Still alive and well \ud83d\ude42 Our internet access consists of people with laptops taking mercy on us and letting us take them to the hospital, where the internet connection is pretty slow.\u00a0 It\u2019s Sunday afternoon right now,\u00a0and we\u2019ve finally had a big chunk of time to do some big time catching up on emailing! So the following will all be recaps on the last week, day by day, starting with Friday, Feb 1st, the day we travelled from Accra to Kumasi\u2026<\/p>\n
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When I last wrote, we were in Accra at the Baptist Guest House, where we spent the night before catching a bus to Kumasi. Adventure #1 of the trip was the gatorade that waged world war 3 on my pack and all its contents. Picture me, fully clothed, standing in a shower stall with cold water flowing freely, holding my pack upside down, blue gatorade powder everywhere, cleaning it with a rag.\u00a0 But it\u2019s hot enough here that the pack dried overnight, and I only smelled like gatorade for a few days!<\/p>\n
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We got up and had breakfast with the rest of the people at the guest house, and then were sent by taxi into the bus station at Accra for our 10am bus to Kumasi.\u00a0 First of all, let me remind you that we had yet to master the Twi accent with which these people speak English, so we understand almost nothing that people are telling us! The taxi is a beat up little hatchback, like all the rest of the taxis are, and we\u2019re basically sitting on our bags because there is so little room. We get to the bus station at 9am, and proceed to wait around until around 11am or so, when another bus headed in the general direction of Kumasi is leaving, and happens to have room for us.\u00a0 Long story short, we get on the bus after drawing about as much attention to ourselves as humanely possible, which is hilarious. We end up sitting in the back of the bus, me by a Ghanian who lives in Spain, and Lisa by a Ghanian who is more educated about the US than we are and who ends up serving as our caretaker for the entire trip.\u00a0 He even gave us some money for the public toilets (yeah, we have to pay!) in case we\u00a0didn\u2019t have any.\u00a0Lisa\u2019s seat back is broken, so we spend the entire trip with her basically laying in my lap, the seat bouncing violently at each bump the bus hits. The bus itself is like the greyhound busses in the states, but about 10 years past its prime. It\u2019s \u2018air-conditioned,\u2019 which\u00a0I think means that it at one point had the capability to blow cold air into the interior of the bus. We sit on these vinyl seats, dripping sweat, surrounded by people who are yelling back and forth to each other, and a TV in the front that is blaring this awful African soap opera of some kind. The man sitting by me asks repeatedly for me to let him follow me back to the US, because then they will let him in (Africans have a very hard time getting visas to the US apparently).\u00a0 He also finds out I speak some Spanish, so we spend the whole bus ride conversing in Spanish, which is good because I can\u2019t understand his english and he can\u2019t understand mine!<\/p>\n
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The trip from Accra to Kumasi was about 150 miles.\u00a0 You want to know how long it took? 7 HOURS!!! Lisa and I figured out that it took longer to travel from Accra to Kumasi than it took to fly from Chicago to London or from London to Ghana! Gotta love that. We get to Kumasi, and are picked up by Anne (wife of Cameron, the MD) and Kaylor (daughter of Cameron), and their driver. We go to a market and do some shopping, which mostly consists of bartering. Luckily, they knew Anne and Kaylor, so we got great deals.\u00a0 These two Egyptian men descended on us as soon as we got out of the car, and proceeded to talk our ears off for the next 30 minutes. They\u2019re in Ghana filming the Africa Cup (more later), work for Al Jazeera, and wanted to know all about whether we were going to vote for Hillary or Obama. Of course, the right answer was Obama, since he\u2019s from Africa! For a couple conservative girls like ourselves, this was hilarious! We decided not to launch into a political debate, and just laugh at them.<\/p>\n
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We then drove the 20 km to Ankaase, the village we\u2019re staying in, and met Cameron, the physician we\u2019ll be working with.\u00a0 Cameron and Anne, and their daughter Kaylor, have lived in Ghana for 10 years. In talking with them over dinner later, we found out that Cam had always felt led to missions, and specifically to start a hospital in Ghana. He and Anne moved here and started this hospital, the Ankaase Methodist Faith Healing Hospital, with just himself and a staff of just a few people.\u00a0 The hospital has now grown to 60 inpatient beds, and an outpatient area that sees about 100-150 patients daily, depending on how many providers are available to see them.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to hear Cam\u2019s story about his call to missions, because the whole thing sounds eerily like my own, up until he was my age.\u00a0 Not that I specifically feel called to live in another country at this point, but that I\u2019m interested in missions and don\u2019t know exactly what that will look like as my life goes on. Yeah, that\u2019s what he said too.\u00a0 Hmm\u2026.!<\/p>\n
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Our living situation is NICE! The place we were supposed to stay is under renovation, so we\u2019re staying in the old apartment of a family that was here for 8 years and just left.\u00a0 It\u2019s huge by African standards, and much nicer than we expected, complete with a water heater we can turn on if we want hot water!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not quite as hot as I expected it to be here. Not to say that it isn\u2019t the tropics, but the humidity isn\u2019t really anything to speak of. They are just ending \u2018harmitan\u2019 right now, which is the dry season when the winds from the Sahara blow south, bringing with them a bunch of sand, which makes most everything pretty dusty and dry.\u00a0 It will get more humid when that season is over apparently. \u00a0Ok, that\u2019s all for now\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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