Cape Coast Red Cross
Miranda and I had a surprisingly productive day. We accomplished all manner of things, not the least of which was my successful attempt at navigating us to the Red Cross chapter in Cape Coast. 
I’m finally beginning to know my way around this town, just in time for us to leave and head back to Accra and then out into the Volta region, hah.
We tried to do the same with the Cape Coast School For The Deaf, but google said its placement on google maps was “approximate,” and by that apparently they mean “several kilometers away from its actual location.”
The way addresses work here is weird (to me, coming from the US, that is — everything is subjective, obviously) … they don’t have regular mail service, so everywhere that has an address is like Box 3349 Cape Coast etc. If you get mail, you get it in your “box” at the post office. This means, however, that the ancillary role of addresses serving as a means by which those who are not postal carriers may also find your premises is also defunct. So businesses use landmarks to exclaim where they are. I know from my water sachet packaging that Honsal pharmacy is “opposite the Ewam Nurses’ flat.” That works great, apparently, for a society where so much is driven by word of mouth and by cultural memory. In Ghana everyone just keeps huge hash tables in their brains as to where you can buy such-and-such and what landmark that place is near.
So in the case of CC school for the deaf, neither of their listed landmarks could google maps find either. Fail. So tomorrow we’ll try again, this time probably by taxi.
We also had some really good interactions with random kids today, walked a lot (I mean: a lot), and sweated like crazy. I also dropped by the MTN store to figure out what to do about the 2GB of bandwidth I paid for that mysteriously went missing from my usb stick, and was told they would inquire about it and get back to me, but that using the “help” link on their web site would be more reliable. Heh.
Miranda also bought a pot at Melcom and tried her hand at making macaroni and cheese (using powdered milk and a handful of shelf-friendly Laughing Cow cheese cubes bought for 30 peshawas each at a couple different vendors).
I don’t really have a lot of cultural insights right now, I think mostly because we spent the day actually DOING things, and logistical things at that (email this agency, visit this place, and so on) so I didn’t have as much time to just observe as I would have liked.
Popi is feeling better. We saw a bird (sparrow sized) get hit by a car today, something I have never seen before. We also had a lot of kids wave to us today, or come running up to us. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel when we’re back in the states and I’m just a regular person again. Part of me will relish it, I am sure — being anonymous once more, but I do love that kids under 5 or so are simply delighted to see me. There’s almost nothing greater than children jumping up and down with joy and waving at you. They are, of course, also shouting “broony, broony!” or maybe chanting this song that they must teach kids when they are first learning English — “Hello Obruni, how are you? I am fine, thank you.” I have heard this song literally one-hundred times now. We hear it some frequently it is often in stereo … one group of kids behind us singing it, and a new group up ahead that just spotted us also singing it.
