This was posted from an internet cafe in Accra minutes before driving to the airport. A lot's happened since the last post. It's another long one, so let's get started.
On day seven, Janaya and I made a second hike to the top of Mount Afadjato, Ghana's highest mountain. Ghana is not an especially mountainous country, and the mountain is not quite nine hundred meters tall, rather unremarkable by Vancouver standards. But it was undoubtedly worthwhile, as the climb was not too strenuous (certainly much less so than that to the Wli upper falls) and offered impressive views of the surrounding towns and rain forest. Sadly, my camera hasn't been the same since it got soaked in rain a few weeks ago, and it gave out just as we reached the summit, but I got an eyeful, and that was enough for me. The rest of you will just have to visit for yourselves!
Learning that another trip member was in nearby Ho, we elected not to go on to Accra that night, staying in Hohoe for the evening instead so that we could meet her for another hike the next day. After meeting with Coleen, we a took another cramped, uncomfortable tro from Ho to Accra, and then immediately went on to Cape Coast in a spacious, air-conditioned tro that somehow managed to be less comfortable than the previous one. We were all fighting off sleep by the time the tro made it to Cape Coast at about 10:30 at night. A local who'd gotten off the same tro helped us find a taxi to take us to our hotel, the Oasis Beach Resort. The taxi dropped us at the top of the hotel's drive, and the three of us exhaustedly climbed out, hoping only for an at-least-slightly-bed-like surface upon which to lie.
As we descended the sloping drive, the lilting strains of Afroman's “But Then I Got High” drifted up from the resort to meet us. We passed through the gate into the outdoor lobby and bar and checked in to a nine-cedi-per-night dorm room. It being the beginning of Ghana's rainy season and thus of off-season for tourism, the three of us had the entire dorm room to ourselves, making it an extremely good deal. After depositing our bags, we headed back out to the bar for some slightly-overpriced beers to reward ourselves after the long journey, and took our bottles down three steps to the beach to drink them while enjoying the cool ocean breeze and watching the high, dark waves crash on the shore.
A bit about the resort itself: We had chosen Oasis on the recommendation of the Peace Corps volunteers that we'd met in Hohoe, and I'm glad that we did. The resort, which is run by a pair of German expatriates, consists of an outdoor bar and lobby and a handful of small huts where visitors stay, and is positioned just above a beautiful sandy stretch of atlantic coast. The ocean is just a few steps away from the rooms and the bar, and the sound of waves can always be heard in the background. It's a bit more tourist-y than most of our accomodations have been, but happily still not much so – the strech of beach, for instance, isn't private, and in the early morning we said hello to some local boys who were doing laps on it. If one is going to stay in Cape Coast, one should stay here. Just don't eat at the restaurant. Like most hotel restaurants, it's very overpriced and the food is nothing special. Better meals can be obtained at much lower prices from the roadside food vendors and chop bars (small restaurants) that are never far away from one in a Ghanaian city. Unless one is dead-set on eating Western food, these are always the better option.
The next day, after carving the last three pawns for my chess set in the early morning, we made a series of exursions to explore Cape Coast itself. Cape Coast used to be the nation's capital, and it's easily the most beautiful city I've visited in Ghana. It's positioned right on the coast and exists on very hilly terrain. When viewed from a high vantage point, the city becomes a rolling, swelling wave of tin roofs, a still-life parallel to the rough seas that it overlooks. While a smaller city by Ghanaian standards, it's very dense and bustling, with the buildings along the main roads typically reaching to three or four stories. Modern Ghanaian construction is mingled with eighteenth- and ninteenth-century European archictecture in a hectic but romantic juxtaposition of styles, a legacy of the slave trade upon which the town was originally built. I ranged along main streets and side alleys, up a grassy hill crested with a crenelated castle and down dusty, decimated dirt roads, and stopped frequently to chat with locals who were bemused to find an obruni in their corner of town.
Around mid-afternoon, while checking out the exterior of the infamous Cape Coast slave castle, I was approached by a man on a bicycle. We greeted one another, and I commented that I liked his shirt, which was brightly coloured and patterned in a common Ghanaian motif. He said that he liked mine as well, and offered to trade if I'd give him ten cedi into the deal. Given that mine was a fairly simple white T-shirt that I was wearing inside-out to hide how dirty it was, I bargained him down to seven cedi and figured that was a good deal. Unfortunately, the only bills I had in my wallet at the time were a pair of ten-cedi notes. We took off our shirts and exchanged them, and I gave him one ten-cedi note and asked for change. "I don't have it now! I'll get it later!" he said, and rode off on his bicycle with my shirt and the ten cedis, as a few locals standing nearby had a good laugh. Getting scammed out of the three cedi was a little annoying, but it amounts to about two dollars and so I can't get too upset, and it was still not a bad price for the shirt I got out of it. Henceforth I'll just have to make sure to ask people if they have change first, before handing over money. Besides, now the garnment has a story attached to it, and that's more than worth the extra.
We stayed at Oasis again that night and left Cape Coast the following day, but not before spending a little more time in town. For breakfast we went to one of several vegetarian, Rastafarian chop bars, where we had some very good pancakes. I made friends with the owner Patrick, nicknamed Stone, and he told me about his pancake recipe and his other work as a DJ in Accra as he smoked a rather large joint. Having made this new friend, the three of us went to see Cape Coast Castle. The guided tour was very interesting, moreso than such things usually are to me. There was a stark and unsettling contrast between the cavernous, pitch-dark slave dungeons and the whitewashed majesty of the castle's exterior. Particularly portentious was the Door of No Return, as it was termed by the slaves at the time, through which they were taken from the castle to be loaded onto ships. There was a plaque above the door inside the castle reading "Door of No Return", and on the outside, a second plaque reads "Door of Return", as the door was termed roughly a decade ago by the descendents of slaves who had come to Ghana seeking their roots.
After we were done at the castle, we checked out of the hotel. Coleen and Janaya went ahead to the tro-tro station, planning to reach Princess Town that night, while I decided to hang back and eat a lunch of banku at another Rasta restaurant. At this one, I sat with four or five guys who were having a highly animated conversation when I arrived. I couldn't understand much of it, but I gleaned that the topic was politics as I heard Atta Mills, the president of Ghana, come up a few times. As the food arrived and we all began to eat, the conversation shifted in topic to religion and in language more to english. It was still difficult to decipher much of what was being said, but it was fun to listen and try, and I got to know them all a bit as well.
