begining of the beach bum phase

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CHANTEL - Today we decide to take it easy and head to the beach with some of the girls from campus. Our first trip to Labadi beach and we’re pretty pumped, I think that I am about the whitest person in Ghana so it is definitely time to work on my tan. Ended up being a crazy action packed day with the lost little girl and An being chased down the beach by the crazy Ghanaian girl. After spending sometime laying in the sun we hit the water and were slowly working our way in (the waters warm and the waves are good sized) two Ghanaian girls felt that we Obruni’s simply were not getting wet fast enough. So they started to splash them and we began to splash back. Then they grabbed An and I and attempted to drag us into the water. An broke free and booted it down the beach, with her new Ghanaian friend chasing her all the way. Mine started a bit of a chase but she gave up pretty easily and collapsed in the water. I joined her and we sat laughing watching An running down the beach screaming something about me saving her. After swimming with our new friends and having enough of being approached by about a dozen Ghanaian guys wanting to be our friends and to swim us - we need to find something they understand because apparently NO doesn’t work at all - we collapse back in our lounge chairs.

It was at this point that we notice a little white girl wandering by herself down the beach. After several minutes of watching her get upset, look lost and narrowly avoid being trampled by a horse I decide to go over and sit with her until a frantic parent comes our way looking for her. She couldn’t have been more than three, toddling by herself and looking for a familiar face. She wouldn’t speak so we sat and played in the sand for awhile. Another girl (her name is Lobke and she is now a good friend of ours) sitting near us joined us and we both decided that maybe we should go look for a parent on the beach, hoping that if we walked around with her someone would see her - after all we had been sitting there for a good 20 minutes thinking that someone would come running by. Nobody did, and nobody said anything to us as we walked around with me carrying her. Some of Lobke’s friends, Ghanaian raised boys of Lebanese descent, told us to take her to the gate and let them know that we had a lost little girl with us. As we walked towards the gate two Ghanaian women came running after us and took the girl. Lobke expressed the fact that she did not feel comfortable just handing her over to them, she had been all alone for at least half an hour now and nobody seemed too worried, it does not matter what country your in nobody leaves a child that small alone near water. The girls grandmother came over and informed us that she was playing with her aunts and cousins in the water. I informed her that there was no one near her for the last half hour and that she was sitting in the sand by herself for quite some time. The grandmother then turned to me and said “her aunts and cousins are black, you wouldn’t of known she was with them”. At that point I just about lost it, I told her I didn’t care what color they were, nobody was with her and she could have gotten hurt. The grandmother insisted we show her where we found her so she could prove to us that we were wrong - so we walked back to where we were sitting. The grandmother than carried on another 400+ meters down the beach and into the water where the aunts and cousins were, no where near where we found the little girl. She didn’t say another word to us and we just sat there baffled at how rude she had been. I can understand someone being concerned by their granddaughter being carried by a stranger but it was clear that they were not watching her and that they had no idea where she was.

Took a few minutes to get over that but we made a new friend out of the whole thing - Lobke is a veterinarian intern in Ghana from the Netherlands who loves to go out dancing so she promises to take us out on the weekend. We go swimming again and are followed around by three small Ghanaian girls who end up playing with us in the water - the kids here are really cute. We also meet an American girl named Amanda who is back in Ghana to live with her Ghanaian boyfriend Jidi. They both invite us out with them later in the week. I find it really interesting to hear why other people in Ghana - it seems like such a random choice for a destination but we love it here and so do most of the people we meet.

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