9/18/11 Bizarre Life on a Ship

Yesterday was Neptune Day. It is a sea traveller's tradition by where you are turned from a "poly-wog" to a "shell-back" on the day you cross the equator.  On Semester at Sea, it is an excuse for silliness and a party.  We were all awakened around 7 am with a parade of trident-holding, crown-clad people playing drums, clanging together pot and pan lids, yelling, and banging on our doors.  We were told to get up, have breakfast and then report to the pool deck where the ceremonies would begin.  King Neptune (the ship Captain) was escorted onto the deck by his Queen (the Executive Dean) and a whole bunch of other dressed up people.  The captain had been spray-painted green and was wearing only a white skirt and a crown, and holding a trident.  We were all told that if we had never before crossed the equator that we would need to be initiated, in order to please the King.  This initiation went as follows: 1) Get "fish guts" (looked like green water to me) dumped on your head, 2) jump into the swimming pool, 3) get out of the pool and kiss a dead fish (REALLY! See Jeff's blog soon for pictures), 4) bow to the Queen, 5) kiss the King's ring, and, 6) have your head shaved (only about 50 people actually did the headshaving part, but many were girls.  Apparently Semester at Sea has developed a reputation at some ports as being the cancer-survivor's ship). Reade and Tate went through this initiation 3 times, Jeff just took pictures, and I opted out, having done it in 1988, my first time over the equator.  Most of the rest of the shipboard community participated, so it turned into a huge party.  Because it was also on my birthday, I adopted it as my birthday party.  It will forever be a memorable birthday!

9/17/11 Thoughts on Ghana

OK.  The comments I made about not seeing much overt poverty in Ghana were proven absolutely wrong yesterday.  I saw one of the most poverty-stricken communities I've seen in any of my travels.  We went on a trip to visit an orphanage yesterday.  In addition to housing, feeding and schooling the orphans, this organization has taken on providing some food to the above-mentioned impoverished community.  We finished our day handing out boxes of food to this population, mostly to the children.  It's very difficult to describe the conditions in which they live, but I will try.  For about 7-8 cidi's (~ $5.00 USD) per month, these families (mostly single women with children) can rent a box of a shelter that is made out of cement blocks or plywood left-overs nailed together.  These "rooms" are about 12 feet x 12 feet. Some have an uncovered window, some don't.  There is no running water, no electricity, no garbage pick-up (it's everywhere, piling up all over the ground), and the floors are dirt.  How do they end up here, you may ask?  Often a woman will leave her community to follow a man to Tema, get pregnant, get deserted by the man, and find herself destitute, too embarrassed to return to her original community.  Many contract HIV along the way.  These women then become very vulnerable to the next man that comes into their lives, and the cycle often repeats itself.  Because they often end up with more children than they can support, they sometimes sell some of their children into slavery within the fishing industry.  The fishermen need labor, the mothers need money, and so the cycle continues.  It's terrible for the children.  They learn quickly to take care of themselves and usually sleep by themselves in the fishing boats at night.  When they grow up, they become the head fishermen (because that is all they know) and they buy more children to help them.  The orphanage we visited is trying hard to provide education to all the parties involved on what that cycle ultimately does to their communities, and why they should stop it (never mind the fact that it is illegal).  They believe that the only way they can change this practice long-term is to change the cultural perceptions of it, so the communities begin to see it as immoral.  They seem to be making progress in that direction, because people will at least try to hide the fact that they are enslaving children now, rather than openly discussing it.

Other Ghana Observations:

1)  It is a polygamous society. Many men have only one wife, because they are expected to be able to provide equally for all their wives and children.  More wives and children equals more prestige.

2)  Trash pickup is not good.  There is one garbage company that monopolizes the industry in the area. Suffice it to say that they do not take their job at all seriously. There is garbage all over the place, especially alongside the major roadways.

3)  The people are very nice.  Everybody smiles and calls you their "friend." Ghana feels safe.

On a totally different subject, I am 44 years old today!  I was served a huge birthday cake in the dining room and had 3 separate variations on happy birthday songs sung to me.  One was a beautiful serenade sung to me by one of the waiters. 

9/15/11 Ghana

It's been too long since I've updated my blog.  I've been a little busier on the medical front.  After Morocco, there were lots of cases of traveler's diarrhea.  We had to isolate some of the kids to a separate room because of concern of a viral strain spreading like wildfire throughout the shipboard community.  That never happened, and the whole traveler's diarrhea thing calmed down quickly.  It was replaced by a viral respiratory illness that is interfering with people having the most pleasant time possible.  However, it turns out that meaningful travel doesn't necessarily have much to do with pleasant conditions.  Unpleasant conditions happen.

