It’s Kente Festival time. All over the Agotime Traditional Ruling Area people have pitched in to help. Sounds like a lot of fun but 8 hours of preparation debates in Ewe gets a little old, over 2 hours were spent on the prizes for the Ms. Kente Pageant, they decided not to have a Mr. Kente since no one could challenge me. It’s still going to be really cool with the speed weaving and design contests. The guys want me to enter the speed weaving competition because I’d be the fastest white weaver ever (big accomplishment). It was weird promoting something that you’ve never been to however; we’ll see how it turns out.
The more I work with the big men and Queen Mothers the more I appreciate my weavers. Bright, Francis, Richard, Oscar, Joshua, and the likes are just all around good guys. Joshua weaves all day 6 days a week and then sings in the choir at his church on Sundays. He and Bright are also the first guys to help with any manual labor for our projects or to come cut my grass. If he sees me struggling in my loom he’ll jump out of his and come over and set me straight which can take a while. There are up to 20 weavers in the center at once and they pretty much just weave and chat. They don’t compete against each other for sales but rather sell for each other if they’re not there. When tourists come they just hang up their cloths and get back to work. Their laid back attitude and quality of work are our best selling points. Some strips take up to a day to weave and then they’ll sell them happily for like 4 or 5 cedi (~$3). I’m glad that I get to work with them the most because as much as I’d like to complain they got it rougher and they’re still happy.
Football season has started again and that really helps. Weekdays I’m usually great but weekends alone with nothing to do can get to ya. Back home weekends were nonstop fun, sometimes too much so. I really get into some of the football matches which makes up some for the lack of social life. I was legitimately depressed after Man U came back and beat Arsenal last week, like I was really into that game and so was the rest of the packed TV hut. My dad wouldn’t be too proud to hear that but I promise if the BoSox make the series I’ll go watch the games in Accra, which will start around midnight here. Until then the Blackstars’ World Cup Qualifier Saturday will have to do.
August broke the streak of consecutive increase in attendance months at 6 but still had a solid 50 guests. We did set a new record in sales with 1055 Cedi.
Megan successfully smuggled bootleg Harry Potter 6 DVDs home, my little sister is using hers a ton.