Going to Africa has been a dream of mine for a long time and finally I made it come true. When I was leaving america I was nervous with all the possible bad scenarios going through my head, but after I was on the airplane my nervousness turned back into excitement. I was yearning for a big adventure.
When I first arrived in Ghana I was completely out of my comfort zone but was extremely happy to be here at the same time. The people trying to sell us things were overwhelming and took a long time to get used to. There were also many other things that I found overwhelming such as persistent men trying to date or marry me, which I never really got used to.
I was pleasantly surprised that I liked all my roommates. We all got along pretty well and supported each other through each of the challenges and tough days. We spend a lot of time together and it is wonderful how well we bonded.
There are two internships that I have been working at. The first one I started going to about a month after arrived, at the Beacon House Orphanage. This is a very nice orphanage run by a lady from Italy who started it five years ago. It is the home of thirty to forty children from the age of 0-13 years old. I go to the orphanage a couple times a week for three hour shifts. I am happy to help improve the lives of these children! When I am at the orphanage I help by teaching the children and just giving them some attention. I am working on helping my friend in America adopt one of the children from the Beacon House. I really hope that the adoption goes through, I know the little girl would have a better life growing up with good parents. Seeing all the orphans growing up without parents really breaks my heart so I have been trying to do everything I can to help them.
When I first started going to the orphanage I found that It is very nice as far as orphanages go. I spent most of my time with the babies (0-4 years old). As soon as I stepped into the play pin and sat down to play with one child about five others came and sat on my lab or hugged my arm. They are darling and well taken care of, but defiantly need additional one-on-one time! I played with the kids for awhile and then held the youngest while a coworker gave the rest their daily baths. Maxwell, the baby I was holding, is a tiny little baby and is extremely cute, but has medical problem that the doctor can’t figure out. He had a swollen liver, often gets fevers, and has some difficulty breathing. I feel for him and hope the doctor figures it out soon! After I held him awhile he fell asleep in my arms. A month or so after I started my internship school started at the orphanage. Since then I have spent the majority of my time teaching the children in preschool and primary school. It is mostly fun to go, but sometimes they can be quite the handful. It is hard to see children with out parents. I can hardly imagine what it would be like growing up in their shoes, it makes me so grateful that I have such a good family. There is a one year old boy at the orphanage named Issac. The poor little guy is going to have a rough start in life. His father ran out on him and his mother, and his mother is too poor to support him, which is why he is there. He is not adoptable so he will grow up at the orphanage until he is kicked out at age 13. Because this is a nice orphanage he should be moderately well educated and healthy by that point, and hopefully he will find himself a decent life. All the poverty here makes me so sad. I am happy that I have the opportunity to make a little difference in these children's lives.
The Saturday morning after my first week working at the orphanage I woke up very early to get ready for a weekend trip to Cape Coast.

Our first stop when we arrived in town was Elmina Castle. It is where slaves were held before they were sent out to ships during the slave trade. I found the place both fascinating and very sad. It is ridiculous how people could do things so extremely horrible to other people. We learned that the conditions were so harsh for the slaves that from the time they captured to the time they were boarded onto ships only 40% survived, and only half of those survived the voyage on the ship. It was good to see the place, but it broke my heart to know what happened there.
Lunch was our next stop. We went to a restaurant that is located on a little swamp. While we were waiting for our meal we observed about a hundred little yellow birds making their nests, along with a few crocodiles! It is a wonderful place!
We went to the canopy walk next. We walked through the rainforest to a long viewing bridge that was held up by the tallest trees.
It was really cool to see the rainforest from above.

 We couldn’t spot any animals but saw lots of pretty butterflies and way too many ants! It is similar to the rainforest that I saw in Mexico a few years ago.
There was a big festival going on in Cape Coast this weekend so it was a little crazy getting around the place. At one point we had to go to the bank, so we went downtown and had to walk through lots of people to get there. Everyone was dancing and having a good time. I love how the people dance in Ghana! That night we went to an outdoor concert where there were tons of people. Most of the lyrics were in Twi but it was good music to dance to! It was a really fun experience to see a Ghanian concert. The next day we went sight seeing a little more and went to the beach for awhile, then made our way home. It was a wonderful weekend and I found Cape Coast to be a really awesome city!
