Cheapy cheap

First, I need to explain what trotro is:

Trotros are like “public transport” here. So, basically they are equivalent for a bus, but they just happen to be mini vans, fitting maybe about 12 people in, depending on which kind of trotro it is. Some of them are nice ones, almost “fancy”, and then some of them look like they will break down in any minute, or look like they have been robbed  very thoroughly multiple times, left with nothing but steering wheel and seats. One trotro (photo below) was started like stolen cars in movies – with the cables, not sure what happened to the keys of the car. But, it was pretty cool.  Surprise surprise, trotros do not have line numbers, like “oh okay we need to take trotro number 54 to get to Agona”. No. You just need to ask, or usually the cashier boy will tell you where the trotro is heading to. Climbing in the back seat of trotro requires gymnastic skills and flexibility, since the trotros are tiny, full of people and probably not designed to carry that many persons. And I have not manage to exit trotro even once without hitting my head, the roof is just so low. But, trotros are awesome!

Trotro

 So, let’s talk about money. I don’t have much of it, not now and probably never will, hehe. But, here it’s not a problem. My euros are quite a lot here actually, making me almost rich. Like, with for example 20 cents one can get lots. Like, taxi ride to the trotro station (1km). Last time I took a taxi from the train station to home in Jyväskylä (also 1km), it cost me about 12€.. 

Hmm, what else. With 20 cents, one can get 2 bags of bissap juice. Ice cream. Bag of popcorn. Doughnuts. Bread. If you double that amount, you can get for example avocado(s), depends on where you buy them from, pineapple, mango(s). I’m not sure what you can get with 20 or 40 cents in Finland, some tiny lollies maybe? Maybe a fruit, like apple or something? Not much anyway. You can’t even dream of taking a bus, not to mention taxi, with 20 or 40 cents. I think in Jyväskylä the cheapest bus ticket is something like 2,80€? Here, A TAXI from the city center to home (more or less 10km), costs about 4-5 euros. If you trotro home, it's about 35 cents. Trotro from Agona to home, which is about 15km or so, costs 40 cents. Shared taxi from Busua to Agona (probably about 10km), is 70 cents. If you want to treat yourself and take a private taxi, then it’s way more expensive, costs as much as (almost) 3 euros.

Cedes

Pesewas

Somehow, very quickly, you get so used to the cheapness of things that all the sudden things seem expensive. Like, we went to have dinner in Indian restaurant and I think I spent about 10€ and it seemed like a lot! Even though that price included a soft drink, delicious and HUGE main dish & rice (ate that for 2 days!) and garlic naan bread, it still felt a bit expensive. Which is crazy, since that was one of the cheapest and one of the best Indian dinners I have had for a long time.

On Sunday, when leaving from the Butre beach, we had to take a “private trotro”, because trotros do not really operate on Sundays there. It cost 50 cedes, so something like 9€, meaning 4,5€ per person, and for a while it felt really bad to pay “that much”. You just get used to it, which makes sense. On our way to the beach we payed about 80 cents for the same journey, so paying almost 5 euros of it now felt like a rip-off, even though it’s not much.

Huge breaad: 6 cedes (1€)

Water bag (0,5L): 20 pesewas (0,035 cents)

Ice cream <3: 1 cede (0,20 cents)

Night at decent room, right on the beach, costs about 10€. With that you get clean room, with private toilet  and shower, and ceiling fan (important) so basically all you need for sleeping! Of course, there are expensive options as well.  If you want to get fancy and if you feel like spending lots of money. It’s really not difficult to find a hotel with rooms that are “standard priced”, like twin room being 100€ per night. So for the people who have too much money and they are looking for places where to spend it, there are options too!

Then, internet and stuff. I have prepaid sim, so I buy credit I add on to my account whenever I run out of data. 1000MB (expires in 7 days, but usually runs out faster than that since there’s no wi-fi anywhere), costs about 2 euros. If I make whatsapp calls (which I don’t really do hehe), that naturally uses data quite a bit and I run out of it in no time.  My favourite café (and also the only one here), has free wifi so if I need to make mandatory “mom and dad I’m alive” – calls, I do them when I go there. 

But, in conclusion, since I pay for internet on weekly basis, it’s about 3€ a week. It’s cheap, and since I don’t have unlimited data, the plus side has been that I can’t use internet and thus my phone that much. It is actually very refreshing to have days when I barely use my phone! But then, there are occasionally times when I end up using the data, planned to last for the whole week, in 24 hours... Whoops. Luckily does not happen very often since I have good books to read, and often plenty of other activities to do! (Btw, updating this blog uses huuuuge amounts of data, mostly the part when I add photos!)

