Waiting for Mom and Sheryl and Fire Festival

I'm in Tamale now, waiting impatiently for tomorrow morning when my mom and sheryl get here. They arrived safely in Accra and called me from the hotel this morning. I hope they enjoyed their day in Accra and didn't get ripped off too many times for cabs and whatnot. They arrive in Tamale around 7:15 tomorrow morning and I will be at the airport waiting eagerly. Then in the afternoon we will leave for Mole National Park and see the animals. On Monday we'll make our way to my site and stay there for a while. Then we'll make our way south back to Accra, seeing Kumasi on the way. More details will come, I'm sure, but I've changed the plans too many times so far to think they won't change again.

As for my life recently, there was a great festival a couple of days after christmas, well named as the Fire Festival. The history of this festival is that a long time ago the chief's son was lost and the village all went out looking for him at night and carried torches for light. After a long time of searching, they found him up in a tree and they were so excited they had a celebration. So, now every year they have this celebration where the traditionalists sacrifice animals during the day to get "juju" from them that will protect them from any harm. At night, everyone dresses with their juju items and carries torches. They parade down the street with their torches, burning everything and everyone (not badly) on the way, and throw the torches into a tree outside the village. Somehow, the tree does not catch fire and all the grass that catches burns out without spreading to houses or anything. Then, they pick fresh branches from another tree and carry them to the cheif's house and other leaders houses. At those houses, people have made concoctions that they sprinkle/pour on the villagers while the villagers dance and people play the drums. The next day you are supposed to boil water with the leaves from the branch that got concoction on it and bath with that water so that you will be protected for the year. It was a ton of fun and dangerous at the same time.

Before the fire part of the festival, I watched some traditionalists sacrifice chickens for the juju. For the first chicken, they did a chant and cut its throat and dripped the blood onto they're juju items. For the second chicken, they did a chant, cut its throat, and let it flop around to see how it landed. Depending how it landed it may or may not give them juju. However, I think they told the chicken to get me before they killed it because when it was flopping, it kept landing on my feet and when I would hop out of the way it would turn towards me and land on my feet again. I couldn't get away from the thing. So, I had some chicken blood on my feet and leg and had a dying chicken flopping all over me. I think I must have extra juju for that.


Sorry it's a blurry picture, but its hard to get pics of people and fire at night while walking. But this is the parade of people about to throw the torches into the tree.


This is the traditionalists bleeding the chicken onto their juju items.

Off to Ghana for a visit

Sheryl and I are leaving for Accra tomorrow at 4:35pm and should arrive 7:35am on Friday morinig their time. They are 5 hours ahead of us so the trip is about 10 hours. We are Sooooooooo excited and will try to post a couple of time if possible. We will meet up with Julie on Saturday morning in Tamale. Should be interresting, adventurous, exciting, emotional and a great experience. I understand many of the people in the village are going to prepare ghanian food for us. Once again should be interresting. I figure if Julie can eat it I certainly can because she is much more fussy than Sheryl and I. In fact we'll probably like it.
If your reading the blog please comment even to say hi Julie loves to hear from you!!

Merry Christmas Julie

Julie was certainly in our hearts this Christmas we missed her but were also very happy that she is following her dreams!!! Sounds like she and her friends made a very special Christmas for themselves!
Julie made the angel for the tree when in grade school and Paul and I talked and laughed about it, and our memories of the great deal of teasing every year when we place it on the tree. Once again our tree is decoratedwith many memmories and Julie was certainly with us when we did it. Happy New Year to all her followers.

Merry Christmas

Christmas here was obviously much different that at home, but my friends and I still made it a nice Christmas. I didn't feel like the holiday was really coming, being in a Muslim village and all, but on Christmas Eve, a bunch of us came to Tamale to celebrate together. There were 10 of us and we did stockings stuffed with things from packages we received from home and a grab bag gift exchange of cheap gifts. One of the volunteers here, Hannah, is also a very good cook and made a delicious lasagna dinner for all of us. We all sat around the table and had a family style dinner together. We also listened to christmas music and even watched some christmas movies. Overall, it was a pretty good Christmas. I still missed everyone at home and hope you all had a good holiday too!


