Kumasi

Hi everyone, I have been really really busy since we got here and everything has been wonderful! Last weekend we went to Kumasi. There are about 60 of us on the EAP Program and 4 are going to the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. It is supposed to be a 4 hour bus ride but it took us about 6. There was a lot of drumming and dancing and singing on the bus and the greenery was amazing. It is a lot more jungle like inland. The campus is newer and very beautiful. Legon, my campus has a more colonial, plantation feel. There is an amazing industrial arts and crafts program in Kumasi and we got to see some student work. Driving in Kumasi is crazy. It is a huge city and has the biggest market in West Africa. Everyone uses their horn here all the time so it is kind of funny when there is gridlock and people are yelling and honking and physically moving tro tros out of the way by getting out of their cars and pushing them. Our bus driver is pretty amazing at negotiating the streets. To road to the Kumasi University can only be accessed by going the wrong way down a one way street...but there is always so much traffic it isn't really that dangerous. For dinner I had the best fried chicken and rice I have ever had, and I have had fried chicken and rice everyday so it was really really good.

Saturday is funeral day in Ghana, so you see the majority of people wearing black. Funerals are huge and public to celebrate the dead. Luckily we got to attend one of the biggest ones in Kumasi that day. There were two chiefs there, a village chief and the chief of the whole region. Although the chief invited us to come, it felt strange for so many of us to crash this funeral. Tents were set up to make a rectangle of spectators. All the elders sat in the front row and we went around and shook all of their hands. It was reall facinating to shake the chiefs hand. He was surrounding by elders and teenage boys were holding huge umbrullas over their heads and some where kneeled in front with golden staffs. In the middle there was the memorial of the woman who died and everyone was dancing to the drums and chanting. Then there were fetish priests who were women painted with red. Most of the people were very welcoming and wanted to know why we weren't dancing and taking pictures...so you can see how different is from our funerals. That was definitely one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.

The next day we went Lake Bosumtwi. It was a crater surrounded by mountains in the jungle and it was so beautiful. It is the largest natural lake in Ghana and an old man from the village told us a story of the lake. I could have stayed there forever. Then we went to the craft villages to see a lot of Kente cloth weaving and cloth dying. A small blanket takes at least a couple days to make. There were a lot of amazing sculptures too. I didn't buy anything because I really want to go back there when we aren't a spectacle of 60 Americans. Later that night another chief came to visit us. You can't speak directly with him so one of the student leaders acted as a translator. It was very interesting to hear about his daily life (he has chiefs specifically assigned to keeping his sandals and another one, his underwear). When somebody asked why people have so many children when they can't feed them all (we saw a lot of poverty in the villages, and even kids who were told to sell their siblings to us for 2,000 GC about a little over 2,000 USD) the chief sort of deflected the question and said that he has many wives and that a lot of children come here from Chad. It was really interesting to see how traditional practices mesh with how modern Ghana is, and how the chiefdoms are almost completely sovereign from the state government. The next day we were lucky to tour the Asante King's palace and see him presiding over a tribal court, where a dispute over who was to be the chief of a region was settled.