Came across this article by chance the other day. Given our time in Ghana it raises some interesting points. Still not sure what to think. Cross Cultural Solutions gets held up as an organization that does it right but having spent four weeks volunteering with them I'm not sure I agree with everything the article says about them and what they achieve. I think I still need a bit more time and distance to sort out the complicated nature of volunteering in the developing world...
Here's the link and I'll let people think about the issue for themselves...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/19/mixing-luxury-vacations-with-charity-work-can-harm-as-much-as-it-helps/
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
Family traveling
One of the things we haven't talked about explicitly are some of the challenges of traveling as a family unit for eleven weeks. Overall, I think it's gone better than we expected given that tore ourselves away from our routine, our friends and most of our familiar comforts. This is difficult for myself as an adult to do; I can only imagine how infinitely more difficult it is for a seven year-old.
As I write this Sylvie is coloring and cutting things out in the living room of our rented gite here in Saumur. It's quite tranquil and relaxing. It also stands in stark contract to 8 hours ago as we tried to rebraid her hair. Braiding Sylvie's hair is always a challenge (she has a part of her scalp that is very sensitive and at seven is still learning to control her impulses and emotions...) but I think all the anxiety she has been experiencing but not necessarily voicing came out today. We were sure that the police were going to show up and charge us with child abuse -- I was more than a little concerned that my French was not going to be at a sufficient level to defend myself in court!
(As an aside, we couldn't help but think about a story that my uncle told us about washing my cousin's hair in the kitchen sink of a walk up apartment in Mechanicsville. She was screaming blue murder and there was a knock at the door and when my uncle answers it all he sees is the uniform and badge of Ottawa's finest. While trying to figure out how to explain the screaming (hers) and the swearing (his), he doesn't realize that the cop is his friend stopping by after shift for a beer...)
Spending almost all our time together and having to change hats throughout the day (good cop, bad cop, teacher, comforter, taskmaster, etc) all while accepting our all-too-human shortcomings is challenging. Some high (and low) points croons the trip so far:
After all sharing one room with four bunk beds we spent the last 10 days in Ghana all three of us sharing one bed. Sometimes it was a queen, at least one night it was a double and on a few occasions it was two twin beds pushed together with the blanket rolled up to fill in the crack between the two beds. Our family doesn't have a great history sleeping in such close quarters and we were worried we'd end up hating each other every morning, sleep-deprived and delirious. The opposite happened, though. We seemed to get along (perhaps because we had no choice, unlike home when there is always another bed) and found a way to sleep cooperatively.
Besides hair braiding, mornings when we have to adhere to an early start (usually to catch a plane, or some other form of transportation) tend to be a flashpoint for everyone. My favorite moment was 4:45 am in our hotel room in Crawley UK as we are trying to get out to catch the airporter to Gatwick and after I've just tied up Sylvie's shoes, she kicks them off because theyA're too loose. I'd like to say that I was calm and rational and explained about the right tension for shoe laces on size one shoes, but alas that did not come to pass. There were many tears and probably not a few people in neighbouring rooms who were awakened to my poor parenting. Since we have switched to traveling by train we've tried to find schedules that fit us better. We leave on Thursday for Paris at 12:15 and not 8:30 for that reason.
The room we had in Poitier was one of the coziest so far. We had a double bed to ourselves, with just enough room at the end for the door to hallway to open. Had flat screen TVs not been invented there wouldn't have been a TV in the room. There was a little desk and a little bench (overwhelmed with our luggage) and a very cleverly designed bathroom. With all the floor space used they had no choice but to build up: Sylvie's twin bed came out like a bunk above our heads. On our first morning she used it as a launching point to wake us up... After a week of low ceilings and close quarters on the canal boat, we were ready and managed just fine for two days, until trying to fit in a little school work before catching our train...
School work is definitely a challenge for families who are together all the time (I can definitely see why most parents like the system of public education we have: putting some distance between you and your child(ren) while they get educated is good for everyone's mental health!). Although we're nine or so weeks in it doesn't feel like we yet established a routine that works for school work; there is still far too much emphasis on the work part. Perhaps with some time off from each other we might be more patient, but maybe not. We've tried to make used of having two teachers and letting the other take over when she's exhausted the first. It's funny how nothing in my training as a teacher or my 10 years of hands on experience has prepared me for teaching my own kid (who, it must be said, knows how to push my bottoms as well as any 2P class).
