June 6th

Last night, Me, Pedro and Dan were going to join Andrea, Shara (the American girls) in downtown Accra. But when we went to get our taxi we found them sitting outside of Grandma's shop with Prince (the organizer of another volunteer program) and two guys from Prince's staff. The 8 of us decided to stay outside the shop and play the most pg rated version of “never have I ever” ever played. Including such diddies as “never have I ever stayed in the same room as someone I loved”, “never have I ever eaten banku” and “never have I ever applied for an internship”.

I got to talking to Prince a little bit. Grandma is his Aunt, which explains why she hosts so many volunteers. Prince and Evans are good friends and they both started with Prince's volunteer organization when they were younger. Prince was inspired in the third grade by a minister who told him he should apply his diligence in school to help the community. Prince works part time as a computer specialist (he has a degree in computer science) and when volunteers are low, he contributes his personal salary to to maintain his volunteer organization. It's really amazing how hard these young men work to better their country.

Today I did some laundry with Pedro and Dan. I didn't really have a much to do, but I wanted to get the hang of washing my clothes by hand. It wasn't bad at all, but let me take this opportunity to say to whoever reads this thing please please please, cherish your washers, dryers, showers and tap water. Taking baths with buckets makes the cold water situation in Gewirz (my law school apartment building my first year) look like paradise. I'm not complaining though, but the little western comforts are easy to take for granted. Keep in mind I'm in the capital city of Africa's "golden child" though, so other parts of Ghana (like poorer regions in the North) and other countries certainly have much less access to water and electricity.

I made good use of some buckets of water today to create my own gym. I went on a warm up run on the road in front of my house where I discovered I was more dehydrated than I thought :-/. But I was fine once I came in and drank some water. I was then able to do some pushups, jumping jacks and weighted exercises with different sized buckets of water! In yo face NY Sports Club.

After lunch, me and the other volunteers hit a local restaurant known as a chop bar in Ghana) ,because Dan was still hungry, ( about 15 minutes from our house. On they way we stopped from some coconut water (way better than Zico, Boots) in a giant coconut for only 50 peswas (like 35 cents). We found out that we can watch all the world cup matches on big screen tvs at this particular chop bar. That fact combined with the discovery of Pedro's favorite local drink (a hard cider called Savannah Dry ) means we'll probably be frequenting this place during the Cup.

For dinner, Grandma made Banku (the plantain/cassava tamale ball type thing Evans and Marcos had yesterday) with fish and palm nut stew for the other volunteers and bean curd and okra for me :) . The other volunteers aren't really digging Banku, but they're all polite and they eat as much as they can. I have no problem with it, but it is quite heavy so I will never buy it for myself for lunch. I can see myself making it once or twice in the winter though (so Terri, Rob and Charlene get excited for that!!)

Tomorrow I meet the firm I'm working for, learn how to take the tro-tro (local bus) and tie up other loose ends. I'll try to upload the videos and pictures I have in the coming days. However, since I'm starting work I probably won't be trekking over to the internet cafe everyday so I'll be posting fewer and more far in between.