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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what is the penalty?”

“800,000 cedis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bright days on the Dark Continent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this isn’t that kind of posting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have done eight.”

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

“Yes. I hope they will be completed.”

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

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

“I was just waiting for your call.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I’m coming right now.”

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

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

“What will you do differently next time?”

Confidently he said, “I will come earlier.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow-up, profiles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other characters who live here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dancing: a vital part of dinner preparation

The Feast!

African yoga is "casual"

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

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

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

Ghanaian food:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One such snapshot:

House No. XXX

OSINO

September 24 2002

The Manager

Mumuado Rural Bank Ltd

Osino

Dear Sir,

Application for Loan

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

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

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

Thank you for your co-operation and assistance.

Yours faithfully,

xxxxxxxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last entry ended with sand flying to the beat of drums and singing on a dark beach in Accra. This one features sweat flying to the same beats in a long one-room rectangular cement building on a dusty lot on a sweltering Wednesday evening. Attracted by rumors of group meditation and a yoga session led by a Tantric monk before their usual rehearsal, I left work early and went to the headquarters of the Africana dance troupe (the same people who were at the beach Sunday night). The rumors were true, kind of. Raghuviir, the monk, led a short meditation and then handed the floor over to Adams, one of the lead dancers, who led about 20 minutes of casual yoga. Actually, they both seemed like good instructors; but the participants were not the serene, focused lotus flowers of my Eastern imagination. The 20-or-so people in attendance were the inhabitants of a different dream: sinewy black men all bones and muscle and smooth, tightly-stretched skin, with fiery eyes and white, white teeth; and full-figured women with lighter skin and softer features. And we all had a case of the giggles. In the middle of “fish pose” one Ghanaian would poke another, and inside ten seconds everyone was literally on the floor laughing hysterically.

Diagnosis: too much energy. Treatment: give the drummers drums, give the dancers space, and take a seat.

The next two hours were a continuous eruption of kinetic energy. The sound of the drums was indistinguishable from the pounding of feet on the small wooden stage at one end of the building, and the violent flailing of the drummers’ arms was a dance in itself. The music is so polyrhythmic that one finds the backbeat by watching the dancers, not by listening to the instruments. But the dances, tightly choreographed and executed in perfect unison by groups of 4-10 dancers (depending on the song), are so viscerally controlled by the drums that they are one and the same. The dancers don’t appear to hear the rhythms—they are the rhythms. The long cement building is one big drum with myriad faces, played by a maniac octopal African whose limbs are somehow themselves drums with myriad faces, which are played by…

The point is that the eruption, even with its distinct components, was so organic that it was synesthetic; and it was so powerful that, even sitting on the floor against a side wall, I couldn’t separate myself from it. Couldn’t even look away, because it was an entire universe inside that room, and every point in space was connected to every drum was connected to every dancer’s whipping limbs was connected to the stifling heat and flying sweat and howling and sachets of water violently squeezed into gaping, panting mouths. Then promptly at 6pm, right on schedule, the power went out; and the tempest continued in the pitch dark for about a minute, during which the energetic elements of this exploding universe came untethered from their visual sources and wheeled chaotically around the space in their frenzied death throes—even louder and louder than before, voice, drum, grunt, stomp, until three nearly deafening reports from all the drums in unison and it was over, spontaneously and completely. There were a few seconds of just heavy breathing in the impossible silence, and then people began talking and laughing in the dark and soon people switched on flashlights and again there were individuals, etc. etc.

So to me it was lightning in a bottle; or cosmology in a long cement building.

This past Sunday morning I took part in the most universal of Ghanaian rituals: I went to church. Nana, a young woman working at Opportunity International, offered to take me when I asked her last week where I could find some good gospel music. She met me at 7am at the grocery store and drove me to her family’s house (the service didn’t start until 9). We arrived at a beautiful compound and went inside. Her house is a sprawling villa with large sitting rooms, a beautiful kitchen with an industrial-size freezer, a plasma television with digital cable, bathrooms with bidets, and a parrot in a cage. After a light breakfast of toast and coffee we headed off.

Church was in the ground floor multipurpose room of a local hotel. It is about 30’x 40’ with a low ceiling and fluorescent lights and about 50 plastic patio chairs arranged in rows. When we arrived a few minutes before 9, we walked inside where it was nearly deafening. A young man sang lead in front of five backup singers, who in turn stood in front of a rock band: drums, electric bass, electric guitar, keyboard, and trumpet. They were singing mostly in English but one could hardly tell—it was loud, and the four large speakers stacked in pairs on either side of the front of the room were overmatched. In addition, the twenty or so members of the congregation who had arrived by that time were armed with tambourines and, of course, the spirit. So they added to the clamor.

