Planet Earth: Ghana Episode

Back from Dagbe and I can't tell you how sore I am. You remember my last entry about Dagbe? The massive amount of sweat it produces in anyone trying to do even a modicum of aerobic activity? Yeah, it's still like that. Possibly even worse. However, the dancing to drumming ratio was far smaller this time - thank god. We finished working on the dancing for Gahu (that's how you actually spell it, I found out...) and got to learn a lot of the drumming parts and the singing part for it. Then, yesterday, we moved onto a stylish war dance. Yes, stylish is the actual word they used. Do you know what that means? PROPS! We got wooden swords which we tied to ourselves with cloth and these furry/fuzzy stick things that are supposed to be spirit sticks that tell you what to do in the heat of battle. How can you hate dancing in 100% humidity when you have a sword and a feathery spirit stick? You just can't.

Dagbe is home to a new resident, Michael, who will be there studying for 6 months. By himself. Poor guy, he hasn't seen anyone outside of the Dagbe staff in 3 weeks. So we befriended him. But on Saturday night, when I went out to brush my teeth(you go into the backyard, they don't have running water), I see Michael, Kym, and Denise all staring at the wall of the building. What are they staring at??

Well, we seemed to have our very own Planet Earth moment on our hands... minus the slow motion filming and voice over. There were hundreds of these bugs that looked sort of like dragonflies (but not as pretty) walking all over this wall. One would chase after another one and as it did - all of it's wings would fall off! Just like that it would go from having four wings to none. And it didn't think anything of it as it continued to chase another bug whose wings have also fallen off by now and then they would mate. This was the most bizarre animal mating thing I have ever seen in real life. The sad part of this love story was that a lot of these bugs would fall off the wall before, during, or after mating. And if they fell onto the ground there were at least 2 really big frogs and 4 lizards there to snatch them up. The whole thing was fascinating, I was mesmerized. Except when I went to the bathroom (actually an outhouse - it's also behind the main building) and saw the insect tragedy being played out there...

All of the flying bugs that lost their wings and fell near the bathroom fell into a puddle where they were half drowning. Taking advantage of this situation were a huge number of ants, of all sizes and types, who were ripping apart these bugs and taking them back to their colony, I guess. It was a sad state of affairs and I couldn't watch for long.

So Dagbe-the-warzone was not so stylish after that. Poor bugs.

In other news, I am basically taking this semester to walk all of Accra. For anyone familiar with Accra (or handy with Googlemaps) these are the walks I have done(/will do in the case of the last one):
Osu to Campus
US Embassy to Campus
Campus to Shoprite to Campus
Osu to Nkrumah Circle to Campus

Annie and I don't have anything to do on Wednesday afternoons so we pretty much spend all afternoon on Wednesday walking places. It's way fun.