Month 2: The Next 50 Days

Month 2: 50 Next Days

In bed with academic lethargy and a bad case of le food poisoning courtesy of Accra Yogo! Vanilla Yoghurt, I am finally updating my blog! I have a lot of ground to cover, having not updated in the last 50 days (I did count; it is 50 exactly).

So here goes. Ten experiences, from worst to best, the full spectrum. In 50 days.

#10: Pseudo-Malaria

 It came quickly in the night, like Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-highwayman/) though resulting in a more protracted pain and without hooves to announce its arrival. I had finished a great night in mid-June; I had finished writing a memo to the Ghanaian parliament on why they should strike down the Election Commission’s bill to increase the number of constituencies from 230 to 275 for the 2012 election, I’d gone to step class at my gym, and Laura, Valerie and I had finished the evening with a grilled chicken salad and chocolate milkshake. 

Within six hours, I was miserable. I wore a high fever, a headache, and a stomachache that squeezed my organs blue. 

On a related note, between mid-June malaria and yesterday’s food poisoning, I think my roommate Laura Jones wins the medal for being that-person-who-has-seen-me-vomit-the-most-besides-my-mother.

#9: Recovering From Malaria
After three hours in a crowded open-air hospital in Nyaho Accra, a blood test paper that reads “no malaria parasite present”, and two days of groggy feverish nonsense, the highlight of the flu is having time off work. Two days after I dived off the deep end, Val caught whatever I had, and both of us were grounded for the week.

That week was filled with Sex and the City, The West Wing, and ice cream.

CDD, the organization that I work for, sent a driver to come and check on me since everyone at the office was really concerned. This was a really hard scene to justify.

#8: Finding a Bookstore

I am accelerating the level of enjoyment that I experienced in each event of this spectrum because I did not take pictures of the mediocre things. And pictures are worth ~500 of my words. From this point on, every event is a level 8+ on the Richter scale of personal enjoyment.

We found a bookstore last weekend. Books are really hard to come by in Accra. They have a lot of corner bookstores, which sell strictly bibles or related religious books. African books are also not too difficult to come by. But if you want anything Western, forget it.

Until last weekend, I had ready everything I had fit into my backpack coming here and all the African classics that I had haphazardly managed to buy. I’d polished off Guns, Germs & Steel (Jared Diamond), The Blind Assassin (Margaret Attwood), The Life of Pi (Yann Martel), After Dark (Haruki Murakami), The World According to Garp (John Irving), Summertime (J.M. Coetzee), The Diary of a Bad Year (J.M. Coetzee), and Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe).  Particularly recommended are The World According to Garp (this is the third time that I have read it), The Blind Assassin and Summertime.

After heading to the bookstore, Laura, Val and I went to Osu and got smoothies and wraps. It had been two months since my lips had touched a chicken wrap. And I came away with the biography of Hillary Clinton.

#7: Ghanaian Cuisine

For all the natural culinary skills that have blessed the members of my non-immediate family (except you, dad!), I seem to have by-passed it all. But I have worked pretty hard at learning how to cook some traditional Ghanaian cuisine. The Strocher Guide to Ghana had me freaked out two months ago that I would hate the food in Ghana. To quote them “it is not that Ghanaian cuisine is bad, per se, but it is nothing that you will find that you miss.”

Fried plantain is the best snack in the world. 

I won’t miss the food in Ghana. But that’s because I’ve broadly learned how to cook everything that I love. My favourite dishes include Ghanaian grilled chicken (with garlic, onions and ginger), Jollof Rice, and Red Red. Red Red is the best dish. It is black-eyed beans in a spicy tomato curry.

Red Red featured above. Made it myself. No big deal. 

The Ghanaians say not to eat Red Red after lunch because of the whole beans beans the magical fruit proverb.  But occasionally, I throw caution into the wind.

(Nothing like a good fart joke to liven up a blog.)  

#6: Exploring the Slave Castle in Cape Coast

At the end of June, Laura, Val, Natalia and I headed to Cape Coast, a sandy stretch of beach along the Ghanaian coast. It was a four hour trotro ride west of Accra to the questionable C-Lotte Hotel, where the manager introduced us to a bedroom occupied by a naked woman, a waitress that served us stone cold omelettes, and a front entrance clad head-to-toe in condom paraphernalia. (If you really love her, wear a cover.)   