I worry a little that along with all the good that's coming from spending this much time as a family, that rer-adjustment to our regular life will be difficult. More and more Sylvie is reluctant to play with kids at the parks we go to (we have to drag her away from the parks in Ottawa) and to even let mom and dad out of sight (I suggested that her and my mother -- her Moma -- could do an activity on their own tomorrow and she insisted it was all four of us or not at all). Her way of coping with all the change that comes with traveling is to nest (hole up in our rented quarters and do arts and crafts) which is ok, I guess (Alice and I were talking about the trips she went on as a kid with her parents to her father's traffic signal conferences and how her fondest memories are of the many hotel pools she swam in -- she's still turned out to be adventuresome in spite of her desire to stay close to those places she finds comfortable when traveling as a kid). I just hope that in the long run she will be more likely to want to spread her wings in the future as a result of what she has experienced during these two and a half months.
As I write this Sylvie is coloring and cutting things out in the living room of our rented gite here in Saumur. It's quite tranquil and relaxing. It also stands in stark contract to 8 hours ago as we tried to rebraid her hair. Braiding Sylvie's hair is always a challenge (she has a part of her scalp that is very sensitive and at seven is still learning to control her impulses and emotions...) but I think all the anxiety she has been experiencing but not necessarily voicing came out today. We were sure that the police were going to show up and charge us with child abuse -- I was more than a little concerned that my French was not going to be at a sufficient level to defend myself in court!
(As an aside, we couldn't help but think about a story that my uncle told us about washing my cousin's hair in the kitchen sink of a walk up apartment in Mechanicsville. She was screaming blue murder and there was a knock at the door and when my uncle answers it all he sees is the uniform and badge of Ottawa's finest. While trying to figure out how to explain the screaming (hers) and the swearing (his), he doesn't realize that the cop is his friend stopping by after shift for a beer...)
Spending almost all our time together and having to change hats throughout the day (good cop, bad cop, teacher, comforter, taskmaster, etc) all while accepting our all-too-human shortcomings is challenging. Some high (and low) points croons the trip so far:
After all sharing one room with four bunk beds we spent the last 10 days in Ghana all three of us sharing one bed. Sometimes it was a queen, at least one night it was a double and on a few occasions it was two twin beds pushed together with the blanket rolled up to fill in the crack between the two beds. Our family doesn't have a great history sleeping in such close quarters and we were worried we'd end up hating each other every morning, sleep-deprived and delirious. The opposite happened, though. We seemed to get along (perhaps because we had no choice, unlike home when there is always another bed) and found a way to sleep cooperatively.
Besides hair braiding, mornings when we have to adhere to an early start (usually to catch a plane, or some other form of transportation) tend to be a flashpoint for everyone. My favorite moment was 4:45 am in our hotel room in Crawley UK as we are trying to get out to catch the airporter to Gatwick and after I've just tied up Sylvie's shoes, she kicks them off because theyA're too loose. I'd like to say that I was calm and rational and explained about the right tension for shoe laces on size one shoes, but alas that did not come to pass. There were many tears and probably not a few people in neighbouring rooms who were awakened to my poor parenting. Since we have switched to traveling by train we've tried to find schedules that fit us better. We leave on Thursday for Paris at 12:15 and not 8:30 for that reason.
The room we had in Poitier was one of the coziest so far. We had a double bed to ourselves, with just enough room at the end for the door to hallway to open. Had flat screen TVs not been invented there wouldn't have been a TV in the room. There was a little desk and a little bench (overwhelmed with our luggage) and a very cleverly designed bathroom. With all the floor space used they had no choice but to build up: Sylvie's twin bed came out like a bunk above our heads. On our first morning she used it as a launching point to wake us up... After a week of low ceilings and close quarters on the canal boat, we were ready and managed just fine for two days, until trying to fit in a little school work before catching our train...
School work is definitely a challenge for families who are together all the time (I can definitely see why most parents like the system of public education we have: putting some distance between you and your child(ren) while they get educated is good for everyone's mental health!). Although we're nine or so weeks in it doesn't feel like we yet established a routine that works for school work; there is still far too much emphasis on the work part. Perhaps with some time off from each other we might be more patient, but maybe not. We've tried to make used of having two teachers and letting the other take over when she's exhausted the first. It's funny how nothing in my training as a teacher or my 10 years of hands on experience has prepared me for teaching my own kid (who, it must be said, knows how to push my bottoms as well as any 2P class).
