Ghana! A Travel Journal of Ghana and West Africa

I can't belive how small the world is! Just 10 minutes ago while i was walking down the street in the middle of Accra (thge capital city here) with these girls that i randomly met who are from near Dorking, England (where we lived a long time ago), I here this girl calling out my name. I turn around to see another girl from my high school in Egypt- Angie Cornell. She's here on a study abroad program from her uni in Calgery. Apprently she used to be best friends with one of my other Egypt friends who's here, Maria, but didn't know she was in town. So now we're all meeting up again for another Egypt reunion! Its kinda crazy how the international circuit is so connected...

Well I finnally got ill, nothing big just the usual traverls stomach problems, but its good. I was getting kinda worried, while everyone else in camp has been getting all kinda of stuff, everything from Malaria to Scabies, i had nothing. I thought maybe the universe was just saving up something special for me and that's why I was being spared, but luckly I got some diarreha this weekend...phew! It's rare that we go a week on camp without at least a handfull of people getting sick with something or the other simply due to the nature of the environment we live in. With sickness taking up such a large part of life here it naturally makes its way into our everyday conversation; its not unusual for our dinner talk to drift towards an update of everyone's bowl movements- who went today and how many times, who's constipated, who's got diarreha, who's puked and how many times. It's all quite lovely!

On a completly seperate note, Katie sent me a wonderful poem today, it really made me feel great, so i'll post it here (if katie dosn't mind):

My poem to you:
When I first met this boy he was wearing a hat,
And was not much of a chitchat,
Nor was he fat.
When it comes to airplanes he is no drat,
Although he does not support combat.
He drinks milk that is only nonfat
And for a short time he was in a frat.
His favorite animal is not a dingbat or wombat,
But just a boaring old cat.
Now he's in Ghana dealing with many Gnat's,
And other bugs you'd like to hit with a bat,
As well as toilet matters that go splat.
But anyone who knows this Matt
Is not left wondering where his heart is at.

Love from the Kindom of Saudi Arabia. -Katie


I thought it was pretty good, thank you katie! I did have a little bit of homesickness this weekend. Not really 'home' sickness, but just that feeling of wanting to be with your old friends and familly. I hope evryone's doing good, and that you're not too bored in Australia mom, and that you're still enjoyign being a grandmother Aunt Susie. Oh, kendra, i have an email i need to forward to you, Ill try and do that as soon as i get to an intenet cafe that will load my email (I have to go to different places to get on different web site, its weird, some sites work at some places and not others)

but the bathroom is calling again so I must wrap up. Everyone cheer for Ghana this tuesday against Brazil...they'll need all the cheer they can get!

Life has finally settled into a semblance of a routine here for me. Its no longer a hassle just to do the daily rounds like washing and sleeping and such and it feels good, like I'm starting to belong here or something. My day goes something like this:

5-6AM: Wake up to either one of the million roosters running around camp or to the blaring screech of the demonic preacher on a megaphone just up the path. This preacher would be comedic if he didn't start at 5AM sharp, didn't have such an horrible, evil raspy voice , or didn't preach about the "burning, rotting flesh of sinners in hell." But take these three things together and you have the makings of one really scare alarm clock! Some mornings I wonder, as i brush the cobwebs of sleep from my brain, just which circle of hell i woke up in!

6:30AM: Go around and empty the CBW (Children Better Way) trash bins that we set up around camp. Sometimes i question the point of this as we take the trash to the UN who then promptly dump the trash just outside the camp in an area known locally as "the gulf." But at least we're getting the trash away from the people...

8AM meet up with the wat/san. Department to go around and clean the drains (I wont describe that again...) or if its a Tuesday, to spray peoples bathrooms for bugs. By 1030-11AM I'm usually done with wat/san, at which time it’s usually so miserably hot that I retire to the house for lunch (made by our cook of course...gosh life is so tough eh?!) On sunny days, as i sit inside during mid-day, I can hear our tin roof crackling as it expands under the intense heat of the tropical sun. It usually too hot to touch everyone the inside (I found this out the hard way...between being burned and electrocuted by roofs here i think i need to stop touching them!)

