I'll have to call you back - I'm waist deep in chiefs! (Part 1)

Howdy!

Again, I know it's been a long time since I last wrote, and this time I actually have no excuse. The internet has been working just fine. I just haven't felt like writing. Not that life isn't blog-worthy, but recently I'd just rather read "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in my down time. Please forgive me! I figure that my Saturday was so cool, however, that I have to write about it before it becomes less clear in my memory. And plus, there is nothing to do right now since it's Sunday morning. I can hear at least two different church services going on near the guest house right now, and I know that nearly every Ghanaian is currently in church. I have no excuse not to write.

There are a few distinct groups of volunteers at the guest house right now: those of us who have been here forever, and those who are only here for ten days. There are a surprising number of volunteers who only come for ten days, and I'm still trying to figure out what they are thinking. Are they just here because they want to be able to put Unite for Sight on their resumes? Do they just want to run home to their clean little lives and soon as possible? I just can't understand why they wouldn't want to stay long enough to actually learn to be part of the culture. Well, the ten-day volunteers always feel rushed to see all the touristy stuff on the weekends (waterfalls and slave castles mostly) and those of us that have been here for months have seen these things at least twice already, so we often are at a loss for what to do on the weekends. However, five us of found an amazing thing to do yesterday.

One of our drivers, Bismarck, is from a town called Big Ada (about 2.5 hours out of Accra) and he went home for the weekend for the annual Ada-Asafotufiami festival. The celebration of the festival is in remembrance of the wars for settlement fought by the ancestors of the area. It's a week long celebration, and the stars of the show are the ten chiefs from the different villages of the Dangme East District of the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Bismarck told us that the celebration was a ton of food, music, drinking, well-dressedness, and festivities, and those of us who were sick of tourist spots decided to catch a taxi to Big Ada for the day to get our festival on :)

We hired a taxi driver (a friend of Bismarck's who knows the Ada area well) and agreed to pay him 80 Cedi for the day to get us to Ada and back. That meant that each of the five of us only payed 16 Cedi each (about 10 USD) for the day. I still can't believe how far our dollars go here! However, fitting five us of in a taxi was . . . special. One in the front, four in the back. Kartee, one of the Unite for Sight nurses, calls it "Africa style" when there are four of you in the back of a car. He says there is nothing more quintessentially Ghanaian than having so many people in a vehicle that they all have to partially sit on each other and everyone's legs fall asleep. So, we did the 2.5 hour taxi ride Africa style. Man, it felt good to get out of that cab!

When we got to Ada, the cab just dove into a mob a people! As we approached Ada, every village seemed barren, and Humphrey the cab driver told us that was because everyone had packed up to stay in Ada for the weekend. Nearly everyone in the region was at the festival. In Ada, the streets were flooded with humanity. Our car actually had to gently push people out of the way. I guess when people feel a metal bumper pushing softly on the backs of their calves, they know it's time to scoot. We slowed to a crawl, and getting to the center of town took probably three times as long in the cab as it would if we had just walked.

Humphrey dumped us off right at the center of town and we exchanged phone numbers. Then the five of us - Anna, Jennifer, Lai, Dimas, and me - dove into the crowd. After that rather cramped car ride, we all had to go use the bushes before starting to party, but there were people everywhere! In Ghana, if you are a man, you can pee ANYWHERE, so Dimas and Lai were set. They joined a few other men peeing on a wall out in broad daylight. We ladies, however, had to find a building to go behind, and even then, our cover wasn't great. I think we amused a good number of locals when they saw two silly little white women blushing and pulling down their pants by a small bush. It's just so much easier for Ghanaian women to be discreet - they wear skirts! Smart smart smart.

