Friday, March 02, 2007

Africa Update

Well it has been a while since my last update and there have been many eventful happenings to tell you all about, some of which I will probably forget to write. I don’t know if I wrote about it in my last entry but the Paramount Chief of my district died just before I got to site-he was the oldest chief in all of West Africa-supposedly 140 years old but closer to his eighties I’m guessing. People here often don’t know their exact age since birth certificates are a new concept. Anyways the chief’s burial happened recently, and it was a pretty cool experience. There were probably over a thousand people there and it was definitely a “you’re in Africa” moment. There was one main area where there were speakers who talked about the chief and also many drumming and dancing performances. After the main celebration the crowd dispersed into many drumming circles where people would be drumming and then others would come into the circle and dance-including many old ladies. It was a lot of fun going to it.

A week or two after that I was riding into town and there were police on every corner of the main road with their guns out. I went to the small crowd that was observing and asked what was going on. Well, turns out they were waiting for seven armed robbers that they had been informed about and they ended up catching them as they came to the main part of town. It was a big story and made the news on television-pretty interesting.

In Feburary the Peace Corps Ghana country director was retiring and had a send off party in Accra so I traveled down south for that. I left a little early and traveled down to the Volta to stay for a little while. So the route that I had to take was to go to Bolga then to Tamale then to Kumasi, stay a night in Kumasi and then go to Koforidua then to the Volta. Well as my tro tro (a small van that is packed with 16-20 people) was getting into Tamale the road was blocked by Police, the driver then pulled into a parking lot nearby and everyone got out and seemed to scurry wherever they were going to. A girl asks me where I am going-I say Kumasi-and she grabs me by the hand and says to follow her. …Ok, I didn’t really know what was going on so we went down the main road where many people were lining the streets and Police in riot gear were waiting when some market ladies where yelling at us to get into their market booth. So we had to get into this market booth, into the corner, duck down and hide our back packs…a minute or two later hundreds of people come running through the streets all waving machetes and saws-literally everyone. So at this point I am thinking “holy shit” what is going on, it looked like a scene from Hotel Rwanda. After a while in the middle of the machete carrying crowd some men carried an old man on a pedestal with an umbrella covering him-the chief of the area. So I was hiding out in this market booth for several minutes when the girl said that we should get out of there. We left the booth walked a short distance and some people were yelling at us to get into their booth. Hiding out in another booth-ducking down in a corner as the crowds run by, everyone in the booth is looking at me smiling probably thinking poor white man getting stuck in this, then we all start laughing at what a crazy situation it is. Eventually the crowd dies down and we leave running across the street to get to the Kumasi station get on the bus just waiting for it to fill when people start running into the station with their shirts or bandanas around their mouths because the police shot tear gas into the crowd. Crazy day!!!

Well, eventually got out of the situation and made it to my destination and had an amazing rest of the trip-definitely my best week in Ghana so far. The Volta was really cool and it was nice to see green again after being up in the desert for a while.

By now you are probably thinking that I am not very safe here-but I feel very safe-even in the middle of the scene in Tamale I didn’t really feel anything bad was going to happen to me. In Tamale there has been some chieftaincy disputes and that was the cause of the commotion. Well I am now on my sixth month of being in Ghana-seems crazy. Next week I leave for In Service Training that is held on the coast at Kokrobitey, so I will be on the beach. On the way down I am going to stop in Koforidua again because I saw an NGO actually Emmanuel’s NGO from the documentary “Emmanuel’s Gift” that works with disabled athletes and I am going to try and bring them to my district and start a disabled athletes association here as a side project along with my business activities. So I am looking forward to going there and seeing what happens. I will keep you posted. Anyways got to run but will try and keep you updated.