Friday, July 4, 2014

Greetings!

Greetings! A lot has happened in Ghana this week. Most importantly (at
least what the locals will tell you) is that Ghana’s football team has
been eliminated from the World Cup. Ghana had a pretty good shot at
advancing, which would mean the USA would be eliminated instead, but
they lost their chance during the game with Portugal. We were in Cape
Coast during the game, so we got to watch it with about 100+ locals on
a giant screen on the beach. It will come as no surprise that the week
before and after the game, we told people we were from Canada. ☺

This was the week that we dropped off our dear Andi and picked up the
amazing Alex Daines. Because we already had to go to Accra, we decided
to have this be our week off and do a bit of traveling in the Accra
area. The previous interns have all commented on how great Cape Coast
and Kakum are, so we decided to do both of these. The weather was good
while we were in Kakum and we got to do the canopy walk! Basically,
it’s a labyrinth of rope bridges suspended between trees that you walk
across. The highest point is 120 feet. It wasn’t as scary as we were
expecting, but there was always that moment of fear when you first
step onto it.

After Kakum, we made our way to Cape Coast to watch the Ghana game and
to explore the slave castles. Those were incredible! It’s one thing to
learn about slavery from a textbook; it’s another thing entirely to
walk through the dungeons where the slaves were kept for months while
they awaited the next slave ship that would take them to the Americas.
The male slave holding room was 12 by 30 feet and would hold 200-250
slaves for upwards of 3 months. The only source of air for these rooms
would be a small hole (1 square foot) which was in the upper corner of
the far wall. Talk about a humbling experience.

From Cape Coast, we headed to the airport, picked up Alex ,dropped
Andi off and tried to head back to Abomosu. Unfortunately- Ghana’s
government has defaulted on its payments to the oil companies, so the
oil companies have decided to stop supplying Ghana with oil until the
government pays them. Gas stations have all shut down—the lines to get
gas have started to wrap around for miles and miles just for the hope
that when gas comes, they’ll be able to get some. Diesel is still in
supply, so we were still able to make it back home to Abomosu.

This afternoon, we will fund Sankubenase and later this week we will
start teaching another phase 3 class. We are all happy, healthy, and
excited for the USA v. Belgium game this afternoon. GO USA!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment