Home Sweet Home-Stay

[Belated Post]

We made it back. Nik and I finally arived home on the 6th after a few incidents on the ride back. My guess is that the trip had about an extra hour or more added to it by break downs on route. Our tro-tro had a tire fail and the spare must have needed some attention as we waited on the road for the driver to return back to the tro. He did a quick job of it actually. This may not have been his first repair job.

After that little stop, there came another incident with a taxi on the last leg of the journey. Our driver had an issue with frequent stalls in first gear. While he was adamant about trying to restart the engine many times over, that did not seem to fix the problem of the car stalling. It was dark out at the time and all the Peace Corps safety and security advice kept drumming along in my brain: don't be out late, try not to travel at night. Much ado about nothing though as within ten minutes we hailed another driver and he took us the rest of the way home. Funny thing though, the engine that we looked at under flashlight had the following issues: no air filter whatsoever, and a missing radiator cap. Those are parts that I thought you needed for the car to continue running properly and maybe that is why we took an unannounced pit stop in the middle of a road.

All told, we got home unscathed by our Project Shadow voyage. It was very encouraging to see a lab and a teacher going about her job doing the best she could with the resources available. I must say, the school we were at had a nice school with many features. I hope the site that I get to has just as much but I would settle for half as much and be happy. Those words may come back to haunt me though.

So we are back at the homestead and it was very nice to be back in my own foam bed under my own mosquito net. I bought a mirror at the market in Kumasi for my family since theirs was cracked in two spots. They seemed happy that I was back and smiled at the gift. I smiled at the great Ghanaian food that was there to greet me. Good times! We are back to doing our language learning. I need to spend a bit more time studying at night though as whatever I get during the day I will struggle with the morning after.

Small, small, the chicken drinks its water. I think that is the phrase we got in Twi but I don't remember that nor do I know the Ewe version of it. It still holds true though. Small steps.