Alrightie, we left our homestay’s last weekend for counterpart (or contact person?) workshop which was in a fairly large town where we got to stay in a fancy hotel with toilets, air conditioning, and HOT running water. But not going to lie, since we were there for 4 days, I would have gladly given up one of those things for the ability to leave the hotel property since we were confined the duration of our stay. Granted, we were occupied most of the time and there was no true need to leave. However, my busy-bodied self went a little crazy and ended up running sprints a couple of the mornings along the 200-meter driveway until I was too bored to continue. All in all, it was completely and totally 100% worth it though because I met my counterpart who is extremely kind-hearted and was excited to welcome me as well as found out my permanent site (which I can not disclose due to security reasons). What I can say is that it’s close to half way between two of the major cities in Ghana, Tamale and Kumasi, which is pretty rad.

            My site is a village about 30 minutes away from a rather significant market town where I will be able to access everything I could possibly need (other than an exercise/yoga mat which I absolutely regret not packing). The main market days are Tuesday-Friday but the majority of people set up shop every day since it is their main source of income. As an American farmers market connoisseur, I appreciate the market towns surplus of fresh tomatoes, yam, banana, pineapple, mango, avocado (or as Ghanaians say “pear”), squash, carrot and more. Between my wrecked digestive tract the first few days and the realization that meat and fish are often left outside with no refrigeration most of the day and covered in insects as well as exposed to everyone’s germs all day, I have decided to again pursue a vegetarian diet again (sorry mom and dad). I am more than open to changing this at a later point should I find a person whom I trust entirely to purchase it from, but until then, meat is a no go. Lucky for me, there is always a plethora of beans, legumes, and eggs, which don’t go bad, are less expensive, and I prefer the taste anyway.

            I arrived to my site on Friday evening after a full day of travel and anticipation. And lets just say, it has definitely surpassed any sort of expectations I had. I went into this whole thing pretty expectation-less, so I guess that’s not hard to surpass but still, I feel spoiled in my current accommodation. I have a pretty sweet set up- a full sized bed, two windows for a fantastic cross-breeze, a table and chairs, ceiling fan, and a girlie color scheme courtesy of my headmistress (principal). My room is one of 4 in a compound that is still getting finished being built. As of right now, only my room is finished since the landlord rushed to get it done prior to my arrival and the rest of the compound is still under construction. In the middle of all the rooms, there is a central courtyard perfect for laundry, cooking/eating, playing games, and studying all within the privacy of your own home! A set up that is truly ideal and has me wishing that the U.S. had this sort of arrangement.

            Since arrival I have attended a full day’s worth of school, which was mostly dancing, preparing fufu, and playing futbol (I’m a bit confused as to if this was a special celebration or a typical Friday). I have also formally met all of the chiefs in my village at their palaces, met all the important members of the Catholic Church to which my school is connected, located the clinic, visited all three schools, and of course have spent countless hours with the kiddos of my community playing games, introducing myself, and learning Twi! To expand on some cultural tidbits, the Ghanaians are some of the friendliest and most caring people you will ever meet. You are expected to greet everyone you see, that is, unless you are on your way to go #2. In which case you straight up ignore the person because you have something unpleasant inside of you that needs to be excreted prior to starting conversation. Most greetings are not just “good morning”/ “good morning”. They generally lead to a follow up question such as “how are you?” and the answer to this question is always “I am fine”. Even if you are the opposite of fine. Most of the time it still doesn’t end here. Remember how I said the Ghanaians are caring? Exactly. They also care where you are going, where you are coming from. Most of my conversations involve me saying “I’m going home” and then them asking precisely where I live, what I was just doing or what I just bought at market, or what I am doing next. This has probably been one of the biggest aspects of culture shock so far since in the states you would not dare ask a complete stranger where they are coming from or to take whatever they just purchased out of their bag to show you as proof. I love it sometimes, especially since it forces me to think and speak in the local language more, and other times I am low key thinking “what’s a girl gotta do to just walk and buy some toilet paper without having to tell 5+ people that she ran out again.

            On the same topic, I attended the Roman Catholic Church this morning to immerse and meet more members of my community. The priest legitimately RAN out of the church as soon as I walked in to fetch his English Bible so that he could do the readings in both Twi and English so that I could understand. He also gave me a formal introduction to the community at the end of the service, telling them that God has blessed them with a new community member for the next two years. As I was walking out, everyone was eager to introduce themselves to me personally. It was really heartwarming and made me extremely excited for what is to come!

