Ghana is 50...Let's all Celebrate!

I wish you could hear how the song goes...the title of this blog comes from the "Ghana is 50" theme song...which is awesome and I'm sad for your ears that they don't get to hear it.

On Tuesday, March 6, Ghana celebrated 50 years of independence!! They were the first African nation south of the Sahara to gain its independence (check the wikipedia and this BBC news article...learn..its good for ya). The celebration was off the chain (as h. would say). It was seriously unbelievable. I'm going to try to describe it...pictures will help...so will this blog: Loreli and John Mark. She did a great job taking pictures. Hopefully between Amy and I we have some good ones too.

So here is how our day went. Amy and I spent the night at Margaret's house with some other girls here in town. We woke up bright and early on Independence Day, and after a great breakfast, loaded up the car with our nine friends to drive down to Independence Square for the celebration/festivities.

(I got a sweet Ghana @ 50 shirt at the market. And Margaret is straight up wearing the flag...love it.)

This celebration was a pretty big deal. There were something like 25 African heads-of-state in town (and ones from elsewhere)...I can't tell you how many times we had to pull over to let police convoys with dignitaries fly by...we saw cars from Zambia (holla to the Adairs!), India, South Africa, Botswana, Benin, Burkina Faso, just to name a few. Really, every few minutes we were pulling over to the sound of sirens. Rumor has it that President Kufor bought a fleet of new mercedes for the occasion...maybe not the best use of money in a developing country where people are hungry. (Read Steve Buchele's post about how the celebration was not for everyone.) Here goes the Cote D'Ivoire fancy pants convoy (the Ivory Coast):

We parked at Methodist Headquarters and joined the hundreds of people walking down the street to Independence Square.

As we were walking, Amy looked at me and said "this is so much bigger than SEC football...but somehow it has the same feeling." And she was so right! It totally felt like walking to a Georgia game. Everyone, EVERYONE, was wearing some sort of patriotic something...everybody had flags that they were waving...hats that looked ridiculous...noise makers of all sorts. And as we walked by packed tro tros, we'd yell "hey! Ghana!" and everyone would freak out and cheer with us. It was hilarious! Here we are, a bunch of white folks, clearly not Ghanaian, and they went crazy when we cheered. It was so fun! Here are a couple pictures from the walk.

they're cheering with us!

When we finally got to Independence Square, I was shocked. I wish y'all could have seen the amount of people that were there. It was unbelievable! Thousands upon thousands.

check out the folks in the tree! and the sweet hat in the foreground

We wound our way through the crowds...trying to get into the "stadium" type area where all the action was. We tried to climb over the wall, but a military man with a gun yelled at Margaret for doing that, so we went around and found a gate. Once we got inside, we fought (literally fought...pushing, shoving, trying not to push kids) our way into the crowd at the front (in front of the bleachers) so we could see something. One of our Ghanaian friends that was with us, Felix, lifted each of us girls up so we could see what was going on. Here is my picture from my lift:

I'm mad that I didn't take a picture of him lifting Amy. She took the opportunity to wave at all of Ghana. :) We passed our camera to another friend to try to get a picture of our white faces in the middle of all the Ghanaians, but he felt like it would be better if he zoomed...so here is what we got.

People were taking our picture all day. It was crazy! We're not very used to that. One man stopped us and asked us to take a picture with his son...so about 8 Ghanaians got in the shot with us...I love stuff like that. So funny.

So after this adventure, we decided to go to our friend Francesca's house to watch the festivities on TV (are you still thinking SEC football? cause I definitely bailed on a couple games and went home to watch it on TV). We got some more good pictures on the way out.

(This is what your feet look like after walking in all that dust. I think Margaret wins...she's on the right.)

They even made special coke bottles for the occasion!

We were all completely exhausted by about 1:30pm. Think about how you feel after a college football game or after going to Six Flags...that's where we were. We made it home by 2 and, after showering, Amy and I slept the afternoon away...and finished off Ghana's birthday with a Felicity marathon.

Here's to another 50! God bless Ghana!