Eat, Pray, Love

On The Road. I think Jack Kerouac would be proud of me if he were alive today. Or may be not. I'm not really a free-spirited wanderlust moving in a vacuum while the ivy grows over the door, am I? :) But this past weekend, lying in a hammock at 6:30 in the morning reading Hemingway's 'A Farewell To Arms' while the waves from the warm waters of the Atlantic came crashing down on the rocks a couple hundred feet away from me, I sure did feel like one :)

Cape Coast is a pristine, palm-draped rustic beach town just a hundred miles west of Accra where the young go to have a fun time and the elder folks go looking for a little peace and quiet time to unwind. We were 11 people ranging in ages from 18 to 40 and stayed in small palm shacks literally 200 feet from the water!

The little town of Elmina is a few miles away, home to the famous St. George Castle, a 300 year old slave castle, one of the biggest in West Africa. The Portuguese, Dutch and finally the English ruled over much of the Gold Coast from within the castle, using it as dungeons for thousands of slaves from West Africa as part of the gold/ivory for arms trade. Unspeakable atrocities and tortures that strike at the very core of human existence were carried out during the centuries of imperialist dominance here, things that have often caused the locals here (oblivious of the true history of this place) to be moved to tears upon seeing the gruesome remnants of a past that we can only hope will never ever be repeated again in the world we all live and co-exist in.

Elmina being a fishing town had hundreds of canoes and fishing boats docked at the harbor when we passed by that afternoon. Never one to miss out on an adventure, I quickly hovered over to one of the local fishermen and suggested he take a few of us out to sea for a little trip. Imagine a bunch of foreigners on a tiny boat floating around on a Sunday afternoon while Ghanaian fathers and mothers watched us from aside the crowded fishmarkets scattered along the coastline :) I doubt we'd had too many predecessors!

I've realized one thing though about volunteering in developing countries. If you really look at where a lot of the prominent NGOs set up their bases, you will find that most of them are pretty far away from major cities or tourist-infested towns. I initially didn't think much about this fact but after my sojourn through Accra and Cape Coast I realized that local people who often live in poor to lower-middle class environments can tend to unfairly look at foreigners in a very pre-set, typecast kind of way - we have more money than they do and that we are indifferent to their troubles and hardships. In towns further away from commercial centers or tourist hubs (like Hohoe where Cross-Cultural Solutions is based), the locals are often quite simple and open minded when it comes to understanding cultures different from their own and look at volunteers as people who genuinely care about helping communities empower themsleves.

Saturday night all over the world is party night, so we didn't want to break any rules :) We went out to a nice place for dinner right by the ocean. The seafood was amazing. Checked out a local nightclub right after. Sunday morning came around and we drove up to the Kakuma rainforest close by. There is a canopy high up above on the trees that stretches for about a few hundred feet. It was a surreal experience walking up so high on wooden planks suspended from ebony trees and looking down on the entire forest!! Acrophobiacs, beware! I doubt if there are too many places in the world where you can experience something like this. I think Costa Rica may be one of them.

I am back in Hohoe now and was at the orphanage this morning. I am slowly getting a better hang of how to interact and teach my little kids :) Since they're so young (2-4 yrs) I've been doing mostly nursery rhymes but trying to explain the concept and story behind it using pictures and actions instead of plain memorization, so I think things are getting better and the teachers here are appreciative of my work. You tend to get quite attached to some of the kids here and I know it will be hard to suddenly leave them behind 2 weeks from now :( I wish I could upload a few pictures but the computers here are quite antiquated, so I'll post them when I'm back in New York.

I will write another blog sometime this week talking specifically about my experiences at the orphanage and about my friends who've volunteered at hospitals and AIDS awareness programs, so if anyone of you is considering volunteering abroad, you'll get a better perspective.

Hang in there eveyone. Our lives are too short to constantly worry and complain about so many little things that seem trivial compared to the many real problems and hardships that the majority of our world has to deal with everyday.

Let's all try to be happy with who we are and what we have.

Eat, pray, love.

Fondly,

Ronnie

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