All's good in Ghana

Crazy obruni what are you doing in this tree?

Finding a bird!

With a trip to the Sunyani Regional Hospital, the recent passing of my grandmother, and a bad case of the homesick blues it's been a while since I've wrote!

But all is good now in Ghana! As for the hospital trip, it was for the last thing I thought I'd be visiting a hospital here for. Sometime last week in school my friend Rosemund gave me a milkpop to try, just like a lollipop I munched down on it, bad idea. Later that day I felt something funny on one of my back top teeth, turns out it wasn't something funny at all, it was an old filling tthat had completely fallen out. I cracked the filling off with the milkpop earlier that morning. Darn it! Anyways, I talked with my dad, my contacts, my host parents, and Toni, my(now back in Germany) host sister, and we decided that a quick trip to hospital in SUnyani would fix it. Richard, my host dad, has a friend who's wife is a head nurse in the hospital and made sure I got a good dentist and well taken care of. The hospital in Sunyani, an hour away, isn't that different from a hospital in America. The building was pretty new, the wait (six hours) was about as long as expected, and the sight of children sleeping next to their mothers in the waiting rooms was normal. Some of the sick people I saw there had very different things than I'm used to, big burns, or rashes of some sort. A small girl had a painful looking sore on her ankle and sat all the while wrapped up in a cloth to hide it. She didn't smile like most of the children do when they see white people. The dentist and I had a little trouble communicating and the UV light he used to finish the filling kept not working, but in the end he did a totally fine job, and my filling was taken care of for about 23 US dollars. AFS insurance doesn't cover eyes, nose, throat, or teeth. For lunch at the hospital the nurse showed Jonas and I roasted plaintians with peanuts (or groundnuts as they're called here), and I decide they are my new favorite Ghanian food! I'm slowly getting better at Ghanian cooking, but fufu I've yet to pound. All in all, the trip to the hospital went well, and I'm feeling a lot better.

School's going really well too. They're still some things I'm getting used to; the corporal punishment, the three hour classes, the accent of the teachers, the different teaching styles, uniforms, ect. but as for just enjoying my time there it's going really well. It seems to make the days past extremely fast though, I can't believe it's already Friday.

Speaking of Fridays, one of my favorite nights to be home. Since I don't have school in the morning I can stay up a little later and listen to all the prayers being shouted behind my house, listen to our security guards radio playing outside my window, dance around for my host family and try and make them laugh. I really like Friday nights. And tomorrow, I'm sleeping in!!!

My school starts at 6:40 every morning, we have a morning assembly (normally inside the cafetria, but there isn't always enough room to fit the students or we arrive late). That actually leads to one of the things that's going to be hard to see for the next nine months. I don't want to talk about all of it, but basically, a lot of students were standing outside talking instead of listening to the morning assembly, and for that that were beaten. Four times each (some eight, I heard later) with a double cane (two canes twined together). I was standing outside and couldn't look away, I was really shocked with how hard they were being hit, how some twitched away from the cane, some teared up a bit, and some didn't seem phased at all. I wrote a lot about it, talked with Justin about it. I've decided that it's in no way my place to say it's right or wrong for them, and definitely not my place to get involved, but I know that in my own heart and mind that I think it's violent, and painful, and not necessary.

School goes on to have morning classes until 9:10 when we break for breakfast, then we're back at 9:40 to continue on until 1:30. Whew, long day.

The past few afternoons we've been having drumming lessons, one of the instructors goes to my school, and tomorrow we've set up some DANCE LESSONS for me!! I just have to teach him some of my dancing in return. The drumming is really fun, it's a lot harder than I thought though. Ransford, the instructor who attends DormaSS told me that often they play the same beat over and over for an hour straight. It's very repetitive and not as middle eastern as I'm used to, so... I was feeling kind of helpless today when I spent more time on a harder drum, but I managed, and in the end I figured it out. Got some video of it too, that will be available someday... internet here is just not up to it.

To sum it all up: there's a lot going on and even more to tell, but I'm enjoying myself, experiencing, and growing and that's what foreign exchange is all about.

I love you mom, can't wait to see a picture of your new tattoo! And thanks for the call today.

I love you Dad and Reva. I filmed part of the drumming lesson for you guys!

I love you Tia, Rinnah, and Grace.

I really appreciated the call from you too Tia, Shmia. I miss you eons, and thank you even more for planning to send a care package my way, I bragged to some Germans today that I'll be getting oreos!

Rinnah, I love having photos of you, the old black and white ones that I took last winter, up in my room. It makes it homey.

I'm wearing the necklace you sent me for graduation Mrs. Williamson, thank you again.

Mrs. Clark, I really wish I could just let you see through my eyes the way people play music at football games here.

Alice B. Elrod. Your lotion, the solid lotion that you gave me, is a big hit in my house. I smell it when I start to miss Montana, which is often, so it sits by my bed.