Nkrumah's dam

A few days ago Uncle Nasir and I went on a day trip to Akosombo, the site of one of the world's largest dams and THE largest artificial lake in the world.

If you compare the picture on Wikipedia to the picture to the right, you wouldn't know it was the same dam -- and the reason is because the huge whitewater shown in my picture is from the spillway gates, which were opened a few months ago for the first time in 19 years. Why? Because massive flooding upriver in Togo and Benin during the rainy season have raised the water levels so much. (I'm just speculating but can we guess that unusual/extreme weather patterns = climate change?)

The dam, on the mighty Volta River, was the signature economic development project of the Kwame Nkrumah government, and currently supplies over 60% of all electricity in Ghana as well as some that is sold to the countries where the river heads are: Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso.

Along with a tour of the dam, I managed to catch a ride around the dock with some local fishermen (second photo).

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow!

That's when I finally leave the US for the trip I've been talking your ear off about for months now (you know who "you" are). I started taking my malaria meds today, which made it all a little more real...

I started writing this sitting out on the porch of the stunningly beautiful Mohonk Mountain Retreat -- picture of the view included -- during a "free time" period of the 1Sky climate strategy retreat. I'm flying out tomorrow from LaGuardia to Accra, via Dulles (ironically), for a 6 week backpacking trip through West Africa.

I'll begin the trip in Ghana, staying for 10-14 days in Accra with family friends whose patriarch went to graduate school with my mother in Australia some thirty-odd years ago. Then I plan to head overland through Burkina Faso to Mali, where I want to go trekking as well as explore the capital city for a few days. That should bring me up to the beginning of December, when I'll head west to Senegal and the Gambia -- where I'll stay with the family of a fellow climate activist I met through the Copenhagen negotiations last year.

It's my first time to Africa -- and the longest continuous amount of time I'll have spent in the developing world since I was 8 when we lived in Argentina for 6 months. I'm a little anxious, a lot excited, and hopefully as open as I can possibly be to growing and learning and experiencing more of this complicated, beautiful, scary world!

Despite careful list-making and packing and ticking off all the boxes of things to take, I realized today that did forget something: My rain jacket/windbreaker. Forgetting something is inevitable in my experience, and I always feel better knowing what it is -- especially since in this case it seems like a fairly replaceable item that I wasn't even sure was necessary.

Oh, and thanks to everyone for a very enjoyable last few days in DC -- everyone who came to my birthday party on Saturday night, and of course my amazing housemates Ben, Paul, Michelle, and Seth, not to mention my might-as-well-be-housemates Libby and Babbott, for wonderful company on Sunday. See you all next year!

Thanks for reading my first blog post (f1rst!), and keep in touch (more soon on how to do that...) :-)