KPONG! KPONG!

It's been a whole week since we last put up a post, but never fear! We are still alive and well, yet to be kidnapped by bandits or eaten by a pack of goats. The last week has been quite busy. Sunday, we climbed a nearby mountain. They call it a hike, but when you have to use rope to climb straight up rocks, I call it rock climbing. It took about 2 hours to get up to the top, and 1 hour to get down. There was a lot of falling and a lot of dirt, so my running shoes may not make it home.

At the beginning of the week, I got a chance to go to the other CCS site in Woe to spend a day with a traditional bone healer. The two hour drive to Woe was nothing compared to the 15 hours to Mole, so we go to the fly-infested, sandy beaches of the Woe house in no time. After spending the night in supposed bed bug-infested beds in a room beside the chickens and roosters, another volunteer, Julia, a translator, Promise, and I headed to see the bone healer. We were given strict instructions to be ready at 7:30am to get there at 8am, in order to see a whole day. In usual Ghana fashion, we pull out at 10 after 8.

Most patients go to the bone healer after going to the hospital hasn't helped. Either the bone hasn't been set properly or there was nothing they could do. They see the old woman, who treated the bones by setting them then applying different herbs for healing. If the bone isn't healed the next time they come, 'dirty blood' is drawn out by making cuts with a razor in swollen places and using a lighted match in a jar against the skin to draw out the blood. The whole process was very interesting, although a bit creepy.

People are coming in one after the other to be treated. The bone healer works every day from 7-12 and sees each patient every 2 or 3 days. The woman herself is very animated when she talked, not that we knew what she was saying. Apparently she goes on and on, saying the same things over again about all the places she's gone and all the people she's treated. She went through some of the x-rays of patients and was able to talk about all the patients she's had over 20 years.

Wednesday, Janelle, Kristen and I went to Accra for the day to visit HelpAge Ghana and the day centre they run. We were able to meet with one of the staff and learn about their community awareness programs as well as see the day centre for seniors that they have set up. Although it's good to have a centre set up, there are only about 12 people that go every day because they each have to be mobile and find their own transportation to and from the centre. It was a really great trip overall; Janelle is bad at the name game.

Today (Saturday), Janelle, Lisa and I made our way back to the Cedi Bead factory, which we went by on one of the earlier weekend trips. What we thought would be a short 3 hour trip, turned into 6 hours, but it was fun nonetheless! We sharpened our tro-tro hailing skills, didn't overpay and got some mighty fine beads by the end.

Tro-tros are a funny business. We got on a tro-tro (big vans that people can hop on and off of, meant to seat 12 but fitting up to 22 people, which we discovered when riding back from the mountain hike) to Kpong (I'd write out how to spell it, but I'm pretty sure we don't use that sound in English), but had to wait 45 minutes at the station for the whole van to fill up. The ride there was about 1 hour 40 minutes. Then we took a tro-tro to Somanya because the taxis were overcharging us. This took us about 15 minutes. We managed to find Cedi Beads, spent about an hour there, then made the long haul back to Ho. This time we had to flag down a tro-tro on the street. The driver's don't actually stop, they just brake a little and you shout where you're going as they drive by. "KPONG!" "KPONG!" ends up sounding similar to a fly buzzing loudly past your ear. Success! We got on a tro-tro to Kpong, then got on one there to Ho. After waiting 30 minutes for it to fill up, and about an hour to get back, we were dropped off nicely right outside the CCS driveway. Maybe it was too much of an effort for beads... but they're just so darn pretty.

I am le tired and I still have to do some laundry tonight. Sigh. The first thing I'm doing when I get home is throwing my clothes into a nice quick and easy washing machine. Then I'm pretty sure I'm going to take a shower to rinse off 2 months of Ghanaian dirt and sweat. It's a daily ritual at the house to spend hours talking about what we're going to do when we get back home. It's usually very detailed and entails food. Janelle and I have 3 weeks to go and some days it doesn't seem like long enough!