I'm Alive!

From email dated: 11/26/05

Hey Everyone,

Happy BeLated Thanksgiving! The internet cafe in Techiman broke down
while I was at site visit, and it's still down...apparently the server
busted, ouch for business!.....so i took a taxi to Nkronza for the
internet! I've been missing everyone! So much to say......

Thanksgiving! I'm actually happy that several of the trainees really
love holidays because they made a huge deal about celbrating
thanksgiving and convinced the trainers to give us thursday off to
make food and have a thanksgiving celebration! Woohoo! So it was
amazing, about 10 trainees bought and killed 3 turkeys, so we actually
got to eat turkey! And some people went the extra mile to buy a bunch
of real potatoes (those are expensive here) and made mashed potatoes,
others made mashed yams....pretty much the same thing.....I help out
with fruit salad, and other people brought green bean dishes, not
green bean cassorole, but still really really good, and people even
made stuffing and apple crisp!!!!! oh my! it was a wonderful day! and
people even talked about thanksgiving day football....the lions were
mentioned! haha!

Oh, my cat has an eye infection, to me it looks like cat pink eye...so
i took it to the vet! It was a surprisingly painless experience! Took
a taxi to the vet......i was the only "patient/customer" so I put
Obolo on the table (dirty table mind you) and the vet looked at him
(yes obolo is a boy) and told me the medicine i needed to buy from the
Chemical Shop....which is a drug store....and also told me about
de-worming pills....to de-worm all 5 cats cost 8,000 cedis, not bad at
all....and! there was no charge for the visit. I asked my language
teacher if this was normal and he said that the ghana gov't subsidizes
vets income as a way of encouraging people to take their pets to teh
vet, so the vets salary comes from the gov't. Cool huh? oh and Obolos
medicine was only 6,000 cedis so not too bad. comes out to about
$1.50. And his eye is already looking better! (i went on wednesday)

Oh that was funny too! So wednesday was the trainee cooking
competition. The language groups had to make a ghanaian dish. My group
decided to make Fufuo ne Nkrakra (Fufu and light soup), my favorite!
lucky me! Peace Corps gave us money to buy the food and we had to go
to the market and pick it out and make it. So I took Obolo to the vet
before my group went to the market, I carried Obolo through the
Market....he was not happy, mewing the whole time! I don't think he
liked being in a basket for 2+ hours......And I need to take pics of
teh market, it's one of the largest in West Africa.....think Art Fair
times 2, it's crazy! So it was a good experience buying food, and
we've had much more practice with language so we can chat more with
the sellers and get a semi decent price with the food. Semi decent,
haha. Damn white skin! = rich.
ohwell.....history....media....policitics....all play a part in that
one.....

Now for the cooking! You'd be very proud (maybe) we bought a live
chicken and Chris (who's also from MI, sagniaw and he went to MTU)
killed the chicken. Cassie held it's wings and legs while Chris slit
it's throat. I just watched. And when you go to pluck the feathers
out it's best to pppour boiling hot water over the bird, the feather
come out like a charm! (oh and we didn't let it run around, cuz our
language teacher didn't want us to, cuz the blood would go everywhere
and we were cooking at my house, but the bird does twitch for quite
some tiime) Then it was choping the chicken and gutting it, while
chris and cassie and laura were doing that i was grinding the hot
pepper for the soup. Anyway, long story short (it took us three hours
to cook) everything came out GREAT! and it was a goodlearning
experience about how to cook.

I'll give you the short version:
Fufu consists of boiled unripe plantains and boiled cassava
(different areas of ghana use different tubers and what not, but here
in Brong Ahafo it's made of this) and then you just pound the boiled
plantain as hard as you can and someone else turns it until it turns
into a nice cookie dough/silly putty consistency....then you do the
same thing to teh cassava and then you pound the two together. you
pound with a motar and pestle....very energy and time consuming, but
tasty, once you get used to it :)

the light soup is chicken, onion, hot peper, tomatoes, salt, ginger,
and water. really simple, really good :-D LOVE....shaza, if you put
some green beans in there it would remind me of your mom's greenbeans
soo much.....i know it's not the same, but it reminds me of her....

So that's the cooking deal....oooh! And before we started cooking i
made a handwashing staiton for my family. that was fun......it works
too, i'm gonna make one at my site. and i'll take pictures! man i
haven't had the opportunity to upload my pics from my camera.....i
have 202 photos saved on my memory stick already, and there's still
room! whoohoo for 512 mb :-D anyway, pics have been taken and are
coming, just not yet.

ok my site! Foase, is AMAZING! I love it! It's incredibly green! I
live in a compound house that's more like a U shape with grass in the
middle and a baby mango tree in the middle. my landlord is less scary
that i first thought, but he's got a lot of money and likes to show it
off, which i don't care for, but it works out good for me, I have a
gas stove, a refrigerator and a ceiling fan, oh and he even provided
me with a bike (he bought it for the last pcv). So that's nice. I
don't have running water, so it'll be 2 years of bucket baths! so i'm
really enjoying my cold showers at my homestay right now! As for my
job, I'll be a health teacher :) My supervisor is teh headmaster of a
primary school and so i'll be talking to each class KG1-P6 and there's
also a JSS (middle school) and another primary school that they want
me to teach at as well....so that's gonna keep me very busy, but the
town also needs a WATSAN commitee, to learn to put the toilet paper in
the latrine pit and not in a bucket, and handwashing stations i think
would be nice. Also, there's a dump and children play in it, gotta
stop that one. Oh! and there's a clinic! so i'll have my hands
full.....maybe i won't get to read so much, haha.......oh my! opening
a bank account in ghana! First of all there's no such thing as privacy
laws, second banks don't provide youwith pens to fill out their
paperworks, third, there's no such thing as a line/queue.....everyone
is just crowded around the teller and she's doing 5 people's
transactions at once.....thank the lord my supervisor came with
me....it was extremely overwhelming and exhausting. My banking town
and market town is Kumasi the 2nd largest city in Ghana, also in the
Ashanti region, and the Ashantis have a reputation for being
agressive, and in Kumasi they certainly live up to it. Man oh man,
will i be a different chick by the end of these two years! :-D

That's the short version of the last few weeks. I think this email is
long enough. I have Oral Proficiency Interview on tuesday, and
swearing in on friday, and saturday i'll be at Foase for 2 full years!
I'm going to miss my homestay family a whole bunch.....and all the
trainees :) But good thing i'm in the middle of the country, everyone
is just 3-10 hours away, not 18 or 20, ugh. .....

HOpe everyone is doing well. THANK YOU for your emails, keep them
coming, i'll try to answer personally next time.....

Kris