Burkina Faso and Ada-Foah

So it has been quite a while since I have written my blog - made evident to me by some fairly persistent nagging from the home camp. This is because numerous events have transpired in quick sequence and also because I am lazy. At the end of February I traveled with a group of 30-some students from the Performing Arts Department of UG to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. This bus ride was eased - on the way up at least - by air conditioning and excitement, despite a departure from campus at 3 am and an arrival at 12 noon the next day in Ouaga. We spent a night at the border- more technically between the borders - as we were able to leave Ghana (after two separate people on either side were woken up at their homes and summoned to come unlock a single gate with two padlocks) but we had to wait for the Burkina border to open at 8 am the next morning. Many of the group simply awake all night, bullshitting with the help of some type of local herb liquor. Others, exhibiting a Ghanaian skill that never ceases to amaze me, were able to fall asleep in incredibly awkward positions on the plastic-covered humid bus seats. Blake, one of we three Oburoni's, was somehow able to join those on the bus. Leeana (my roomate and partner in crime - don't worry Dad, this is still a figure of speech) and I improvised and copied some of the nearby truck drivers. We dragged 2 wooden palates over to the front of the bus - to the amusement of our Ghanaian peers - laid out my towel to prevent splinters and/or tetnus, and feel asleep to the sounds of rumaging goats and a nearby bar blasting music. I could give other humorous anecdotes about the border - including cockroaches, improvised plastic bag toilets, hustlers and money changers, and endless word of mouth plan changes - but needless to say I have never slept in a stranger, more surreal place than goat/trash no-mans-land between two West African countries.

Moving on... the reason for our great journey to Ouaga was to attend FESPACO, the pan-African film festival heralded as Africa's version of the Cannes or Sundance festivals. The trip quickly became something very different from what we had all anticipated, as despite the spectacular opening ceremony, the festival organization itself was so poor that the films themselves took the backseat (at least in my mind) to other activities such as swimming in a nearby hotel's pool, eating more meat than even my father would think healthy in a single week (mostly spiced goat meat), and putting on a multi-dance performance hosted by the Ghanaian embassy for Ghana's independence day. Soon after arriving, the embassy requested that the UG group put on a show at the end of the week for an audience full of African and worldwide dignitaries at a 5-star hotel. Rehearsals were held every night and I was able to participate in two of the easier dances which I had learned in dance class. I cannot say that my performance that night was spectacular, but the experience of rehearsing (aka goofing around with the Ghanaian students) made my trip incredibly worthwhile. And, as the analogy agreed upon by Ghanaians and the 3 Oburonis alike: Oburonis are to dancing as Obibinis are to swimming. Once in a while an exception emerges, but I have been humbled enough to know that I am not that exception. The strength of the language barrier was another element that was unanticipated by all on the trip - though I don't know why more of the Ghanaian students didn't know French seeing as its surrounded by Francophone countries - and it led to creating a more insulated, cohesive group. The trip also gave me my first experience rooming with a Ghanaian - a wonderful, lively, quirky, beautiful and intensely nurturing woman named Naa or Glaydis. Our room became a hub of activity, usually centered around feeding her closest male friends from a costco-sized plastic bag full of homemade banku, as well as becoming the place to borrow and exchange such useful items as washing buckets, cocoa butter (like lotion), and rice cookers. We were gifted with incessant loud reminders and door knockings that carried little validity such as "the bus is leaving in five minutes," "get up get up (5:30 am)" or "Please, who left their biscuits in the bathroom? that is not acceptable." Sometimes, my oburoni self felt like I was experiencing an invasion - as I have never before experienced such a prolonged lack of privacy - but I got into the flow of things after a while and appreciated what I was experiencing: a Ghanaian family. I knew that adjustment was well underway when I became "the breakfast maker" - preparing the men's milo (chocolate "energy" drink) and corn flakes before they were even requested.

Ouagadougou itself has striking differences from Accra. Motor bikes and regular bikes are absolutely everywhere- with the largest roads even having specially demarcated lanes. Though this appeared a sustainability-minded liberal American girl's dream at first, it is a result of Burkina's extreme poverty relative to Ghana, and particularly Accra (where cars including BMWs and Jaguars choke every major road). In fact, relative poverty was evident in a general scarcity of material goods, business activity and food stands as compared to Ghana. The disparity between regular Burkinabes and the festival-goers was intense with foreign film crews, directors, judges, and critics staying nice hotels and a special market for FESPACO monitored and guarded. Also, as white women, neither Blake, Leeana nor I had any problems getting into films - even when I didn't have a pass on me. The rest of the UG students were consistently hassled, being assumed to be Burkinabes trying to sneak into films (despite not speaking French and speaking in Twi and English) and some were even turned away because they had only one form of FESPACO identification. They had to strategize and go in groups so that they could pass off the limited festival passes white we three oburonis were able to go wherever we liked. The environment in Burkina was DRRYY, causing chapstick and cocoa butter to become hot hostel commodities. The sun during the day was like a microwave on bare skin, while nights were cool and incredibly beautiful except for constant mosquitos. Also in Burkina, the 3 oburonis made friends with a 4th: Jacob, a Philidelphia native, recent grad from Temple University who, after studying abroad in Senegal and applying for a Fullbright is traveling in Africa from Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, then Ethiopia.

We left Burkina early Sunday the 8th, and my birthday was celebrated with good friends, sweaty plastic seats, and a suprise elephant spotting along the side of the road in Northern Ghana. Luckily, I was not subjected to the normal birthday treatment of "ponding," in which a bucket(s) of water is thrown at your back as hard as possible. Ponding serves as a useful catch-all hazing technique, employed for birthdays, initiations in men's halls, thieves (along with beatings), varying in degrees of intensity dependent upon the occasion. Luckily, its not cool to physically hurt females on their birthdays, not at 8 am before a 20 hour bus ride. Thank the Lord.

So, onward to the following weekend, after a week of mentally if not actually playing catch-up with work that I hadn't really gotten behind on. Leeana and I decided to go with Forest (yes, Carter) and Rosie, his girlfriend, to a beach area at the mouth of the Volta River (only about 2 hours from Accra) for a relaxing weekend of swimming, "homework," and hammocks. When Jacob, who had just crossed the Ghana border, heard of our plan, he high-tailed it down to meet us. The weekend was a beautiful alternate universe, complete with actual palm frond huts, a lazy and gracious fishing village, night bonfires lit by the 2 women who run the almost deserted "resort", a furious ocean on one side and a freshwater estuary on the other. Nights were warm and windy with numerous small storms rolling through and intermitant bright starts and beautiful non-city black sky. The people at Ada-Foah are the type of Ghanaians that tour books and tourist promotional videos generalize about, incredibly warm and laid-back. Leeana, Jacob and I spent an entire afternoon hanging out with children, mothers, and men fixing fishing nets- after eating a meal of waakye (waa-che) and fresh fish. Jacob claimed the two of us to be his wives whenever we were propositioned, but this plan backfired when a leading male figure in town derided him on his unwillingness to share, specifically requesting me to be given to him as a gift. Before anyone reading this is confused, almost all interactions with unknown Ghanaians are humorous and joking and the best way to diffuse askward cross-cultural interactions is to joke about one another's or one's own culture. However, I know that Jacob likely has outstanding school loans and had Emmanuel Kofi Opong offered a monetary sum, I might still be in Ada-Foah - learning Ewe very quickly.