Warning: parental discretion advised
Here's the scene: We are draped on the various couches in Eugene's big main living room. One dim light is on, leaving most of the dark wooden paneling of the walls in shadow. The ceiling is high, but collapsing in places. We are oozing tiredness, but I don't think any of us is quite asleep, just quietly listening to the African pop music playing softly through the radio.
All day, Orlando and I have been traveling. We set off at eleven this morning, first on a futile mission to find an unneeded inflatable mattress, then to the station to catch a tro tro, then to the town of Koforidua, then hours and hours looking for someone to stay with after Orlando's friend's original offer falls through. We finally find Eugene and an entire unused floor of a building owned by his family, and are grateful to have somewhere to lie down for a bit, before we head out again at midnight to see Blakk Rasta.
All of a sudden, a man stumbles through the door. He takes no notice of us, but walks straight over to Eugene and impatiently wakes him from his slumber. "Is it ready? Is my stuff ready?" Eugene mutters yes, and walks across the room to the bar on the far side. He picks up a joint and hands it to the man, who promptly takes it to the window and lights it.
After a few drags he is ready to attend to other business. The joint never leaves as he takes his shirt off, turns the volume on the radio way up, and begins dancing. Orlando and I haven't moved during all this, only watched, and it is only now that he takes notice of us. With a think accent he introduces himself Kwasi, Eugene's older brother. That is all; he goes back in front of the stereo again and doesn't stop dancing by himself. This goes on for an hour, as I shuffle around the room and make hesitating attempts to join him and Orlando pretends to be asleep. Kwasi now and then tells me something in his thick and stuttering English, but I don't understand. Eugene sinks back in to a stupor.
Finally it is time to go to Blakk Rasta, a big name DJ who is playing here in Kuforidua. Kwasi hurries us out the door when he decides it is time for us to go, but he himself has not bothered to button up his shirt or zip his fly and I notice for the first time that he stinks strongly of gin. He only makes it a few steps down the block before he turns home again, leaving us to go alone. We never actually make it in to the show, it is too expensive. The only excitement is when our taxi driver goes through an intersection too fast and has to brake to avoid a collision with a police van. It wasn't really that close of a call, many feet seperate the two vehicles. But there is a tense moment after both cars have stopped, us in the taxi eyeing the police van and the officers in the van staring at us. It was very bizarre: everybody knew what was supposed to happen next, that is, the police would get out of the van and shake the taxi driver down for money, but being thrust in to this situation so abruptly, everybody felt acutely self-consciousness. A moment later, things proceeded like clockwork. The police got out of the van, upbraided the driver for being so careless, then one cop got in the car, they drove us to a spot where we could get another taxi, and then presumably proceeded to the police station. They might have stopped before they got there, it didn't matter exactly where it happened, but it did happen; a bribe undoubtably changed hands.
During the tense moment of consciousness, I had a feeling that if the taxi driver merely waved sorry and drove on, he could have avoided paying the bribe. The idea that police collect bribes has permeated the collective conscience of this country in a very strange way. Everybody complains about it, but, in that moment of truth, the taxi driver acquiesed easily to what he believed, no, what he made, the inevitable. Ghana is not a lawless, dirt poor country; it is modernizing everyday, and bribery could easily be left behind. But instead its like people accept bribery as just being part of their culture, just something that happens and is meant to happen. Weird.
The next day we climbed this little mountain overlooking the town. There was a nice view at the top, and on the way down we passed through a couple of farms, although I wouldn't have known they were farms if it hadn't been pointed out to me. Not the neat rows of crops you see in America, just jungle thickets of Cassava trees. We found a Papaya tree, and hit a couple of the fruit down with a broken Cassava shoot. Then we brought them to a food stand and cut it in to slices to eat like a melon. MMMM!! More delicious then you can imagine. A few more miscarriages of our traveling plans, and we headed home to Accra. byebye