After a long time away and lots of procrastinating, I decided it's time to finally what is bound to be the longest blog entry in the entire history of blog entries. Since I last updated, I stayed in Ntinanko, a village in the Ashanti region, for two weeks and moved up north to Tamale, the northern region's capital.
So, let's start with some village details: Ntinanko is about 900 people and about an hour or so from Kumasi. Because SIT varies the villages they go to every semester, some of the children in the village hadn't ever seen white people before, so that was definitely an interesting experience. Other than that, though, the community was absolutely welcoming and accepted us right away. In fact, almost too much. I didn't realize that we would all, to some extent, be sort of like zoo animals where everyone, especially the children, would want to watch us do nothing. Sometimes, the six of us would be taking naps in the SIT headquarters living room and children would be crowding the windows to stare at us. It was pretty suffocating at times, but then a lady yelled at the 60-80 kids outside of our house and threw some rocks and they never really came back with such great force. We were able to do a lot of really great things, like teach in the schools and I was able to study the Ntinanko palm oil co-operative for my mini independent study, which I'm sure is too boring to write about in detail on here, but it was totally perfect for me. Also, on the list of Ntinanko experiences was the three-hour church service we went to...all in Twi. Yes. That happened. Oh, and Izzy got a millipede on her butt when she was going to the bathroom. Village life. Totally rad.
The village experience was by far one of the most life-changing that I've had so far in Ghana. I'm going to try to help out the Ntinanko schools when I get home. They have a Tech Ed class, but only one computer for 168 students and the roof leaks when it rains. All of the kids were so excited to go to school that I just don't feel right about leaving when I know I could pull something together.
Anywho, we drove seven hours to Tamale and now I think I might be in the hottest place on the planet. It was 110 degrees today. It's so different than Accra and Kumasi, though. There are goats and cows just roaming the streets and whatnot. It's really cool. Most of the people are Muslims, too, whereas most of the country is Christian. The city's much more manageable, too, which is really nice after just coming from a village where there's just dirt roads and under 1,000 people in the community.
Today, we went to see a dance and drum troupe and every time I'm reminded about how real and raw and human it is to just dance to simple drum beats with your bare feet. I absolutely love it and could watch it all day. I'd say I would love to actually participate every day, but I'm pretty much the most embarrassing person ever when I dance, so I just like to, you know, tone it down a few notches every once in a while.
My internet time is about to run out, though, but in the next entry (which will hopefully be sooner), you can expect any combination of the following:
+ The story of Anita
+ Making shea butter
+ American food in Ghana (specifically lamb burgers)
+ The lameness of Ghanaian cuisine
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