Some things have begun to fall into place after the first weekend. The major developments include: living arrangement, my first Ghanaian friend, and my first non-Ghanaian friend (except Justin).

I’m set to move in tomorrow (Tuesday) morning to the Volunteer Abroad house in the Labadi section of Accra. It’s a medium-sized compound near the beach with a wall, a gate, and two freestanding structures: a main house with a large living room, a kitchen, two offices, and four bedrooms; and three more bedrooms in a low building along the back wall. The house and all the furniture inside is less than a year old, and the whole complex is very clean. For GHC 2,000,000 per month (about $225) I’ll have a bedroom, unlimited clean drinking water, utilities, kitchen access, complimentary coffee & tea, a ceiling fan, and Canadian friends. There is also a guard at the gate at all times and a “groundskeeper” who cleans the floors, etc. every day. Call it Ghanaian Living Lite.

Volunteer Abroad is a Canadian program that gives people (mostly university students) a chance to work on a wide variety of volunteer programs for a few weeks. I first saw the house Saturday night when I attended a Halloween party there. The program coordinator/house director was dressed as a palm tree, with real palm fronds in her hair and a coconut-shell bra (no grass skirt). On the other hand, there were some locals there playing drums and generally getting down, and the power was out. So it’s kind of like a college dorm, but also kind of like Ghana. I think it’s a good intermediate step to African living.

Saturday was also notable as the day I made my first Ghanaian “friend” (i.e. our relationship didn’t start with a cash transaction). As I was walking back along the main road from a day spent apartment-searching, he called to me as he leaned on a crumbling, chest-high cinderblock-and-mortar wall, watching the cars zoom by: Obruni! Obruni! (=foreigner). I turned and saw him, almost shining, standing without a shirt and sun gleaming off his entirely bald head and torso. He wore two large pieces of costume gold jewelry across his chest like sashes. One was a leatherette strap with golden six-pointed stars studded all the way around; the other was a chain whose links were golden flattened elephants’ heads. “Obruni, are you a real estate developer?”

He went on to tell me his name (“Pierre, or Peter”) and that he owned this crumbling chest-high cinderblock wall and the crumbling ramble of a mostly-destroyed foundation on whose edge it stood. This “foundation”, he lamented, was only rated for a three story building; but he envisioned so much more—five, six stories rising out of the dusty, trash-strewn slope of about 200 yards that separate the road from the Atlantic. Was I interested? I told him I was not a real estate developer but wished him luck with his construction plan.

I think it was “plan” that set him off, and he began explaining that he wanted to finance the project himself, but that he couldn’t open a savings account with the local bank (“Their systems are down.”) and he wanted to convince me that he was a responsible and hardworking man so he led me down the slope a little way to his house, a low cinderblock affair with a corrugated roof. Inside was a chaos of plastic buckets in the first room and a chaos of furniture in the second, dominated by a spinning multicolor disco light, a hanging tapestry with a silkscreen of Jesus’ face, and a TV playing a Madonna DVD. He sat me down on a couch and introduced me to his wife Emelia and his son and daughter (maybe 12 and 14 years old). I told him I’d bring information about savings accounts from some banks I knew of and he taught me that, when invited into a Ghanaian house, one must accept a drink of cool water from the host, sip it with both hands on the cup, and pass it to the right until everyone (guests and hosts) have drunk.

We talked for a little while longer and then I got up and shook his hand to leave. He said our meeting was one that made him deeply happy and moved his spirit, and, by the way, was I a Christian? When I told him I was a Jew he sat me down promptly and began firing off theological questions. About 30 seconds later when I ran out of answers he ordered his son: “Bring me my Bible,” and, by the light of his mobile phone’s screen—there were no electric lights in the inner room except the spinning multicolor, which was already on full blast—had me read Psalm 37 aloud. How he loved to hear it read! He nodded with every sentence and every verse, cocking his head to hear, then nodding in assent with conviction so pure it was icy cold. But he also was basking in every word and just in the sound of it! Some passages he asked me to repeat. A half hour, many questions, and many apologetic excuses about being late for an appointment later I managed to escape, with the help of Emilia’s increasingly insistent “Peter, he must go. Let him leave.”

But Peter was not proselytizing at all during our discussion; he just wanted to know the answers to his questions. “Everyday I am trying to learn,” he said. However it comes out in this telling, I was really taken by Peter’s sincerity (not only with the religious stuff), and I am planning to bring him some savings account info tomorrow.

Sunday was ex-pat day, and I tagged along on Justin’s invite to lunch with a middle-aged British woman, a Kenyan woman (West Africa correspondent for BBC’s The World), a globetrotting American, and a jet-setting Ghanaian businessman who happened to be in town. We spent nearly all afternoon on a breezy patio overlooking the ocean at a swanky hotel, ordering appetizers and mains and dessert and tea and laughingly complaining about the slow service and the waiter who didn’t know what a “burger” was and making nice with the other diners. Conversation meandered from African politics to computers to Ghanaian funeral and wedding traditions to the nicer hotels in Fes the way cold water rolls around the bottom of your mouth when you slowly tilt your head from side to side. Everything was said with a little bit of a sigh or an offhanded chuckle. Who knew decadence was so close by?

