Journey to Sefwi Wiawso

This weekend, Rivky Zahava, Zahava’s friend and I went to visit our fellow Jews in Ghana in a village called Sewfi Wiawso (pronounced Seshwi Wiawsho, but the sh also includes a whistle noise…as you can imagine, when we were telling people where we were going, they had no idea what we were saying so we have a piece of paper with the name written down). This village is not predominately Jewish, but does have several families and is the largest Jewish community in Ghana (apparently there are others…)


The journey was a long one to say the least. It took us almost 13 hours to get there. We left our dorm at 6 AM, got to the bus station at 7 AM and waited. There are no schedules here; you just need to wait for the buses to fill up, so we ended up waiting about three hours. Keep in mind that it’s Friday so we were concerned about making it in time for Shabbat. Anyways, so after the long wait and the traffic we arrived in Kumasi (one of the biggest cities in Ghana) more than 7 hours later, a trip which should take 4 hours. We got off the bus and were immediately surrounded by people who wanted to carry our bags or take us in their cabs. We hurriedly got in a cab that took us to the next bus station. At this point, time is definitely of the essence. The driver guarantees us that he is leaving in 10 minutes, which of course did not happen. We board the bus to take us to the village, filled with Ghanaians and a live chicken (there are tons of chickens always walking around and I strongly dislike them, so on the bus, Zahava stood next to the chicken as I passed it on the bus.) About 30 minutes later, we left only to turn around again. Everyone was screaming in Twi so we had no idea what was going on. Turns out, one person did not pay so we all had to go back. Meanwhile, the sun is slowly getting lower and lower and it becomes pretty clear that we will not be there before Shabbat.

In the meantime, the people of the village are consistently calling me to ask where we are but they do not speak English well, my phone is really bad quality, there’s music blasting, and everyone on the bus is screaming. As you can imagine, this was a slightly stressful situation.

Eventually, we arrived in the village, about 20 minutes after Shabbat had started. Surprisingly, there is no eruv and we have bags to carry. (On Shabbat, you cannot carry bags in a public domain so we could not carry our bags off the bus). Rivky had called her rabbi and he told us to carry the bags, but don’t stop walking with them; we needed to be continuously walking. So we got off the bus and began to walk in circles. Not only are we the only white people, but we are literally in the middle of the street walking in circles. Everyone was shouting at us “Oboruni, what are you doing?!” (Oboruni means white person). Taxi men were grabbing us and we just kept walking. There was one persistent guy who kept grabbing us and we kept walking away from him, but turns out, he was the person from the village who had come to take us back. I’m pretty sure EVERYONE thought (and maybe rightfully so) that we were absolutely insane.

TO BE CONTINUED!!!