Whatcha Ghana Do?

2007-04-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

Ten things I hate about Ghana:
1. The heat. It never stops. The changing seasons have no meaning in Ghana. Summer is hot, Fall is hot, WInter is hot, Spring is hot. There are only two seasons, the hot and dry season, and, even worse, the hot and wet season.
2. The dust. In Ghana, there's hardly any grass, and a lot less pavement then in America. What do we have instead? Dirt. And this dirt doesn't stay nicely on the ground, but floats up and becomes dust. Add that to the exhaust that pours out of the old cars here, and I can't walk to the store with out getting dirty. The dust accumulates in the folds of my skin where my elbow bends, on my neck and wrists, and it sticks to where my clothes are sweaty. I have to scrub the arm pits of my white shirts for half an hour before some semblance of white appears.
3. Traffic. There are a lot of cars, and it is always surprising how efficiently they move and how few accidents there are, considering how few traffic lights there are. Besides, I'm riding a bike, so the amount of jammed cars doesn't affect my speed. My complaint? Most of the cars here are old, and most of the carburetors on them don't seem to be doing their jobs correctly any more. I can see the exhaust pipes shivering with the amount of black smoke they're pooring out, and I can taste the soot even beneath the handkerchief I tie around my mouth. I have never hated cars more.
4. Lights off. Some people mysteriously know before hand when its going to happen, but it usually takes me by surprise, right when I want to make some tea on my electric stove. The worst thing about lights off is that the fan doesn't work. You never know how much you need something until you miss it.
On a joyous note, the lights just came on after 48 straight hours of no electricity!
5. Lack of variety in the food. The only vegetables I've eaten for seven months have been tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, cucumber, and these weird leaves called contumbri. They're okay, but I miss my green leafy's back home. Everyday I take rice and beans in some sort of combination, not that there are many, and also some other starchy food, yam, cassava or maize, that has been pounded in a squishy substance that you eat with your fingers. From lack of variety, I've learned to like eggs, something I haven't eaten since I was a little kid, but now can't live with out. More shocking, I've relaxed the rules of my vegetarianism and have been eating fish. Its not really so evil to chew some little silver fishies that local fisherman have brought in in their nets, I guess, but I'll stop when I get home.
6. Catcalls. This will never stop. No matter how long I stay here, I will never start looking more black. Here are the things I here, people have remarkably little imagination when it comes to inventing new things to yell at white people: 'obruni' 'Kwesi bruni' 'my friend' 'whiteman' 'bruni, where are you going? (everybody is always desperately curious as to where I am going)' 'Okwahen? (where are you going)' 'Welcome to Africa' 'bra bra (come come)' 'come come, I want to take you as a friend' 'give me _____' 'Dash me _____' It is different if I yelled 'blackman, blackman' at people back home, I suppose, but sometimes I'm not exactly sure why.
7. Ingratitude. Charles Lamb says this: 'The human species.... is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. .... The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate the great race, is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. "He shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious; contrasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of the other.'
All of my black friends here have much less money than me, and I like to do what I can to help them out. But just because I am white doesn't mean I am made of money, and I don't think I deserve to be classified as a spend thrift miser if I refuse to give out small 'dashes' left and right. But these sorts of demands are placed on me all the time by people who think I owe them something just because I am white, from asking to use my bicycle (and I should mention that a lot of people don't ask before they use it) to asking for some small money to chop. My mother, via her ATM card, is probably one of the more generous, trusting, charities working in Ghana, but sometimes the more I help people the more I feel degraded around them.
8.Stealing. As I hinted at above, there are relatively few people here who's sense of pride would prevent them from taking advantage of me. And unfortunately, a large subcategory of the above set do not stop before out and out thievery. All of my friends, white and black, have had something stolen from them. I've been robbed of my ATM card twice, once when it was picked from my pocket at a show, and once when it was taken by a boy who I had been good friends with for the three months previously. Worst, he had conned me into giving him my PIN number; I never suspected that an old friend would have designs on my bank account. He is indignant when I confront him over the matter, like I am making baseless accusations. I was amazed at how little my friendship was worth to this boy.
9. Teasing me when I act 'African'. A couple times I've been riding my bicycle and someone has yelled to me 'Who taught you to ride a bicycle?' I would have been confused by such a question if I hadn't heard different versions of it, said in the same tone of voice: 'Who taught you to wash your clothes?' 'Who taught you to eat Wakye?' Handwashing my clothes is certainly a skill I have acquired here in Ghana, but eating Wakye, which is just rice and beans, is something that even white people know how to do.
People seem to find it hilarious that I would act in any way similar to them. Its odd to them that I do anything else than sit in an airconditioned hotel room smoking cigarettes and eating french fries. I admit that my first attempts at washing my clothes were undoubtably amusing, but now, after seven months, I would just like to be taken seriously.
10. Poverty. If there was no poverty, just about all my other complaints about Ghana would disappear. I suppose the heat wouldn't go away, and the traffic would get worse, but besides that... Everyday I see and feel the affects of poverty, and it is hateful to me. I may be insensitive to homelessness in New York, but seeing polio stricken beggars, sitting in the dirt on their useless shriveled legs, will never stop bothering me. And there are a lot of polio stricken beggars here. They carry themselves with incredible dignity. They don't allow me to act self-conscious about my own good health and wealth when I'm talking to them. But the dignity of poverty is a myth, it is a pride that exists in spite of misery.
Most people here don't have the money to afford such a thing as privacy. They sleep together, eat together, work outside all day. And for all their lack of Western luxury, they seem to be happy, proud, and fulfilled in a way that I am just beginning to understand. I have no doubt that, without an environmental catastrophe or world war of some sort, Ghana will be a rich country in the next 50 or 100 years. The amount of foreign investment here is increasing apace, and I see more Hummers rolling around the streets here than I do in New York. The poverty of this nation was created by Western colonizers, and it will probably be eliminated by Western investors. But I'm afraid that with the westernization of Ghana will come more and more new things to be disatisfied about. I love watching DVD's on my laptop, I like eating tofu and ice cream, and I wouldn't deny anyone these and other pleasures. Poverty will probably go, but I hope the culture and the pride doesn't go with it.

2007-03-27T06:10:00.000-07:00

The clouds were dark and huge in the sky, an army of strange shaped floats that had taken up position across the sky. I hurried to the toilet. Already the first small drops were falling. When I emerged, it felt like I had stepped on to Mars. The air was dark and murky, and at first I wasn't sure why. A strange, portentious wind was blowing, whipping up the dirt and dust on the ground. Towering waves of dust rolled across the street, and I timed my runs to avoid getting hit. Even so, I could feel the grittiness of the swirling dust in my throat. Black leaves streamed and circled above my head like crazed bird, and a brown roller of the fine loose dust swept between some ladies and the big cast iron pots they were stirring. People were dashing to and fro, emerging from the dusty gloom and disappearing into it again.
I was just inside the school when the rain began to fall. It came hard and slanting, torrents of bullets from heaven. The dust settled back to earth, and soon little muddy streams were winding there way here and there. And the rain kept coming. A downpour lasts five or ten minutes before exhausting itself, but not this one. The power of the rain was unrelenting.
Its been a long time since it has rained in Ghana, not since October or thereabouts. You can imagine how welcome this weather is to me. I've sent up the rain prayer many times before, just for a relief from the never changing hot, dry sun. I didn't know how much I would miss bad weather. I went outside the shop that is always thumping reggae music, and I took off my shirt and danced for a little bit in the storm. The so long unfelt water made me feel free. Then I went back to the school, squelching my shoes in the mud and leaping across the ever widening streams.
Now I am sitting in the office typing this. It is still raining outside, but the clouds are giving up the last of their guts. The school is full of noisy childrens eating their lunch, and inside the office the young teachers banter over the cries of the kids and the music on my laptop. I am the butt of many jokes, but I can give even better than I take. It is nice to know that one is safe and warm and dry inside, even as the elements batter away at the walls. It is a powerful feeling of comfort, of snugness, of home.
I know its been a long time since I wrote a blog entry. I couldn't muster the energy for a long time. But I will start again. The wonder and the curiosity I used to feel about every aspect of life here has disappeared, to be replaced with the routine of my regular daily life here. I quickly felt at home in Ghana, and now Ghana feels like an old home to me. I know the people of Accra, know their lives and their minds, know the different places, markets neighborhoods. I am now focused most on my work at the Street Academy, and on my music lessons, and on accomplishing as much as I can before I leave at the end of June.
But, as I emerged from the school, the rain over, and breathed in the clean, rain freshened air, I felt that original wonder catching me up all over again. The water had cleaned the dirt and dust from the air, and it seemed to me as if the world was born all over again. The bright tropical colors shone bright again, the obscuring filth washed from the green palms and the blue sky and the rich brown skin of my countrymen. The Independence Arch, which had always been hazy in the distance, stood in clear and sharp relief. I knew then that Ghana was still my home, and it had many more stories left to tell.

