Hello! I have finally got a few of my own pictures onto the internet. This one is of my friend Debbie trying to get off "umbrella rock". Some local boys had made the ladder out of bamboo, and cahred us 50p to climb up. Last weekend the 5 of us that live together travelled to see 2 waterfalls, which were amazing, and went on a tough walk scrambling over rocks to get to umbrella rock. We stayed in a little town called Aburi, where we visited the botanical gardens and went for a mountain bike treck through the rainforest. It was good fun - our guide found us a cocoa tree and made us suck the cocoa beans - they are covered in a white goo that tastes like mango. The path was so narrow sometimes that you couldn't turn your peddles and occasionally you had to cross a river by walking over a log. It was hard work - by the time we got back to the town I had to get off and push, but the local children wanted to help me push it back.

This weekend I went to a big town called Kumasi and met up with my friend Tony from Warrington, he is working on a construction site here. I shopped at Kumasi market, which is huge. Towards the end of the day you begin to hear banging - the local people grinding up the ingredients to make fufu, a local dish in a very large pestle and mortar. On sunday tony drove me to Lake Bosumtwi, which was made by a meteorite, so is beautiful as you can see that the mountains surrounding it are all the same height. The fisherman fish from flat planks of wood because they are superstitious abotu carved out boats. At first I thought there was a lot of rubbish on it but it turned out to be bottles attached to fishing nets.

The hospital is good - i get on well with the docotrs and other students. This week I am at a rural clinic with just one nurse. Our house now has runnign water but it is dirty, and we found 2 cockroaches yesterday. (I was the one who had to move them outside). It is nice to see patients progress now we have been at the hospital a while. But it is still hard to get used to the differences from western medicine.

Tuesday the 1st was a bank holiday and I went on a hospital "health walk" to the top of the mountain, which had amazing views over the town Nkawkaw and beyond (I think I put a picture on) I then went to the local pub with a doctor and some of the administators of the hospital and shared a bowl of fufu with them. It is like mash potato that has the consitency of raw dough, in soup, with various meats on top. It wasn't as bad as other students have made out.

Missing everyone, lots of love XXXX