Monday morning I left the house at the regular time, around 7:40. My house is at the back of a compound beside a small potholed lane. Beyond is a strip of dirt and high mangy grass and trees, then a wide and deep sewer channel with angled cement walls, and then Ring Road, where I catch a taxi each morning. I walked across the lane and the dirt strip and crossed the sewer on the same rickety wooden span as always. That left me on the shoulder of the southbound side of Ring Road, where I waited for a break in traffic and walked to the grassy median, then across the two northbound lanes to the other shoulder.

That’s how I get to the spot where I catch a taxi. Here you say “pick a taxi” instead of “catch a taxi”. The walk takes less than two minutes in all.

Taxis have no meters and I always negotiate the price in advance. Just about every weekday I take a taxi from my house to the office, and every time I pay 20,000 cedis. You might say that the price of that taxi ride is 20,000 cedis. But every morning we play a game, me and Taxi Driver X. The opening is simple and strictly-choreographed like a good, clean box step. He pulls over to the shoulder with the passenger window rolled down and I begin.

“Good morning, sir. How?”

“Fine. You?”

“Fine, thank you. I’m going to Accra, Wato side, near Post Office.”

“Accra Post Office. Hmm.”

“I will pay twenty.”

Normally this is where the game really takes off, but Monday morning’s Taxi Driver X immediately tipped his king and emptied his pockets. “Sit down,” he said, and I did. It was as easy as taking a ripe banana from a bunch.

We set off north on Ring Road and the driver made pleasant conversation. His car was neat inside and he kept the radio turned down low. The ride was a sweet piece of hard candy twist-wrapped in purple cellophane. He made an inexplicable U-turn, but I had total confidence.

It became clear that he was taking the High St route, through Accra’s biggest construction project. A two-lane road is being widened to four. It’s due to finish eight months ago or some other time, whichever comes first. For now the westbound lane is buried under the rubble of a sewer excavation. The two uncompleted lanes are a flattened bed of cracked clay soil and silty sand. They are so busy being used a diversion for the westbound traffic that there is no time to pave them.

On a hot, dry morning like Monday’s, a heavy cloud of fine dust and exhaust drapes itself over the construction zone, too lazy to get up and go to work. We crawled along westward. Somewhere near the Supreme Court Taxi Driver X shifted into neutral and the engine died. Immediately the cars behind erupted in a honking chorus. The sweet hard candy ride became ashes in my mouth. When it refused to start again Taxi Driver X jumped out and ran to the back to begin pushing, leaving the steering wheel unattended. Realizing his mistake he called me to the back to push while he took care of steering. The well-dressed obruni pushing a car through the choking cloud attracts laughter and calls of “Pusher! Pusher!”

After a short distance Taxi Driver X took pointed the car at a driveway to a vast dirt lot on the other side of the road. The car rolled dumb and heavy through the lane of slowly-oncoming traffic like a big, misshapen pumpkin that wins no ribbons at the State Fair.

Now sweaty and in a foul mood, I prepared to pay the driver half the fare and walk the rest of the way to work. But he didn’t have any change and suggested that I try and get some from the men hanging around the tro-tros in the dirt lot. One of them made change for me and I turned back to see the driver pushing the car down a natural incline to the corner of the lot farthest from the road. He had made over a hundred yards in those three minutes and was still pushing himself and his car away from me.

When I caught up with him I asked him why he was trying to escape from his paying customer. “The car, if I leave it there they will worry me.” I guess I wasn’t really expecting a better answer; anyway it was not necessary to look any deeper into the identity of “they” or the nature of “worry”. His response was a forgettable breakfast of plain crackers. There were no bacon and eggs underneath. I gave Taxi Driver X 12,000 cedis and began the walk back to the road. He ran after me to complain. My pants were sticking to my shins. It was around 8:05.

Approaching work I found that Josephine the Breakfast Woman had not come that day. On a wooden table in the car park across the street from the office she prepares bread with margarine, Laughing Cow cheese, marmalade, or fried eggs, and delivers it to the office when it’s ready. She also makes tea, coffee, and Milo (a chocolaty hot breakfast drink from Nestle). If she’s there I buy 2,000 cedis of bread and one triangle of cheese, and if she’s not there I usually don’t eat breakfast. But I was hungry from the pushing and walking and had been looking forward to placing my order. Disappointment made my briefcase heavier and its strap dug into my shoulder as I crossed the street towards the office.

As I reached the first floor landing I saw Josephine’s daughter Rachel in her school uniform carrying a wicker basket full of polythene bags. She called me over, poked around in the basket, chose a bag, and handed it to me. “My mom couldn’t come today but she made yours.” It was the usual small microns-thin black plastic bag, its handles tied into a tiny intractable knot. Stapled to the bag was a small strip of paper ripped from a ruled sheet. There was my name, “JAKE”, written on the strip in pencil. Inside was my bread and cheese.

