Cape Coast Fest, Football, and Sewage

Day 45.

On Thursday of last week, we all (EAP students) travelled to Cape Coast for their annual festival. We arrived at night in just enough time to search for dinner. A group of us followed Kofi, one of the EAP facilitators, to find food. We were surrounded by street food but Kofi said that we shouldn’t eat it – he would but we shouldn’t. It was dark out and very noisy. It is typically noisy here, but in preparation for the festival, there were huge industrial speakers stacked every few hundred meters….playing the same six songs…over and over and over. After a long walk weaving through crowds of unfamiliar people wanting to talk to us, we ended up at Castle Beach restaurant – one look at the menu (4.5 GH cedi for a plate of chicken and rice) we left…to go eat street food.

Friday. We woke up to bad news. The hotel had been broken into and Travis’ very expensive professional camera, 150 GH cedis, and 2 backpacks were missing. The backpacks were found but the money and the camera were long gone. The rest of the day we spent enjoying Cape Coast: we had pancakes made by a Rastafarian named Stone, climbed to the top of a fort overlooking the whole city, ate at a vegetarian (!!) place for lunch (Avocado sandwich – bomb), and Carmen and I accidentally slept through the sacrifice of a bull (they hacked his head off with a machete and dragged him through the streets with it barely attached…part of me is glad I missed it). The day was great, but come nighttime I found that I really do not have a taste for Cape Coast, at least not during festival time. There were far too many people looking at us to see what they could steal and grabbing us as we walked by. As compared with other places we have been in Ghana, Cape Coast is currently low on the list.

Saturday. The day of the festival. Thousands of people were in the streets dancing and celebrating underneath their Chiefs or Queen Mothers who were carried on people’s heads like in Roman times. As each chief passed, he danced to the beating of drums following him, smiling at the crowd and his people below. Everybody was full of energy and excitement. There were people dressed up in all kinds of costumes (nurses, monkeys, stilt walkers, only underwear, clowns, regalia, drag, matching outfits) and it was very colorful. The procession lasted a few hours and it was hot. Working our way through the crowd was not easy as people would stop us and say “Obruni, dance!” and then laugh as if they’ve never seen a white person dance before.

That evening, Marlon, Alex, Nikos, Sauce, and I went looking for dinner. Sauce spotted a sign for a street stand that said “Special Soup”. Being an adventurous eater, he walked over to check it out; we followed. He lifted the lid of the soup to see pieces of unfamiliar looking meat floating in it. He asked the women selling the soup, “What kind of meat is that?” One woman replied what sounded like “kaat”. Not understanding, he asked again, “What kind of meat is that?” Again she replied, “It’s kaat”. We still didn’t understand so she asked a man near by to help explain. He said, “It’s kaat. You know, we have dogs and we have kaats.” The three women behind the stand proceeded to meow. Sauce said, “I’ll take it!” I left.

Sunday. We woke up still tired from the previous day to take the three-hour bus ride back to Accra. Despite our exhaustion, we had our friends from Tufts buy us tickets to the Fourth Round FIFA World Cup Qualifiers: Ghana Black Stars vs. Sudan – my first real soccer game. It was amazing. The stadium was packed with Black Stars fans wearing Appiah and Essien jerseys, waving Ghanaian flags, blowing noisemakers, and covered head to toe in body paint. We had VIP seats: third row, center field. Though there was a pane of glass between us and the action, we got to sit right behind the players. The Black Stars scored once each half making the scores Ghana 2, Sudan 0. The final whistle was blown by the Vice President of Ghana, who then officially stated that Ghana has qualified for the World Cup…and the crowd goes crazy.



Today: this deserves a blog post of it's own but I am going to add it here and make it brief. Just a few hours ago, I went on a field trip for my Conservation and Environmental Studies class. We were going into Accra to see how they manage liquid waste (sewage). The "high tech" facility that cost 22 million pounds that began running in 2002 broke down in 2004 and all of Accra's sewage has been diverted to the Atlantic Ocean ever since. We literally saw sewage trucks pull up to the beach and release all of their sewage then drive away. Devastating for so many reasons. Maybe I will write more later, after I have had time to process what I saw.