After dropping our luggage in the hotel, we went to the Cape Coast Castle, which was the largest slave castle in Ghana during the colonial era. The viceroy lived in the castle along with about two thousand slaves in the segregated dungeons below, waiting for months at a time to be shipped off to the West.

The castle was beautiful.

The dungeons were chilling. 

The Obamas unveiled the castle’s reconstruction in 2009, in Barack Obama’s first trip to Africa.

When I came to Ghana, people told me that Ghana was “Africa for beginners.” Frankly, I think that identity is pretty bogus. I can’t speak with any authority, because I have never been to another African country, but living in Ghana is hard. It is jarring. And even its beautiful parts are gritty. And there isn’t anything watered-down about that. Slaves were deported in Ghana. Thousands of people died in tribal warfare with the colonials in Ghana. Ethnic tensions remain. Ghana was granted independence in 1957, and then promptly underwent four coups to get to the Fourth Republic in 1994 (and has been a democracy ever since).  But it’s got a firm sense of national identity, and it’s proud to be an African state. And the people are nice, and the food is good, and the music and dance are mad fun to partake in.

I think it is only Africa for Beginners because it was Obama’s first African country. 

#5: Painting the Primary School in Ho

The weekend after Cape Coast, Laura, Val, Tukeni and I went back to Ho where we helped to pain the new classroom and wing of a primary school in the village. This is the school that I had written about earlier – the one Valerie had volunteered with two summers ago.

We painted it on Canada Day.

The walls of the Ho Primary School are now a proud shade of Pepto Bismal.

#4: The Beach in Ada Foa

Perhaps the most beautiful place that I have ever visited in the world is Ada, Ghana. Ada is this entirely remote beach village, enclosed by the Atlantic Ocean and a cluster of small sand islands which each host some 200-person community.

We stayed at the Dreamland Beach Resort, which was a fifteen minute walk from this place.

We then came back and fell asleep in the hammocks with a nice bottle of wine, some Margaret Attwood, and a dinner of watermelon, mango and pineapple.

#3: Village in Ada

But before the night of the beautiful beach, we toured around developing villages near Ada Foah. We were guided by a friend of Natalya’s whom was running an NGO in the village. The purpose of the NGO was to train unemployed youth / adults in some working skill, like auto-repair, tailoring, etc.

Children often roll tires as a game. 

And they love getting their pictures taken. 

Women carry heavy loads on their heads to sell -- food, water, utensils, anything. 

The main problem facing the NGO isn’t a lack of funds or organization, like most NGOs in Ghana. But its motive. The problem with occupation in villages like Ada or Ada Foah is that the market is over-saturated with labour without enough capital to fund the service industry. There are too many mechanics and tailors, and not enough people with disposable income to finance them. Most people in Ada or Ada Foah leave to Accra eventually, and it’s a brain drain to the cities.

#2: Touching a Crocodile

It was 100% legit. We were sitting at this restaurant which was encircled by crocodiles in water somewhere near the Kankun National Park. And this waitress came over to Natalia and asked her if she wanted to touch a crocodile. Of course, neither of us had ever desired anything so much. So Natalia  and I said that we would like to touch the crocodile, and we paid her the equivalent of $1.12 for her to lead us across a wire fence that read ‘DO NOT OPEN. DANGEROUS ANIMAL’.

And we crouched by THAT crocodile, and we took pictures.

The crocodile’s name was Saddam Hussein. Which meant that I was a lot closer to hell than I had ever intended to be. (That's just a little Saddam humour for you! Admittedly, in poor taste.) 

#1: Rope Bridge Across the Jungle

At Kankun National Park, we went on an hour’s hike through the jungle, which climaxed at a 2k journey across rope bridges above the tree canopy of the jungle. The rope bridge was 500 meters from the ground, a single string of planks fastened by rope from tree to tree. The bridge shook as we walked across it, one at a time.

At first it was terrifying. And we had to sing “These Are a Few of My Favourite Things.”

Then we loved it, and were near running across it.

You could see some animals in the trees, but not many since most animals come out at night.

