September 25 2010 / Takoradi, Ghana

After last night, I decided that I would sleep for however long I darn well pleased, so I missed breakfast entirely and didn’t really leave my room until lunch time, where I found Julie and Jared.  I’d forgotten I had promised Julie I would go with her to the market circle, so we went together as a gaggle, walking all the way there.  They had loud music booming out in the circle today, which was pretty neat.  It was just really fun to just kind of dance through the circle.  Everyone is so friendly there!  We also found some pretty nifty fabric, that’s kind of brownish/white/purple patterned, very African and cool, and it was only four cedis a yard, so I bought two yards of it to cut up and make armbands for Aegean Sea pride!  Sea Olympics  are like… in late October, but it never hurts to get pride started now.  In the store they ever have stuff organized by color, so people can get especially spirited, which I just love!  :)  But this will be a financially friendly way for people to get excited. 

We left the circle and walked in the same direction that I did the last time I went to the market circle, went to the same shop we had the first day (it was called “Real Life”), and had my delicious pear drink again.  Julie and I saw a lady roasting plantains on the street, and went over and bought a ridiculous amount of them for two cedis.  Then we sat by the roadside and munched on them as little girls shouted obruni at us.  It never seems to have a negative connotation, it’s just very interesting here.  Eventually we grabbed a cab back to port. 

We departed Ghana around dinnertime.  Dinner was filled with laughter—we started playing Would You Rather and then MFK, which was pretty fun, and continued when we went outside.  All the people who had been selling us stuff directly outside the boat were all singing and drumming and dancing, some of them waving Ghanaian flags, and we were clapping and waving and screaming “We love Ghana!”  We also waved to a Singapore oil tanker, which was pretty cool because they were taking pictures of us with their cameras, which I thought was kind of a funny reversal. 

Post port kind of made me feel ill at ease, because everyone was talking about how they’d made all of these “lifelong friends” with the Ghanaian people, and how they'd felt like they'd helped to change people's lives when they volunteered in hospitals or building houses.  Meanwhile, although I’d had an overall positive experience, I didn’t have anything more than fairly shallow relationships.  I’m not sure if that was because I was still on my guard from Morocco or what.  I didn't feel like I'd changed anyone's help at all--I felt like I was a dumb tourist who didn't know how to help and couldn't help with the widespread poverty.  Still, everyone seemed to come away with these incredibly amazing experiences, and although I feel like I learned immensely in Ghana about poverty especially, and the amount of joy that human beings can find in the things that they have, I can’t say that I met friends there that I will remember and who will remember me.  I came away from the country not feeling like I had a fun time, but instead feeling deeply disturbed by the country-spread poverty and astounded that there was virtually no overall governmental presence aside from the chiefs and queen mothers of certain areas that were helping people, though mostly without providing monetary assistance (at least I think they weren’t).  In that way I did enjoy Ghana because I am glad I have gotten such a clearer viewpoint, but it’s a view that has been extremely difficult to even comprehend and accept, as I’ve been born into an incredible affluent life in the United States and have never had to worry about whether I was going to have food to eat that night.  Of course, that’s not to say everything was a bummer—Kakum National Park was amazing, as was the joy you could find in the market circle.  But it was definitely the biggest impression on me.  I hope this is even mildly coherent, I've been struggling to try to put my feelings about Ghana together for days now. 

That night we really wanted to play Monopoly, because Jared and I are both highly competitive at it apparently, but by the time we got to the student activities stand, it was closed.  Curses!  So instead we went up on the observation deck (which we were quickly shooed away from, because the wind was so strong they thought someone might be blown right off the deck), and then to the empty classroom two, where Jared, Steven, Julie and I played Hangman on the white board.  I was dreadful, because Jared knew all sorts of crazy chemical names and things like that, Steven knew Russian authors, and all I could come up with was “conflict-theorism” by the time I could go up.  I think my favorite of the night was “Liam Neeson is Raz al-Ghul.”  Anyway, after we got bored of that, we played Who’s Closer, which is a game I learned how to play on Wikipedia of all things, which is where you think of something random, other people say something random, then you reveal what you were thinking of and people argue who was closest to what you were thinking of.  It was actually pretty entertaining.  We played until around midnight and then went back down to deck 2 to go to bed. 

I’ll send out my Ghana postcards that I got in South Africa, because the postal system here was pretty sketchy.  :D