Last Wednesday our group travelled to the village of Akropong, about a hour and a half north of the University, for the annual Odwira festival. We arrived in Akropong on Wednesday and did nothing except wander around the little town, which is situated on top of a mountain, making for a nice change of pace from bustling, dirty Accra, not to mention some much-needed fresh mountain air.

Thursday was our first encounter with the Odwira festival, a week-long event meant to honor the ancestors and pray for blessings for the upcoming year (the years go by harvest schedules, not the typical calendar year). We were not briefed about the activities we would be watching apart from the purpose of the festival overall, though we were told there might be some things we would find disturbing. Still not knowing what to expect, we split into groups of 3 (me, Brad, and Kristen) and were brought to various stations on a long road where we were to observe the rituals of a long procession that would be travelling from one end of the town to a palatial construction near the center of town.

After about an hour of waiting and making friends with a group of beautiful old ladies next to us, the procession started to pass the station where we were sitting. I don't know if it caught me off guard simply because I'd had no idea what to expect in the first place, but what we saw was very unusual. Young girls (maybe in their late teens or twenties, some even younger), dressed in white and covered in decorative white body paint, were being led down the road as they carried baskets of food on their heads, which they were bringing to the a feast for the ancestors. Along the way (at our station, for example) designated people were offering libations, pouring water onto the girls' feet or pouring gin and schnapps onto the ground before them. Drummers, dancers, and bell-ringers were also part of the procession, as were several men firing shot guns full of air-soft pellets into the air.

The hardest part about the whole experience, the part that most unnerved me, was the fact that these girls were allegedly being possessed by the spirit of the ancestors. Some Ghanaians have told us that they are just pretending to be possessed; others truly believe that the spirits are possessing the girls. While some of the girls truly seemed to be pretending, others truly did seem depossessed of themselves. Some were violent, some making really furious grimacing faces, some would nearly faint , and most had to be restrained at some point. It was really weird and I don't really know what to make of it all or how to respond to it, except to take it as a cultural experience and try to understand the motivation behind everything involved.

Ghanaians who participate in this festival view the ancestral spirits who possess the girls as benevolent; they believe it is because of these spirits that they prosper, so the idea of being possessed by them is not a bad thing to them. To an outsider, particularly a Christian, the idea of possession comes with certain connotations and, especially with the girls who were acting violent, those connotations are not always good. We've been talking in our group a lot since then about reconciling these cultural practices with Christianity, etc. and it's made for some very good conversations.

Overall, a very good trip. We're back in Accra now for only a week and then we're venturing up to northern Ghana for an 8 day excursion. I'm very excited for that, as northern Ghana is very different from Accra...very rural and predominantly Muslim. In addition, several thousand Ghanaians have been displaced by the flooding of Lake Volta, so we may be volunteering at a World Vision IDP.

More to come later. Hope you all are well.