One morning I decided to go for a run on the main dirt road going through my village & I got a ton of people doing a double take at me as they rode by on their motos. I’ve realized that no one just “goes for a run” because they’re taking care of their farm, garden, & multiple children, or they’re busy fetching water from the borehole or cutting down dead trees for firewood & putting these heavy loads on top of their heads to walk back to their mud hut. So getting exercise isn’t really a problem for them. Anyway, a good handful of people in Tumu will know that you’re exercising if you decided to go for a run; however, the villagers won’t really understand unless you explain to them your purpose for running when nothing is chasing you.

Back to my story – after running one morning, I took a bucket bath & had intended to eat my breakfast when a group of girls from the village were knocking at my door to tell me that they were going to church & that I should come, so I did. The mass was held in one of the small classrooms of the school & the number of villagers in attendance were about 15. Not exactly what we’d call a church mass back home in America, but it works here in my village. After the mass, the girls encouraged me to walk home with them & greet all of the people along the way, which I did. We walked through about half the village, including the chief’s compound to greet the chief & his family. Now it’s around 11am (note: I left for my run around 6), it’s hot as anything, & I haven’t eaten any food & probably didn’t drink enough water. So I admit, I made some bad decisions.

As I was walking back to my room with a few of the girls from the chief’s palace & explaining to them the uses of moringa, I started to feel dizzy. I told them that I didn’t feel so well & I leaned up against the wall near my door, but they continued asking questions about moringa like nothing was happening to me. That’s when their voices started fading away & all I saw was little specs of light…& then just pure darkness. The next thing I knew I was being lifted out of the dirt & into my room. Thank god I was swinging my keys around in my hands as I was talking to them so they knew how to open up my door. I was so weak, they dragged me into my room, leaving a trail of dirt in my path (so sweeping my place that morning before my run might not have been a good idea after all), & plopped me onto my bed. I felt delusional, but I insisted that I get up, although they were all directing me back to my bed. My purpose for wobbling across my room? To turn on the fan. But that didn’t help.

I told them that I’d be alright & to leave my room, although I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t alright, but I didn’t want a group of Ghanaians just chilling in my small single-roomed “house” with all of my belongings not completely put away. I sat on my bed, not being fully cognizant yet of my situation, when I suddenly heard my stomach roar like a lion. Yes, my stomach became a fierce feline that demanded food, & when I presented it with a Cliff Bar, it inhaled half of it in a second. Realizing that sitting on my bed a few feet away from my fan wasn’t doing me any good, I hobbled over to my only chair, moved it about a foot away from the fan & sat on its hard plastic. While sitting in front of the fan that seemed to only blow hot air into my face, I downed all of my hot filtered water, which didn’t sit well in my stomach. This called for desperate measures. I decided, for the first time, to turn on my refrigerator.

I know, I know…why didn’t I have the refrigerator on in the first place? Because I had just come back from all of my conferences (my Reconnect In-Service Training & All-Vol) & I was about to leave again for Wa for my World Malaria Day program. So turning on my refrigerator would use up a ton of electricity for a short time until I had to thaw it out before I left my village again. But I didn’t care anymore. I turned my fridge on & put filtered water into the freezer section. I tried eating more of my Cliff Bar, but the hot water inside my stomach made me feel sick. So I tried to sit in front of the fan & not think about my churning stomach or dirt stuck to the sweat all over my body, when a group of children knocked at my door yelling “Madam! Madam!” The first thing that came into my somewhat rational mind was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

At this point in time I was only wearing my running bra & underwear because my body temperature was just too hot to have any clothes on, so now I slowly walked over to my towel & wrapped it around my body before I opened my door to about five playful little kids. “Madam! Madam! Give me water!” Now, I’m usually nice to them, even when they demand things from me like that, but that day I was just not feeling it. “Go home,” I angrily said in Sisaali, desperately trying not to yell at them. “My head & stomach pain me,” pointing to my head & stomach as I said the words in English because I couldn’t think of the words in Sisaali off the top of my head in my still slightly delusional state of mind. Lucky enough, the children listened to me (that never happens anymore) & they walked away looking concerned. Maybe it was because my hair was a mess & I still had dirt all over my body, including the bits hanging off of my face. I probably scared them away.

Closing the door again, I decided it was time to check the fridge. I felt the cool air on my body & I immediately drew myself nearer. I opened the little freezer section & checked on the water & it felt slightly cool. “Good enough for me,” I thought as I downed most of it in a few gulps. Before putting the water back in the freezer section, I stayed crouched down in my position of opening the freezer for a few seconds, & then I went for it…I tried sticking my head, dripping of sweat & dirt, in the freezer. Unfortunately, my head was too big. Plan B: I stuck both of my arms into the freezer instead. I was in a state of freezer-burn bliss when my worst nightmare returned. The children.

“Madam! Madam!” they cried. I swung the door open ready to yell at them this time when they began mumbling in a panic-stricken state of voice, “You must bathe” in Sisaali. And as they motioned for me to bathe, it finally hit me. I should bathe? I should bathe! I don’t know if they were still concerned due to my appearance or if they were miraculously sent from above to deliver a very important message of pouring water on myself. Whatever it was, I was not going to wait around & contemplate the “hows” or “whys.” I slammed the door, took out my bucket for washing clothes & stepped inside of it, opened my garbage can filled with borehole water & splashed bucket upon bucket of that warm water all over myself. Then I walked to my plastic chair, dripping water all over my concrete floor, & sat in front of my fan & open refrigerator until I felt my body temperature reduce to a reasonable degree of comfort. I ate the rest of the (by this time) mushy/almost watery Cliff Bar & slumped back into my bed, not even worrying about the pile of dirt that I left on my bed sheets an hour or so earlier. Then I passed out – not literally like before, but I was just so weak & tired that I slept for almost the entire afternoon.

Needless to say, it took a few days to recover. Not to mention, when I visited my NGO before travelling to Wa for the World Malaria Day program, Gladys, one of the guesthouse receptionists, had given me an orange. Now, we all know that oranges are filled with Vitamin C, a vitamin that should have helped me to a much-needed speedy recovery. HA! Fortunately for me, that orange was not only filled with Vitamin C, but a wad of unexpected protein thanks to the maggots crawling around inside of it. I didn’t realize they were even there until I was halfway done stuffing myself with this delicious tasting orange & finally noticed the inside of the orange was moving. I know Gladys was only trying to help, but try explaining that to my stomach & an already barely functioning body.

Since then, I’ve taken more care of myself because it truly is more important to worry about my health & safety first over the happiness of everyone else in my village. I know they love having the pleasure of me greet them for hours on end, but now it won’t be on an empty stomach.

Moral of the story: kids, don’t try this at home.

Last Wednesday, May 9th, I had a program with JSS (Junior Secondary School) Form 2 girls from the school in my village, which included girls from my village Chinchang & the neighboring village Taffiesi. Grade-wise, it’s the equivalent of 8th graders back in America, but the students here are not even close to an average American 8th grader’s academic performance. The program was spearheaded by another PCV who sent out a message to all PCVs in Ghana saying that there was funding to do a program for young girls called Take Your Daughter To Work Day, so I requested to receive funding & got it. Some of the goals of the project were to encourage girls to pursue and develop goals for the future, encourage continuing their education (academics or technical skills to acquire new life skills), provide examples of various career opportunities for their future, promote positive mentorship between youth and adults, & to acknowledge the success of women in the workplace.

It took me forever to try to think of a Sisaala woman in Tumu that held a respectable job outside of the norm of being a teacher, cook, or small shop owner. I couldn’t think of any that I knew of. That’s why I always tell myself, I spent a reasonable amount of time in Tumu before coming to my village for a reason – resources. I called my friend Celia, a Danish health worker, who had a woman named Fadilah in mind immediately & I couldn’t ask for anyone better. Fadilah came from a nearby village, so she grew up with the same cultural background as the girls from my school. She was determined to go to school & completed SSS (Senior Secondary School) & continued onto nursing school. She spent a little less than 2 years working at a small health clinic when she was moved to head nurse at the health clinic in Nabugabelle, a village on the same road as mine but just 3 villages beyond, & now she is known as one of the best nurses in her field in the Sisaala area. She was just the woman I was looking for to carry out the program.

I then just had to figure out the logistics. Who would make cheap enough food for “take away” in Tumu so that the girls going to the program could eat lunch? Who could provide drinks that weren’t pure water sachets & could easily be transported out to the village without worrying about lugging glass bottles to Nabugabelle & back to the store? Once I got those answers after walking throughout Tumu from early morning to late afternoon, I felt relieved because at least that is all I had to spend my allotted money on. And thank goodness that’s all I had to spend the money on because I already had to take some money out of my own Peace Corps pay to purchase the drinks. My Danish health worker friends were nice enough to offer the girls a ride from Chinchang to Nabugabelle & back for free in their off-roading work cars because they said that they could count my program as a joint program for them as well to educate the girls about some health topics.

The program couldn’t have run more smoothly than it did. All 17 girls were allowed by their parents to come to the program, the headmaster & their teachers approved, Celia & Rasmus couldn’t have been better drivers on our terrible washed-out road, & Fadilah really became a mentor to all of the students. She spoke about all of her struggles in life, successes & failures, & how she had to be motivated to go through school to then return to where she grew up & help the people of her village & other surrounding villages when the rest of the other nurses from her program took jobs in southern Ghana. Fadilah was someone that the girls could relate to, so they listened to her & really took what she said to heart. After asking each of the girls what they wanted to be when they grow up, she explained that it’s important to have goals to work towards, & not to let the village boys get in their way of fulfilling those dreams. After the girls asked her several questions about her job as a nurse, Fadilah had an educational session about cholera & family planning, & then she gave them a tour of the Nabugabelle health clinic.

What a success! None of the 17 girls had ever been to Nabugabelle, but now they were acquainted with the staff of its health clinic & they have a mentor that they seem to trust & look up to. Also, they now know the Danish health workers so whenever they go into Tumu & need someone to talk to there, they can easily talk to them. In addition, the girls have another resource in Tumu in the education department, James the VSO. He came along for the ride because he just usually works in Tumu training teachers, but he thought it would be a great experience to witness a program involving students living in the villages outside of Tumu. Overall, the program went extremely well & I know that more programs like this will come in the future, especially now that the girls have a connection with Fadilah.

A big thanks goes out to the North American Women's Association (NAWA) who funded the program. I had the girls write thank-you notes to the NAWA & they were so thoughtful. Granted, the girls may not be able to write clearly (grammatically & in meaning), but they were so appreciative that they had the opportunity to go on a field trip for the first time in their lives. Funny thing, as I was waiting for them to finish writing their thank-you letters, they took out their school books, so I thought several of them were doing their homework. Nope. Because I provided them with pens & crayons to write these letters, they took their schoolbooks to get ideas for things to draw. So some of these thank-you letters have hand-drawn pictures of the anatomy of a flower, a chemistry lab set up, a computer, wheelbarrow, Ghanaian flag, a house (labeled “here’s a house for you”), flowers made from a pencil & protractor, & hearts with “I love NAWA” written inside of them. I’m telling you, looking over these thank-you notes again make me want to cry because I didn’t think this program made that big a difference to these girls, but apparently it did. They will remember this program for the rest of their lives.

April 25th was World Malaria Day! So my friend Hannah, a Health/WATSAN (Water Sanitation) PCV from the Wa East District, & I led a malaria awareness program in Wa, the capital of the Upper West Region.

The morning of the event, Hannah & I, a JSS student from Hannah’s village, & other PCVs Kimmy, Zack, Ryan & Van, went to the Upper West Region’s radio station Progress 98.1 to advertise our event later that day & to give some facts about malaria. Hannah & I were in the hot seats, but Hannah’s JSS student got in some broadcast airtime as well, which he was very excited about. After the radio broadcast but before the program started, 15 UWR PCVs helped to assemble a tent (it was quite a site, I have to say, for the Ghanaians to watch a bunch of white people struggle to put up a tent) so the DJ for the event could put all of his equipment under it. We also set up a mosquito net near the tent to spur interest in our event. The entire program took place at the basketball court in Wa near the Metro Mass station & next to all of the ministry buildings so it was in a place where a lot of people would pass by to wonder what was going on. While waiting for the program to begin, some PCVs were keeping the children that had congregated around the DJ occupied by dancing while others started practicing basketball with some of The Unicorns’ players. The Unicorns are Wa’s community basketball team, a team comprised of players in their 20s & 30s that are a lot taller & more experienced at playing basketball than most of us PCVs. And we were to have a basketball game against them after our program…ohh that was something to look forward to haha.

Anyway, because it’s Ghana, you can never expect anything to start on time. So we were still waiting for the DJ to finish setting up & our translator Assana to arrive, a seamstress in Wa & good friend to all PCVs who know her. Once everything was set up, all of the PCVs interacted with the children that had gathered around the DJ’s blaring music by asking them questions like: “How many of you know someone that has died from malaria?”, “Where does malaria come from?”, “What are the symptoms?”, & “How can you prevent malaria?” For every answer they gave, whether it was right or wrong, we gave them “toffee” (what the Ghanaians call all types of candy) for being brave enough to come up to the microphone to participate. Then, we debunked myths about malaria, did a net hanging demonstration, explained how to mend & clean the net, & played a high/low risk game. Although there were only children present in our audience, we hope that they’ll relay the message back home to their families. After the educational part of the program came the promised & well waited for, basketball game. Even though they won the game because we were clearly no match for them, it was still a ton of fun. Plus, they laid off a little…well, actually a lot haha so the score wasn’t more than a 10 point difference but the score didn’t matter to any of us. What mattered is that people came out to be educated on malaria. Our final “take-away” message was that it is easier to prevent malaria than have to cure it, so start preventing yourself now if you haven’t already.

SWAT Malaria!

Hannah & I beginning the World Malaria Day event in front of the tent on the basketball court in Wa.

Thanks Grandpa Pete for the title of this post. I’ll always remember you whenever the phrase is said.

After spending some time in the Upper West Region, I travelled down south with my fellow UWR PCV friends Janette, Van, Britany & her boyfriend David from South Africa, & Simone (one of Britany’s Senior Secondary School students) to the Eastern Region for All-Vol (All-Volunteer Conference) where we met up with all 161 PCVs in Ghana & our supervisors. It was such a fun trip down because we didn’t have to worry about taking mass transportation since we were piled into David’s orange Landrover, which him & Britany called “Bush Car Paa” (“paa” is a word in Twi for “a lot” or “very much”). Although, that poor Landrover had taken quite a beating over its travels throughout Africa, so there was a decal on one side of the car that said “Bush Car Paa” while the other side said “Somehow” haha. We had a great time riding down together listening to music that we actually like & not blasting Ghanaian music with no meaning to the song whatsoever or songs with underlying derogatory meanings that play loudly in public places for all children to hear.

Along the way we picked up Simone’s uncle in Techiman in the Brong Ahafo Region to comfort Simone. Why? Well, it was an exceptionally special trip south because after All-Vol, Britany & David were going to drive Simone & his uncle to Accra for Simone to get a prosthetic leg. Apparently Britany had met Simone because he won an award for being one of the smartest students in the school based on his grades & test scores. Not too long after meeting him, a poisonous snake had bitten Simone & the venom had gone too far up his leg to recover it once he got to the hospital, so the leg had to be removed. He used to love dancing & playing soccer, but now he walked around on crutches & could do little else but his schoolwork, which he continued to excel at. After doing some research, Britany had found an organization (I think called Standing for Hope) that agreed to do the surgery for free, if only she could get him to Accra for the operation. So, Janette & Britany & their families back home in the states had raised money for Simone & his uncle’s travelling expenses to Accra. I felt honored to take part in his travels south to support such a great cause. And because it was his first time outside of the UWR, we used a video camera to video tape every stop along the way.

