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!