On Saturday
afternoon we had to go to this "welcome durbar" for new international
students. There was amazing food and performances, one of which I took part in.
It was a dance that we'd been working on for a while, and it went pretty well.
If someone puts up a video on youtube and I decide it's not too embarrassing,
I'll put it up here. Maybe. Then after dinner there was just normal,
non-choreographed dancing. It was like one big, awkward wedding where no one
really knows each other. But I had fun. And again, there was free food that was
incredible. Goat stew and jollof rice and some noodley dishes and chicken
aaaand SALAD. I almost wet myself. (After eating nothing but simple
carbohydrates for over 2 weeks, salad is like heaven. I have never appreciated
raw vegetables so much in my life.)
Sunday was another
uneventful day. I know ya'll probably watched the Superbowl, but I decided that
I didn't care enough about either the Giants or the Patriots to take a cab all
the way to a bar super late at night to watch the game just for the commercials. Instead, I watched Ghana beat Tunisia in
soccer. They're now moving on to the quarter-finals, which is tonight. I can't
believe I'm actually following sports. But it's so much more fun to watch here, because everyone's so nuts about it. In a different way than people are nuts about sports in the states. When they scored their first goal in the game, the cheering in the TV room was deafening, someone literally forced me to stand up and jump around with them and then everyone started dancing and singing this song in Twi or something. Nationalism at its finest.
In other news, I
finally had a normal, non-CIEE lecture! It was interesting, because it's just a
much different system than I'm used to. The professors here will repeat every
sentence 2 or 3 times and everyone is expected to copy it down verbatim. And then we got out of class about an hour
early because my professor suspected that no one was going to pay attention
after the first 45 minutes or so. I was cool with it.
Also, I made a
potential new friend in class today, because we had to share a desk because
there were too many people and not enough desks in the room. She was really
friendly and we chatted for a while before class started. After class she left
really quickly but then later tracked me down because she said she forgot to
say goodbye. I kind of laughed to myself because we had just met, and in the
US, I don't know a single person who would do that. I would never do that.
Sometimes I get taken aback by how friendly some people are. Its one of my
favorite things about Ghana so far. I think it's helping me to try harder to be
less shy than I normally would be back home, because I've figured out that in
general, people don't really respond to you much if you're really quiet or
don't greet someone right away. I'm still working on it though. It's hard to
try to be more outgoing all the time when I'm not usually like that, but I
figure it's better than people thinking that I'm being rude to them.
And on that note,
I'm getting better at trying to make people stop ignoring me so much at the
hospital. I've introduced myself to several of the nurses, and (besides the
midwife, who I'm slightly terrified of) they all seem really nice. Besides the
fact that they still call me 'oburoni' instead of my name. There's also an
Italian medical student in the maternity ward with me this month, and it gets
confusing trying to figure out which oburoni they're talking to sometimes. I
think she's definitely the favorite though, because she's in med school and
actually knows things, unlike me. I'm pretty useless there. But I might get to
start helping more soon! Yesterday I watched them deliver another baby and
watched while the Italian girl cleaned all the blood and stuff off of the baby,
and they told me I'd get to do the next one. But then it ended up being time
for me to leave before the next woman delivered. Bummer.
I'm headed off to my
3:30 class, which I'm hoping won't meet today because the soccer game starts at
4. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, though. We'll see.
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