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I took the weekend to visit the neighboring Cape Coast. A definite tourist destination, there were more obrunis (at least six in the span of six hours) there than I’ve seen my whole trip thus far. Cape Coast is the home of the Cape Coast Castle, a world heritage site, known for being one of the largest slave holding sites in the world during its time. It was definitely a sobering experience to see the “rooms” where they kept up to 200 slaves for months at a time. The males and females were kept in separate areas and rooms of the castle. Both rooms were underground and consisted of a tiny trench that went through the middle of the room where the occupants can relief themselves. It was said that during that time because the trenches could easily be backed up with rain water and human feces the layer of crap that covered the floor was as high as 6 inches, now imagine sleeping in that! Once the slave ships came the women and men were then walked through the “Door of No Return” and loaded onto the ships and ready for their journey to America or other places depending on the sailing winds. Recently two ancestors of slaves were brought back through the door to be buried in Cape Coast, leading to an added plaque on the other side of the door saying “Door of Return”.


During the tour I met a fellow obruni from Germany and we decided to hang out the rest of the day together in Cape Coast. Micheal was spending a year volunteering at an orphanage in Accra. Interestingly, in Germany before you start college you are required one year of military service or one year of field service to a developing country, he chose the latter. I was afraid to ask him how old he was because I’m pretty sure I could as old as his mom! Haha, even when in Ghana I’m still a cougar! Since he’s been here already been here for four months it was interesting to learn about his impressions of Ghana thus far. According to him, the school system here is extremely rigid and does not foster “free thinking”. For example in one of the classes he sat in they were taught the days of the week, when he spoke to one of the kids and asked what day comes after Wednesday the kid had to go through the whole order in his head to come up with Thursday. In another example, when he asked what 9/3 was, the answer came easily because that was memorized. When asked what 90/3 was the person wrote out 9 ten times then started crossing out and adding. This revelation actually made some sense to me. When I was with Alberta she had pointed out a man carrying a large burnt box on his head because he was cursed by some witch doctor. I asked her what would happen if he just didn’t carry it to which she had no response since she did not seem to understand the idea of why he wouldn’t carry it and do what he was told. All that being said, Micheal suggested that the Ghanaians were taught not to question authority which could lead to corruption. This corruption can be seen in the police barricades along the road where they’re essentially taking bribes from the cars passing the barricade. It will be interesting to see what is going to happen with the new discovery of oil off the coast of Ghana, I hope that it will not corrupt and adversely impact the people here.

On a side note on my way to Cape Coast I took a shared taxi, which got into an accident with another broken down taxi. We probably hit them straight on at a speed of 20mph (none of the cars’ speedometers work here!), luckily it didn’t seem like their hand break was on so the impact was probably less severe. Since there are no seat belts, it was a slight miracle that everyone in both cars were ok, I got a slight bruise on my cheek (same cheek as the surfing bruise!) and a small bruise on my leg. Craziness!!