I worry a little that along with all the good that's coming from spending this much time as a family, that rer-adjustment to our regular life will be difficult. More and more Sylvie is reluctant to play with kids at the parks we go to (we have to drag her away from the parks in Ottawa) and to even let mom and dad out of sight (I suggested that her and my mother -- her Moma -- could do an activity on their own tomorrow and she insisted it was all four of us or not at all). Her way of coping with all the change that comes with traveling is to nest (hole up in our rented quarters and do arts and crafts) which is ok, I guess (Alice and I were talking about the trips she went on as a kid with her parents to her father's traffic signal conferences and how her fondest memories are of the many hotel pools she swam in -- she's still turned out to be adventuresome in spite of her desire to stay close to those places she finds comfortable when traveling as a kid). I just hope that in the long run she will be more likely to want to spread her wings in the future as a result of what she has experienced during these two and a half months.
Monday, 22 April 2013
My new obsession
I was not sure what to expect from France. In some ways there have been cultural diffences that I am still trying to get adjusted to. For example shops closing up for some/most of the afternoon I am having a hard time getting used to, as well I had the misconception that France ( and Europe) in general had great public transit. Generally the public transit seems ok, but small town are small towns and the dependence on the privately owned vehicle is paramount in most places. Making getting around the small towns like Saumur and to a lesser degree Agen more difficult then I had imagined. Even finding car rental has been more challenging than expected. I am missing the tro tros and taxis in Ghana that made getting around so logistically easy, albeit sometimes very smushed and never sure if the vehicles were running on more scotch tape and a prayer rather than fossil fuel.
However, there are many many things to love about France and one of these things are the marcarrons. These absolutely delightful two puffs of lightly baked meringue holding a tiny bit of flavoured whipped filling. I have taken on as a bit of a personal and family mission to find the best of these marcarrons, which means a lot of sampling of different bakeries/boulangeries One in Agen ranks quite low, while I thought the ones we had tasted on the boat from a small town south of Agen was in the running of the best marcarrons, but alas we made our way on to Saumur, and there just right around the corner from our apartment, is a little boulangarie with marcarrons that are so light and delicately flavoured. What absolute luck!
However, there are many many things to love about France and one of these things are the marcarrons. These absolutely delightful two puffs of lightly baked meringue holding a tiny bit of flavoured whipped filling. I have taken on as a bit of a personal and family mission to find the best of these marcarrons, which means a lot of sampling of different bakeries/boulangeries One in Agen ranks quite low, while I thought the ones we had tasted on the boat from a small town south of Agen was in the running of the best marcarrons, but alas we made our way on to Saumur, and there just right around the corner from our apartment, is a little boulangarie with marcarrons that are so light and delicately flavoured. What absolute luck!
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Cave visits
Although we don't remember all the reasons we chose Saumur to spend time in -- the Loire valley had a great reputation, the town was not too big and not too small -- one of the things that caught Alice's imagination in what we read was the prevelance of caves in the region.
Some of these are troglodyte caves and people lived in them thousands of years ago. More commonly, these caves are the result of quarrying limestone to build towns like Saumur. Outside of town are two museums that involve caves and we took the opportunity to make the 5 km walk this afternoon. They are among the strangest museums I have visited.
The first is called Pierre et Lumierre. Some years ago a couple of guys (neither of them named Pierre -- it's all about the rocks...) decided that it would be a great idea to used an abandoned cave to house cavings of Loire Valley architecture. For three years the artist worked in these caves carving churches, abbeys, castles and townscaapes -- 20 in all. It sounds like a weird passion (I picture a cross between Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams" -- build it and they will come (to our caves!) -- and Richard Dreyfus carving land formations out of mash potatoes in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). Yet somehow it was considerably more impressive than it sounds. For his depiction of Saumur, for instance, he used the water in the cave to represent the Loire. And the level of detail is quite incredible.
They had a little activity for kids in the courtyard that gave them the chance to do some carving for themselves on a little 5x8 piece of limestone. Sylvie chose to do a rabbit. Once she had the relief carved out the arisan who was helping her told her that she could color it with some chalk. "You can use white or brown," he said showing her the chalk, "or combine some to make grey, like this". That wasn't what she had in mind, though. Watching Sylvie, he eventually conceded that her rabbit could be purple if that was what she wanted. And that it could have a medal around its neck.
