to do is learn fluent Twi, become a professional African dancer and figure out the food culture of Ghana (including how to cook it all!)!!

my new dance teachers