Jake in Ghana

2009-06-21T19:29:00.003Z

Three True Stories about Music in Paris

Arriving in France on the redeye from Newark was pretty easy. You just woke up when the wheels hit the tarmac and groggily gathered your things and sleepwalked up the jetway. The hard part was that the passport control stations were closed. A whole plane’s worth of people let out a collective groan, and then we proceeded to wait. After a half hour some uniformed officers walked over and sat down in the empty booths, fired up the computers, changed the dates on their stamps, and casually waved the first travelers up. It was as if they hadn’t seen the crowd gathered there, propped up on the telescoping handles of their wheelie bags.

The next step was to buy a ticket for the RER line B, a commuter train that runs to Paris. This could be done right there in Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, at a touch screen machine. A lot of people had caught on to the convenience, so there was a substantial line. I waited. When I got to the machine everything failed in order like dominoes: all the credit cards don’t work, oh there is no bill acceptor, oh I don’t have any coins, etc. All the people behind me were breathing right down my neck. It was a step-out-and-regroup moment. I shuffled to the back of the line and this time watched over others’ shoulders while they nimbly navigated the series of screens. The next time things went better.

Down on the platform, the train glided up like it was on silk wheels. Just a gentle whoosh and a pleasant *ding* and the doors opened and I was on. Seconds after we pulled away from the station there was a hollow sucking sound, the door at the end of the car opened, and in walked a man brandishing an accordion and wearing a black beret and tight blue jeans. As far as I could see, this was not a joke: he seemed serious about the whole ensemble. He scanned the car for just a second, then launched into a very fine rendition of “Besame Mucho”. Ambling slowly and nonchalantly up the aisle of the car, he was looking out the windows, seeming to play not just for us passengers but also for the gray warehouses and the graffiti’d walls sliding by. He came to the door at the other end just as the song finished. Taking his hand off the keyboard, he opened the door and stepped out. He hadn’t given anyone a chance to pay him.

*

On Monday night, June 8, a group of us were walking around Paris in the dark. We crossed over from the Quartier Latin to the Ile de la Cite and we looked up at the towering hulk of Notre Dame. Standing very close to the wrought iron fence in front, inspecting the intricate carving over the portals, all at once and without warning there was a great and frightening sound from inside. It was an organ. It was the organ. Someone was inside the cathedral after hours playing that massive thing, and here it was, emanating like a rumble from the stomach of the great gray church. In my imagination I saw the player sitting at the stacked manuals, surrounded by scores of stops, the bass keyboard underfoot, and the only light on in that huge vaulted stone place would have been the little cylindrical brass light mounted atop the cabinet. You know, the one with the black plastic knob on the end that you turn between your thumb and forefinger.

*

Just minutes later we were crossing back over from the Ile de la Cite to the bank from which we had come, and we heard accordion music again. This time it was not the strange speaking of some inanimate object, or of the city itself. As we came closer we saw it was another bereted accordion player. He had been hidden from the lamplight by the shade of a leafy tree at the near end of the bridge. And there was an old couple, a gray-haired man wearing a dark suit and a tie, and a woman in a long skirt and a jacket, dancing cheek-to-cheek near the rail overlooking the water. It was nothing structured like a waltz or anything else; just a tender procession of soft, turning steps, the two together in planetary motion across the gentle arc of the bridge.

2009-06-14T10:03:00.001Z

Egads, how the time passes. Two weeks in far-flung corners of the world, and no blogs to show for it. I have half-finished posts from Paris and from Busia, Kenya. (They're coming...) But this one was...urgent.

Yesterday I left the IPA Malawi office in around 3pm because I was delirious and falling asleep in my chair. I hadn't slept in 34 hours due to the outrageous timetables that define international travel within Africa, and so I was aiming for the hotel bed, for a nap before dinner. In the end I didn't get any sleep because of what I saw on the minibus (a larger version of a Ghanaian trotro). It kept playing through my head and chasing away the sandman. So I chased it away by writing it down:

The oldest woman in the world rides the minibus from Old Town, Lilongwe to Likuni, sitting in the back row. She wears a yellow print cloth wrapped around her waist for a skirt, and a red hand-sewn blouse with puffy yellow shoulders. Out of its short sleeves emerge the oldest arms in the world, skinny bones leading to jagged wrists, spanned by ropy veins like the woody vines of an ancient jungle, and paper-thin leather stretched over it all like the skin on a cup of instant coffee left out since last night.

The oldest woman in the world has a piece of plain green cloth around her waist for a belt. In its cinched knot hide a number of old, dark coins. More are hiding in the twists of a triangular brown cloth shawl whose corners are tied in front of her chest. Her head is wrapped in a red cloth. All I can see is a few small yellow-gray bushes of wiry hair at her temples. There are bits of charcoal and sand in the hollows of her ears.

She has exactly no teeth. Her voice is the breaking of dry twigs, the hot, dry air of the oven, and the creaking of an old wooden door, or a rusty pile of scrap metal ribbons.

The oldest hands in the world are bigger than you might think. They used to be reptilian, but their shiny, scaly skin and their claws are dull now from 48,000 years of kneading sharp gravel. They are gnarled from being twisted in the spokes of an ancient wagon wheel. The left thumb-nail is like the blade of a shovel: squared off, pitted and embossed with dirt, the edge bent under.

There is a walking-stick, both ends of it bashed out soft and flat like the head of a railroad stake that has known the nine pound sledge. Its length is knobby and worn smooth as driftwood.

I would like to tell you about the face of the oldest woman in the world, but in truth I barely got to see it. From the moment I sat down beside her until the moment I got up to leave, she was turned away from me, making faces at a baby girl perched on its mother’s lap in the next seat.

2009-04-21T15:07:00.002Z

The tiny nowhere town of Uyuni has two claims to fame: fantastic freshly-made pizza, and the world’s largest salt flats. It had been pointed out to me that, although it is at least eleven hours away, La Paz is the closest major city in the sense that it takes longer to get to Uyuni from anywhere else. Clearly, this was a golden opportunity.

I left La Paz Friday morning at 10 on a bus bound for Oruro, a smallish city at about the halfway mark. From there I would take the train. The bus was scheduled to stop at the Oruro train station, so the connection should have been easy. But ultimately it was not.

On the bus a woman sat down next to me and struck up conversation, kindly accommodating my horrific Spanish. In a slow, halting way we found out about each other. She is a book distributor dealing mostly in textbooks and technical literature. She sells to retail bookstores in La Paz, and also directly to schools and universities. She was on her way to Oruro to catch the train to Buenos Aires, site of a big international book fair during the coming week. She had friends with her, too—other book distributors from La Paz also headed to the book fair. In fact, theirs was the same train as mine. It continues south from Uyuni, over the Argentine border, and on to the capital.

We talked until the movie came on; after that we couldn’t. I can always count on being seated directly under a speaker. If possible, mine will be the broken, rattling and buzzing and hissing one. This has been true since Ghana and was true again on Friday. The real issue is the combination of excessive volume and poor-quality soundtracks of local movies. In this story, the main character had recurring visions, abruptly cut to, of a roaring tiger and of a deafening drum circle. It was unpleasant.

I put in my headphones and fell asleep. Sometime during the ride I was nudged awake by my neighbor, who told me something about Oruro. My Spanish was even poorer in that confused state; I really only heard the words for “problem”, “blockade”, and “train”. But I was awake enough to know I my options weren’t very good. They were: (1) Ask the bus driver to stop and let me out in the altiplano, that vast plateau of grassland full of nothing but thin air, brutal sun, and a driving prairie wind, where I could try to make alternate travel arrangements myself; or (2) Wait and see. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up we were closer to Oruro, and all the chatter on the bus was about the bloqueo. My neighbor told me more about it. Apparently the city’s residents were unhappy about a fare hike by the combi drivers. (A combi is a just like a Ghanaian trotro: a van whose insides have been gutted and replaced with bench seats to accommodate 13 passengers. It is used for public transportation.) Some routes which used to cost Bs. 1 ($0.15) now cost Bs. 1.50 ($0.22). While not a huge jump in absolute terms, the percentage increase was reason enough to drag out a bunch of sizeable rocks and break glass bottles. These hazards were organized into neat lines across all the main roads in the city, and made it impossible for vehicles to pass.

So eventually our bus came to a stop behind other buses and trucks, on a ring road that ran to the east of the city center. Beyond the bloqueo kids were playing soccer on the empty asphalt, and vendors selling ice cream and bread rolls pushed their carts, calling out to them and to the adults who leaned against the cement barrier in the middle of the road. Except for the kids, everyone looked bored. We were about four miles from the train station, and had a little less than an hour before departure.

My neighbor told me to come with her group—they had a plan, she said—and we stepped over the stones and the glass and began walking south. The women split off on a side street and I continued with the men. One of them was on his phone, furiously smoking cigarettes. He looked around in all directions. Just beyond the next bloqueo, about 300m down the road, a white pickup truck pulled up. The man with the phone raised his arms in triumph. We walked to the truck, got in, and took a winding tour of Oruro’s back roads, avoiding the rocks and broken glass and indifferent protesters. We were at the train station inside of ten minutes.

I thanked them as profusely as I could with my limited vocabulary, and they in turn insisted on buying me lunch. How about that?

2009-03-11T16:19:00.003Z

It's been a while. I will not claim there was nothing to write about--of course, something interesting is happening everywhere and at all times. Too often I just don't have the eyes to see it. Thankfully, India is abrasive, even corrosive. It rubs those cataracts right off.

Even at two weeks' remove, some of the visions still feel miraculously fresh. Below are three. Sorry they're late.

*

1. Nirmal's Math

During our first conversation, while I was seated on a tiny stool in his shop, Nirmal said, "For me, I have a saying: 'Come as visitor, go as friend.'" This, it turned out, was no empty threat. I can say so confidently because the very next day he risked life and limb taking me to the train station on his scooter. We were weaving in and out of a wedding procession, around palanquins and around people dressed in incredible sequined saris and around a wooden cart loaded with huge blaring speakers and around an elephant. Actually, we were heading towards my hotel--and away from the train station--as we lurched out from behind the elephant, but that's only because we had to get my big, unwieldy suitcase and try to wedge it onto the scooter with us.

He parked his scooter and we rushed across a footbridge to Hanuman Gat, the neighborhood where my hotel was. We were hustling around couples and groups out for eveningtime strolls. Many were stopped, leaning on the rail of the bridge, looking south onto the lake and the fairytale palace that seemed to float in its center. The palace was all white and lit with white lights. It looked like a huge, organized assembly of candles out there on the dark lake.

Nirmal said, "You know, we get a lot of Indian tourists here in Udaipur."

"It looks that way. What percentage of all tourists to Udaipur are Indian, do you think?"

"Oh, at least sixty to seventy percent."

"Wow," I said. "So most of the tourists in the city are actually Indian?"

"No. It's about equal."

"Oh, so half-half? I thought you said at least sixty percent were Indian."

"Yes. Half-half. Sixty percent Indian, sixty percent foreign. It is like that."

*

2. Two scenes glimpsed out the side of an auto-rickshaw in Calcutta. Each lasted less than 30 seconds.

First, a little boy not more than 5 years old. He was filthy, wearing filthy pants and a filthy shirt, and his cheeks and forehead were marked with little circles of soot or ash, as if he had been stamped by a filthy stamp. He was doing awkward and jerky somersaults on the sidewalk and in the side of the street. Not fully in control of his limbs, he moved like a rag doll. A woman, presumably his mother, sat to one side playing a tin drum with a wooden mallet. She was smiling. After his fourth somersault he sat with his legs splayed out and the woman handed him a metal ring about 16" in diameter. He pulled himself through it, sitting doubled over with legs outstretched, cinching it around himself perfunctorily, working it over the sad little hump of his shoulders. The ring, free of him, clattered to the ground and the woman banged twice on the tin drum to mark the end of the show. The boy walked around to the cars and rickshaws stopped at the intersection, braying feebly at the drivers. He made his loop and walked back towards the sidewalk. In his filthy, sweaty, sooty little right hand he clutched the shiny rupees my auto driver gave him.

Second, at night, close to the Shobhabazaar metro stop in an auto-rickshaw bound for Ultadanga. The road is impossibly crowded. Dingy orange-yellow light from incandescent bulbs and coffee-can oil lamps spills over vendors, pedestrians. It smells like burning ghee; it smells like cigarettes. On my teeth I can feel the grit from diesel exhaust, from burning gas and plastic. The driver spits a vile missile of dark red juice out onto the street. His left cheek is stuffed with pan (a mix of betelnut, tobacco, sugar, fruit syrup, candied dried fruit, anise seed, dried coconut, other nameless pastes and powders, all rolled in a green leaf into a cone-shaped pouch the size of a golf ball). Looking up to the sidewalk, there they are BOOM! two perfectly white cats in a wire cage perched on a high stool. People stream by the cage carrying briefcases, carrying plastic bags with sticky, dirty hands, bearing in their cheeks huge wads of pan. Yet here are the cats, perfectly white, impossibly white, actually, given the dingy orange-yellow light of the street, but undeniably there and undeniably as white as they seem. They were cute, too, their fur attractively matted and tousled. One playfully batted the other with its paw, gentle as a lamb.

*

3. Some types of houses seen on Feb 17th, around 5:00pm, from the window of a Sleeper Class car on the overnight train from Chennai to Hyderabad.

Houses made all of dried palm fronds woven together
Houses made all of odds and ends of corrugated aluminum
Houses made with walls of corrugated aluminum & peaked roofs of dried up interwoven palm fronds
Houses with walls of dried up interwoven palm fronds & one-way slanting roofs of cardboard and plastic sheeting and corrugated aluminum
Houses in the mud
Houses that are just cloth sheets held up by 4 or 6 wooden poles
Houses of cloth and poles fallen over like a horse
Houses caved in like rotten tomatoes
Houses all deflated like an old pumpkin
Some brick houses

2008-05-22T22:59:00.003Z

In the last post we learned that Elizabeth, our housekeeper, didn’t want to put a cast on her broken leg. She wanted to spend another month’s wages on a second round of topical herbal treatment, but we convinced her to have a consultation with the doctor before putting her money down.

Nobody said it would be easy. Elizabeth went to Korle-bu Hospital on Monday morning, signed herself in, and waited. Around midday she was told that the doctor wasn’t coming in; she should come back Wednesday. So she was there Wednesday morning, name on sign-in sheet, sitting in the folding chair. In the afternoon the woman came out from behind the reception counter and told Elizabeth she had seen her name on the sheet with “x-ray” written next to it and watched her all day in the waiting room. Didn’t she know she should be at Ridge Hospital? If she wanted to see a doctor for an x-ray she was in the wrong place. By now it was too late to go to Ridge, though, so she should go tomorrow morning, first thing. Thursday at Ridge Hospital the doctor should have been in—he hadn’t called in sick—but nobody could find him. Surely he would come tomorrow.

In fact he did come Friday and Elizabeth was there waiting for him. He took an x-ray of her lower leg and reviewed it with her. The partial fracture that was a hairline crack in her January x-ray had opened into a wider fissure, which helped to explain why the swelling and pain persisted, even months after the injury. Fissure or no fissure, the fact that a PoP cast would leave her foot slipperless for a month spelled ignominy at church; and this was reason enough to seek other options.

The doctor was adamant that the cast was the right treatment. Nothing else would do. Refusing a cast now, he said, might earn her an amputated foot somewhere down the line. Understandably, this proved to be the decisive blow; after all, an amputated foot is just as unslippered as one wrapped in plaster. It looked like some amount of disgrace at church was inevitable. Elizabeth opted for the PoP right then and there (though she would spend about 16 more hours in hospital waiting rooms over the next three days before actually having the cast put on).

Elizabeth has taken a temporary leave of absence until it is removed. I suppose it’s only fair that some of the waiting be passed on to us, though it is less clear why an immobilized foot is a greater impediment to work than a broken one. The slipper issue is a moot point since housework is done barefoot. We certainly will not argue, though; after so many months of constant aggravation, any excuse she finds to take a load off is a good one.

---------

A few days ago I hailed a taxi on the street just in front of the bank. We were driving down Beach Road, smooth and newly-paved, not much traffic. I asked the driver my usual suite of questions—whether he owns his taxi, who pays for repairs, whether he’s married, how many children he has, whether he saves money with a bank or susu association—and he asked me about my work. When I told him I was working with the bank where he had picked me up, he wanted to know more.

His goal was to own his own car, and he felt he needed a loan to buy one. He asked good questions about the process of accessing credit through the bank. Would he have to hold a savings account? (Yes.) What kind of interest rates do they charge? (3.17% per month, flat, on the initial balance of the loan.) How often would he have to make payments? (Monthly.) Could he repay over a year? (No, the maximum maturity of the first loan is six months.) Does he need to use land to secure the loan? (No, he must provide a guarantor for security—not collateral.)

By the time he eased the car around the traffic circle in front of Independence Square, he was enthusiastic. “Tomorrow morning I will come straight to the Banking Hall before I start work,” he said. He knew what documents he would need to open an account and whom to ask about starting a loan application. The path forward had been illuminated. You could tell by talking to him that he had the will and the aptitude to succeed; he had just been unaware of the resources he could access.

He had one question left: “Do you know another obruni at that bank called Matthew?” He recalled driving Matt home from work one day some time ago. “At least one year. I think even more than that.” Still, he remembered his name and where he lived. During their cab ride, he said, Matt had answered “so many questions” and told him all about the bank’s products and procedures. I asked, “Well, what did you say to Matthew once he told you all of that?”

There was no irony here: it was as clean as a clean plate. He said, “I told him I would come tomorrow.”

---------

The rainy season has begun. Sometimes the sky darkens up like someone pulled a great gray cloak over the city. It gets very cool all of a sudden, and the air feels empty and thin. When the wind blows, the dust on the roads and sidewalks swirls up into your eyes. It tickles the inside of your nose. The rain comes lashing down furiously in sheets. It plays a very loud drumroll on the tin roofs of our house and our neighbors’ houses. Sitting on the couch inside it roars like white noise on TV. If it keeps up for more than an hour, the seams of the corrugated roofing sheets start to leak. Then little droplets of water splash down on the back of the couch and on the tile floor. They explode into tinier droplets that collect on me like dew on the grass.

---------

Our landlady is Elizabeth Amankwa, wife of the late O.B. Amankwa, former Ghanaian ambassador to China and all-around heavy hitter. Recently she had to travel to Kumasi to attend to the preparations for the funeral of a tribal chief. She left her house in the care of her daughter and the two small girls, Bridget and Irene.

These two are the girls who make the sounds that populate our mornings and our nights. They are the ones bent over the brooms that scratch on the pavement; they are the ones pounding the plantain and cassava into fufu; they are the ones who sing gospel songs in voices soft and light like dandelion fuzz. Only one of them sings at a time, so the tune is always like a fine silk thread.

If you sit on the couch and listen, you won’t have to wait long to hear Elizabeth call one of them her signature harsh, barking tone. Akosua! Akosua! Bra! (Irene! Irene! Come here!) Either there is some secret, untranslatable affection in grandma’s voice, or the girls have learned through years of painstaking practice not to cringe. The sound, like a wet and rusty cheese grater gnawing through an old brown tire, doesn’t seem disturb them at all. In fact, they’re almost always smiling.

But how much more does the age of fifteen have to offer Bridget than the perfection of quiet, deferential obedience? What buds would burst open while the shadow of unceasing obligation was briefly cast out? This is what we hoped to discover when grandma took a trip.

I came home one day last week and found her standing near the front gate. Her head was down, resting on her forearms, which were crossed and laid on the flat top of the compound wall. When I approached, she looked up. “Oh, Bridget. How are you this evening?”

“I’m very well, thank you. How are you, too?”

“I’m also fine, Bridget. Are you taking a nap on the wall?”

“No.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“How long have you been not doing anything?”

“A long time. I can’t remember.”

“Up to an hour?”

“Yes.”

“How do you mean you weren’t doing anything?”

“I’ve just been watching the road.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Irene and I were watching for beautiful cars to pass by.”

“Did you see any?”

“Yes, we saw about three.”

“Which was the most beautiful car you saw?”

“A Hummer.”

Later that night I was happily scandalized to find Bridget inside the compound leaning against the wall of the house, talking with a boy. The moon, almost full and very bright, caught her cheeks and her white, white teeth. She laughed and fidgeted and flirted, oh the boy was flirting, too, and this was easy to see because the flirting of fifteen-year-olds is unmistakable in any language; it was all very chaste and very fine. I only watched long enough to see her smile flash a couple of times in the moonlight.

2008-04-13T23:28:00.004Z

In a small, dark cabinet under the bar, a vicious snarl of dark cables guards the open USB ports. I felt around for a place to insert a flash drive and hit my head. It was another Thursday Trivia Extravaganza at Champs, and we stalled while we tinkered with the projector that would display our questions on a big screen at the front of the bar. The usual crowd of ex-pats, Tex-Mex platters, and beer was on hand. There isn’t a great deal to say about it. Although some people are bound to feel that the contest is unfair, we still refuse to ask about cricket, former British PMs, and Formula One racing. These and other grumblings were drowned out by the din of conversation and the clatter of plates and mugs on servers’ trays.

On my way out of the washroom a young, skinny Lebanese man with a ponytail struck up a conversation about a company he had recently joined. As he explained the work, which was going exceedingly well for him, it became clear that he was describing a pyramid scheme. I tried to convince him of this but he became incredulous, even agitated, and moved to put the conversation to rest, summarizing his position with great conviction: “The market for making money can never be saturated. There is no bottom rung!” Beware the olive-skinned seller of souvenir coins.

Soon after the Trivia contest finished, the bar closed and I went to the road to hail a taxi.

It was after midnight when I stepped out on the shoulder of Ring Road. I crossed the wooden bridge over the deep gutter and walked onto the rough track just beyond. Some cars drove by on the main road, traveling fast; but because they didn’t honk they seemed quiet. The main sound that could be heard was a rhythmic chanting from a group of men crowded around a small fire in the scrubby area between the rough road and the gutter.

As I walked towards them more sounds emerged. The edge of a butter knife was tapping on a beer bottle and there was the shrill scream of a metal referee’s whistle. Plastic elephant horns, like the ones that were so ubiquitous during the Cup of Nations tournament, accented the chanting. They seemed to slice stinging crescents out of the heavy night air. There were about ten men by the small fire and most of them were in a tight circle, stomping around and around it in rhythm with their chanting, “HEY com bey sey la la la OH come bey sey la la la…”

About 20 feet away, across the rough track, two women sat on the edge of a cement slab in front of a metal shipping container that had converted into a barber shop. Beside each of them was a bare candle standing up on the concrete. The night air must have been very still not to blow them out. The women were wearing Western-style skirts and blouses, sitting comfortably with their legs extended and crossed at the calves. Each one held a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, which glowed in the soft light of the candles. I wanted to sit down on the slab with them and watch the men, but it seemed that I would have been gawking.

I continued past them, but then thought better of it and walked back to the women. When I came up to them I said, “Please, madam, I’m sorry. What are these men doing?”

“Our brother has passed away, one year today. They are mourning him.”

“Oh, Ok.”

I didn't sit down beside them, though I’m sure they would not have protested. Probably I could have sat there and the women wouldn’t have said anything more to me, in the remarkable way Ghanaians often sit together without talking at all. I wanted to ask questions about the chanting, what the words meant and which tribe it came from; but it was the wrong time for asking questions. I nodded deliberately to the women, wished them a good night, and turned around for home.

As I walked the short distance—not even 100 yards—along the rough track to the gate of my compound, the men’s chanting grew quieter, but the despairing crescent calls of the elephant horn could still be heard clearly. I went inside the house and the sound followed me there, too. It was like a dog pawing at the door to be let in. Sitting on the couch by the louvered windows, all at once I felt very lonely, like a clump of dried leaves and grass bobbing down through the eddies of a cold creek.

-----

Elizabeth, our housekeeper, injured her ankle almost two months ago. She was crossing a ditch at the market, walking on a plank that had been laid across it. The plank broke and she fell a couple of feet onto the uneven dirt. Her son Godswill, held on her back by the usual fabric wrap, was lucky not to be hurt.

I found out about the incident a couple weeks afterward when I called Elizabeth to ask why she hadn’t been coming by the house to clean. I said, “Elizabeth, we haven’t been seeing you recently.”

“Oh, Brother Jake, I’m sorry I haven’t been coming. I broke my leg."

“Oh, Elizabeth! What happened?”

“I was at market and I fell inside a ditch.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry. Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yes, I went to hospital.”

“And the doctor told you your leg is broken?”

“Yes. He said I have twist it near the foot.”

“Oh, so it is twisted. But is the bone broken?”

“Yes, the bone is not broken.”

We had reached the limit of our ability to communicate over the phone. Elizabeth said she would come the following Monday and tell me the whole story then.

When I came home from work that day I found her sitting on the front porch of the house. Her left leg was extended awkwardly in front of her, swollen below the knee and wrapped tightly in an Ace bandage from the shin down to the foot. She wore her usual wide smile and greeted me kindly. As we talked she described the accident and her visit to the hospital. The doctor had recommended she seek treatment at an herbal clinic. There they put her on a one-month regimen of weekly checkups and daily applications of a topical cream to the affected ankle. The cost was GHC 60, about half her monthly salary.

Elizabeth wasn’t told what was in the cream, but it seemed to be a mild analgesic. Patients at herbal clinics are rarely allowed to know what medicines they are taking, since most of them could be acquired much more cheaply at a local market.

There were good days and bad days. Sometimes her leg seemed normal and wasn’t painful or sore at all; other times, when it was swollen, she was forced to walk tenderly on it. She unwrapped it and rewrapped it tighter. On these days she sometimes described pain coming “from inside,” pointing just above her ankle. Through the ordeal she was convinced that the treatment was helping, though, and that she was getting better. She wanted to sign on for another month of the regimen, but didn’t have the money for it.

Last Monday her leg looked worse than ever, and I asked her to tell me again about her initial visit to the hospital. Now she said she had been x-rayed and that the doctor had first recommended a cast. Only when she refused did he refer her to the herbal clinic. I asked, “Why didn’t you want to have a cast?”

“Oh, Brother Jake, if I get POP [a plaster of Paris cast] then my leg would be too big. I could not put a slipper on this one foot. And I could not go to church wearing only one slipper.”

2008-03-09T16:24:00.003Z

George Tries for the High Note

In the weeks surrounding Valentine’s Day, which finds a devoted following in the residents of Accra, the local radio stations change their playlists. Edem from the Audit Department keeps his radio on all day, and the office is filled with love songs. Favorites include the original Lionel Richie/Diana Ross version of “Endless Love” and Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You”. Those familiar with the latter (or with the movie “Vegas Vacation”) will know that it is notable not only for its sweet sentiment, but for its outrageous high note. Not many popular songs make use of the elusive whistle register of the human voice.

Nor is this lost on listeners at the office. There is a lot of humming and singing along with all songs, and there is a real feeling of anticipation when the unmistakable opening of “Lovin’ You” wafts out of the Audit corner. Most people are on board through “La la la la la/La la la la la/La la la la la/La la/Doo doo doo/Doo doo”. When the high note hits you can adjust your ear to hear a thin, quiet caterwauling from the desks of many big, hulking men who continue looking at their computer screens like nothing was going on. It sounds like recorder hour in the third grade mouse class.

The exception is George, who takes time out from work for the attempt. He puts his hands on the edge of his desk and pushes his chair out a little bit to give space. When the time comes he squints his eyes, tilts his head back, and tries to squeeze the note out from the base of his spine. He doesn’t get very close.

One time I asked him if he thought he could hit it. He said, “Yes, I’m going to get it.”

“But George, you’re nowhere close to it. You’re at least two octaves below it.”

“I know I’m not getting it now, but if I practice I could get it."

“I don’t think any amount of practice will let you get it.”

“No, Jake, I know I can do it. Hey, maybe on the weekend I can just stay indoors and practice it straight. If I come down—Doo doo doo/Doo doo—then the next part I’m going to get it.”

“Well, George, I’d love to see it.”

So the gauntlet was laid. For a couple weeks George updated me on his progress every day before lunch. He would sing the part as we walked down the street to the rice seller: “Okay, I’m coming.”

“Okay, George, I’m ready.”

He would put his hand out flat in front of him and raise and lower it with the pitch like he was marking out the tune on staff lines. The approach came, “Doo doo doo/Doo doo” (middle down middle/up up-slide-middle), then he would stretch his mouth into a wide, flat line, screw up his face, and send his hand way up while he tried to wrench out the “Oooohhh” from the very top of his throat. The hand always came fluttering down with his finger wagging while I started laughing. “I’m coming close to it. I didn’t get it yet but I know I will get it. I’m very sure of it. I’m going to get it!”

I’ll be sure to let you know if he does get it, but I still don’t think he will.

----------------------------------

Elephantiasis Lady

She sits on the sidewalk in front of the Central Post Office, around the corner from work. Her back is up against a low wall that forms the edge of a cement patio, which wraps around the outside of the Post Office. Most of the day the sun is behind her and she is in the shade of the patio.

She always wears the same flower-print dress. Maybe it was white once, but now it’s as grey as the sidewalk. She sits with her right leg flat on the ground, pointing straight out towards the street. Her leg is turned out slightly so her foot sags down to the side. A rubber sandal dangles by its thong between her first and second toes. It is badly askew like a sloppy wooden signboard in the Old West that says “Keep Out”.

Her left leg is bent at the knee. Its upper half is hidden by her dress and its lower half is ballooned up with elephantiasis. The flesh is so swollen that the network of tiny, fair-colored canyons in her skin has been forced out flush with the surface, where it appears as a web like the fat in marbleized meat. I have never touched it but you can see that her leg is scaly and hard. Her foot is swollen in the same way and it looks like a badly-drawn cartoon foot, like a football with stubby toes. I’m not sure whether the condition comes with chronic pain, but to see her leg you can only think that it must hurt all the time, some kind of dull stinging from the skin being stretched so taut.

All day she angles for coins from the passers-by, and she keeps the money in a thin red handkerchief that stays spread out on the sidewalk next to her. When someone presses a coin into her outstretched right hand, she slowly folds her rough, callused palm fully around it, and as she makes her fist she raises her head. Then she deposits the coin onto the handkerchief and replaces her hand in front of her.

During the few steps while I approached her, as I dug in my back pocket for some coins, I decided I would smile and greet her as I made the handoff; but when she looked at me I saw her eyes for the first time and got stuck. The centers were painted with milky clouds and the whites were a sickly, mucus yellow. My greeting caught in my throat and I just had to keep walking as I thought: That must hurt all the time, too.

--------------------------------------

Free Cinderblock

When a friend left two issues of Men’s Health on the coffee table in our house I was inspired to try one of the exercises inside. It’s a simple exercise:

(1) Find something pretty heavy

(2) Hold it out in front of you at chest height with your arms straight and your hands pushing in on its sides

(3) Put it down when you can’t hold it anymore

I knew that if I could do (1) I could do (2) and (3). But I found out that it’s not easy to assemble a home gym on a budget, even here in the capital city. I tried a plastic bag full of 30 water sachets but it was big and awkward to hold. Next I figured I should try a cinderblock. Luckily there were some nearby.

The land between my compound and the main road is divided into three distinct strips: first is a narrow, rough road the runs parallel to the larger one; second is a strip of uneven, dusty dirt about 30’ wide with some scraggly trees and scrub grass growing on it; and third is a wide, deep gutter.

Directly across the rough road from my gate on the dirt strip, in the shade of a wide neem tree, there is a neat pile of cinderblocks. There must be 100 cinderblocks there. I walked over and found a man sleeping on the ground with his feet up against the pile. He woke up when I approached.

