Molly, Indiana Jones, and me

I am more a fan of the 1st (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and 3rd (The Last Crusade) Indiana Jones movies than the 2nd (Temple of Doom) and 4th (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). I do not intend to discuss the relative merits of them, just to say that several events that we experienced during the visit of my friend Molly resembled things in Temple of Doom.

First: We went to Kakum Park (see photo of canopy walk/rope bridges under the entry "In country" posted on 9 September) where we both mentioned that we were thinking of the scene in Temple of Doom where Indiana Jones cuts the rope bridge with a sword while Shorty and the whiny female lead are on it.

Then we took a wrong turn on our way back to the Visitor's Center, not so that we got lost, we just took a less used path to get there. On the way, however, we encountered this:


















when I almost stepped on him while wearing sandals. He was up against a sort of step in the path, hence why I did not see it until I was literally almost on top of it. Molly hurdled over him with a running start.

Exciting in a different way was our batik lesson. There is a great organization here called Women in Progress (http://www.womeninprogress.org/) that offers, among other things, cultural workshops; you can learn drumming and dancing, cooking, batiking, or work with local fishermen. They are affiliated with a cooperative/shop known as Global Mama's (http://www.globalmamas.org/). From the Global Mama's shop in Cape Coast, we went to Eli and Emma's batik studio. Molly and I selected stamps made from foam, the two women pictured below helped us with our part of the process which was to dip the stamp into the melted wax and apply it to the fabric.















Once we had done our small part (the stamping), the women dyed the fabric per our request. It was neat to watch the color develop - my cloth started out looking as if it would be a dark purple or black, but as it dripped and started to dry the color changed to a grey and finally to the sunny yellow I wanted.














After the color developed, the cloth was mixed in a pot of boiling water to remove the wax. It is dipped in and out of the pot with a long stick, the melted wax is skimmed off the top, and finally the cloth is removed, wrung out, and hung to dry. It was a really neat experience, and we both got to take a piece of Ghanaian culture with us that we had a hand in creating.

Scenes from Molly's visit: bananas to market in Accra.
















The mango tree outside my house.