Ghana Day 4

Not much to report since last time. It’s probably going to be a pretty boring weekend filled with reading and such things. I don’t have any real work to do (except a little bit for the paper I’m writing with Barak) until I start on Monday, at which point I hope I’m given interesting things to do and think about. I went wandering around the neighborhood yesterday for a few hours (and found an internet café, which was excellent). I was planning on going to the beach today, but it finally decided to rain last night and is continuing to drizzle as I write this. It rained hard enough to wake me up, and Matt will tell you how impressive that is. So it’s fairly muddy around, and the beach is possibly not the best idea in the rain. Hopefully the sun will come out later. In terms of other entertainment, I’m going to wait to explore the city until I have (hopefully) made a few friends who know what’s around to do. My entertainment budget is pretty close to nonexistent. I need to wait and see how much I’m likely to spend on taxi and tro tro (large vehicles where lots of people pile in) fare every day before I can assess how much extra I will have for that sort of thing. I hate to give up on being a tourist, but I really am here more for the work experience, so that has to come first.

I think that in Ghana English is not quite as widely spoken as French was in Cameroon. I have had some trouble talking with a few people, which is rather disappointing. Also, Ewe (pronounced ay-vay, sort of) is what is normally spoken in the house here, so hanging around with the family is not terribly enthralling. This differs from my Cameroon family, who only rarely spoke anything but French at home. It is possible of course that they were a fluke, or else avoided speaking anything but French in front of me out of courtesy, so it’s hard to make a generalization.

The kids are all fascinated by the solitaire games on my computer. Around 7 of them (one is small and got covered up in the picture) piled into my room on the currently spare bed last night to draw a house in paint and play spider solitaire. It was pretty cute.