I work with some truly remarkable people. I’ve just completed an 8 day stint out doing visitations in my villages, and I am astounded by how extraordinary some of the local workers that I have the privilege to be supervising are.
A week ago, I had just finished my supervisory visit in the village of Koro and was getting ready to bike the approximately 7 kilometers back to Tetou, where I was camping at a friend’s house. One of the local workers that I supervise in Koro, and my main contact there, had some papers to drop off at the health clinic in Tetou and wanted to speak with the doctor there so he suggested that we bike back together. Since I still don’t know the roads incredibly well, I was grateful for his company. Especially in rainy season, which is now, the roads are extremely difficult to navigate in certain sections: nomadic herders have established many spur roads that wind their way back into remote parts of the bush, and this is further complicated by the rains creating large swaths of mud which eradicate signs of the main road and also contribute to slowing the pace of travel even more. There are certain parts where it is simply easier to dismount from the bike, take my shoes off so that they don’t get pulled off by the mud, and slog my way to the other side of the muddy patch where I promptly seek out a Malian to ask for directions since I have inevitably lost my way (or at least suspect that I have). The first time that I biked out to the villages of Borokuy and Kira, it took me 3 hours and one tire repair to go what should have been 9 kilometers. That time and the previous trip to Koro I am fairly certain I took a wrong turn but was then lucky enough to take another wrong turn and still ended up in the correct village.
So, I was grateful that Dabou wanted to bike back to Tetou with me. While I had been in Koro for the day, he had bent over backwards to be a good host. I drank several rounds of Malian tea, was offered innumerable bowls of toh (the local food), given the best parts of the meals that I was actually able to partake in, and practically forced to take some recently ripened corn back with me to cook and eat later. Just like with all our favorite grandmas, in Mali food is love. When it was actually time to leave, I strapped my notebooks on the back of my bike, threw on a camelback and climbed onto my mountain bike. I had Dabou start ahead of me for 2 major reasons: he knew the route better, and I also suspected that he would be slower than me. I was right. This man, who is probably over 6 feet tall, was riding a Flying Pigeon, the endemic bike of Mali which was originally provided to a select few by UNICEF but is now widely available. These bikes come in one size only, which means that children ride them by sticking one of their legs between the crossbars, and men of Dabou’s size are hunched over as they ride. I don’t think that it’s possible for me to be more acclimated to Malian temperatures than a Malian, but the discrepancy between our bikes resulted in his shirt being soaked in sweat by the time we reached Tetou, whereas I was essentially dry. After he dropped off the paperwork, he turned around and headed back to Koro, hopefully completing the approximately 7 kilometer trip just before sunset.
I remember last time I went to Koro, Dabou said to me, ‘This is a simple village, and we are very simple people.’ The way he said it, I felt as though he was apologizing for the state of things there, and I was struck at how much effort my people actually make to improve the lives of their neighbors. Dabou had grown up there, only completed the 6th year of school, and then embarked on the life of his parents and grandparents. Despite these adversities, he has managed to become fluent in French and been working as a relais, or local health worker. His story is not unique within my project, but through my experiences here I am constantly grateful that I was born into the life that I have, and grew up with the opportunities that I too often take for granted.

