A Week and Counting

If all goes as planned, I'll be embarking on my 11 hour plane trip to Ghana in exactly 1 week from right now...this very moment! That thought gives me some butterflies but I'm incredibly excited at the same time. While Alan, my husband, has already been in Accra for the last month getting settled, I have been visiting with my parents in Georgia and am completely removed and unprepared for what life will be like in a short week's time. Luckily my attempts to have regular phone calls with him have begun to get me in the right mind set. For example, I am already frustrated with even just our ability to reach each other via phone or internet, which I've been told to get prepared for in Ghana, as there are constant frustrations with regular daily tasks like this. Alan and I thought we were so smart by buying the Magicjack phone system - maybe you've seen commercials on T.V. - but basically it works by just plugging a regular landline phone into the computer and getting a local U.S. number from which you can call the States. However, we soon realized that you actually have to have a decent internet connection for the thing to be of any use and decent internet connections are not easy to come by in West Africa. So after faithfully trying for several days with the crappy hotel internet connection, we gave that up and figured Skype would definitely work. Well, our Skype conversations went just as terribly because the internet was not strong enough for that either. So, I've resorted to buying phone cards online and needless to say, they also carry their own problems. Usually it takes 3-4 tries before we can hear each other and then midway through the conversation I only hear every other word which makes for a very frustrating conversation. Oh...and this is not to mention that I didn't realize that all my calls on my cell phone to the 1 800 access line were using up all of my minutes so my phone bill is off the charts. But, really all of this frustration is worth it for a few minutes of chat time with my husband even if we can only hear every third word.

So in the meantime as I wait for the days to pass before I board my plane, I've been trying to think of every possible item that I may want but won't be able to find in Africa and buying enough to last me a few months at least. I've also finished my vaccinations and got the dreaded anti-malarial pills. After much wavering back and forth between one pill, Larium, that can cause vivid dreams, paranoia and anxiety and another pill, Malarone, which is $8.50 a day and isn't really meant to be taken long-term, I decided to opt for the vivid dreams, paranoia and anxiety one. Then I made the mistake of reading about it online the same night I took my first pill and realized that now I'm anxious and paranoid and am probably going to have scary dreams about being paranoid and anxious. But, fortunately, I have no vivid dreams to report yet...I'll be sure to include them in my posts though if I have them!

So hopefully my next entry will be post-arrival in Ghana, but as I am prepared to deal with, I probably won't have any internet access for several weeks so I will try to remember all the good stories for reporting once we get some internet in our apartment.