Baililaylious

Right now I'm in the middle of an eleven day safari, which is more than most people do, but I really wanted to see the main parks and make an attempt at climbing Mt. Kenya. When I arrived I found out that it’s difficult to arrange for tours of the parks without going through one of the safari companies in either Nairobi or Mombasa. Of course, it would be technically possible to find a guide privately to go to each park, but this would be hard to do and possibly not that much cheaper. So far I’ve toured three of the main national parks that Kenya is famous for: Maasai Mara, Lake Nakuru and Samburu. I took seven days to make my way through them, which felt like a good amount of time, since we saw ... read more

I just wanted to let everyone know that I made my transition from Ghana to Kenya alright. I'm going to miss Ghana, but I'm also very pumped about Kenya. I spent the day today with a tour guide that took me around to all the safari agencies and helped me haggle for prices. It's actually a pretty sweet system, he preps me before I go in and says that pretty much I set me constraints such as number of days, parks and places to visit, price and items included in the price. Then I do that at several agencies and see how close I can get to what I want. Once I found a place that offered what I wanted for the price I wanted then he took me back to the company that he said ... read more

Green Turtle Lodge is an amazing place to spend a relaxing weekend. Last Saturday and Sunday I spent lying on the beach in front of the ecolodge. It's about a 6 hour journey from Accra, which is quite acceptable for the end result. We caught an STC bus from Accra to Takoradi. Then from Takoradi we took tros through Agona junction and down to the Lodge, which is very close to the small town of Akwidaa. It was great just to spend a couple of days with nothing else to do but lay on the beach, swim in the waves and eat good food. There are day tours out of Green Turtle, however, the better ones tend to be quite expensive. For example, a tour of a village that is built on stilts above a river ... read more

Ghanaian Service Ghana is the land of contrasts: heat to AC, north to south, Christian to Muslim, Bebeni to Obruni, etc. One of these contrasts is service. It’s amazing how drastic the level of service can change from one restaurant to another or from a taxi to a tro-tro. The Royal Garden Restaurant in the Aburi Botanical Gardens is one example of the kind of odd service one can receive in Ghana. After walking in and initially seeing nobody to be found, a waiter appeared from the back room as we seated ourselves and asked “would you like food?” I thought that would be obvious but it was still a fair question. I was more surprised that after we replied ‘Yes’ he just stood there and looked at us. After an awkward moment we asked if ... read more

Northern Ghana The north of Ghana is completely different from the south; they are like two separate countries. The first contrast is religion. In the south almost everyone is Christian and there is an abundance of churches and stores with Christian inspired names while the north is predominately Muslim. There are many mosques and some towns claim to be 100% Muslim. Another change from north to south is the appearance of the people that live there. We noticed that the people’s facial structures differed from those in the south. Some people, who lived in the north, looked almost Asian. As we drove toward Tamale and then to Larabanga the vegetation changed from secondary rainforest growth to a type of savanna, where the trees were much smaller and thick grasses replaced the stanch bushes of the south. ... read more

Well I'm really falling behind on subjects I wanted to write about, but I think I put some of them off for a little while longer to tell you about my first weekend here. However, I soon as possible I'd like to write about my first week in the Police Hospital since it was at a completely different level of care than any hospital back home. Also, I'll have to tell you about navigating Accra and making it through a market without being held up for a hour. But that will have to wait. Friday Helen, Eric and I wanted to explore the area just to the north of Accra (I forget the name of the region at the moment). We started by going to Aburi to see the Botanical Garden there. To get there and ... read more

This will just be a quick entry to give everyone an update since I haven't written in a little while. I'm going to be gone for the weekend because I'm going to travel north of Accra to Akuapem. When I get back on sunday or monday I intend to write a couple of entries about the first few days a spent at the Police Hospital. For now I'll just say it was quite interesting and I am learning some pharmacology, even though it would never be applicable in Canada since it's all regarding tropical diseases. There is always really slow points in the day where I end up just standing around waiting for something to do but the rest of the day there are quite a few patients to see and procedures to watch. Luckily, I ... read more

Today I was introduced to the Police Hospital that I will be working in for the next month. I arrived at around 8:30am after a half an hour tro-tro ride to Osu, although I didn't start my introduction until 9:30. As the other volunteers have informed me, Ghanians are very relaxed about time. People will often come late to work and its accepted as being quite normal. However, this is quite reasonable considering that the tro-tro is fairly unreliable. As Louise put it yesterday, the transport system here is organized chaos but it works. People actually sometimes fight their way on to a tro-tro. Imagine a very small minivan with about 20 people in the back of it; that's a tro-tro. When it came to a stop near the guest house this morning there were probably ... read more