Happy Thanksgiving

This was certainly a most memorable Thanksgiving! Last week, John got an infection in a cut on his leg so we went to the hospital in Ho, the closest big town, to have it checked out. To ensure the quickest recovery, they admitted him and set him on IV antibiotics, to be discharged Friday. So Thursday morning, Mo and I headed to the Bishop's house (a fortunate friend we met last time we stayed in Ho). His daughter, Emelda (who happens to have formal culinary training), accompanied us to the market and helped us prepare a Thanksgiving feast. We transported it from her kitchen to the area outside John's hopsital room

And proceeded to gorge ourselves in true Thanksgiving style. We had: a roasted chicken, french fries with ketchup, baked apples, salad, garlic bread, and pancakes and vanilla ice cream for dessert (a European touch from Mo).

The hospital visit put us back another few days getting started on our work at Tafi, so we are just now rolling on some of our ideas. Our mission is trifold: to assist in business management, tourism development, and community work (anything the community needs help with like teaching, tutoring, painting, farming, digging, etc.)

The four tour guides with whom we primarily work are wonderful, especially Sylvester- an extremely selfless and well educated Tafi native with an irreplaceable smile. The seven of us will work together to accomplish our goals (benefitting from the duel perspective of tourist and native guide) and will then report to the Tourism Management Committee, who ultimately must run everything by the chiefs and elders. This, predictably, has the potential to slow progress, since each decision must pass through three levels of authority. However, we are starting small and trying to stay optimistic through the slow pace of change.

In the meantime, the people of Tafi Atome have truly stolen our hearts. They are happy, proud, and extremely generous with the little they have.

An English woman a few years ago began a sponsorship program to enable more children to attend school. The program seems to be working well (I will provide details in the next post if you are interested) but it is not perfect. One of the tour guides, Patrick, is in a polytechnic University in Ho, thanks to a sponsor. Last Monday, he left the village to begin his second of three years, but returned Tuesday because his sponsor could no longer support him and had not paid his school fees. Sylvester explained the situation to us when we asked why Patrick was still here.

We want to help Patrick, but the situation is a tricky one. We cannot simply hand him the money, and if too many people hear we sponsored him, we will have beggars on our doorstep. After much conversation among ourselves and with Sylvester, we decided it is appropriate for us to sponsor him this year and try to keep that information among ourselves (he only needs about $150 USD).

Now here is my question to you, the ones who have sponsored and supported me to be here. Do you think it is appropriate for me to help sponsor Patrick with the money I raised before arriving in Ghana? I am struggling with this question because Patrick is a personal friend who is in need. Though the money may help many down the line (like his future family), it is going towards an individual. What makes the greater impact: helping a few individuals or providing something for a group (a school, orphanage, or program)?

There is a second case I am struggling with even more. Before we left Mampong, Mavis (our host mom) explained to both Mo and myself that she plans to turn the empty building behind their house into a cold store (where you buy frozen meat and fish). But she needs some help with the startup money and asked if we would donate to her. Again, this is a situation where I would be helping a personal friend; however, this is something she wants to do. The family does not need to depend on the money she will make. How much does that matter?

These are questions I have been seriously considering recently and, though I know the final decision is my own to make, I would love to hear your input. Your support is a very important aspect of my trip.

Life with the Monkeys

Well, I have a new place to call home. We made it down to Mampong after my last post just long enough to see our family and unpack then immediately repack. We jumped back on the road and headed to Accra to greet John, who arrived very early Monday morning.

Tuesday evening, we arrived in Tafi Atome, the small village and monkey sanctuary. The three of us (John, Mo, and myself) will live here until Christmas, helping with tourism, NGO proposals, and hands-on work with the children. There are three schools and an orphanage in this town of less than 1,000. The children are wonderful, we already have a strong following that hang out in front of our hut almost all day wanting to talk, play, and learn. The orphanage has 43 children in it, about half of whom have poor family in town, the other half are true orphans.