“Good evening, sir. Are these cinderblocks for you?”

“No, they are for somebody.”

“Oh. Is he here?”

“No, he is not here now.”

“Do you know if he plans to use them?”

“Yes, he is using them.”

“What is he doing with them?”

“He is building a house.”

The cinderblocks in the pile are nice enough, but they aren’t the right amount for a house, even a very small one. The whole neat pile of them isn’t more than 3’x 3’x 6’.

“Where will the house be?”

“Just here.”

The dirt strip is also nice enough, but it isn’t the right place for a house. There are no structures anywhere along it, though it runs the whole length of the main road. It’s too small and scrabbly and uneven to do any serious building on.

“I don’t know if he can build a house here with these blocks.”

“Oh, he is building it.”

“Well, do you think he would mind if I took one block from here?”

“Oh, you can take all.”

“Oh, sir! I only need one. Anyway, wouldn’t it be difficult to build the house if I took all?”

“This man, don’t mind him. For the house, the blocks wouldn’t catch.” (To say something doesn’t catch is to say it’s not enough for its intended purpose. Taxi drivers will often tell you that your offer doesn’t catch.)

“Well, I agree. Anyway, I will be very happy just to take the one.”

“You can take it.”

So I took one of the nicest blocks from the top of the pile and carried it to the alley behind my house. We already had a good wooden pole with a bent nail in it, which could be wedged into the corner at the base of the back wall to herd the clotheslines to one side. That way there is plenty of space to stand up and hold the cinderblock out at chest height, then put it down when it becomes too heavy. Voila, home gym.

2008-01-23T23:41:00.000Z

Have we done this before?

They woke me up for breakfast: a cereal bar, a banana, and a custard cup of orange juice with a foil top. Clunk, clunk is the sound of Ghana coming up under the wheels. Soon we are stopped and people are prying their plaid jute bags from overstuffed overhead compartments, and when the cabin door is opened the air rolls in like a hot fog. Down the stairs, across the tarmac, through the queue to the immigration officer whose accent is, for a second, too thick to make out. He is asking me how many books I’ve written, and whether I’m famous enough that he should get my autograph. On my entry card I’ve listed my occupation as “Writer”.

Outside I can taste the dust. It’s the Harmattan, O the evil Harmattan and its choking haze! Last year I lost my voice for two weeks when the cruel silt took up residence in my throat. It makes the morning sky look like a big brown smudge left by a junky pencil’s hardened eraser. And the taxi drivers, so anxious to help me home. Only GHC 15, you say?

It feels pretty automatic this time around. The lively taxicab tango (resulting in a fare of GHC 3) is a well-rehearsed show for no audience. When my pants start to stick to my shins after four minutes outside, I make a mental note: that’s probably twice as long as it’s ever taken before. After eight months of preparation the plastic sheeting has been removed from the edge of Cantonments Roundabout—also known as Deforestation Circle, for its center island full of venerable old trees that were chopped down in an effort to drive away the prostitutes known to hide from the police in their shadows at night—revealing an area of sparse grass with a sizeable podium in the middle. The statue on the podium is hidden under a cloak of garbage bags. My house has not moved, but the pitted track that runs in front of it has seen some repairs, as the deepest potholes have been filled with loose chunks of cement.

So some things are different; others are the same.

I walked into an empty house, put down my bags, and fell asleep. The first couple days always feel slow and arduous. I notice things that aren’t: the hours aren’t passing; the air isn’t crisp; the loved ones aren’t around; the acquisition of a good meal isn’t likely; the shower isn’t hot and the pressure isn’t good. Happily, Ghana is so many things that the tide turns irresistibly. The vegetable lady remembers my name and dashes me a mango. Elizabeth, our cleaning lady, has mounted festive newspaper pages and hand-drawn Christmas cards from her kids on the walls of our living room with medical tape. The newspaper pages are scrawled with kind messages in thick black permanent marker. I miss you, you are welcome! Well, I guess I missed you, too.

CAN 2008 is the biggest thing since Ghana@50. It’s the African Cup of Nations, the continent’s most soccer tournament, held every other year. From January 20 – February 10, Ghana is hosting the 16 best African teams as they play for a golden trophy and valuable bragging rights. It is no small matter.

In Accra alone the construction has been going on for over a year. The main sports stadium has been completely renovated and the deadly construction on the beach road was finally completed a day before the opening match. Imagine: they’ve turned the earth under every square inch of that road so many times by now, dug and filled and pressed and graded so many tons of dirt over and over with such hopeless Sisyphean sincerity that the project had become almost wholly symbolic—and they finished it. Curbs are freshly-painted and street lamps have been installed.

The people are also keeping up with the masonry. Every car—yes, every car—has at least one Ghanaian flag visible in or on it. Sales of whistles and plastic horns are through the roof. The plastic horns are in green, red, or yellow and they make a triumphant elephant sound. Those who can beg, borrow, or steal for them have bought CAN 2008 shirts. There are no less than 100 unique styles.

It’s not just for Ghana, either. Along the main roads, compound walls are draped with the flags of all 16 participating countries, and they’re all being purchased. Angolans, Namibians, Moroccans, even the much-maligned Nigerians are in the streets. With brightly-colored flags hung like capes over their bulging backpacks they are shiny, exotic beetles. Mostly they roam the terrarium freely, but they are sometimes forced to scurry aside when a herd of those damned hornblowing elephants comes trundling down the sidewalk.

So it is a real to-do, a combination of competition and pageantry that amounts to something like a medieval joust on safari. As such, it is not to be missed.

A well-connected manager at the office who has been sidelining with the company printing tickets for the entire tournament managed to wrangle one for me: blue section 13, seat S0050 of the popular stands (cheap seats) for the opening match. I gave that one to George to ensure his attendance; then when Sunday came we went to the stadium at midday to try our luck with the scalpers. How do we look?

It was, as expected, a madhouse. All the red, yellow, and green paint in the city seemed to have been bought up and used to color the people walking around. They had been dipped like dark fried meat in fondue. It wasn’t too hard to find a ticket. It cost GHC 30 for a GHC 4 ticket, but that was what the market would bear. George feigned outrage (or wasn’t it feigned?) at the scalper, who happily exchanged blue section 12, seat U0002 for my three green bills. He added them an ample stack which he folded neatly in half and put in his pocket.

With tickets in hand we took some time to amble around the outside of the stadium and see what was going on: mostly rowdy fans and the noise of plastic horns, whistles, kazoos, and foghorns is what it was. One guy, though, was handing out little glossy prayer-a-day booklets, and another was promoting Trashybags, a neat organization that makes handbags, backpacks, duffels, etc., from discarded water and FanYogo sachets.

We went into the stadium around 2:15. The match wasn’t beginning until 5 but the gates were to be closed at 2:30 in order to “encourage” ticketholders to attend the opening ceremony in addition to the game itself. It worked. When President Kufuor and the heads of both continental (CAF) and global (FIFA) soccer governing bodies made opening remarks at 3 they were met with thunderous applause and not a little hornblowing.

The hour that followed featured a real spectacle with a cast of thousands: dancers, tumblers, men on horseback, etc. George explained that the first part was a visual retelling of Ghana’s evolution from disparate tribes to unified nation. One group represented each tribe, wearing its traditional dress and dancing its traditional dances. Gradually these separate groups coalesced into a single mass doing a single dance. Apart from these there were drums ten feet high, men dressed up as kings with huge gaudy golden scepters, and hundreds of dancers carrying giant crescent horns. Taken together, the performers’ costumes made a squirming kaleidoscope shawl of mardi gras sequins and glittery wet fish-scales in the sun, which the field wore with distinction like a bag lady movie star showing up to the Oscars drunk on good champagne.

There was also the part where everyone came out with colored umbrellas and glided into perfect formations: the flag, the outline of Africa, the tournament’s logo, etc.

And that was before the game. A good hour before, actually. Once the spectacle ended the grounds crew came out and wadded up—did not roll up—the field-size white tarp and carried it off with some difficulty, revealing a yellow surface covering the middle half of the field. Many more workers rushed out from three directions with big cardboard boxes on their heads and ran to the edge of the yellow amoeba, which they began to dismantle pixel by pixel from the outside in. The amoeba was made up of thousands of interlocking tiles intended to protect the grass below. This was less of a precision drill than the performance. Tiles were removed in odd strips and shapes and thrown haphazardly into the boxes, which were quickly filled and carried off, leaving the amoeba only half-dissolved, pixels bleeding out onto the pitch. Workers looked around at each other confusedly for a minute and then resumed their work, now carrying the tiles to the edge of the field and heaving them over a waist-high barrier into a buffer zone between the closest seats and the field.

George watched the jumbled yellow piles grow and spread in the buffer zone and plainly saw the result of poor planning. He lowered his head into his hands, chagrinned: “They have failed. The tiles should have been attached to the white cloth. This is terrible. They have disgraced themselves.”

Later, with the field clear, the teams limbered up, the starting lineups announced, and the sun finally sinking, the match began. All the fans’ noisemakers, flags, face paint, and road flares had survived three hours in the sun and were fully functional. We happened to be in the unofficial Guinean cheering section (Guinea being the opponent) and didn’t realize it until well into the match when the differences in cheering became obvious. It’s hard to tell based on flag-colored attire alone. (See host's and visitor's flags below, respectively.)

Towards the end of the first half two men walked up the steps towards our section carrying two large jute bags each. They stopped right near our row, unzipped the bags, produced two handheld foghorns, and declared, “Ten Ghana cedis!” Well, it was really a success. It wasn’t five minutes before they had sold all their horns to fans within twenty seats of George and me. Groups of people were pooling money to buy them.

What made them so great was probably the amount of sound you got in return for pushing a button with your pointer finger. Meanwhile, you could use your breath for screaming. One foghorn was easily equivalent to three or four plastic elephant horns in terms of decibels; and it produced a unique pitch which resonated with the cranial bones, creating the sensation of a balloon being inflated in the hollow pressure-point space behind all the listeners’ ears.

Understandably, they needed to be tested out. All possible combinations of short blasts, long blasts, and very long blasts were examined. The results were summarized in a comprehensive report consisting of a single continuous blast that lasted minutes and exhausted the compressed air in the foghorn of a man a few rows behind us. George, whose ears are tender, was beside himself. “We would have been better to see the match on TV,” he said; but I could tell he was enjoying himself.

The second half was coming to a close. Ghana and Guinea were tied 1-1 and the match was getting sloppy. The clock crept towards 90 minutes and an unsatisfying draw. Then in the 89^th minute Sulley Muntari wound up and sent a laser from 20 yards out into the top right corner. The stadium erupted. For all the screaming I couldn’t hear the foghorns. People flailed wildly with uncapped water bottles in their hands, sending big sloppy arcs of warm water across the stands. George took off his glasses and waved his flag so hard I thought the plastic pole would bend in half. We were all soaked and the noise was deafening well through the ending whistle about four minutes later.

Afterwards, as we walked home past the cemetery, groups of wet fans with paint running down their faces lifted stuck cars out of the roadside ditch. There was music and honking in the streets, car horns and foghorns and plastic elephant horns.

2007-12-08T16:26:00.000Z

O the trotro is hot, and even though the temperature drops slightly as night falls it gets hotter still. At least I have a good spot. This trotro is actually an old bus. Its seats have been torn out and replaced by rows of small, narrow benches. There is an aisle up the middle and a two-seater to each side. Every row also has a jump seat that folds down over the aisle. I am in the second row jump seat.

To my right a man studies a small, detailed map of Great Britain bound into the front of his daily planner. The rider just in front of me gets up from his jump seat and turns around to face the passengers. He is wearing a dark blue suit and a limp necktie tied in a small, clenched knot. It looks like he pulled the knot as tight as it would go. He lays his briefcase on the jump seat, opens it, and pulls out a three-ring binder. Then he starts his pitch.

Every big trotro traveling a fixed route carries a salesman or a preacher. You can tell right away that this guy is the former, because preachers don’t carry briefcases.

The most common item sold on trotros is Smokers Toothpaste (with free hard-bristled toothbrush) from China. Typically sales pitches are done in Twi with bits of English thrown in for color and emphasis. For Smokers Toothpaste (with free hard-bristled toothbrush) there are phrases like, “Eye strong! Eye powerful! Eye natural!” (“It is strong! It is powerful! It is natural!”). Extensive pantomiming and gesticulating ensure that the deaf learn something, too.

A funny thing happens on a trotro when the pitchman starts to work: nothing. It’s nothing if he’s slinging secret herbal male enhancement pills from the jungles of Thailand and it’s equally nothing if he’s forecasting the End of Days. Like so many other smells and sounds and sticky heats, the pitch is inexorable; and as it is with those things, I can’t tell whether anybody else in this trundling heatbox even notices it.

As soon as he opens his binder we are sure that he won’t be selling Smokers Toothpaste (with free hard-bristled toothbrush) because he flips open to a laminated page with pictures of orange gel-caps and a lot of small Chinese writing. If it were toothpaste he would have just held up a sample. In fact, today we are being given a rare opportunity to buy a powerful orange Chinese wonder-pill, and let’s find out what those Chinese have jammed into this thing anyway.

On one hand it is a powerful curative. It can relieve:
· Leg pains
· Migraines
· Fever
· Insomnia
· Malaria
· Blood clot
· Spinal pains
· Pain in the joints
· Pressure in the eyes
· Stomach pains
· Running (diarrhea)
· Pain in the throat
· Cutter (common cold)
· Bad dreams

At the same time it promotes general health:
· Circulation
· Muscular strength
· Regular menstruation
· Virility (“Strong Penis”)
· Powerful Hips
· Warm chest
· Strong bones

And all this for just GHC 1 per pill. You only have to take it once to get all the benefits; but the more you take, the better. At a pharmacy they would cost at least GHC 10 each. This is a special limited offer for the riders of this car only. Who will take some? If there is no response he continues the pitch. Just look at your arms. (He holds out his arms wide.) The blood will flow freely and your arms will become more powerful. Your bones will be very hard. Just one Ghana cedi. No more tired arms!

While the man talks and pantomimes the riders sit mostly in silence. They don’t talk to each other very much. Once in a while one raises his hand. How many, sir? Just one. The salesman carefully shakes one pill out of the plastic bottle and places it in a tiny ziploc bag which is then passed back over the rows of passengers to the man. He puts the bag in his pocket or his briefcase. Then he produces GHC 1 and it is passed up to the seller.

A man sitting just to my left raises his hand and asks for one pill. The salesman shakes it out and puts it in the tiny bag and hands it to him. The man produces a GHC 5 bill. It’s the only bill he has. The salesman says, “Why don’t you just take five?” But he doesn’t want five; he wants one. “They are very good. No more back pains, no more migraines.” Pause. Well, alright. He’ll take the five then. He passes the tiny bag back to the seller, who has already shaken out the other four pills. They hardly fit when he jams them in there. The man accepts the bag and stares out the window.

This will continue until enough product has been sold. I’ve seen the pitch go to the bitter end. By then the salesman is repeating himself and trying to shove tubes of Smokers Toothpaste (with free hard-bristle toothbrush) into riders’ hands as they file hunched out of the trotro. Other times enough is sold in the first few minutes that he can get off and board another trotro long before reaching the destination. He always sells some, though, no matter what it is. I wonder whether people sometimes buy one just to make him feel good, or to get him to sit down and be quiet.

On this ride the man sells his share of orange pills within a half hour. Then he puts away his three-ring binder and takes out a box about the size of a cigar box. He smiles and holds it up for the whole car to see. The dramatic opening of the pitch. On the cover is a pornographic photo of a white woman bent over on all fours with a huge, musclebound black man behind her and with her face buried in the breasts of a blond woman who’s arched ecstatically backwards on a mattress. Since I’m sitting so close I can see by the trotro’s dim overhead light that the mattress is bare, and that the blond woman’s eyes are squeezed shut and her tongue protrudes just a little bit between pressed lips, as if she’s thinking very hard. There is no response from the other riders. It’s the same sweat and dank smells. He could just as well have been reciting Psalms.

I got off the trotro just a few minutes after he started into his pitch for the rare, ancient Chinese remedy for sexual dysfunction. (“Creates great warmth in the genitals,” etc.) By then he had just sold a few, all to a woman in the back who had raised her hand almost immediately and said loudly that her husband could use some. The passengers got a kick out of that. They must have been listening, after all.

2007-11-18T15:56:00.001Z

Our Waiter at Venus Bar

Matt and I sat down for a drink at Venus Bar. The waiter brought us our beers and we got to talking with him. He lives in Nungua, about 15km east of Accra, and has two children: a boy in high school and a girl in middle school. He smiled when he told us about them. His teeth were spread out and a little crooked like old white fence posts in his mouth.

He provides for the kids himself because his wife died from breast cancer about three months ago. Normally a person could turn to family for help in such a situation, but his mother and father and two siblings are also dead. They died on the way to a funeral in the mountains.

Matt said, “I’m sorry.”

The waiter said, “You can never know what will happen. That is life.”

Matt said, “Yes. Yours is a hard one, though.”

The waiter said, “Yes. Well, everything from God, you know? Everything in this life is from God.”

These were things he just said, as if he were talking about the weather. They were statements of fact. It seemed like the only thing we could do was to pour and drink the beer he had brought.

Boxing

Jamestown is a relatively poor neighborhood of Accra right by the ocean. Most of its residents are fishermen and traders, but it is best known for boxing (see stock photo above). The following is from Ghanaian law professor Josiah Aryeh’s memoir:

Accra Central is famous for boxing. A couple of generations ago practically every argument among the youth was settled with a fist fight and every neighbourhood had a clear pecking order. Boxing canalised those energies and calmed the youth. My half-brother, Charles Kweinortey Aryeh, was the founder of the world-famous Bukom boxing club. He was almost a generation older than the rest of us and his mother was a Sackeyfio in whose ancestral household the Bukom Boxing Club is based. My brother had developed love of the sport during his school days at Accra Academy when the Americans had considerable military presence n the Gold Coast. Accra produced a long list of Commonwealth boxing greats, including Roy Ankrah and Attuquaye Clottey but it was the Azuma Nelsons, D.K. Poisons, Alfred Koteys and Ike Quarteys who went on to become world champions. The great featherwieght Azuma Nelson shared many things in common with me.

(from http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=116989)

Last night a friend invited a bunch of us out to a boxing match to celebrate his birthday. There were seats for GHC 2 and GHC 10. We took the cheap seats. Entering though a small, low metal door in a cement wall, we walked through a narrow alley that gave onto a big open area with three basketball courts. There was a full-size ring set up in the middle of one of them, and hundreds of plastic chairs around in neat rows. Four bright bulbs lit the ring. They were hung from a cable stretched between two tall poles.

The first bout began just after we walked in and ended just as quickly when one boxer’s trainer threw in the towel less than 30 seconds into the first round. The second bout made it through the first round, but ended moments into the second when the referee called it on account of one boxer was leaning back on the ropes with his hands down getting pummeled mercilessly in the head.

Tiggy, photojournalist and girlfriend of the birthday boy, knew Daniel, one of the fighters in the third bout. He is featured in a photo essay she has been doing on one of the boxing clubs in Jamestown. We rooted for him while another group of spectators beside us rooted against him, chanting, “Die, Rasta, Die!”

The fight went all twelve rounds. The first six were full of good, tight boxing. I was surprised how clearly the sounds carried over the noise of the crowd. We were sitting at least 50 feet from the ring, but each falling blow could be heard; and the early rounds were full of the sharp staccato ksh! of the fighters exhaling with every thrown punch.

After a while things got sloppy. By the ninth round Daniel was lurching around the canvas with his hands down at his sides and his opponent was too tired or too disoriented to hit him. They threw wild haymakers that glanced off each other’s necks and shoulders, and their gloves started to look heavy. Daniel’s shoe came untied and the referee had to call a break. Despite obvious fatigue and the fact that their punches were starting to look desperate, there was still plenty of admirable clobbering going on in the ring. The drama was diminished, though: the dull raw-meat thud of a blow to the midsection while your forehead is buried in your opponent’s chest; the trainers’ violent fanning of the fighters’ faces in between rounds with hand towels. It was hard to keep in mind that these guys were here bashing one another’s heads in for our entertainment.

By the time the judges’ scores were announced, we had seen enough boxing. Daniel lost the fight by unanimous decision.

Children’s Story Fragment

Friday night after the boxing match I came home and ate a few forkfuls of three-bean chili I had left over from cooking the day before. Then I went to bed. That night I dreamed a fragment of a children’s story that has yet to be written. I hope I dream the rest. So far I have:

Lua was a great big blue whale, as big as any whale ever was, maybe bigger. Inside Lua’s mouth lived every single hippopotamus. Every last one, from the greatest to the smallest, from the wisest to the simplest—was there in Lua’s mouth. As for Lua, she lived in the sky, where she did her work moving the clouds. She swam there, pushing the big, white, puffy clouds across the sky with the great smiling curve of her mouth.

2007-10-25T23:23:00.000Z

I was going to write about my typical weekday lunch in an entry called “You’re Invited.” I would have described the rice and beans and stew I eat almost every day at about 12:30. Sometime I’ll get to it; the lunch routine isn’t going anywhere.

Matt told me he would take me to a birthday brunch on Sunday the 7th at Labadi Beach Hotel. He picked me up at 9 and we drove down Ring Road and then along the beach road. We parked in front of the main entrance and walked in. My mind was on eggs and bacon and the tiny glasses of fresh fruit juice they have. Mango and papaya and pineapple. Two steps into the lobby I heard the tune of Happy Birthday being played on the piano. I looked up and saw my mom sitting at the piano bench. You can imagine my surprise.

Well, I didn’t really know what to do. I think I quietly said, “Mom?” She was instantly recognizable in a familiar bright turquoise shirt.

She smiled and got up from the bench. I put down my backpack and gave her a big hug. We all continued to the restaurant.

I wasn’t afraid of waking up and realizing it had all been a dream; but the situation was fragile like looking down and realizing that the floor you’ve been walking on all along is made of lightbulbs. We had a big brunch and a cocktail outside by the pool afterwards.

Of course there were some particulars and real-life things going on. Nobody appears in the lobby of an African hotel just like that. There had been a flight and an itinerary and accommodations and all the other elements of an intercontinental journey. But the effect for me was like waking up to find everything covered with snow. Just like that, magic. Anyway she was here to wish me a happy birthday and she had a black duffel bag with her, full of gifts.

What else can you do but open them? Here on a hotel room bed in Nyaniba Estates, you can tear open brightly-patterned wrapping paper and wad it up and throw it on the floor, and get birthday presents. You can look through the What’s New section of the current issue of Popular Science and talk about the fancy futuristic gadgets in there, things like robot vacuum cleaners. Then you can plan to make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and think about when exactly to poach the four Bosc pears brought along just for that purpose. You might be thinking about the floor made of lightbulbs, and whether or not you’re actually weightless.

From Sunday until Wednesday we stayed in Accra. Mom came to the office and had a chance to see all the people I work with there. Some of them came out after work on Tuesday to a spot overlooking the ocean, and we had drinks and kebabs. Fred was adamant about ordering gizzard kebabs, so we ordered those and some other things, too. She got to eat the lunch of rice and beans and stew that I enjoy almost every day at around 12:30. She agreed that it was good.

We visited Peter (my first Ghanaian friend, the man who opened a snack bar a few months ago) and found that the snack bar was no longer standing. He told us that it had been torn down when vandals struck his house. Peter had intended to sell a portion of his land and hired a broker to manage the sale. Once a buyer had been found and some payment had already been made a serious misunderstanding came to light: the buyer thought he was purchasing all of Peter’s land, but Peter only intended to sell a portion of it. The sale was called off and the buyer was upset, so he sent a gang of thugs to Peter’s house. While he was home, they ran inside and ransacked the place and tore down the snack bar out front while they were at it. Apparently the broker himself was one of the thugs. When we saw Peter he was preparing for a court date. He is hoping to be compensated for the damage.

He has already made plans to reopen the snack bar. This time instead of a wooden structure he has ordered a sturdier, more secure metal container. He will be able to lock his goods and supplies up inside at night. The container will be painted red, white, and blue with the Pepsi logo. He expects to open in time for the Christmas season.

On Thursday afternoon we set off for Lome, the capital of Togo, about 100 miles east of Accra. We planned to leave in the early afternoon so we wouldn’t have to travel too much in the dark, but we had to wait almost an hour for the tro-tro to fill before leaving the station. The first two hours of the ride are over smooth, well-paved roads; but after crossing the Volta River at Sogakope the route is not so good. The tro-tro lurched and listed and swerved, and sometimes dipped a wheel into a deep pothole with a big, hard clunk and the whole vehicle shuddered. Mom described the seat as “a piece of plywood covered with a quarter inch of low-density foam” and she was right. The second half of the ride was like riding down a long wooden staircase on a piece of wax paper.

On the way I bought two loaves of bread through the window of the tro-tro while we were stopped. When we got to the immigration office at the border I gave them to the Ghanaian officers hoping the gesture would be a feather in my cap when they examined my visa, which was six weeks out of date. I thought the bread looked doughy and it felt like a soft pretzel when I poked it, but they liked it well enough to ignore the visa infraction altogether. So in the end I traded the bread for free passage, and that was a good trade for me. I’d say it’s on the order of trading a couple of saltines for a strawberry ice cream cone.

Once we were over the border Mom and I got to dust off the old French skills, which worked well enough to get us to a hotel with all our belongings minus four dollars.

Friday we spent the day walking around the city. Unbeknownst to us it was a Lome tripleheader: the last day of campaigning for legislative elections to be held Sunday, the pre-party for a soccer match against Mali that night, and preparations for Eid al-Fitr, the celebration marking the end of Ramadan. The streets were full of people in red and people in yellow (the colors of the two biggest political parties) having parades. Thousands of yellow plastic whistles had been distributed on account of the soccer match and people were blowing them nonstop as if they had never seen a whistle before. What’s this? Looks like everyone else is just blowing into this little slot…WOW! All that sound from this tiny thing? WOW! Just as much sound as the first time! WOW! It doesn’t run out! And so on. They didn’t tire of the whistles, and that gave the day a celebratory air.

We also walked across the beach that bounds the city to the south and dipped our feet in the Atlantic. The beach is hundreds of yards wide and, except for two neat rows of palm trees by the main road, completely bare. The only other people out there roasting in the sun were sweepers, sweeping the sand with regular bristle brooms. It was a big job they were up against: square miles’ worth of empty beach and not a trash can in sight.

The main market was not unlike Ghanaian markets. One big difference was the availability of couscous. A woman had a Tupperware bowl full of grey-white shards about the size of dimes. They looked like pieces of rock. We asked her what they were for and she made a motion as if to eat one. I told her, “I’m going to try it,” so I went ahead and ate one. It was just chalk.

That night we ate one of the best meals I’ve had on this continent. Tortilla chips and salsa, fattouch salad, a thin crust pizza, and a nutella and banana crepe for dessert. Also Belgian beer. The restaurant was outside in a courtyard with big trees and was gently lit by lamps covered by brightly-colored fabric shades in geometric shapes.

Sunday the week was up and I went with Mom to the airport to see her off.

I can’t find a good way to explain how happy I was that week. Imagine a day where you get four new packs of baseball cards and get to stop at 7-11 for a slurpee on the way home, and go waterskiing and then to the beach where the waves are big enough to body surf, then at night you get the brass ring on the merry-go-round. After a while you’d just think the whole world was full of only the best things.

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Last Friday I took a taxi from the office back to my house and I could tell that the driver was a nice guy. I knew it from the way he smiled and made conversation. On the way I asked him to wait for a minute while I bought some biscuits at the roadside. He happily pulled over and told me to take my time, he would turn the car around while I was buying the biscuits. When I finished he pulled up and we continued towards the house.

I told him, “I like the way you drive. I can tell you are in no hurry. I like that.”

He smiled very big at this and chuckled a little bit, and replied, “One night you will go to sleep and you won’t wake up. Any night you might go to sleep and you won’t wake up tomorrow. Once you realize that, why hurry? I am fifty-eight years old and I am doing what I love to do. Whatever small money I can take, that is God’s gift and I thank Him.” His words, and the whole car and everything in it, were filled with his smiling.

2007-09-30T13:50:00.000Z

Monday morning I left the house at the regular time, around 7:40. My house is at the back of a compound beside a small potholed lane. Beyond is a strip of dirt and high mangy grass and trees, then a wide and deep sewer channel with angled cement walls, and then Ring Road, where I catch a taxi each morning. I walked across the lane and the dirt strip and crossed the sewer on the same rickety wooden span as always. That left me on the shoulder of the southbound side of Ring Road, where I waited for a break in traffic and walked to the grassy median, then across the two northbound lanes to the other shoulder.

That’s how I get to the spot where I catch a taxi. Here you say “pick a taxi” instead of “catch a taxi”. The walk takes less than two minutes in all.

Taxis have no meters and I always negotiate the price in advance. Just about every weekday I take a taxi from my house to the office, and every time I pay 20,000 cedis. You might say that the price of that taxi ride is 20,000 cedis. But every morning we play a game, me and Taxi Driver X. The opening is simple and strictly-choreographed like a good, clean box step. He pulls over to the shoulder with the passenger window rolled down and I begin.

“Good morning, sir. How?”

“Fine. You?”

“Fine, thank you. I’m going to Accra, Wato side, near Post Office.”

“Accra Post Office. Hmm.”

“I will pay twenty.”

Normally this is where the game really takes off, but Monday morning’s Taxi Driver X immediately tipped his king and emptied his pockets. “Sit down,” he said, and I did. It was as easy as taking a ripe banana from a bunch.

We set off north on Ring Road and the driver made pleasant conversation. His car was neat inside and he kept the radio turned down low. The ride was a sweet piece of hard candy twist-wrapped in purple cellophane. He made an inexplicable U-turn, but I had total confidence.

It became clear that he was taking the High St route, through Accra’s biggest construction project. A two-lane road is being widened to four. It’s due to finish eight months ago or some other time, whichever comes first. For now the westbound lane is buried under the rubble of a sewer excavation. The two uncompleted lanes are a flattened bed of cracked clay soil and silty sand. They are so busy being used a diversion for the westbound traffic that there is no time to pave them.

On a hot, dry morning like Monday’s, a heavy cloud of fine dust and exhaust drapes itself over the construction zone, too lazy to get up and go to work. We crawled along westward. Somewhere near the Supreme Court Taxi Driver X shifted into neutral and the engine died. Immediately the cars behind erupted in a honking chorus. The sweet hard candy ride became ashes in my mouth. When it refused to start again Taxi Driver X jumped out and ran to the back to begin pushing, leaving the steering wheel unattended. Realizing his mistake he called me to the back to push while he took care of steering. The well-dressed obruni pushing a car through the choking cloud attracts laughter and calls of “Pusher! Pusher!”

After a short distance Taxi Driver X took pointed the car at a driveway to a vast dirt lot on the other side of the road. The car rolled dumb and heavy through the lane of slowly-oncoming traffic like a big, misshapen pumpkin that wins no ribbons at the State Fair.

Now sweaty and in a foul mood, I prepared to pay the driver half the fare and walk the rest of the way to work. But he didn’t have any change and suggested that I try and get some from the men hanging around the tro-tros in the dirt lot. One of them made change for me and I turned back to see the driver pushing the car down a natural incline to the corner of the lot farthest from the road. He had made over a hundred yards in those three minutes and was still pushing himself and his car away from me.

