We have been in Accra the past few days to attend an embassy orientation briefing for Fulbrighters and to collect a few items (half of which failed).  So, Monday we arrived and we are staying at Deron's place, a Fulbright lecturer in Accra, with his wife (Lori) and two children (Jasper-8, and Dashiel-4).  It was Jasper's birthday on Monday and guess what he got?  A chicken!  Yep.  It was really nice, Lori and Deron invited us to all the family events: cake and dinner.  It was a treat!  Then Tuesday was the embassy---lot's of don't do this, don't do that...most of which we have been doing.  It was definitely caution city!  Then that night was a Jazz performance--African Jazz--which was, interesting (?).  So...it was put on by a Fulbrighter who is finishing his research--preservation of recordings of traditional music--and the performer, the Divine Drummer, was very strange to say the least.  It was him telling the story of how modern African Jazz came to be, that was interesting.  Lot's of American's stole our music stuff and Cubans did something stuff, but I thought it was unique mixture of story and samples of the music changing.  Then he gets to "this is African Jazz," plays one tune, and says goodnight.  Then, his last comments were "and if you illegally pirated this performance, see me up here to pay me my royalty to save your bones."  So, I did tape a piece of it, but like hell I was going to ask for my bones to be saved.  (There is a small clip below as an example of what "African Jazz" is according to the Divine Drummer, but we seem to be having difficulties uploading it. . . maybe another post though).

Then, last night, Mo, Andrea, and I stayed up gabbing about infections and weird illnesses and such that exist in Ghana. We all own this book "Where there is no doctor" and I read parts of it, so did Mo, and it is SCARY sh*t!. I mean, worms entering and coming out all parts of your body, meningitis, malaria, etc etc etc. And we were just laughing at how squimish we were about these things. Then, this morning, we talk with Lori, who is a licensed nurse, and she told us the worst. If you leave your laundry out to dry and it is not totally dry when you collect it, or you collect it in the evening, there are chances of tumba fly larva crawling into your skin. The prevention, ironing your clothes. So today, we all bought an iron! So no worries about this happening.

Well, no pictures, no video. . . I think you'll survive though. . . Sorry about not being able to take care of your A/V needs, but we'll make it up to you, we promise.  If you need someone to blame, try a certain US delegate appointed to "take care" of us and yo's lack of any ability to do so.  It's been frustrating to say the least, but since we would both like our blog not to be deemed an instrument of seditious and libelous sentiment, we will refrain. . . for now.