"obruni bye bye"

Ok, people will stop reading this blog if I don't write at least once a week I figure, so here's an update before I head off for the weekend.

The past week of work has been interesting and definitely up and down. While working at CHRI is an interesting opportunity, it's not what I'll remember most from my time here I'd imagine. First an important development. They hired a new guy to answer the phone! He's hired as a receptionist, a Ghanaian right out of high school, and in theory he takes over that role. Oddly enough, he still puts the phone on my desk when he has other work he wants to do. Strange logic eh, he takes over my job so I can do my work, but when he wants to type up the address book, he needs the phone off his desk and on mine. Anyways, that's been a nice change already.

Most of my work so far has been kind of organizational work leading up to a major Conference we are hosting at the end of July. I've been in charge of the budget among other things (ya Nigel, I'm doing accounting work...shoulda taken those Excel training course you always blew me off shinny to go to). Anyways, I also got assigned this report which Nana's been jerking me around with. She ripped into me for not working on it on Monday, not realizing how busy I was with other stuff (I was assigned to work full time with this Ugandan lawyer Florence by Nana, so that's where my work comes from). She then reversed things, and now things are relaxed. Plus she's out of the office next week (Zach, you know what that means, lol).

Today was a crazy day. We began by going to this conference on African Legal Aid. There were some big people there, with the Assistant Attorney General of the United Nations as the moderator and the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. The President of Ghana was supposed to give a speech, but he didn't show. We had to get out of there early though, because the entire group of interns (oh, all 18 of us) were supposed to go this school out in this rural area beyond Accra.

That was kind of stressful. We were supposed to meet this guy to leave at 11:15, but he didn't show up until 1:15. Then we got there, and it didn't start until almost 3. Now, it takes an hour to get back to Accra, and some people wanted to leave almost as soon as it began to get back to Accra by the time they were officially off work. Thankfully we didn't though, because these schoolkids were ecstatic to have a tro-tro full of obruni interns (that they were told were representing the Commonwealth, lol) coming to watch their performance. It was really good too, with some great singing and acting. We didn't get back into Accra until close to 6, but at least in my firm opinion, it was worth it because the kids would have been really dissapointed if we'd bailed really early (not to mention it would have really looked bad on us).

It was also interesting for me just personally. It was interesting to get out of Accra and see what it's like at a school in Ghana. The themes of the play were education, HIV/AIDS, drugs, stuff like that. And I dunno, they don't see obrunis every day like people in Accra. Even once we got back out to a more main road (this was a fair ways off the highway), you could tell they weren't used to obrunis. And I love the little dialogues with random Ghanaians for some reason. Like this street vendor who came up to me while I was in a tro-tro. He asked me if I wanted something, I said no, talked to him a bit, and as the tro pulls off, he just shouts out in a voice I'll never forget, "obruni bye bye". About two minutes later another little memorable one too, where this like 12 year old boy vendor comes up to me, asks me if I want what he's selling, and I say no. He then asks me how I'm doing, and then "where you going", to which I say "Accra". He then just flashes me this big smile and says "can you buy me something nice?"

Some people get hung up on the little things, like the smells or the taxi drivers or overdosing on rice or whatever. But the other half of people just roll with it and don't worry about those little things and just laugh about it. Like, I find the dialogues with the taxi drivers just funny to joke and laugh about and stuff. If you go to a developing country there will always be a billion little things to stress.

Anyways, I'm off for the weekend to this beach town about four hours away called Ada or something. I'll try and upload some pictures soon too, maybe after this weekend.

Until then, "obruni bye bye".