3-7-09
Sorry it has been so long since I have posted! Nothing very interesting happened for a week, then we were in Kumasi for the weekend, and when we returned there were power and internet problems. I hope everyone is doing well!
We traveled to Kumasi to attend the funeral of K’s (see first entry for an explanation of who K is) grandmother. It was a very long weekend, so I will just give you some of the highlights. We were supposed to stay with K’s father, who is a chief in his village. However, the men K was running from showed up for the funeral before we did. They thought K might show up. African hospitality demanded that K’s dad give them a place to stay. So the men were staying in the rooms he had intended for us. Such a bizarre situation. So we stayed in a little hotel about half an hour away. On Friday we toured some of Kumasi and explored the city with K’s best friend John. John had met us at the airport and spent the first weekend in Accra with us. We were all very excited to see him and he was very excited to show us Kumasi, which is the second largest city in Ghana. Kumasi is much hotter than Accra. We all got very sunburnt the first and second day there.
The funeral was on Saturday and Sunday. We had been told that the funeral would probably have a lot of tribal elements. Coffins are usually hand carved to reflect the person’s life. However, it ended up being a completely Roman Catholic ceremony, complete with a viewing and mass. Everytime you arrive at different location you have to go around the room or the circle of chairs and shake everyone’s hand. There were a lot of people there, so I am pretty sure we must have shaken at least 1,000 hands over the course of the day. We were the only abrunis there, so everyone stared a lot. When we first arrived, a lady on a microphone said that we had come all the way from America specifically for this funeral and to pay our respects. K’s father told us that we were the first white people to ever come to a funeral in that village, which was about an hour and a half outside of Kumasi, and several of the very few white people who had ever come to the village at all. Most of the children under 8 or 9 had never seen white people. I made a lot of babies cry. They looked at us, and when their moms or siblings tried to make them touch our hands they just started screaming like they had seen the devil incarnate. A lot of the younger kids were curious, but a little apprehensive. They would touch our arms very quickly and draw back like they had touched something hot. It took a couple tries before they realized our skin felt just like theirs. They kept trying to pluck our freckles off, thinking the freckles were dirt. Many of the little ones couldn’t understand why the tattoo on my arm wouldn’t come off. They kept rubbing at it and looking very confused. They also had a lot of trouble understanding the concept of sunburn. Many didn’t speak very much English, and I didn’t speak Twi, so explaining was a little hard. The funeral started at 8 AM and by 8 PM, everyone was still singing and dancing. The women of the village and the old chiefs had a lot of fun trying to teach us their native dances. It took us a while to catch on and we all laughed over how ridiculous it all was.
Janine started feeling sick halfway through the day. We all thought she was just dehydrated, but by the evening she was miserable and thought she was going to pass out. We left around 8PM because she was feeling so ill. Halfway back to Kumasi we decided she needed to go to the hospital. After three minutes the doctor had diagnosed her with malaria. The poor girl spent the whole next day in bed weak, feverish, sick to her stomach. Michelle, Rachel, Karim, and John went to the second day of the funeral while I stayed in the hotel with Janine. We didn’t get a bus back to Accra until nearly 11:30. It was 4:30 in the morning by the time we got back to our hostel in Accra.
I was supposed to go to Monrovia this week and most of next. There was an International Women’s Leadership Conference I had been invited to by a MSW grad of Monmouth who started an NGO with repatriated Liberian refugees. (Explained in the first entry). I had been indecisive as to how I was going to get there. At first, flights we too expensive so I couldn’t go. Then I decided to go overland via Cote d’Ivoire, which would take two days. Then I found cheaper flights, but they were only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. So I was going overland again. I was going to get my visa at the border, but then I heard with bribes it could be nearly $200. So I decided to get my visa here before I left. There was one day visa processing, and I needed to catch my bus at 4:30 AM Wednesday morning. So by Tuesday morning I had finally made up my mind to go overland but get my visa before I left. There was no internet so I couldn’t look up the requirements for a visa so I had to go to the embassy. The woman at the visa counter gave me a sheet of paper with the things I needed. I went back and forth from the embassy to campus to the embassy to an internet cafe to the embassy to a forex exchange bureau, the to the embassy. Everytime I came back to the embassy thinking I had everything, she would say…"Well this isn’t right. Why don’t you have this." If I could have smacked the woman through the bullet proof glass…I would have. So six hours after I first arrived they told me there was a backlog and I couldn’t get the visa until Friday or Monday. At which point I would have missed most of the conference.
However, I made a student contact who is doing research in Buduburum Refugee Camp and wanted a research assistant. So I am off to spend the weekend doing research in the camp, which is one of the most exciting things that has happened since I got here.