You lose some, you win some.

A week ago today I was back at Champs. It was trivia night, and I had promised Chang (a recent graduate of U. Chicago and OI’s newest intern) I’d show her what little I knew about the social opportunities for ex-pats here. It seemed like an obvious choice; the place was packed as usual and there was hardly a Ghanaian to be found, save the wait staff. Our motley crew won the tequila round and took home the coveted second place honors (GHC 200,000 prize, with no obligation to run the contest the following week), and in the process ate an impressive quantity of greasy food. Enchanting!

But Friday I suffered from post-Champs disorder (PCD). This is the only time I have known a restaurant to poison its patrons with such regularity that the infection has earned a name of its own. Yet Champs remains a popular spot, and even claims many experienced PCD sufferers as regulars. (By now, one assumes, they know their way around the menu.) For the record, this uncanny client retention attests more to the dearth of alternatives than to Champs’ “delightful ambience”, “hip, attractive crowd”, or “distinctive character”. There’s only one trivia game in town.

PCD is a combination of food poisoning and self-condemnation. Inevitably, the discomfort of a digestive tract gone haywire is compounded by the knowledge that you gambled and lost. Frequently exacerbating the latter is the fact that PCD seems impervious to the “safe-ordering” prophylaxis. That is, although you order fried chicken strips and French fries while the rest of your table opts for octopus sashimi, you’re the one bent over a toilet the next morning. (For those who like the taste of irony, though, this can actually be a mitigating factor.)

Friday morning my alarm sounded at the usual 6:15, and the act of sitting up seemed to crack open a delicate capsule of hot, black bile lodged somewhere in my lower back. Its contents diffused immediately through my midsection and, vaguely aware of what was in store (but hoping it was a fluke), I went back to sleep immediately. I woke up again at 8:00 to throbbing kidneys that somehow powered a belt of hurting like an evil heating pad all the way around my midsection. But the pains were not as sharp as they had been earlier, so I tentatively got dressed, took some yerba mate tea bags—“Tones stomach and aids digestion,” says the package—from home, and headed for the office.

I hadn’t sweated through my first cup of tea at work when I knew the day was over. Quickly I gathered my things and made for the exit, but halfway down the stairs I had to divert into the bathroom (better there than in the taxi home, anyway). Then at home I laid flat on my back on the foam mattress, alternately sweated and slept, watched a bootleg DVD of The Departed—probably not the best treatment for nausea—and then spent some time focusing in on the visceral feeling of sickness: What hurts exactly? And how does it hurt? I drifted off to sleep staring inwardly at the glowing iron spikes in my kidneys.

Whether it was due to the above exercise or to the nature of PCD itself I cannot say, but by Saturday morning I was much improved, and by noon I was right as rain.

On Tuesday the sun was scorching, it was dusty, I haggled with a taxi driver for the fare to work (Oti has been MIA for over a week), ate my usual egg-and-bread breakfast, and settled into a day at the office like any other. Around 10 Mavis, Stanley, and I set out for Makola, the site of last week’s massive sacking by the AMA.

The streets still seem empty, but the market has begun to grow back like the branches of a harshly pruned forsythia. From the storefronts lining the streets tabletop stands and blankets sprawled with goods emerge like spry green shoots. For sale are bags of candy, plastic wastebaskets, lanterns, soap, hand-wrapped baggies of powdered indigo dye, wheelie suitcases. A few young women sashay down the sidewalks with big plastic tubs on their heads, mostly selling the ubiquitous half-liter sachets of water. “Jaaaaahhz pyooAHtahhhhhhh….” (“Just pure water.”) Because my eyes wander, and maybe because I’m a lanky, gawky obruni, people call me out while I walk. “Hey white man! What do you want? Come take a look.”

It is buoyant, vital commerce in the hot and dusty streets. I am sweating through my shirt. The roads themselves are rough and strewn with mango-sized chunks of cement and rock. In some spots the sidewalk has caved in to form treacherous, gaping holes down into sludge-filled sewers. But there is no problem, no contradiction there; nor is there any sense of a problem solved or an obstacle overcome. The hazards are as sure as sunrise. They are not cause for complaint, and they do not require repair—they hardly demand attention. (In fact, it appears as if I’m the only one who thinks they are “hazardous” at all.) The water-selling women’s feet seem to know instinctively where to step.

Meanwhile, I’m engaged in a Frogger-like meander: fast in the straightaways, awkward lateral steps, queer shuffling in narrow bottlenecks. I have felt this way before in some train stations, glancing nervously between the departures board and the track signs, squinting, looking again, doubling back. All around is a flowing stream of daily commuters who glide effortlessly to the right track at the right time. It’s like watching fish in water.

I think that’s one reason it’s so enjoyable to come to Makola: here the characters are entirely in their element—the adaptation is complete. What appears to the outsider as an impediment is to the expert no such thing, having been smoothed by the force of repetition. And since it is the individual who adapts to the market (and not vice versa), the result is the resident population of savants who—each one with miraculous nonchalance—make up the buzzing, chattering whole. Along the invisible time-smoothed grooves of the marketplace flows the stuff of daily life; and what appears chaotic is actually ordered, even efficient.

But it is certainly not efficient like a Target Greatland with its acres of aisles of shelves of individually-wrapped and barcoded goodies. No, this model’s efficiency (and magic) lies in its immediacy. It is more like a stock exchange than a store. No prices; just deals. Supply and demand are spontaneous, organic forces to be coordinated by hand. So here one truly makes deals—makes them from nothing at all. And that, surely, is another reason why walking here is invigorating: one can’t help but observe hundreds of these exchanges, and so one constantly bears witness to that great human alchemy—mutual gains from trade.

I guess that’s just a fancy (obnoxious?) way to say that it feels good to see people bargain, agree, and exchange. It feels good to be yelled at by a lady who is trying to sell me a huge (like two of my fists!) live land snail. It feels good not to step into the fetid knee-deep sludge.

At the risk of oversimplifying (it wouldn’t be the first time), Makola this morning—bright noise, snails, rebirth from the sacking, indigo dye—seems to be the living and continually-unfolding expression of a single fact: You go into the marketplace to get the things you need. What could be simpler? Just say it—it even sounds plain. But here it is, articulated in a hundred colors and a thousand sounds, the kingdom from the mustard seed.

Hell, maybe it just feels good to be out of the office and in a setting where I can’t even pretend to know what I’m doing. Whatever it is, or was, it seemed to be in abundant supply; and I plan to return and fill my cup as needed. Who knew the elixir was so close at hand?