April 28th

So I’ve been travelling for about the past 10 days with Jenna. A lot has gone on but I think I’ll just try to hit the highlights and you can check out my sweet pictures and videos on facebook.

Saturday the 17^th we spent on a bus going to Tamale, Ghana. We were heading up to Burkina Faso but had to stop over in Tamale for the night. On Sunday we made our way up to the Ghanaian border town of Paga. Paga is known for their sacred crocodiles. Legend has is that a man made a pact with the crocodiles that his people would not kill a crocodile if the crocodile helped him across the river. There’s more to it but that’s all I can remember off hand. You could probably google it. So the crocodiles are considered sacred and are very docile. We visited a crocodile pond where they said there were 500 crocodiles. A man lured a crocodile out of the water with a small (live) chicken and then we were able to go up behind the crocodile and pick up its tail. The crocodile was probably around 6 ft. long. The crocodile just sat there and chilled while we took pictures. Afterwards they threw the chicken to the crocodile. The crocodiles seem to have a pretty easy life. The men at the pond said they are even able to swim in the crocodile pond. They invited us to swim but we politely declined.

After that, we made our way across the Ghana-Burkina border. We were planning to go to a village to see its unique architecture but as we found out, it’s difficult and expensive to travel to smaller towns in Burkina, especially on days when no one else is travelling. So instead we made our way up to Ouaga, the capital. Ouaga is short for Ouagadougou but that’s a really intimidating name. It was about 9 or 10pm when we arrived in Ouaga. We had some names of hotels but we really didn’t know where we were or where to go. Luckily we had met a really nice guy, Ishmal, at the Ghanaian border who took the bus with us. He’s a business man who sells gold all over the world. In his own words, people in Burkina are either extremely poor or extremely rich. And he certainly wasn’t poor. His brother was picking him up so they took us to a decent hotel.

The next day we just hung out in Ouaga. There wasn’t too much to do but it was really nice to just be in one place and enjoy the city instead of the rushing from place to place that travelling normally is. We took it pretty easy. We went to some markets and shops and saw some really cool Burkinabé art. In Ghana, it feels like if you’ve been to an art market, you’ve been to them all. But in Burkina we found some really interesting and more modern African art. We walked around the city some and saw the mosque. I got to practice my French. All of the countries we visited spoke French as a national language on top of all the local dialects. Jenna doesn’t know any French so it was all on me. I didn’t mind since it was helping me remember things I had forgotten. That night we went out for a little bit with Ishmal and his brother. In the car they showed us a small bar of gold that they had on them. I can now say that I’ve held $9,000 in one hand. It started to get a little creepy with them after that so we didn’t see them again.

The next day we just hung out in Ouaga again. We went to the National Museum that had exhibits about the role of women in Burkinabé society and tribal masks. That night we saw some traditional Burkinabé music and dancing which was really interesting. We had gotten a bus ticket from Ouaga to Contonou, Benin for 5am so we decided not to bother getting a hotel room for the night. We listened to music until 1am and then went to the bus station to wait for our bus. The bus ride was hopefully the longest bus ride I will ever take in my life. It was 20 hours from Ouaga to Contonou. I’m not going to lie, it was painful, especially since we hadn’t slept the night before and we were forced to watch about five different Welsey Snipes movies dubbed in French. It was worth it though because taking a bus straight to Contonou saved us a lot of time and money instead of hopping transport to Benin and having to stop over another night.

The first day we were in Benin we went to Porto Novo. Contonou is the biggest city but Porto Novo is the capital. In Porto Novo we went to an Ethnography Museum, the market, and saw a few churches. There wasn’t much to do there but it was nice to chill there for a day.

The next day, we went a few miles outside of Contonou to a village on stilts called Ganvié. It was a really cool place to visit but unfortunately our tour guide was a jerk and tried to ripe us off. We paid for a boat ride including someone to drive the boat and a guide, but when we were walking to the boat the guide tried to convince us that we had to pay 10,000CFA (about $30 or the price of one night in a hotel) more for him to come with us. Obviously we argued with him about it. Then he tried to get us to pay 2,000CFA but we opted to go back and talk to the front desk about why we had to pay more. When we got there, he back pedalled and we didn’t have pay anything. The boat ride to the stilt village was about an hour. When we got there, the guide only took us to a souvenir shop barely inside the village. The tour was supposed to include a circuit of the village but he said we had to pay extra for that. So we didn’t have any choice than to get back in the boat and head back to shore. I’m still glad we went, I think, but he was probably the biggest jerk I’ve met in West Africa.