We are much more secluded than we were in Mampong- surrounded on all sides by monkey territory. It involves either an hour walk, 30 minute bike ride, or 10 minute taxi ride (which you have to call) just to get to the junction to find transportation anywhere else.

Being so secluded, it is a bit more involved to find internet, so my posts may come less frequently, I'm sorry about that ahead of time. I will try to post well when I get to post!

In typical Ghanian fashion, we arrived on Tuesday but have not started work yet. We will meet with the tourism committee tomorrow morning (a group of elected community members) to talk about what they want from us, and hopefully to pitch some of our ideas. I am optimistic that we will be able to make an impact on this village. They seem open to new ideas and truly rely on money from tourism to survive. In the meantime, we have had a great time with the local children, who seem to be more respectful and speak more English than those we encounter in Mampong.

We felt immediately welcomed and at-home in Tafi Atome, they are taking very good care of us. Because it is such a small town, everybody knows who we are and why we are there. Just walking around, we will get smiles accompanied by "welcome" or "thank you!". Plus I think it is just the greatest thing that I finally live where seeing monkeys is just as common as seeing goats or chickens! I just don't get tired of that.

I promise next post will have pictures!!!

Je ne comprends pas!

That is one of about 4 things I can say in French (and it's not pretty...). Between Mo and myself, we could confidently navigate any country in which the primary language is English, Dutch, Spanish, German, or Italian. They speak French in Burkina Faso. It was the first time in all my traveling when 98% of the people we encountered did not speak a word of English. It certainly added some excitement to the trip. Each encounter became an interesting mix of charades, guessing games, and lots of laughter. Since we didn't speak the language and wanted to visit some of the more obscure spots, we decided to travel in style. We hired a car and a driver. Unfortunately, our driver was part of that 98%. Despite the impenitrable language barrier, I found Burkina Faso to be an amazing country and the people as nice as could be.

Burkina is rated as the 3rd poorest country in the world, but I would never guess that from traveling there. The people are happy, helpful, and proud of their heritage. The streets are clean (at least cleaner than Ghana's). There is almost no crime and I certainly never felt threatened or unsafe. We encountered very few beggars and did not see many people living on the street. The nicest thing for me was that I felt much less aware of my whitemess in Burkina than I do in Ghana. People didn't stare, point, laugh, or scream when we walked by. Taxis hassled us less, and there were very few calls of "abruni" (well, it's "le blanche" there). I always felt relaxed walking around.

And now, in no particular order, a few of the fun and memorable things we did in Burkina: I rode a camel, slept under the stars in the desert, bribed the Ghanian embassy to give our passports back, ate roadkill (for Breakfast!), swam in waterfalls, sat on a crocodile, went to a cattle market, and bought a kora (that's a beautiful traditional west aftrican instrument I studied last year).

That last one has made traveling back through Ghana on tro-tros very interesting. It was a great trip, but it's also good to be back in Ghana. Though I enjoyed the challenge of learning French in 10 days, it's nice to be able to communicate with people again. Plus Burkina was HOT!! They are already in their dry season; it didn't rain the entire time we were there. In fact, the first time I saw clouds in the sky, we were on our way back to Ghana. I would regularly drink 5-7 liters of water in a day, without changing the frequency of bathroom trips. Unless it was just bought (which involved stopping every 20 minutes or so), the water we drank was hot. Not luke warm, but close to boiling. When I carried 3 satchets from the car to our room one afternoon, they burnt my arm. Then we drank them. It was unpleasant. But completely worth it.

I'm sorry I don't have pictures to add to this post, but we are still not done traveling. We are in Techiman now, slowly making our way down to Accra.

Happy belated Halloween. We were in Ouagadougou for Halloween here, so we went to an overpriced supermarket, bought some overpriced snickers, and handed them out to people we met, desperately attempting to explain why we were giving out candy. It worked sometimes, mostly they just walked away very confused. Then we ate the rest of the candy for dinner. An interesting halloween, I must say.