Throughout my life, I keep being reminded of the great importance of context. The most clear-cut example of this was in University, when I even had a series of courses referred to as the ‘Context Sequence.’ During my study with Glenn Murcutt in Australia, I was reminded of his aversion to design outside his native country because he has a legitimate concern of misunderstanding foreign context. Here in my work in my villages, I am also constantly reminded.
Even after I have over 2 years of experience working in Malian villages, there is still so much that I don’t understand about culture and custom. Not only am I now working in the somewhat different context, being over on the other side of the country, but there are still aspects of the pandemic Malian culture that I don’t grasp thoroughly. Just the other day I was eating dinner with some of my co-workers and was informed, for the first time that I know of, that shaking my eating hand down and away from the communal bowl is bad. There are simply so many small nuances that I have not yet experienced, or have experienced but not had someone willing to explain their cultural importance and meaning, that I am constantly learning new things about Mali. All of these little factors come into play when I am trying to work in what is still a very foreign context.
I’ve spent the last 3 weeks traveling around to all of my villages, most of them twice, and I have been continually reminded of the importance of noting all the slight indicators for how and when to be most effective in my work. The first 2 weeks of this month I was biking around by myself, staying in the compounds of friends and village chiefs, so I had sole responsibility of overseeing and motivating the local health workers that are part of our project. I found myself often unsure of how to best go about getting the results that we want: Do I do what comes more naturally to me and point out how and what truly needs to be done? Or should I taking the more passive aggressive approach, since in Mali it’s not normal to openly criticize? I found that I usually ended up somewhere in the middle, which is dangerous territory (try to please everyone and you please no one…). I was disappointed overall in how much work my villages had gotten done, but still felt fairly accomplished by the end of those 2 weeks, having logged about 160km of biking, and reached 8 of my 9 villages. There were a few really good times, too. The most project related was when I went to the village of Koya and within my first hour there had introduced the idea of a cheaply made hand-washing station and actually built it (check out some of my pictures posted on facebook to see how excited the kids were to use it). Another more cross-cultural one was when I went to a dance party with my friends in one of the villages where everyone was thrilled when I actually worked up the courage to dance awkwardly with them.
I’m to the point now that I feel comfortable greeting in the three most commonly used languages in my service area, and I know which places are most likely to use which language, so several of the towns I don’t even work in but do bike through know me by sight and greeting, if not by name. Many of the people in the villages I do work in, don’t work with personally still know me and greet me by name. Furthermore, those random people I meet while biking out in the bush, especially when I’m worried about being lost, are constantly getting this big grin on their face when I greet them in their native language and then ask whether I’m on the right road. Every time I hear that recognition in their response or their use of my name even when I have no idea who they are, I am reminded of why I came back to Mali. All of these little incidents make me feel like I’m at least doing something right at far as cultural integration goes.
This last week one of my supervisors came up from Bamako, and he and 2 of my other co-workers went around to all 9 of my villages by car. At first I was concerned about the lack of progress that I had made in the last few months: Would the slow progress of our local workers reflect poorly on my supervision, or would they recognize that this is Mali?
As it turns out, and probably thanks to the fact that all three men are Malian, I experienced far more of the latter sentiment. I could tell that there were also disappointed in the slow progress, and I admit that I was secretly pleased to see them showing the frustration that I had been feeling, especially since it was not directed at me. Lest I give the impression that this last week of visits was an overall bad experience, I must point out that I think this show of frustration from a fellow Malian was more effective in motivating people than mine ever would have been on its own. As integrated as I can ever get in these villages, I will still always be seen as a bit of an outsider who brings their own approach, and I have personally been told on several occasions that ‘this is Mali, and that’s just not how it’s done here.’ So, I was very pleased to have the support of Zana, Kone, and Tounkara this last week, and I have great hope that these dual visits will have a catalyzing impact.
Going back to what I was saying in the beginning of this post, about context, I’ve found that in the Mali it’s just as crucial as ever. I’ve also found that, while I will never be as good at the cultural context here as your average native Malian, I still do okay. I try my best to adjust when I can, and I’ve found that it’s usually not only effective enough, but also greatly appreciated. Probably even more so than if it came from one of their own…

