Awesome update!

Hey guys!

It's been an awesome past couple days and so eventful that I decided to post early! So this weekend we went to Cape Coast. Cape Coast is an area about 2 hours east of Ghana and is home Elmina and Kakum National park. Elmina is one of the largest slave castles in West Africa and we walked through the dungeons of the castle where slaves were held, saw the governors quarter, heard stories about the horrid treatment of the slaves. The castle itself is a large structure ironically with a church squarely in the middle. The church was one of the strangest things to me that inside it was God's place but right outside was dehumnization and evil. Regardless, in the room of no return the tourguide asked us to say "never again" together, which evoked memories for me of the week I spent viewing concentration camps after Junior year of high school. I haven't said those words since talking about Darfur and the Holocaust, so to here them again was powerful. I realized that humans have an incredible ability to justify any action, no matter how inhuman, and that we are a very regretful species, we have said "never again" so many times about so many things in history, and it's a guarantee that someone will look back at today and say that our generation regrets not having acted for something.

So the next day we went to Kakum National Park and walked along a canopy walked that was about 100-150 feet off the ground. As my friend Robyn described "it was hammock material with a ladder on the bottom and pieces of wood sitting on top". It was shaky but sturdy and it was very exciting to see the jungle from so high up.

We got back last night and I passed out at my homestay after watching a Thai movie called Body Gaurd that was entirely in Thai, my host family bought it being told it was in English. Yesterday I went to my internship for the first time. It was a great day! It began with a battle for the tro-tro. At 6:30 in the morning, there were about 100 people at the tro-tro stop and tros came every 5-10 minutes only with 5 or 6 empty spots. So as the tro came by people would run towards it and elbow, push and chove to get on. Because I wanted to get to my internship on time, I was on the front lines. So when one tro-tro came really close to me, I dashed towards it and was at the front of the line. I tried to step onto the tro-tro but the force oe people also trying to get on prevented me. I was elbowed in the ribs and eventually pushed and choved my way onto the tro-tro sitting in the second to last seat available. The person in the seat behind me remarks, "Oh, Obruni, how did you get here?!"

The day at the internship was fascinating. The organization People's Dialogue (PD) works as a facilitator in the slum communities around Ghana. The organization helps groups of slum dwellers come together to establish a savings program. The dwellers have regular meetings and discuss about their problems, needs, and savings. PD operates on a self-help model, in which the groups discuss their own problems and come to the organization for help when they identify a need and have a way to solve it. For instance, a group in Old Fadama will meet and realize that they have a need for a water system, so they will talk to PD about it and PD will bring in a professional to train some community members on how to do community mapping. These community members will interview other community members and map the water resources and use in the community based on the training. Upon completion of the mapping, PD will provide expertise in water production and help the group construct the water system on their own with technical assistance from PD. It's a very effective method that empowers slum dwellers to solve problems themselves. Other methods create a system of dependency, in which organizations will give the water system to the dwellers but it won't be maintained because people didn't identify the need or feel a particular sense of ownership for it.

With that in mind, the project I worked on yesterday was writing a proposal for a women's rights, inheritance, and property project. One of the groups has noted that there are large issues with women's rights in regards to land in Ghana. First of all, women are afraid to put their names on the registration for land even if they have inherited it because they fear they may be killed or harmed so they put it under their husbands name. As a result, if the husband takes a second wife (as is common in Northern Ghana), and that second wife has kids the husband may take the land for that wife and kids eventhought it was the first wife's inherited land. The goal of this project is to educate women about their rights, that they can register land under their name and to map out the issues in the community about women's land and inheritance rights. So I wrote up this proposal to Women's Land Link Africa for PD to undertake a project for this purpose. It was an awesome project to start off with and I got to meet some fascinating leaders in the organization.

I'd say that's about all for now. Nante yie ne yebehyia bio (a safe journey and we will meet again).