Our first week in Ghana

What a week we've had so far!! We have been very busy here so I will try to mention a little bit of everything.

We started work at the KITE office on Wednesday. The staff are very friendly and welcoming and they are all very hard workers and passionate about their projects. We have had a number of presentations about our projects so far, and without going into too much detail, I will be working with Lindsey Fielding on a project dealing with providing communications (internet, phone etc) to towns which are currently off of the grid. We have done a lot of reading this week and will likely do a lot next week as well, and then the week after that we will be visiting different communities around Ghana.

My favourite part of our week was this weekend. On Saturday we walked down to a market down by the Novotel Hotel. It was very busy and huge, and isn't even the main market here! You can buy anything you want: suits, clothing, cloth, irons, movies and DVD, bags, you can get your hair done (if you have the right kind of hair) and of course, so much food! The food aisle was definitely the highlight, pineapples, mangoes, so many peppers and spices, cows feet, live snails and lots of fish. The pineapple is almost white inside and is the most flavourful I've ever tasted, I ate an entire one myself!

It is wonderful to simply walk down the street or drive around and experience the city. The whole place just seems so alive. Everywhere you turn, there are people selling things along the roads: newspapers, toys, ground nuts (peanuts) and plantain chips (so delicious). The cars are constantly honking as well; they use honks along with turn signals when they enter an intersection or change lanes. On our way to work we always see children walking to school in their brightly coloured uniforms, tro-tros (big vans that carry an amazing number of people) whizzing by, and on every street corner their is a huge billboard advertisement for some cellphone carrier.

This weekend was also great because we got to hang around the YMCA, which is where we are staying. Their is a boys dormitory on the campus and during the week it is a technical school, where the boys (mostly our age) study draftsmanship, carpentry, etc. We sit under the big tree in our yard and some of the boys come out and talk to us, or some kids come and we play "football" with them. We have made a couple of friends and they have been very serious in teaching us Twi, which is one of the main languages in Ghana. I am not that great at it, but I write it all down so that I can remember it. It is a very tonal language and often we can't hear the difference between what we are saying and what they are saying, but to them we say it entirely wrong. They've also been showing us some of their favourite Ghanaian music which is pretty fun. In general, the people here are incredibly friendly. Any time we look lost of confused, which is definitely 90% of the time, at least 2 or 3 people will come up to us and ask us if they can help us. In general, we are always SO awkward, not wearing the right thing or totally lost, and they find it very hard to understand our accents.

The food here is pretty different. They eat A LOT of rice and meat, and their portion sizes are very, very large. I think we will start splitting meals, because we can never eat it all, and once when we left food on our plate the cook came and asked us why we didn't like it!! I am enjoying the food, although last night I was pretty sick. The most unusually thing so far, at least for me, was Zoo Soup with fufu. It was a red, spicy soup with beef, fish, snail and many entire crabs in it. The fufu, which is mashed cassava with a kind of doughy texture, is dipped in the soup and then you are supposed to swallow it whole without chewing. It was hard to get the hang of but quite good in the end! The best part is definitely the fruit here, which is so flavourful!! The man who is in charge of the YMCA wants us to feel at home there, and so each night he brings us huge bags of mangoes and pineapple!! He is very nice and we have had some interesting discussion about Ghana and Africa with him.

It is getting late so I should probably finish up here. Thank you for all of your emails, I LOVE getting news from home so keep them coming! I will try to post once a week from now on. We haven't taken too many pictures, but when I do I will post them!

Amy