I started teaching a couple of weeks ago at Sanity School. After becoming more familiar with the syllabus, I decided to cut my classes down to teach just Junior High School 1 and 2; which means I am teaching around 65 children- more than enough! The children range from 12 to 17 years in a single class, as they are graded by ability rather than age. To me it seems counter-productive as the older children are embarrassed to be with the younger ones and so contribute less, making the situation worse for them. Like always in Ghana, the staff and students struggle to stick to a timetable so start times, break times and lesson lengths are all a little haphazard. But I am enjoying teaching them and they seem to have fun but I am dreading the day when me being a white woman loses its novelty!
After class on Friday I rushed back to Sogakope to put the finishing touches to a surprise birthday party for Yonna at the orphanage. I bought a huge cake- big enough for all the children to have some- and some candles. With Yonna totally oblivious, we went round at 7pm and were welcomed by an elongated version of happy birthday sung by the children and lots of Christian songs too. I had also arranged for the kids to make birthday cards so we gave them all to Jonny and he had a great time. The kids were pretty happy with the cake too! Some of the kids stood up to give Jonny special birthday wishes and Agnes, who runs the orphanage, gave a long speech about how I must not leave Jonny and when he’s bad I have to forgive him and when he’s good I have to praise him. There were no such rules for Yonna but we were made to promise if we got married we would hold the ceremony in Ghana!
After another dramatic football match on Saturday for Jonny’s team, we packed and prepared for our exciting birthday trip up to the North. We left very early on Sunday and took a tro-tro through Accra and to Kumasi. Kumasi is the capital for the Ashanti people, the ruling tribe, and so is quite a big city but much, much nicer than Accra. We got there after an 8 hour journey and set off from our hotel in search of some nice food after repetitive yam and vegetable sauce for what felt like weeks at home. We hit the jackpot when we found out there is a large Chinese population in Kumasi and went to a Chinese restaurant. It was the best won-ton soup I have ever had in my life and I can’t explain how good it was to have some tasty food! We ate until we felt sick (as is customary with Chinese food isn’t it!?) and then went back to the hotel to sleep before some sight-seeing and the next leg of our journey.
The next day we went to the fort in Kumasi which doubles as an armed forces museum. It was fascinating and housed weapons seized by Ghanaian forces in the Abyssinian conflict with Italy, fighting the Japanese in Burma, the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars and the war in Rwanda. They really have amazing artefacts there, including flags won from opposing armies, photos of the British colonial rulers and photos from the First World War. It was very upsetting to see the crude weapons used in the Rwandan genocide and brought all the stories I have heard first hand, horribly to life. It had never occurred to me that, under British rule and after independence, the Ghanaian armed forces fought beside the British in the above conflicts and the world wars. It was therefore especially difficult to hear that when Ghana wanted independence, we resisted and from that same fort, fired upon protestors and Ashanti leaders trying to gain what was rightfully theirs.
We then walked to a sacred Ashanti site in the centre of town. A famous and powerful Ashanti fetish priest is said to have laid a sword in the stone in the centre of Kumasi 300 years ago. The legend states that when the one comes who can remove the sword, the power of the Ashanti will be destroyed and they will no longer rule. The guide told us that they allowed Mohammed Ali to try and pull out the sword but was less impressed by our requests and suggestions that we thought we could do it. He said that if we tried, we would surely be killed. So we left that one alone....
We took our next bus the same day and after a relatively short drive, arrived in Kintampo. The hotel we planned to stay in had a power cut in the stormy weather that circled above us, so we were given two candles and shown to our room. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant and watched an awesome lightning storm in the distant night sky. Without electricity and therefore no fan, the night was hot and restless. This was added to by a kitten crying constantly by our window, talking through the night and finally the Muslim call to prayer in the early hours. After much fighting we agreed with the hotelier that we would not be paying the full rate and left for Kintampo waterfalls. We saw the falls early so were the only people there and the spray from the falls was a nice early morning shower to wake us up.