In the afternoon, we went to an art exhibit in Contonou called Fondation Zinsou. It was amazing. It was all contemporary African art. There was a guy working there that spoke English and walked us around the whole exhibit and described everything. He was the polar opposite of the jerk we met at the stilt village. There was art from all over Africa that was based on things like the Rwandan genocide, pollution in Contonou (which is really bad because of all the fuel exhaust), a lot of things made out of recycled material, etc. Jenna and I were blown away. They also had a room where children can come twice a week to create art and a room where children have painted all over the walls. It was really apparent to us how much more emphasis the Francophone African countries put on art than Ghanaian does. We haven’t seen anything like that in Ghanaian and the exhibit literally only had one small piece of Ghanaian art. When you go to Ghanaian markets, all the art pretty much looks the same. Considering how developed Ghana is compared to other African countries, it’s disappointing that they don’t invest more in their artists.

The next day we went to the market in Contonou. We just wanted to find the fetish (aka voodoo) section of the market. Benin and Togo are known for voodoo still. It took us a while to find the voodoo section in the huge market but we did. Most of the voodoo items were pieces of dead animals. Pretty much any animal you could think of in West Africa, was there. There were dead bats, birds, snakes, chameleons, crocodiles, monkey skulls, horse skulls, bird skulls, turtles, animal pelts, cow heads, and a huge hippo head. Jenna was really grossed out by it but I was morbidly curious. A person could get years in prison in the US for owning some of the things that were on sale there. We only hung out there for a little bit. I ended up buying a couple wooden voodoo dolls so that they’d let me take pictures of some of the voodoo items. I think the voodoo dolls are harmless. I couldn’t completely understand the man’s explanation in French but I believe the two voodoo dolls have something to do with fertility and male-female relations. Anyways, I’m not a voodoo priestess.

After that we headed across the border to Togo and stayed the night in Lomé, the capital. The first day we were in Togo we went to Togoville. The locals there say that you haven’t been to Togo until you’ve been to Togoville. It is known as the first place the Germans “settled” when they colonized Togo. In 1884, the Germans and Togolese signed an “agreement” that essentially forfeited Togo’s sovereignty over to the Germans. We had to take a boat across Lake Togo in order to reach the village. We got a tour of Togoville which was actually pretty interested. Togoville is also known for being a voodoo stronghold. We saw a few voodoo shrines, a monument to the German-Togolese agreement, the chief’s house, and the cathedral that the Germans built in 1910 among a few other things. I think in the 1980s or something, there was a sighting of the Virgin Mary on Lake Togo so Pope John Paul visited Togoville. After our tour, we took a swim in the pool at our hotel. The fact that our hotel had a pool was amazing. Then we just sat out by the Lake which is gorgeous.

The next day we left Togoville and headed to Kpalimé (pronounced pah-lee-may). From Kpalimé we got moto-taxis up Mt. Klouto. I think it’s the second biggest mountain in Togo. We stayed at a hotel there over night near a village called Kouma-Konda. It was absolutely gorgeous. In the morning, a tour guide took us on a 4 hour hike. Along the way he pointed out a bunch of different plants used for food or dyeing cloth or otherwise. He showed us cocoa plants, cotton, mango, avocado, coffee, papaya, etc… It was amazing how much he knew about the plants. He even told us all the scientific names. The area is also known for its amazing variety of butterflies and we saw some beautiful ones along our hike. He took us to a couple waterfalls and we had a picnic next to one of them. He also took us up to a bat cave. After our hike, we packed up and left again for Lomé. We stopped for lunch and then crossed the border back to Ghana. We got back just late last night.

Well, I guess that’s my trip in a nutshell. Now it’s time for me to really hit the books. I have my first finals on Sunday. I’ll be back in the states in less that 20 days.