That bread and cheese was a good breakfast, and it was also a sponge that wiped the whole day clean as a smooth countertop. The morning’s events flew right off like dry crumbs.

At precisely noon every weekday a siren moans over Accra Central. It sounds just like my idea of an air raid alert: a low, quiet start that crescendos as it slides up to the main pitch. That pitch sits there for a few seconds, open like a cartoon mouth in the downward-U shape of the entrance to a dark tunnel, with no teeth or tongue visible. It is a hollow, vaulted, echoing sound. To me it has come to mean lunch.

George and I walked out the back entrance of the office and around to the street. The building next door is four stories high like ours. At noon on Monday its front was obscured by a clutter of rickety scaffolding. All the way up by the roof two men teetered on a precarious platform of loose boards. They leaned against the wall of the building with chisels and mallets, tink tink tink—pause—crisp woody crack of breaking pottery. They were chiseling tiles off the cement façade of the building. Once free from the façade the tiles and mortar didn’t waste any time. They got right on falling and shattering on the sidewalk below. Some rotated and toppled gracefully and others just bombed straight down without any acrobatics.

So their performances varied, but the finale was always the same: every piece of falling debris hit the sidewalk and flew apart. No kind of barrier had been erected around the scaffolding, so the general downtown public was free to participate. You could watch debris fall down and shatter from any vantage point you wished. You could stand directly underneath the scaffolding if you were feeling adventurous.

It was necessary to make some adjustments. Anybody who wanted to walk past the building and avoid the debris, for example, had to make a wide arc into oncoming traffic. The man who sells mobile phones and accessories out of a glass-paneled wooden case along the sidewalk there smartly set up shop behind a low cinderblock wall. That kept his goods out of harm’s way. Still, not many customers had come by that day. He knew they were being driven away by the threat of injury and was annoyed about the construction work, but didn’t see any good solution. He summarized his assessment with a scowl and a disapproving shake of the head: “You know these boys. They get thousand cedis and they would bring something new. Who for complain? They think they are big men.”

George and I watched a few more pieces of debris fall and then swung a wide arc into the road on the way to the lunchtime rice vendor.

Most taxi drivers in Accra decorate the rear windows of their cars with stick-on letters in wavy fonts. A good portion of the messages are in a local language (usually Twi), and the majority are religious—usually either direct Bible quotes or chapter and verse references. Some are otherwise. “Shut Up” and “Respect the Hustlers” are two of my favorites.

But one taxi stands out. I have seen it three times, always a momentary glimpse as it darts off onto some impossible side street. Fortunately my friend Matt is keener and nimbler than I; when the elusive beast showed itself he was ready. Here it is:

What does it mean? Is it an algebraic statement? A garbled sentence of symbolic logic? Pure philosophy? Monkeys at typewriters? Three ideas:

(1) “Don’t worry about what anybody else is doing; take care of business.” This reading was suggested by Amanda Johnson, who works at the desk opposite mine. Different people see the world in different ways, but each of us is at the center of his own universe. The clause “If 7 + 2 is = to 11” is the logical conclusion of the fact of difference: in the extreme case, everyone else agrees (and what is that but a universal law?) that 7 + 2 = 11. However disconcerting this may be, the second half of the sentence still follows. One is stuck in one’s own universe always and everywhere, and only through one’s tireless effort and action does it keep from total collapse and the annihilation of its very center. There are mouths to feed and bills to pay, laws and conventions notwithstanding.

(2) “Math is for the birds.” This is probably the straightest reading. Exploiting the lack of punctuation, we can invert to get “Who cares if 7 + 2 is = to 11”. But, in my view, this interpretation can be rejected on aesthetic grounds alone.

(3) “Conventions are the glue that holds the universe together.” Read “If 7 + 2 is = to 11, then who cares?” Indeed. If the most fundamental truths were violated, who would care about anything? If the sun rose from the west and the sky turned orange, would we not devour ourselves in a massive primal orgy? Would Starbucks fail to open on time? More precisely, if our most fundamental truths are actually false, then we are utterly lost, here and now. I suppose this is simply a variation on (1). Here the “If 7 + 2…” is taken to be a “real” fact (how did we get it wrong?); and we are so helpless in our misperception that the universe threatens to cave in.

The Twi phrase “Efa Wo Ho Ben?” simultaneously supports (1) and undermines the entire exercise. It translates: “Is it your concern?” Reinforcement, or meta-commentary? Never underestimate the subtlety of Ghanaian taxi drivers.

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It seems like more and more planes pass over the roof of my house. They make a noise like an angry milk steamer. I usually imagine a big ravenous machine mouth with gnashing metal teeth, furiously eating its way across the sky.