Afternoons we have recreation time for the kids that Erin, Kiran and I run. We grab some kids and head out through the 'gulf', literally picking our way through trash and sewage to the field (As I’m typing this I realized that the smell of shit i smell is from my shoes- I still have someone's shit stuck on the bottom of my shoe from walking through there today that i still haven’t wiped off!). Once out there we have learned to give up all hope of having any control or order. We once tried a game of kickball (like baseball but you kick a soccer ball instead of hitting a baseball) but the kids kept stealing bases...literally, they would pick them up and run off with them! So now we just dump a couple soccer balls into the field of stand around while all the kids go nuts. The kids are cute but incredibly misbehaved and filthy (two of the other volunteers seems to have picked up Scabies, a skin parasite, from one of them). But as soon as I feel myself start to lose my patience with any of them i just try and remind myself of where they've come from and what they've been through. It’s amazing to watch them sometimes, their carefree happiness and uninhibited joy stand in such stark contrast to the tortured history of the land they've fled and the lives they live.

hehe just a side not...the Google Ads that i have on the top and side of the page are smart ads- they scan the content of whatever website their on and place advertisments for corresponding companies. As I'm looking at my page just now I can't help but notice that they're all for sewage and toilet solutions! Guess google's been reading about my work here...

I can't BELEIVE I missed the Ghana game! After watching how Czech played against the US I just assumed they would roll over Ghana but i guess not!

Me and another volunteer, Kiran from Toronto went out to see these water falls up by Lake Volta. It took a while to get there on tro-tros, about 5 hours for what should be a 2 hour trip, but it was worth it. Friday night we stayed in a swank hotel room. By swank I mean it had AC, a fan, a TV and running water (no hot water though). But it defintally was a little over our budget at 9USD a night per person. So Saterday we decided to stay out right by the water falls, in a place the guide book descreibed as a "Chalet over looking the Boti Falls". For 2.5USD a person/night we got what we paid for, and I don't think chalet is quite the right description. It was great to be out in the country though and the people are so amazningly friendly. After Egypt, as soon as anyone does anything nice for me I find myself wondering how much I'm going to have to tip the guy. But when I tired to hand one guy a tip here he just gave me a "aww what an ignorant little white kid" smile and told me to go buy myself something with it. I'm sure I greatly offended him but he was too nice to say anything.

The only downside was no electricity, which meant no TV to watch the world cup games. This was the first place in Ghana that I've been too where I couldn't find a place to watch the games. I got a general idea of what was going on from cheers and hollering coming from somewhere across the hills and forests, but it was dark and I had visions of wild monkeys hiding in the woods so i made no effort to trek over to the sounds (which turned out to be true according to the locals- but usually they only come out during the dry season). I also missed the USA game, which i wasn't holding out too much hope for until i read kendra's email- go team USA!!

Oops, my internet time is almost over, hope everbody's doing well!

Wow, I can't believe I've already been here 2 weeks!

I had a busy week this week. Started out by going with one of the Water/Sanitation local volunteers (meaning he's a Liberian) to one of the clubs on camp (yes they actually have night clubs in the refugee camp!). Its basically just a area of concrete near a wooden bar that serves some beers, but still, i can say i've been clubing in a refugee camp! Some guy next to me kept trying to give me tips on how i should dance, "ya nee ta move ya body, la thees..." pshht- like i don't know how to dance, I should be giving him tips! (Katie, Steph, stop laughing!)


Next day however, my roomate got pretty sick. He came home from his HIV/AIDS outreach and just collapsed in a chair the rest of the day. We didn't think anything was really wrong until that evning when he had trouble making coherant sentances and had a 102*F (39*C) temperature. Sure enough he had malaria. Later in the week he started getting better until Wed. when he started having these nasty halucinations. He kept seeing dead cats in trees and dead bodies around and other such things: kinda scary. Then thursday night while we were all sitting around in the common area he jumped up screaming "GET IT OFF ME, GET IT OFF!" He thought there were bugs all over. We think it was a reaction with some other meds he was taking, but regardless, I wasn't too keen on sleeping in the same room with him that night!

The programs I'm working on in the camp have been plodding along this week. It sometimes gets increadibly frustrating though when nothing seems to work. We finally got current at the IT center so we could have class, this makes it the 2nd class to be held since I've arrived (we're supposed to meet everyday).