April 13th

So this blog will be much shorter than last weeks. I haven’t really had any crazy Ghanaian experiences this past week to speak of. Last week I decided what classes I’m going to take in the fall. So far I’m registered for 14 credits including Contemporary Africa, Comparative Foreign Policy, a criminal justice class, a senior seminar on sustainable global development, and a career and internship preparedness class. My schedule looks pretty good.

Towards the end of last week I started committing myself to doing my course reading. I made a pact with myself that whenever I finish all my readings, I’ll celebrate by going to a nice restaurant. I’ve finished readings for one class and am almost done with another. That only leaves 2 ½ class reading packets left. Doing all this work now makes me really wonder where all the time went. The semester has flown by. It also feels really good to stretch myself academically again.

Friday night, Nana called me around 11:30pm and told me to come down to the night market. I was really confused as to why but I went down anyways. When I got there, there were a couple girls at her kiosk that said they were looking for three girls to dance on stage with the band 4x4 at the Ghana Music Awards on Saturday night. Not any choreographed dance, just in the background. 4x4 is a pretty big deal in Ghana. I’ll post a link to one of their videos. I am in no stretch of the imagination a dancer but they were looking so I said yes. They were looking for other girls too so Jenna and Allie came down to the night market. They just asked us if we had a dress that was something we’d wear to the clubs and if we had heels. I knew that they were looking for dancers before because another girl in our program, Cathy, had gone to an audition to dance for them earlier in the week and was chosen. It was really strange that they were just looking for random people the night before, but Cathy later told me that the band does a lot of last minute bookings because they like to keep who the dancers are secret. I guess it’s some kind of competition between the bands with what girls they can get. And sadly, a lot of times they look on the UG campus because they want white girls. Some other girls from our program were used in some of their music videos. They didn’t give us much information but said that they’d call me Saturday morning.

The next morning, the girl who was recruiting called me and had me come over to another dorm. She said they didn’t need Jenna and Allie so it was just me. I met Cathy at her dorm too. Then we went to meet a manager at the mall. They talked to for a while and then just told us that they’d call us around 2pm with more information about a rehearsal. I really wasn’t surprised when they didn’t call. The whole thing was pretty unorganized and I’m not exactly dance-on-stage material. It was too good to be true. Sadly, Cathy didn’t get called either. I felt worse about that because she had been planning on it all week and she actually looks like dancer. I guess I can say I almost danced on stage for 4x4. It would have been amazing. They were going to pay us 100ghc and we’d get into the music awards (the tickets were 50-150ghc), plus it was on national television.

Instead of being a tv star, I just did homework on Saturday. Our plans before were to go to Kokrobite on Saturday and spend the night but when we heard about the Ghana Music Awards, that went out the window. It was too bad because Nana was going to go to the beach with us too. I did homework pretty much all Sunday too. Jenna, Amy, Allie, and I went to a smoothy place where we could do some reading. This week is the last week of classes. Next week is revision week when there is basically nothing. On Monday (yesterday) I had my three classes. The first two was just the professor telling us what questions were going to be on the exam. I also finished reading The Devil in the White City which means that I’ve read 15 books since I’ve been in Ghana. Last night I went to the movies to see Date Night. Monday night movies have turned out to be a ritual for me.

Today, I’ve just been doing homework. That’s what I’ll be doing pretty much all week. Unless my plans change, Jenna and I will be traveling to Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo during revision week. This is my last chance though so they better not change. We’re going to get our visa for Benin tomorrow. We can get the other visas at the border. We’ll probably be leaving Friday or Saturday. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to write about after that trip.

4x4 music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVmYev1SGU

April 6th

Well, last week just consisted of hanging out with friends and going to class and such. We can skip over most of that since there’s not many new things to say about it. I finished Prep and now I’m reading Devil in the White City. I really need to start hitting the books this week though so I’ll probably just be reading that when I travel. I need to be doing a lot of studying during the week because I won’t get a chance when I’m travelling in between finals and on the weekends. There are just two more weeks of classes. I was also trying to find an apartment for the summer last week. I’m not exactly sure yet where I’ll be living this summer but I’m figuring it out.

