My Birthday

Written on the 7th of August
Summary:
When it rains in Ghana, everything stops. No one goes outside, which means no one goes to school, work etc. It's crazy! I mean when it rains it usually rains hard but still if you have a raining season every year you'd think you'd get used to it.. So this happens once in a while, more this week than it's happened before, which means our room has been flooded for a lot of this week as we have no windows. lovely. I had a really good birthday! A volunteer made me a cake, which is really hard to do in Ghana as they don't eat cake here, which was absolutely lovely. During the day we went to the swimming pool and at night I just had some drinks with the Ghanaian boys which was a laugh. I'm now leaving Tamale on Friday instead of Sunday, it's surreal how soon that is! I'll be going to a beach resort near Accra for my last weekend.
Detailed:
On Wednesday it rained from 6am until 11am. This doesn’t happen very often as when it rains in Tamale, it usually rains heavily but only for about 20 minutes. But like Fred said: “when it rains in Ghana, it’s a public holiday”. Everything stops. Kids don’t go to school until the rain stops, people don’t go to work and patients don’t go to their appointments. In other words, I didn’t have work that morning, so I just stayed at home and went to the internet cafe in the afternoon, but the sun was shining in the afternoon, so I still went to reading. When I told my girls I would be able to continue reading with them, I thought I’d read with the 2 girls every day. But slowly it became 3,4,5 and now 6 girls that I read with! This means they don’t get to reach much in the hour, but it seems they’d prefer to read a little bit than not at all. I gave them some biscuits and it was so cute as many of the older girls just saved them for the younger girls, which was really thoughtful.
The next two days were just as normal. Lessons in the morning and reading in the afternoon. After reading on Thursday I went with Musah and Francis for an hour motorbike ride which was fun. Francis at the front, me in the middle and Musah on the back. A Ghanaian sandwich haha! Thursday night though I spent more time on the toilet than in bed, which was really tiring, but I felt a lot better around 7am. The girls left to Mole national park in the afternoon and are coming back on Sunday. This means Valentine and I were left as the only volunteers. He did the Friday day shift and the night shift. On Saturday morning, I went to the internet cafe to chat to my parents and some friends. My parents and Luc and Judith had sat in front of skype with party umbrellas on and blowing some little party trumpets, and sang happy birthday it was so funny, but did make me miss them more. They even teased me by showing my wrapped presents to me, it wasn’t fair haha! I also skyped Jitske, my Dutch best friend, and her family sang to me on skype as well, which was so nice.
Afterwards, I came home and Valentine, the Romanian boy, had a cake with a candle waiting for me. It was so sweet! It is literally impossible to buy cakes here, so after searching for a long time, he’d found two plain bases of a cake, put one on the bottom, put nutella on it with pineapple and banana put the other base on top of that and then put more nutella, pineapple and bananas on it. It was really nice! After we’d had some, we went to the swimming pool. It was pretty cloudy, which was a shame, but still hot and it was nice to just lie down next to the pool for the day and now and again go for a swim. At about 5pm we could see the dark clouds coming really quickly and it suddenly started pouring really heavily. As we were meant to get picked up just after 5pm, but our van’s windscreen wipers don’t work, we couldn’t get picked up until the rain stopped. The rain quieted down a bit around 6.30pm, which is when Rockson, one of the boys, came and got us. But it was still raining, so we drove about 10 miles an hour as the windows were steaming up, the fan doesn’t work in the car so couldn’t get rid of it, and driving without windscreen wipers is near to impossible. We were on main roads and everything, and the drive ended up taking about 40 minutes, but luckily no one died...
I’d given Rockson some money to buy some drinks for us tonight, so he’d bought a crate of 24 smirnoff ice’s. Valentine hadn’t slept for about 36 hours, so he went to bed when we got home, so I stayed up with 5 of the boys until about 12am. We had a lot of fun. They definitely tried their hardest to get me drunk (tried to convince me to drink 18 smirnoffs as it’s my 18th) but they failed as I didn’t want to drink more than two. We had some ipod speakers, so we danced and sang and they decided they wanted to create a new hairstyle for me, using shampoo... Look below for the results. Also it’s a tradition in Ghana, that if it’s someone’s birthday they pour water all over you. At the swimming pool someone had realised it was my birthday and got a whole bucket all over me, but Francis, being the creative one, thought Smirnoff ice would be a good replacement. I was covered in sticky Smirnoff ice, then they found water bottles and poured water all over me, I was soaked! At 12am, after one of the boys Musah had given me a speech of about 20 minutes about how long distance relationships can work and that I don’t have to like someone from my own country and that I shouldn’t go for looks etcetcetc, basically doing the talking for Francis, trying to convince me we belong together, I went to bed.
I’ve decided that I’m going to leave Tamale on Friday instead of Sunday, because if I left on Sunday I’d arrive on Sunday night and I didn’t want to spend the whole Monday waiting in Accra for my flight which is at 10.45pm. I’ll now be leaving on Friday morning to Kokro Bite which is only 25 km away from Accra. I’ll be staying at a beach resort there for the weekend, which is really well known (Big Milly’s Backyard) until Monday afternoon. Then I’ll get a taxi or a tro-tro to Accra for my flight in the evening. Apparently it’s really nice there, so it’ll be a nice way to end my time in Ghana.
It’s so surreal that the end is coming near. I’m really glad I decided to stay the amount of time I did, as some people stayed for 2 or 3 weeks, and that just isn’t enough. It really doesn’t feel like I’ve stayed here for 5.5 already, more like 3! But I’ll be happy to be going home soon, it was definitely long enough for me.