Plotting...

I'm coming up to a month in Ghana. The time has flown past. So I'm staying a bit longer. This weekend I plan to go to Kumasi, Ghana's second town with one of the other volunteers. When she returns to Accra after the weekend I am heading North for a week. I'm planning to go as far as the border with Burkina Faso. And then come back. Which seems ridiculous, even to me but I have a couple of reasons.

I'm about to start doing computer training with one of the women's groups and I need to come back so that I don't just visit them once and then leave. Also I have got my Togo visa and it was not the most fun day getting it, so I intend to go there and not just straight to Burkina Faso. I am, however, cutting Benin off my schedule due to an outbreak of Cholera in the capital city.

We said goodbye to another volunteer today, leaving just three girls, who will be leaving Ghana about the same time as me, in another two weeks. It makes the thought of properly starting my travels that much harder for the fact that the last few weeks everyone has been gearing up for going home. Discussing what they will eat when they get there (Pork belly and olives are high on various lists), what they will do (watch sports, look for places to live) and who they will see (family, friends etc) has switched my thoughts in that direction. I have to keep reminding myself that when I leave I am not going to be going home but instead will be lugging my backpack around in the incredible heat, alone. Fortunately West Africa appears to be one of the friendliest places on earth, and my backpack is not really that heavy, the sun is (almost) always shining, and there's so many interesting places to go, things to see and people to meet.

The weeks have continued in much the same vein, training and taking repayments and even processing new loans. The only real difference is that I feel more confident, less like I'm working in the shadow of previous volunteers and the people who stop me in the street to say Hi, I've often spoken to before and know their names. The weekends are travel time. Last weekend Sam and I went to the Volta region, dominated by a large lake and therefore very lush and green. The lake is famous for the two hydroelectric dams instituted by former president Kwame Nkrumah. These appear to have made the region fairly wealthy. All the houses (actual houses, made of bricks, with roofs and windows) have satellite dishes, the roads are all paved and don't have potholes, the cars are very nice, and the Ghanaians all live in New York and London. We played tourists and went on a scenic ferry trip up the lake to an island which for the hour that the boat is docked is inhabited by pestering children who demand pens, or money for pens, or if you claim to have neither, call you a liar. The island part of the trip was not fun. For Sam, whose stomach was still adjusting to her travels, neither was the ferry trip. So we cancelled our onward travel plans to a very tall waterfall and stayed another night in the port town of Akosombo. Sam stayed in our bathroom all night whilst I chatted with the locals and visited a gospel church, which was disappointingly unstereotypical.

The previous weekend was the wedding of VPWA's director, Hayford, so the volunteers were all on drinks serving., balloon blowing up duty. The Sunday we spent being all Western and went to the mall which contains restaurants with beef, supermarkets with chocolate and vegetables, lots of air con and a cinema showing hollywood films. A nice break from the reality of Ghana, which I felt lucky (and a bit guilty) to be able to take.