Java House, Elmina, Ghana

Africa's Gold Coast is ripe with history after all, so I'll tell you the story of how our house came to be named. It's called the Elmina Java Museum. 'Java House' for short. Note, no coffee. In the 18th century there was a Dutch governor at Elmina Castle named Ulzen. With slavery abolished here in the early 1800s, the Dutch intermarried with local women. A great grandson of that governor, Manus Ulzen, joined the Royal Dutch East Indies Army in 1831 when they were recruiting from tropical climates to try to reinforce their melting brigades at war in Indonesia. Manus Ulzen was decorated for a tour in Java. Thus the name of the museum...we recognize the region in Indonesia, not the dark beans harvested there that I lust after. Ulzen family members also founded the clinic where Kirsten works. So, our house is some odd combination of an African cultural museum and, um, a mexican prison from a spaghetti western. The front half of the building houses the museum. One room of the museum houses the family who've taken very fine care of us. Behind their house is a series of four cells that house volunteers at the medical clinic. Currently, our family and a medical student from Canada are the only inmates. There are bars on the windows and our heavy wooden door bolts with hardware that a hollywood prop master would kill for. We do have non-potable running water including a shower and flush toilet. There is intermittent electricity. The food is outstanding, which is nice because I don't think there is a restaurant within a hundred miles and you might not enjoy the fish as much if you had seen where Lucy bought it. But in all we are reasonably comfortable and quite content.