Now that I have spent several weeks in the San part of Mali, I have discovered a number of differences between here and the area around Bafoulabe.
The most disappointing change is definitely the lack of peanut butter. I’d always heard that Malinke/Khassonke country was the land of tigadege, and I was aware that we had the best tigadegena (peanut butter sauce) in Mali over there, but it still didn’t sink in until I looked all over market and didn’t find any peanut butter at all for sale. Fortunately crises has been averted and I was able to procure some this morning here in San. While that’s far less convenient that it being in my actual market town, I will survive. I’m far more concerned with my ability to find food for wale now than I was while I lived in Drametou, because this time around I don’t have a host family (yet – I’m looking for one right now). When I had a host family I ate almost all of my meals with them, and only cooked for myself about once a week right after I had gone into market. This resulted in a significant lack of variety (millet porridge for breakfast, millet with sauce for lunch, millet with a different sauce for dinner), but I knew that I would be getting some protein, some greens, and three meals a day. Keep in mind that I chose to eat with my host family regularly, not only for the convenience of availability, but mostly because it was important to me to be eating the same kind of food that everyone else in my village was eating. This time around I’m going to have fresh vegetables at every opportunity, but those opportunities are going to be pretty limited.
One of the most visible changes is the types of animals that I’m seeing on a daily basis. The most obvious of these is the existence of pigs. I was definitely the only Christian in my village before, although there were a few in my market town, so no one was raising pigs. Now there are pigs everywhere. Yum. I’ve decided that pigs are to me now what goats were to me before. Somehow, even though they are disgustingly filthy 99.9% of the time, they are still really adorable. The other animal that I see all the time now are horses. In the Kayes region, only wealthy people had horses, everyone else just had donkeys. Here, I see horses almost as much as donkeys, which is fantastic, because donkeys are surprisingly really loud. They even eat loudly. There were times in Drametou when I would literally be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of donkeys chewing. I’m really excited that that doesn’t appear to be a problem this time around.
Other than those two really big changes, and the different language (which is a whole different problem), San is really similar to Kayes. People are still amazing. Rainy season still floods the road and makes transport hard. I still worry about my ability to effectively work with all these barriers. So, not that much different. And, the most important thing is that I am really glad to be back.

After leaving Mali a mere 7.5 months ago, I'm back! I arrived safely last night to Bamako with all my luggage and will be here for a few days before heading out to my site.

Seeing as how my last entry was so long ago, here is a short list of what I've done in the interim:
travelled on 4 continents in 5 countries
been in 22 airports
moved about 5 times
held 2 jobs
spoken in 3 schools
attended 1 epic concert (GAGA!)
got in 1 painful bicycle accident
and
met innumerable awesome people

Now I am back in Mali with Peace Corps Response, working alongside Helen Keller International near the town of Tominion in the eastern Segou region. My assignment is working with community health workers, women’s groups, and school personnel to promote improved hygiene behaviors in an effort to reduce disease transmittal, and I will be here for 6 months this time. It seems like such a short time in a lot of ways, but I'm hoping to get a lot accomplished. SInce I will be in a different part of the country I will be learning a new language for trips out to small villages, and hopefully improving my French for more professional atmospheres. I'm excited for the opportunity to make a difference again here in Mali and also to get more experience and contacts in the international development community, since I think it's what I would like to do for a career. I've been looking at graduate school programs and checking out a few jobs, but all of that is being put on the back burner for a little while so that I can concentrate on doing my best work here. Wish me luck!