2007-01-26T10:59:00.000-08:00

The Street Academy is a battered wood building at the back of the Accra Arts and Culture Center. To reach it, I have to bicycle through the rugged terrain of the Arts center, skirting stones and sewers and ignoring the calls from Rastas in their shops. 'Its free to look, its free to look! Why don't you mind me?' I don't know why they mind me, they see me everyday, they can't imagine that I'm here to shop.
Sometimes I have a cup of tea or koko (porridge) on a rock that overlooks the sea. Then its time for school. At 8:45 they ring an old dinner bell and the kids have to line up. Then, line by line they stream in to the school, to the beginner, intermediate, or advanced classroom.
These classrooms are actually just sections of the room partitioned by big wooden boards. Often, the teacher teaching the next class over is just as audible as I am. Even louder is the sound that one of these partitions makes when a bored kid pushes it over. When I was bored in class I doodled in my notebook, but these kids like something a little more dramatic.
Also, they like to fight. Words escalate to blows escalate to class room engulfing brawls remarkably quickly, and everyday I have to plunge through a thicket of flailing arms and pull the combatants apart. But if their tempers are quick, they subside as soon as the heat of the fight is lost, and if anyone child bears a grudge against another, I haven't noticed it. There is no bullying, for instance, and the girls can more than hold their own against the boys.
These are 'street kids', kids who, if they were not in this tuition-free school, would, likely as not, be out on the street hawking water or snacks to passersby. I'm sure many of them are out there as soon as class ends.
I teach the advanced class, and my pupils are a charming bunch. They vary widely in age, and there are even a couple boys older than I am, although, for lack of proper nutrition, they look younger.
There are a few trouble makers in my class, but I hold nothing against them. One reminds me of my old girlfriend, and the other is a singularly good dancer who just likes to try and steal the attention from me. When the secretary of the school, Mabel, is around, she flourishes her wood switch and administers a whistling blow, but when I am alone I have a harder time controlling them. The first time I tried to teach math, the class united in mockery of me, and one boy erased everything I wrote on the board. But I have been gaining their respect and losing the nerves and hesitancy I had when I first stood before them, and things are going more smoothly now.
I trade turns teaching with Mabel and a social worker there, but as I learn the ropes I'm taking over full responsibility for the class. Its actually pretty terrible that they don't have any real, qualified teachers in the school, and kind of ridiculous that they're floating ideas around for relocating and, get this, a school bus, when they don't even have any real teachers. There is one teacher last year, but he never showed up after the Christmas holidays.
I teach English and Maths in the morning. The classes are necessarily short, due to the short attention spans of these kids. Then I take most of the boys over to the soccer field for a while. I usually take part in the games, and my barefeet and ankles are white with dust before the match is up. I need to remember to bring my sneakers!
Or sometimes I sit in the shade of one of my Rasta friend's booths. We sit on a table, invisible behind the colorful pants he sells, and he teaches me phrases in Ga, the traditional language of the people of Accra. I just got a book on the language, and I'm hoping he will give me more formal lessons.
At twelve its time to for lunch, and I am given a plate of seasoned rice just like all the rest of the kids. I wash my hands and 'chop' with my fingers. I just love a country where its ok to eat with your fingers, screw silverware.
Then its time for reading. I write something on the board and the kids chant it out in unison as I tap each word with a pencil. Repeat, repeat, repeat, I hope they're learning something. More sucessful is when everybody has a copy of the book, 'literary treasures' (what garbage!), and we all sit outside and read it together. Thats fun for the kids and me, although I still have to get up and admister smacks and taps to the kids skipping to the wrong pages or punching their friends.
Then school is over. I am always tired by the end of classes, but I can go relax and unwind with my drumming lesson with Sammy. Drumming is very therapeutic!
More on the Street Academy soon.

2007-01-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

I've just started drumming lessons with a new teacher. I spent a lot of time with Francis, the drumming instructor I've mentioned before who lives in Menkassim. He's an accomplished drummer, a cool guy, and he has shown me a lot of interesting things from Ghanaian culture, but he is just not a very good teacher. I actually just rented him a room for two years, at an expense of $60 to my mother. But I'm sure if you knew him, mom, you'd be glad I donated him your money. I'm going out to see his new digs on Friday, I will write how they are.
My new drumming teacher is named Sam. He's a big guy with small dreadlocks that he keeps buried under a knit hat. I ask him if it makes him hot to always be wearing that hat, but he won't listen to my words of wisdom. When we have a lesson, the sweat really pours off him. He drums hard!
He also drums amazingly. He's twenty two or twenty four now, and was part of a group that played in Amsterdam and a couple other european cities in 2001 and 2003, but thats all over now that the lead drummer in the group is dead. So he makes his money giving lessons to white people, and seems to be highly dependent upon a mysterious American known only as Ryan. Ryan's back in the states, now, but he still manages to wiggle his way in to a lot of conversations.
Lessons with Sam are good. There is a narrow alley behind a row of drum and curio shops, where all the Rastas hang out when they're not working in the shop. Well, we take up position behind Royalhouse shop number 59, me sitting on an upturned drum and him on a plastic carton of cooking oil, and bang out rhythms. We make a lot of noise, and people from the street are always coming to peer at us through the holes in the wall in to our alleyway. I'm getting good!

2007-01-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

There was a funeral in Menkassim this evening. We walked through the dark and twisting alleys of the town till we reached the football pitch. The chairs had been arranged to form a giant rectangle, as is customary in funerals and festivals. Somewhere in the middle of the wall of people was a man yelling in to a microphone, but he was barely audible in the general din. People talked, kids chanted and danced, groups of drummers serenaded those near them. We wandered around outside the box of people, which would periodically fill with dancing people, and then just as quickly empty, when the music went off and the man came back to his microphone.
We wandered around outside this gathering, talking to different kids. I did some lady chasing, too; I literally chased some teenage girls around the pitch as they ran screaming like little girls. I traded freestyle raps with a boy, he went first, then cut me off two lines in to my rap because I had cursed. He was obviously deeply offended, and it took much parley and apologies before I had consoled him.
The body was in a big well lit tent on one side of the field. It was surrounded by people, but they formed two corridors so one could walk inside past the body. As I walked inside, two wailing women ran outside past me. There was a casket inside, but the body wasn't in it. Instead, the ex-coach had been stood stiffly against a leaning board. He wore a suit and white gloves, and a soccer ball had been placed in his left hand.
Later, I asked Francis if it was customary for the bodies to be stood up like this. He answered that it depended on the job of the deceased. A football coach or a dancer would be standing. But a secretary, for instance, would sit.
The festival was to be held at the beach village of Asafa. We hired bicycles, put our supplies in two big bags, and took the dirt road that led to the ocean. A river crossed our path. We paid twenty cents to be poled across. The town was soon reached, and I immediately hopped in the ocean, despite the fact that the beach was littered with fresh turds. Later, a drunk elder upbraided me for swimming with out asking permission, and, later still, I took a glass of whisky with the chief himself. He was amiable enough, but told me that the next day he would not be present at the festivities because his wife had died earlier that year.
The festival continued apace, perhaps all the wilder for his absence. We were relaxing in our bamboo pole tent on the beach when we heard drumming and singing passing behind us. We found the parade continuing noisily through the town, marching and shouting to the beat of two boys playing cowbells. Out in front was a man in a traditional grass skirt, swinging a big flag around on a staff. And many of the men had guns which they fired in to the periodically.
We made our way through the village till we reached the center of town. The whole populace was out in force, and the scent of palm wine was heavy in the air. People were going crazy, everybody was dancing and shouting. Much of the dancing was overtly sexual, and, more odd, many of the men were dressed as women, wigs and dresses and even makeup. The parade continued, slowly and unevenly, here it would halt around a dancing pair, there a group of boys would go rush by in a frenzy. A group of drunk youth picked me up on their shoulders and charged towards an opening in the bush at the end of the street. They were shouted down before we reached there, though. Apparently, the rascals had been taking me to a place of bad spirits and evil magic.
The parade continued up and down the main road, gathering energy as it went along. There was a group feeling of utter mindlessness, we danced and chanted to the cowbell as we beat the road to dust until it was gathered like two inches of powdery snow around our feet. I was constantly in physical contact with someone, holding someone's hand or someones hips or feeling some anonymous fingers latch on to me. And the whole time we shouted rhthymic chants to the time of the ever clanging cowbell, I even introduced one that was a hit with the group around me, and we yelled in unison:'Obroni bye bye, obroni bye bye'. Well, the dirt was in our throats but the fire was in our hearts, and we went on and on.
The parade finally broke up and we went to rest on the grass of the football pitch. There many boys and girls snuggling up to each other in the dark, it reminded me of a park in New York. Then we paid 50 cents to enter the official festival dance party. Many kids were gathered around outside trying to get a peep of what was going on inside: a slab of concrete in the middle of dirt lot, and boys in baggy clothing dancing in front of a big wall of speakers. It wasn't Studio 59, but, man, these kids can really bust a move! I sat and watched for a while, and then it was back to our home on the beach. I took off all my clothes and threw myself in the ocean. The water muffled my ears and held my body, and my eyes wandered among the stars.
The next morning we woke to the sound of boys chattering outside our tent, waiting for us, well, for me, to get up. They watched as we packed our bags, took our leave of the queen mother, and mounted our bicyles for home. Thank you, people of Asafa!

2007-01-14T13:47:00.000-08:00

Here's something I wrote a week ago.

Happy New Year all! Its a little late, I know, but people here are still celebrating. Or at least, the fireworks haven't all been used up, I hear them cracking through the window. Its no surprise, every street vendor in Accra started selling fireworks, in addition to what they usually sell, starting a few days before Christmas. I myself shot off a couple.
The first time was at the La Palm hotel, a super shwanky beach resort on the outskirts of town. Some boys I know from soccer were visiting as a part of a New York City all stars team. They played a few teams here, and did surprisingly well. They had one full eighty minute game against a team here, and of course they lost, because in this heat running for five minutes is hard work, let alone eighty. But then they played in a tournament with shorter games and beat everybody. Way to go, champs!
Well, that night I came over to their hotel with my Ghanaian friend. All the team coaches looked at me suspiciously, but we stayed up till they were all asleep and then we shot these fabulous fireworks off that would go way up with only the little spluttering fire at the tail to mark where they were, and then bang! party time. We spent the night goofing around in the hotel room, and I availed myself of their hot water and took an absolutely splendid feeling bath. It was a trip seeing kids from New York, they were all amazed that I was staying here by myself, and of course they could not hide the disdain in their voice when they asked 'why? why live in a country that doesn't have cable tv and big macs and closed sewers?' Well, its because I don't like cable tv and big macs and closed sewers! so there.
The next day was new years eve, so we headed to Osu, the westernized bit of Accra where one can buy pizza and expensive cocktails. But this night, the big main street was closed to traffic and was overrun with young people. They divided in to dancing clumps around where different djs had set up their speakers. Everybody was acting wild, and fireworks were being set up all over the place. We got these little ones that looked like soda cans, but when you lit the fuse they spun around throwing sparks on the ground, and then somehow improbably went airborne and exploded in brilliant pinks and purples. Well, the first two went up alright, but the next one went like a snake for the legs of some unsuspecting onlookers. Nobody was harmed.
We danced the night away, and then it was New Years Day. We traveled the to the town of Koforidua. I have written about the place where we stayed there in a previous blog entry, but let it suffice to say that the brothers who offered us accomodation live in a cloud of weed smoke. These guys, they're not done smoking their joint before they're rolling the next one. We visited the Boti falls, disappointingly free of water, due to the dry season, and then had a pleasant walk in the woods to visit the 'umbrella rock', a cool rock formation on top of a nice green hill in a land rolling with them. The girls continued on the next day to the north of Ghana, and I returned home to Accra.
What is home for me? In the last couple of weeks I have hopped from Mrs. Sackey's house to my drumming instructor's room in Mankessim to the Finnish girls apartment to here, the place where I am sitting now typing this entry on my laptop. 'Lets Stay Together' is playing on the laptop, 'oo baby, lleeeetttss, lets stay together, loving you whetheer, times are good or bad, happy or sad', and my roommate Amartey is humming along. He is a washed up Afro beat musician. He's done some really cool stuff, played in a psychedelic rock band in Ghana in the sixties, lived in America for many years playing with different bands he put together, but he ran in to money troubles and came back here a few years ago. Now he has two rooms in his family's place here in Accra, and has kindly offered me the use of a foam mat on which to lay my head. I intend to lay my head everynight for some months.
I met Amartey at Kokrobite, the happening beach resort that all-in-the-know Accra people frequent. He laughed at me a little while I was trying to learn coshka, a little instrument I must have mentioned before. It consists of two little balls with seeds inside, like shakers. But the balls are attached by a string, so not only do you make music shaking them, but also by knocking them together. You can put together some surprising combinations on this toy, and I am becoming quite proficient, as I carry them with me everywhere.
So, anyway, I went swimming and didn't see Amartey again, although, I swear, I had a funny feeling that Amartey could play a big role in my future. I bumped in to him again in Accra, and as we were near his house he invited me over. We talked for a while, I gave him my number, a month and a half later he called me and invited me up again. Well, his house is very near the Finnish girls house, so i came over, and I was actually thinking of asking him to let me live with him when he point blank asked me to. 'sure!'
Well, his apartment is cool because its full of musical instruments. He is good at all of them, can blow a sweet tune on the African flute and bang a hip shaking rhythm on his drum and knock some nice tones on his xylophone. And he has this weird African violin that he can just wail on! Well, I can't play any of them, but he lets me fool around on them, although he is too lazy to give me lessons.
His life ambition now is to get some gigs and get a nice white woman to marry, although both of these prospects seem suitably bleek at this point. He's an awesome musician and still in great shape, but hes getting on in years and I can only wish him the best. I'm going to help him the best I can, I tried to introduce to a German woman I'm friendly with, plus I think just the fact that I'm around motivates him to work harder. And he motivates me too, hes always tromping around the house by 7 am so I'm up to. And theres no tv or internet, so instead I'm washing my clothes and doing excercises and other productive things.
I bought Amartey a DVD with all the spiderman and X-men movies on it and hes just been going wild, watch and re-watching them all on my laptop.
And thats about the sum of it.

