Ghana, Meet My Sister

My sister Judy was here this past week, and she got a whirlwind tour of Ghana. Or at least the parts of it we could get to in a week.

And that meant, of course, that I got another crack at the the Kpandu Pottery works and the Cedi Bead Factory.

More pottery!

More beads!

And both places had all kinds of new stuff. Color me happy.

If you've been reading since the beginning (the last pictures of Kpandu were sometime around October of 2005) you will be pleasantly surprised by the tidy new "showroom" of pottery.

Here's Judy trying to decide if she wanted a bowl with bumps on it (she ultimately chose a different bowl).








Everyone here was so happy to meet her- Duke has had the whole week marked on his calendar as he looked forward to driving her around Ghana.






And we had a lot of fun seeing Ghana through her "new" eyes, having forgotten how things looked to us long ago when it was all so strange and different.


The passing parade didn't disappoint, either. We followed a truck full of thatch for some village's roofs...




and a tro tro overloaded with people and smoked fish...




and yesterday, as a parting gift, we were lucky enough to run across two enterprising young men and their cart...

Judy took the picture- I was so excited I forgot I had a camera too!

These four wheeled carts are very common here and young men and boys pull them all over Accra with a variety of salvageable goods on them.

A long time ago we saw the hulk of an entire burned out car on one and never hoped to have the good luck to spot something like that again when we had a camera with us.

Go ahead and spend a little time wondering how they got the car onto the cart at all... :-)

We spent a good chunk of Wednesday afternoon with Duke, Jane, and the girls- we went to a local play ground with a bunch of fun kid stuff to play in and on, and then piled onto the porch for pictures...



As we wandered through the Tetteh Quarshie Arts and Crafts Market for the second time Friday morning, searching out the perfect gifts for her family, Judy (with Duke's enthusiastic help) used her newly acquired savvy about negotiating the cost of items and almost gave the poor woodcarver a stroke trying to settle on the price for a small carving she wanted.

It was a hoot watching her and Duke tag team this poor man who had been pleased to see us return.

I know we overwhelmed Judy a little, and she will never complain about Illinois potholes again, but I hope when she got on the plane Sunday morning she wished she could return to our little corner of Africa and all the smiling people.