Turkey Day

A happy Turkey Day to one and all. I have five minutes remaining on my time here, but I wanted to extend Thanksgiving Greetings to all those stopping by my blog.

And for my family,

I miss you too much right now, and I hope you're all having a wonderful time even without Allison or myself. May your mashed potatoes be perfect, may Tobey NOT get the Turkey this year, may the marshmallows on the sweet potatoes be abundant, and my Mom's stuffing recipe this year be the best ever. Cheers to family and friends, to hot water and electricity. Cheers to gathering and being away, cheers to adventures. I love you all.

The fun in dying?

Good afternoon / evening / morning / whatever!
I'm back in Accra. This weekend I ventured out to Kumasi in order to visit Bonwire (bon-wir-AY), a town some forty minutes drive from Kumasi where Kente was born. Seeing as I am studying Kente as my research topic, a visit to Bonwire seemed to make sense. I headed out on Friday evening with Trina, who was bound for Nama (the village she stayed in while I was in Benim) to spend a week with the villagers while doing more research for her ISP.
Now, I've made the trip to Kumasi before. And, all things considered, it was one of the easier trips I've had along the dusty unpaved roads of Ghana. However, for all of my previous excursions I have been with the full SIT Ghana Arts and Culture group, meeting at an assigned time to take a chartered death-roach-bus... I mean trotro... to our next destination. So you can understand when I say I was a little apprehensive about our trip.
It was very easy though, getting to Kumasi, so I needn't have worried. I met Trina at Circle, one of the largest stops in Accra for trotros, and after some confused calling around and vague descriptions of landmarks we found one another. After we met up we headed to the VIP bus depot, a popular chain of buses that always have trips to and from Kumasi going, and waited to buy a ticket. Granted, we walked into a den of shouting and yelling and ticket grabbing at first, but once we figured out the system and waited in line and avoided the angrier of the waiting passengers, we made our way to a bus and began our journey.
Unfortunately due to some setbacks (see: vague landmark descriptions, waiting times, etc) we set out very late in the evening. Despite the relatively short distance between Accra and Kumasi, the drive takes anywhere from four to six hours, depending on the number of stops your bus makes, the amount of traffic you encounter, and how fast / crazy your driver is. Our ride wasn't bad at all (I slept through most of it, thankfully), just a little peppered with a horrible film* on the bus' television. We were going to be met at the station by Kwame, one of the SIT leaders who had helped us out and around when we spent our two weeks in Kumasi so long ago.
Due to setbacks on the road and other obstacles, we didn't get into Kumasi until around midnight. Considering most Ghanians go to bed around seven in the evening, Kwame was understandably fatigued. He had promised to meet us at the station with a chartered cab to take us to his house. After getting off our bus and the standard Ghanian greetings, we looked around for our ride. Seeing nothing but an empty parking lot with some trotros waiting in the corner, we turned in slight confusion to our host.
"I couldn't find a cab, so I got us a trotro." He said.
Well, that was fine enough. Maybe a little awkward, considering the lateness of the hour and the fact a normal trotro holds 17 - 20 people and we were three. We greeted the driver, and in an attempt to be funny / amusing / endearing / adorable / all of the above, I made a really lame joke about being the mate of a trotro.
The mate, you see, is the person on the trotro who accepts the change from the passengers, keeps track of who gets on where and who gets off where, and interacts with the passengers so that the driver can, well, drive. Our driver was mate-less. Presumably, we were soon to learn, because he had left him at the bar.
Well, the driver screamed in laughter (literally) at my really lame joke or because I was so funny / amusing / endearing / adorable / all of the above. Although slightly unsettled, we clambered in (each taking up a bench) and began our descent into hell.
Ok, it wasn't THAT bad. But he did proceed to put petal to metal and shoot out of the abandoned station, over unpaved roads, bumping us so high in our seats my head hit the ceiling. We then rocketed along the abandoned streets of Kumasi while our driver turned around and kept speaking with us, eyes abandoning the road. After Kwame's instances, he DID turn the little attention he possessed to the complicated process of not killing us, but all the while talking to the absent mate. Each time we barreled past a stop, he'd call it out, asking "Yen se wo he?" (Where is your [collective] stop?). We were too busy holding on to answer.
But somewhere in between the buildings flying by, the violent shaking of the car, and the realization that he wasn't driving with both headlights on I began to have fun. Maybe it was the sheer absurdity of the situation or just the fact that if I were to die in Ghana, to killed by a crazed trotro driver would be quite an acceptable way to go. Trina and Kwame seemed to come to a similar realization, because when I looked around our small, shaking cabin, I saw them smiling. Or maybe crying. I can't really remember.
After fifteen minutes of said ridiculousness, we reached our destination, where our driver immediately shot out of the trotro as if it were on fire, sat down on the ground some feet away, and started yammering on his cell phone.
We looked at one another and started laughing.
Also, did I mention we ran over a chicken? Yeah. Chickens are like pigeons here (and lizards are like squirrels, just FYI) and we definitely flattened one during our wild and crazed ride.
Regardless, after surviving the trip to our accommodations, I slept quite soundly and got to go to Bonwire the next day, where I interviewed some master weavers, impressed the locals with my tricks (Look! I'm an Obruni! And I can WEAVE!), purchased some kente I couldn't live without, and had a merry time. Because Trina and Kwame were so entertaining, I decided to stay on another day and hang out / run errands with them rather than head back on another late-night bus.
So on Sunday, after said hanging out / errands, I went to the station and boarded another bus. Unfortunately, due to my timing and the fact it was rush hour, there was only one seat left on the bus: the jump seat. So I sat in the jump seat, sandwiched against the Bus' mate (who asked me to marry him every five minutes... funny for the first hour? Not so much after five) trying to ignore the pungent B.O. wafting from his unwashed body and attempting to finish my book. Oh what a fun fun time.
So I'm back now in Accra. I finished another Kente today! I'm quite proud of it, not only because it has some of the most complicated patterns I've learned yet, but also because I managed to turn one really, really big mistake into something that kind of looks like the Chrysler Building in New York. And I love that building, so therefore my mistake is awesome. For my next cloth I'm going to break slightly from the ones I've done in the past and work with a different back pattern. It's hard to describe, but it's keeping me from getting too repetitive in my creations.

