Kumasi, part 2

I'm posting this from a little internet cafe in Tamale, in the north of the country. We've done and seen quite a lot since my last post, so it's another long one.

On Sunday, we visited Albert and Evelyn Annadie, a husband-and-wife team who founded the Kaleo Area Women's Development Association (KAWDA). They fed us a big lunch and told us about the work they do with female victims of HIV/AIDS. Albert spoke eloquently about it and I won't try to summarize it here, but do check out their website at sites.google.com/site/kawdaghana to learn all about their project. We also met Alice, a girl from London who was volunteering with KAWDA for the summer, and Albert and Evelyn's kids, who didn't speak much English but were very friendly. Several of them insisted on arm-wrestling me and Taha, and one of them, Alfreda, variously clung to my leg, rode piggy-back on me, and finally pushed me half way down the path back to the road when we were leaving!

Walking back to the hostel at about three or four, we bought coconuts from a vendor, who chopped the tops off with a machete to make a hole wide enough to drink from. We walked the rest of the way through the afternoon heat drinking the faintly sweet and surprisingly cool milk straight from the shells. The fruit here is fantastic. We've eaten pineapples, oranges, papayas, mangoes, and lemons, and probably other fruit that I'm forgetting, all bought from roadside fruit vendors. Some look very different from what we're used to. The oranges have green skin, as do the lemons, which are spherical and warty-looking. But all of it is very flavourful and much juicier than those I've had anywhere else. The pineapple in particular is the sweetest I've eaten.

One big cultural difference between North America and Ghana is how open the people here are. As I mentioned in my last post, Ghanaians are much more likely to just walk up and introduce themselves to strangers just for the hell of it. Some of the most memorable were the woman in the market who gave me and Sarah (another OG member) new names, and Addi James, a policeman with an AK-47 whom I got directions from and chatted with. Two nights ago we took in some live music and dancing, and there were two local guys who were pretty crazy dancers, who evidently got a big kick out of seeing me try to match their prowess (Julian probably could have done better)! In my part of the world you generally don't talk to others unless there's a particular reason for doing so. This is something my friend Julian has observed in most Asian countries as well; as one of our trip leaders, Taha, said, this closed-ness seems to be a phenomenon peculiar to the West. Why this is, I don't know, but I have to wonder.

Another, more amusing cultural difference, is the corniness of advertising in Kumasi. Everything from movie posters to shop signs are all visually cluttered and gaudy, and festooned with simple photoshop effects like lens flares and blurred-together images. The small businesses that line the streets of Kumasi have names like "Perfectman Ent." and "Great Wisdom Bookstore", and many of them are overtly religious, despite the businesses in question having nothing in particular to do with religion. I can't recall many examples off the top of my head, but my favorite so far was "Jesus is Still Alive Ent.", which I think was an electronics repair shop. Even the taxis are festooned with phrases like "God is Good" and "Jesus saves". Evidently Ghanaians are very religious, and see no contradiction in incorporating that into their commercial endeavors!

Yesterday we began our journey from Kumasi to Sandema. The plan was to catch the bus early in the morning and get to the northern city of Tamale by this evening, stay the night, then continue to Sandema the next day. To that end we got up a little before 5 AM and got to the bus station about 6 or 6:30. Unfortunately, when our bus arrived it needed repairs, and it didn't end up leaving until about 3:30 PM, so we spent about nine hours sitting outside in the hot sun and getting periodically blasted with dust by passing buses! It wasn't too bad though, as we drank plenty of bagged water and bought plenty of snacks from the food vendors in and around the station. Finally we got on the bus and set out on the roughly ten-hour ride to Tamale. We're told the north of the country is much less heavily forested than the more humid south. I could see this as we drove; the foliage outside the window is gradually thinning out, losing the tremendous density that we observed in the south near Accra. I'm looking forward to arriving in Sandema this evening. Doubtlessly I'll find a great deal to write about while I'm there.