Parenthetical.net

It only takes $5.60 and one week to get an envelope full of letters from students in a Boston suburb to students in a rural Ghanaian village.
The global infrastructure is an incredible thing.

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Finally, finally, I have my Ghana pictures (or a good representative sample thereof) up on Flickr. Here’s my photoset. Enjoy!

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So as of Tuesday night, I am home at last! There will be pictures and more stories at some point soon, but in the meantime it is just unbelievably good to be here, in this place that I love more than anywhere I’ve ever been. Waking up with my boy after a night [...]

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So now that the project is done, I’m being a tourist for my last week. I only have 15 minutes left at this internet cafe, so I will tell you quickly that this morning I got up at 5 a.m. to do a dawn walk through Kakum National Park, featuring the only canopy walk [...]

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I unexpectedly have another shot at internet access today! And probably will again on Tuesday! So I want to write more, while I’m thinking it. Perhaps a run-down of how the basics of life work here would be interesting:
Bathing: Fill a bucket from the house water barrel. Use a smaller pail [...]

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Last Sunday I made French toast for the guys, with one of the bottles of maple syrup I brought. They liked it, though they mostly thought the syrup was too sweet. (They tried to put way too much on - sauces here are really more like soups that you plunk a big ball [...]

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I’ve started thinking of myself as Snow White (appropriate on a number of levels, obviously) and the guys as my Four Dwarves. They take care of me, feed and shelter me, help my naive self navigate the big bad world, keep me on a bit of a pedestal, and lead sort of mystifying lives [...]

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Back in Ho for “TGIF” last night at a spot (bars are “spots”) called the White House. RY got my camera and took many artsy blurry shots of me drunk and dancing. Good times.
A guide to some of the people in my life here:
RY, M, DJ, and RT: My Keepers, the [...]

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I can’t believe it’s been a week since I’ve been able to communicate with the outside world! I’m definitely getting a sense of the “real Ghana” in Tanyigbe (in the sense that “everyone in the city comes from the village,” as they say), and the size is good in that I can get to [...]

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Hi! Here I am, finally able to check email. I’m at an internet cafe in Ho, at 8000 cedis an hour (which is somewhat less than $1). Last night we stayed in Accra, tonight I’m staying in Ho, and tomorrow I’ll go to Tanyigbe, the village where I’ll actually be living and [...]

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