past two weeks...

These past two weeks have been pretty fun but hectic. My little brother, Richard, had a cold and I’m pretty sure I got that from him, so I have been sick for about a week, which isn’t too fun, but I’m starting to feel better.

It’s been hard adjusting to the food. There doesn’t seem to be much variety. It’s usually a type of meat with some starch. Banku and Fufu are popular here. I forget which is which, but one is mashed yams and cassava and the other is mashed yams and plantains. This turns into something like looks like bread dough and then you dip it in a stew/soup. I don’t really like it because I feel like I am eating slimy bread dough and you can’t chew it otherwise it expands in your mouth, so my mom has been giving me rice and noodles and other soups/stews, beans, etc. Ghanaians also eat with their hands, so that has been hard to get used to because everything is scorching hot. My family always laughs at me because I’m not used to touching a boiling pot with my bare hands but they are. The other day they were grabbing hot coals to move them around and I was grimacing, which was entertaining for them. They also don’t eat anything that is cold, so when it’s a million degrees outside it gets even hotter when your dinner is boiling. Luckily my mom often gives me some pineapple, which is so delicious. Ghanaians also eat out of the same bowl as each other. So the girls sit at once place and the boys at another and they all have the same bowl to eat out of…I have my own, except for one night when I shared some Fufu with my sisters.

Last week I got watch my older brother, Mark, kill a chicken. I think it was pretty entertaining for them to watch my reactions because I’ve never seen a chicken killed before. This chicken happens to be the same chicken that stole food off my plate the other day…it shouldn’t have done that! So on Saturday, my brother caught the chicken and held its wings down with his feet and then he poured water down its throat, which I have been told is a tradition that some Ghanaians have before killing a chicken so that it can have a safe passage to the next world. After giving it some water he slit its throat and let the blood pool into a hole he dug in the ground. After that my two brothers poured some boiling water on it and started plucking its feathers (all has been captured on my camera!). Then my mom came and started to chop it up for dinner. That was definitely and interesting experience. I hope I don’t have to kill my own chickens when I go to site, otherwise I won’t be eating chicken!

The next day all the PCT (Peace Corps Trainees) and our host parents went to meet the village chief. You can’t talk directly to the chief so you have to talk to his counterpart who refines what you say and then tells the chief. As is tradition in Ghana, when going to visit the chief you have to take a gift, and they prefer hard alcohol. So our trainers took the chief some schnapps. Another tradition is that the elders pray to the ancestors and ask for help and wish others well, etc. After doing so, they pour libation and pass around the schnapps so everyone else can do the same. We each got some and poured a little on the ground and drank the remainder. It tastes like moonshine, so at 830 in the morning this was not so great for our stomachs!

After meeting the chief I went to church with my family. We went to my brother’s church, which is about 5 minutes away (my sister usually goes to the Methodist church next door, but my brother prefers the Pentecostal one because his uncle is a preacher there). There was a lot of dancing and singing and then all of a sudden I heard my name being called. So my mom and sister took me up front to introduce me to the church. I forgot to mention but I have been given a new name here in Ghana. I am not called Hayley anymore (at least by Ghanaians); instead, my Ghanaian name is Dokua (sounds like doe-kwee-uh). Apparently Dokua is a special name because it was my mother’s mother and everyone really seemed to like her.