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.

Another week has passed here in sunny Accra and everything is delicious here on Saturday morning outside on the porch. My legs are sweating but a lazy breeze wanders my way sometimes. Relief! One way or another my body is adapting to the weather here and I find myself sweating less and less when I walk the streets with the National Service Personnel, defining markets in the midday heat throughout the workweek. “Less and less” is a good ways from “not at all” though, and still everyday I look forward to the evening ritual of peeling off the clingy skin of soaked shirt and pants stuck to my shins and thighs. For reference, the Ghanaians I’ve been working with this week, George and Mavis, don’t seem to sweat at all. Maybe week three will bring complete adjustment? I’m not counting on it.

The sweating problem was compounded on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week when Oti, my driver, had car trouble.

On Wednesday he showed up at the office later than usual. We try to leave downtown by 4:30 so as to beat the worst of the traffic. If we make our target we can complete the 5km drive in under 30 minutes. Otherwise it can take an hour or even more. Sitting in traffic with Oti isn’t so bad, though: he’s great to talk to and I’ve learned a lot from him about growing up Ghanaian. It’s significantly less enjoyable to make the hour-long trek in a compact car piloted by Oti’s friend Kwame who has 5 elementary school kids in the backseat. Oti had gotten a flat on the way to pick me up and Kwame, who happened to be passing by, offered to help him out. So when I walked out of the office Wednesday around 5pm (peak traffic time!) I was whisked into this miniature-circus-kinderwagon-mobile and we puttered off down the road towards home. Just 75 minutes later came the second-to-last stop: the VA house!

On Thursday Oti had his car back, and he drove up in front of the office just a few minutes behind schedule. When he started the car it was belching thick acrid white smoke from the tailpipe and he was revving it to beat the band. The problem here was that anytime he took his foot off the gas pedal (which, in a stick shift car, is quite a regular occurrence) the car would turn off, or worse, stall and violently lurch to a stop. So the game was to drive without letting the engine rev below 2,000rpm. This means a delicate two-footed approach with limited clutch and liberal use of the emergency break. Of course it doesn’t help that a large portion of the drive is spent inching along in traffic. So the car didn’t last very long under this regime. Within a half a km we were pulled to the side of the road and Oti was taking a taxi to the nearest filling station to get some gas.

When he returned with a full gas-can and an eager taxi driver cum mechanic they had some ideas: first, was it just out of gas? No. Second, was it the gas line? Here they yanked one end of the hose out of the starter motor and the taxi driver sucked on it until he had a mouthful of unleaded gas, which he proceeded to spit out on the starter (“to be sure the petrol is everywhere inside”). Again, no dice. Now came the time for a rolling start. The taxi driver and I pushed together while Oti kept the car in neutral and successfully started it and kept it revving high. Then they popped the hood and, with the engine whining proceeded to attack it with finger, screwdriver, and stone. They banged on the battery terminals with rocks from the ground, poked at the starter motor and belt with a screwdriver, and even thrust hands with reckless abandon into the squealing mechanical hurricane. At some point it was determined that she runs good, and with a lurch we waved goodbye to the taxi driver and lurched on down the road.

A few minutes later we were stalled again and it was determined that, whenever we lurched to a halt, I should hop out and give us a push while Oti desperately pumped the gas pedal and urged the starter. This actually worked for the most part (only a few more stalls), and it also produced one stand-out encounter that was, without a doubt, this week’s high point: here we stalled in the middle of a busy three-way intersection and the pressure was on. Honking and yelling coming immediately from all directions and out steps the well-dressed Obruni from the passenger seat, beginning to push the car. I was immediately joined by some locals who were standing by the roadside; but they had barely laid hands on the car when Oti got it started and I hopped in the passenger door, sweating profusely, and we began to roll down the road. Then, for no more than two seconds, I was rewarded with the pure comedy of this man running alongside the car by the open passenger window with his hand out. He said “A little something for the guys!” It sounded like “A leedle sum-tin fo’ deh’ gize!” and he was smiling like a bellhop at Club Med, showing some local color for the big tip. Oti was laughing and then it hit me too and we were laughing so hysterically the car almost stalled again. But after that we made it all the way to the repair shop where we coasted in and Oti’s friend fixed the car completely, for free, in less than five minutes. I got home just over two hours.