We got to Ada around 11 AM, and the official ceremonies didn't start until around 2 PM, so we had a while to wander. In the center of town, a huge clearing was surrounded by chairs. The central clearing was probably the size of an entire city block and people were so densely crowded around it that it was really hard to see what was inside. At 11 AM, though, there wasn't much in the center except a few European-looking tourists looking clueless. We meandered around the packed area, bought cokes and fish pies, and people-watched. Everyone was dressed in their best. Women wore their best long-skirted dressed, decked themselves out in jewelry, and had their hair done. And you could always tell which groups were together because all the women in the group were dressed identically. They had the same dresses made out of the same fabric. The festival is such a big deal that groups of women go to the tailor's all together and have dresses made out of the same fabric for the occasion.

Before there was any official music or drumming, there were a few independent groups of drummers performing. We were drawn toward a group of people - three men drumming and a group of men and women dancing. They said they were from a fitness club, and they were singing and dancing to the different drum calls. Some of them really hammed up when we took their pictures, and then as soon as we put our cameras away, they pulled us into the dancing! It was such a surprise because two girls just grabbed Anna by the arm and yanked her inside. They rubbed their booties on her and made an Anna sandwich. She looked a little overwhelmed, but was a good sport. Then I jumped in and joined the gyration to help Anna feel a little more comfortable, but I think you can be only so comfortable when sweaty strangers and grinding on you :) Lai, Dimas, and Jennifer just laughed at us. I think they were glad that they didn't have to try to shake their butts too.

After we got covered in sweat and dirt from the dancing, we wandered around a bit more. We found a glorious little treat - shots in a bag! The water and ice cream in Ghana are in bags, so why shouldn't the booze be in bags too? We found a brand of gin called "White Virgin" and figured we had to each take a shot. Each bagged shot cost about 5 US cents, and tasted horrible! But you just can't pass up an opportunity to suck down something called "White Virgin" when you really are the only white people amongst thousands.

While we were still gagging, we heard the sound of car engines in the center of the huge arena. We walked over to see if something was happening, and saw that about 5 SUVs were inside. One of them drove over to a stage on one side of the stadium, but we couldn't see who was being dropped off. The whole morning, voices speaking the local language (unfortunately not Twi or Ewe) were being pumped over the loudspeakers, and of course none of us could tell what they were saying. Next, the man from the SUV came to speak on the PA, and this time everyone listened. We asked a man standing near us who the man speaking was, and he exclaimed, "the President!" "You mean Atta Mills?" (the president of Ghana), I asked. And he nodded enthusiastically. Although we didn't get to see him and couldn't understand his speaking, we witness the President of Ghana making a speech at the festival! He was only there for about 20 minutes, and after his speech the SUVs hauled him away quickly, but that was still pretty cool. Apparently, the Ada-Asafotufiami festival is a pretty big deal!

After the President left, the atmosphere picked up a bit. It looks like the down-time in the morning had simply been spent waiting for the President to arrive. While I was nibbling a grilled plantain, Anna and I were approached by a smiley man with a small recording device in his hand. He picked us out because we were obviously tourists, and he said he worked for a radio station that was going to air a segment about the festival. He held the device up to us and said, "Please, beautiful girls, what is your impression of the festival and of Ghana?" Uh. Anna and I felt really dumb responding, but we said that everyone was dressed so beautifully, that people were very very friendly, and that we loved the drumming. Arg, we probably sounded like ditsy tourists. But hey, I bet we were on the radio. Then, not even half an hour later a whole camera crew approached the two of us! I don't know why the media was out looking for white women! The man who was holding the camera said that they were traveling all over the coast and visiting many festivals so they could make a documentary for UNICEF. He asked us the same thing the radio man had - tell me your impression of the festival. Arg! We both insisted that we were too shy to be on camera, but the camera man was so persistent. We learned that his name was Enoch because he had though that he and Anna had the same name, and he didn't leave! He turned on the camera while we were still insisting that we didn't want to be recorded, and finally we gave in. We said our dumb tourist speech again, and blushed like crazy. They seemed to like it though! And then they were really nice and took pictures with us. After that encounter, my face was so hot - both from blushing and from the sun that was beating down on us. I started really wishing that I'd though about putting on some sunscreen. Especially since Anna and I were practically celebrities by this point. Haha.