On the following Wednesday night my roommates and I went to the weekly reggae concert on the beach. We sat and had a drink, went dancing, then we decided to go for a night swim in the ocean. I love living near the ocean, it is always a lot of fun! It was a fun night but I was a little annoyed by some pesky men.
During the Friday of that same week was Ramadan, which was the first muslim holiday that I have ever celebrated. Friday night I went out with my roommates Gina and Ada and their group of muslims friends to celebrate. We found that Ramadan is a very big deal to muslims so there were a lot of people out celebrating. We went out to a popular dance club. Our new muslim friends are very nice guys and did a great job at keeping all the overly outgoing men away from us, which I appreciated very much!
On Saturday we went to campus to watch the soccer tournament. It was a lot of fun to watch them. Many of them didn't have proper gear such as shin guards and cleats but they still were so good! The little boys team could probably beat a US college mens team. We also watched the basketball tournament for awhile. It was a little weird seeing so many tall Ghanaians because Ghanaians tend to be fairly short.
The following weekend my roommates and I went to the town of Ada. The taxi and trotro rides felt long, a little confusing, and when we got into town I was a little sketched out by where we were and was not in the best mood. Luckily before too long we were on a boat on our way to the beach resort.
The beach resort was absolutely beautiful. It is located very close to where the Volta River meets the ocean, so there was water on all sides of us. We spent the night in little huts. The huts had only sand as flooring and grass as roofing, but luckily it didn’t rain and the huts did the job.
I enjoyed a few water side walks near the resort. I liked walking down on the river side until it meet the ocean and walking back on the ocean side. We had fun collecting seashells, there were tons of really beautiful ones on the beach. There was a dead whale washed up on the beach that we were told was killed by the local fishermen because it was eating the fish. It was sad and it smelled bad, but in a way it was cool to see. There were also lots of dead jellyfish and other fish on the beach, we don’t know why there were so many. If there wasn’t so many dead things and trash washed up, the beach would have been a perfect and absolutely gorgeous tropical paradise. It was still pretty darn nice!

On one of our beach walks we meet a rastifarian guy who lives on the beach close to the resort. He was a really funny guy. After we had dinner he came and joined our table and sang some Bob Marley songs for us. After he was done singing he taught me the basics on how to play a drum. I’ve wanted to learn how to play one for a long time, it was really fun! He wanted us to buy some of the jewelry that he made. I would have if I had brought enough money with me, he had some really cool stuff. That sunday I was starting to feel a little under the weather, but the trotro rides went pretty quickly and we were back in Accra soon enough.
Later that week was the national holiday celebrating Kwame Nkrumah's 100th birthday, so most people didn’t have work or school. I traveled by myself out of town via trotro for the first time to meet my family friend’s friend. I was scared that I would get lost but luckily I made it there safely without any problems. I got to John and Martha’s home a little less than two hours. They are very kind people and were very happy to have me over for the day. Martha made fufu in a light soup for an early dinner. It took me awhile to like fufu and banku, but I enjoy them now and thought that Martha’s was the best I’ve ever had.
My other internship started following week for an NGO called FightAIDS Ghana. I was introduced to William who is my supervisor and he showed me the office and introduced me to the other staff. He took me and the other interns to the school that his stepfather runs. We went in each of the classrooms and meet the children that we teach. The children range from first grade to 12th grade. I have been to the school a few times. Teaching the young children was difficult because they are very routy and there was never a teacher around to give me an example of what and how I should be teaching. I helped out William with FightAIDS Ghana quite a lot during that month and some over the next month. Things I did include sending out invitations to fundraisers, creating email addresses, computer assistance, and distributing school supplies to children in need.
