Trip to Togo!

This weekend, I went with Evelyn, Marcella and their friend Nox to visit Togo! We were particularly excited because by crossing the border and then returning to Ghana, we avoided paying 80 cedis from a visa extension (of course, we paid more than that for the trip, but I'd rather go to Togo than send the government 80 cedis and stay at home).

We took a tro-tro from Accra all the way to Aflao, which is the city on the Ghana/Togo border where you can get visas. It is also the dustiest place I have every been in my life.

The beaches were really pretty though!




When we crossed the border,


we took moto-taxis (The Best and Most Dangerous mode of transportation)


to our adorable hotel.


That night, we took a moto-taxi tour of Lome, which was the most fun hour and a half! I couldn't take any pictures, as I was pre-occupied with not dying (Friday night rush hour traffic, no real laws, no helmets), but I took some later of the cool stuff we saw.

Nox got us permission to wander on the docks and take picture. Later a guard chased him down and demanded a bribe, which was totally ridiculous (but common). He paid it, but then he called and got the guard in trouble/fired, so serves him right.

Lome has some really cool architecture!

Pretty blur!

This is where the president does some Serious Business.

After that, we went to the International Museum of the Gulf of Guinea. It was incredible! I could only take a picture of the front of the museum, but it was full of fantastic works of art from around West Africa. And you could TOUCH them. Even the statue that was 2,000 years old. Even the costumes sewn for spirits to inhabit and dance in. And it was only about $1 for students. I totally recommend going there, if you ever find yourself in Togo.

After that, we went to the fetish market, where you can buy voodoo remedies to common ailments. They had dog heads and snake spines and leopard skins and the skull of a hippo. It was really cool and interesting, although I was pretty skeptical of our guide's claim that all the creatures had died naturally and was kinda worried that the fee I paid to look at everything perhaps contributed to poaching. Hopefully not. Anyway, check out these gross pictures!

One of the best parts of the Togo trip, for me, was the delicious food. Lome is more Eurpoean than Accra, and our hotel had a delicious restaurant.

Excellent ice cream! Coconut and chocolate

Pho!!! Cause former French colonies gotta stick together!

Mousse!

Beef with red wine sauce and potatoes with bacon pieces

Okay, all that stuff was really good, but this was the best. Sold for cheap on the streets, it is a salty, crusty-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside baguette, with this guacamole-like stuff spread inside and a hard-boiled egg cut up and spread in there too. Everything was Africa-outside temperature and it was so delicious that we each had one for breakfast and another for lunch the last day in Lome.

Okay, so there was one thing that happened that was not as good. When we went to get our money changed, there were tons of guys on the border offering to do it on the streets. A little sketch, but really you do EVERYTHING on the street in Ghana, so we thought we'd just check the rate with what we'd looked up and be fine. They offered a good rate so we sat down and changed 100 cedis each. They counted the money and we counted and back and forth and when we put the money away, we were all sure we had the right amount. But sometime in there, they had managed to sneak away from our piles; 5,000 CFA (~$10) from me and something like 15,000 CFA from Evelyn and that much plus some of her cedis from Marcella (we suspect they took a little from me and when we didn't see it, they got braver when they counted Evelyn's and Marcella's). We had no clue until we got to the hotel and took out money for dinner. There was a big mixture or fury and respect, because we were all SURE we had watched carefully and counted well and KNEW we had the right amounts. So, as obvious as this should seem, always make sure you change money at a legit place, even if you think you are savvy enough to do it on the street. It's funny, because in Europe I was wary about going anywhere other than a bank cause I didn't want to be ripped off. But here I only thought about the rate, not about them conning me. Ah, lessons learned in Africa.

Fooood in Ghana!

Us Americans (or "Ucanese" as the Canadians and US students have decided to dub our united nationalities), we are very spoiled by a variety of food options from around the world. In California, especially, I believe one can find some of the most mind-blowingly delicious and diverse food ever. So it was (is) difficult to get used to living in a place where one eats rice, plantains, and fried chicken or fish or some variation of that for every meal. The first week, when ISEP provided the food for us, to ease our delicate Western tummies into the spicy swing of things, most meals looked like this:


(This was towards the end of our ISEP integration, when, after eating more friend chicken in a week than I had in my entire life, I just went without.)

Tasty, to be sure. Super inexpensive (bowl of jollof and plantains for 1 cedi, or 75 cents). But not so great everyday

After ISEP, we flocked to the bread and fruit stands, and to Henry Jr.'s egg sandwich stand (a daily stop for most international students, which he appreciates, as, aside from our business, he is simultaneously learning Spanish, French, and god knows what else from us), and making tasty little lunches like these:


Groundnut butter with bananas and a star fruit!


I added tomato and avocado and, yes, plantains (I really love them) to my egg sandwich to grab a few more food groups and delicious tastes.

Sometimes we tried to cook stuff from home, to mixed results:

Fried potatos were delicious, as was Evelyn's rice. My Thai peanut noodles (not pictured) left a bit to be desired though.


Pasta Fagioli was good, but mainly cause of the 11 cedi jar of Prego I bought.

