goodbye ghana!

(at least for now)

so, it has sadly come to my last night here in ghana already... although it turned out to be a day later than planned - and now i might only leave super early tomorrow morning due to flight delays which is annoying.
unfortunately i have not written as much here since i started traveling outside accra, but at least all the photos are there and when im back in rome i still plan to go through my journal and share some more stories! the past few days have been hectic with michelle and ian leaving to canada today too - buying gifts for the whole family and saying goodbye to everyone...although i have already been promising that this is definitely not the end - the trip was like an amazing whirlwind and i very much hope to return soon so i can spend a bit more time with all the projects i only had time to get a taste of!
in the last few days alone I managed to squeeze in a visit to the national museum in accra, learnt to do some more complicated weft-faced designs on the loom, spent some more time with trish and her wonderful collection of west african textiles, found a beautiful ewe kente piece for the CHRRCT archive in london...and even had a couple of outfits made from the great fabric I bought in the market at the beginning of my trip...!
finally a big thank you to ian and michelle - i miss you already!
looking forward to seeing you all again very soon :-)

weaving, boats and beaches!

richard on the loom

sailing the Yellow Weaver

laden canoe on the river volta

Keta lagoon

the sea approaching - the road has disappeared!

its always amusing reading signs from the car window...

cape coast castle

another vodafone house

the london bridge of ghana!

Michelle and I at Anamabo

beach house and boogey boarding

kakum treetop canopy again

me at the loom!

today was my last day of weaving...

piro, richard, jimmy, dennis, kofi and young man

another quick note

so, back from another fantastic journey with michelle!
i have updated some of my photos below from the past couple weeks but there are still a whole bunch on michelles camera which i will download tomorrow...also due to lack of internet whilst traveling i have been writing a journal instead of blogging so will have to share some stories too...but now i need some rest! it was a long drive back from kumasi (a lot of inter-city cross-country roads in ghana dont have much surface left due to the abundance of pot-holes, which are actually more like craters) and on the way home we rescued jony and laura who have been staying in a hostel on the university campus but are both quite ill and leave ghana tomorrow...
goodnight!

first a few photos :)

"Meet Me There" - Keta Lagoon

colourful warps of the Klikor weavers

meeting the weavers and their cloth

(me), Alaska, Michelle, Godwin, Trish and Ian fishing boats at cape coastmichelle in the old slave fort...

...and again!

Anomabo beach resort

treetop canopy walkway at kakum

mixing dye in ntonso
nana nsiah's sesia basket of kente samples
kumasi market (largest in west africa!)Comfort wearing an amazing piece of old clothkente row in kumasi market
MTN and vodaphone houses along the road

im still here!

a quick hello again - it has been almost a week since my last blog!

just a quick update as this very minute michelle and i are walking out the door again to leave on our cape coast to kumasi adventure, after 2 days in accra spent mostly weaving! i also met a fascinating writer and researcher of kente and other traditional ghanaian cloth called martina odonkor, who has given me lots of great contacts for our next trip...

more updates on my last trip when i get back on sunday - after which i will only have 3 days left here! time is running out fast...and i have lots of photos to share too...

a presto!

weaving kente

today i spent the day with bob dennis and jimmy in burma camp for my first kente workshop! there was actually very little weaving done, as the preperation of the loom takes such a long time...measuring out threads, dying them, winding them onto bobbins, threading and tying on the warp...anyway it was fun to see how they do things without any metal parts (everything is homemade out of wood or string or some handy stick/rock/wine bottles/old CD ROMs that were lying around!) there are a group of women learning too who have come from liberia - they are in accra with an environmental art project that looks at craft and recycling - so they are also doing workshops in basket weaving and beading. sounds good - and the organization wants volunteers/interns from abroad so might be a fun thing to get involved in!
i go back tomorrow just for the morning, and then michelle, ian, trish and i are heading east to their sailboat at Ada, the delta of the river volta. will spend the weekend exploring ewe kente villages between the river and togo :) i cant wait to travel and see what ghana looks like outside accra!

makola market

the Clothes Peg design - one of the more unusual ones!

