It's been a while

It seems that a lot has happened since my last post but now that it's time to write, I'm not sure where to start.

From vision quest, I took a 4 hour tro ride north to the Kumasi sub-office (there is an Accra Peace Corps office and there are also Kumasi and Tamale sub-officers for those who are too far from the coast). This ride was miserable!! I was in the back right seat so I was above the wheelwell. My knees jabbed into the seat in front of me and my right leg was either completely straight (the guy a row in front of me kept stepping on my foot) or bent behind me to the point where the top of my foot was pressed flat on the bus floor. Kumasi was really chill. I was one of a dozen or so trainees who split travel into two days so we all chartered a tro to Techiman the following morning. As I got ready to bitch and moan about the terrible travel situation, I started to hear truly traumatic stories. Some of my counterparts spent as long as 13 hours on tros and experienced flat tires, broken axles and a variety of other issues. Not too bad for me I guess.

Our training group (down from 48 to 47 by this point) spent 4 days and 3 nights in Techiman. The days were full and included anything from getting acquanted in the city to VERY detailed lectures on the MANY ways we can get sick. As long as I don't touch standing water, I should be good. Our "gender roles," class explained how if an American man kisses a Ghanaian woman, it's implied that the two will sleep together that night. If the two do end up having sex, the woman is to lay there and any movement will suggest that she's a prostitute. Also, if a man touches a Ghanaian woman's breasts, it's not unlikely that the woman will laugh in response since breasts are purely functional in Ghana. On top of all of this, it's expected that once you've slept with a Ghanaian, you will marry her and take her to America. Long story short: I won't kiss any Ghanaian women!! I'll admit that after seeing a few pairs of 80 year old breasts flopping around town, the purely functional aspect makes more sense.

On our 4th day in Techiman, all 47 trainees sat in a group while at least 80 Ghanaians sate across from us. One by one, our names were called and we ran up to meet our new host family. It felt like an odd sort of draft but was definitely exciting. My Ghanaian "mother," speaks almost no english and her daughter? (I'm still not sure how they're really connected) did nothing but sit and stare.

I've been living with this host family for about a week now. I live in a "compound," which means that there are about 15 people living in a 5 room area. Picture a square in which three sides are made up of rooms, one is made up of a fence and the center is all open space. I wake up at about 5:15 each morning. It took 3 days to figure out the time. I have no watch and didn't put a battery in my alarm clock until I got to the homestay. I had no clock to reference so I only knew that I would normally wake up at around 14:15. I have my own bedroom and a small porch of my own. The porch feels a bit like a prison cell; there is a solid metal gate that closes around me and a cement floor. I eat by myself and for a few days would sit and eat while everybody stared from their respective location in the compound. Kinda odd.

Each day, I get more comfortable and I'm able to communicate more. I've gotta run soon but want to share an experience from last night. After a full day of training in Techiman (a 15 minute cab ride from my town : Aworowa), several of us went out on the town for dinner. After dinner, my friend Will and I went back to our village and realized that we hadn't brought our flashlights. It had just rained and the two of us walked the 1/4 mile through town in pitch darkness on wet clay ground. We managed to get to Will's place fine but from his house to mine has a number of dips (pee drains) in the ground and I walked like a blind man while Ghanaians ran past my as though it daylight out.

More to come. I know where I'm going to live for the next 2 years but that deserves an entry of it's own.

Love to all!!