Workin' 9 - 5

Here's my day in a nutshell:

7:30 - Wake up, strumble around my room and start getting ready for work
8:00 - Eat bread and boil water for Nescafe
8:45 - Stand outside my house and wait for a sharecab to take me to the junction
- From the junction I catch a tro tro that follows the oceanside to my second stop
- At a different junction I catch another tro tro where I go to the last stop
- Walk for about 30 minutes through sandy garbage laden backyards to my workplace
10:00 - arrive at work and work on my laptop in the office with my boss and Nii until about 3
12:00 - go across the way to the woman selling fufuo, bring it back to the office and eat
3:00pm - walk back to the main intersection, buy some vegetable and get on a tro tro going home
4:30pm - arrive at my house, say hi to my creepy watchful neighbours, buy a huge bag of purewaters, carry it back to the house on my head
5:00pm - do washing while watching a movie (usually If These Walls Could Talk 2)
5:45pm - start cooking supper (sweat like a maniac on speed) and wait for Chris to get home
6:30pm - eat, and watch True Blood and/or read
9:00pm - do our exercise routine of pushups and situps


There you have it. It's an average day of sweat, grime, people yelling OBRUNI at me, and trying to make sure my room doesn't become completely submerged in ants.
All for now.

Bring On February

This month, like those past, has gone by very fast indeed. I have spent most of my time editing the book by my boss is attempting to get published - his life and times as a gay, Christian man in Ghana. It is both heart-wrenching and hopeful, and I have learned so much already from his experiences. Chris and I have made some realizations about the neighbourhood we live in: that it is too isolated and too unsafe. We are starting the stressful process of trying to get refunded and find a new, safer place but everything here takes a long time to come to fruition.

A big part of what has made up my happiness this month has been our kitchen. I have been cooking up a storm and experimenting with Ghanaian ingredients - such as fresh plantains - and I'll be so sad if we move to a place with a less accessible kitchen. This is likely considering this is the first time all year I've had a working fridge.

There's not really much to update right now, still very hot, still going to work, still living with Chris and having lots of good times.

xo

CEPEHRG

The name of my NGO is the Centre for Popular Education on Human Rights, Ghana, and so far I am really enjoying working with them. I have to take a taxi and then two tro tros to get to work, so it takes a while in transit even though geographically the location is close enough to where I live. I catch a taxi outside my house that takes me to a junction, from there I get on a tro that drives along the beach by the ocean, and from there I get another tro that takes me to an area called Teshi. My NGO is hard to find (it's in an unmarked, gated house) and yesterday I got lost and my boss had to come find me, but hopefully since that happened I will be able to get there with relative ease.
So far my duties have included a lot of editing and proofreading, along with writing emails and taking notes on the activities of the organization. I love the guys I work with, they are smart and kind and have a good sense of humour. Yesterday Chris and I got to move into our separate rooms which was fantastic, and so far living in the house is going smoothly.
Although, yesterday Chris and I were talking about how it's our dream house and what that actually means.

This house:
- is at least a tro ride and a taxi ride away from anything
- as of yesterday had almost no gas to cook with and almost no water
- is not near a place to buy phone credit
- is unfinished
- has no door to the bathroom so when you go you have to just hope no one walks in
- has some ants (but not many!)
- is in such a dusty part of town we can't really open the windows and everything is covered in a fine layer of red
- the shower has the water pressure of a slow pee.
- has no beds, just mattresses on the floor

BUT overall the living conditions are spectacularly posh compared to the other places we have stayed and to the majority of Ghana. I think our standards have shifted so low that this place seems like an oasis in the desert simply because it is clean and has a working fridge and nice love seats.
We are so happy buying groceries and being able to stock a fridge for the first time all year and I even bought a sassy tiger print mug to celebrate our last move.

Yesterday we had a bit of a scare where our watchmen (who we didn't know was our watchmen, just thought was a creepy rando) was knocking at the window and acting really strange, saying things that made no sense. I was outside and Chris was poking his head out the window and it was pitch black so neither of us could tell what was going on. We were getting freaked out by his behaviour and eventually I got inside and locked the door and both of us were like What Is Going On?? We were so terrified because (a) if it was our watchman, why was he acting so strange? and (b) if it wasn't our watchmen, who the F was it?? So we hid in my room under the fan with the lights on until we heard banging at the door, when Chris picked up one of my high heeled shoes with a spiky heel and approached the door cautiously. Turn out it was Serge and he was all, why are you guys acting so spooked? The dude was in fact our watchman, and no conclusion as to the bizarre behaviour other than perhaps a result of a solid language/cultural barrier.
Anyyyyyways. Glad that got cleared up because I honestly about had a heart attack.

Chris and I have come to the conclusion that we truly look forward to the time when we go home and generally have an idea about what is going on at any given time. We laugh about it now.

Will keep updating on NGO activities and experiences that change from terror to hilarity.

New Years

Chris and I have been staying at a really cheap hostel situated in a ritzy part of Accra, and the juxtaposition is highly amusing. I was getting bitten all over my body every time I lay in my bed, I think from bed bugs, so I took it upon myself to wash the sheets (which smelled...fermented). The water came out brown. So brown in fact that Chris looked at me and said, "But why is it so milky?" After that the bites decreased, but I was horrified at having slept in that for 2 nights. New years was interesting and ridiculous. Everyone here sets off really loud but not so bright fireworks which sound like gunshots if they are within a block radius, which made us all jump in fear every 20 minutes or so the whole night. Three of our friends met up with Chris and I and we went out to eat and bought some dusty champagne at the gas station to bring back to the hostel with us. We ended up getting locked out of the room and having to get a Ghanaian woman to hipcheck the door open for us with only ten minutes to spare before midnight, allowing us to pop our bubbly and eat our tiny Danish snacks and set of the dangerous firecrackers we bought of a guy on the street. We almost lit the hostel on fire with one stray firecracker, but luckily that was a false alarm. Yesterday the same group of us went to a beautiful beach called Kokrobite outside Accra for the day, which went quite well up until the way home when our tro tro couldn't get up a hill and we had to get out and walk a piece in our sundresses and flip flops until we found another going in our direction.

Chris and I have had some extreme luck this week. We are working at different NGOs that are relatively near each other in Accra so we were hoping to somehow find a place to live together. We met a girl from England who was staying in our hostel, and she used to live here and knew a guy who rented to foreign volunteers. So she called him for us and we met with him today and his house is amazing, with luxuries such as running water and our own rooms and a gated property!! We were so happy to have made that connection and we are hoping to move in by Tuesday. He is an incredibly nice man named Serge who is an artist and a model.

Will keep this blog updated with how my first week at the NGO goes and the new place. I hope everyone is well and staying warm (god knows I am...)

xox