2007-01-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

Writing from Menkassim.

Today Francis, my drum instructor, and I escorted Francis's aunt while she bought things at the Menkassim market. This means sitting on overturned wooden crates staring in to bowls full of weird living things while she argued over prices. The markets here are really something, there's not much concern for hygiene, and the women who work them all sell the same things, the same fabrics, the same tomatoes, the same dry and fly infested fishes. And theyre huge! I got lost and inadvertently bicyled through one in Accra, I'd never heard of it before and it took me at least twenty minutes to make it through. Thats bigger than Walmart, and the prices are better. Where else can you buy a plastic bag full of struggling crabs for twenty cents?
Then we went back to his Aunties place and watched music videos for a while, while Anita made yams and vegetarian stew for me. Anita is 25, francis's cousin, she just lives in the house, and she has placed me in the same tricky situation that Effua, Francis's senior sister has before her. She's cooked for me, shes flirted with me and joked about us getting married (although I think she already is, to a flimsy sort of fellow), and now I feel like perhaps I owe her something. We're friends, yes, but I just met you yesterday. What do you want from me? Effua lets me feel the pressure, she often asks me for money. And earlier this evening, when I was distributing small toys to the kids around francis's house, she was begging and fighting for them harder than anybody. I said : 'for kids, for kids' but even francis's mom looked me in the eye extended an open palm to me, waiting for it be filled. Do I really owe you something? Your family has been kind to me, Francis, they have anticipated my every want and also things I didn't want, but they made me feel uncomfortable when they mobbed me like that.
Another event this evening. I had a long debate with a christian missionary from w. virginia and her ghanaian friend, although the woman insisted it was not a 'debate'. Well, I enjoy this kind of thing, and so obviously did the woman, who positively twitched with anger as she told me about her inner peace. It ended with the two of them chanting over me, the man rambling on, the woman working herself up in to a state, 'please jesus, please jesus, please jesus, save him, please please please jesus jesus.' well, im not saved, so there!

2007-01-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

Some vignettes:

I had to go to the internet cafe to copy some cds, but before I went up I decided that maybe I would have a snack. I went to the store and bought a little pre-wrapped ice cream cone, like the King Cones they sell in New York. I went outside and sat on the stoop to eat. It was around noon time, and the day was clear and bright. I sat and gnawed on my too-frozen ice cream, and thought nothing in particular, when I saw my bike roll by. What's more, there was a man on it, and he wasn't me. Now, I had stuck a football sticker on the front of my basket, and it was not there anymore. Because of this little detail, I almost didn't lazily get up and call 'brah, brah' (come, come) to the man on the bike. But, considering that my bike had been missing since yesterday, when I had left it unlocked outside an internet cafe with only a security man's word for protection, I figured I had nothing to lose.

The man immediately returned to where I was waiting for him. Not as sure a sign of guilt as pedaling off furiously in the other direction, true, but when he brought the bike to me there could be no doubt that said aluminum single speed be-basketed Shiki bicycle, with 27" wheels and orange wire to hold the fender where it was rattling, there could be no doubt that this was my baby.

'This is my bicycle.'

'This is your bicycle?'

'Yes, this is my bicycle. You are riding my bicycle.'

'Hmmpphh. Lets go see the owner.'

'I'm the owner.'

'No, someone gave it to me. Lets go seem him.'

'Yeah, well, first you stop riding my bicycle.'

'Fine. Here. You ride it. But come with me to see the owner.'

I mounted my machine and did a joyful victory lap around this would be joy-rider, and then I parked the bike in the near-by yard of my muscular friend Edmond. The man, a sort of dumpy short fellow, at least thirty, promised he would return with the owner. Well, I hung out in Edmond's room, and we listened to Bob Marley and waited for the real 'owner' to come. So up shows the guy again with a skinny kid of twenty. Edmond tells him in the local language all the identifying marks on the bicycle that make it mine mine mine, and then the kid promises to find the 'real' 'owner', the guy who had given it to him. These African chains of command!

Well, Im sitting at home now, waiting for the phone call from Edmond telling me that the , the phone call will never come. So, I'm happy to have my bike back, especially because its a worn out piece of junk that makes my ass ache and I am going to trade it to a Rasta man for a nice drum.

It was midday and I was walking on a section of sidewalk. Now, real side walk is rare here, generally there's just the middle of the road where the cars go and the side of the road where you and the sewer ditch goes, so it was nice to walk on a real piece of sidewalk, even if it was no longer than twenty feet. But, the change of terrain must have been too sudden for my footwear, because the strap on my flipflop suddenly broke. What happened exactly was that of the soft plastic piece that reaches down between your big toe and your second biggest toe broke and came lose. Well, I didn't fall, and I hadn't payed more then sixty cents for these flip flops, so I wasn't too broke up about it.

But the man walking immediately behind me instantly sprung in to action. First, he informed me that there was a place just up the road where I could buy a new pair. Then, his mind made a further logical leap.

'Give me your slipper.' He then opened a little bag he was carrying, pulled out a section of wire and cut it and stripped it to its metal core. Then he took a out a metal gouge and put a hole in the plastic strap of my flip flop. He pulled the strap through the hole in the flip flop and put the wire through the hole. Voila! Good as new.

The whole process took no longer than a minute. At the end, we shook hands, exchanged greetings, and made vague plans to meet in the future that we both knew we would not honor. Then he went off his merry way and I went mine.

2007-01-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

I don't feel like writing anything. hey!

