A Month of Sons – part 2

Just as it was when we arrived a year ago the internet at the apartment recently has been very uncooperative.  Maybe it’s because of the harmattan.   The internet doesn’t work a lot of the time.  And when it does work it is painfully slow.  Uploading pictures takes forever. 

Christopher returned to the states on Saturday, 1 January 2011.  Garrett arrived three days later.  (Arrival photo on the 10 January blog entry.) We hardly had time to change the sheets.  Garrett stayed with us two weeks.  Just as with Christopher Marsha and I thoroughly enjoyed his visit and tried to savor each day.

Here is his departure photo.

We were saddened to see him go but felt blessed that he, and Christopher two weeks earlier, had been able to share time with us here in Ghana.   

Garrett did not experience any “culture shock.”  He said, repeatedly, that Ghana reminded him of Brazil, the only difference being the language.  He enjoyed interacting with the people.  He worked very hard to learn some of the local dialect.  I took him with me on a Saturday morning to participate in a church building clean up.  He was immediate friends with all the kids.

This is a picture of Garret with a family at church.  Garrett is trying to look inconspicuous by wearing sunglasses.

We took Garrett to meet Thomas, a wood carver.

Thomas is a little man about five feet tall who works in a little shop about four feet by ten feet.  You can see part of his work bench in the photo.  He does not have electricity in his shop.  He does all of his woodwork with hand tools.  He is a true artist/craftsman.  Thomas is showing us part of the nativity set he had just finished.  We had asked Thomas last fall to make a nativity set for each of our children.  He finished three of them in time for us to mail them home for Christmas.  He finished the remaining two after Christmas.  Christopher and Garrett each took one home.

We took Garrett to see Bernice.  

Bernice is a wonderful woman.  She is a seamstress.  She makes bags, briefcases, children’s clothing, aprons, etc.  She, too, is a real artist/craftsman.  Her sewing room is a little larger than four feet by ten feet.  It has electricity.

We took Garrett to dinner at Mama Mia's. 

Mama Mia's is our favorite restaurant.  It had been closed when Christopher was here.  This is the restaurant that serves cockroach pizza.  Just kidding.  (see blog entry dated 15 November 2010.)

We went to Cape Coast for two days.  We toured the slave castle.

We have been there enough, now, that we declined the opportunity to have a guide show us around.  I mentioned the museum in the last blog entry.   We took Garrett though the museum which has displays that are very informative and much more factual than the guides, who tend to focus on the emotions that can be easily aroused when talking about slavery.  We went to the dungeons where the slaves had been kept.  We looked into the tunnel that took the slaves to the ships.  And we stood on both sides of the Door of No Return.  Here is another picture of the fishing village seen from the castle.

Garrett and I did the canopy walk.  

Marsha did not want to do it again.  She chose to stay behind.  It turns out she chose wisely.  Garrett and I were climbing the hill, about a 500 meter distance, to the beginning of the canopy walk in a group of about 30 people led by the guide.  We were following a very well dressed black family, probably Ghanaians, but ones, by listening to them talk, who obviously lived outside of Ghana and were just home for a visit.  The mother had a dress way too western for a Ghanaian, and way too nice for a sweat producing hill climb/canopy walk.  We were about half way up the hill when this woman in front of us let out a blood curdling scream and started jumping up and down, obviously frightened out of her wits.  The whole group stopped.  Garrett was on my left and quickly pointed out the tail end, about six feet long, of a black snake as it disappeared into the jungle.  We were all startled.  The poor woman, however, was more than startled.  Obviously she had just experienced a closer encounter with the snake than the rest of us.  She wouldn’t stop screaming.  She continued in frenzy mode, upset about the encounter, but also jumping around and fanning her dress.  I thought maybe something had crawled up under her dress.  And then I realized that she had wet her pants.  Poor woman.  No one tried to console her.  She finally slowed down the screaming but continued fanning her dress.  She obviously didn’t enjoy the rest of the walk.  Garrett and I agreed that Marsha had made a wise decision to stay behind. 