While us PCVs were at All-Vol, Simone & his uncle were dropped off at Janette’s homestay family’s compound in Anyinasin because her host mother agreed to take care of them while we were at our conference. Could Ghanaians be any more welcoming?! While in Anyinasin, I visited my homestay family & saw Mamma (my host mother!), Kofi (my host brother), Amma (my host sister), Mamme Grace (my host grandmother), & Coby (a cousin of my host family). Unfortunately, Coby’s 5-year-old brother had just died the day before we visited from a bad fall that caused internal bleeding that wasn’t treated right away. So everyone wasn’t in their happiest state, but they were still excited to see us. Janette & I even met a few of the new Health/WATSAN (Water Sanitation) PCTs that were about to be sworn in as official PCVs which was really nice. Everyone recognized Janette & I as soon as we got to Anyinasin & they were calling us by the names our host families gave us: Amma Buatema & Mamme Grace. I had hoped to see my host sisters Sarah & Akwia too, but Sarah was in Accra & Akwia was at another house on the opposite side of Anyinasin. My host mother even started cooking dinner for Janette & I, but we had to refuse because we really had to get back to our conference’s location, which wasn’t too far away from our host families’ village, for checking into rooms.

All-Vol was great! It was so nice to meet all of the PCVs throughout all 10 regions of Ghana & hear stories of their villages, why they wanted to be in the Peace Corps, & their plans for the future (for the COSing, Close of Service, PCVs that will leave Ghana in July/August of this year). There was so much to learn from the COSing & third year PCVs - to hear all of their successes & failures, & to know that there is no such thing as being a perfect PCV. Everyone shared their skills at the skill fair, & people sold crafts & other goodies at the craft fair. I brought moringa soap, moringa tea & handmade Ghanaian dolls from my NGO, & everything was sold within 15 minutes. Note to self: bring more next year! I didn’t buy much at the craft fair this year, only 750ml of honey from a Western Region PCV & a handmade bracelet from Kyndra’s (from my NRM group) village’s women’s bead-making group, but next year I hope to buy a bunch of souvenirs to bring home to America once my service is completed. Throughout the weekend conference, the sessions revolved around food security topics & organization meetings. In the UWR VAC (Upper West Region Volunteer Action Committee) meeting, I was voted to be the SWAT (Standing With Africa to Terminate) Malaria representative, so whenever anyone from my region does a malaria related project, I’m to be informed about it in case I could provide any assistance & then I’m to report to Peace Corps Ghana all of our region’s programs. The nights at All-Vol were quite a different atmosphere filled with fun activities for the PCVs to get to know each other better. There was a game night where Mafia was played & of course I was there. We had a talent show where the audience was entertained by singers, comedians, magicians, a professional Irish step dancer, fire thrower, husband & wife’s wedding Thriller dance, & much more. Another night was GYD’s (Gender Youth Development’s) date auction to raise money for programs within their organization. And finally there was a “2-yard (what the colorful Ghanaian cloth is usually sold by) toga party” where I wore my piece-piece cloth that I bought in Kumasi while I was at my Reconnect IST (In Service Training). This cloth is made from all of the leftover scraps of cloth that some seamstresses sew together to make one extremely colorful cloth, so I knew that the cloth that I was wearing would be unique.

After All-Vol, I attended an IST for my SWAT Malaria team to have a malaria refresher course & get the low down on all of the possible programs that we could do. It was nice to have a sense of belonging to a group of PCVs that can connect me to all 10 regions of Ghana. After my IST, I went to Accra with a large group of PCVs so we filled a tro tro & got them to take us straight to our Peace Corps office. Accra, mind you, is a completely different world from the rest of Ghana. It’s like a mini America. I ate a cheeseburger & fries, gelato, pizza, banana bread, & tons of other good food that cost a fortune on a Peace Corps budget. The one night that I spent in Accra, I went to a show by the Italian National Circus that was doing a tour throughout West Africa (from what I heard), & it was AWESOME! Not to mention, I went with a group of about 20 PCVs, & even though we could only afford the cheapest tickets all the way in the back of the stands by the guy directing the spotlight, we were still the loudest group in the audience. We were so loud that every time the circus performer looked to the audience for applause, they looked at our group haha. Throughout the performance, we splurged & bought popcorn & cotton candy (which for some reason they called candy floss?) too. The next day myself & a few other UWR PCVs took a bus straight from Accra to our regional capital, Wa, & then we parted ways from there.

It was crazy doing a bunch of travelling for all of my meetings, but well worth it in the end because I learned a ton. Unfortunately, my travelling wasn’t yet complete & I would have to travel to Wa again after being in my village for about a week to prepare for World Malaria Day on April 25th as the new SWAT Malaria representative for the UWR.

So back in April, just before my All-Volunteer Conference (what PCVs like to call All-Vol), I promised my closest PCV friend Janette that I’d visit her for Easter. She lives in Lawra, the third largest “city” of the Upper West Region (after our regional capital Wa & Tumu in Sisaala Land). If you remember, I was in Lawra in November for my HIV/AIDs education program during training because Britany, a PCV in a village just outside of Lawra, hosted the program there. So it was great going back to Lawra because it’s a little less than half the size of Tumu, so it’s even more peaceful & holds more of a personal atmosphere because it seems like everyone knows each other. Unfortunately, the language is Dagaare so I couldn’t use my Sisaali there & at first I felt completely helpless when it came to speaking with the locals, but at least Dagaare & Wale are very similar, & Wale is spoken in Wa so I know a few words for greetings & to get my point across if I want to buy something.

I was so happy to see Janette! She was like a breath of fresh air to me because her & I used to be in language class together since we had the same language instructor Aliu, & we used to talk about anything & everything. We saw the best & worst of each other too. For a quick flashback… In our host village Anyinasin in the Eastern Region, our houses were fairly close to one another so we were always at each other’s house. Both of us were nervous about our language exam, but I tried to compose myself to help her relax because I think she was more nervous than I was! And then both of us got sick when we were on the road for technical training. When we were roommates in Kumasi, she took care of me like my own mother would have, & then I took care of her in Tumu because she got sick not too long after me. So it was really great to see such a good friend like her again, even though I had just seen her at my Reconnect IST (In-Service-Training). But it was special to visit Lawra to meet everyone that she had become friends or acquainted with, especially her counterpart Cletus because he’s such a nice guy. I remember meeting him in November through Britany & he was just a genuinely kind person that would go out of his way to help anyone. Even Janette calls him her son, & because Cletus calls me Janette’s daughter, that makes him & I brother & sister haha he likes making that joke.

It was great to be in Lawra for Easter because the entire weekend there was a youth program going on, so every day there was a soccer match as well as other events, whether it be dance-offs, food contests, debates, archery, or listening to speakers. Janette’s role in all of this was to help the youth club that she got involved with in Lawra because at every half time during the soccer games, the children recited a poem about HIV/AIDS to spread awareness. Janette & I also attended an Easter mass at Cletus’s church, we visited a run-down palace that the British used to live in before Ghana declared its independence because Lawra was once the Upper West Region’s capital, she showed me the jail that imprisoned the first president of Ghana before his presidency, & we went to a party by VSOs (Voluntary Service Overseas), other development workers, in the Upper West & Upper East Regions.

I got to be good friends with the VSOs too because I went to Wechiau, the Hippopotamus Sanctuary just southwest of Wa, with six of them (3 from the UWR & 3 from the UER). At first we thought it was going to be a terrible experience because the day started off pouring rain, but the sky cleared up & it became a beautiful day. The tro tro ride from Wa to Wechiau I would never recommend to anyone because it was the bumpiest ride that I’ve ever had, but it was worth it to get there, even if our tro broke down 3 times. Once at the location of the hippos at the Black Volta River, defining the border between Ghana & Burkina Faso, we boarded two wooded boats, one of which was leaking…badly. Unknowingly, of course I would be one of the so fortunate passengers to board the leaking one. It was so much fun though! Our guides didn’t have to paddle very far to find the hippos on the Ghana side of the Black Volta River, so they paddled us to the Burkina side of the river to watch from a safe enough distance to reside & take pictures. It was so peaceful, & the water & foliage made the scenery just gorgeous out there. Plus, the thrill of being in a sinking boat made it all that much more fun. After having some fun with the hippos, we made our way back to the lodge where we cooked ourselves some rice, veggies & eggs for dinner & then we shared a box of wine by pouring it into our empty water sachets. Classy, I know. I wonder who could have come up with such a genius idea? Anyways, after our stomachs were satisfied, we walked about an hour at dusk into the bush with our backpacks, water sachets, mattresses, mosquito nets & sheets (that the two guides provided us with) to our reserved night’s stay in the Wechiau treehouse. All 7 of us, plus the 2 guides set up our sleeping places in the tree house by flashlight & then we sung songs, told stories & ate snacks around the little light that we had. It reminded me of camping trips with Brownies/Girl Scouts when I was young or with my church’s youth group in high school. It was a whirlwind of a trip, but it was relaxing at the same time to get away from the craziness of NGO work, the 0% privacy of village life, & not being fully understood by Ghanaians, even if they could speak perfect English (which so far I haven’t encountered). It was a way to just enjoy nature & good company with new friends who have the same drive to be development workers in a foreign country.

Looking back at my trip to Lawra & Wechiau, I’d do it all again. I love Lawra’s atmosphere & the kindness of the people, & going to Wechiau was great to spend some time away from a ton of people & just enjoy the serenity of the Black Volta River & vegetation surrounding it.

Happy April Fools Day! No, I didn’t prank anyone #1) because I don’t think Ghanaians would understand what April Fools Day means let alone know that pranks are meant as jokes & aren’t to be taken seriously & #2) because I had a really long ride from Kumasi to Wa that took up a majority of my day (7+ hours, & that’s being in a fast car that I paid more money for compared to the really awesome snail-moving barely-functioning MetroMass buses) & I was tired, dusty, & sick of being squished in a seat with little room to put my bags & feet; therefore, I was in no mood to prank anyone or have anyone prank me. And remember, I wasn’t even in Sisaala land yet; I still had to travel another 4+ hours to Tumu. Anyway, I was in Kumasi, the second largest, if not the largest, city of Ghana in the Ashanti Region’s capital, because I just had my weeklong Reconnect IST (In-Service Training) with my group of 24 NRM PCVs. And yes, we are a group of 24 now; 2 down & counting, although let’s hope no one else leaves. We started with 26, then my closest friend Slade left & now another close friend of mine, Mike, left Ghana for good. My friend Mike was in the Peace Corps’ Grad School Fellowship program & was supposed to be working with farmers & Ghana’s Forestry Department to get his Masters degree, but unfortunately his site didn’t work out. Mike was placed in the Brong Ahafo Region in a village of farmers working with cashew trees, but if he stayed in his village, his professor said that he wouldn’t be able to get his Master’s degree. Mike’s situation was a lot more complicated than that, but long story short, he got really frustrated that nothing was working in his favor & he called it quits. [Note to Mike: I’m really sad to see you go, but I know you’ll enjoy being back in the states after everything you’ve been through here in Ghana. I’m sure you’re eating a lot of delicious American food & drinking a few beers to make up for lost time, but don’t rub it in too much or I may hate you indefinitely. Anyway, I hope you can finish up your Master’s degree - good luck cowboy! PS- Right now I’m listening to the Celtic music that you gave to me & I really like it, thanks!]

Update on my village status: I’m officially living in Chinchang! I moved to my village in the very beginning of March & I love it. The people are so kind & welcoming, & I already made a few good friends with Form 1 & 2 (first & second year) Junior Secondary School (JSS) girls that speak better English than the Form 3 students do. What exactly have I been doing you may ask? Well, I’ve been doing no work that’s for sure - rather I’ve been focusing on integration since I spent the previous 2 months at my NGO working. The three JSS girls Alija, Bedaw, & Asana helped me most to feel like Chinchang was my new home. The very first night I slept in Chinchang, Alija came to my room with a bowl of TZ (tuozafi – made with millet &/or maize) that her mom cooked for me for dinner. I was so thankful because I wasn’t even planning on cooking anything that night since I was so busy unpacking all of my things into my room. “You are invited,” I kindly told Alija, meaning that she was welcome to eat with me, & she accepted. And so, Alija & I sat on the concrete floor of my room with a small pot of burning hot TZ between us, & we dug into that TZ with our fingers (on our right hands obviously since it’s offensive to use our left hand), dunked it into the even hotter sweet & spicy dawadawa & okro soup in the smaller pot next to it, & quickly placed it into our mouths, feeling a very hot & slimy TZ slide down our throats. This is what I was invited to eat every night either with Alija & Bedaw in my room or with Asana & her family on the other side of my village. Not that this is a favorite food of mine or anything, but I was so happy to be invited to eat with the local people because it showed that they had accepted me into their village. During the day, I would fetch water at the closest borehole (between my room & the school) with my neighbor Bedaw & another JSS girl Nashira, or with Asana since she would help me fetch water on my side of the village & then I would help her fetch water at the other borehole near her mud-house. There is a third borehole for our village, but it’s near the chief’s palace, so it’s really just for him & his family. Oh, & a trip to the borehole doesn’t just mean that you’re fetching water to balance on your head, it means that you’re going there to socialize. There is always a line of women & young girls waiting to pump water into their buckets, so they turn their buckets upside down & sit on them as a seat, talking about anything & everything. And if you were to pick me out of the crowd in the midst of all the commotion at the borehole, you may get a flashback of playing Where’s Waldo because you’d think a white girl would be obvious to find, yet so many children are always surrounding me, sitting on my lap, & hanging onto my shoulders that I become engulfed in little black babies & toddlers. I’ve also walked on the paths behind the school towards the farms in the bush to collect firewood with Bedaw & her friend Hawaw, & if help means me using a machete to cut down dead trees & pile them on top of these JSS girls’ heads, then help I did. Mind you, they wouldn’t let me carry the firewood on my head, all they would let me do was carry the machete & pockets full of sweet tasting nuts called nangkpalama that we picked from trees in the bush to bring back to all the children in the village who love to crack them open & taste the sweet fibrous inside.

Almost every weekday I visited a different primary & JSS class in my village, & so far I’ve attended KG (kindergarten), P3 (primary school, year 3 students), & JSS Form 2 (JSS, year 2 students). The KG students learn their ABCs & numbers in English, they sing songs in both English & Sisaali, & they have break time every 15 minutes – oh the carefree life of being a kid. One of the youngest KG students cries every time he sees me, so oftentimes he has to be carried home because “he’s disturbing the others,” as one of the teachers always says. Poor kid, his family’s house isn’t too far from mine, so I always know when the little boy is outside because he’ll see me across the open field & start wailing. Fortunately, he’s the only one that does that…so far. The rest of the young children love me & shadow me everywhere I go, so the villagers always joke that when I leave in 2 years from now that I’ll take all of the children with me. When I visited the P3 students, they were so excited that I chose their class to sit in on, & I’m glad that I did because I even learned something that day: that third graders don’t know the difference between it & hit. They can spell the words when pointing to them written on the board, but they don’t know how to read the words aloud (& even when they do, I think they’re just guessing & hoping that they say them correctly). The teacher spent an entire English lesson on teaching them 10 simple words like it & hit, & the most complicated word to spell was aeroplane (yes, I know it’s spelled funny, but this is how the children were taught how to spell the word airplane, so it must be the British English way of spelling it). At the end of the lesson, the teacher quizzed them on those 10 words & only 2 people of an entire class of 30+ students got the highest score of 60%. The majority of the class got 30% or 40%. I can’t imagine what P1 & P2 students’ English classes are like. To make matters worse, there is a young girl in the class that the female teacher says “is slow in the head,” so the teacher doesn’t pay any attention to her, & when the teacher does, it’s to hit the girl with a stick on the back to tell her to try harder to get the right answer. One thing I’ve realized about schools here in Ghana is that caning gets progressively worse as the grade year of the student increases. So in KG, the teachers carry around twigs with them & they’ll bonk kids on the head with them when the kids are talking out of turn or if they keep asking to go to the bathroom when clearly all they want to do is escape the classroom & play outside early before break time. Primary school teachers, including the P3 teacher that I observed, carry a similar caning device, a stick. Watching Junior Secondary School Form 2 ICT (Information Communication Technology) class on the other hand, was quite a different & most unpleasant experience for me. The teacher is not too much older than I am, from “the south” (southern Ghana), & is only teaching the class for one year because he is on National Service, so he’s not too happy teaching in rural village schools in the Upper West Region. I think, as a result of his unhappiness & culture engrained into his head, he canes the students on their backs with a fairly large branch until they cry. I felt so bad for the students, especially the JSS girls that became such good friends with me. I couldn’t bear to watch the teacher cane them or to see the tears of those children with eyes screaming at me to free them of this monster of a teacher. I could do nothing more than to sit there, face hidden in a copy of their ICT booklet to cover the stream of tears flowing down my cheeks. I told the teacher that we don’t do those things in America & I’d prefer that he doesn’t do it, but he assured me that the students needed a beating because they weren’t answering the questions. Hmm let me think…these middle school students can’t answer questions about how to create a folder, open a file, or locate the calendar on a computer because they’ve never seen or touched a computer in their lives. Maybe Master, the title given to all male teachers in Ghana, that’s why the students can’t answer your questions. Rote memorization from a booklet teaching you how to use a computer without physically having a computer in front of you won’t help much.