I'm out of time (again), I'm growing to really dislike Internet Cafes, but I urge everyone to drive with both headlights on, strapped in a seat belt, paying attention to the road, and (if possible) avoiding as many chickens as possible.

Love to you (yes, YOU!),
Lo

* I don't know why, but Ghanian films or their imported Nigerian films are some of the worst I have ever had the misfortune of viewing.

Accra and Week One

Well hello, little neglected blog.

First off, kafra (sorry) for the lack of updates recently. Life in this Ghana has been pretty busy to say the least. But, as I have been learning from my Kente Master, "even the most complicated and beautiful Kentes can be unwoven if you take enough time and care," meaning it is always possible to undo your mistakes. Thanks, oh wizened master.

We're well into our ISP time, and everyone has dispersed around the country. Some are in Kumasi, some in villages scattered here and there, and I remain in Accra. Although I think I'll be taking a weekend trip or two to the Kente capitals of Ghana, I'm going to be in Accra until we leave. A couple of my fellow students (Isabel, Claire, and Megan Goldsmith) are in Accra for the majority of ISP as well, so we have rented a room in a hostel together. It's actually pretty nice. Although it's stuffy and lacks any kind of fan, there are two bunk beds, a bathroom with running(!) water, a counter we have furnished with a hot plate, and a small balcony on which to dry your laundry. My only complaint is that the ladder to get to my top bunk is quite slippery, making for some perilous mornings. I've quite gotten used to the occasional power outage and water stoppage. It's pretty interesting to think about how quickly you can adapt to new standards in living.

I'm keeping up with weaving kente. I weave every day from 8 in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. I'm weaving in a small town outside of Accra called Ashiaman. There's nothing remarkable to visit there, and since most Obrunis in Ghana are tourists or don't leave Accra, my daily walk to the kente workshop draws quite a bit of attention. And due to the high concentration of Ewe-speaking people from the Volta region (Ghana has many, many native languages. We learned Twi because it is the most commonly spoken), I have collected a couple more names: Obruni Kokoo and Yevu. Obruni Kokoo (pronounced kohkoh, not cucoo) means "red obruni". In Ghana, they have different color connotations based off of how pale or dark you are. Red, for example, is considered to be a very "light" color. Therefore you can be called "red" and it is akin to calling you "pale". So, for those of you playing along at home, I am being called "really, really pale white person". As for Yevu, it's the Ewe equivalent of Obruni, kind of. I prefer Obruni because the connotations are less negative. According to one of our professors of Twi, the term Obruni comes from the word for "horizon" and "visitor", referring to the colonizers who came from the horizon on their ships. Today it means a white person or any foreigner, or even Ghanians who have gone and received a "western education". Yevu, on the other hand, directly translates to "tricky dog" (Ye is dog and Vu is tricky in a negative context). Because the Ewe people encountered the colonizers only AFTER they had gotten around to taking advantage of everyone on the Gold Coast, their term for white man is much more negative. Although it isn't seen as a negative label any more, the history still remains in the meaning of the term.

