Life on the equator

I don't think I've yet to talk much about the weather or food here so this post will be dedicated to the two things which my life pretty much revolves around here.
Weather: I woke up this morning around 4:30 am and I was sweating. I can't imagine growing up in a place where the coldest temperature you've ever felt in your life is 65 degrees but that's literally the life here. My host brother refuses to go to the internet cafe because he thinks the AC is too cold. The days are usually between 80 and 90 degrees and it's incredibly humid this time of year since it's the rainy season. Which means you basically never stop sweating. At night it might get to be 70 degrees. Maybe. In the afternoons in October until December or January it will just absolutely downpour. Sometimes it lasts until the following morning but it will never rain past about 8 am. And then it's hot all over again. I hear dry season is rough because everything is so dusty and your skin gets cracked so I've been told I'm very lucky to be here this time of year. Which I believe until I'm caught under an overhang waiting out the rain which can last for hours at a time without ceasing and the roads begin to flood.
Food: As I've mentioned before Ghanaian food is primarily carbohydrate-based. But it's not quite like the carbs we know and love at home. The three main dishes you have to try when arriving in Ghana are fufu, banku, and kenkey. Fufu is made from maize and is ground up and made into a sticky dough which is put into a nut or palm oil soup. My first day in Ho, my program head Ash got me to eat fufu but apparently I was eating it wrong and I got scolded by a man (you are supposed to cut the dough, dip it into the soup and eat it. I had skipped the dipping step...). They even tried to give me a soup to eat it with (the majority of dishes are eaten with you right hand).
Banku (aka akple) is similar being fermented corn and cassava cooked in hot water to make a paste and is eaten with a stew or sauce. And then there's kenkey which I actually haven't tried yet but it's essentially banku that's been wrapped in cornhusk and it doesn't taste quite as good.
They love their plantains here, which are like very large bananas. You can either pick them raw and fry them to make plantain chips or you pick them ripe and cook them in oil to have fried plantains. Red red is a bean dish served with fired ripe plantains with the typical red sauce that they put on everything here (it's spicy and kind of salty and you get it with pretty much everything).
The Irish volunteers say they feel at home here because of the amount of potatoes you have with your meals. One lunch option my host mother makes for us several times a week is sweet potatoes, yams, cassava (likes a huge potato originally from South America but grows rampant here) and fried plantains with some stewed vegetables. I have yet to understand the need for 3 different types of potatoes in one meal...
You often find women selling bread on the street - you can get plain bread, tea bread or sugar bread. Since our trip to Cape Coast I've become newly addicted to sugar bread, especially when they sell it fresh from the oven.
Finally you have your  rice and pasta. Which, much to the dismay of the Asians and Italians I'm sure, they often serve together in one dish mixed together with the red sauce. You can also get Jollof which is rice cooked in a meat stew. You see chop bars all over town which means meat and fish are served there  however meat is fairly expensive here as are vegetables. They have carrots, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce and onions but salad is not a part of the traditional dishes and vegetables usually aren't prepared with meals (something I've been having to deal with in the diabetes center).
I have this pineapple lady (she's a diabetic) who chops up whole pineapple with a machete and sells it fresh for a cedi (roughly 70 cents!) It's also the best pineapple I've tasted in my life. My host family continues to give me coconuts from their yard, oranges and of course bananas which are half the size of bananas at home.
You can find pretty much the same variety of 20some snacks all over town. I've recently become addicted to milk sticks which are bread sticks made with coconut milk. I'm not sure if I've mentioned how much they LOVE Obama over here and at the market in town (the kind with stalls where the venders sell fresh foods and fabrics etc) they sell Obama crackers with his face alllll over the package! There is one supermarket in town  that has a few more Western goods but it's all rather expensive so I'm just sticking to Ghanaian foods for the time being.