After lunch I embarked on another series of tro-tro rides, going further west along the coast to Green Turtle Lodge near the village of Akwidaa, to say hello to some other group members that were staying there. After about five hours of riding tros through towns of decreasing urbanity and jumping from vehicle to vehicle at various junctions, I was dropped at a along a stretch of dirt road surrounded by rainforest, where a sign directed me down a sandy side-path to Green Turtle. A short walk later I met Anna, Polly and Ben at the lodge itself. From the lodge, it's possible to hike for two hours to the town of Cape Three Point, where there is a lighthouse in which travellers are normally allowed to stay a night, and then to hike another two hours to Princess Town the next day. This had been my tentative plan, but by the time I arrived the skies were just beginning to darken. I didn't relish the thought of a two-hour hike with all my bags down a remote, unlit road at night, especially when held against a night on the beach with friends and drinks, so I decided to stay the night at Green Turtle and make the whole hike the next day.
Green Turtle Lodge was much like Oasis in its structure and layout, but somehow seemed much more touristy and less authentically Ghanaian. I suppose this was due to the higher population of visitors, most of whom were western, and moreso to the fact that the lodge is a ten-minute walk from the nearest village, meaning that the only encounters that one is likely to have with Ghanaians are with the staff. This is very unlike Oasis, which is right in the middle of a city. At any rate, I wasn't looking too forward to an evening of touristy beach bumming, but it was nice to catch up with my friends about what they'd been doing during ITT, and to get to know the other North-Westerners. I talked at length about UBC with a German girl who was hoping to study there for a year on exchange, and an Edmontonian taught me to play Owari, an African board game. The food was even more expensive than that at Oasis (ten cedi for a meal?!) but unlike that at Oasis was good enough to be worth the price, at least for Western-style food.
And that was the final day of ITT. The next day we were all to come together in Princess Town for Disorientation. The other OG members at Green Turtle were going to take a tro-tro to Princess Town, so after eating breakfast I said goodbye to friends new and old, shouldered my two backpacks, and set out on the hike at about 10:00. Walking first litte ways down the beach, I passed through the tiny fishing town of Akwidaa, which consists of two clusters of buildings on either side of a small inlet, connected by a wooden footbridge. There I bought some bread and pineapple for lunch, and also witnessed a little boy happily dragging a dead puppy around on a string.
Shortly after passing through the village, I reached the main road which would take me to Cape Three Point. This was the same red dirt road I had been dropped off on at Green Turtle, and being hemmed in closely by rainforest it didn't make for a terribly scenic walk. But occasionally it crested a hill and offered a short view of the sea and the point on which the lighthouse stood, and as I went I met a number of people walking the other way with goods balanced on their heads, or just sitting by the roadside.
After about two hours I reached Cape Three Point, and found it to be a town much like Akwidaa and just as small. I passed quickly through to the short road leading to the lighthouse at the end of the point. The point on which the lighthouse sits is the very southernmost tip of Ghana, and it's been made into a bit of a tourist attraction; in the clearing around the lighthouse, there is a pole with signposts pointing in the directions of cities around the world, a stone block painted with a map of Africa, and a few other simple but neat bits of brick-a-brack. After looking at these, I paid one cedi to the groundskeeper to let me in to the lighthouse itself. It's just four stories tall and very narrow inside, but it's really cool, and the view from the top is fantastic. There's a little cupboard full of Coke cans on the second story, and they can be had for two cedi, a lot for soda in Ghana but not much at home. I bought one for the novelty of it and went back down.
I found a palm tree in a spot just near the rocky cliff where the point meets the sea, and sat down under it to eat my lunch and take in the sights and sounds of the Atlantic. As I sat, three cats, followed by countless goats, gradually drifted in and surrounded me, staring intently. This seemed pretty wierd until I realized they were interested in my bread. I fed them a few pieces, but they didn't leave until I had finished eating it started up to leave. After lunch, I climbed down the rocks close to the ocean to feel the spray on my face, then climbed back up, and poked around the remains of the older ninteenth-century lighthouse before taking up my bags once again for the second half of the trip down to Princess Town. This walk was much more scenic than the one from Green Turtle. It started by running along the beach, and then climbed onto a high ridge and became very narrow, passing through close-grown rainforest dotted with small farms for some distance before coming back down on the other side. Then it passed along a very long sandbar that separates the ocean from a lagoon. Along this stretch it went through two tiny fishing villages, one the size of Akwidaa and one about half that size, where the buildings were made not from the usual mud with tin roofs, but from wooden sticks and palm leaves. After the second village, the path became sandy and wound through a stand of coconut palms on the sandbar. The walk was full of beautiful views and strange and amazing things to see, not least the villages themselves, and the whole day was I think the most fun one I'd had in the country.
At last the path entered the outskirts of Princess Town, and on the directions of the locals I turned left and followed it up a hill through the rainforest, past the fenced-off enclosure of a cell phone antenna, and into the courtyard of Fort Groot Fredericksberg, the former German slave castle where we'd be spending our disorientation. Walking in at 4:30, I was the last group member to arrive, and I found my friends all sitting on the western rampart of the castle, eating crackers and pineapple jam.
The castle, which has been renovated into a hotel, was a spectacular place to spend the next few days. It's much smaller than the one in Cape Coast - the eleven of us took up the entire place - but it's marvelously atmospheric and surrounded by gorgeous views. Its position on the ridge gives it a spectacular view out over Princess Town just below it, where the sun can be seen setting over the ocean in the evenings. Joseph, the proprietor, is a chef by training and he prepared excellent meals for us, which we ate at a table on the ramparts overlooking the town. We were happy to overlook the lack of electricity and running water during our stay, but even those with a greater attachment to western conveniences would be making a mistake to avoid the place. Everything else about it makes it more than worth the sacrifice.
Disorientation was very relaxing; we spent much of the time talking about what we did on ITT. We also did a short canoe tour of the mangrove forests behind the town, and all hiked together to the lighthouse and back. It was fun to do this again with everyone, instead of alone, and on the way back I helped the villagers in the smallest village haul their titanic net back in from sea with the day's catch.
But after three very short days, we had to return to Accra, taking a tro-tro all the way from Princess Town in a single day. Now we're here, back in the Salvation Army guest house, and preparing to leave for the airport, which we'll do in just half an hour. There are a few posts yet to come, and time now is short, so I'll leave the trip overview until later. I'm excited to see my family and friends at home again, but at the same time it's strange to think of going home after seven weeks, and of not being with the OG group anymore.
As always, thanks for reading. Cheers!
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
ITT: Part 1
Hey everyone! I'm writing this at an internet cafe, so I'll try to keep it brief.
It's only the sixth day of ITT and we've already managed to cross the entire country in both directions, and have a couple of adventures. We left Sandema on Tuesday morning, eight of us aboard a tro-tro (a private transit vehicle slightly bigger than a van) to Bolga. After grabbing lunch there, Janaya, Sarah and I left the rest of the group and got a second tro south to Tamale. Arriving in the evening, we returned to King's Guest House, where we'd stayed four weeks earlier on our journey northward to Sandema. Arriving at the guest house just seconds ahead of a torrential downpour, we were greeted again by its affable owner and manager, Kofi, who remembered us and gave us a discount on our rooms, and then rode his motorbike through the rain to pick up food for us! While we waited, I sat in the front-door-less lobby, enjoying the cool breezes and the sounds of rain from the storm just outside, a welcome relief after the three hours we'd just spent in a hot, cramped tro.
