the long post from cape coast!

So I promised you a longer update of my Cape Coast/Elmina weekend, and if I keep putting it off, it’ll never get done and I’ll start to forget things! Before I start, though, this has been a very busy day, and I have lots of homework, so feel blessed that I am writing this, haha.

Anyway, our trip began EARLY Saturday morning. The bus came for us at 6:20, so we had to be up by 5:45. Mostly my own fault, I got little sleep the night before, so I conked out on the bus ride to Cape Coast. Cape Coast/Elmina is about 2 ½ hours west of Accra. The reason the two towns are always joined together with a “/” is because they are so close, and there are two big slave castles there, one in each town. Each castle is named after its respective town, but they are only about 10 minutes apart. Anyway, we pulled up to the Coconut Grove Hotel around 8 am and immediately checked in and had breakfast. Because this was an NYU-sponsored trip, we were randomly assigned roommates, and my roommate was Leah, a girl I hadn’t gotten to know very well before this weekend, but who is very nice. Our breakfast was an outdoor buffet, complete with all kinds of great American breakfast-y foods, including omelets, croissants (Sarah!), sausage links, cereal and fresh fruit. Of course, they had fresh pineapple juice, which was delicious! It was so nice to have a full, complete breakfast. Usually at home in Accra my breakfast consists of two pieces of buttered toast and jelly. But anyway, we had breakfast outside under some gazebo/hut type things right on the beach. After breakfast, we played on the beach for a while, and the water was the perfect temperature. It’s a shame I didn’t have a chance to swim all weekend, because I really would’ve liked to! BUT, we had a jam-packed weekend, learned a lot and had some sobering moments, but also had SO much fun!
Gabby, Marykate, Gillian, Mallory and I at the beach!

After breakfast we went to the Elmina Slave Castle, which is really called St. George’s Castle. A man named Atto was our guide, and was so knowledgeable. His family had passed down the oral history for generations, and so he literally knew the castle inside and out. We learned that the castle was constructed in 1482 by the Portuguese, who originally built the castle for gold-trading purposes. Over the course of hundreds of years, several different European empires occupied the castle, including the Dutch. We learned that any part of the castle that had red brick was constructed and occupied by the Portuguese, and any yellow brick indicated the Dutch’s presence. Throughout the course of the commodity trading going on in the castle, the Portuguese governors would bring back 20 Ghanaians at a time back to Europe, to “help educate them” and teach them how to be Western, so that they could go back to Ghana and be of use to their own people. However, when they arrived in Portugal, the king would use them as servants, cleaning the castles, and not providing them with any of the education they were promised. This idea of using these Ghanaians, who were already readily available near the economic hub of the city, for menial tasks was then exploited (quite an understatement), and the Europeans began paying off different African tribes to capture other tribes and bring them to the castle, where they would be kept in horrible conditions and eventually used as a commodity, which led to the great Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Many wouldn’t even make it to the boats because the living conditions were so terrible.

A thousand men, women and children would live in the castle at one time, along with the governor and the European soldiers. The castle’s structure is interesting, as it is divided into many different levels. The slaves were kept in the bottom level, the soldiers in the middle levels, and the governor and his quarters occupied most of the top level. The men and women were separated, and oftentimes entire families would be captured at one time, and therefore split up. Husbands and wives would rarely, if ever, see their spouses again, and if they happened to see them as they were being boarded onto the boat, it was only for a few seconds. The children had no separate living quarters, so they stayed with the adults of their appropriate gender. The women and men each shared a large, communal cell, where they would literally remain for their entire stay in the castle. Many died in the cells from disease, lack of nutrition, heat exhaustion, etc. There were two buckets in each cell, one for feces and one for urine. Atto said that many became too weak to even make it to the buckets to relieve themselves, and therefore, the floors of the cells were constantly soiled with human excrement. These are the same floors the men and women would sleep on, eat on and live on. They were never cleaned, and the heat combined with the stench made living unbearable. Because the governor was away from his wife back in Europe, he would rape the women (who he chose by standing over a balcony, having all the women come out of the cell and stand outside in the courtyard, choose a woman, who would then be stripped naked, humiliated, and washed publicly in the courtyard for everyone to see before making her way up to the top floor where the governor would have his way with her). Best case scenario, she would become pregnant and get to leave the castle, establishing a home in Elmina. These mulatto children then served as almost liaisons between Africa and Europe, as they were both black and white, and became very valuable to the Europeans.
Part of the castle

There are several cells, men and women, and then the “room of no return,” which is where those still living would be held while waiting for an incoming ship. The doorway that leads to stairs which lead to the ship is incredibly narrow, and Atto informed us that this is so the men and women (whose feet are shackled together, so they stand and walk in a single file line) can file through one at a time. Additionally, he said that it didn’t need to be any wider, because even those who were “fat” when they entered the castle, were usually always so malnourished that they were frail by the time they left.