I got a bit of a shock during class though, literally- I was stretching and touched the celling and got an electric shock. I rushed to tell the main teacher (a local volunteer) who kinda of looked at me like I just told him the sky was blue when I explained about the roof. Apparently having a electrified roof is no big deal. I just wondered what would have happened if I wasn't wearing tennis shoes with a half inch of rubber protecting me. I don't touch roofs anymore on camp

We finally finished a Water and Sanitation educationaly pamphlet this week too (thanks Kendra for the clip art by the way!). It gives advice on how to keep camp and your self clean with simple things like "wash your hands before eating" and "through your trash in a bin". And then it explains how these things help prevent malaria (by keeping rubish off the streets it helps keep water flowing, meaning malarial mosquitoes can't lay there eggs) and cholera (of which there was an outbreak on camp recently). We were working in conjunction with local volunteers to make sure we were using language that liberians would understand (aka, 'dislodge bins' instead of 'empty bins'). But then, after this whole long meeting on how to educate the refugees on proper trash disposal and how its important, one of the local volunteers takes his empty water bag (water comes in little 500ml plastic bags- there a bitch to try and set down without spilling) and just chucks it into the grass! It feels like your banging your head into a brick wall!!

But other than that it felt like a productive week. To top it off it rained on thursday!

I awoke this morning to the sound of a young girl scraming bloody murder. I peaked out
through the bars and mosquito net in my window and saw a half naked young girl getting
beating \with a stick on the front porch of our neighbours. Our water guy (the person who
gets the water from out well for our bucket showers), who was between me and our
neighbours and thought i was looking at him, cheerfull waved and greeted me good morning,
completly oblivious to the action going on behind him. Later, as when i left to go to
work, i noticed that she was tied up in front of their house.

Today we were set to do sewage cleanup again, yum! After doing this job i don't think
there is anything that can gross me out again! The camp is drained by a system of open
sewers and we pick a certain area in camp and set about clearing all of the trash out of
the sewer and then digging any sedements that are blocking water flow. Our goal is to
keep water flowing so that Malaria carrying mosquitoes don't have any place to lay their
eggs (they need stagnant water). The water flowing through these drains is raw, raw
sewage, straight from the toilet. Sometimes, people who can't afford toilets simply drop
their pants right over the drain and do their business in front of everyone, including us
who then have ot shovel it out and put it to the side (where people walk, but its the
better of the two options). I can't even begin to desribe the smell that comes from raw
sewage- human feceas, mixing with rotting garbage (and usually a few small dead animals and condoms, which isa good sign cause it means people are using them!),
all festering under the baking tropical sun and humidity (sorry if your eating!). We also do spraying for mosquitos, mice, roaches and such in peoples rooms, toilets and showers. Most peoples toilets are out-house style, with just a hole in the bottom where the waste goes. We went into one toilet today to spray and noticed that the hole had been entirly filled up to the brim with crap (and the hole is prolly 10feet deep- thats alot of crap!), then as we went in to spray i noticed that something was not right- it was moving! It was almost a solid mass of maggots and worms mixed in with the sewage, it was probabl the closet i have come to vomiting yet! But luckly i had my dig camera on me and i just had to take a video, so if anyone is interested when i get back....

Sorry, i promise my posts wont be so disgusting in the future, but i really had to share that with you all!

Oh, World Refugee Awarness day is coming up on June 20th, i had never heard of it before and im not exactly sure what its all about- but, be aware!

I have a post about camp life in "Little Liberia" but its in an email which i can't access. At the place where i can get on my blog, i can't get to my email where i saved all my blogs from when i couldn't get to my blog! Hopefully it will be up soon

So the whole point of me going in to Accra was to catch up on some much needed relaxation time. I'm going in to visit my CAC friends Kayla and Maria and enjoy the luxury of A/C and running water and soft beds and all such stuff. I wasn't expecting to be so shocked walking into Kayla's house, but after just a week and a half in the camp western animities (yeah yeah i know my spelling is not even close!) seemed so unbelievable! It was amazing to be able to flush the toilet, to turn the taps and have water come out, to not be constantly drenched in sweat! It was probably a stupid thing though, I had just gotten used to the camp and I haven't been minding it or even noticing it so much anymore (i know it probably dosn't seem that way from all my complaining!)

We went out on the town last night to this Irish pub were we met some South African's throwing a house party to which we were invited. Kayla and Maria wanted to go home so left me direrction back to her house in the morning on a 2000 cedi note (about 20 US cents) since we didnt have any paper and i wasnt really going to miss the 20 cents. Well the next morning when I busted the money out to read the directions home while i was at a space to space ( like a pay phone, guys sit on little tables and rent out cell phones you can use by the minute) on the street all hell broke lose. This big guy stormed up to me with a look that i knew ment trouble on his face and spittle flying from his lips. Now usually i tried to avoid confontations at all cost in strange contries cause i am usually the one who is screwing up and doing something wrong, but i was so tired and hung over that i just snaped. The conversation went something like this (sorry for the gratuitous explicitives, but this is how it happend!):