This weekend was obviously Easter weekend so our classes were cancelled for Friday and Monday. That meant that I had a five day weekend since I don’t have classes on Tuesday anyways. I was planning on going to Kumasi with Jenna, Amy, and Allie this weekend, but Amy and Allie ditch out to go to Benin instead so just Jenna and I went. We took a bus Friday afternoon up to Kumasi and stayed in a hostel that Jenna had stayed at before. The hostel was pretty nice and decently priced. I didn’t know what to expect because I have stayed in such a wide range of places while travelling in Ghana. I’ve stayed in places with no running water where we sleep on the roof and I’ve been to nice resorts where you sleep in tents… but this particular hostel was what I thought of as the stereotypical hostel. We got one room that had a huge bed. It was actually just two twin sized beds pushed together and twin sized bedsare bigger in Ghana than they are in the states.

On Saturday morning, we got up early and walked to the cultural center in Kumasi. I had been to the cultural center in Accra which is basically I pretty quiet craft market. The cultural center in Kumasi was not what I was expecting at all. It was inside an expansive grounds with well manicured lawns and various museum buildings. It was very quiet and empty since it was a holiday weekend. Not all the shops were open but we went in some. The shop keepers were so low pressure. I have never felt so unwanted in Ghana. It seemed the shop keepers didn’t care whether we did or did not buy from them and if we didn’t want to pay their prices they didn’t try to stop us. It was a new type of shopping experience.

After the cultural center, we went to Kejetia Market which is the biggest market in West Africa. It is indeed large. Our Bradt guide gave us a little guidance as to where certain areas are in the market but it didn’t really help. When we got inside the market we didn’t know which way was up anymore. I wish I had my Bradt guide with me right now so I could tell you exactly how big it is but you can probably google it. We walked through a long stretch of clothing and then we wandered through home supplies and food for a long time. We never really made it to anything we’d want to look at. We could never seem to escape the food and home section. After wandering for a while, we asked people how to get to the bead section but I’m skeptical that the beads we ended up seeing was really the bead section because it was pretty unsubstantial. Eventually, getting out of the market was even a chore.

After the market, we got a tro to go to the town of Ejisu. We stopped to get lunch there and I had banku for the first time. Banku is a Ghanaian food that’s very similar to fufu and teezat. It’s a sticky dough that is put in a soup and you eat with your hands. Out of the three variations, I think banku is my favourite but it’s also not that greatest. After that, we walked to the next town over to Besease. I had a lot of fun learning how to pronounce all the names of the villages that we visited and I’m only being slightly facetious. We hoped a lot from village to village. Each time I had to master the names because if I mispronounced it just a little, the locals had no idea what I was talking about. In Besease, we visited an Asante fetish shrine. I don’t think the shrine has a fetish priest still, but a small, friendly, old man takes care of the shrine. He let us in and encouraged me to take pictures. Some international organizations had worked to restore the shrine in Besease so it had a sharply angled straw roof that was similar to the original and they had repaired the walls and inlaid artwork with some of the original techniques. As part of the restoration, they had posted plaques to the walls that had blurbs about Asante religion, architecture, shrines, art, etc that were very informative to what we were seeing. The plaques also had pictures of old Asante buildings and fetish priests and so on. This gave us a good context. I’m not sure why, but the old man keeps four turtles in the shrine. He didn’t speak English so we couldn’t exactly ask him. The turtles were at home there and he fed them fruit. The shrine building itself is composed of an open courtyard with four open air rooms on each side. The side rooms are designated for singers, drummers, cookers, and the fetish priest during ceremonies. The fetish itself is kept behind a locked that we weren’t allowed in. After looking around for a while we left. We only had to pay 2 ghana cedis to see the shrine which was nice and reasonable considering there is someone looking out for it’s upkeep.