When I caught up with him I asked him why he was trying to escape from his paying customer. “The car, if I leave it there they will worry me.” I guess I wasn’t really expecting a better answer; anyway it was not necessary to look any deeper into the identity of “they” or the nature of “worry”. His response was a forgettable breakfast of plain crackers. There were no bacon and eggs underneath. I gave Taxi Driver X 12,000 cedis and began the walk back to the road. He ran after me to complain. My pants were sticking to my shins. It was around 8:05.

Approaching work I found that Josephine the Breakfast Woman had not come that day. On a wooden table in the car park across the street from the office she prepares bread with margarine, Laughing Cow cheese, marmalade, or fried eggs, and delivers it to the office when it’s ready. She also makes tea, coffee, and Milo (a chocolaty hot breakfast drink from Nestle). If she’s there I buy 2,000 cedis of bread and one triangle of cheese, and if she’s not there I usually don’t eat breakfast. But I was hungry from the pushing and walking and had been looking forward to placing my order. Disappointment made my briefcase heavier and its strap dug into my shoulder as I crossed the street towards the office.

As I reached the first floor landing I saw Josephine’s daughter Rachel in her school uniform carrying a wicker basket full of polythene bags. She called me over, poked around in the basket, chose a bag, and handed it to me. “My mom couldn’t come today but she made yours.” It was the usual small microns-thin black plastic bag, its handles tied into a tiny intractable knot. Stapled to the bag was a small strip of paper ripped from a ruled sheet. There was my name, “JAKE”, written on the strip in pencil. Inside was my bread and cheese.

That bread and cheese was a good breakfast, and it was also a sponge that wiped the whole day clean as a smooth countertop. The morning’s events flew right off like dry crumbs.

At precisely noon every weekday a siren moans over Accra Central. It sounds just like my idea of an air raid alert: a low, quiet start that crescendos as it slides up to the main pitch. That pitch sits there for a few seconds, open like a cartoon mouth in the downward-U shape of the entrance to a dark tunnel, with no teeth or tongue visible. It is a hollow, vaulted, echoing sound. To me it has come to mean lunch.

George and I walked out the back entrance of the office and around to the street. The building next door is four stories high like ours. At noon on Monday its front was obscured by a clutter of rickety scaffolding. All the way up by the roof two men teetered on a precarious platform of loose boards. They leaned against the wall of the building with chisels and mallets, tink tink tink—pause—crisp woody crack of breaking pottery. They were chiseling tiles off the cement façade of the building. Once free from the façade the tiles and mortar didn’t waste any time. They got right on falling and shattering on the sidewalk below. Some rotated and toppled gracefully and others just bombed straight down without any acrobatics.

So their performances varied, but the finale was always the same: every piece of falling debris hit the sidewalk and flew apart. No kind of barrier had been erected around the scaffolding, so the general downtown public was free to participate. You could watch debris fall down and shatter from any vantage point you wished. You could stand directly underneath the scaffolding if you were feeling adventurous.

It was necessary to make some adjustments. Anybody who wanted to walk past the building and avoid the debris, for example, had to make a wide arc into oncoming traffic. The man who sells mobile phones and accessories out of a glass-paneled wooden case along the sidewalk there smartly set up shop behind a low cinderblock wall. That kept his goods out of harm’s way. Still, not many customers had come by that day. He knew they were being driven away by the threat of injury and was annoyed about the construction work, but didn’t see any good solution. He summarized his assessment with a scowl and a disapproving shake of the head: “You know these boys. They get thousand cedis and they would bring something new. Who for complain? They think they are big men.”

George and I watched a few more pieces of debris fall and then swung a wide arc into the road on the way to the lunchtime rice vendor.

2007-09-14T11:48:00.000Z

Most taxi drivers in Accra decorate the rear windows of their cars with stick-on letters in wavy fonts. A good portion of the messages are in a local language (usually Twi), and the majority are religious—usually either direct Bible quotes or chapter and verse references. Some are otherwise. “Shut Up” and “Respect the Hustlers” are two of my favorites.

But one taxi stands out. I have seen it three times, always a momentary glimpse as it darts off onto some impossible side street. Fortunately my friend Matt is keener and nimbler than I; when the elusive beast showed itself he was ready. Here it is:

What does it mean? Is it an algebraic statement? A garbled sentence of symbolic logic? Pure philosophy? Monkeys at typewriters? Three ideas:

(1) “Don’t worry about what anybody else is doing; take care of business.” This reading was suggested by Amanda Johnson, who works at the desk opposite mine. Different people see the world in different ways, but each of us is at the center of his own universe. The clause “If 7 + 2 is = to 11” is the logical conclusion of the fact of difference: in the extreme case, everyone else agrees (and what is that but a universal law?) that 7 + 2 = 11. However disconcerting this may be, the second half of the sentence still follows. One is stuck in one’s own universe always and everywhere, and only through one’s tireless effort and action does it keep from total collapse and the annihilation of its very center. There are mouths to feed and bills to pay, laws and conventions notwithstanding.

(2) “Math is for the birds.” This is probably the straightest reading. Exploiting the lack of punctuation, we can invert to get “Who cares if 7 + 2 is = to 11”. But, in my view, this interpretation can be rejected on aesthetic grounds alone.

(3) “Conventions are the glue that holds the universe together.” Read “If 7 + 2 is = to 11, then who cares?” Indeed. If the most fundamental truths were violated, who would care about anything? If the sun rose from the west and the sky turned orange, would we not devour ourselves in a massive primal orgy? Would Starbucks fail to open on time? More precisely, if our most fundamental truths are actually false, then we are utterly lost, here and now. I suppose this is simply a variation on (1). Here the “If 7 + 2…” is taken to be a “real” fact (how did we get it wrong?); and we are so helpless in our misperception that the universe threatens to cave in.

The Twi phrase “Efa Wo Ho Ben?” simultaneously supports (1) and undermines the entire exercise. It translates: “Is it your concern?” Reinforcement, or meta-commentary? Never underestimate the subtlety of Ghanaian taxi drivers.

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It seems like more and more planes pass over the roof of my house. They make a noise like an angry milk steamer. I usually imagine a big ravenous machine mouth with gnashing metal teeth, furiously eating its way across the sky.

2007-09-03T08:19:00.000Z

Three weeks ago today I was back at Safari Beach Lodge. The day was hot and bright. Pamela and I walked a couple miles down the beach to the point, climbed around on the rocks, and walked back. We ate as well as ever and after dinner Saturday we went for a short stroll. The night was very dark and the foam from the breaking waves rolled in and spread smooth arcs down the beach like bunting of rich white velvet. It seemed to glow. Phosphorescents in the sand set off pinprick flashes of green light with every step that burned and died quickly in our footprints.

If it seems like a dream, maybe it was. Safari is a real place, but the times I’ve been there the elements have always conspired to make it seem otherwise. The fact is that all you have to do is show up; then sometime during dinner once it’s dark you look up from your kingfish and see the paths winding through the palms from the main building to the bungalows, and all along the paths are little posts with oil lanterns hanging on them. Beyond the lanterns’ light there might be nothing at all but the soft rumbling of the waves and the clatter of palm fronds in the breeze. Your thoughts haven’t ventured beyond the ends of the long, curved beach since you arrived. It could just as well be an island in your mind.

We were back in Accra by Sunday night, picking our way through the cacophony of honking and lurching vans at Circle, eventually jamming ourselves into a tro-tro bound for Danquah Circle. Back to “reality”.

The real purpose of this entry is to say a little bit about my friend Aziz Mohammed (at right above). He is a member of the Africana dance troupe, which I’ve written about before. I knew him only in that capacity until Cathy came to visit in the spring. The two of them were fast friends and they kept in touch after she left. When I returned home in July Cathy gave me some money to take to him. She said it was a contribution towards his AIDS education program.

That was the first I had heard of it. Aziz explained it to me when I next saw him: for the past 18 months he has been working with a group of about 30 kids (mostly teenagers) from a section of Accra near where he lives. His main goal in organizing the group was to give the members a safe, wholesome place to go and a positive community to belong to (think Boys & Girls Club); in addition he has tried to spread the good word about sexual and reproductive health.

Most of the kids come from Nima, a predominantly-Muslim neighborhood. Two-thirds of them are girls. According to Aziz, some of them, and many of their peers from the neighborhood, have been pulled out of school early—or never attended at all—so they could earn money. Typically such a girl would spend the day at the roadside walking up and down with a tray on her head selling fruit or water sachets. Most of them will marry young and start having children in their early twenties. They will spend most of their young-adult and adult lives contributing to Ghana’s astronomical fertility rate.

Aziz isn’t a doctor or a public health professional, though—he’s a dancer (see above). Fortunately, the kids prefer dancing to lectures on sexual health. So that’s what they do for a few hours, a couple afternoons each week. They meet at the Nima/Mamobi Learning Center, a spiffy new building recently erected by a Canadian NGO. Inside is a performance space with a stage, a sound booth controlling two powerful speakers, and a full backstage area. The Center’s director agreed to let the group use the facility for free. At a typical weekday meeting, small subgroups learn and rehearse dance routines that Aziz choreographs. Mostly they dance to recorded music, but sometimes Aziz (who is also a drummer) is joined by some percussionists from Africana to provide a live soundtrack. Many of these are “dance dramas”—stories told in words and movements—that illustrate issues in sexual and reproductive health.

Every few months Aziz puts together a program to give the group a chance to perform and to try and spread the word to the community at large. Normally he picks a theme for each program. The last one was about AIDS. Hoping to draw a large crowd, he put up posters around town and asked the principals of local schools to mention the program to their students. He wrote an invitation to his District Assemblyman (a local elected official (roughly the equivalent of a borough president) and went to the Ghana AIDS Commission to request that they send a representative to speak, or at least provide some of the pamphlets and booklets they had given out in the past. In order to avoid any suspicion that he was out to make a profit, he was adamant about asking for non-financial support. (The money to put on the programs comes out of his own savings, plus voluntary donations.)

His District Assemblyman never replied to the invitation, but Aziz visited his office in person and was assured that he would attend. The AIDS Commission also agreed to send someone to give a short lecture on AIDS prevention. But when the day came, the Assemblyman didn’t. Neither did the speaker. Watching the room fill up with neighborhood kids, Aziz tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with the AIDS Commission and eventually dashed across town in a taxi to the office, where he was told that they had never heard of his group or its request.

This all came as a crushing blow. Here was a completely homegrown and genuine effort to improve the community, ignored by the very institutions whose job it is to encourage and support such programs. Through Africana’s interactions with (mostly do-gooding) foreigners, especially its close relationship with the Canadian volunteer placement organization Volunteer Abroad, Aziz knows how much support there is (in word, if not in deed) in the broader development community for programs like his own; but this was a local project, and he had hoped to show that the local community was behind it. No number of well-meaning foreigners can stand in for a District Assemblyman. Advice about AIDS prevention plainly sounds different when it comes from someone who knows the environment in which her audience lives. (It could also be given in Twi.)

But this isn’t a sob story, though Aziz did get heated when he told it to me. After the AIDS program he considered disbanding the group but decided against it. “The kids love it,” he said. He is certainly not a martyr—he really enjoys teaching dancing and watching the kids improve. Above all, he completely avoids the extremes of cynicism and self-righteousness. He speaks with Zen-like clarity and directness about the whole situation. “I know it is a good thing we are doing. We are helping each other. Even though we can’t get the support we need, we will keep trying.”

Two weeks ago Saturday we sat together in the Learning Center while the group rehearsed. That’s when he told me all of the background information above. While he spoke he watched the dancers out of the corner of his eye, occasionally yelling some instructions or clapping at the end of a routine.

Everyone wanted to get it right because they were preparing for another program coming up in a week. This time the theme was “Send the Girl Child to School” and Aziz wasn’t relying on any external assistance (though he made good use of Cathy’s and my donations). He hand-wrote flyers on the backs of glossy posters he found around town and put them up in the neighborhood. Because no one was coming to speak, he added an extended drama piece about girls’ education. He also took me up on my offer to make copies of a half-page typed handout about the importance sending girls to school. In order to increase the participation and get the word out, he personally invited dance groups from local schools.

Last Saturday was the big day. I arrived at the Center around 10am, the advertised starting time, and found the performance space filled with rows of empty wooden folding chairs. There was room for at least 200 people to sit. The program hadn’t started yet, and by 11:30 there were still only a few seats filled. The emcee finally took the stage and announced that the show would be starting soon. But while we waited, wouldn’t we like to see a little dance contest? For the next 45 minutes audience members took the stage three at a time and danced to blaring, fuzzy music (mostly it was P-squared’s “Al-haji”, an Ivorian song that, to me, is the aural equivalent of getting hit square on the head over and over with a mallet). Winners were declared by the applause and hollering of the sparse audience. It seemed like a wash-out.

Once the contest ended I roused myself from the stupor induced by the repetition of that awful song and got my bearings. Many more seats were filled. Aziz was introduced and talked for a couple minutes about the program and its message. Considering the way I’ve seen him throw himself around a stage during Africana rehearsals and performances, he seemed remarkably shy speaking in front of an audience. “Let’s get to the dancing!” he said, and out they came.

Most of the next four hours were filled with hip hop and R&B numbers, with a few notable exceptions. Three girls read poems they had written. There was a longer dance drama about a girl taken out of school to sell pineapples who is then raped by some delinquent boys from her class; the story ends when she discovers she has AIDS. There was also a more uplifting short play in which a mother recounts to her daughters her own struggle to get an education. When her father insists on sending her dimwitted brothers to school instead of her (reprimanding her that she should be in the kitchen), she and her supportive mother walk out. She endures her mother’s untimely death and the prejudice of both her teachers and her classmates, and through a mix of patience and tenacity finally becomes a doctor. Both the dance drama and the short play were shot through with comedy, and the audience—which by that time had grown to over a hundred people, mostly teenaged girls—was thoroughly engaged throughout.

After an incredible ballet piece by Aziz and some of the Africana dancers (where did they learn that?), the program was over. When I walked out, most of the 200 handouts were gone, hopefully bound for the audience members’ homes.

Aziz was also in a hurry, rushing across town to the Trade Fair to perform with Africana at a “Fit for Life” program. But he stopped to thank me for coming and to invite me to an Awards Dinner that night. “The kids have done such a great job. We want to recognize them,” he said.

At 8pm back at the Center, after an hour-long performance at Trade Fair and another mad dash across town, Aziz was exhausted, nearly asleep but running around making sure the food was arriving, popping caps off bottles of soda, joking with the kids, sliding across the stage lip-syncing to an R&B ballad. I didn’t see him sit down once. By the end of the night his energy, and his savings, were utterly depleted from the events of the day. But his spirit was plainly not. Instead he seemed to be fueled by the expression of gratitude for others’ efforts. He thanked the kids and gave out awards to some of the dancers and thanked the Canadian woman for the use of the space and even thanked me, “our special guest from the US”, much to my embarrassment. It would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so utterly and obviously genuine.

I have often been told that those fortunate enough to have plenty should give some back. Among other things, it has engendered some sense of obligation to share some of mine with them. I think it is different with Aziz. What he gets is ours before it is his at all. But this analysis fails to capture the spirit of what he’s doing; at any rate he doesn’t articulate it in these terms. He makes it simpler. Here are some good kids and I have an opportunity to share something nice with them. They might even come out better for it. So let’s do it. What’s so complicated about that?

Do you love Aziz yet? I will be happy to forward any questions, comments, responses, expressions of admiration, etc, his way. Just email jacob.appel@gmail.com.

2007-07-28T18:48:00.000Z

Home Again

I practically ran from the customs check out into a muggy Friday afternoon in the bowels of Terminal 4, JFK. Winding up around a helix towards the Airtrain station it was white face after white face and I was bouncing along with Medeski, Martin and Wood. The pack on my back weighed nothing. There is an elevator that climbs two stories from ground level to the platform. It is a shiny glass box. The platform is scrolling LED banners and a cheery bing! announcing the arrival of each sleek monorail snake. Last stop on the Airtrain is Jamaica station, transfer to the subway and the LIRR. But first you need a ticket.

Great banks of touchscreen Metrocard machines stood empty waiting for poking fingers; bing! and the hall was instantly inundated by the passengers from the Airtrain. They formed orderly lines behind each machine. I stepped up and was walleyed—I’ve bought a thousand Metrocards but only for the subway. Besides, it was all discrete options: Refill or New Card? Airtrain+Metrocard or just Airtrain? I asked the man at the machine next to mine but he was equally confused. We were both strangers. Around us people approached the machines confidently, danced through the options, and marked the time while their debit cards processed with anxious foot-tapping. I wanted to tell someone, “I need to get to Penn Station. How should I go?” But this was a time for the poker face. Aware of holding up those behind me, I sheepishly canceled my transaction and walked back to the end of the line to watch what the others did.

The second time around I got a card and walked through a futuristic gliding two-paned gate that opened and shut in perfect silence.

The LIRR train was full of people heading into the city for a night out, dressed up, drinking brown-bagged cans of beer, talking a mile a minute in thick Long Island accents. I felt like I knew everyone on board.

The man in the seat in front of me takes Fridays off in the summers and usually spends them with his son; but tonight he was meeting “the boys”. He was sitting with three women friends he had run into on the train. They were on the way to a girls’ night out. Their banter was incredible—Work is slow and How’s Bobby and Gawd, that night don’t remind me. They seemed to manage a comprehensive review of the months since they had seen each other last.

(You might remember from an earlier posting this story about Oti: Driving through the neighborhood he spotted someone walking and, seeming excited, pulled over to greet him. “Charlie, How?” “Fine. You.” “Fine.” “Nice.” And we drove away. A few seconds later Oti said, “That was my good friend. I haven’t seen him in years!”)

Next, the incredible herd moving through Penn Station and onto the subway platform. In Accra I have a basic policy of looking twice at any obruni I see on the street. The ex-pat community is small and incestuous enough that I have a fair chance of knowing a random white face in town. The technique doesn’t play as well in New York. Ambling down the platform I looked half a dozen people up and down thinking, Don’t I know you? Were we in a class together sophomore year? Or maybe I was just looking for that glint of recognition in the great underground hive of anonymity. The subway! Nobody met my eyes.

Got off at 18^th St and walked up to street level where I approached a punkish girl dressed in denim and black with spiky hair and asked to borrow her cellphone (mine had a dead battery). She happily assented. Glancing up the west side the block (8^th Ave between 16^th and 17^th) I counted four restaurants: Thai, Mexican, sandwiches and wraps, and a diner. Exactly none of those foods is available in Accra.

Two hours later I was walleyed again in the great hall of Grand Central Station. I stepped up to the ticket window and spoke to a real person: “One-way to East Norwalk, please.” “What?” “Just one single, one-way to East Norwalk, please.” “No East Norwalk.” “Oh. I thought there was a train at 9:17.” “Not to East Norwalk.” “Is there any train that stops there?” “No.” “Um…” “Listen, there’s no station at East Norwalk. Where do you want to go?” “Well, it’s one of the Norwalks.” “Not East.” “Okay, what Norwalks are there?” “The 9:17 stops at South Norwalk and West Norwalk.” “Well…South Norwalk then.” “Ten twenty-five.” I only had a twenty. “Sorry, I don’t have a quarter.” He was visibly irritated; there was a line behind me. By the time I got my change I had taken at least 90 seconds in total.

I have never been a good golfer and this vacation was no exception. But a couple miles’ walk with my dad, uncle, and cousin on the verdant green carpet of the Weekapaug while the morning sun burned the dew off the back nine—golf didn’t have much to do with it. We returned home to a table erupting with bagels, cheese, five kinds of smoked fish, fruit, juice, and coffee. I ate a bagel cut in quarters with a different kind of cheese melted on each piece. On the porch we talked and read the newspaper; some of us fell asleep in hammocks or Adirondack chairs. There are spots in the shade and spots in the sun, and spots under a leafy tree that provide some of both. Out in front of the house the bay was full of ripples.

After the weekend we went back to Montclair where I slept in my own bed, sat on the swing on the front porch late at night, played the piano, and ticked off the episodes of the final Sopranos season On Demand.

The night of July 3^rd was the annual campout at Caumsett State Park on the north shore of Long Island. Five of us rode Rich’s Buick down the dirt track to the fishing beach. We set up camp just before the sun set and started the charcoal going. Some time later the park security came and made us take down our tents, but by then we were a couple beers deep, eating sausages and watching across the Sound as nine simultaneous fireworks displays bloomed over the Connecticut coast. We weren’t going anywhere. The night was a success. In the end we rolled out our sleeping bags in the open and got ravaged by sand fleas.

Returning to the parking lot in the morning dragging coolers, tents, and trash bags, we found the Buick under investigation by official types who wanted to revoke Rich’s fishing permit. Adam, far and away the best negotiator in the group, made an effort at damage control, but his overtures were roundly rejected by a smug officer not much older than ourselves. Growing tired of our appeals, he addressed all of us: “Hey, I could give you all summonses for trespassing. How would you like that?” As we looked around blankly (How could one reply? Oh, please, anything but that! We’re so sorry!) I think he realized how much of an ass he was being. His demeanor changed and his chest deflated slightly under his blue uniform. They took the permit and sent us on our way.

On the weekend we went back up to Rhode Island and to the bay full of ripples. It was late one night and four of us shoved off in a rowboat. The bay was quiet and dark except for a bright spotlight shining from beyond the golf course that runs along the eastern shore. At times it seemed to follow us. For a while we rowed towards the sandbar hoping to walk around, but after a few minutes of hard pulling in the channel found that we were fighting against an incoming tide, going nowhere. Instead we turned and made for the house and found ourselves assaulted again by the squinting, bright-white ember of the spotlight. A row of young evergreen trees along the edge of the golf course obstructed the beam, and the light played through like rays from a UFO. My cousin said, “I’ll do a monologue on the light.”

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call:

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

On the way in the oars lapped the water like wooden tongues and the oarlocks squawked with each stroke. When the boat crunched up against the sand we got out and fixed the stern line to a cleat, then heaved the anchor out into the bay where it landed with a hearty plop. I could hear my aunts’ and uncles’ voices on the porch, desultory conversation and laughter.

Wednesday night I was back in New York on 19^th St near 5^th Avenue. I met my friend outside her office building and we walked to Madison Square. There was a small, open tent set up and about a hundred folding chairs, and the warbling sound of a Hammond organ. It was the Lonnie Smith trio, playing a free concert as part of the park’s summer series. We found a bench next to a lawn dominated by a large sculpture that looked like a big, leafless tree dipped in liquid silver. The Flatiron building glowed in soft evening light. I felt full to the brim and perfectly light, as if I had taken a deep breath of spearmint-sharp air that filled up my whole body down to the tips of my toes.

My aunt once wrote, “I feel like a balloon on the fingertips of everyone I’ve ever loved,” and mostly I felt so buoyant. But my family also gives hugs as filling as Thanksgiving dinner, and I had many helpings. They say you can never go home again, but they’re wrong.

2007-07-21T18:28:00.000Z

It’s a long way to Kintampo. From the State Transport Company (STC) office near Circle in Accra, we waded through the morning traffic and took the northbound spoke, heading away from the city. Our first break was about two hours later at the Linda Dor rest stop, where the same GHC 1,000 can buy you a piss in a fetid urinal or a tasty fresh orange.

Another four hours and we were at the STC depot in Kumasi. Fifteen minutes’ stop to stretch and use the facilities and we were on the road again. But this time we didn’t make it more than 200 meters before the attendant stood up in the aisle and announced, “There has been a small fault with the clutch. We will return to the yard to have it fixed very well. We are sorry for the delay.” Stepping off into the midday heat at the depot I was sure it would be at least an hour. Imagine my surprise when we the big powder-blue bus lumbered out of the service hangar just 15 minutes later. We were back on and moving in no time.

Four hours later it was beginning to get dark as we turned into the Mandatory STC stop in Kintampo. A few minutes after I stepped off, a lone white face walked in among the myriad sellers of mango and pure water and bread and phone cards in that dusty lot. It was Pamela.

We bought bananas and a loaf of bread and walked up a hill along a paved street gouged with deep potholes. There were more potholes than street. It looked like someone had taken a giant mellon-baller to the road and stopped when he couldn’t get any more good chunks. At either side of the road was a canyon etched deep and smooth into the red clay by the rushing water of northern rainy seasons. In some places it was five feet deep. All along the length were rickety plank bridges leading to the houses on each side of the street. Goats and sheep in a variety of sizes and colors crossed our path.

Reaching the crest of the hill we came to the campus of the Health Research Center, a pleasant collection of one- and two-story buildings sprawled across grassy fields. One of these is a big, square two-story affair surrounding a large courtyard (more than 100’ square). The courtyard is bounded by two levels of railed walkways. When we walked in, these were draped most of the way around with laundry. The place was bustling with people talking and playing portable radios. Young girls floated through, making circuits of the perimeter balancing wide, shallow plastic basins on their heads. They were selling pure water sachets.

In Accra water sellers say: “Jahhhs pyi’awtahh.” (“Just pure water.”)

In Kintampo they say: “Pee-yooo waytahh.” (“Pure water.”)

Pamela had already bought pure water, though, so we didn’t take any. She had also bought beautiful red/green mangoes—for GHC 2,000 ($0.20) each!—which she cut expertly with a small machete she bought in town.

The next morning we assembled a lunch of fresh oranges, boiled groundnuts, and groundnut paste, honey, and banana sandwiches (local PBJ?) and made for the falls. Kintampo is the district capital of the Kintampo North district of the Brong Ahafo region. They’re not just handing out those district seats, either. The Kintampo falls, a few short kilometers up the road, are known throughout the country. When I mentioned to people at work that I was planning to visit the city, almost all of them advised me that the falls are a must. (Strangely, none of them had ever seen them before. “What would I be doing in Kintampo?” they asked.)

The falls have three stages. The first, farthest upstream, is a big overhanging rock shelf. Water flows over the lip and falls about ten feet, then disappears underneath a garden of large smooth boulders. The water seems to have been swallowed whole by the ground, but it emerges about 20 meters downstream, coursing up from its underground tunnel.

It’s a short walk to stage two, an extremely modest rapid whose report is an easy conversation of gurgles and slurps. Continuing downstream on a path parallel to the water, one reaches the top of a meandering cement stairway. From the ground 152 steps below, stage three of the falls announces itself with a healthy roar as a big rock shelf with a coat of slippery, shaggy black fur breaks the river’s sixty-foot dive. There was nobody else there.

We climbed up the shelf and sat right under the falling water. It was a hard, beating force on my shoulders and the top of my head. I had a laughing fit and I’m not sure why. That water, it just kept pounding down and I sat there soaked dead through, imagining how incredibly wet I was getting, and it seemed like the funniest thing. It’s a long time since I had a laughing fit like that.

Pamela slid down the furry shelf to the pool below and I scooted down in an awkward crab walk. The water was cool but not cold. Near one edge of the pool there was a rock with a perfectly flat rectangular face that sat like a tabletop a foot out of the water. We each did a sun salutation, then dried off and walked back up the 152 stairs to our taxi, waiting at the entrance to the falls park.

Next stop was Fuller Falls, a smaller and less-well-known landmark west of Kintampo. We rode the taxi 10km down a good dirt road to a wooden gate and waited. A few minutes later a man rode up on a bicycle and unlocked it for GHC 40,000. Then it was another 2km on a rough, winding dirt track to the parking area. The falls were beautified by a group of Catholic priests living in the area. A minute’s walk down the trail is a gently-sloping walkway of fieldstone set in cement. It leads to the edge of the pool at the foot of the falls and opens into a sort of stone patio overlooking the water. There are benches and tables and planters of the same stone and the whole thing seems to be a single, continuous surface tucked into the forest. It reminded me of the Parc Guell in Barcelona.

The falls are broad and not very high. We had just begun to wade into the pool when it began to rain. Fearing that our escape route would quickly become impassable, we hurried back to the parking lot. Our taxi was a Kia Tico (stands for Totally Inadequate Car-like Object), a very common vehicle in Ghana. Imagine a toddler’s crayon vision of a SmartCar: a big box for the body, a small box for the hood, and wheels the size of dessert plates. Incredibly, it managed to negotiate the treacherous dirt track to the main road. Constantly using one hand to wipe down the fogged-up windows with a dirty rag, the driver eased it through long, deep pools and straddled coursing muddy canyons all the way to the wooden gate, then ably navigated the dirt road back up the hill to the outskirts of town and the Health Research Center. When we got back to Pamela’s room we ate some boiled groundnuts.

The rain let up in the late afternoon and we set out westward on foot towards the descending sun. After about thirty minutes we turned back and watched the sunset from a paved road in town just over the crest of the hill. The sky was mostly clear by then and there were scalloped cirrus clouds high overhead and wispy stratus clouds beyond. They changed from white to pale salmon pink and we continued back to the campus.

Being so close to the equator, night in Ghana falls quickly and at almost the same time every day. Around 6:30 the sun sets and by 6:50 it is dark. Kintampo offers very little in the way of manmade artifice—floodlights, drinking spots with devastating stereo systems—to interfere with night’s abrupt descent or with the envelope of quiet licked by the disappearing sun and pressed shut by chirping and rustling nighttime sounds. When the power is on, the dormitory’s courtyard is alive with the sound of radios and televisions and, occasionally, a student rally; but the din is swaddled in a heavy darkness. We went to bed around 9pm.

Sunday morning we steeled ourselves for the ten-hour ride to Accra. The STC lumbered into the station almost on schedule and we boarded. It was cool and miraculously quiet. No radio, no Nigerian movies. No movies at all, actually. It was delightful. Around 9pm we were back at my house. The air-con has never felt cooler. And the vast array of restaurants to choose from; the fancy grocery stores (two!) with imported cheeses, the wide, smooth main drags; the traffic; the dank air heavy with acrid exhaust fumes and smoke from trash fires; the 24-hour internet café.

The vast majority of Ghanaians live in towns or villages much smaller—and with fewer amenities—than Kintampo. The Accra I inhabit is living abroad lite. I know because I’m typing this paragraph from a palatial house with broadband internet, a big lush yard, satellite TV, hot water, air-con everywhere, a microwave, and hardwood floors. (I’m housesitting.) It’s good to be comfortable, great to be pampered, and easy to forget the rest. Who knew myopia would be crouching in the shadows of the Dark Continent, waiting to pounce?

(Note: My trip to Kintampo took place before my vacation back home. For more on being pampered, wait for the next installment!)

2007-06-09T21:26:00.000Z

Better Late than Never

Long time since my last post—sorry for the delay.

In an earlier post I mentioned our stay in paradise at the Green Turtle Lodge on the beach near Dixcove. If that was contentment’s lodging, the Safari Beach Lodge, a few hundred meters to the east along the same soft sand, is its penthouse. Just opened in January by an American couple, it is a collection of neat self-contained bungalows with thatch roofs and shutter doors of dark wood that open out onto a sandy grove of palms. The sea breeze blows through, rustling the fronds with the same lazy clatter of falling rain.

We arrived around 5:30 on Friday afternoon, in time to place our orders for dinner and take a swim. The water is velvety smooth and the waves break hard. There is a strong current pulling to the east and it makes a hollow wet vacuum sound around your legs as the wash from one big wave is greedily sucked back to topple and crash with the next.

Dinner was lamb steak with a sweet balsamic reduction and a colorful tower of sliced roasted vegetables. Cloth napkins, oil lanterns, heavy silverware, big clean white plates, real wine glasses, and the breeze. After eating we walked along the beach. There was lightning in and behind the clouds striking every few seconds, and the whole enormous sky would light up silently in pale, pale yellow and blue-gray, revealing a vast landscape of clouds. It looked like the first light of morning. We turned back and came eventually to the bungalow, where we rinsed the sand off our feet in the outdoor shower and stepped inside.

