Settling In

Our transfer to Sunyani was postponed by two days, as some of the faculty from Sunyani Polytechnic (or S. Poly as they call it) was in Accra for a workshop and it made more sense for the van to pick us all up at the same time. We were disappointed not to be heading out, but were also able to spend more time with George and Sandra which was nice.
We arrived at the dorm for the Forestry University at about 6:30pm after the bumpiest 8 hour drive I have ever been on! In Ghana they use speed bumps to try and slow people down…‘try’ being the key word! There will be 3 -9 speed bumps as you enter a town or village and then a few throughout, and then another 3 -9 as you leave. Over the 450km distance, there were a lot of villages!! But the van was air conditioned and for that I was truly thankful! :)
We were greeted by some of the students that Amanda had befriended last year, with whoops of delight and lots of hugs! Our accommodation is in a four story cement building that is built around large common grounds that are still under construction, but will eventually have some grassy areas, a badminton court, and a basket ball court. They are working very hard to get it completed. We are on the fourth floor in our own bedrooms that have a shared hallway and bathroom. They are quite large rooms, and each has a balcony, though not much of a view. The only down side to the accommodation is that the day before we arrived there was a power outage that affected the water system, and so we are without running water. We take buckets across the street onto the campus and fill them up to wash with…it’s pretty sad how weak we are compared to the other students here!! They carry the buckets without too much difficulty, some even carry two at a time, while we can only accomplish ten or twenty steps at a time before we have to stop and rest! I don’t know who laughs harder at us try to carry it, us or the other students watching us. I don’t know how long we will be without water, but we will definitely get stronger in the mean time…once we get the water back to the building we then have to carry them up 4 flights of stairs too!
I had my first really local food today. It was banku which I have no idea what it is made of, but it is kind of like a dough that you pull pieces off of and then dip it into the groundnut (a groundnut is a peanut, but I didn’t really detect a peanut flavour) soup that had fried chicken in it. The banku was not my favourite…although I figured out if you take very little pieces it was not so bad. The soup was quite spicy and had me sweating even more than I already was, but was pretty good. Only time will tell how my stomach reacts to the meal! I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
We went into town yesterday and bought some equipment to enable us to do some of our own cooking, so we do not always have to go out to eat. I think we are both feeling very good about this arrangement!
We have met most of the students and faculty that we will be working with, and have scheduled our first team meeting for Monday morning. I’m very interested to see how this all plays out, as while we have ideas about how we should proceed, this is a community development project and so as a group we need to decide how to best move forward which can be very time consuming. Also we are students and so I’m not sure how our input will be taken. I’ll keep ya posted!

p.s. about the lack of pictures…I forgot the cable for my camera to be able down load pictures in Canada! Hopefully it will be brought out with the next team members that will arrive from home, in the mean time I will try and copy some of Amanda’s. :)