Take Ghana for instance.  It is actually much more pleasant than I expected, with less overt poverty than I expected (although I'm told it is one of the poorest countries we will visit).  It is, however, awfully hot and humid.  At times all I can think about is sleeping, or better yet, jumping in the nearest body of water to try to cool off a little.  This behaviour is strongly discouraged due to the high prevalence of parasites found in fresh water here.  We are advised to wear long pants and sleeves to avoid attracting mosquitos or unwanted attention.  This does not help the problem of being too hot.  It seems that most of the locals wear long pants, which baffles me, given that they  basically live at the equator.

Another test for me is the food here.  Our tour guide cab driver took us to a local African food restaurant yesterday.  The place was called "Lick the Pot," and was completely empty except for us.  The cab driver recommended we try a soup made of tomatoes, spicy red peppers and onions, in which half of a fish is placed, complete with bones and skin attached. We were then given 2 bags each of "banku" which is a cooked, mushy, fermented cornmeal mixture.  We were also each given a large bowl of water.  In this country it is rude to eat with your left hand, so you must touch your food with your right hand only.  You're supposed to take a glump of the banku, dip it in the soup with your hands, and then eat it.  Then you should reach back into the bowl with your sticky fingers, grab a clump of fish, and eat it, skin and all.  You can use the spoon provided to sip the broth, if you'd like. When you're done, you're supposed to clean your glumpy, gooey hand off in the bowl of water that we're been told not to drink for fear of bacterial contamination.  Well, I couldn't quite stomach eating the skin of the fish.  I'm sure it was comical (or disgusting, depending on your perspective), watching me try to get the skin and bones off my chunks of fish with my right hand only, while it was submurged in a bowl of red, spicy liquid.  The fish was good. The banku is an aquired taste, I'm told, and I won't disagree with that observation.  The boys did surprisingly well at navigating their way through the meal and at least trying to look like they were enjoying it.  I was very proud of them.

While we're on the topic of food, we learned that the average Ghanaian local has at least 5 parasites living in their GI tract and that personal hygene habits around food are not quite what we're used to in the USA.  Therefore, despite lots of warnings against eating food that hasn't been cooked or drinking the local water, I'm expecting lots more traveler's diarrhea after this port.  Fun, fun, fun!

Yesterday we got the opportunity to visit a local elementary school where our taxi driver's wife works.  We got to speak with the principle, see all the classrooms, and do some interacting with the kids.  The conditions are very simple; open-air classrooms, wooden desks, chairs, a chalkboard, pencils, paper and some books. That's it.  The kids were all in uniform and were as cute as can be.  They seemed to be ahead of our kids in the USA as far as their education is concerned.  They were learning French (the official local language is English,which they speak well, but most also speak one of the several African languages of the four main ethnic groups present in this area), and the math seemed a little above par for where our kids are expected to perform at similiar ages.  Granted, this was a private school with small class sizes, but I was impressed, none-the-less.

Traffic jams are a real problem in this country, but some Ghanaian higher-up has decided to spare us the pain of waiting in traffic jams.  They have actually provided police escorts to make the local traffic move out of the way so that we spoiled visitors don't have to wait.  I think they want Semester at Sea to continue coming to Tema and boosting their local economy.  They appear to be afraid we'll be scared off by the traffic and choose to go elsewhere.  I must say, that although it made me more than a little uncomfortable to think of being treated in such an undeserved VIP fashion, it saved us hours of sitting in traffic.  Please read Jeff, Reade or Tate's blog for details of the police escort experience, which was FASCINATING!  In the rare times we did have to stop for a few minutes, local street vendors crowded all over the highways, hoping to sell whatever it was they were selling (which could be anything from snacks to clothes irons).  It seems there is a demand for this service and that the locals do get some of their shopping done in this way.  I would imagine it thins out the population a little too, although our tour guide told us that traffic-related deaths of street vendors are rare.