For example:

3 avocados 5 cedes (0,85 cents)

bag of coriander  2 cedes (0,35 cents)

10 eggs  6 cedes (1€)

Indian food for two people (two main dishes + rice, and naan bread) + home delivery (10km), 126 cedes (21€)

For ex. Pineapple: 2 cedes (0,35 cents)

Fabric: 3 yards (2,70m) 30 cedes (5,80€)

Butre beach

People who follow me on instagram have already seen plenty of vids and pics from this place, sorry for the spam! I just wanted to share this perfect location, if you ever go to Ghana and end up in the West, I’d recommend you to visit Butre & Hideout Lodge!

I wonder who built this bridge.
 A bit scary, but the only way to get to Hideout Lodge from the Butre community

French press-coffee for breakfast *drool*

Butre beach is right next to Busua, the beach & town I have posted about before.

Butre is just a bit smaller, and more remotely located. Which means, it’s super chill place, perfect for relaxing! I could l and finish my thesis here.. no distractions. Actually the swedish girl I met, was finishing off her Bachelor’s thesis at Hideout Lodge, can’t think of any better place for doing that!

We stayed at Hideout Lodge, fairly big lodge with sort of ”bungalows”, treehouses and dormitory rooms. The best thing about this place is, that there were hardly any people around, and that it is right next to the beach, or actually it pretty much is ON the beach. I love when you can hear the 

sound of waves when you go to bed, and wake up to the same sound. 

There are some activities one can do at Butre area, but we decided not to. So what I did, was layed on the beach, read my book, listened to music, walked on the beach and met super cute dog (highlight of my trip), met new people from Sweden, New Zealand and France, ate plenty, and also had few drinks which was niiiice! This is where I tried the Kpoo Keke for the first time, French/British guy, who has been here for quite long time already, shared some with us.

Weather was super warm as usual, we only got some rain on Sunday afternoon, when we were about to leave anyway. On Saturday evening the sky was  clear, accompanied by full moon and stars, so it was incredibly beautiful. Add ocean view and sound of the waves. P a r a d i s e. 

The only downside is that the waves at Butre beach aren’t good enough for surfing, so I didn’t get chance to surf on the weekend.. but I guess I’ll manage, it’s weekend now and I think I’m heading to Busua tomorrow, yay!

Unexplainable

Food and drinks in Ghana has been interesting experience so far. One can find a lot of different cuisines from here – Indian, “European” (which usually means weird pizza), Lebanese, American (there’s even KFC here in Takoradi) and so on. And then there is the local food, of course. Which I haven’t had chance to try that much yet, but luckily, I do have plenty of time to try (almost) everything. Ghanaian food (at least the dishes I have tried) has interesting, very different and difficult to explain-taste. I won’t be able to explain them very well, but at least you’ll see some photos of the food and learn what’s in them. To understand what I mean by the “interesting taste”, you will just have to come here and try it by yourself!

Ghana-style restaurant. Liking the name here

Food here is usually mildly spicy, accompanied by rice and often does not look very nice, but tastes good. I haven’t experienced any super spicy dishes yet, not even sure if they have really spicy Ghanaian dishes. Would like to try them though, if there is any. The spicier the better!

Okay, here comes the dishes & drinks I have tried so far.

Let’s start with very simple food, such as yams chips – they look so plain and tasteless, but they actually are really good and way better than normal fries. Especially when they come with two super tasty chili sauces, red chili sauce and shito (black chili sauce). Yummy!

Yams chips

Then there’s bissap (also colled sobolo)– a weird “medical” drink. This one is sold every day at our school during snack time, and I guess it’s a thing Ghanaians drink a lot. Bissap is red, has interesting, sort of berryish taste to it, but still it’s not a berry drink. Bissap is made from dried Hibiscus flowers, water and I guess they add some spices on it too. The school principal told me that bissap has plenty of health benefits and referred to it as a “medicine drink”, so obviously I had to google it.  So, turns out that (google says so, so it must be true), bissap drink can reduce blood pressure, decrease cholesterol level, help in weight loss (much needed here) and treat cold, as it is packed with vitamin c and antioxidants and so on. 

It has a weird but good taste, and I love it on a hot day when it’s fully frozen and just slowly melting, perfect icy refreshment! I’m officially addicted to it now.

     

Bissap/Sobolo

Banku with okro stew. That is our lunch on every Wednesday or Thursday. Weird, very weird food. The okro stew is slimy, a bit spicy and nobody can really tell what’s in it. Seafood usually, like that one tiny crab I had in my okro stew the other day.  The texture is not the nicest, slimy food is a bit gross, but I like the taste. But, I eat it super wrong; with rice. Okro stew is supposed to be eaten with banku, something one just possibly cannot explain. Banku looks a bit like mashed potatoes, is usually served in a plastic bag, and it smells funny. Probably, because it is made of fermented corn – you can really taste and/or smell that there’s something fermented in that dish – and cassava dough. And I think you are supposed to eat it by hand – take some, dip it in the soup/sauce and off you go!

