end of the semester?!?

Though I still have just under a month left on this side of the Atlantic, I know that it's gonna fly! It's even stranger, because I am going to be done with classes (and thus with my college career!) as of next week Wednesday! (or Friday...depends on when I finish the final paper, but I'm shooting to be done BEFORE Thanksgiving! So what will the last 3 weeks here contain? So much fun! We are doing some traveling before we are done here. We have two more trips with our group - one to Kumasi and a final trip to the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, the bible college in Ghana that we've visited twice already. That's always a fun trip because the people there are amazing and the accommodations are fabulous! In between these trips we have just over a week of free travel. I am going with 3 other girls, Elisabeth Risch, Katie Sytsema, and Steph Lasota, to Togo! We are going to stay with a pastor-friend of the family of Elisabeth's family in the capital of Togo, Lome, for a few days. We will also spend some time on the beach perfecting our tans before we return home and some time hiking and seeing beautiful things like butterflies and waterfalls. All in all, it will be a great end to a fabulous trip! Suffice to say, internet access may be lacking from here on out... at least after next week... so I'm not sure when more updates will come. I love you all, and if you're in GR I hope to see you December 19 or around New Years, and if you're in Chicago, I hope to see you December 22, and if you're some where else, then get to a place I can see you, oK?

The Volta Region

It seems that all I have posted about recently have been the trips we’ve been on, but they are definitely the most interesting things that are going on! Being in school and our life here has become routine. Not to say that it’s boring (no way!) but finding new things to describe in a blog becomes difficult when it’s all so normal to me. So, I will talk about the trip we took this weekend. We were actually only gone Thursday and Friday, and Saturday became a day to catch up on homework and organize pictures and write this! We took off Thursday morning and drove to a fishing village on Lake Volta (which, at the time it was made in 1960, was the largest man-made lake in the world). The water is inundating this village because the lake is rising right now. It’s causing a lot of problems for the people who live here. Many of them only moved into the village when the lake was created. The lake was created by the building of the Akosombo Dam, and people who had previously lived along the Volta River had to be relocated. The people in this village had been relocated and were finding life difficult. Their main occupation is fishing, but the fish supplies are very low. The dam has hurt the livelihood of these people as well as the environment they lived in. Most people in Ghana and especially the government have ignored these negative effects of the dam that provides much of the electricity for the country. Next we visited a village where they weave Kente and saw those weavers in action. If you don’t know what Kente is, do a Google Image search for it. I’m sure you will see the bright and beautiful patterns that characterize Kente cloth. We stayed in a hotel in the town of Ho, the capital of the Volta Region. I had the best banku that I’ve had yet in Ghana! It is a meal of crushed yam and cassava. I had it with groundnut soup, which is like a peanut soup. It was delicious! I ate it at a chop bar, which is a little “restaurant” that serves local dishes for very cheap prices.
Friday we went to Wli falls, the highest waterfall in Ghana. We went only to the lower falls, but the walk and the falls were BEAUTIFUL! There were so many various butterflies I saw on our 45 minute walk to the falls. The enormity of the water cascading down was overwhelming; the spray misting our bodies was cool and refreshing. Afterwards we had delicious club sandwiches and then stopped by a monkey sanctuary on our way back to Accra. The monkeys would peel and then eat the bananas we would hold in our hands. Unfortunately I never got to try it, but it was really cool to see other people do it!

The North

Two weeks ago we spent in the North – the major reason why I have not posted anything in the past 2 weeks. I’ve been meaning to post since I returned, but internet time has been coopted by reading (for fun and for class), playing a computer game my roommate got me addicted to, going to visit a chief’s house for farmer’s day, going to Makola Market in Accra to buy fabric and going to the Bush Canteen on campus to get clothes custom made :) Yesterday I took a picture that would be my new facebook profile pic if I could ever get a picture loaded – it’s me in a dress I had made here, with my hair braided (I now have brown extensions and I like it! I’ve never been a brunette before!), drinking fresh coconut milk out of a coconut! You can all see this picture once I get back to the States and have an internet connection that can handle loading pictures.

The time in the North was great. We spent a lot of time looking at NGOs and the work they do in Ghana. We visited CRS (Catholic Relief Services), World Vision, and a few locally-run NGOs as well. They are going great work in Ghana! We also toured the wildlife of Ghana. We went up to Paga and saw the sacred crocodiles who never eat people…so we sat on them and took pictures and sacrificed two chickens to them. We also went to Mole National Park where you’re supposed to be able to see elephants, but since it is mating season none of them were around :( We did encounter our share of wildlife in the bugs in our room – I was glad I had a mosquito net! We spent a ton of time in the North in our bus. The North is quite a ways from Accra – we rode 12 hours to get there. It’s not that it’s as far away as Florida is from Chicago, but the roads are not as good. Swerving around potholes and going through police checkpoints is not conducive to the 79 mph I’m used to going on the interstates in the States. The long dirt road to Mole made a few of our group members get carsick. I’m so glad I don’t suffer with that! The best part was pulling over into the bush grasses every time someone needed to pee. It was easier (and cleaner) than most of the urinals (i.e. hole in the wall – literally – is often the bathroom at gas stations and the like) we found otherwise!