I only have 28 days in Ghana left now. But I promise to update before those are up. And if you want a better blow-by-blow account of what I’m up to, this is my friend Valerie’s blog. She updates more frequently than I do, and is good for a laugh: http://valerieinghana.blogspot.com/

Weeks 2&3: Three Hos and a Wedding

Take my blog’s extended period of silence as an indication of how thoroughly and exhaustedly happy I am in Ghana.

While I would profess that I just don’t have the time to update my blog – partially because that would refute my parents, who alternate between assuming I’m dead or perpetually lazy – in actuality, I haven’t written because it always seems that there is something more fun to do. There is someone in my compound to talk to, or there is some movie that everybody is watching. Or we’re going to jazz bars, reggae nights, containers, the beach, the gym, travel, etc. (Picture to the left is where I live.)

So here are the highlights – the egregiously-abridged synopsis of the last eighteen days. With many many pictures. (Those are for you, mom and dad!)

Observation #9: Rain doesn’t stop for Weddings, but Weddings do Stop for Rain

On our second weekend in Accra, Tukeni schmoozed the four of us onto the guest list of a genuine Ghanaian wedding. We arrived at eleven thirty to a Pentacostal church in Achimota, Accra, wearing four traditional Ghanaian party dresses tailored from thin dyed cotton.

If you want to know the biggest difference between Ghanaian weddings and Christian/Western weddings, I would argue that it’s audience participation. Christian Weddings are infinitely more static. Ghanaian weddings feature synchronized congo lines composed completely of the audience, an all-female church choir that swings their hips as they belt, and family speeches containing intricate heartfelt parables. Young boys march up and down the aisles with mahogany staffs. The minister lights ashes in a goblet aflame. If our wedding ceremonies were like this, I would get married more often.

 He lit that on fire first. 

 Exchanging of the rings. 

The couple, whom we did not actually know. 

But I would not marry in the rainy season. By the time the reception began at an open-air banquet hall at a beautiful country club in Greater Accra, the rainclouds were already convulsing. To this day, it was the worst rainstorm I have seen in Ghana. It left no survivors. In a matter of minutes, every napkin, every ribbon, every balloon had been torn from the reception. The guests plastered themselves to the slightly roofed walls of the banquet area. The air grew Canadian cold. And the skies drenched Accra for two solid hours.

 Before the Storm. 

 5 minutes later. 

 10 minutes later. 

Observation #10: Accra is Ghana, but Ghana is definitely not Accra

On our third weekend in Ghana, the four of us finally ventured outside Greater Accra and into the neighbouring Volta. There are ten geographic regions in Ghana, of which Volta is this long stretch of farming land in the southern center of Ghana. We went with two of my friends from work – an intern from California and another from Alberta – to stay the weekend in the city of Ho.

 Hiking through the Volta mountains. 

Ho is nothing like Accra. In fact, none of the rest of Ghana as far as we have found is anything like Accra. Accra is a gritty, dirt-brown, roughly-paved, densely populated, rich and vibrant city. And if I could only remember the Volta by colour, it would be nothing but green. We took a trotro through the Volta, pelting down shabby dirt road through blades of grass as tall as my body. We passed under coconut trees laden with fruit the size of basketballs. We got hit by a Ghanaian moonsoon three hours into the journey, and the windshield of the trotro blurred over with the smoke of rainstorm, pelting down this potholed road at easily 80 km/h. Joseph Conrad meets NASCAR in the rainsoaked last leg of the drive.  

 Walking through Ho.

View of Ho from the trotro. 

Valerie had spent the summer two years ago in Ho, and we stayed with Val’s hostmother when we came. She was an amazing cook. Aside from fame and lasting political importance, my new life goal is cooking redred (a bean dish) half as well as Victoria.

On Saturday morning, we visited the school that Val helped build when she was here two years ago. It was a neat experience. Across the door, one of the three classrooms was painted VALERIE WEBER, and when Victoria introduced Val to anyone, they would point at the door and get excited. It was also a particularly interesting venture for me, because I have spent the last three weeks processing education data on primary/public schools for thirty districts in Ghana, one of which was Ho. I know the number of textbooks, the number of desks, of washrooms, of water, of students, of girls, of teachers (trained and untrained) in all those districts. And I got to watch my data come to life in Ho.

Swingset at the school painted in Ghana's colours.

 Where lunch is served (cooking on the small stove to the right). 

