First Week In ghana!

After a 15 hour flight to Dubai, a 12 hour layover and another 5 hour flight to Accra, I finally arrived in Ghana on Sunday! Dubai was the cleanest place I have ever been. The airport was spotless, uncrowded and brand new. A few girls and I took a taxi tour around Dubai when we got to the hotel. We saw the tallest building in the world (it was so tall we couldn't see the top from inside the taxi) and a 7-star hotel that is shaped like a sail and costs $5,000/night. We also drove onto a palmtree-shaped island with multi-million dollar homes lining the island. These homes have double beach access and Michael Jackson owned a home there! The craziest thing about Dubai was how much of it was under construction. Everywhere we looked there were cranes and construction zones. The "main street" is more like a highway lined with tallllll buildings and American fast food chains and stores.

When we arrived at the Accra airport, there was an instant tropical, laid back feel. The airport is really small and the customs check was almost non-existent! The woman did not even check my passport or my bags, she just waved me through. EAP picked all 50 of us up at the airport and we took buses to campus which is about 20 minutes from the airport.

The campus is so beautiful! Ghana is so green and the soil is dark red. On campus, every building is white with red tiles. The campus is probably one and a half times bigger than Davis- so it's really big! Everyone walks here, and our guides told us that only international students ride bikes. Each department has their own building and there are six residence halls (they are building two more!). My dorm, the International hostel, is a little far from the main road of campus but it's close to the pool!

We are doing our orientation program for the next two and a half weeks and it counts for credit. In the mornings we go to lectures on Ghanaian culture, history, geography and Twi (the native language) that are taught by University of Ghana professors. They have such thick accents and sometimes it's hard to understand them, but they keep telling us it will get easier! They provide us with three meals a day. The food is delicious! It's a lot like Indian food; very spicy. It's mostly sauce/curry-type dishes always served with rice and meat.

My favorite activity so far has been the nightly dancing/drumming classes. The teacher is an old Ghanaian man named Oh Nii who hobbles around with a cane. He always tells us it's "time to boogie". When we "boogie" particularly well, he throws his cane to the side and shakes his hips just as well as his 20 year old dancers. They can all move their bodies in ways that americans just can't. It's really funny to see the african dancers next to our UC students- but everyone gets really into it and tries to do the dances right! I'm going to take a drumming class here. The teacher, who is one of Oh Nii's drummers, makes his own drums and has offered to make a bunch of students their own for his class.

Anywhere you drive in Ghana there are people standing in the middle of the traffic lanes selling goods like water, cheap toys and food. The women carry these goods in baskets on their heads. They stand in traffic waiting for people to buy their items and call to people to try to entice them. They are not scared of cars hitting them and will go up to random cars and wash their windows while they are stuck in traffic.

We went into Accra yesterday to a market called Medina. It was by far the most exciting and overwhelming experience thus far. It is a maze of dirt pathways lined with shacks of people selling old shoes, American goods and dried fish. The streets are lined with sewage in trenches and on the ground. Kids were running around the market barefoot, yelling "Obruni!" (white person) every time we passed. We definitely attracted a lot of attention. I felt like a celebrity because each road we went down people were trying to grab us to buy their goods and welcome us to Ghana. The people at the market were selling every single good you can imagine. They had everything ranging from raw pig's feet and dried whole fishes laying out on tables to toiletries, fabric to make dresses, and cell phones. One man held his baby out to my friend Andi because white people are considered precious and angelic and he wanted her to bless his child. Being in Medina was such a contrast with being at the University. It is clear that students who go to UG are among the upper middle class here. Everyone is dressed well in name brand clothes and can afford an education of $4,000 a year whereas the people in Medina were scraping by, living in dirty conditions selling used goods. It was an eye-opening experience and it really reminded me why I came to Africa in the first place. While I am here to go to school, I really can't wait to learn more about the NGOs in the area and how they are providing pure water for the exponentially growing population.

No matter where I go in Ghana, everyone is so friendly and welcoming. People here are excited and passionate about life. They are happy to talk to us and have really interesting stories to tell us. They love when we use Twi words in conversation! Time seems to move slower here, as events happen as people show up, not at a dictated time on the clock. A rule of thumb here is to add an hour or two to the announced time and you'll be on time. It's really amazing to experience this culture and I can't wait to live here for five more months!

peace,
katie