togo & benin

Day 1: Lonnie, Nina and I arrived at Circle (the place where we would get the bus to Lome) around 2pm, and pulled out of the chaotic bus station that is Circle approximately 30 minutes later. The three of us dozed in and out of sleep as the bus moved slowly through traffic, until we noticed – about an hour and a half later, might I add – that we were just passing by the university. We have no idea why the drive that usually takes 20 minutes took five times as long…Oh, Ghana. We were told that the drive to Lome from Accra would take about 3 hours, but we ended up at the border in almost double the time. I got excited as we neared the border to start speaking French again – while getting our visas at the Togo border, I married off both Nina and Lonnie to one of the security guards, who also wrote down his number for us and told us to call him. Good times. We made it to our hotel and then wandered around looking for a place to eat, after which we crashed into bed to try and get some sleep

Day 2: After leaving our not-so-lovely hotel room, we had an amazing breakfast of omelettes and our first moto ride of the trip along the coast of Togo…it was awesome! We wandered through the market in Lome, and after deciding that markets in West Africa pretty much all look the same, headed to the fetish market. The fetish market is where people who practice voodoo go to get their medicines…it was certainly an interesting experience. We met the son of the fetish market chief and saw how many stones/animal parts/random stuff was used to do voodoo, and then got to walk around and take pictures of all the musty dead animals.

As Nina put it: “Thank God for the World Wildlife Federation.”

After we had enough of snake skulls and horse heads, we got a taxi to Togoville, the village that the whole country is named after. We took a pirogue ride through Lac Togo to the village, which boasts of the voodoo religion (stone statues of gods were everywhere) and the place where the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared in the 80’s (the pope even visited Togoville after that happened). We then pirogue-d it back to the shore, which was a memorable ride as Lonnie met another future husband and an old man blessed us about 50 times…pretty sure “God Bless You” was the only thing he knew how to say in English. We crossed into Benin in the afternoon, and made it to Ouidah in what we thought was a too-full taxi with 4 people crammed in the back. Little did we know what was to come….anyway, we made it to Ouidah, which is a small town with a Portuguese fort, slave history and a museum full of snakes (but we stayed far away from that!). Our hotel was blue bungalows right on the ocean…amazing! We had a lovely French dinner, laughed when the power flickered on and off numerous times, and swam in the saltwater pool.

Day 3: We first walked to the Door of No Return, which was located pretty close to our hotel and then took a motorbike into town…with all THREE of us, along with our backpacks and purses, behind the driver…it was crazy. We took a tour of an old Portuguese slave fort, taxi-ed to a bank in Cotonou to take out money, and took a moto ride to Ganvie, the largest stilt village in Africa -- It is comprised of 4 villages that total around 80,000 people. They even had two hotels you could stay in and a gift shop, where the store owner outfitted Nina like an African woman which was pretty funny. We then headed north to Abomey in a shared taxi, walked around a little bit in search of French food, only to realize that Ghana has a disproportionate amount of street food compared to Francophone West Africa. We pulled out the guidebook and found a place that sounded good, found it and sat down to learn that they had no menus (we are used to only getting one menu per group, but no menus??) and that they were only serving rice and meat. Since I don’t eat meat and Lonnie and Nina were rice-ed out, we decided to give up on and head to our hotel, which turned out to be a great idea. The hotel was very cute and despite the lack of running water, we had a great dinner and lots of fun hanging out there.

