Good Friday

Just like at home, we have a four day weekend for Easter this weekend. We had to go to Kumasi, a big city about 2 hours away to meet with a Canadian lady working on another CIDA project that we may be able to collaborate with, so decided to get out of Sunyani on Friday to meet with Cassandra. One of our team mates with the project, Vincent, is from Kumasi and was heading home to see family anyway, so we decided to all go together and then he would get us to a tro-tro (mini-van sized bus) in the evening back to Sunyani.

So we arranged to meet with Cassandra in the morning at the Cultural Arts Centre, and kill two birds with one stone (which is really a terrible saying when you think about it!). We had a great meeting with Cassandra who is from Bow Valley College in Calgary, which has a few international projects going on, but that I was shocked to find out has no students working on any of them! She said she is trying to change that, but isn’t really sure how to make it work yet. I tried to really get across to her the benefits of having students working on projects, as we three students sat across from her all telling her about our learning and involvement with this project. I think she was really surprised and impressed when we told her how Malaspina University-College has really taken a great stance on their undergrad student involvement in projects.

Then we had a wander around the Cultural Arts Centre which was pretty quiet as it was a holiday, but it had some interesting crafts and what not to check out. After that we went to see the famous sword that is stuck in a stone (kind of like Excaliber!). The story tells that a man came to see the Ashanti King (one of the main tribes in Ghana) and commanded this sword down from the heavens saying that when the sword was taken out of the stone it would be the end of peace in the Ashanti Kingdom. The sword has been there for more than 300 years. It was pretty cool. Apparently many people have tried their strength at pulling out the sword with no luck, even Mohammed Ali when he visited Ghana many years ago.

We then went to visit some of Vincent’s family. First we went to his cousin’s house to see their baby, who is their first born, a little boy about 11 month old. Very cute! They also brought us a huge plate of rice, pasta and stew to eat, as it is custom to always feed your guests when they come to visit regardless of the time of day, or if they have already eaten. Did I mention that we had a big plate of fried rice for breakfast with Cassandra?! Vincent tried to warn us that there would be food at our stop, but we were so hungry at breakfast that we had already eaten quite a bit. Anyway we managed to eat most of the food at his cousin’s house, although I was seriously struggling with the last few bites. Then we went to some friends of the family’s house who is like Vincent’s second mom, and guess what!? There was MORE food!! A whole table full! And she told us we had better clean the table because if we didn’t it meant that the food wasn’t very good! Talk about pressure! I was SO full, and was struggling so badly that when the hostess left the room I started laughing so hard I was crying! …which didn’t help my very full tummy! We most definitely did not clean the table although we tried hard to get Vincent to eat more so it didn’t look so bad, but we did have a nice visit. We are going back there next weekend and will stay with them for the weekend which will be great.

The last stop before heading back to Sunyani was at Vincent’s mom’s house which is in an area called the Zongo. Many communities in Ghana have a Zongo area which is the poor part of the community. A building is built around an open courtyard with rooms that open onto the courtyard. These building are then homes to many people potentially from all areas of Ghana. Neighbours will cook, clean, and do laundry together in the courtyard of this newly formed community of housemates…for lack of a better word. A Zongo can be a quite large community or area of a town or city. We were warmly welcomed by his mom and all the other ladies that were around the courtyard. We had begged Vincent prior to arriving to let his mom know that we didn’t need to eat again! We actually did have to leave fairly quickly, so there wouldn’t have been time to eat, much to her disappointment, but we promised to return next weekend when we go to visit again. We’ll be better prepared for the whole eating at EVERY stop next time!