Less than a minute later the rains came: mighty and exquisite pouring, as if from giant pitchers. Between the rain and the thunderclaps, the sound of pounding waves was drowned out. It was perfectly dark except for the lemon flashes of lightning. We lay in a big bed hung with a big rectangular mosquito net. When I opened my eyes, all that came in were sheets and sheets of the sound of heavy rain, borne on the cool, wet wind. Beyond our feet the shutter doors were wide open and behind our heads the wooden louver-slats of the window were open, too; but we stayed perfectly dry. Still, it seemed as if the rain was pouring right onto—or into, or through—me. Like I was lying in that drenching rain with my skin turned inside out.

The whole weekend the food was absurd—kingfish, quail, corn pudding, crepes, butternut squash soup—and we walked up and down the beach, swam and dried off, read, and played half a game of Scrabble. We talked to the owners, who had become proud parents just three weeks before, and cooed at their pudgy new son, Parker (Ghanaian alias Kwame). Like the last time at Green Turtle, there was an unmysterious quality to much of it: it feels damned good because it is damned good, and relaxing, too. Buy the ticket, take the ride. But Friday night in the rainstorm was different: a crackling electric feeling of wanting to burst right out of your skin and stretch and squeeze and curl your toes up tight.

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Fast forward. It is a couple weeks later, about 1:30 on Saturday night, and I am in a taxi riding back to my house. We pass through Cantonments circle and head towards Danquah circle. Just past the circle we approach a police checkpoint and are waved down by an officer in a dark blue uniform. He motions with his flashlight for the driver to roll down his window. In Twi he says, “We will ride with you.”

The driver complies and the officer calls the other two from their post on the other side of the road. All three, big Ghanaian men in dark blue with black berets, pile into the comically small backseat of our taxi, leaving the checkpoint empty and with its movable barriers stretched halfway across the dark road. They place their guns—automatic rifles with long banana clips, like those carried by all Ghanaian police officers at all times—with stocks in between their feet and barrels pointing up. Nobody talks until I say, in English, “Good evening, officers. How is it?”

One answers, “Fine.”

“You are closing for the night?”

“Yes. To the station.”

About a kilometer ahead one of the officers taps the driver on the shoulder and says, “Here.” We pull over and the three men clamber out in front of the police station. The driver asks for a bit of water to fill the radiator of his car. The officers decline at first, then reconsider when the driver asks again. One begins to head for the station, then turns around and says (in Twi), “We don’t have any. Go.” So the taxi driver eases the wheezing taxi into the street and drives away.

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Oti’s grandmother died about a month ago, of complications from diabetes. Oti has been living in her house for a few months and had been looking after her. She fell ill one day and was taken to the hospital two days later. Oti said, “They came to take her, but she had died before they reached. That was the end of my grandmother.”

This past Wednesday night I attended the wake-keeping for her. It was my first Ghanaian funeral. They are a ubiquitous social exercise here. Typically they are three-day affairs, beginning on Friday evening and ending Sunday afternoon. It starts with wake-keeping, which lasts through the night. The second day begins with more wake-keeping and eventually moves to the burial ground. The last day is centered at the church, where the deceased is mentioned in the service. A reception follows with food and drink.

Wake-keeping takes many forms, most commonly sitting in plastic chairs under a canopy set up in the middle of street while popular music blares at incredible volumes from a tower of rented speakers. There is frequently food and drink, and almost always some dancing. Walking around Accra on any Saturday, one is very likely to encounter at least one such gathering. Crowds range from the tens to the hundreds. To my knowledge, there is no eulogizing or speechmaking about the deceased—it is a party held in her honor. But while it is not really somber, neither is it terribly exuberant. Older attendees sit quietly in chairs and submit to the violence of the speakers. Younger ones eat and drink and dance and wander off to other weekend engagements. More than anything it seems to have the flavor of an obligatory exercise—and it is nothing if not obligatory.

Any family with the means to do so is expected to provide a proper funeral for its dead. Frequently this means breaking the bank; and almost always one relies on the attendees’ donations to offset the cost of renting equipment and space, catering food, and settling bills from the church and the mortuary. It represents such a shock to expenditure that most microfinance loans have a funeral insurance policy built in. (It is also available as a standalone product, but almost nobody buys it.)

Attendance is strictly required for all extended family members, and expected for almost anyone who knew the deceased. It is not uncommon for a family in Accra to pack up its things for a week and travel across the country for a relative’s funeral.

The wake-keeping for Oti’s grandmother took place at the family house in the South Osu neighborhood of Accra. Family tradition dictated that the first night be a quieter affair (no sound system). Oti led me inside the compound, where about 30 people sitting in small groups scattered in a sea of plastic chairs under a large canopy. Some were talking quietly, others were just sitting. I sat with Oti and his cousin while they discussed the FA Cup Final (halftime had just ended and AC Milan was ahead 1-0), and Oti explained to me the significance of wake-keeping. Traditionally, it is a ritual that marks the final departure of the deceased from the family house. They pour a libation and wash out the front stoop and entryway with water. In some cases, it is also an opportunity for attendees to see the deceased one last time.

Oti’s grandmother was laid out upstairs in the house. I wasn’t aware until he and his cousin got up and he said, “We are going to see the body. Do you want to watch?” I said I would be up in a minute.

When I reached the top of the stairs the two were standing in the hall just outside an inner room. An eerie, clinical white light spilled through the door. The inner room was not very large, maybe 12’x15’. All the walls were hung in lacy white fabric that glowed in the light of a naked fluorescent bulb. From the ceiling a runner of the same fabric hung in a complicated meander pattern and led to a runner of bright woven kente cloth in the center. The kente described a rectangle under which was a bed laid in smooth white cloth. On it was Oti’s grandmother’s body, dressed in a perfect white satin gown with sequins and delicately ruffled sleeves. She wore a rhinestone tiara. Her skin was very smooth and her face looked puffy. From the stillness in the room you could tell immediately that she was dead—she looked like a wax figure. But all along I couldn’t shake the feeling that she might bolt upright and jerk her eyes open.

The three of us continued downstairs and I told Oti that the funerals I had attended at home normally included some kind of remembrances of the person who had died. I asked him to tell me something about his grandmother.

“She loved to crack jokes. And when it comes to food, no one could ever get her. She would send people from the neighborhood to pick things for her cooking, then she would make enough food for the whole neighborhood. She was always cooking. And she loved to make people happy.”

He said a little more which I can’t remember word for word. But from his descriptions I understood that she was a grandmother, the kind of grandmother that is essentially the same everywhere, but cooking different foods: pasta in Italy and jao tse in China and fufu in Ghana and a casserole in Ramsey and gefilte fish in Brooklyn.

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My room is in the corner of the house, nestled in the southwest corner of the compound. The compound wall is about 6’ high and is separated from the south and west walls of our house by a narrow cement path. The exterior walls of my room have louver windows that give out onto the path. When the power is on I usually sleep with the air-con humming away and the windows shut; otherwise I crank them open and hear the sounds of the night and the morning.

Our house is about 5km from Kotoka International airport and lies directly underneath one of its most popular approach patterns. Most flights originating from Europe land in Accra between 9pm and 1am. More than once I have been jolted from sleep by the furious roar of a jet passing overhead. It sounds as if they’re just inches above the roof.

Every flyover is followed by a spirited chorus by the neighborhood dogs. Like so many third world dogs they are skinny, sinewy, light-brown mutts with pointy snouts and ribs showing. They seem at their most natural when they’re yelping. And that’s what they do, mostly—they are not bold enough to bark and not hearty enough to howl. So for a minute or two after the jet engine roar subsides, the night air is alive with a cacophony of yowling and whining. It’s like they were all hit simultaneously with rolled-up newspapers.

About 6am every morning the youngest daughter of the landlady (who lives with her family in the house just in front of ours) takes about an hour and a half to sweep the entire compound. The Ghanaian broom is a powerful counterexample to the theory of evolution. It is a bundle of shoots, like straw but stiffer and pointier, about 18” long and tied by a string about 4” from one end. The preferred sweeping method is to hold the bundle at an oblique angle to the floor and swipe in a crescent shape, proceeding forward in small steps between each swipe. Of course, since there is no handle, it is necessary hunch way over at great expense to the lower back.

It’s not as if they haven’t seen the broomstick; American-style brooms are available all around town—and at competitive prices. One might think that the benefits of a broom that allows its operator to stand would be immediately obvious to someone who spends a couple hours each day hunched over in a deadly “C” shape, but one would be wrong. It just hasn’t caught on.

The sound of morning sweeping is ksh, ksh, ksh. Sometimes the girl sings while she sweeps, usually religious songs in Twi or English. Her voice is soft and very light. It sounds like it could blow away.

The other sound I hear regularly from my bed is the high-pitched scream of a young boy from the neighboring compound while he is being smacked by his father. About a quarter of all mornings it cuts through the air while I’m sleeping or sitting. It is always accompanied by the loud, aggravated jabbering of the father in Twi—fast, savage nonsense punctuated by sharp slaps. I wonder what could possess a man to beat his son in the morning, in the courtyard for the whole neighborhood to hear.

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In other news, the study I came here to work on is underway, after seven months of preparation, piloting, training, and jockeying. Even with so much time leading up to the launch, the past few weeks have been incredibly hectic. Since the roll-out on May 28 I have worked more than in any other two-week period I can recall. But the important thing is that it’s going on and hasn’t run off the rails yet. Hopefully that will continue to be the case; and with some luck it can be achieved without logging too many more 80-hour weeks. Because, really, it’s screwing up my blogging schedule.

2007-05-04T17:16:00.000Z

Overdue Update

Two words: New Digs. Ten days ago I packed my things and brought them to another 3BR house about a mile away from my house in South Labadi Beach Estates. This one is smaller and sits on a compound behind a larger house occupied by a Ghanaian family. My room here is not large and is oddly shaped. There are windows on two sides and the floor is smooth tile. High on the south wall is my new best friend: a Deltac air conditioner with remote control. As I write this paragraph I’m delightfully chilly. Last night it was so cold I had to pull my sheet over my legs.

There are other perks, too—consistent water, comfortable couches, and two new roommates. On the day I moved in there was also a generator by the front door, but it was removed soon afterwards for repairs, since it was found to be leaking gasoline into the living room. You can’t have everything. But my fingers are crossed and I’m patiently waiting for its return.

It’s likely to turn out to be an important appliance in the coming weeks. Actually, the important appliance. The last report from Akosombo was ominous—2.1” of water and two spinning turbines separating most of Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso from a merciless light off. Now the two turbines are down to one and the 2.1” is down to an even slimmer margin.

A lot of the expats working in development here “know somebody” at “the embassy”, and he invariably has some dismal news to report on the power issue. Besides these rumors there are two facts: (1) In 25 years of assiduous daily recordkeeping of the water level at Akosombo, the reservoir’s lowest day has never come before 1 August, and (2) A dam is being constructed in the south of Burkina Faso, upstream from Lake Volta on one of its chief tributaries, and the reservoir behind it is currently being filled. (1) tells us that we shouldn’t expect rising water levels for quite a while, and (2) tells us that, even when the rains come up north and the tributaries start to flow, we’ll only get a modest trickle while the reservoir in Burkina swells.

That guy at the embassy, though, has a number of forecasts, none of which is very optimistic. The best of them has lights off in Accra for a full 24 hours every third day starting in mid-May; the worst has a total blackout for the whole country beginning May 1 (tomorrow).

Whatever is the case, it’s good that Cathy made it here while the power schedule is consistent and fairly accommodating. She walked out of Kotoka International last Sunday at 9:30am, fresh off the direct flight from JFK, with a banjo in one hand and a big duffel stuffed full of Entenmann’s multigrain bars over her shoulder. Cathy taught me number theory, cofounded the legendary folkgrass outfit Twenty-second String, and is my good friend. She ditched her last week of lectures to come to Africa with her banjo and multigrain bars.

We went straight to the Regency Coconut Grove Hotel, where there were no rooms available. Luckily there were beers available and so we had that instead.

Like most Ghanaians I’ve met, Cathy is friendly, good-natured, and not shy. She likes to laugh, too, and that served her well. We went together to the OI office Monday morning and she quickly struck out for Makola market with a pocketful of cedis on a mission for cloth. She navigated the place easily, never stepped in a gutter, made friends, and bought fabric. She also established her M.O. for the week: Go, Do. Between Monday morning and Friday afternoon, while I inconsiderately spent many daylight hours in the office, Cathy crisscrossed the city, tracing a seemingly effortless arc from dressmakers to drum lessons.

Wednesday afternoon was a highlight in the long cement building where the Africana dance troupe practices. It was hot. The way the drumming rings deep inside the ears, so that when you step outside all the sounds seem far away; and the black nylon running pants the men wear, soaked completely through. When they stand in one place in between dances they drip pools of sweat. Cathy said the dancers redefined “sexy”.

I think they also redefined “friendly”. Cathy arranged with Junior, whose bead creations were pictured in a long-ago post, to buy a drum. He makes those, too. Thursday she went back to the long cement building, picked up her djembe, and took a two-hour drum lesson from Aziz. And then the three of them were friends.

Friday afternoon we went up to Akosombo, almost the same trip I made with Mom about a month before. We arrived at the Akosombo Continental Hotel soon after dark and sat on a patio jutting out over the river’s edge. Just downstream was the unlit Adome bridge. Lonely cars drove over, silent pairs of ghostly headlights trundling low and flat through the black sky. We ate drank and talked and also sat quietly for a little while. There were tiny winged ants and other bugs. One was long and skinny like a flying grasshopper. It flew right into the side of Cathy’s head, then sputtered off to land on some other piece of the patio. There was an animal somewhere close by making an electronic hiccup sound.

The next morning we walked in the hotel’s impressive menagerie. They have at least ten monkeys of various species in three cages, parrots and parakeets, a crocodile, two duikers, and a huge turkey. Cathy observed that the turkey could probably beat either of the duikers (miniature antelopes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duiker) in a fight.

We also hired a small powerboat (with a captain) for a trip to the low side of the dam. Speeding up the Volta River past mud huts and dugout canoes dragged up on the shores, we passed under the swooping powerlines stretched a quarter mile between Erector-set towers. Six black cables on the six arms of each tower and as you approach, pass underneath, and retreat, their smooth arcs seem gracefully to bend and tilt, intersection points sliding along the curves; the steep lush hills on the east bank of the river; scalloped cirrus clouds in a high sky—the place was wide, wide open.

At the base of the dam the river is a wide basin. We approached close enough to see the meager bubbling of the outflow, one grate of six gurgling quietly, the rest still and silent. After a couple minutes looking around we sped back down the wide river, under the slow-motion dance of the catenary powerlines.

On the way back to Accra we stopped at the bead section of the Krobo-Odumase market, aisle upon aisle of brightly-colored glass. As we walked in from the street Cathy carried a plastic bag full of the last of the multigrain bars. Having handed out some 30 lbs of them over the course of the week, she didn't have many left--maybe 40 bars or so. As we approached three teenage boys walking out towards the street Cathy produced a handful of the individually-wrapped bars and offered them: "Do you want some multigrain bars?" The boys happily accepted and one asked me for some water from my bottle. By the time I handed it to him a small crowd had assembled around us and Cathy reached into the bag and held out fistfuls of bars and the people grabbed at them. The crowd grew and the number of outstretched arms multiplied and within half a minute it was a roiling scene of groping hands gobbling up as many bars as they could. Some bars fell on the ground and then people dropped to the ground and the hands gobbled them up immediately. People began to ignore the handfuls and reach directly for the bag, which was getting light anyway, and Cathy cracked a smile. She let go of it and for an instant it was suspended there by a web of black arms, hands kneading and pulling in all directions. It broke and the remaining bars fell like a pinata's cargo onto the dusty ground and there was a mad scramble for them. People hoarded and tug-o-war'd and yelped. Cathy was laughing and we walked deeper into the market towards the beads.

Cathy’s flight was scheduled to depart from Accra at 10:30 Sunday morning. She left my house at 5am although it’s only 15 minutes from the airport. She had heard that check-in closed three hours before flight time and wanted to be extra safe. Before she left she used my phone to call Junior and Aziz. When she got back to New York she told me that, after she called, they had biked halfway across the sleeping city to the airport and waited with her until she walked to the gate at 9:30. They just wanted to see her off. I wonder if it ever occurred to them as they pedaled through the hushed predawn that they had met Cathy only four days before. My guess is it didn’t.

2007-04-14T13:56:00.000Z

Easter Weekend

We had Friday and Monday off from work for the Easter holiday, and Oti had arranged a party Sunday night for his girlfriend Millicent’s birthday. It had been a couple weeks since I saw him last. His car has been on the fritz and I have been traveling on the weekends. But when we spoke Saturday he arranged to pick me up in the evening and take me to the party.

It was scheduled to start at 8 and I was ready. Oti came at 9:30 with his friend Eddie in the front seat of the Astra. We drove halfway down the block before the unmistakable flapping of a limp, deflated tire caused the car to shudder. Conveniently there was a gas station nearby. We rolled gingerly up to a tiny sagging shack on the edge of the station, outside which a few men sat amid stacks of bald used tires.

Oti and Eddie got out of the car and explained our situation to the attendants. Apparently he had been at the station earlier that day to inquire about a new set of tires. He had arranged to purchase them the following day; but now the attendant wanted him to buy a brand new inner tube which would be useless as soon as the new (tubeless) tires were mounted. Oti tried to convince him to lend him the inner tube for the night, to be returned the next morning when he came for the new tires, but the attendant wouldn’t budge. A fairly heated exchange ensued, which was less an argument than a series of vigorous repetitions of Oti’s proposal and persistent appeals to the attendant’s sense of fairness. In a few minutes of loud talking and gesticulating, there seemed to be no new ideas and no rebuttals or counterarguments. Ultimately Oti won out, proving his case by what some math professors call the method of sufficiently emphatic assertion. Though they proceeded to agree on a price of GHC 60,000 for the repair, he paid GHC 40,000 and no questions were asked about the sum. We left around 10:15.

The irony really was that the party was just a few blocks from my house, not more than ten minutes’ walk. When we pulled up Oti stopped to let Eddie out and told me he needed to pick something up from his house. We drove the two blocks there and Oti took me inside where he changed into his “whites”—a pair of white cotton pants, a white cotton shirt, and white sneakers—and took a small suitcase from his room.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Clothes.”

“Are you staying at Millie’s house tonight?”

“No. These are for the party. I will need to change outfits throughout the night.”

Back into the car and up two streets and we parked in a driveway. It was 11 o’clock. The party was outside and extended a full block down the street to its dead end. There were tables and chairs, a dj with a mountain of speakers, and a grill serving up chicken and kebabs. Oti had arranged all of it. He hadn’t even turned off the engine when he caught sight of Millicent and realized something was amiss. She had changed out of her white cocktail dress and into a black skirt with a white blouse. So before getting out of the car he dove into the backseat and shimmied out of his white pants, exchanging them for dark jeans. “I cannot be wearing my whites once Millicent has changed from hers,” he explained.

As soon as he got out of the car he was surrounded by friends and guests, and Millicent walked up and they circulated easily together from table to table for a little while. There were close to a hundred people there by my count. Oti is fairly short, a couple inches shorter than Millicent at about 5’4”, but he walked tall next to her. He was beaming. When he leaned in to talk to someone over the loud music he would put one arm behind him with his hand at the small of his back like a waiter at a fancy restaurant.

After a few minutes of socializing Oti excused himself and we went together to the corner store where he bought a couple cases of beer. We carried them back to the end of the street, gathering the beer-bearer’s Pied Piper trail of guests as we walked. Everyone seemed happy but Oti wasn’t content yet. Back up the street, through the knots of people dancing and talking and sitting on plastic chairs, and over to a drinking spot where Oti bought Angostura bitters, local dry gin, and two other bottles of unidentified hooch. Then we returned to the party for good. Oti continued to buzz around, the consummate host, bringing out plates of piri-piri chicken and offering drinks, collecting pats on the back and occasionally indulging in a short conversation. Whenever he walked past me he swooped in and introduced me to the nearest few people. He seemed to know everyone.

At one point he sat down for a few minutes with me at a table. He told me that both he and Millicent were glad I could come, and then he said, “You are like the bone taken from my own body. Without you I could not stand.” He smiled, and to me he seemed so rich in good feeling—happy that so many people came, satisfied that Millicent was having fun, grateful that he could plan and pay for it—that all he could do was share it. I had to smile, too. The contentment he exuded felt like an August afternoon sun, the way it warms the flesh beneath the skin. I don’t know why, but it fed an awareness that other people are exactly as real as myself, each of us a tiny star in every other’s unique night sky. His happiness was a generous unspooling of tightly-wound gravity. Imagine the opposite of a black hole.

Before long he moved on, gliding around with more plates of chicken and making sure everyone was having a good time. I wandered over towards the dj’s mountain of speakers. In the road just in front of it people were dancing in tight groups to the ubiquitous soundtrack of American hiphop and Ghanaian hiplife. The scene was unmysterious—good company, dancing, food, birthday cheer. A nighttime block party on a long weekend is an enjoyable thing. No quiet epiphanies should be required. But I was tired, so I found Oti and Millicent, thanked them for the party, and set off for home.

Monday night I had dinner at a friend’s apartment in the Airport Residential neighborhood of Accra. It was late, almost 2:30, when I left. It is about 500m to junction where I could get a taxi. Walking out of the compound I put on my headphones and started down the quiet street. About halfway to the main road I saw two young men coming up the opposite side of the street. I kept my eyes forward and continued, but I could see from their gestures that they were calling to me. Though I pretended not to notice, they continued. Somehow it seemed like a bad idea to ignore them completely, so I took out one ear bud and looked over at them. Immediately they started crossing the street to my side. I feared I had made the wrong decision.

When they came close to me one said, “So you are afraid of us.”

“No, I was listening to some music. I am just on the way to pick a taxi at the junction here.”

“Let us escort you back to your place,” the same one said.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. My laptop was in my backpack and my hip pockets held an iPod, a cellphone, and GHC 700,000 (about $80). “Thank you, I’m sure I will be fine.”

With a lazy smile the other said, “But you must need an escort. There are too many armed robbers around.” His speech was a little bit slurred and only then did I recognize that both men were drunk. Their eyes were glassy and, trying to stand still, they swayed slightly. This made me feel better.

I turned the conversation to them and found out they were on their way home from a late night at a drinking spot. Our exchange turned cordial. They asked about my holiday weekend and told me about theirs. Soon they were squinting in the dim street light, writing their phone numbers on the back of a matchbox, and telling me to be sure to call them. “I’ll try,” I said. They still wanted to walk me to the junction and wait with me for a taxi, but I convinced them not to.

At the junction I got a taxi in less than a minute. I struck up a conversation with the driver, who had spent the holiday relaxing at the beach with his family. Just a couple hours earlier he had dropped them off at home and set out to drive for the night. As we continued to talk he told me he was impressed with my English. “Most obrunis I cannot hear it when they speak English, but you I hear it very clear.” It’s true—when I speak with Ghanaians I meet casually my diction and inflection change. My sentences start to look more like the above. Though I can only imagine that it sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth, it does wonders for comprehension.

Well, the driver was very excited and apparently really thought it was a hoot. “Excuse me, I must call my wife,” he said. And so he did, at 2:30am called her giggling and saying quickly in Twi something about the obruni in his car who speaks like a black man, etc, etc. Then he handed the phone to me, saying, “You must greet her.”

Her voice was hoarse and creaky. I said, “I’m very sorry to wake you. You sound as if you have been sleeping.”

“Yes”

“Well, do I sound like a black man?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Sound sleep.”

“Good night.”

I handed the phone back and they spoke only a few seconds more, then he hung up. He seemed completely satisfied with the exchange. I always consider it a sign of exemplary service to disturb one’s family members at all hours of the night on behalf of the customer, so I dashed the driver GHC 5,000 when he dropped me at my house. As I got out of the car I said to him the standard Twi farewell and he said “Oh!” and drove off down the street laughing.

2007-04-05T15:22:00.000Z

Paradise, etc.

Friday morning 3/23 I played hooky, packed up my mosquito net and bathing suit, and went to the STC bus terminal by Circle. The 9:30 bus to Takoradi, not known for its punctuality, was elsewhere. Around 10:15 an old hulk lumbered creaking into the loading area and the crowd of passengers assembled on the platform rushed inexplicably for the ticket kiosk. As it turned out, everyone there had paid for a luxury bus with air-con; and since the route would be serviced by an older model, riders were entitled to a refund. Fifteen minutes later, after considerable jostling and grumbling, each rider settled into his sticky vinyl seat with a crisp GHC 20,000 ($2.20) bill while the heavy diesel air of the station wafted indolently through the open windows.

The engine’s hacking, phlegmy report signaled our departure. The driver shook the rust off with a couple of lurching stalls, then got the bus rocking back and forth, performed a remarkable start without plowing into the loading platform, and backed cautiously out of the slip and the bus yard into the stagnant midmorning traffic approaching West Africa’s largest roundabout. Once we got outside the city the air in the cabin cleared and the ride was comfortable. Five and a half hours later we arrived at the STC terminal in Takoradi, Ghana’s third largest city.

As soon as we stepped down we were descended upon by taxi drivers. Our group of six backpack-toting obrunis was an obvious target. “Green Turtle or Ellis’ Hideout?” was all they asked. That both of these are more an hour outside the city speaks to Takoradi’s cachet as a tourist destination. They were referring to two of the best-known ecotourism spots on Ghana’s coast. Tremendously popular with backpackers and semester-abroad students, each is a cluster of bungalows and tents right on the beach, outfitted with solar panels and composting toilets. I think every white person I know here has visited one of them at least once. I wished that we could have defied their expectations—“Take me to city hall,” or “Where can I find some good okra stew in this town?”—but like so many other palefaced paradise-seekers before us, we waddled off with our bags of plantain chips and our iPods towards the tro tro station and hightailed it to Agona junction, then haggled for a taxi that rambled through Dixcove and down 15km of rough road to deposit us at the entrance to the Green Turtle Lodge.

Paradise is a gently curving beach of powdery sand glowing pink in the light of a low sun. There are leaning palms for effect, and the sound of the surf. The sun stayed out the whole time we were there and at night we slept under the mosquito net while the breeze made the palm fronds clatter together like rain. There was also bodysurfing. And real coffee from a French press. More than once I was nudged by that delicate, fleeting feeling that seems to come only when the world offers no resistance: a slippery awareness that I managed to forget that I am right now falling backwards through a clear sky. Nonsense?

Like my recollections of most events and places that have allowed that mysterious sensation to unfold, my mind’s Green Turtle has the sharpness, coherence, and satisfying completeness of a clever short story.

But more often life here is a novel, and Monday I was back at the office. On Tuesday it rained hard for about an hour. First it became dark and the wind began to whip through the streets, stirring the silty sidewalk dust into little cyclones. The ubiquitous black plastic bags took to the air like the ashen ghosts of jellyfish and migrated towards the ocean. Then came the rumble of thunder and the tropical monsoon.

While the vast network of open sewers was overflowing, flooding the low-lying parts of Accra with impossible filth, we were perched comfortably on the third floor of OI’s head office. There it stayed completely dry, save for a few drips from the edges of the window frames. Most buildings in Accra have louver windows, but since the office was built for air-con, it has large horizontally-sliding panes set in metal frames. So much for an airtight seal; still, what little water managed to sneak through was quickly mopped up without incident.

Most of the next day it was impossible to work because the sound of a power drill boring into metal cut through the entire building. The office maintenance crew was repairing the window frames. To keep water from leaking in and collecting on the floor, they had contrived to create drainage by drilling holes through the frames themselves. The thought was: If we can’t stop the water from coming in, we can at least give it a way out. Unfortunately the drainage holes they drilled are level and gouge just underneath the track where the panes slide. So, temples throbbing after a day full of the torturous dentist’s-chair squeal of the drill, the windows scrape closed on their deformed tracks and outside water has some new ways in. However airtight the seals were (not very), now they are less so. Thus, the cool air we condition for the office we now share to a greater degree with the whole city. In the microfinance business they call that “outreach”.

Though the rain was severe enough in Accra to press into service all the ingenuity of our maintenance squad, it didn’t do a lick of good up at Akosombo, where it might really have helped. On Wednesday afternoon the Volta River Authority shut down a fifth turbine, leaving just one, and instituted a new schedule for the rolling power outages. Now every other day will have 12 hours light off, alternating 6am-6pm and 6pm-6am. For instance, if lights are out Monday during the day, they will also be out Wednesday night, and again Friday during the day, etc. Since I arrived in October they had managed to keep power on all day, cycling light off for just 12 hours every fifth night. Naturally the new arrangement is less than ideal for Accra’s businesses.

Happily OI has a huge diesel-powered generator on the premises, nestled right up next to the building. It is the size of a small SUV. Normally it kicks in only when the power cuts out; I don’t think it was designed to be used for hours on end. It drones and rattles and radiates heat and emits thick diesel exhaust and generally makes the whole area feel like the engine room of an ocean liner.

When it runs continuously it is necessary to keep the building sealed; otherwise, since the exhaust shoots directly onto an outer wall where an updraft carries it to windows on every floor, one ends up inhaling diesel fumes all day. And only when I caught a noseful of that sweet oil smoke wafting through the drainage holes on Friday morning (the first daytime light off at the office) did I appreciate fully what the maintenance crew had achieved with their window repair. The only thing left for them to do is to plug the holes with asbestos when it’s not raining. I think that’s scheduled for next week.

2007-03-28T09:20:00.000Z

Volta

The weekend of March 17 was Mom’s last in Ghana. She took the bus from Cape Coast to Accra on Friday evening. Saturday morning we went to the tro tro station and boarded a car bound for Akosombo, a town at the southern tip of the Volta Region.

Covering 8,502 sq. km., Lake Volta (seen from space here) is the world’s largest manmade lake in terms of surface area. It was formed in 1965 when Ghana’s government dammed the Volta River at Akosombo to build a hydroelectric power station there. As the valley flooded, 80,000 villagers were relocated to higher ground. Today, just a couple of winding miles downstream from the dam, the river is wide and smooth. It looks undisturbed.

Our first stop was a few miles west of the wide and smooth river, at the Krobo-Odumase market, famous for its beads. From the paved road it looks like a typical town market with produce, secondhand clothes, meat, household items, shoes, and groceries; but it extends far back on vast cement slabs and on dirt paths, a jumble of homemade tables and stalls and blankets and baskets. We arrived eventually at the bead section, which was mostly vacant although Saturday was supposed to be the market day. The vendors that had come, though, stood behind tables laden with bright bracelets and necklaces.

Most Ghanaian beads are rough glass cylinders, about ¾” long and ½” wide, of a single background color painted with bright geometric designs. They almost feel like clay to the touch. Judging by their inclusion in the general town market—as opposed to in a handicraft/souvenir bazaar designed specifically for tourists—I have to assume there is some local demand for the goods; but this week was the first time I have noticed a Ghanaian wearing any jewelry of that kind. He was a taxi driver and he had a bracelet of chunky yellow beads with red and green zig-zags.

Besides the standard fare, some vendors also had beads made of smooth batiked cow bone. Others had smooth glass beads with bright color inside like cat’s eye marbles. These were imported from Mali, the Gambia, Italy, and China. Still others had necklaces of smooth grey river stones—each about the size of a Silly Putty container—that must have weighed a few pounds in total.

