Northern Ghana Part 2 - Your favorite sandwich filling

Learning from our experience from the days before, none of the girls in my room set alarm clocks and we all just got up when we wanted to or when we heard others getting up. Banku for breakfast again. The most expensive banku we've had...5 cedi! Split among 3 people. We could barely finish it.

We stopped at a small village for a very short time and chatted with a villager who was carving a stirring stick used to make banku and TZ. (don't quite know what TZ is...i assume it is something similar to banku.)

Villager carving a stirring stick

Our next stop was Lansia. The villagers didn't appear as friendly or welcoming. Here we tasted their traditional beer called pito, made from maize, millets, or dillicon. They also sold shea butter! Only 10 peswas a ball! I bought two. They made DELICIOUS kosi with some kind of pepper that topped it off perfectly. I can't find that pepper anywhere. We continued on into the village to interview two seventy to eighty year-old women with lip piercings (one hole above the top lip, one hole below the bottom lip) formally holding padlocks. (silly me kept holding the shea butter balls in a bag and only just realized that they were melting really really fast. Didn't really know what to do with them so I handed them to some villages kids in hopes that they would go put it in a basin of water to keep it from melting and save it for future use. They just held on to it giving me a "What the heck do you expect me to do with this, stupid oburuni?" kinda look.) So you wanna hear about the padlocked women eh? Well in the past, such piercings were considered fashionable and conducted to attract men. However, authorities have banned the practice, which is why we didn't see younger women with such piercings. Padlocks were used to prevent wife kidnappings. This way they were not able to talk with their abductors. Furthermore, padlocks were used to keep wives from talking with visitors. The typical, male authoritative, controlling power kinda deal. The women we talked with wore plugs in their holes.

Me and some village women with pito beer. FYI, the drinking age is 18 in Ghana, and don't worry, I didn't drink the entire bowl.

One village women who formerly had a padlocked mouth

We stopped at a large market in Wucheau. Walked around a bit, bought some garbanzo beans + gari for lunch. Also fell in love with a beesap hibiscus juice that you drink out of a sachet bag. YUM! We spent the next seven hours driving further north to Bolga. It wasn't an enjoyable ride. The roads were extremely dusty because it was no longer paved. Dust started flying into our bus through the ventilation system and attacked us. It was SO stinkin dusty that they distributed face masks. It was difficult to breath and I was convinced that I'd have asthma by the end of the trip. When we reached our destination and the bus lights were turned on, we found one of the passengers completely covered in dust! I abandoned my contacts after this day and went with the glasses cause of all the dust. New accommodations that night. Not as nice as the night before, but better than the first night. About 30 beds in one room.

Blood. I mean hibiscus juice.

Next day: Ghana's 53rd Independence Day! We didn't do anything special regarding the holiday. Stopped by the transit center for breakfast and ate...guess what? banku. We visited Paga, famous for their crocodile ponds. We visited one village with a crocodile pond which supposedly held up to 200 crocodiles. We paid a small fee to have the community members lure crocs out of the pond by feeding them live chickens. They attempted to call out the largest croc to shore, but were unsuccessful. Apparently the largest croc ate a sheep earlier that day, so we settled for the second largest croc. We all took turns sitting/crouching/touching the beast. It was pretty thrilling. I was kinda hesitant at first because it's a wild croc. Meaning, it could turn on you at any point in time, and I'm sure the villager's measly little tree branch sticks weren't going to stop the animal from taking me down. We all had our turn and thankfully left with the same amount of people we came with. I love what our tour packet says about the crocodile experience: “Relax, express your anxieties and enjoy your experiences.” What if screaming your head off is how you express your anxieties? That obviously conflicts with relaxing and enjoying.

Me and the cute lil' croc

Next up, Ghana-Burkina Faso boarder post. It was pretty uneventful. We walked through No Man’s Land. While the residents of No Man’s Land are under no governmental rule, they do have elders of the village who enforce peace and justice when necessary. Note, "when necessary," because when I pulled out a camera to take a few pictures, some people in my group frantically told me to put it away because a lot of residents of no man's land have been known to take cameras away and destroy them. And with no real governmental rule, who's to stop 'em? It's ok though, cause I was still able to get in a few shots. =)

Our next visit was to the Pikoro Slave Camp. Here we visited a rock city where slaves were taken. Their faces were marked with hot iron and five to six slaves would be chained to a tree. They drank from small water holes and grinded stones into rocks to form pathetically minimal holes out of which about five slaves would share a meal. This in turn resulted in malnutrition and starvation. There was a market place for slave buying and a punishment rock where a slave sat with hands and feet bound, and was forced to stare at the sun all day. There existed a three-strike rule where a slave was killed to serve as an example to the rest of the camp if he/she were to be punished three times. The scenery was gorgeous. I wish we had more time here. I wanted to sit and mediate about the history that is the slave camp. But as usual, rush rush rush. (Interesting enough, while we were visiting an ex-slave camp, some other friends who didn't accompany us on the tour went north west that weekend and witnessed present-day child slavery in Ghana.)

The minimally carved grooves in the rocks from which the slaves ate their meals at Pikoro Slave Camp

Notice how sparse the land is compared to the green forest at the beginning of the trip

Off to Tongo where we visited the Tenzuk Chief Palace. The village is built in the mountains. The housing highly resembled the rocky surroundings, and blended right into nature. Here we learned about a very traditional community in which heavy rituals were performed. For example, the fact that our fully clothed tour group was even allowed into the village is attributed to a lengthy cleansing ritual involving the sacrifice of three cows and thirty sheep, for they were entering a harvest festival season in which no clothing was required. Men were topless and women wrapped towels around their bodies. We spent some time interviewing the chief in front of the palace. There was a man sitting at the chief's feet and he kept on shouting "NA!" while the chief was talking. I thought he was trying to call out to one of the many children running around the village. The chief would be speaking, "blah blah blah...explaining something important..." "NA!" "Blah blah blah explain explain" "NA! NA! NA!" Me thinking to self: "for goodness sake, man! Get your lazy butt off the floor and find Na yourself!" Turns out, Na isn't a person, but an interjection, to confirm whatever the chief was saying. So at the end of every phrase/pause, the man would yell "NA!" Which grew tiresome because I could never hear the beginning of the chief's phrases. I think it's pretty similar to all the "Amen!" "yes, Lord," and "Mmmhm's" that you hear in church during a sermon or a prayer. =P Anwaaayyys... The village was a labyrinth. You could easily get lost. Some of us lingered on the palace rooftop for a while to take pictures of the village from above, but was scolded because we were warned not to exit the same way we entered, and if we were to get lost, a complex ritual must be conducted before the rescue. Ancestor and idol worship is highly prevalent. Consultation of deities and shrines occur when the village people have problems and need help. Over three hundred people live in the chief’s palace, seventeen of which are his wives. I was really interested in listening to the tour guide talk about traditional values/practices, but it was difficult for me to hear the tour guide as village children swarmed all the obrunis, linking onto our hands and arms and keeping us from getting close enough to listen to the information concerning the community, though I had a delightful time playing with the children. Note, the picture I posted in an earlier entry as a teaser from this trip was from this village.

Me n the chief

View of a part of the village from the palace rooftop

On our way to our destination, Ashley gets a call from her roommate asking if she was alright because apparently there was an outbreak of spinal meningitis in the north. Huzzah.

We went to a sit down restaurant for dinner, which was a big mistake because most restaurants I've been to that are run by Ghanaians tend to have ridiculously slow service. They usually have a very small kitchen and only two cooks. We ended up waiting about... an hour and a half for our food.

An awesome two days.