A Home Away from Home

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A lot has happened since the last time I posted - namely, I began my job at the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) and have moved into what will be my home for the next ten months! Everyone keeps telling me I have lucky stars following me around to have found a house so quickly, especially one that is furnished! It all came about during a lunch meeting last week… As a part of our orientation, all of the volunteers went to the Ministry of Education’s Girl Education Service (who are partners of WUSC’s) to meet with them, and especially with the Director, a man everyone calls Divine. Well it was brought up that I was still looking for housing when Divine said that he had an extra room in his house, and seen as he had rented to a previous female Canadian volunteer, well the option was open to me as well. I went and took a look at it last Monday, and by Wednesday I was moved it! It is in a neighborhood called Ashalley Botwe, which is a suburb in the north east of the city. I like it here because it’s quieter then the bustle of downtown, yet it’s very close to a big market and it only takes me about 40 minutes to an hour to get to work. Just like commuting back in Toronto (except in TO I don’t sweat my ass off and look like I ran a marathon by the time I get to work!)

So far it has been going very well! Divine has proven to be another of my “lucky stars” - I would have ended up lost and sleeping in the gutters of Accra without his assistance one night for sure! I would also probably not know how to properly do my laundry, ground spices for cooking, or know how to make some basic Ghanaian dishes! On my first night in the house, he and some of his friends took me to a concert, which was a lovely distraction - It was a musician from Senegal playing the cora and singing. Although I didn’t understand a word of what was being said, it was beautiful and melodic and put me in a wonderful mood! I feel like I have gotten the best of both worlds in terms of housing - I have my privacy, but also the support and friendship of Divine as well as sharing a compound with a family that has three very cute children! I am making it my mission for them to be my friends :P

Apart from the house, I have been learning how to get around the city on my own. My main mode of transportation is the tro tro, which is essentially a big van that piles in as many people as it can and takes off to its destination. Although an informal system, there is no shortage of vehicles and you never have to wait long to hop on one. It’s pretty much like catching the bus in Canada - there’s stations and stops (although really they will stop anywhere), so you just have to know what side of the road you are supposed to be on and where you’re going! I had a lovely adventure on my first day in the new house - I went to explore the market that is nearest me, called Madina, and although I made it there alright, my problem lay in coming home as I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of my neighborhood! All I could remember Divine telling me was something about New Town Junction. So I set out into the tro tro station, and having that “white-girl-I’m-lost” look on my face, people helped me to find the right tro tro… unfortunately it was going to actual New Town, which I discovered is another neighborhood in the city and very far from Ashalley Botwe, New Town Junction! So not wanting to look like the stupid foreigner, I sat on the tro tro all the way across town and then had to take a very long and expensive cab ride home! As Divine said, it was my baptism to my new home!

Although it is nice to have Divine around to introduce me to aspects of life in Ghana, I can’t rely on him to hold my hand to do everything, and plus he has his own life to live! So this weekend I set out to conquer Madina market once and for all, as if I wanted food for the weekend, that was the place to get it! Going to the market is definitely something I have to mentally psyche myself up for as that place is chaotic, bustling, crowded, and well just insane! Once you’re there though, the mood takes you over and I get into mission mode. It must be several blocks long and stretches down the entire length of old Madina road and is essentially just a set of streets all crowded with vendors selling everything from tomatoes and fresh fish to flip flops and cell phones. Saturday is one of the big market days and as such, the place was packed with shoulder to shoulder foot traffic in some places and people trying to get your attention to buy from their stall by any means necessary. And of course, being the only obruni in sight (foreigner), it makes it all the more overwhelming! I took a deep breath though and plunged in - I managed to get quite a lot off of my shopping list and by using my limited knowledge of Twi (a dialect that the majority of Ghanaians speak), even managed to do some bargaining (although to be honest, I really suck at it hahaha)! People really seem to appreciate the effort to speak the local language and always get a kick out of me pointing to an item and asking “sain?” (how much?) or saying “mahdassi” (thank you). Many times it gets a chuckle and the “ha! Obruni speak Twi!”. Another common response is for people to start speaking to me in Twi and I end up looking stupid cause I don’t know what they’re saying unless they’re asking me how I am, what my name is, or where I’m from! Oh and I also know how to say bread thanks to the woman at a store near my house. Hahaha, I’m trying though and will hopefully pick up a language book next week so that I can start forming more comprehensive sentences!

So that’s all my news for now! I wanted to include some pictures of my house, the volunteers that I spent time with last week, my Ghanaian Thanksgiving (pasta, salad, and rice pudding :P), flying over the Swiss Alps and the Sahara, and of my office, however the connection at this internet cafe is crap and I do not have the patience to figure out how to make it work! I will be hooked up to the internet on my own computer from Monday to Friday, 8am - 5pm Greenwich Mean Time though so stay tuned -- next week I will post just pictures! I will be heading up to Wa tomorrow for the week, so I will have lots of new stories and pictures from my cross country adventure as well! I will get into more detail about work in the coming weeks when I have some more concrete stories to tell. Hope all is well at home or wherever in the world you might be…

Lots of love,
Courtney

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