High school friends and backpacking adventures

Oh what a weekend!  I love Ghana so much!  Or maybe I just love Kokorbrite and Big Millys?  This could be it too.

 

Gardenia arrived and I had to wait nearly three hours for her at the airport.  Her plane arrived nearly thirty minutes late and her luggage took over an hour!  Quite expensive when I’m paying a driver $10 per hour to wait and drive us home.  At least for Ghana prices.

 

We spent the first half of Garci’s first day at the school taking pictures.  She also bought a pure water for every child in the school ($10) for all 200 students, which made lots of the kids excited that they didn’t have to pay for it today.  We then met Emmanuel, the man who works for an NGO and will also be my driver in the Volta region.

  He is best friends with a girl named Hannah who runs the Ghana Literacy Program.  Emmanuels’ NGO, Dream Global Foundation and Hannah’s may be great partnerships for Global Brigades.  I’ll be learning more about them later and am hoping that I can possibly steal any data they might already had.  I think Emmanuel had mentioned he had some water surveys done in the Kpando area of the Volta region and if he has any data on them, that could TREMENDOUSLY help our water program!  It was great to meet him before I run off to the rural countryside with a stranger for two and a half weeks =)

 

After he dropped us at the STC station, we caught a state bus to Cape Coast which was a nice ride.  It’s the only transportation in Ghana that you might actually enjoy and is much safer.  We arrived in Cape Coast in the evening, got a bite to eat at a very quaint little dinner spot with great food actually, and then headed to bed. 

 

I awoke on Friday with no running water in the hotel (not so great, I really needed a shower!) and waited until the last minute to wake Garci who was still adjusting to the time and heat.

  Just as I did, the water came on and I decided to shower first before waking her, even though I was already ready.  We grabbed a bite to eat at the same place where Garci had some AMAZING banana pancakes with Vanilla ice cream while I had a fried egg which probably had a little too much oil on it but was still good.  We headed out to Elmina to explore St. George castle and reminisce about the history we will never know…slavery.  Everytime I go to that castle I can envision what might have happened there and it’s just devastating.  Hearing the stories from the tour guide makes me so happy that I live in America today.  Granted, there is still many forms of “slavery” and I’m unsure the world will ever be where it needs to be…being at Elmina has been the strongest lesson in slavery.  It’s more than I could have ever learned in school.  Even seeing history in the US is nothing compared to seeing a castle where at LEAST 1,000 slaves were held at a time.  It’s devastating.

 

We headed up to Kakum where we happened to be on tour with two Chinese men, one of whom happens to be a top Chinese diplomat (as in one of the maybe top 20 most important government officials in China?).

  They were very friendly and invited us in their vehicle for a ride back to Accra which we gladly welcomed for three reasons; 1) It was free (very important!  We saved $4!), 2) Their vehicle had air conditioning, and 3) They were really friendly people!  They dropped us at our stop to Kokobrite and we were off for our fun at Big Milly’s!  In the U.S., who gets rides from strangers?  Here, it’s so natural for everyone to offer you something…a ride, half of their orange, a slice of bread, you name it.  Why is that the developed countries live their life on materialism and are quickly losing the value of community and family?