The more you know.

Moving along, I am weaving every day in Ashiaman with Kwakutche, my kente master. I'm working on a full cloth as opposed to smaller individual pieces, and it's taking me forever. While I enjoy being creative and have tried my hand at many crafts before, timely tasks involving a lot of repetitive motions are the kind of thing I often abandon. Arts and Crafts are hardly my strong point. I like instant gratification, so having to weave at one thing for two weeks? Well, it's a lesson in patience for one thing. But I'm keeping with it, and minus one catastrophic disaster (goat, loom, lunch) things have been going very well. Today was my first day off, and I slept in for the first time since my arrival in Ghana. It was wonderful. I haven't had much time to just sit back and breathe here as I'm running from one place to the next or trying to coordinate something for my ISP or going back to pick up something I've forgotten at the hostel and so forth. Add to the fact that I don't get much sleep due to the stuffiness of the room and the stagnant air smelling slightly and inexplicably of asparagus, and you'll understand why one of the first things on my "to do when I get home list" is "sleep for a really, really long time".

On a completely different note, some of the stores around Accra have started to decorate for Christmas. After sending me into a slight rage at the first sight of tinsel and "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" signs, I had to take a step back and remember Ghana doesn't celebrate any large holidays in November. So it's actually quite remarkable that the holiday paraphernalia was held back until the second week of November. That's one of the things I'm know I'll miss the most about not being home for so long- Thanksgiving. It's a huge family affair for us, and somewhat of a cherished tradition, you could say. I'll miss the cooking and my cousins and my family (I guess). Alas, so it goes. Some of my fellow students are going to gather in Cape Coast for Thanksgiving to celebrate on the beach with a gumbo cooked by Megan Goldsmith. Although at first my intentions were to go along and join (as well as celebrate both Paco and Ismatu's birthdays), I might be headed to the Volta region to look up a Kente village instead with my Kente master. Regardless, this paragraph has depressed me and now I am moving on.

There's a mall here in Accra (I can't remember if I've mentioned it or not), and it's quite unsettling at times. I have to get out and walk by it every day on my way to Ashiaman. It boasts a Shoprite (grocery), Mr. Price (clothing store akin to a Forever 21), GAME (Wal-mart), Puma store (Puma store), and an Apple store (Apple store). You can go inside and completely forget where you are-- consumerism is universal. However, one of the most exciting aspects of the mall is the movie theater. It's really surprising how much I miss movies. I haven't seen one since I left, and so when those of us in Accra discovered the presence of the Silverbird Cinemas, we decided to make a day of it. Although exceptionally overpriced for anything in Ghana, converted to dollars it's about the same as going to a movie back home. I got a small popcorn(!), a coke(!), and went into the air conditioned(!!!) theater to see "Inglorious Basterds". Gory, inaccurate, and splendid, I don't know if I enjoyed it so much because I actually liked the movie or if it was because I was watching a movie for the first time in months. Regardless, due to the significant dent in my wallet I have to say I'll be waiting until Christmas break to see another film.

That's all for now! I'm headed out to do some research on Kente and start writing my ridiculously long paper.
Be safe, shower warmly!
Love always,
Lo