From the bead market we made our way to the Aylo’s Bay Hotel on the west bank of the Volta River, a few miles downstream from the dam and about 500m upstream from the Adomi Bridge, whose sturdy steel arch is pictured on the front of the GHC 2,000 note. The water was smooth and warm and, incredibly, flowed the wrong way. Even with the dam so close and the ocean more than sixty miles away, the river was tidal.

There was a good reason why the outflow from the only dam on the world’s largest manmade lake was insufficient to overcome the push of a distant tide, and this we learned the following morning. We rode a tro tro from the hotel a few miles to the town of Akosombo. It was Sunday morning and the place was largely deserted. Even the tro tro station was mostly empty. A few taxi drivers laid in wait for the infrequent arrivals and some tro tro drivers and mates slept on the bench seats of their vehicles.

A taxi driver told us that a director of the Volta River Authority, the organization that serves as operator and gatekeeper of the Akosombo dam, had recently come through the station and had gone to the VRA office just around the corner. If we wanted to see the dam, we’d need to get a pass from him, so we walked to the office and were received by a young man who looked to be about my age. He invited us inside and began to arrange a tour.

The two-room office was full of reports, papers, photos, and charts. On one wall of the first room was a whiteboard with large T-chart displaying the water level of the dam day by day for the past three weeks. The young man described the situation: the dam was designed for a water level of 240’ or over. Below 238’ they have to shut down four of its six turbines. With so much less water passing through the dam, the river downstream becomes quite still and is left to rise and fall with the tide. That’s why it was flowing backwards at the Aylo’s Bay Hotel.

When they step down to two turbines they also stop providing electricity to Togo, Benin, and much of Ghana’s own industrial sector. When its factory is working at full capacity, VALCO, a private aluminum company based outside Accra, consumes a third of Ghana’s total electricity output. For Togo and Benin the partial shutdown is a bitter pill to swallow, as they each rely on the Akosombo dam for upwards of 90% of their power. If the water level falls below 236’, the last two turbines will be shut down and Ghana’s power output will fall instantaneously by 65%.

On that Sunday the water level was at 236’2.1”; and over the previous 20 days the water level had fallen between .06” and .08” per day. If the trend persists, the dam will shut down sometime around April 20.

What would such a doomsday scenario entail? “There will be light off,” said the young man. Questioned further, he explained that efforts would be made to keep Accra’s power grid up and running to the greatest extent possible; the rest of the country might well be cut off indefinitely.

And what is the operative plan to forestall this disaster? “We are really hoping for rain,” he said. Anything else? “We are also praying.”

As it turned out, the young man we were speaking to was a recent university graduate doing his national service with the VRA in the Publicity department. One of the VRA’s directors showed up soon afterward and suggested that, in addition to hoping and praying, they might try to avoid a catastrophic full shutdown by increasing the frequency of scheduled power outages—now every fifth night—as the water level creeps lower and lower.

The director assigned the young man to be our driver and tour guide and handed him keys to a car parked outside. The four of us walked out together and the director gave him some hurried instructions about how to use the clutch. Then we pulled out and began up the winding road.

Standing on top of the dam, leaning over the fence and looking down into the pool on the high side, we could see fish at the edges and two gentle whirlpools spinning in opposite directions (Coriolis effect be damned) above the intakes to the long, steep penstocks that feed the two operational turbines. Light on, light off; air-con; water pump working or spoiled; demand for gasoline to run generators; ceiling fans; light to read by—a variegated strand composed of these fine filaments wound round and round in two mesmerizing spirals, sucked down and unspooled all the way to the ocean.

The dam itself is huge and made entirely of stones, sand, and clay. During its construction in the early 1960s the town of Akosombo was built essentially from scratch to house the laborers who built it. It must be considered a testament to the farsightedness of the construction authority that such a small town, not obviously different from the others nestled along the Volta’s banks, can boast of the region’s only waste treatment plant.

From the top of the dam one can also see the Ghanaian equivalent of Camp David: a special retreat for the President and his guests, accessible only by helicopter, perched high atop a hill overlooking the lake, the dam, and the river below. According to our guide, Bill Clinton stayed there.

Our last stop before returning to Accra was at Dan’s Bead Factory, a tourist-oriented spot along the main road. Although the factory itself was closed Sundays, one of the women manning the showroom brought us to the thatch-roofed production area and showed us how Ghanaian beads are made. Glass bottles (wine, soda, beer, etc.), divided by color, are collected and smashed into tiny pieces. These are placed in clay molds and heated in a clay oven for almost an hour. Then they are cooled, removed from the molds, painted, fired again to set the paint, and strung into necklaces or bracelets or keychains. At that point they are ready for sale. At this particular factory, some empty bottles are purchased from stores, while others are donated by wine-swilling friends of the owner who are residents of Accra.

Finally, I will indulge myself in recounting a very beautiful dream from our night at the Aylo’s Bay Hotel that I can’t stop thinking about:

I woke up laying on a hard chaise lounge on a dark beach and turned my head to the right, looking towards the water. Just where the waves were washing up on the sand, a long line of sea turtles was advancing from left to right. They were of many different shapes and sizes. I couldn’t see either end of the line but they kept coming, Slow and Steady as only turtles can. Then all at once they stood up on their hind legs and hind flippers and faced the breaking waves, the whole line of them, and from the infinite distance to the left they began diving one after the other, like a great domino chain, into the dark surf. The collective sound was a great big effervescent shhhhhhhhhhh and they slid under the water, leaving the beach clear. Then I looked out over the ocean and saw the moon huge and perfectly round, sitting on the horizon line, all its craters clear as a bell. High in the black sky above it was another moon, this one a bright ghostly metallic-white, casting a glow over the whole scene and making the crest of every ripple flash like a cool, wet lozenge of pure silver.

2007-03-16T16:06:00.000Z

Many Places, Long Entry

I just finished eating my favorite Ghanaian dessert: a Cape Coast pineapple. Unlike the standard variety, these are cone-shaped and more green than yellow on the outside. On the inside they are white, and have less pulp and juice. They are sweet and crisp. I selected the one I had tonight from a large pile of attractive candidates on a roadside table just outside Cape Coast. I don’t usually go 200km for fresh fruit, but in the past two weeks I have visited more of Ghana than I did in my first four months in the country.

My parents arrived on February 26 from India, where they had traveled to attend the wedding of a friend’s nephew. For the first few nights they stayed at the plush Labadi Beach Hotel, in whose locker room I have often snuck a hot shower when the water is out at my house. After a few days exploring Accra, we set off together Thursday afternoon for Cape Coast. It’s about three hours’ drive to the small city that was once the capital of the British Gold Coast.

That night we stopped just short of our destination in the town of Biriwa, where we had booked two rooms in the Biriwa Beach Hotel, a long, low, white cement building with wide triangular buttresses on each side. To me it looked like a futuristic structure that wouldn’t have been out of place on the moon. It was perched on a steep hill overlooking a curving beach and a quiet piece of the Atlantic Ocean. We put our bags down and went for a walk around the grounds and down to the beach. Our lap ended by the patio restaurant, where we found an old German couple (the proprietors) and a couple of Ghanaian staff looking on with concern as thick black smoke rose from the cabinet housing the hotel’s fuse box. No one could say exactly how the fire had started; it was fairly certain, though, that we would be spending the night with “light off”.

The restaurant stayed open despite the power failure, and incredibly it seemed that the entire menu was available. Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to eat German food by candlelight in the heat of a tropical night, Mom ordered pork chops and sauerkraut. When dinner ended we retired to our rooms. Due to my extensive training in the art of living “light off”, I was able to fall asleep fairly quickly. But for Mom and Dad, unused to the still air and the constant beading of sweat, sleep was an impossible dream. For all its futuristic design, the hotel was poorly equipped to deal with the failure of its air conditioning system. (Or maybe this was consistent with the lunar base idea—who cares about airflow in the deadly vacuum of space?) The rooms were L-shaped, with the entrance and window at the top of the long piece and the bed pushed to the far end of the short piece; and what few zephyrs might have stumbled through the lone window were blocked by the solid, wide-sweeping buttresses that ran along the length of the building. We didn’t stay a second night.

We did visit Cape Coast and Elmina, and toured the castles there. These are two of the best-preserved forts that dotted the Gold Coast. Built at first as trading posts for gold, ivory, timber, and spices, they eventually became the African nodes of the triangular transatlantic slave trade. It worked roughly as follows: Europeans brought finished goods (notably firearms, alcohol, and glassware), exchanged them for gold, ivory, and Africans, and transported them to the New World where they exchanged the Africans for raw goods (especially sugar) to bring back to Europe. The guns that ended up in Africa ensured a constant supply of slaves by enabling local marauders and tribal armies, now heavily-armed, to conquer and capture other Africans and sell them to the Europeans.

The castles were the points of departure for slaves headed to the new world, but a typical African’s ordeal began in the bush. Taken prisoner by a neighboring tribe, he might be made to walk hundreds of miles through dense jungle to the coast. There he would be held in an overcrowded underground dungeon like the one at Cape Coast castle until a ship came in—typically about six weeks—at which time he would be taken out for inspection. Incredibly, many of the slaves that were judged too weak to survive the harsh journey across the ocean were simply released. To me, this illustrates the completeness of dehumanization that characterized and enabled the slave trade. That some might be set free simply because they were unsaleable suggests that they weren’t viewed as people at all—the concepts “freedom” and “captivity” may never have occurred to the traders (African or European). Does one consider the freedom of the runts when he buys only the strongest puppies from the litter? Somehow the thought of the weak ones stumbling out free onto the streets of Cape Coast while the most vital men and women trudged in chains towards the filthy hold of a wooden ship begins to capture the perversity of the whole enterprise. Of course, it falls far short: countless European soldiers and civil servants fathered children by the captured women and some even installed their families in sturdy stone houses near the castles.

Friday morning we visited Kakum National Park, just north of Cape Coast. There we walked over a series of cable bridges suspended between platforms built around tree trunks that thrust straight up out of the canopy. The highest platform is 40m above the ground. The bridges themselves are known to be sturdy, but they still sway as one walks along. It’s a long way down from there. Mom noted that the tree trunks around which the platforms were built were crawling with ants. Why were they scurrying so far above terra firma? Why were we?

After the canopy walk we engaged a guide who offered to take us on a walking tour and teach us about the medicinal uses of some of the plants there. He showed us the rough, deep-furrowed bark of the ebony tree and explained that elephants use it to scrape themselves clean after bathing. Many of the trees he showed us were used in reproductive medicine. The ya-ya (as in “Yeah! Yeah!”) promotes virility, while the stinkwood tree removes fibroids in women. His expertise came from his grandfather, a traditional doctor who in turn had learned from a forest dwarf. According to the exhibit at the visitors’ center, there exists a race of dwarves native to Kakum whose feet are turned backwards. If you step onto the ground where one has recently urinated, you will lose your way in the forest.

Fast forward one week. Dad returned home Saturday night, the day after our canopy walk. Mom had spent the week in Cape Coast working with Women In Progress, a local NGO founded by two former Peace Corps volunteers. WIP provides local batikers and seamstresses with designs and training to make their goods export quality, then sells them in the US and England. The marketing arm of the organization, Global Mamas (www.globalmamas.com), supplies about a hundred retail outlets in the US and also sells directly through the website. Mom was there to do training in bookkeeping, both for employees of WIP and for the sewing and batiking women they serve. Despite the Tuesday-Wednesday holiday for Ghana@50, she managed to work with WIP’s bookkeeper and also ran a couple of trainings for the clients.

But the weekend came and we hit the road again. Throughout the week in Accra and Cape Coast, and again the following weekend, we had the pleasure of riding in a private, air-conditioned car. Our driver was Ben. He had been recommended to us by neighbors from New Jersey who rode with him when they came to visit their daughter who was studying abroad here this past Fall. At that time he had been working for a company, but after their experience with him they offered to make him a loan so he could buy a car and go into business for himself. When the new year began, he was the proud owner/operator of a tan 2006 Toyota Corolla and the Managing Director of Combay Enterprises. Ben is knowledgeable, friendly, and as professional as anyone I’ve met. He is happy to be working for himself and is anxious to pay off his loan. He takes pride in his car, which is always spotless. Judging by the way he uses the word “tidy”, he believes that cleanliness is next to godliness. It was a pleasure to ride with him. If you or anyone you know is planning to visit Ghana and want a driver, I give Ben my highest recommendation.

Ben picked me up at the office Friday at noon. We swung by Cape Coast to pick up Mom and then continued another two or three hours to Kumasi. For all but about 15km the road is good enough to support cruising at about 60mph. The bad 15km, though, is a patchwork of deeply-cratered pavement and rocky dirt. There are long islands of tarmac that end abruptly, dropping six inches onto deep-grooved dusty dirt that looks as if it has never been paved. Here lanes don’t apply; the strategy is to take the path of least resistance on the rough sections and to get on and off the paved islands where it will do least damage to the vehicle. So cars and tro tros wander down the road like grazing cows, occasionally slowing way down to ease themselves over treacherous obstacles.

Once Ben had removed the slightly rickety front right hubcap, we bounced happily through the bad section and cleared it before sunset. From there it wasn’t far to Kumasi and the Rexmar Hotel, where an idyllic outdoor dinner setting was all but shattered by an overenthusiastic rock band playing poolside. They weren’t bad, but when the saxophone was shrilly belting out the lead line of “When a man loves a woman” I could feel it in my teeth. They played until around midnight, so Mom and I fell asleep with headphones in our ears.

Saturday morning we got pleasantly lost in the huge market. When we walked through the butchering shed many of the men, recognizing me from my visit a couple weeks earlier, warmly greeted me. I told one of the butchers whose picture I posted in the blog that he was now “on the net.” He was overjoyed to hear it. Mom wondered whether the free global advertising had set his business booming. I think he was more excited at the prospect of having his face pop up on computer screens in distant corners of the world.

We also visited Manhyia Palace, home of the Asantehene, the king of the Ashanti tribe, whose empire was once as large as present-day Ghana. There was a lawn with strutting peacocks that led to a staid, squareish house of painted cement. This, the former palace, was converted into a museum in 1970; the current palace was deeper in the compound and was not open to the public. The first floor of the museum was kept more or less as it had been when the king lived there. There were two sitting rooms, an office, a living room, and a dining room. The relics on display were fairly modern, dating back no further than 1925, when the place was built. Notable were three rotary telephones, an old color TV, and a radio. There were also photographs of the royals and life-size effigies in full dress seated in chairs, festooned with yards of bright golden bracelets and necklaces. The guide insisted that all the jewelry was pure gold.

The second floor had more photographs and also featured display cases with some older relics. There were ceremonial swords and axes, carved stools, royal Kente cloth, and two leather satchels, each about the size of a small backpack, said to have once served as the treasury of the whole Ashanti kingdom. One held the gold and the other the silver. They were secured with gold and silver padlocks, respectively.

I was surprised to hear that all the Ashanti gold could ever have fit in such a small bag. The Ashanti region of Ghana is known—and envied—for its natural resources. It produces much of Ghana’s best timber, and almost all its bauxite and gold. The Ashanti tribe became wealthy by trading gold with the Mali empire in the 14^th century, and they continued to prosper by trading it with the Europeans until they were defeated by the British in 1900. According to legend, the Ashanti kingdom was born in the late 17^th century when, at a meeting of local Ashanti chiefs, a fetish priest conjured a golden stool that floated down from the sky onto the lap of the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu I.

On the same day, the same priest thrust a sword into the ground, burying it all the way up to the hilt. Fixed in its place by his miraculous power, he warned that, whenever it is extracted, the Ashanti kingdom will fall. It can be found in Kumasi today, housed in a small round cement building on the campus of Ghana’s second largest hospital. We came to the place and paid the GHC 10,000 ($1.10) to get in, then continued inside. In the middle of the single round room is a pit about 4’ in diameter and about 3’ deep. At the bottom, in the middle of a nondescript patch of red-brown gravelly ground, is the sword’s hilt standing at a slight angle. It looks suspiciously like a fancy newell post.

The man who had collected our entrance fee came up behind us and perfunctorily recounted the story of the sword’s origin. He finished with its recent history: “When building the hospital here, they came with their bulldozers but the sword would not move from its place. Then they dug all around it and the sword disappeared mysteriously for two days, then reappeared in the same spot. In 1964 Mohammed Ali, heavyweight champion of the world, visited the hospital and tried to pull the sword from the ground. He failed. Later, a boxer from Ghana who claimed he was stronger than Mohammed Ali also tried to pull it. But he also failed. That is the story of the sword.”

This week it has been back to work. Tuesday it was George’s turn to lead OI-SASL’s morning devotion. He had been assigned the topic of Confidence and the passage Philippians 1:6—“being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” As I have said before in this space, George is excitable, a fast talker prone to nervous laughter. From what he has told me, he’s not very religious at all. But standing in the middle of the banking hall he seemed entirely at home.

He began by leading the group in a few songs in a powerful, spirited voice I’ve never heard him use before. Somewhere far inside his wiry frame he shaped deep tones like smooth round bowls. And when he moved onto his discussion he spread his arms wide on the counter in front of him and spoke with great conviction. I almost cracked a smile because I can hardly imagine George as a fiery preacher, but his performance was sincere. He even interjected “Hallelujah!” and “Praise God!” with complete naturalness. More than any exegesis of the text, his delivery spoke to the topic he had been assigned. I wonder whether it was his careful preparation, the receptivity of the audience, genuine religious fervor, or something else altogether that brought out his flashing eyes and resonant voice. George surprised a lot of people Tuesday morning—maybe even himself.

Oti Installment:
Tuesday morning I had Oti pick me up early so I would be sure to arrive in time for George’s devotion at 8:00. We left my house around 7:15 and made our way towards the office. The fuel gauge needle was resting lifelessly in the red stripe at “E”. Oti pulled into a gas station and made his usual purchase of GHC 30,000 ($3.30), paid the attendant, and turned the key. The starter wheezed a couple of times but didn’t catch. Oti turned the key again and again the wheezing came. Over the next five minutes he turned the key more than sixty times, experimenting with myriad combinations of different gears, of pumping the gas pedal, and of popping the clutch just as he sparked it. He never waited more than two seconds between successive attempts and never seemed confused, frustrated, or the least bit worried. I offered more than once to give us a push, but he declined. Sometime between attempts sixty and seventy the engine caught and Oti gave it a couple hard revs. Then he put it first gear and we drove on.

2007-03-09T09:28:00.000Z

Three Scenes from Ghana@50

One

Tuesday Ghana turned fifty and threw a big party to celebrate. For months they cleaned, decorated, practiced, programmed, and outfitted for the bash. Preparation included everything from the sacking of the vendors in Makola market to the purchase of 150 new luxury cars with fifteen million tax dollars to fresh coats of white paint on the curbs of every main road in Accra to the construction of mansions for visiting heads of state. It was a big party, and it was called Ghana@50.

It began just minutes into the day with a huge fireworks display blooming over the ocean, launched from the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park and Mausoleum. We found a spot at a restaurant about a mile away right on the shore. The show was scheduled for midnight sharp, and so when we hadn’t seen anything after a half hour we began to think that maybe we had made some mistake. Cynically we wondered aloud whether “they” would screw this up, and start Ghana@50 off on the wrong foot. But around 12:40 they came like only fireworks can.

There were red, yellow, green, blue, and purple ones that burst in perfect spheres; gold ones that spilled out in enormous fountains and left lingering tails like glowing fingerpaint; clouds of hanging glitter; silver shooting stars that each burst into three more snaking flares, tracing a gnarled tree in the sky; color-changing ones; bright red embers that stayed lit as they smoldered through the sky all the way down to the ocean; and all the other usual suspects.

It lasted about twenty minutes in all, during which time I think the residents of Accra must have been as collectively quiet as they ever have been. For the most part I only heard the spontaneous oohs and ahhs of those bewitched by the miracle that is a professional fireworks display. Afterwards everyone, Ghanaian and obruni alike, was gushing about how great it was. And really, when it goes off without a hitch, as it did, what a fine, fine thing—who can find fault with those bright, fiery spiders arching confidently across the sky?

Two

Tuesday morning I woke up at 10, quickly dressed, and made my way towards Independence Square, Accra’s main parade ground, by taxi. Close to our destination the traffic was completely stopped, so I got out and continued on foot through the street jammed with cars and streaming with people. Most were wearing some Ghana@50 regalia—t-shirts, hats, pendants, and flags as capes or skirts or dresses. In general people were talkative and excited. There were some unofficial parade groups weaving through the stopped traffic playing drums and bells, waving flags, pumping fists, and hollering exuberantly.

Approaching the entrance to the square I passed increasing numbers of vendors, mostly of small food—Fan Ice, popcorn, sausage kebabs, doughnuts, plantain chips—and finally reached the gate. It was very crowded, but people were moving, entering and exiting in what seemed like equal numbers. The program was supposed to have started “around 9”, which is Ghanaian for “in the morning”, so I was surprised to see so many people leaving. But as I came closer to the edge of the parade ground I could see that events were well underway.

Independence Square is almost a quarter mile square, and except for the north edge, which is open to leave an unobstructed view of the Arc-de-Triomphe-style Independence monument across the street, it is bordered by covered bleachers. In the center of the south edge the bleachers are interrupted by a large arch with seats for optimal viewing. These are reserved for VIPs. I had entered at the northeast corner and I walked towards the center of the north edge, where the crowd was least dense. Eventually I took my place in a throng of people pressing up against the portable police barricade that separated the viewing area from the parade ground itself. I was about eight people deep from the barrier, and just behind me the crowd was much more dispersed, leaving ample room to back up.

When I stood on my tip-toes I could see past the dark blue military vehicles parked along the north edge to the many columns of army, navy, air force, police, and schoolchildren that made up the marching corps. Various columns of schoolchildren wore different uniforms: brown and yellow, green and white, blue and white, and purple. Some of the military were in their dress, complete with white gloves, and others were in camouflage. But when I arrived, and for the first 30 minutes or so, everything on the parade grounds seemed stationary.

During that time the vast crowd must have grown bored. Most people, not being six feet tall, couldn’t see anything. There was a lot of banter, some jockeying for position, some rounds of “Happy Birthday to Ghana” (followed by “How Old Are You Now?”) and even a couple choruses of the lesser-known “Ghana oooohhh”. I was wearing a thoroughly ridiculous homemade hat that I bought yesterday on the way to work: a hand-painted affair with “50 Yrs” scrawled in Sharpie a couple times on its yellow panels. It was extremely well-received. And whenever I took out my camera, people wanted to pose for pictures.

During this time many people introduced themselves to me, a lonely obruni in a sea of black faces. One man named Johnson had his children with him: a teenage son and two younger daughters wearing cream-colored dresses that looked like satin. He was alternately lifting each daughter onto his shoulders so they could see the action (or lack thereof). Each time they got up there on his shoulders, surveying it all, they smiled so big and deep they almost went walleyed. Even surrounded by the overwhelming crowd, their expressions radiated the contentment and security that only Dad can provide. Johnson and I talked for a few minutes and he gave me his business card; then we were separated by the slow shuffling of the crowd. But our brief interaction, and just seeing him there with his children at the parade grounds, a family man doing all the things that are right and good on a national holiday, was a great gift and my fondest memory from the day.

I guess there was some point when people got too hot or too tired and so became agitated; or maybe there were just a few who wanted to see something happen, but there began some light pushing at the barricades and some loud chanting right in the faces of the police officers manning them. The barricades would be pushed back and the crowd would sway as one. The continual hollering and hissing from the few loudmouths was such amateurish goading that I thought people would just ignore it. But each time the police pushed back the barrier, the crowd would lean and shuffle, and then some more would join in the hissing and push it forward again.

I kept checking behind me to make sure I wasn’t boxed in from all sides. Meanwhile, the jostling became more spirited, and some police officers incredibly started removing their belts and whipping them (not too hard, but with the buckle out!) indiscriminately into the crowd. I even saw one brandishing a splintery piece of scrapwood, waving it around like a toy sword.

The back and forth continued in fits and starts. During what seemed to be a lull I heard the sound of shuffling feet. All at once a hole opened up in the crowd about twenty feet to my left, as if invisible, irresistible hands were pushing out from the center. People started listing like concentric rings of dominoes, then stepping, then stepping faster. I turned around to find that the open area behind me had closed in, and I was part of the tilting, moving herd. All around, people picked up their flimsy plastic chairs and held them over their heads while they pressed on; the empty area at the center had widened. It was the horrifying feeling of trying to run in a dream where you know your legs should be pumping faster, but they can’t. Hands grabbed onto the shoulders in front of them and involuntary, plaintive yelps were heard all around. The chaos was excruciatingly slow and persisted for about 30 seconds. Then the shuffling sound stopped; the crowd quieted and stood up straight. The center area began to fill in again. I continued outward made a hasty exit to the main road. In the end, I only suffered a scrape on my toe.

Three

Around midnight I was in Osu, the nightlife district, walking with Sarah and Pamela to find a taxi. The main street was jammed full of people having a block party. But it had not been closed to traffic, so despite the music blasting from speakers just beside the road and the throngs of revelers dancing in front of them, cars tried to inch through. The Silent Majority, whose representative I had met earlier at the parade grounds, was fast asleep, and the madness was that of any mass gathering of mostly drunk, mostly male young adults: generally well-intentioned, wild, and bursting with a teetering potential energy. Here were three young men writhing on the ground in front of (slowly) oncoming traffic. And here was a guy trying to grab Pamela by the waist and pull her into a small pod of dancers as we walked by. She brushed his arm away without much trouble and we continued towards the main road.

2007-02-26T08:32:00.000Z

The Central Market of Kumasi (With Pictures!)

Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti kingdom and seat of its highest chief, the Asantehene, is Ghana’s second-largest city. It sits some 170 miles northwest of Accra, in the lush, rolling hills of central

Ghana

I boarded a bus in a dusty parking lot near Circle around 11am Thursday. Having paid the full GHC 80,000 (about $9) for the “luxury” bus, I was ready for a smooth and relaxing ride in a cool, spacious seat, just like I’ve seen in Amtrak Acela ads. As it turned out, the ride was admirably cool thanks to full-time air-con. There was also room to stretch my legs! Smooth was unfortunately out of the question due to the condition of the road; and relaxing was a pipe dream, anyway. The entire 6 hour journey (for readers without a pocket calculator handy, that’s a blistering 28mph average speed) there were Nigerian movies playing on the TV at the front of the bus. These films, well-loved by millions of Ghanaians, are incredibly low-budget and outrageous. They are the West African descendants of the Jerry Springer Show. Although they visit the usual dramatic themes—love, death, betrayal, ambition, etc—they are so (unintentionally) shoddy and over-the-top that they serve mainly to insult the tastes of the people who watch them.

Maybe that’s too harsh, but it’s hard to be complimentary when these movies are being amplified over the crackling, hissing bus PA system at unimaginable volumes as we trundle through hour five down the jalopy highway between Accra and Kumasi.

But eventually we arrived and I found my way to the Central Market—the largest outdoor market in West Africa, according to the guidebooks. It is the lowest part of the city, sitting in a depression between four hills. In the picture below, taken from the hill overlooking the southwest corner, the area bordered by the tro-tro station in the immediate foreground and by the substantial buildings on the hills to each side is the market. It’s well over a square mile.

But on Thursday I hardly walked through it—it was almost sunset and I didn’t want to find myself (or lose myself) in that impossible maze in the dark. So I stayed mostly to the edge and continued around the west side, where I saw a familiar sight in the waning daylight: trees whose branches were heavy with hanging bats like big dead leaves curled up on themselves. There were many thousands of them. I watched for a few minutes and, without obvious provocation, the trees began exploding one by one in whirling clouds of chattering and flapping that merged before the setting sun.

Had it not been for the persistent ringing of the wake-up call, I probably would have slept through most of Friday morning. Burrowed under a bedspread, head buttressed by soft pillows, heavy drapes drawn, the exotic sting of cold air in my nostrils—these are pleasures well known to (and often taken for granted by) experienced business travelers. But opening my eyes in the air-conditioned cave that was 6:30am in Room 110 at the Royal Park hotel, getting up wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me.

Nonetheless, by 8am I was at the Kejetia branch of OI, which sits on one of the hills overlooking the Central Market (actually, it’s just to the left of the frame of the photo above). There I met with the branch manager who arranged for me to accompany one of the Susu collectors on her daily rounds through the market. Susu is a savings product designed specifically for petty traders where the customer commits to deposit a daily deposit of a certain size—usually between GHC 10,000 and GHC 100,000 ($1 to $10)—and a bank officer visits his business each day to collect. Cynthia, the collector I went out with Friday morning, had 125 clients to visit. She led me through the streets, into courtyards, along narrow alleys, up crumbling stairways, down impossibly crowded aisles of the market, weaving a path whose complexity I cannot describe. Theseus would have run out of thread in our labyrinth. And as we slid along our incredible route, passing thousands, tens of thousands, of dark black faces, she would stop at a stall and *pop* familiarity! A short conversation, an exchange of soft-worn bills, a line on the ledger card, and the interaction was done. As it was Friday, about half of her clients didn’t make any deposit; she explained that they wanted to save their money for the weekend, but that on Monday they would all pony up their appointed sums.

To try and give some sense of the variety of the customers’ livelihoods, here is an incomplete list:

Rice and Stew (prepared)
Fabric
Rice (raw)
Shoe adhesive and leather
Butchers
Vegetables
Shoe heel wedge cutter
Groundnut paste
Sugar/flour/milk powder
Toiletries
Bread
Cooking pots
Candy
Sandal manufacturer
Machete sales
Beaded jewelry
Secondhand clothing
New clothing
Newspapers
Ground red pepper
Electrical supplies
Secondhand shoes
Luggage
Plastic bags
Laundry soap
Lamps
Embroiderer
Legumes (raw)
Cosmetics
Tailor
Sunglasses
Radios

And that was only the morning. I left after two hours, less than half way through Cynthia’s appointed rounds, and headed back to the branch. During that time I didn’t have my camera, but I had it when I returned alone in the afternoon to try (unsuccessfully) to develop some rough mental blueprint of the market and to consider the possibility of breaking it down into smaller clusters for the purposes of our study (prognosis: impossible).

Below are some of the pictures I took. General warning: the pictures do not capture the intensity of the market, its overwhelming size and scope. In fact, they’re completely deceiving because they are silent, self-contained, and individual: single stalls, tables, or people. But to stand there is to be inundated by many: many bodies, many smells, many colors, many sights, many sounds. Maybe it will suffice to say that, every time I snapped a picture, there was someone just inches outside the frame calling out, “Hey! Obruni! What are you doing?” or grabbing my arm, or laughing, or making a sale, or otherwise creating waves in the fabric of space-time. Serious warning: there are five shots from the butchering shed. Why so many gruesome pictures of raw meat? For two reasons: (1) the butchers were, on the whole, the nicest group of people I met at the market, happy to talk and let me take pictures. Go figure. (2) I’ve never seen anything like the inside of that shed, and suspect most of you haven’t either.

Shoe Alley: The first place I walked through with Cynthia. I can’t believe I managed to find it again in the afternoon. It is accessed by going through dark passage at the back of the dusty courtyard of a nondescript building on a side street. About 300 yards long and five feet wide, it climbs up a hill beside the market (of which it is not technically a part). On both sides are stalls with floor-to-ceiling lattices hung with leather shoes and sandals.

