Electric Lib

Shaking it West African Style

I just returned from a fabulous dinner with everyone in my program plus another program that's studying at the University of Ghana Institute of African Studies, and it was just splendid. We enjoyed a delicious meal while watching a West African dance company perform dances from around the country. Once we all finished eating, they invited everyone up to dance (which might sound horrendous to some), and it was SOOO much fun. I took a West African dance class at UVM and had such a good time, so I was pretty excited to try it again. Hopefully it won't be the last dancing we'll do here (and I highly doubt it will be).

In other news, school work is suddenly starting to pile up here! When your first two courses only last eight weeks they have to jam in a bunch of material and assignments all at once. I'm sure I'll get it all done, I just hope it will be done well.... After our courses end, we take a ten day trip up north to start researching which NGO we want to work with. After that we do another course, less academically intense, and we do a mini week long placement with an NGO. Then comes December break! I will keep you updated with my plans, because they only exist in my imagination right now and change daily... We shall see....

This weekend we'll be traveling to the Volta region which is on the Eastern side of Ghana and home to the Ewe ethnic group (pronounced eh-wey). There are supposed to be some beautiful waterfalls there so I'm pretty excited to check them out. I've been trying to take some more cool pictures as actual evidence that I'm here, so hopefully I will post those after this weekend (might as well wait till I see the waterfall). I took some awesome videos on my camera tonight of the dancing, so I'll try to post those as well... (Josh, where would be the best place to post videos?).

That's all the news I have for now! Life is good and I'm so happy to be here. Although... when I think back to my mother's homemade chocolate chip cookies, I kind of wonder how I ever could have left? My sweet-tooth has been feeling a bit neglected lately... Posted by lib at September 17, 2008 05:59 PM