I am in Morocco! I flew into Casablanca without a hitch, even getting in a little before schedule. And then the problems began. My friend Colleen and I had arranged to meet outside of baggage in the airport since I was supposed to get in a couple hours after her, but she was nowhere to be found. I searched for a good 20 minutes or so before realizing that her flight had been delayed....for 4 hours. Good seeing as how I hadn't been able to find her, bad seeing as how we were supposed to check into our hotel shortly. Slightly before panic set in she came through the gate and we hugged and went to get some money. Unsuccessfully. Apparently all of the ATMs at the airport hate us. So we exchanged some cash and headed into town. Our hotel was fabulous, easy to find, and a great comfort after the debacle at the airport. We went out to explore for a while, then came back and slept.
The next morning we had a mission: get money. We failed at our mission. Apparently all the ATMs in Casablanca hate us. We wandered around for literally hours, trying at banks and hotels for some way to get money, finally going back to ours, our small little budget hotel which to our great surprise was able to help us out. Now that we weren't panicking about going broke and being stuck indefinately with no money we went to see the one sight in Casa that we wanted to: the Hassan II mosque. It was really big, really elaborately decorated, and actually allowed us infidels inside to look.
Now that we were done with that one thing in Casa, taking into account that the city appeared to regard us with loathing, we set out for Marrakesh.
Marrakesh loved us! First of all we were finally able to get money, but even better: the city was a bustling sensory experience: tons of color, spicy scents, music....it was fantastic! We walked around the square and market all the time, checking out all the wares and goodies, watching the snake charmers and musicians, and fending off women doing henna and vendors selling everything from spices to fresh squeezed orange juice to silver jewelry to leather everything to rugs to clothes to everything else. And yes I bought some shoes.
After Marrakesh we headed to Essouira on the coast to relax a little. For a few days we wandered around, walked the beach, and ate fresh seafood. Once we were completely relaxed from that we headed back up north to Rabat. Rabat was really nice. It had the feel of a functioning city that was just very comfortable with itself. Whereas Marrakesh had felt a little divided, with one part of town a little stuck in the past and the newer part of town trying so hard to be like a hip western city, Rabat just really seemed to have it together while still having some beautiful sights. While there we went up to the kasbah overlooking the sea and also checked out an old ruins on the edge of the city with some Roman, some Islamic influence, took lots of pictures and even did some sketching.
After Rabat we headed off to Fez. I was kind of expecting Fez to feel a lot like Marrakesh, but it really didn't. Once again we stayed in the medina (old town), but this time it felt like it was still functioning for more than just tourists. On our first afternoon there was a parade through the streets complete with horsemen, camels, musicians, singers, and dancers, and we were able to watch it all from the roof of our hotel. The next day we wandered through the tiny narrow streets, getting out of the way for pull-carts and mules overloaded with goods and supplies (the streets are too narrow for cars to be allowed) and at one point got so lost that a couple little boys had to help us find our way back to the more easily identifiable part of town. In the hopes of that not happening again, we tried to stick with more recognizable routes from then on and on our trip to the Jewish quarter we even allowed ourselves the luxury of a bit of a guide. He took us around, and then, surprise, surprise, we ended up at a big shop full of goods they were just looking to unload on us poor unsuspecting tourists. Little did they know how many times we had already fended off such attempts at parting us with our hard-earned money, and little did they know just how little of that money we actually had at our disposal. Of course, little did I know just how good these guys actually were. Now I don't want you to think that I don't love my beautiful, gorgeous, lovely Moroccan rug, but I was shell-shocked for the rest of the day that I actually bought it. It felt like it happened so fast, but I know it didn't. We were probably in that shop for over an hour, drinking mint tea, learning about the different types of rugs and materials, but when they actually tried to start selling us stuff it just happened so quickly. I had noticed my future purchase at the very beginning, so to be polite I said I might be interested. He wrote down the expected price. I then wrote down my insultingly low offer. He countered. I didn't budge. He countered. I didn't budge. And then he said ok. Oh my god. I couldn't believe he actually said ok. So now I have a rug. It's beautiful and I love it, but what on earth am I going to do with it? I don't even have a place to live yet! C'est la vie...
I did finally get over my shock (Colleen did, too: she also got a similar, though smaller rug), which is good, since we had another day to enjoy Fez before heading north to Chefchaouen, which is where we are now. This place is stunning. It's almost unreal how beautiful it is. It's set on the slope of the mountains and in the medina where we are all of the buildings have been coated with a blue-tinted lime wash. We've been seeing postcards all over Morocco that have pictures taken here, but it's so striking here in person. The other night we were wandering around and I looked down this little side street that was just gorgeous and it took me a minute to realize that, no, it wasn't the lighting that made the blue look so pretty, it was just the color of all the walls.
We're now heading off to Tangier for our last little bit in Morocco and then heading across the straight into Spain. It's getting obvious how close we are to Europe with all the other tourists and the menus translated into French and Spanish and sometimes even English. Oh yea: the food here is amazing! We've had tons of couscous and tajine (slow-cooked meat and veggies in a spiced, savoury sauce) and pasteries and flatbread sandwiches. I don't think we've had anything that I didn't love. Last night we decided to fix a simple little feast of flatbread and cheese and olives and even that was amazing. Mmmmmmmmmm....
Here's hoping that Tangier treats us as well as the rest of the country (Casa nothwithstanding), and we cross into a new adventure in Spain soon.

Today is my last official day as a Peace Corps volunteer. Tomorrow I will wake up, not at the Peace Corps house, but at a friend's, because I will be an RPCV. The R stands for Returned, and, even though I don't actually leave Mali until Monday morning, and am traveling for 10 weeks before returning to the US, returning is what I suppose I'm doing. It makes me nervous. My time here in Mali has been this amazing, enlightening, challenging, slow-paced while still intense two years. I will be returning to an America that I may not altogether recognize, and I know that I've changed at least a little. I suspect more than just a little, but I suppose I won't actually realize how much for quite some time.

