ahoy

Today Kristin and I are off to a tropical paradise--a beach with the beautiful name of Ada Foah (pronounced "Fo," I think), so remote that there are no roads to it and someone has to take you there on a canoe. It's right between the Volta river delta and the ocean. I'm going to camp there.

My buddy Zach has a photo site to which he has uploaded pix. I think if you scroll around you'll find pictures that look suspiciously like a tropical paradise--that's Ada Foah. He also has pictures of our Obruni House and Kumasi. I need to find a way to upload my photos. yep.

Yesterday Kristin and I went on a marathon shopping trip. We got up pearly early and took a tro-tro (cost: less than $1) (I got to sit in the front--great b/c you can see everything, but also hard not to imagine your gruesome death in a not-too-improbable vehicular collision) to a town called Aburi, about 90 mintues away. Aburi is up in the mountains, and has an incredible view of Accra, which is on flat land near the ocean. And they have a gigantic wood market there, to buy all those African masks that everybody (except me) brings home from Africa. There are lots of other pretty little trinkets there too, and they make them right there, in ramshackle little huts. There were wood shavings everywhere. I cannot understand how they make money, since they all sell basically the same stuff (although I did see a unique giant wooden statute of a Sixers basketballer) and are all clustered together in the same little place. The ones on the road and at the ends of the rows must make the most money. After our wood curio shopping, we had hiked up the road into Aburi proper and had us some lunch--our favorite fried chicken and jollof rice (spicy tomato rice). People in Ghana generally really enjoy playing their stereos very loudly, but this was taken to an extreme in Aburi. We were really hungry and tired, but we had to turn away from a couple of different little restaurants because the music was SO loud. Anyway, the fried chicken was great.

From Aburi, we took a shared taxi (cost: about $1) (shared taxis are taxis that go to and from specific places, and they fill all the way up before they go with the various people who want to go there) about half way to our next destination, the other half done in a tro-tro. Outside a town called Somanya is Cedi's Bead Factory, which has been operated by one family for several generations. To find it, you have to walk about half a mile down a little dirt path, where every once in a while you are reassured by a sign (Cedi Bead Industry: A Place Where Beads Talk) that you are indeed coming to the factory. It's less a factory than beautiful grounds with open air buildings (roof and walls that go half way up--don't ask me what holds up the roof) in which they hang out and make zillions of beads. Mr. Cedi himself gave us a tour of the premises, showing us the five different kinds of beads one can make with recycled glass bottles, how he designs them, fires them, polishes them, and strings them. The tour of the place was just delightful. Everybody was so nice and the grounds so relaxing and the activity so productive and pretty! At the end, we each bought a few strings of beads from the showroom, and then he gave us a another string each for a present. This is easily one of the nicest ways I have spent an hour here. And Mr. Cedi also volunteered a few people to drive us out to the main road, and then, when we told them that we were going to a nearby market, they drove us all the way there! very sweet.

The Agomanya market was our last destination. It's famous for being a bead market (MUCH cheaper than Cedi's) but it has all the other market stuff too, food and fabric, as well as some gigantic ceramic pots (beautiful but too big to take anywhere). Kristin and I went nuts with the bead-buying (and some cloth, too, of course). It was a buying day, for sure--but it was also my day-t0-buy-beads-and-wood-stuff, so I don't think it will be repeated. We were quite exhausted after the bead market, so it was time to go home again home again jiggity jog. From Agomanya we were able to catch a tro-tro straight back to Accra (again in the front seat), and along the way I saw my favorite sign ever. In order to understand it, you have to know that ueenmothers are female chiefs--the British called them Queenmothers, instead of Queens, or just Chiefs, so that they wouldn't seem to disrupt patriarchy so much (according to somebody at the abortion conference last week). So here it is:

Lover Boys Undertakers: We Take All Corpses, including QueenMothers and Chiefs!

ok, thanks, bye!
anne