My Favorite Pepper Seller: This woman called to me and spoke very good English. We talked for a little while and she agreed that I could take a picture of her and her peppers. After I snapped it, she smiled and asked, “Where’s the money?” I told her I wouldn’t pay her, but that she could have some candy (I had just bought a big bag of individually-wrapped caramels). She said, “Okay!” and grabbed the bag out of my hand, emptied half of it onto her lap, and laughed the heartiest laugh I’ve heard in a long time. I screwed up my face and said “Oh!” but the women sitting at the tables near her saw what happened and started howling, too. There was nothing else for me to do, so I laughed so hard I almost cried.

Butchering Shed Pictures

What’s Inside a Cow?: At bottom left is the lung, bottom center is the gizzard (the flesh inside is incredibly deep ruby red), dominating the center are the intestines, the furry bag at right is one of the stomachs (turned inside out), the bubbly-looking stuff at top left is mostly fat (I think), and the blurry part being sliced at top center is the penis (which looks like a 3’x 2” tapeworm). Hungry?

Fat, and The Butchers Who Sell It: The greenish-white lumps at right are portions of pure beef fat.

Goat Heads: Mainly for soup, though I’m told that people eat the brain separately.

A Man and His Cow Head Halves: Maybe gratuitous, but this is here on a table along with everything else. And the man pictured, who produced this incredible gore, was one of the nicest people I spoke to all day.

The Whole Damned Thing: The man at this table let me take a picture, but couldn’t tell me what these are used for. I have to guess this one weighed at least 30 lbs. Who’s carrying that home for dinner? This was probably the hardest thing for me to look at all day. The skin is rough, like sandpaper.

No More Butchering Shed Pictures

Cloth and More Cloth: This one stall was bursting with so much color that I couldn’t pass by without taking a picture (or two).

The staggering variety of the single cloth stall above illustrates a difficulty that I have hardly begun to digest. The thousands of aisles of stalls, the myriad skills at work and products for sale, the impossible mass of humanity in that low-lying market in Kumasi—it is a composition of individuals so numerous that any attempt to grasp them is immediately confounded. But cutting a razor-thin path through that mayhem I came face to face with hundreds of them, exchanged words, made real human contact, and continued on, knowing that I could never find my way back. How numerous, and how brief, those sparks—and how much more numerous the sparks that were not struck, the aisles I never did (and never will) walk down…

Thomas Wolfe says:

“O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?”

But my feeling is not one of grief, or of missed opportunities; but rather of dizzying awe at the inescapable randomness of my jaunt through this continent. And the detail in this infinitesimally thin slice—does it even make sense to speak of a whole pie? Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, and standing inside Kumasi’s vast Central Market one couldn’t disagree. But then, climbing the hill back to the Kejetia branch, the particular fading into the general, the swarm of activity blurring continuously into a nebulous cloud and eventually into a bounded whole, the deception of sight and the conceit of knowing.

Every night at dusk the bats fly, millions of them, over the dispersing atoms of the market while the place folds in on itself and lays down to sleep.

2007-02-17T17:00:00.000Z

The Silent Guardian

Warning: the following took place here in Accra, but is not expressly about Accra. Is this a welcome increase in the scope of this blog’s reportage? Or am I just overstepping, wandering onto subjects about which I’m not qualified to speak at all? I apologize in advance since it’s likely to be the latter.

Tuesday night I ate dinner at Sarah’s apartment. Not, loyal readers, the Buddhic Sarah of OI fame whose profile appeared in a prior installment of this blog, but rather Sarah the recent Yale graduate and Fulbright scholar. She has a beautiful apartment in the upscale Airport Residential neighborhood of Accra that she shares with five other young ladies. We ate a delightful meal of chicken, potato pancakes, and tomato-and-bread salad, kicked back, drank wine, and generally savored the high life in all its temperature-controlled splendor.

After dinner had finished the doorbell rang and it was Ryan, one of the six US Marines stationed in Accra—guarding the embassy—and the boyfriend of one of Sarah’s roommates. We found ourselves in a conversation that somehow meandered onto the topic of non-lethal weapons. I had recently read a BBC article on the Silent Guardian (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6297149.stm), a weapon designed mostly for crowd control that has been recently unveiled by the US military. It’s a large Humvee-mounted dish that focuses a high-energy beam on a point up to 500m away. The beam penetrates clothing and the first .5mm of human skin, and produces an excruciating burning sensation which subsides immediately when the beam is removed. It leaves no physical trace. Claims about its effects have been verified by journalists who volunteered to be shot by it while it was demonstrated at an Air Force base in Georgia.

I mentioned the article to Ryan, who had not heard of the Silent Guardian but thought it sounded “cool”. He chuckled and advised me that I should never volunteer to be a test subject for a non-lethal weapon. I didn’t need much convincing.

He went on to describe the general purpose of non-lethal weapons and he mentioned a few examples that he had seen or experienced firsthand. “’Non-lethal’ just means ‘pain-compliance’,” he said—that is, distinct from impositions of force designed to incapacitate a target. When you shoot a would-be attacker in the leg (or in the head) the idea is to render him physically incapable of harming you, but the pain-compliance approach seeks to make the would-be attacker decide not to harm you. In the former, pain is a side effect; in the latter, it is a means to an end.

Consider the following from John Alexander, formerly of the US Army Special Operations and now an advocate for non-lethal weapons: “There is a misconception that war is about killing. War is about the imposition of will.”

Indeed, the US military has devised a number of creative ways to impose its will without killing: mace, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the Silent Guardian are some examples. Ryan discussed the first three, in whose application he has been trained, with clinical matter-of-factness. Mace—actually concentrated red pepper—inflicts extraordinary pain but is completely non-lethal (there have been no recorded deaths from it). The 15% concentrate used by the military is enough to cause burning “bad enough that if you had a gun you’d want to shoot yourself,” but the sensation goes away shortly after the spray is washed off. (If the spray is water-based it can be washed off with running water; but if it is oil-based it bonds to skin and you need special soap.) If it gets in your eyes it severely distorts vision but does not permanently impair it. Ryan would know, because every Marine must be a sprayee before he can be a sprayer, and so he has been shot directly in the face with the stuff and made to guess how many fingers his C.O. was holding up. Looking on the bright side, one can at least be happy that they use the low test (15%) version—100% concentrate “would melt your skin straight off.”

Tear gas is similar to mace, but is neither as strong nor as non-lethal—there have been deaths from exposure to very high concentrations of the gas. Typically, though, it is used on large crowds in open areas, while mace is usually applied at close range; its effects are comparatively mild. Ryan suggested that they ought to make a similar crowd-control device with an oscillating sprinkler mounted on a Humvee and connected to a tank of mace inside, thus combining the broad application strategy with the increased pain (read “compliance”).

Finally there are the rubber bullets or, more broadly, any projectile shot from a non-lethal launcher. This is an air-powered rifle with a .62” barrel (like a paintball gun) that shoots missile-shaped projectiles. These may be designed to burst and distribute a payload (e.g. mace or tear gas), or they may simply be made of hard rubber. The weapon is rated non-lethal for 3-150 yards so long as you don’t shoot anybody in the face. While he was on guard duty at a base in the Middle East, Ryan was stationed on a tower overlooking the chainlink fence that marked the boundary of the installation. They had been instructed to keep the fence clear; so whenever someone was too close, or leaning directly on the fence, the Marines would yell to him to move away and would eventually shoot him if he refused. Normally tower guards are armed with traditional rifles but eventually they acquired a couple of non-lethal launchers. Referring to the military leadership, he remarked, “I guess they said it was more humane.”

He mockingly emphasized the word just as people mockingly emphasize other poorly-defined or generally ridiculous terms from the vocabulary of political correctness. Ultimately his attitude was that such a nebulous concept was ill-adapted to the strict utilitarian calculus of military decision-making, and so it ought to be abandoned up front. If nothing else, this seems, to me, (brutally) honest.

But the untraceable and excruciating pain of a concentrated energy beam as a means of persuasion? This is dark magic and finds application in places where blatant military force has generally been deemed inappropriate: places where, when it is put to use despite general condemnation, the best way to fight back is to make public some record of the brutality. An unseemly demonstration or a tight-lipped suspect under interrogation? Zap and it’s a memory—and who can tell the story of the suffering under the ray? There is no scar to testify to the ordeal.

The ease with which Ryan imagined these scenarios suggested that the military has in mind uses of precisely this sort. Imagine the irony: you might be at a rally protesting the use of these weapons when you hear, from the Humvee behind the barricades, the mechanical whine of the Silent Guardian’s dish pivoting to focus on you…

But one hopes such fears won't be realized, so long as we all stay in line. Reassuring, no?

2007-02-16T08:43:00.000Z

Ashaiman Market: The Top Three

I have to interrupt the other entry I’m writing now for the following urgent report.

Background: The greater Accra metropolitan area, which is usually referred to simply as “Accra”, is actually composed of the city proper and a number of outlying towns. It stretches along the Atlantic coast from the western city limits of Accra to the port at Tema, some 40km to the east. The northern boundary of the city is marked by Achimota forest in the west and Ashaiman in the east. OI recently opened a shiny new branch in Ashaiman and has begun serving the community there. The town of 100,000 is a sprawling jumble of wooden shacks and two-story cinderblock buildings. Many of its residents are petty traders and the economic activity of the town centers around a large outdoor market with long rows of vendors selling goods of all kinds, from produce to clothing to flatware to radios.

I went to the branch there today to talk about incorporating its service area into the interest rate sensitivity study. After meeting with some of the members of the credit department I went out for a loop around the market to try and get a feel for the place. Besides the bright piles of red and green peppers, tables of pungent grilled fish, baggies of sugar and cassava flour, calls of “White man!” and “Krasi Obruni!” (Krasi means Sunday-born, and Sunday-borns are supposed to be lucky. One is also considered lucky to be white. Thus, one is frequently called out as Krasi Obruni.), there were three things that stood out as exceptional:

1) Up against a wooden kiosk was a drift of wicker baskets filled with a variety of things, and on the left side of the drift were three baskets that seemed to contain strange dried animal parts. On closer inspection I found goat skulls with hair still attached; frighteningly large birds’ heads; lizard skulls with rows of shiny white teeth; an entire basket of whole dried salamanders and chameleons whose leathery skin had become delicate like phylo dough and was torn in some places, revealing withered organs inside; and some animals more recently dead that might have been roadkill. I knew that sheep and goat heads are sometimes used to make stock for soups, but I’ve never seen a chameleon-liver pate on a Ghanaian menu, so I had to ask.

The animals are there for use in traditional medicine. They might be ground up and put into salves, balms, or pastes, or they might be ingredients in a remedy to be ingested. Although I wanted to ask more, and perversely wanted to see what strange carcasses were deeper inside the baskets, the smell was a little much, and I made to leave. The woman I had been talking to, seeing that I was getting skittish, made a face of mock disbelief: “Oh! You don’t want to buy anything, white man?” she asked with a kind smile. “Here! I dash you a bird skull!” She picked it up, six inches long with the beak, and presented it.

“Ahh…thank you. I have too many at home, though, already.”

“Oh! Then take a whole bird!” And now she produced one of the roadkill-looking carcasses, small and squashed and dirty, and held it between her thumb and forefinger, making as if to pass it off to me.

She laughed at my involuntary grimace of disgust and let me turn to leave. “Next time, white man!”

2) In a corner of a less-crowded alley near the back of the market a dark man sat on the ground with his legs fully extended to each side in a right angle. In the empty space in front of him was a pile of charcoal. In Ghana charcoal (i.e. wood that has been buried in sand and partially burned, leaving black chunks that can smolder at high heat for hours) is a common cooking fuel. It is sold in sacks and put to use in simple stoves made from old car wheels or sheet metal. In order to fit in the stoves, the logs of charred wood that are dug up from the burning pits must be broken into fairly uniform pieces, and that was this man’s job. His arms, legs, shirt, pants, and feet were completely black. He was so black that the silty dark grey dust from the rough surface of the alleyway that settled on him, kicked up by passersby, stood out like flour against the skin of his feet. I watched him for just a few seconds as he broke down big chunks from the pile in front of him into smaller chunks that he placed in a pile to his side. The ground on which he sat was pure black, too.

But he wore a huge, broad hat of woven dried palm fronds that kept his face and chest in shadow; and it was light brown and clean as a whistle.

3) A little further on from the charcoal man, along a narrower portion of the same alley, an older woman was sitting on a bench against a side wall. I was walking towards her and when I was a few steps away we made eye contact and smiled at each other. Since she was sitting, as I walked closer to her I had to look down to hold her gaze, and just when I came even with her I realized that she was holding a baby. In fact, she was breastfeeding the baby from her fully exposed right breast. You’d think that I would notice such a thing when I first saw her from no more than ten feet away—but I can only suppose that my brain didn’t really process the scene because the proportions were off: her right breast was (not kidding!) as large as the baby itself. And it wasn’t a very small baby. I think her breast was more than twice as big as my head. That’s just incredible.

Don’t you wonder what your Top Three would have been, had you walked through Ashaiman market today?

2007-02-08T11:11:00.000Z

Thursday of last week I returned home from work by taxi and pulled up to the gate to my house. As we pulled to a stop I noticed that across the street, in front of another house’s gate, stood a group of school children still in their uniforms. The uniforms are brown bottoms—shorts for boys and bibbed overall-style dresses for girls—and light yellow collared tops for all. I recognized most of them from the neighborhood. There were about seven of them, and I’d say they ranged in age from six to ten. All bunched up together, they seemed poised like a group of carolers waiting for someone to answer the door.

Sure enough, as soon as got out of the taxi, they began chanting and pumping their fists: “Serious! Serious! Serious! Serious!” (Ghanaians say it SEER-yus.) It wasn’t my first time being chanted at here, but in past instances the cry has been “Obruni!” (oh-BROO-ni), and it has always seemed better not to encourage it by reacting. But my interest was piqued; why was I “serious”? As I fumbled with the key in the gate I weighed my options.

I turned to them and said loudly across the road, “Hey! Who is Serious?”

“You! You are Serious!”

“I thought I was Jake. Why am I Serious?”

One of the older girls broke away from the group and ran across the street towards me, beaming a wide smile. She came to face me, stood up straight, and hollered: “Cause you’re a ‘ARDWORKIN man!”

At this punchline, she and the rest of the group burst into rollicking laughter. The others cascaded across the street and crowded around for high-fives and a couple minutes of general merriment. It was, without a doubt, the best I’ve felt in weeks.

Lest anyone think I am acquiring a devoted fan club here, I will note that nothing like this had occurred before or has occurred since. It was, as far as I can tell, a one-time thrill. I still have no idea why they were all assembled there in front of the neighbor’s gate on that Thursday afternoon, looking as if they were anxiously awaiting my arrival. In fact, I don’t even know whether or not they were making fun of me. I can only guess from their giddiness that, at the time, I was a goofy and incongruous neighborhood character who needed to be addressed. Whatever the motivation, the encounter made me feel light as a balloon. I’ll take a Ghanaian under-13 cheering section any day of the week.

Also from the sublime/ridiculous file: On Tuesday’s ride home from work Oti saved a kitten and nearly killed a tro-tro full of people. We were driving down a narrow section of High St (the main road) that runs through South Osu, a dense town area. Like most improved roads in Accra, this one is bordered on both sides by open cement sewers about 1.5’ wide and 2’ deep. It was nearly 7:00, and completely dark. The dim headlights of Oti’s Opel Astra illuminate only a few feet in front of the car, so even at a modest 25mph objects in the road ahead seem to materialize out of thin air.

One such object was a little grey-and-black striped kitten that appeared in our path, scurrying across the road from left to right with back bowed in a moving crouch. Oti let out a muffled Oooh! and, eyes on the cat, swerved to the left so we could straddle it between the tires. When we swerved I looked up and my eyes met the headlights of an oncoming tro-tro rambling down the road as only a tro-tro can. To help you appreciate the way these vehicles move, the way they rattle and bounce and list to one side, the baldness of their tires, their utter ricketiness, I will try to post a video soon. It suffices for now to say that it’s not the kind of vehicle into whose path you’d want to swerve.

But swerve we did, and the tro-tro responded with its own evasive maneuver. With the agility of a three-legged cow it lurched to the side and teetered on the edge of the sewer, its topheavy bulk leaning precariously over the ditch, until in an instant we passed each other and it lurched back towards the center of the road. As we continued driving in opposite directions, Oti and I could not help but hear the fading spasm of yelling and the wheezing honk of the tro-tro’s overused horn, which was quickly drowned out by the rattling of our own vehicle. The whole event lasted maybe four seconds.

Oti ensured the incident’s induction into the Hall of Absurdity with his elegantly ambiguous summary: “Oh! We didn’t hit it!”

2007-02-01T13:44:00.000Z

You lose some, you win some.

A week ago today I was back at Champs. It was trivia night, and I had promised Chang (a recent graduate of U. Chicago and OI’s newest intern) I’d show her what little I knew about the social opportunities for ex-pats here. It seemed like an obvious choice; the place was packed as usual and there was hardly a Ghanaian to be found, save the wait staff. Our motley crew won the tequila round and took home the coveted second place honors (GHC 200,000 prize, with no obligation to run the contest the following week), and in the process ate an impressive quantity of greasy food. Enchanting!

But Friday I suffered from post-Champs disorder (PCD). This is the only time I have known a restaurant to poison its patrons with such regularity that the infection has earned a name of its own. Yet Champs remains a popular spot, and even claims many experienced PCD sufferers as regulars. (By now, one assumes, they know their way around the menu.) For the record, this uncanny client retention attests more to the dearth of alternatives than to Champs’ “delightful ambience”, “hip, attractive crowd”, or “distinctive character”. There’s only one trivia game in town.

PCD is a combination of food poisoning and self-condemnation. Inevitably, the discomfort of a digestive tract gone haywire is compounded by the knowledge that you gambled and lost. Frequently exacerbating the latter is the fact that PCD seems impervious to the “safe-ordering” prophylaxis. That is, although you order fried chicken strips and French fries while the rest of your table opts for octopus sashimi, you’re the one bent over a toilet the next morning. (For those who like the taste of irony, though, this can actually be a mitigating factor.)

Friday morning my alarm sounded at the usual 6:15, and the act of sitting up seemed to crack open a delicate capsule of hot, black bile lodged somewhere in my lower back. Its contents diffused immediately through my midsection and, vaguely aware of what was in store (but hoping it was a fluke), I went back to sleep immediately. I woke up again at 8:00 to throbbing kidneys that somehow powered a belt of hurting like an evil heating pad all the way around my midsection. But the pains were not as sharp as they had been earlier, so I tentatively got dressed, took some yerba mate tea bags—“Tones stomach and aids digestion,” says the package—from home, and headed for the office.

I hadn’t sweated through my first cup of tea at work when I knew the day was over. Quickly I gathered my things and made for the exit, but halfway down the stairs I had to divert into the bathroom (better there than in the taxi home, anyway). Then at home I laid flat on my back on the foam mattress, alternately sweated and slept, watched a bootleg DVD of The Departed—probably not the best treatment for nausea—and then spent some time focusing in on the visceral feeling of sickness: What hurts exactly? And how does it hurt? I drifted off to sleep staring inwardly at the glowing iron spikes in my kidneys.

Whether it was due to the above exercise or to the nature of PCD itself I cannot say, but by Saturday morning I was much improved, and by noon I was right as rain.

On Tuesday the sun was scorching, it was dusty, I haggled with a taxi driver for the fare to work (Oti has been MIA for over a week), ate my usual egg-and-bread breakfast, and settled into a day at the office like any other. Around 10 Mavis, Stanley, and I set out for Makola, the site of last week’s massive sacking by the AMA.

The streets still seem empty, but the market has begun to grow back like the branches of a harshly pruned forsythia. From the storefronts lining the streets tabletop stands and blankets sprawled with goods emerge like spry green shoots. For sale are bags of candy, plastic wastebaskets, lanterns, soap, hand-wrapped baggies of powdered indigo dye, wheelie suitcases. A few young women sashay down the sidewalks with big plastic tubs on their heads, mostly selling the ubiquitous half-liter sachets of water. “Jaaaaahhz pyooAHtahhhhhhh….” (“Just pure water.”) Because my eyes wander, and maybe because I’m a lanky, gawky obruni, people call me out while I walk. “Hey white man! What do you want? Come take a look.”

It is buoyant, vital commerce in the hot and dusty streets. I am sweating through my shirt. The roads themselves are rough and strewn with mango-sized chunks of cement and rock. In some spots the sidewalk has caved in to form treacherous, gaping holes down into sludge-filled sewers. But there is no problem, no contradiction there; nor is there any sense of a problem solved or an obstacle overcome. The hazards are as sure as sunrise. They are not cause for complaint, and they do not require repair—they hardly demand attention. (In fact, it appears as if I’m the only one who thinks they are “hazardous” at all.) The water-selling women’s feet seem to know instinctively where to step.

Meanwhile, I’m engaged in a Frogger-like meander: fast in the straightaways, awkward lateral steps, queer shuffling in narrow bottlenecks. I have felt this way before in some train stations, glancing nervously between the departures board and the track signs, squinting, looking again, doubling back. All around is a flowing stream of daily commuters who glide effortlessly to the right track at the right time. It’s like watching fish in water.

I think that’s one reason it’s so enjoyable to come to Makola: here the characters are entirely in their element—the adaptation is complete. What appears to the outsider as an impediment is to the expert no such thing, having been smoothed by the force of repetition. And since it is the individual who adapts to the market (and not vice versa), the result is the resident population of savants who—each one with miraculous nonchalance—make up the buzzing, chattering whole. Along the invisible time-smoothed grooves of the marketplace flows the stuff of daily life; and what appears chaotic is actually ordered, even efficient.

But it is certainly not efficient like a Target Greatland with its acres of aisles of shelves of individually-wrapped and barcoded goodies. No, this model’s efficiency (and magic) lies in its immediacy. It is more like a stock exchange than a store. No prices; just deals. Supply and demand are spontaneous, organic forces to be coordinated by hand. So here one truly makes deals—makes them from nothing at all. And that, surely, is another reason why walking here is invigorating: one can’t help but observe hundreds of these exchanges, and so one constantly bears witness to that great human alchemy—mutual gains from trade.

I guess that’s just a fancy (obnoxious?) way to say that it feels good to see people bargain, agree, and exchange. It feels good to be yelled at by a lady who is trying to sell me a huge (like two of my fists!) live land snail. It feels good not to step into the fetid knee-deep sludge.

At the risk of oversimplifying (it wouldn’t be the first time), Makola this morning—bright noise, snails, rebirth from the sacking, indigo dye—seems to be the living and continually-unfolding expression of a single fact: You go into the marketplace to get the things you need. What could be simpler? Just say it—it even sounds plain. But here it is, articulated in a hundred colors and a thousand sounds, the kingdom from the mustard seed.

Hell, maybe it just feels good to be out of the office and in a setting where I can’t even pretend to know what I’m doing. Whatever it is, or was, it seemed to be in abundant supply; and I plan to return and fill my cup as needed. Who knew the elixir was so close at hand?

2007-01-24T22:01:00.000Z

Piloting + sacking

While Accra continues shamble along as only it can, I have found myself less captivated by its peculiar rhythms since I’ve returned. Familiarity leads to monotony; or is it the other way around? Yes—I think it’s the latter.

In the past two weeks work has been the focus. We’ve reached a major hurdle—the beginning of the pilot—and I think we’re in the process of clearing it. But this is not a simple run-and-jump deal. Every miniscule movement of our collective striding legs is an excruciating coordination of myriad twitching nerves.

But what’s the pilot anyway? For that matter, what’s the project for which it serves as preliminary research? These are questions I have not yet answered in this rambling blog, and I will try to do so in the following paragraphs.

The project I was hired to work on is an Interest Rate Sensitivity Study for individual microloans. The set-up is as follows. I work for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a US-based NGO run by development economists. Most generally, our output is papers to be (hopefully) published in academic journals. More specifically, those papers tend to be write-ups of field experiments in economic development—particularly in the science of evaluating development programs. The question that guides IPA’s research is, broadly: What works in development, and why?

In some remote corner of that question lives microfinance; in some nook in that corner are microloans; in one cranny of that nook are microloans; and on one grain of sand in that nook is the individual loan product offered by Opportunity International – Sinapi Aba Savings and Loans (OISASL). IPA has partnered with OISASL to investigate the following specific questions: How do individuals at various poverty levels respond to different interest rates in microloans? Do particular interest rates attract certain types of borrowers? Are people’s abilities to repay dependent on the interest rate offered?

To answer these questions, we have designed the study that has just entered the pilot phase. For the first two months of my stay here, we pounded the hot pavement of Accra cataloguing some 7,000 businesses large and small—everything from sidewalk stands selling mangoes to more sophisticated operations in permanent buildings with multiple employees. These 7,000 were divided into 125 geographic clusters (think of a cluster as comprising all the businesses on a given city block), and to each cluster we will randomly assign one of four different interest rates.

Next we developed a poverty-level assessment (in the form of a short questionnaire) and promotional flyers inviting first-time customers with OISASL to apply for loans. Then comes the labor-intensive step—marketing. It proceeds as follows: an OISASL marketer approaches one of the catalogued businesses, asks the owner the poverty-level assessment questions (e.g. How does your household get drinking water? Do all children age 6-17 in your household attend school regularly? What kind of cooking fuel do you use?), tells him a little bit about our promotional offer, and hands him a flyer advertising loans at the interest rate we have assigned to his cluster, inviting him to come to the branch and fill out an application. Repeat 6,999 times, and we’re done with that step.

Once the business owners have flyers and we have their poverty-level information, it just remains to track their responses. (A) Who comes into the branch? (B) Who continues with the application process? (C) Who is approved? (D) Who is able to repay?

We will accumulate the data necessary to answer those four questions in the year or so following the marketing campaign. Then all that remains is analysis and, finally, writing the paper itself (happily we have Dean Karlan, a rising star in development economics, to do the bulk of the last step).

So that’s the project in a nutshell. The pilot is essentially a short-term, small-scale implementation of that mess. We have selected four clusters (one at each interest rate) and are now marketing to the businesses in them. Our goals for the pilot are (1) to refine our marketing technique, (2) to streamline the reception of study participants in the branch, and (3) to get some estimates of (A) – (C) above. Once we have a sense of what percentage of people will come to the branch, we can set about preparing to handle the additional workload associated with the full study. We will not attempt to study (D) in the pilot, as repayment data only builds up over the life of the loan (typically 6-12 months).

For (2) above I probably should have written “damage control”. It is ultimately a dangerous thing to advertise different rates to different people, especially when many of those people are Ghanaian petty traders, a notoriously gregarious variety. The concern is that we will have a lot of irate customers coming into the branch and laying into the individual loan officers: My friend owns a shop just across the street, and he got a lower rate than me. Give me the lower rate! One reason for randomizing interest rate at the cluster level (as opposed to at the individual level) in the first place was to minimize this issue. If we offer everyone in a given cluster the same interest rate, then hopefully friction will only occur at the edges where it borders on other clusters.

Incredibly, Ghana exhibits extraordinarily resistance to even this most rudimentary instance of advance planning. As I said before, many of the businesses we’ve catalogued are street-side stands. Sometimes goods are laid out on a blanket spread on the sidewalk; other times they are stacked on a table. In downtown Accra these stands are ubiquitous. They seem to occupy 75% of passable sidewalk, and in many areas, especially where there are “rough” (dirt) roads, they spill out into the street. While this makes walking in the city an exhausting exercise in dodging and jostling, it also means that one can buy anything from fresh produce to toilet paper to stereo systems without walking more than a couple blocks. From the seller’s perspective it means a wealth of loosely (if at all) regulated commercial space in a heavily-trafficked market; and a typical sidewalk stand operator has staked out a physical location and a regular customer base that he returns to everyday.

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (roughly analogous to the Mayor’s office) has decided to put an end to this in one fell swoop. In preparation for Ghana’s Golden Jubilee 50^th Anniversary on March 6 of this year, the AMA is undertaking a number of ambitious projects to improve the look and feel of the capital. While these improvements are ultimately intended to benefit the residents of Accra, most people readily admit that the reason they’re being made—and made quickly—is so that Ghana can put her best foot forward for all the important folks (read “first world tourists and politicians”) coming in for the celebration. In addition to widening some major roads and installing trash cans in public areas (wow!), on Monday they began the systematic “sacking” of all informal street vendors, from hawkers (people selling on foot, carrying their goods in large baskets balanced on their heads) to tabletop stands.

“Sacking” really means forced relocation to one of two locations that have been set aside for the vendors. Most Ghanaians I’ve talked to are thrilled with the results—in the space of three days the downtown streets have been rendered passable again, and the whole area is undeniably cleaner and less chaotic. Until Monday afternoon Makola, a twelve-square-block area just a few minutes walk from the OISASL office, was the densest market in Accra, with vendors completely filling the streets. On Tuesday morning it was unrecognizable: wide, empty thoroughfares with cars timidly poking along, still not sure if they really belonged there. In corners and against the sides of buildings were piled great drifts of broken and abandoned wooden tables and racks—the dusty, brittle bones of the marketplace.

There is reason to believe that this new arrangement does not constitute a free lunch. For one, the largest area that the AMA has set aside for the vendors is just beside Kwame Nkrumah Circle (known here as “Circle”), which has the dubious honor of being Africa’s largest roundabout. It is easily the most congested area in the city, and the addition of thousands of hawkers and vendors—not to mention their customers, who would otherwise have no reason to go there—is sure to exacerbate the problem. Fortunately Circle is not on the tour bus route.

Above, I introduced “sacking” by way of saying that Ghana had resisted our attempts at planning ahead to avoid complaints about offering different interest rates to different people. About half of our 125 clusters are in areas that have been, or will soon be, sacked. So whereas we had hoped that those clusters, and the vendors comprising them, would remain geographically distinct (even if only separated by a street), now they will be busted up and the sidewalk vendors among them will corralled as tightly as possible into one massive pit.

Recipe for disaster? Maybe. Then again, if things were easy, they’d be too easy.

Much love and cheer from Accra,

Jake

2007-01-17T19:47:00.000Z

Dust & fighting.

No—it’s not a Clint Eastwood movie. But those two signature Wild West themes have featured in my week so far.

We are now in the grips of the season called the Hammarton. It normally lasts about two months, from late December to the middle of February. Typically it separates some very hot and dry months (October-December) from some very hot and wet months (March-April). It is a little pocket of agreeably mild temperature, with highs typically in the low 80s. There’s even a breeze. But every rose has its thorn; and this thorn is made of choking dust.

I’ve asked a number of Ghanaians and have heard a variety of answers, but most agree at least that the signature winds of the Hammarton come from the north. When wind comes from the south it picks up moisture from the Atlantic and brings humid air into Accra. Although it only rained for about ten minutes total in my first two months here, it was almost always humid and sticky. But when the winds come from the north they carry with them the sands of the Sahel, the desert belt south of the Sahara. The northernmost third of Ghana lies in the Sahel, and I shudder to think what the Hammarton is like up there. In Accra, some 400 miles south, it’s incredibly dry and dusty. The haze is so thick that during the day you can look directly into the sun without hurting your eyes. And the dust is fine as silt; it goes everywhere the air goes. It sneaks between doors and their frames, between the panes of louver windows. There is a film of dust on everything, and it builds up overnight (literally). Today we had the house cleaned, and tomorrow morning I will be able to write “wash me” with my finger on the glass top of our coffee table. I know this for certain.

And if it were only the coffee table, or everything in the house, I probably wouldn’t mention it. But any dust fine enough to sneak through a well-fitting door is also fine enough to sneak through the forest of little hairs inside one’s nose that are supposed to act as an air filter. From there it is only a short journey to the throat and lungs, and that’s when Hammarton becomes very frustrating.

