October 2, 2008

It rained last night and became quite chilly in our room. We only have a bottom sheet so I wrapped myself in a scarf I brought, which was perfect. The rain made the morning air colder than usual, so Beatrice added hot water she had boiled to our shower buckets of well water. The hot shower was really nice. Steam was actually coming off our bodies, haha!

Without being escorted by Tony, we walked to the bus stop where more people came to greet us and test our knowledge of Ewe. A few seemed concerned that we were going to Ho alone, but were satisfied when we were able to say, “Meyi Ho mava,” meaning “we are going to Ho and coming back.” Hans and Emil came up to say hello as well as the vice chief, Dick, and our new friend Divine. Divine is going to take us to a waterfall next week. It’s nice to have someone close to our age to hang out with, who also speaks English fairly well and has useful input for our projects. He comes to visit every day almost.

Once we got to Ho, we finished sorting the donated books- a task that took 4 hours, also meaning that we had already missed the bus back to Ho. As a side, Saviefe Gbogame is one of the 18 villages that get these books! Yay! Score 1 for the home team! Now the books are packed (in 16 or 17 boxes) and ready to be picked up. Tony will have to coordinate this on his own, and will solicit some help from other villagers to collect enough money to pay for a tro-tro to drive the books from Ho to the village, which is an endeavor costing about 20 cedi (approximately $20, but that’s a lot of money to these people). They’re going to wait for next week’s Market Day, when tro-tros can be considerably easier to hire for maybe a little less money.

We went to “White House” for lunch, which is kind of funny because the few white people in town go there to eat. I got chicken and rice—again, the rice was really good and the chicken was like leather. I did find out some other things they had on the menu so next time I’m getting vegetable pizza and vegetable salad! There’s not really cheese on the pizza, but its close enough, and I’m craving vegetables now. Lunch took forever so by the time we got to the office it was already 3pm! The last bus leaves Ho at 1:30pm, which doesn’t leave much time to get things done. After our orientation, we attempted to use the internet café because Bismarck wanted to close the office, but there was a virus on some of the computers so it wouldn’t recognize our flash drive, and the computers were SO slow, even typing required an extra 3 second response time. If I opened up more than 1 window, whether it was internet and Word, or 2 internet windows, I was doomed. By the time I checked a few emails, and finally was able to upload my blog entries, it was 5:45pm! It was getting dark, and started to thunder very loudly again. We caught a taxi back to the village, arriving in the dark at 6:30. We felt bad, we knew that Tony, Sema, and Beatrice would be worried, and sure enough, Beatrice and Sema joked something in Ewe, meaning “very, very bad girls.”

Divine came over after dinner and asked if we could give him computer training as well. We talked about the school system here, and his goals, and firmed up plans for the waterfall excursion next week. It took a long time for him to ask for training… I could tell he wasn’t sure if the training was just for Anyo or if he could ask for some too. He was very pleased when we said “of course,” and put him on the training schedule for Thursday at 7pm. This pushes our bed time back a bit, but that’s ok, haha.