Weaving Kente Cloth
Trip Start
Feb 15, 2011
1
22
33
Trip End
Mar 31, 2011
Kpetoe, Ghana
Friday, March 11, 2011
The scenery from the tro tro was beautiful, luscious and green. Lydia works in Kpetoe as a sanitation officer, and the village is well known for its kente weavers. Kente weaving is a particular style of weaving that is indigenous to the Ewe people of the Volta region. She brought us to a big kente weaving factory/large room full of people weaving. They sit at wooden looms with colorful strings stretched across the room, and create beautiful cloth by weaving the thread together in different patterns. Learning to weave was so much fun! When I tried, the foot pedals kept popping out of their pulleys but eventually I got the hang of it. I wish I could set up a loom to weave at home, but I would never be able to replicate its makeshift construction. All of the weavers are men, and watching them is unbelievable. They are incredibly fast, but still it takes about 2 days to finish one panel of cloth. Throughout the room you hear the clicking of threads sliding back and forth on their spools as the weavers pass the different colored spools back and forth through the line of strings.
I went to the hospital for the afternoon and helped take blood pressure readings around the ward. It was rather amusing though because the two other nurses and I consistently got different results from each other, so we kept having to call another nurse over for a 4th opinion. Usually I was pretty close to the number we went with ;-)
The rest of my time at the hospital I spent updating records. I found the record system to be incredibly frustrating. Folders get lost, there are patients in beds who were never admitted, other staff members pulled folders from the pile while I was recording them so some patient information doesn't get recorded, piles get mixed together, patients go by multiple names…it was extremely overwhelming. At the end of the day all of the folders are brought to an office where patients are entered into an electronic record system.
I picked up my traditional dress for the wedding today! I love it. I really specific about how I wanted the fabric arranged, and it ended up being just what I wanted. Unfortunately, since the seamstress had to cut all the fabric up in order to have the patterns fall the way I wanted them to, there wasn’t much fabric left over, but I’m sure I can do something with the rest. I hope that I get to wear my dress often – it’s a bit too fancy and traditional to wear regularly, but I can probably wear it to synagogue and Tradewinds.
I just recently found out that there is salsa in Ho every Friday night! I can’t believe I didn’t know before! It was at a cute outside bar, and about 15 students from Ho Polytechnic University were there. I was a bit rusty to start, but ended up having a great time. At all salsa dances here, they do a bunch of Ghanaian line dances, comparable to the electric slide or Macarena, to certain songs. I wish I had time to learn them better!
Health update: All of the volunteers in Ho are sick now. Pernille has a bladder infection and malaria, Nina and Erna both have malaria, Fabienne has severe diarrhea, and I have typhoid!