I left my village on the 28th of August. It was really hard to say goodbye, even though I had kind of been looking forward to that day since I got back from Ghana. Due to the loss of my project I had been more than just a little depressed about the course my service had taken, but that didn't really change the attachment I felt to the people in my village. I started packing way ahead of time (big surprise to those of you who know me well), sorting what I would give away to friends in village, what I would leave for friends in Peace Corps, and what I could actually fit in my bags to go home. Since I'll be traveling for so long before getting back to the US I am only taking one bag with me, and that has necessitated a lot of purging. I also burnt a lot of stuff...mmm, fire.

When that Saturday actually arrived, though, I wasn't ready. For one thing, I thought I wasn't going to be leaving until the afternoon and the car showed up in the morning. For another, I hadn't come to terms with the fact that I was leaving, probably for good. Since I am not being replaced in Drametou by a new volunteer, I was moving all of my stuff out and thankfully being helped by a car and driver from Peace Corps. When they showed up, I said final goodbyes to as many friends as I could, but many were still out in the fields working, as they had intended to come in in the afternoon to see me off. I'm not entirely sure which would have been harder: not getting to say goodbye to everyone, or having to say goodbye to everyone. Regardless, I was upset and still in a little bit of shock as I pulled out of village, silently crying in the back seat.

I didn't actually have much time to dwell on my loss, as we promptly got stuck in the mud. Really stuck. As in I could see the growing panic in the driver's eyes, thinking we were never going to get out. Thankfully, a group of men from the nearby village came to our aid, and after a couple hours of digging, scraping, and cutting branches to put under the entrenched tires, we were free. Bakoye cew: i ni ce, i ni baara ji. By that point in time I had stopped crying, and since they wouldn't let me help (it was muddy, and I was a white woman wearing a complet, and therefore completely inept), and I knew that even if we were stuck for the night it would still be okay, I admit I found the whole situation kind of comical. The downside was that I also felt guilty: the car wouldn't have gotten stuck if it hadn't come out to my village to pick me up and had all of my crap loading it down. But, we did get out, and from that point on it was pretty smooth sailing, or at least as much as it can be on the road between Bafoulabe and Kita. In Manantali we unloaded most of the stuff. I left all my furniture, a lot of my clothes, and various other small things there for a new volunteer that wasn't immediately replacing a previous volunteer. Best of luck in the next 2 years Jorie! We also unloaded a bunch of soak pit construction supplies for another volunteer who is planning to take advantage of the benefits that my village didn't and restart the project in Manantali. I took one last look at my favorite place in the country, the stage house overlooking the river, and briefly mourned the loss before climbing back in the car and heading to Kita for the night. I parted with the car and driver the next morning and spent a few days moping in Kita before heading into Bamako myself on my final stint in Malian public transport. Of all my frequent routes on transport, this is/was by far the easiest. The bus was basically on time, not too crowded, and in good condition running on a paved road. Of course, there were also frequent stops to pick up more people along the way, a handful of those people sitting in the aisle, a few crying babies, a few people getting sick, and the unavoidable midday heat, but nothing unmanageable or out of the ordinary.

I actually came in to Bamako a day earlier than I had originally planned since my friend Alaric was going to be leaving a day earlier than I had thought. I'm glad I did, because it turned out that there was a concert that night at Tubaniso, the training facility just outside of Bamako, by Vieux Farka Toure that I got in just in time to go to. When I was in training out there we didn't get any private concerts like that, so I chose to consider it a little bit of a send off for me as well.

The next few days were a whilwind, filled with lots of hanging out, going out on the town in Bamako, and reminiscing. On Friday, 3 September the new stage of volunteers swore in at the embassy in the midst of a huge rainstorm. In the few hours between my morning run and leaving for the embassy, several feet of water accumulated in the streets, and my 2 minute walk from the house to the bureau to catch a car resulted in a full soaking. When I arrived at the embassy I literally wrung out the bottom of my skirt. At least it wasn't too hot I guess. There were a few short stints of sunshine in the afternoon, but it was still pretty cool and drizzly when we went out with the new volunteers to celebrate that evening. As in previous years it was a good party, and then it was over and I spent the next few days recovering from the sleep deprivation of the previous few.

