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.