Dancing to the Ghana beat - Anna soaks up her first week in west Africa

HELLO friends and family from AUSTRALIA which is SO VERY far away from where we are now. Holy mammoth! Firstly I would like to apologise for the gargantuan size that this blog will become. This has been the most intensely crazy week of my life and I can't even fathom how I'm going to express that to all of you at home. We haven't started in our teaching/caring placements just yet, so I thought I'd kick off the blogging party about 1 week in before it all begins. The first few days we were staying at Felcare hostel with Tina and lots and lots of children. One afternoon we went on a walk with about 6 kids and returned with about 35! Everyone's in for a party in Ghana! Can't say I can stick out the soccer and the dancing for too long in the heat though. The heat is so intense...luckily we have fans in our rooms but if ever there is a power out the heat is like BOOM - hits you like a wall. But so worth the moment of rejoice when the fan starts up again in the middle of the night. Power cuts are also not preferable in the middle of scary stories. For some reason I decided to recite the whole of wolf creek (the scary movie) to everyone only to lose all the lights 10 minutes later. We all just froze and snuggled into our sheets.. ha! We've also been very fortunate with water/showers/toilets. I know you all want to know about toilets but I thought it was interesting. And we do tend to spend a lot of time peeing because we spend a lot of time drinking water because we spend a lot of time sweating. Sweaty sweat. Sweaty sweaty sweat sweat. Necessary repetition right there. On that note I haven't looked in a mirror really since I left.... not that I'd want to. Other freedoms (besides mirrorlessness).... freedom of time constrictions. GHANA TIME! Best thing ever. "Ok so we go to town at 8.30".. means you may get in by 11.30? If you're lucky. There's this huge chilled out mentality with the Ghanians. If you say you'll do something, you will when you're ready. When you're finished getting ready, or cooking, or whatever life may be calling you to do. They're also very relaxed about answering their phones. Whenever my phone rings I go on a mad scramble to find the thing, but I've noticed Tina and Seth a few times just smiling at their phone, and listening to the ring tone for a while before slowwwwly bringing it up to their face and "HEYYY!!!" 

Ghanians are very good at dancing. And singing! We discovered this at a 5 hour church session that Hari and I experienced on Saturday. They have such beautiful voices and everyone seems to have a natural groove! Even the two year olds know where it's at! We were watching a movie on Kofy's laptop and in the little musical interludes between scenes all 9 people sitting around me would all start grooving slowly. It's amazing. But generally people here get very excited about having white people and really celebrate your presence. They brought us up on the altar and gave us microphones and said GREET THE PEOPLE!! and then we sung hymns. 

Once when Hari and Bardie were getting passport photos, (at a shop in a Ghanian woman's house) they got so excited by us that they invited us all in to sit on their floor and watch a Ghanian soap opera beneath a nicceeee fan. All the kids and relatives of the family were poking their heads through the windows to see what was going on hahaha. My Ghanian name is Akosua Mianu (spelling?) .. Akosua means female born on the Sunday and Mianu means I am the second child. COOL. Basically the orientation was amazing. Everyone all in together, plus some Germans and Swedish people also volunteering in the lovely world of Ghana. We've been learning Twi and speaking with the locals is so much fun. But there's also Fanti, and Da .. and a trillion other langages that people speak here that are all slightly different. The conversations we can sustain rarely make it past the "hello"s and the "how are you"s and the "what is your name" and then we rock out the classic line 'mete twi kakraa' which means I only speak twi a litttle. classssic. It all kind of reminds me of Woodford, a folk festival in Brisbane. The heat, the smells, .... the SMELLS let me tell you about the INTENSO market places!! Selling nearly everything. You just weave your way through a million stalls with people selling fish and piles of meat and pigs legs and GIANT snails. 

Everyone's yelling OBRUNI at you but all the while you're trying to keep your bag safe and take photos and keep up with Seth as he bolts on through. I got some bargaining practice and got my 20 cedi Ghana t-shirt down to 6 Cedi. Good times. Then we had ice-cream in a bag. Melted of course. Everything seems to be in bags here. They have these amazing 500ml sachets of water that we buy in bulk. So good. Although you do feel a bit obliged to finish the whole thing once you start because with water in a plastic bag there's nowhere else you can go. I'm getting bettter at brushing my teeth with them. Once I had to shower with a bag of water because we ran out when I was covered in shampoo and soap... good times. The food we've been eating has been pretty incredible. Lots of kenke and yam and rice.. pretty delicio! And it's fun to eat with your hands. FREEDOM FROM CULTERY. 

We had a cooking lesson .. it gets so so hot in the kitchen. And they use so much oil! Probably why it tastes so good. My favourite dish is Kontombre stew which has tofu and spinach in it and we eat it with steamed yam. Yam is similar to potato but more stringy and a little salty. We've been enjoying the local drink Soubolobo (served cold) and also amazing herbal tea Hannah makes from the garden. We've been to one beach in our time here - Kokrobite Beach (: Which was so beautiful. Asides from the amount of plastic in the water. But there were actual palm trees! We had a drumming lesson.. (all the different beats I did sounded the same) and then some African dancing which I like to whip out at appropriate moments such as the kitchen floor bonding sessions with my host mum, or at a Ghanian wedding with nobody who knows you. BUT I'LL GET TO THAT LATER wahhh so much to say. 

And I have 27 minutes remaining for my 70 pesoas worth. Didn't actually get any change but I'll look into that. Usually I'm not one for car travel but here I'm just so content staring out the window. You'll always catch Harriet doing some nice indie photography.. (: It's so different from Australia... mud huts and plantain .. and dirt roads and barbed wire. Children smiling and waving at you.. if given the chance Bardie will always run off with Ghanian children. "where's Bardie?" "hmm.. any kids around?" ahha. but people sell so many things on the roads! As soon as you stop at traffic lights everyone swarms with baskets balanced on their heads selling everything!! Dried plantain (50 pesoa) water bags, towels, randawg mesh things, electric massagers, hannah montana stickers.. you name it! 

But on Thursday we all moved into our host families. I'll ask the girls about their experiences later but I can tell you about Hari and mine. We are living with the Turksons, a family of 4. But there are 13 people living in our house (: I just love my host sisters Ama and Ellen, and we have some very sweet little ones that are always running around. Family time is praying, watching Ghanian cartoons, and singing ! Our host mum Hannah is constantly singing in her beaaautiful voice. Ghanian's are generally quite noisy, at 5.30 there will be pots and pans on the scrape and roosters and all sorts of serenading love. I just love the amount of music in our house.. i'm glad I brought my ukulele! It's been fun teaching everyone "my violin". 

They've taught us how to wash our clothes locally.. with a bar of soap and about 4 buckets each with different purposes. Things find a way to get clean. Unfortunately it rained as soon as we got everything on the line... Conversations have been so entertaining. Mum - the concept of pilates is difficult to explain to a Ghanian family. You ended up as a rehabilitation exercise lady with your own business (?) We made up a song about the Obibini chicken (black chicken) which is literally exiled from the pen because the White chickens will beat it up or not let it eat. The song turned out to be pretty catchy so when all of us caught up for chills and a city tour it caught on and nicely spread around all the antips households. 

Hari and I have been fortunate enough to witness an engagement party and a wedding! As you can imagine, so much dancing and singing and PRAISE THE LORDing .. everyone here has his incredible joy for living and singing and following God. It's really beautiful. I'm really missing home but this is just the experience of a life time. We'll get into our work next week at the orphanage so I'll have to let you know how it all goes. We all send our love and hypothetical plantain. We would send you it if we could. It's so yummy. Talk soon (: Anna