Nothing much today

July 8^th, 2013 4:45pm

It has been a quiet week here in Ghana.  I've not really accomplished much since I got back from last weekend’s adventure.  It has been fun watching the groups of European students on holiday pass through the hostel.  We've had several groups pass through to northern Ghana this past week. Groups from England, Scotland and a mixed bag of European have all passed through Crystal hostel this past week.  The students are very amusing.  They are pretty terrified of Ghana.  I hope when I arrived in Ghana I was not as green as the students I've seen pass through here.  This past weekend the group of kids from Scotland thought their shower was broken because they could not get any hot water.  I did not have the heart to tell them there is no hot water in Ghana.  “Auntie” says that they will learn quickly when they get up north.

                Since not much has been going on I thought I’d use this space to recount a couple of the smaller adventures I've seen here in Ghana.  The first is that we've had our first case of malaria here at the hostel, and it was ‘Auntie’ who got it.  It did not really slow her down, she says she has had malaria more times then she can count.  She did not go to the hospital, she just had her husband go and buy some medicine.  She even worked through it since the hostel has been so busy.  She did maybe do a bit less work herself and a bit more ordering around of the workers.  She even went to church on Friday night because she had to pray for an end to her sickness and that we got power.  We had a bad week of power outages, even a period of three days without power.  She also did not want the Scottish group to not have any power on their first night in Ghana.  I guess her prayers must have been answered because she is feeling much better and we've had a good three days of constant power.

“Aunties” grandson Kafui

“Aunties” grandson Sadin

                The second story happened at the school to which I go to teach English.  I was waiting outside the school for class to start last week, when a young black girl came running up to me and said in a  perfect New Zealand accent “Bloody hell it’s nice to finally see another white person.”  She was very nice and told me how her grandmother was worried she was not growing up properly in the Muslim faith and had her sent to Ghana to attend a proper Muslim school.  She could not wait to turn eighteen so she could go to America to finish her studies.

                The third story happened at our local favorite food place Trust God.  A large Ghanaian woman was not satisfied with the food she received.  She asked for her money back and they refused to return her money.  After about five minutes of very loud shouting, during which time all business had stopped she proceeded to take the bag of food she had bought, all Ghanaian take away food comes in plastic bags, and throw it as hard as she could through the service window and it hit the kitchen wall and exploded sending rice flying everywhere.  She then walked away and they again started serving customers.  As a side note we are no longer eating at Trust God as a few too many people have gotten sick eating their food.  The only problem with that is that it is by far the best meal option taste wise on our street.  There are a few other options, like Richard the chicken man, Mohammed the steak man and Mona the egg sandwich lady, since none of their business have any signs or names we just refer to them by what they do, but none are as good as Trust God.

The last story had to do with our work project.  I was sent to the Ghana survey office with the surveyor to find the location of an Accra city water main that runs near our berm project.  We got the co-ordinates for two points of the water main and got a quick look at the as-built plans.  I was told after that the head surveyor of Ghana wanted too much of a bribe to give us a copy of the plans or more than two points on the water main.  I then calculated the distance and angles for finding the two points from two control points they had given me, this did impress the people at the job site a bit.  We then set out to find the pipe from the two points we got from the head surveyor.  The main problem with finding the pipe was that the control points I started from were measured from the corner of a well, one meter out and one meter left.  This kind of control point is not very accurate and if either of the two control points is a bit off it can mess you up pretty bad when you need to go four hundred meters away.  After we marked out the first point we had the workers dig for the pipe and found nothing.  I was busy double checking all the calculations I had done while the surveyor, George, tried to find the other point.  George and the survey crew marked out the second point of the pipe and dug and this time found the pipe, everyone cheered.  If we had not found the pipe the only option would have been to spend days digging by hand a trench where we thought it was located in the hopes of finding it.

A Ghana survey monument

Berm construction

Johnny