Ghana part 3

The rest of my stay in Ghana was in a small village north of Accra in the Volta region. Torgorme Village is a little place of varying population depending on who you ask, anywhere from 500 to one million (Closer to a thousand I would say). This village is one of the places that made me really think about who I am and what kind of person I want to be. We drove a few hours outside of Accra and the change was dramatic. There was room to breath, farms and open space rolled off into the distance. There were small huts and houses spread out, people did not have to live on top of each other like they did in the city. We pulled into the center of the village and children ran out and chased our bus down the dirt road, singing and dancing, like a scene from a movie. We got out of the bus and we shook hands with all of the village elders and sat down to go through a naming ceremony. Traditional names are based off of the day of the week you were born, mine is Kofi, since I was born on Friday, and my last name is that of my host family, Elolo. The ceremony was cool, they did a few names and then had the kids dance and sing and play drums in a traditional style, it was like going to one of my sisters dance recitals when they did their african dance, but a little more authentic. The whole thing was really cool and felt very real, but when I thought about it, it made me think twice about what it was I was really experiencing. Several years ago the Volta dam was built, forming the largest lake in Ghana. The main income for the people of this village was the export of shells that flowed onto their river banks, but because of the Dam the shells stopped coming and they had to move to tourism for income. Their most marketable tradition was the naming ceremony, everyone is given a name, a bracelet and a small pot with your new name on it, so that is the new way to make money, and later when I went into a building I could see the pots of the next five groups that were going to go through the ceremony. I learned that just before the ceremony they had gone through a funeral rite, but tourist money means a lot, so they acted as happy as they could for our new names. All of the elders were in their traditional garb, and half way through the ceremony one of the old men pulled a cell phone out of his robe and started texting. It just shows that they don't really want to be in this situation, but they have to be. You see I was still experiencing the culture, but the naming thing wasn't the real culture, the fight to make money and adapt was the real culture. Later on one of the men asked me if I would tell my friends about this so that they would come and spend money. I don't want it to sound fake because the two days in the village certainly were not but the one ceremony felt forced.
I met my host family and their nephew, Wonder, showed me and another SAS kid around the village. We learned all about pottery making and watched their team play soccer. We had a dance party after dinner and we all learned how to dance like a Ghanaian, we even taught them some of our moves like the snaky leg and the soldier boy. The village story teller told us tales around the bonfire, and we had some amazing food. One thing that really stuck out was something that happened at dinner. The food for the SAS kids was catered so that the families would not have to make food for us. I had too much chicken and I couldn't finish the piece that I had started, so the father took the uneaten meat and saved it for later, because meat is not something they have a lot of. That just made me think about how much we wast in the US without even thinking about it and this guy was saving the leftovers of a stranger.
Ghana meant a lot to me. Many of the people on the ship have no interest in returning to Ghana because they thought it was dirty and they didn't like being harassed on the streets, but I liked it because it was the first port that really countered my culture and put me way outside my comfort zone. Accra and Torgorme were the kind of places that just knock you off your feet. I don't think that I will ever be able to put into words how it effected me, I don't even think that I fully understand that, but I do know that this is the kind of thing everyone should witness. Take care.