We stayed at the Elmina Bay Resort, which is a new facility with very nice rooms.   

It is about a half mile from the Coconut Grove Beach Resort.   The accommodations at Elmina Bay Resort are very modern and consist of a dozen two story quadraplexes facing the ocean in a semicircle around a pool, and a restaurant/bar.   Two of the quadraplexes are still under construction.   Unfortunately, because it is so new the grounds consist of recently planted trees/shrubs and immature grass.  It will take ten years to get the grounds to a maturity similar to the Coconut Grove Beach Resort.  But the rooms are modern, clean, and comfortable and the pool is very nice.   We had tried to stay at the Elmina Bay Resort with Christopher but there were no vacancies the entire two weeks of Chrismas/New Year. 

We went to the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Garden. 

Kwame Nkrumah was the leader of Ghana’s independence from Great Britain in 1957, the first country in Africa to break colonial rule.  He is a hero.  Kind of like George Washington. 

We went to the batik “factory” and watched the workers make the batik prints by hand and then lay them out on the ground to dry.

We went to TK Beads and watched the workers make beads as they grind the recycled glass, put the glass powder into molds, fire them, and then hand paint them.  

We went to Aburi Gardens.

I am trying to demonstrate for Marsha proper snake encounter scream technique.  Without the wet pants. 

  

Garrett’s time with us, just as it had been with Christopher, passed too quickly.  It seemed he had just arrived and then he had to pack and head home.  We enjoyed being with him each day.  We laughed a lot.   For example.  We were in the car one day, running a few errands and heading out to the MTC to give shots.  Marsha and Garrett simultaneously noticed a chicken by the side of the road that didn’t have any feathers.  They tried pointing it out to me but I missed it.  This sighting of a “naked” chicken led to a ten minute laughing session as we joked about why a chicken would not have feathers in Africa.  (Who would want to constantly wear a down comforter in this heat?)  I was a little skeptical of their observation at the time but have subsequently seen a similar chicken.  I tried getting a photograph of this second naked chicken sighting but failed. It must be an African example of Darwinian evolution.  We'll  keep looking for more.

Another example of laughing.   This is a photograph of the geckos that are seen everywhere.

Marsha, Garrett and I were going from the parking lot into the mall, which is not a usual location for a gecko encounter, but noticed a gecko on the sidewalk in front of us.  (Not the gecko in the above photograph.  The one at the mall had a stubby tail.)  He (?she) would pause as we approached him and then scurry ahead five to six feet and stop and wait, almost as if he were teasing us to follow him.  (Maybe an explanation for the stubby tail.)  At one point he ran onto a three foot by three foot stainless steel plate on the concrete walkway, a covering for some kind of a manhole.  He stopped in the middle of the plate.  As we approached the plate he waited until we were close and then started to run.  However, we didn’t know it, and he might have known it but forgot it, but geckos don’t move quickly on stainless steel.  It is too smooth for traction.  He frantically moved his legs but didn’t go anywhere.  He moved his legs faster.  It was like watching a car on ice spinning its wheels.  We immediately started laughing.  For about two seconds this little guy/girl was a gecko in high speed but not going anywhere.  You could almost hear the engine whining.  We cracked up.  He finally got a little momentum and made it to the edge of the plate and jolted off at high speed, just like the car spinning its wheels on ice and then hitting pavement.

As we pulled out of the mall, still laughing about the high speed gecko encounter, we started toward the Tema highway and noted a car coming directly at us, backwards.  We veered to the right and watched the crazy driver, driving his car backwards at an unsafe high rate of speed, head towards the mall entrance.  We probably shouldn’t have laughed about it, but it seemed so logical to have just seen a gecko at high speed out of control and then encounter a Ghanaian at high speed out of control.  I wonder if the police ever consider giving tickets for reckless driving?  Duh.  Where would they start?

We enjoyed the Month of Sons.