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.