During my last couple months William got me a position assisting a nurse at a local hospital. The hospital is very different than the hospitals in America. I work in the section of the hospital that deals with babies, new mothers, and pregnant women. I have been given duties of record keeping and figuring out if there are any problems with the babies or mothers that need further attention. I was given these duties before I even really knew what was going on and before I really knew the system or what was going on. I have much more responsibility than I would be giving at an america considering my lack of training and the language barrier. Usually I don’t have much trouble doing my duties but sometimes I have trouble communicating with patients or I am unsure how to cure a medical problem and all the nurses are too busy to ask, which is frustrating. I have noticed that the hospital lacks sanitation, organization, and proper training. I believe that the hospital won’t ever have these things until Ghana becomes more industrialized and the hospital has more money. I do what I can to help and I hope that what I learned from my experiences at the hospital will help advance me to my goal of becoming a nurse.
My internships, classes, and excursions keep me pretty busy. I find that it is nice to be busy. Walking around town and taking the trotro is a lot of fun to me. I have made most of my friends here while traveling to or from work or school. I like walking a lot, but some days it has just been to hot and I have had to take a taxi.
One weekend our program took us to Kumasi. About half of the drive was on dirt roads which made it take a long time to get there, but on the way we bought some tasty new foods from people selling them on their heads. We bought the African equivalent of a tamale which was a steamed corn husk containing corn kernels and peanuts. We also bought a loaf of sweet white bread, which may have been the best bread that I have had in my entire life! When we arrived at the hotel we got settled in and then went to the hotel restaurant where they prepared a great lunch buffet for us. It was truly fabulous Ghanian food.
After we were done eating we hopped back onto the bus and went to the king’s palace museum. The king of the Asante region has the most power of any of the Ghanian kings, although the kings don't have much power now that Ghana has a democracy. We had a hilarious tour guide and it was a lot of fun.
We then went to the Kumasi market, which is gigantic. We stayed there for less than a hour so we didn't see very much of it, but what we did see was really cool. There are huge metal bowls in some of the little store huts that contain anything from peanut butter to rice to giant snails. We briefly walked through the leather section of the market. It was interesting to watch all the men cutting and sewing the leather into sandals, belts, and other commodities. Later we walked through the market's meat section, which was quite the experience. The smell of the fish and the various types of meat stagnated in the air so I tried to breath through my mouth. We quickly walked through the open building full of tables covered in a medley of animal parts. Ghanians eat pretty much every part of the animals and the head of any animal is a delicacy, which is a little strange to me. It was a cool experience but I was very happy when it was done!
The next day we went to the kente fabric market. It was really cool to see how kente is made and how much work goes into each piece made. Each of us got to try to make a portion of kente ourselves. I'm sure that it takes a lot of time and practice to master the art. I bought one big piece of the beautiful fabric which I plan on either hanging on a wall or using as a tablecloth.
Next we went to a adinkra building. We got a history lesson on adinkra and how it is made which I found very interesting. We then got to stamp some onto cloths to take home with us. As we were making our pieces a huge thunder storm rolled in. Every time the thunder struck it was so loud that it made us all jump. The storms in Ghana are huge compared to the ones that I have experienced in the USA.
Our last stop before we journeyed home was the bead making factory. One of the owners of the family business showed us how they make the beads and the different ways that they can put designs in them. I never knew that bead making was such an art! After I saw how they were made I grew a greater appreciation for the bead jewelry.
The next week quickly rolled around and the trip that we planed on doing since we got here was finally about to happen. It wasn’t planned very well, but the goal was to go to Mole National Park. We stayed in Kumasi monday night and took a taxi up to Techiman the next day to meet Ada and her french boyfriend, Allen. It was a beautiful drive and we had a nice lunch there before parting ways with Molly and her visitor Dorothy who were not able to continue our journey with us. The new Fad Five headed up to Kintampo in a couple hour long trotro ride. Kintampo is a small but lovely town that has a waterfall that we were all excited to go to. We splurged and spent the night at an “expensive” hotel that was recommended in my guide book which actually extremely cheap compared to american hotels. We all had comfortable beds, high water pressure and cable TV :) We found that hotels and taxis are much cheaper in the northern parts that in Accra. In the morning we had a relaxed start and headed out to see the waterfall. This waterfall was surprisingly my favorite part of the trip.
