First 10 days

Valley View Dorms (days 1-5)


Just arrived in Accra


Loading luggage onto a truck in Accra

Quite a lot has happened in the last 10 days or so. My group arrived in Accra after an 11 hour flight directly from D.C. We disembarked right on the tarmac and were herded toward the baggage claim and then across the street, where we threw our luggage into the back of a giant, rusty old truck. We climbed onto some posh, air-conditioned buses and were police-escorted through the dense traffic of Accra and out to Valley View, a college that would be our home for the next week. Living at Valley View was essentially like attending summer camp, complete with talent shows, raging hormones, and afternoon Ultimate Frisbee or soccer games. Peace Corps is easing us into Ghanaian life by starting us off with showers and running water, and then perhaps weaning us off of those first-world luxuries. (Although I’m fairly certain that I will have running water at my site since I’m an Art Ed volunteer.) Did I mention it’s hot here? It’s the rainy season, so in general it is much cooler than during the drier months, but when the mid-day sun is blazing, it is oppressively, mind-meltingly hot, to the point where we all start lethargically falling asleep in our seats during lectures.

Our first few days in country were filled with introductions, medical interviews, vaccinations, malaria meds, flip chart/PowerPoint presentations, safety meetings, and Twi language lessons. We ate a giant meal every couple of hours, consisting mainly of fried foods—plantains, onion rings, donut-type things, French fries, veggie balls, (and for the meat eaters, fried chicken and fish). A spicy tomato sauce, like a curry, generally accompanied these fried foods.

After a few days of meetings, they let us loose to find our way in groups back into the capital, Accra. We had an assignment to find a certain landmark, which was just a way of getting us to start exploring. With my new friends Jim and Sara, I took a “tro” (modified mini-van) into the city. We easily found our landmark destination, the Nkrumah Mausoleum, by asking a series of people to point us in the right direction. Ghanaians were (and are) incredibly helpful, often leading us blocks to the correct bus stop or intersection. As a group of three, I felt very comfortable engaging people on the street, and many of them were very excited to talk to us. The Mausoleum is only few steps from the ocean, so we walked a bit further down the road, and found a beautiful cliff overlook that allowed us views of the coast in both directions. I had my heart set on finding an internet café, so we walked quite a distance to the main intersection in town, nicknamed “circle,” where we found what is touted as the fastest internet connection in Accra. I spent a few minutes letting my family in the U.S. know I was alive before we jumped onto another tro and headed back toward Valley View. In the course of the day, I received several marraige proposals; one man in particular was quite insistent, and when I told him I am married (a lie), he proceeded to ask me if I had any single friends.

Before leaving Valley View several days later, we received our medical kits, which include everything from anti-diarrheal medicine to dental floss. I was also issued a mosquito net and a stool sample kit, in case at any point my poop needs to be rushed back to Accra for testing. On Tuesday, we took the bus to Kukurantumi, about an hour outside of Accra in the lush, gorgeous tropical forest of the Eastern Region. Kukurantumi will be our training site for the next three months, and it is where I will live with my homestay family. This is a small town of about 5000 people, and we are able to walk to our training hub and easily navigate the entirety of the area. My homestay is particularly nice, I’d say---I have a shower (no bucket bath yet!!) that I share with the family, my own room (no fan, though) with a locked door, and a screened-in porch where I can study and eat my meals. I have access to something approximating a toilet, but that is essentially a raised cement hole with a black plastic seat on it. My homestay house is like a compound, with a courtyard and four buildings surrounding it. I am in one building, and my ‘mother’ lives in another adjacent to me.

My host mother, Doris, lived for a year in Cincinnati with her son who works for Toyota, so she speaks excellent English. She is also the caterer for the Peace Corps hub site, so she knows how to make a great, clean meal. I think they paired her with me because I said that I am a vegetarian, and she is familiar with what that means, and can offer me a variety of protein alternatives (i.e. eggs, peanut butter, and black-eyed peas). While at Valley View, the ‘vegetarian’ dishes contained zero protein, and were less hygienically prepared (I spent a great deal of time on the toilet). I feel SO MUCH better now, though. In addition to my host mother, I also have a host brother, Kwame Prince, who is a 21 year old student, and a sister, Maggie, a high school student who insisted on washing my underwear despite my protests. I also have an Auntie named Comfort who is essentially my second mother, and who is doing most of the work of caring for me. It’s like I’m a child again; my family boils my water for morning coffee, buys and prepares my food, packs my hot lunch into a tiered thermos, and wants to know my whereabouts at all times.

Tonight I walked home from the hub site with a group of PC trainees headed into Kukurantumi to find an internet café. It started pouring rain, and all the locals went running indoors. They laughed at us walking in the rain—we were drenched and loving it. We are living in Africa!