The museum next door, also in caves, is devoted entirely to mushrooms. The first half is mushroom specimens on display (there are a helluva lot of mushrooms in the world and seeing them all preserved in polyresin cubes in display case after display case is, frankly, a little overwhelming, especially when you're hunched over in a cave examining them...). The back half of the caves are devoted to growing mushrooms. Caves are as good a place as any to grow mushrooms because as long as the moisture and temperature are within the right range, all is good. The other thing you need, of course, is fertilized manure and again Saumur leads other way because besides caves and castles the area is noted for its equestrian excellence and having a lot of horses in one place leads to a lot of horse -- well you get the idea. Most interesting fact learned while bent over looking a mushrooms: most of the white button mushrooms (the most popular variety in the world, by far) have been crossbred from only 6 or 7 parent mushrooms.
In the gift shop I picked up a bottle of of Shitake beer (Belgian and 9 percent alcohol). It's cooling as we speak. I'll keep you posted on whether it is possible to make good beer out of fungus spores or just beer.
Some of these are troglodyte caves and people lived in them thousands of years ago. More commonly, these caves are the result of quarrying limestone to build towns like Saumur. Outside of town are two museums that involve caves and we took the opportunity to make the 5 km walk this afternoon. They are among the strangest museums I have visited.
The first is called Pierre et Lumierre. Some years ago a couple of guys (neither of them named Pierre -- it's all about the rocks...) decided that it would be a great idea to used an abandoned cave to house cavings of Loire Valley architecture. For three years the artist worked in these caves carving churches, abbeys, castles and townscaapes -- 20 in all. It sounds like a weird passion (I picture a cross between Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams" -- build it and they will come (to our caves!) -- and Richard Dreyfus carving land formations out of mash potatoes in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). Yet somehow it was considerably more impressive than it sounds. For his depiction of Saumur, for instance, he used the water in the cave to represent the Loire. And the level of detail is quite incredible.
They had a little activity for kids in the courtyard that gave them the chance to do some carving for themselves on a little 5x8 piece of limestone. Sylvie chose to do a rabbit. Once she had the relief carved out the arisan who was helping her told her that she could color it with some chalk. "You can use white or brown," he said showing her the chalk, "or combine some to make grey, like this". That wasn't what she had in mind, though. Watching Sylvie, he eventually conceded that her rabbit could be purple if that was what she wanted. And that it could have a medal around its neck.
The museum next door, also in caves, is devoted entirely to mushrooms. The first half is mushroom specimens on display (there are a helluva lot of mushrooms in the world and seeing them all preserved in polyresin cubes in display case after display case is, frankly, a little overwhelming, especially when you're hunched over in a cave examining them...). The back half of the caves are devoted to growing mushrooms. Caves are as good a place as any to grow mushrooms because as long as the moisture and temperature are within the right range, all is good. The other thing you need, of course, is fertilized manure and again Saumur leads other way because besides caves and castles the area is noted for its equestrian excellence and having a lot of horses in one place leads to a lot of horse -- well you get the idea. Most interesting fact learned while bent over looking a mushrooms: most of the white button mushrooms (the most popular variety in the world, by far) have been crossbred from only 6 or 7 parent mushrooms.
In the gift shop I picked up a bottle of of Shitake beer (Belgian and 9 percent alcohol). It's cooling as we speak. I'll keep you posted on whether it is possible to make good beer out of fungus spores or just beer.
Saturday, 20 April 2013
Back online!
After a long absence we are back ( though we have probably lost most of our loyal readers during our time in the virtual wilderness...)
One of the most obvious differences between traveling in 2013 as compared to 2001 or during the 1990s is how much the Internet and smart phones have changed the landscape in innumerable ways. I talked briefly before about how easy (and cheap) it was to get a cell phone in Ghana. As handy as it was (it is always hard to know for sure, but I think that parts of our trip there would have been impossible without it; for example because credit card use is so minimal in the country most hotel reservations all require a phone -- if you don't show or are late they call and if they can't get in touch they'll give your room away) it was not a smart phone.
We came to realize that even in the developing world it's a smart phone/tablet landscape that travelers have to navigate. There was Wi-fi almost everywhere we went and stayed. By contrast the number of Internet cafes and other means people used to rely on are falling by the wayside.
We had consciously decided to leave our iPod Touch and iPad in Canada and use our 11 weeks to unplug. During the first month of our trip we coped by borrowing all the other volunteers' devices and making use of the Wi-fi at the house. Later we kept in touch with some with our phone but stopped being able to write easily on the blog or Facebook.