On another note, I haven't been receiving a lot of letters that people have been sending me, so I am going to revert to the original address I gave people for sending letters. So, send letters to:

Julie Bordua, PCV
Peace Corps Ghana
P.O. Box 5796
Accra-North, Ghana

You can still send packages to either address though.

Life Update

I’m sorry it has been a while since my last entry, but the internet has been down a lot at the Tamale office and I don’t have a lot of patience for slow internet cafés. Things have been going very well though. I did some HIV/AIDS work in the community for a couple of weeks. I taught about the biology of HIV/AIDS and how HIV is transmitted in the junior high school. I did a bunch of condom demonstrations, and we had a testing day where 98 people got tested, which is really good. I was excited that it went so well.

All of the HIV work was in preparation for the testing day and for a film showing that we also had. The girl that I replaced at this site was a videographer and made a film about Kayayo when she was here. Kayayo is a term for when young adults travel to Kumasi or Accra (the big cities) to work in the markets. They do this because there is not much work for them in the north and there is not much money in farming like their families do. In theory it is a good idea, but in practice it can be very dangerous. They live near the markets in very poor areas that have high crime rates and frequent fires that destroy dozens of their homes at a time and often kill people. They also tend to find significant others while they’re there and may come back with an unwanted pregnancy or an STD.

Alicia, the girl I replaced, came to show the film and another RPCV (returned Peace Corps volunteer) who is a photographer, and took photos of Kayayo, came to show his photos with the movie. They also brought a crew of singers/actors to put on a show for the village before the movie. Literally half of my village showed up to the movie and then we had the very successful testing day after. It was a very eventful two days, but the village loved it and I was really happy to see that people here are very willing to work with me.

Another project I am working on is the Village Bicycle Project. This is an organization that gets bikes donated from the US and Britain and fixes them up for people living in poor villages in Africa. They sell them to the villagers at about half the price of a normal bike and have an 8 hour workshop to teach bicycle maintenance. It’s great for the villagers because they can farm in areas farther away and therefore have bigger farms. It also makes life easier in general, considering our closest market is at least a 20 minute bike ride away (if riding fast). It is turning out to be a lot of work already though, and I am just starting it. However, if I successfully do this, I think my village will love me forever.

Outside of work stuff, I went to Accra for Thanksgiving, along with about 70 other volunteers. The US Ambassador invited all of us to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was incredibly generous of him and a delicious dinner. We had all the traditional Thanksgiving foods, along with an open bar with beer and wine (and sangria that the Ambassador kept making). He also let us swim in his pool before the dinner. He also invited some people who work at the embassy and Fulbright scholars that are working here.

The peace corps was great about getting accommodations for us when we went there, too. We were all hosted by Peace Corps or embassy workers. I ended up staying with an embassy worker who I have a connection with from home (not by coincidence, I called him on my way down). It turns out that my pediatrician’s son works at the embassy, and since my mom is a labor and delivery nurse, she is still friends with my pediatrician. So, she got his contact information for me and I called him to say I would be in Accra. He offered to let me stay with his family at their house, which is gorgeous, and they were wonderful to me the whole time. I was worried that I would be sad to be away from my family on Thanksgiving, but it was actually a great holiday.

That’s it for my update, but I have heard that people also want to know what I would like for Christmas packages. People have done really well with sending good packages so far, but here’s what I can think of off the top of my head:
Candy (chocolate especially), cookies (not homemade, they don’t travel as well), parmesan cheese, mac-n-cheese packets, drink mixes, snack foods, spices, any food items you think will travel well, photos of all of you, news magazines (not celebrity gossip), and random surprises are always good.

Pictures

These are in reverse chronological order (oops), but I guess that goes with the layout of the blog.


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.