2006-12-26T06:01:00.000-08:00

Today I visited the house of Mrs. Sackey, my host mother here for three months. I hadn't intended to call, but I was in the neighborhood, so my friend Orlando and I decided to swing by. We walked down from my newspaper office, past the Karldorf bar and along the dirt paths that serve as sidewalks. When their wasn't enough room for two to walk abreast, one of us would step over the sewer ditch that divides the path from the road and walk on the pavement until a car came. We strolled under the green leafy trees, thick with branches that would be infested with bats when dusk came. The walls of villas lined the side of the road, and we peeked over here and there to see the huge, but not exactly wealthy looking, houses inside.
From the main road we passed left on to the street that led to Mrs. Sackey's. The concrete of the road crumbled to rocks and then dust beneath our feet. The street bent right under the white washed walls of a villa, and stretched out straight before us. It is a quiet street, lined with palm trees and the almost-grand houses of the rich. And beneath their windows are the wooden stands that serve as shops in the day and houses at night. Rich and poor share the same space, and the same attitudes, in Ghana.
Behind a low wall on the left there is a chop bar that serves local food. It is always swarming with women and their young kids, and everything is such a mess that I can hardly imagine they know which kid is whose. But one of kids is distinct from the others. I stepped inside the wall and spotted him in the corner. He was standing looking in to space. I waved to all the women, who instantly recognized me and the scene that was going to follow. One of the woman yelled to the child, who looked up, saw me, and began screaming in terror. As he ran away yelling, the tears gushed from his eyes like they were waiting there, just for this moment. All of the women laughed uproariously, of course, and I, too, admit to seeing the humor in scaring the wits out of a poor kid who once told his mother that I was an 'agent of satan'. Well, this demon has visited that child six times now, and there has never been any abatement in the pure unadultered terror I instill. I wish I had this power over some other people!
Well, next we passed the little old lady who is always sitting on an upturned crate by the side of the road. We had to be careful, she is definitely suffering from some kind of dementia, and always wants to talk for an endlessly. The next gates on our left were the entrance to Dromie Villa, the Sackey residence. I peeked over the top; Mr. Boeti, the security man was there. I woke him from his doze, and he opened the gates a crack to talk to me. He thanked me profusely for the gifts I had given him when I had left the house, and called upon God to bless me so many times that if God was watching he might have seen me blushing.
Then there was a voice from inside the house.
Mr. Boeti: (whispered) Quick, go, before she sees you. (yelled in response) gobbledeegook Orlando blablablarg.
Orlando: (playing his part admirably well) Hi Mami, how are you?
Me: I run around the corner and wait while Mrs. Sackey comes out and talks to Orlando for a while. What were they talking about? Me, of course. She has told Orlando that she was very angry because I had yelled at her on the phone that day. She had been in a rush, and it had been very rude of me to ask for the ten seconds of her time that it took for me ask if I had left any keys in the house and her to respond in the negative. She hadn't stopped there, however, but had gone on to explain how badly she had been treated by whites when she had visited New York, or, more specifically, JFK airport. She also had passed something to Orlando that we was supposed to turn over to me: a little neatly wrapped parcel containing exactly everything I had left in my room: 600 cedis, or six cents. I could accuse her of nothing.
If running and hiding from her seems stupid to you, its seems stupid to me, too. That said, I have always taken a little illicit thrill in these of cat and mouse that we play. I go to the kichen at night and make some toast; she finds out and hides the toaster, 'to save electricity'. I go to the kitchen at night and eat a banana; she locks the bananas in the dining room (thank god there's no lock on the door to the kitchen like there is on every other fucking door, cabinet, drawer in this fucking house). I go to the kitchen at night and make a sandwich, quietly... no response, no countermeasures. Again, I go to the kitchen at night and make a sandwich, quietly... I do it again and again and am not stopped! Victory? well, perhaps, but I wish that there were more edible things in her fridge than cheap jelly. White bread and and jelly can come together to make a sandwich, but not a good one. Still, I do it again and again, and never leave any evidence of infraction other than a few missing slices of bread. Does she count the slices, once in the evening and again in the morning? Does she measure the height of the jelly? I wouldn't put it past her.
I'm not sure how Mrs. Sackey has spent her younger years, but if there was any meaning to her life, it has long since departed. As far as I can tell, her life consists of cleaning the house, yelling at the numerous underlings she keeps to clean the house for her, locking things at night, and harassing her grandchildren. How could their parents be so unwitting as to leave them in the grips of this robustly evil old lady? The girl, Gifa, she punishes relentlessly for such crimes as fidgeting and talking. 'Why do you always worry me?'
The boy, Ethan, is just a toddler, and Mrs. Sackey actually professes affection for him. But she expresses this affection by rushing after him and scooping him up everytime he gets to far away. For Ethan's benefit, the screen doors for the kitchen and the front entrance have both been replaced by models with heavier springs. Also he has been supplied with the most annoying invention known to man, little shoes that squeak when he walks. If I had to wear squeaking shoes, I would certainly go crazy, but maybe Ethan wants to stay sane until he's old enough to take his revenge on his torturess.
Well, Mrs. Sackey may hate her grandchildren, but I think they are wonderfully cute. As she was trying to make Gifa stand still, I would dance with her and chase her around the house. I think my bad influence on her kids biased her against me even more than my messy room or my late night ventures in to the kitchen. I could tell she didn't like me because of the coldness and condescending attitude of servility she always put on around me. But it was very rare that she would actually admonish me to my face for percieved faults, although she did sometimes complain about me in front of my face to someone else. I wasn't perfect, I could have kept my room tidier and taken more care towards keeping her everyday scrubbed tile floors totally white, but if communication is the key to a good relationship, she might as well have been speaking in Twi.
Thats why it came as a surprise when, one morning, coming home, I found the staff of Projects Abroad sitting on the patio talking with Mrs. Sackey about me. I should have expected something; the night before Katie and Fergal had shaved my head in to a mohawk (which I still have, by the way, although the hair on the sides of my head have grown out long enough to prevent anybody from thinking I look like a 'mafia' anymore). But I had seen Mrs. Sackey that morning, and she hadn't said anything to me, although I had of course tried to keep my distance from her.
I went out for an hour, came back at ten or a eleven, and, voila, Mrs. Sackey had called Projects Abroad and told them she 'couldn't live with me anymore.' So I sat down with everyone else, and Mrs. Sackey still went on about how awful I was with out ever once looking me in the eye. Highest on my list of offences was me 'being naked around the house.' collective GASP! When were you naked in the house Matthew? I, too, was nervous. What could she be talking about? Then I remembered that one night when I and some volunteer friends and some of her grandkids and their nannies were all goofing around out front of the house, and Mrs. Sackey was skulking somewhere inside, I had mooned Fergal. Funny at the time, yes, but one of the nannies had told Mrs. Sackey, and, between my bald ass and the bald sides of my head, Mrs. Sackey could not concieve of a more despicable person than myself.
Well, she was not serious about her threat to throw me out of the house, and the only result of that meeting was a sort of tacit agreement between Sackey and I that we would never speak again. Sometimes, when we were forced to share the space of the same room at the same time, she chuckled in her ugly way, 'heh heh'. She continued to speak to other people about me, even taking my friend Orlando as a confidante. He would communicate what she said to me, and I was surprised that she invented outright lies about me. I forget most of them, but i do know that she pretended to Orlando that my messiness was the reason that my room mate Fergal had left the house (he had moved out of Accra to work in an orphange) and that also she also said that she had had a long talk with my mother during which they traded stories about how bad I was.
In fact, she was always telling little lies like this, right until the last day, when we wanted to take a picture with her. 'Oh no, heh heh, I won't take pictures with you people, heh heh. You people always tell me that you will send them to me and then you never do.' Well, first of all, who said this picture was for your benefit, you old hag? But whats worse is that I knew this was not the real reason she didn't want to take a picture with me. The reason was simple: she didn't like me, and if she could hurt me by refusing to pose for a picture with me, she would do it. Well, I've lived with you for the last three months, but if you want to forget me and you want me to forget you, fine.
I have written all this, though, just so I will not forget you, Mrs. Sackey. Not that you are such a memorable character, but you are enough example of how not to live that you are worth writing about. I don't even feel any real sort of grudge or anger towards you, despite the obvious vitriol of my writing. Mostly this little rant was inspired by what I'm reading now, Philip Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint'. And I should add here that you can be hospitable enough when you choose to be, and you worked diligently enough preparing me the same four dishes for three months of dinners, although perhaps your boiled yam was bit dry. But if its true what you told me, 'you white people are look down on us blacks, you always expect us to do something for me' (I asked you to put on some water to boil for tea! And I would have done it myself if only you let me!), then perhaps you should let the whites find their own way in Ghana from now on and not waste their time like you wasted mine.

2006-12-18T03:41:00.000-08:00

Heres a post I wrote a week ago on my laptop.

Today is Tuesday, December 12th, the day my volunteer project with Projects Abroad is officially up, the day marked on my flight itinerary for me to leave. But I'm still here! and I'm gonna stay here! I talked to KLM, and they said 'its ok that you dont want to leave December 12th, you just come back here and tell us when you figure out exactly when you would like to go.' No charge, no rules to follow, Dutch airlines are very nice to students.
Right now I am typing on my laptop in the bed of my 'peculiar friend' Katri-leena. She broke up with me a few weeks ago, but chooses to torture me by lying in bed with me all day. Shes talking about Finland and her friends and her plans for the future, and thats nice, but I have a hard time concentrating when you're absent-mindedly running your hands around my stomach and my back. Ahh! It is not fine, as people say here. Still, I appreciate her and her roomate Mari very much. Collectively, they are known as 'Finland' to me and my Projects Abroad volunteer friends. If I'm going to hang out with them, I'm going to hang out with 'Finland', if I'm going to sleep at their house, I'm going to sleep at 'Finland'.
Their room is in the bottom floor of a story building. They have one room, some boys from Benin here learning English have another, and some men from Nigeria live in the last one. The kitchen and bathroom are shared, as is the electric hot plate where we make our porridge in the morning. 'Finland' is something of a meeting house for neighborhood friends, they're always having visitors over. The two most common guests are Edmond and Richard. Edmond is a very handsome, very muscular young man who works for his older brother at a local fried rice joint called Papa Nesto's. They are very cheap and always go out of there way to make dishes palatable for vegetarians, that is, Katti and Mari and I. Edmond's father was a very famous musician in Ghana, a sort of big band television performer like Ricky Ricardo. I'm sure I could make a more apt comparison to someone else, but damn!, Im only 18. Anyway, Edmond is very poor now, works like a dog, shares a bed with his senior brother, and is always in good spirits. He is head over heels in love with Mari, who likes him back but unfortunately cannot return his advances because she has a boyfriend back in Finland. But Edmond never seems to let this get him down, and is often over at the girls house entertaining them with his knowledge of funny African customs and his musical and dramatic talents.
Richard is as skinny as Edmond is built, and likes music and acting even more. He is a born entertainer, always beginning a freestyle rap in his native tongue Twi or telling weird jokes or imitating people he has met. By day he works at a curtain shop, but business is slow, and he dreams of becoming a hip-life rapper. He has a gig at a festival soon, which he got by submitting his friends album. So now he has to go there and pretend to be his friend! It will be hard, because his friends voice is a very deep baritone. But I bet he can pull it off, or I at least hope he can. As far as I can tell, he shares a skinny bed with two other men.
The people here will never cease to amaze me in how resilient they are in their poverty, and how little they let it affect their happiness. Of course, they hope for more, but they know the importance of being happy now. And I am going to have to learn from them. I never had to share a bed in my life in America. But, for the next three months, or however long I stay here, I will be dependent on the kindness and sharing spirit of others. I will be sleeping with my drumming instructor in Menkassim, I will be sleeping with Katti and Mari in Finland (pure deliscious torture, lying between two undressed girls), I will be sleeping with my friends Orlando and Siebe at their respective houses, and I will probably be reliant on the kindness of others. I am excited and nervous at the prospect of leading such a itinerant existence. I will be living out of my bag, and the future is uncertain except that I know it will never stop coming on and on and has to taken used. And, if things get too hard, I will just get on a plane back home. Not exactly Down and Out in Paris and London, but still uncertain enough to keep me on my toes.
Well, the future beckons! I have to catch a tro-tro to Menkassim. I'll write from there.