Leaving the nest

Today was the last day of class. If you could call it "class". Really it was the last time we will officially meet as a group until we reconvene for our final presentations the week before we head home.
Which, by the way, is in 35 days. Holy crap.
Since I'm staying in Accra for the entire research period, most of my work was done. I know where I'm staying, I didn't have to coordinate any travel plans or try and figure out where I'm staying next, and I already have my weaving contact and recently secured an advisor. So the past few organizational days have been pretty low-key for me. But that was fine.
Now, however, I'm beginning to feel the pressure of freedom all around me. I form my own days. Soon I will be moving out of my homestay and into a hostel with other students, so I won't even have to keep the usual hours... I could (gasp) sleep in!
Oh man I have to take a second and breathe. Let's not get too crazy here.
I'm really looking forward to the next month(ish). I think I'm going to learn a lot more than I already have, and the opportunity to weave kente in Ghana isn't something I pass by every day. So I'm pretty freaking lucky to be here. It will be nice to cook my own food, control what I eat (yay! No more fufu!), and set my own schedule. I just have to keep reminding myself that I have to write a 30 page paper at the same time, so procrastination is not recommended.
So when I publish the inevitable post in, say... 34 days freaking out about the ridiculousness of the paper, I'll have no one to blame but myself.
In other news, I got to poke around downtown Accra today, something I'd failed to do previously. I got to explore a whole new district, meet some new people, get heckled by new people, and visit a couple of shops. There's one store called Global Mamma's that's a free-trade store that has a base somewhere in the United States as well. They focus on Women's empowerment and helping them support themselves in Ghana. While their prices are much heftier than I've found anywhere else in Ghana (a dress, for example, sells for 27 cidi. I got my dress sewn (fabric included) for 10 cidi), they truly have things completely unique to their store. We visited one of their outlets in Cape Coast, but there was another in Accra that I got to pop into today. I also bought some Black Stars team jerseys, which are very popular due to their winning the U-20 World Cup! I never wrote about that here, but if I get around to it I'll share the story. Maybe one day when I have nothing else to write about.
One thing I DID miss in all our travels though... Trotros. I never really appreciated how easy they make my life and getting around this Ghana. Or how cheap, either. Even when they're more expensive, charging 45 peshewas (Ghana's equivalent to the cent), converting that back... it's less than loose change. I'm really enjoying how easy it is for me to explore all around Accra. I never got to do the "tourist" bits, and I'm planning to knock most of them off my list within the next month.
That's all for now {folks}! Just a quick update to prove I'm still alive, still studying, and still enjoying this Ghana.