After visiting Besease, we got a taxi to the village of Edwenase. This village is home to the Atia Kusia Kwome Shrine. After the Bease shrine, I was surprised to see that this shrine had a tin roof. We went into a room of the shrine before the section that is reserved for the ceremony. I was also surprised to see trash on the ground and cigarette butts. The fetish priest came to talk to us before he let us in. The fetish priest was a really strange guy… He had just been the fetish priest for about a year. He had really darty eyes, kind of skiddish, and made me feel uneasy in general. He wanted us to pay 20 ghana cedis to see the shrine. He said it was 5 ghana cedis each to enter and then 10 ghana cedis for an ‘exotic’ bottle of schnapps. Oh, I should mention that when the priests are pouring libation out to the gods they always and only use schnapps. Apparently, it’s the gods’ favorite drink. It was really uncomfortable because we didn’t want to pay that much to see it and thankfully Jenna told him that because I felt too awkward to. We sat there for a couple minutes thinking about leaving since they wouldn’t let us in but eventually we decided to give in and pay 15ghc to get visit the shrine. Inside the shrine building it was relatively similar nix the turtles and straw roof and plaques. In this shrine the fetish was actually out in the open. The actual fetish is kind of hard to describe. You should look at my pictures to get an idea. It was just some nondescript lump covered in kente clothe. Around the fetish were cow horns that represented cow that was sacrificed for the fetish and also egg shells that were used as sacrifice if the person didn’t have a chicken. There were also a few empty bottles of schnapps around. The fetish priest poured libation while we were there. He prayed in Twi to the fetish and prayed for us as well. Then he poured some of the schnapps on the fetish. The last bit of schnapps he drank. We talked to the priest for a little bit. We asked him what they pour for the gods before there was schnapps in Ghana but the priest just insisted that the ancestors were always able to get schnapps from the Dutch. The answer didn’t make sense but he didn’t understand our point. Jenna also asked him if he was married and he said no but that if he makes a “friend” and pours libation to the gods then its “okay.” Make of that what you will. He also offered for us to be his “friend” and we acted like he didn’t know what he was talking about. While he was talking to us about how he could sleep with women, he would turn and talk to the fetish saying “should I say this?” At one point a bird flew into the shrine and he started talking to the bird. Like I said, this guy creeped us out. As far as the power of the fetish priest, he’s a man that the chief comes to for guidance. Also if anyone needs prayers or has a health issue, they can come to the fetish priest to pray for them. The gods speak through the fetish priest.

After visiting that shrine, we hopped transportation until we got to the village of Kuntenase. We found a hotel to stay at there. The hotel was creepy in its own way. It’s not that it wasn’t nice, but it felt like we were put in a time capsule from the 1970s. The grounds were well kept and the architecture looked pretty western. Inside, the furniture looked decades old. Our room was in the basement. The basement felt strange too because the ceiling was like a little over 6 ft. high. I had to fight the urge to duck when I was walking in our room because I could stand up straight, but just barely. The toilet room was also strange because it was a really long narrow room with the toilet at one end and the door about 6 ft. away. In our room was a magazine from 1995. The staff, as in the one woman we saw there, was really nice and friendly though. We never saw anyone else at the hotel.

On Sunday morning, we got a taxi to Abonu, the village on the edge of Lake Bosomtwi. It was really frustrating because a couple men stopped us on the road demanding that we pay an entrance fee to the lake. We knew we were getting ripped off (the Bradt guide even warned us that we would) but the cab driver wouldn’t help us at all. The men were trying to sell us tickets for an event that was dated December 26, 2009. They were charging us 6ghc each even though the “tickets” said the rate was 3ghc each. We argued with them for a while but eventually had no choice and paid 3ghc each. The road down to the lake was marked with hairpin turns that went steeply to the lake. From what I remember from the Bradt guide, the mountains around the lake are about 600m high. When we got down to the lake, we waded in a little bit with our pants rolled up. The water was really nice but we didn’t want to swim. We wanted to take a boat ride on the lake but there was apparently something wrong with the boat engine. They have a boat for tourists, but otherwise boats aren’t allowed on the lake. The lake is sacred to the villages living around it so they didn’t allow boats and they used to not allow fishing apparently. Instead of boats, people and fishermen get around by sitting on a plank of wood and using their hands to paddle. Since we couldn’t take a boat ride on the lake, we decided to take a walk along it. We met a couple of Rastafarian guys and they insisted on walking with us which was kind of annoying but they also told us about the villages around the lake. It was also nice because they let us put our backpacks in their room while we walked. We walked to a couple other villages and stopped and had some pineapple and papaya. The Rastafarians smoked weed throughout our whole encounter with them. Jenna said she tried to keep track of how many joints they had and she got up to around seven. They also had a shot of Apateshie (local drink similar to gin) around 10am. We had lunch at a restaurant on the lake and then left around 1pm.