Three weeks ago today I was back at Safari Beach Lodge. The day was hot and bright. Pamela and I walked a couple miles down the beach to the point, climbed around on the rocks, and walked back. We ate as well as ever and after dinner Saturday we went for a short stroll. The night was very dark and the foam from the breaking waves rolled in and spread smooth arcs down the beach like bunting of rich white velvet. It seemed to glow. Phosphorescents in the sand set off pinprick flashes of green light with every step that burned and died quickly in our footprints.

If it seems like a dream, maybe it was. Safari is a real place, but the times I’ve been there the elements have always conspired to make it seem otherwise. The fact is that all you have to do is show up; then sometime during dinner once it’s dark you look up from your kingfish and see the paths winding through the palms from the main building to the bungalows, and all along the paths are little posts with oil lanterns hanging on them. Beyond the lanterns’ light there might be nothing at all but the soft rumbling of the waves and the clatter of palm fronds in the breeze. Your thoughts haven’t ventured beyond the ends of the long, curved beach since you arrived. It could just as well be an island in your mind.

We were back in Accra by Sunday night, picking our way through the cacophony of honking and lurching vans at Circle, eventually jamming ourselves into a tro-tro bound for Danquah Circle. Back to “reality”.

The real purpose of this entry is to say a little bit about my friend Aziz Mohammed (at right above). He is a member of the Africana dance troupe, which I’ve written about before. I knew him only in that capacity until Cathy came to visit in the spring. The two of them were fast friends and they kept in touch after she left. When I returned home in July Cathy gave me some money to take to him. She said it was a contribution towards his AIDS education program.

That was the first I had heard of it. Aziz explained it to me when I next saw him: for the past 18 months he has been working with a group of about 30 kids (mostly teenagers) from a section of Accra near where he lives. His main goal in organizing the group was to give the members a safe, wholesome place to go and a positive community to belong to (think Boys & Girls Club); in addition he has tried to spread the good word about sexual and reproductive health.

Most of the kids come from Nima, a predominantly-Muslim neighborhood. Two-thirds of them are girls. According to Aziz, some of them, and many of their peers from the neighborhood, have been pulled out of school early—or never attended at all—so they could earn money. Typically such a girl would spend the day at the roadside walking up and down with a tray on her head selling fruit or water sachets. Most of them will marry young and start having children in their early twenties. They will spend most of their young-adult and adult lives contributing to Ghana’s astronomical fertility rate.

Aziz isn’t a doctor or a public health professional, though—he’s a dancer (see above). Fortunately, the kids prefer dancing to lectures on sexual health. So that’s what they do for a few hours, a couple afternoons each week. They meet at the Nima/Mamobi Learning Center, a spiffy new building recently erected by a Canadian NGO. Inside is a performance space with a stage, a sound booth controlling two powerful speakers, and a full backstage area. The Center’s director agreed to let the group use the facility for free. At a typical weekday meeting, small subgroups learn and rehearse dance routines that Aziz choreographs. Mostly they dance to recorded music, but sometimes Aziz (who is also a drummer) is joined by some percussionists from Africana to provide a live soundtrack. Many of these are “dance dramas”—stories told in words and movements—that illustrate issues in sexual and reproductive health.

Every few months Aziz puts together a program to give the group a chance to perform and to try and spread the word to the community at large. Normally he picks a theme for each program. The last one was about AIDS. Hoping to draw a large crowd, he put up posters around town and asked the principals of local schools to mention the program to their students. He wrote an invitation to his District Assemblyman (a local elected official (roughly the equivalent of a borough president) and went to the Ghana AIDS Commission to request that they send a representative to speak, or at least provide some of the pamphlets and booklets they had given out in the past. In order to avoid any suspicion that he was out to make a profit, he was adamant about asking for non-financial support. (The money to put on the programs comes out of his own savings, plus voluntary donations.)

His District Assemblyman never replied to the invitation, but Aziz visited his office in person and was assured that he would attend. The AIDS Commission also agreed to send someone to give a short lecture on AIDS prevention. But when the day came, the Assemblyman didn’t. Neither did the speaker. Watching the room fill up with neighborhood kids, Aziz tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with the AIDS Commission and eventually dashed across town in a taxi to the office, where he was told that they had never heard of his group or its request.

This all came as a crushing blow. Here was a completely homegrown and genuine effort to improve the community, ignored by the very institutions whose job it is to encourage and support such programs. Through Africana’s interactions with (mostly do-gooding) foreigners, especially its close relationship with the Canadian volunteer placement organization Volunteer Abroad, Aziz knows how much support there is (in word, if not in deed) in the broader development community for programs like his own; but this was a local project, and he had hoped to show that the local community was behind it. No number of well-meaning foreigners can stand in for a District Assemblyman. Advice about AIDS prevention plainly sounds different when it comes from someone who knows the environment in which her audience lives. (It could also be given in Twi.)

