Cultural Emersion

One of the things that really sold me about CCS was the fact that the organize parts of the week for volunteers to really experience the the different aspects of the culture, whether it be traditional dancing, folk lore, or fabric dyeing. About every other day we have something to do.

Already this week we have dyed our own batik, (attempted) to hike the highest mountain peak in Ghana, and we get taught hip-life dancing tonight after dinner. Batik is sort of like tye-dye, I guess. Stamps are dipped in wax and then onto the fabric in all sorts of different patterns and symbols. Then the fabric is dyed but the parts with the wax stay light. It's pretty cool. We only got to dye little squares but I'm going to see if the seamstress will let me dye my own yard of fabric that I can then get made into gifts and such. So if you get a bag from me for Christmas, odds are that it will be batik.

So I said "attempted" to hike, because although I tried I only got up half the mountain side before my asthma kicked in and I couldn't breathe. I was so frustrated that I couldn't continue but I had nightmarish visions of me being rolled down the mountain after I passed out from lack of oxygen. So I turned around and headed back to the van to wait with some others who were injured and couldn't make the climb. On the way down I fell twice. Nothing serious was hurt but I do have some scratches on my leg, and my shorts are probably never going to get clean...especially since we hand wash all of our laundry. After the first fall I realized that I was never going to make it down without peeing. I preferred to not do it my shorts so that left me the only option of dropping my pants in the middle of the trail (I wasn't risking getting behind a bush without knowing what sort of plant they were and I was by myself so it didn't really matter). I have to say that even though I didn't see that view from the top, it was still a pretty memorable trip.

The home base where we live is about a 15 minute walk from the main part of town and most of the buildings on our road are houses. I guess you could say we live in a residential neighborhood of Hohoe, although at first it just looks like rambled down houses and a dirtbike track. There are some pretty nice buildings in the area, the home base being one of them. But clean and respectable looking houses are not something you see a lot of. There are some children in the neighborhood who like to come around in the evenings after school and watch us play volleyball or try to get us to color with them. There is this one little girl across the street who can't be more than 3 or 4 years old and she is the most adorable little spitfire. Her name is something like Loveya, although I've never actually seen it written out so I have no idea on how it's spelled. She doesn't speak a lot of English because most of the children here aren't taught that until primary school. But she'll repeat EVERYTHING that she hears. We were sitting outside around the patio table yesterday when she came visiting. One of the volunteers was trying on a dress she'd had made and another volunteer, Francesca, made the comment "Oh, cleavage"...and not 3 seconds latter we hear "Oooo, clebage" coming from Loveya's direction. Then she looks around at all of us as we are laughing hysterically like who are these idiots. It was so cute.


Everyday so far was been filled with little memorable moments. I'm excited to be able to share the pictures too once I get home.