Friday night, in honor of Sarah’s birthday, all the volunteers went to this hotel at the beach in Elmina called “Stumble Inn”. Angelina and I knew that this place was going to be a good distance away from the Kwaw’s home, but we decided to join the group because there would be dinner followed by a performance with drumming, dancing, and fire eating. It sounded too good for us to miss it, but we were determined (and at times worried) to get back to our house at a decent hour. We made it to Stumble Inn at dusk, it is a quaint little place founded by people involved in a british NGO. The inn has sleeping quarters, washrooms, a kitchen and bar, and a dining hall, each separated into individual buildings. The cab driver we called to transport all of us to the inn had to make three trips to get us all there. While we waited for everyone to show up so we could eat, we played games in the dining hall while the already weak light bulbs fluttered and all together left us in the dark multiple times. Dinner, as we had been foretold, was sweet and sour chicken. The chicken was barely there, it was more like sweet and sour vegetables and a mountain of rice.
For some time after dinner it seemed like there wasn’t going to be a show and Angelina and I thought maybe it hadn’t been worth making the trip out there. We worried about getting back to the house. Luckily, a group of the other girls had told the cab driver to pick them up at 9pm so we would just hop on that ride back to Elmina. We would then need another cab from Elmina to the Kwaw’s house. We called Peter, a cab driver the volunteers know and call regularly whose car was broken down but had called his friend to take our big group out to the beach. We asked him if he had friend who could take us to Polycam from Elmina around 9:30pm. Although eventually we got lost in translation, it seemed we would have a ride after all. Luckily, there turned out to be a show after all! The performers, a talented group of 5 guys, entertained us with drumming, singing, dancing, acrobatics, funny facial expressions, and yes, fire eating. We even got to do some dancing with them and boy was it a workout, no wonder they’re so buff! The trip out to the beach had been worth it after all.
After cramming 7 of us into the taxi back to the volunteer house in Elmina, Angelina and I realized that there was no other cab coming for the two of us, there had definitely been miscommunication. It was getting late, but we knew the other taxi guy only had to do one more trip out to the beach and back, and so we decided to simply wait for his return and ask him to take us home. He charged us 3 Cedis more than we usually pay for a “drop in” taxi, but considering it was past 10pm and we just wanted to get home, we knew it was fair. We had called Wallace earlier telling him we were doing our best to get home between 10 and 10:30pm, we didn’t want to disrespect their hospitality. He told us that if he was asleep when we arrived to simply give him a ring and he would let us in, however we would be embarrassed if this had to happen. We arrived at 10:45pm and Wallace was still awake, as he usually is, watching some last minute sports action before hitting the hay. He wasn’t mad at us, instead he asked about our night and was glad we had enjoyed ourselves.
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