so much colour - wash cloths and rope stall

a typical market alleyway

cloth piled high to the ceiling!

close up of the fabrics we bought

this afternoon we went to the biggest market in accra, where the thing to buy is wax-printed cottons in countless colours and designs. it took a few hours to get round only a tiny part of it as makola is a whole neighbourhood packed full of stalls and shops and winding streets with women selling wares they carry balanced on their heads - so its easy to get lost. trish came with us - it was great to have her expert eye and no-nonsense approach to buying fabric! just in terms of quality the different companies are classed according to value - GTP (Ghana Textile Printing), ATL (Akosombo Textiles Ltd) and then the Dutch wax prints which are super expensive and the cheap Chinese versions too. i had so much fun admiring all the different kinds - but it was hard to choose what to buy!! for the rest, i think the photos speak for themselves...

more market...

roadside kiosks

Y is for Yam, T is for Televi

yesterday i joined michelle for her morning of teaching at the osu community library, where she volunteers on their adult literacy programme. i was given a student too! her name is violet, and i spent a couple of hours helping her learn the phonetic sounds of the alphabet and watched her painstakingly copy out all the capital and small letters. her favourite letters were V for violet, Y for yam and J for jessica! imagine having made it to mid-adulthood without knowing how to read or write... kathy knowles, a canadian who started the library from a couple of blue freight containers almost 10 years ago, has also written a series of colourful childrens books with beautiful photographs of life in ghana. for example, Otu Goes to Sea is about a boy who lives in a fishing village just outside accra, near the port of tema.

http://www.osuchildrenslibraryfund.ca/

after lunch i finally managed to fix my phone situation - the mobile industry is booming here in ghana but MTN, the company i bought a sim card from, has set up a lengthly registration process in the last month - just my luck! so, almost one week, 2 phone complanies and 3 'chips' later i now have my own number here.

we went back to JayNii after checking out a spot called the waterfront - a cemented but brightly painted complex on the rocks where you can eat, drink and dance whilst the huge sea waves break against (or sometimes even over!) the walls surrounding it. i think my favourite drink so far here is pineapple juice with ginger - quite potent, especially given that the bottle doesnt mention any contents besides pineapple in its ingredients! i also picked up a pair of ghanaian shakers called Televi - which are made of 2 small round gourds filled with seeds and joined by a string. you put the string between your fingers and hold one ball in your hand, and then swing the other one around your hand to make them hit against each other. often musicians will have one set in each hand...have a look!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xspgiLoHIM

Nii is quite the pro - he taught me some simple 2 and 4 beat rhythms which i have been trying to master - one hand only! yesterday a couple of volunteers from Art for global Justice came to the beach to paint with the kids - they are having a fundraiser party/music night on friday to raise money for the Class 5 they have been helping at the local school in James town to be able to afford Class 6 next year...

after trying some sugar bread (ghanaians have 4 types of bread, in decreasing order of sweetness they are: sugar bread, tea bread, butter bread, which are all white and fluffy, and then the slightly less popular brown bread) which Nii picked up on his motorbike, so fresh it was still hot - we headed home once it got dark (early! around 6...) and i cooked fettucine ai funghi porcini and carpaccio di zucchine for dinner, complete with red wine and parmiggiano!

finally some photos...lots of big happy smiles :)

So, another eventful day - we visited one of the projects funded by NAWA called JayNii Streetwise, which is headed by Jay and Nii with their cultural dance troop and drum band. They raise money by performing at festivals which they then use to do workshops on their beach (which theyve fixed up nicely!) with school kids, like the one i had the privilege to join today...

the drumming boys

Learning the moves

Nii teaching us the rhythms

the beginning of a library that they are building onsite

Jay and I

the lighthouse beach

I also was recommended by trish the bead lady to visit eric boateng and his kente cloth in a small shop called Safari in the national culture centre - which is basically a big marketplace where you can find every kind of artifact associated with ghanaian arts and craft...he had the most amazing pieces, which he told us the names and the history of - and even showed me how to drape the cloth to wear it...

Eric and I

lots of fabric!

...and below an incredible tree I found nearby!