After a busy week I was able to enjoy a fun weekend. Saturday was much more like a ‘normal’ Saturday in Wilmington. Getting up, cleaning the house, running errands and generally finishing out the week and getting ready for the next. I also purchased some ready-made curtains for my bedroom so finally the tablecloths have moved on to another room and my room is really dark at night so it is much harder to get up in the mornings!
Sunday morning I woke up with very mixed feelings. I really wanted to go to Church but also knew that it was my last day to have fun with a colleague from the US as she will leave this week. Knowing that Church would take up the entire morning (as the service doesn’t end until 12.30) I made a difficult decision to miss Church. So instead I started my day with my own little ‘worship service’ at home. I cranked up the iPod with my Worship Songs, selecting four favorites and then down the volume down low and started to read in Acts. As I read Acts, Chapter 3, Verse 15 “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. And we are witness to this fact!”, it hit me that I had been allowing other people’s behavior and actions impact me every day and had forgotten about following my own believes and faith. That changed my entire outlook and I pray that I will learn from my lesson and continue to get my daily strength from my own faith in God and what I need to do.
Having started my day with such a great revelation, I headed out of the house to collect Lucy so we could start our adventurous day out of Accra! We decided we would head out on the coast road in the direction of Cote D’Ivoire (don’t worry not getting close) and try to find the Fort of Good Hope. The only map I have is a tourist map that doesn’t show many roads (of course most of them aren’t really worth putting on a map yet as during the rainy season they get rather washed away! We drove to several really interesting coastal villages looking just as one would imagine a small African village; one ‘single lane road’ in and out, passing numerous small homes built of various things – mud, wood, corrugated iron, plastic sheeting, etc. Lots of small children, goats (more about that later), chicken, fruit and vegetable stalls and of course on the coast fishing boats and people selling fish. We crawled through the villages at about 5 mph just going with the flow of the villagers as they went about their business.
Around lunchtime we arrived in Winneba a slightly larger fishing ‘town’ that is supposed to be the “Oxford” of Ghana with its University – I have to admit I would never have considered the resemblance if it wasn’t written in the West Africa Lonely Planet book – and actually still don’t but oh well! Driving towards the beach, Lucy half-jokingly said it would be great to find a really nice restaurant with air conditioning that had great food including fresh fish. Well who would have believed it – but that is almost exactly what we did find – after asking an elderly gentleman if there was “somewhere that served good food in town?” The only thing missing was the air conditioning, however we sat outside under a wooden frame covered in plants (couldn’t quite refer to it as a pagoda) with a nice breeze blowing off the ocean. After a wonderful lunch of grilled red snapper and french fries we drove back towards the beach. Having parked close to the beach (on the grass at the edge of the sand) we took a walk along to the beach to check out the fishing boats before finally heading back towards Accra.
Now you may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the Fort of Good Hope yet – well the reason being is that we never actually located it, in spite of asking many, many people. We have decided that since it was apparently built in 1702 that it is no longer a Fort of Good Hope but quite possibly rather a fancy (for Ghana) beach resort called Whitesands! That is still to be confirmed though J.
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| Whitesands Beach |
So back to the goats! Through all these villages we kept coming across these really rather cute goats – they are pygmy goats, originating from Cameroon but now found through many of the West African countries. They are smaller (hence the name pygmy) than the usual breed of goat and are really fun – the website I looked at calls them precocious!! So I told Lucy that since I don’t have my dogs here with me in Ghana that maybe I would have a couple of pygmy goats (they don’t like to live alone apparently). I have room in my garden to fence off an area big enough for them and can get them a few logs to play on – they like to jump on and off things and they can be my pets until I leave Ghana. Since goats have a value here, particularly if they are females I would easily be able to find someone (possibly even my guards) to leave them with and would know that they would be taken care of (since they are valuable) until it was time for them to be eaten.
I have already spoke to Solomon about helping me find some pygmy goats – although I have told him that I only want ones that are pretty colors (the dark ones are prettiest especially if they have white speckles on them) and after giving me his ‘smile – meaning oh no what now’ he started seriously discussing how we could find some for me. So who knows in July I might have a couple of pygmy goats to keep me company here in Accra! Stay tuned to find out……….
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