I’d say that banku is like Finnish salty liquorice. You need to be/get used to it in order to like it, since the taste is so incredibly bizarre. So, either you love it, or you can’t stand it. There are not many types of food I hate, so I don’t want to say I can’t stand banku, but I can’t say that I like it either... Maybe I will learn.

     

Banku in making

Okro stew

Then, everyone’s favourite food here. Fufu. I have tried fufu only once, and I think I did not do it right. It is supposed to be eaten by hand, just like banku, and it is supposed to be swallowed immediately, just like banku. I actually tried this with banku yesterday, and it really works – use your hands, take some banku, dip it in the slimy but delicious okro stew, put it in your mouth and swallow it. No chewing, nothing. So weird way to eat food, since we have been taught to chew food properly before swallowing it. But it really does make the taste of the whole banku-okro combination very pleasant actually. 

But, back to the food I was talking about. Fufu is made of cassava and green plantain flour, it’s white, thick and very sticky. It’s like wallpaper paste. Liisteri. So, I don’t know how one can eat it by hand. But I’ll find out! Fufu is usually accompanied by soup, either palm nut soup, ground nut soup or light soup. I have no idea what light soup is, but that is what I had with fufu. It was very tasty, tiny bit spicy and had some fish in it.  Next time(s) I want to try palm nut soup, and the ground nut soup. So, plenty of fufu tasting ahead!

You can't actually see fufu in this, it's under the soup!

Hausa koko, also known as “spicy millet porridge” (millet = hirssi). The school owner has nice habit of bringing us some food sometimes, usually fruits or snacks (like doughnuts), but one day he brought me breakfast; Hausa Koko porridge, some slightly spicy, deep-fried thing (bread? chicken? Mix of those two? I have no idea what it is) and then Bofrot, Ghanaian doughnut which is really yummy.

Edit: That slightly spicy deep-fried thing that tasted a bit like chicken was Koose. Koose is “spicy bean cake”, so it is vegetarian yay! And really good. Usually served with the “porridge”. Addicted to this one now too.

Porridge in a bag, and bofrot and koose!

Plantain (keittobanaani) in all kind of forms. I absolutely loooove plantain, it’s so delicious! Especially plantain chips.  Plantain is also such a good accompaniment with food, like the other day, when we tried fufu, we also ordered very delicious bean sauce with fried plantain. Plantain is slightly sweet, has really nice texture and works kinda in the same way as potato would. A bit like sweet potato, but still not quite. Very well explained, good job me. Shortly, it’s amazing. Try it if you haven’t yet.

Plantain & red bean sauce. Plantain really looks like banana!



Plantain chips, crispy and tastyyyy

Alcohol. Haven’t really drank much at all while I’ve been here, some odd beers on the beach or at dinner, but that’s about it. I have been craving for wine since I arrived here, but still haven’t had any. Maybe this Friday I will have some (I say this every week). 

I have tried local beer, Club Lager. Club is light and  “easy to drink” kind of beer, it’s watery in a good way and fresh, thus it’s perfect in hot and tropical country like Ghana. I like it a lot, but the issue is that it is always served in a huuuge bottle, and I have two problems with that: 1) I can’t drink it fast enough, so it gets warm and disgusting in no time 2) I can’t drink that much of beer.

Another local drink I tried is Kpoo Keke. It is made of atadwe and ginger. Somebody tried to explain me what atadwe is, and if I understood correctly, it is some sort of plant, or a nut. And that it is believed to boost fertility and good for one’s sex drive and so on. Go figure. 

Anyway, Kpoo Keke tastes just like the healthy ginger shots one can have in hipster cafes, you know? So delicious, and devious as you can’t really taste the alcohol (18%) in it. Could just have one shot every morning with breakfast and have no clue that there’s alco in it!

So that’s it. Things I have tried so far. Not many, so there is much more to come, and I CAN’T WAIT!

Earning that bread

I hope you are ready for a long and confusing story about my job here.

We are already halfway through the work week aand I SWEAR  just few hours ago it was Monday morning, so how it can already be Wednesday evening? Go figure. Time is flying! 

Soooo, I guess it’s time to talk about work. I mean, that’s the main reason why I am here. Not surfing, like my dear cousin (greetings to Viltsu if you are reading this!), put it: “So you basically just went to surf there, with the money you got from the university”.

Not quite.. luckily I get to surf and enjoy of the beach on the weekends, but during the week I actually have to try and get something done. 

Classrooms!

School kitchen

 I work from about 8.30am till 2.30pm. I can pretty much define my work hours by myself, so I could go in later and work a bit later, or maybe sometimes I guess I could just do shorter days if I feel like it. Every day at about 12/12.30 we have lunch. 

