There's no place like home.

First, I love you all, thanks for reading and caring so much about me in all of this excitement. I'm back in Avon, CT for my summer "break" of 14 days. I never thought May 29 would come, and cannot believe my semester abroad has come and gone. I leave on June 11 for Belize and I'm feeling really excited and brave.
In my last few weeks in Ghana, I took a trip with one other girl to the amazing Northern regions. Went to an african traditionalist tribe where I had to meet the chief and ask permission to tour his palace and see the shrine. I also sat on/touched a live crocodile, and walked around a witches camp/refuge for women who have been accused of witchcraft in their villages. It is remarkably common for a woman to be labeled a witch in Africa. And in Northern Ghana there are multiple sanctuary villages for these women to live. It isn't optimal of course for them to be isolated from their families and forced to live somewhere else, but the real problem is that fact that people actually BELIEVE that the way a chicken's head lands on the ground after it's cut off can determine if a person is a witch. The village I went to was called Gambaga, and there is a documentary called The Witches of Gambaga that I'm about to watch to learn a lot more about it. The chief at that village let us walk around and say hi to the "witches" and see how they live, but he didn't allow us to have conversations with them or anything. You can see the pictures from that trip here: Northern Ghana Trip. And click the video below to see the Gamabaga witch camp that I went to.

Other than that, I really just hung around campus and Accra spending time with my wonderful Ghanaian and American, friends who I won't be seeing for who knows how long.

My trip home was a little frustrating, but if there is one thing I learned in Ghana, it is patience. The flight from Ghana to DC went by fast and I slept pretty well. I sat next to a woman who lives in CT actually and flies back and forth to Ghana to see her family and boyfriend a few times a year. Then when I got to DC, our flight to CT was cancelled. Luckily I was with two other girls from CIEE going to CT and we hurried to customer service. We got on the next flight to Connecticut, which left from Reagan airport in about 4 hours. This was just enough time to wait for our luggage, Taxi from Dulles to Reagan, and eat a giant double bacon cheeseburger with fries from Five Guys. Finally I made it home at 5pm, shed a few tears of happiness hugging my mom for the first time in months, and began to take in my new scenery.
I don't think I could possibly go to any two places more opposite than Avon and Accra. Driving through this suburban, AFFLUENT, clean, quiet, less populated, and green town was a big shock after coming from crowded, smelly, dirty, busy, Accra (which is actually wonderful in many other ways). I'm noticing little things that never would have occured to me. Like how many people wear jeans, and don't talk to each other, and how everyone really has money, the variety of choices everywhere you have to buy something. Just so many differences. But I have to say it's definitely comfortable. I've eaten sooo much. And it's beautiful and green and smells like flowers instead of sewage! Haha I'm really making Ghana sound like a shit hole, but in all honesty I feel a little empty at times without it. The first shower that I took at home was a cold shower because I didn't care about having a hot one. I've already noticed how I have changed, but everything here has stayed the same. I've already found myself being way more conversational and open to complete strangers. And driving gives me an amazing sense of freedom, but it's pretty challenging to listen to my Ghana tunes while driving without dancing. The hardest part of being here is NOT talking about Ghana because I want to compare and tell everyone here about little things there, but I need to not talk everyone's ear off.

Anyways, I'm really happy. And I feel like I got everything I wanted and more out of this experience. I read through my journal entries from the very first days and it's amazing how many of my hopes came true, even though I went into it with so few expectations. I feel like I can handle myself in almost any situation, and I feel like I've grown. Now on to the next big adventure, BELIZE!

Banku for dinner?! Sometimes I'm so Ghanaian I can't even handle it...

That's right, I ate banku *voluntarily* for dinner tonight. I've probably described it before but banku is just like fufu and kenkey and all the other heavy foods here. It's a ball of dough thats made of mashed up corn and slightly fermented in a bowl of groundnut (peanut) soup that you eat with your hands. I like it better when it's not in the soup and instead you eat it with grilled tilapia and a pepper sauce.
I've been at a loss of what to eat these days, but the most important criteria for me lately is that it's cheap. And what cheaper way is there to get really full than eating a 50 pesewes ($.30) ball of dough? I made sure to buy some pineapple and watermelon for dessert to try and balance my diet... Also, even though I'm not a huge fan of the heavy foods here, I might as well eat them while I can because there isn't anywhere in the states that's serving homemade banku or fufu, that's for sure.

I've been thinking more about my trip to Belize lately (I'll be there in exactly one month!) and I might try to keep up this blog and write about my research there. Though for at least 4 weeks I'll be completely without internet so I'll probably have to rely on my journal entries and field notes and then blog based on that.

I have an exam at 7:30am tomorrow (Friday the 13th...good thing I'm not too superstitious) that I've been studying for all week. Aside from the studying this week I haven't really been doing much of anything. It's making time go by slower and also making me want to be home even more. I've hardly been off campus in at least a week but today I went into town for a few errands and though I started out my excursion feeling irritated by the city and everyone around me, I met more than a few nice people along the way who brightened my day and reminded me why I'm going to miss Ghana.

Beginning of the end?

The past few weeks have been fairly low-key, though most of my life here hasn't been overly stressful or fast-paced by any means. After Easter was our final week of classes. The Buddhist students I became friends with this semester put on a student forum that I felt was enormously successful. I spoke on "What is Happiness" and we also introduced some key philosophies and concepts in our Nichiren Buddhist practice. The turn-out was good, mostly Ghanaian students who had plenty of questions to ask and notions to challenge based on their Christian backgrounds. It sparked a lot of healthy discussion. During the forum, I peeked over the shoulder of one guy sitting in front of me who was writing in his notebook while listening to the forum "Jesus is my savior, I am redeemed through him. I can not choose any other path." Even though I know the forum probably didn't change anyone's religious views (which was not the aim anyways), we at least were able to open peoples' eyes to another world religion and encourage tolerance of different faiths. I think it also cleared up a lot of misconceptions about Buddhism that people in a predominately Christian society have never been educated about.

The following weekend I went to Togo with Stephen and Kelsey. Togo is the country bordering Ghana to the east, and also the only country bordering Ghana that isn't currently in political turmoil. Cote D'ivoire is seeing some serious political unrest- Ivorians are calling it a civil war, even if the rest of the world isn’t. And recently Burkina Faso has also been in conflict. But don’t worry, I’m perfectly safe in Ghana. Anyways, travelling to Togo was an adventure in itself. Once we got to the road close to Aflao, it became extremely dusty and bumpy for at least an hour of the trip. Our trotro driver also thought he was king of the road and passed and sped through every traffic situation that came our way. I feared for our safety a few times. When we got to the Togo border, this friendly “Ghanaian…?” said he would help us with the customs process and waited while we filled out our forms and got our passports stamped. Then he told us we had to take this special taxi across the border because we couldn’t walk over the next gate, and because motor taxis are not to be trusted. We were really frazzled and decided to just go with this taxi to our hotel. When we got in the car he got us all confused and flustered, trying to tell us to fold all of our Togo currency up in our Ghana currency so that the x-rays in the next gate couldn’t tell that we had CFA’s on us. This was complete bullshit and in the process of showing us how to fold up our money he was definitely trying to steal from us. I was unbelievably relieved when we actually arrived at our hotel, having not passed through a second gate, and not ending up in some vacant lot to be robbed at knife-point, which they easily could have done…sorry to alarm any family and friends reading this entry, I’m safe and sound and am learning through EVERY situation how to be more and more cautious. It’s such a hard balance here knowing who to trust and who not to trust.
Anyways, we arrived at Hotel Gallion to find out that they booked our reservation for May 29 instead of April 29 so we didn’t have a room there. We went around to a few other places which were too expensive, and then this nice woman told us to follow her and took us to the Lady Diana guest house or something. This ended up costing the same price as hotel gallion and was just as conveniently located. It was run by a really sweet couple. It should also be noted that while in Togo we spoke almost no English to any local people. It is a francophone country so my 7 years of French actually came back to me pretty fast. We ended up eating most of our meals at hotel gallion that weekend, walked around the central market of Lomé, rode moto-taxis (motorcycles!) to the voodoo fetish market, where people go to buy animal heads and skins and things of that nature for medicinal purposes. That was super interesting and we got to bless a few little souvenirs and rolled some shells on the floor for the gods to tell us how much we should pay. It was super interesting and if you want to see/read more about the voodoo market that we went to, here is the BBC link.

Overall we loved Togo and wished we could stay longer. Although we only got to see the capital of Lomé, it was less populated, cleaner, friendlier, and had wayyyy better food (real coffee!!) than Ghana because of its French history.

The night after coming back from Togo we had our CIEE farewell dinner, which kind of marked the beginning of the end. In the slide show there were even pictures of us arriving at the airport in Accra, and of all the trips and things that we’ve been through in our 4 months here. It really reminded me how much we’ve all grown and experienced here. Orientation at the Coconut Grove hotel feels like the distant past now. This Sunday my best friend here is getting on a plane back to America because she finished finals early. I’m jealous, and sad because it is making it much more real to know that I’m leaving in less than 3 weeks now.

I’ve had 3 final exams so far, which have all gone pretty well. It’s much different than my exam period at Clark because usually I have about 50 pages worth of papers to write during a 2-week period at Clark. Here, I have 2-hour exam blocks spread through May for each class, mostly essay writing, and to study I’ve had to just re-teach myself all of the material from the semester for each class. I took my dance final, my Deviance final, and my Twi final. I just have my Medical Soc and Psychology of religion left on May 13 and May 24. With all this time in between I’ve been relaxing a lot and enjoying my friends before we all leave each other. One thing I’ve really wanted to do since being in Ghana is go to the North, where the Muslim influence is much stronger, and it is much more rural than southern Ghana. I’ve planned a trip up North for next week- May 16-21 for about 5 nights that I am suuuuuper excited for as a final trip before heading back to America.