The stream was beautiful, carving it’s way through the slabs of rock that got in it’s way. After we saw the smaller series of waterfalls we climbed down the steepest set of stairs that I have ever seen and arrived at the bottom of the large waterfall. I felt it’s mist from far away and when we stood closer it drenched us with mist, which was a great feeling. We all got into our bathing suits and then stood and laid under the waterfall. It is so powerful and amazing! After a couple hours of having fun at the waterfall we trekked up the stairs and continued our journey northward.
When our trotro got to Tamale the daily bus to Mole had already left so we had to find alternate means of getting there. We ended up finding some English girls that were also trying to get to Mole, so we grouped together and got a decent price on having a pickup truck take us. The English girls rode in the cab and we rode in the truck bed. Riding in the back of the truck was a little uncomfortable and we got a thick dirt tan, but it was fun! As we were driving along the long bumpy dirt rode many children from the little villages yelled out greetings to us and we waved to them as if we were celebrities. It was wonderful watching the sunset while talking to each other in the back of a pickup. As soon as we drove into the park we were greeted by warthogs roaming the street. They are gross looking fellers, but it was exciting to see them! We got dropped off at the motel and got a room. As we entered the room we were greeted by three cockroaches! I was thankful to not have my normal job as the cockroach killer. Allan had his hiking boots and happily took on the duty. I was amazed by the enormous numbers of bugs in the park! After a late dinner, on my way back to the hotel room I came across a herd of antelope in the field, along with warthogs, and an anteater. It was so incredible!
After a full nights sleep Ada and I woke up early to go on a walking tour. It was so nice to be up early before it got hot and the bugs all came out. As we were leaving the hotel to go to the tour center we came across a big baboon so we decided to ditch the tour idea and follow the baboon instead. The baboon ran off pretty quickly but we keep walking down the road until we came across some children going to school. One of the little boys really wanted us to go to his school so we went down the little path with him that led to the school. The school children were darling and so happy that we walked with them, and the scenery was breathtaking.
Ada and I are a little jealous that they get to go to school in a national park! The path was surrounded with soft grasses heavily covered in morning mist, and the occasional tropical shrub or tree. It was a peaceful and beautiful walk. We saw warthogs and an older antelope with big horns. After our walk we went back to the hotel only to find it raided by baboons searching for food. In Mole National Park baboons are the equivalent of the raccoons in NW America, although I like them much more. They aren’t really afraid of human and they will do anything for food. We went on a couple guided tours as well during the couple days we spent there.
During our walk and tours we in total saw baboons, green monkeys, an elephant, three different types of antelope, some really cool looking birds, warthogs, anteaters, and every type of insect imaginable. When the sun was up it got way too hot to do anything but go swimming, and when the sun went down the horrible heat was replaced with masses of bugs. I wore bug repellent but by the time we left the park I counted over thirty bug bites on my arms alone. The view was amazing and I loved seeing all the animals but I was happy when it was time to leave.
We got a car going back to Tamale and went to a cheap hotel that was close to the bus station. It was the worst hotel that I have ever been to, it really shouldn’t have been in the guidebook! The paint was peeling off all the walls, it was dirty, there weren’t sheets on the beds, the ventilation in the room was poor which made it unbearably hot during the day, and it had a gross communal bathroom. Luckily we only had to spend one night there and I had brought my own sheet!
We left the hotel promptly that night and went out to a little club for a drink and got some yummy street food. It was a fun night apart from the walk home. This annoying boy with horrible breath refused to let me walk back without him. During the walk when I stepped over a miniature wall between parking lots I found that the ground wasn’t where I anticipated but there was a sewer there instead. I feel into a sewer! My entire foot was covered in grime and I had a few scrapes. I got back to the hotel, made the annoying boy go away, and got Emily to go to the communal bathroom with me so I could wash the sewer grime off my legs.
