Overdue Update

Two words: New Digs. Ten days ago I packed my things and brought them to another 3BR house about a mile away from my house in South Labadi Beach Estates. This one is smaller and sits on a compound behind a larger house occupied by a Ghanaian family. My room here is not large and is oddly shaped. There are windows on two sides and the floor is smooth tile. High on the south wall is my new best friend: a Deltac air conditioner with remote control. As I write this paragraph I’m delightfully chilly. Last night it was so cold I had to pull my sheet over my legs.

There are other perks, too—consistent water, comfortable couches, and two new roommates. On the day I moved in there was also a generator by the front door, but it was removed soon afterwards for repairs, since it was found to be leaking gasoline into the living room. You can’t have everything. But my fingers are crossed and I’m patiently waiting for its return.

It’s likely to turn out to be an important appliance in the coming weeks. Actually, the important appliance. The last report from Akosombo was ominous—2.1” of water and two spinning turbines separating most of Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso from a merciless light off. Now the two turbines are down to one and the 2.1” is down to an even slimmer margin.

A lot of the expats working in development here “know somebody” at “the embassy”, and he invariably has some dismal news to report on the power issue. Besides these rumors there are two facts: (1) In 25 years of assiduous daily recordkeeping of the water level at Akosombo, the reservoir’s lowest day has never come before 1 August, and (2) A dam is being constructed in the south of Burkina Faso, upstream from Lake Volta on one of its chief tributaries, and the reservoir behind it is currently being filled. (1) tells us that we shouldn’t expect rising water levels for quite a while, and (2) tells us that, even when the rains come up north and the tributaries start to flow, we’ll only get a modest trickle while the reservoir in Burkina swells.

That guy at the embassy, though, has a number of forecasts, none of which is very optimistic. The best of them has lights off in Accra for a full 24 hours every third day starting in mid-May; the worst has a total blackout for the whole country beginning May 1 (tomorrow).

Whatever is the case, it’s good that Cathy made it here while the power schedule is consistent and fairly accommodating. She walked out of Kotoka International last Sunday at 9:30am, fresh off the direct flight from JFK, with a banjo in one hand and a big duffel stuffed full of Entenmann’s multigrain bars over her shoulder. Cathy taught me number theory, cofounded the legendary folkgrass outfit Twenty-second String, and is my good friend. She ditched her last week of lectures to come to Africa with her banjo and multigrain bars.

We went straight to the Regency Coconut Grove Hotel, where there were no rooms available. Luckily there were beers available and so we had that instead.

Like most Ghanaians I’ve met, Cathy is friendly, good-natured, and not shy. She likes to laugh, too, and that served her well. We went together to the OI office Monday morning and she quickly struck out for Makola market with a pocketful of cedis on a mission for cloth. She navigated the place easily, never stepped in a gutter, made friends, and bought fabric. She also established her M.O. for the week: Go, Do. Between Monday morning and Friday afternoon, while I inconsiderately spent many daylight hours in the office, Cathy crisscrossed the city, tracing a seemingly effortless arc from dressmakers to drum lessons.

Wednesday afternoon was a highlight in the long cement building where the Africana dance troupe practices. It was hot. The way the drumming rings deep inside the ears, so that when you step outside all the sounds seem far away; and the black nylon running pants the men wear, soaked completely through. When they stand in one place in between dances they drip pools of sweat. Cathy said the dancers redefined “sexy”.

I think they also redefined “friendly”. Cathy arranged with Junior, whose bead creations were pictured in a long-ago post, to buy a drum. He makes those, too. Thursday she went back to the long cement building, picked up her djembe, and took a two-hour drum lesson from Aziz. And then the three of them were friends.

Friday afternoon we went up to Akosombo, almost the same trip I made with Mom about a month before. We arrived at the Akosombo Continental Hotel soon after dark and sat on a patio jutting out over the river’s edge. Just downstream was the unlit Adome bridge. Lonely cars drove over, silent pairs of ghostly headlights trundling low and flat through the black sky. We ate drank and talked and also sat quietly for a little while. There were tiny winged ants and other bugs. One was long and skinny like a flying grasshopper. It flew right into the side of Cathy’s head, then sputtered off to land on some other piece of the patio. There was an animal somewhere close by making an electronic hiccup sound.

The next morning we walked in the hotel’s impressive menagerie. They have at least ten monkeys of various species in three cages, parrots and parakeets, a crocodile, two duikers, and a huge turkey. Cathy observed that the turkey could probably beat either of the duikers (miniature antelopes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duiker) in a fight.

We also hired a small powerboat (with a captain) for a trip to the low side of the dam. Speeding up the Volta River past mud huts and dugout canoes dragged up on the shores, we passed under the swooping powerlines stretched a quarter mile between Erector-set towers. Six black cables on the six arms of each tower and as you approach, pass underneath, and retreat, their smooth arcs seem gracefully to bend and tilt, intersection points sliding along the curves; the steep lush hills on the east bank of the river; scalloped cirrus clouds in a high sky—the place was wide, wide open.

At the base of the dam the river is a wide basin. We approached close enough to see the meager bubbling of the outflow, one grate of six gurgling quietly, the rest still and silent. After a couple minutes looking around we sped back down the wide river, under the slow-motion dance of the catenary powerlines.

On the way back to Accra we stopped at the bead section of the Krobo-Odumase market, aisle upon aisle of brightly-colored glass. As we walked in from the street Cathy carried a plastic bag full of the last of the multigrain bars. Having handed out some 30 lbs of them over the course of the week, she didn't have many left--maybe 40 bars or so. As we approached three teenage boys walking out towards the street Cathy produced a handful of the individually-wrapped bars and offered them: "Do you want some multigrain bars?" The boys happily accepted and one asked me for some water from my bottle. By the time I handed it to him a small crowd had assembled around us and Cathy reached into the bag and held out fistfuls of bars and the people grabbed at them. The crowd grew and the number of outstretched arms multiplied and within half a minute it was a roiling scene of groping hands gobbling up as many bars as they could. Some bars fell on the ground and then people dropped to the ground and the hands gobbled them up immediately. People began to ignore the handfuls and reach directly for the bag, which was getting light anyway, and Cathy cracked a smile. She let go of it and for an instant it was suspended there by a web of black arms, hands kneading and pulling in all directions. It broke and the remaining bars fell like a pinata's cargo onto the dusty ground and there was a mad scramble for them. People hoarded and tug-o-war'd and yelped. Cathy was laughing and we walked deeper into the market towards the beads.

Cathy’s flight was scheduled to depart from Accra at 10:30 Sunday morning. She left my house at 5am although it’s only 15 minutes from the airport. She had heard that check-in closed three hours before flight time and wanted to be extra safe. Before she left she used my phone to call Junior and Aziz. When she got back to New York she told me that, after she called, they had biked halfway across the sleeping city to the airport and waited with her until she walked to the gate at 9:30. They just wanted to see her off. I wonder if it ever occurred to them as they pedaled through the hushed predawn that they had met Cathy only four days before. My guess is it didn’t.