Election 2008 (The Ghanaian One)

So as some of you may know, Ghana just had a presidential election on December 7th. As we aren't supposed to get involved in the politics were, we spent the day in our quiet little training village of Addo Nkwanta. Our day involved going for a really nice walk on a bush path which took us out through a cocoa farm and a really awesome giant tree, playing some ping pong (that's right--ping pong!--and I actually beat JJ!--twice!), and watching some episodes of 30 Rock on someone's laptop.

There were several polling stations in the small village so there weren't really any lines or any big hoopla or anything. People vote by putting their thumbprint next to the picture of their candidate. When the results started coming in that evening a lot of people were gathered at the center of town listening to the radio blaring (the radios are typically blaring over here) and you could feel the excitement and anticipation. And it blared on for awhile but as it turns out the results didn't come in until yesterday (3 days later). And the winner is....no one yet! The candidate would have had to get 50% of the vote plus one in order to win, and since there were a few parties aside from the main two parties (NPP is the incumbant party and more similar to republicans and NDC leans more toward social democracy) and there was about 2% of the vote that were misvotes, neither candidate got the needed 50% plus 1. So there is now going to be a run-off on December 28th. We weren't sure what this would mean for us, since they had intentionally consolidated all of the volunteers for the Dec. 7th election and we are supposed to leave for our sites on the 13th. We found out today that we will be going to our sites and will be basically on lock-down from Christmas Eve until January 2nd, so we can't leave our sites at all during that time. The idea is that we are safest when we are at our sites and I'm confident that this is true, but it will be kind of a pain not to be able to go to the market at all in that time. I think we'll be eating lots of rice and beans for my 30th birthday and New Years! So though we might not be well fed for a few days, know that we are safe and should anything go wrong, the Peace Corps has a solid emergency action plan that will ensure our safety.