2006-12-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Hey, y'all, I'm in Ghana and roughing it! That is, I'm done with my volunteering organization, and am going it alone. I'm entering phase two of Operation Ghana. My plane ticket was scheduled for today, but I canceled it and am staying on here until I get sick of it or just get miserably sick. Hopefully, the first will happen before the second.
I'm back in the town of Menkassim, which I briefly mentioned in a previous post. I'm here to take drumming lessons with Francis, but when I arrived here today, he was nowhere to be found. I don't blame him, I told him I would be coming in the morning and didn't actually arrive until 6 p.m. Still, though, I was a little nervous. Of his whole family and everybody else who stays at the compound where I was to stay as well, he is the only one who seems to speak any English. My fears were ill founded, however. One young girl here seems to have taken a bit of a fancy for me, and enjoys mothering and caring for me, the helpless obroni. Last time I was here, she scrupulously washed and cleaned my sores. Today, as soon as I entered the compound, she commanded me to sit in a chair, brought me a foot stool and some porridge, and brushed my hair. Very nice!
The rest of the family was excited to see me, and everybody gathered in the courtyard of the little compound and made a fuss over me. What they were saying, I don't know, but they all remembered me as the obroni with the funny hair and who loves dancing. One of the boys put the stereo on his room, and I entertained the family by dancing with all the small children. Dancing with the kids here is great, they do a move and then you imitate it, or you do a move and then they do it. I'm not kidding, small kids here have made me the accomplished dancer I am today.
When I was sweaty, my little mommy found a bucket for me and some soap and a washcloth. I went to the compound of the queen mother of this part of town, the grandmother of my francis, my drumming instructor, and got my suds and bucket shower on. Now I am clean, happy, and slightly hungry. Francis has just arrived at the internet cafe, and we will probably go for killy willy, small sliced spicy fried plantain. My mom here has put up a mosquito net on the clothes lines, and I'll be sleeping outside with the rest of the family, who forego the net. Ok, nighty night!

2006-12-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't written anything for a while, sorry for that. I was staying in Menkassim for a while, and plan on going back there soon to live there for a while longer, but last weekend I came back to Accra for a visit. Everything was nice and good until my girlfriend prepared a dish from leaves and vegetables called kotomuri. Ugh! I swear, it makes me sick to my stomach now even to think about it. But, at the time, it looked very deliscious, and tasted good, too. I kept sneaking more when nobody was watching.
So, the food was eaten. Now, another circumstance that may have contributed to what followed: relations between Katrileena had been a bit icy, and after we had finished eating and found ourselves alone together, she told me perhaps the four most ominous words known to man: 'we need to talk.' I took that as my cue to run away. I made my home through rush hour in twilight Accra, walking slowly in a bit of a dazed state, not really thinking much but sort of relishing the self pity I felt.
When I got home, I went to my room and lay down. Soon, I began feeling feverish. I put on jeans and a long sleeve shirt, and even requested an extra sheet from Mrs. Sackey, who wondered aloud why I would want one when it was so hot out. No reply. Well, I took some Tylenol, turned on some music, and lay in my bed for a few hours, and the fever passed. All's well, right? wrongo.
Soon, I became aware of having to use the bathroom. I went and passed a big 'loose stool', if you know what that is. But when I went back to bed, as soon as I lay down I immediately needed to return to the bathroom. By this time, I was aware of feeling shitty.
I have never passed a longer night. I would doze for a while, then get up and have to use the bathroom. But each time I went, I was aware that more was on its way, but I never could make it come before I went and lay down again. Then I would instantly have to stand up and return to my throne. Sometimes this would happen four or five times before I could lie down with any security.
Morning finally arrived, and I told Mrs. Sackey of my condition. She called the volunteer organization, and someone arrived with some anti-diarrheal salts and a taxi to the hospital. I did not feel like going to the hospital, though. The upset induced even by walking to my door and talking to Kwame for a minute made me rush back to the toilet and actually vomit. It was actually a bit of a dilemna, whether the urge to vomit or to shit was stronger, but I chose the former, and everything ended happily in the toilet bowl.
This shuffling between bed and toilet lasted a couple days, during which no food passed my lips but one piece of bread and a nibble of spaghetti. None the less, my body found things to pump out. Looking in the mirror at the end of the ordeal, it was actually disgustingly obvious where my body had found these things: I was visibly emaciated. Rest assured, Im back to my strong and beautiful self now, only a few days later, but it was scary then to see how prominently all my ribs protruded.
I finally condescended to go to the hospital. They diagnosed a stomach virus, no malaria or anything, and gave me some pills, and I bought a collection of Sean Connery films on DVD ($5!) as a reward for my suffering. I am convinced that what was more important than actual medical attention was just the fact that I forced myself out of the house and away from the tempting bathroom. Once I left in the morning for the hospital, I, who had previously been shitting every hour, just did not have to go that bad. Certainly, I was miserable when I was sick. But, in a sick way, I enjoyed this misery, relished being weak and helpless and the accompanying freedom from any responsibility. I'm reading Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain right now, and he has a lot to say on the subject as well, dealing with Tuberculosis patients whose illness is often nothing better then conjectural. Well, a little self pity never hurt anybody, and here I am, working hard on my blog again.
Anyway, the day after I went to the Htal, I stopped by my girlfriends place, and she clarified things. "I just want some space right now." Well, so we're through. Later that night, she stepped on a buried fire pit at a beach party and suffered disgustingly horrible burns on her foot. She's the one who believes in Karma, not me! Anyway, she had a really unpleasant time at the hospital, and now shes hobbled, hopping around on one foot, although theres usually an african guy around more than willing to demonstrate his strength by carrying her. Thats certainly a service I could never offer her for more than about twenty feet!
Last night we went out for drinks, we talked and laughed nicely, and while we were waiting outside her house for her friends she leaned on me (being a cripple) in a suggestive manner, if one can lean in a suggestive manner. That is, there was a lot of unnecessary back stroking and even a bit of butt handling. Basically, I got the impression that this cats in the bag, and I need only reach out and grab and she'll be mine again. Fine, I will do it, but girls are really very bizarre!
Okay, I've written enough, matt out!

2006-11-23T12:41:00.000-08:00

I am living in the town of Menkassim for two weeks, taking drumming and dancing instruction with a man here. Accra was making me sick. The capital city is just filthy, especially this time of year when the rain stops and the wind comes and throws all the dust and soot around. The sores on my body weren't healing, my lungs were hurting, and I was generally acting like a layabout. My bed was more inviting than any other part of the city. Thats not to mean you should worry when you read this, if you're in a relationship with me that would cause you to worry about my health when you read this. You got my email, and I assure you that Menkassim is doing wonders for my health.
Menkassim is very poor. I live in a room in a courtyard shared by a couple families, and my window looks out on the dirt lane. Chickens and goats run by, and children peer in to my window more and more frequently, and then run away laughing when I look at them. You would not believe how many children there are here. They play together out in the street all day, and when they see me they all begin yelling 'obroni, obroni' in unison. Today I visited a school during recess, and was greeted by a hundred cries of 'obroni'. I picked up a stick and ran at them, and I felt like moses parting the red sea, or a sheep dog chasing its flock. It was incredibly fun, making dashes at this ocean of children.
Its also sad, I suppose, that there are so many of them. People here may have heard of birth control, but when I see girls with their tell-tale short haircuts showing they are still in school suckling their babies, I know that nobody uses it. Ok out of time bye.

2006-11-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

Having a mohawk in Ghana isn't so bad. For one, my mohawk isn't a particularly abrasive one, it isn't tall and spiky and it isn't brightly colored, although the landlady for the finnish girls
suggested that I color it red. Also, I have taken to wearing a hat during the day in public places.
This is probably a good idea anyway, because otherwise the sun would burn my pale scalp bright red.
Without the hat, though, I attract more stares and jeers then usual. You can't imagine how many times people call to me everyday, all though I can now completely block it out of my mind ( the downside: just before coming here, someone was hissing to me, in that weird way that Ghanaians try to get your attention, and I didn't hear. My friend did, though, and it turns out it was the chief of the village I visited before! very rude of me). Having funny hair only makes this problem worse, although most people aren't hostile, just amused and confused. Actually, most people are under the impression that having hair like this makes me a member of the Italian Mafia. That, or they call out, Mr. T! Mr. T!
In this culture, it is considered unusual and suspect for men to wear their hair any other way than short. I am openly flaunting their cultural norms, and I may be wrong to do so. Ghana is fast becoming a part of the world, but there is certainly a very conservative element still present. This is good, the traditional culture might otherwise be lost in the flood of globalization.
Yet, I will not respect their culture merely because 'culture' the word has a sacred aura to it. There are many things about accepted life here that I objectively know are wrong, i.e. the taboo about having AIDS, corporal punishment at school, etc. I wear my hair in a mohawk not for any particular reason, not to make a rebellious statement, but just because I can; and I feel that I have made some people see this.
Last weekend we had a surprise beach party for Johanna and Heini, two Finnish girls who were leaving for home. It was great. We got there early, piled some rocks up, and built a big fire on top out of reach of the high tide. Then the girls came down the stairs in the cliff to the beach, blindfolded, and we all yelled at them and poured more kerosene on the fire. A whole bunch of guys with drums were there, and as they beat away madly we danced around the roaring fire. Sander from Holland roasted a leg of lamb, we all stripped to our underwear and went swimming and dancing in the ocean, beautiful.
During the festivities, a black man approached me. He looked vaguely familiar.
'Hey, you remember me? I work at the Arts Centre.'
'umm...'
'Look at my hair. I cut it to be like yours.'
Then he bowed his head, and sure enough, the sides of his afro were gone, and all that remained was a tight line of hair down the middle of his head. We both laughed hysterically, and nuzzled our mohawks together.

