Jumbo is Jumbo

To explain my title I'll have to give you a little background first.

Ghana is a VERY religious county. VERY Religious. Most of Ghana is Christian but there is a large Muslim population also. Now this religiosity (is that a real word?) manifests itself in several ways... First of all, everything is pretty much shut down on Sundays. Medina market, which is usually crazy busy is not so crowded and not so loud. People also like to name their businesses very religious names. I'll give you a few examples... "Jesus is the Head Chop Bar" or "Blood of Christ Bicycle Repair shop" or "God is Good Furniture Upholstery", etc, etc. I would say 90% of all small businesses in Ghana have names like these. Tro-tros and taxis also have names like this, albeit much shorter. Some are named "Forgive me" or "Honor Him" or my personal favorite "God is God."

Now Tufts bought a new van for our program before we arrived and it's a really nice van. It didn't take long for us to decide that we wanted to name our van in the Ghanaian fashion. We debated naming it "Jumbo" but after seeing the "God is God." tro-tro we decided upon "Jumbo is Jumbo". We had to find the guy who sells the letters to put on the van and tonight are going to put them on in what will probably be an elaborate ceremony that involves the "spilling of libations" (Something that they do here in traditional Ghanaian religion...)
That is somewhat of a long story that doesn't really pay out in the end but you needed the background to understand.

In other news I have gone to 4 classes and thoroughly enjoyed two of them. I'm beginning to narrow it down and will hopefully know what I am taking in the next week or so. I will unfortunately NOT be taking "Preparation for Marriage" in the Home Science department and will be regretfully unprepared for my future as a Ghanaian house wife. Damn it. It was a Friday class and we can't take anything on Fridays because Tufts has us traveling a bunch.

But, my NGO class was amazing! First of all, it was a decent sized class. It's about 30 students (which is unheard of here!) and I'm the only American, which gives the whole thing a different flavor. And the best part is that we spend 3 weeksat the end of the semester actually creating an NGO. It's small groups and we get to register them in Ghana at the end of the semester if we want to. It's pretty sweet and totally makes up for the fact that it's a 7:30 AM class.

Also, I've found more parallels between Hogwarts and UGhana. We have a "forbidden forest" here... it's the Aburi Botanical Gardens. It's off limits to the students and quite dangerous actually. People get attacked there because its so secluded. But sadly there are no unicorns or other awesome creatures. Also there are interhall games that take place throughout the year... most notably football. It's no quidditch but I bet there's an awesome House Cup at the end. And Kofi? How can you say he's not a Dumbledore, c'mon people!