After eating a dinner, we retired to our rooms. King's requires that men and women room separately, which made things more expensive but had the advantage that I got a room to myself for the night. And what a room - it had clean tile floors on which I could comfortably walk barefoot, and the AC had been left on for a while, so when I entered the room it was actually cold. This was the first time I'd been cold since arriving in Ghana. By western standards, the room would probably seem low-quality, as it was rather small and the bathroom lacked a sink. But after five weeks in the country, I'd grown entirely accustomed to sweltering heat, malfunctioning machinery, and general dustiness. With those forming my new benchmark, I felt that I'd landed in the lap of luxury, and I was suddenly conscious of how much my standards of comfort had adjusted!
The next day, we had originally planned to get an early start, as our guidebook suggested buying tickets for the 1:30 bus to Mole as early as 7:30 in the morning. But Kofi said that, it being off-season for tourism, we'd easily get tickets as late as 11 AM. As he was a local with much experience with tourism in the area, we assumed he was correct. We took the time to get breakfast and shower before heading to the bus station around ten, where we found that the tickets had already been sold out.
"Oh."
But all was not lost: the ticket seller said there was a private tro that made the same journey that day, and gave us the number of Zanab, the driver. We called her, and she instructed us to meet her at the tro-tro station, which was a short walk away. After meeting her, she led us through the station and what seemed like half-way across the city to where her vehicle was parked. It was only then that we were told that, as we were the only passengers, the ride would cost us fifty cedi per person! That's about thirty-three dollars each, and a lot more than the bus, which would be about 2.50 cedi. We told her that unfortunately, at that price it was impossible. But again, all was not lost; Zanab herself made a call to someone back at the bus station, who said they could get us reserved staff tickets on the bus that we'd originally planned to catch. This cost just six cedi each, more expensive than the normal tickets but a lot less than Zanab's tro. She was also kind enough to give us a free ride back to the bus station in her air-conditioned tro, rather than having us make the long walk back!
We returned to the bus station at about 11:30, got our tickets, and sat down to wait. We ended up waiting for a lot longer than two hours, since the bus didn't I bought some oranges from a roadside vendor and carved a few pawns for the first hour or two. The bus didn't arrive until a good seven hours later, despite being scheduled to leave at 1:30, but it wasn't the longest we'd waited for a bus here, and we had time to chat with a few other westerners who were also waiting at the station - an American with the Peace Corps, a German tourist also headed to Mole, and two Norwegian volunteers who had just arrived in the country. We were starting to get a bit worried by the time the bus actually came, so it was quite a relief to see it pull up. We climbed aboard for a five-hour ride that was by far the bumpiest I've ever been on. As we traversed a long, narrow strip of mud pits which some had puzzlingly referred to as a road, Sarah said that she felt like a popcorn kernel, which is about as eloquent a description of the experience as is possible.
Night fell soon after we left, and as luck would have it, a partial lunar eclipse was occurring that night! We stopped once in a small village while it was still going on, and everyone climbed out of the bus for bathroom breaks and to buy provisions at the innumerable business shacks. The children were all running about banging tin cans with sticks and chanting. One of the locals taking the same bus explained to us that this was a sort of ritual related to the eclipse. According to the folklore of the area, lunar eclipses were believed to be due to the sun trying to capture the moon, and the children's noise-making was an appeal to the sun for the moon's release. I made a brief effort to explain the real cause to a few of the kids, but the language barrier here proved insurmountable, so I gave up and simply watched as the black disk of our shadow slid languidly across the moon's bright surface.
We finally arrived in Mole at about 11:30 PM and got our room at the park's only hotel. Travelling as a group of three has been a good arrangement, as most places thus far have had family rooms that for three people work out to the same price or less as staying in dorms. We'd been informed that one's chances of seeing lots of animals were best on the early morning walking safari at 7:30 AM, so we set our alarms for 6:30 and fell right into our beds to get what sleep we could. Rising early, we headed out and met the rest of those going on the morning safari. Unsurprisingly, all of them were other tourists; the German woman from the previous day, some other Germans and Americans, and a group of some twenty or thirty young Chinese people. We wound up in a smaller group of about six with the Germans, and followed a camp ranger with a large rifle off into the bush.
For the next hour and a half, we wandered through the park, seeing baboons, gazelle, and various other large mammals at a distance and through the trees and underbrush. These being largely prey animals, they tended to see us before we saw them, and would run off after a few seconds; the views we got weren't bad, but taking good pictures was nearly impossible. We also saw the signs of the presence of elephants: knocked-down trees with the leaves or bark eaten, and the occasional massive footprint or pile of droppings.
I was starting to wonder if we'd actually see one of the creatures themselves when the ranger got a call on his cell phone, and told us that some elephants had been sighted. After a little more walking we encountered the other safari groups, and finally we came upon a herd of about three or four elephants. At first we only saw them through the trees, but after a few minutes they moved towards us in a procession, crossing the screen of vegetation and continuing to a mudhole in the middle of a large clearing. Another few came up behind us as this happened and we had to move quickly to get out of their way as they went to join the others. We stood about thirty meters from them as they covered themselves in mud, which the ranger said they did to protect themselves from flies. After a while, we followed them as they moved directly to a small lake where they immersed themselves and washed the mud right off again; here we got as close as perhaps fifteen meters or less. I took lots of pictures and video, but it can't compare with actually being in the presence of these huge, majestic animals, with nothing but air between you and them.
After an hour of watching the elephants, we returned to the top of the bluff on which the hotel was situated. It was only about 10:30, so we had a large brunch at the staff canteen and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the room and around the grounds. Apart from the elephants, all of our most memorable encounters with animals came during the rest of the day. During brunch a monkey mother and child and a number of warthogs walked almost right up to our table looking for scraps. We saw bushbucks walking right past our room a bit later.
Best of all were the baboons. Our room had a back porch with a spectacular view over the reserve, and we saw many baboons moving quite close throughout the day, near where the forest began just a few meters away. Then, in the afternoon, Janaya was standing on our room's back porch with an orange she had just peeled, when one of the baboons rushed at her and grabbed for the orange! Terrified, she dropped the fruit, and the ape took it and then climbed right onto the roof to eat it. We'd heard the baboons here had a propensity to steal things from the guests, but it was pretty cool to experience it first-hand, and we were glad that it didn't take something more difficult to replace.