Eventually, after venturing out on our own, we found things that we liked, loved even.

Some that reminded us of home:




And, even better, some that were completely different but still delicious:
(Apologies, these pictures aren't my own because I felt funny breaking out my camera in the places I was eating these things, and can't work out how to get the photos that I did manage to surreptitiously take with my phone onto my computer.)


Fufu! Very, very spicy. This is one of the Ghanaian dished that you eat with fingers. First you wash your right hand only in the bowl and water pitcher provided by the food stand. Then you grab a bit of the dough, roll it into a ball with your fingers, picking up as much broth as possible and maybe a bit of meat, then sort of propel it into your throat. You do not chew it, This was probably why it was so spicy for me, since I didn't know that the first time I had it.


So fufu is made by pounding plantains and either yams or cassava really quickly like this. This picture does not properly capture the danger and speed with which they do this: one person pounding with that giant wood thing, and the other sort of kneading during the millisecond between each pound. Intense.


A Ghanaian friend made banku (fermented corn dough; much like fufu dough, but different, apparently) and okra stew and Evelyn and I and it was delicious! The stew is much thicker and more interesting than fufu and easier to pick up. It's equally messy, and you still don't chew, which is weird but fun.


I also really like red red, which is sort of just a variation on the plantains and jollof rice thing - its plantains and black-eyed peas stew, which is a bit spicy and delicious, and full of protein (which I get a lot of here anyway, cause Ghanaians love to sell you fried eggs, all the time).

Fun facts about eating in Ghana:
1) You eat with your right hand only. Actually, you do everything with your right hand. Otherwise, you are gross, or disrespectful. Or both.

2) If you are eating and wanna offer some to someone else, you say to them, "You are invited." When you wanna ask someone for some of their food, you say, "Am I invited?"

3) Most food if bought from stands in the street, or maybe parts of a market that might have some chairs and a table. But then the stand is still on the street. They will put your food in a plastic bowl, if there is a table, and a plastic bag if there is not. The travel doctor says not to eat anything from a street stand, or any fruit that you don't peel or wash yourself. That is unrealistic. The best you can do is try not to buy food from women with babies (who need diaper changes a lot) and try to wash your apple before you eat it (but really, just don't buy an apple cause they are way too expensive here).

4) There is not a lot of refrigeration here. Eggs are left out, as is butter, milk, and cheese. I'm not dead yet, so it's fine.

5) Ordering food is an adventure to those new to it. For your reference, you tell them how much you want to spend on each item, unless its countable. For example, I would say, "Mepaakyew, I would like 50 pesewas fried rice, a piece of chicken, and 5- pesewas of fried yams." Yum.

The everyday sights of Ghana - stealthily photographed during a festival

Ghanaians are not crazy about having their pictures taken (except for children, who are really really crazy about it). Understandable, I wouldn't really be into a foreigner taking a picture of my carrying my groceries home or at work. However, it makes it nearly impossible to take pictures of the cool things I see all day, everyday. Luckily, this weekend we went to the a festival in Cape Coast (another post on that to follow) and everyone had a camera, so I could photograph some exciting everyday stuff to
give people a good idea of day-to-day Ghana.






First. Signs. Ghanaians are very religious. Consequently, almost all their shop names refer to God, Jesus, Allah, or Bible verses. Usually, like in the case of God Gives Electronics, these are hilarious. And they are everywhere. Selling stuff is the main way to make some money here, so EVERYONE does it.





Some people have shops, but many just carry things on theirs heads and walk around. Doing that with pillows is pretty weird, though, mostly its little stuff that you might want on the go, like food:

This last picture is of a delicious treat called a boflo. It's like a cross between a donut and a roll and I love them.

Another popular thing to buy off someone's head is ice cream!




The ice cream here is really good and there is rarely a time when I don't want some. These Fan ice creams come in a little pouch. You bite the corner and squeeze it out and it's only 60 pesewas (40 cents).

All these things are sold and stoplights and in heavy traffic, so it's a frequent occurrence on the tro-tro or in a car to hand people money out the window and get some water or and ice cream in the middle of traffic. It's actually gonna be super weird when I go home and am wandering around downtown and have to actually go and search for food or water instead of having someone walk up to me with it.

Speaking of, here is how we buy water:




A sachet of water is 5-10 pesewas (depending on where you are and whether you get Obruni price or Ghanaian price). It's 500 mL and clean, and frequently cold, because the people who carry them usually have a frozen water bottle in there with the sachets. Like the ice cream, you need to bite a corner of the plastic bag and squeeze the water out.

Other stuff:


So this is how women in Ghana carry their kids (especially good because they are usually out working). Little kids and women having trouble conceiving wear dolls like this as well.


These are the gutters, or "Obruni traps" as my friend who fell in one and cut her leg open calls them. This one is actually very nice and clean, as are most of the ones on campus. In major markets, though, they are a death trap, filled with filthy liquid and a thousand plastic bags with mysterious contents (lemme tell you though, many of them are poop - no toilets at the market and vendors are there all day). Sometimes they are covered with boards or cement or dirt, but they are often open because those things crack. What can ya do?



