Ghana part 2

Sorry for the delay again I just got back on the ship from South Africa, I will write about that in a later post.
On the second day in Ghana I woke up, stretched out and looked at the clock, and to my horror realized that I was two hours late for a trip I had planned. I rushed to the tour busses and of course they had left, so I spent several hours trying to figure out if I could get to the slave castles on my own with a few friends. Unfortunately it was four hours away and Biggie, the cab driver, wanted to much money. On the way back from the ship we ran into some friends: Destiny, a deaf student, her interpreter Kara, and three other girls, Tori, Alyssa and Nicole. They were headed to a deaf school so we decided to tag along. once we got there it was amazing. The kids were so excited to see visitors. They ran out of the school as our taxi pulled into the parking lot. The school itself was not in the greatest condition. There were desks and black boards, but no text books, and interestingly none of the teachers knew how to sign, so you can imagine that these kids are not being taught to their fullest potential. In Ghana they use American Sign Language, so these we were with were able to communicate with the kids and I got along using some of the signs that I picked up in the cab ride there. They kids wanted to have their picture taken over and over again, they would pose and then get more people and pose again and then garb the camera and take their own pictures. I don't think I took half the images that I have from that day.
An interesting fact; story telling is a major part of sign language culture. This fit nicely with the documentary I am making and I was able to have one of the kids tell me a story in sign language about the history of Ghana. We were at the school for a few hours and then it was time for us to leave, I taught all of them the exploding fist bump, which they thought was hilarious, and we drove off with smiles on our faces. Several of the girls I was with are Mormon so we stopped and visited a Mormon temple that was just built. It was cool to see other Americans there working and doing their Missions. After our temple stop we decided that it was about time to get some food. Now is a good time to explain a concept known as Africa time... this is an idea that time does not matter, and there is no rush for anything, no dead lines and no worries. We are a group of very hungry Americans running on American time, you can see the problem. We go into a "To-Go" pizza place. We each order our own pizzas since we were told they were small and sat down to wait for them. We waited and waited. We saw pizza after pizza get carried out, and none of them were ours. We waited three hours, sitting hungry in a pizza place and finally a man brought us our pizzas, and they kept coming and coming and coming. Some how we had accidentally ordered ten full pizzas for our small group of five girls and myself. There was so much pizza that it could not fit on the table. A possible reason for the three hour wait time, we looked around and all the Ghanaians had one pizza for a family of five and we were huddled around TEN, definitely the fat American stereotype. The sad part was that we ate it all, it was a challenge that we happily accepted, I was sweating by the time it was all gone. That night the ship sat uneven in the water as I slept , very full, in my port side room.