In country (now with photos)

I arrived safely last Sunday, and was taken to my school (Achimota, also called Motown) where I was met by a fellow teacher and former Fulbrighter. She arranged for the keys to my new home, for it to be tidied since it had not been used during the last school year, and took me shopping for some initial groceries and household items. So many people have already proven themselves invaluable to me, and I am sure they will continue to be so throughout the coming year. As I already mentioned this former Fulbrighter helped me get settled, later showed me around campus, took me to meet the headmistress (like a principal), also introduced me to someone from the American Embassy, and later the Head of Department for Social Studies. One invited and drove me to a service at the church where he is a pastor. Two other teachers initiated and sponsored a trip to Cape Coast (a town west of Accra) where we visited Kakum National Park and took a canopy walk through the forest, 40 meters off the ground. It was beautiful, so green and lush.





There are times I forget that I am in Africa, and this was not one of them! The landscape on the drive to the park was intriguing – several kinds of palm trees, but not the really tall ones (my knowledge of local flora and fauna is a fledgling thing!), and dense undergrowth, with an occasional lone very tall tree in the middle. It creates a wonderful vista. I have taken to walking around the campus – it is sprawling, I was told that the large oval road that encompasses most of this campus is 2.9 kilometers long, so it is much more like a college than a high school setting from my American perspective. One reason it is so large is that a number of students board (live at the school) as Ghana has a national educational system, so students can attend schools in other parts of the country. The educational system here is very competitive. From what I have read, approximately 260,000 junior secondary school students (think 8th or 9th graders) take a test each spring and 60,000 of them do sufficiently well to be admitted to the senior secondary schools (like Achimota). The better your scores, the better your chance of attending the school of your choice. This also means that the 1st year students will not arrive until the middle of October as the scores were only recently released and the students have to be notified and then make arrangements to get to the school they have been placed in. Anyway, back to my walks around campus: I am lucky that I have yet to fall into a gutter (pictures of those to come as well) and broken an ankle, as I spend much of my walk looking up into the trees trying to see the birds that are making these wonderful noises. There is one bird that, when it flies, the sound generated by its wings resembles an owl – at least I think so... Another that has a sound I cannot describe, but it is entirely black except for a bright red beak. One I have seen is an iridescent blue. The plants here are amazing as well – one tree near my home has leaves that are easily more than a foot in diameter, there are bushes with beautiful and fragrant yellow flowers, and there are aloe plants in pots outside my front door (no call for them yet, as I have not yet gotten a sunburn…)

After Kakum and the canopy walk we went to Elmina slave castle in Cape Coast. It changed hands several times during its history, it was first a Portuguese fort, than a Dutch, and finally a British until they were kicked out at independence. The guide estimated that between 12 and 14 million enslaved Africans passed through the “gate of no return” (see photo below) on their way to the new world for work on plantations. The conditions were, of course, horrible and many died before leaving and many on the voyage to the Americas. Ironically, one group of people living in the castle during its tenure as a slave holding and departure venue were missionaries. Another woman and I agreed that anyone witnessing the situation at the castle and not saying anything about it does not deserve the title of “missionary”.

You can still see the remnants of the wharf where the slaves were loaded onto small boats to be rowed out to the large ships.

Fortunately, the power problems that I had heard about are mostly a thing of the past – a year and a half ago, due to insufficient rainfall and a hydro-electric power system, electricity was off for large chunks of time each week. Such has not been the case since I have been here. The traffic, however, is equal to what it had been advertised as (bad). I thought, I come from Washington D.C., home of the second worst traffic in the country most years, how bad can it be? Let me try to explain. Everything seems to be more than it is in the U.S., in that drivers in the U.S. do these things, but they are more common here. At certain times of the day, there are just more cars than the roads can handle. People do not use turn signals enough, people speed, there are fewer street lights (or sometimes none at all), there are potholes that make the driving more exciting, drivers use their horns A LOT, the tro-tros (vans that have been put into use for public transportation) stop at designated and undesignated places to pick up and drop off passengers. I took my first tro-tro today. Here is how it works: you stand by the side of the road (or sit if there is a bus stop), and wait for a tro-tro to come by going where you want to go. How do you know where it is going? A young man, called a “mate” hangs out the window and shouts the destination. You flag down the tro-tro and climb on. Many of the tro-tros end at huge hubs where you can transfer to another tro-tro. However, again there are few signs (saw my first sign on a tro-tro indicating destination today), so you have to know where in the large parking lot you have to go to get a tro-tro to your destination, again signaled by someone shouting that end point. Once you find a tro-tro going to where you want to go, you board and wait for it to be full, which is when it will leave. Fortunately, one of my new friends accompanied me on my tro-tro journeys today to help and provide much needed information about how it all works.

School starts next week, so I have much studying to do – as I suspected, the classes are very different than what I am accustomed to teaching, so I have a lot of prep work to do. As previously indicated, I will update this entry in a couple of days with more specifics and some photos. There is so much more to tell, but I have a whole year for all of that – like the Makola Market, the main market in Accra, which I visited last week.