            I also met a bunch of my future JHS students on Friday, and since then, they have been showing up to my room every hour or so to say hi and ask to help me with Twi. I gladly let them into the compound the first few times and let them teach me more vocabulary than I have the capacity to remember right now, but I have already had to set rules about when they can and cannot come hang out. I love their willingness to help and enthusiasm, don’t get me wrong. But one can only be so extroverted and spend so much time with junior high school kids in any given day. An aspiring doctor by the name of “Nelly” has been my saving grace as far as the language goes. As an avid reader, her English is far superior than many others in the community and she is able to translate most things with ease. She also has a loud and clear voice which is monumental in terms of me learning the pronunciation of Twi vocabulary.

Quote of the week: (translated from Twi)

Lady on the street: “Where are you going?”

                                Me: “Banana”

                                Lady: No where are you going?”

                                Me: “Banana…oh, wait. Plantain!”

                                Lady: “Nooooo. Where. Are. You. Going?”

                                Me: *silence*

Today marks 4 weeks away from home. I’m still unsure whether it feels like it’s been longer or shorter than that, it depends on the moment. Some times I feel like I’ve been here for at least a couple months already and other times it feels like we arrived in country yesterday. Things are still going really well overall and I’m ecstatic to be in a Ghanaian classroom for three more beautiful days this week. This last week was filled with a multitude of fun adventures including our first time teaching a full lesson in a Ghanaian classroom, first experience at a festival, a continuation of language training, meeting the chief at his palace, late night (8:00pm) card games using a headlamp hanging from a tree branch as a lantern, another round of laundry resulting in bloody knuckles, climbing trees for oranges and eating them like a true Ghanaian, sunset and post-sunset walks which I keep forgetting to take pictures of, and consuming close to my body weight in rice.

My first lesson last week was on matter. It went alright for the most part, however, I ended up having to improvise quite a few things on the spot since I had overestimated the students’ familiarity with elements and knowledge of chemistry. It’s a bit difficult to teach atoms, molecules, and ions when students do not know what hydrogen or oxygen are and have never seen the chemical formula “H₂O” before and therefore cannot grasp the concept of a subscript. This was a gentle reminder to more thoroughly think about the level of previous knowledge while lesson planning and to prepare extra background information should it be needed. The second day I was able to teach something WAY more up my alley- the circulatory system. After a somewhat monotonous lesson on matter, the option to teach anatomy the following day got me more excited. It also enabled me to get students up and out of their desks to monitor their heart rate after 60 seconds of running in place and compare it to their resting heart rate. I even drew a glorious, anatomically correct heart on the chalkboard and went over the flow of blood. This time making sure to go back to basics and see if they even knew where their heart was in the first place and if they had heard of the lungs before (and to be clear, not everyone did know).

In other news, I have started filtering and bleaching my own water in contrast to buying water sachets or bottled water (boo plastic), and haven’t died yet, so that’s fabulous. I’ve also become a pro at sweeping my room every morning when I hear my host sibling “Blessing” make the first sweep on the porch. Usually this is what wakes me up right around 5:15 (I have yet to use an alarm) and I join her in the adventure of sweeping the compound and fetching water. Also guess who can carry water on her head now?! That’s right, this girl. Normally, I would be jogging first thing in the morning but I have not been able to go every day due to our student teaching schedule that has us leaving as early as 6:00am. Sometimes I have time to go for a quick jaunt and other times I don’t. Sometimes I am able to go after sessions in the evening and sometimes the rain eliminates that option. As sad as it is, the absence of routine in regards to my exercise has been the biggest obstacle for me so far. I’m certainly making strides in the right direction but after years of consistency and rarely taking an off day, you do sort of become obsessed and losing control over that aspect of my life has been more difficult than I anticipated. That being said, I’m super grateful for my buds Richard and Will who accompany me on my jogging adventures and put up with me talking to them even when they don’t have the breath or desire to respond to whatever I’m talking about, thank you. Also special shout out to Will for bringing me his extra fruit when my host family was in a 4-day “fruit and vegetable drought”, lets say. Truly made my day.

Yesterday we had the privilege to see a senior high school in our area and sample some experiments in their chemistry lab. Although the resources and facilities at this particular school will more than likely be substantially superior to what we will have access to at our permanent sites, it was beneficial in terms of getting us to think about the sort of adaptations we will need to make and reminded me about the importance of innovation (@ASU- #1 in innovation, #2 Stanford, #3 MIT lol) and planning months ahead in order to acquire any desired materials. The reality is that I will probably be teaching science with no beakers, test tubes, chemicals, or other laboratory equipment. So once I get to site I will be starting a collection of water bottles and other litter that I found laying around to use to cut into beakers, funnels, and anything else I might need.

We will all be meeting our counterparts soon as well as traveling to our sites to initiate integration in our communities. Everyone is extremely excited about as it means we will actually know what our lives will be like for the next two years and where we will be living. Until then, I’ll just be doing more student teaching, practicing my Twi with my host family, playing “Oware” (similar to mancala) with my siblings, and hopefully learning to cook more.

