Friday: Well, elections are on and I am loving it. Porks only worked for a little while this morning. Voting opened at 7pm and although closed at 5.00pm, there was a problem with the verification machine so they had to stay open until 7pm. It has gone very peacefully.
We decided to take a drive to Lake Volta.
Driving through one of the towns we saw this and just HAD to take a photo!
We stopped to buy a boiled egg for Porks and I had roasted plantain. A banana-like fruit but inedible raw. It is considered to be a vegetable but is actually a fruit. They are larger than bananas and are eaten at all the stages of ripeness, green, yellow and black. Low in fat, low in sodium and no cholesterol. The whole plant is useful and the leaves have many medicinal values.
This lady had roasted fish, plantain and yam for sale, as well as little packets of ground nuts. Everything we bought cost 50 peswas each, but the old school people say that we owe them 5000 for each item. We nearly have a heart attack every time! They have had to remove some noughts to renumber the currency. 5 Cedis used to be 50 000 Cedis.
I commented to Porks on a number of occasions that the Ghanaians are house proud and I don't see much litter lying around. The sand around the houses is swept clean and always looks tidy and neat.
He then explained why. A contract company called "Zoom lion" collects all the rubbish and then throws it away on the side of the road just outside the town. So, as long as the town is clean "noworriesghana".
I said to Porks along the way, "Porks, this is fun!" He answered gruffly, "Yea, like sky-diving!"
As we drove through more and more remote towns, it was like watching the Mexican wave. The first shouts of " Oh, Brony" started (I found out its not Abruni its Brony, pronounced Bruni and the O or A beforehand is like Ohhhh...Brony) and the children further ahead could hear them and turned around to see and then continued the shouts until we drove through to the end of the town.
In between each little town the roads are straightish and sandy. Most roads are terribly rough and potted but this one was quite flat and easy going. I am trying to give you an idea of what the countryside looks like. There are little towns every 2 - 5 kilometres and this is the vegetation in between. The reddish tinge is the dust on the vegetation. More often than not, if you parted the long grass there would be cassava, mealies or yam growing behind it - someones farm.
We left home at 11.30am, drove 70kms, and got there at 2.00pm! We drove through Kwam
e Danso (not Kwam
a Danso as I have already told you!) on the wild sea road again and the bad road continued virtually all the way. We were down to 10kph at one stage.
At last we arrived at the Lake, after managing to persuade Porks every now and then to "Let's just go another few kilometres" and voila! there it was. Huge but unimpressive! The little town at the end of the road was horrible, run-down and neglected and we are glad to be living in Bantama, our neat little village! Porks agreed. There really is a silver lining around every cloud.
These two young chaps on the fishing boat have a massive white net on board and were folding it backwards and forwards so neatly so as not to tangle it.
This photo is just to show you the shoreline. The lake is obviously much much bigger than what you can see. It's surface area is 8,500 km squared. I took my cozzie as I thought I might be able to swim.....glass half full me....but some ladies were throwing rotten oranges into the lake and we were too conspicuous anyway.
In the middle of nowhere on the way home, we came across these neatly cut blocks. Porks had been telling me that Italians have been coming to Ghana for years to cut timber for parquet flooring. There were many more piles and a saw mill close by.
We bumped into Tony in Bantama and he showed us that he had voted (see little finger). He is quite a high up chap in the community and is the local counsellor. He told us that even though there are different religions in this district, as well as different political views, everyone respects each other and all get on well.
Saturday:
As soon as the truck or 4-wheeler starts up at our house, the children come running out to wave. This was not posed.
We went to Atebubu this morning. We took Sarah with us as she is more au fait with where to buy the items that we cannot find. Sarah works at Porks' office where she cooks for the men that work there as well as any visitors that come on occasion.
Sarah told me that those desks we had seen are to replace the old ones and for new classrooms when they have been built. I am sure they are going to weather before they are used.
I had seen these little cigar-like things before but didn't know what they were. Sarah told us that it is clay and people buy it to eat! Jeepers, I used to eat the beach sand when I was a little girl but there is no way I will spend money to eat dirt. I will try it sometime but Porks wasn't in the mood for me to try today. He can only do 30 minutes of shopping and then hits his patience limit.
I have mentioned that people sell things from containers balanced on their heads. They also have their own little stalls everywhere. These are sachets of water in a stand. Theresa (at our house) uses our fridge to freeze the sachets and supplements her income by selling them.
Porks went hunting this morning - his first best hobby - and found a large earthworm for Gundi. She smelled it and licked it but her new mommy doesn't know how to teach her what to do so eventually she left it alone. It lay around for a while and then I rescued it and put it back into the wild before it dehydrated and died.
She is a funny little thing. When she walks, she walks properly with alternate feet but when she "runs" both her front feet work together, followed by her back legs together, like a rabbit . It looks so uncomfortable but she can really move fast.
I nearly lost my blog! I went on this afternoon and it said "Your blog has been deleted!" Eish! Try as I might I couldn't get it back no matter what they told me to do. "Heeeelllpp Kelly!" She managed to fix it from South Africa as the connection here was too slow! I was so relieved to get it back as all that information would have been lost! What would I do without my very special daughter?
