This is a really juicy blog post.

There is a particular phrase that terrifies me:  Eat All.  My SIT study abroad friends can recall how our host families would plop a heeping plate of who-knows-what in front of us and say, “Eat All.”  And you’d better, because they may have just slaughtered their pet goat for you.   The women of the co-op invited me in for lunch -  palm wine with kenke, a maize dish with a fish chili sauce.  I was instructed to Eat All.  Anyone who knows me is aware that I have the stomach of an old man, so adventures with food always end in suffering.  To complicate things further, I’m a vegetarian, and telling Ghanaians you don’t eat meat is like saying you don't take showers or something extremely nonsensical.      No matter…you can add “problem solves on feet” as a bullet point in the skills section of my resume, because I did just that: “Omigosh!  It’s so good that my brother must try some!  I will get him!”  Hehehe.

It was an exciting morning for all at the cooperative: we did video biographies of each of the Dzidefo seamstresses.  They had prepared their lines and dressed all pretty.  Sweet.  The women are rockin and rollin on production so we got out of their way for the afternoon.   

We did a photoshoot.  In the Afia high-waisted shorts.  With a waterfall. 

The way to compensate for being neither chic nor modelesque is to just embrace the cheesiness.  Are these shorts sweet or what?  They also come in a juicy electric green, laaadies.

Literally moments after these pictures were taken a torrential downpour hit.  We found shelter in a tin roof hut.  I had a horribly cliché moment where I had the urge to sing “I saw the raaiins down in aaaafricaaa.”  Toto’s Africa is listed on StuffWhitePeopleLike.com.  

The trek back was out of some humans vs. nature tv show.  Bats, bullfrogs, spiderwebs.  Evan had just bushwacked his way through a tree that had fallen on the trail from a storm when he politely called out: “Hey guys, can you come help me with these ants?"  He was covered head to toe in the largest ants I’ve ever seen, the biting kind.  

The power in the Volta region had been out all day.  As we were walking in the dark back to the orphanage, realigned with our inner-Sacajawea, the electricity came back on.  Magic!