Ghana Day 12

On Thursday I went to the June 4 rally and got to see former president Jerry John (JJ) Rawlings speak. I was really nervous I would miss him, because he was scheduled at 2pm and we left the office at 2:03 for whatever reason. Turns out I would have been better pleased had we left at 3. We got there only to wait through a dozen lesser speakers (some of them pretty important, but mostly lower level officials). While this might have been interesting, all of them were speaking in Twi, so I was pretty darn bored. I also reinforced my understanding of how much I cannot be a real journalist here, since there will probably never be an event where I won’t need a translator.

Thankfully, JJ spoke in English. I don’t really know why, but I was grateful. Surprisingly, he took the current administration to task. He said that his protégé Mr. Atta Mills was not working fast enough to prosecute people who were corrupt in the last administration. He also said lots of stuff about probity and accountability and the meaning of June 4 – lots of the same stock rhetoric. But this apparent break with the NDC, or at least threat to it, is certainly interesting and might lead to a new party formation (either a new party or a new leadership structure within the NDC).

I’ve also been getting my ear talked off about NDC versus NPP policies. It seems like everyone has an opinion, and impressively a lot of people have opinions based on ideological grounds. Essentially the NPP supporters like that the NPP seemed to have provided lots of services and more democratic governance, and they believe that the NDC were despots who did not do enough to help the people. NDC supporters on the other hand think the NPP was full of crooks and that their programs weren’t widespread enough, did not take macroeconomic stability into account (the NPP increased the debt burden significantly), and think the NDC is accountable and doesn’t tolerate corruption. From what I can tell, almost all of these arguments are legitimate, so it’s a problem of choosing between two evils. Fortunately for Ghana, the sides both have strong, good aspects, so over the course of the next few decades, if things don’t radically change, I predict that the parties will have to refine their policies to reduce the easily identifiable bad parts and work on their good parts. Good parties are certainly not built overnight, and these two have only had 5 elections so far to pan things out. I think the trajectory looks good, but time will tell.

I got home late again Thursday and met more thoroughly the two American girls who moved in on Wednesday. They’re both very nice, although not sisters as Prince told me. Elizabeth is 23, and she is dating a guy whose sister (Maddie) came with her on the trip. Elizabeth is from Tennessee, while Maddie is from Cincinnati (although I think she said she has since moved somewhere else). Elizabeth’s father John is also on the trip, who is a very talkative and pretty stereotypical southerner – on our trip this weekend he wore a cowboy hat. The girls are working at the orphanage that I plan on spending my Saturdays at, and they’ve visited once. Apparently the living conditions are pretty atrocious, because it’s run by one individual who has no source of funds, and it sounds like John is planning on donating new beds. I guess I will see for myself pretty soon.

On Friday we took our weekend trip to Cape Coast. Fortunately we missed the bus, so Prince hired a van, and that van had air-conditioning, so we traveled in style. After we got there we went to the Cape Coast castle, which was built by the British and used as a slave port. We got a tour through the male and female dungeons, the punishment room, and the door of no return. A couple tunnels had been blocked off by the Brits after the end of the slave trade, and I was somewhat surprised they hadn’t been opened back up for the museum. One was a tunnel directly to the water that I think would have been interesting. The dungeons were pretty awful. They were very deep in the ground and had ventilation only at the top. Apparently when they were dug up in the 1900s or whenever there was about a foot worth of straw, sand and excrement caked onto the floor. The captured slaves were supposed to defecate and urinate in a groove in the floor that started at one end and ran through a couple rooms downhill to the ocean, but obviously this was not always unblocked. Apparently women who got pregnant (by white men) were spared the voyage though, and they were given “cushy” jobs as servants in the castle. People who got sick were thrown into the ocean so they wouldn’t infect the rest of them, which I am sure must have been a big percentage. I think one of the worst aspects of the whole place was that the first Anglican church built in Ghana was in this castle right next to a spy-hole to the male dungeon, so on their way to church (and probably during church) the Englishmen there could hear the captured Africans yelling and dying. It was all very grim.

One weird thing was that on the tour I started talking to an American girl who turned out to be a student in SFS at Georgetown (going into senior year). Very small world.

Saturday morning we went to Kakum National Park, which is a rainforest with a canopy walk. There are 7 bridges suspended between extremely tall trees that visitors walk along. They’re very safe, and you’re almost surrounded by net (unless you’re very tall, which I am not – they came up to my armpits). It was still a bit scary, and I mostly looked at where I was stepping rather than down into the trees and the ground several hundred feet below me, but when I did look it was a very nice view of the forest. I also got to smell a lavender tree. That was pretty cool.

After that I touched a live alligator. I was just not out to please my mother this weekend. : ) He was tame and several people went before me. Apparently alligators can’t turn fast, so if for some reason he had decided the people touching his back were more interesting than the lady in front of him feeding him chicken gizzards, a person would be able to get out of the way. In theory. In any case, it was an extremely touristy thing to do.

In terms of health, this was not my weekend. My stomach was still getting upset with me all the time on Thursday, so I started that day a diet of bland and packaged food (bananas, crackers, etc). I tried to keep this up over the weekend, and while I wasn’t totally successful, I think my stomach has forgiven me and settled down (I’ve asked Grandma not to make my food spicy anymore – we will see if that helps). However, according to Dr. Matt (who isn’t really a doctor but has helped out a lot in hospitals), the stomach thing made me immuno-suppressed, which is why starting Friday morning I’ve had the cold that I recurrently get. (Dr. Matt thinks I have a virus.) It was pretty bad and I was probably not amazing company most of the weekend, particularly today (Sunday). I’m just about over the worst of it now though.

To add to these things, however, our trip to the beach on Saturday afternoon led to yet another Lindsay ocean mishap. This time I did not lose my glasses or skin my knee, but I did take a chunk of skin out of my toe. I’m not sure what did it, since I was in the water, but the beach was not the cleanest one. There were plastic bags and things floating in the water and trash washed up on the beach. It’s possible I cut it on something icky, although more likely it was just a piece of shell. That’s what I’m going to stick with anyway. Lucky for me I had my first aid kit along with me, as well as a handy Dr. Matt, and it got cleaned, treated with iodine (and later hydrogen peroxide), and bandaged with gauze. Although it looked pretty nasty at the time, I think most of what came off was callus, and I just nicked a little vein in my toe. It’s a pretty small cut. So that was exciting, and has reinforced my utter dislike of the ocean.

Last night we watched on network tv what we were pretty sure were bootleg copies of the two Narnia movies, which is kind of cool. They both had problems with track speed, and the second had Chinese subtitles. It’s funny what people can get away with.

That’s about all I have to tell. Today we got home at noonish, and after greeting Grandma (who is having a recurrence of malaria, poor woman) I planted myself in bed where I am being a stick in the mud all afternoon. I really wish I had movies to watch, but I’ve got plenty of reading material, so until I talk to you next time I’ll probably be doing nothing but drinking fluids, reading, sleeping, and trying as hard as I can to clear my sinuses.

(Update: feeling better on Monday, but definitely gookier)