One day, after classes were finished, the students showed me their school library, which I had asked to see because it seemed as though no one ever went in there. Their library is a fairly small room with benches & 3 medium-sized boxes of books. One box was filled with school books for Mathematics & English, another was filled with really big old books that I don’t think anyone could read with their literacy rate, & the last box had children’s books in it apparently donated a few years ago by some sort of a British organization but the only “children” that may be able to read these books would be SSS (Senior Secondary School) students although I doubt that they’d want to read stories like The Three Musketeers or The Princess & the Pea that they can’t relate to or understand the characters’ Old English. Overall, I was happy that the school even had a library because Ghanaians are known to not like reading, but I hope to change that. If I can get the children of my village to like reading, maybe a future PCV project could be to improve their library & get more books. Until they have the motivation to read or learn how, I can’t start working on any library project or the books will just continue to collect dust & bugs. Another day after school was out, the students showed me their school garden, which again, I asked to see, but there was nothing there for me to see. There were a few dead sticks still standing upright out of the ground, acting as their fence, encircling a dry & almost barren inside since it contained nothing but dried up brown weeds. I hope to encourage the students to improve their garden; however, no one in my village does dry season gardening because of the intense manual labor that would be needed to haul water to their gardens several times a day. As a result, my plan is to get the students so interested in gardening during the rainy season that they’ll just continue to take care of their garden during the dry season, especially since there are many students that can take turns fetching water.

What else happens after school hours? I’ve read multiple times to 20+ children crowded around me on my “veranda.” Granted I’m reading those British “children’s” books to them so they really have no idea what I’m saying, but they just like to look at the colorful pictures. I’ve helped primary school boys with their English homework since they can never seem to understand the passage that they have to read & answer questions on due the next day in class. I helped Bedaw study for an exam from her Social Studies book – topic of the exam: Ghana’s tourist attractions. OH & one night after eating TZ with Asana & her family, they excitedly walked me over to a neighbor’s mud hut with a mini TV in it (nice combo right?), & we, as well as 60 villagers, watched a movie called The Shephard from benches & the dirt floor. Asana wanted me to watch it because it was a foli film (white person’s movie), but I don’t think any of the Ghanaians understood what was going on at all throughout the entire movie because they kept rooting for the good guys, then they’d cheer on the bad guys, then they’d yell when the good guys shot the bad guys. Yeaaaa they had no clue what was happening so I became more interested in watching them & their reactions rather than watching the movie itself. I also like watching the stars. I know it’s a totally different subject, but the sky really is so beautiful here at night. Most people don’t have electricity in my village, so when I open my door at night, I can see the entire landscape lit up perfectly just from the night sky. No wonder why the Ghanaians get used to walking around without any flashlights – the moon & the stars lead their way. Unless you count the beautiful twinkling night skies that I looked up at outside of my tent or hammock when I was in the middle of the jungle in Honduras this past summer doing research, the night sky over my village is #1. So I guess you could call it a close second.

Once again I’ve been busy as anything, but I do have a little fun sometimes. Just before I left for my Reconnect IST & Jonas left to go back to Switzerland, Margrit & Justin from my NGO brought Jonas & I to the Gbele Game Reserve about an hour south of Tumu by car. The reserve was peaceful & it was nice because we were able to see a huge monitor lizard &

some really colorful birds fly by. Unfortunately, we didn’t come early enough in the day to see the monkeys & as for bird watching, we couldn’t do anything of the sort because the rangers insisted that we continue traipsing through the bush, never stopping to be quiet as they continued to stomp on dried leaves along the way. Not a single bird perched on a tree branch anywhere near us for fear of the herd of humans plowing through their homeland. Also, on my way to my IST, I visited my friend Ben, an NRM PCV in Kumasi. He’s in the same Masters program that Mike (the same Mike that just left in February) is in, & funny enough, they were roommates in college. Anyway, he showed me his worksite at the Boberi Forest Reserve just outside of Kumasi & it’s gorgeous there. Kumasi is such a busy, crowded & polluted city, & then you have this beautiful forest reserve not too far away from it that seems like a completely different world from the city. Boberi is known as a research reserve where many professors & students come from around the world to examine the plants, trees, animals & insects; however, it’s also used as a tourist attraction so tourists can come & walk the trails with a guide. As you probably already guessed, Ben was my guide since he’s walked the trails hundreds of times. His main project at Boberi was to design & build a butterfly sanctuary because there are over 250 species of butterflies in the reserve. And because Ben’s PCV service is almost up, he’s in the building stage...although not as far along as he had hoped, but “it’s coming,” as Ghanaians would say. When I visited, the trusses were already in place & from the looks of it, the butterfly sanctuary is going to be huge. Speaking of being near Kumasi, our PCVL (PCV Leader) Mikey of the (KSO) Kumasi Sub-Office officially ended his service in March after being in Ghana for about 4 years. All PCVs of Ghana really liked Mikey as our PCVL, so it’s sad to see him go, especially because he helped with so much of my NRM group’s training & interviewing for site placement. Remember, Mikey was the one that told me “[the] Upper West [Region] is the Upper Best” since his service before becoming PCVL was in the UWR in a place with no electricity or running water. Anyway, some of his last words as a PCVL in our monthly newsletter was a quote by Charles Darwin that I really liked & will share with all of you: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Thanks Mikey for the reminder that being able to adapt is the only way a person can survive out here in the village.

Shout out to family back home: Congratulations Christopher! I’m so proud of you for getting into all of the colleges that you applied for, especially Pratt. I really can’t express it over the phone or on here, but I truly am so happy! Also, Happy Easter everyone! I hope the tradition of making the meat pies & dying eggs continues on Good Friday.

Love & miss everyone,- Rachel

OUR FIRST RAIN! The night of Feb 19th, I was getting ready for bed when I heard an unusual sound outside of mine & Lydia’s window. Now, the night before I woke up hearing a sound almost like this one but it was more of a crackling noise, & when I pushed the curtain aside, I saw a raging fire outside of our window just on the other side of the SILDEP wall. Those darn bush burners. I was really afraid that a flame was going to jump through the holes in the wall & burn the whole place down, but thank goodness it didn’t. Anyway, so the night of the 19th the sound was more of a pitter-patter than anything else, & when I pushed the curtain aside, I couldn’t see anything but pure blackness. While my sense of sight was hindered by the lack of light, my sense of smell worked like a charm & I ran outside knowing exactly what was happening. RAIN! I love the smell of a fresh rainfall – it’s my favorite smell of all, & you’d be going a little crazy like me if you haven’t seen or felt rain in a few months. So I decided to stand outside for a good half hour until it began pouring & then I knew I had to go in. According to Margrit from my NGO, there are “local rains” where a storm will hit one village & not the next, but this was a full-on lightning & thunderstorm with heavy winds so this type of rainstorm was completely unexpected. Reasoning why the books that where still being cleaned & counted at my supervisor’s mother-in-law’s house got soaked & filled with dirt & dust – not to mention more earwicks & a poisonous SNAKE. Yea, that’s right, a snake decided to make its home in the “La Kerime Isaaling Ne – We Read Sisaali” book box. Good thing our new gardener David was nearby to kill it. Ghanaians love killing snakes. Maybe because they are deathly afraid of them, which really doesn’t make any sense, but I guess they’d rather see a dead snake than a live snake, especially a live poisonous snake. Oh & no big deal or anything, but there was also a scorpion found in one of the boxes today. It was about the size of my pointer finger so it wasn’t that big, but still…this is life in Ghana. Jonas & I just finished putting together some shelving for the books since there are no more cardboard boxes to pack the books into & we asked my NGO for plastic containers that we could seal them into (to keep the bugs, mice, lizards & now poisonous snakes out), but they don’t want to buy them right now. Anyway, after the rainstorm, I enjoyed the cool weather, but then it got really humid for the first time that I’ve been in the Upper West & it reminds me of the hot, humid summers back home in NJ, except this summer is never-ending. Some workers at my NGO said that they couldn’t go to sleep with the rain pouring down in buckets like it did all night during the rainstorm, but I slept like a baby.

Speaking of baby…Hera had her baby & IT’S A BOY! He’s a handsome baby boy named Matthew & he was born on the morning of February 14th so he’s a Valentine’s Day baby! My PCV friend David from Kupulima, seems so incredibly happy & proud to be a father. He’s also convinced that because his baby’s horoscope is Aquarius, that he was the one that brought the rain, so thanks Matthew! My mom was nice enough to send gifts for the baby in my birthday package, & Hera & David absolutely loved all of them since the quality of even a baby blanket in Ghana is sub-par to what we have available in the states. Thanks mom, you always think of everyone & everything, I don’t know how you do it, but you managed to make a newborn baby’s life 10x more comfortable.

While we’re on the topic of newborns…I’m not the newbie anymore! The new WATSAN (Water Sanitation & Health Education) group came to Ghana on Feb 8th & they’ll be in training until April 19th when they swear-in as official PCVs (like I did on Dec 15th, 2011). I call my host family from the Eastern Region every once in awhile, (if they don’t call me first!), & the last time that I called them, I was able to speak to the new PCT (Peace Corps Trainee) that they’re hosting & they’re actually hosting a PCT married couple! I’m so happy for my host family to be allowed to receive 2 PCTs & I know that they will make the couple feel welcome during their first 3 months in Ghana for training.

Moving on to the topic of sports, AFCON (the African Cup of Nations) soccer games were enough of a reason to bring together all but 1 of the 6 PCVs from the Sisaala area to SILDEP’s guesthouse TV to watch the games. In the Ghana vs. Zambia match, Ghana lost 1-0 & then we (I’m already saying “we” like I’m a Ghanaian, but hey, I’ll be here in Ghana for 2 years so why wouldn’t I root for my “home” team?) lost to Mali 2-0 so we were then in 4th place by the end of AFCON. The final match was a good one to watch because finallyyy after overtime & after the 5-shot penalty kick limit, the 0-0 tie was broken! And if I remember correctly, I think it was the 8th penalty kick that broke the 0-0 tie. In the end, Zambia officially won over the favorite, Cote D’Ivoire.

As for other goings-on in February that you missed (man, it’s March already, how the heck did that happen?!), there was some crazy dusty weather in the beginning of February that officially signified the end of the harmattan winds. It was kinda scary to step outside because it seemed like one huge foggy mess, but it was really the dust & you could smell it the second you breathed in the air. I wonder what all that dust did to my lungs for those few days. One thing for sure is that all the weird weather got Lydia sick. So like how in my last post, I was sick & she was busy taking care of me, now she was sick & I was busy taking care of her. And when you’re sick back home what do you do? Bum around & watch movies obviously. So on the weekends, when I would usually be working like any other day since I live with my NGO, I wound up watching a few movies with Lydia. One of the movies that we watched was No Reservations & she really enjoyed it. It’s about two chefs that meet in a high-end Italian restaurant & how they fall for each other in the end – typical chic flic – but I knew Lydia would like it because she calls me Italian girl when she doesn’t remember my name, which happens often…although sometimes she’ll just call me “this girl.” She also calls everyone else “this girl” or “this boy” (she must not be good with names?), including a pastor’s son in Tumu that just passed away. “This boy,” she says, “I knew this boy. He was very sick, just like his younger brother.” So sad really. He was a well-known 23-year-old who died of sickle cell anemia, & Lydia helped me to realize that one of his younger brother’s died from the same disease before he reached the age of 10. Since I’ve met the pastor a bunch of times, because he lives at Margrit & Justin’s old house that neighbors SILDEP’s soap making building, my NGO & I went to a Baptist Church service dedicated to his son. And all I’ve gotta say is that I sure am happy the electricity was off that day otherwise the really loud singing & praising would have been even louder no thanks to a microphone that they apparently always use, making people go tone deaf – or so Margrit says.

Despite the hot weather rolling in as the cool dusty air moved out, Lydia getting sick & the pastor’s son passing away, February was a good month. It was Travis’s 24th birthday on February 10th so I gave him some of SILDEP’s moringa soap & tea that he’d been complaining he hadn’t gotten from me yet, & then on February 25th it was my 23rd birthday so my NGO made me a birthday cake & I put the candles saying “23” on top. A BIG THANKS goes out to my mom’s entire family in Florida for those awesome candles & many other birthday treats & goodies as well as things that I know I can use & need when I’m in my village. Anche, Olivia, sei un’amica vera! Grazie di nuovo per il pacchetto e le carte, e mi manchi tanto (benché lo sai già hahah) però io so che farai bene in Chile! <3 A huge SHOUT-OUT goes to Kayla & the awesome RWU Resident Assistant staff for putting together a card for me & having all of my friends, especially our good ol’ Cedar staff sign & write to me! Kayla, I know how busy you are & you still managed to get loads of people to sign & write something for me. Thanks so much for all of that, I miss you a lot. And Griffin, you cracked me up signing for Kevin hahaha. Thanks again everyone, you truly lifted my spirits & made me remember all of the good times of being back at RWU with such great RA staffs & having so many memorable residents, whether you were from my floor or not. And finally to my family back home, THANKS A MILLION for everything! I’m tellin ya, that orange-red-tan backpack is a perfect African dirt color (YES! Just what I wanted..no joke) because it’ll blend right in the second that it gets dirty, which it already is since nothing stays clean here for long in the north.

Another February activity included attending a “going away get-together” for 2 of the 6 Danish health workers in Tumu, where I was lucky enough to witness about 20 Ghanaians smack the bejesus out of a wooden box piñata & not be able to break it until my Danish friend Kristian broke it open all in one blow. Unfortunately, the Ghanaians didn’t fully understand this game & rather than solely picking up the candy that was strewn all over the ground, they decided to push & shove each other to tear open the last bit of the piñata & greedily snatch up the rest of the candy like little children do at a 6-year-old’s birthday party if the parents aren’t around. Funny…these Ghanaians were adults. Anyway, yet another get-together was Margrit’s “foli night” that she had been planning ever since she knew that more missionaries were coming to stay at SILDEP’s guesthouse. Now that all of the new “foli”s (white people) were settled in Tumu, she invited all of them over SILDEP for lasagna, salad, & a variety of yummy desserts – all very delicious food that Ghana Peace Corps Volunteers NEVER get, until now. The 19 folis that attended were a mixture of SILDEP workers, PCVs, Danish health workers, & missionaries - & we were still missing the Tumu head missionary & a PCV married couple from a nearby village. Margit said that there’s never been this many folis in & around Tumu before, so she wanted to celebrate. [Hey, if you were a foli living in the Sisaala area of Ghana since the 1960s, you would have celebrated too.] I already knew everyone that was invited, but most of them didn’t know each other, so I helped introduce them to one another & the conversations went til the end of the night.

