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Again, massive apologies for the lateness of the blog! I have now settled in Tumu but am now over 2 weeks behind and was going to spend the weekend catching up but I seemed to be the only person in Tumu who was unaware that they were shutting the power off for the weekend as I don't have a personal radio. (Goodbye frozen mountain of hacked chicken, but more about that later!). So much has happened since Accra, I have encountered scrum hat wearing children, watched a former dictator blow me away with his teaching, made a unscheduled stop in Lawra to find alcoholic goats and flaccid candles, become a skilled plumber and discussed David Cameron's sexual preference with the Internal Auditor of the Local hospital but I guess you guys are going to have to be patient for those stories! At this rate I may get onto them by my birthday in August!
Secondly, apart from some shining examples, (Capt's 'To me, Tumu' was genius and was tickled with Jonnies idea of swapping children) most of you failed in your homework. If I was giving feedback, it would be 'could try harder!'. I realise that fault may lie at my end as I haven't given you engaging enough source material so for the younger crowd your homework will involved condoms. I look forward to reading your replies!!!
The second part of the week continued at the same breakneck as the first half. Three people got food poisoning (although not a huge amount of sympathy from my end as they all ordered salads for supper instead of getting stuck into something meaty). During the safety briefing I announced that on the plane over I had met a member of the British council who told me that they considered Accra to be safer then London. Ibrahim, who was leading the briefing, decided that what I actually meant was Ghana was Safer then London and kept on referring to this while telling us statistics about armed robbery, assaults, burglary etc. Despite the safety briefing I feel incredibly safe in Ghana and need to keep reminding myself that I need to padlock my door before I leave my new pad.
Two of the more interesting lectures were the heath lecture (you will get malaria, don't worry you will be fine, most, but not all, snakes are non-poisonous, don't worry you will be fine, you will probably fall off your motorbike but don't worry you will be fine etc) and language training (where I can't even write the local language phonetically, don't use enough nasal sounds, and got rather depressed when my language teacher got very excited after 5 hours of training as I managed to pronounce my first word correctly. Rice as it turns out is the only word I can say without anyone hysterically laughing!). After language training we were given our VSO supplies. Two mosquito nets, two water filters, blankets, sheets, mozzy spray, rehydration salts, two packs of normal condoms and two packs of X-large Champion Ghanaian condoms (the packaging very kindly invited me to the big boy club). Now this lead to a hushed conversation with another male volunteer about what on earth you would use an x-large Champion Ghanaian condom for? After a few minutes of discussion we were rather stumped.
It has not just been lectures that we have been doing. We have had evening activities to! We visited a volunteers house (much nicer then I had thought they would be), went salsa dancing where I seriously embarrassed myself when asked if I wanted to try the line dancing with 'Hurricane' (her real name is Katrina, hence the wicked nickname) I replied, 'only if we do it over in that dark corner, by the bar where no one can see what were doing' which caused much hilarity and quote repeating over the next few days. The problem with the dark corner was although for the first line dance I was right at the back, the second dance was a complicated version of a macarana type dance meaning that my plan of staying anonymous was wrecked as we did a couple of quarter turns and suddenly I was leading a dance with 80 Ghanaians behind me watching me butcher their heavily choreographed moves. Not ideal.
I also got a chance to catch up with an old friend called Charlie SE whose visit to Accra luckily co-in sided with mine and had my last blowout Indian meal which was incredible. From then on it's been local food all the way. Now local Ghanaian food consists of a few main staples. Rice, meat (almost anything goes, I had some barbequed assorted meat in a spot in Tumu and am slightly worried I have now eaten dog without realising), beans, plantain, yams, TZ, banku and fufu. The last three are variations of mashed cornflower, yams and water that are mixed together and left to ferment for different amounts of time before being moulded into a blob and served with a thick soup with some sort of assorted meat in it. This would be fine except for the last few years Agi, Anna and myself have been using the word 'fufu' as a substitute for the more crude words used to describe a woman's lady garden. This combined with being shown the correct way to eat fufu is to use your fingers and being asked if your fufu needs another chunk of meat has lead to some serious self-control in the laughter department from me. Think I am going to have to stick to banku and rice with chicken for now.
On the final day we visited the VSO offices in Accra where they had a very cool, large map which has every volunteers picture, job description etc on it with a bit of cotton joining to the town they are in. (hopefully I have managed to upload a few pictures of it into the photo section). Although this has lead to me finding out that there are only two volunteers in Ghana who are in a town all by themselves. Myself in Tumu and Sarah in Lawra (More about her in two blogs time) although we are only 3 hours away from each other on a motorbike and so we are virtually next-door neighbours! While there we got to meet all the staff and got our pay for our first two months in Ghana. This was rather exciting as we got it massive wads of 5 cedis (the local currency) in a paper bag off 'the accountant' so I felt like I was in a 1930s gangster film.
It was here where we found the newspaper with the report about the religious man fornicating with a pregnant sheep he had tied to a tree. (Fortunately I was the most informed volunteer about this as one of my friends had already posted the link on my facebook wall. This had already lead to a conversation with Sarah where she was saying it was so nice how her friends were leaving her links to interesting articles about education and aid in Ghana on her facebook wall, to which I replied, 'we must have a slightly different class of friend as the only link my friends have sent me is about a religious man who had s*x with a pregnant goat asking me if I was in anyway responsible.......' this comment was followed by a rather awkward, pregnant pause.
This story also lead to another volunteer entertaining us with an amusing story of another person who was caught doing something similar and in court used the excuse, 'when I started she was definitely a woman, someone must of cursed me as I have no idea where this goat came from.' Don't think the jury went for it.
Over the next week I will try my best to catch up on the blogs I am behind. Miss you all! Xxx
PS Homework for this week is to come up with uses for my X-large champion Ghanaian condoms. (Apart from what they are meant to be used for!)
- comments
Johnnie Pull the aforementioned condom over the top of your head until the band around the bottom is just under your nose and wrapped around your head with most of your face and head covered with the rest.... Now the tricky bit.... Inhale through your mouth and exhale through your nose... Keep doing this until the condom expands and you get a giant condom alien head... Then jump out an Uni un expecting victim make a wired gurgling noise... Pop the condom head with a prepared pin and collapse with a gurgling scream and see what happens..l
Jem Barnaby bear them. A day in the life of a condom in Africa...in photos. Thinking about you jim xx
captain FIVE STARS>>>>>> Laughed out loud at the fufu paragraph...maybe it is the Heale sense of humour ...I tried to rate your blog a five and just clicked the first star and it wouldn't let me click any more....next time I'll know to hit the right hand star...Captain
DinaG Hey James - greetings from southern Africa! Thanks to the Capt for sharing your link with me and I definitely agree with her that your blog should be 5 stars! (My 5 star rating - hitting the right hand star brought it up to 3 stars!) Keep having wonderful adventures and writing about them - they are great fun to read. I laughed out loud at many of them including the fufu paragraph!