Do you like meat?

Lauren and I woke up early on Sunday and spend 5.5 hours in church. Really. 1 hour of bible study, 3 hours of service, followed by 1.5 hours of meetings and greetings. I looked at it as more of a cultural experience and truly enjoyed meeting all of Lauren's congregation. I won't lie though...although very interesting, getting through that was a challenge.

Lauren and Leslie have a weekly tradtion that after church to go to his Aunt Sophie's house for a traditional dish called fufu. Fufu in Ghana is made from boiled cassava and unripe plantain beaten together with a mortar and pestle. Water is slowly added towards the end to create a dough like ball. This ball is then split up and put into induvidual bowls, which is then covered in ground nut soup. The soup was dark, oily, and spicy and is filled with random meat. My bowl had various parts of cow, crab, goat, and fish in it. The broth and fufu part were so good! The meat was...interesting and I didn't want to be rude so I continued to eat it all. By the way, everyone eats this dish with their hands so it's very messy. At one point,
Aunt Sophie looked up at me and said "do you like meat?" and I nodded. She grabbed a giant chunk of mysterious meat from her bowl and plopped it in mine with her hands. It looked really strange and had black hair on it. I guess my face gave away what was going through my mind. She said "it's cow skin, it's good!". Then it got me to thinking what other mystery meat was in my bowl. I made a huge mistake by asking, because I had already tried most of it. After finding out that I munched into a chunk of cow head, I had to stop eating.

Leslie has been feeling sick and I guess he has malaria. Which seems like a big deal but I have already met 4 people with malaria since I have been here. It's very common and people act like it's a common cold.

Today I am at the American Embassy with Lauren. They have fast and free internet!