June 11, 2011 -- Village life

We've made quite a leap the past 48 hours or so. From sleeping in the village 3 nights ago to Lome to Accra and now still in Accra but at the beach. It's major culture shift. But I can't say I mind it. I didn't realize how developed Accra and, it seems, Ghana in general is until we left and came back after being in Togo. It's a really big difference between anything we saw in Togo, even Lome, and here. It's much more of an undeveloped, village feel in Togo. We stayed in the literal village the other night. That was interesting. When it got dark they used a kind of box flashlight to see, they listened to the radio really loudly, and for dinner we had fufu (mashed up starchy root vegetables that look and taste like snot) with sauce made from bayobab leaves (that tasted like dirt). We decided it would be less impolite to stop eating than to throw up all over the place. We slept at Kumea's house on mats and our sleeping bags and some of her hard pillows on the floor. Maybe one of the worst nights of sleep I've ever had. Communicating with Kumea and her family was really difficult since none of us spoke the same languages. But even with all the discomfort, their hospitality completely blew me away. They gave us their food and were so welcoming to us. Kumea even slept on her pallet outside our doorway as our self-proclaimed "guardienne." She really was wonderful to us and tried to communicate with us even through the language barrier.

Speaking of which, I think the language barrier did get more taxing as time went on. The more time we all spent together and spending the night there, it just would have been so nice to be able to talk to the women and everyone. We joked that night about being blind and mute because it was dark and we couldn't see or speak to each other. It was definitely a challenge.