Here, as in Morocco, the locals shop in markets made up of narrow isles filled with little booths. The vendors sell food, toiletries, clothing, cloth, diapers, appliances, sporting goods, and just about everything else you can imagine. There were tailors all over the place, custom-making clothing on very old, well-used sewing machines.  There were also stalls filled with grains that were being ground and made into the piles of mush that would later become banku, or kenkey (sour cornmeal mush).  The electronics shops were full of discarded cell phones and computers that were being fixed and reused.  People were everywhere, and at this market, were much less aggressive than those in Morocco.  The art market was a totally different story though. We stepped off our tour bus into a flood of vendors, literally trying to pull us in 5 different directions to their various shops.  It was too much chaos for me and made me really uncomfortable.  We did get personal drumming lessons from one vendor and ended up buying 2 of his African drums (for far more than the locals would have spent, we later discovered).

That's all for today.  We're going to spend the day at an orphanage tomorrow, so I expect to have much more to report after that.

9/5/11 Morocco

We've been in Morocco for 3 days now and it's been great!.  The first day here we spent exploring Casablanca.  We saw the 3rd largest mosque in the world. Something like 25,000 people can pray inside at the same time, and over 100,000 if you include the huge areas outside the mosque built for that purpose. This government is a parlimentary monarchy and the mosque was built by the last king, Hassan II, who died in 1999, thereby relinquishing power to his son, Mohammed VI.  Mohammed VI's picture is everywhere including on the paper money and most buildings. People generally seem happy with the current king, who recently made some fairly substantial reforms to the government, taking some power away from himself and moving the government closer to the type of setup seen in England. 

The most interesting part of Morocco for me was the street market experience.  We went to the medinas (old town centers) of both Casablanca and Marrakesh.  In both cases there were huge areas of narrow corridors with little shops lining both sides.  The corridors weave all over the place, making you feel hopelessly lost when you're in the middle of them without a clue as to where you are.  Amazingly, about the time you feel totally lost, some man will show up insisting on taking you to where ever you would like to go. As soon as you buy anything, he will demand money from you for his services (that you never requested) and refuse to leave you alone until he feels sufficiently compensated, giving you stink-eye and following you around until you finally cave in and hand over the cash.

And then there are the monkeys.  If you get anywhere in the vicinity of the monkey men, they will immediately place a monkey on your shoulder, encourage the person with you to take a photo, and then demand money. I got the extra bonus of getting peed on by the monkey.  One would think this may translate to a free photo, but NO, greenbacks are still expected.  After that experience we steered clear of the snake charmers, henna tattoo artists and fortune-tellers. The kids were a little freaked out by all this unwanted attention, although they were equally fascinated by this crush of vendors, all interested in making some money off the unsuspecting tourists.

The Moroccan food is right up my alley; lots of veggies, couscous, fruit, fish, chicken and breads. My belly has been happy since I got here. Islam is by far the most prevalent religion in Morocco and so alcohol is much harder to come by than it is in the states.  We saw groups of men hanging out at bars all the time, but they were coffee bars, not booze bars.  The interesting thing was that the nightlife seemed every bit as active and social as it is in the USA, if not more so. There were literally thousands of people, including little children, in the center "medina" of Marrakesh at 11:00 pm when we left our dinner restaurant Sunday night. We are told (by our guide, Mohammed) that Sunday night is a "slow" night, compared to Friday and Saturday.

Today we travelled to the Ourika valley in the high Atlas Mountains and visited 2 of the homes of the indiginous "Berber" people.  In one home, there was a room especially for the family cow.  23 people also lived in that home, including toothless great-grandma, grandparents, parents and children down to the age of 2. The 2 year old boy, Mohammed (are you noticing any name-theme here?), immediately began leading Reade and Tate around the house by the hand and introduced them to the baby kittens, which delighted them.  The homes have multi-use rooms with big covered benches that are used for eating, entertaining and sleeping.  The floors are dirt and many of the rooms are open to the elements.  Those that aren't are small and dark. The wonderful thing is that the people also have trees drooping with oranges, walnuts, avacados and pomegranates.  We were served mint tea and homemade bread with butter, olive oil and honey at one of the homes. The tea is traditionally served by the person in the home that is the most respected, in this case, toothless great-grandma who can poor tea into small cups from about 18 inches above without spilling a drop. Speaking of teeth, it seems that many adults have lost many of their teeth by the time they are in their 30's or 40's. I tried to use this observation to scare my children into wanting to take care of their teeth and gums all on their own, without the constant nagging of their parents.

We have one more day in Morocco, but I need to be back on the ship before 4 pm for our post-post medical clinic.  So, we'll stay local tomorrow. Bye for now!