Boston to Kumasi: An Adventure in Several Parts

Hello and akwaaba (welcome)* to Team Ghana (Rayshawn, Carisa, Elsa, Sandra, and me)’s first blog post! We safely arrived in Accra, Ghana’s capital, yesterday afternoon after an 11 hour layover in D.C.’s exhilarating Dulles Airport and a 10 hour flight. We promptly hopped on a 5- hour bus (called a tro-tro) to Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city, and the historical capital of the ancient Ashanti Empire. We are staying in the Engineering Guesthouse at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where a team of local engineering professors and students are hosting us. It’s about 95 degrees and slightly humid, but our rooms at the guesthouse are pretty luxurious with AC, TV, and personal bathrooms!

Because of our long time in transit, most of what we’ve seen of Ghana so far has been out of a tro-tro window. We spent about an hour driving out of Accra through winding streets all covered in dustfrom the deep red (iron-rich) soil that seems to be everywhere here. As we paused in the stopping and starting traffic, vendors (many of them barefoot children) ran up to our tro-tro trying to hawk all manner of ware: DVDs, antennas, food, and watches. Women in brightly patterned dresses were balancing impressively heavy-looking baskets on their head and around with larger food items like whole bananas and coconuts. We bought 2 bags of fried plantains for 1 cedi (about 66 cents). They were salty and delicious.

Even though Ghana is officially only about a quarter Christian, the huge Christian influence on Ghanaian culture was palpable even from our humble tro-tro window. We saw dozens of tiny specialty shops selling convenience items, snacks, tires, meat, PVC, and assorted knick-knacks, many with Christian names: “Medi-Moses Prostate Center", "Jesus Savior Gear Box Specialist” and “God of Time Tires” were my favorites. There were also lots of billboards for churches, services, and various religious events, as well as miscellaneous things like hair straightening services, clothes, and, of course, Coca-Cola. I was sitting next to a mission group from Kentucky on the plane, and they mentioned that Ghana's reputation as a long-stable African democracy makes it a popular destination for Western churches.

March is the beginning of the Ghanaian rainy season, and Team Ghana can now proudly report that we survived our first full-out African storm. We were warned that rain in Ghana is very different from rain in the west in that it usually only rains for a very short period of time, but when it does, it’s torrential. Besides from the slightly frighteningly poor road visibility, it was a thoroughly awesome experience. We were about halfway to Kumasi when the rain started— it was already dusk, but we could still see the sheer amount of water coming down like a blanket, and watch the huge clouds looming over us light up like strobes from the lightning that struck almost every second. We passed the time eating Ben’s Italian sesame cookies, learning Twi, the native language of Ghana’s Ashanti region, even though most people speak English (and luckily for us, signage, etc. is in English as well), and trying to sleep as the tro-tro bounced over the pot-hole-filled road. We made it to the guesthouse at about 9 pm, just in time for us to eat our first proper delicious Ghanaian meal of plantains, beans, rice, cassava, and chicken. More about our adventures and work we're doing soon!

Over and out,

Preeta

*Trying to cover for my woefully inadequate knowledge of Twi by inserting what little I do know in awkward locations? Who, me?