baby steps

I understand that it is Day 12 and I am sitting in the airport about to leave Ghana but I will blog this trip. So… Day 3…

Easter Sunday! After a lovely breakfast, Dr. Meyer, Emma, and I joined Dr. Amekudzi for church services at Lighthouse Chapel. She drove us through Accra to the church passing Nima. It was as we passed Nima that an overwhelming feeling washed over me. It was very clear to me for the first time that EVERYONE was black. The conditions in Nima are another story.

Dr. Amekudzi’s church is a huge church with multiple sanctuaries and an impressive cathedral. No air conditioning but the building was well designed and the large glassless windows provided a refreshing cross-breeze. The service was dynamic and afterwards, the bishop invited us to his office to welcome us, probably because Dr. Meyer and Emma were the only white people in a crowd of a couple thousand.

After church we headed back to the Holiday Inn to pick up the rest of the crew for lunch at Tante Maria. The food was delicious. For the most part, we all tried traditional Ghanaian dishes. Elise and I, true to form, shared our dishes; palava sauce with beef and garden egg stew with chicken, served with boiled yam and plantain. Palava sauce is a spinach based dish and garden egg stew is tomato and eggplant. The yams are not at all like the ones in the States. They are white and not sweet at all…think potato. In all, it was delicious.

After lunch/dinner, we visited with Dr. Amekudzi’s parents. We got to hear stories about Papa and the Pope and his opinions about Ghanaian politics and various other affairs. When it started to get dark, we packed some “take-aways” since we were all still pretty full from Tante Maria even though it was dinner time (6ish). We said our farewells and headed back to the Holiday Inn.

Elise and I broke out the laptops and cranked out some work until we got a little snackish around 8ish. We watched the end of “The Other Boleyn Girl” with dinner. We also watched the beginning of “Awake” but got to freaked out to finish it. So we read the IMBD cliffnotes. Crazy movie! But glad I didn’t waste 2 hours of my life watching it. Plus it gave us more time for work before we called it a night.

So you may realize that I have been back for about 5 days now. I think it may be safe to say that a full day-by-day account may not be a realistic goal at this point. But I will at least publish a run down of our activities and reflections and a link to pictures. Sorry, there just wasn't enough time. Such is grad school ay?