2006-11-09T08:53:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

my phone book.
1111a: I dont know
555: Kay from the swimming pool
Amartey: 50 year old musician, has played his world beat at the smithosonian in America, I go to his apartment and we talk and play the bongos
Bicycle Ben: Owner of this cool tricycle that has the two wheels in the front, can do impressive tricks on it
Ceebs: Siebe from Holland, fellow volunteer at the Chronicle newspaper but he quit after two weeks
Chopper: Cofounder (with me) of Lovers As Friends Association, so named chopper because he had to leave Nigeria for chopping his friends leg off, first meeting of LAFA is tonight! be there or be square, Teddy's Pub, 10 p.m.
Clive: I don't know
Ema: Kid across the street, obsessed with american rap, should be in boarding school now but all the teachers are on strike
Eugene Play: We stayed in his house when we went traveling to Koforidua, smokes pot incessantly
Fergs: Fergal from Ireland, my roomate, his help was invaluable in shaping my mohawk last night
Festus Legon: This weird British guy I met at Champs Sports bar, he is black and has been here for two years but he hasn't had a Ghanaian girlfriend!
Francis Cape: Drumming and Dancing instructor at Cape Coast, I will be staying with him for two weeks of intensive African dance!
Han4na: This girl Orlando met on the street in Koforidua, he took a little fancy for her and got her phone number and a promise to meet us later, but she didn't return our calls and never showed
Katie: Katerina from Germany, my housemate, prime instigator behind the mohawk, she wields a razor with great speed but lacks precision, my mohawk is not even!
Katri-leena: my girlfriend of almost five weeks, from Finland, has 96 dreadlocks which she wraps up very nicely with a scarf before going out, used to have lots of facial piercings but thank god she took them out, has not seen my new hair cut yet.
Kobey Rasta: Very nice Rasta man, well dressed, clean, I see him everywhere and everytime he asks me to buy him 'just one little coke'.
Kofi cell: This guy pretended to fix my cell phone, really it only needed to be charged, took 80000 cedis from me and then had the nerve to ask for my phone number! I have not recovered the money yet, but justice will be served.
Lando: My number one homey in Ghana, he's 22 but doesn't have much to do but hang around outside my gate and borrow my bicycle. Thats cool, though, when it gets a flat tire he always takes it get it fixed. Weird phobia: Will not go in public swimming pools because the water is 'dirty'. Unshakeable belief: Juju, African forebearer of voodoo, exists, and that I will be cursed for disrespecting the juju priest.
Mari: Finnish girlfriend and roomate to Katri-leena, has big blond dreadlocks that make her very popular with all the Rastafarian guys here
Matt Legon: An American with the same name as me! and thats pretty much all we have in common.
Maxwell: Supermodish worker at Labadi beach, very friendly, excellent pool player, can bust a move on the dance floor, popular with the white girls
Me!: for a while, I couldn't remember my cellphone number, but now I dont need to keep referring to me! everytime someone asks for it.
Michele: Not actually sure how to spell this guys name, but michele is definitely wrong. Very cool man from Holland, a smile seems to be frozen on to his face, but not in that annoying way you see sometimes. He likes extreme sports, snowboarding, windsurfing, things like that, but he is also rather heavy set and clumsy, and the scars he bears from his accidents are terrible to behold.
Mike: Former housemate from Britain, he is now alone somewhere in Mali, hope he's fine!
Natty: A rasta man who works at the Arts Centre in downtown Accra, he makes drums from big tree trunks that are lying around outside his shop. I'm ordering a custom drum from him with my name on it, plus I will be working with him on his family's farm.
Pianim: Head honcho of some sort of energy commission, but a nice man who has agreed to talk to me for my newspaper about the possibility for renewable energy in Ghana's future.
Rich: Goes to NYU and is here doing sort of crazy film studies program following a Ghanaian rapper around. I must get to know him better.
Sacks: Mrs. Sackey, ruler and tyrant of the volunteer's hous where I live. On seeing my mohawk on the morning after Fergal and Katy made it, she said nothing. Everythings cool right? wrong. I get back from a morning dip at the swimming pool, and she has assembled all the Projects Abroad directors, saying that she wants me to move out. Since, she has stepped back from her uncompromising position, but relations between us are strained, to say the least.
Tinathenuyorka: ahh, she only lived in New York for a year, she's not really a nuyorka
Vicky: The English woman who serves as coordinator for all the volunteers in Accra. nothing very exciting to tell you about her.

Okay thats all folks!

2006-11-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

sorry I cant put any pictures up, I have lots of fabulous ones and will try to put them on another website so you can see them.

2006-11-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

Alright, I’m finally getting caught up with what’s going on here, mostly by skipping a lot of stuff. This weekend was the Projects Abroad volunteer party, when all the volunteers get together and be merry. It was held at Cape Coast, a beautiful sea side town west of Accra. We took the lorry there, and then sat on the roof of the hotel and ate lunch. Rather, everyone else did that while I went off exploring. Cape Coast is full of old Colonial buildings, but what is most remarkable is not there age or there beauty, but the mere fact that there are buildings at all. It is odd to walk down streets lined by two and three story structures and not just corrugated-iron roofed wooden shacks.
I climbed up a hill through the courtyard of a school, and then past some children picking through the rubbish at a dumping ground. When I emerged from the brush at the top, I was at a little tower ringed by a high wall and four old English cannons. I climbed the ladder over the wall and looked inside the tower, and there was a man sleeping on some mats! And this small fort, known as the light house, was listed as a tourist attraction in the guidebook. Not like tourist attractions in America!
Later we took a guided tour of the big Cape Coast Castle. A huge and beautiful fort, its white walls and black cannons overlook the sea as it churns around the rocks below. Beneath the battlements, women lay out thousands of shining silver fishies to dry and, where the beach begins, there are many colorful sailed fishing boats. In both directions, palm-fringed sand meets shining sea as far as far as the eye can see. All very nice, yes?
But I could not help being moved as the guide brought us down to the dungeons, and showed us the dark rooms, maybe the size of my living room at home, where the slaves were held until the ships came to take them away to America. One hundred fifty slaves would be squished in to a room, with no light but that which wandered through two narrow slits high up in the wall, and no bathroom but a shallow trench that ran through the middle of the floor and in to a hall in the wall. Our guide also showed us the pitch black room where ill-behaved slaves were locked in without food or water. The double gates were not opened until the prisoner was dead.
Later we had a party! All the volunteers were there, plus I invited my girlfriend and her friend. There was free food and alcohol, and I was soon in a very gay mood. I took my shirt off and me and a Ghanaian guy there would go crazy dancing. We would find people who were not having fun, the kind of people who refuse to have fun as if it was beneath their dignity, and tease them relentlessly. Later, I unplugged the speaker system by accident, and then went and hid while people bickered about who’s fault it was.
The next day, I called up Francis, the drumming and dance instructor who lived in Cape Coast. He brought me to a village festival. They were celebrating the return of their Sudanese ancestors or something, but mostly, they were just trying to get money out of everyone. They had all sorts of money gathering activities; First, they had the men who gave the most money stand in a line; I was one of them, even though I gave less then the others. Then, they auctioned us off, which was a pretty embarrassing moment for me. As a white, I am fawned over and given special treatment all the time. But this time, nobody would pay the money necessary to allow me to sit down again! After that, they auctioned some bread and fabric; it all went on for a long time.
But the festival itself was very fun. I was the only white person there, and was treated as a guest of honor. I paid my respects to the chief and queen mother, and then was given a stool so I could sit between them. The chief gave me a heavy gilded necklace to wear, and then I got up to dance a whole bunch of times. Everybody was arranged around a clearing, and in the clearing different groups got up to dance, first some men in fancy dress, then a lot of women, then some local youth dressed in baggy hip hop clothing, then a bunch of kids, then all the chiefs and important people. The dancing consisted mostly of people forming a sort of African conga line, first the right foot forward, one two, then the left foot, one two, and I was encouraged to join all the different groups. It was very fun, and everybody laughed to see the white man dance.
That night, I was back in Cape Coast, and the next day in Accra.

2006-10-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Last weekend was beach party time! We all jumped in the tro tro for Big Milly’s Backyard at Kokrobite Beach. Its funny, the beach resort we stayed at is very clean and well organized and frequented by well to do looking tourists, but getting there from Accra means jumping sewer-overflow and wading through stinking markets full of incredibly pungent meat and sitting in a crowded car for an hour. However, I know that one day the rest of Ghana will be as clean and expensive as Big Milly’s. Kokrobite is really a very beautiful place. Blacks and whites play football together on the sand, and all stand and watch when the fishing boats come in, nets full of flopping little silver fishies. The waves break far off from shore and then come splashing in lines of white foam. I took a wooden board and swam out with four little black boys, and then we sat on our boards and waited for a suitable wave. The sun came down straight on my head, and I dove down and grabbed some sand to drip over my hair like the boys did. Then came a wave a wave arching up, and we paddled frantically so it would lift us up on its shoulders. And then the world fell out beneath me and I came swooping down on its curling tip, only to be caught by the splashing white foam and carried all the way in, all the way to the sand on the beach. I took a nap and then got up at night when the Reggae covers band came on. Many people danced, black girls with black girls and white girls with white girls and black guys with white girls, and even a few of the more adventurous white guys. At the front, I found my girlfriend and her friend and two identical Rastafarian twins, who wore their hair in dreadlocks of exactly the same size and wore the same blue overalls and danced in exactly the same bouncing way. I shook my butt for a little bit, and then we ran in to the ocean and swallowed salt water in the gloom. Sunday was the same. Monday we were back in Accra, skipping work because it was the Muslim holiday of Lassa, the last day of Ramadan. We went to the Arts Centre and bought these cool little instruments, two gourds filled with beans on a string that you knock together in your hand. I’ll bring a whole lot back to America and blow your mind with my gourd knocking skills. Then we went to the Muslim parade. It was absolute madness. Before we even got there, we saw a horse galloping free down the street, and then, way later, a man in colourful robes hustling after it. The parade was men on horses and scooters rushing around yelling, and truckfuls of people cheering wildly and throwing out candy. We picked a spot on the corner where two big speakers were blasting the hits and everybody was dancing. It was impossible not to get caught up in the party atmosphere, being in the middle of such wildness was intoxicating. I shot a gun in to the air, jumped on a truck full of little boys, jived and hooted in a circle dance with some muslim men, and got in to a dance/fight with some ecstatic sales women who were using the parade to sell Sobo Fruit Drink (Their motto: Sip and Slurp It All!) Then we took the car home, and yelled at girls, ‘ehun yefe’, ‘you are pretty’, out the window the whole time. Today, business as usual. I wrote an article on a university swim meet, and now I’m going to the internet café. Bye bye.
(Today is not actually today, but a few days ago)