So most cabs and tro-tros have religious and inspirations stickers like this on the back and sides of them. This one is my favorite so far.

And that's some everyday sights in Ghana!

Education in Ghana: a university for the rich kids and a K-12 school for the orphans

So, I'm in the country (allegedly) for university. Here are some of my thoughts on how that's going (excerpt from a letter cause I keep finding myself explaining everything many times to many people). This semester I can taking traditional dance and traditional drumming, which have been a blast and are really just for fun and to get some more cultural competence. I'm also taking 2 lecture classes fro credit: Ghanaian Literature and Rural Resource Development, as well as auditing 2 for fun: Art History of Africa and Foragers and Farmers in West Africa's Prehistory. They all sounded very promising and interesting, and to some extent they are, especially the reading. My lectures, however, have not been as super interesting as I’d hoped. Not sure I’m into the education style here. There isn’t a lot of discussion and the classes tend to be straight note-taking. Plus, it seems a bit basic right now. It’s still sorta the first few weeks of class, but it is also the 3rd week in only 12 weeks of instruction. Since we only meet once a week for 2 hours, by the time I feel like we’re really IN the class, it’ll be time for exams. Finally, many of the readings, while really interesting, are 20-30 years old (not as big a deal for lit classes, but definitely more so for my rural resource development class).

Despite the disappointment in some classes, I'm still learning a ton. I see the infrastructure problems firsthand, every day. Sometimes the ATMs have no money. The Internet comes and goes, as does the water in some buildings. There is no toilet paper or soap in any but the nicest bathrooms, so you bring your own or do without. Managing the maze of class enrollment took days. As we say, everything in Ghana is a process. So it’s really interesting to see what people have to deal with and how insurmountable the challenges are. It also really makes you appreciate how other things work. For example, I rarely have to wait long for a tro-tro wherever I want to go and they are so inexpensive. This is not the case for buses in downtown San Jose. Also, despite transportation and refrigeration difficulties, you can buy freshly squeezed (the one on my desk was bottled on the 1st of September and expire on the 7th) Blue Sky pineapple and mango juice all over the country.

Another thing about education in Ghana is that, to go to university here, you need to be fairly wealthy. There is a huge class difference, where most houses I see are either tiny one/two room shacks that look like they have been made out of storage containers or big fancy homes surrounded by a tall wall with barded wire or shards of broken glass embedded at the top and sometimes even private security.


Here's where most of the kids I volunteer with live (more about them below). It's about 10-15 sq feet and has no windows. I have no been brave enough to photograph the rich houses yet, I'm afraid someone will yell at me.

I know there must be some in between, but I have not seen it. So most of the people in my classes are at the top of the heap, money-wise. That's not to say that they are snobby. That actually doesn't really seem to be a Ghanaian concept. They are all down to pile into a tro-tro and buy cheap fish at Madina and all the rest. Still, the stratification is mind-boggling.

I also see the flip side, when I do my volunteer time at Mawuvio's Outreach Programme in the little village of Kissehmah (or Kisseman, I've seen it spelled both ways) inside Accra. The school was started by a Ghanaian called Kwame and a ISEP student called Renee who came over from Iowa two years ago. They started with 15 students and now have 2 addition teachers and 54 students (ages 3-16) and have to send some children away for lack of space. The 2 Ghanaian teachers are paid and, thanks to a donation set up by an ISEP student last year, the kids get a free lunch every day that school is in session. Another donation bought them all uniforms, which they do a pretty good job of keeping clean. All these donations are important, as almost all of the kids are orphans and street kids and none of them can afford to pay the fees required to attend the Catholic and Christian schools here (I've heard those fees can be 100-200 cedis a year, per child, but I'm not positive about that number).

Kwame and Renee are dedicated to giving these kids as good an education as possible. Kwame especially is very passionate about helping these kids achieve their dreams: they want to pilots and lawyers and doctors, and the idea that even one or two of them might get to go that is incredible. So it's really great to get to go out there and see the other side of education in Ghana. Like the university (though more understandably, in my opinion), things are haphazard and improvised. The kids, of course, are at all levels of learning and abilities. But that also gives the school opportunities to deviate somewhat from the strict hierarchy of learning. There is Math and English, of course, but there is also plenty of time devoted to play, art, music, science, dance, civil education, and religious education. I feel like the looseness of the curriculum is as good for the young kids as a rigid university structure would be for me.

Check out some pictures we painted this morning!




A collaborative effort between me with crayons and a boy I don;t know yet with a paintbrush.


I told Isaac I like pineapple juice and he made me this. (Sorry it's backwards, I had to photograph it with Photobooth. No scanner; I live in Africa).

Mawuvio is currently building a full school building (they are on a porch and in a courtyard right now, and have to cancel school if it rains too hard) with dormitories for the students and teachers and 6 individual classrooms. They are hoping to fund this through some of their past fund-raising (donations and selling jewelry made by the students) as well as getting some people to sponsor some of the students and send enough money for all their meals and clothing. Check out their website!

Also, buy some of their jewelry! Perfect for all occasions!