Accra

After a wonderful and cold holiday in Portugal I am glad to be back in sunny Accra. I had forgotten how humid it is in the South because Northern Ghana is extremely dry, and I am remembering what being sweaty actually means. I am staying with my friends Jen and Selina and I start my placement on January 5th.

You can mail me at my original mailing address in Legon as I will be checking that post office box regularly:

Claire Ryan
c/o TIG
Institute of African Studies
PO Box LG 73
Legon, Accra
Ghana, West Africa

Being away really made me realize how much I missed Ghana, and how much I like living here. When my plane landed I felt at peace and as though I was truly coming home. I wait in nervous but optimistic anticipation for my second semester!

Claire

December

So I packed up all my stuff, having to leave behind (very regretfully) my steam iron, my laundry basket, and my flip flops. So now I am wrinkly and washing in my bare feet, but I thought I was going to dislocate at least one of my shoulders as it was carrying all of my stuff around Tamale. I got on a bus and went to Kintampo, visited my new friend Rohini and saw waterfalls and met other new friends. I got on another bus yesterday at 9:30am, and got to Accra at 9pm. The distance is about 300km maybe? And it took Twelve Hours. The traffic is ridiculous coming into Accra; it took us 2 and a half hours to drive 27km. The roads are also in horrendous condition slowing down the drive so, so much. It was so good to see my homestay family again and meet my Auntie's children and grandchild. They were hospitable as always and are letting me keep my stuff at their place while I travel. Tomorrow I leave for Portugal for a week, come backon the 27th, will probably hang out with my Ghanaian friend Collins in his village for New Years, and then begin my last four months in Ghana. Time is flying.

xo

Mole National Park

This past weekend my friends Mika, Julie and I traveled West to Mole (pronounced MO-lay) National Park to explore, relax, and go on wildlife tours. Julie and I woke up at 04:30 on Friday to taxi into town and buy tickets - you have to go this early or you won't get a seat. After that we went back to sleep, or at least I did, and then walked around downtown because it was Farmer's Day and the President Atta Mills was visiting Tamale. At 14:00 all three of us went to the Metro Mass to wait for our bus to arrive, because it was supposed to leave at that time. At 15:15 it finally arrived, we pushed our way into the line and got on the bus and sat in our dirty cramped seats.

At this point I would like to talk about transportation. This is one thing I will never, may I stress ever, take for granted in Canada again. A full greyhound with a smelly bathroom seems like a distant dream at this point.

So 4 or 5 hours and a couple episodes of This American Life later, we arrive at Mole National Park. It is now dark and we are tired from being awake for so long. We decide to stay in the dorm rooms which we share with three other female guests because it is cheaper, and we go to bed early in order to be awake for the early morning walk on Saturday. Saturday we walked twice: once at 07:00am for two hours, and once at 15:30 for two hours. We saw tons of different types of antelope, warthog and warthog babies, and monkeys and baboons. At one point Julie and I were having a pop by the poolside (ya, there's a pool, super weird) and baboons just started casing the place and one came about 10 inches from my face and then thankfully bolted away as one employee chased after it with a slingshot.

That night we started chatting to a couple of doctors from the States, who were stationed for a month each in a Town South of us called Kentampo. I want to preempt this with saying that, in general, I am extremely skeptical of all foreigners that I come across in Ghana. Every white person I see I am so critical of because I know that many of them are not as self critical as I would like them to be. Unfortunately this is not just me being a judgmental jerk, it is in fact a reflection of the reality that white people in Ghana generally don't realize their position of privilege. It is in this light that I cringe when foreigners try to talk to me just because we are foreigners - they think we are in the same club, which makes us friends. And as much as I am critical of them I am critical of myself and my position, it just makes me deeply uncomfortable to think that probably they have not fully analyzed their motivation for being here. However these two doctors we met totally proved me wrong on these points and turned out to be hilarious, brilliant people who really were critical about the situation they were in. It was so good to talk and laugh comfortably with new friends that we got their info and will most likely visit them in Ghana or the States. Who doesn't need a contact in Brooklyn and Alaska?

The next morning we went on our third walk with our new doctor friends, and told them funny stories about getting ecoli and staph infections and malaria, and they ripped out a page of my romance novel and prescribed anti-funguls to take on the plane home. Closest thing I've got to a prescription in Ghana, I told them.

That night we made a friend named Emmanuel and got him to drive us to Larabanga to stay at the Salia Brother's motel, where we could sleep on the roof if we so chose. There was a ladder about the size of my forearm going up to the roof and one dirty mattress, and Mika says "So...this is what we have to work with." But I saw the biggest two cockroaches ever in the room below so I didn't mind having to sleep on the roof - it was so beautiful, but freezing cold with many mosquitoes. We then woke up at 04:15 to catch the bus back to Tamale and 4 hours later arrived.

It was amazing to see so much wildlife close up and in their natural habitat. But back to reality, I have two assignments due by Friday and a Christmas holiday to plan so it's really nose to the grindstone now.

All for now!

Claire

Politics

Ghana gained its independence in 1957, Nkrumah being its president at the time. Padraic requested I blog a bit about politics so here it is.

Ghana is predominantly Christian and Muslim, and it has had exclusively Christian presidents despite the huge Muslim population. Padraic's question was whether people tend to vote along religious lines or not, so I talked to my landlord. He said that people vote along "tribal" lines, meaning that depending which cultural grouping they are from (Ashante, Akan, etc) they vote for a certain person. The way he described it kind of sounded like the way people who are running for Presidency in the US go around campaigning, winning over one state at a time. Presidents who have the majority of the regions on their side will win. The current President is John Atta Mills.

More on this later.