Okay, so I wrote this blog on Saturday but the internet at ISH (where I live) was too slow to be able to post it on blogger. Boo. So pretend it’s Saturday.
The foot is a beautiful shade of purpley-blue-grey. The swelling doesn’t seem to want to go down any further but I am almost walking like a normal person again. Which is great! There’s only a slight limp, which I kind of exacerbated by thinking of myself as totally healed and walking around on it all day today without my ace bandage. Which I regretted by this afternoon. But alas, it is much better than I ever thought it would be at this time.
SO – Rosie, my quietly persuasive roommate, finally convinced me to get braids. It took some convincing as I was sure that I was going to look like just another silly Oboroni. But I could not be more curious. Since coming here in July, I have wanted to get the full range of experiences of being in Ghana. No food is too gross to try. No dance is too embarrassing to perform in front of a hundred strangers. And getting your hair braided is just such a Ghanaian thing to do.
I wasn’t in denial about how silly I was going to look, I really wasn’t. I just figure, at no other time in my life can I look this funny and not have to see a billion people that I know every day. I can do it and, besides a few pictures and the memories of the other 5 Tufts girls, no one will be the wiser!
However, by Friday morning I was dreading getting it done. Rosie and I made plans to go to the “salon” (actually a stall at Bush Canteen – a market on campus) at 7 AM. The process of getting your hair braided takes something like 3 -6 hours, depending on how many people are working on you at once. It’s also quite a painful process. They don’t just braid your hair normally. They braid in a TON of fake hair (they go through a process of trying to match your hair color to the different fake hairs they have… they had to mix a brown and a red for mine. Except the finished product is much more red than my hair actually is…). So any one who knows how thick my hair is normally should understand that I have 3 times the amount of hair on my head now. I can’t pull my hair into a pony tail because I can’t fit it in one hand. I got the front cornrowed in a pretty pattern and the rest is in regular braids.
I haven’t decided if I like it yet. It’s definitely weird. My original plan was to withhold judgment for 2 days and the earliest I could take them out (if I didn’t like them) was Thursday. I still haven’t made that decision yet, but we’ll see. I can’t imagine I’ll want to leave them in any more than 2 weeks.
In other news, today Nana Akufo-Addo came to campus. We were told in our orientations that we were not supposed to go to “political rallies” as they could become riots and/or be dangerous. But a Presidential Candidate was coming to OUR CAMPUS. How could I not go?? I’m totally missing the fun and fervor of election season back home so I need something to fill that gaping hole. The original word on the street that he was speaking in the morning. WRONG. He’s speaking at 5:30, says the people wearing NPP shirts, setting up the platform on the basketball court. So we show up at 5:30. And wait. And wait.
Denise worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign last summer, so she was all a flutter about the similarities between American and Ghanaian campaigns and rallies. She said something about how in the US they always tell people to get there at least an hour before they actually think it’s going to start. (UGH. The stage manager in me HATES that.) So 6:30 rolls around and we think – Hmm. Maybe things will start.
Nope. Then it’s 7. Then’s it’s 7:30. Then it’s 8. Then it’s 8:30. Finally someone comes on stage to tell us that Nana is on campus, but he’s in Legon Hall for something or another and we should all go over there. And there’s literally a stampede of people trying to get over to see Nana. This part was by far my favorite as people got super excited when they started seeing important politicians. There was tons of yelling and chanting and singing and picture taking. It was quite exciting.
On the way to Legon Hall I got into a VERY detailed and intellectual conversation with a student working on the NPP campaign. He asked me all of these interesting questions about American politics in comparison to Ghana and my viewpoints on the war in Iraq and the American economy. It was really cool to have that kind of discussion with someone who didn’t go to Tufts.
So we got to Legon, more jumping and shouting, and then suddenly – another stampede! This time, back to the place we came from originally. I’m not sure what the point of relocating us for 20 minutes was, but it happened and I seemed to be the only one questioning it. By the time we got back and the lesser politicians were making their introductory speeches, I couldn’t take it any more. I’d been there for almost 4 hours. My foot was starting to hurt. I was hungry. So, even though it seemed as though maybe Nana was actually going to show up, I had to go home.The experience was worth it all the same, I was just too cranky/tired/hurting to stick it out any longer.
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