Akropong

This weekend (Sunday through Tuesday actually) our group went to the Akrofi-Christaller Institute in Akropong, Ghana (it's in the Eastern region up in the mountains, about an hour from where we are in Accra). There we had our first "excursion" and some orientation about culture, customs, and religion in Ghana. We heard lectures on Muslim-Christian relations in Ghana (which are remarkably peaceable), Christianity's relationship with the African Traditional Religion (which explains a lot of the culture we see), and Culture and Customs, like doing everything with your right hand (including waving) and using family titles to address people based on what age group they are to you (mammy, auntie, sister, brother, etc.) Hopefully that will help us learn how to address the vendors in the Night Market, the place where we buy our cheapest meals because it's right by our hostel and you can get a meal for under 1 cedi (basically the same as 1 dollar).
I want to tell you a bit more about African Traditional Religion. The Traditional Religion holds to the belief that the spirit world affects every aspect of the physical world. An accident, an illness, anything that happens has a spiritual explaination too. Thus, the spirit world is very important to the physical world. All of the shops here are called "God's Time Resturaut" or "Jesus Saves Hair Salon" or something similar. It is not a matter of taking the Lord's name in vain, but a matter of truly believing that God is in all and through all, a matter of believing that God has complete control over all aspects of our life. In truth, it's quite Calvinistic!
The final thing we did as a part of our Akropong trip was to visit the Cedi Bead Industry and the Akosombo dam which provides electricity for 70% of Ghana, as well as parts of Burkina Faso, Togo, and Benin. It created Lake Volta, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. It also displaced a lot of people to do it... our guide said they were resettled along the banks of the river and a lot of them have jobs fishing, but seeing how controversial the displacement that is occuring in China for Three Gorges is, I can't imagine that it was smooth or desired by the residents that were displaced from their homes. How difficult it is to deal with some of those dilemmas- the dam provided electricity for so many, yet displaced so many people.
The Cedi Bead Industry was very cool to see. It was very sustainable bead-making, and they made some really neat stuff! They used a ton of recycled glass bottles to make their beads, everything is done open-air so there is no heating/cooling costs, and most things are done by hand so there is very little pollution from machinery. I was impressed by the output and the quality of these beads. It really was a neat place.