From Accra to Hohoe

My one week in Accra was plenty. I will miss Felicia and the kind family that made me feel at home there, but not the stench of wet garbage and fish, or the dust and exhaust that stifle you on the streets.

Getting around is hell as well. There are more craters in the road than the moon. Not potholes, craters. Drivers constantly weave and jostle to avoid them, their hands at the wheel like a toddler’s playing an arcade game for racecar driving. When there is absolutely no way to avoid them, they simply create new lanes for themselves on the roadside. However, most roads are lined with deep, open gutters for drainage, so this is, well, problematic.

Then the intersections. There are very few streetlights, so usually it is simply a game of chicken—even if your opponent is a semi-truck. Of course, no one wears seatbelts, and most cars don’t even have them. But don’t worry about the safety of those in the cars, because the women walking along the road to the market and the children playing unsupervised in the street are much closer to unpleasant death….

Okay, enough about Accra. Wednesday I traveled the four hours from the city to the town of Hohoe in a tro-tro (a tro-tro is a small van crammed full of passengers, which I would also complain about had I not used up my bitching-about-transportation word limit). The director of my school picked me up, and I am staying with him through the weekend. The village where I will work and live is just 20 minutes away, and classes begin next week.

Hohoe is part of the Volta region, and this area is absolutely beautiful. The Volta river (which powers much of the electricity to the country) winds its way through valleys and mountains plush with greenery. People grow a lot of rice and cocoa here, and everyone seems to have a farm.

Even if you have a different job, you have a farm here too. That’s just how it is. When Francis and I drove to see the guesthouse in the village where I will be staying, the wife of the owner told her 10 –year-old grandson to get in our car and drive with us to their cocoa farm to fetch his grandfather so that we could negotiate a price. We did, and we settled on 90 cedi a month (a “discount,” he said, because I would be teaching his grandson). For anyone who wants to visit, they have a spare room and a flush toilet!

Anyway, I like this area a lot. It has shops and a market in the town, but it’s not so chaotic or dirty. And I feel very welcome. Children still stare as I pass and giggle the world for whiteman (oh, I forgot to mention the language here is different than the one in Accra). But I think they will get used to me soon, and maybe I will begin to blend in eventually—well, figuratively speaking.

Oh, one more thing I have to mention: Until I came to Volta, the best bananas I’d ever eaten were the tiny ones they grow in Chiapas, Mexico. Here, these are equally good and twice as big! Francis bought two dozen bananas from a woman on the road carrying them to the market for 1 cedi (~ 70 cents). He said they would go bad soon, so he ate six on the drive. I ate three, and then he asked me if I don’t like bananas….