Day 4: In the morning we visited the palace that used to be where the chiefs of the Abomey people lived – now it has been turned into a museum. The whole thing was so interesting, we saw many of their religious practices, the uses for the various compounds within the palace, and heard how all Abomey kings had more than 1,000 wives -- whenever one king died, the next king inherited all of the previous king’s wives! After our tour, we went to the bus station only to find out that there wasn’t another bus going to Natitingou (where we wanted to go) that day. We accepted an offer to ride up on what we thought was going to be a tro tro the whole way, only to find out that was NOT the case. Here ensued the hilarious events: from a squished tro-tro, to taxi #1, which included me straddling the stick shift, 4 people in the front row and 8 in the backseat, which is a total of 12 people, then taxi #2, which had three rows – 4 people in the front, we think 8 in the middle, 4 in the back (that’s where we were), 1 in the trunk and 1 on the roof for a grand total of 18 people. This was a seriously hilarious experience…we bonded with the Beninois people in the car, and I got to play with a little girl who was adorable. One of the guys in there (the one who was at first on the roof, but then came in the car when it started raining) spoke a little English and said “See? Africa no good. In America, this not happen.” He was laughing about it, but it’s true. I don’t know whether there is a shortage of taxis in Benin or that people don’t have enough money to pay for a reasonable number of people in one taxi, but it is so unsafe. Then, we were dropped off again to taxi #3 which I thought was the most uncomfortable. Lonnie and Nina were jammed in the front with the driver and another lady, I was in the middle with I think 7 others, and 4 guys were crammed in the trunk. We went through a police checkpoint….our driver bribed the officer to let our way-too-full taxi through with a bag of pure water. We finally made it to Natitingou around 10pm, found a hotel that had the friendliest workers ever who helped us get a guide for our SAFARI the next day!

Day 5: AFRICAN SAFARI! We rented a truck and a guide for the day, which turned out to be a great idea. We left our hotel at 5:30am and returned back at 5:30pm….it was amazing! We saw lots of elephants, crocodiles, monkeys, hippos, wildebeasts, gazelles, warthogs, monkeys, baboons, birds, antelopes, turkey-looking things and many other animals that we had no idea what they were called. We got to ride on the top of our guide’s truck….we felt like we were in the Lion King and so sang a lot of Lion King songs throughout our drive  After our safari, we took a tro tro through Benin into Togo which was amazing. The ride was beautiful and we saw so many interesting villages. One of the funniest parts was the “border” between Togo and Benin…it was literally a tree log. Since we didn’t get exit stamps, the three of us never actually left Benin, according to our passports. We stayed overnight in Kara, a city in the far north of Togo, at possibly the worst hotel I have ever been in in Africa…and that’s saying something!

Day 6: Travel day! We took a bus from Kara to Lome, which surprisingly left on time and got to our destination on time! From Lome (which, fun fact, is the only capital city in the world that is also a border town) we went through the border with no issues and then got a tro from Aflao back to Accra. We were so happy to be back in Ghana! As the three of us were sitting on the tro with people surrounding the bus trying to sell items, two ladies in the tro yelling at each other over something or another, and being able to use our beloved cedis instead of confusing CFA, Lonnie said, “I never thought Ghana would feel so much like home!” So true :)

a typical week in ghana

Whenever I read people’s blogs, I always wish I had an idea of what they did every day…maybe it’s just the American in me, but I LOVE when things are in chronological order. So…here is a short recap of a typical week here in Ghana throughout the past 3 months – but keep in mind that nothing in Ghana can be called ‘typical’…

Monday: I usually wake up debating whether or not I should go to the Urban Development class that I’m auditing. If I decide to go, I’ll leave the hostel around 8:50am, which gives me enough time to order an egg sandwich at the night market and walk to my 9:30 class. During class, I write notes and look around when the professor makes jokes to try and figure out why everyone is laughing. If I don’t decide to go, which has been the case recently, then I wake up later and head straight to my African-American Literature class that starts at 11:30 (which, unfortunately, is the same time that my first class ends…why they don’t add more time between classes is a mystery to me). But it’s okay because I’ve always made it there before my professor, an African-American, arrives. During this class I have the luxury of being able to stop paying attention periodically because I can easily understand what the professor is saying. I get out of this class at 1:30, and either get lunch at one of the nearby eating places (all of which are inside the individual dorms/hostels) or back at Night Market which is right next to my hostel. I usually arrive at my 3:30 class, Africa and the Global System, only to wait for my professor to show up 30 minutes later. At 5:30 I am very happy to be done with classes for the day, and usually head back with my obruni friends to grab my usual dinner at the Night Market – beans, white rice, and plantains. At night, we’ll hang out, get stuff made by the seamstress, watch movies, go to a movie at the mall, whatever.