And that was Mole. The next two days were given over largely to travel. We rose at 3:30 AM the next day to catch the only bus back to Tamale, which left at 4:00, and tried to sleep as best we could Arriving in Tamale, we immediately boarded a tightly-packed but mildly air-conditioned tro-tro for the subsequent seven-hour tro ride to Kumasi. We spent the night in the Guestline Lodge where we'd resided a month ago during orientation, and that evening and the following morning, we spent a bit of time enjoying the nearby familiar parts of the city, making use of the unusually expensive and well-apportioned internet cafe and buying some food for the subsequent bus and tro rides. We also discovered a fantastic egg-and-bread vendor that we'd missed the first time, and met a family of Torontonians who were visiting relatives in the country.
At about noon on the eighteenth, we took another five-hour tro-tro back to Accra, where we left Sarah with a friend of her family, with whom she was staying for the rest of ITT. Then it was off across the city on foot and by taxi to another tro-tro station, where we found transport to Ho, our first stop in the mountainous Volta region. Arriving late in the evening, we found that the cheapest guest house in our guidebook was full, and the next-cheapest was no longer in operation according to everyone we spoke to. Finally someone directed us to Lord's Hotel and Restaurant, and we got a taxi there. At thirty-five cedi a night it was much more expensive than we'd been planning, but we were so exhausted from day's to-ing and tro-ing that we decided to stay.
The next morning we rose at about 8:00 and wandered around the city in search of the Ho Museum, getting totally lost, and finally being shown the way by a helpful local. The museum was interesting, consisting of displays on Ghanaian traditional culture and modern history, but was very small and took about half an hour to see in its entirety. We walked back to our hotel, looking for a stall to buy breakfast from on the way, but we learned the hard way that the vast majority of shops in Ghana are closed on Sundays, and we eventually resorted to eating breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, which like the hotel itself was not bad but rather over-priced.
We checked out before noon and found another tro to take us to our final destination in the Volta region, the town of Hohoe. This was a relatively short ride, taking only about two hours, and while it rained for part of that time, it wasn't long enough for the leakiness of the vehicle's roof to become a serious problem, and there were plenty of gorgeous views of the mountains and jungles to enjoy on the way. We got to the Grand Hotel in the early afternoon. It was supposedly the cheapest in town, but we found upon our arrival that the cheapest rooms had been taken just minutes before by a few Peace Corps volunteers, so we had to settle for a twenty-eight cedi room that was much smaller and poorer than our room at Lord's. Next time, we'll call ahead.
Despite having snagged the cheap rooms, the American volunteers weren't total bastards. They invited us to lunch and drinks, and Janaya decided to stay back at the room while I went with them. They told me that they had almost finished their two years (!) in the country, and regaled me with stories of their drunken exploits the previous night. Later we sat in the Grand's outdoor courtyard and I told them about some recent news from the West, including about Watson's Jeopardy victory and the sport-related rioting in Vancouver. One of them disappeared for about half an hour and returned with his hair shaved into a Mohawk. Finally they went to meet some other Peace Corps friends of theirs, and I went out into the night to find some street food for dinner and to absorb some of Hohoe's night atmosphere.
The next day - that is, today - Janaya and I went to hike to the Wli falls, which reputedly form the tallest waterfall in West Africa. Rising early once again, after a breakfast of Nescafe, rice, and hard-boiled egg, we took a group taxi to the tourist information center near the base of the falls, where we met our tourguide. He led us along a wide, level path towards the lower falls for about half an hour, and then handed us walking sticks from a big pile of them and turned off this path onto the narrow, rocky, and extremely steep path leading to the upper falls.
What followed was probably the most arduous hike I've ever been on. It lasted about an hour and a half each way and had an average incline of about forty-five degrees, coming closer to sixty in a few places. Within about ten minutes I was sweating more than I was aware I could. We wound our way back and forth up the face of a steep cliff, keeping a good enough pace to pass a trio of Dutch girls that had left well before us, and taking only a few breaks to catch our breath and take pictures of the stunning surrounds. At last we arrived at the pool at the upper falls, where the cool breeze and faint spray quickly refreshed us. After enjoying the sights for a while and having a small snack of fruit which we'd bought in town - and chatting with the Dutch girls when they arrived later - we started back down. This was less physically exhausting but a good deal more nerve-wracking, but fortunately we both made it to the bottom again without breaking any bones. Then we walked two more minutes over level ground to the larger pool at the lower falls. Here there were hundreds of bats roosting on the underside of the cliffs next to the massive waterfall. Leaving my things on a bench by the water, I waded in to the icy water and stood under the falls, the stinging spray driving all the sweat off of me. I normally don't like swimming or getting wet, but after the previous three hours this felt fantastically refreshing.
So much for keeping it brief. My time at the cafe here is just about up, so I've got to go. I'll post again soon. Tomorrow we climb the country's highest mountain, and then it's back to Accra to explore the city properly. Thanks for reading!
It's only the sixth day of ITT and we've already managed to cross the entire country in both directions, and have a couple of adventures. We left Sandema on Tuesday morning, eight of us aboard a tro-tro (a private transit vehicle slightly bigger than a van) to Bolga. After grabbing lunch there, Janaya, Sarah and I left the rest of the group and got a second tro south to Tamale. Arriving in the evening, we returned to King's Guest House, where we'd stayed four weeks earlier on our journey northward to Sandema. Arriving at the guest house just seconds ahead of a torrential downpour, we were greeted again by its affable owner and manager, Kofi, who remembered us and gave us a discount on our rooms, and then rode his motorbike through the rain to pick up food for us! While we waited, I sat in the front-door-less lobby, enjoying the cool breezes and the sounds of rain from the storm just outside, a welcome relief after the three hours we'd just spent in a hot, cramped tro.
After eating a dinner, we retired to our rooms. King's requires that men and women room separately, which made things more expensive but had the advantage that I got a room to myself for the night. And what a room - it had clean tile floors on which I could comfortably walk barefoot, and the AC had been left on for a while, so when I entered the room it was actually cold. This was the first time I'd been cold since arriving in Ghana. By western standards, the room would probably seem low-quality, as it was rather small and the bathroom lacked a sink. But after five weeks in the country, I'd grown entirely accustomed to sweltering heat, malfunctioning machinery, and general dustiness. With those forming my new benchmark, I felt that I'd landed in the lap of luxury, and I was suddenly conscious of how much my standards of comfort had adjusted!
The next day, we had originally planned to get an early start, as our guidebook suggested buying tickets for the 1:30 bus to Mole as early as 7:30 in the morning. But Kofi said that, it being off-season for tourism, we'd easily get tickets as late as 11 AM. As he was a local with much experience with tourism in the area, we assumed he was correct. We took the time to get breakfast and shower before heading to the bus station around ten, where we found that the tickets had already been sold out.
