An amazing day!

Yesterday, I went to Cape Coast for the first time. It was a fun day to get away and experience something new since coming here. We left early in the morning yesterday to make the trip to Cape Coast. It was a long drive, but I took a little nap and then Stacy and played Boggle to entertain ourselves (I know Jenni...Boggle...don't worry, I only won ONCE!). When we finally arrived, we went to Kakum National Park first. Kakum National Park is a rainforest and it was beautiful. The leaves on the ground reminded me of some of the woods around San Francisco. So pretty! There are elephants, leopards, monkeys, and green mambas in the rainforest, but luckily, we didn't meet any of them on our journey through the park. We had to hike up quite a hill to make it to the canopy walk, the reason for our adventure. The canopy walk is a bunch of rope bridges that start 11 feet above the rainforest floor and go up to 40 feet above the rainforest floor. I was a little nervous about the whole thing, but was not quite as nervous as Marty, one of our guests from the States. She was terrified! But after crossing a couple of the bridges (there are seven of them altogether), you don't feel quite as scared anymore. That is, until Nosa or John start jumping up and down on the bridge in front of you! Quite an adventure FOR SURE! When we made it through all the bridges, we stopped for some coconut (becoming a favorite of mine) and John even got a cocoa bean to try. You don't really eat the beans, but you suck off the fruit around the outside. It had kind of a sweet soury taste. Really interesting! After Kakum, we made a pit stop in Elmina for lunch and then went to the slave castle there. Wow! What a surreal experience. The treatment of the slaves was terrible, in fact, the captain's headquarters had a trapdoor for slave women to travel through into his bedroom. Sick! And the numbers of people that came through with no place to take a bath or to go to the bathroom--it's shocking. The "door of no return" shocked me as well. A tiny slit in the wall where slaves go through to board the ship, 15 slaves per chain. They had been so ill-treated that they could fit through the door with no problem. At the end of the tour, I was just blown away by the fact that the slave trade is still a very real thing going on in the world today--and I get the priveledge of being on the forefront of stopping it. We all get that priveledge. The world should be a people of JUSTICE--there is just far to many injustices that have happened in the past for us not to learn our lesson. The road home was a long one as we got stuck in traffic outside of Accra. I had felt a sore throat coming on throughout the day, but tried to avoid the thought of me getting sick so I could enjoy my day. Unfortunately, a fever grabbed a hold of me and my sore throat escalated and today, I've been pretty much best friends with my bed--no energy to do much of anything and my body aching to badly (probably partly the hike and partly this bug) that I don't even want to move. Pray for it to go away! No fun at all! In any case, I am so glad that I got to experience our day out yesterday. So much fun and I learned so much about the slave trade that I want to do even more to put a stop to the slave trade of today.