New Updates from Volta Region

School starts in 5 days. I've been spending a lot of time at my house in my village, so I will start to update you all on them. Kofi, who is about 5 years old, I am slowly teaching bits of English. I brought some lacrosse balls to use for juggling, and he just likes to simply walk around all day with one (they are different colors, so he must say the colors of the balls correctly to get any for the day). Fafali is about 2 years old, and if any of my family has heard a baby screaming in the background while they call, its her. She cant say my name, so she yells "Ai" when she wants my attention. Kekeli is about 10 and speaks English very well, but he watches television all day and I rarely see him playing outside. My landlord (a 76 year old badass) is still full of energy, though he cannot walk very far to his farm. Also, Kofina is essentially my caretaker because she cooks dinner for me, but she is always doing something - never any down time it seems like... she does have three kids to look out for. Village life is good.
Number of complete fish found in my food: 1
Number of goats found inside my room yesterday: 2
Countdown until I will return to the US: ~700 days
Current temperature: ~75 F
Number of Werther's Hard Candy eaten in Ghana: 42
Number of times I've been to a police station in Ghana: 1
Okay I will tell a bit of a story here. I went down to the Kente festival with a few friends to see all the cloth and have a good time. It was fantastic. Except for a digital camera that went missing. It belonged to a Ghanaian but she was pretty sure that one of us took it. At the time, we all had our pricey SLR cameras and had no need for a simple 1 MP point-and-shoot AA battery operated camera from 1999, so she called the police to search the house we were at and everything in it (including our stuff). Long story short, it took four hours out of our day including a trip to our district police station. The final result? as the police were about to look through our stuff a second time (with us watching very closely to make sure nothing of ours went missing), the camera magically appeared where one of our bags had been about a minute earlier. Since the Americans were all in a different room when it was replaced and found, we concluded that someone in the household may have 'borrowed' it but gave it back in a way to make it seem like we had had it all along. The police commander said a prayer, thankful the camera was found, and then the police left. It bothered all of us a bit to be accused of stealing a camera so blatently, when in fact someone else from their family had taken it, and then the same person tried to frame us loosely in the end. Besides that, we had a great mini-vacation in Kpetoe.

If you want to see a video of fellow PCVs and I doing a Ghanaian dance, check out Molly's blog: mollyrumery.blogspot.com Its about halfway down the page.