 Inside the third grade classroom. 

The Valerie Weber Classroom ft. Val

Mountains Beyond Mountains

After Val’s school, our six-person troop jumped on a tro tro to the city of Ho Hoe, located at the base of the Volta mountains. From there it was a short one hour hike to the Wli falls – the tallest Waterfall in West Africa.

My own writing cannot do these sights justice.

 At Wli Falls. You can actually swim under the waterfall. 

 You can hike to the top of the mountain, but we did not since it was getting late. 

This is the side of the mountain by Wli falls. Those are all bats.  One guy caught a bat when he was under the waterfall, drowned it, and took it to shore. Ghanaians love bat meat. It is apparently very tender.

 Ho Hoe, from the taxicab window. 

It took us three hours to get to Ho Hoe, and a fierce four hours to get back. But the taxi ride back was amazing. The trotros stopped running around five so we grabbed a cab back to Ho. We fit six of us in this tiny taxi – four in the back, two in the front. And we were just pelting down the mountains, between palm trees and green vines. And the sun was setting so the whole sky was gold with dust, and the cab driver was playing this deep afro beat on his radio that fit the speed at which we lurched through the potholes.

Excerpt from next entry on this weekend: Today I ate goat.

Days 6, 7 & 8: I Have Named My Desk “The Fourth Republic”  

My office desk also has a chair, which is no small deal. It is the best office chair I have ever seen. It has recline capabilities, and it is dressed in faux-leather. The fake leather does not sweat in the heat.

The heat is not so bad because the office has air conditioning. It is the only air-conditioned building that I know in Accra except for the Golden Tulip Hotel (which also uses water for superfluous purposes like a swimming pool and toilet bowls that flush).

This is my office: The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD) – a, foreign-sponsored, domestically administered, political think tank located in the New Airport District of Accra. You can’t tell from the picture, but there is a second newly-built four-story building behind the white one. That’s where I work. I’m on the Election Watch Commission, working to ensure that the December 2012 Federal and Parliamentary election in Ghana happens peacefully. There is genuine fear here that the election results, whatever they might be, will meet civil unrest. The discovery of oil in the west and increased fighting between the Asante and Ewe tribes (who tend to vote for the NPP and NDC parties respectively) is cause for concern.

Observation #6: Ghana Has Not Heard of Sleeping In    

Accra is hot, populated, and clad in only narrow streetways. The average Ghanaian businessperson is awake by four in the morning and on the road by six, keeping just ahead of the traffic and the sun. I am not nearly so prompt. But I am up by 6 a.m. and on the road by 6:45. I make it into the office by 7 a.m. and I check out at 6 p.m. I beat the morning traffic with a five minute carpool cab ride. And for those who judge the 4 km cab ride, remember that Ghana has no sidewalks. And the streets have impromptu holes for sewage. They are unpaved and uneven. And that I work in heels.

The office has a betting pool on how long it will take one of the interns to trip into a sewage hole. It happened to two of the McGill interns last year.

Observation #7: Interning is Static

Not to mention comprehensive. Before I can do any polling, any work with the Afro barometer, any inspection of election sites, any policy recommendations, reports – before I can even edit the English of any CDD document – I have 1,200 pages of background reading on the history of Ghanaian democracy (or military dictatorship: it’s a fifty year binary, with the exception of the Jerry Rawlings regime who served 9 years as a dictator and 8 years as a democratically-elected president. And yes, they were consecutive.) I need a thorough background on the ethnic demographics of Ghana, the history of ethnic conflict, constitutional reform, civil-military relations, the chieftain system (because in addition to the federal and local branches of government, Ghana also has traditional chiefs), and a background on election violence as well as the issues at stake in the election. After that, polling data from the elections since 1992 is advisable. I think there is a romanticism to reviewing data from every year since which I was born.

But before that, on my first day, I got sent to a Round Table conference on the politics of becoming an Oil Producing Nation (worries about the ‘resource curse’ with unnecessarily long comparison of Ghana to Tunisia's contemporary political climate. Because oil is the problem there). Then, I sat in on a constitutional review meeting. The people in that room were building the Fifth Republic from the weathered articles of the 1992 (Fourth) Constitution.

My job is almost as cool as the West Wing. Only the 90s instrumentals and elaborate banter are lacking.