For the first week back it seemed as if the air was just dry. Then yesterday my throat started to feel a little scratchy. This morning I woke up with that feeling where you can’t take a full breath, and with no voice at all. I’ve lost my voice before, but this felt more like the time I tried to swallow a scoopful of protein powder—so dry that the throat winces and contracts, all the water gone from it. Sadly, this has persisted all day. Everyone here says it hasn’t been like this in years. It’s cooler and windier and dustier than was expected. Most every obruni I know, and some Ghanaians, too, are having a hard time with it.

Myself, I do like the cooler weather, but the dust is too much. Even after a dozen or so mugs of tea with (local Ghanaian!) honey today at the office, my voice is nowhere to be found. Damn you, Hammarton.

So even though the Hammarton (let’s just say “dusty season”) in general doesn’t have much going for it, and even though this one in particular is lousier than most, there is one saving grace: pronunciation. I don’t know why, but when Ghanaians intone the word itself they invariably do so with great gusto. Even when it’s said slowly it is zesty, saucy, more like a catchphrase than a meteorological phenomenon. And it always sounds like “Hammertime”. So that’s a throwback right there.

Monday night, before I lost my voice, Justin and I went ate a delightful Indian dinner at the Banana Leafz Kitchen in Osu, the upscale nightlife district of Accra. Afterwards we were walking back towards the main road. When we reached it we saw a white tro-tro pulled to the side with its door swung open. (Some tro-tros have a sliding side door on the right side and a narrow aisle to allow access to the forward-facing bench seats; others, rigged for maximum passengers-as-sardines capacity, have a bench along the right side—leaving an even narrow aisle—and only a paddywagon-style door in the back. This was one of the latter.)

When we first noticed it, about a hundred feet ahead, two men were standing on the street and more were pouring out onto the street, as if from a clown car. They were yelling and, as we approached, the smaller of them pounced at the larger and laid a lightning-fast right hand into his skull. I kept my pace and crossed to the far side of the street, watching as people continued to emerge from the cramped vehicle. In a flash the two were on the ground, the smaller one with his head buried in the other’s chest, fists flailing at his head. The larger, in turn, was pummeling the smaller man’s skull over and over.

Justin had been crossing to the other side with me but then diverted towards the pair and stopped just a few feet short of them. By this time only a couple more passengers had made it out of the tro-tro and they gathered around the two. Everyone looked confused. It was a strange picture, a few Ghanaians and 6’3” Justin in a tight ring around the brawling men.

A few seconds later the crowd had grown and had apparently decided enough was enough: a couple men took off their shoes and started thrashing the snarling pair. Another man slipped off his leather belt with a flourish, raised it high above his head, and began laying into them furiously. There were terrible slapping sounds and the two continued only a short while longer. In the ferocity and desperation of the fighting men; in the way that the bystanders beat them indiscriminately to a stop; in the ragged, bristling panting that followed as they eyed each other afterwards, separated by the man brandishing the belt; it was more like a dogfight than anything else.

By this time Justin had returned to my side of the street (he had left the throng of bystanders around the time when the shoes came off). He said, “I was trying to decide whether or not to get in that.” Let me pause to say that Justin’s interest here was thoroughly that of a Good Samaritan. Nonetheless—get in that? Really?

We began to walk away as the two fighters continued to yell at each other across the belt-man’s outstretched arms. One of them lifted up his shirt to reveal some injury to his torso, then ducked quickly around the belt-man and the pair were at it again, this time tussling into the middle of Oxford St (the main road), stopping traffic there as the crowd, now numbering close to twenty, moved amoeba-like to envelop and separate them.

When we turned our heads for good it was away from a cacophony of yelling and car horns.

2007-01-12T18:52:00.000Z

Back in the saddle.

Home was so delightful that it flew by like summer camp and the sojourn is too quickly acquiring that dreamlike quality that characterizes the best experiences. Now the game begins: “It was only ___ days/weeks ago that I was _____.” If I can make a temporal chain back to it, it must be real; I could skip a stone across the days back to New Years, back to Family Band Take Two, back to 7 Fairfield.

The first 24 hours back in Ghana I was stricken with a fairly dreadful combination of jetlag and comfortlag. The latter is a condition analogous to the first, except that in comfortlag the body is slow to adapt to a change in—or dearth of—things that make it feel good. Family, good food and beer, friends, down comforters, New York City, and driving a car are all relevant examples. My mind forgot that these things were no longer at hand, and so it operated as if they were. It was like arriving at a friend’s apartment and finding it vacant. There was nobody home, and I felt sharp pricks of loneliness for the first time since I began this journey.

But it passed, largely under the radar, due in no small part to the fact that another raucous workweek began the day after I arrived. Back at the office it’s “business” as usual. On Thursday I desperately hope to begin the Pilot Study, which is really a small-scale mock-up of the interest rate sensitivity study I came here to do. But before that ship can sail, I need to (further) train the marketers and loan officers, requisition a color printer and ink for flyers and then print them, convince the management team that everything is going exactly according to plan so they can just lazily wave the thing on, pitch a couple slight changes in operating procedures, and requisition two desktop computers for the loan officers to use. Incredibly, it appears that this may be within reach.

So it has been a busy two days thus far, and the rest of the week should follow suit. By Friday I probably will have forgotten all about Belgian brews and the people I care about. Just kidding. Lest I create the impression that noses are being scraped up on the grindstone, let me relay two scenes from today.

SORRY--DUE TO THE EXISTENCE OF FILTERS (THANKS, GOOGLE) I HAVE BEEN ADVISED TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT WRITING, MENTIONING NAMES, ETC. SO THESE FEW PARAGRAPHS HAVE BEEN REMOVED. HERE IN ACCRA EVERYTHING IS GOING GREAT AND EVERYONE I ENCOUNTER (ESPECIALLY THOSE I ENCOUNTER IN MY CAPACITY AS AN EMPLOYEE) IS ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. IF YOU WANT ANY MORE INFORMATION THAN THAT, YOU'LL HAVE TO ASK VIA PRIVATE EMAIL. CHEERS!

Yes, back in the saddle. Honestly, five days in (I started this entry Tuesday night; now it’s Thursday) it feels good. It’s easy to get lost in the days, in the mad jumble of sensations and events, in the unintentional comedy. At the moment I’m reminded of my favorite Bright Eyes lyric: “Oh! My morning’s coming back; the whole world’s waking up. The city buses swimming past, I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one.”

2006-12-22T20:13:00.000Z

It is Thursday morning, 21 December. This evening I won’t fall asleep to the bzzzzzzz of the ceiling fan, but to the roar of jet engines. I’m coming home.

And I think I’m ready for a break. I’ve heard too much bad Christmas music and have spent too many consecutive days (6) without water. Last night I snuck into the 5-star Labadi Beach Hotel to shower in their health club locker room. (It beats the bucket method.)

But worst was this morning. Oti and I set out at the regular time and encountered a wall of traffic in the one-lane section of High St. At one point, a right turn only lane breaks off and Oti turned into it, zipped past about 50 idling cars, made the (legal) right and then a (legal) U-turn, and went to rejoin the line of stopped cars. An inconsiderate maneuver? Without a doubt. But one practiced by hundreds of taxi drivers every morning, and legal all the same.

Jeff, a loud, officious traffic cop, didn’t think so. He stormed up to the driver’s side window and demanded to see Oti’s license. Oti handed them over and then Jeff demanded that Oti open the door and let him sit in the backseat. You can guess where the story went from there.

As the three of us inched along, Oti explained that he was driving me to the office and to the bank, and that we were in a hurry because I was leaving today to return to the US. I apologized and told Jeff it was my fault we were rushing. Jeff introduced himself cordially, smiling, as if I might mistake him for another friendly Ghanaian. That was the worst part—the cheap shit veneer of friendliness, an obvious ploy for him to discover how best to extort us. Not ten seconds before, he had been barking into Oti’s ear from the backseat. Would I play the gullible tourist and pony up every cedi on the spot to get him out of the car? Or would he have to bargain?

“You should pay the penalty for your friend,” he said calmly.

“And what is the penalty?”

“800,000 cedis.”

This is a ridiculous, impossible price—more than 2 months’ pay for the average resident of Accra. In an effort to call his bluff I began to argue that we would need to see this in writing, that he should give us a printed ticket and that we would go to court to settle it. I actually entertained the thought that he might charge us with an actual violation of law.

But Oti had already taken out his wad of cedis and begun to peel off 5,000-cedi notes. It was not my risk to take, Oti’s license being on the line; and so ahead lay the filthy prospect of the bargain. It is the seediest, the most pathetic abuse of power, all the more obscene because of the banter, the back-and-forth, the dickering over 10,000 cedis ($1.10). To reject one offer, Jeff said, “Oh! That’s not a bribe; that’s a dash.” (A dash is something you’re expected to give a cop whenever he stops your car, even at a meaningless roadblock, even if you haven’t been accused of any violation.)

We settled on 80,000 cedis and I peeled it off my own wad, disgusted with myself and with the whole situation. If anyone should be willing to go through the rigamarole of Ghana’s “due process”, surely I, with money and (some) time to spare, should. But instead Oti and I succumbed to that time-honored tradition of lassitude and evasion of accountability that feeds the system of bribery in the first place. In bribery’s defense, it saves time and money—in the immediate—on both ends. And the only thing you give up is any inkling of respect for the integrity of the laws themselves, or for the people who enforce them. But, hey, what’s integrity, anyway? We’re talking tens of thousands of cedis here—almost $10—that’s real money!

As if to underscore the absurdity of the situation, Jeff shooed me away when I went to hand him the money. “Give it to your friend,” he said, and motioned to Oti. In doing this he seemed to be trying to create the illusion that this was not a shakedown. The driver was the one who made the violation; thus he would be the one paying the fine. This way everything was on the level. So I handed the bills to Oti, who went to pass them to Jeff. The final flourish was the hand-off itself. He first lifted his right hand up and back at head level, fingers full of money facing the backseat. Jeff hissed venomously “tsss!” and Oti realized his mistake. So he tried again, this time backhanding the bills down at floor level, where they were happily collected. Jeff resumed his cordial demeanor and motioned for Oti to stop. With a handshake and a hearty “Nice day,” he squeezed himself out from behind the driver’s seat and was gone, the next palm greasing surely just moments away.

Just afterward I was livid. I told Oti that I thought corruption like this will keep Ghana from becoming a “first-rate country”. (What an insulting, low thing to say to a friend about his own home. I feel ashamed to have said it, especially given Oti’s response.) He quickly, almost apologetically, proposed a solution. His good friend is a “big man” whose father is the superintendent of the traffic division of the Accra police. We could simply relay what had happened through the obvious channel and have Jeff sacked. Do the ends justify the means? Is the prospect of a “net gain” in Accra’s police force integrity reason enough to use the same backdoor tactics to punish Jeff as he used to punish us?

Why am I so torn up about the whole affair anyway? I think it’s because, while I know some fault lies with Jeff and some frustration stems from being put in the situation to begin with, ultimately I failed to do the right thing. High-minded principles, zero follow-through: moral masturbation. Even these paragraphs are preachy. I’m sorry for that.

Later in the day I was told that the two weeks before Christmas are well-known to be prime time for these activities. Hell, traffic cops have kids, too, and they want presents. Maybe this Christmas season is as good a time as any to revisit Kim’s epiphany from the depths of her dance with misfortune: “It’s all about the money.” But from the blissfully comfortable vantage points of 7 Fairfield and 481, in the warm company of family and friends, I hope (and expect) to roundly reject it. Home sounds good. And I’ll be there soon.

2006-12-17T18:49:00.000Z

Phase II

On Thursday morning I piled all my stuff (a big red duffel, a backpack, the mandolin, and a briefcase) into the trunk and backseat of Oti’s Opel Astra and we drove three minutes down the road behind the Labadi Polyclinic to my new house. It’s a standalone 3-bedroom affair with a living room, dining room, a large kitchen, and even a small garden out front. I will be sharing it with Suzanne, a mostly-Chinese German in her early thirties; but just hours after I moved in, she headed for Hong Kong to spend the holidays with her family. In this version of the ex-pat shuffle I will replace Nate, another blond-haired American. He has been here for a year and is off to live in Rome for the next six months. So until Thursday, when I will retreat to the First World for the holidays, I have the place to myself.

Like the VA house, it sits behind a wall and has a metal gate. But it’s more spacious and much more private. Thursday afternoon I returned to an empty house, got a beer from across the street, cracked open the mandolin case, and had a ball. While it’s just me living there it’s a cement-walled bubble of serenity and sweet, sweet solitude. That said, it’s still a distinctly Ghanaian version of paradise: in my first 48 hours as a resident I had 24 hours of electricity and a measly 2 hours of running water. The water issue is significant because bucket showers just don’t get you clean and because toilets are infinitely better when they can flush. But I’m told the Polytank is being repaired as quickly as possible.

A Polytank is a big black plastic cylinder that sits atop a rickety scaffolding tower. There are 50, 100, 250, 500, and 1000 gallon models available. In a city where the water runs for less than four hours per day on average—and those four hours are usually 2am-6am—it’s a completely necessary and invaluable commodity. In theory an electric pump, which is always on, will fill it anytime water is available. Then for the other twenty hours of the day the house gets a gravity feed from the tank. With respect to our current water situation, I should have seen the writing on the wall; for as I carried my bags inside Thursday morning, a pair of Ghanaians were lackadaisically rolling the big black tank out toward the road. And our electric pump is a melon-sized fixture, only a few weeks old and already showing rust, left in the open but for a hobo sheath of thin plastic bags. The water pipes themselves are skinny, bowed PVC. Which link in our chain is weakest?

Water or no water, lights or no lights, the new place is a haven. The past two mornings I’ve been able to spread out my makeshift yoga mat (actually a narrow sleeping pad donated by the Dutch couple from the VA house) in a room where I can’t touch the ceiling, and where it’s possible to spread my arms wide without hitting a wall or a piece of furniture. The living room set is, like almost all the ones I’ve seen here, bamboo-framed; but miraculously it is comfortable. We even have throw pillows. As if that weren’t enough, there is an electric blender in the kitchen and two ice trays in the freezer.

Happily, it’s less than ten minutes walk from the VA house and still on the beach side of the main road. So I will retain an accessible houseful of companions for dinner and beer at Tawala beach, a short walk to free wireless internet, and the incomparable sea breeze.

The next logical step after securing a house is to host a party in it. Suzanne is a bit of a neatnik (no shoes inside, e.g.) and I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot by leaving the place a mess after the first weekend. But there was celebrating to do, mainly due to the beginning of Hannukah on Friday night. So Dennis and I devised a way to bring the Festival of Lights to Ghana: do it at his place.

Dennis is a half-Jewish resident of the VA house who works in TV production. He knows something about planning and organizing events, but next to nothing about Hannukah. (“I know the hadlik ner prayer because in my house it was known as ‘The One You Have to Say to Get the Presents’. But that’s all I know about it. Well, also the Adam Sandler song.”) Truth be told, I’m not exactly a religious scholar myself; but comparative advantage dictated that I be the emcee for Jewish activities and he be the master planner.

This turned out to be a good scheme because when I arrived at the VA house Friday evening after work I found a hearty crew sitting around the table grating potatoes and onions and assembling goody bags. In the kitchen Sophia (an incredible housekeeper/cook who works part time at the house) was putting the finishing touches on a huge meal of fried chicken and fried rice. All I had to do in the way of preparation was to get the oil hot. We lost power at 6pm, right on schedule; but this only heightened the experience, affording us an opportunity to effect our own Miracle of Lights—illuminating the whole house for the whole night with one box of shoddy white candles.

As I prepared the latkes, guests started to arrive. We had a healthy mix, a group of fifteen or so, well-balanced in race, nationality, and gender; but not in religion (Dennis and I combined to make the lone Jew). When the time came, I led the candle-lighting, tried in vain to encourage some audience participation in the three prayers, did a “bonus round” of bruchot for Shabbat, told the story, and passed around the latkes. In his infinite wisdom Dennis has remembered to get applesauce. They were a hit.

And so was the delightful (and apropos of the holiday) all-fried dinner, well-lubricated by an impressive array of strange wines, including palm wine. Aside about palm wine: it is a cloudy white liquid, slightly milky, that comes directly from the palm tree. For the first couple hours after it is tapped, it is quite sweet and slightly alcoholic. After that brief window, though, it becomes stronger and starts to develop a vile, sour musk like human sweat. It also begins to taste that way. By hour six it’s just gross. But the stuff that Justin brought to the party was freshly tapped less than an hour before his arrival, and it was actually really nice. We poured it into a calabash bowl and passed it around the table.

The finishing touch was the distribution of the individually-wrapped goody bags, which included full-size candy bars, foil-wrapped chocolate coins (how Dennis was able to find these in Accra is beyond me), and plastic packets of cheap gin. Another alcoholic aside: while in the First World we seem always to package and serve liquids in rigid containers, the Third World has discovered that flimsy plastic will do. In China you can buy firewater in plastic sacs at the grocery store. If the average Ghanaian drinks filtered water, he does so out of a $.03 half-liter clear plastic pouch called a sachet. (The same quantity of water in a bottle costs ten times as much.) When you order hot tea from a street vendor here, she will line a plastic cup with a clear plastic bag, pour the tea in, then take the bag out and tie it up for you to take away. You tear a tiny hole in the corner and squeeze it into your mouth as you walk. And instead of little airline bottles, they have adopted the ketchup-packet delivery method for single servings of alcohol. Why not?

So we rounded out our holiday observance with gin-and-tonikkahs (see Sandler, Adam. “The Hannukah Song”) and dubbed the party a success. I can now confidently say that at least six Ghanaians know the story of Hannukah and have experienced some incarnation of a Jewish holiday. I think my missionary work here is done.

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And now, another installment from the shameless plug department. Adams, the Africana dancer who is also a painter, has asked me to bring some of his paintings with me when I come home next week. He wants me to try and sell them for him. Although I’m not so sure how I feel about trying to unload his stuff on my friends and family, I told him I’d do it. So I’ll have a dozen or so paintings with me, if anyone’s hurting for an African painting. But please DO NOT feel obliged. There is at least one picture of his work in the photo entry of this blog, but you should check more of his stuff out at adamsartservice.blogspot.com if you’re interested. And if you have any particular requests, you can email them to me at jacob.appel@gmail.com; I’ll see if he can whip something up.

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Finally, for the non sequitur of the week we can look to Tuesday night, when I joined George for dinner in his big, lonely house. We were eating omotuo (balls of white rice) and groundnut stew with fish, cooked by his neighbor Nasika, a kindly old Nigerian/Ghanaian woman who makes sure he’s well-fed, etc, while he lives all alone with his minimal domestic skills. Once the fish was finished he picked up the entire comb of needle-like bones from a small tuna and ate it, spine and all. I told him that, in America, we’d give the bones to the cat. He finished chewing and said, “I know. An African man is very good at eating bones, while American man is very good at typing on the computer.” He pantomimed fast typing on the tabletop. “That is why American man will be very successful in business, but an African man will stay in the house and become fat.” Then we both laughed heartily; because damn, that’s funny.

2006-12-12T12:47:00.000Z

Bright days on the Dark Continent

Friday night I got a call from Peter. Turns out that when I spoke to him last weekend the cause of the soreness in his back was, in fact, hard work: The snack bar is open!

First chance I got Saturday I cajoled virtually the entire VA house into coming to check it out. It sits on the edge of his uneven parcel, which borders on the parking lot/yard of a huge church beside High St. It’s a prime location, sure to get tons of foot traffic Sunday mornings. The rest of the week shouldn’t be too bad either since the churchyard is frequently used as a thoroughfare for the residents of the shantytown behind it.

The structure itself is about 8’x 10’ with a linoleum-topped counter on one edge and a plastic table and four chairs inside. Pieces of corrugated aluminum set on a simple post-and-lintel frame serve as a ceiling; and instead of walls a waist-high picket fence runs along the other three sides. Everything has a fresh coat of white paint. The western side, opposite the counter, is dominated by two large posters that serve as shades: Britney Spears and Allen Iverson. On the southern side, a hanging woven rug depicting Dogs at Billiards serves the same purpose.

The Britney Spears poster in particular is a ridiculous thing, 3’x 4’ in all, at least 3 sq ft of which is cleavage spilling out of a pink lace bra. Her eyes are dark and deep, but blank as deep space. Par for the course for her, I guess, but it seems especially lewd and soulless in the clean, honest churchyard snack bar. That said, it is definitely an oddity; not a vulgarity. The little snack bar is so neat and happy that it cannot be anything but downright charming.

Some other things you can find there are: a small glass display case with a dimly backlit sign that says “Hot Food!”; a juice dispenser with a clear plastic rectangular tank on top and a fountain that keeps the bright orange stuff circulating; a conspicuous shelf above the counter with three brand new blue-tinted plastic margarita glasses, each with a cartoonish foot instead of a base; a young girl (Peter’s daughter) hostessing and singing Christmas carols into the microphone of a dollar-store miniature electric keyboard. Yes, charming is an understatement.

We had spring rolls, samosas, water, Malta, and even a fancy blue glass of the orange drink. Peter’s daughter did the waitressing, his wife Emilia did the cooking (inside the family kitchen, which is now really one big fryer), and he did the managing.

While we were waiting for our goodies I had a chance to talk to him a bit more, and he filled me in on the rest of his activities this past month. In addition to the snack bar launch, he has opened an account at Opportunity International. Between his balance and the new business, it looks like he might qualify for a loan in the next couple months. Hard to say how thrilled I was—and am—to hear this news. Man! Getting ahead of myself, of course, but just to think that all he needed (in addition to a critical mass of desire and follow-through) was a suggestion and the names and addresses of a couple banks; and now he’s on the way! So it is a thoroughly inspiring and encouraging example. Hooray, Peter!

What a healthy antidote to the cynicism that builds up like so much tro-tro exhaust on my insides…

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In other pleasant news, things are finally looking up for Kim. She was days away from packing her bags and returning to the first world when she came knocking on the gate of the VA house last weekend hoping to find a room on the cheap. Kirsten, the plucky twentysomething Canadian landlady, tried to make whip up some room-sharing, cost-cutting solution, and while she was in the process Kim continued to scour the city for other options. In her search she serendipitously met Nadine, a German girl with a similarly worthless volunteer-placement organization, who was in the same boat with respect to housing. They teamed up and are now sharing a room in the New Town neighborhood, relatively close to both the long cement building (where Kim dances) and the epileptics’ orphanage (where she volunteers).

I saw her and Nadine out at a party Saturday night and Kim looked fabulous. As usual she refuses to feel sorry for herself and is committed to owning her experience in any way she can. For now, that means taking back the street: “Whenever I walk on the road I keep my head high so that if any of the robbers sees me he should know that I am not afraid.” It sounds too easy, maybe even naive, but somehow it is entirely believable coming from her. Her credibility lives somewhere between the inherent seriousness of Germanic accent and her smile, which is like that of someone who just got a gold star. She knows she has done well. And the rewards for her resilience and buoyancy are a heightened awareness to—and thorough enjoyment of—the fact that things are coming more easily now.

And that, too, is an encouraging example: sometimes you get a break when you need it. Of course, the truest truism I know still applies, as it has throughout Kim's saga. When it rains, it pours.

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So however late Oti is (even if he doesn’t show up or call in the morning or afternoon, like today), however slow and painful is the grinding rotation of the rusty gears that are OI's internal management, however foul the exhaust fumes, etc., etc., there is sunshine; there is hope.

By the way, Kim thanks you all for the good vibes. See? They helped!

2006-12-09T14:34:00.000Z

My week with Oti began on Monday morning. We sat in traffic along High St, the main east-west road in southern Accra. Except for the first half mile from the house, High St is one lane in each direction. We were behind a tro-tro, the Ghanaian equivalent of public transportation. If it was like any other tro-tro, it was an old, rickety van whose inside has been gutted and filled with narrow rows of bench seats. Like most tro-tros, it was overflowing with people. Arms dangled out each side and the exhaust pipe wobbled under the rear bumper. It sent out a continuous stream of thick black particulate smoke; and whenever it inched forward it belched forth a big filthy plume. The unmistakably sulfurous, acrid, choking stuff wafted lazily through the car’s interior. The unconditional tolerance for this pollution (drivers never close their windows to keep the smoke out, very rarely comment or even grimace) makes me angry then depressed. If they don’t feel compelled to react—by rolling up the goddamn window—to that kind of direct assault on their health and well-being, how can they possibly be expected to _________ (insert some ambitious, well-intentioned goal here)?

But this isn’t that kind of posting.

I keep meaning to clock it, but I think the drive to work is about 4 miles. Most days it takes 25-35 minutes. Traffic here is fantastically unpredictable. Not completely so—the probability of hitting traffic is not the same every minute of every day—but, maddeningly, weekdays between 7am and 7pm it is always around 80%. Of course there is local wisdom about rush hour: 7-9am and 4-6pm, they say, are the worst. And maybe they’re right. But somehow, exactly one day out of each week there is no traffic on the way to work, and exactly one day out of each week there is no traffic on the way back. Which days these are is impossible to forecast. Further, the flow of traffic doesn’t seem to depend on things like accidents, stalled cars, obstructions in the road, or presence of traffic cops directing at intersections. Obviously there is no traffic report on the radio; actually I just chuckled out loud at the thought of it—that would imply the (impossible) existence of 1) a local newsradio station, 2) a privately-owned helicopter, 3) listeners who cared to know.

Thus, choosing to drive during the day means choosing to gamble with your time. And the residents of Accra seem completely indifferent to the outcome. Here it is important to clarify that they are not indifferent between winning and losing something of value; rather they don’t perceive the stakes (i.e. one’s time) to be valuable in the first place. So their astounding equanimity in this case comes not from non-attachment, but from an aversion (inability?) to thinking of time as a scarce or non-renewable resource to be utilized. If I spend four hours driving ten miles today, then that’s what I did today. There is no thought of what I might have done today, had I not sat in traffic—no awareness of opportunity cost.

Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done is done.” Ghanaians add, “So why think about it?”

This pervasive attitude touches many aspects of life and conduct. What comes to mind now, though, are:

1. It dramatically changes the relationship between planning and execution. Almost separates them entirely, actually. Plans are, at best, a loose suggestion. The only way I’ve found to be sure an action will be carried out in accordance with some design is to remind the actors of the design throughout the process. (Note: then it’s not “planning” per se, but instruction.)

2. It lends a quality of autonomy to most actions—things just happen, or they don’t. Thus, the passive voice pops up everywhere. If George is supposed to enter 50 surveys into the computer on a given day, our conversation will likely proceed as follows:

“Hey George, how many have you done so far?”

“I have done eight.”

“Wow. You have a lot more to do, huh?”

“Yes. I hope they will be completed.”

1+2=3. If things cannot be planned in advance, how can one have expectations? And if actions are perceived to occur on their own, then who are the agents? No expectations + No agents = No accountability.

On Tuesday I told Oti to plan to pick me up at 4:30pm from work, unless I called to tell him to come earlier. At 4:45 I called to see where he was, and he hadn’t left the house yet. “But we agreed that if I didn’t call you should come at 4:30. And I told you that if it would be another time, it would be earlier. So how could not have left by 4:45, since we said 4:30 would be the latest possible time?”

“I was just waiting for your call.”

“Well, I think I will take a taxi, then, since you haven’t even left the house yet.”

“No, I am leaving right now. I will reach in 20 minutes.”

By 6:30 (only six times as long as he predicted) Oti had arrived. Turns out, after we talked at 4:30 he got into a discussion with his grandmother; then he left around 5:15 and hit traffic.

I told him that I would be clearer in the future about exactly what time he should come to pick me up; and that if he was going to miss his given time for any reason, that he must call me and tell me, so I could know. “Yes. I will do that,” he said.

Wednesday we arranged for 4:30. At 4:15 I called for an update. He still hadn’t left the house. “I was planning to leave the house at 3:30 but my friend called me and told me that the traffic was coming since 2 and it was so bad. So I know that if I went to pick you, I will not make it by 4:30. So I have been waiting until the traffic is finished. Then I will be able to come quickly.”

“Since you have not yet left the house, I will take a taxi.”

“No, I’m coming right now.”

When he arrived at 6:30, after repeated calls in which he was “very close—reaching in five minutes,” I told him why, given yesterday’s conversation, I was upset. “I am so sorry. I was planning to call you at 4:30 to tell you I will be coming later. And as I was coming the traffic was too slow. Then the car ran out of petrol and I had to walk to take the gallon.”

I wondered if, in one of my calls, he had said he’d arrive in five minutes while walking back through the creeping traffic to the gas station with an empty gallon jug in his hand.

“What will you do differently next time?”

Confidently he said, “I will come earlier.”

And, just like that, our discussion about calling, today’s plan about 4:30, any and all dissatisfaction, was completely and utterly erased. You could just see it.

Had it been any other week I probably would have tried to be stern, and would have taken a taxi on the afternoons when he was terribly late, then deducted it from his weekly pay. But this was Oti’s birthday week, a time for leniency. On Thursday he turned 24. So Monday morning I proposed that, if he wanted, he could get a few friends together and I would take them out for dinner, anywhere he liked. He seemed thrilled at the idea; he really wanted to do it! So at the beginning of each subsequent car ride I asked him whether he had decided on a place or a group of people to go with. “Oh, soon soon. By the afternoon/tomorrow morning I will decide.”

On Thursday Oti arranged to pick me up at 7:30 to go to dinner, location and attendees TBA. At 7:30 he arrived with his friend Obi, and we went to pick up his girlfriend Millicent. When we pulled up in front of her house a few minutes later Oti told me that they had been fighting the day before, so he wanted to make up with her and have her come to dinner. “I’m coming. Five minutes,” he said as he walked into the house.

Obi and I sat in the car for the next two hours. At some point I asked him if this waiting frustrated him. “It’s a long time,” was all he said. I felt slighted and even thought badly of Oti while we were in the car; I felt as if I had offered him something really nice and he wasn’t paying it any mind. At 9:45 he emerged arm-in-arm with Millicent.

“Well, I don’t think many restaurants are open now, but if you still want to have some dinner we can go anywhere you like.” Oti decided on a big fast-food place called Papaye, and we set out. We were about a half mile from Millicent’s house when the car ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on the side of the road. It was smooth, lazy, quiet coasting, and as we glided to a stop, I thought “Perfect.” But then, all at once, the sarcasm was gone. Actually, it was perfect, absolutely perfect, and it couldn’t have been any other way. It was almost like someone put a blurry film into sharp focus. Do you follow?

So we celebrated Oti’s birthday by pushing the car a short ways down the road to a gas station, waiting twenty minutes for it to be filled, then having sausage-on-a-stick and a beer at a spot beside the gas station. Oti and Millicent shared a sausage and kissed while they ate it, like Lady and the Tramp with a spaghetti strand. They were radiant.

The obvious clichés apply: it’s not where you are, but who you’re with; etc. But there is much more to this story. Most of this posting is criticism, and I think it still stands. There are many, many hurdles to positive change (timidly, “development”) here. The part about ignoring opportunity cost can even be applied to the above paragraph—what meal might Oti have enjoyed, if…? But Oti’s and Millicent’s radiance, and all our satisfaction, was and is undeniable. Thus, there are at least some tradeoffs to be acknowledged. Expectations can be met or fallen short of. Agents can succeed or fail. Accountability implies winners and losers. I’m tempted to say that these are facts of life, and must be acknowledged; but many Ghanaians think—and live—differently.

