As promised i took some pictures, so this will be a picture entry. I will try to add more pictures when the internet lets me... it takes forever to load pictures. so please be patient.

PC sent us on a little quest to find things/places in Accra. We got assigned to meet with a coffin maker. His name was Hello. He made all sorts of coffins, like cars (which had back lights that actually worked) cameras, birds, bibles, pineapples, squash (as seen in the picture), and many others. The second picture is of his workers making the coffins. Also on this Accra quest, they basically gave us little direction, so we were pretty much lost the whole time. This coffin place was in Teshie, which was about a 45 minute trotro ride from where we started… we totally thought that we were going to the wrong place, but some how managed to get some guy on the tro to help us find Hello. Ghanaians are pretty helpful, reminds me of the Japanese.

so here is a picture of my living compound. the two doors in the front is the kitchen and the storage area. they do most of their cooking outside on the ground where there are a billion flies around. its actually very lovely sight. if you look closely you can see a some pots, probably that have stew inside of them. there are five rooms on the left hand side and then a big room on the right hand side. i live in the third room on the left side. the two rooms before me have 4 people dorming... in a room the same size that i'm staying in. they pack them in.


here is my room. is pretty boring, but i figured that i'm only here for a couple of months... i sleep under a mosquito net, which somehow i still manage to get bit every now and then. the matress is pretty uncomfortable and sinks in the middle, but somehow i still manage to sleep fairly well. the pillows here are worse, but i guess thats just how it goes. i still live out of my suitcase which sucks, but oh wells. mmm, yea, i don't spend too much time in here, but you get the idea.
this is some of the crazy rock climbing that we had to do to get into the caves. i'm not sure if the picture does it justice, but i was a bit scared... but thankful we had Boss there, so i felt uber safe in his care.

this would be one of the bat caves... its always appropriate to make like a bat while getting your picture snapped.

This was in Likpe Todomo on my vision quest. They had a nice little swing mid way through the hike, so it was a good resting area before we started to the bat caves and rock climbing. The second picture is the hole to the bat cave. There were so many bats inside the cave, it reminded me of Ace Ventura. As we got to the entrance all these bats started flying out, but Boss (our tour guide) told us that bats could smell humans, so they won’t bother you. I'm pretty sure that was a lie because ive heard stories of bats flying into peoples heads and what not, but thankfully we did not experience any of that.


There is a picture of Boss, with his machete handy. And those are some of the rocks that we had to climb in order to get to some of the bat caves. There were 7 total caves that we went to. Some of the stories that Boss told us about the caves were hard to believe, but maybe there were true. The brochure for these bat caves said that at the 7th cave the view is such that of the Grand Canyon in the US. I haven’t been to the Grand Canyon yet, but I’m pretty sure the views are not similar at all… but whatever gets tourist to come and visit right?

So here is something I have pretty often (there are really only 6 different dishes that Ghanaians eat. They can the same thing over and over and not get tired.) So this is boiled yams and some kind of oily stew. I’m not really sure what it’s called… its kind of spicy and really oily. The water bowl is to wash my hands because they don’t use utensils here, but at least most of them wash their hands before they eat. Then in the top right corner is a water sachet, basically what i drink all the time here. Water sachets are 5 peswas and most of the time a little chilled. sometimes they taste pretty nasty. I’ll try taking more pictures of my meals so you can see fufu and banku.


So remember how I said that I thought I had snail in my soup? Well, these pictures pretty much conforms that. They use snails in their soup. My brother said it’s very good… I mean I probably shouldn’t be shocked because people eat snails, but it’s still not something of the norm for me. Plus, these suckers are huge! And that’s my sister Patricia cracking the snails. Most of the food preparation is done outside and on the floor. I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten a few bugs that were in my food cause every now and then you’ll find some random crunchy thing in your rice or stew. It is not pleasant at all, but whatever, I’m sort of getting used to it. Also the amount of flies that are around when they are preparing the food is pretty disgusting, but somehow it doesn’t bother them a bit.




okay, i am uploaded up and tired. so that is all for now. i apologize for the randomness and unorganization of it all... next time i will try to make it more organized.


xoxo.

Kelli, PCT

Peace Corps Ghana

P.O. Box 5796

Accra-North