from top to bottom: our first dinner in Ouaga (on the left from front to back are Emma, Aki, and Gunnstein, Emma and Aki's apartment mate); the view from inside the tro-tro (although it doesn't quide capture the number of people who were in it); the beautiful swimming pool we went toGreetings from Ghana! Sorry it has taken me so long to post, but we away over the weekend and then the beginning of this week seems to have flown by. The big adventure since my last post was a trip up to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to visit two other Georgetown students there, Emma and Aki. We finished our rotations with the various projects last Thursday and decided that we could use the free Friday as a travel day. After asking around the Centre, we determined that it shouldn't be too hard to make it to Ouaga, all we had to do was take a cab to the border and from there take a taxi or bus from the other side straight to Ouaga.
Welllll it wasn't quite that easy. Getting to the border and making it across was no big deal, especially since we were still in English speaking territory. On the other side of the border, however, things started getting interesting. We realized that there were neither buses or taxis to be found and so, we ended up in a tro-tro. For those of you who don't know what a tro-tro is, its a 12 or so seater van that usually ends up holding 20 or so people inside with a whole lot of belongings (and sometimes more people) on the roof. The big problem with tro-tros lies in the fact that they don't leave until they are full which unfortunately meant an almost 3 hour wait in the heat. Our tro-tro finally filled up and we were on our way, but we stopped every 30 min. or so to let people off or pick up more. Thus what could have been a 1.5 or 2 hour ride via car turned into a very squished 3 hour trip. Before we even got out of the tro-tro in Ouaga, all three of us were totally overwhelmed by the fact that we were in a big city (in fact, we got excited when we saw a stop light). Once we got to the bus station, a Burkinabe who had been in the tro-tro and thankfully spoke English helped us get a taxi and set a fare (Burkina is French speaking and of the three of us here only Ashley is able to speak a little of the language). Many hours after we were supposed to arrive, we finally got to Emma and Aki's apartment (just as they were going in search of us).
It was quite the luxurious weekend. There was much eating of non-African food (we had pizza and ice cream the first night) which was a nice change since that's all you can get here in Navrongo, and we even got to go swimming at a hotel. Having a break from Navrongo was nice, but at the end of the weekend I was homesick for Ghana, something I never in a million years expected to feel (don't worry Mom and Dad, I promise I will come home). Our trip back was much easier, with only an hours wait for the tro-tro and much less stopping along the way. Needless to say it was an exhausting and fun weekend but it was wonderful to get back to Navrongo.
Other than that there is not much else to report. We have spent the past couple of days finalizing topics for our first paper we have due and beginning to think about our final research projects. My first paper will be looking at the sector-wide approach to health care financing and its implication on district health funds; for the big project I have only decided that I will be doing something with adolescent sexual and reproductive health, but I am unsure of which direction I will be taking. The rains here seem to be over (which I'm a little bummed about) and it is getting hotter and hotter--I'm not quite sure how I will be able to survive the temperature change when I come back to the US. That's all there is to report for now, hope everyone is doing well!
