We are just getting settled in. Our first orientation that took place in Philadelphia was full of introductions, name remembering, and getting to know Peace Corps, The Organization. There are 72 of us, so just the logistics means we end up standing around a while as people get gathered up and ready to go. We had a bit of a free afternoon on Wednesday which a few of us used to run up the six blocks to the Liberty Bell and then back to the Reading Market Terminal for lunch. The next morning, they piled on three buses and we rode to JFK airport. Being my first time to New York, I quite enjoyed the ride through Manhattan and Queens. We got to JFK incredibly early since it takes a long time for 72 people to check in and get through security. The next eleven hours were filled with, unfortunately, very little sleep, lots of yakking, and whatever other entertainment contraptions they programmed into the individual touch screens. We touched down in blessed Africa and were met with a healthy spring rain.
We arrived in Accra at 8am and after getting our baggage, took a cruise through customs. We got onto the special Peace Corps bus that took us to the Accra office where we were welcomed with a short Ghanaian-style ceremony—complete with locally brewed gin! The rain didn’t seem to faze anybody as we met all the staff and continued to mingle with each other.
It’s now the third day we’ve been here and it feels a bit like summer camp. We are staying in lodgings belonging to the Women’s Seventh Day Adventist Valley View University which is really open and outside the city. We’ve had our first lesson in Twi—Makye, wohondusay?—learned how to bathe and do our laundry with buckets, started our anti-malarial pills, eaten some Ghanaian food, learned to do everything with our right hand, played lots and lots of Mafia. We’ve actually done very little as they seem to have the idea that they have to break us in slowly and that we will be too easily overwhelmed. They also are not considering this phase as training which will start in full swing in about a week. But first we must have a Vision Quest.
Apparently, after giving us a little bit of Twi, some directions, bus tickets, and promises of a willing already stationed volunteer at the other end, they put us on a bus and send us to a possible field site. The trip could take anywhere from a few hours to a couple days for those of us traveling all the way to the north. We don’t have our assignments yet, but I’ll tell you all about when I finish. It’s meant to give us a sense of accomplishment that we can travel around Ghana on our own outside of our so far exclusively American group.
Though they don’t let us out much, we do get the occasional glimpse of the city as we drive from the PC office to Valley View. Pictures speak better than I can describe, but the ride is full of private vendors selling various merchandise from fabrics and groceries to car parts. Women carry large bowls full of anything and everything on their heads with great skill (I saw a ten year old girl balancing a five foot bench on her head—horizontally), piles of tires act as a road barrier, roads switch between paved and packed red earth, and scorpions are as big as your hand.
The people I am with are diverse and interesting, and a few with connections to me that were a surprise. A guy who’s hiked the entire Appalachian Trail; a guy from Salt Lake who first went on his mission to Uganda, decided against Mormonism after a year and came back and did this instead; a woman who’s a nurse and been to Africa several times; a guy who roams, but spent the last year in Portland; a woman from Takoma Park and a guy from Silver Spring, ten minutes from my home in College Park; an older man who grew up in Edinburgh and on his second Peace Corps trip; and a guy who was born in south Sudan and has come back to the continent of his birth. Everyone seems great, and we’re all excited and raring to get going. I am excited as we all pass through this process together and see where we all end up.
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