2006-10-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

I am way behind in my blog entries, and if anybody is frustrated by my slowness, I am sorry. What’s worst, though, is that everyday here brings something new and interesting, and that every time I don’t write whatever it is down, it is lost in to the recesses of my memory, probably never to be recovered.
Anyway: Two weeks ago, this journal found me running down and scaring my friends on the trail above the Upper Wli Falls. The falls themselves were incredible. They are tucked in to a niche on the mountain side, and are at least one hundred and fifty feet tall, the tallest falls in western Africa. The water comes shooting over the lip at the top and sends little white rockets shooting down that burst in to spray before ever reaching the base.
To approach it, you wade in to the wide pool at the base. The spray from the falls reaches you at the edge of the pool, and as you get closer it is so intense that you must walk backwards. It is hard to breath, and I imagine my self on the beach as Hurricane Katrina lashes the ocean and sends it flying. It is impossible to reach the very point where the fall breaks with the water. We do find a little cave in the rock right near the bottom though, and I must yell to the American girls we meet and I bring there for them to hear me. We don’t have much to say, however, but mostly giggle hysterically to be in such a wonderful place. I am tempted to ask one of them, Isis, to kiss me, and I am sure she would not have refused. (A week later, some other American girls we meet at a bar bring back to me bittersweet memories of high school: ‘Did you, like, hook up with her? Cause we kinda have a thing with her, she’s just, like, totally gross)
We left the upper falls and went back to the village of Vli for lunch. Then Katie, a weird Australian we met, and I headed to the monkey sanctuary at Tafi Atome. They fed us rice and woke us up early in the morning and gave us bananas to feed to the sacred simians. The monkeys were very disappointing; I figured we would be walking in the forest to go find them, but they were ready and waiting for us at the edge of the village. There was a house bordering the forest, as we approached I saw the tree above it shaking, then one, two, three monkeys dropped out of it on to the roof of the house and clambered down to greet us. Soon the area at the edge of the forest was positively crawling with scrambling, leaping monkeys eager to relieve us of our bananas. The biggest monkey, the troupe leader, did not take any bananas himself, but when one of the other monkeys came back for seconds, he would pull him away and push another monkey who hadn’t had any bananas yet towards us. If you held the banana firmly in your hand, they would greedily dig at the tender meat inside and leave a limp yellow peel in your hand with in seconds.
As soon as the fruit was exhausted, they left as quickly as they came, and soon all the trees were still again. I wanted to chase after them, but we went off to eat porridge instead. Later that day, we went to see the Kente weavers at the traditional weaving village of Tafi Abuipe. Kente weaving is to hard to explain, but basically, a number of threads are stretched out by a rock fifteen feet away. At one end sits the weaver and his apparatus, and he pushes horizontal threads through the vertically stretched ones with incredible rapidity. Kente is a very durable material, and I am the proud owner of one scarf, given to me on my birthday, and was promised another one by Francis, our guide in the village. After seeing the village we headed back to Accra, five hours on a tro tro that left my ass red and raw.

2006-10-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

So much happened this weekend, I won't bother writing it all. I went to the Jay-Z rap concert on Friday, and that was a really interesting experience. I'm going to write an article on it, though, so when I'm finished with that I'll post it on the blog. Somethings that won't go in the article: My friend Fergal from Ireland took a picture of some policemen beating up a guy who tried to sneak in to the show. They arrested him and sent him down to the station, where it was no big deal. He deleted the pictures, and then he could go back to the show. But when he got there, he had to pay the commanding police officer there a bribe of 50,000 cedis! Well, thats really only about $5, but, still, my first experience of official corruption.
The next day Katie from Germany and I took the express bus to me our friends the Volta Region of Ghana. Well, the express bus broke down, and we had to take a Jeep in to town. When we got there, our friends had no cellphones on and we wandered around town trying to find a place to stay at 11 at night. Very stressful.
Well, the next morning, the shared car we had organized to take us to the Wli falls did not show up, so we had to take a taxi. Our friends names were on the register for that morning, so we rushed in after them to try to catch them. We made it all the way to the lower falls, but of course there was no sign of them. Deciding that they were probably at the upper falls, we began scrambling up a very steep narrow path through dense green foliage. It was very humid in the forest, and soon we were sweating like pigs. Continuous streams of sweat would run down my arms and down my face. But, of course, in our haste, we had neglected to bring any water. I took off my shirt and left my bag in some bushes, but it was no good. Soon we were desperate. Where were our friends? More importantly, where was there water?Had we even taken the right path?
Finally, the path stopped climbing and began descending steeply, and in no time I saw the white skin and fair hair of our obruni friends through the greenery. Those bastards, leaving us nearly with out hope. I snuck down as quickly and quietly as I could, till I was near behind them. It was just me in my short shorts and sneakers and nothing else, and them dutifully and slowly plodding down behind the guide they had hired at the bottom. With a wild, blood curdling (I hope) scream I took off flying down the steep muddy path and pounced on my unsuspecting prey. A proud moment.
Now the man here is telling me I must go, its closing time, so this will be continued.

2006-10-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

I had a good Birthday!!

Here are my friends Mike and Orlando

Here I am dancing up a storm with the Kente
Scarf Orlando gave me and the Finnish girls,
mine is the Brunette, and were not finished,
we're just getting started

The Rasta Man loves his White Sister,
or maybe just her money

Tro Tro ride: 20 cents
Taxi Ride: 2 or 3 dollars
Soccer ball: 3 dollars
Orange: 4 cents
Sliced pineapple: 10 cents
Fried greasy doughball: 10 cents
Greasy Prostitute: 5 dollars (!!!)(note: was willing to negotiate with a friend who told her he had this amount, her services were not actually purchased)
Messenger Bag: 3 dollars
Nike Sneakers: 5 dollars
Jay-Z cd: 2 dollars
Jay-Z live in Ghana: 60 dollars
Carton of 200 hundred cigarettes: 6 dollars
Three Marijuana Joints: 50 cents (again, not actually purchased)
Plastic Bag of Water: 3 cents (purchased continually throughout the day)
My First Date with the Finnish Girl: 1 dollar 80 cents
Dates with girls in New York: Way More
Lunch of Red Red (tasty beans in oil) and Plantains: 40 cents
Large Star Beer: one dollar
Bottle of Coca-Cola: 25 cents
Internet: 50 cents an hour
Single Speed Bicycle with Basket: 35 dollars
Single Speed Bicycle with Basket and Flat Tire: 37 dollars
Single Speed Bicycle with Basket and Flat Tire and Broken Seat Post: 40 dollars
Fighting for an hour with the guy who sold me this crap: Priceless
There are somethings money can’t buy; For everything else, there’s money.

Going traveling this weekend, will have lots of nature pictures soon!

Me and the editor of my newspaper

2006-09-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

2006-09-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

The more I see of Ghana, the less I understand it. My life here is a whirlwind of meeting new people and doing new things, and it feels like I am just along for the ride. It is impossible not to get sucked in to the irrational but natural flow of things.
Yesterday I woke up rather late. We had gone out to Thursday night Karaoke at the bar near our house, and stayed there till far in to the wee hours. I’ll mention here that I met a nice Finnish girl there, whenever I find a white girl at a predominately locally patronized spot they naturally gravitate towards me if only to escape the ceaseless advances of Ghanaian men. But she genuinely liked me, we had a good time dancing together and I’ll be seeing her again. Anyway, I’m drinking my tea on our patio and my neighbor Ema calls to me from his balcony to see if I want to go swimming.
Yes, I do, and while I wait for him to get dressed (He is very concerned about his appearance) I kick the football around in the street. Now, if there is anyway to meet people in Ghana its to play soccer, every guy who passes motions for me to pass him the ball, and soon we have a nice little game of keep away going on. I end up talking to one of the guys, and he invites me to come with him to a meeting that evening of GAG (!), the Ghana Actors Guild.
At the swimming pool, Ema and I did some underwater wrestling and tried to pick up a German girl. She was doing very slow laps of the breaststroke, but we were always waiting patiently for her at the end of the pool.
Later I met up with my actor friend Daniel a.k.a. Baby. He couldn’t afford the twenty cents it costs to take a tro in to town, so as we walked he told me about his future as a Ghanaian superstar and asked me extensively about my sister. I told him your cell phone number; do you think you could marry him? He’s really a very nice guy.
We got to the GAG meeting, which was conducted in an open air courtyard in central Accra. It opened by the chairman telling everybody to turn off their cell phones. About 30 seconds later, he was on his cellphone competing with the man reading off the minutes. The meeting went on, interrupted every now and then by an outburst from a man in the back. A typical example: The chairman is talking about how actors reflect society, and metaphorically describing how society is composed of many different kinds of people.
Chairman: Some choose to go through life with bare heads, some go with hats. Some people wear shoes, while others go…
Man in Back: NAKED!
Another example; Chairman: …. How many weeks are there, There are 52 weeks in a year…
Man in Back: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I don’t know if you find this hysterically funny, but I did, and so did everybody else at the meeting, except for the Chairman, who, to his credit, didn’t really seem to mind. What was weird is that the overall tone of the meeting was rather sad, as a number of Ghanaian actors had, coincidentally, recently died, including regular members of GAG. The grief over these deaths climaxed suddenly during a five minute prayer session. A woman at the front stood up to lead everybody in song, and then she led the prayers. People didn’t really follow her, though. Everyone, with heads bowed and eyes closed, murmured to themselves. The collective but disjointed praying quickly built in intensity. A woman in front was openly sobbing, some people stamped their foot, everyone was experiencing a beautiful agony, myself included. I too bowed my head and whispered feverishly too myself as I felt a tightness in my chest. This is definitely the closest I’ve ever had to a religious experience; we ended with another song, very beautiful.
Just as quickly it was over. The chairman immediately began talking about a need to replace members of the sports committee and the jokes were soon flying again.
I left and made my to Pigfarm, the area of town where a party for all the volunteers was being held. It was very nice, a lot people were dancing in the rain and all the volunteers were friend and most of them were female. Most of us then made our way to Champs, a horrible Western style sports bar, although I did meet a very interesting guy there, a Marine who had been guarding the U.S. embassy in Ghana was leaving for Iraq in just a few days. Another weird thing that I’m sure my mother doesn’t want to hear. The director of volunteers in Accra was a woman in her mid twenties, and the night was her last before she left Ghana. She had been fawning over me all night, telling me I was very cute and good, and when I said goodbye she gave me a quick smooch.
I spent most of the rest of the night trying to help this stupid girl find her hotel. She had utterly forgot where it was, and everybody we asked had never heard of it. About 4:30 we called off our search and went back to my place where she could sleep with the other girl here. She has since, inexplicably but gratefully, disappeared; no one saw her leave.
Its now early afternoon Saturday. I spent the morning at Ema’s house watching a real low budget action flick; I think I’ll spend the rest of the day doing nothing. Aight.

2006-09-28T10:37:00.000-07:00

They really love their Jesus here, religious stickers adorn every taxi, as you can just barely read at the top of the pic
Heres me and my British housemate Mike at a football game.
I've been to a lot of different beaches, but, I swear, I have never seen a handsomer boy.

2006-09-26T04:36:00.000-07:00

The frogs here are louder than they are in America. They live in sewers and somewhere outside my window, and only croak at night, the better to keep me up. They are in alliance with the feral roosters that roam around the streets at random, going 'Cock a doodle doo' way before dawn.
Our house is infested with Geckos. They wait near the lights on the ceiling for flies, then scurry over and try to catch them with their tongues.
There is a family of baby goats down the street from us. aahh!!

