Traveling to Sunyani
Trip Start
Jun 30, 2008
1
10
18
Trip End
Aug 04, 2008
Sunyani, Ghana
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
We began our day pretty early. After meeting with Dr. Ankobea the previous day he had told us that we would need to meet with Francis, a member of the KNUST Medical School Faculty, early in the morning. He made sure to stress that we would need to meet with him between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m. All the IBV students and Marcie were ready to go by 7:20 a.m. but we decided that we would call before we started heading over to the medical school. We called and he said that he would be there in 15 minutes to pick us up. This worked out even better.
Right around 7:45, Francis picked us up so that the IBV students could fill out the paperwork so that they could become KNUST students. This would allow them to use all the facilities of the hospital and give them rights to see all the equipment and the procedures. Francis began to explain the paper work and then he added that it would be $150 to do the paper work. This was a fee that no one had told anyone about previous to this visit. We then had to explain to Francis that the IBV students would only be in the hospital for less then a week and that time period did not justify how expensive it would be. Francis then drove us back to the dormitory.
After doing some final packing we began our journey to Sunyani. Four large suitcases and five backpack later we were ready to go. The suitcases were filled with four of the XO laptops as well as our photo printer along with many Michigan Tech beanie babies, pens, suckers, and other fun stuff. This large amount of luggage made it a little bit difficult.
We made it to the Kumasi bus station where we decided to take a trotro to Sunyani. Then we got to the bus station there were so many different buses going everywhere. We heard many buses going to Accra and Dormaa and everywhere in between. We weaved our way through all of the sales people and other trotro buses until we finally found one that was going to Sunyani. There were only three people sitting inside of the trotro and it needs 16 people to leave. We bought our tickets but then had to haggle with them about the extra charge for all the luggage. In the end we paid for our luggage and then paid again for the extra seats so that we would have a little more room. In the end the total cost was still under 5 cedis for an hour and a half trip.
By the time we finally left it was already 11:30. The trip was a little bit longer because we were traveling a little bit slower than when we drive with Emanuel. We finally ended up in Sunyani at the dormitories around 1:30. We tried to check into the dormitories. They remembered Mitch, Cory, and Marcie but did not understand that we would be bringing friends. We tried to get our same room arrangements but they had to make sure that the other rooms water worked! During this this period, we decided that lunch/ early dinner would probably be a good idea.
We headed down to a restaurant called Berlin where Mitch, Marcie, and Cory like to visit the jaguars (or small, gray kittens with black spots). We all sat and ate hardily because we were so hungry. After a quit lunch we headed back up to the dormitories where we got the room situations settled. Each of the rooms had running water.
By this time it was just past 2 p.m. We decided to try to go to the hospital but as we began to call our contacts each of them said that they were not at the hospital but they would be there tomorrow morning. The schools were also already out so there was going to be no testing of the computers. Also, the dean of the KNUST Forestry center already went home. While, still having a few hours of daylight left we decided that it would be nice to walk downtown and show IBV around Sunyani.
The walk downtown is about 30 minutes. While we were walking we passed the place where Mitch got proposed to. The same people were sitting there! They were very excited to see us and where glad that we were coming to say hello them. They asked where we were at and why we didn't stop by more. We had to explain that we were working on different projects and many different places. While we were sitting down one of the guys introduced himself to Mitch by kissing his hand and rubbing his ear ring! During this time Cory also was the first people to have another male hold his hand. This is something that is very normal for close friends of both sexes. After a few more moments chatting we decided to head downtown.
The downtown in Sunyani is quite a bit smaller than the one in Kumasi. This is allows for a little bit more relaxing experience but there is not as much variety. We began walking around taking in the "smaller town" feel. After buying a case of water and a little bit of dinner we decided to head back to the dormitories to prepare for tomorrow.
The two different teams split up. Marcie, Mitch, and Cory refreshed themselves on using the XO laptops and talked about the best way to introduce the laptops, what programs to use, and how to introduce the computers to the instructors. The IBV team looked over the devices and made sure that their bags were packed and ready to go tomorrow morning. We ended the evening paying some rousing games of UNO!