Starting Work

Sorry it has been so long since I last updated, I haven't been on the internet in a while. I'm in Tamale now to use the computers for some work and finally give you all an update. Its been so long that I don't actually know what to write. I guess I'll start by ending my stories from last time...

For the stove, the manager was very nice and had someone repair it for me the day I brought it in. When I picked it up, he said there was dirt blocking the gas flow and that it was fixed. However, at site it worked that night and stopped working completely after. So, after having about 5 men from my village trying to diagnose and fix the problem for two days, we decided the regulator was the problem and I had to come back to Tamale. I made it a quick day trip, and the man who sold it to me remembered me and gave me a replacement no problem. I went back, and finally, my stove was working properly. I've been cooking fairly good meals ever since, and even some very good ones (by my standards).

As for my bed, it also finally arrived. My counterpart and his friend rode two bicycles to the district capital about an hour bike ride away and brought back the bed frame and mattress on the bicycles. Unfortunately, I was not at my house when they got back to see their amazing maneuvering to manage that, but I'm very impressed and happy that they did it for me. The bed is very nice and they also gave me a new desk and chair the next day. I think I have nicer furniture than most PCVs.

Also, my birthday was almost two weeks ago, so I am now the old age of 24. The weekend before my birthday two of my PCV friends came to visit my site to celebrate with me. It was nice to have people visit and my village loved it. We didn't do much celebrating, since there is not much to do at my site, but we hung out and played cards and enjoyed each others company. I also made them my favorite meal so far, which is spaghetti with meat sauce (the meat is canned corn beef, but I swear it's really good). However, while there, they ruined my reputation of being good at Dagbani. They are both more outgoing than I am, so they love to be loud and talk a lot, whereas I like to listen more and talk when I know I'll say something right. So, when we were greeting everyone, it was decided that I don't understand dagbani but my friends do. I expected this and was prepared, and within a day or two, everyone forgot, but it was funny at the time. However, I told them they aren't invited back until I'm fluent, haha. My language skills are actually coming along though, and I think I might ask one of the teachers to tutor me.

Ghanaians do not celebrate birthdays because they don't usually know when they were born. So, my actual birthday was very uneventful, just another day. I got a lot of phone calls and texts from home though, so that was nice. I explained birthdays to my counterpart, but he still didn't really get why we celebrate them.

Other than that, I finally started doing actual work. I started my census of the community. So, I've been going house to house asking how many people live there, what their most common health problems are, if they have a toilet, if they have mosquito nets, where they get their water and if they filter, and if they know about family planning. I'm going to use this information to find out where to focus my work. So far, it seems they need everything, so I'm still not sure exactly where I'll start, but there certainly won't be a shortage of projects. This takes up about 3 hours everyday, which is nice. I also like it because I am really meeting everyone now.

Hmm, I also met with the guinea worm volunteers in my community. They are very nice and eager to work with me. This was a good meeting for me to go to because I learned who to go to for organizing the women, which seems like it will be difficult. The women are ridiculously busy everyday since they do like 90% of the work.

Other random stuff... I rearranged and cleaned my kitchen and covered the hole the mice use to enter. However, they made another hole and forced me to start using the poison. I've killed two so far, and hope there are no more. This country is also increasing my hatred of bugs, but they seem to love me. The rainy season is dying down, which makes me sad, so it's starting to get hotter. Harmattan is coming though, which is supposedly the coolest season of the year. So cold that "people won't even leave their house. Sometimes they'll even be inside until 9:30" and "you'll have to wear a pullover". These things make me laugh, like I do when the ghanaians are shivering and wearing coats when it rains and I'm comfortable in shorts and a t-shirt.

And now for the closing dagbani lesson, a conversation with me that ghanaians think is hilarious:
A: I'm cold: "Wari malima"
A: Are you cold: "Wari maliaa?"
B: No, I'm not cold: "Aayi, wari bi malima"
B: I like the cold a lot: "M borila wari pam!"