-"Ey, fuck you man, what the fuck are you doing!"
me looking bewlidered and truely wondering what the fuck i was doing
-"Why the fuck did your write on this what the FUCK is your problem!"
me still wondering what the hell is going on
-"Hey obruni ( derogitory name for forgiener) I'm talking to you, whats your fucking problem man, i'll fucking punch you in your face obruni"
"shut up man, im just trying to get home, leave me alone" (I dont remember exactly what is said as i was too busy trying not to crap my pants)
"You dont fucking write on our money man, your disrespecting Ghana man; I write on your face! You don't write on American money"
"yes i do" (i actually dont think i have but i might someday)
"no you dont, don't fucking lie to me man, fucking obruni!

Looking around at the other people watching i realised that this wasn't just some crazy drugged out, drunk guy on the street, everyone was one HIS side. At this point a Rasta (rastafarian or something like that) stepped in a took me aside to explain that since i wrote on the money, no one would accept it making the note worthless. Since it costs the bank money to print money i was actually making ghana poorer. Now i really didnt explain to him that since it cost less than 20 US cents to print this bill that by me taking it out of circulation i was actaully making the rest of the money in Ghana worth slightly more (by an obserdly small amount, but still...)

Seeing that everyone was on his side i made a quick apology (which i REALLY should have done to begin with but i thought that might make it worse) and everyone returned to being the wonderfully friendly Ghanaian people that i know and acted like nothing happend (thats not sarcasim, the people are generally really friendly here. The Rasta guy, with his arm around my shoulder, then took out about 10 joints and wanted to know if i wanted to buy some pot off him (This is all taking place in the middle of the street). As visions of Ghanaian jails danced in my head I bid a hasty retreat with some lame excuse of needing a bathroom or something and made my way to Kayla's house a bit shaken but otherwise no worse for the ware and a little bit wiser to the ways of the Ghanaians.

Now I've got to make my way back to Little Liberia, hopefully i'll be able to get that other post with stuff about camp life up soon, but who knows here....

I miss everyone and really appriciate all the comments!

Last night as I lay on top of my sheets, striped of everything except my boxers, I awoke in the middle of the night with to the most glorious sensation in the world: I was shivering! It was ever so faint and I was barely cold, but none-the-less, shivering! We're down at Cape Coast for a weekend break from the camp and I was enjoying the undescribable joy of sleeping under a working fan. The past week I had given up on the idea of even trying to remember what being cold felt like. Trying to get to sleep in our house in the camp is torture sometimes. No current (electricity) means no fan, and when there's no fan the air is dead still...not a breath. Usually as i lay in the feverish heat drifting in and out of sleep under the closterphobic confins of my mosquito net I catch myself dreaming that I just felt a draft of cold air on my sweat drenched back. But no, its just my sleep deprived, heat stoked mind playing cruel tricks on me. Laying in bed on these steamy, sticky nights my mind is my worst enemy.

But I really am having a great time! It gets very hard sometimes where all you want to do is be clean and not to sweat for just a little bit. But once you get used to be constantly sweaty from the moment you step out of the shower, from the moment you wake up, its not that bad. Plus everyone else is in the same boat so you don't have to worry about smelling because they're just as dirty!

Tomorrow I get down to real work and I kind of excited. I've been anxious to get down and get my hands dirty and feel like I'm actually doing something. Of course we have to get back to the camp first. Getting over here we had to jump through what I imagine are the typical hoops for travel in this part of the world. A group of us had negotiated a price to hire a tro-tro (a big mini-bus over-stuffed with way to many people), then after we had all piled smushed inside the driver told us to get out and get in the tro-tro sitting next to us that was falling apart because apparently he had negotiated a price for a tro-tro that wans't his (why he did this is?...well i just don't ask why, it keeps the blood presure down). Naturally we refused as we wanted to go in a tro-tro that was actually going to survive to the destination in one pice. So to make a long story short we sat baking in the sun skirming in our sweat negotiating for 15 min with lots of hands flying, yelling and such (I felt like i was back home again...though they arn't nearly as good actors here) then got out and found a new guy who would take us to a town in the opposit direction where upon we would catch another tro-tro for the Cape, nothing is simple here. I'm just glad we had a couple veterans with us to do all the talking, it makes it so much easier! Poor Malcom though, one of the volunteers, as we were switching tro-tros somebody swiped his digital camera...they are fast here!