2006-12-03T22:52:00.000Z

Follow-up, profiles:

Kim, the ill-fated Dutch girl, was robbed again on the very night I wrote the entry about her. She was walking home from the dance rehearsal where she had told me the story of her ghastly week. This time she was escorted by Jimmy, one of the Africana dancers. He’s a pretty substantial guy—tall, lithe, and muscular. As they were walking along the road, a motorbike with two riders sped up from behind them. The passenger jumped off, brandished a “cutlass” (a long machete, I presume), and beat Kim and Jimmy with the flat side of the blade. Once they were both on the ground, he relieved Kim of her bag. This time there would be no catching or identifying the thieves, since they were mobile and wore full motorcycle helmets that obscured their faces.

When Kim returned to her host-family’s house in tears, they inexplicably erupted into laughter at her misfortune. Then, after Jimmy left, they reproached her for hanging out with “dirty Rastas” like him and said that her association with them was likely the source of all her recent troubles. They also told Kim that their own daughter had been accosted on her way home from school that day; that, too, they felt, was a result of Kim’s friendships with the dreadlocked Africana dancers. They angrily admonished her for putting their family in danger and advised her to shape up.

So she did, by moving out the very next day. But what next? The Dutch volunteer company that “arranged” her visit (i.e. set her up with a bogus, corrupt Ghanaian NGO that she quit after a couple months to volunteer in an orphanage for spastics and epileptics) has been no help. Not that they helped her to find the host family in the first place. But now she is searching for a room in a safe part of town, with a GHC 2,000,000 (approx $225) monthly budget. That’s GHC 2,000,000 for everything—room, board, and transportation. Even here in the land of ramshackle rentals and cheap, tasteless stomach-fillers, that’s a tough nut to crack.

So Kim is holding out, searching, keeping her chin up as much as possible, and hoping for the best. If she can’t find a place in the next week or so, she may return to Holland. So much for good intentions—maybe Kim’s example underscores the necessity for contingency plans, etc; but how could one prepare for such a wretched string of events? It doesn’t seem fair that such a well-meaning soul can’t be accommodated here. Hell, her idea of a good day’s work is strapping a little girl to a board for ten excruciating minutes to train her spastic muscles so she can eventually stand—maybe. Can you imagine?

Sometimes you can look to the Good Book for the Bad News: the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

Yesterday I spoke to Peter (the man with dreams of real estate speculation and a special love for Psalm 37) for the first time in a couple weeks. He has not yet visited the banks I told him about because he has been busy preparing to open his roadside snack bar. Apparently he has been traveling to Kumasi on supply runs. He expects to open up in a couple more weeks, and he assured me that he would call to let me know when exactly he fries his first spring roll. I’ve insisted that I want to be his first customer. But yesterday when we talked on the phone he told me that when he woke up his neck hurt (“from sleeping”), and so that was slowing him down for the day. He sounded sedate, like the second time I went to visit him. I hope it’s just stiff from hard work.

Other characters who live here:

Sarah is a large Ghanaian woman in her mid-twenties. She works in the Corporate Planning division of Opportunity International and her desk is close to mine. She is kind and serene, smiles an easy smile, laughs a lazy laugh, and calls me her “white boyfriend”. Her eyes are clear and bright in her wide, full face. I’ve never heard her raise her voice.

Every morning at 8am there is a mass exodus from the third floor office (where I work) to the banking hall on the ground floor for Morning Devotion. Virtually every employee attends every morning, and most are in the office before 8, so they leave their desks to go downstairs. But Sarah stays and reads her own small, plain-black-leather-bound, soft-worn Bible at her desk. The other day I asked her why she doesn’t go down with the others. She said, “I don’t want to walk all the way down and back up. So I just read my Bible here. Besides, I already have a Morning Devotion at home.”

She went on to explain that her father, a pastor, wakes the family at 4:30 every morning so they can worship together. Their family service consists of some group prayer, a song or two, and preaching. When they finish, a few minutes before 5, those who don’t yet have to prepare for work go back to sleep; but Sarah does some housework and chores until 6, when she leaves for the office. They used to have an afternoon devotion as well, when everyone returned from work, but her father stopped giving it due to lack of attendance.

“Why so early?” I asked. Sarah explained that some of her siblings leave for work as early as 5; and by that time they need to have had their daily dose of praise, worship, and thanksgiving.

“Don’t you have a time each morning when you thank God for your family, your friends, thank God that you are breathing, thank Him for all He has given you?” she asked, almost rhetorically, as if I didn’t have to answer whether or not, but when and where. When I told her that my Morning Devotion didn’t involve God, but only some meditation and yoga, she didn’t miss a beat. She just continued discussing her own practice, her own routine, and the beliefs of her church (Spoken Word denomination) calmly and matter-of-factly. She was not actively proselytizing, but rather spoke as if her subject was so true and universally-accepted that it had a gravity all its own. It was as if she only needed to present it—the persuasion would follow naturally.

So, for about 15 minutes, she led me on a meandering walk through her—and her church’s—beliefs, and the attitudes and actions that grew organically out of them. She touched everything from wardrobe to interpersonal relations. Two of my favorite quotes are below:
“Each morning I give thanks for my enemies as well as for my friends, and I pray to God that I can influence their lives in a good way.”

“It’s so hard to be angry—you have to work and work at it. But it’s so easy to be happy. You don’t have to do anything. God made us to be happy.”

Would that everyone, Christian or otherwise, build a life on these foundations! But Sarah said the above with such effortless sincerity—maybe even innocence—that I had to wonder whether they had ever been put to the test. What if she had been in Kim’s shoes the past week? That said, who am I to judge? A beautiful attitude is not something to be criticized, even if it is something to be understood in context.

Whatever the case may be, Sarah is a joy to work with and is almost Buddha-like in her tranquil demeanor and essentially good nature. If it comes easily to her, all the better.

From a different camp we have George, one of the National Service Personnel who helped with the arduous process of defining clusters of businesses. He is skinny, with rather thin lips and bright white teeth. He wears glasses. George is a nerd in the most complimentary sense of the word: inquisitive, excitable, opinionated, and friendly. Most of his clothes look big on him and he has a jaunty, duck-footed walk. He doesn’t drink, but he loves to dance (“boogie”). He speaks in quick, concentrated packets and tends to swallow the last letter of each word—somehow in its intonation, diction, and enunciation, his English sounds like that of a native Chinese.

George has “big plans”, and he’s chomping at the bit to get them started. He has a scheme to sell home construction materials, a plan for an herbal mouthwash product, and a secondary degree in mind. Only thing is, his National Service at OI is taking up all his time. He’s not very happy about it; but he tries not to let it get in the way. When work is done, he rarely hangs around to socialize, and sets out quickly for home.

And home for George is a very large—and very unfinished—house on the outskirts of Accra, ten-minutes’ walk from any paved road. The first floor has windows and doors installed. Inside there are nice floors of shiny dark tile, gaping holes in walls with gnarled nests of wires hanging out, well-appointed bathrooms (some with bidets!), water-damaged walls and warped, leaning bookshelves, nice mouldings on some ceilings, and bags of cement stacked in unused corners. George’s bedroom gives the distinct impression that he’s squatting: he has a mattress on the floor with a crumpled sheet kicked to the corner, a coat rack which holds his entire wardrobe, a television and radio set on boxes, and a pile of things too various to describe. It’s the kind of random assortment that cannot be willfully constructed, but must be accumulated over time. When I went to enter, he warned me, “It’s very dirty in there. I have not swept in a long time.”

Why is George living alone in a large house under construction? The Ghanaian standard is to live with one’s parents until one gets married and begins his own family. But George never had the standard set-up: his parents separated when he was very young and he grew up in his father’s house, meeting his mother for the first time when he was seventeen. Although he has eight half-siblings, he considers himself an only child. Just before he first met his mother he had a falling out with his father, who disapproved of his taste in churches and in universities (George wanted to go to a private school). Eventually he presented George with an ultimatum: toe the family line, or go it alone. So George chose the latter and applied to his uncle for help with school tuition. Instead of paying the expensive housing fees he directed his nephew to his slowly-emerging house in the sticks; and George has been there ever since.

In a culture where devotion to family is absolutely paramount, where household chores are done daily and with mind-numbing consistency, where the universe of most upwardly-mobile young adults is like a sparse and tidy cloister, George’s is like, well, a rambling, messy, half-finished secondhand mansion in the sticks.

Beyond his business plans, there are family plans; these we discussed in the cavernous living room of his uncle’s house last night. One more thing about George’s diction is that he says “develop” whenever he means “work on,” “improve,” “invest in,” “create,” “modify,” etc. Maybe it’s a symptom of his entrepreneurial spirit. Anyway, he has been “developing” a girlfriend: a Ghanaian-born girl who has lived in the Netherlands the past 15 years. He knows her from the times she has come back to visit. And he knows that she is a hard target, surrounded as she is by the glitz, glam, and wealthy suitors of Europe. But he has made his intentions clear to her and is convinced that he has only to demonstrate that he is responsible and independent; that he can provide for (George said “manage”) her.

His thoughts on independence: “If you can make food for yourself, have a place to stay, have a car—what again can you want on this earth? Nothing again.”

So what do we make of George? He has big plans for the future but decidedly ordinary desires in the long run. He is always presentable and well-dressed but his room is a mess. Hell, he wants to marry a Dutch Ghanaian. He has broken the mold! Where others look straight ahead, he can’t help but look around. Thus, even if he chooses to walk the same path with them, he does so willfully and deliberately. In Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux writes that most Africans “lived their lives with a fatalistic patience.” Sarah does; but George doesn’t. I think that Ghana needs a dash of that impatience, that willingness to jump off the lumbering status quo and check out something different, even if only briefly. How else can change come about?

Anyway, now you know Sarah and George; and hopefully you send your best vibes to Kim. I’m thinking of all of you…I hope everyone is well! Much love, Jake.

2006-12-01T14:04:00.000Z

Here it is – a visual record of Africa! Most of these come from the camera of one of the Africana dance troupe members. A couple are from my own camera.

If you guessed that this is not a picture of Africa, you're right. It's the Amsterdam morning

The next few pictures are from the night when the Africana dancers came for a feast and a dance.

Here is banku being prepared in a grill made from a car wheel.

Mmmm, small fish. Can you guess who ripped off their heads?

Dancing: a vital part of dinner preparation

The Feast!

African yoga is "casual"

From the shameless promotion department: when they're not making feasts and dancing, the members of Africana paint, carve, bead, etc. They're even setting up a website to sell their goods. Here are some things they've made. I'll include the web address soon!

Finally, one of the many perks of life in the VA house: the view down our street at about 6pm.

So there you have it: irrefutable proof that I'm here. I'll try to integrate images with entries more seamlessly in the future. Now, if I only had a picture of that goat sac...

2006-11-29T08:41:00.000Z

Ghanaian food:

I know I haven’t written much about this. Truth is, thus far I haven’t had much inspiration, apart from the meal in the woods at Bunso. The majority of the average Ghanaian’s calories at any given meal come from one of three things: foufou, banku, or kenke. Foufou is a gelatinous dough made from boiled cassava and boiled plantain mashed together in a mortar and pestle. Banku is a dough made from cassava flour mashed together with cornmeal and a little salt. Small measures of boiling water are added to the mixture and it is constantly stirred until it is so thick and sticky that it can be stirred no more. Kenke is a grainy dough of cornmeal and water, wrapped inside a corn husk and steamed until it reaches a Play-doh consistency.

Foufou, the most pedestrian of the three (and, not coincidentally, the prototypical Ghanaian staple food), was on the menu at Oti’s house Saturday afternoon when I went for lunch. Oti lives beyond a concrete wall with an iron gate not unlike ours at the VA house. Inside the gate one walks down a narrow cement alley and along a long cement building with a row of dilapidated wooden doors on the right side, each opening into a small bedroom. The left edge of the alley gives onto a paved courtyard dominated by a web of clotheslines. Also along the left edge the alley runs a straight, narrow, shallow paved sewer leading to a cooking alcove some thirty feet straight ahead from the gate. There, in a haze of heat rising from a charcoal stove, Oti’s mom presided over a clutter of large pots.

She quickly left her post and brought us two plastic patio chairs and a small wooden table, which she covered with newspaper. She set them at the side of the courtyard, in the shade of the long cement building of bedrooms. A few minutes later she brought over two plates, one upside-down on top of the other, and a bowl of red-orange soup with meat floating inside. Removing the top plate revealed two symmetrical flattish beige ovals, each with a smooth and slightly shiny surface: the foufou. We washed our hands with a small pitcher of water and some liquid dish soap, then Oti demonstrated eating: first he dipped the fingers of his right hand into the bowl of clear soup and used them to pinch off a piece a little smaller than a golf ball. Then with his thumb he gently depressed the middle so the foufou was like a little bowl itself, dipped the whole assembly into the soup, and fired it off into his mouth and down his throat.

I made two beginner’s mistakes: first, I didn’t wet my fingers enough with the soup, and the foufou wouldn’t cooperate when I tried to pinch off a portion. It stuck like peanut butter mixed with rubber cement. So I put the whole finger-foufou assembly in the soup and then sucked it off my fingers and began to chew. Oops!

Historical note: foufou is an ancient dish that originated—and often still exists in rural areas—as a village-wide effort in a country where, especially inland, staple food is scarce. The individual’s first goal at mealtime is to hedge against the possibility that the next opportunity to fill the belly might be a ways off. Also, by gorging oneself until full, one can convince his body—however briefly—that he has acquired life-sustaining nutrients. Hence, eat lots, and fast. Further, since the fixed costs of cooking are high, each family contributes some of the ingredients to the group meal and everyone simultaneously digs in from the resultant huge, slick globule. A classic tragedy of the commons, at first each family relied on the others to provide the highest-cost inputs: seasonings. Over generations expectations leveled and a consensus was reached: foufou is utility. Since speed of intake is crucial, it should be edible with minimal lag-time between hand and stomach. The tongue and throat are only obstacles; so Occam’s razor cuts out the seasoning, and what’s left is the thing that was sticking mercilessly to the roof of my mouth and the back of my teeth in Oti’s courtyard.

He saw my trouble and laughed: “Foufou is not for chewing.” He’s right. The whole operation needs to be well-lubricated (hence his dipping fingers and then lump in the soup) and placed deep inside the mouth as possible. If this is done properly, foufou lumps of remarkable size slide down the throat without the slightest difficulty. Indeed, the Ghanaians have achieved their objective. Nonetheless, in an amazing testament to the human need to outdo one’s neighbors, most Ghanaians will say that their mother’s foufou is the “best-tasting” available. That’s right, the taste of a dish engineered specifically to avoid the superfluities of taste and texture is a topic for argument among friends. It’s like ultra-premium vodka that way.

The rest of the meal: the soup itself, “light soup” is a mixture of water, tomato paste, and crushed little round green peppers that are hot as hell. The soup is good. It is made more delectable by the little puddles of fat floating on its surface. Those come from the various goat parts that are cooked in the soup. In our bowl, Oti pointed out three different anatomical features: meat, knee, and sac. Did you know you can “eat” all three of those?

Meat is self-explanatory. It’s even tasty to my virginal palate, marinated in the spicy soup.

Knee is where two parts of the weight-bearing leg join together. Watch a goat for a little while and you’ll see that this particular body part is almost always in use. It’s tough. In fact, it’s so tough that chewing a small mouthful over one hundred times (I counted after a few chews) vigorously with my molars was not enough to break it down. Even the last clenching of my jaw felt like I was biting a brace of rubber bands, and brought with it a sound like the crunch of wet, heavy snow underfoot that reverberated off the inside of my temples. I finally swallowed the thing and chased it with a couple foufou bombs to clean the pipes.

The final hurdle was goat sac—the wall of the animal’s ruminant stomach—served in chunks. This is green-brown and has a texture like something between moss, living coral, and the scrubber side of a two-sided dish sponge. It has a healthy backing of clear, chewy fat. A chunk is about 1”x3” and naturally curves so the bushy side (the interior of the sac) is convex. Like knee, it has the unnerving resilience of rubber bands, but of older ones that you can break if you try. Actually, once it is chewed with conviction, it becomes a not-disagreeable paste with some texture (the ridges and fingers of the bushy side), and even a flavor distinct from the spicy soup. At very least, it goes down much easier than the knee.

So I survived my first real, traditional, homecooked Ghanaian meal without insulting the chef or embarrassing myself too badly. By the end I was slugging down slippery foufou lozenges with ease. But I don’t think I’ll make a habit of it. If nothing else, it’s food for thought: to me, Ghanaians’ attachment to these dishes (everyone I’ve asked eats the foufou/light soup/goat meal) confirms that taste is almost wholly a product of nurture, not nature. Relevant as ever, CSNY offer both an explanation and an ultimatum: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

2006-11-25T11:49:00.000Z

North and west of Accra, driving along the good road to Kumasi, the landscape becomes hilly and lush with tall trees rising out of a floating carpet of banana and plantain trees. Early Sunday morning Justin commandeered Fred and his taxi for two days as we ventured to the village of Osino. We picked up Doug and Jesse, the two Tufts undergrads who have been helping with the task of market definition, and ambled along the main road, leaving the dust and haze of the city behind us.

A couple hours later we pulled off at the Bunso junction, bounced along a bumpy dirt road past the Cocoa Research Institute, and eventually found our way to a gated dirt track lined with royal palms straight as toothpicks and happy as could be, regal green crowns swaying lazily in the breeze fifty feet up. It was the Bunso arboretum, an oasis of cool zephyrs, darting lizards, and trees heavy with voluptuous fruit: oranges, paw-paw (papaya), plantains, bananas, coconuts, cocoa, limes, palm nuts, and even Ghana’s only Brazil nuts. Here, dawdling along the narrow paths through the jungle, a sharp knife entitled us to full bellies and chins sticky with sweet juice. On that note, a tremendous thanks to Patty and Joe for the Leatherman.

The other natural growth along the winding paths is the family farm—typically a couple of mud huts with corrugated iron roofs and a clearing in the middle with a clay stove and some low benches. Here families produce any of the fruits mentioned above, and/or maize, palm oil, palm wine, and apiteshie (Ghanaian firewater, distilled from palm wine). Embarrassingly it felt like National Geographic to come upon these homesteads nestled in the hills of the Eastern Region. But these are not tribal Africans; they’re just on the frontier of the ever-expanding stain of technology and consumer culture that is seeping outward from Accra and Kumasi, slowed but never stopped, even by the steepest hills and thickest vegetation. Sometime in the not-so-distant future the entire national fabric will be soaked. The evidence: in the clearing of one such homestead are the innards of some old computers strewn randomly in the red dust. Here a PCI card, there a crushed processor, some of the plastic skeleton of a CRT monitor, a motherboard.

But they haven’t been dyed quite yet with the indelible ink of “civilization”. The family whose homestead was closest to the Bunso arboretum’s guesthouse (where we parked the car and arranged for the night’s lodging) agreed to cook the five of us a lunch of groundnut stew with beef knuckles, omotuo (a Sunday treat of white rice balls), and unlimited fruit for $5; and while the two adult women (looked to be at most 30 years old each) took the reins on the stew and rice, a troupe of naked and half-naked children went to work scampering up tall trees to gather fruit. The task of hacking open coconuts with a long, rusty machete was left to a five-year-old girl, sitting innocent and nude in the red dirt, who grinned and cooed delightedly each time the blade’s ghastly arc ended with a dull thud in the thick husk.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the narrow paths, stumbling on clearings where cocoa seeds dried in the sun on large thatch tables and passing cloudy springs attended by children filling large water buckets to spirit back to their respective compounds.

Monday morning it was off to work—that is, to the Osino branch of the Mumuado Rural Bank. A fairly new two-story affair, it is easily the biggest and most imposing building in town. On the stoop (as on every Ghanaian bank’s stoop) sit two police, each armed with a shotgun. In a back room of the ground floor are the bank’s archives. According to their records, Mumuado has serviced some 5,000 loans. Most of their lending occurred before they adopted their current dismal computerized record-keeping system, and so the bulk of the bank’s loan records are on paper in bright pink folders stacked on every flat surface in the cramped room. Opening the drawers of the lone file cabinet, one finds the folders stacked vertically in no particular order. Since space is scarce and organization nonexistent, old files (read: “those whose pink folders have faded slightly”) have been discarded seemingly at random over the past few years. What remains is a disordered scrapbook full of snapshots of rural financial life.

One such snapshot:

House No. XXX

OSINO

September 24 2002

The Manager

Mumuado Rural Bank Ltd

Osino

Dear Sir,

Application for Loan

I wish to apply for a loan of ¢300,000 [about $35]. This will enable me maintain my cocoa farm.

I am a customer of your bank with Savings Account No. xxx

I hope this my humble application will meet your kind consideration.

Thank you for your co-operation and assistance.

Yours faithfully,

xxxxxxxx

Since we had to wade through all the files (a few thousand), we saw many letters like this one, most handwritten or typed on a typewriter. Only a couple of the agricultural loan applications asked for more than $100.

Our idea, on this smallest of scales, is to integrate a crop price insurance option into Mumuado’s Agric-loan product. If all goes according to plan, we’ll market two kinds of Agric-loans to farmers in the Eastern Region, where Mumuado has all five of its branches. The first will be the current Agric-loan, which charges 25% flat annual rate, with no repayment schedule (a concession to the reality that a farmer’s income is not steady enough to support any kind of regular payment plan). If this sounds like a recipe for default, it is—most borrowers end up repaying the loan in just two or three installments, and most don’t make any payments until the term is at least half over. Their demand for money and their ability to pay coincide with the farming cycle of planting and harvesting, and the growing season looms as a chasm of uncertainty for farmer and creditor alike.

The worst case scenario is that the farmer, having planned for the harvest when he took the loan, goes to sell his produce in the eleventh hour and finds that the price is low. Fearing default, he sells when he otherwise would have waited for the price to increase. Thus, the second type of Agric-loan we’ll market allows farmers to pay extra in return for integrated crop-price insurance. That is, if prices are low when the harvest comes in, some of the debt is forgiven. Our task is to price the insurance option appropriately based upon governmental data (records of prices by crop, by week, by region) and Mumuado’s pink folders, which should reveal historically how strongly default is correlated with low crop prices. The study wants to see how many, and what kind (in poverty-level), of farmers are interested in buying this kind of insurance; and then to track the outcomes for purchasers and non-purchasers. Does the safety net of crop insurance create a disincentive for farmers to try their hardest? How, if at all, does the bank stand to gain from offering this product? Does that sound fun?

More fun than any study-planning, though, was our ride home from Osino, which took us past Koforidua (capital city of the Eastern Region) where we dropped Justin, and then through Fred’s (our driver’s) hometown where he surprised his parents with a visit. On the good road from Koforidua to Kumasi, which winds through many such villages, his is a smaller one, a dirt road that spikes off one side of the paved one. We turned onto it around 8pm, so it was dark; but people were still up and about. Close to the paved road there were some chop bars (generic term for restaurant) and spots (generic term for bar), and people sat at plastic tables outside, eating, drinking, and talking.

Fred slowly snaked the car through this scene, slapping hands and exchanging shouted greetings with friends he had not seen since he last visited at Christmas ‘05. We continued down the dirt road about a quarter mile, parked the car, and were led through down a narrow, dusty path through a stand of banana trees to a clearing and a rectangular house whose painted cement walls glowed bright white in the moonlight. There was a woman bob-hoppering some wooden benches around the clearing who didn’t notice our arrival until Fred walked up to her and tapped her on the shoulder. She let out a scream of utter delight and wrapped up her son in a big bear hug. Chattering with happy anxiety she bob-hoppered the benches back to the center of the clearing and bustled inside the house to rally her husband and her other children. They all came out and hugged Fred and sat and talked. They wanted to know what their eldest son and big brother had been up to. Fred is a farmer’s son who up and left his small town in search of bigger and better things. So, especially to his younger brothers, he is the embodiment of worldliness. He is the first in the family to move to Accra, and he returned wearing fancy white leather shoes and a shiny watch. Naturally, they wanted to hear everything.

But, for his part, Fred’s dad mostly cooed and yowled and moaned the unmistakable animal sounds of parental caring and content. Do you know these sounds? Oooo, and owww, and awwhhhh, inflected with a high tone at first and then falling like a slide whistle, petering out deep in the throat. I will remember that scene for a long time and the palpable feeling of homecoming that was created there by the moonlight and the different sounds in the clearing.

After twenty minutes or so we continued on our way and arrived in Accra around 10pm. Tuesday it was back to work at OI. This week our attention has turned to developing a short, easy, and accurate poverty-level assessment for the 6606 business owners whose shops we’ve been counting these past three weeks. With five multiple-choice questions we aim to be able to estimate the likelihood that a respondent is poor (defined as some level of daily expenditure) within a few percentage points. It’s very interesting, and also kind of uncomfortably clinical: “Should we ask whether they have a pit toilet in the house? If they use a bucket that they empty by hand into an open sewer, should that go under other?” To help formulate good questions we are fortunate to have the accumulated data of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, a huge national census conducted every few years, which incorporates questions like these. So at least we’re not flying completely blind into the bathrooms (or latrines, or public toilets, or holes in the ground) of Accra.

Still, it seems to be a world away from the longest-term goal of helping people. The road from here to “progress” looks something like this: rigorous study hopefully convinces donors to give more to banks and microfinance institutions so they can offer new and different products, which potentially expands credit access to poorer people, which gives them a fighting chance to scale up their enterprises, amass capital, and prosper on their own. It’s a nice, if Rube-Goldbergish, diagram. Can I get a flowchart?

Anyway, it’s refreshing to spend some time in the air-conditioned oasis that is the OI main branch, and to indulge in the thought that what seems like an academic project might actually ripple out into the real world.

Finally, happy belated Thanksgiving to all. I thought wistfully about turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce most of the day yesterday; and in my mind I had a real feast, attended by just about everyone who might read this blog. You were, naturally, great company.

So best wishes, full bellies, warm fires, and much love.

2006-11-22T22:06:00.000Z

I’m in the middle of writing another entry, but I have to interrupt it for now. It has been a strange day.

Work was work, like other days, interesting but not the subject of this writing. I went again to the Africana dance rehearsal for meditation and yoga, and they were similar to last week’s, though not as giggly. The yoga especially left me dripping sweat on the wooden stage in the long cement building.

But before anything began I talked to Kim, a Dutch girl who dances with the troupe, and who I’ve gotten to know a little bit in the past couple weeks. She told me about her weekend:

Friday, walking home from dance rehearsal, a man ran up from behind her and grabbed her purse. She ran back to the long cement building and told the dancers, and some of them walked with her to the place where the theft occurred. There they stalked into the bushes and came upon the man; they sprayed him with mace and beat him to the ground, then dragged him to the road where they summoned the police. They all (Kim included) continued to the police station, where the officers beat him in the head with a piece of wood.

Saturday was Kim’s birthday and, shaken from the scene the night before but happy with the return of her bag, went to the beach to celebrate. During the afternoon everyone went swimming, and one of her Ghanaian friends drowned near the shore. From the shore she saw him bobbing up and down waving his arms, and swam to try and rescue him. But she was too late; she couldn’t even find him in the water. So again she went to the police station, where they threatened to hold her responsible (since it was her birthday party); and they charged her and her obruni friends with the task of informing his family about his death.

Then Sunday morning she learned that his body had washed up on the beach, and she was summoned to identify him. She did, and they covered his naked body with palm fronds, then poured cheap gin over it (local custom) before wrapping it in sheets and heaving it into the back of a pickup truck (no room in the cab) to take it to the mortuary. She rode in the back with the corpse. His family was already there when they arrived, and they wailed when they saw him. A fight broke out when the bereaved attacked some passing Ghanaians who tried too aggressively to beg some money from the obruni they saw standing inside the mortuary fence.

Sunday afternoon Kim manically laughed and cried on the way to the other police station where she went to follow up on the bag-snatching. Meanwhile, she had an epiphany: “It’s only about money.” Since she had decided not to charge the thief, his family had to compensate her directly. To facilitate this transaction she had to visit his house and embarrassingly confront him in front of his family. Then the police demanded a cut and marched her back to the station. Meanwhile she was told that, had she only offered them some money, the lifeguards at the beach could have saved her drowned friend. “Since you are obruni you can swim.” And so they had left the task to her. But, they said, if she had only offered them a few thousand cedis, they would have rescued him. That, they argued, is why she should be held responsible: she should have known that the lifeguards only do their duty for free if the other concerned parties can’t swim.

So Kim told me all this before meditation and I listened without saying much—only the perfunctory apologies. What can one say to those stories? Somehow they were only that—stories—and Kim was still there and even smiling (“I have even begun to laugh again, although I still see his body on the beach in my dreams.”), and meditation and yoga proceeded as usual. I stayed for a little bit of the dance rehearsal, which was as enchanting as last week, with the same cast of sweat-shiny characters and the same ferocious intensity.

But I left a little early and walked out of the long cement building and down the dirt path towards the road to catch a taxi. It was about 5:20pm, the time when the sun is easing itself to the horizon and the sky is painted pale blue with thin, wispy clouds way up high. I stopped for a second, looked up, and saw a huge flock of black birds flying south. There were so many, flapping forth from behind the barrier of trees beside the dirt path, filling my field of vision, that I kept watching. And then I saw the shape of their wings, and even the points of their ears, and they were not birds but bats—the bats of Accra, and they came without interruption from beyond the trees. They were at exactly the height where their forms were visible but their screeching and chattering inaudible. For not less than twenty minutes I stood stock still looking up, and they didn’t stop for a single second. Black forms flapping against the pale blue sky, hundreds in view at any moment, flying generally in one direction but in no discernable pattern. In that twenty minutes I saw well over a million bats pass overhead. The sky itself was moving.

Eventually some young kids came over to me and started to laugh and scream and talk, shake hands, they wanted to be friends. Everything seemed far away. I felt like I had shrunken inside myself. The hands I shook and the fingers I snapped seemed to be at the end of some distant arm that belonged to someone else. These kids wanted to know my name, they shouted their names, they all wanted to scratch my mobile phone number in the dirt, they were grabbing at me; I was hardly even there. I don’t remember what I said to them but moments later I was walking again towards the road and I hailed a taxi and got in. I realized some minutes into the ride that it was the first Ghanaian taxi I’ve been in where there was no music or radio. Once we passed the “37” tro-tro station, whose trees, I learned, are home to the millions of chattering bats, the sky was empty save for two stragglers we saw a few miles away.

Sitting in the passenger seat I felt so small, a tiny homunculus somewhere inside my body, but not close to any part of it. Divine secrets and great mysteries seemed to be encoded everywhere: in Kim’s wretched story, in the painted sky, the uncountable fluttering bats, the sticky, clamoring kids, the quiet taxi, and even the two bats left behind the millions. Those profound truths—that profound truth—seemed so close that it pressed through the taxi’s open windows and right onto my skin; but it passed, passed, passed, without being comprehended, so remote was I from my own skin. Still it persisted for minutes and minutes, everything so pregnant with meaning, it’s all here in plain view, it seemed as if time should stop.

The sky had changed when I got home and it was dark by then; but still I had not recovered. Afflicted by, or blessed with, the residue of this strange feeling I had a farewell beer and said goodbye to my friend Thilo, a German who has been staying at the VA house since I moved in a couple weeks ago. In the next hour he will say goodbye to Ghana and board a plane bound for Munich via Milan. Is this an afterthought?

As I said, a strange day—one that is not over, and that I’m not sure I want to see end. I suppose it’s one of those times that the world conspires—to obscure? To illuminate?

Sorry for the confusing, rambling post. But if anyone who trudges through it can help to make sense, please do! I promise I’ll try to be more coherent in the future…if only the days would do the same.