After the weekend's festivities I had to buckle down and get the last of my work done. I had unknowingly chosen the worst week ever to try and close out my service. Officially, today is my last day. However, today happens to be the last day of Ramadan for most of the world, and the day after the the last day of Ramadan for Mali (don't ask me why, I'm still a little unsure), so Bamako is pretty much non-functional both yesterday and today. Oh yea, and Monday was Labor Day, which means our office was closed then, too. So I only had Tuesday and Wednesday to get the last two years wrapped up. Throw into that mix the fact that all of those new volunteers that just swore in were moving into their villages this week and you have a seriously reduced number of staff actually in Bamako on those two days and you get a somewhat panicked me. Fortunately I was still able to get everything taken care of at the bureau and now I am just waiting. I've gotten a lot of practice waiting in Mali.

So.....

Inchallah, I will fly out on Monday morning for Casablanca. My friend Colleen will meet me there and we will embark on 6 weeks of traveling in Morocco and then up through Spain and France to London. Once in London we'll catch up with our friend Kelly who currently lives and works there and then Colleen will head back to Spain and fly to America, I will fly to Mumbai/Bombay, and Kelly, well Kelly will go back to life as normal in London. In India I will meet up with my friend Jen who also just finished up her Peace Corps service in Mali, and we will travel around for a month before getting back stateside.

Here's to Mali, here's to travel, here's to the world! Oh yea, and i sambe sambe!