We thought that it would be easier in Europe but that hasn't proven to be the case. The half hours at the library in England weren't enough to write anything meaningful. We had free Internet in Poitiers but again time limits and a crazy keyboard (what could the French have against QWERTY? Maybe it's an EU regulation) made posting difficult.
Apple's value was really made clear to us on our last day in Agen; Alice's brother and his wife both has their phones with them and we used them and the hotel's Wi-fi to plan the next part of our trip. We also used the phone to send an e-mail to my mother who was getting ready to come and meet us: "please bring the iPad!" It has made figuring things out here in Samur so much easier.
It's also made posting the blog a lot easier again. We'll try and be a little more regular, but I must warn you that the weather has been fantastic and given the choice between sitting in the living room of our rented gite and enjoying cafe and a pain au raisin on a sidewalk patio, modern communication and the internet will still finish second... :)
One of the most obvious differences between traveling in 2013 as compared to 2001 or during the 1990s is how much the Internet and smart phones have changed the landscape in innumerable ways. I talked briefly before about how easy (and cheap) it was to get a cell phone in Ghana. As handy as it was (it is always hard to know for sure, but I think that parts of our trip there would have been impossible without it; for example because credit card use is so minimal in the country most hotel reservations all require a phone -- if you don't show or are late they call and if they can't get in touch they'll give your room away) it was not a smart phone.
We came to realize that even in the developing world it's a smart phone/tablet landscape that travelers have to navigate. There was Wi-fi almost everywhere we went and stayed. By contrast the number of Internet cafes and other means people used to rely on are falling by the wayside.
We had consciously decided to leave our iPod Touch and iPad in Canada and use our 11 weeks to unplug. During the first month of our trip we coped by borrowing all the other volunteers' devices and making use of the Wi-fi at the house. Later we kept in touch with some with our phone but stopped being able to write easily on the blog or Facebook.
We thought that it would be easier in Europe but that hasn't proven to be the case. The half hours at the library in England weren't enough to write anything meaningful. We had free Internet in Poitiers but again time limits and a crazy keyboard (what could the French have against QWERTY? Maybe it's an EU regulation) made posting difficult.
Apple's value was really made clear to us on our last day in Agen; Alice's brother and his wife both has their phones with them and we used them and the hotel's Wi-fi to plan the next part of our trip. We also used the phone to send an e-mail to my mother who was getting ready to come and meet us: "please bring the iPad!" It has made figuring things out here in Samur so much easier.
It's also made posting the blog a lot easier again. We'll try and be a little more regular, but I must warn you that the weather has been fantastic and given the choice between sitting in the living room of our rented gite and enjoying cafe and a pain au raisin on a sidewalk patio, modern communication and the internet will still finish second... :)
Friday, 5 April 2013
Out of Ghana ...and into the cold!
We're into stage two of our trip. As I write this we're in Crawley England (just outside of London near Gatwick airport). In the strange world that is modern travel, it was less expensive to fly from Amsterdam to London, hang out here for a couple of days and then fly on to southern France for the next leg of our journey.
There is so much that we saw and did and felt in our last ten days in Ghana that we wanted to write about that one blog entry won't do justice to, but I don't know how much time we're going to have to write in the next couple of days (if we were to make one pre-trip change we definitely would have brought an iPod or iPad with us -- everywhere, even in Africa -- has WiFi and it would have made staying in touch a lot easier...); we're going to take the train into London proper tomorrow and then we fly out early on Sunday morning. I'll do my best to capture some of the high (and low) of the week and half we spent travelling around Ghana and then if we have more time and access in the days to come we'll try to expand on some of them in longer entries.
Once we were done our placement in Hohoe (we will definitely have to write about the last day at the school -- we made paper airplanes with the kids and played games with balloons; it felt like we actually added a tiny little bit to the KG class's education, but it also felt like it was time to move on) we travelled back to the capital Accra. We had made arrangements to stay at Hotel Obama (as you might expect, the first black president -- with African roots, even if they are in east Africa -- is very big in Ghana; one of the larger and fancier drinking establishments in Hohoe was called Obama Gardens) but we learned upon arriving at the hotel (after a great deal of difficulty) that they had fudged their location on Google maps and were nowhere near the airport as the map had suggested. One of the other volunteers still had to be dropped off at her hotel so we went with her and got a room there. Coconut Grove was very much the lap of luxury, after a month in Hohoe, but you paid for it. An airport shuttle was inlcuded, and we got up bright and early the next morning to catch a plane to Tamale in northern Ghana.