Finally Friday afternoon rolls around and it’s so nice to get a clean, quick ride home at the end of the week. And it’s not so nice to step out of the office and see Oti standing there without a car, but with an empty gas-can; and to know that, wherever the car is, the nearest filling station is a 20-minute walk. But it’s better to carry gas to a car than to push a car through rush hour in Accra. So even though it was a fairly long detour (about an hour) it was easy and punctuated by a beer we bought at the filling station and drank on the way back to the car and, ultimately, not so bad. I was back home in about an hour and a half.

So transportation is “consistently variable” and, with Oti at the helm, even that is pretty fun.

Last night (Friday) I had a taste of home when I went with Justin and some other friends to Jazz Tone, Accra’s leading (only) jazz club. We heard real, and really good, jazz; we sat in front of the air-conditioning vent; and I had a Tanqueray and tonic with two slices of lime. I could have died right there…Heard some blues with killer harmonica player sitting in, some Duke, Miles, Gilberto, and even a version of “St. Thomas” that was cooler than the A/C and the G&T put together. It was a great night.

Now it’s lazy Saturday, the day of rest and email and maybe some music. Tonight Oti has invited me to go with him and his friends to their favorite beach spot and “take some beers.”

And how’s everything in your respective habitats? Let me know! Love, Jake.

Ghana continues to toe the razor line between sublime and ridiculous. Here is an example from the last five minutes: I am sitting outside on the patio of a hotel in the Adabraka neighborhood of Accra, just north of downtown. The hotel is on a fairly well-traveled street and, behind the 5’ high stucco wall it’s pretty quiet. The sound of cars passing is no louder than the rustling of the palm fronds overhead. But it is Friday; and on Friday Ghana lets its hair down. They have answered “casual Friday” with “traditional dress Friday” and people wear beautiful, brightly-colored outfits of every description to work. The radio is on all day, inside and outside. So I didn’t even look up from my laptop when I heard music approaching. It might have been one of the many pickup trucks with huge speakers bungeed to the bed that amble through the streets, especially on Fridays, blaring high life, reggae, or Christian pop music.

But I thought I heard the crackling of a snare drum. Is it real? Thirty seconds later it was New Orleans here on Farrar Avenue. It was a huge flatbed 18-wheeler overflowing with teenagers, all wearing white tee shirts and whooping and hollering and waving their arms while a brass band belted out dirty jazz from the back of the bed. There was only one trumpet and it was bright, bright gold; the proudest and happiest trumpet I’ve ever laid eyes on, and it was exclaiming the way only a trumpet can. The gang was all there—trombone, tuba, and the (real) crackling snare—and it was so brassy and pugnacious and I want to say defiant; but what was there to defy? Nothing! There was no resistance from grouchy residents or oncoming traffic. The flatbed truck was like the invisible force that runs along a chain of dominoes, toppling each one exactly in order: as it reached each pedestrian, he or she would look up and smile a wide Ghanaian smile. And so it lumbered down the street, delighting each passerby in turn, none looking up in advance of its arrival, but only as it came to him in good time and of its own accord.

Who was responsible for this display? Had Katrina flung the bayou’s musicians all the way to this distant corner of the world? As the broad side of the flatbed rolled by the patio the mystery was revealed: it was, of course, the Ghana Statistical Service. After all, this is the 2^nd Statistical Service Week, whose theme is “Upscaling Statistical Service’s role in statistical planning for dynamic development”. Were the teenagers the statisticians? Does this particular government ministry always conduct its research from a slow-moving flatbed truck accompanied by live music? Is it a sign that my efforts to learn statistics from a PDF file are misdirected? Does this represent the Ghanaian take on rigorous statistical analysis? If so, is our little study doomed?

Whatever its origin or purpose, it is, like so many things here, delicately balanced on that fine, fine line. But it’s leaning towards “sublime”.

The sun is setting on my first full workweek and it feels good. Around 5:30 it starts to get a little cooler and here in Labadi there is a breeze from the ocean which, with the aid of the ceiling fan on maximum level 5, actually pushes me over the edge from tolerable to comfortable. I think the music has something to do with it, though.

I came here with a beautiful 12-outlet surge protector thanks to Mom, and I managed to blow it out within two seconds (literally) of plugging it in. As an aside, always check whether your new “voltage converter” is also an wattage amplifier. And if it’s rated for 1200W or more, don’t plug anything into it besides some ridiculous hairdryer; or else your shiny new grey surge protector will make a loud POP and you’ll start swearing. When I finished swearing I began to think about replacement and quickly discovered that, in Accra, “quality” is separated from “electronics” by a huge chaos of junky plastic and wire called “China”. But perseverance paid off and I found a surge protector closer to the “quality” side and crossed my fingers and plugged everything in and minutes later I was falling asleep to Daniel Barenboim playing Chopin nocturnes. And since then (knock wood) I have not passed many minutes in my room without an aural elixir.

