Valentines Day

Hello everyone. Village life is wonderful. Going into Accra is quite a journey! First you walk the 40 minute trail to the highway. You wait until a tro-tro has room to pick you up. You pay 2500 cedis (about 0.30 USD) for the trip to Kasoa. In Kasoa you change to another tro-tro to Kamiche market in Accra. This one costs about 5000 cedis and takes about 40 minutes.

A tro-tro is an independently owned and run public transportation like a bus. It has a driver and a mate. The mate collects the money and talks to the driver. He also yells out the location the tro-tro is headed so you know which tro-tro to get into. I’ll try to describe the typical tro-tro. You take a mini-van that is about 10 years old. You weld a new door mount that is held onto the new door runner in the ceiling. You then add an extra seat across. You now have a mini-van that seats 4 people across. You sit on this and wait until it is full. Of course there is no air conditioning and everyone has been walking just as you have so we are all hot and sweaty and sitting as close as possible. Children ride free when on their parents’ laps so sometimes there are 6 people in one aisle. It gets better when we drive because you have open windows. However, now your knees are hitting the seat in front of you at every bump in the road of which there are thousands. The ride ends at your destination and you have just traveled from the village to Accra in 1 ¾ hours for less than $1.00!

Last weekend Myrte, Anne-Christien and I went to see the small village where Brother Evans grew up. We had the above ride into Accra followed by another 2 tro-tros for another 1 ½ hours of travel time. Twice I was lucky enough to share my foot space with the spare tire. Brother Evans’ childhood home is in the Eastern Region of Ghana. It is very tropical, green and beautiful. We met his mother and step-father. We saw the home he grew up in; the river where he fetched water as a boy; and the primary and JSS schools he attended. He kept saying how much closer the river is now then when he was a child fetching water. Most people still use the river for both their drinking and bathing water.

The soil there is incredibly rich and everything grows. We saw cocoa trees and the inside of the pod. You can eat the membrane around the cocoa seed. It tastes very good. We also saw a cassava plant harvested. When the cassava tree is about 9 feet tall, it is cut down. At this age it is about 3 or 4 fingers in circumference. It is the root that is harvested and eaten. The farmer then just cuts a 2 foot length of the fallen tree and plants it. Then it takes root and grows. We even saw some cassava wood that was intended to be fire wood in a pile that was sprouting. Amazing for a desert rat like me!

The difference between where we are which is coastal savannah and Evans’ home town which is tropical forest is comparable to the difference between Tucson and Flagstaff HUGE!!! It is amazing that we changed environments so completely in such a small amount of time and distance.

I found out that Stephen and Benjamin are biological brothers so no wonder I was so confused earlier! I sometimes do as my mother did when we were growing up; I look at one child and have to go through the list of names to get to the right one. The kids just laugh at me. (Sound familiar mom?)

Happy Valentines Day to one and all. Myrte and Anne-Christien made valentines cards for all the children last night. Today they will give the cards to the kids after school.