Tamale is where Alice worked 11 years ago. I will let her write more about the city then and now, but suffice to say it's changed a lot in a decade. It's gone from a somewhat sleepy city of half a million to a booming metropolis of 1.4 million. It was not the city that Alice remembered -- it was considerably larger, busier and nosier. It's hard to put into words what an African city feels like for people who haven't been, but the three of us found Tamale overwhelming, even with our month-long experience in Hohoe (which, for comparison sake, is much smaller at only about 50,000). The traffic feels like it's everywhere, taxis moving all around, honking, brakes squeaking as well as cars and truck pulled up here, there and everywhere on the sides of the roads and on the sidewalks; people are everywhere as well, selling, sitting, bartering, walking.
One of the reasons for the boom in the city, we were told, was the war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire; much of the traffic that travelled through there -- mostly trucks with goods for the contries that lie inland -- now travel through Ghana and specifically through Tamale. Tamale was the only time we were approached by aggressive panhandlers and Alice's friend Coleman told us that most of these people had been displaced from places like Cote d'Ivoire and Mali.
Still, it was very nice to picked up at the airport by someone we knew and ferried into a town that Alice knew (at least a past incarnation of it anyway). Coleman had made arrangements for us to stay at a guest house close to his house.
My time on the library computer is about to run out so I'll sign off for now and try to write more later.
There is so much that we saw and did and felt in our last ten days in Ghana that we wanted to write about that one blog entry won't do justice to, but I don't know how much time we're going to have to write in the next couple of days (if we were to make one pre-trip change we definitely would have brought an iPod or iPad with us -- everywhere, even in Africa -- has WiFi and it would have made staying in touch a lot easier...); we're going to take the train into London proper tomorrow and then we fly out early on Sunday morning. I'll do my best to capture some of the high (and low) of the week and half we spent travelling around Ghana and then if we have more time and access in the days to come we'll try to expand on some of them in longer entries.
Once we were done our placement in Hohoe (we will definitely have to write about the last day at the school -- we made paper airplanes with the kids and played games with balloons; it felt like we actually added a tiny little bit to the KG class's education, but it also felt like it was time to move on) we travelled back to the capital Accra. We had made arrangements to stay at Hotel Obama (as you might expect, the first black president -- with African roots, even if they are in east Africa -- is very big in Ghana; one of the larger and fancier drinking establishments in Hohoe was called Obama Gardens) but we learned upon arriving at the hotel (after a great deal of difficulty) that they had fudged their location on Google maps and were nowhere near the airport as the map had suggested. One of the other volunteers still had to be dropped off at her hotel so we went with her and got a room there. Coconut Grove was very much the lap of luxury, after a month in Hohoe, but you paid for it. An airport shuttle was inlcuded, and we got up bright and early the next morning to catch a plane to Tamale in northern Ghana.
Tamale is where Alice worked 11 years ago. I will let her write more about the city then and now, but suffice to say it's changed a lot in a decade. It's gone from a somewhat sleepy city of half a million to a booming metropolis of 1.4 million. It was not the city that Alice remembered -- it was considerably larger, busier and nosier. It's hard to put into words what an African city feels like for people who haven't been, but the three of us found Tamale overwhelming, even with our month-long experience in Hohoe (which, for comparison sake, is much smaller at only about 50,000). The traffic feels like it's everywhere, taxis moving all around, honking, brakes squeaking as well as cars and truck pulled up here, there and everywhere on the sides of the roads and on the sidewalks; people are everywhere as well, selling, sitting, bartering, walking.
One of the reasons for the boom in the city, we were told, was the war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire; much of the traffic that travelled through there -- mostly trucks with goods for the contries that lie inland -- now travel through Ghana and specifically through Tamale. Tamale was the only time we were approached by aggressive panhandlers and Alice's friend Coleman told us that most of these people had been displaced from places like Cote d'Ivoire and Mali.
Still, it was very nice to picked up at the airport by someone we knew and ferried into a town that Alice knew (at least a past incarnation of it anyway). Coleman had made arrangements for us to stay at a guest house close to his house.
My time on the library computer is about to run out so I'll sign off for now and try to write more later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)