After a very relaxing and relatively uneventful weekend (save for a trip to the beach Saturday night where I dipped my toes in the other side of the Atlantic!), Monday hit with a vengeance. Firstly, Mondays are always difficult to handle; but toss in the unpredictability of transport and length of travel time to work in a new country, and it is a whole other experience! After waiting at the trotro station for an hour, Jessica and I decided we had to suck it up and take a cab. Long story short, we ended up not at Nkrumah circle (where we were going to get another tro), but at the Tigo headquarters (a cell phone/internet company). Needless to say, there was some miscommunication, and Jessica and I were discouraged, but managed to orient ourselves and get to work at a fairly reasonable time. The good news is, our colleagues are quite used to the traffic situation in Accra. It is common knowledge that traffic is almost constantly heavy, and some days it is much easier to find a tro than others. They are very understanding ladies!
Jessica and I have been spending this week looking through newspapers from January until the present, looking for human rights stories about Ghana that have some sort of gender lens. This is part of the baseline work for a new project the Gender Centre is starting in June which will focus on encouraging female leadership. We are finding it difficult to find stories with a gender lens - thus the point of this exercise. The hope is that after the program, there will be an increase in these kinds of stories in the newspapers as women are encouraged to be leaders and the media picks up on their involvement. Hopefully this will lead journalists and people in general to specifically consider gender issues when analyzing human rights issues.
Tuesday was a better trotro day, and today was even better. So good in fact, that Jessica and I left for work at 6am, and got there at 7:40am. To put this in perspective, it took us 3.5 hours to get to work on Monday! Unfortunately, this luck came at a price - we were at work much too early! However, this is obviously better than being late! While we made it to work before the rain got too bad, once we were there it started to rain fairly hard, and continued until about 10am. Now, listen up fellow Canadians: rain is an interesting event here in Accra. Traffic slows to a halt, vendors gather their wares and seek shelter in which to wait out the storm, and the city ultimately seems as if it is on pause compared to what it feels like on a sunny day. The rains don't seem to last more than a few hours though, and when it starts to let up the city is once again teeming with life, with people repairing what the rain damaged and getting on with their busy lives.
Since it was raining, causing our co-workers to be either trapped in traffic or their homes while they wait for small floods to resolve themselves, and we were also incredibly early, the office was locked when we arrived. Luckily, the maintenance man - who greets us with a smile each and every morning - would not have us just stand under the overhang while we waited. He pushed aside his own chair and radio and let us wait with him in a small maintenance room. The three of us chatted somewhat, listened to the radio, read the newspaper, and some of us (i.e. yours truly) decided that taking a little nap was as good a use of time as any. With the arrival of Joanna and a call to Gladys, we finally got into the office mid-morning. Jessica and I made a bee-line for the tea, set up our stacks of newspapers, and spent a nice day doing our work. For lunch we tried a Ghanaian dish called Red Red; my favourite so far! The only way to describe it is as a kind of spicy chili, with strips of meat as opposed to ground. I am not sure what else was in it, but it sure disappeared quickly! After work Jessica and I made our way to busy Oxford Street, a 10 minute walk from work, and set out to go to the bank. Naturally, we became slightly side-tracked by the beautiful dresses for sale on the way (partly because our roommate Leah came home in such a beautiful dress this week - we figured we needed some too!). We found this nice little stall run by a sweet young woman with an absolutely adorable son named Prince. He was probably less than two years old, but already making his mother chase him and able to give a great high five! I broke down and did end up buying my first African dress - it is long, handcrafted, and beautiful! So excited to wear it out somewhere.
On the drive home (which ended up being very quick as well), Jessica and I got yet another hankering for some FanIce. The woman in front of us had bought one, and we decided we needed our fix. When stopped in traffic in the trotro, we caught the eye of a maybe 13 year old boy selling FanIce on his head. He seemed to be rather new at the selling game, but was a pro nonetheless! He could definitely tell we were thinking about it, and he gave us a coy smile. We turned away to discuss how badly we wanted it (which was confirmed as quite badly), and then called him over. This boy could not have looked happier. We think it was either his first sale, or at least his first sale to an obruni (white person)! I gave him his money, and he happily went about getting 2 FanIce out for us. He carefully wrapped each one in a piece of magazine to use as a napkin, smiling all the while. I made sure to thank him greatly, and pretty soon he was selling to the rest of the back of the tro (FanIce cravings are definitely contagious). While he was about to walk away, I heard him yell, "Obruni!". Knowing he meant me, I turned around , thinking he maybe wanted to sell me more. I looked out the window at him, and he was smiling ear to ear and just gave me a big thumbs up. While I wish that he did not have to sell FanIce on the side of the road, his smile was infectious and meeting him was the cherry on top of a great day filled with amazing food, friends, dresses, and laughter! An absolutely great Ghanaian Wednesday. 
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