Tuesday: Up at 9am, I will usually get oatmeal or waffles at Tasty Treats (the eating place inside of my hostel), which can take from between 10 minutes to an hour to receive. I always bring a book out there to read while I wait, but inevitably I will end up talking with the other international students waiting for their food. Until around 2pm, I will either read for class, go online, write blogs, read one of the many books I brought here and am trying very hard to finish, or hang out with my roommate or other people. I then usually go to meet Rebecca, one of the social workers from Street Girls Aid, at Tema Station – which is right in the middle of Accra. The ride from campus to Tema Station takes about 30 minutes, depending on the traffic and the number of people getting on and off. After meeting Rebecca, we walk to the slum where Comfort, Ata, Afia and Adua live (or lived, since Ata and Afia are already back home trying to start their businesses!) and visit them and the others who lives there. This often ends up in me taking a million pictures of everyone, or in us walking to a nearby (well, nearby according to them, but not really by my standards!) pharmacy or market to get them either medicine for their children or something they need. I always love visiting them and seeing their smiling faces. I then travel back to campus, usually get stuck in a ton of traffic and laugh at the insane drivers until I get back to campus. Back at campus I then grab dinner – you guessed it, rice, beans and plantains from the Night Market – and then eat quickly before heading to our International Students Bible Study, which is held in the hostel right next to mine.

Wednesday: I’ll wake up at 8am to get ready, grab breakfast and go to Street Girls Aid – a process that includes a walk to the tro-tro stop at the nearest junction, a tro-tro ride past the main gate of the university, a wait at the tro-tro stop outside of the main gate for a tro to La Paz, the tro ride to La Paz, and then a few minute walk to the refuge house. I usually arrive there by 10am, and start doing school with the girls. They break for lunch at noon, during which I’ll go and sit with them and ‘be invited’ to all of their meals (Ghanaians say “you are invited” whenever they are eating and are trying to tell you that you can eat their food with them). Afterwards, we usually go upstairs to their room and hang out, talk, dance, be silly, take pictures, whatever  I’m always sad by the time I have to leave at 2:30 to get back to campus for my class at 3:30. I go to my Strategies of Development class where almost half of the students are international. One of my friends re-named the class “International Students against Professor,” which I think is pretty accurate, given that our professor does not always have the strongest or most valid explanations for things. I then trudge to my 5:30-7:30 class, Geography of West Africa with special reference to Ghana, where my friend Maggie from Elon and I sit in the front next to our friend, Pounds Sterling (yes,that is his name). He is really nice and very helpful in decoding the Ghanaian English spoken by our professor to us. By 7:30 I can’t WAIT to eat beans, plantains and rice and so we speed walk back to the hostel to get some food!

Thursday: Nina and I walk to tutorial for our Strategies of Development in Africa class which consists of an hour of discussing the topics covered in class more in-depth (which only sometimes happens since our teaching assistant really likes to hear himself talk), and then usually grab lunch at Tasty Treats or an egg sandwich at the Night Market. Sometimes I would go again (often Nina comes with me) to visit Comfort, Ata, Afia and Adua, or little Jon with Rebecca in the afternoons. At 6:30, I go upstairs to Selma’s room for my Ghanaian Bible Study, which is an outgrowth from a local church. I really enjoyed my time listening to Ghanaian perspectives and getting to know more Ghanaians here. They were all very welcoming and nice.

Friday: On Fridays I try to sleep in as late as the blasting music from the Night Market will permit, hang around doing random things in the morning, and usually leave to head to Street Girls Aid by noon. On Fridays I do different things with the girls, sometimes school, sometimes creative art-type stuff, and once I had my international student friends come in with their laptops so the girls could learn how to use computers! It was awesome watching them – they were so excited.

The weekends really vary, but if I’m not traveling, it will often include a trip to a beach or a pool, a movie or play being showed on campus, going to the mall to get pictures printed of the girls at S.Aid or getting on the super fast internet at the Apple store, watching movies and hanging out, going out to dinner anywhere that does NOT serve Ghanaian food, or exploring Accra.