Coming to you from Accra

Eric and I are in Accra, Ghana now. At this very moment Eric is taking the GRE and I am sitting in an internet cafe, with air conditioner, waiting for him to finish. We got here on Monday evening and are leaving tomorrow around 7 am. It's been a good trip and I have to say I'm not looking forward so much to going back to Cotonou. Although it is definitely easier to speak French in Benin than for us to alter our English to speak with people here. Ghanaian english is quite good, but they still say some funny things. We saw some wonderful signs on the road: "Pork show" (a butcher shop), "Evangelical church with bazooka fire" (don't even know what that means), and "Havard Kiddies School" for overachieving youngsters.
I think I mentioned about our last time in Accra (when we flew out to go to South Africa) that it is a bit mind-blowing for us here because it actually feels almost developed, although obviously our perception of what a "developed" city is has been altered by our time in Benin. Coming into Accra is amazing because there are huge houses and hotels and businesses all around, and you drive in on a multi-lane highway! Eric and I are staying at the Salvation Army hostel in Osu, which is a nice neighborhood in Accra. I forgot the SA is Christian so Eric and I have to stay in boy and girl rooms, but otherwise it's cheap and you know it's safe if it's church related...
We've been spending our two days here walking around, going to the market, eating at restaurants (we had real salad yesterday with tomatoes and cheese, not just lettuce with mayonaise dressing like the usual Beninese salad) and guess where we ate dinner- at a pizza restaurant in a FOOD COURT! Meaning fast-food style. It was kind of amazing. Does that mean I will enjoy going to eat in the mall when we get home? Maybe so, but don't judge.
So to conclude, we have really enjoyed our time here in Accra. We have especially liked experiencing a city in West Africa where people seem interested in development in a serious way and take pride in their country and their accomplishments. Whereas in Benin a common refrain is "we'll never do what the West has done, we'll always be behind", what we've seen here indicates that Ghanaians think they can develop and they'll do it there own way.
In other news, we had a very eventful day on Sunday. Our neighbors had invited us to go to a funeral ceremony in a town about forty minutes from our own. The funeral was supposedly for the grandma of one of our neighbors, the one who told us that his father is a big man who owns our house and lots of other property around Benin and West Africa. For this funeral Eric and I had to buy fabric, because everyone who is part of the funeral party has to match to show solidarity with the person who lost a family member. Then we had clothes made to match. The women's outfit was a shirt-vest thing with a skirt made like a Klein bottle, meaning I couldn't figure out how to wear it properly. To make matters worse the taxi we were supposed to go in didn't show so we all had to get on motos, meaning I had to ride in that awful skirt and keep a piece of cloth on my lap so I wouldn't expose my underwear to the world! At one point we had to cross the Couffo river, on a man-made bridge of bamboo and other wood, about thirty feet above the river. The motos had to cross too!
But we got to the ceremony, and it turned out that the ceremony had actually taken place on Saturday but that we were just here to greet and show solidarity (naturally the neighbors were aware of this, but Eric and I, always in the dark, were surprised that we had spent all this money to go greet the family of someone we didn't even know, and not even be in the ceremony!). We all sat down together in the house of the aforementioned big-man (it was his mom who had died- I don't know if that was clear), which Eric and I were surprised to see was not fancy or particularly nice for someone of his supposed wealth and stature. This feeling of surprise and confusion was furthered when we were fed cold akassa (fermented congealed corn mush, one of my most hated dishes in Benin) with hot chilli and cold dried up meat and fish. Now, to give you an idea of why this was dissapointing, akassa costs about 5 cents in the market, and any respectable person would feed their guests at least a tomato sauce with it, not just chilli paste, and at least make it hot! The next course was pate rouge (corn mush with tomatoes and spices- pretty good) and much less dissapointing. We all ate and drank warm beer and nobody was really talking, which is normal because there's not much to talk about. There were two babies and they spent their time scooting around, chewing on chicken bones, taking sips of beer from moms' cups and peeing on the floor.
Finally the big-man (I will call him papa) showed up, and he seemed to be a bit drunk. He made us all sit down with him, Eric and me on the couch next to him. He then talked for about 20 minutes off and on about how great it is that Eric and I are volunteering our time in Benin, and he even made other people tell us how great we are! It was very awkward. He kept asking "true or false?" after everything he said so that we all would have to tell him that yes, he was right about whatever he said. He also made us drink with him and poor Eric, who was really dehydrated, was forced to drink Guiness which is made in Nigeria and has about 8% alcohol. Basically this guy was a total creep and Eric and I both independently came to the conclusion that with more power and money, this guy could most easily be a dictator. He just had that kind of personality. It was really disturbing.
But we did learn some interesting things from spending time with papa. First, our neighbor who told us that papa is his dad seems to have lied to us; it became apparent that, unless papa has lots of illegitimate children including our neighbor, papa didn't seem to know things that a dad would know about his son- who his wife was, who was the elder among him and his sister, etc. Papa did say he has "children everywhere" (a direct quote) but I still doubt our neighbor is his real son. We already though our neighbor was kind of shady, so our suspicion of him is raised even more! We also learned that papa wants to tear down all the buildings in the concession except the one our house is in, so if this actually comes to pass we may not have many neighbors for a long time. Considering all of our electricity problems, that could turn out to be a very good thing! Finally, we learned that papa, although he expressed to us how he would love to give us our house free of rent, is charing the mayor $30 a month for it. This is a LOT of money and we thought it was payed not by the mayor but rather by Eric's school and my NGO. This definitely changes my feeling of obligation to my NGO and now I care even less about working with them.
Well. That was a lot of writing. I hope some of it was interesting. I won't write about work because, well, I haven't really had much. I'm still working on the grant project though...