Leaving University of Ghana Legon for the last time on Thursday, I hopped in a shared taxi going to Adenta as I could not face the hour and a half commute home via tro-tros. My taxi driver asked me where I was from and when I told him Chicago, he went on and on about how he lived there for 2 years and truly felt at home there. We talked about Bolat and compared the West African food in Chicago to Ghana's and that's when the conversation took a turn for the worse.
It went something like this:
Taxi Driver: Marry me. I can support you and make you a very comfortable life in Chicago.
Me: How old are you?
Taxi Driver: 47.
Me: 29 is my cutoff.
The marriage proposals have not followed me to Kumasi, where I am now for my second home stay. I live right next door to Claire and Ashley, and Izzie is just around the bend so we are enjoying running over to each other's homestays and appreciating being so close to eachother after being so far away from any other Bruni in Accra.
My homestay parents run a small convenience-type store in the front of their house and they bake bread outside just behind that and sell it at the store. My homestay Dad told me that one day I will be working the store, making sales entirely in Twi while he sits nearby and laughs without helping. The gang of gals who live nearby are excited to document this and make the day even more challenging for me; and I am just as excited for it, too.
The family is Methodist and Sunday brought another Church experience that was impossible to get out of. I got to attend bible study for one hour with a group of two other people where I was grilled on how I could relate my own experiences to biblical references on how to think positively to live positively. The bible study teacher laughed at me when I talked about Noah's Ark as a scripture...is it not? I've learned to just present myself as a practicing Christian here who values hearing the word of God, two lies that need to be said so you are not shunned from society. It's like saying you're a vegetarian here, people are just like Huh? "Oh, you're Jewish, but you believe in Jesus and attend church every Sunday, right?"
One of the girls here made the mistake of being honest with her homestay sister and explained that she actually does not believe in God or heaven and it is her choice not to: her homestay sister called her the anti-Christ.
....post bible study class...... I sat through a three hour service where I was pushed by the woman sitting next to me to dance at the front of the church and then I had to introduce myself with a microphone to the church community where everyone laughed in response (laughing here is sort of just what everyone does in conversation, more out of a mutual respect than anything else). My homestay Dad is in the choir and my homestay sister, Juliet, gave a speech in Twi and English for about an hour; so they are bigshots there and I will be spending lots more time at church, whether I like it or not.
Spent yesterday at the Kumasi soccer game with most of the group and my favorite part had to be enjoying the Fan Ice ice cream.
Other highlights include dancing our hearts out at a club called Candie's where Kwame is a regular the night we arrived in Kumasi. Oh, and that same day a bus full of about 100 Ghanaian school children shouted at us, "sexy brunis sexy oh, brunis" as we passed them. I think I speak for our entire SIT group that we all feel like celebrities here and would rather just blend in. Hair braiding and custom made Ghanaian dresses from Izzie's host mom are looking more and more necessary.
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