Bits and Pieces

Just FYI, to the left, on the blog, there is a website that you can go to in order to view all of our pictures on Picasa Web Albums. Also, below that there is a link to our videos. We will update both of these as often as possible.

Now, for the more important stuff! Such as, I (Meg) went for a run this morning for the first time and was soon joined by three kids who ran with me for a short strech, I had Obruni (White person) yelled to me about 100 times. The people were so excited to say hello!

Katie here, how is everyone doing? I wanted to share a couple of things that have been going on around the convent. First of all, we met Martina, who lives here at the convent but she was on a retreat so this was our first meeting. She is from the Upper West region of Ghana, and will hopefully take us up there to travel at some point. Also, we had a convent game night on Saturday. I was a little nervous knowing my competitive nature. I was very careful and in the end it was the most fun game of Uno and Jenga I have ever played. Comfort and Alice, two candidates who live here and are preparing to go into the Novitiate in the US in Feb., have never played before. It was hilarious to observe them get the hang of the popular game- the idea of Skip, Draw 2, and even Reverse. Don't worry, Alice fully understood the power of the Draw 4 Wild and decided to drop that bomb on me twice. My new nickname around the house is Draw 4. Jenga was justas exciting... Evelyn accidentally bumped the table and down went the tower. The laughter that erupted was so contagious that even those who were not playing got a good kick out of it.

On Saturday evening, Meg and I went out to explore a bit. We were looking for players to get a game of cards going. We ran into Alice in the classroom who was teaching 4 local children how to serve during mass for Friday mornings when we have mass here at the convent. Afterwards, she was going to walk them home so Meg and myself decided to join. Phyllis, Cecilia, Joseph (our student), and Emmanual were great! I brought along a football and we were laughing and playing catch the whole way home. Cecilia insisted she needed my sunglasses so I gave them to her. She was mimicking everything that I said. The kids then were pointing to things and teaching us new words. They loved the fact that we already knew a couple of animals. So we bragged about knowing akoko (rooster), bodum (dog), anoma (bird), and a couple of others and they laughed and laughed.

Last night (Sunday), I was skyping and Meg yelled at me that our friends were here. Confused I looked into the court yard area and there was Cecilia, Emmanual, and Joseph asking if I still had the football. We played for a couple of hours with them before it got dark and they had to go home. Later in the evening, we were in the TV room with Comfort, one of the candidates. Since she is going to the US soon we were preparing her on what to expect. We told her really important things like not to point with her middle finger (a lot of people do that here), not to say 'flash me' while talkin on the phone (very popular phrase meaning call me back), the fact that when she says she has boyfriends we get very confused so we told her the difference between boyfriends and friends that are boys, among a couple of other do's and don'ts. It was really fun to be able to just sit and talk to her about her upcoming adventure to the States because we are currently experiencing all of our firsts with our adventure here in Ghana. We also had the chance to talk about her family, friends, and all the normal stuff considering she is the same age as Meg and me. She is one of the kindest people we have ever met and because of our age- it's fun to have her here to make our transition easier.