Ghana

            Greetings from Africa!  First, I would like to say that I plan on making several FaceBook albums for the different ports on the voyage once I get home.  Internet is so slow on the ship, and our megabyte usage is limited, so I cannot post them or send them out.  Also, I won’t make an album for Ghana since my camera is gone.  I don’t know whether it was lost or stolen (I’ve sort of been going with stolen because it sounds better and isn’t my fault this way).  I can get pictures from the friends I was traveling with, but it would be weird to repost their pictures on an album.  I could have easily held on to my camera in Charlottesville, but it is the price I pay for traveling, and now I have an excuse to buy a new camera in Cape Town, and a good travel battle story to tell. The real downside is that now I have to take another bridge tour to retake the pictures I lost from my last tour and the crew and captain will all think I’m weird.

            Anyways, we arrived in Takoradi, Ghana, on Sunday.  The first day, I went with some friends to explore the city.  Once we go off the gangway, we were all accosted by merchants.  They are really aggressive; they ask you for your name because they want to be your friend, and then they make you a bracelet with your name on it.  It is really tacky and they tried to charge me 30 cedi for one.  Even when they would have sold me one for 5, I still wouldn’t buy it.  They just put the bracelets on your wrist and act really confused when you tell them that you won’t buy it.  Some people got scammed pretty hard and paid 20 cedi for two bracelets.  I refused and just wanted to leave, and actually get in the city.  The merchants told me I was bankrupting their business by not buying a bracelet and that I didn’t want them to survive (though if the businesses were in danger, they shouldn’t waste time and resources on people who clearly don’t want bracelets.  They didn’t like it when I told them this.).  People gave them money to leave them alone, but I didn’t want to encourage them.  There are several bracelets with my name on them floating around the city and I eventually got one for free, though the merchant to me I owed him a “gift from my heart.”  He said he would be waiting for me at the pier the next day, but I left at 5:00am the next day so I don’t know if he was really there.  I actually really like the merchants; they keep you on your toes.

            The port went on for a while and passed through a cacao plant, which doesn’t smell as nice as one might think, but once we finally got through, we just walked around the city.  Takoradi is not as big as Accra, and not a lot was open because it was Sunday, and Ghana is pretty religious, but we walked around the marketplace where we saw, and smelled, a lot of fish and pigs’ feet.  We also saw women carrying everything on their heads from water to souvenirs, very impressive, and went out to lunch at Captain Hook’s.  The city is pretty poor and rundown, but most people we met were really nice.  A group of SAS kids came into the restaurant as we were leaving with Cynthia, a Ghanaian girl they met at a bar.  I think they introduced her to us to ditch her.  She was really drunk and loud.  She tried to take us to the beach, but took us on a really indirect path and kept shouting at people to invite them to come with us.  She kept hitting on all the guys in our group, telling us all about how she didn’t believe in marriage, gave up her baby in Japan, and asking us to run away with her.  We finally ditched her at the beach, and just hung out there for a while, making friends with Ghanaians who turned out to be merchants trying to sell us bracelets again (I told you they are sneaky).  After getting back to the ship at dinner time, we walked to the cybercafé for cheap internet.  A taxi driver tried to rip us off and internet was really weird after not using it for a month.  I checked my Virginia e-mail and had so many messages.  It really made me happy to not be at school right now.  All those e-mails just get overwhelming and I tend to get too bogged down with the Internet.  Being without Internet is really refreshing.

            They streamed the Super bowl in the Union and then at 4:30am I went out to meet a group of people to go on a village with Can Do, a tour company that works with Semester at Sea a lot.  We traveled to the Elmina Castle, one of the slave dungeons in Ghana, where thousands of slaves were housed before being sent off across the ocean.  It was really moving to be there and have a private tour of the castle.  It is a really nice place so it is hard to imagine it being used for something so horrible and seeing the castle made the whole issue of slavery seem much more real than it ever did before.  We next drove a few more hours to Kumasi, a town in Ghana where we ate lunch and went shopping.  The Ghanaian government didn’t allow SAS to bring back drums from Ghana so a bunch of people ordered drums and had they shipped back to the States.  They are probably three feet high, and they are all hand made with beautiful carvings and paintings.  I thought about buying one, but decided against it.  They were somewhat expensive, but also I am not musical in any way so a drum would probably just sit in my room collecting dust and taking up space.  It seemed almost disrespectful to take a drum, something someone worked so hard on, and ultimately never use it.  I didn’t want to turn out like the girl I saw put her bottle of Sprite on top of the drum.  By 9pm, we finally got to the Senase Village, Fred’s village.  Fred was our tour guide and owner of the company.  He was really great, and it was weird that he is only 19.  We were greeted by all the kids in the village who were so excited to see us and play with people’s cameras. They loved to have their pictures taken.  After being greeted, we ate dinner and went to our host families’ houses to sleep.

