A Silk Cottonwood tree.

Hello again from Africa!

Well, okay, I'll be back from Africa when I send this. I'm actually on the plane heading home now. We left last night (Tuesday) at 10, and landed this morning at London Heathrow Airport at 6 AM. Then we changed airports in London and flew out of London's Gatwick Airport at noon. Had an interesting thing happen on the plane heading out of Ghana last night. They fumigated the plane for bugs -- with us on it! They wanted to kill any bugs that we might be carrying on us personally. That's the first time that's ever happened to me in all my experiences with flying. I expect it is due to the recent events in international news, such as SARS and Mad Cow Disease, etc. It didn't smell, but certainly fogged up the plane.

I had my bags inspected at Gatwick as we were checking in. Ugh. Had a huge box that I'd packed to the gills and taped up with two rolls of tape. Took me about two hours to do this. Fortunately they didn't give it more than a cursory glance inside, nudging things here and there, and then taped it back up.

Boxes are an interesting item to acquire in Ghana. They DO have UPS in Ghana, but unless you're shipping something with them they won't sell you a box. And shipping something through UPS to the States is very expensive. About $500 for my 60 pound box! What you have to do is walk along the street vendors and find boxes that are used that they'll sell you. They reuse almost everything in Ghana. This is good. For one thing, they don't have as sophisticated a waste disposal program as we do, and much of their garbage is in personal or small community dumps along the road. You don't throw away or recycle plastic water bottles. You sell them! You can purchase cans of coke (though I haven't seen plastic), but mostly there is just glass available, and you have to drink this where you buy it because the bottles are worth more than the coke to the vendor. They're just selling you what's inside. The bottles are reused over and over again by the Coke plant. They're worn on the outside, but of course the inside is sanitized so its perhaps better for the environment than going through the entire recycling glass process. Certainly plastics are horrible on the environment to recycle. This isn't to say they're big environmentalists over here. I choked on enough exhaust fumes, burning brush smoke, and factory smog this past month to know they need some standards implemented in that area. I'd just say they're thrifty! ;)

Well, last I left you we were still in Kumasi, so I'll catch you up. We worked in studio last Monday and Tuesday. Our lecturer on Monday talked about witchcraft. He said that witchcraft has been practiced in Ghana since as early as 250,000 BC. Apparently most Ghanaians still believe in witchcraft. The prominent religions here now are Christianity and Islam, but they do retain a good bit of their traditional beliefs mixed in.

They believe anyone can be a witch, including children. You can be born a witch, or "catch" someone's evil witch spirit through an object that contains their soul, or simply by opening your mouth and the spirit floats in... muahahahahah! ;) And they believe witches can transport themselves to anywhere in the world instantly. (Perhaps I could have skipped this 14 hours of plane travel, eh?) The huge Silk Cottonwood tree that I wrote about last time is often used for witch meetings. Apparently they will hover above the upper most branches and discuss the weeks business. Sorry, folks, never actually saw one of these going on, but I looked, truly!;)

Tuesday's lecturer talked about traditional Asafo flags and temples. The Asafo is an old military organization that fought the English during the wars to overthrow the Ashanti. There are 9 different Asafo groups, differentiated by color and number. They built very unusual temples around Cape Coast, where most of the symbolism within the structures on the temple represent power. There should be an image of one of these we saw between Cape Coast and Accra attached.

Wednesday we visited the Ashanti Chief's palace. This was really just a large house. The chief uses a larger home built behind the "palace" during the reign of the last chief so that the original palace could be used as a museum.