Sixty Days in Ghana

Stepped off the plane and into a warm and thick Accra night in which wasp-like moths swirled under bright lamps and beat against everyone's head. On the drive from the airport to the guesthouse there were men and women sitting on the sidewalks around blazing fires. Some buildings were enclosed within walls and barbed wire, gatehouses, towers. Roads were often made of dirt criss-crossed by rivers of mud.

(Accra smells like sewage, flowers, cooked chicken, and something burning. At first the smell is all around you -- external, pungent. Then after two days without a proper shower and having walked through the dusty markets, sampled red red and banku, the smell gets in your skin. At two a.m., sweaty, you lie on the bed's top sheet and smell Accra on your arms and shoulders. The first night it is hard to sleep.)

The Childaid director who met us at the airport was a young woman named Dorcas. She is a twenty-one year old Ghanaian born and raised in the Northern Region whose parents now live in Kumasi. Opinionated and very knowledgeable about the country's politics. Discussed President Kufour, the New Patriotic Party (which is the party in power now; Kufour's party) and the transition over the last six years away from the "culture of silence" that former President/military leader Jerry Rawlings promoted.

Slept for the first time under a mosquito net which I hung improperly but close; at least it formed a sort of protective space around my body. But I felt so good after having hung that net. Then I lay awake on the damp bed until four in the morning. Kept remembering that earlier I had raised the mattress to find little bugs, maybe cockroaches, scurrying around on the frame. A lot different from home. Morning found no running water; toilet didn't flush, no shower.

Oh, what an amazing place! It sounds a little rough -- but friends, you do not know true joy until you have found yourself capable of bathing out of a water bottle and of eating unidentifiable soup in which curled meat floats.

After two days in smoky crowded Accra the other volunteers (Dutch Anke, German Alex) and I travelled to Tamale on a fifteen-hour bus ride. The bumpy dirt road snaked first through Central District, which was a wide stretch of shantytowns, and then northwest. Absolute poverty. Roads were backed up for miles -- scenes from Armageddon. Every half hour or so you saw a broken down truck, abandoned car, or a fresh wreck; in one case a bus had rolled over and caught fire -- the thing lay on its back, charred and smoking.

For entertainment the bus driver played Nigerian action movies back-to-back, with a few love stories in between. The volume was turned up so high that the noise sometimes overpowered the speakers and distorted the characters' voices. You would be hard pressed to find worse writing, but the plots and reactions of the characters were rich cultural education. Also you can tell a lot about Ghanaians by the way they laugh at some things and not others -- for instance when a girl had to explain to her parents that she was pregnant everyone laughed, even though it appeared that the father was trying to beat her to death. Other times, I was the only one laughing.

When I first boarded the bus the driver forced me to stow my bag in the storage compartment (it was too big to carry on, after all!), so the only entertainment I had during the ride was these Nigerian movies. No books, magazines. We saw about ten hours of Nigerian television that day.

My favorite was the one whose protagonist was the leader of the "Secret Cult Protection Force" on some university campus. He was a bad boy type and the daughter of a rich man fell in love with him. He beat a few people up and he got beat up a few times and then he married the girl. Basically. But it was interesting that the villains in the movie were the chief of a local tribe, the members of the police whom he manipulated, and a rich man -- the father of the girl. The "heroes" were college students and, to a minor degree, the legal process.

Other than poor Central District our bus passed through Kumasi, where it broke down for a while, and then through a string of similar-looking villages and long stretches of dense tropical forest in which huge trees shot up into the sky and village people crowded the roadside selling loaves of bread and fresh fruit.

Eventually arrived safe in Tamale and met my host family -- "Momma" Tina, Prospa, and their baby Emmanuel. Strange to sit in the main room at night and listen to them communicate in Twi, a language which is more common in the south. The Northern Region is populated more by Dagbons whose language is called Dagboni; these are usually Moslems. Twi is an Akan language found in Kumasi to the west and in the southern regions. If my understanding is right then Akan and Dagbon are two different ethnicities.

So I am not staying in a hut. Actually it is a house and I have my own little room in the back with a shuttered and mosquito protected window. Loud Ghanaian television and radio shows blare from dawn until I pass out around eleven p.m. -- that or the crying baby. Not what I expected. For the first couple of nights I used the mosquito net as a blanket because I did not understand how to hang it -- my guesthouse rig didn't work. Then I talked with a more experienced volunteer who explained that I had to tie these little strings to various objects around the room. Okay.

Prospa and Momma Tina are very nice and don’t expect much of me. Big challenge to use the word "momma" in reference to a woman probably twenty-seven years old who is not my mother. Last night she was sick with fever so I did the ironing. Smelled like she had vomited. Hope it isn’t malaria!

Most nights I go to the internet shop and do homework or else I meet one of my new friends (another volunteer or a Ghanaian). Have found it very easy to make friends on this trip. Kwabena, a local schoolteacher, is someone I like very much. Very kind and generous man. Yesterday I taught at Zion, which is a school at Fou Village; the village is one of those stick hut villages where I thought I would be staying. Really Zion is not a school at all. The building is a two-room structure -- some zinc plates nailed to boards -- that was built as a temporary replacement for the old school which a storm destroyed.

At Zion there were sixty kids between kindergarten and sixth grade education levels and for an hour or so I was alone with them. It was a mad scramble of half-remembered multiplication tables, the "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" game, animal names, and a lot of sweat. Then I sent Kwabena a distress call and he came to my rescue. He even managed the writhing mass of children at playtime, when they all boxed each other for a chance on the new swingset, so I could take a piss under the mango tree. When it was all over he gave me a ride on the back of his motorcycle. We went to his place and watched music videos from the Ivory Coast.

Earlier in the week did some construction work at Egg Village, the volunteers' nickname for another stick hut village out on the Bolgatonga road (I think). Helped the contractor mix mortar (white sand, river sand, cement) and spread it on two walls. Really he did most of the work. There is a real art to slinging mortar; if you do it wrong the stuff just falls to the ground in a pile of slop.

So far have not been bit by a mosquito I think. Though they are crawling all over me -- have to whack them off my arms when I go out at night. The strongest insect repellent on the market (~98.6% deet) doesn't seem to faze them.

Also despite many warnings have eaten much African food, even from little roadside stalls covered in flies, and no bowel discomfort. Love the plantains; they do all kinds of delicious things with them. Although don't have as much love for banku, which is a blob of corn dough the size of your foot, usually served with okra stew (slime) and some chicken. You're supposed to roll the dough into balls, like fufu, coat them in slime, and then swallow them; but that's not good for you. (Kwabena notes that the dough is already pounded into mush, which means your stomach has little digestion work to do.) And here they eat chicken bones. I told Kwabena that in America we don't eat bones because they might rupture your intestines, but he said it was fine. Still I didn't eat any bones.