Happy Birthday Cliff, It's Ghana Be Exciting

Hey everyone! Long time, no blog.  Today is a momentous day for my big brother.  Cliff is turning 28, so, he deserves a shout out from my recent stop in Ghana. Happy Birthday Cliff!

Now, I'll say a little about Ghana.  The country was an amazing experience in seeing what poverty looks like, and how the less fortunate part of the world survives. I roamed around the capital city of Accra the first day visiting markets, an abandoned fort and eating dinner in a slum.  After my friend asked a street vendor where we could eat local food, we taken into an urban slum where a woman cooked fish for us and made bankum (sp?), which is crushed maize.  I saw a man hard at work at his sewing machine after the sun went down, people walking home from wherever they work, women mashing the maize to make bankum, and children playing near us and near their own urine...it was a tough sight to see.  Accra is also the most developed part of Ghana.

The second day I visited slave castles that were used as human warehouses while traders waited on ships to take captives through the Middle Passage.  The conditions were, of course, awful to see.  I learned about how difficult life was before captives even left the African continent.

On the third day, I visited a chocolate factory, the University of Ghana, and a couple markets, which took a little edge off of the pessimism of the first two days.  Accra is still a bustling city, despite its poverty.  The University of Ghana was very exciting because I was able to talk to a law student there about issues in the United States and Ghana.

My fourth day in Ghana was spent listening to experts at the World Bank branch office in Ghana talk about the country and its growth prospects.  For those who didn't know, Ghana was the world's fastest growing economy in 2011 (with the help of oil discoveries).  This means that as long as Ghana can find a way to begin developing the northern region of the country, then it should become a shining example to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa of how to move forward.  Despite the dryness of the technical terms, I enjoyed the entire presentation, especially, when they discussed the World Bank's new policies on transparency.  Check out their website and search for their database, the amount of information should be staggering if you find the right program.

On the fifth and last day, I capped my Ghana experience with a visit to an orphanage.  We played with many of the kids at the local school while they waited two hours for someone to bring their lunch in on a truck.  Eventually we had to leave, but seeing the "school" which was only some trees with chalkboards leaned on them, and meeting the woman running the orphanage, Mama Peace, was certainly an influential experience.

I still have a lot to digest about my experience in Ghana, but it was amazing and I'm glad I was able to visit the places I did.  The opportunity to dwell on things I've never even thought about before, that's why it's an adventure...

Jeff

A Brief Break from Stories about Brazil

Hey everybody!

I thought I’d take a break from telling you about Brazil and give you an update on what’s been happening around the ship.  Or really what just happened this morning.  Semester at Sea has a tradition every time a voyage crosses the equator for the first time on the open ocean (we already crossed it sailing the Amazon River).  It’s called Neptune Day, and people who’ve never sailed across the equator (which is almost all of us) are treated to a little ceremony.

First, we were woken up early in the morning by members of our crew banging drums and blowing whistles while dressed in togas.  After that, we had fish guts poured over our heads and we jumped into the pool on-board to rinse off.  We also had to kiss a fish.  Plus, everyone had the option of shaving their heads.  Being the rebel that I am I decided to go for it (sorry Mom, it’ll grow back).  Tonight, some friends and I are signed up for a five course meal to celebrate a birthday.

This is how you pass ten days on a ship the size of a high school by the way; by doing things you didn’t really plan for.  It keeps you from getting cabin fever, but hey, that’s why it’s an adventure…

P.S. I figure the ship's bandwidth can handle one compressed photo right?

The First Half of Brazil...Sailing Around the World Is Inspiring

Well everybody, sorry for the long intervals between posts, but I’ve been catching up on sleep and class work since Brazil.  Oh, speaking of Brazil, it was awesome!  So awesome, that I’ll be splitting my post about it in two…so, here it goes.

The MV Explorer sailed up the Amazon River for a few days until we reached Manaus which is where the Amazon forms between the meeting of the Rio Negro (which has black water) and the Solimoes (which has brown water).  This juncture is called the Meeting of the Waters because the two rivers flow together, but don’t mix.  The first thing my group (the one I traveled to Rio de Janeiro with) did was get on boat and motor downriver from our port to the Meeting.  It really is as nifty as people say because the rivers hardly mix (due to temperature, density, and some other factors I’m told).

