Madness and Hurrying

The last bit of time in Accra was one big sea of crazy situations, nervousness, rushing, and randomness. It's easy enough to ascribe this to the necessity of writing our moderate-sized paper and preparing our rather short performance, but there's more to it than that. There's the fact that we'd not prepared for the paper nearly at all, the fact that it was our last week in the country and thus our last chance to see and buy stuff, and of course the actual events. For one, the day we got back to Accra was the day that our chief drum teacher and all-around awesome guy, Francis, had a massive party for the outdooring of his new son and his 30th birthday, which was a rather raucous affair with lots of live music (Hewale yet again), crazy quantities of people and alcohol, and of course dancing. It lasted all day, and by the end it had gotten rather awkward for us, what with the entirety of the staff being drunk since it wasn't program time, most of the guests having been shooed out, and it being just us and Francis's close friends sitting around eating while our AD and such were rather incoherent, so we got out of there eventually. It was... intense. Then there were certain... group issues... which tied up most of monday - nothing I'm discussing here, but a bit of an issue. That basically left tuesday and wednesday to research and write a 10-page paper, while at the same time playing drums four hours or so a day in prep for my performance - at this point I picked up my (amazing) djembe, and inadvertantly ordered a kpanlogo drum, which I'm very happy with. Needless to say, those were a few days of nervous agony, with me finally finishing on wednesday night at 9:00, but the printer in the internet cafe didn't work and their Word didn't spellcheck for some reason, so I only had the final version 20 minutes before it was due, which was still better than some. That was quite the relief.

That left the rest of the day to complete my performance prep, which was actually fun due, as one would hope. The next morning, we all performed, all very well. I did a djembe piece called fumefume; the other performances were:
-Atsiagbekor dance and drumming
-Kpanlogo dance
-A xylophone piece
-A calabash drum piece
-A dance whose name I still can't remember (sorry Mysteena!)
-Palmwine-guitar-arranged jazz standards
-Ghanaian dance move choregraphed to a piece Kristen brought with her, followed by miscellaneous spontaneous dancing
-The song Jordan recorded in a studio in Kumasi (he stood there and hit play)
All were very good. The rest of the day was mostly market-going; the next day was a mad market splurge followed by the leadup to our homestay party, a great affair even though my host mother couldn't make it (she was going to London!) complete with yet another Hewale show, this time with all-stars from all manner of other people we met over the program. And then it was over. I found myself at the airport saying goodbye sadly but speedily (they'd called boarding and I was outside security), and then on a German airplane, and that was it. Despite the free Warsteiner, I couldn't quite register it was all done. I guess it's still a weird feeling a week later.

Next up, reflection. Till then.