            The next day, we ate breakfast, some sort of maize, water, condensed milk, and sugar, which tasted a lot like grits, a nice change from the fish stew from dinner.  We were officially welcomed into the village by the elders where we introduced ourselves to all the elders in twee, one of the hundreds of languages spoken in Ghana, and they welcomed us in return and told us the history of the village.  We spent the next couple of hours visiting the village’s farm, which was huge and run by one woman in her sixties.  When I think of Arica, I always think of desert conditions, like the Sahara or Egypt.  I did not expect to see so many trees and such lush vegetation.  We then spent a couple of hours at the schools in the village.  There were hundreds of children at the school I went to, and they all stood outside the school to greet us.  All the kids swarmed us, grabbing at us, trying to get us to take their pictures, holding our hands and following us, and some of them asked us for money and other gifts.  I had one picture of me on my camera  with probably fifteen kids, which was a really good picture, and a classic Semester a Sea shot, but sadly I don’t think I’ll ever see that picture again.  One of our guides brought us to a bar where the kids weren’t allowed so we could hide for a while and rest up.  After finally making our way away from the kids, we were greeted by our dance instructor who taught us a traditional dance we would be performing for the entire village the next day. I cannot keep a beat for my life so I wasn’t on the drum, which meant I had to dance.  Both jobs were hard though; our teacher was a typical dance instructor who wanted everything to be perfect and got mad at us when we messed up, which happened a lot.  The drummers got yelled at as much as we did so it was fair.  The routine was only about three minutes long, and our instructor kept shortening it to make it easier on the dancers and drummers, but we practiced for over an hour...more than enough for me.  We returned to Fred’s house for dinner and afterwards, we drove to a bar outside the village.  Everyone was really tired and probably would have preferred to just go to sleep.  People just sat around the table and a good number fell asleep at the bar; I was close.  We were also the only ones there. 

            The next morning, we went back to the school for a little while to talk to the kids and try to teach them something.  I went with the group that went to the junior high.  We tried to teach them their times tables, but they were on the quadratic formula.  English is Ghana’s national language, but I don’t know how many kids speak it at home, and I don’t think they learn English until they are in school, so communication was still tricky.  They sang us their national anthem, but we couldn’t remember ours.  They asked us about Obama (Ghana loves him).  They name things like sports and games after him.  I even tried Obama biscuits, which were like shortbread cookies with less flavor.  The kids also asked the girls if they were married and had children, and sang us one of their nursery rhymes, which was about STDs.  Later that morning, we were all given traditional Ghanaian outfits, made out of kenti (spelling?) cloth to perform the dance.  The guys were given shorts and the girls wore given skirts and shirts that were essentially just bras.  The elders greeted us again and we performed our dance for the village.  It was pretty horrible, everyone was out of sync and people forgot moves, but it was all in good fun.  Hopefully someone has a video.  We finally said goodbye to the kids and made the long drive home.  We left at noon, but somehow we didn’t get back to the ship until midnight.  After not showering and using squat toilets for the past three days, we were all pretty excited to get back, but there was no water on the ship.  Ghana can’t provide enough water for all five days so the Explorer didn’t have water for a few hours each day in Ghana.  This was a cruel twist of fate, but it just made the next morning’s shower all the better. 

            The next morning, I went to Nzuelo, a village on stilts.  We drove for two hours on the bus, and then took an hour canoe ride through a river to get to the village.  It’s really awesome.  The village is really just a giant dock, but four hundred and fifty people live there.  The kids have an elementary school, but take an hour canoe ride to go to secondary school.  We learned the history of the village, and just went back for lunch.  I would have liked to explore the village more, but it was raining, and I don’t think there is much else to see there.  I helped paddle on the way back and after lunch we went to a fort on the beach and took a tour where we learned about the soldiers that lived there and traditional Ghanaian healing methods.  We finally got back to the ship less than an hour before on ship time, but there was a market thirty feet away from the ship so everyone did some last minute shopping before heading back inside.

            Now it is Friday, and we are back in school.  At 12:05, the captain announced that we were crossing the Equator and Prime Meridian at the same time.  This put us at 0 degrees longitude and 0 degrees latitude, which is really awesome.  This makes everyone on the voyage Emerald Shellbacks or Royal Diamond Shellbacks, an honor among sailors.

            I lost a camera and a pair of socks, and have never been dirtier in my life (I blew my nose when I got back on the ship and it was black with all the dirt and ash in my nose.  The village burns everything from brush to trash.), but Ghana was so much fun.  Senase is not a tourist attraction so the whole experience felt so real and authentic.  Some people were really nice and some people were really aggressive (kids kept hitting us up for money and gifts like my watch) and some places we went were beautiful and some places were not.  I felt like I experienced so much in only five days.  I even got to help bail someone out of jail (while we were waiting to leave for the village at five in the morning, a police officer came up to us and told us that he had one of us in jail.  Apparently an SAS kid who I sort of know had been mugged and arrested.  I don’t know the full story and trouble seem to follow him though).

            If you Google the Senase village, you’ll find an NGO for the village.  I believe it is called the Senase Project or Foundation or something.  It was started by SASers who went to the village last year with Can Do.  They are just starting out and are still getting approved for NGO status, but they are working to help build schools in the village.  The girl who got this trip rolling on FaceBook, and Tyler, one of the guys on the trip whose friend went on the trip last year, are working to help he is just helping out with it now build a hospital in Senase.  I think Tyler’s friend is the one who started the hospital project and he’s just getting involved now.  Either way, our group is going to try and help out as much as possible with the NGO.  They need about $30,000 USD to get the hospital started, and hopefully the Ghanaian government can support them from there.  I think our group is really going to try and make this happen; people were excited about the idea and it will be a great excuse to stay in touch and to come back to Ghana one day.  Right now, the closest hospital is a forty five minute walk away from the village.  The hospital serves both Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire so even if people make it to the hospital; they have to wait up to days before being seen for even serious injuries.  Plus, people may get bitten by snakes or something on the way and die before even making it to the hospital.  Hopefully, this NGO will take off and the thirty of us that went on the rip can do something.  I am impressed how passionate so many people are on the ship; it gets me excited about causes I would not imagine myself getting involved in back at home. 

Next stop:  one of the ports I am most excited for...CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

I don't have any pictures of my own so this is the only picture I'm going to post.  But this is all of us in Senase.