Cape Coast Castle

Today our main visit was to Cape Coast Castle. On the way we stopped by a beach and briefly watched some fishermen pulling in their net. We didn't stay long because the Castle was opening soon. It was very interesting to see but it was too bad we couldn't stay to see what they did with a massive net full of fish. It was several hundred metres long!

Cape Coast Castle was one of (if not the) main slave trading posts in Africa. Like our tour of Fort Amsterdam on Sat, it was very somber and quite sad to hear the story of the Castle. By today's standards it seems unimaginable that this ever happened but the reality is that it did and it is a grim part of the history here. Thankfully, slavery was abolished long ago.

We saw all parts of the castle including the slave dungeons, the "door of no return" where the slaves went through to board the ships for the Americas and the Governor's quarters among others.

Following the tour, we stopped (again very briefly) at the fishing community next to the Castle.

After lunch we went to the Cape Coast School for the Deaf. After a brief presentation by one of the staff, we toured the grounds. It really is a nice learning environment. In addition to the regular school curriculum, they have a farm where they grow vegetables and raise animals such as chickens, pigs, and rabbits. All of the food produced is either used in their kitchen or sold. I think that is a wonderful idea and maybe more schools should do that! We passed out more pencils, pens, and balls but this time we gave them to the staff to hand out. The students even "sang" a song for us in sign language! We took lots of pictures of the kids. They just love to have their picture taken with a digital camera and shown the picture on the screen.
Then it was off to the beach for some fun in the waves for the rest of the afternoon and more social time for the cadets in the evening.

On Tuesday, a visit to Kakum National Park and a canopy walk above the jungle!

Sent from my wireless handheld device / Transmis de mon appareil portable