After this point our guides took us out into the marshes between the two rivers on motor canoes.  We didn’t see anything absolutely amazing nature wise, but it was definitely sobering to see houses floating on and built along the water.  Some were actually nice, but a couple of the houses were leaning a foot to one side and people were still living in them.  I took a few pictures until I realized people were actually home, at which point I got really embarrassed.  I certainly wouldn’t like people taking pictures of my home simply because it showed how poor I was…

So, after that sobering moment, we got to see some cool things in the marshes, several birds, a gigantic colony of ants carrying leaves to a tree, and a caiman (which is related to alligators).  I actually spotted one of the caiman.  From there we returned to the port in Manaus, and since we had finished an hour and a half early (it was still a long outing) we had time to explore Manaus before we had to be ready for our plane flight to Rio de Janeiro.

I definitely wish I’d had more time in Manaus because the parts I saw were really interesting.  Right out of the port there are street vendors everywhere because it’s the heart of downtown.  There were several blocks of stores and street vendors actually, which is super interesting consider how dead the downtowns of some cities are in the United States.  We passed a cathedral in the middle of a park downtown which was having mass when we passed by and a few blocks up we saw the Téatre Amazonas.  This is the opera house in Manaus, which like most of the other really nice European style buildings was built during the rubber boom in the early 1900s.  It seems like your average neoclassical building until you look at the dome on top.  It’s a mosaic that looks like the Brazilian flag and has other bright colors. 

It was at the opera house that I and two other guys from SAS met some high schoolers from Manaus.  They knew some English words, and we were able to gesture the rest.  They taught us a few words in Portuguese, we laughed at how weird both our sets of names were, and everyone exchanged e-mails. Brazilians are extremely friendly (at least the ones I met) and I’m looking forward to a future where Brazil has more influence and contact with the USA.

After exploring Manaus a bit, I got showered and packed for the flight to Rio de Janeiro.  We flew out of our airport at 12:30 AM and because of the time zone changes, we reached Rio at 6:30 AM.  Except for the two and a half hours of sleep I caught on the plane, I didn’t close my eyes until one the next morning.

So, our guide in Rio took us to Copacabana (a few blocks from our hotel), but we didn’t hit the beach.  Instead, we hiked up a steep hill near the end of the beach into a former favela.  It’s now known as the Babilonia/Chapeau Mangeira community.  This was the most inspiring place I was able to visit in Brazil.  There was obviously a lot of poverty; people lived in units, only about a third of the size of my home, built of bricks and other easy to obtain materials.  The catch here though is that, according to my guide (who grew up in Babilonia) this community is heavily involved in improving its lot.

They’ve made deals with the city to gain some electricity and sanitation services, and they’ve built a water storage setup to help with sanitation in the community.  They also host a university from either Switzerland or Sweden that built a green roof over their community center to help keep the building cool and catch rain water.  In that community center they have an after school program staffed by teachers who are paid by the tours they give to groups like SAS.  And, the reason they have so many tour groups visit this favela lies in the half the community’s name – Babilonia.

You see, Babilonia, when it was founded as a favela in the early 1900s, was named after the hanging Gardens of Babylon.  The hillside where they built the community was Atlantic forest (of which only 7% remains on the Brazilian coast), and they’ve preserved a large chunk of it for tours.  There are even monkeys, so, it’s not your typical trail.  After walking through the trail and stopping at an overlook of the city (it was spectacular) we headed down from Babilonia and out to our bus (I’m not really sure it could have driven the road up to the community).

I walked around the city for a couple of hours with some others, and we ate lunch along the way.  I had a cheese and meat pastry of some kind, which was awesome.  And a note to any travelers in Brazil, you need to be on the lookout for Pao de Queijo.  They’re fluffy little cheese rolls that are very difficult to stop eating.  Once we had eaten, my group set out to find a good deal for tickets and travel to the futbol match being played that night.  And that’s where I’m leaving you all for now…

P.S.  Again sorry I haven’t posted more pictures. I fully intended to in Rio, but it cost money to use our hotel’s internet, and I didn’t really have time to log on anyway.