How Teachers Can Spend Their Weekends in Ghana

Last Friday I showed up to my 12:00 class. It looked a little bit different- I certainly don’t know all 60 names yet but the faces didn’t even look that familiar. The room was quite full, too, 3 to a desk at times. I asked (as I have been doing every day) “Is anyone new?” 20 hands went up. “Some are new but some have left,” Gloria in the first row said. What????? To make a long story short, I guess they did some sort of ‘balancing’ of classes and I now have a very balanced 70 student class 1/3 of them I’ve never seen before . I taught the lesson I’d prepared but left a little shell shocked.

Luckily it was time for my first ROAD TRIP!

Matthew, Rebecca (the other 2 Fulbrighters in Accra), a new acquaintance Andrea (an artist/crafter doing research) and I traveled this weekend to a tiny coastal town, Busua, near the large Ghanaian town of Takoradi (for those of you with maps of Ghana) which is west in Ghana towards Cote d’Ivoire. We left from Accra at 5AM Saturday. It took 5 hrs to get to Takoradi on a bus, a real 'air conditioned' slightly shabby bus, and it cost $7. From Takoradi we had to take a tro-tro (basically a big van with anywhere up to 15 people smushed into it. This is one of the main transportation modes in Ghana) and then a cab to get to the out of the way beach of Busua. The beach was very deserted, clean (not always the case in Ghana) and swimmable (no strong rip tides like many Ghanaian beaches). There was lush unusual vegetation and some really funky birds. There was good food and we had a nice relaxing time. Take a look at some pictures….

View from my balcony

Kids shelling prawns on the beach

Houses on stilts

Picturesque island in the distance

The side of a building

Yes, they are vultures...but there were other exotic birds too!

I came back on a bus by myself because I found a bus that went directly to Tema (which is on the other side of Accra). Traffic was terrible, it was Sunday and there is only a two lane highway up and down most of the coast. But, I had fun buying things out of the windows during traffic jams. Women walk between idling cars and busses with large baskets of stuff to eat on their heads. My new favorite is plantain chips. At one point I handed a woman a cedi ($1) for a pineapple and got 4 of them.

It took 7 hrs to get ‘home’, and you know what? It actually felt like I was coming home.