2006-09-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

We went dancing at this little hole in the wall club the other night, and after a while I went to sit down outside. A small man approaches me and shakes my hand and asks me the same questions I've been asked by every other Ghanaian. I don't really want to talk to him, but he doesn't seem to mind, he just wants somebody to talk to. He tells me that he is vendor in Osu, the big tourist part of town. Most vendors there rip off tourists he says, an obvious truth. But he goes on and on about it, how it costs them so many cedis to buy a jersey and then how much they sell it for, and soon I see there are tears in his eyes. He is really upset about this! He says his people are liars and thiefs, and, that, when he sees me he will give me a free soccer jersey. Now, this has been going on for a while, so I thank him and go back inside.
Ten minutes later, he approaches me again. I think that he wants to talk more about how his 'brothers' want to rip off tourists, but, no! he wants money! It is hard to get him to go away. This is a weird thing about Ghana. Everybody is very friendly, and is always eager to help you, and, quite naturally, I am often in need of help, being a stranger in a strange land. Most of the time thats it, they're glad to be of service. But, at places like nightclubs, beaches, and other spots frequented by tourists, there is a whole blossoming service industry. It is conducted by young people whom we refer to disparagingly as Rastas. Thats because most of them introduce themselves as such, talk about one love and Jah almost continuosly, and, unlike other Ghanaian men, sometimes wear their hair long. Not all Rastas are trying sneakily to take money off of you, and not all those who sneakily take money off you are Rastas. But, for simplicities sake, we call them Rastas.
It is hard what, exactly, to make of them. On the one hand, they are most definitely trying to take money off you through preprosterous scenarios they enter you in. For instance, one showed my friend the way to the bathroom, and then, later, demanded money for the favor. But, on the other hand, they sometimes really seem to believe you owe them. They lie so convincingly that they fool themselves. I have seen a Rasta in tears because he was not given the money he thought he was owed. More0ver, they seem to represent the only real alternative youth culture in Ghana. In America, we have punks, goths, skaters, whatever. But here, the Rastas are the only youth who talk and dress differently from their peers. They are a weird phenomena, created perhaps as a rebellion against the predominate culture but subsisting by preying on western tourists.
I've been lazy, but I'll try to put photos up soon. Ok, peace!

2006-09-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

Its a slow Friday at the newspaper office, i.e. I'm the only person here. Thats ok, though, as it means I get to use the only computer with internet.
Last night I went to the weekly Karaoke at the Karldorf bar, just up the rode from my house. The place was packed, and crowds of Ghanaian youth spilled out on to the street. The speakers were pumping African hip hop, called hip life, and many people were dancing. We made our way through the crowd, and had just ordered a few drinks, when a man showed us some seats, rare scores in such a crowded a place, though. They came at a price, though; He sat down next to me and started yelling and spitting in my ear over the noise of the speakers. "You like to Fuck?!Fuck! You like to Fuck?"
I turned away from him to talk to my friends, but it was hard to hear them over the music, so we decided to leave. I could feel the mans fingers on my pockets as I stood up, a last attempt to get money from me, but I ignored it because I knew I had nothing. We made our way out of the circle of tables but got caught up in a dancing crowd and were soon lost, lost in the music.
I danced with a full figured African girl for a bit, but most of the time I was dancing with guys. This is not considered weird at all, in spite of Ghana's strong anti-homosexual sentiment (I haven't met a Ghanaian who didn't hate gays). At one point me and another boy faced each other and rapped the lyrics to Cisco at each other, another time a guy approached me and began yelling in Twi at me. I yelled what little Twi I knew back, this went back in forth until we were embracing and screaming gibberish in each others ears.
Men here are very physical with each other, when you meet some one they immediately reach for your hand and often don't let go until the conversation is over. Often, I have met someone at a dance, that is one of the three dances I've been to, and found there arm around my waist a moment later. I am convinced that this is motivated from pure friendly spirit (as long as they're not trying to pick your pocket), and also, from a practical stand point, it makes sense because one needs to be very near someone else to be understood when the music is loud.
Ghanaians like their music, and they like it loud. I remember seeing a young woman dancing in front of a loud speaker at a beach party, and then being surprised when she turned around and I saw she was carrying an infant on her back. But music seems to have a irresistible pull for the Ghanaian. On several occasions, all work has stopped at the newspaper office as people started dancing to the ever blasting radio.
Back to the Karldorf. A well dressed Ghanaian boy put his arm around me and introduced himself as Batman, a popular Reggae artist. He told me about the many awards he has won and his upcoming gig with Jay-Z, the American rapper, and then asked me if I wanted to sing karaoke with him. Why a famous Ghanaian singer wanted to sing karaoke with a white boy, an Oburoni, I don't know, and I had other reasons to doubt his honesty as well. But that was irrelevant. Me, my British friend Michael, and Batman went to the DJ and told him we wanted to sing 'Ghetto' by Akon. I had never heard the song, and it didn't help that the karaoke machine didn't work, but I yelled and whined and sang on the microphone while our friend Batman poured his heart on the other mike.
Nobody much payed attention, but when we were done, the dj told everyone to thank us 'white brothers' and I was happy that I had done what I could to improve international relations.
The rest of the night passed uneventfully, I met a few more people and went through all the handholding and question asking and laughing that is part of the elaborate ritual of greeting practiced here. Then we finally got away from Batman, whose habit it was to grab you and sing lyrics in your ear, and went home. Good night.

2006-09-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Monday afternoon at the Busy Internet in Accra. My first article that I wrote alone was published today, a thrilling but rather controversial piece on natural gas. Today I went in to the office, started typing, and then the power went out. With out air conditioning, the place was unbearably stuffy, so I left.
Generally, though, heat hasn't been too much of an issue, although I am generally glad to take a cold shower in the evening. I'm not always glad, but thats not really an issue, seeing as there's no hot water in the house, or in much of Accra, for that matter.
Water, water, water is drunk out of little plastic baggies. Prepubescent girls and women with the bodies of prepubescent girls carry big bowls on their head and walk through the traffic, yelling 'puhe watuh, puhe watuh'. When I'm sitting in a tro (mini bus) and I spy one near me and I'm hankering for a drink, I gesture or grunt and one comes running over to my window. I hand her the equivalent of three cents and she passes me the H20. I rip open the corner with my teeth and suck. A very satisfying way of drinking.
A large portion of business in ghana is done in this way, people hawking wares carefully balanced on their head to passing commuters in tro tros. When the tro is stuck in traffic, which is most of the time, all the nearby vendors come running and pressup against the windows. So if you're on your way home from work, and the traffic is bad, maybe you do a little shopping in the meantime, buying a snack of plantain chips or a flashlight or some christian literature.
The local dishes I have mostly stayed away from, as a large portion involve meat. In poorer areas, meat is pretty much unavailable but in Accra they have a wide variety of meat sauces or soups to douse your mashed up cassava in. They also eat a lot of rice and yams and plantains, none a good source of protein. They also have a dish called redred, which is beans in somesort of sauce, and I've been eating a lot of that. Plus, energy bars are always a good snack, and the locally produced chocolate is delish. Ok, my friends are here, I'm out.

2006-09-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

Its Friday evening, but I just have time to dash off a quickie before I have to go back to work. We covered a big news conference today about the construction of a natural gas pipeline in to Ghana, lots of reporters and tv cameramen. My heart was beating about a mile a minute, but I stood up and asked the Chairperson of The Resource Center for Whatever a question about the 'completion date' of the pipeline, and was pleased to recieve a satisfactory answer. My friends and I are going away to a beach resort town for the weekend, so in order to make sure the story will be filed in time for the Monday paper I have to do it tonight.
The newspaper business is fascinating and I'm learning a lot. One should write simple sentences and short and snappy paragraphs.
George, an editor at the paper, called me 'Downtown Manhattan', and it stuck. As I walk through the gate and make my way to the office, I am besieged on all sides by calls of 'Downtown!' 'Downtown!'. In the street, I am Obruni, whiteman. But this is not derogatory, it is a greeting and many random pedestrians have started conversations with me this way.
I will have pictures next time.

2006-09-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Hey! My first post.
Africa is a trip. Its not dangerous, I haven't seen or felt a single mosquito and poisonous snakes and the deadly AIDS virus, when left alone, are not a nuisance. I'm glad I don't live here, though. To find this internet linked computer I had to travel twenty minutes by tro tro, a sort of privately owned bus thats really a dirty old van packed with people, and then wade through blocks of vendors and beeping taxis and smog. Its like Canal street, except with open sewers in the place of side walks.
I live in a well to do suburb of Accra in a walled-off little house. I peep over the gate and Kofi, the house boy, comes running to let me in. I say something incomprehensible to him, he says something incomprehensible to me, and we both laugh. Mrs. Sackey, my host, is waiting behind the door to fuss over me the way grandmas do all over the world. She is really very nice, though, and she gives me Pineapple and Papaya treats like you have never tasted. Her two grandkids are normally around, one very young and one a nice little girl of five who chases me around and trys to bite me.
My roommate is a smart, nice Irish boy who talks too much and down the hall is a prim German girl who wears her Protestantism around her neck and an English boy with a big nose who I might go to Mali with. All of us are journalists, but they have crap placements and I have a good one.
I work at the Chronicle, which has a nice big office that I walk to in the late morning. I'm the only volunteer there, but everyone is very nice and very chatty. The organization is a bit spotty and no one seems to be really in charge, so the first day, after I was introduced to everybody, I just sat down and wrote an article. I don't think they'll publish it but thats okay. Today I accompanied Tina to cover the birth of a new political party. We went to the Electoral Institute of Ghana and waited, and an hour late arrived the chairman of the Ghana National Party and his little posse. It was really an exhilirating and proud event, he formally turned in his party's proposed logo and constitution and all the signatures he needed and the commissioner of the electoral college formally accepted them. But then, this being Ghana, it turned the commissioner and the chairman were somehow distantly related and they sat down and talked and laughed for an hour while Tina and I sat bored stiff. Then everybody shook everybody's hand like everyone does in Ghana, like a normal handshake except that when you're drawing your hand away from your friend's you press your fingers against his so that they make a snap! Everybody shook my hand, too. It was very nice.
All Ghanaians are very nice. It seems that they are genetically predisposed to be friendly. They want to know my name and know where I'm from and know my address, too, which is a bit odd. But even the cabbies who honk at you on the street honk with a smile, although I must add that the prostitutes who solicited my attention were all business and didn't smile back when I shook my head at them.
Maxwell, a Ghanaian boy I met, invited me to a beach party and I musn't be late. Signing off, Me.

2006-09-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Yay! Blog Created.