Mole and Birthday!

This past weekend, we visited Mole National Park, a two hour drive outside Tamale on some of the worst roads we’ve seen. At one point during the drive, the road narrowed to a three foot wide isthmus and our cab was forced to back up and choose the shoulder of the road instead. At another point, I was rudely awoken from my nap (we left at 6 am, I deserved the nap) when the cab nearly stalled out in a sand pit that, for some reason, took up most of the road. At any rate, we arrived in Mole miraculously intact and thoroughly in need of some time at the pool. The pool overlooked a jungle transitioning to savanna, with two large watering holes. Watering holes frequented by ELEPHANTS. We watched them all afternoon doing elephant things, like ambling around and taking showers using their trunks. Several hours into our elephant reverie, however, a band of baboons came tearing through the pool area, swiping Lyubov’s apple from our table and freaking out pretty much everyone. Baboons, and warthogs we later discovered, pretty much roam free around the hotel site. Accordingly, we chose to eat dinner inside.

The next morning, we joined a 7 am walking safari into the park. Led by an guide armed with a rifle, it was actually a pretty intense hike, at times requiring us to walk across logs to cross a stream or scamper up a hill because a charging elephant is right behind you. Seriously, but we’ll come to that later. Having already seen the baboons and warthogs more up close than we ever intended to, the real point of the safari was to find an elephant. We/the guide tracked down a group of three hidden in the trees, and encouraged us to go as close as we wanted. They shied off when a large group of Ghanaian school children came rustling through the trees, and our guide explained that they’re actually quite shy. They would much rather flight than fight, and there’s never been an attack at the park. The only time they do attack, he went on, is when they’re injured or when a baby is involved. Even then, the warning signs are clear: ear flapping and trumpeting. Good thing he told us, too, because not ten minutes later we were creeping close to another elephant we’d come across, all down on one knee for the best possible angle. And then we saw the ear flapping. And then the guard had his rifle up, and there was yelling, and we were running up an embankment, and then an elephant came charging out of  the underbrush. There were some tense words exchanged with our guide, who brushed the whole thing off with a very casual “Oh, that one is injured.” BUT WE’RE FINE, MOM. We’re great. And it’s a fabulous story.

WAYYYYYY TOO CLOSE

Monday was my 22nd birthday, which makes me feel old just to type. With our research falling apart around us, most of the day was spent fighting back tears and reading emails aloud with emphatic outrage. In the midst of this though, Mary, Ceci, and Lyubov really did throw me a nice birthday. I had a crown and a lovely pizza dinner in Bolga, and the night really took everyone’s minds off of how badly our projects are going. We spent a long time singing along to Mary’s 4th of July playlist, and especially with Thanksgiving coming up, I think we really all just want to go home.

Monkeys and Waterfalls!

We were back in Tamale on Friday, where we met up with Kathryn, who graduated from Georgetown last year. She’s now in Tamale working with a clean water NGO, and offered to let us stay with her for the weekend. It was lovely, she had 4 extra (clean) beds and a kitten, which is really all we ever wanted. On Saturday, a cab driver named Small Boy showed up at the house at 5 am, and we were off for a full day of monkeys and waterfalls. [Sidenote: When Small Boy gets a girlfriend, he’s going to change his name to Big Boy. I couldn’t write this entry without including that tidbit.]

We rolled into the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary around 9:30, having spent fully half of the driving time navigating the 30 km dirt road into the jungle. It was more of a dried up riverbed than a road, and would have been entirely impassable during the rainy season. It’s a shame the road is so bad, too, because the Sanctuary is really well kept and makes for a lovely tourist destination once you get there. Like the crocodile pond at Paga, the Sanctuary was first protected for spiritual, not tourism or conservation, reasons. The legend goes that the chief was walking through the jungle and found a bunch of monkeys playing around a coffin, which he took and brought to the local fetish priest. The priest told him he could give the coffin back to the monkeys and they would go away, or if he liked the monkeys he could keep the coffin and they’d stay near the village forever. Weird, I guess, but whatever. Point is the monkeys have been really closely intertwined with the villagers ever since. Supposedly, the monkeys will always seek out one of the fetish priests before they die, so that they can be buried in the monkey cemetery. The fetish priests are buried there, as well. Historically, one fetish priest was always a virgin woman, but that rule has become pretty lax recently “because a virgin is too hard to find nowadays,” according to our tour guide. Who was a German schoolteacher. Anyway, the Sanctuary has two types of monkeys: black and white colobus and mona monkeys. The colobus are a little more shy and stay in the taller trees, but the monas are really friendly and will come really close. They like to raid the villages for food, and will steal shiny things from tourists if you’re not careful. They came right up to us, like within two feet at times. 