At the moment it’s the David Grisman Quintet and it makes everything a little nicer. A lot nicer.

The learning curve at work is steep and a little scary but also exhilarating. With the help of a couple Tufts students studying abroad in Accra, we have defined 15 markets comprising over 1000 businesses and have at least attempted to administer around 80 surveys. Also this week has transported me back to the mathematical universe: we have a piece of statistical software that helps to design cluster randomized trials (of which our interest rate sensitivity study is one), and although it does crank out some really pretty graphs, they’re entirely unintelligible without some basic understanding of statistics. So I sharpened my pencil and hit the books (that is, the 200-page manual for the program, which contains a kind of introduction to stats). It is embarrassingly fun and refreshing to scribble nonsense Greek letters and try to derive simple equations. So now the graphs are starting to make sense, and slowly the powerful beam of mathematical clarity is illuminating the treacherous terrain of our study and its potential to produce meaningful results. Hopefully we can gain some footing soon.

While I have been scratching out square roots with my pencil, across the office Stanley has been doodling. Stanley is one of the National Service Personnel currently employed at Opportunity International. Every Ghanaian who attends university is required to serve one year through the National Service program, which places him at a government agency, a school, or, if there are some left over, a business. This year there was an excess and so it is that Stanley has a desk and a chair but no real assignment, since he has not yet been trained by OI. So until he goes to Kumasi to complete the two-week training program he has agreed to help me out.

Yesterday we went out in the morning so he could take the reins on the survey process (that he speaks English and Twi is more than a little helpful) and maybe also the project of defining markets. I think it’s the first time I have been a delegator and an instructor in a business setting and it’s a little awkward to tell him what to do. He’s more of an expert than I am as far as Ghanaian business practices are concerned, and is probably equally a non-expert in the science of surveys. But we’re making a go of it. If it proves to be a truly African arrangement, he’ll leave for OI training as soon as he gets really good at conducting surveys.

In other news, I went to Peter’s house again to give him some information on community banks in Accra. This time there was much less fanfare and Peter was decidedly sedate. I think his coolness might have been due to the fact that I interrupted TV time. When I walked in he, Emilia, and three other men were sitting silently around the inner room in the glow of the set and the spinning multicolor light. They were watching a South African soap opera called “Generations” which seemed a lot like US soaps, except that it depicts both black social circles and white ones that rarely intersect. This way they can retain a multicolored audience.

Peter spoke slowly and quietly, and didn’t try to start conversation, although he still did radiate confidence and kindness. When I asked how his business (of renting apartments) was going, he described his newest plan: to open a snack bar by the road. Using his fryer (I don’t remember whether I mentioned that before—it is a plug-in, self-contained deal that also serves as a conversation piece in the living room) he plans to turn out samosas and spring rolls along with the usual Ghanaian fare (fou-fou, banku, kelewele). I assured him that his would be the only snack bar offering such a variety of foods and that I’d be there on opening day to try all of them. NB: this time there was no water-sharing ritual.

Finally, I had my taste of home last night when Justin and Matt (American, big wheel at OI) and I ate dinner at Champs, the sports bar at the ritzy Paloma Hotel. Inside is pool tables, a dart board, big screen TVs, various jerseys hanging from the ceiling, and even a sports-themed menu (“Sandwedges” instead of sandwiches, etc.). Also, true to US sports bar form, the food was mediocre at best. It’s funny the way that one extraneous ingredient can turn an otherwise good attempt at a particular cuisine into a complete joke. In the case of my chicken fajita salad, that ingredient was cucumber-dill salad. Luckily we hadn’t come for the meal, but for the beer and trivia contest. But the rest of the night was a success, as we won trivia (to the tune of 300,000 cedis = $35, which paid for a big dinner and a bunch of beer). Unfortunately, the winning trivia team is responsible for the following week’s trivia challenge. So we’ll have to return to Champ’s at least one more time. The good news: last week’s winners drink free.

Thanks for all the emails and pictures. It is great to hear from all of you. Keep me posted on goings on stateside and elsewhere, and be well. Love, Jake.