Akwaaba!

Hi everyone! I'm trying to update as often as possible, but the internet has been down for a few days. I had an amazing weekend! Saturday we hired the Unite for Sight van and Bismarck drove us to the Volta Region (about 5 hours away) to visit the sacred mona monkey sanctuary and the Wli waterfall. I expected both of these places to be touristy and filled with Bohemian Europeans, but they were not at all. When we got to the monkey sanctuary, it was in a very rural village. People were just doing their day-to-day activities and we paid a lady to walk us into the forest where the monkeys hang out. I bought some bananas from a lady selling them on the roadside, and when I went into the forest, monkeys just came right up to me and peeled the bananas and ate from my hand. It was the coolest thing ever!

Wli waterfall was cool too. It was a 40 minute hike through the forest to get to the falls, but it was breathtaking. It was the largest waterfall I've ever seen. It is also a bat sanctuary, and at one point, hundreds of bats came out from the cliff face and just filled the sky. They were far enough away for it to be exciting and not scary.

On Sunday, we caught a taxi (terrifying!) to Bojo beach. The beach is so nice; it was just overcast enough to not be excrutiatingly hot. We didn't go in the water much because there was a pretty strong undertow. At one point I waded in to cool off a little, got caught in an undertow, and ended up losing my glasses. Good thing I'm working with an eye clinic; I'm going to try to see about replacing them tomorrow.

Outreach is business as usual. We go to a different village every day. Today we were in Sege-Nakomkorpe in the Volta Region. We saw about 95 patients, most of them students. I'm enjoying outreach. I've been picking up little snippets of the local languages. They speak Ewe in the Volta region, and I've learned to say "Nye nkor nye Rikki. Me tso America." The people love that someone actually gives a crap about their language and their culture. I've been asking the village elders about their tribal scarring patterns and their traditional remedies.

Tomorrow I am going to the clinic to observe surgeries all day. Afterwards we might go to the art market. I tried fufu today. Pretty tasty. I'm starting to be comfortable eating the street food, because everyone else has been doing it and they're not sick. I also bought some sweet bread and pineapple. I will, however, be steering clear of the "bushmeat," which is giant rat. We see it hanging by its tail from shops on the street. Grotesque.