Before half an hour had passed the multipurpose room was mostly full. Men were dressed in slacks and button-down shirts without ties and women were wearing the brightly-colored outfits I’ve seen before on traditional-dress Fridays. Everyone was dancing and above the gospel strains of the lead singer one could hear the whine of the electric guitar bending the pentatonic scale. It was a strange but incredibly captivating marriage of early Allman Brothers and Janis Joplin-style wailing. Everyone was moved (literally) and most of the congregants swayed with varying levels of vigor in front of their seats while some tall skinny men, sweating until they shone like smooth black riverstones, lurched in the aisles like an epileptic’s marionettes. One such man stood apart from the crowd in a blue and bright green tie-dyed shirt with his back to all the others. He was directly in front of one of the speaker stacks, holding his hands over his ears and hunched far over, sometimes violently thrusting a spread-fingered hand against the wall for support. The whole scene might have been his own ecstatic dream.

Meanwhile I was moving, too; but my inspiration was the red Stratocaster and the unlikely skinny Ghanaian in a plain navy blue necktie who piloted it.

The music continued for about 90 minutes, after which Pastor Mike came to the lectern (with the hotel logo on the front) and delivered a passionate sermon. The theme was: “God wants people to worship him.” So for the better part of an hour Mike recited single verses from the New Testament confirming that sentiment, and interspersed his own insights and interpretations with his selections. To me it seemed like a meaningless concatenation of words of praise. An example: “We are here to celebrate the majesty, the excellency, the greatness, the power, the righteousness, the might, the wisdom, the awesomeness of God with our praises to him and to his son Jesus Christ. And as Bible says, God sees our rejoicing and also rejoices.” Also consider his discussion of the following:

Psalm 95 (King James Version)

1 O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

2 Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.

3 For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

4 In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also.

5 The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land.

6 O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.

7 For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To day if ye will hear his voice,

8 Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness:

9 When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.

10 Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways:

11 Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.

Pastor Mike recited verse 6 and the first sentence of verse 7, and explained the meaning of “the sheep of his hand”: a shepherd leads a sheep with a stick, but only God or Jesus could lead sheep gently, could guide them with His hand. That was all. Where was God’s wrath? Isn’t this Psalm a cautionary tale about lack of faith and the consequences that follow? Doesn’t this inspire one to worship out of fear? Not this Sunday.

During the course of the sermon I also learned that God loves alone those who worship him; that God will make his worshippers “spiritually rich, materially rich, and financially rich”; and that the Devil, incarnate now as AIDS, wishes to infect us all, but that we can close the door on him through our praises to God. (Note: no mention here of obedience to the abstinence-until-marriage law.)

For believers maybe every sermon is an eloquent tautology. And maybe a more discerning critic would have also identified the music as abuse of the power of the pulpit. But I had the feeling that I had fallen for a bait-and-switch: the inclusive and even universal power of music hijacked by a gospel of exclusivity. So it was with mixed feelings that I walked in both parades past the collection plate, which achieved complete participation of all attendees. Here the Pastor said, “As you have rejoiced with your hearts and your voices, now rejoice with your wallets!” Maybe it should be noted that they switched back to upbeat music and dance during these segments.

I know I sound bitter; but that’s only because I enjoyed the first half of the service so much.

After the second collection everyone shook hands with one another and filed out into the parking lot. Nana invited me back to her family’s house for lunch and I went and enjoyed a delicious meal of rice and chicken stew.

When I returned to the VA house, members of the Africana drumming and dancing group were trickling in. Laura, a young Canadian woman who’s returning home this week, has spent ten months in Ghana and started dancing with them soon after she arrived. So they were coming (about fifteen of them) to have a feast and a night of music and dance. A bunch of us ripped the heads off small silver fish, cut up tomatoes and onions, ground up maize, and made a fire in an old car wheel while the remaining troupe members played drums and cowbell and shakers and sang and danced and kicked a soccer ball and laughed, laughed, laughed. It was so enjoyable that I forgot to curse the midday heat. When the sun set and the food was ready we held hands for a prayer (common practice) and dug in to the spread of salmon, tilapia, the little silver fish, banku (cassava flour and cornmeal), and spicy tomato/onion/pepper sauce.

After cleaning up we walked down to the beach with four drums, two shakers, and a cowbell, and had homemade palm wine out of gas-can type plastic jug and danced in the dark by the waves. The drumming is an irresistible force. Actually it is a force field: if you’re far enough away you can just listen, but there is some radius (about 20’) inside which even a rhythmically-challenged obruni like me can’t keep still. There are also lyrics (in Twi), vocal melodies and harmonies, and specific dance patterns to accompany different songs. All of these were out of reach. But just to move while they moved, a bunch of sunburnt North Americans sharing in the ancient African night—that’s religion if anything is.