Final Weekend before Classes Begin

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After returning home (wow I can’t believe I am already calling this place home) from Kumasi and taken a much needed cold shower I headed to the International Student dinner. The dinner was for the individual students who applied directly to the University of Ghana and had come on there own as opposed to doing it though programs like ISEP or CIEE. Although I feel that doing it through a program would had made the first few weeks in Ghana so much having you day planned out to a tee, going on trips, and having the daunting task of registration done for you (which I am still in the process of trying to complete) I am happy that I was able to do it on my own and it just adds that much more to my experience thus far in Ghana. At the dinner we were treated to a free meal (who can reject that?) and some nice words from the Dean of the International Program at UG. While at the dinner I talked to a professor from Cornell University who spends 6 months in Ghana a year to work on agricultural technology and economics, as well as other individual international students from Hungry, Norway, the UK, Germany, France, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa just to name a few. The dinner was great especially the jollaf rice and it was nice to meet some new people that are just as confused as me when it comes to all things Ghana.

On Saturday we finally had our International Student Orientation from 9am-4pm. I stayed for the first half and listened to the important things like how you should not register for 300 level and 400 level because exam times will clash and it is against University policy to take an exam at a time other than the posted schedule time so you will fail. To bad they didn’t tell me this and my potential classes were a mixture of both 300 and 400 levels. After that I decided that the discussion about culture shock and safety and health issues such as malaria and how you can die if you eat a fruit that is not washed properly was not as important so I went into Accra with Julie (Mt. Holyoke), Rebecca (Drexel), Paul (Rutger), Stephanie (France) and Ryan (Clemson) to find cooking supplies and look around. After we went to the market we decided to take a taxi to the mall so all 6 of us squeezed into a taxi car. Unfortunately as we were driving 3 men in another taxi started shouting at our taxi driver to pull over, when the taxi driver continued to drive the 3 men in the taxi again drove up next to us and shouted at the man in Twi. Eventually our taxi driver pulled, and the three men dressed in casual clothing stepped out of there taxi claiming to be police officers. The handcuffs on the jean belt loop didn’t look to convincing to me nor did their attire of jeans and white t’s. We all got out of the taxi as the “police men” continued to yell at our taxi driver for overloading his car. As we walked off one of the “police men” got into our taxi and escorted the taxi driver away. We only had about a half a mile walk to the mall thank goodness. The mall is a little piece of America, sir conditioned and all. The stores inside and food was very westernized and there was also a cinema. It was so nice to get away from all that is Ghana for a bit and relax in a food court sipping on a cold soda. The second we walked out of the mall we were surrounded by children who grabbed us and asked for money. Theses children were more persistent than others that I have come across in the street markets of Ghana, and I later found out that the parents of these children bring them all the way from Chad to beg for money. By the time we got back from the mall I was hoping to take a nice ice cold shower since hot water is no existent in these parts, but the water was off…again.

On Sunday morning I had hoped to do some laundry and take a shower before classes start tomorrow, but chance of that we looking dimmer and dimmer by the second as we found out there was something wrong with the pipes and we wouldn’t be getting water for days. So instead I cleaned my room and relaxed on the big red couch in the lobby of ISH II and watched some Nollywood television (Nigerian t.v.). I would not recommend Nollywood t.v to anyone, but I must admit it was somewhat amusing to watch with all the princes’, goddesses, and gun shots that sound like a light saber fight straight out of a Starwars movie.

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Comments

[anonymous]

THANK for your story
TIG