As for work, I’ve been busy as usual not only with the books, but going back & forth to my village to make sure that everything is getting done that needs to get done before I move – reasoning why maybe SILDEP’s truck that Jonas usually drives me in broke down even before we got to the Bolga Road (main road from Tumu to the Upper East Regional capital, Bolgatanga) in the middle of the hot & sunny afternoon for a good hour until we cleaned the battery a little. I also attended my first VSLA (Village Savings & Leans Association) meeting in Taffiesi, the village just after my village Chinchang, with my counterpart Moses & another SILDEP VSLA worker Zaneb. There was one men’s & one women’s group that shared the money from a lock box that they had been saving for the past year, so it was a very exciting meeting to see their faces light up the moment that they received their year’s savings. [Note: Most Ghanaians have no sense of saving money.] By the end of the meeting, the women’s group had heard that I was going to be a PCV in their neighboring village Chinchang, & they were so excited! They even wanted me to move to their village, but all I could say is that I would visit them often, I will be staying in Ghana for 2 years after all. = )

Needless to say, February was a very busy month, but March will be even busier because Ghana’s Independence Day is on March 6th, then not too long after that is a Sisaala festival, & somewhere in there I’m moving to my village because the security bars were just put up on the window to my room, the holes in my ceiling were covered in case another rainstorm comes, the mice/termite holes in my walls were sprayed & patched, & my trap door (screen door) & separate cooking area for me to prepare my food is underway. Wish me luck!

<3 Rachel

SILDEP’s guesthouse & satellite/radio towers holding strong during the hazy days of early February when the sandy Harmattan winds from the Saharan Desert began to roll in & out for good from the Tumu area. I’m going to miss the cool air at night & in the early morning. The back of SILDEP’s guesthouse & the beginning of their garden during Harmattan. The black polytanks are used to store water once the water is pumped from the ground. This is how we get running water around here. The dusty Harmattan winds made the sky look like it’s about to have a snowstorm. If only it weren’t so darn hot outside. So what do you do when 2 Danish health workers leave Ghana after being here for 14 months? Have a going-away party & hit a piñata. Obviously. And here’s Christian with the winning hit. That little box was our piñata. Once the candy came pouring out from the bottom, the adult Ghanaians booked it over there like little children pushing & shoving each other to get the candy. They even cheated by pulling the rest of the candy out of the piñata instead of giving other Ghanaians a turn at hitting it. This doesn’t surprise me one bit about Ghanaian culture. Margrit’s Foli Night at the SILDEP guesthouse. Hello mister snake hiding in the Sisaali literacy books. One of the women’s VSLA groups in Taffiesi counting & sharing their saved-up money in their lock box.

There’s a new addition to the family! So yes, I’m still in Tumu with my NGO & they just got the cutest puppy from a friend of theirs in Tamale. She’s as playful as anything, is only about 1.5 months old, & has a fur coat of white, tan & gray. Jonas & I gave her a bath when she first got here, but we’ll need to give her another one soon because she gets into everything! My NGO wanted to give her a Sisaala proverb name, so they named her Zi Le Keng Chie (literally translated into “goodness has tomorrow” but figuratively means “goodness of the future”). If it was up to me, I would have named her Shadow because she follows me everywhere & if I’m not careful, I’ll step on her because she tries to gnaw on my shoelaces or the heel strap of my Tevas. She’s adorable anyway so I’ve posted some pictures of her below. My NGO already has a female dog named Ngaa worung na (meaning, “do well & see”) but she is an older dog that doesn’t want to be bothered with the puppy, so she’ll growl & snarl at her. Another reason why I’ve taken a liking to this new dog – to rescue her from Ngaa worung na that could easily tear her to shreds.

This past week went by really quickly with the Peace Corps here for the Dry Season Gardening IST. It was nice to meet some PCVs from the Northern Region that I hadn’t met before & there was one PCV from the far away Western Region that came as well. He lives on the coast overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. So not fair…let’s not talk about it. Anyway, all of the PCVs & supervisors loved the food that my NGO provided them, especially the baked goodies that I gave them for snack. In the morning, the classroom sessions for the IST were held at TUTCO (Tumu Training College) where Travis, my closest PCV neighbor, teaches ICT (Internet & Computer Technology). In the afternoon, the fieldwork was done in 3 surrounding villages: Pulima, Jawia & Kupulima. The last day of the IST, we constructed a drip irrigation system in Kupulima where David, my next closest PCV neighbor, lives. Fortunately, Kupulima has a dam, so setting up a drip irrigation system was possible. Unfortunately, my village Chinchang doesn’t have a dam, so no drip irrigation system for me – manual labor all the way. Anyway, setting up the system wasn’t easy, but with several PCVs, some of the Danish health workers & help from some of the Kupulima farmers, we finished it all in one day. According to David, the most important things to remember to do with a drip irrigation system are to flush out the system & to check the filter. Word to the wise, do exactly that. Because as soon as we flushed out the system by letting the water run through the pipes & tubing that we just set up, there were clumps of reddish-brown sediment that poured out & then the water stopped flowing entirely. Hmm that’s strange everyone thought…no one turned off the pump. “Let’s check the filter!” exclaimed Jordan (my third closest neighbor located about an hour south of Tumu), acting all happy because he remembered what David had instructed us. He then turned the control valve to stop the water flow, in case it started up again while checking the filter, when everyone heard the loudest CRUNCH. Well, I don’t really know how many mice were in the tubes or if they truly were blind, but I do know that they were dumb enough to crawl through our drip irrigation system because all of them died that day. Pictures shown below - just in case anyone was interested. In the end, we finished flushing out the system, including the mice guts, & we were finally able to watch water dripping out of the holes in the tubing. Then we planted some cucumber seeds & snap peas. Not too bad for a day’s work. As for a sports update, CONGRATS GIANTS! And congrats to my dad & brother for winning the Super Bowl pool final score box = ) I wish I was there to celebrate with all of you (family & family friends) back home at the Super Bowl party, but I’m sure everyone had plentyyy of fun without me haha especially my cousin Nick that I’m sure was jumping up & down screaming his head off once the Giants won. Miss all of you & hope you ate some hot wings for me. And for other football news, I’ve also been watching Ghana play football (or our American soccer) in all of its matches in the African Cup of Nations on the TV in my NGO’s guesthouse. Their most recent game was playing against Tunisia in the quarterfinals & Ghana won 2-1, but their final goal was in OT & they were really lucky that they even got it. “It’s not easy oh!” all of the Ghanaians will say - & don’t forget the “oh” or you won’t be talking like a true Ghanaian. Ghana took a shot on goal & the Tunisian goalie deflected the ball rather than holding it, so a Ghanaian forward was there to easily tap it in. Luck, pure luck. Ghana has some good players, but as a team, they aren’t cohesive. I just hope that Ghana won’t get creamed by Zambia on Wednesday. Oh, & I’m sick again. I think it’s a combination of heat exhaustion, eating unfamiliar Ghanaian food & overworking myself – but my NGO says it’s malaria. Then again, as soon as someone is sick in Ghana, the locals always say it’s malaria. Chissà? (in Italiano: “Who knows?”) But it gave Jonas (because he got sick the same exact time that I did..as well as half our guesthouse staff. weird.) & I an excuse to hang around & watch movies. One of the movies that we watched was 127 Hours & although that was the third or fourth time I watched it, it still reminds me of how important it is to cherish the people I care about in life. I mean, you never know what can suddenly happen to you, your family, friends, acquaintances, that really nice person that you just met on the subway - okay, well maybe not that person, they were probably a creeper – but really, the list is endless. So don’t end on a bad note with people & no matter how independent you might want to be, keep in touch with those that you care about. Whether it’s a relationship among family members, between a husband & wife, boyfriend & girlfriend, you & Joe Shmo down the street…keeping relationships are hard – they’re not meant to be easy. People always make the excuse, “I don’t have the time,” but then make the time. I thought that I would have so much down time here in Ghana, but since I’ve been living with my work, I’ve been working nonstop & see where that got me? Sick in bed. So make the time to call that person you didn’t call back yet, tell the ones you love that you love them, write to your friend who now lives on a different continent because it will make her the happiest girl around (just a little plug on my part haha), etc. It’s not too late to change your ways.

Love from miles away,Rachel Zi le keng chie & I. The cutest puppy in town. A few years ago, a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) volunteer had built a playground in Tumu, but when he left, the playground shut down. Until I walked passed the entrance did I see that some kids had broken the door open & were playing inside.

Have you ever been in a room filled with really old books covered in dust & cobwebs, mice, lizards, earwicks (or earwigs? not sure on the spelling), & excretions from all of the above? I have. Remember I mentioned in my last post that I took up the Sisaali book inventory project for SILDEP? Well I thought that the boxes & piles of books in the office & watchman’s room were bad, but that was only the start of it…the worst was yet to come. When Margrit, Jonas (the Swiss carpenter), & I went to SILDEP’s supervisor’s mother-in-law’s house, there was an entire room off of her semi-compound that held all that I mentioned above…including chewed up boxes & books, a bunch of items that the supervisor’s mother-in-law owns that look like they haven’t been touched in years, & the largest sack of shea nuts that I’ve ever seen. So, over the past few days, Jonas & I have become master book counters, cleaners & exterminators. I don’t know how many cans of Raid we went through, but it wasn’t & will still never be enough to kill all of the earwicks that were & still are crawling around in the books & boxes. And throughout the cleaning & exterminating, we’ve been wearing gloves because these earwicks have a pretty nasty pinch. To make matters worse, in the cleaning process Jonas & I had realized that the shea nut bag had a hole at the bottom of it…that would explain why the nuts were hidden in all nooks & crannies of the room – those darn mice. So we brought another bag to pour the shea nuts into but it wasn’t big enough so as of right now, we put half of the shea nuts in the new bag & kept the other half in the big bag with a hole in it - & we were still barely able to drag both of the bags outside. The poor old supervisor’s mother-in-law just returned home from being in the hospital for some sort of a toothache, so she’s been watching us work all afternoon under the heat of the sun day in & day out, & I think she gets tired by just watching us work. On the first day that Jonas & I began working at her place, a little boy related to her kept trying to steal my pen that I was using to write down how many books there were, so the next day Jonas gave him one of his pens…which might or might not have been a bad idea because the first thing the little boy went to write on were the books that we were counting. Anyway, Jonas & I haven’t seen the boy in a few days, but the supervisor’s mother-in-law just told us (she’s pretty fluent in English) that the little boy had asked her what type of soap we (Jonas & I) use. She thought this was a strange question to ask, so she asked the boy why he was asking such a silly question. So apparently the boy excitingly replied to her in Sisaali, “I want to use the same soap that the white people use so I can be white like them!” As the woman told this story to Jonas & I, the three of us began laughing hysterically. Oh children really say the funniest things, but it’s an interesting idea though. Imagine if soap could magically change your skin color…I wonder if there would be more or less racism in the world if changing your skin color were that easy.As for other news, SILDEP is busy preparing for the Peace Corps Dry Season Farming IST (In-Service Training) this weekend. My job? Making more berry & papaya jam by picking the fruits from the garden & mashing them together, & baking brownies & a mock apple pie (using green papaya instead). Living at SILDEP with a full kitchen is awesome. I’ve also been helping the day watchman to water the garden once in a while so I’m getting a few pointers on gardening from him. And of course there’s always helping Lydia with her moringa. This time she was crushing the outside shell from the moringa seeds so that the seeds could be weighed & packaged to sell at the guesthouse, so I was showing her how to use the scale to weigh them. It doesn’t help that she forgets what numbers are greater or lesser than other numbers, but she gets to the correct number on the scale eventually…so in the end, she’s teaching herself, which is exactly what I had planned. Moreover, I have been working on updating SILDEP guesthouse’s brochure because the Burkina Faso border patrol passes it out to people driving into Ghana & since they ran out of brochures to hand out, they need more - & preferably updated ones. And this morning I just went to a Naming Ceremony, which is a ceremony in Ghana that happens 1 week after a baby is born & it is the only time that the baby’s name is announced to everyone. A traditional Naming Ceremony would have had a lot of dancing & drops of water (& alcohol apparently) put on the baby’s tongue, but this was a Christian Naming Ceremony so we just did a lot of singing & praying before the name, Jane, was announced for the adorable baby girl wrapped in a blanket in her mother’s arms. What can I say? I keep busy.

Love, as always, Rachel

PS- Thanks to my family back home for keeping me updated with sports as the days to the Super Bowl draw nearer…GO GIANTS!

I’m sure you’ve all heard plenty of times from multiple people to take the road less traveled to have “new & exciting experiences” in life. Unfortunately they don’t tell you if you literally take the road less travelled, you’ll feel like you’re on a clickity-clack wooden roller coaster bumping up & down while hitting your head on the ceiling of a tro tro for four hours straight because no one warned you that the back seat was bad news bears even if you’re a shorty like me. Phew! Don’t get me wrong, I love roller coasters, but the alternative route from Wa to Tumu is just a wooden roller coaster ride from hell. So as you can tell, I recently returned to Tumu from Wa because I had to travel there for an UWR PCV VAC meeting (Upper West Region Peace Corps Volunteer Volunteer Action Committee…I think? These Peace Corps acronyms are a killer to remember!). It was great to meet all of the UWR PCVs & finally see Van & Janette again, the 2 other PCVs from my NRM (Natural Resource Management) group. I was also able to see a Deaf Art Education PCV’s house in Wa & it’s awesome! Running water, electricity, a fully equipped kitchen, & a few rooms with enough space for a bunch of other PCVs…is this really the Peace Corps? Haha this is the accommodation that Education PCVs get when they’re placed in cities. Sweet deal right?! While I was in Wa, I went to the market & bought a bicycle, voltage regulator, can opener & a few other things that I really can’t find or get good deals on in Tumu. Speaking of Tumu, I’m still living there with my NGO. The latrine just outside of my room in my village isn’t done yet & neither are the windows that need bars welded onto them (Peace Corps Safety & Security protocol). I told you, everything works here in Ghana by Ghanaian time, so it’s not a surprise that it’s not completed yet. But don’t get me wrong - I haven’t just been sitting around doing nothing…I’ve actually been really busy. I’ve been teaching basic accounting to my NGO’s guesthouse receptionists so that they can keep track of all of their expenses & know whether the business is losing or gaining. Scary thought really…running a business & just writing everything down on scrap paper & throwing them into folders that are put who knows where. Funny how I’ve never had a single accounting class (or business class for all that matters) in my life & I at least know the basics of how a business should be run by recording income vs. expenditure & keeping a balance. I’ve also been helping to make moringa soap, & Margrit & I have tried making the lotion/pomade & it came out pretty good. We’ll need to work on it more & play with the measurements of the ingredients, but if we can get it just right, then we can start selling the lotion/pomade as well. Another project that I took up was to make an inventory of all of the Sisaala literacy books that SILDEP offers. There are books everywhere in the office, watchman’s room, & supervisor’s house, so I’m organizing & counting all of the books so that my NGO & I will know how many more books need to be printed in Tamale (the Northern Region’s capital) & then SILDEP’s literacy program of teaching Sisaali to children in schools can start up again. Apparently the program was stopped a little over a year ago when the head of the literacy program moved onto a different project (I think to do Bible translations from English to Sisaali), & like most things here in Ghana, the project was never taken up by anyone else & the program came to a halt. As for what I’ve been doing in my free time, I’ve been out to my counterpart Moses’s “spot” in Tumu for dinner with Danish health workers – so once again, I’m not the only “foli” (“white person” in Sisaali) around! Two of them will be leaving in February & four others will stay in Tumu until the end of this year. Moreover, three more missionaries will be arriving in Tumu next week. One is a girl from Canada around my age that will stay at the missionary house, but the two others are boys (one from South Korea & one from the states) that will stay at SILDEP’s guesthouse for about 6 months. (Side note: I was recently kitten/dog/donkey-sitting for the Tumu missionaries when they were away for a conference. The kitten’s name is Peanut because she’s so tiny since she’s only a few months old & she reminds me of my cat when she was young & playful. The dog was so excited to play with me that it kept jumping up on me & tore a huge hole in one of my skirts. And the donkey…well, as long as you didn’t stand behind it to get a full-blown-on kick in the shin, you’d be A-OK. Baby-sitting is so old fashioned nowadays anyway.) To add another person to the “foli” count, a volunteer carpenter from Switzerland came to SILDEP & he’ll stay here for 2 months to help with the construction for the addition to the guesthouse. He moved into the guest room that I’d been staying in Margrit’s home, so I moved into Lydia’s bedroom since two beds are in her room & we’ve basically become sisters. We’ll joke around constantly throughout the day & I help her to write “memory verses” at night, which are just parts of the Bible that she wants written in her journal to remember them. I’m also teaching her the differences between Ghana’s new & old currency, since she never seemed to understand it - & I’m teaching her how to read & write...slowly but surely. I’ve also helped a friend of mine to go baby shopping in Tumu! She’s a Ghanaian that’s married to the PCV David just north of Tumu & she’s expecting a baby boy on February 26th (the day after my birthday!) although she thinks she’s going to have the baby any day now. After an afternoon of baby shopping, we met up with David & the other PCV in Tumu, Travis, & had lunch together so it was nice to be able to hang out with them & get some inside info on David’s upcoming Dry Season Farming IST (In-Service Training). Yesss that’s right! The Peace Corps will be coming to SILDEP again for training at the end of January & this time it’s all of the NRM PCVs from the northern regions, so I’ll be seeing a lot of the same PCVs that I met during the shea processing training held at SILDEP in November. Despite the craziness of my days, I’ve still found some time every once in a while to read & this time I picked up the book The Secret Garden. My friend Arielle recommended it to me over the summer before I left the States, so thanks Arielle! I’ve found it my escape from the barren land of northern Ghana - although I’ve gotta say, the barren land has its beauty too, just a simple less colorful beauty. Anyway, the book describes the gardens in such detail, I almost feel like I’m standing within walls covered in ivy, surrounded by rose bushes & robins chirping. I remember watching the movie as a kid & loving it so much, that I hounded my dad to build a “secret treehouse” surrounded by walls of ivy & flowers when I was younger. I remember drawing over & over again the layout of how my secret treehouse would be from a garden book that my mom had, but my idea came from watching the movie The Secret Garden. My dad never built my dream treehouse, but my mom planted the loveliest flower garden in the front of our house. I don’t think I ever fully appreciated that garden, but now I miss it terribly.