"Oh."
But all was not lost: the ticket seller said there was a private tro that made the same journey that day, and gave us the number of Zanab, the driver. We called her, and she instructed us to meet her at the tro-tro station, which was a short walk away. After meeting her, she led us through the station and what seemed like half-way across the city to where her vehicle was parked. It was only then that we were told that, as we were the only passengers, the ride would cost us fifty cedi per person! That's about thirty-three dollars each, and a lot more than the bus, which would be about 2.50 cedi. We told her that unfortunately, at that price it was impossible. But again, all was not lost; Zanab herself made a call to someone back at the bus station, who said they could get us reserved staff tickets on the bus that we'd originally planned to catch. This cost just six cedi each, more expensive than the normal tickets but a lot less than Zanab's tro. She was also kind enough to give us a free ride back to the bus station in her air-conditioned tro, rather than having us make the long walk back!
We returned to the bus station at about 11:30, got our tickets, and sat down to wait. We ended up waiting for a lot longer than two hours, since the bus didn't I bought some oranges from a roadside vendor and carved a few pawns for the first hour or two. The bus didn't arrive until a good seven hours later, despite being scheduled to leave at 1:30, but it wasn't the longest we'd waited for a bus here, and we had time to chat with a few other westerners who were also waiting at the station - an American with the Peace Corps, a German tourist also headed to Mole, and two Norwegian volunteers who had just arrived in the country. We were starting to get a bit worried by the time the bus actually came, so it was quite a relief to see it pull up. We climbed aboard for a five-hour ride that was by far the bumpiest I've ever been on. As we traversed a long, narrow strip of mud pits which some had puzzlingly referred to as a road, Sarah said that she felt like a popcorn kernel, which is about as eloquent a description of the experience as is possible.
Night fell soon after we left, and as luck would have it, a partial lunar eclipse was occurring that night! We stopped once in a small village while it was still going on, and everyone climbed out of the bus for bathroom breaks and to buy provisions at the innumerable business shacks. The children were all running about banging tin cans with sticks and chanting. One of the locals taking the same bus explained to us that this was a sort of ritual related to the eclipse. According to the folklore of the area, lunar eclipses were believed to be due to the sun trying to capture the moon, and the children's noise-making was an appeal to the sun for the moon's release. I made a brief effort to explain the real cause to a few of the kids, but the language barrier here proved insurmountable, so I gave up and simply watched as the black disk of our shadow slid languidly across the moon's bright surface.
We finally arrived in Mole at about 11:30 PM and got our room at the park's only hotel. Travelling as a group of three has been a good arrangement, as most places thus far have had family rooms that for three people work out to the same price or less as staying in dorms. We'd been informed that one's chances of seeing lots of animals were best on the early morning walking safari at 7:30 AM, so we set our alarms for 6:30 and fell right into our beds to get what sleep we could. Rising early, we headed out and met the rest of those going on the morning safari. Unsurprisingly, all of them were other tourists; the German woman from the previous day, some other Germans and Americans, and a group of some twenty or thirty young Chinese people. We wound up in a smaller group of about six with the Germans, and followed a camp ranger with a large rifle off into the bush.
For the next hour and a half, we wandered through the park, seeing baboons, gazelle, and various other large mammals at a distance and through the trees and underbrush. These being largely prey animals, they tended to see us before we saw them, and would run off after a few seconds; the views we got weren't bad, but taking good pictures was nearly impossible. We also saw the signs of the presence of elephants: knocked-down trees with the leaves or bark eaten, and the occasional massive footprint or pile of droppings.
I was starting to wonder if we'd actually see one of the creatures themselves when the ranger got a call on his cell phone, and told us that some elephants had been sighted. After a little more walking we encountered the other safari groups, and finally we came upon a herd of about three or four elephants. At first we only saw them through the trees, but after a few minutes they moved towards us in a procession, crossing the screen of vegetation and continuing to a mudhole in the middle of a large clearing. Another few came up behind us as this happened and we had to move quickly to get out of their way as they went to join the others. We stood about thirty meters from them as they covered themselves in mud, which the ranger said they did to protect themselves from flies. After a while, we followed them as they moved directly to a small lake where they immersed themselves and washed the mud right off again; here we got as close as perhaps fifteen meters or less. I took lots of pictures and video, but it can't compare with actually being in the presence of these huge, majestic animals, with nothing but air between you and them.
After an hour of watching the elephants, we returned to the top of the bluff on which the hotel was situated. It was only about 10:30, so we had a large brunch at the staff canteen and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the room and around the grounds. Apart from the elephants, all of our most memorable encounters with animals came during the rest of the day. During brunch a monkey mother and child and a number of warthogs walked almost right up to our table looking for scraps. We saw bushbucks walking right past our room a bit later.
Best of all were the baboons. Our room had a back porch with a spectacular view over the reserve, and we saw many baboons moving quite close throughout the day, near where the forest began just a few meters away. Then, in the afternoon, Janaya was standing on our room's back porch with an orange she had just peeled, when one of the baboons rushed at her and grabbed for the orange! Terrified, she dropped the fruit, and the ape took it and then climbed right onto the roof to eat it. We'd heard the baboons here had a propensity to steal things from the guests, but it was pretty cool to experience it first-hand, and we were glad that it didn't take something more difficult to replace.
And that was Mole. The next two days were given over largely to travel. We rose at 3:30 AM the next day to catch the only bus back to Tamale, which left at 4:00, and tried to sleep as best we could Arriving in Tamale, we immediately boarded a tightly-packed but mildly air-conditioned tro-tro for the subsequent seven-hour tro ride to Kumasi. We spent the night in the Guestline Lodge where we'd resided a month ago during orientation, and that evening and the following morning, we spent a bit of time enjoying the nearby familiar parts of the city, making use of the unusually expensive and well-apportioned internet cafe and buying some food for the subsequent bus and tro rides. We also discovered a fantastic egg-and-bread vendor that we'd missed the first time, and met a family of Torontonians who were visiting relatives in the country.
At about noon on the eighteenth, we took another five-hour tro-tro back to Accra, where we left Sarah with a friend of her family, with whom she was staying for the rest of ITT. Then it was off across the city on foot and by taxi to another tro-tro station, where we found transport to Ho, our first stop in the mountainous Volta region. Arriving late in the evening, we found that the cheapest guest house in our guidebook was full, and the next-cheapest was no longer in operation according to everyone we spoke to. Finally someone directed us to Lord's Hotel and Restaurant, and we got a taxi there. At thirty-five cedi a night it was much more expensive than we'd been planning, but we were so exhausted from day's to-ing and tro-ing that we decided to stay.
