Ouagadougou (Wa-ga-do-gu)…

Last Monday I learned that Accra Girls’ has a midterm break that would start on Tuesday after school and last until the following Tuesday morning. With 6 full days off, I wanted to take advantage of it and to travel and see as much as I could. I learned that some of the other Fulbrighters were planning a trip north to Burkina Faso and the capital city of Ouagadougou and they invited me to come along. Every other year there is a weeklong festival of African arts and crafts in Ouaga that supports more than 28 different countries. The only thing that stood in my way was the fact I did not have my passport. Upon arriving in Ghana, I turned my passport over to Ghana Immigration Service so as to get a 1 year residence visa. I had not gotten it back yet, so I went down to the Immigration on Tuesday after classes just to find out that they did not have my passport ready. I tried everything I could, but to no avail, I could not convince them to give me a visa. They did give my passport and told me I could get into Burkina with it, but that when I returned I would not be allowed back into Ghana without the visa. They promised that by 10am Wednesday morning I would be able to pick up the passport. So, unfortunately, the other Fulbrighter took off Tuesday afternoon from Accra. I was able to get my passport, with visa, and got on a bus Wednesday afternoon, and there I sat for the next 15 hours. I got into a town in northern Ghana at around 4:30 in the morning, met one of the Fulbrighters, and stayed with a friend of a friend of a friend. Then next morning, we met the other Fulbrighter and her husband in a small, neat village called Bongo. We spent the day and one night and the next morning caught a taxi to the border. We changed just enough money to pay for a visa into Burkina and then got on a bus to Ouaga. Three hours and a pretty bus trip later, we were in the capital of Burkina Faso. We arrive around 4 pm and the situation was this; We were in a French speaking country (none of us speak any French more than what was learned from one year in high school), no water (this is city on the edge of the Sahara so it is hot and dry), no money (little did we know there is no place to change Ghana Cedis to Cefas- currency in B.F.) and no place to stay (we were suppose to meet a Ghanaian lady who was selling at the festival, but had no idea where she was). So after about 2 hours of walking around and darkness falling, we were able to find a Ghanaian women who helped us find our contact, Florence. Florence was amazing! She loaned us 10,000 cefa (not a lot, but more than enough to buy water), and told us that the house we were staying in was only a few blocks away. What started out as a pretty trying experience in Burkina quickly turned out to be really cool.

We all went back to the house (which was very nice), bought pasta and tomato paste, because it was what we could find and afford cooked dinner and then talked with Florence, her husband, and “the boys” (the workers she brought along, I am not sure if they were really her boys or not). The next morning dawned anew and we were able to find an ATM and two of the others had cards that worked and so we were able to withdraw money, a nice feeing. The next couple of days we explored the festival and the city. The festival was nice and Ouagadougou was ok. It is so hot and dry that there is dust everywhere; it is actually hard to breath sometimes. Also the country is so poor that food can be hard to come by in comparison to Ghana. Regardless, it was a very neat experience.

Monday morning at 8:30 two of us got on a bus to in Ouaga to head back to Accra…22 hours later (6:30 am) I was walking back on the campus of Accra Girls’ having had almost no sleep, dirty, carrying my backpack, and a 6 day beard on my face. The girls all have chores to do in the morning on campus so they all watched me walk back to my house. I took a bucket bath, shaved, got dressed at was in the classroom and teaching at 7:40am. Tuesday is my busy day so I taught seven classes and then went home and crashed. But because Tuesday was the election, I had to get up in the middle of the night here and I went down to a hotel in Accra that was broadcasting the election results. I stayed there until around 5, long enough to hear Obama’s speech, then went to the embassy because they were having an election celebration breakfast. Then it was back to school to teach.

A side note on the US election here: 99% of the people here that I have talked with support Obama. I was told by some other Americans who have been here for elections before, that if Obama had not won that people would look at me differently and some may even blame me. However, with an Obama victory, many Ghanaians approached me and congratulated me; not only for the result, but also for simply having a smooth, non-violent election!

All in all I think that in a three day period I slept only a handful of hours. However, it was a really neat experience and I enjoyed every minute of it.