We have spent the past few days on our very first excursion in Ghana. We left the university after church on Sunday and headed up into the mountains to the Akrofi Christaller Institute (Ghana's very first Christian seminary). Here we spent time getting to know one another better, listening to various lecturers (including famous Dr. Bediako), and walking around the village of Akropong. It was really nice to get out of the city for a while, the Akrofi Christaller Institute has an incredibly peaceful atmosphere and the entire weekend seemed to rejuvenate me. Today we also visited a bead factory (where most of us girls bought lots of hand-made beaded jewelry) and the dam on the Votla river which supplies most of the electricity for Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Before leaving Akropong in the afternoon we spent some of our free time hanging out with kids in the village, they were really cute. They made us play all sorts of funny games with them, including one where we had to stand in the middle of a circle and shake our hips... boy did we put on a show! All the Ghanaian adults thought it was hillarious (apparently it is widely known here that white people can't dance... maybe the next wave of missionaries aught to bring videos of that show Dancing with the Stars to help break the stereotypes).
To update you all on the health of our group: Sierra was released from the hospital early on Monday (only to be brought back on Monday night). She was still feeling a bit lousy that whole day but by the night-time she had begun puking again. All I've heard was that she's a bit better now... Pearl did not have malaria. They ran tests on her and determined that she must have caught some sort of bug and put her on antibiotics. She's fine now. Dan is doing a bit better now (after being in bed for 3 or 4 days) although I think he's still not quite back to normal. Kristen also caught something this weekend. A few of us were up with her for quite a while last night (she had a high fever) but she seems to be better today. We would all appreciate prayers for health right now as none of us have all been healthy all at once yet.
Pictures are coming soon, I promise... including ones of my shaking it in front of Ghanaian villagers!
Peace