The next morning we rose at about 8:00 and wandered around the city in search of the Ho Museum, getting totally lost, and finally being shown the way by a helpful local. The museum was interesting, consisting of displays on Ghanaian traditional culture and modern history, but was very small and took about half an hour to see in its entirety. We walked back to our hotel, looking for a stall to buy breakfast from on the way, but we learned the hard way that the vast majority of shops in Ghana are closed on Sundays, and we eventually resorted to eating breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, which like the hotel itself was not bad but rather over-priced.
We checked out before noon and found another tro to take us to our final destination in the Volta region, the town of Hohoe. This was a relatively short ride, taking only about two hours, and while it rained for part of that time, it wasn't long enough for the leakiness of the vehicle's roof to become a serious problem, and there were plenty of gorgeous views of the mountains and jungles to enjoy on the way. We got to the Grand Hotel in the early afternoon. It was supposedly the cheapest in town, but we found upon our arrival that the cheapest rooms had been taken just minutes before by a few Peace Corps volunteers, so we had to settle for a twenty-eight cedi room that was much smaller and poorer than our room at Lord's. Next time, we'll call ahead.
Despite having snagged the cheap rooms, the American volunteers weren't total bastards. They invited us to lunch and drinks, and Janaya decided to stay back at the room while I went with them. They told me that they had almost finished their two years (!) in the country, and regaled me with stories of their drunken exploits the previous night. Later we sat in the Grand's outdoor courtyard and I told them about some recent news from the West, including about Watson's Jeopardy victory and the sport-related rioting in Vancouver. One of them disappeared for about half an hour and returned with his hair shaved into a Mohawk. Finally they went to meet some other Peace Corps friends of theirs, and I went out into the night to find some street food for dinner and to absorb some of Hohoe's night atmosphere.
The next day - that is, today - Janaya and I went to hike to the Wli falls, which reputedly form the tallest waterfall in West Africa. Rising early once again, after a breakfast of Nescafe, rice, and hard-boiled egg, we took a group taxi to the tourist information center near the base of the falls, where we met our tourguide. He led us along a wide, level path towards the lower falls for about half an hour, and then handed us walking sticks from a big pile of them and turned off this path onto the narrow, rocky, and extremely steep path leading to the upper falls.
What followed was probably the most arduous hike I've ever been on. It lasted about an hour and a half each way and had an average incline of about forty-five degrees, coming closer to sixty in a few places. Within about ten minutes I was sweating more than I was aware I could. We wound our way back and forth up the face of a steep cliff, keeping a good enough pace to pass a trio of Dutch girls that had left well before us, and taking only a few breaks to catch our breath and take pictures of the stunning surrounds. At last we arrived at the pool at the upper falls, where the cool breeze and faint spray quickly refreshed us. After enjoying the sights for a while and having a small snack of fruit which we'd bought in town - and chatting with the Dutch girls when they arrived later - we started back down. This was less physically exhausting but a good deal more nerve-wracking, but fortunately we both made it to the bottom again without breaking any bones. Then we walked two more minutes over level ground to the larger pool at the lower falls. Here there were hundreds of bats roosting on the underside of the cliffs next to the massive waterfall. Leaving my things on a bench by the water, I waded in to the icy water and stood under the falls, the stinging spray driving all the sweat off of me. I normally don't like swimming or getting wet, but after the previous three hours this felt fantastically refreshing.
So much for keeping it brief. My time at the cafe here is just about up, so I've got to go. I'll post again soon. Tomorrow we climb the country's highest mountain, and then it's back to Accra to explore the city properly. Thanks for reading!
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sandema: Pt. 3
Hey Everyone! I'm posting this from the Sandema Resource Center, using its newly internet-enabled computers. More on that further down; we'll start a little earlier, just before my last post.
The Wednesday before last, we made an excursion to Paga, a town right near the northern border with Burkina Faso. There we visited the Paga crocodile ponds, where we took pictures of each other holding the tails of the crocodiles that live in the pond, and a former slave camp, where a tour guide nicknamed me Long Boss, being as I am the tallest person in the country right now. We also penetrated the very southernmost few meters of Burkina Faso after spending a token effort persuading the border guard to let us cross. We saw some semi trucks, ate lunch, and had a guy try to sell us ridiculously overpriced rugs and towels. It was a fun day.
That friday, we went to Bolga and partied all night at an outdoor club called Soul Train, which turned out to be a fascinating, protracted exercise in culture shock. All night long, bats could be seen wheeling and diving in through the open air over the dance floor, illuminated by the club's floodlights. An entity known as "Yes Boss" was performing at Soul Train that night. From seeing the show, I was unable to ascertain whether this was a band, a rapper, a DJ, or a dance troupe. The music was mostly pre-recorded, and the live performance consisted almost entirely of a few dancers throwing down while dressed in neon-green eighties-era geek suits, a guy with a microphone exhorting the crowd to cheer for "Yes Boss". Strangely, no-one seemed to care about him, though the large turn-out would suggest that "Yes Boss" was very popular. He'd keep trying to get a call-and-response going with the audience, but I didn't hear a single person respond all night. Go figure.
The dance floor, meanwhile, was packed most of the night with people dancing in pretty much the same way as in western clubs - except that the male-female ratio was something like 10 to 1, so most of the dancing consisted of guys dancing alone or with each other. Any girl that wasn't obviously taken would quickly be surrounded by guys pushing and shoving each other to get close, and this was even more true of the white girls in our group. The moment any of them stepped onto the dance floor, they could barely move for all the guys trying to grind with them. Understandably, most of them didn't spend too much time dancing, and I was frequently enlisted as an ersatz boyfriend or husband.
Some of the clothing styles on display were pretty crazy to our western eyes as well. The eighties geek suits weren't limited to the dancers. A number of young men in attendance wore collared shirts, sweater-vests, and bow-ties, all in an array of eye-catching colours, and a few had coke-bottle or wire-rim glasses to complete their ensembles. It made me very curious how the garb of a dated Western stereotype became the cutting-edge of fashion in Ghana in 2011. All in all, it was a pretty crazy evening. We stayed overnight at a guest house in Bolga, and returned to Sandema the following morning, just in time to get pleasantly drenched by a tropical downpour on our walk home from the bus stop.
So much for fun times. Work-wise, this past week I finally got all the donated laptops set up at the Sandema Resource Center. Two of their hard drives failed just a few days before they were brought in, but I was able to buy a used replacement for one at a reasonable price, so all but one of the six donated laptops were brought up and running one week ago, dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 11.04. Since then I've been experimenting with setting up a local network (no dice, their old switch seems to be broken) and trying Windows 7 instead of XP (decided against 7 - too many issues resulting from our copy being the Nudge-Wink-Say-No-More Edition).
