Fabulous!

I am so backlogged on blogging. I have so many more things to write about, and I keep putting them off because my choices are - 1) go out and have amazing times that are worth writing about, and 2) write about my amazing times. But ok, right now I'm gonna really take some time. Until I go to the beach :)

As promised, I'm going to work back through time. Right now, I'll talk about what I did exactly a week ago. On Sunday July 5th, we woke up too late to go to church, so we took an easy morning. Not much is open on Sunday because it truly is a day of rest. That's always slightly frustrating, though, because it's hard to find food to eat on a Sunday. However, there is another Ghanaian Sunday ritual in which we decided to partake that day. This, my friends, is the ritual of football.

Just as a note, football is not the same thing as American football. Ghanaians play the football that you actually play with your feet. We silly people know it better as soccer.

Every Sunday, there is a football game at the Accra stadium downtown. The stadium is about a 30 minute drive from the Telecentre, and it's a cool place. There are two tiers of seats - the top one is painted red, the lower is painted yellow, and of course the field is green. If you are perceptive, you realize that this turns the whole stadium into one big Ghanaian flag: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana. It looks great.

Last Sunday, we went to a football game. The two teams were Asante Kotoko (a club team from Kumasi whose mascot is the porcupine) and Liberty Professional (a pro team from Accra). It seems like Ghanaians are much more into club football than professional, because the Kotoko fans came out in swarms! We decided to root for Kotoko too because we figured they were the underdog being a club team playing a pro team and because the Kotoko fans thought it has a hoot that the obrunnis were wearing Kotoko hats and had Kotoko flags around their necks.

I bought a really crappy quality Kotoko flag to wear around my neck, and it the best-spend Cedi of my entire life. Accra is just filled with Kotoko fans, and on our way home from the game, we have so many friendly people holler at us about the team that we obviously mutually supported. People hanging out of car windows would yell "Kotoko!" or "Asante Kotoko, the best!" or "Fabulous!" (the team's motto) out their windows, and I got a free mango on the street because the vendor was a huge Kotoko fan who taught me his Kotoko chant. It was amazing - wearing Kotoko gear made us an instant favorite as we walked home from the game.

The game itself was nuts. Kotoko scored the first two goals, then Liberty scored three, and finally Kotoko scored one more in the last three seconds to end the game in a tie. Every time Kotoko scored, everyone went bonkers. The men hooped and hollered, jumping up and down and waving all their gear. They trash-talked each other and yelled with wide-eyed enthusiasm. And the Liberty fans sang amazing cheers when Liberty scored. They had full-length songs and ran laps around the stadium. They also brought along drums and drummed along with their cheers.

When we got back to the Telecentre after the game, we learned that about half of the staff of the Telecentre had been at the game as well, and on outreach on Monday we learned that our driver and one of our nurses had been there too. Football is more than a game here, it a phenomenon.