It snowed at Colby yesterday. I writhe in envy. Enjoy it, kids.
Love,
Lo

ACTUAL post

Ok ok ok.
Let's actually read about the travels now, shall we?
We've now been all over Ghana. We've gone up to Tamale in the north, seen the boarder, gone all the way down to Cape Coast, back up and east to the Volta region, back down, and looped into Accra. Yemi told us today that we "know Ghana as much as I do", and he's been living here for some ten years.
Our most recent excursions, to the Volta region, were very beautiful. They seemed to pass by much more quickly because we only stayed in one location for two nights, but it was fun nonetheless. Instead of a focus on academic lectures, the majority of our days was spent either watching a dancing / drumming demonstration or participating in a pottery workshop.
The pottery workshop, located right on the lake Volta, one of Ghana's most predominant natural features, was quite relaxing. We got to knead the natural clay collected from local farmers with a special kind of dirt, and then shape it on the floor into pots and blenders.
The oddest thing about this is that when they build the pot, they build from the top to the bottom. You create a doughnut of clay on the floor, and then wetting your hands you work the clay upwards. First you create the top, rimmed, layer and let it dry. The next day you come back with new clay and complete the pot, closing the top up and leaving the opening on the floor. I'd only ever thrown a pot on a wheel before, so watching one being made in this way and seeing the degree of perfection they were still able to achieve was ridiculous.
We all started out with our own pots, but after several attempts the two women who were instructing us would walk around the floor (we all sat on a concrete floor in a scattered, unorganized clump) and reclaim our pots. Then they'd make the pots we'd just tried to make, creating in one minute what we'd just plodded for half an hour on.
We also got to create "blenders". These are a fixture in every Ghanian kitchen. It's a low, shallowish bowl with ruts carved out of the bottom. Using a wooden hand piece shaped like an hourglass, you use the blender to mush and crush spices before adding them to the food. They're also good for mashing tomatoes for sauces and avocados for guacamole. They were made it the same fashion as the pots, from the top down, but instead of building up as we did for the deeper pots, we built supportive bases onto the bottoms. I tried to etch a narwhal into the side of my bowl, but the clay was too leathery by the time I was struck with my inspiration. Alas, I am left only with the tiny narwhal of a signature on the bottom of my creations.
In addition to creating (or watching them create) the pots, we also got to see how they naturally fired them. In the bush where we were learning they don't have kilns, so everything is fired in an open-air fire. They also use this process to blacken some of the pots, turning the natural terracotta color of the clay into a sooty black. First they laid out corn husks into the base of the fire. On top of those they stacked the dried out pots. It apparently didn't matter if they were touching one another, because they stacked them all together into a large pile. Around the pot-pile was thrown more corn husks along with dead palm branches. They used the branches to enclose the pots entirely into a small heap of dead leaves. Finally a layer of straw was thrown on top and lit. Because the middle and bottom layers burnt more quickly than the upper and final layers (aside from the straw used to kindle the fire into existence) the smoke got trapped within the layers of dead foliage and created a super-hot fire. And a lot of smoke. It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would to fully fire the pots. Once they were fired, some were taken away to be spray painted while others were just set out to sell.
They don't have any glazes here, so everything is either blackened, left the natural color, or spray painted. I don't know if glazes have been introduced but haven't taken, if they're to expensive, if they're unpopular, or if they simply haven't made their way to Ghana yet. Regardless, the whole process was fascinating to watch and learn about.
Another thing we got to do was create glass beads. They were completely recycled from glass bottles, and used to create many different styles, shapes, and sizes of beads.
You started with a bottle whose color you like, and then you smashed the crap out of it. After taking the small splinters of glass and putting them into a mold (made by hand from the same natural clay of the pots-- but the molds are made by the beadmakers themselves. They vary as per shape and size, but usually they are round holes in a clay disk. There are usually 4 to 10 holes in a disk, depending on the beadmaker's skill), you put the mold into a burning hot fire and let it melt. The fire is constructed in a clay oven that allows it to reach ridiculous temperatures (note my colorful use of adjectives to cover up my lack of note taking) to melt the glass together. After they have melted enough, you take them out and use a small straw to round them out within their holes in the mold and poke a hole through the bead.
We worked with a blue rum bottle, a brown Guiness bottle, and a green gin bottle, in addition to the standard clear window glass. You could make a pure-color bead, but some of the most beautiful beads were made by mixing the different glasses together in a combination. Due to the process, instead of the colors flowing together into a mix (like yellow + blue = green), a marble process took place making a multi-colored bead. Everyone got to play around with the types and colors of beads to make, and we all came up with some pretty amazing results.
After the art days, we also got to sit down and see two new styles of dance. We've already been to quite a few dancing demonstrations, so it's amazing to me that there are still dances we haven't seen yet, costumes we haven't imagined yet, and drum beats we haven't heard yet. Ghana is such a diverse place, and that's a fact I sometimes forget. One of the dances involved a mock-fistfight where men in colorful tu-tus pranced and jumped in the sand in front of us. Another one involved women with mirrors dancing around and dragging some of the Obruni bystanders into the fray. One of my favorite dances, though, showed a man getting shot by a gun and how, back in the day, the traditional healers dealt with such a serious wound.
In dance form.
It was so cool.
But we've completed that chapter in our travels, and now we are about to set off on our ISP time. This unstructured month is where we complete our research topics (mine is Kente cloth) and tie off any loose ends we might have left around the country. It's a little daunting, facing the infinite possibilities of the future month, but I'm very excited to learn weaving and start to seriously research into this topic that has fascinated me since I first landed in Ghana.
I'm going to be in Accra for the bulk of my ISP, but I'll keep you posted of any sudden changes. I hope everyone at home is enjoying the colder weather and early snows!
Love,
Lo
PS: I'd like to include a shout-out to my cousin Allison who is studying abroad in Italy. I have Google Analytics going for this blog to record page-counts and the like, and one of the features included is a map showing where in the world I get the most traffic. The country that visits the blog most is, understandably, the US, but holding on for a strong second is Allison in Italy. I say Allison in Italy because she's the only person I know of in Italy, and therefore the coveted second position belongs to no one but her. So a hearty congrats, Al. Many thanks for staying with me this long.

The Return

A howdy hello from... Accra?

That's right! We've come full circle, returning once more to the capital of Ghana, Accra. We're back with our homestays (this is the Pimpongs for me, with Auntie Emma and Uncle Samuel and the crazy hectic bathroom o' doom) . I'll blog more about this later, but I have to keep things short right now because there's someone reading over my shoulder.

Until later!
Lo