We then started our great journey to Mole national park. We took a tro-tro to Tamale, which took around 3 hours including a breakdown. The bus in Tamale was packed full of people and luggage with an extra ten or so fold down seats in the middle row so they could pack on yet more people. We waited in the bus for around 2 hours before everyone had come to board the bus and the driver decided to come and drive it- we were pretty tired and frustrated at this point. Little did we know what we had ahead of us...Many roads in Ghana are very bad- pot holes, dust, water logged, but the road to Mole national park was the worst I have seen and is infamous for breakdowns and lorries and buses tipping over. I was pretty apprehensive to say the least- we had 5 and a half hours and pretty much non-stop bumps. There were a few times that my heart stopped when we were close to tipping over or getting stuck in a massive puddle in the middle of nowhere. Plus having got up at 6am that morning, it was like sleep deprivation torture to not be able to get any rest on the bumpy journey. But we made it alive to the village just outside the park and commissioned a taxi driver to take us into the park. If I thought the previous journey was bad, this was insane. The taxi driver clearly thought he was a rally driver and took the potholes and mounds at a cool 60mph in a normal saloon car. It was quite fun until we hit a mound of rocks so hard the car came to a stop and he got out to check his bonnet was still in one piece. He decided it was fine and carried in the same manner until reaching an owl in the road. Jonny and I were thrilled to see an amazing night bird and then the driver sped up towards and clipped its wings, narrowly missing a kill! We were pretty shocked and later understood that the owl is a cursed bird according to Voodoo beliefs so the locals kill them when they get the chance. We finally arrived at Mole Motel at around 8pm (a 14 hour-ish journey all in all), having had to pay an entrance fee each to the park and a fee for the taxi and its driver. Ghana has not quite embraced the idea of tourism yet- to say Mole is probably the number one potential tourist attraction in Ghana, the road is almost impassable and the fees they charge are a racquet.
The light of the next morning, however, made us forget all our niggles and the discomfort of the previous day. We opened the door to our balcony and saw that we were situated on a cliff front looking over thousands of acres of forested park land and a watering hole just below the cliff. It was a breathtaking view and also Jonny’s birthday! We woke up early enough to do presents and cards before we went on our walking safari. I had successfully carried and kept hidden gifts and cards from Jonny’s family, which he was really happy to receive. We set off on our early morning safari with an armed park ranger and me in very fetching wellies. The ranger told us time and time again that a safari was ‘a game of chance’ in order to ease our disappointment if we didn’t see anything. But luck was on our side when we saw a group of baboons and monkeys and then turned round to see a family of elephants leading the way to the watering hole. We climbed down the cliff and past the watering hole to the grasslands where we saw a heard of elephants, with two babies, munching away on trees and vegetation. It was incredible and added to by spotting three types of antelopes too. We were happy with that alone but got an extra treat when we returned to the hotel and watched two elephants bathing in the watering hole just below our balcony. I never knew that elephants are actually quite a dark black and that it is only the mud they roll in that makes them grey! We did some swimming ourselves in the clean pool and had a nice birthday dinner and drinks.
We had to catch the bus at 4am the next morning and I will not go into the return journey again. Suffice to say it was just as bad and sleep deprived on the way back. We finally reached Kumasi 14 hours later and rewarded ourselves with another Chinese at the same place (it was that good!). All we had left to do the next day was an 11 hour bus journey back to Sogakope, but we did do a lot of it in an air conditioned bus as I think we had both reached our breaking point with rattling old buses!
Today I happily started my teaching again but having witnessed some of the pupils getting severely caned, I have requested a meeting with the headmaster and the staff to think of alternatives to corporal punishment in the school. I understand it is a cultural difference but I can’t help thinking there are better ways to discipline- violence breeds violence and all that. It is something that has been upsetting me for some time in Ghana as I have seen it a few times now, so I have my arguments pretty much ready and am having to learn parts of the Bible to support my argument and be able to counter theirs that they base on the Bible! Wish me luck!
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