<3 from a garden-dreaming-Rachel …thanks Mefloquine!

Helping the missionaries with their program for the children of the village Kowie just outside of Tumu. We played with the parachute over & over again because the kids loved hiding underneath it. Mirium, our translator & now a good friend of mine, & I helping a little boy to color during a craft activity.

Merry Christmas! I know Christmas is over & everyone’s already looking forward to the next holiday, but I’m writing this post (or at least part of it) on Christmas Day & just thought I should say it anyway knowing that I wouldn’t get internet for a few days. Sorry that I haven’t had internet in a long time. I thought that I’d be at the KSO after swearing-in but I stayed at another volunteer’s site in Kumasi with a few other PCVs to pick up supplies instead. And as you may have already guessed, I’m an official PCV through & through! My PCV Swearing-In Ceremony went by in the blink of an eye. I got to meet the US Ambassador for Ghana, sing America’s National Anthem, sing a Sisaali song, & dance two dances with my NRM PCV group to Ghanaian drums - & I think my dance partner, Chase, & I were the most watched pair simply because our dancing was the most amusing…we kept hitting each other in the face on purpose during our handkerchief dance & the Ghanaians watching us thought it was the funniest thing. Since then, I have bid farewell to the Eastern Region & said hellooo to the Upper West, aka Upper Best. Unfortunately, the construction of my toilet & bucket bathing area are not finished at my site in Chinchang, & because it’s a requirement by the Peace Corps to have them constructed, I’m waiting for the construction to end. In the meantime, I’ve been livin’ it up at my NGO’s house where I’ve been staying in their guest room & get this…I have electricity & running water (with an added extra bonus of occasional hot water!). Anyway, the owners of my NGO have an adopted handicapped daughter Lydia & since it was her birthday yesterday, I baked her a chocolate birthday cake covered with frosty chocolaty goodness. She loved it & now wants to conserve it for who knows what reason, except for maybe putting a huge smile on her face every time she sees it sitting on the shelf in the fridge. I also baked two different kinds of Swiss Christmas cookies, since one of the owners of my NGO Margrit is from Switzerland. Weird how I’m in Ghana & am still baking Christmas cookies – granted it was nothing like baking cookies back home with my mom & decorating the Christmas tree. Speaking of Christmas tree, my family sent me a Christmas package (although I know it was really my mom that put everything in it because if anyone knows me best, it’s her) & in it was a sparkly Christmas tree. Obviously it wasn’t a real one & it’s not 3D, but it’s the closest I could get. And I know one of my friends from home will be jealous…it’s from the German Christmas markets. Nooo my mom didn’t fly all the way to Germany to get it, but she found it in a Christmas shop back home. She also packed a small Merry Christmas sign & Santa Claus, as well as a silver star (all from the German Christmas markets) that I gave my NGO to put on their small Charlie Brown-style Christmas tree. As for my fake tree, I decorated it with other things that were sent to me in that same package: candy canes, little bells, the red ribbon that was used to wrap my package acted as garland, the gold bow for my package turned into the Christmas tree star, & last but not least – the little Cindy Loo Who red Christmas ornament that my mom & I always save until last to add to our Christmas tree back home. That’s when I lost it. I had been doing such a good job with not getting upset being away from my family for the holidays, & that just about did it. I think the rest of the things I opened are still a little wet with my tears but by the time I finished, I was laughing hysterically because I imagined my mom running around the house throwing a bunch of random things into this package to send me. Some of these random things include: fake snow & icicles, paper snowflakes, a mini stocking, Christmas cookie ingredients & recipes, Q-tips & hair conditioner (since they are non-existent here in Ghana), Trident gum, banana chips = my favorite college snack, The Night Before Christmas book that my parents always read to me when I was young, & HA you’ll love this…anti-diarrheal medicine…gee wiz, THANKS MOM! How’d you know I needed it?! Ma, I know you’re reading this so really, thanks <3 Also, this package definitely can’t overshadow the cards or package of Christmas goodies from my family in sunny Florida – & I swear, I will reallyyy try to hold out on eating any of it but they’re just so tempting (especially the Nutella)! I also LOVE the Florida sand & beautiful seashells that came with the package too…ohhh you guys know me all too well = )

As for my Christmas Day agenda, I went to a Baptist church service with my NGO & it was over 3 hours long! To make matters worse, the entire first 2 hours were dedicated to their adult Sunday school discussion & this week’s topic was on funerals & how a Christian should properly be buried. Really?! REALLY? This is a day that we’re supposed to celebrate birth not death. I just had to laugh about the entire experience & promise myself that I will never go to a Baptist church on Christmas ever again. Anyway, after church I prepared fufu by pounding cassava & yams into huge mounds of gooeyness & ate it in a tomato/meat soup since it’s a traditional Ghanaian meal eaten on Christmas. I actually like the fufu of the north but it still expands in my stomach so I was really full. Then I walked off my fufu by going to my new friends’ place in Tumu – one is a woman missionary from England & the other is a German missionary around my age. So I expected to have a girl’s night with them & was surprised with a British Christmas dinner! The food was delicious & the missionaries were so kind & caring. They even invited me to help them out with their children’s program the next morning in a nearby village where we sang songs, played games, told stories through our Ghanaian translators, & colored & painted sheep. I fully enjoyed the program since it reminded me of participating in my church’s youth group back home in the states. Anyway, I’m glad I got to meet the missionaries & I know we’ll become good friends throughout my time here.

As for other news, every few days I get a nosebleed & the tips of my fingers are cracking because it’s so dry here. The nights & early mornings are cool (which is really cold according to the Ghanaians) & the days are hot & dusty – all from the Harmattan affects, the winds from the Saharan Desert. Early morning bucket baths in the Eastern Region were brutal before I left for the Upper West, so I can only imagine what they’ll be like here once I stay in my village. For now, I’m staying in Tumu but I hope to move to my village as soon as my bathroom area is built. Currently, my days at my NGO have been spent learning how to do the books for the guest house, teaching the receptionist how to use an Apple computer, & helping Lydia collect moringa leaves & lemon grass from the garden, drying them, & packaging them into bags to sell as tea. Before I came to my non-profit NGO, they received a microcredit loan to buy moringa & soybean saplings to give out to local Ghanaians so that they can plant them. Now, the Ghanaians who’ve planted them are selling their dried moringa to Margrit, providing them with an income year-round. In addition, soybeans are commonly used to make Tom Brown, a Ghanaian breakfast porridge. So in both cases, the Ghanaians with these plants in their gardens can provide food/food supplements for themselves or decide to sell what they have for an income. But I’m telling ya, moringa is going to be the next aloe vera or shea butter craze. If more people were educated about moringa, there’d be a market for it abroad. As it is, Margrit just exported our first batch of moringa soap to Switzerland & as long as it passes their requirements to sell there then we hope to export more. And once we buy all of the ingredients for the moringa lotion/pomade, we hope to make the right consistency & scent, & begin selling that too. As of right now, my NGO & I are trying to find fair trade organizations that might be willing to buy our products in the states, so if anyone knows of any, that’ll definitely help us out! Margrit has a lotion from The Body Shop that contains shea butter from Ghana but I don’t know how fair they are with being such a big company. Margrit is also hoping to buy a soap-making machine so that we can speed up our production & create more jobs for the local people, especially if there’s a market for our moringa soap in Switzerland (& maybe America in the future). However, the internet here is so slow & I never know when I’ll get internet to do research on all of this, so if anyone knows of soap-making machines just chilling in someone’s backyard, give me a ring. Thanks = )

Jin-faling nukala! Happy New Year everyone!<3 Rachel

Side Note: It is very rare that a Ghanaian can say or spell my name. Everyone pronounces Rachel as Ritel & I’ve gotten the craziest spellings. As a result, I’ve reverted to my homestay name Grace until I get a Sisaali name from my village.

Sooo I tricked ya! Technically I've been a PCT (Peace Corps Trainee) all this time & tomorrow I become an official PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer). I'll give updates at the KSO but as for now, here are some more pics of homestay.

A big thanks goes out to my friend Janette for taking this picture of me wearing one of my dresses that my homestay mom made for me. Janette says that I remind her of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in this dress haha & I can kinda see it...just picture me holding a basket & Toto following behind me.Anyinasin vs. New Tafo soccer game that Danny played in. Anyinasin won 1-0! This is what happens when I give my camera to Janette’s host sisters to take a picture of us soccer fans. And again haha…this is a keeper.

LPI, LPI, LPI!!! This is all I’ve been hearing from my language instructor & what I’ve been thinking about for the past 2 weeks during & out of language class since I came back from my on-the-road technical training. LPI means Language Proficiency Interview, & if you don’t pass, the Peace Corps can send you home. AHH! Now for all of you that know me & exams, I pretty much freak out. And the fact that I’ve been learning a language by myself with no other PCVs or anyone at my homestay to practice with makes it even harder since I am the only PCV learning Sisaali. To tell you the truth, only two districts in the Upper West Region of Ghana speak Sisaali: Sisaala East (which I will live in & Tumu is the district capital) & Sisaala West. So there are very few places in Ghana that are occupied with people speaking Sisaali, although it is spoken in southern parts of Burkina Faso as well. I really do like my language, I’m just saying it’s difficult to practice learning it to do well on an oral language exam that determines my fate of staying or going home when living in the Eastern Region where everyone expects you to speak Twi. But let’s just say that all goes well on Monday for my LPI, then all I have to worry about is singing a song in Sisaali & America’s National Anthem for my PCV Swearing-In Ceremony on Thursday. Oh, I didn’t mention that before? Yea…so apparently every language group has a spokesperson that will address the crowd in their target language, but since it’s me, myself, & I…I guess I’m the spokesperson for Sisaali. So I have a short song that my language instructor assigned me to sing by myself in Sisaali during the ceremony. Also, my friend Richie & I were chosen to sing the National Anthem together in front of everyone, which includes not only my NRM PCV group & our trainers, but also other Ghana PCVs & our homestay families, sooo this’ll be interesting considering that I’ve lost my somewhat-of-a-singing voice since March when I was really sick with a bad sinus infection & bronchitis.

Anyway, other than preparing for the dreaded LPI, this past week I had my NRM Technical Exam (which I passed..phew!) & I had to present a topic in front of my trainers & PCV group. Most PCVs presented in groups, but I went solo (not all that surprising I guess) & for my topic I chose the Fulani herdsmen, the largest nomadic group in the world, because I heard a lot about them when I was at site visit in Chinchang. The Fulani herdsmen traveled with their cattle from Northern Africa into Western Africa, & have gone as far east as Ethiopia. They’re a predominantly Muslim tribe that has a tainted reputation for being untrustworthy. They’re known for stealing cattle & other livestock, overgrazing their cattle on other people’s land, & taking over farms (especially now that the northern regions have experienced a drought this year with a short rainy season, they’ve taken over a lot of northerner’s dry season farms). Because of the drought, they’re on the move – going south where the soil is better for farming & providing the cattle with more land to graze on. However, they have been in the news a lot here in Ghana because they’ve been wreaking havoc wherever they go (especially in the Ashanti & Eastern regions): robbing people’s homes, raping women, & murdering or injuring anyone who gets in their way. But the more they move towards Ghana’s capital, Accra, the more media attention their actions get, so Ghana’s National Security has finally stepped in to deal with these nomadic people. Exactly what, I haven’t had the time to check because all of this is recent news & my life has consisted of class all day & studying when I come home so I may be able to give more of an update later on. If anyone can give me any news about this since I never have much time on the internet (reasoning why I copy & paste my blog posts)/it’s reallyyy slow, that would be even better.

On a better note, I was able to get a bunch of movies onto my external hard drive from a few of my PCV friends – including a bunch of Disney movies! I couldn’t wait to show my host sisters Akwia & Amma some of the movies, especially The Lion King! As of today, they’ve watched The Lion King (twice!), Snow White & The Seven Dwarves (also twice!), A Bug’s Life, & parts of Dumbo…& let me tell you, they can’t stop singing Hakuna Matata from The Lion King & Hi Ho from Snow White. Also, it was exceptionally cute when they kept drawing the bugs that they remembered seeing in A Bug’s Life or a small blob resembling an elephant with big ears, Dumbo. I got out of language class early today, so I think when I go home I’ll watch another Disney movie with my host sisters…I’m tellin ya, I need a break from all of this language learning!

I can’t believe that my PCV Swearing-In Ceremony is less than a week away. All of this stress for the LPI reminds me of being at school & studying for final exams, but once Monday morning has come & gone, most of the stress will have been lifted & I can enjoy the rest of my stay in the Eastern Region. My host mom said that she & my host brother Kofi will go to my Swearing-In Ceremony, which will take place at a Presbyterian Church in my homestay village of Anyinasin. Not to mention…my host mom said that her, Kofi & I will have matching outfits…haha how did I know that was coming, my host mom really is too cute. I don’t know if I’ll get internet again before I become an official PCV, but I’ll make sure I take a ton of pictures from the ceremony & post them up when I get to the KSO (Kumasi Sub-Office) before I head up to my site in the Upper West!