But this isn’t a sob story, though Aziz did get heated when he told it to me. After the AIDS program he considered disbanding the group but decided against it. “The kids love it,” he said. He is certainly not a martyr—he really enjoys teaching dancing and watching the kids improve. Above all, he completely avoids the extremes of cynicism and self-righteousness. He speaks with Zen-like clarity and directness about the whole situation. “I know it is a good thing we are doing. We are helping each other. Even though we can’t get the support we need, we will keep trying.”

Two weeks ago Saturday we sat together in the Learning Center while the group rehearsed. That’s when he told me all of the background information above. While he spoke he watched the dancers out of the corner of his eye, occasionally yelling some instructions or clapping at the end of a routine.

Everyone wanted to get it right because they were preparing for another program coming up in a week. This time the theme was “Send the Girl Child to School” and Aziz wasn’t relying on any external assistance (though he made good use of Cathy’s and my donations). He hand-wrote flyers on the backs of glossy posters he found around town and put them up in the neighborhood. Because no one was coming to speak, he added an extended drama piece about girls’ education. He also took me up on my offer to make copies of a half-page typed handout about the importance sending girls to school. In order to increase the participation and get the word out, he personally invited dance groups from local schools.

Last Saturday was the big day. I arrived at the Center around 10am, the advertised starting time, and found the performance space filled with rows of empty wooden folding chairs. There was room for at least 200 people to sit. The program hadn’t started yet, and by 11:30 there were still only a few seats filled. The emcee finally took the stage and announced that the show would be starting soon. But while we waited, wouldn’t we like to see a little dance contest? For the next 45 minutes audience members took the stage three at a time and danced to blaring, fuzzy music (mostly it was P-squared’s “Al-haji”, an Ivorian song that, to me, is the aural equivalent of getting hit square on the head over and over with a mallet). Winners were declared by the applause and hollering of the sparse audience. It seemed like a wash-out.

Once the contest ended I roused myself from the stupor induced by the repetition of that awful song and got my bearings. Many more seats were filled. Aziz was introduced and talked for a couple minutes about the program and its message. Considering the way I’ve seen him throw himself around a stage during Africana rehearsals and performances, he seemed remarkably shy speaking in front of an audience. “Let’s get to the dancing!” he said, and out they came.

Most of the next four hours were filled with hip hop and R&B numbers, with a few notable exceptions. Three girls read poems they had written. There was a longer dance drama about a girl taken out of school to sell pineapples who is then raped by some delinquent boys from her class; the story ends when she discovers she has AIDS. There was also a more uplifting short play in which a mother recounts to her daughters her own struggle to get an education. When her father insists on sending her dimwitted brothers to school instead of her (reprimanding her that she should be in the kitchen), she and her supportive mother walk out. She endures her mother’s untimely death and the prejudice of both her teachers and her classmates, and through a mix of patience and tenacity finally becomes a doctor. Both the dance drama and the short play were shot through with comedy, and the audience—which by that time had grown to over a hundred people, mostly teenaged girls—was thoroughly engaged throughout.

After an incredible ballet piece by Aziz and some of the Africana dancers (where did they learn that?), the program was over. When I walked out, most of the 200 handouts were gone, hopefully bound for the audience members’ homes.

Aziz was also in a hurry, rushing across town to the Trade Fair to perform with Africana at a “Fit for Life” program. But he stopped to thank me for coming and to invite me to an Awards Dinner that night. “The kids have done such a great job. We want to recognize them,” he said.

At 8pm back at the Center, after an hour-long performance at Trade Fair and another mad dash across town, Aziz was exhausted, nearly asleep but running around making sure the food was arriving, popping caps off bottles of soda, joking with the kids, sliding across the stage lip-syncing to an R&B ballad. I didn’t see him sit down once. By the end of the night his energy, and his savings, were utterly depleted from the events of the day. But his spirit was plainly not. Instead he seemed to be fueled by the expression of gratitude for others’ efforts. He thanked the kids and gave out awards to some of the dancers and thanked the Canadian woman for the use of the space and even thanked me, “our special guest from the US”, much to my embarrassment. It would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so utterly and obviously genuine.

I have often been told that those fortunate enough to have plenty should give some back. Among other things, it has engendered some sense of obligation to share some of mine with them. I think it is different with Aziz. What he gets is ours before it is his at all. But this analysis fails to capture the spirit of what he’s doing; at any rate he doesn’t articulate it in these terms. He makes it simpler. Here are some good kids and I have an opportunity to share something nice with them. They might even come out better for it. So let’s do it. What’s so complicated about that?

Do you love Aziz yet? I will be happy to forward any questions, comments, responses, expressions of admiration, etc, his way. Just email jacob.appel@gmail.com.