Waka Waka Africa!

Words cannot begin to describe what I just experienced in Africa. It was fun, humbling, amazing, life-changing all in one. The first day when we pulled into port I was a bit skeptical getting off of the ship because there were a lot of hecklers trying to sell their wares and it was really intense with them being very pushy. But we got off and started to take the 20 minute walk to get to the end of the shipping yard where we could catch taxis. On our way we began to smell a very interesting scent. It smelt very yeasty and almost sour and was not very pleasant and the smell almost overpowered you when you were walking by some of the storage cells at port. It took us about 15 minutes to realize that it is cocoa. Ghana is one of the leading exporters of cocoa in the world. In our classes we learned a lot about the cocoa industry and the negative effects it has in Ghana. Like any 3^rd world country Ghana has a lot of things that could use improvement and one of them is their labor force and the price we pay for the goods we import from them. Farm owners can barely make a profit on these wages and thus use child, slave, and exploited labor on these cocoa farms to turn a meager profit. I helped with a project where we sent valentines to David West (CEO of Herseys) to try to get him to see why he should create a fair trade chocolate bar for hersheys (who is one of the last companies to do so). I know multinationals are always more concerned with the bottom line but I feel like we also have to take into account the repercussions of forcing this bottom line lower and lower. It leads to poor working conditions in sweat shops, child labor in cocoa, increase in poverty, a decrease in education for the children of the families, the list could go on and on but it basically perpetuates the cycle of poverty. And poverty was definitely evident here. For the first time I saw children with round bellies not from overeating, I saw people who only ate one meal a day cook me breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I saw hunger in the eyes of children that broke my heart, I saw kids who could not afford to go to school because their families could not afford the uniform and the 40 cedi per semester (under $30 USD) cost that it would take to send them. But before I get more into that I should fully explain my time in Takoradi. Takoradi is one of the bigger cities in Ghana and it definitely was unlike any city I had ever been to. Full of shacks similar to the favelas with tiny little stands littering the dirt filled streets with vendors everywhere: men selling piles of used shoes on the road. Women walking around with huge containers on their heads (everyone carried things on their heads!) with everything from drinks, foods, and trinkets inside; while their baby was also wrapped onto their back. Bush meat for sale with heads of antelopes and other unknown creatures, women cleaning fish and giving the innards to begging children, goats and chickens walking around the market as if they to were shopping. I finally felt like I was in another world. Ghana made it evident that I had finally left the United States. I want to write more right now especially about my homestay(and about the poverty and experiences I inferred above) but I have a ton of HW so I will try and get the rest posted by tonight but I wanted to give you a little insight into what I experienced!