Good luck to everyone preparing for Christmas & the holidays in general! I wish I was there for all of it - Christmas is my favorite holiday by far!Love, Rachel

Driving to the training office in Kukurantumi from Accra. Yes, that is a monkey just chillin on a car. No big deal. I guess this goes to show you how far into the jungle we drove. Ghanaians buy filtered drinking water in plastic satchels. No wonder why there is such a problem with the pollution of plastic in Ghana. Diana & I at our field trip to Boti Falls in the Eastern Region. Pretty awesome scorpion that we found along the trails at Boti Falls. Ruth, Gloria, Jeremiah (the peer educators) & I after a successful program on educating people living with HIV/AIDS, their family members, & at-risk groups about HIV/AIDS in Lawra, Upper West Region. - Did I mention that we put the live turkey with us on the Peace Corps bus & brought it to the guest house to cook for Thanksgiving when we were in the Upper East? Now I did.

Happy December! I still can’t believe that as it gets colder & colder back home, it’s getting hotter & dryer here in Ghana every day as we move into the dry season, so while everyone is bundled up in layers upon layers of clothes back in Northern NJ, I’m going to bed in shorts & a T-shirt. It’s pretty sweet…all of you freeze your butts off every time you step outside while I sweat 24/7. If only Mother Nature would make a compromise between our two worlds, then maybe we could make our days spent outside more productive in these extreme weather conditions. However, life wouldn’t be half as fun as it is with season changes, so I’ll embrace the intense heat if everyone back home throws a few snowballs for me.

Anyway, I’ve been safe & sound back at my homestay for over a week now. Unfortunately my stomach isn’t 100 percent cooperating with me yet, so I had to break the bad news to my homestay family that if I’m not eating a lot, it’s not because I don’t like their food, but because my stomach doesn’t like it. And apparently my host mother learned the term “running” from her past two PCVs that she hosted, so every time she sees me going to the bathroom now, she asks “Are you still running?” Hmm, let me think, every time you see me walk across the courtyard, the only place I go to is the toilet so, why yes, I still am, thanks for asking for the fifth time today. I’m happy that she cares & worries about me though, & she sticks up for me constantly to the people in the village that don’t agree with hosting Americans if we’re not learning their language, Twi. And going back to the food issue, she was nice enough to listen to my request for groundnut paste (basically our American peanut butter) & she’s been spreading it on bread for me for breakfast or lunch. Although I’d rather have the groundnut paste jar so that I can control how much of it goes on my sandwich or so that I can have apples & peanut butter, I really don’t mind at all, especially because I just cut a few slices of banana to make a peanut butter & banana sandwich. My stomach thanks me after I eat those meals. It’s a nice change up from their intense palm oil & starch diet…not to mention, it’s a nice comfort food that reminds me of home. My host mother is also extremely thoughtful & generous! Since she’s a seamstress, she took my measurements before I left for the on-the-road technical training & when I came back, she gave me two dresses that she had made while I was gone! The other PCVs had to buy their own cloth in the market & find a seamstress to make a dress, skirt, shirt, or pants for them, but I conveniently have a loving mother who does all of that for me.

As for updates on our PCV cultural training, last Saturday we did some cooking! The 5-person Northern Region PCV group, as well as myself & the 2 other Upper West Region PCVs decided on a dish that we found in our PCV cookbook called Ku Ku Paka. It’s a Kenyan dish that uses all Ghanaian ingredients so our language instructors had allowed us to cook the meal. It’s a stew that includes chicken, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes (but since we couldn’t find any in the market, we substituted them with yams) onion, garlic, salt, cloves, & coconut milk. Because okra is a common ingredient to most Ghanaian dishes, we chose to make fried okra as a side dish. Although, our instructors told us that Ghanaians never prepare okra that way, we decided to Americanize at least one of our dishes…or maybe two of them. We also made a fruit salad, & because Ghanaians have no concept of salad, it was the first time that our instructors had pineapple, watermelon, apples, oranges & bananas in the same dish before. I may just need to introduce my Italian family to Ghanaians so that Ghanaians can become more creative in their cooking. Anyway, our stew was delicious! The coconut milk in the stew is what won us over, making the dish seem more tropical than African. We also threw the coconut meat into the stew…although our initial plan was to put it in the fruit salad, but we liked the coconut milk in the stew so much that the meat went right into the stew too. Also, we were able to find limes in the market as well (which is a miracle considering lemons & limes are basically unheard of in Ghana), so we put some lime juice in with the fried okra which made it taste even better. Needless to say, our lunch Saturday afternoon put us, as well as our language instructors, into a food coma.

In addition to the crazy training schedule, I picked up a book at the KSO (Kumasi Sub-Office) from the PCV bookshelf, & I really don’t know why I haven’t read this book before. The book is Eat, Pray, Love. There was a lot of hype around the book when it was made into a movie with Julia Roberts playing the role of the main character/author of the book. I really enjoy reading this book to clear my mind from all of the craziness going on around me. Also, maybe, just maybe, I’m reading it because a third of the book takes place in Italy, reminding me of when I studied abroad in Florence exactly 2 years ago. And although I just finished the first section of the book about Italy & am secretly wishing that the other two sections were about Italy as well, I can’t stop thinking about how different Italians are from Ghanaians..especially because Ghanaians don’t talk while eating! It’s culturally unacceptable for them to talk while eating, which I have a problem doing considering Italians will tell you their life story in one meal. Despite our cultural differences, which I’m beginning to realize more & more every day, I love & accept them for who they are. I’m happy to be in Ghana to learn & experience something new, to live a Ghanaian life & be whoever I want to be. Just as the author of Eat, Pray, Love says in her reference to the Bhagavad Gita (an ancient Indian Yogic text), “it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”

Love from a very hot (& getting hotter) Ghana,Rachel

Sadly, our on-the-road technical training has come to a close so I’m currently at the KSO (Kumasi Sub-Office) & preparing to return to my homestay in Anyinasin tomorrow. Yesterday, everyone in my NRM group put together a Thanksgiving dinner with what could be scavenged & bought from the Bolgatanga market in the Upper East. Just to note: we bought a real live turkey, killed it, & plucked its feathers. Granted it wasn’t the traditional American Thanksgiving, but it was a very successful first African Thanksgiving…two more to go. I’m already missing watching the movie It’s a Wonderful Life right after The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV with my mom in the states, but I know that most Ghanaians don’t even have a TV so I can’t complain. As it is, Thanksgiving is all about giving thanks to the people that matter in our lives & appreciating everything that we have so I’m extremely grateful for my close family & friends in my life. The material things in life don’t matter & I know that it’s difficult for a lot of people to realize that, but until you live in a developing country can you really see that this statement is as true as it can be. So the PCVs & I have realized that we’re lucky to have each other to lean on. Actually we had a very festive Thanksgiving because a lot of us dressed up as Indians & pilgrims (I dressed as a pilgrim) for the Thanksgiving dinner, & even our NRM trainer dressed up as a Ghanaian fetish priest (HAHA look that up!), so I think it was the most festive Thanksgiving dinner I ever attended. And of course, because we’re in Ghana, the electricity went out just before we sat down to start eating, so we took out all of our flashlights & candles, & ate our Thanksgiving dinner among flickering lights. But the food was delicious & being in the company of good friends made the entire event a huge success. After my Ghanaian Thanksgiving dinner, I called home to check on my family’s American Thanksgiving feast, & the phone was passed around to my aunts, cousins, uncle, grandma, brother & parents just before they sat down to eat (remember there’s a 5 hour time difference)…& that phone call put the biggest smile on my face. Yes I miss home (especially around the holidays) & I would be lying if I said I didn’t, but it is because I know I have the support out there from family & friends that I continue my work out here. I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving back in the states! And really, take time to think about everything that you’re thankful for – we take so much for granted now, it’s good to sit back & appreciate everything & everyone. Love from Africa,Rachel

Before technical training, I visited my site in Chinchang where I met a lot of my village’s elders, including the chief. Everyone seemed really nice & welcoming (they gave me a bunch of yams & a chicken as gifts so that's gotta count for something), & the location of my room in the semi-compound is conveniently situated near the school & across the dirt road from the chief’s house so I’m in the middle of all the action. I can guarantee you that I’ll be having several visitors on a daily basis. I’m both excited & nervous as to how that’ll all play out but I don’t have to worry about that yet…I’m not quite an official PCV at site yet. Unfortunately my outside bathroom near the semi-compound house isn’t build yet so I couldn’t stay in my room. My NGO in Tumu was kind enough to take me in & let me stay in their guest house, which is like an inn with several rooms & a communal kitchen. It is a Ghanaian husband & Swiss wife led NGO & they truly are the most loving couple. Their main project has been to translate the Bible into Sisaali, but they focus on teaching Sisaali to people of all ages because several people are illiterate & it is a dying language. They also work on development projects, such as moringa soap & vitamin production, to help the Sisaala people generate income & live more healthily – so it’s right down my alley. I had a very busy few days visiting my NGO, getting to know the people of my village & my counterpart’s family members & friends, & meeting up with 2 current PCVs stationed in & around Tumu. After a very successful site visit, I went to the district of Lawra in the Upper West region to educate people living with HIV/AIDS & their families, as well as at-risk groups, about HIV/AIDS. I went to Lawra with the two Upper West region assigned PCVs in my NRM group & we were hosted there by a current education PCV stationed in a nearby village. This was the most rewarding experience I have had yet, especially the first day when I was able to interact with 60 people living with HIV/AIDS. We educated about 200 people about HIV/AIDS & I truly think that we made a huge impact on their lives. We debunked a lot of myths about the spread of HIV/AIDS, got rid of a lot of stigma & discrimination that Ghanaians have for people living with HIV/AIDS, explained the symptoms of AIDS, gave hope to the people living with HIV/AIDS, etc.

Right now I am on the road for technical training & I absolutely love it. The PCVs & I made moringa soap & cream/pomade; interviewed shop owners in Techiman, analyzed their business using the S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) Method & explained to them our results; visited an arboretum at a monastery with amazing views of the tree-covered rolling hills of the Brong Ahafo region; & we had hands on practicals at an organic farm where we learned about plant tea preparation (green manure/fertilizer), liquid animal manure, composting, neem extract preparation & how to make a tree inventory. For the tree inventory, we were given a plot of land that we had to measure by pacing it ourselves & then we had to count how many cashew trees were on the plot of land. There were 5 groups competing against each other to see how accurate our guestimates were to the actual data & my group came in first which was pretty exciting because the prize to each team member was a Twix bar (& for all of you who know how terrible candy is here in Ghana - like their suck-on-candies that taste like cough drops - that Twix bar was a really good prize). Unfortunately, yesterday I wasn’t able to eat a single piece of my Twix bar because right after the tree inventory practical I suddenly became ill & couldn’t stop vomiting. A couple other PCVs have felt sick over the past few days as well, so at least I know I’m not alone. I think it’s the Ghanaian food that gives me an upset stomach…my body just can’t get used to the overload of palm oil & the food here in general. Today I stayed in my hotel room & rested because my stomach was (& still is) churning. The other PCVs went out for more training so I just told them to take really good notes for me so I can catch up. Tomorrow we split up because half of the PCVs stay in the Brong Ahafo region to learn about cashew processing while the other half of us travel up to Tumu to learn about shea processing. I’m excited to go back to Tumu (since I was just there for my site visit) because I plan on meeting up with my counterpart & I’m staying at my NGO’s guest house again so I can introduce the other PCVs to my NGO friends. So today I rested so that tomorrow’s full day of travel doesn’t upset my stomach even more. By the way, check below for another updated post.

Missing my Mom’s & Dad’s healthy Italian cooking more & more,- Rachel

The morning before I left my homestay for my on-the-road technical training, I gave my host sisters Akwia & Amma a coloring book & crayons that I bought in the states but was holding out on giving to them because I was waiting for the right time to give them some gifts. Now was the perfect time to give them these gifts because it would keep them busy while I was gone. Also, the coloring book was all about the history of pumpkins, how to take care of them on a farm, & how to make a Jack-o-lantern so it was perfect timing to explain to them what pumpkins were & their significance in Halloween. Anyway, Akwia was fascinated by all of the colors of the crayons that I gave her, & she kept asking me what color she should use to color something. I told her that she could use whatever color she wanted & that’s what makes coloring so much fun, because you can make the sky green & the grass blue. You can color a coloring book however you want because you are in charge of the colors & no one can tell you that you are wrong. As I drew a rainbow in the sky, Akwia picked up the black crayon & colored the people in the scene. She colored a person black & then she picked up the white crayon & colored a person white. She told me that the black person was her & the white person was me. I pointed at the two people that she just colored & said, “You know, we’re not so different you & I.” She looked confused. I took the black & white crayons from her hands & told her that the color black absorbs all the colors of the rainbow while the color white reflects all the colors of the rainbow. So, I explained to Akwia, although black & white may look different on the outside, they are made up of all the colors of the rainbow on the inside. Again I pointed at the two people that Akwia colored & told her that although we may look different on the outside, we are the same on the inside like the rainbow. She looked up at me with a huge grin on her face & then she hugged me. Moments like these are what I miss most about homestay.

Look! God!After a long day of sessions today with our counterparts & learning about HIV/AIDS prevention, I somehow remembered a funny story that my language teacher Aliu told me this past week that I thought everyone would enjoy reading. The story is about a young student who was learning English from his native language Sisaali. One day during the rainy season there was a clear sunny day & after a long day of classes, the student walked outside & yelled, “Look! God!” in English. As a result, everyone ran outside hoping to see the almighty God paying a visit to their school (I told you everyone is really religious in Ghana). But all of the other students were confused. They saw the young student staring up into the sky & nothing was there but the bright sun shining down on the school & students below. After seeing the young student point up at the sun, all of the other students laughed & went back inside to finish packing their things. Just to fill you in…in Sisaali “wiaa” means God, sun, & message. Poor kid, he made everyone think they were about to see the real God that they’ve been worshipping since they were young children. I just thought it was a cute story & that I would share it with all of you. Time for my kudiilee didaaning (dinner),- Rachel

(Ng lulung means "greetings" in Sisaali...although 2 letters are different but this is the closest I could get in English with my letters on the keyboard)

I’m in Kumasi! Change of plans though…I’m not staying at the Kumasi sub-office, rather I’m at a really nice hotel in Kumasi so it doesn’t feel like I’m in Africa right now. It’s almost like the Peace Corps is spoiling us for our Counterpart Workshop now because in a few days we will go to our site with our counterparts & not have all of the amenities that we have here. HA, it was really funny how all of our bags got here though. All of the PCV bags from Maase had just fit inside the Peace Corps Jeep so by the time it got to Anyinasin, we just piled our bags about 5 feet high on top of the car. Rope & tarp kept the bags on the top of the Jeep, but I really don’t know how they stayed the entire 3.5-hour trip on top of that Jeep without falling off. I don’t know all the details because the Jeep left before the Peace Corps bus picked up all of the PCVs, but the Jeep apparently broke down along the way! So I wonder how it got fixed & still managed to make it to the hotel in Kumasi before we did. Anyway, all of the PCVs & our bags made it in once piece so we’re A-OK. Today I met my counterpart, who I’ll be working closely with for the next 2 years for my assigned project. He’s extremely knowledgeable about everything that I’ll be doing & he can speak fluent English, so I’m really fortunate to be able to converse with him without a language barrier. Actually, my language teacher Aliu is good friends with him as well. My counterpart told me that there are women’s groups that make soap from moringa so I’ll be working closely with them, as well as groups that make vitamins (since moringa is extremely high in calcium, Vitamin C, & magnesium) but they just need me as the link to the school systems in the area so I’m really looking forward to visiting my site the end of this week & meeting everyone. And according to my counterpart, everyone at my site is just as excited to meet me since I’m their first PCV. On another note, this past week I found out from my language teacher Aliu some news about Ghana. A lot of people are homeless in the region of Greater Accra due to recent flooding from all of the rain that we’ve been having. Also, a large teacher’s union is protesting because they haven’t gotten their back pay in a few years so a lot of students aren’t going to school because their teachers are either not showing up or just sit in the classroom without teaching. To make matters worse, there is a doctor’s strike occurring throughout Ghana so unless Ghanaians have enough money to pay for private hospitals, they’ll be on their own. As a result, a lot of people are dying because they aren’t getting the medical attention that they need. The strike has been going on for about 3 weeks in the south & the northern Ghanaian regions just joined the strike this week. Imagine this happening in the states...no doctors or nurses in the hospitals…scary thought.

