At the end of Ramadan there is a festival where you go to prayer outside in the morning, eat tons of food, greet a million people, and there's dancing. This is me dancing with the women. In the dance, you stand in a line singing and clapping and when you get to the front you sort of run out towards the drummers and back, booty bump someone, turn around and booty bump the next person, and get back in line. It was a lot of fun.
This was my outfit for the prayer part of the festival and some of the greeting. We decided I should wear the traditional clothing. The dress is actually mine that I had made here, but the scarves are borrowed.
This is the prayer service outside in the morning. Its neat to see everyone praying together and dressed in the beautiful scarves.
Here's the new desk and chair the the District Assembly gave me.
Here's the new bed they gave me too. My counterpart and his friend brought this from the district capital on the back of two bicycles. I wish I could have seen it.
This is me with Cynthia, another fresh volunteer, at the after after party after swearing in. We started at a bar in the next town over and ended in this bar in our training village. It was a great night. And yes, I'm just wearing a two-yard piece of cloth, but it is much more comfy than the dress I had worn to swearing in.
This is my host brother and I at swearing in. My host mom had the dress made for me for the event. Terribly uncomfortable!
This is all the new volunteers going to the Northern Region. Don't we look good in all our ghanaian clothes?
Two of the best outfits at swearing in! Our host parents must have had a blast playing dress-up with us.
This is all the new WatSan volunteers in our glorious Ghana gear.
The Dagbani language group. Clearly the best language group ever!
The first time I wore the dress my mom had made for me was for church. After church, she paraded me around town to show off my beautiful new dress. Towards the end of training my mom would surprise me with random new dresses or skirts to wear. I began to feel a lot like a doll.
There's nothing like waking up early in the morning in an African village and digging a big hole in nasty smelly mud and filling it with rocks! We built a soak-away pit during training and it came out pretty good. Soak-away pits are built under the drain pipes of bathing areas in people's houses and are used to prevent malaria by preventing standing water where mosquitos can breed.
This is a beautiful waterfall we hiked to towards the end of training.
And here are the girls at the waterfall, excited to be doing something fun and not training related.
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