In the morning I was awaken by Emily and Joe at the door. We had oversleep and had to get ready really fast to go to the bus station. So I jumped out of bed and speed walked over to the bus station to get our tickets, only to find that the bus was already full. We made the best of our day by hanging out at a restaurant and going shopping at the art market. Tamale has some amazing art work and it was fun shopping there because we weren’t hassled at all like we would be in Accra or the villages in southern Ghana. Finally we got a nice bus that took us the entire twelve hour drive back to Accra. The traveling wasn’t bad because I managed to sleep most the way. I was happy to be back. The trip had its wonderful parts and its not so wonderful parts, but all in all it was a great trip full of wonderful experiences!
A few weeks later our program took the fab five (my roommates and myself) on an excursion to the Volta Region. I didn’t know what to expect the Volta Region to be like but I instantly liked what I saw. It has tons of mountains and greenery, it is very beautiful. We arrived early afternoon in Wli where we hiked down a path to a big waterfall. It was so nice to hike around in the forest for the first time since I arrived in Africa, I had missed hiking a lot. Our guide pointed out pineapple, cocoa, and coffee plants to us, none of which look like I had expected them to. It was so peaceful walking through the tropical forest, listening to all the exotic birds and insects make their noises. When we arrived at the waterfall it was pouring down the cliff at full force. It was so powerful that we could feel the mist from really far away. I went swimming with Emily and Molly, we got really close to the waterfall but it was too powerful to go under it. It was lots of fun and a nice get away from city life. On our way back to the bus we bought some things from the villagers and observed their pet ostriches which are possibly the strangest looking animals that I have ever come across.
Our next stop was a small village that is home to a monkey sanctuary. A local took us into the forest and called the monkeys over. They jumped over to the tree we were standing near and climbed down so that we could feed them bananas. I held out my banana and they ate it right out of my hand. One little monkey jumped onto Gina’s arm to get her banana. As we where standing around listening to our guide Molly got the pleasure of having the monkey sitting in the tree directly above her start peeing. It was truly hilarious. The next day we relaxed all morning and afternoon at the hotel’s pool, it was wonderful. We then got into the bus and made our way home. It was a great weekend, I only wish that we could have spent more time there.
Time has gone very quickly and the end of my trip here is coming to an end. I love Ghana and the experience of being here is wonderful, but the different culture is still tiring and I miss home. There is no way that anyone will ever be able to experience Ghana without being here. Everything is different here, there is no way to truly capture it all in words or pictures. Some of the differences between here and America include the way people greet each other and the way they shake hands, the food, the way people eat, the weather, the gender roles, the sewer system, the laws, the politics, the way people drive, the way people talk, the clothing, the beliefs, traditions, and pretty much everything else.
One weekend we were feeling a little homesick and tired of the city so Molly, Ada, Emily, and I went to Aburi. It was so nice to walk around the gardens and enjoy the different trees and plants from around the world. The weather up there is much cooler than in Accra and it was nice to feel a little chill for the first time in over three months. It was so nice that we could travel just 30 minutes out of the city and feel like we were in the jungle.
As we were walking through the gardens, we heard some singing and drumming and decided to follow the beat. We had to exit the gardens again and we came to a building where the music was. There were little kids waving at us from a window telling us to come. We were hesitant but we finally went to the entrance. A woman greeted and welcomed us inside. It was Sunday afternoon so they were having church in the small building. I had not been to a Ghanaian church so it was an interesting experience. I am very glad to have seen a piece of Ghanaian culture that is so important and so prevalent in Ghanaian society. We enjoyed some wonderful pizza and then headed home. It didn't take long to catch a ride for all four of us and so we were on our way back to the hustle, bustle, and heat of Accra.
The main reason that I have begun to miss America is that I miss blending in. I am tired of being a spectacle and I am tired of being hassled because of the color of my skin. I love Ghana and I know that I will miss it when I return home, but right now I miss home a little. Luckily I have just enough time to see all the things that I haven't seen yet. During our last month or so in Ghana we had all our spare time planned out and have been very busy. Some of our plans have failed, but most were successful and we have been able to experience a lot of Ghana. After we are done with school we will do some traveling around Togo, which I am super excited for! I have learned a lot from my experiences in Ghana and think I have grown from them. This last semester has made me realize how important and wonderful traveling is, and I hope to do a lot more of it in the future.
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