In my last entry I mentioned an upcoming trip to Ghana, and it was epic. But first a little bit of background information:
Immediately prior to this trip was probably the low point of my entire Peace Corps service. As many of you know, I have been slowly working towards a big (or small, depending on your perspective) project in my village, and we were finally to the point where funding was going to be coming through in about a week. I was really looking forward to having a visible, tangible result from my 2 years in Mali, but as time went on it became clear that I was far more invested in this project than my village. One of the things that I respect most about Peace Corps is its focus on sustainable development, and I no longer felt that completing this project was going to have sustainable results. So, after a few really difficult days of deliberation I made an executive decision to pull the funding. It was one of the hardest, most heart-wrenching things I have ever had to do, and my village was (and still is to a certain extent) very upset with me, but I still feel that I made the right decision.
Needless to say, I was really looking forward to my vacation in Ghana, and it fortunately lived up to my expectations.
The first step of our adventure was to take an overnight bus through Burkina Faso and down into Ghana to the city of Kumasi. There is a PC house there that we were able to spend the night at, bathe, and then continue down further south. After being on a bus for about 30 hours straight it was a welcome relief with the added bonus of getting advice from a current PCV in Ghana (thanks Mikey!).
Our first stop was in Accra, but it was really just a stop-over in a failed attempt to get our Burkina visa extended and save some money, but we had a lovely night at the YWCA and our first Fan Ice - so good. From there we went to the beach at Kokrobite, which was nice, but not enough to get us to stick around for too long, so our next planned stop was in Apam.
Oh Apam. I had gotten this idea in my head that I wanted to stay in an old slave fort. In our guide books it says that this is possible in a couple of different towns along the Ghanaian coast, and Apam seemed like one of the cooler places to do it, so we headed on down. When we arrived it was just gorgeous - I'm talking French Riviera gorgeous. The fort was at the top of the hill overlooking the fishing harbor that was full of big, brightly painted boats, and the aging stone building was just as I had imagined. Creepy history aside it was kind of romantic. The three of us each had our own individual rooms on the top level of the fort with a breezeway in between where we could all hang out together, so we relaxed for a while then went down to check out the town. After getting a little harassed along the harbor (as expected) we headed back up to our refuge on the hill and started settling in for the night. We were having a lovely game of rummy accompanied by a fine box of Don Simon sangria when it became increasingly clear that the 4th room in the fort, the only one not occupied by us, the one right next to my room and opening out into the breezeway where we sat playing cards, was being rented out by the hour. Yup, a couple of times. Awesome. So, okay, we weren't the only ones to find the fort setting a little 'romantic' but we did our best to deal with the situation (I did have to make a *little* fuss), and the next morning we had the fort to ourselves again and all was well and beautiful. But we didn't stay for another night...
Next on the agenda was Cape Coast. A lot of other volunteers had very good things to say about it, and I have to agree. It was a nice town on the beach, we had a nice room at the Red Cross hostel with good access to the rest of the town, there was good seafood overlooking the water, and, perhaps most importantly, it gave Jess an opportunity to flesh out her obsession with the Obamas visiting Ghana. Nothing really remarkable happened while we were there, other than lovely site seeing, and then we went up to Kakum NP to the north.
Kakum was pretty amazing. It's famous for its canopy walk, but we did a little extra and spent the night in the park. Since the park closes at 4pm and you have to be spending the night to stay any longer, we had the whole park to ourselves for more than 12 hours, which was pretty cool. We also realized that we were really good at being cheapskates. Instead of splurging on a lunch in the park (about $4) we walked down the road and spent about 1/5 of that, and because we had thought it would be even more expensive than it was we also brought food with us for dinner. Well done us. The next morning we got up relatively early and took another guided walk through the park and then headed off to the beach again.
This time we went to a highly recommended eco-lodge that's kind of out of the way called the Green Turtle Lodge, and basically fell in love with it. Joelle essentially spent every waking hour in the surf, while Jess and I took some breaks for books, food, and bathing. We met some other travelers and shared stories, walked into the nearby fishing village for lunch every day, and just relaxed for a while. We also made some tentative plans to open our own eco-lodge next door, thus having this be our day to day life.
From the Green Turtle we headed back up to Kumasi, where I got to have a short visit with my old site-mate Brooke, who is living there for a while. We also went to the zoo, where I got spit on by a chimpanzee and actually ran into some of our friends from Mali who were also traveling in Ghana. Kumasi was mostly just a nice place to relax (since our time on the beach had been so stressful), do a little laundry, etc. and then we took a little side trip to a crater lake nearby before continuing on up north.
Our final big stop in Ghana was Mole NP. On the way to and from there we were able to stay at another PC house in the town of Tamale, which was really nice and convenient (thanks again Ghana PCVs for sharing!), but Mole was infinitely better. You always hear about all this great wildlife in Africa, but after a year and a half here I had hardly seen any, so I was skeptical of the claims of all these baboon/monkey/warthog/antelope sitings. They were all true! It was crazy! The warthogs were probably my favorites, running around with their little tails in the air, grunting with several little ones following behind. The baboons were really cool, too, but also a little scary. They weren't afraid of people at all, going so far as to steal the ketchup bottle literally off our table at lunch one day. And then there were the elephants. Our first full day there we saw 2 of them from a distance and it was very cool. Our last night there we had a guide take us out away from the hotel and slept on a platform next to the watering hole. We weren't able to really see anything because it was so dark, but you heard all the jungle-y sounds and then we had to start hiking back out at about 2am to catch the morning bus, along with our armed guard. On the way back in we were almost back to the hotel when our guard signalled us to stop walking and then made us start backing up slowly because there was this massive elephant less than 100m away, staring us down. I was grateful it didn't charge or anything, but that didn't stop my heart from leaping into my throat until we starting walking again. We hadn't gone 50m before we had to stop again. A bunch of antelope were running across the road ahead of us, and as we slowly continued after they had passed we saw another elephant that had come along. It was pretty spectacular.
Afterwards, we headed back to Tamale, got our stuff together, did some last souvenir shopping and then got transport back to Mali. Just in case you thought our adventure was over, though, we got to see yet another elephant up close right after crossing the Burkina border. It was standing in the opposing traffic lane as we rode by in our bus. Crazy!
So, our Ghanaian adventure was over, and it was a great one.
I didn't go straight back to site, because we were having our 'Close of Service Conference' in Bamako right after the trip anyways. Instead a made a quick stop in my friend Gemma's village and then went the rest of the way to Bamako with her. The conference was good, mostly because it was one last chance to see all the other volunteers that I came to Mali with almost 2 years ago. I still can't believe it's been that long already, but time flies when you're sitting in village with no running water!