Craziest experience yet?

How to describe yesterday, that is the question.

Most of my blog entries are of the summary variety, updating the world (or at least those unfortunate enough to have been sent the link to my blog :P) on a whole list of things over the past week or whatever.

Well today, I’ll just write about one thing.

All week Nana had been talking about going to this festival for her ethnic group (or tribe). There are like fifty or a hundred different ethnic groups in Ghana, with ‘Ga’ being one of the biggest. They also originate from the oldest part of Accra, which is the really interesting ‘JamesTown’.

She made the entire office go. I even tried to get out of it because I had too much work, but she insisted upon us going. I’m glad she did, because it may have been the highlight of my trip so far.

The basic premise is that once a year, the Ga have this festival celebrating twins. I expected the twins part to be a bigger deal, but it certainly didn’t stand out.

Nana took us by taxi, all like 20 of us, to the area where it was going to be. We went to these random couple of houses where they were beginning to party. We saw this family, who had little baby twins, and they were making this ceremonial…I don’t even know what. If you look at pictures you’ll see, I want to call it a “stew”, but I don’t think that’s right.

It was a combination of random leaves, apparently part of a dead chicken, and who knows what else. Alcohol for one thing. The man of the house dipped his hands in to it and proceeded to wash his head with it. In other words he took an Italian shower in dead chicken, random vegetation and liquor.

Then we went to this other random place. It was really cool because with Nana (and our other Ghanaian colleagues), you kind of can go into the back alleys of these slums, not just look at things from the street.

Oh, and like usual, the kids love for you to take pictures. I’ve decided that taking pictures of kids and then showing them the picture is one of the best things you can do as an obruni. They are fascinated by the camera, love the attention and overall it’s just really fun.

Anyways, we then go and find a little “spot bar” to have a drink waiting for the main event.

The main event is basically what amounts to a….parade.…of people. It’s like the ‘running of the bulls’ in Spain….with people? I have no idea how to describe it.

Basically that ceremonial concoction (supposedly) has the power to make people possessed when they put it on their head. So this “parade” is basically this. Instead of floats, there are people walking with these bowls/buckets of dead chicken, vegetation and alcohol, on their head.

Only they aren’t really walking. They’re stumbling, unable to keep upright on their own (themselves or their pants by the way). Sometimes they run like zombies, other times they can barely walk. They swing around the street with a crowd guiding them. Liquid falling and splashing around.

The entire thing quickly became the most chaotic, craziest thing I may have ever seen. There aren’t a lot of people with these things, it’s at best a 1 to 100 ratio, but you get these people running down the street with this. And everybody’s watching. Hundreds of thousands of people watching I’m quite sure, as they barrel down what feels like the race course for the bull running (or the running of the Jew from Borat, nice!).

I really don’t know what else to say about it. You have men cross dressing, all sorts of people with their faces chalked in white. Then random people start putting random things on their own head. There is enough liquor flowing to keep Acadia wet for about a decade. One person ran with their ‘bucket’ also with a dead dog around their neck. People are doing random back flips. Twin children are paraded down on the shoulders of others.

And every time one “possessed” person comes near you, you have to be ready, because they may swerve right in to you. I even got a video on my camera of it, as we have to jump over the open sewer back on to the side walk so not to get leveled by a possessed Ghanaian man with who knows what on their head.

Ultimately the pictures won’t describe it. The videos probably won’t do it justice. But I’ll try and post both.

But suffice to say, it was crazy.

The Conference

Ok, so I haven't written a blog in a while, but I hopefully have a good excuse. In short, my two months of work in Ghana culminated into the last two days.

Since I arrived at CHRI, I've primarily been working on this big "international" conference that I've written about before. Anyways, I won't go into the details, and I'm too tired to write a long blog, but I'll at least ramble about it.

I must say though, wow am I relieved to have it over with. I had to work the entire weekend, meeting and greeting the foreign participants, setting things up, running errands and all that. Very little sleep, really long hours, lots of stress. But the conference went really well.

Day 1 started off really stressfully but really well. The Opening Ceremonies had some pretty major politicians from Ghana giving speeches, as well as the most famous scholar in the country I think. It drew about 40-50 members of the media. It was kind of crazy, but unfortunately I was manning the registration desk outside for much of it. I guess I missed some crazy political bantering between a couple of the politicians.

After that though things calmed down. Nana and the Minority Leader in Parliament did some TV interviews and whatnot, and then the real conference started. The entire morning went well, some interesting presentations, some decent discussion. But the afternoon things thinned out a bit.

We were supposed to have about 50 participants, and about 20 were supposed to be from outside Ghana, 30 from Ghana. But only about 16 of the foreign participants came (4 dropped out in the days before, including our unofficial "guest of honour". And by the afternoon, only about 10 Ghanaian participants were still there. So the dissapointment of the conference was the numbers. While we expected 40-50, we got 25-30.

Ultimately though it went well I think. Edmund made a mess of some things, but Steve and I tried to clean things up. The conference room was great, I think we did our best and that's good.

I also got to meet some really interesting people. None of the foreign participants were celebrities, but they were all big and impressive members of various civil society organizations. Meeting people from South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and so on and so forth was really interesting.

We also went out for this really cool dinner on Monday night. It was supposed to be to show the foreign participants a good time, but I think myself and the other interns (only Steve and I worked on the conference, but the others were invited because of low numbers relative to the original reservation) were about as amused as them. We went to this gorgeous outdoor restaurant on the ocean just outside of town. The moon was out, the waves were big and spraying mist over the big patio.

The highlight was this cultural group we hired to perform for us. It was basically like a 'busker festival' combined with west african drumming. It was sweet, I wish my camera wasn't out of batteries.

But it was still great. There were a couple great moments, but I'm not sure if retelling them would do them justice. A video might, perhaps, but not a blog entry. But it was really cool to see the foreign participants go from serious and intellectual to relaxed and fun.

The second day was good, again low numbers, but overall fine. Some presentations were really interesting, including from two different guys from South Africa. Then there was discussion and all that.

Finally, I was asked to give the closing thanks. Steve and Florence joked about me doing it because they know I'm shy about public speaking. I thought it was a joke, and i was running around the entire afternoon session, passing the microphone and stuff. Then Nana pulls me over and asks if I'm ready. I say I thought it was a joke, but she says it's too late. She scribbles a few sentences, and then I have to go. I have no idea how I sounded, probably terrified, but I kind of winged it and didn't completely embarrass myself.

And then it was over. I'm still at the hotel today, making sure all the guests leave alright. But I get tomorrow off (i guess because I worked all weekend) and will rest and relax. I honestly have no idea what i'll do the rest of my work time here in Ghana. Probably start some new project and not finish it. I only have two more weeks left of work (maybe less if I decide to do some continental travelling), so I guess it's kind of winding down.

People are leaving too, it's getting quiet and really feels like it's winding down. That I have one month to go is crazy. I feel like I've been here forever, but in good way.