Our homestay began on Monday the 13th. It was a 5 hours drive from Accra to Kukurantumi where one of the Peace Corps Offices is located.
After almost a whole day of traveling and anxiously waiting, we finally made it to the little village where we’re going to spend the next 3 months. I was completely overwhelmed (and probably dehydrated) so much that I don’t even know how I made it through the entire event without passing out. My heart was pounding a mile a minute up until the second when I found out about my host family. Only my sister was there to pick me up, so everyone, including me, thought she was my mom. She seemed super eccentric and definitely lived up to that image (but more on that later).
After the reveal, we had some awkward moments of sitting and getting to know each other. Of course, my new sis and I didn’t have much to talk about and at this time, I was still thinking that she was my mom. I think at one point, I asked her how old she was, and she said 50, and I couldn’t believe it. I told her she was too young to be 50. Later, I realized that she told me that her mom is 50, which makes more sense now. My sis is only 25… or so she said. She has 3 kids, and the oldest is 13 so you do the math and tell me about it.
I had two giant bags each about 40 pounds in Ghana, and even though she needed help putting it on, my sis carried one of them on her head like it was a fucking hat. And she walked the entire 20 mins walk to our house with it and left me trailing behind with my 16 pounds backpack. To put me to even more shame, a small child, probably the age of 12, took my other 40 pounds bag and propped it on her own head. She only went half way though because then we ran into Dennis, my oldest nephew who is 13, and Dennis then took the bag over with his head. Just the whole thing about people carrying a anything/everything on their heads deserve a post all on its own.
My host family is relatively small. Mom, pop, sis and 3 nephews and we all live together, and I have my own room as per requirement by Peace Corps. It’s pretty cool, I get a bed and a table, and they gave me a fan. It’s an old old old fan and needs like a 2 hours head start to run full speed but it helps get me through the night so it’s been great. Compare to some of the other volunteers who don’t have electricity or even a bright light bulb (i.e: dim blue or green light in the room) I’m living the high life. Location wise though, I guess I’m in the backwoods boondocks because it takes walking up a dirt path for 15 mins before hitting the town’s main (and only) paved road.
Back to my family, they are pretty relaxed. I joke about how we are kind of the hicks of the town because we are kind of living in two sets of bungalows and our court yard is pretty much a second road for bystanders, but I actually really like them. My sister and my mom speak great English, which apparently isn’t the case for all host families. This is not their first time hosting so they are now used to the volunteers/trainees’ antics and habits and actually have made my homestay experience relatively pleasant, i.e: not setting up a curfew, not putting too much palm nut oil in my food, not giving me too much food, not feeding me all meat no veggies.
Anyway, my sister is youthful and somewhat crazy (the fun crazy, not crazy crazy) and she thinks that I’m hilarious, which is always a plus for me. I think it valentine’s day the 2nd night I was there, and she wanted to take me to a spot, which is what people here call a bar. I asked Heather to come with me, and we planned to meet up after dinner. Sometime between me eating and showering, Heather had to go with her family somewhere, and for about 20 mins, I was in panic mode because I texted a bunch of people but no one else was around/available to go with me. The last thing I needed at the time was being alone in a spot on Valentine’s Day with some drunken Ghanaians. Lucky for me though because as we were about to head out, Heather came back, a total life saver moment, so the three of us set out for the Lover’s Inn Spot (not even the tackiest names I’ve seen here).
On our walk to the spot, we picked up Adam, another volunteer. So there we were three obrunis, aka white people, and a local heading out for a night on the town. The spot was still empty when we got there, and my sis got us some cold Fantas to drink, and literally the second our drinks came, she paid and announced that she was heading into town for the night, but we should enjoy ourselves here.
Yeah… definitely didn’t see that one coming.
And so my sis left and then it was just the three of us obrunis sitting there outside drinking Fantas and chatting and pondering about what just happened, us being dropped by my sister who was supposed to show me the town. It was nice until a group of drunken young men came and wouldn’t leave us alone after that so we had to leave.
Since the people have been so polite to us during the 2 days we were there, it was sobering to experience this bit of negative attention. Foreigners stand out. Women stand out. You always have to watch yourself. And leave it to me to get the one family with the partying sister.
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