Accra

So, turns out by “two days,” Calvin really meant “one day then we’re leaving at 4 am the next day.” But we did have one day, I guess. I’m going to try to paint a picture of Ghana for you, but I really don’t think it’s going to do it much justice. In general terms, it’s a combination of Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, central Texas, and everything that possibly comes to mind when someone says the word “Africa.”

The first thing you see when you walk out of our hotel is a wooden plank sidewalk, with periodic gaping holes that reveal the open sewers beneath. There’s also a massive highway-- it’s hard to say how many lanes, because no one seems to really care. People and cars just kind of go the way they want. To walk to the bank, you run across the highway and follow one of the sidewalks pass street vendors selling everything. LITERALLY everything. There’s food, there’s clothes, there’s phones, there’s motorcycles, there’s leather sofas. There’s also a fair number of goats milling around, and we even saw some chickens today pecking around old parked cars.

On our way home, Ceci pointed out that, besides one or two billboards, you can’t really tell what year it is here. Sure, people are walking around with iPhones and Blackberries, but all of the cars (including tro-tros, which you’ll hear more about soon, I’m sure) look like they’re from the 90’s, or before. Most of the stores look like lean-tos, or kind of huts, but even the actual buildings all have a faded, dusty appearance. I would say probably about half of the people are dressed in Western clothes, but we also saw a ton of women in traditional African clothing with huge baskets balanced on their heads. They would weave in and out of stalled traffic selling everything from Mentos to bags of water.  OH. And there are men with AK47s (or some other big gun, not really an expert here) outside of all of the banks. I guess this is supposed to make me feel safe, but it backfired. On the other end of the comfort spectrum, Beyonce is apparently a national hero. She’s on the radio everywhere, and this really does make me feel safe.

We’re leaving the hotel at 4 am to travel up to Navrongo, so I should be able to tell you more about where I’m living tomorrow!

Akwaaba!

True to my word, I fell asleep as soon as I was seated on the plane, sleeping through a two hour delay on the runway and eight hours of the flight, leaving me with a comfortable amount of time to enjoy breakfast before touching down in Accra. Once we were through customs, we were greeted with this sign, which makes me more than a little concerned about the rest of the trip:

Having left DC late at night, it was disconcerting to leave the airport and see that, once again, it was night. The sun sets weirdly early here, so by dinnertime it’s pitch black outside. I haven’t had a chance to see much of Accra, since we went straight from the airport to the hotel, but I can tell you that there were lots of goats casually at bus stops and a graffiti reinterpretation of the cover of Bill Clinton’s “My Life.” Tomorrow we’re getting up early to go get our phones and exchange money and things, but I’m also hoping to spend the afternoon sightseeing.

I’m only in Accra for two days, and then we have another full day of travel to reach Navrongo, which is a little town near the border of Burkina Faso. Then we’ll have some time to unpack and relax before meeting our host, Dr. Williams, and getting started.

I’ll try really hard to keep this thing updated. Eric, feel free to badger me if I don’t.