"I love my life!"

Hello hello hello!!!

The name of this blog is a Ghanian song that is played SO much here.

Here I am…typing on a super slow computer with an even SLOWER internet connection in Mampong, Ghana. This week has been great. We took a weekend trip to Cape Coast this past weekend, it was great. It’s about 4 hours (give or take 30 minutes, depending on traffic). So kind of like driving to St. George.

The hotel we stayed at was in the middle of a lake/pond that had crocodiles in it. It was kind of scary! There was this little dirt hill that they would come up on, and we could go walk by them and take pictures. It was super scary. But it was a really cool set up. It even had a pool!!! When they put us in our room…it was LITERALLY a jail cell. White walls, with 3 twins beds with white sheets, concrete floors, and one small light in the corner of the room. The bathroom was a community bathroom, and it was outside around the corner. BUT our key broke (they only use the big old fashioned keys here) and they had to switch our rooms. Which was a freaking blessing from heaven, because our other room was 1000x better. It had carpet and real windows and decorations and drapes. And a small TV and fridge and a bathroom connected to it. So that changed the trip from bearable to enjoyable. If you compare anything here to American standards, it looks like crap, but for Ghana, it was really nice.

All Saturday we toured around and did different things. First we went to a rope bridge. It was pretty cool. There were 7 different bridges that were about 120 ft in the air. The set up was very similar to a zip line through the jungle you’d do in Hawaii or somewhere, except instead of zip lining you were walking on scary rope bridges. It wasn’t actually scary though. But it was fun! 

Then we went to a slave castle. That was a really cool experience. I’d honestly never really thought about like…where all the slaves came from and stuff. It was just really thought provoking. The chambers they kept them in were pretty small….maybe like smaller than the size of the family room in my Heber house. And they’d keep 200-250 slaves in each one. They were never allowed out, so they pooped, peed, threw up, and ate in there. They said each floor had about 3 ft of waste on the bottom of it. The only ventilation they had were 3 super small windows at the top of the chamber, where the rain was supposed to come in and wash away all the waste, but it never did. In the girls’ chambers there was a bigger window so that the English people running the castle could choose which women they wanted to rape. It was sickening to think about. There was a “Door of No Return” where the slaves would walk through it, and get put on boats so they could be sold to the Americas or Europe (recall the Triangle of Trade from your history classes). They said over 2 million slaves passed through that door. They was completely crazy to me, because that was just one slave castle, there are tons on the coast of west Africa. And that was just the slaves that didn’t die in the chamber (they said they kept them in the chamber for about 3 months.) Then the conditions on the boat were so terrible that 1 slave made it to America for every 4 that died. It made me think about how many of there names were probably lost/how many people’s temple work we’ve done. It was really…sad and interesting to learn about.

Then we went to the beach. We went to a resort on the beach, where we also used their pool and ate dinner there. It was really fun. It was pretty over cast, so I didn’t get in the ocean because I would have NEVER dried if that happened. But we sat in the pool for a minute, and then just laid by the pool. It was fun. Dinner was also nice. After dinner we ordered ice cream…which was SUPER expensive. They always only give us 2 spoons, but there’s 3 of us (Katie, me, and Brittney) so we have a nice system down where we take a bite and pass the spoon. It works like a charm because there are two spoons going around so by the time you’re finished swallowing, you have a spoon again! Don’t worry, we filmed it. Then we decided the ice cream was so good we had to buy another one. 

Today we just went back to the daily grind. When we went to school, three of the boys in our class were mad at me and Katie (I team teach with Katie) because we didn’t come to school Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. We had to write an apology on the board for them to even look at us. It was funny. I really do love these kids.

 Here's a fun fact about Ghana, there are NO public bathrooms anywhere here. Everyone just pees on the side of the road. It’s pretty funny. So you just have to hope ALL day while you're out, you won't have to go to the bathroom, or make the walk back to the hotel. Also if you happen to find a place with a public bathroom, it's usually so disgusting you can't even walk in it, and there's never toilet paper.

We only have 3 weeks left, we’ve been talking a lot about going home and just like…what time we need to leave for the airport and stuff. It’s weird it’s so close. Three weeks exactly! I seriously feel like I have only been here a week. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of what I’m going to feel like when I really have to leave the kids, and I’m so sad. It’s going to be so hard to leave them. 

So…I realize 2 months it no where near 2 years, but I feel like I’m serving a mission or something. Here are the similarities. Foreign country, email once a week, knee length dresses and modest shirts….which leads to severe farmers tans. That’s about it. But really, I’ve never had a farmers tan in my life, and I had one within the first 3 days of being here. It’s disgusting. That’s about all. After you get passed all the lifestyle differences here, my daily activities are pretty boring. I hope all is going well with you. I’m just as interested in your lives as you are mine. Send me an email!!!