Our Day Out
We take the students out of the village every year for ‘educational purposes’ and cos basically its a laugh. In the past, we’ve given the students their first bewildering sight of the sea and taken them to hospitals to see organs in jars and this year we decided to go to Lake Bosumtwi near Kumasi.
The plan was to gather outside the Anglican Church at the unGodly hour of 4am. That's still the dead of night, when the air is thick with dew and mosquitoes. I sat there waiting for the kids to arrive thinking that this is no way to earn a crust when out of the murk came an old woman bent by age and presumably insomnia. Her frail old frame looked ghostly as she emerged from the vapours and headed toward the gong at the top of the hill. The gong is beaten to tell people the time, just when they probably least want to know it. To me, it acts as a reminder to roll over and brace myself for the loudspeaker dude who comes on the tannoy later on. The gong is basically a rusty old car wheel, minus tyre etc, strung up from a tree. It takes a fair old clack for it to make any noise but this old bird whipped out something like a spanner and ‘CLANG’ she whacked it for all the village to hear the birth pangs of a new day. She then comes back at half hour intervals to clang Humjibre awake. So there are definitely worse gigs than mine.
As usual, we set off a bit late but made good time to get there by 9am. Bosumtwi is a beautiful place, completely round and with high forested hills encircling it. Apparently its still filling slowly and consequently displacing the villages that huddle on the narrow shore. The lake is important to the Ashanti people for various reasons( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosumtwi_crater the belief that when a member of the tribe dies, Bosumtwi is where the people return on their way to meet their ancestors. One of the taboos is that the fisherman have to paddle on flat boats that look remarkably like surfboards. It looked a bit tricky to be fair.
To my knowledge, a universal African trait is the involuntary snorts and whinnies that are made to express surprise. In Ghana these vary from ‘esee’ for something that’s a mild turn up for the books to ‘aiieee’ for something that really turns your head. As the bus came over the lip of the hill and we caught our first glimpse of the lake the noises inside the bus would make a hyrax blush. The kids had a top time at the shore too playing games and trying to swim. I was in the water kicking people off the ‘teacher’ dinghy for some hours myself until I felt a sucking on my foot that turned out to be a leach. Slimy creatures that suck your blood tend to put me off swimming, for some reason.
We sang songs and played games on the bus home and lingered in Kumasi so the kids wouldn’t get back in time to do their chores that day. When we eventually rocked up to the village we were about to park when a cry to take the bus on a spin was heard. So we toured the village with the kids singing their hearts out and bragging loudly of their trip to ‘heaven’.
P.S. No snakes, sweets or chickens were stolen during the course of this excursion.
The plan was to gather outside the Anglican Church at the unGodly hour of 4am. That's still the dead of night, when the air is thick with dew and mosquitoes. I sat there waiting for the kids to arrive thinking that this is no way to earn a crust when out of the murk came an old woman bent by age and presumably insomnia. Her frail old frame looked ghostly as she emerged from the vapours and headed toward the gong at the top of the hill. The gong is beaten to tell people the time, just when they probably least want to know it. To me, it acts as a reminder to roll over and brace myself for the loudspeaker dude who comes on the tannoy later on. The gong is basically a rusty old car wheel, minus tyre etc, strung up from a tree. It takes a fair old clack for it to make any noise but this old bird whipped out something like a spanner and ‘CLANG’ she whacked it for all the village to hear the birth pangs of a new day. She then comes back at half hour intervals to clang Humjibre awake. So there are definitely worse gigs than mine.
As usual, we set off a bit late but made good time to get there by 9am. Bosumtwi is a beautiful place, completely round and with high forested hills encircling it. Apparently its still filling slowly and consequently displacing the villages that huddle on the narrow shore. The lake is important to the Ashanti people for various reasons( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosumtwi_crater the belief that when a member of the tribe dies, Bosumtwi is where the people return on their way to meet their ancestors. One of the taboos is that the fisherman have to paddle on flat boats that look remarkably like surfboards. It looked a bit tricky to be fair.
To my knowledge, a universal African trait is the involuntary snorts and whinnies that are made to express surprise. In Ghana these vary from ‘esee’ for something that’s a mild turn up for the books to ‘aiieee’ for something that really turns your head. As the bus came over the lip of the hill and we caught our first glimpse of the lake the noises inside the bus would make a hyrax blush. The kids had a top time at the shore too playing games and trying to swim. I was in the water kicking people off the ‘teacher’ dinghy for some hours myself until I felt a sucking on my foot that turned out to be a leach. Slimy creatures that suck your blood tend to put me off swimming, for some reason.
We sang songs and played games on the bus home and lingered in Kumasi so the kids wouldn’t get back in time to do their chores that day. When we eventually rocked up to the village we were about to park when a cry to take the bus on a spin was heard. So we toured the village with the kids singing their hearts out and bragging loudly of their trip to ‘heaven’.
P.S. No snakes, sweets or chickens were stolen during the course of this excursion.
Labels: bosumtwi
posted by Luke Chapter 1 at 6:12 pm
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