I also spent much of the last week working to bring internet services back to the SRC, which it hasn't had for a few years, since their ISP disconnected Sandema's broadband land line. I eventually settled on buying several USB modems that connect to the internet over the cell phone networks. The official relaunch of SRC internet was this morning, and everyone at the center is very excited about it. While there have been some bugs to work out as things come online, mostly to do with trying to get the modems to work under Ubuntu, for the most part everything has gone quite smoothly.
Service will be bought in data bundles provided by the network owners. The center operators will decide whether this is economical depending on how much business they get in the first week or two; there's a good chance it will be, if the business they had last time they had internet is any indication. There isn't really any other provider of public internet to Sandema, as the government-sponsored computer center, the only other one in town, has had about a week or two of up-time in the last six months. Satellite internet is another option we're exploring as a possible replacement for the current system, depending on how it does.
Other than that, I've been doing a bit of coding, writing some python scripts to analyze the data that was gathered by the G-Roots surveys of farmers that we carried out. I hope to get those done shortly after I arrive back home, as I'll be without a computer for the rest of my time in Ghana. I've also been whittling a chess set for the boys at the HCC, from branches taken off a fallen tree beside our house. It's coming together well enough for a first attempt at woodcarving, and I've finished everything but the pawns. We'll see if I'm able to finish them before the trip is over! If not, I'll leave them for the next group to polish off.
We're leaving Sandema tomorrow, on a Tuesday. It will have been a total of four weeks here, just under a month. I think I'm going to miss the town, with its laid-back vibe and picturesque surroundings, but I'm also excited to start independent travel time. I'll be traveling around the country for the next eleven days with two other group members, Janaya and Sarah. Next stop: Mole National Park.
Cheers, and thanks for reading!
The Wednesday before last, we made an excursion to Paga, a town right near the northern border with Burkina Faso. There we visited the Paga crocodile ponds, where we took pictures of each other holding the tails of the crocodiles that live in the pond, and a former slave camp, where a tour guide nicknamed me Long Boss, being as I am the tallest person in the country right now. We also penetrated the very southernmost few meters of Burkina Faso after spending a token effort persuading the border guard to let us cross. We saw some semi trucks, ate lunch, and had a guy try to sell us ridiculously overpriced rugs and towels. It was a fun day.
That friday, we went to Bolga and partied all night at an outdoor club called Soul Train, which turned out to be a fascinating, protracted exercise in culture shock. All night long, bats could be seen wheeling and diving in through the open air over the dance floor, illuminated by the club's floodlights. An entity known as "Yes Boss" was performing at Soul Train that night. From seeing the show, I was unable to ascertain whether this was a band, a rapper, a DJ, or a dance troupe. The music was mostly pre-recorded, and the live performance consisted almost entirely of a few dancers throwing down while dressed in neon-green eighties-era geek suits, a guy with a microphone exhorting the crowd to cheer for "Yes Boss". Strangely, no-one seemed to care about him, though the large turn-out would suggest that "Yes Boss" was very popular. He'd keep trying to get a call-and-response going with the audience, but I didn't hear a single person respond all night. Go figure.
The dance floor, meanwhile, was packed most of the night with people dancing in pretty much the same way as in western clubs - except that the male-female ratio was something like 10 to 1, so most of the dancing consisted of guys dancing alone or with each other. Any girl that wasn't obviously taken would quickly be surrounded by guys pushing and shoving each other to get close, and this was even more true of the white girls in our group. The moment any of them stepped onto the dance floor, they could barely move for all the guys trying to grind with them. Understandably, most of them didn't spend too much time dancing, and I was frequently enlisted as an ersatz boyfriend or husband.
Some of the clothing styles on display were pretty crazy to our western eyes as well. The eighties geek suits weren't limited to the dancers. A number of young men in attendance wore collared shirts, sweater-vests, and bow-ties, all in an array of eye-catching colours, and a few had coke-bottle or wire-rim glasses to complete their ensembles. It made me very curious how the garb of a dated Western stereotype became the cutting-edge of fashion in Ghana in 2011. All in all, it was a pretty crazy evening. We stayed overnight at a guest house in Bolga, and returned to Sandema the following morning, just in time to get pleasantly drenched by a tropical downpour on our walk home from the bus stop.
So much for fun times. Work-wise, this past week I finally got all the donated laptops set up at the Sandema Resource Center. Two of their hard drives failed just a few days before they were brought in, but I was able to buy a used replacement for one at a reasonable price, so all but one of the six donated laptops were brought up and running one week ago, dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 11.04. Since then I've been experimenting with setting up a local network (no dice, their old switch seems to be broken) and trying Windows 7 instead of XP (decided against 7 - too many issues resulting from our copy being the Nudge-Wink-Say-No-More Edition).
I also spent much of the last week working to bring internet services back to the SRC, which it hasn't had for a few years, since their ISP disconnected Sandema's broadband land line. I eventually settled on buying several USB modems that connect to the internet over the cell phone networks. The official relaunch of SRC internet was this morning, and everyone at the center is very excited about it. While there have been some bugs to work out as things come online, mostly to do with trying to get the modems to work under Ubuntu, for the most part everything has gone quite smoothly.
Service will be bought in data bundles provided by the network owners. The center operators will decide whether this is economical depending on how much business they get in the first week or two; there's a good chance it will be, if the business they had last time they had internet is any indication. There isn't really any other provider of public internet to Sandema, as the government-sponsored computer center, the only other one in town, has had about a week or two of up-time in the last six months. Satellite internet is another option we're exploring as a possible replacement for the current system, depending on how it does.
Other than that, I've been doing a bit of coding, writing some python scripts to analyze the data that was gathered by the G-Roots surveys of farmers that we carried out. I hope to get those done shortly after I arrive back home, as I'll be without a computer for the rest of my time in Ghana. I've also been whittling a chess set for the boys at the HCC, from branches taken off a fallen tree beside our house. It's coming together well enough for a first attempt at woodcarving, and I've finished everything but the pawns. We'll see if I'm able to finish them before the trip is over! If not, I'll leave them for the next group to polish off.
We're leaving Sandema tomorrow, on a Tuesday. It will have been a total of four weeks here, just under a month. I think I'm going to miss the town, with its laid-back vibe and picturesque surroundings, but I'm also excited to start independent travel time. I'll be traveling around the country for the next eleven days with two other group members, Janaya and Sarah. Next stop: Mole National Park.
Cheers, and thanks for reading!
Friday, June 3, 2011
Surveys, Centers and What-Not
Wow, has it really been two weeks since my last post? Sorry for the long wait. The internet has been down in Sandema for the past week, and I'm posting this from an internet cafe in Bolgatanga.
