people are leaving

this week we have four departures, all females, from our obruni haus group, leaving us a little smaller and a little less feminine. anne left on tuesday, jess left last night, candice leaves on saturday and kristen leaves on sunday. im starting to dislike the airport bar quite a bit. its become a ritual that we take people to the airport and sit at the airport bar while they check in, then they come join us for a final beer before departing. its a sad ritual.

new people are constantly moving in, but they just don't fill the gaps left by the old people. thankfully after this weekends departures, im the next one to leave on the 27th august. to avoid the airport ritual, we will say goodbye to candice and kristin tonight and then the rest of us, joined by simon will go to the beach for the weekend. it will be nice to get out of accra. when i get back on sunday im supposed to go to Nana's house for a goodbye dinner because she is going out of town for the rest of my time in ghana.

ive only got one week left of work. then late next week timo, kris, mark and I are going on a weeklong trip up north to see more of the country. northern ghana is supposedly a lot more arid, poorer, and way more muslim so it should give us some new experiences. im pretty psyched.

then i get back to accra in time to leave on the 27th. i get back to ottawa on the 28th, spend a few frantic days getting ready for school and seeing people in ottawa before heading back to wolfville. ross are we driving?

ill try and write a few more entries before i go traveling. then i think thats it for the blog. adios

chicken murder

we killed a chicken sunday night. we'd been planning this for awhile; a true ghanaian experience. we figured we couldnt live with ourselves as meat-eaters without actually seeing the slaughter ourselves. so we got a live chicken for five bucks from a little hut down the street and carried it home.

apparently (i think my boss told me this) Ghanaians grow up killing things so its not a big deal for them, but we didnt have any Ghanaians with us. that was our first mistake. chris' dad had once killed a chicken in his garage but chris hadnt been there to see it. so we got all our info on how to do the beheading from his second hand experience. our second big mistake was not having a sharp enough knife. things did not play out as we imagined. we pictured a quick clean death and a nice meal.

the whole thing was a disaster. someone decided to video tape the debacle which turned out to be a good idea. i think we could sell the rights to the video to PETA for a lot of money. this was animal cruelty at its purest. maybe the longest fifteen seconds of my life, and i didnt even do the killing. we are all truly going to hell.

i posted some before and after pictures on my blog. ill show a copy of the video to the strong-stomached when i get back.

bad thursday

there is way too much to write about in the last two weeks so i'm not going to even attempt to cover everything. that'll give me some stories to tell when i get home which havent been told in my blog.

it has been a good two weeks and it has been a horrible two weeks. up until thursday night at 1 am things were peachy. ill start with thursday i guess. we had a great night early on. a big group of us went to a sports bar called Champs which is run by a canadian guy from PEI. it was like being back home, pretty surreal. we entered a team in the pub quiz and got third place meaning we got a lot of free beer. afterwards chris, kris, timo and I went to bywell's bar which is a five minute walk from our house. they have live music and a nice atmosphere so that was cool. kris met a girl so stuck around, but chris, timo and i walked home. we were almost home when a moped sped around the corner and stopped literally inches in front of timo and i. a guy jumped off with a knife and started motioning like he was going to cut me if i didnt empty my pockets. i did quickly and gave him my cell phone but didnt have any money so i pulled out my pockets to show i had nothing else. he then moved on to timo and timo gave his wallet but the guy smacked him across the face with his knife anyway for no reason at all. as this was happening our neighbours came running to help catch the bastards but they jumped on their moped and made off. there was no liscense plate or anything and it happened so fast we didnt even get a good look at them.

timo got cut pretty bad by the knife. i went off with another guy who saw the whole thing to chase after them, but then we realised it was useless. it was only after timo called me back that i saw how bad it was. his face a shirt were covered in blood so we flagged a taxi down quick and got him to the closest hospital. we got there and he almost passed out so the doctors gave him an iv and cleaned the cut up a bit. then kris showed up with his ladyfriend and brought some money so we could pay the doctor. then we went in an ambulance to a bigger hospital where after waiting for two hours for the doctor to wake up and get there, timo got stitched up. they did a decent job with the stitching but he's still gonna have a wicked scar on his face. he's posted some pictures on his blog which you can get to by clicking the link to his blog on the right of the page. some are graphic just to warn you.

it was an interesting night. we'd been at champs and bywells since 830 so we were not sober when this happened. in fact the whole night at the hospital was not sober. timo, despite "ruining" his new obruni house tshirt (look at his blog for a good picture) managed to stay in really good spirits and keep his sense of humour. it was actually a somewhat enjoyable time at the hospital if you can believe it. he was bragging about the scar he'd have and we took some pictures of all of us giving the thumbs up around the hospital bed.

we got him home from the hospital around 5am and we were all pretty scik and hungover so we stayed up for sunrise. then we spent all day taking timo to his office, then a UN doctor, then a dental surgeon who put his teeth back in the right place. candice had to sit next to him and hold his hand as the doctor forced wires into his mouth. kris and i watched squeamishly from across the room. i guess the surgeon game him anesthetic but it didnt seem to be working too well. terrible stuff. timo might have to go home a month early to get more work done by his orthodontist. it will really be a shame if he has to leave, we will all miss him very much.

it was only later when we got home from the dentist that i realised that i had been involved in the whole thing as well. i wasnt hurt but i think i was still shaken up a lot more than i realised. its not everyday that something like this happens. i've always told people that accra is a safe city and i really believed it. i felt really safe walking on the streets at night in my neighborhood because you never see any crime or shady characters around. in ghana, if a thief is caught in the act, people around him will beat him up, often to death. crime really doesnt seem worth it here. this changes how i feel about the city a lot obviously. the speed with which it happened was maybe the most shocking part. it was all over in twenty seconds which makes me think that it could happen anywhere.

things are starting to return to normalcy however. we're going to one of my favorite restaurants tonight and Kris is bringing his projector home from work so we can watch movies off of someones laptop on the roof of obruni house.

it will be nice to put this behind us.