Amedzofe

Day 2

After the terrible first impression that Accra had given us of Ghana, we were all extremely glad that we had signed up for a trip to get out of the city and see some of the villages. It's a good thing too that a few of my friends had also signed up because apparently there were a few emails circulating with information on where to meet up that I never even received. We got off the ship and took the shuttle to the port gate and began the wait. 0700, the designated meeting time came and left and we all attributed it to African time. African time is even slower than island time, and you can always expect things to be at least an hour late. 0800 approached and we began to get concerned that perhaps we were in the wrong place. It was also around this time that I realized I'd left my money back in my room on the ship. We began discussing the various emails and itineraries we had received and realized that all of them, save for the latest one, had said that pickup time was 0900, and realized that 0700 must have been a typo. Hopefully. So I decided to take my chances and walk back to the ship with my friend to retrieve my money. As we were leaving the ship for the second time, a few girls from our group were coming back. They had given up. Three down. We walked back to the port gate and waited. And waited. And waited. People slowly began to trickle away. 0900 came and left and we decided to give it until 0930. As the chances of our trip working out began to fade away we started making plans to go to Cape Coast instead, find a hotel, spend a couple nights, see the slave castles and some of the beaches. By this point we were all sitting around in a little waiting room area playing cards. And then we heard someone call from outside "They're here!"

There was a man and a woman there to greet us, both extremely apologetic for being 40 minutes late (apparently the meet up time was indeed 0900, and they didn't realize we had been waiting for nearly three hours). We strolled onto the bus and began our journey. About an hour into the trip we stopped for lunch. Where we stopped was this breathtaking little lakeside restaurant with lizards running around and little covered decks out on the lake, called Aylo's Bay Garden Restaurant and Lodge. It was a scene out of movie. I ordered Banku. I've learned over the course of this trip that it is really an American thing to bring everyone's meals out at once. Different dishes take different amounts of time to cook. They are always served fresh, and you are not expected to watch it get cold until everyone else is served their food. No, when you are served you eat it. In groups as big as ours, when we went to restaurants many people would usually already be finished eating by the time the last of our food arrived. Well, on this particular occasion, my food still hadn't arrived by the time it was time to get back on the bus and move on. The tour guide felt terrible and so had the restaurant pack up chicken and yam fries to take with me. I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't eat meat.

There was a long drive to the village where we would be spending the night and so many of us fell asleep. When I woke up, we were on a dirt road winding up a steep mountain path. I don't think the road was built for vehicles as large as our tour bus. It was a rather terrifying experience. I watched out the window as various villages passed by. A staple to the scenery were little miniature goats running around, almost wild everywhere. As we passed, every eye of every person around would be glued to our bus; we were clearly not a sight that they saw every day. It felt a bit like being an animal on display in a zoo, but at the same time here we were in their country, and they were out in the sweltering heat trying to sell their wares so as to make a cedi or two, and here we were rolling through on a giant, luxurious (by their standards) air-conditioned bus. It felt so bewilderingly backwards.

Our bus finally came to a halt in a little village called Amedzofe, which as it turns out is the highest human settlement in Ghana. We grabbed our belongings and were off. We were divided into two different groups and led to two separate guest houses. Our house was on the edge of the hill, with a spectacular view out over all the surrounding area. There was a little porch area, which led to the dining room and a closet of a kitchen. There was a hallway with several rooms jutting off. Lizzie, my roommate, and I were surprised to find that we had our own bathroom and even a TV, although there was extremely limited electricity and no running water. The man who owned the house led us outside with a stack of buckets and turned on the tap in the back to start filling them up. One by one, we brought the buckets inside to fill up two large basins of water in the main hallway. That was our water supply. Even though we had a toilet, we had to pour a whole bucket of water down it to make it flush. There was a shower area, and showers consisted of a bucket of water dumped over your head. Once we had deposited our bags and filled the water basins, we walked back to the village center to meet back up with the rest of our group. At this point I should apologize for having referred to this place as a village. One of my friends called it such and was told that it was a town, not a village. So we walked back to the town center where many of the locals were already gathered. We spent a long while playing with the kids, giving them stickers, taking their pictures... They were positively delighted by our cameras, having never seen pictures of themselves before. We'd take a picture of a group of them, switch the camera to playback mode, and show them the picture, which would result in a chorus of laughter. At one point I gave them my camera to allow them to take their own pictures and they went crazy. After a while though I had to take it away because they were all fighting over it. But looking back at my pictures I have dozens of photographs of blurry faces and hands where one kid tried to take a picture, and another kid snatched it away.

One of my friends brought a Polaroid camera that prints out stickers of the photos. She went around taking pictures of all of the mothers with their children. It was amazing to see their reactions to the small gift; many of them had never owned a picture of their family before.

Dinner time rolled around and the entire group of us headed back to our guest house. A few of the local women were in the kitchen busily preparing what turned out to be rice, pasta, and chicken. I am nearly positive that the chicken had just been slaughtered. There is no place else that they could have gotten it from. One of the little girls from the town had walked back with us and we gave her one of our chicken legs. She ate the chicken leg, to the same extent that any of us would have. But when most of us where finished with our plates, she kept gnawing at the bone, eating every last scrap of meat, and when that was gone she began chewing at the cartilage. By the time she was finished with it there was literally nothing but the bare bone left. I think it gave us all a bit of a reality check.

When dinner was finished we walked back in the pitch black to the town center. I emphasize in the pitch black because electricity, as I've already mentioned, is extremely limited, and there literally was not a single light outside. It was like a blackout. There are so many things we take so for granted, like light illuminating a street, and when you don't have that anymore it is a bit of a shock. By the time we arrived in town it was pretty much dead. The people who live there live very traditionally: up with the sunrise, and to bed with the sunset. We split up and went to two different bars that our tour guide pointed out. And by bar I mean a little shack of a shopfront on someone's home where they sell liquor, with a little patio area for sitting. The bar seemed to be deserted, although there was music playing. So we danced around on the patio until a few of the kids started poking their heads around the corner and a couple people in the group figured it would be a good idea to ask them for alcohol. Turns out they actually were the bartenders. We were served beer by an eleven-year-old. At one point their mother showed up, and I figured the little kid was going to be in trouble for serving us alcohol but she acted as though it was completely normal. I guess when it is the childrens job to help out, that extends to bar-tending duties as well. So we drank the local beer (which was really incredible) and danced around with the kids, and every now and then reminded each other with a tone of disbelief, "We are in Ghana!"

I don't know how long we spent at the bar but at some point we went back to to our guest house. The night was not over though, we sat around and played this really fun game, which I will relate here because you all should play it; it's a fun time, I promise. Take smallish pieces of paper, and however many people there are, give each person that many pieces of paper and number them. So there were nine of us, and we each had a small stack of papers numbered one through nine. On paper #1 write down a phrase, it can be anything, but preferably with an action, such as "sailing around the world." Everyone passes their stack of paper to the left and the receiver tries to draw the phrase on paper #2. Again, the papers are passed to the left and the next person has to write out the phrase for the picture on paper #3 (they can only look at paper #2). This continues around the circle, phrase, drawing, phrase, drawing, until you end up with your original stack of papers. And then you go through everything and have a good laugh. Try it.