hollieeloise

On a bad day in Accra, a word that seems to resonate with myself and other volunteers is ‘endurance’. You endure the heat and mugginess, the stench of petrol fumes and sewage, the stares on street corners. You endure the indigestible carbohydrates, the claustrophobic tros and the frustrating amount of time it takes for simple things to be done. It’s energy consuming to walk down a street where everybody is watching you, to peel hawker’s hands from your arms, to shake your head at the hundreds of taxis beeping their insistent horns at you, knowing that whatever you do, there will always be someone watching. You have to gather all your confidence to ignore the staring and constantly walk around as if you know where you’re going to attract the least attention as possible. Living in ... read more

Apologies for digressing from the travel side of the blog but I have to get this off my chest. I am living in guilt, and divulging my secrets on the world wide web must surely help to relieve it. I think I have made Aunty’s dog pregnant. For those who don’t know, I am living in a house in Accra with a retired teacher who we call Aunty. She’s a lovely lady who trundles around after us offering advice and guidance. Like many Ghanaian people she has strong Christian values about relationships, marriage and affairs. Her dogs do not. After the exhausting journey up north I opened our gate to find two doglets desperate to escape. Feeling tired, I decided to let them play out on the road instead of calling them in straight away and ... read more

Early news: It’s half past six in the morning and I arrive in the office. The breakfast show is already in mid-flow - through the glass walls, I can see the presenter standing over a microphone in the studio, avidly gesturing with his hands. I sit down to the computer and watch hopefully as it struggles to boot. After fiddling with the internet cable it finally connects and takes three minutes for the homepage to come up. I catch a glimpse of the international headlines before the computer dies a sudden death and I am left with no stories and ten minutes to go before the 7am news. Grabbing a pile of newspapers and a pen, I improvise five minutes worth of stories and make it into the studio for one minute to seven. In search ... read more

We woke up early on Saturday morning in Cape Coast and headed to the canopy walkway in Kakum National Park. Chuckled at the people who were getting scared until we reached the platform and realised that the bridges were just planks of wood held up with a bit of string netting. I would like to describe the rainforest in detail, but once the boys started messing around behind me and the plank started wiggling from side to side, I put my head down and marched over the bridges, completely missing the scenery altogether. Safely back on firm ground, we took part in a nature walk and then headed back to Cape Coast for some food and a rest. We ate dinner by candlelight as the electricity went out and then headed out towards a beach bar/restaurant. ... read more

On Saturday we were woken up by the sounds of helicopters flying overhead. Whether it was security or media we weren’t really sure, but we did know that Barack Obama was on his way. The lead up to the American President’s arrival in Ghana has been a very different experience to that in England. Not to say that the English weren’t excited to have him but it certainly wasn’t the kind of life-changing anticipation that many Ghanaians have had for this weekend. Obama T-shirts, badges, books and flags have been on sale in the streets; the ‘Akwaaba Obama’ song has blared out of speakers in shops and tro-tros; journalists have been contending for press passes; and despite most Ghanaians speaking their traditional language, which is totally beyond my understanding, the word ‘Obama’ can still be heard ... read more

With two weeks' worth of Accra's carbon monoxide swirling in my lungs, it was about time to get away for the weekend. So on Friday afternoon, we waded through a fish and vegetable market to find the bus station (which took a little while as nowhere is really signed and Ghanaians don’t seem to do maps). With flies everywhere and the ground wet with filth from the rain, we were happy to finally get onto a tro tro. Even as we sat down, hawkers rapped on the roof of the bus and shoved food through the open windows for us to buy. I sat in the back row, wedged between another volunteer, both of our backpacks and a little girl and her father. It took an hour just to get to the edge of the city ... read more

Here is creative writing piece number two. Have been doing various news bits too but Ghanaian people seem very interested in Oburuni's 'first impressions' so here goes... As human beings we have an artful ability to normalise our surroundings. Cast into a foreign place, we are quick to adapt to the novel sensations we encounter. What begins as remarkable, exciting and new can all too quickly become ordinary, routine and even mundane. This is why it’s so important to record our impressions of a place in the first few days of arriving, before the new becomes old and the unfamiliar so familiar that you no longer really see it at all. On 12 June, I arrived in Ghana, the first West African country I have visited and my home for the next three months. Stories had ... read more

To all those who told me Ghanaians love their football and heard me say "Well I won't be reporting on that!", here is my first article to be published. Admittedly, it is much more of a creative writing piece but Match of the Day here I come... A procession of tro-tros pass by in a flash of yellow and red, men hanging from windows laughing and shouting. A man strolls casually between the cars, covered from head to foot in opaque red paint. Groups of people push past us. "My team will win 4-0 today," one smiles, waving his ticket in the air before disappearing into a group of red and yellow shirts. The noise becomes louder and unbroken as we discover the stadium encircled by swelling crowds and hawkers selling ribbons, bags and football flags. ... read more

Next stop was Railay Beach so we hopped on the night train to Surit Thani, which felt a bit like the Harry Potter knight bus with crazy characters roaming up and down the aisles and beds appearing from nowhere. (Thought that I'd mastered the art of squat toilets but the jostles and jerks of the train took this to a whole new level.) We fell asleep in the smog of the city and woke up to palm trees and pineapples. The south is unbeliveably beautiful - cloud-kissed cliffs looming over carpets of palm trees everywhere you look. After a taxi-train-bus-taxi-boat we finally arrived at Railay, a sandy bay wedged between two giant rugged cliffs. The west side of Railay is the best beach and amazing spot to eat dinner as the sun goes down and then ... read more