Quote of the week:

“Because it’s a food, you have to say I like or enjoy it, you cannot say ‘I love it’ “ –Godwin (our language trainer)

“But what if I want to marry it?” –Jen

Hiya! Now that I am officially laying in my elegant new mosquito netting fort listening to the chirping crickets, swaying trees, and “baa”-ing sheep, I decided it was time to get this blog up and running. I departed from Phoenix on June 3rd, which means I’ve been on the move for about 12 days now. It already feels like I’ve been gone for an eternity, in the best way possible. The Peace Corps has a sly way of jam packing every day with so much stuff and tricking you into being best friends with your cohort right away that it feels like you’ve been gone for much longer than you have (in the best way possible, really). It was my longest flight yet and my first time leaving the country. Normally I would have been crazy excited about this, but since it was an overnight flight, it didn’t really hit me until we landed. And at that point I was just hoping to make it through customs  and have my one bag with essentially everything I own encased in it. I did indeed make it, as did all the others in my group and the Peace Corps staff picked us up and took us to the headquarters. Once we arrived there we went through a traditional Ghanaian welcome ceremony/prayer, got shot up with a few more vaccines, and got situated on our anti-malarials (which I would like to point out do not actually stop you from getting malaria, they just mask the symptoms- which was news to me but I’ll take what I can get). Other trainings have included integration, language, Ghanaian customs/culture, a 2.5 hour session on diarrhea, and classroom management, all of which are going to be important throughout our stay here. For the first 5 nights after arrival in country we stayed at a university in Accra, the capital city, called Valley View University where we all continued to bond, laugh, learn eat, and occasionally suffer together. VVU did an excellent job at providing us with meals that were somewhat of a conglomeration of Ghanaian and American cuisines in order to introduce us to staple items here that way we could provide our home stay families with food preferences. We are now all in a town a couple hours outside of Accra at “homestay” where the 24 of us are living in separate compounds (homes) within the same community. 

     My homestay family is lovely. It is composed of two sisters (who I am to refer to both as my mothers) and somewhere between 6 and 10 children. To this day, I am not sure how many of the children that roll through this house actually live here. Nevertheless, it’s a full house, and in my case, a full room close to 100% of the time. In Ghanaian culture hosting a guest is a big undertaking and our host moms desire to cook exactly to our liking, watch us eat alone in silence, and make sure we “eat all”. Sometimes I am capable of this task, but other meals it is not even close to an option. Exhibit A: I asked my host mom for oatmeal at breakfast and she provided me with a literal HEAPING pie dish of oatmeal. I’m talking so much oatmeal it would be the equivalent of the entire round cylinder of Quaker Oats at grocery stores in the U.S. How she thought I could possibly consume this much food? I will never know, but bless this woman’s heart, seriously. Since being with my host-family I have learned 5+ handshakes/games similar to “down by the banks” and “lemonade, crunchy ice”, helped with loads of middle school math and science homework, been told that they “give up” on teaching me how to dance, spent hours upon hours drawing with my siblings (which has resulted in 10+ pictures from the same yellow highlighter being duct taped on my walls), spent my fare share of time in the pit latrine during the middle of the night, and have learned how to sweep/clean/bathe/do laundry the Ghanaian way. And boy, I’m grateful for all 10-ish of them. Only the kindest of souls would open their home to a non-twi speaking girl from the U.S who’s skin turns red in the sun (they don’t exactly understand the concept of a sunburn yet and just laughed at me). Speaking of languages, I have been assigned to learn “Twi” (pronounced more like a 3 year old with a speech impediment saying “tree”), which means I will more than likely have a final placement in the eastern of central region of the country! This is the biggest hint we get about where we will be serving the next two years since different regions of the country speak different languages. If I’m lucky, I’ll be in a part of the country that is still beautifully lush and green, and maybe even within a couple hours of another volunteer. In 5 or so weeks, we will find out our final communities and even get to visit them. Until then, I’ll just be practicing my Twi.

Quote of the week: “you are my son” -Tony, to a random kid we found that’s helping us on our Twi homework

Welcome to the online space I have created for the thoughts, emotions, stories and realities of my Peace Corps Service. I hope this can entertain or enlighten you in some way. Whether you are a stranger interested in volunteering in the Peace Corps, a new invitee curious about what you’ve signed up for, a current volunteer needing affirmation that you’re not alone, or a friend or family member occasionally checking in to make sure I am alive and somewhat well (@mymom), I hope you enjoy! I depart out of Phoenix on June 3rd 2019 for staging in Washington D.C. and head to Ghana shortly after. Keep in mind that “The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Ghanaian Government.”