Happy New Year (and a belated Merry Christmas)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone,

First of all, we want to say that we hope all of you had a happy and healthy holiday season. Hopefully it was a time to relax and reflect for everyone - we have heard that the snow in the lower mainland and other parts of Canada has been pretty crazy.
I had 3 weeks off from school for Christmas break, and we really wanted to do some traveling to other West African countries while we were here, so we decided to travel to Ghana for Christmas. It is a more developed country, and one of our friends was traveling there with her mom and sister. They invited us to spend Christmas Eve and Day with them there, so it seemed like a good fit.
Traveling to Ghana was a fantastic experience, and we are so glad we decided to spend to time there, even if it was only 12 days. It was so interesting traveling from one West African country to another – each in a different stage of development. We spent one night in Accra, the capital city, before traveling West across the coast for about 5 hours to the small beach town of Busua. We spent 3 nights there, and travelled slowly back across the coast to Elmina, Cape Coast, Kokrobite, and then back in Accra for the last 3 nights. (Travel itinerary and city names included just in case anyone cares)
Highlights:
1. The experience of traveling to Ghana after being in Sierra Leone. Ghana has paved roads and electricity running throughout the country, and the infrastructure in totally incomparable. In the city, traffic lights are fully obeyed and there are large paved highways. We had reverse culture shock the first day traveling on the public transit because everything was so clean and organized from buying a computerized ticket to sitting on an air conditioned bus. A week later, we visited the fully modern Accra mall, complete with a Silver City-style movie theater, food court, etc.
2. Being a tourist. It was great to relax on some beaches, and stay in a variety of places – from budget backpacker types to medium to high – end places. One really interesting thing about Ghana is the fact that there are number of castles and forts built centuries ago by various European countries while in competition for slaves. We also did a lot of swimming, relaxing on the beach, surfing, eating, and even some mountain biking.
3. Coming back Kabala after arriving in Freetown. We are infinitely glad to be living in Kabala rather than in Freetown for a million reasons.

Lowlights:
1. Even though much more developed, Ghana is still a 3rd world country. Once out of the major cities, people live much like they do in Sierra Leone. For example, most places that we stayed were quite nice, but we were surrounded by stark poverty. This was hard to deal with emotionally while vacationing.
2. Christmas Eve. It was rather strange celebrating Christmas with the absence of everything that normally goes along with it, but especially family. On Christmas Eve we stayed at a low budget place ($20 per night), with our friend Megan and her mom and sister. The combination of a musty, hot, mosquito – infested room, frequent toilet visits after eating too many meat skewers (we’re basically vegetarians in Kabala), and phone calls from family made us come down with serious home – sickness, so we escaped early from that place back to an air conditioned hotel and spent Christmas day there. In a way were almost glad just to have Christmas over with.
3. Being in Ghana made us realize just how far Sierra Leone has to go in terms of development. General infrastructure differences was perhaps the most obvious example, but one other noticeable one had to do with currency. For example, in Ghana, there are bank machines everywhere (almost as many as back home), you can pay with Credit Cards at a lot of places, and they recently revamped their currency so that one “Cedi” is equal (almost) to one American Dollar. By contrast, there is not one bank machine in all of SL, and all money transfers, regardless of how large, are done with cash. Before the war, the exchange rate in SL was 300 “Leones” to 1 US dollar. Currently, it is 3,050 for every dollar and climbing (it was 2900 when we arrived 4 months ago).