Anyway, although Ghanaians don’t celebrate it & most don’t even know what it is…Happy Halloween everyone!Love,Rachel

FYI: I updated my Homestay: Anyinasin post by adding a lot of other activities that I've participated in so far.

This past week the PCVs & I went to Bunso Arboretum to learn about a bunch of different tree species & find out the medicinal properties & other uses for each of them. We’ve learned about agro-ecological zones, conservation strategies, agroforestry techniques, tree nursery establishment & how to build a fuel efficient clay stove! We built the stove in one of the PCV’s backyards & as soon as our teacher Richard had said that he needed volunteers to get dirty in building it, myself & 4 other PCVs jumped right in. We pounded wet clay with a huge stick, molded the clay into about half the size of a soccer ball, & began building the walls to the stove. The stove was a lot easier to make than I thought, but I’m sure it’ll take a lot longer when I have to make one on my own at my site. After we made the stove & I went home to my family in Anyinasin, I showed my family the packet of information (showing pictures) of how to make the clay stove & my family already asked me to help them make one. This upcoming week, my fellow PCVs & I will be learning how to teach environmental education, basic record keeping (for the business side of our NRM job) & we’ll be going on a field trip to a local park to learn more about tree nurseries. On October 30th we’ll be leaving for the Ashanti region’s capital, Kumasi, where we’ll be staying for a few days to meet up with our site counterpart (so mine lives up by my site Chinchang). On November 4th I’ll leave Kumasi with my counterpart for my site to visit it for the first time so I can’t wait to see what it looks like! I’m nervous about the language though because it’ll be a real test to see how much Sisaali I’ve been learning from my teacher Aliu. After visiting my site for a few days, the NRM PCVs & I will be doing a bunch of technical training in Techiman, including learning about moringa processing so I’m really excited to start hands-on work with what my job will be for the next 2 years. Our NRM group will then be divided in half where some PCVs will be learning about cashew production & the rest will be learning about shea processing. We’ll travel to the Upper East region together & on Thanksgiving we’ll be visiting a crocodile nature reserve so it’ll be a nice day off from the constant training every day. I’m looking forward to everything that I’ll be doing in the upcoming weeks, but I know that it’ll be a really busy schedule & I don’t know when I’ll be able to update my blog. So before I forget, as of right now there are a few things that I’ve come to terms with while being in Ghana: (1) getting the common cold in hot, humid weather is not fun; (2) eating garlic at night just before I go to sleep to get rid of my cold is just as ridiculous in this hot weather because I sweat a lot after a few bites of it; (3) I purposely keep cobwebs in my room so that the spiders will catch all of the other bugs flying around my light at night; (4) I will always have bug bites & itching them will be the death of me.

Thanks for reading & I hope to update you while I’m on the road for technical training – hopefully at KSO (the Kumasi sub-office).Love,Rachel

PS - I have a few pictures posted in one of my first posts in Ghana & I have a ton more pics to upload, but the internet service is really slow & my host mother is getting worried that I'm not home yet from the internet cafe so I gotta go. I hope to upload more pics in Kumasi where the internet service will be better (I hope!).

Here's the info I promised about my site assignment & much more:The site announcement ceremony consisted of a bunch of drum playing while a group of 25 PCVs anxiously overlooked a map of Ghana drawn in chalk on the ground. Our Country Director Michael Koffman jokingly poured water on Lake Volta saying that if you walked through the lake that you would drown, & then the site announcements began. Our names were called off by region, with the Upper East PCVs called up first & standing in their region, then the Upper West, Northern, Brong Ahafo, Ashanti, & Volta region PCVs were announced respectively. I was one of the first PCVs to be announced because I was placed in the Upper West region of Ghana, also known by Mikey as the Upper Best. Mikey was stationed there as a PCV a few years ago & he loved it there. My site will be in Chinchang, a peaceful community almost bordering Burkina Faso so I’m as far north as you can get into the savannah of Ghana but I’m so excited to be placed where I am! In my site interview before site announcements, my only requests were to work on the moringa-planting project with women & to be involved with environmental conservation with children – & I guess my site interviewer Mikey thought that I was up for the challenge because I fit the description perfectly for my site & got everything that I wanted! My community is predominantly made up of farmers who produce crops like yam, maize, beans, sorghum, & millet, but my host agency that I’ll be working through is an NGO (non-governmental organization) called Sisaala Literacy & Development Project (SILDEP) & my specific program is Enterprises Moringa, Soybean, & Microproject. According to my Peace Corps paperwork, my main job description is: 1) Design an innovative Natural Resource Management Plan for SILDEP2) Promotion of environmental conservation in my community & other schools in/near Tumu3) Training women & youth on business & entrepreneurial skills4) Promote moringa & soybean cultivation & utilization5) Supervise beneficiary on moringa & soybean projectI’m so excited, especially to be working with moringa! Moringa is called a miracle plant for several reasons: (1) you can just cut down a branch from the tree, plant it & it’ll grow another moringa tree; (2) it can be used as a food supplement for nutritional purposes, which is definitely needed in the north where crops from the south can’t be irrigated because it’s hot & dry; (3) it can be made into soaps, lotions & other beauty products for hygienic purposes & for boosting the morale of women. As for my housing, I will be living in a semi-compound house with electricity, & I will be sharing a bathroom with 2 other people living in my house. I won’t have running water but I can get it from a borehole from my village (good thing I’m fetching water from the well & walking back with it on my head at homestay with my host sisters!). I didn’t even expect to have electricity at my site so I brought a travel solar panel with me & a bunch of cables to plug my electronics into it, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. I will be the first PCV at my site & I’ll be 7km from the second largest city, Tumu, in the Upper West region. There’s an education PCV in Tumu & an environmental PCV in a village just beyond mine (bordering Burkina Faso even more than I am!), so I’m in the middle of two PCVs – which is good to know for emergency reasons, in case I want to work on projects with them, practice learning my local language with them because they learned the same one that I am right now, meeting up for market day in Tumu, & for the sole purpose of having English speaking people nearby! Actually, my language teacher Aliu had said that Tumu has a bunch of schools in it so a lot of people in the city know English & a ton of students commute from the suburbs so I may have some English speakers in my village as well. Speaking about language, I am learning the language of Sisaali & it’s only spoken by the Sisaala people in the northern part of the Upper West region as well as the southern area of Burkina Faso so my language won’t do me any good in any other areas of Ghana. Also, I am the only PCV learning Sisaali, so I can only practice my language with my teacher. There’s only one other PCV learning their own language in the Northern region, but everyone else is learning a language in groups, including the majority of people that can continue learning Twi & practicing it at their homestay. It’ll be difficult learning a language on my own, but I’m up for the challenge. My language Sisaali is actually quite pretty to tell you the truth. Good night is “Tang jang pulla worung” (although the letters “n” & “g” are combined into one letter in my language, it makes the same sound so you get my point)…literally meaning “we will brighten the darkness better together.” Although there are tons of other examples, that’s the first one that I thought of & I really think it’s a beautiful language. There are 2 other PCVs from my group of 25 NRMers going with me into the Upper West region, but they’ll be located by the region capital Wa so I’m not very close to them & they’re learning a different language, Dagaare. But my Sisaali teacher Aliu was from the suburbs of Tumu so he was able to give me info about my area, saying it’ll be very easy for me to ride my bike into Tumu to go to the police station, hospital, post office, bank & internet café.

Alright, that’s all the info for now about my site placement. I’ll have more updates about how my week has been in the next post!Love, Rachel

October 15, 2011: I don't have too much time left at my Internet Cafe to explain what happened during my site announcement ceremony, but here's what all of you have been waiting for. I'll be at post for 2 years at a village called Chinchag in the Upper West Region, literally bordering Burkina Faso! Here at the Peace Corps Ghana program, Upper West is called the Upper Best so I'm psyched! = )

I'll update you about what my site description is soon!

Love,

- Rachel

October 14, 2011: One of my good friends Slade left Ghana this morning. Slade, I know you said you’d be reading my blog from America, so this post goes out to you. I don’t know why you left, but I’m really sad to see you go. You were one of my first friends in the Peace Corps Trainee group, and now the rest of training will be hard to go through not having you around. I’ll miss your humor, sense of adventure, and kindness…and no matter how many times you made fun of me for being from New Jersey & I made fun of you from being from Iowa, I still enjoyed your company. Now who will be there to call me “Jersey”? I walked past your homestay house today, per usual, and couldn’t help but feel sad. You were basically my neighbor & our host brothers are friends – how much closer could we get?! I still can’t believe you’re gone. You were someone that I looked up to because you were such a mentally strong person, and I tried to be strong just like you. I know you went home for personal matters, but I’m sure your decision to leave was not easy. I am very observant & I had seen you being quiet for the past 2 days, that’s why I kept asking if you were ok. I never believed your “I just feel sick” excuse and I knew something was up when you texted me. I’m sorry I let you down as a friend and didn’t talk to you about it. I just hope that you will keep in touch while you’re back in the states.

Slade, you would have loved hearing about my day. Today for the PACA training, we had to walk around in 4 groups around Maase and draw a community map based on our assigned area. However, just as we started our walk, we got stuck in a downpour! My group tried hiding under plantain trees, but that didn’t work all that well, so when a group member spotted a porch on a local’s house, we made a run for it…only to realize that the family was outside on their porch & we ran in on them cooking their dinner. There was an 80-year old grandmother completely topless sitting in a chair greeting us, a weathered mother with teeth pointing in all crazy directions, 2 daughters: one which spoke English really well & attempted to teach us Twi, & tons of goats & chickens…all in this tiny porch area. Okay okayyy laugh all you want haha it is pretty funny. So although we were soaked from the rain & had to wait for the Peace Corps bus to come by to pick us up for a good half hour, we had quite an eventful afternoon. Later that night however, my host mother’s niece, Sarah who is 21, took me to a funeral in the courtyard of Josh’s host family’s place. Mind you, a funeral seems to contain very loud music & a lot of dancing…definitely not a typical funeral in the states. Anyways, we got to the funeral & a lot of people were up dancing so we danced with them, & I kept an eye out for other PCVs but none were in sight, not even Josh. As soon as we sat down from dancing, a bunch of people came up to Sarah & I yelling in Twi. An older woman actually started the conversation & then a lot of other people chimed in. I had no idea what they were saying until one of the younger woman yelled at me in English saying that she didn’t understand why Americans were there if we didn’t know how to speak Twi & that we are not welcome there. And apparently they were yelling at Sarah because she wasn’t teaching me enough Twi. Slade, you know I probably knew the most Twi of everyone in our PCV group, so if I didn’t know enough Twi then the rest of the group was in even more trouble than me. After the group cooled down, one of the women tried teaching me Twi, but she was speaking quickly & remember we were still at the funeral so there was loud music & I couldn’t hear half the words she was trying to teach me…you know how tonal this language is & if you say one vowel wrong it means a completely different word. So the woman kept laughing at me – I felt humiliated. Sarah & I left the funeral & I realized later that night that today was the worst day I’ve had in a long long time. Today you left with barely any goodbye, today I got soaked from the rain & was up to my knees in mud with a skirt on, & today I was yelled at in Twi/English from the majority of people at a funeral. Let’s just hope that my days get better from here. Miss you already & I hope you had a better day than me. – Rachel

Favorite Slade jokes that I don’t think any of us NRM PCVs will ever forget: Peace Corps bus?So did your hotel have a pool too?At least you’re not from NJ

On October 12th there was a big ceremony to see where we would be placed for homestay. All of the Ghanaian mothers & fathers (& some coming with children or other family members) attended the ceremony so it was nice to see all of the families that my friends would be living with as well as my own. When I was called to meet my host mother Grace, I was SO HAPPY!!! I remember meeting her when we were touring Anyinasin because she was on the main street & was sewing because she owned a tailor’s shop. She had some pretty superb dresses hanging at her shop so from what my host sister Sarah tells me, my host mother will be making me a dress for my PCV Swearing-In Ceremony on December 15th (The date got moved up from December 22nd...I’m so excited!). Technically I don’t have a host sister – she is my host mother’s niece that lives in the same compound as my family, but everyone seems to call each other “brother” or “sister” here in Ghana anyway, so for the sake being, she is my sister. Sarah is 21 & speaks fluent English, which is great because she has been teaching me her local language Twi & since we get along so well, we have been doing everything together. Anyway, my host mother remembered seeing me in Anyinasin when myself & the other PCVs toured the village & because we had name tags on, she remembered my name & my “huge smile” she said & she requested to the Peace Corps that I be her host daughter. Since she told me that, I haven’t stopped smiling around her because I always put a smile on her face as well. My host mother Grace doesn’t know much English, but she knows enough to get by & she introduced me to her son Kofi who is 24 years old. Kofi is one of the nicest guys that I’ve met in Ghana so far & he helped me with all of my bags to bring them to their place in Anyinasin. He speaks fluent English & told me that he’d always watch my back & make sure that he keeps me safe, which is good to know since a lot of Ghanaians just stare or yell “obroni” whenever a white person walks by. Sarah has two younger sisters (or so I think they’re sisters) named Akwia (~3yrs) & Amma (~7yrs) that live in our compound as well & they’re the cutest kids ever. A lot has happened since I’ve been at my homestay so here’s a list of things that I’ve experienced so far:

- LOTS OF FOOD!- Sarah, Akwia, & Amma playing with my hair because they really don’t have any. Also Akwia is very curious of white people, the hair on our arms & how different our facial features are, so she traces all of my facial features with the tips of her fingers & lightly pulls on my arm hair while laughing hysterically. I think she’s adorable & I look forward to spending time with her every time I go home from training all day.- listening to American music from my lap top- Getting to know my family members + their many relatives that they say are their “brothers” or “sisters” so I never know who is really who in their family tree- Getting a tour of Anyinasin from my host sister Sarah by walking through town & going to her brother’s house to download Ghanaian music- Dance party at my homestay with my host mother & my sisters (happens on a daily basis)- Playing/drawing with my host sisters Akwia & Amma- Washing the dishes outside in the courtyard with my host sister Amma- Learning Twi from Sarah, Akwia & Amma- Meeting the Chief of Anyinasin- Packing 20 PCVs/some Ghanaians into a tro tro for the first training morning ride into Kukurantumi- All of the PCVs bringing really cute lunch boxes to training every day because that’s what the Peace Corps supplied our host families with so we can bring lunch from home to training

- Attending a church service & an all weekend funeral with nonstop music

Days are already hectic here waking up early, having training all day, eating dinner with my host family as soon as I come home because they’re practically waiting for me since I get back at around 5 (or later sometimes) & it is already dark at 7pm. Busy, busy, busy! I’ll update more about my homestay when I get a chance, but for now the only other thing to add is that my new name is Mommy Grace, after my host mother’s mother’s name (so she is my grandmother).