After the monkeys, we packed into the cab and Small Boy took us to the Kintampo Waterfalls. They’re the second largest in Ghana, but the biggest are too far away for us to reasonably travel to so we settled. The waterfall was packed. It was a Saturday, and there’s a Muslim holiday this week on top of it, so entire busses of students emptied out into the park. It seems like a great place to go on weekends, there were lots of gazebos for picnics and a guy grilling meatsticks (kabobs... we just call them meatsticks). Plus, when we headed down the trail to the largest waterfall, there were huge speakers set up by the waterside blasting Ghana’s greatest hits. Very few girls actually went in the water, but Mary and I didn’t let that stop us. Some of the guys even helped us climb up behind the waterfall, which I really appreciated because I was going nowhere but face-first into a rock without their help. It was pretty high up, and Mary and I didn’t know how we were going to get down safely... until someone pushed us and we slid down the slippery rocks into a gaggle of kids at the end. It was so much fun, but we didn’t spend too long in the water. Ghana’s freshwater is notoriously swimming with parasites, and we’re almost definitely infected with schistosomiasis now. It’s nothing a thorough deworming back in the States can’t fix, though, and it was so worth it.

With the Muslim holiday tomorrow, we’re not going to be able to resubmit to IRB until Tuesday at the earliest. Troublesome, because we’re quickly running out of time to get everything done. Oh, and the water is out.

Halloween in Tamale

We worked our Peace Corps contacts and landed an invite to their annual Halloween party in Tamale, the largest city in the northern part of Ghana. Tamale is about two hours south of Navrongo, so it was well worth the effort on our part to travel down for the party. We also were excited to have our first tro-tro experience.

Tros aren’t exactly public transportation, since they’re not state-regulated and you barter a price, but they’re not exactly private either, as they run between established and extensive tro stations. I guess tros are analogous to busses... only in the type of disrepair you only see in junk yards in the States. They’re the size of your typical 12-person Georgetown vans, although the interior is ripped out and refitted to fit over 30 people (we counted 35, but some of those were babies). It’s not uncommon to see tros were the doors need to be tied shut with rope, or where doors are missing entirely. And it’s almost a given that there will be animals. The roof of our tro to Tamale was packed with chickens, who squawked most unhappily when we hit a bumpy patch in the road. However, we only paid 5 cedi for the entire trip, which is a pretty good deal.

Tamale, the “NGO Capital of Ghana,” is rumored to be the fastest-growing city in all of West Africa. There are a lot of foreigners and investment, but this also means that the crime rate has gotten really bad, especially targeted attacks against foreigners. However, it’s a fun city and we had a great time. Besides meeting up with the Peace Corps kids, we met another of Ceci’s cousins who attends medical school there. She took us out for great Chinese food, and showed us around the city a little before we left on Sunday, and we were disappointed to have so little time to explore. Never fear, though, we’re headed back this weekend and will hopefully get to see more this time around!

In Tamale, we also had our first brush with Ghanaian homophobia when Mary and I were, somehow, accused of being lesbians. Despite its reputation as a progressive African nation, Ghanaians in general are very conservatively religious, either Muslim or Christian. Nationwide, homosexuality is illegal and completely unrecognized. “That doesn’t happen in Ghana” is a frequent explanation. The subject has become particularly sensitive in this past year, as several prominent politicians (especially in the North, away from the Western influence of Accra) have called for gays to be rounded up and arrested and have asked neighbors to “report” on suspected homosexual behavior. There’s been huge backlash to Britain’s statement that it will cut off aid to countries who do not recognize gay rights: Ghana’s president just this past week publicly vowed to never legalize homosexuality in Ghana. Unofficially, Peace Corps members are working to support the underground gay rights movement, but it’s clear that Ghana is really far away from equal rights.

All in all, it was a really fun weekend away from Navrongo. Because of all the crime, I didn’t bring my camera (this seems to imply that I value my iPhone over my life, and I’m not really sure what to say to that), so I don’t have pictures. However, if you picture me in whiskers standing in front of a mosque, that just about sums it up.

Hospital update: Was called in at 6 this morning to observe a C-section. Gross and fascinating. Not posting details to preserve Kilbride's fragile sanity.