time flies

my time with peace corps will end on the 29th of july 2011. it really has gone so quickly, and yet, so much has happened.

racecourse station

a couple weeks ago i traveled for some conferences. i had to go through kumasi on the way there and on the way back. i think i have mentioned that i don't like traveling, and i think i have mentioned that i really don't like kumasi either.

racecourse is the station that buses to the north leave from. i don't like racecourse station either. there are at least four separate "wa stations" in racecourse, each with a different bus at a different price leaving once filled with different passengers. the trick is finding which one is leaving soonest. that would be easy if the station managers were honest, but when you ask how many tickets are left on their bus, they always lie and say maybe 2, when in actuality it is 20 and you'll be waiting 5 hours if you buy a ticket on their bus.

anyway.

that wasn't going the be the point of this post.

while i was waiting for my bus to fill, a guy came around with a loudspeaker, advertising the ointments that he was selling. this is normal: sometimes they are trying to sell cassettes or cd's, sometimes it's just preachers or whatever.

this man met a little boy who was just wandering around, and he started interviewing him. they were speaking in twi, so i couldn't understand the actual conversation, but it was pretty cute.

rainy season

i am thankful the rainy season has begun, but i wish it didn't make its entrance with quite so much enthusiasm.

friday i returned home from nearly two weeks of back-to-back peace corps conferences. having been in the south, where the rains come earlier, i was dreading returning to the sweltering heat of almost-but-not-quite-rainy-season in the north. i was wishing for rain, but doubting it would come.

well, no more than two hours after i arrived home on friday evening, we got that rain. ghana doesn't have tornadoes, but i would say this rainstorm was just about the closest thing you could get to tornadoes without actually having a funnel cloud. first rain, then hail, lots of thunder and lightning. the power went out. the rain started coming in the windows. the windows were closed. rain was gushing in the windows, through the cracks on the sides of the louvers. some areas of my house had up to an inch of water on the floor. that began the frantic effort of raising things off the floor, IN THE DARK. it involved lifting my spare mattress off the floor and finding every electrical cord (and there are a lot) that was anywhere near floor level.

when the lightning flashed, i could see that the outside of the house was faring as badly as the inside. the tree right outside my bedroom window was knocked over from the roots. the fence surrounding the chicken coop was completely blown off.

it wasn't until morning that i saw that my house was not the worst hit: the entire roof was blown off the boys' dormitory at my school. the kids' rooms were completely flooded and all their belongings soaked. the zinc from the roof is in twisted shreds about a hundred feet from the building, so who knows how long it will take to repair that damage. 

the dormitory was only a year and a half old.