Two Weeks to Ghana

After making several trips to Goodwill, battling scary things in the refrigerator, and forcing our belongings onto friends and family, we are almost ready to leave Ballard. The next two weeks are going to be pretty crazy--we'll spend a few days in Burien with Joan and Fred, then fly to LA on Thursday for Tony and Becky-time (I hear wine country might be involved?!), then onto Chicago to visit Grandma Rose, then to Atlanta to visit my people. Then we fly to Philadelphia on the 27th for two and a half days of staging, where we will meet all the other people who are embarking on this adventure with us, fill out lots of paperwork, learn some stuff, and I think get injected with various things to keep the tropical diseases away. We'll take some sort of bus to NYC and then get on a 5pm flight to Accra, Ghana on Sept. 29th. It's an 11-hour flight, and it's direct, which is fantastic.

We'll spend the first four days or so in the capitol, and then mosey on up to the little village(?) of Kukurantumi (2 hours from Accra), where we will live with a family for ten weeks for pre-service training. I haven't been able to find out too much about Kukurantumi, except that it is in the Eastern Region, which is the "mountainous region", and that there is a monkey sanctuary and Ghana's tallest waterfall nearby. Sounds like our kind of place! Our literature says there is very limited internet access there, so hopefully we'll be able to post something at least once or twice during this time.

We should find out in the first couple weeks of training specifically where we'll be for our actual service. The country is really diverse, ranging from tropical rainforest to desert, and from Ashanti chiefdoms to Islamic cultures, and there are over 60 languages spoken in this country that's roughly the size of Oregon. We've been practicing our Twi (the most widely-spoken native language) so it would be nice if we were placed in a Twi-speaking region, but I think we'd be happy anywhere. Our history in New Mexico makes us both kind of itch to live in the desert again. But on the other hand you have lush rainforest with exciting wildlife. Either way we win.

As excited as we are to be doing this, we are also sad because we know we are really really really going to miss our friends and family. If you'd like to write us, feel free to send us an email anytime or, if you're really ambitious, you can send us a postcard or a letter. If it's a postcard, though, apparently you should put it in an envelope because postcards end up on the walls of the Ghanaian post offices! Here's our mailing address for the first three months:

JJ Gama-Lobo and/or Kirsten Tuhus, PCT
Peace Corps
PO Box 5796
Accra North
Ghana

And I guess that's all for now. Our next blog should be awesome and stuff --- so keep an eye in the sky for it.