Finally, today (Monday) was the first real day of work. The goal for the next week or so is to divide the businesses of metropolitan Accra into approximately 100 markets, each containing something like 50-100. For our purposes “businesses” comprise everything from large stores down to a man selling coconuts out of a wagon on the sidewalk. And “markets” comprise everything from Accra’s answer to Madison Ave. to its version of the Meadowlands’ carnival retail area. So the project of defining the markets such that each is heterogeneous, both in the sizes and types of businesses contained, is a “soft science” (read: virtually impossible).

The ultimate goal is to define them in such a way that when we offer loans to the first 25 markets at 3% and to the second 25 at 4%, the owners don’t talk to one another about the offers and then complain about unequal treatment. Which begs the questions: Do Ghanaians talk about loans and finances very much? At all? Are they even on Ghanaians’ radar? What’s this project all about again?

Answers to come…sorry for the rambling post. A lot’s happening! I miss you all very much and am thinking of you. Keep in touch! Love, Jake!

Wednesday afternoon I cried at the airport while I said goodbye to Mom and Julie; then I was on a big shiny airplane bound for Amsterdam. It was about 5:15am local time when we touched down, and since I had nearly 8 hours until my connecting flight to Accra I decided to head to the city and explore a little bit. With the help of a quick train from the airport I was downtown shortly thereafter, and it was around 8:30am when I was walking up the bank of one of the canals through a glorious morning glowing blue and yellow with crystal-clear Steely Dan pouring from my iPod into my ears. Stopping on one of the bridges to take it in, I decided I must have some pictures, and I fished through my bag to find the digital camera. Lo and behold, the memory card was full; so I ambled through deleting a couple “extraneous” shots.

Then it was with only the slightest slip of the thumb that I chose to “Delete all images and sound” and then I was left to watch helplessly as the little LCD went black and flashed “Deleting” in perfect little white letters for the next 30 seconds or so. At exactly the moment that message first flashed, the song changed to “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”. The lyrics:

We hear you’re leaving, that’s ok
I thought our little wild time had just begun
I guess you kind of scared yourself, you turn and run
But if you have a change of heart
Rikki don’t lose that number
You don’t wanna call nobody else
Send it off in a letter to yourself
Rikki don’t lose that number
Its the only one you own
You might use it if you feel better
When you get home

So it was, and so it is that I have lost the pictures; all of them. My first diagnosis was benevolent divine intervention: the fates wanted to drive home the “break with the past” dimension of this adventure and conceived this clever way to induce me to throw myself into the world of Accra with reckless abandon. The second diagnosis was instant karma: an immediate (and fitting) punishment for my own desperate need to take a picture of the beautiful canal in the glowing light of the Amsterdam morning, to try and grasp it rather than to let it pass. The final diagnosis is, sadly, simple and atheistic: foolishness, ineptitude, and hastiness.

On one hand, perhaps this is not such a tragedy: now many of you are bottled up in the index cards you so thoughtfully filled up at my going away party this past Sunday. Though I have not read them yet (I’m trying to hold out on reading them until a low point, when they will completely resurrect my spirits) I have no doubt that the sentiments contained there paint a more beautiful picture of my friends and family than could ever be captured on camera. On the other hand, the appetites of a nostalgic mind are unpredictable, so I submit to everyone who happens on this passage a desperate plea: Please send me pictures! Send them to jacob.appel@gmail.com! Send them so I will not forget!

The news from Accra: when I arrived it was dark and there was a throng of Ghanaians waiting outside the airport terminal and everything seemed dark and hot except for the other tall white guy. That’s Justin, my first friend here, and the country director for IPA’s projects in Ghana. He spirited me away from the throng and into a taxi which took us to his apartment, in the Trade Fair section of Accra. Unfortunately, when we arrived there was no electricity and no water. Electricity is on a rolling blackout schedule whereby every third day it shuts off for 12 hours. The water is on a seemingly entirely random schedule whereby it is unavailable whenever it is most desperately needed. So we just dropped my things and headed for Osu, the “hip nightlife district” of Accra. Here we feasted on grilled whole tilapia and banku (a sticky, starchy ball of cornmeal and cassava flour) and Castle Milk Stout, then headed back to the apartment and hit the hay.

Friday (today) is my first full day. It began with a hardboiled egg from a street stand, then took us to Areeba mobile phone services store (where I bought a nifty wireless modem that should give me internet for good!), then to a house full of Canadian journalists with rooms available, then to the offices of Opportunity International – Sinapi Aba Savings and Loan (the partner organization we’re working with), then to one more housing opportunity (this a stand-alone villa in a Ghanaian family’s compound – actually a pretty beautiful house!) and finally back here to Justin’s apartment.

The people thus far are extremely friendly and they smile almost all the time. There are fewer beggars than in Morningside Heights. It is hot as blazes during the day and a little better at night. The sewers are among the most hazardous I’ve ever seen, some a yard deep and a few feet across, some covered by grates and others open. That notwithstanding, they are actually not very dirty and they generally don’t smell bad. Taxi drivers are at least as crazy as their counterparts in Manhattan, and the average taxi was built before the breakup of the USSR.

This isn’t quite home yet; but it’s only been a day. By tomorrow I will have a telephone, and by Monday maybe my own place! How’s that for adjustment?

I’m thinking of you (plural) all the time and smiling like a Ghanaian as a result. Thank you for everything! Send pictures!