From there we went back to Kuntenase and tried to get a tro to Ejisu again. To find the right tro you always have to ask around to find it so we did that they told us to get in a tro. They said it would take us to Ejisu but about 40 minutes later we found ourselves in Atonsu, a village way north of Ejisu. It wasn’t a big deal since tros are so cheap. Since we were up that far we decided to try to go to the Bodwease shrine and asked for a tro going to a nearby village. And they pointed us to a tro and again it went way further than where we wanted to go. It actually took us to Ejisu ironically. It was only an annoyance but it’s too bad we didn’t get to the Bodwease shrine. From Ejisu we went to the village of Aduko Jachie where there is another shrine. When we got to the village we met some people who said that there wasn’t even a shrine there but they asked around for us. We were taken to a shrine building that was slightly run down and had a tin roof. There isn’t a fetish priest there anymore. Apparently, a couple years ago the fetish priest quit in order to become a musician and another fetish priest hasn’t been chosen. They made us pay 11ghc to visit even though I’m pretty sure not much is being done to take care of the shrine. They said only the chief visits the shrine on Sundays to pour libations now. There wasn’t anything new to look at at this one. After that some of the village people said there was another shrine nearby in Tikrem. A very nice guy around our age named Gilbert insisted on going with us because he said he didn’t want us to be harassed or exploited. We got a taxi to Tikrem but when we got there, people said the fetish priest was travelling. Our taxi driver said that there was another one just further up that he could take us to in the village of Bawro.

When we got to Bawro, an old man led us to the shrine. It was a far walk because the shrine was in the middle of the forest. It was completely unlike the other shrines. The other shrines were just traditional buildings in the middle of town. The shrine in Bawro had a few different spots where the priest prays to the gods. Like the others he used schnapps. He had also built a shelter into a big tree where he kept many of the tools he used when he was possessed by the gods. He showed us this one small clearing in particular where he prayed that had a small pond that was covered in lilly pads. He said that the pond had never dried up. We talked to him for a while and he said that he has been a fetish priest since 1982. He used to be a Wesleyan but then he started feel possessed and long story short he went on a journey to find out what was happened and he realized he was called to be a fetish priest. He says he still considers himself a Christian though. I asked him why he doesn’t have a traditional shrine building like the others and he showed us where he was building one. We had to be barefoot around the shrine. It was probably the most stereotypical African experience I’ve had: walking barefoot through the bush to visit a fetish shrine. He said that people come to him for consultation for example when their infertile. I figure that’s where he gets his money from. The fetish priest was nice and informative but he had creepy darty eyes just like the other fetish priest. Thankfully he didn’t ask us for any money and he only asked for our mailing addresses to keep in touch.

It was getting dark so we hiked back to the road and went back to Kumasi to stay in the hostel that we did the first night. Since it was Easter evening, absolutely no restaurants were open. At the hostel, a woman said she could get us fried rice so we ordered that from her and paid her. She didn’t come back for more than three hours. By then it was 10pm and Jenna had already gone to bed. I woke her up so we could eat though. It was ironic because both of our parents had told us to go out and get a nice meal when in fact it was literally impossible to do that Sunday night.

Monday morning, we hopped transportation to get to Adanwomase, a kente weaving village. On the way, we saw a bunch of small goats riding on top of a tro. I got a kick out of it. They didn’t look like they were tied down. I think they were just holding on for the ride. We met a really nice woman around our age who was willing to show us good kente shops. She wasn’t allowed to tell us what we should pay for the kente because then the sellers would be mad at her. But she did tell us when a price was fair and when we did a good job bargaining. I bought some kente that I think it gorgeous. Kente is an old Asante tradition of weaving. With some patterns take the weavers months to work on.

After that, we went back to Kumasi and bought bus tickets back to Accra. The bus ride was just fine. We got back around 8pm last night. I didn’t go to volunteer at the school today because I have a lot to do, such as writing a four page blog. I also need to figure out what classes I’m taking next semester because I register in two days. Tonight I think my friends and I am going to fulfil my parent’s advice and spoil ourselves at Monsoon.

That’s about it. My days are numbered here. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing this weekend but I think it will involve a beach. Check out my pictures from this weekend on facebook.

April 6th