Work begins!

June 6^th, 2013 7:08am

After a week of waiting for supplies for the drainage system we are installing at Accra’s sewage treatment plant they finally arrived and work began on Monday.  Now that work on the project has started it is a lot more interesting, it was getting pretty boring waiting around for people to deliver the supplies. 

Pipes

Sand and gravel

I’m taking Thursday and Friday off this week to spend four days in Cape Coast checking out the old salve forts and they have a large rain forest park I’m planning on visiting.  I’m sure it will be a fun little trip.

I’m starting to feel like I’m fitting in here in Ghana, daily activities aren't a chore any more, and for the most part I can find what I need and get it without too much trouble.  I’m starting to feel like an ordinary Ghana citizen, getting up in the morning and heading off to work on the tro-tro with everyone else. 

Our current favorite lunch spot

Coconut vendor: he cuts to top off of the pointy ones and you drink the coconut water then he cuts it open and gives you the flesh in a little bag to take with you

I’ve also gotten used to some of the local food and how the small mom and pop restaurants on the side of the road work.  There are small one person restaurants along every road here, they are called chop shops and each one offers the same few items.  These are the places where most Ghanaians eat lunch and maybe dinner if they are not preparing it themselves.  You have to order by saying how much money you want to spend, and they give you the quantity of food of whatever you order equal to that value.  The choices are pretty limited you can get plain rice, fried rice, or jollof rice.  Jollof rice is a Ghana dish; it is very similar to fried rice but much spicier.  You can get a piece of grilled chicken or a tilapia fish to go with which ever rice you chose.  Other than that you can get soup, there are four types: groundnut, palm nut, light and sometimes okra.  They are all very spicy, based off a fish stock and have very mild flavour, other than the spiciness.  I have not notices any great difference between any of the types of soup, other than the okra soup has bits of seafood in it.  After you select the type of soup you want, you need to choose a starch to go in it.  There are three to pick from, fufu, banku or rice balls.  Fufu is a dense ball of dough, made from plantains and yams, that has the texture and stringiness of soft mozzarella cheese. Banku resembles and dense ball of oatmeal and is made from cassava and plantains.  All the starch options are very plain and sit in your stomach for a day, definitely not a good choice if you wish to do anything other than take a nap after lunch.  To top it all of you pick a meat to have in your soup, chicken, goat, fish or beef.  All the meats are burnt to a crisp and very tough.

An amusing thing about the chop shops I have noticed is when they show pictures of what is available they show the meat as live animals.  If they sell beef, they will show a picture of a cow and not a steak as you’d see in Canada.  They also have very amusing religious names.  One of my favorite places to eat right now is ‘Trust God’.   

Breaking ground on the drainage system

The walls of the trench started to cave in, everyone was trying to come up with a way to fix it

More work, the wooden cross is called the traveler and is used by lining it up with preset elevations and then you can tell if you've dug enough 

The pipe fitter being called into action from his afternoon nap

Another of the daily adventures is my tro-tro ride to work.  The morning ride is always a spectacle.  Monday a giant police man dragged a guy off the tro-tro and carried him by his belt, while using the poor guy’s head to clear people out of the way, and threw him in a police car.  The whole ride to Atomic junction people were talking none stop about it with many wild theories about what the guy had done and why he though escaping on a tro-tro was a good plan.  On Tuesday I was entertain for the whole ride by a man who was 77 years old and had been on his death bed in the hospital when Jesus came and saved him.  He said he was as fit as a 40 year old now and spent his days praying and sharing his testimonial with the people of Accra.  He preached, clapped and sang for the whole ride which is just under an hour.  And finally on Wednesday I was seated next to a lady and her baby and as soon as we started our trip she began to breast feed her baby, then she changed him, all the while using my lap as a change station and storage area.  She was also on her phone the whole time, she never said a word to me she just put stuff on my lap and then sat her child on my lap while she searched for things in her bag.  The tro-tro is always an exciting way to start your day.

 

Roadside towel and carpet vendor

A goat I think

Johnny