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!