I was thankful to get to experience all of this, though it was very sobering and difficult to deal with. There are several African Americans on our trip, and one of them was crying when we reached the point of no return. I was telling one of my friends this: that in America we know about slavery, and the struggles African Americans faced in achieving equality in America, but the beginning of the story for Americans is that “there were slaves”. Experiencing the slave castle opened up my eyes to the “prequel” of the story, if you will, of where these slaves came from, how they were literally ripped from their homes for NO reason (most of the time by other Africans, their brothers and sisters), and put into these horrible living conditions. If they survived, that was just the beginning of the journey, though most didn’t even make it to the ships. It was a powerful experience and the historical education I gained from it is something I wish we were taught in schools when talking about slavery, because these people came from somewhere, they had a history that shouldn’t be ignored.
Standing at the top of the slave castle, overlooking Elmina, a fishing village

But anyway, after the slave castle we made our way to Kakum National Forest, where we were to do our canopy walk!! We had to climb a mountain to get to the top of the trees, which was so cool! Once we were at the top of the mountain, there was a little platform where a few of us at a time stood and waited to walk across the first of seven bridges. The bridges are seriously no bigger than 2 feet wide, and I couldn’t put both my feet side by side on the bridge, it was that narrow. There was netting up to about my shoulders, and the bridge swung back and forth. The bridges are strung about 150 feet up in the air (though it feels like MUCH higher, sooo cool!!), and are literally nestled in the forest. Every direction you looked, 360 degrees around, was forest. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life, especially because the slight anxiety caused by the boards creaking beneath us was enough to just give me a jolt of adrenaline that made the whole thing a billion times cooler. Everyone did the walk, even those who were afraid of heights, but lots of those people were freaking out the whole time. I, however, don’t mind heights at all, and LOVED every second of it. God is so good, and I had to stop midway on the bridge and just say to myself “LOOK AT WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW! In Africa, in a forest, walking through the tops of the trees!” I am truly, truly blessed. I thought about how much my dad and Eric would love doing something like this. I hope one day Eric and I can go back to Cape Coast and do all of these things together. Anyway, as soon as the last person crossed the last bridge, it began to ran, which was really cool and refreshing (and what perfect timing!).
Me and Gillian high above the ground!

We headed back to the hotel, showered, and had dinner, which was again served outside on the beach, and which was, again, delicious. After dinner we had a bonfire and a few of us played elementary school games on the beach like freeze tag and red rover. It was a lot of fun just to play and be barefoot at night, on the beach, next to a bonfire.

Sunday morning, about half of our group of 40 went to make our very own batik!!! A woman who knows Christa, our director, has an NGO here (I forgot the name) which enables local women to use their crafts in a very directed way to make their own livings. The woman who runs the NGO is American, and this was the first batik-making workshop she’s doing, so essentially, we were her guinea pigs! Fortunately, everything was FREE, and we got to take home 2 yards of our own batik. There were three local Ghanaian women teaching us the whole process, and their ultimate goal through this NGO is to establish future workshops for these women to be able to conduct on their own, for a profit, for visitors. I’m going to steal an excerpt from Gillian’s blog describing what exactly we did:

1) We cut out designs to stamp on our cloth using foam blocks
2) We dipped our “stamps” in melted wax and applied it to the white cloth
3) We soaked our cloth (once completely covered in our design) in a bucket of cool water
4) We dyed our cloth
5) The cloth is hung to dry
6) Once dry the cloth is dipped in a solvent to dissolve the wax and seal the cloth
7) The cloth is hung up to dry againWe get our cloth!!

The cloth wasn’t dried by the time we had to leave for home, so the woman brought the cloth into Accra today, and I got mine tonight! It’s great! I wanted to dye it bright orange, but (unfortunately), it turned kind of, almost exactly burnt orange, t.u.’s colors. Oh well, it’s still really pretty and I love it!
Stamping my batik!

All in all, this weekend was incredible, and I’m still processing everything we did and learned!

Today was exciting and very jam-packed. I went to WAAF at 8:30 this morning, and ran around to the 5 different schools until around 2. We had to hand-deliver new letters, confirming our presence in their schools. This wouldn’t be so bad, or take so long, if getting from school to school didn’t take about 30 minutes each. BUT, I am really getting a kick out of all this, and loving every second of it, even when I’m hot, sweaty, smelly and gross (which is 90% of the time). The kids at the schools are so respectful to us when we walk in their classrooms to talk with their teachers, and I think they’ll be great to work with. I’m really, really excited to start teaching. At 4:40 Marykate and I headed to Legon for our Media and Society class, which, surprisingly, was WONDERFUL! The teacher must have put some sort of spell over the students or something, because there were NO uproars or interruptions, and the students were incredibly well-behaved. The lesson was really interesting, too, which was great! Oh! And Marykate (who is also a communications major) and I found out, after communicating with our advisor and department chair back at NYU, that this class counts towards our major, which is a double plus! When I got home, I had a care package from my mom and FIVE letters waiting for me (from mom and Nana), which totally brightened my day! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

I am going to bed tired but extremely satisfied and content. I am so glad everyone is doing well at home, and I am praying for you, Nana, for Wednesday. I miss you all so so so much and think about you all the time!

love love love

**Again, for more pictures from my trip with detailed captions, go to:

www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=102876&l=d1a86&id=616486619