Days 1298-1300: The Beginning of the End

Early Saturday morning, my parents left for a weekend in Elmina, at my urging.

Saturday, Ruth and I just hung out.  We read stories, we played tro-tro to Madina Market, we danced in the courtyard, we had a nap.  Nothing special, except that it was special.

Sunday, we spent most of the day at the Shangri-La (and by most of the day, I mean five hours).  We ended up grabbing a cab down after waiting forever for a tro-tro (not that hard to get... except on a Sunday).  There, we played in the big pool - some other children had brought small animal-shaped squirters, and Ruth asked very nicely if she could borrow one.

The pool was pretty crowded - the other kids (mostly expats) were all a bit bigger and better swimmers (I tried pointing out the girl who was probably only 4-5 and swimming underwater, but Ruth was unmoved), and so Ruth was having fun but would sometimes get a bit frustrated that she couldn't follow them off the steps.  I managed to convince her to let me carry her on my back while I swam (despite it meaning - horrors - that her face was close to the water), and of course once she took the plunge that was all she wanted to do, squealing the whole way.

I loved it.

We ate pizza by the pool (and drank some pineapple juice).  Later, some local kids came and Ruth played quite energetically with them in the splash pool - throwing a beach ball around, flipping and horsing around, and even convincing one to let her ride on her back.

She also found a large swing near the pool, which she climbed on for a while with a little girl about her age.  It was grass, so I let them go pretty far up onto the sides - Ruth can be brave when she wants to be.

And, of course, after five hours, it was a good place to take a flop.

Monday, following a tip from the Embassy, we went to see Mr. Happy at Unique Ceramics (Happy told me while we were there that he was interested in turning the place into an NGO - first thing they should get their own website!).  He was very nice even though Ruth was - as usual - a bit shy.

We started with a quick tour around the workshop area.  Ruth was especially impressed by the big walk-in kiln that they use for firing large pieces (like some huge vases they had on display - they were lovely, but I didn't think I could get one home!), and by the fact that they heat them in it for three days!  Then Happy showed us how to throw pottery on a wheel, by tossing off a perfectly symmetrical flowerpot as if weren't no thing.

But for Ruth, he wisely started us on rope ceramics.  Ruth tried her best to make it like a snake, like she does with Melissa, but soon found that rolling small balls for decoration was more her speed.  So I made ropes and she made balls, and then Happy guided us in building them up into sort of cups.  Ruth quickly became interested in filling hers up with tons of balls - it was a crown, she explained, and those would make it more comfortable.  Happy was polite, but seemed to sense that she was done actually listening to directions and so moseyed off to take care of some other things, while I helped Ruth (this is not at all a criticism of him - and in fact, he only charged us for an hour despite our being there for over two all told, so it's not as if he was billing us for time that I was the only adult in the room).  He told me that he'd call and I could pick up our creations in two weeks - I'm looking forward to maybe painting them with Ruth when I get home.

We stopped by Miss Gloria who, alas, was not quite done with Ruth's dresses.  So we went back to the flat and met my folks - they'd braved a tro-tro from Cape Coast, much to my surprise.

Ruth napped, and I thought about how she was going home soon.  I made some pancakes for dinner.  I probably won't do that again while I'm here.

Day 1289 - Kpong and Odumase-Krobo

Pronounced like this.

After Shai Hills, we pressed on north toward Kpong.  I'd read about a traditional bead factory, Cedi Beads, up near there.  Again, we had some trouble finding it.  We took the road north from there, and it looked on my map as if we needed to hang a left at the Somanya junction and head up through Odumase-Krobo (spoiler: I was right).  But the Somanya road looked a little rough, so George hopped out to ask directions, and we were sent back up the main road.  I shrugged - the maps in the guide have been wrong before (especially in Congo!).

Where we ended up was at the "annex," which was nice but just a place to buy beads, not where we could see them made.  Fortunately, the man running the annex was able to give us better directions to the factory itself - we had to loop up through Kpong and then back through Odumase-Krobo, which is where the factory was - back to where we would have come up from the south had we taken the Somanya road. He also gave us a number so that we could call ahead and ask Cedi himself if it was OK for us to come and look around.

Odumase-Krobo itself was a bit of a trip.  The entire place was like one big market that ran for miles, and going was slow.  There was a sort of astroturf street party at one point with shirtless guys dancing on a flatbed and handing out free samples of some sort of new bitters (didn't catch the brand, sorry).  And every chop bar was blasting window-rattling music.

Ruth slept the whole way.

We did eventually find the factory, down a side road that we again worried would rip out George's undercarriage.

When we got there, Cedi apologized that it wasn't really in full swing.  As it turns out, this was related to the craziness in Odumase-Krobo.  We had unknowingly arrived at the beginning of the Nymayem festival, originally a millet-planting (I think planting) festival, where people would travel up to the ancestral home of the Krobo people, mount Krobo, and otherwise party for a week (we were sorry to have missed it, but it may have been just as well!  Chieftancy disputes are no joke here, folks.)

Despite everyone else at the factory being off at the festival (and us feeling a little guilty, but he assured us that he was there anyway), and hence the kilns not running, Cedi was happy to show us around and walk us through some of the beadmaking.  It was actually quite fascinating - the Krobo are one of the originators of the tradition of bead-making in Ghana, and widely considered the best (the archaeological museum here on campus has a ton of displays on Krobo beadmaking).  At Cedi's, they do a few kinds - the cheapest and simplest ones are ones made by breaking up and fusing glass bottles (beer bottles for green, Coke bottles for a sort of faintly blue-white, etc.).  Everything else requires the work-safety-defying process of grinding up glass (usually clear bottles, like from soda) into powder in a mortar and pestle and then adding pigments.  They use the powder both to create straightforward beads in colors you can't find bottles in (e.g., red) and to make more complicated ones that involve painting designs on the outside with a slurry of glass dust and water (then re-firing) or building a pattern up from glass dust (Cedi made it look easy, but oh my).  They also reclaim broken ancient beads by putting the shards into a form and re-firing them, fusing them into multicolored ones.

I was listening in interest (and wrangling Ruth, who was fascinated), so I only got the one photo of the demo work table, after he was done:

The kilns themselves are traditionally made from the clay from termite mounds - apparently the termites secrete a saliva that makes it more heat resistant.  But, in the olden days, they would still only last a few months of heavy use before the bottoms and sides where the heat was most intense would start to break down.  So the new thing is to use car parts to strengthen them - the floors of most of the kilns were made from leaf springs (my dad has photos).

And, of course, we bought some beads - I got a strand of small purple ones and black and yellow painted ones for Melissa (and a surprise for Channukha, of course).  Ruth got some yellow ones for herself (and a larger star-shaped one), and we got a bunch of beads for Ruth's class (I hope - Melissa is checking with the teachers) to string into bracelets.

Then, everyone was exhausted, so we came home.  I did not make George stop the car so I could try grasscutter at the place advertising it.