Lunch is provided by the school which is AWESOME. Meaning, we don’t really have to worry about cooking, except in the evenings. Lunch is always something quite basic, mostly rice and some sort of mildly spicy sauce, usually with fish. As I do not eat meat (but fish yea), I sometimes get the food accompanied by egg – as a substitute for meat. Can’t say that the food is very versatile – looks pretty much the same every day (but does not taste the same every day). Also, it does not contain much of protein or anything else, but anyway, does the job. And btw it is way tastier than it looks like, don’t let the (not very appetizing) photos fool you!

                             

Banku! Unable to explain how this tastes like...

Hello my friend

Okay, somehow, I ended up talking about food when I was supposed to talk about my job. Typical. It is actually kind of difficult to explain what I am doing here since it’s a bit vague concept to myself as well. 

Let’s start with the easy one and hopefully that will lead me to some sort of explanation of what I am doing, or what I’m at least supposed to do.

Firstly, I am here to collect data for my master’s thesis. I only have a working title for my thesis now and don't really want to share it,  but what I am aiming to research is teacher professional learning communities. Therefore, I am focusing on teachers’ professional development and teacher collaboration, and I’m doing a case study in this specific school I’m working at.  I have managed to link my thesis and my job tightly together, which makes the whole thesis project actually intriguing and motivating. At least for most of the time, can’t say it’s fun all the time, in its entirety, master’s thesis process sort of sucks.

Secondly, I'm here to support teachers' professional development, by trying to plan and implement in-service training programme. Great, and simultaneously awful, thing is that I have plenty of freedom when it comes to my job here. I can pretty much decide what I do at work, as long as the outcome is  training/professional development programme for the teachers.

Coffee and planning

Got mail, aww

At the moment I am planning to organize about 4 workshops for the teachers here, mainly just to enhance collaboration between the staff and to start creating understanding of preconditions for the development of teachers’ professional learning communities.
I might, or might not, tell more about these later on. Right now, I have quite clear image in my head what I’m going to do, but still have to concentrate on how and when I'm going to do these thing, and how to squeeze this all in 4 workshops.
 And one of the biggest questions is,  how to make this project sustainable. My aim is to start and create something that will continue even after I have left Ghana. But we’ll see, after all it is Ghana and things work here in a veeeery different way than in Finland. 

In conclusion, what I do is that I sit in our cute office. For real, they have at the school given us this one pretty cool and quite big room in the administration (the very first picture of this post is from our office), and even the principal does not have his own office (just a desk in administration), so it is actually pretty cool that we have one. And since Eveliina, the other intern here, is teaching and therefore basically in the class for the whole day, the office is pretty much just mine.

And how does my typical day at work look like?

Besides sitting in my office, I walk around and ask stuff from people (such as from the school owners and principal), chat with the principal (a lot, have to CB), hit my head to the wall occasionally, try to organize the data I have already collected, try to create something from scratch, try to somehow overcome the issue that we are constantly running out of internet (no wifi here), and trying not to get annoyed by the fact that I do need internet a lot in order to do my job. And when I do have the internet (hotspot from my phone), it most often does not work since the connection in my office is bad. And then it works for 10 minutes and then I run out of internet again. But that’s okay, now I can just print something I need and go do something fun with the students. Oh but the printer does not work. I downloaded some hecking big installation program on my computer, and managed to print something yesterday. But something miraculous has happened in one night and the printer just does not function anymore. Of course. So there goes my plans to do some coloring activities with the first graders.

Since I feel like I sit a lot in the office, it is fun to go to say hi to the kids and play something with them, talk with them or just chill for a bit and gain that positive and cuteness energy from them before heading back to work. I mean that is also my work or could be at least. These kids here are just lovely and adorable, funny and handful as well. Never a dull moment in a class with them.

The work environment is a bit different here. Lack of resources and equipment is setting us some challenges, but nothing that we could not overcome with some sort of plan b. It’s just slowing me down a tiny bit, and tbh from time to time it is very frustrating – trying to do something and not being able to finish or even start because there is something important missing.  Something (but luckily not everything at the same time!) is ALWAYS broken or at least working insufficiently, but I’m sure this is something I’ll get used to pretty quickly. I have been working only for about a week so far, so it’s just about getting used to this.

Okay, so might not sound like it, but I really really am enjoying of my job and I’m sure it will just get better and better the more familiar I get with this place and the further I get with my work projects and the thesis project!

OH WAIT! Last minute edit! I wrote this post on Monday, and on Tuesday we got wifi AND it works, at least for now! Yay! 

SECOND EDIT. As I said, something is always broken: now, when we have got a working wifi and printer, and the ceiling fan in my room got fixed, one of the most important work equipment of mine broke down. The coffee machine. Wish me luck, I have already downshifted to two cups a day (from 4/5 cups a day), now I might have to settle for just one cup per day..