Monday June 4, 2012

Monday morning - and once again I have to catch up first.

I think I won the contest of who took the cutest photo of the shopkeeper's boys at the castle.
Here is the youngest one wearing my hat and striking a pose worthy of any cowboy.

I also wanted to add this great shot of Sam  during our canopy walk.  The scene of one of us taking a photo with the canopy in the background was a pretty universal view for all of us.

We had planned to leave at 8:00 am, but finally left Accra about 9:00 after our packed lunch arrived.  We will be stopping at the top of the pass on our way to Kumasi to have a picnic lunch.  Gifty prepared it all for us last night, but the morning traffic in Accra was so bad it took her 45 minutes longer than expected to reach us.   She will be joining us in Kumasi on use 13th, which we found out is her birthday.

City roads and traffic began to give way to country lanes and no traffic.  I'm not a big fan of photos through the windshield, but it makes the point in this case.

Soon we began to see the mountains on central Ghana in the distance.  

We were also seeing these:

That's a termite mound, and those are normal size people in the photo.  These things are everywhere, and they really are all that big or bigger.  Many fields have 4-10 visible from the road.

The roadside stands looked much as they do in the city but they became much less frequent and were offering different things.  Instead of the "necessities" of urban life - cell phone minutes, chargers, soda pop and such - we were now seeing stands selling palm oil and gari, which is ground up casaba.  Casaba is a staple of almost all African diets.  The gar can either be mixed with just a bit of palm oil and is more solid as a staple starch, or if can be mixed with water and/or milk and it is more like a porridge cereal.  This photo combines 2 images.  You see palm oil, fruit & veggies on the left and bundles of firewood, gari and  bowl, on the right.  The items of daily living are of more importance here than the consumer items of the city.

Fun Fact: one of our former UMAPS scholars worked at UM with a chemistry professor doing spectral analysis and discovered that casaba contains arsenic, sometimes in significant doses.    Apparently the way it is prepared has much to do with whether the arsenic remains (or remains toxic) which explains why methods for properly preparing casaba have been passed down over generations.  Or at least down through the generations that did not die from arsenic poisoning.

And you see school children in uniform at every school.  This promotes the sense of the importance of school and eliminates the problems of envy & embarrassment we see at schools in the US without uniforms, and all the problems that this can cause.  Kwasi also says that it helps to pinpoint troublemakers by their uniform after school.

More tomorrow (actually just a bit later tonight), where you will hear about my harrowing adventures getting to and from the Palace, which turned out to be a harrowing 3 hour journey....

Tuesday June 5