Last week on Wednesday, we went on an excursion to Kadema, a neighboring town to Sandema, to shadow some of our compatriots as they administered a survey to some subsistence farmers in the town, to gather data for the G-Roots project. The survey is newly constructed and is intended to gather knowledge about things like what sources of income the farmers have and how many of their children attend school. These surveys are going to be administered to a wide sample of the farmers in Kadema, and this research is meant to provide the hard data which G-Roots will use to plan their project for next year. To get there, six of us rode on the backs of motorcycles driven by four others over a bumpy road that was sometimes paved but mostly made of dirt. The ride was nerve-wracking for about the first two minutes, but after that I was able to relax my grip on the rider in front of me and begin to enjoy the ride. The wind in my face was a welcome relief on what was another day of sweltering heat, and it was an excellent experience to watch the green African countryside fly by.
We stopped on the way in the Kadema town square. Kadema is a much smaller, less-developed town than Sandema, and the square made Sandema's look cosmopolitan by comparison. It consisted of a few tall trees for shade and a handful of tiny shacks, out of which a few people ran businesses. Until I was told, I didn't even realize it was a town square. We bought a lunch of rice balls and ground nut soup (ground nuts are peanuts) from a cheerful old woman operating out of one of the shacks, and then continued on.
We finally arrived at the farm, and there observed as Misbah interviewed members of the two families who lived there. As the farmers spoke only Buli, he did this with the help of an interpreter. We learned that these were subsistence farmers, who consumed essentially all of the food that they grew, and as a result had family incomes of a few dozen cedi a year (again, one cedi is about sixty-five cents). Nonetheless, they were very cheerful, and they laughed and joked in Buli as we spoke wiht them in the shady, thatch-roofed gazebo that they'd built from tree branches outside their home. After the survey was complete, they showed us the home itself. Unfortunately my camera's battery was charging at home so I couldn't take any pictures. Like many of the farmhouses we'd seen around the north, it was a small mud home, but it was built with a high degree of artistry, and it was almost startling in how rustically picturesque it was. I hope to get a chance to take some pictures of similar homes later on.
So wednesday was a pretty cool day. Other than that, I've started doing some work at the Sandema Resource Center, a free computer lab in the town square that is run by the HCC. Their public terminals were donated to them about five years ago. They're all about ten years old, and of the roughly nine or ten that there are, only two worked when I arrived. Most of the others were beyond my powers to repair (and probably beyond repair entirely) but I was able to fix one of them, bringing the count up to three.
The innards of the three computers were caked with red dust, so I gave them as thorough a dusting as I could with my breath and some paintbrushes, and put them back together. Also, despite the SRC's lack of internet, the three computers all were bogged down by adware and seemed to be suffering from viral infections. I assume this had been spread via flash drives, probably from computers in the local internet cafe, many of which share the same symptoms. I suspect that a lack of computer literacy makes computers here in Sandema especially vulnerable to such attacks.
While I'm by no means a security expert, I'm going to try to make the machines a bit more resistant and useful by adding partitions with Ubuntu Linux to each of them and setting them up so that only the center operators will have administrator access. I've set up the operators with laptops running Ubuntu so that they can try it and discover any technology and usability issues, and if there's nothing I can't resolve I'll go ahead with this plan. I'm also going to put some freshly-downloaded free AV software on the Windows partitions (I'm thinking Avast), which should provide some temporary protection.
That's all for now. Next time I'll write about the surveys of farmers that we've been doing, and of course about any other cool things that happen between now and then. I'll try to post a bit more frequently henceforth as well. Cheers!
Last week on Wednesday, we went on an excursion to Kadema, a neighboring town to Sandema, to shadow some of our compatriots as they administered a survey to some subsistence farmers in the town, to gather data for the G-Roots project. The survey is newly constructed and is intended to gather knowledge about things like what sources of income the farmers have and how many of their children attend school. These surveys are going to be administered to a wide sample of the farmers in Kadema, and this research is meant to provide the hard data which G-Roots will use to plan their project for next year. To get there, six of us rode on the backs of motorcycles driven by four others over a bumpy road that was sometimes paved but mostly made of dirt. The ride was nerve-wracking for about the first two minutes, but after that I was able to relax my grip on the rider in front of me and begin to enjoy the ride. The wind in my face was a welcome relief on what was another day of sweltering heat, and it was an excellent experience to watch the green African countryside fly by.
We stopped on the way in the Kadema town square. Kadema is a much smaller, less-developed town than Sandema, and the square made Sandema's look cosmopolitan by comparison. It consisted of a few tall trees for shade and a handful of tiny shacks, out of which a few people ran businesses. Until I was told, I didn't even realize it was a town square. We bought a lunch of rice balls and ground nut soup (ground nuts are peanuts) from a cheerful old woman operating out of one of the shacks, and then continued on.
We finally arrived at the farm, and there observed as Misbah interviewed members of the two families who lived there. As the farmers spoke only Buli, he did this with the help of an interpreter. We learned that these were subsistence farmers, who consumed essentially all of the food that they grew, and as a result had family incomes of a few dozen cedi a year (again, one cedi is about sixty-five cents). Nonetheless, they were very cheerful, and they laughed and joked in Buli as we spoke wiht them in the shady, thatch-roofed gazebo that they'd built from tree branches outside their home. After the survey was complete, they showed us the home itself. Unfortunately my camera's battery was charging at home so I couldn't take any pictures. Like many of the farmhouses we'd seen around the north, it was a small mud home, but it was built with a high degree of artistry, and it was almost startling in how rustically picturesque it was. I hope to get a chance to take some pictures of similar homes later on.
So wednesday was a pretty cool day. Other than that, I've started doing some work at the Sandema Resource Center, a free computer lab in the town square that is run by the HCC. Their public terminals were donated to them about five years ago. They're all about ten years old, and of the roughly nine or ten that there are, only two worked when I arrived. Most of the others were beyond my powers to repair (and probably beyond repair entirely) but I was able to fix one of them, bringing the count up to three.
The innards of the three computers were caked with red dust, so I gave them as thorough a dusting as I could with my breath and some paintbrushes, and put them back together. Also, despite the SRC's lack of internet, the three computers all were bogged down by adware and seemed to be suffering from viral infections. I assume this had been spread via flash drives, probably from computers in the local internet cafe, many of which share the same symptoms. I suspect that a lack of computer literacy makes computers here in Sandema especially vulnerable to such attacks.
While I'm by no means a security expert, I'm going to try to make the machines a bit more resistant and useful by adding partitions with Ubuntu Linux to each of them and setting them up so that only the center operators will have administrator access. I've set up the operators with laptops running Ubuntu so that they can try it and discover any technology and usability issues, and if there's nothing I can't resolve I'll go ahead with this plan. I'm also going to put some freshly-downloaded free AV software on the Windows partitions (I'm thinking Avast), which should provide some temporary protection.
That's all for now. Next time I'll write about the surveys of farmers that we've been doing, and of course about any other cool things that happen between now and then. I'll try to post a bit more frequently henceforth as well. Cheers!
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