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!