Love you all,Rachel

Tro tros: they’re basically vans with about 5 rows of seats & squishing 4-5 people in each row, with the aisle always being all the way to the left side of the van & having a pop down seat in the aisle. If someone further inside the row from you needs to get off at a stop when you don’t, you & everyone keeping them from getting out needs to get off the tro tro (basically everyone in the aisle pop down seats & in your row). Then you can get back on the tro tro & continue your journey. Ohh tro tros, they have no leg room (& that’s saying something for me who’s 5’5”), there’s always music blasting from their radio stations, Ghanaians talk loudly on their cell phones because of the music, the drivers are crazy & somehow seem to dodge every other crazy driver on the road, & god forbid you sit next to someone that hasn’t taken a shower in a few days…good luck to ya! Not all tro tros are going to the destination that you may be going to, so you need to carefully listen to what the “mate” is yelling out the window as the tro tro drives by; however, most of the time you have no idea what the mate is saying because they chop off more than half the name to their destination so if a tro tro was going to station 37, the mate could change 37 to “se’en” & just yell that out the window over & over again in his (this is mostly seen as a guy’s job, so if you see a girl mate, it’s pretty rare) Ghanaian accent if there’s more room in the tro tro. To explain what a mate is…they are basically people who do everything for the tro tro service except drive the car. They yell their destination out the window & they tell the driver when to stop to pick up more customers & where to drop off their current customers. The mate also handles all of the fares, but whatever you do don’t expect him to ask you to pay as soon as you get on the tro tro. A few minutes could go by (or sometimes even the entire trip) before he asks you to pay for the fare. Also, if you only have large cedi bills left to pay for the tro tro fare, don’t expect your change back anytime soon; it may take the entire tro tro ride for the mate to hand you back your change. And although I haven’t experienced my tro tro breaking down yet, from what I’ve heard is that if it breaks down, they just keep it wherever it broke down – whether it is in the middle of the road or in an intersection – it stays there until someone can come & fix it. Let’s just hope that wherever the tro tro is, that there is cell phone service so that they can call for help. If not, you’re pretty much stuck waiting until someone drives along & can help fix it. And because this is Ghanaian time, you can be waiting all day for the tro tro to be fixed. Note to self: always bring a book to read or something else to do to keep myself busy in case this ever happens to me, which I’m sure will happen sooner or later in my 2+ years of being here. I’m sure there will be plenty of tro tro stories in the future, so I won’t bore you much here.

Be prepared for the next post that I already wrote about when I found out where I was staying for homestay (with my host family)!- Rachel

Welcome to Ghana! I’m sorry I haven’t been able to post sooner than this, but I haven’t had internet for quite some time. There’s TONS of stuff that I have to tell all of you, but the best way to tell it is to go day by day, so here it goes…

Wed Oct 5th - Thurs Oct 6th 26 Peace Corps Volunteers, including myself, traveled for a day & a half from Philadelphia to JFK, JFK to Frankfurt, Germany for a layover, & finally Frankfurt to Accra, Ghana, arriving at around 9:00 pm…2 hours after we were supposed to arrive due to traffic on the runways. That’s Ghana. Just to warn you, I will be saying that a lot here thanks to Mikey, my PCVL of KSO (Peace Corps Volunteer Leader of the Kumasi Regional Office), who says that a lot to explain why time doesn’t really exist in Ghana. Anyway, we traveled straight to dormitory housing of a university in Accra and crashed. My roommate Cara and I from the hotel in Philadelphia decided to room together again in Accra because we got along so well, haha we basically have the same humor, so we’ve gotten close over the past week.

Fri Oct 7th We went to the Peace Corps Accra Main Office for a welcoming ceremony where we met with the Country Director (CD) Michael Koffman, got more vaccinations (thank god I only needed Hep A so I just get a shot in my left arm), and had some very serious talks about safety & security. Scary fact: apparently identity theft is the largest theft in Ghana right now because surrounding countries have been cracking down on their thieves, so Ghana has become their safe haven.

Sat Oct 8thACCRA QUEST! This was the scavenger hunt that I knew about before I got to Ghana; however, I didn’t know that we were literally on our own without our leaders! I guess there’s no better way of learning the country than being given 10 Ghana cedes (Ghanaian currency), a piece of paper with instructions of where to go & what to find, & a map. Hahaha ohh this was a fun trip. I paired up with my roommate & two guy friends: Mike & Ran - we needed boys in our group because traveling around in Accra by ourselves for the first time would not have been the safest idea. Mind you, my group members’ ages were 26, 25, 24, and 22, with me being the youngest in the group. We walked along the road by the university and took a tro tro. What is a tro tro?!? HA! I’ll save you that story for another time. But we had to transfer at two stations, one in Medina & the other at 37 to get to our destination of the city of Labadi. How did we know which tro tros to take in these crowded markets/stations? We didn’t. We asked in English & the Ghanaians went out of their way every time to help us out. I know I’ve been told this many times by the administration of the Peace Corps Ghana program, but Ghanaians truly are the kindest people. Back to the scavenger hunt – so we had to find Trade Fair in Labadi, write down the facilities around Trade Fair, locate the Fair Garden’s Hotel near Trade Fair, & write down their rates. After being dropped off by the tro tro, we walked down the “highway” a bit until we found Trade Fair, which seemed to be a huge international fair next to an enormous outdoor event hall, with huge tents set up everywhere, bands playing Ghanaian pop/rap, and people trying to sell their goods. Funniest moment: when my roommate realized one of the food store names was called Slap & Tickle. It started to drizzle on us, but the rain felt good after the buckets of sweat that poured off of us in the tro tros. After walking through Trade Fair, we tried finding the hotel, only to stumble across a Christian congregation of over 1,000 people chanting to themselves/listening to their leader in the center of all the commotion. The men setting up chairs for the event kept trying to get us to sit down to join in on all this fun, but we really had to go since we were against the clock and the other groups to finish our mission. After completing our mission, we got back to the university safely, being the first group to finish their mission with all of the correct answers. Although it was a long day, everyone stuck around for that night’s talent show where my fellow PCVs & I got to know each other better.

Sun Oct 9thFREE DAY! In the morning, I attended a Christian church service with two other PCVs, Danny & Janette, just to see what it would be like. The service involved drum playing, dancing in place, & lots of hand clapping, so we had a lot of fun but the service was over 2 hours long! At the very end of the service, the people of the church wanted to honor & welcome us (once again, an extremely nice gesture by Ghanaians) by making myself & the 2 other PCVs introduce ourselves in front of everyone. Later, we began walking back to the university on the road, but it was really hot, the sun was just above our heads at the time, & there was no shade…we felt like we were going to melt. I guess we didn’t realize how far away the university was from the church because in the morning the Peace Corps bus drove us there. As we continued walking, a car pulled in front of us & 3 Ghanaians from the church service motioned for us to come into the car so that they could bring us home. Once again, Ghanaians are some of the nicest people you will ever meet. Danny, Janette & I squished into the back seat with one of the Brothers of the church, a large Ghanaian man, & we were driven back to the university. After we returned, we learned how to wash our own laundry & how to take a shower – bucket style. Yeaa it was kinda awkward but funny all at the same time watching Dan my PCVL of TSO (Peace Corps Volunteer Leader of the Tamale Regional Office) & Mikey my PCVL of KSO take a bucket bath, even if they had their bathing suits on. Later on, we finally got our cell phones and/or SIM cards, so I called home for the first time & talked to my Mom (who used up half the amount of talk time that I bought). And our treat at night was watching Fight Club outside under the gazebo on the projector screen. Thanks Slade for providing the movie!

Mon Oct 10th Shots, shots…shots, shots, shots, shots! Yea not those kind of shots. We got a typhoid vaccination that still hurts my arm & a huge medical kit that I’m still having trouble fitting into my bags. Next, we had one of our first official Twi lessons & I realized that I knew a little more Twi than the other PCVs because I had listened to the recordings that the Peace Corps had recommended we listen to before we arrived in Ghana. Twi is difficult to learn because the language is very nasally & it puts stresses on vowels in words that Americans don’t do. But so far, so good. We also met Nico, our APCD (Associate Peace Corps Director) for the NRM (Natural Resource Management) program & he said that our site projects will be based around either cashew production in the Brong Ahafo region, shea butter in the northern regions, beekeeping, gardening in the Volta region, rabbit rearing, and/or moringa planting. So exciting!!! After all of these sessions, everyone dressed in their best clothes for the dinner at the U.S. Ambassador’s house in the center of Accra. Everyone had a ton of fun, & just mayyybe the open bar had something to do with it, but we had the loudest bus ride back. Loudest moment: “OHHH!!” after I told everyone that Slade, Danny & Alex chickened out by using a taxi instead of a tro tro during the Accra Quest. A big thanks goes out to Caitlin for catching them red handed & taking a picture of their crime.

Tues Oct 11thEveryone woke up bright & early to finish packing so that we could be on the road by 8:00am to our main training site in Kukurantumi. We learned about & toured the two villages (Maase & Anyinasin) that all of us would be living in with our host families. Each village seemed great, but most of us felt like we were parading down the locals’ roads in these small villages because everyone was staring & young children yelled "obroni, obroni, obroni!" (meaning white person) every corner that we turned. As of right now, I don't feel very welcome in either of these villages, but I hope by the end of training that I will be able to call one of these villages (depending on which one I will be assigned for homestay with a host family) my second home.

Like I said, sorry for not posting sooner, but this is the first time I've had internet since being in Ghana. I have other posts already typed that I'm just copying & pasting from an MS Word document so get ready for some intense reading.

Love & miss all of you back home,Rachel

I honestly cannot believe that I am leaving! I have wanted to be in the Peace Corps ever since high school, so this is like a dream come true. Without a doubt, I am extremely excited to embark on this 27-month journey abroad, but I can assure you, it will be no vacation. The Peace Corps tells us that being a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) is the "toughest job you'll ever love," so no...I am definitely not afraid to admit that I am nervous. But I am truly honored to get accepted into Peace Corps Ghana as a Natural Resource Advisor & become a part of its 50-year program legacy (1961-2011). I'm sure I will be doing a lot of learning before I can start any projects, but progress can only be achieved with patience (& lots of mistakes!) - especially in learning their local languages. Although Ghana's official language is English, most rural communities only know how to speak their local language, so for the majority of my Pre-Service Training (PST) I will be learning the most commonly spoken local language, Twi. However, during PST I may have to learn another local language depending on where I am assigned for my 2-year post. I'll be living with a host family during PST, so I hope they'll be able to help me out in learning Twi, their culture, traditions, & how to cook Ghanaian style. Don't worry Mom, no one cooks as well as you do, I just can't tell them that = )

So what does my crazy schedule look like you may ask? I'm driving to Philadelphia for my Peace Corps staging (orientation) TODAY to do a little sight-seeing, meet up with a friend, & enjoy my last dinner with my family. The actual staging is tomorrow (Oct 4th) & I'll be meeting with all of the other Ghana PCVs that I will come to call my family. We will be under the same program, Natural Resource Management (NRM), with positions of either Natural Resource Advisors or Small Enterprise Development Agents. On Wednesday Oct 5th, we will be bused to JFK Airport, fly out to Frankfurt, Germany for a layover, & then finally arrive in Ghana's capital city of Accra. Word on the street is that the new PCVs have a scavenger hunt to do in Accra, so that should be pretty interesting considering we won't know the local languages or have ANY clue where we're going haha but that's what'll make it fun...let the games begin! We'll also attend a reception at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador & have a bunch of sessions in Accra to prepare us for training. On the 6th day, myself & all of the new PCVs will travel on our own or in pairs to a current PCV's site for our "vision quest" for 5 days. At their place we will learn firsthand what our life might be like when we are "at post" for 2 years. After the vision quest, all of the new PCVs will be placed with a host family near the Kukurantumi PST office where we'll have full days of training for 6 days a week (from what I've heard). About 3 weeks after arrival in Ghana, we'll be notified where our site/post will be, so I'll keep all of you posted as soon as I find out!

Overall, I hope that this experience will give me the opportunity to make a difference in Ghana, no matter how small it is. Just think, if everyone did one act of kindness every day, I'm sure the world would be a better place. Anyways, I don't know when the next time I'll have internet (it could be a few weeks from now), but as soon as I do, I'll make sure I give you guys an update.

Shout Out:

- To my friends from home, RWU, & Honduras: To those who have just graduated & are still doing the long & painful job search, if employers were smart, they'd hire you. You're all knowledgeable in what you studied & each of you have such great personalities, so I know you'll find something out there, just keep your head up. For those of you that went on to grad school, I don't think you realize how intelligent & determined you really are. You're some of the smartest people I know, so don't stress, you'll do just fine in your future studies. And for the rest of you still in undergrad, enjoy the time that you have in college. Your last year at school will fly by & then the real world will come knocking at your door.

- To ALL of my family & family friends: Thank-you for always being there for me, through thick & thin, & try not to worry about me too much. I love you & I'll miss all of you. Send me mail when you get a chance to keep me updated on life back home! I'll enjoy hearing news outside of my Ghanaian bubble = )

Finalmente...I'm done packing!

On another note, since I found out approximately 2 months ago that I was accepted into the Peace Corps Ghana program, I've had a lot of time to think about my future in Ghana; however, I've also had the time to think about everything that I'll miss back home in the states...

- Season changes (fall/winter) and all of my family's traditions for celebrating the holidays. At least I'm able to enjoy a little bit of fall weather to see the leaves change color and feel the crisp air push out the heat of summer, but I'll miss the holidays like Halloween (hey, you're never too old to dress up!), my brother's birthday (he'll be 20 by the time I come home!), and Thanksgiving. I'll miss watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, helping my Mom bake our apple, pumpkin, and chocolate pudding pies while watching It's a Wonderful Life, and then stuffing my face full of food at my house in the good company of my Dad's family for a huge feast (I must say, Italians know how to eat). Then autumn will end and winter will begin, reminding me that I won't have any snow to throw snowballs at my brother, make snowmen or snow angels, go sledding down my long driveway, sip hot chocolate while sitting bundled up in a blanket next to the fireplace, help decorate the Christmas tree by loading it up with ornaments that are probably twice my age, bake a dozen different kinds of Christmas cookies with my Mom while watching holiday movies or listening to Christmas music, and get overwhelmed by the smell of cinnamon in the kitchen while my Mom bakes her famous Christmas bread and my Dad makes my Grandpa Pete's rice pudding. I won't be there for the annual Ricciardi Family Christmas Party (basically a huge get-together for our Italian family to eat a lot of good food and catch up on life) or to celebrate any other winter parties: my Dad's birthday, New Years by watching the Times Square ball drop in NYC, the Ricciardi Family Scholarship Fund's Beefsteak, and mine and my Mom's birthday that we usually celebrate together since our birthdays are so close.- My brother's high school graduation in June of 2012. Granted I've been there, done that, and it's long and boring, but these kind of events only happen once, and I won't be there to share this memory with him. Nor will I be there to help him prepare for college, set him up in his dorm room, or give him any college advice. I just wish I could be there for him.

- My friends from home, and my friends from RWU that I've become so close to over the past 4 years. It's weird not seeing all of you every day, whether we were in class together or hanging out on the weekends. While I'm abroad, I'll miss having a familiar shoulder to lean on.- My cat Oreo. Okay, I know it sounds silly, but my brother will understand. And in a year from now, while I'm still in Africa and my brother is away at college, my dad will take full advantage of having Oreo be vulnerable to his sock and napkin attacks, and basically just any other way that he can scare her. Oreo, you must now fend for yourself - be brave.

...& much, much more...so don't think that I will forget about any of you while I'm abroad!

FYI: If you haven't read the tabs on my blog yet, then check them out when you get the chance. I give tons of info on my position as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, how long I'll be gone, what I'll be doing, info about Ghana, etc. etc.

Mikey: Don't you realize? The next time you see sky, it'll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it'll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what's right for them. Because it's their time. Their time, up there. Down here, it's our time. It's our time down here. That's all over the second we ride up Troy's bucket.

The Goonies taught me a valuable lesson at a very young age:

Never ride up Troy's bucket...meaning don't take the easy way out, embrace the challenge, & enjoy the adventure.

Now it's my time, my story. And even though the chances of me finding treasure on a hidden pirate ship are pretty slim, I still hope that I can inspire others to go on an adventure of their own through my experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana.