Week 1 in Ghana: Week 12, and some other stuff too!

Akwaaba! Hope all is well with everyone! Things are going pretty well here in Ghana. The rainy season is just about two start, but then again we've been told it'll start any day for weeks now! It's raining right now, and rained a bit the other morning. I'm really interested in how the rainy season works here. Apparently it rains for an hour or so everyday, which should be tricky considering most people make their living selling things outside from baskets on their head! It also cools things down a bit, which is awesome!
This weekend we are going to a village on the coast which is entirely on stilts! Pretty crazy.... we have an hour long canoe ride to get to it.. should be interesting!
It's pretty wild, I'm nearing the end of my trip! I leave in just under 6 weeks, which seems like a long time, but will definitely fly by! Jon leaves on Wednesday, Becky, a medical volunteer living with us, leaves next Saturday. Then Katie and I have 3 weeks, during which we are planning a trip to see the lagoons and wild life reserves in the Volta Region/East Coast, and then Nicola, another music volunteer comes. Then we leave in a week! Crazy. I am definitely ready to come home, in certain ways (mostly AC) but I know there are things I'm going to miss like crazy! Ghana is an incredibly welcoming place, and I'll miss how friendly people are. However, I won't miss being a spectacle! Obruni (white people) are pretty rare in Takoradi, so we can't go anywhere or do anything without being noticed, getting shouted "obruni, how are you?" and waved at. I can't really complain, but it does get a little old sometimes!
Things are going well in the school too. The kids are on spring break, so we've got lots of kids at mansek! Sometimes too many! Keeping busy for sure!

These are the kids that I live with. Jenny is the smiling one, age 5, going on 35, and Emily is the shy one, age 7.

This was a procession of women headed toward the Methodist church next door. They were singing and clapping their way to a women's group meeting. You can't really tell, but they all have matching dresses which say "Methodist Women" on them! The fabric are kinda neat here, you can get one printed for nearly any organization, occasion etc.

This is the open are right next to our house. The beige building in the back is the Methodist church, and often this space is used for funerals, which is the setup above. These events last like three days. This one in particular started at 8pm by blaring music from the giant stack of speakers all night (yes, all night) and then through the whole day. Luckily it stopped the second night, but resumed the next morning. Most of the time there aren't really any people there, and the music is insanely loud. I'm still investigating the reasoning for a 27 hr funeral with really loud rap music, no luck yet....

Nearly everyone has access to their roofs. They use it to hang their laundry, catch a breeze, and when the mosquitoes aren't too bad, they sleep up there.

This is Jon and Katie teaching at Mansek School of Music. We have been really busy the last two weeks. The kids are on spring break from school, so from 9-1 we have anywhere from 15 to 20 kids in here for lessons, which is interesting to say the least. We have two rooms and a very limited amount of instruments, so things can be a bit chaotic at times.

The main classroom. The guy at the piano is Samuel Queyson. He is the main teacher for the school, and is awesome!

These are the treacherous stairs leading up to the school.

This is the outside of the building. The very top window is the office of the school, where we eat our lunch and do a bunch of admin work. Also looking from the window towards the left we can look into the neighbors yard, where they slaughter goats and dry the skins for drum heads! (Keep in mind this is dead center of town)

This is the entrance to the school. The sign says Do Not Urinate Here and is more than often ignored. There are very few toilets accessible around town. There are a few government funded toilets, but they are atrocious, and businesses, if they have one, don't allow the public to use them. Since any and all plumbing runs into the maze of open sewers, most of the time people just use them directly. There are signs like this painted on walls all over town. The school has a toilet, but it empties right here, too. You can see the grey pipe down the wall.

This is the dance troupe of kids in the part of town known as Kwesi Mincim. These kids are a group of street children, orphans, etc and Edwin, the guy in the white and green, teaches them cultural dance and drumming.

The kids are really talented, and have tons of songs/dances memorized. They range from age 4 -15 and rehearse after school every day for two hours. This week they traveled to the Volta region, which is to the east near the Togo border, to perform and study some regional dances.

This is still at Amandze Fie. The groups always draws a large crowd of other kids, especially when there are white people dancing too! (We're quite the spectacle, they laugh when we do it wrong, which is frequent, and they laugh when we do it right!)

Children here don't often get their pictures taken, so they love to get get snapped and have a look.

This is in the market. These girls are there with their mother, who sells okro (okra) in Market Circle. The little one in the orange, Princilla, was one of the first little kids who wasn't afraid of me! She just touched my skin and thought it was hilarious! Most little kids are scared of obruni, and often burst into tears!

This is a view of the street from the second story of Market Circle. It consists of a huge ring, a 2 story building, and is full of stalls in the middle. The entire place is probably over an acre, and is crammed full of anything you want to buy. Cell phones, goats, knock off designer clothing, giant live snails, handmade glass beads, wigs, you name it, Market Circle's got it!

This is the street in the other direction. We were waiting in the dress makers shop where we picked up our handmade Ghana dresses.

This is us pounding fufu for dinner! Fufu is one of the main dishes in Ghana. You boil plantain (which is kind of like banana, but less sweet) and cassava (similar to potato) then you pound it into a thick dough. The process is quite hard work, but definitely worth it... it's delicious!

You put the boiled plantain and cassava into the heavy wooden bowl and pound it with the big stick thing. The person sitting down (that's Jessie, our house mom) turns the dough so it kneads evenly. It's pretty interesting, you keep pounding in rhythm so the stick person doesn't crush the other's fingers! Apparently there is a whole collection of songs people sang for pounding fufu, but they aren't really used any more. What a shame....