My Birthday, Kumasi

My Birthday
I had a wonderful birthday. My friend Julie made the long bike ride from her site to mine. I baked a chocolate cake for us with my dutch oven. My counterpart made a sort of porridge for us with cows milk and millet. It tasted similar to rice pudding. Julie gave me some small candy bars, a gravy packet, and a small yo-yo, all things that are hard to find here. She and Achiri stayed most of the day, and we played a Ghanaian card game. Apparently, Ghanaians remove a lot of cards from the deck (I think we took out every card with a value under 8.). The game was a lot of fun, but I lost every time.
The next day Achiri and I headed to Kumasi for a workshop with my fellow Health volunteers and their counterparts. It was really nice to see everyone- some people I hadn’t seen for five months. The workshop was fun and informative. More importantly, the food was good. I also won a hand washing station in a raffle and got to take some tree seeds back to my site. Hopefully I will plant them with my JSS class.
One of the most interesting things we did was to visit an agric university. The idea was to look at income generating projects for our villages, such as beekeeping, raising snails (people in the south eat snails.), growing mushrooms, and keeping rabbits or grasscutter. Grasscutter looks like a cross between a rat and a rabbit. They are a popular food here, which I haven’t had the opportunity to try yet. Depending on your region, they are expensive. We met a man who became farmer of the year here. He started with a small poultry farm, and worked his way up which I found inspirational. He was incredibly smart, which was obvious by the detail he gave when answering questions about his farm. He now keeps fish, crocodiles, monkeys, and ostriches. Ostriches are huge and scary looking creatures. He was a mechanic before he became a farmer.
I forgot how different the south is than the north. Where I live, everything is brown and the air is like a giant dust cloud because of the Harmattan, which blows dirt from the Sahara desert. This sounds unpleasant, but it’s actually nice because it gets cool at night (sometimes cool enough that I have to sleep under a sheet). Kumasi, however, is always green. Near the roads, all the plants are coated in red dust from the road, but they are green underneath. The vegetation is more tropical and the air is moist. Houses, animals, and people are larger. Taxi drivers are more aggressive. I don’t speak Twi, the primary language in Kumasi. The food is different (good, but no tezed and a lot more palm oil. Everything is still mashed into a giant ball of starch though). It’s strange, because Ghana is about the size of Oregon, and going from Tamale to Kumasi is like going to an entirely different country.