Okay, so a lot has happened since the last time that I was able to update. I never would’ve thought that Ghana would have so many waterfalls and places to hike, but I seriously have been hiking more in the past month than I had back home. Lets see, I went hiking at Likpe Todome, Boti Falls, Leklebi, and every time I go through the bush to get somewhere I feel like I’m hiking. So Boti Falls was a pretty cool place, it was nice to actually be able to swim there, especially since its been so hot and I have no ocean to turn to… all I can rely on is my daily cold shower to cool me off. The water looked pretty damn nasty, but I think it was well worth getting in the nasty looking water to finally remember how it feels to be cold and have chicken skin. Best of all, I am still alive with no worms or parasites! Hopefully it will stay that way for the rest of my time here. The waterfall was pretty huge, there was two of them filling into the same pond below. I wasn’t able to get a good picture, but hopefully you get the idea.

Then we went on our field trip. I almost feel like I’m in high school/college again with all these field trips, classroom sessions, home stay, and we even received some good reference books to rely on once we get to our site. So for our field trip we went to the Volta Region to visit current PCVs and various businesses and the local government assembly. This field trip was a lot like our vision quest, but we traveled in our group of SED volunteers. So I realize that sometimes you may not understand some of the references that I may make and the acronyms that I use, but PC loves to use acronyms and so I have gotten used to it as well. So SED=Small Enterprise Development. There are three different sectors in our group. There is SED, WatSan=Water and Health Sanitation, and Environment. So there is a stereotype that SED usually gets a better living situation than other volunteers, and I think I would agree, but that’s also because of the types of organizations/work that we do. The moral of this story is that on our field trip, we got hooked up (plus we got to basically be tourist visiting various attractions in Ghana because that is essentially what we are getting into). We stayed at a hotel for one night with a pool, at a mountain lodge, and at some rich Ghanaian house. The other group had to travel 18 hours on a tro on dirt roads to get to their destination, didn’t have electricity, and had no pool. The mountain lodge was absolutely amazing. Here is the link, check it out. Mountainparadise-biakpa.com They also had the best groundnut and rice ball soup that I’ve had since being in Ghana.

During the field trip they jam packed our schedule with many visits, some days we went to five different places… it was very exhausting. The first day we went to visit a PCV that lives in Leklebi, who is doing a tourism site dealing with a waterfall. The waterfall was absolutely beautiful. It was a pretty intense hike, but well worth the waterfall and the swimming area. So basically I decided that I don’t want to do any more hiking in Ghana unless it involves a swimming area at the end. If it happens to be something like Manoa Falls I will be truly disappointed. We got to eat some traditional grub from his area, dance with the natives and drink palm wine. So on our last night staying in Leklebi, the volunteer organized a bon fire with drumming and dancing. Imagine a bunch of Africans drumming sweet music and dancing crazy around a fire and some palm wine being passed around… it was a sweaty good time. I personally think it is unfair that Africans are born with a gene that makes them amazing dancers, but maybe it’ll rub off while I’m here. So basically we danced around the fire copying what the Ghanaians were doing, but at one point of the night we decided to teach them a few moves of our own so this one guy (who by the way is an amazing dancer and exceptionally funny) started doing the zombie and then breaks out the Elaine!! Watching him do it, plus watching the Ghanaians trying to follow such a strange dance was probably the funniest thing I have ever seen. I wish I had a video to capture it in all its greatness. By far the best night in Ghana.
The next day we went to visit the District Assembly to talk to them about their roles in the community, just so we could have a better understanding of what they do and how they can help us when we get to our communities. We also went to visit various businesses like batik dying, wood carvers, pottery makers, jewelry makers, and kente weavers. At the kente weavers, we went to this community called Tafi Abuipe. This is also a tourism site (I think my site will be a lot like this) where they have tour guides taking tourist throughout their community to tell them a little history and to show the process. At Tafi Abuipe, basically the whole community does kente weaving. So when you are walking around, you see all these kids slaving away to make strips of kente. What I find even more amazing is that these kids will start apprenticing at around the age of seven and then they start weaving about a couple of years later, but the designs that these kids weave is not documented anywhere… they do it all from their memory. Some of the designs are pretty damn intricate I’m amazed by how good their memory is. [in case you were thinking that this is some sort of child labor, you are wrong. These kids will go to school and then after they are finished with school they will slave away their afternoon making kente strips.] We also visited a pineapple exporting processor, who was also starting to expand and export mango and is working on juicing pineapple and mango. Then we visited with a micro-financing company and were able to visit some of their clients at their business.

So in case anyone is wondering what palm wine is, I actually did a project on it and was able to visit a tapper to talk to him about the process. Palm wine is the sap that is collected from a palm tree. The sap starts to ferment as soon as it is collected from the tree and within an hour or two the alcohol content is about 4%. It is very sweet when it is first tapped and as the day goes on it continues to ferment and gets stronger in content and taste. Palm wine only has a shelf life of 24 hours so most of the palms that are tapped get made into akpeteshi. So I was also able to view the distilling process of akpeteshi, which was pretty damn cool. It is very basic, but I’ve never seen anything like it before so I was pretty damn amazed. So basically they ferment the wine for 6-8 days in big barrels and then after it is fully fermented they fill half of another barrel with the fermented wine and put it to a boil. There is a coil tube that is connected from one barrel to another which lets the vapors travel from the barrel that is burning to the next barrel. The second barrel is attached to another barrel which then has a hole at the bottom which akpeteshi comes out of. I’m not the best at explaining, but maybe by looking at the pictures that I took, you will understand the process a little better. [also, I have decided that I want to have a palm tree, magic berry, cocoa tree, moringa tree, and plantain farm when I get back.]

Ps. I don’t want people to get the wrong impression that all we do on our free time is drink, because we simply don’t have that financial luxury. It is just nice to hang out and have something cold to drink besides water. I personally have started to like pineapple, grape, and orange fanta. They also have this drink called Malta which taste like liquid rasin bran, its pretty disgusting.