Visit to Botongli

A few weeks ago we went to visit the village of Botongli, about an hour away from Tamale. We went to stay with Teacher John who I first worked with at Maltiti Girls Vocational Training Centre (OK, his name is John but I can't stop calling him by his official title, and he always calls me 'Madam B' - my official title at Maltiti). He was the all-faithful teaching assistant who basically kept the place running almost single-handedly in times of chaos and he had always invited me to come and stay at his village. When Mara and Marit came to stay in our house for a month (two lovely Americans doing an amazing student-photo-exchange project) they decided to come with me, and the village gave a warm welcome to the 'three white ladies'.

The first picture is two friends walking along: mates are the same all over the world. Over here, men and women would hardly ever be seen walking along holding hands, but you will often see 2 guys walking along holding hands as a sign of friendship. (Ghana is very anti-gay so it is definitely not a sign of romance.) Men and women kissing in public is completely not done here, and is quite shocking to most people in the north. Some of my colleagues who have been to Denmark for training (the NGO receives funded from Denmark) described how they just did not know where to look when they saw boys and girls kissing in public.

The second picture is the compound house where we stayed. We discovered that the round rooms are for women and the square ones are for men, and on asking why it's that why, we were told that it's because 'women like round things and men like square things'! To the left of the picture in the foreground is the toilet: That's right, just by these green shrubs. I admit it was pretty, shall we say, open and each time I used it I was hoping no one would walk along the road at that moment and wondering how much more visible white people's backsides are on a moonlit night!

Next picture is me and our neighbourhood kids hanging out - I was doing 'Gimme 5' and they love it! Do you remember it from school? Gimme 5, on the side, up high, down low, too slow! (they love 'too slow') We were actually racking our brains for games and songs to entertain them, cause we were kind of a main attraction when we arrived so thought we should try and keep the audience interested. As a result a whole lot of our childhood games got dragged out!

Then we have the Little Water Carriers who also wanted to be 'snapped', then Teacher John me and Mara and our little gang. Below that is our groovy mosquito-net-covered bed in the compound (goats kept galloping around the compound during the night - quite a hilarious sound to fall asleep to!) and also a photo of Gafaru and Rebecca (with Gafaru looking ridiculously serious - he was usually laughing and clowning about the rest of the time.