Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Slave Castles, Tree Tops, and Prisons...it's always an adventure in Ghana.

Today is Tuesday. That means it's Terrific Tuesday. Five of us went today and looked absolutely hilarious sitting at a table with six pizzas. That's right. More than one pizza per person. Mmmm....buy one get one free.

The past few days have been really awesome. Last Friday, we had a woman come to do some lovely womanly maintenance for like ten of us girls. She did some very affordable threading/sugaring right in our living room. A leg wax here is only 10 Cedi! That is so ridiculously amazing. Currently me, Griffin, Caroline, and Mallory are partaking in a few No-Shave weeks so we can delight in cheap leg waxing. Beauty is pain...c'est la vie.

On Saturday I woke up at 5:45. A.M.! It was terribly early, but I managed to wake up, make some toast with amaaaaaazing bread (one of our CRA's moms is a caterer and we can place orders weekly), get dressed and be on a bus by 6:30 A.M. After drifting in and out of sleep for the whole bus ride we arrived in Elmina at the Coconut Grove resort just in time for brunch on the beach. It was phenomenal. Lots of breads, eggs, fresh fruit, and juice. It would have been a great meal if my stomach wasn't killing me the whole day and I hadn't been in agonizing pain. Regardless, I didn't want to miss out on the day so I soldiered through the pain. I'm so happy I did because it was really cool to do what we did. We started by going to the Elmina Slave Castle (which actually counted as 10% of my grade for one of my classes!). It was a slave castle that had been occupied by the Portuguese, Dutch and English since it was built. It was really great to be able to visit such a historic site and we had a great tour guide who took us throughout and was really informative. It was so hot at the castle that one of the girls in our group fainted. It was pretty scary but she was alright in the end.

After the castle, we left Elmina and made our way up to Kakum National Park. The rainforest and park are most famous for the canopy walk there. Having done a few canopy zip lines in my day, I wasn't too sure if I would be so impressed with it, but it was really different and really cool. The bridges were a little shaky, but that's all part of the fun! Also, it started to rain while we were on the bridge which I found so cool. It rained on me...in a rainforest! Afterward, we headed back to our gorgeous resort, hopped in the pool, spent some time on the beach, and had a beach buffet, bonfire, and palm wine. The next morning we had another great breakfast and then got to do one of my favorite things in Ghana yet.

We had a batik lesson from some local women which was so incredible. We did everything! We designed our stamps, carved them out of foam, stamped wax on cloth, dyed the cloth, and hung them up to dry. I was the first one out of the group to finish and we were all so stunned at how great mine came out. The woman running the show called me her star student. I attribute my success to my years of tie-dying. It's just a gift that will never really come in useful. Oh well, it was great experience.

On Monday, I had a full day at my internship at the LRC. It was really intense for my first real day of work. I went with the executive director, Edward, to visit a prison to check up on some UNDP programs being run there. We were mainly visiting classes which were part of the UNDP funded prison education program. When we were in the last of the classrooms we were to visit at the prison, I was truly astonished by what one of the prisoners said. A prisoner had asked a question and mentioned that he had been in prison for ten years as a remand prisoner. I was shocked and appalled. This man had not even stood trial and yet was been kept as a prisoner. Edward was also shocked and gave out his business card and truly seemed to want to help the people with the injustice they were facing. After the classes, we were taken to see a remand block of cells. It was absolutely despicable to see the conditions these men lived in. In a cell meant for less than 10 people, 43 people were living (possibly even more) without any beds or mattresses. I really didn’t have much to say because I was just in such a state of shock that people could be forced to live in such inhumane conditions. It's just so hard to imagine the conditions these people, who are possibly innocent, must live in. Hopefully, I'll get to do some more work on it through my internship.

Tomorrow I've got my photo class. For my next project I'm doing a series of photographs of Richard, one of the security guards at Church Crescent. I'm excited because he's really a great guy and was so happy to help me out. Hopefully my photos won't be called "coke light" this time around.

peace and love

No comments: