The Central Market of Kumasi (With Pictures!)

Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti kingdom and seat of its highest chief, the Asantehene, is Ghana’s second-largest city. It sits some 170 miles northwest of Accra, in the lush, rolling hills of central Ghana.

I boarded a bus in a dusty parking lot near Circle around 11am Thursday. Having paid the full GHC 80,000 (about $9) for the “luxury” bus, I was ready for a smooth and relaxing ride in a cool, spacious seat, just like I’ve seen in Amtrak Acela ads. As it turned out, the ride was admirably cool thanks to full-time air-con. There was also room to stretch my legs! Smooth was unfortunately out of the question due to the condition of the road; and relaxing was a pipe dream, anyway. The entire 6 hour journey (for readers without a pocket calculator handy, that’s a blistering 28mph average speed) there were Nigerian movies playing on the TV at the front of the bus. These films, well-loved by millions of Ghanaians, are incredibly low-budget and outrageous. They are the West African descendants of the Jerry Springer Show. Although they visit the usual dramatic themes—love, death, betrayal, ambition, etc—they are so (unintentionally) shoddy and over-the-top that they serve mainly to insult the tastes of the people who watch them.

Maybe that’s too harsh, but it’s hard to be complimentary when these movies are being amplified over the crackling, hissing bus PA system at unimaginable volumes as we trundle through hour five down the jalopy highway between Accra and Kumasi.

But eventually we arrived and I found my way to the Central Market—the largest outdoor market in West Africa, according to the guidebooks. It is the lowest part of the city, sitting in a depression between four hills. In the picture below, taken from the hill overlooking the southwest corner, the area bordered by the tro-tro station in the immediate foreground and by the substantial buildings on the hills to each side is the market. It’s well over a square mile.

But on Thursday I hardly walked through it—it was almost sunset and I didn’t want to find myself (or lose myself) in that impossible maze in the dark. So I stayed mostly to the edge and continued around the west side, where I saw a familiar sight in the waning daylight: trees whose branches were heavy with hanging bats like big dead leaves curled up on themselves. There were many thousands of them. I watched for a few minutes and, without obvious provocation, the trees began exploding one by one in whirling clouds of chattering and flapping that merged before the setting sun.

Had it not been for the persistent ringing of the wake-up call, I probably would have slept through most of Friday morning. Burrowed under a bedspread, head buttressed by soft pillows, heavy drapes drawn, the exotic sting of cold air in my nostrils—these are pleasures well known to (and often taken for granted by) experienced business travelers. But opening my eyes in the air-conditioned cave that was 6:30am in Room 110 at the Royal Park hotel, getting up wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me.

Nonetheless, by 8am I was at the Kejetia branch of OI, which sits on one of the hills overlooking the Central Market (actually, it’s just to the left of the frame of the photo above). There I met with the branch manager who arranged for me to accompany one of the Susu collectors on her daily rounds through the market. Susu is a savings product designed specifically for petty traders where the customer commits to deposit a daily deposit of a certain size—usually between GHC 10,000 and GHC 100,000 ($1 to $10)—and a bank officer visits his business each day to collect. Cynthia, the collector I went out with Friday morning, had 125 clients to visit. She led me through the streets, into courtyards, along narrow alleys, up crumbling stairways, down impossibly crowded aisles of the market, weaving a path whose complexity I cannot describe. Theseus would have run out of thread in our labyrinth. And as we slid along our incredible route, passing thousands, tens of thousands, of dark black faces, she would stop at a stall and *pop* familiarity! A short conversation, an exchange of soft-worn bills, a line on the ledger card, and the interaction was done. As it was Friday, about half of her clients didn’t make any deposit; she explained that they wanted to save their money for the weekend, but that on Monday they would all pony up their appointed sums.

To try and give some sense of the variety of the customers’ livelihoods, here is an incomplete list:

• Rice and Stew (prepared)
• Fabric
• Rice (raw)
• Shoe adhesive and leather
• Butchers
• Vegetables
• Shoe heel wedge cutter
• Groundnut paste
• Sugar/flour/milk powder
• Toiletries
• Bread
• Cooking pots
• Candy
• Sandal manufacturer
• Machete sales
• Beaded jewelry
• Secondhand clothing
• New clothing
• Newspapers
• Ground red pepper
• Electrical supplies
• Secondhand shoes
• Luggage
• Plastic bags
• Laundry soap
• Lamps
• Embroiderer
• Legumes (raw)
• Cosmetics
• Tailor
• Sunglasses
• Radios

And that was only the morning. I left after two hours, less than half way through Cynthia’s appointed rounds, and headed back to the branch. During that time I didn’t have my camera, but I had it when I returned alone in the afternoon to try (unsuccessfully) to develop some rough mental blueprint of the market and to consider the possibility of breaking it down into smaller clusters for the purposes of our study (prognosis: impossible).

Below are some of the pictures I took. General warning: the pictures do not capture the intensity of the market, its overwhelming size and scope. In fact, they’re completely deceiving because they are silent, self-contained, and individual: single stalls, tables, or people. But to stand there is to be inundated by many: many bodies, many smells, many colors, many sights, many sounds. Maybe it will suffice to say that, every time I snapped a picture, there was someone just inches outside the frame calling out, “Hey! Obruni! What are you doing?” or grabbing my arm, or laughing, or making a sale, or otherwise creating waves in the fabric of space-time. Serious warning: there are five shots from the butchering shed. Why so many gruesome pictures of raw meat? For two reasons: (1) the butchers were, on the whole, the nicest group of people I met at the market, happy to talk and let me take pictures. Go figure. (2) I’ve never seen anything like the inside of that shed, and suspect most of you haven’t either.

Shoe Alley: The first place I walked through with Cynthia. I can’t believe I managed to find it again in the afternoon. It is accessed by going through dark passage at the back of the dusty courtyard of a nondescript building on a side street. About 300 yards long and five feet wide, it climbs up a hill beside the market (of which it is not technically a part). On both sides are stalls with floor-to-ceiling lattices hung with leather shoes and sandals.

My Favorite Pepper Seller: This woman called to me and spoke very good English. We talked for a little while and she agreed that I could take a picture of her and her peppers. After I snapped it, she smiled and asked, “Where’s the money?” I told her I wouldn’t pay her, but that she could have some candy (I had just bought a big bag of individually-wrapped caramels). She said, “Okay!” and grabbed the bag out of my hand, emptied half of it onto her lap, and laughed the heartiest laugh I’ve heard in a long time. I screwed up my face and said “Oh!” but the women sitting at the tables near her saw what happened and started howling, too. There was nothing else for me to do, so I laughed so hard I almost cried.

Butchering Shed Pictures

What’s Inside a Cow?: At bottom left is the lung, bottom center is the gizzard (the flesh inside is incredibly deep ruby red), dominating the center are the intestines, the furry bag at right is one of the stomachs (turned inside out), the bubbly-looking stuff at top left is mostly fat (I think), and the blurry part being sliced at top center is the penis (which looks like a 3’x 2” tapeworm). Hungry?

Fat, and The Butchers Who Sell It: The greenish-white lumps at right are portions of pure beef fat.

Goat Heads: Mainly for soup, though I’m told that people eat the brain separately.

A Man and His Cow Head Halves: Maybe gratuitous, but this is here on a table along with everything else. And the man pictured, who produced this incredible gore, was one of the nicest people I spoke to all day.

The Whole Damned Thing: The man at this table let me take a picture, but couldn’t tell me what these are used for. I have to guess this one weighed at least 30 lbs. Who’s carrying that home for dinner? This was probably the hardest thing for me to look at all day. The skin is rough, like sandpaper.

No More Butchering Shed Pictures

Cloth and More Cloth: This one stall was bursting with so much color that I couldn’t pass by without taking a picture (or two).

The staggering variety of the single cloth stall above illustrates a difficulty that I have hardly begun to digest. The thousands of aisles of stalls, the myriad skills at work and products for sale, the impossible mass of humanity in that low-lying market in Kumasi—it is a composition of individuals so numerous that any attempt to grasp them is immediately confounded. But cutting a razor-thin path through that mayhem I came face to face with hundreds of them, exchanged words, made real human contact, and continued on, knowing that I could never find my way back. How numerous, and how brief, those sparks—and how much more numerous the sparks that were not struck, the aisles I never did (and never will) walk down…

Thomas Wolfe says:

“O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?”

But my feeling is not one of grief, or of missed opportunities; but rather of dizzying awe at the inescapable randomness of my jaunt through this continent. And the detail in this infinitesimally thin slice—does it even make sense to speak of a whole pie? Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, and standing inside Kumasi’s vast Central Market one couldn’t disagree. But then, climbing the hill back to the Kejetia branch, the particular fading into the general, the swarm of activity blurring continuously into a nebulous cloud and eventually into a bounded whole, the deception of sight and the conceit of knowing.

Every night at dusk the bats fly, millions of them, over the dispersing atoms of the market while the place folds in on itself and lays down to sleep.

The Silent Guardian

Warning: the following took place here in Accra, but is not expressly about Accra. Is this a welcome increase in the scope of this blog’s reportage? Or am I just overstepping, wandering onto subjects about which I’m not qualified to speak at all? I apologize in advance since it’s likely to be the latter.

Tuesday night I ate dinner at Sarah’s apartment. Not, loyal readers, the Buddhic Sarah of OI fame whose profile appeared in a prior installment of this blog, but rather Sarah the recent Yale graduate and Fulbright scholar. She has a beautiful apartment in the upscale Airport Residential neighborhood of Accra that she shares with five other young ladies. We ate a delightful meal of chicken, potato pancakes, and tomato-and-bread salad, kicked back, drank wine, and generally savored the high life in all its temperature-controlled splendor.

After dinner had finished the doorbell rang and it was Ryan, one of the six US Marines stationed in Accra—guarding the embassy—and the boyfriend of one of Sarah’s roommates. We found ourselves in a conversation that somehow meandered onto the topic of non-lethal weapons. I had recently read a BBC article on the Silent Guardian (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6297149.stm), a weapon designed mostly for crowd control that has been recently unveiled by the US military. It’s a large Humvee-mounted dish that focuses a high-energy beam on a point up to 500m away. The beam penetrates clothing and the first .5mm of human skin, and produces an excruciating burning sensation which subsides immediately when the beam is removed. It leaves no physical trace. Claims about its effects have been verified by journalists who volunteered to be shot by it while it was demonstrated at an Air Force base in Georgia.

I mentioned the article to Ryan, who had not heard of the Silent Guardian but thought it sounded “cool”. He chuckled and advised me that I should never volunteer to be a test subject for a non-lethal weapon. I didn’t need much convincing.

He went on to describe the general purpose of non-lethal weapons and he mentioned a few examples that he had seen or experienced firsthand. “’Non-lethal’ just means ‘pain-compliance’,” he said—that is, distinct from impositions of force designed to incapacitate a target. When you shoot a would-be attacker in the leg (or in the head) the idea is to render him physically incapable of harming you, but the pain-compliance approach seeks to make the would-be attacker decide not to harm you. In the former, pain is a side effect; in the latter, it is a means to an end.

Consider the following from John Alexander, formerly of the US Army Special Operations and now an advocate for non-lethal weapons: “There is a misconception that war is about killing. War is about the imposition of will.”

Indeed, the US military has devised a number of creative ways to impose its will without killing: mace, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the Silent Guardian are some examples. Ryan discussed the first three, in whose application he has been trained, with clinical matter-of-factness. Mace—actually concentrated red pepper—inflicts extraordinary pain but is completely non-lethal (there have been no recorded deaths from it). The 15% concentrate used by the military is enough to cause burning “bad enough that if you had a gun you’d want to shoot yourself,” but the sensation goes away shortly after the spray is washed off. (If the spray is water-based it can be washed off with running water; but if it is oil-based it bonds to skin and you need special soap.) If it gets in your eyes it severely distorts vision but does not permanently impair it. Ryan would know, because every Marine must be a sprayee before he can be a sprayer, and so he has been shot directly in the face with the stuff and made to guess how many fingers his C.O. was holding up. Looking on the bright side, one can at least be happy that they use the low test (15%) version—100% concentrate “would melt your skin straight off.”

Tear gas is similar to mace, but is neither as strong nor as non-lethal—there have been deaths from exposure to very high concentrations of the gas. Typically, though, it is used on large crowds in open areas, while mace is usually applied at close range; its effects are comparatively mild. Ryan suggested that they ought to make a similar crowd-control device with an oscillating sprinkler mounted on a Humvee and connected to a tank of mace inside, thus combining the broad application strategy with the increased pain (read “compliance”).

Finally there are the rubber bullets or, more broadly, any projectile shot from a non-lethal launcher. This is an air-powered rifle with a .62” barrel (like a paintball gun) that shoots missile-shaped projectiles. These may be designed to burst and distribute a payload (e.g. mace or tear gas), or they may simply be made of hard rubber. The weapon is rated non-lethal for 3-150 yards so long as you don’t shoot anybody in the face. While he was on guard duty at a base in the Middle East, Ryan was stationed on a tower overlooking the chainlink fence that marked the boundary of the installation. They had been instructed to keep the fence clear; so whenever someone was too close, or leaning directly on the fence, the Marines would yell to him to move away and would eventually shoot him if he refused. Normally tower guards are armed with traditional rifles but eventually they acquired a couple of non-lethal launchers. Referring to the military leadership, he remarked, “I guess they said it was more humane.”

He mockingly emphasized the word just as people mockingly emphasize other poorly-defined or generally ridiculous terms from the vocabulary of political correctness. Ultimately his attitude was that such a nebulous concept was ill-adapted to the strict utilitarian calculus of military decision-making, and so it ought to be abandoned up front. If nothing else, this seems, to me, (brutally) honest.

But the untraceable and excruciating pain of a concentrated energy beam as a means of persuasion? This is dark magic and finds application in places where blatant military force has generally been deemed inappropriate: places where, when it is put to use despite general condemnation, the best way to fight back is to make public some record of the brutality. An unseemly demonstration or a tight-lipped suspect under interrogation? Zap and it’s a memory—and who can tell the story of the suffering under the ray? There is no scar to testify to the ordeal.

The ease with which Ryan imagined these scenarios suggested that the military has in mind uses of precisely this sort. Imagine the irony: you might be at a rally protesting the use of these weapons when you hear, from the Humvee behind the barricades, the mechanical whine of the Silent Guardian’s dish pivoting to focus on you…

But one hopes such fears won't be realized, so long as we all stay in line. Reassuring, no?

Ashaiman Market: The Top Three

I have to interrupt the other entry I’m writing now for the following urgent report.

Background: The greater Accra metropolitan area, which is usually referred to simply as “Accra”, is actually composed of the city proper and a number of outlying towns. It stretches along the Atlantic coast from the western city limits of Accra to the port at Tema, some 40km to the east. The northern boundary of the city is marked by Achimota forest in the west and Ashaiman in the east. OI recently opened a shiny new branch in Ashaiman and has begun serving the community there. The town of 100,000 is a sprawling jumble of wooden shacks and two-story cinderblock buildings. Many of its residents are petty traders and the economic activity of the town centers around a large outdoor market with long rows of vendors selling goods of all kinds, from produce to clothing to flatware to radios.

I went to the branch there today to talk about incorporating its service area into the interest rate sensitivity study. After meeting with some of the members of the credit department I went out for a loop around the market to try and get a feel for the place. Besides the bright piles of red and green peppers, tables of pungent grilled fish, baggies of sugar and cassava flour, calls of “White man!” and “Krasi Obruni!” (Krasi means Sunday-born, and Sunday-borns are supposed to be lucky. One is also considered lucky to be white. Thus, one is frequently called out as Krasi Obruni.), there were three things that stood out as exceptional:

1) Up against a wooden kiosk was a drift of wicker baskets filled with a variety of things, and on the left side of the drift were three baskets that seemed to contain strange dried animal parts. On closer inspection I found goat skulls with hair still attached; frighteningly large birds’ heads; lizard skulls with rows of shiny white teeth; an entire basket of whole dried salamanders and chameleons whose leathery skin had become delicate like phylo dough and was torn in some places, revealing withered organs inside; and some animals more recently dead that might have been roadkill. I knew that sheep and goat heads are sometimes used to make stock for soups, but I’ve never seen a chameleon-liver pate on a Ghanaian menu, so I had to ask.

The animals are there for use in traditional medicine. They might be ground up and put into salves, balms, or pastes, or they might be ingredients in a remedy to be ingested. Although I wanted to ask more, and perversely wanted to see what strange carcasses were deeper inside the baskets, the smell was a little much, and I made to leave. The woman I had been talking to, seeing that I was getting skittish, made a face of mock disbelief: “Oh! You don’t want to buy anything, white man?” she asked with a kind smile. “Here! I dash you a bird skull!” She picked it up, six inches long with the beak, and presented it.

“Ahh…thank you. I have too many at home, though, already.”

“Oh! Then take a whole bird!” And now she produced one of the roadkill-looking carcasses, small and squashed and dirty, and held it between her thumb and forefinger, making as if to pass it off to me.

She laughed at my involuntary grimace of disgust and let me turn to leave. “Next time, white man!”

2) In a corner of a less-crowded alley near the back of the market a dark man sat on the ground with his legs fully extended to each side in a right angle. In the empty space in front of him was a pile of charcoal. In Ghana charcoal (i.e. wood that has been buried in sand and partially burned, leaving black chunks that can smolder at high heat for hours) is a common cooking fuel. It is sold in sacks and put to use in simple stoves made from old car wheels or sheet metal. In order to fit in the stoves, the logs of charred wood that are dug up from the burning pits must be broken into fairly uniform pieces, and that was this man’s job. His arms, legs, shirt, pants, and feet were completely black. He was so black that the silty dark grey dust from the rough surface of the alleyway that settled on him, kicked up by passersby, stood out like flour against the skin of his feet. I watched him for just a few seconds as he broke down big chunks from the pile in front of him into smaller chunks that he placed in a pile to his side. The ground on which he sat was pure black, too.

But he wore a huge, broad hat of woven dried palm fronds that kept his face and chest in shadow; and it was light brown and clean as a whistle.

3) A little further on from the charcoal man, along a narrower portion of the same alley, an older woman was sitting on a bench against a side wall. I was walking towards her and when I was a few steps away we made eye contact and smiled at each other. Since she was sitting, as I walked closer to her I had to look down to hold her gaze, and just when I came even with her I realized that she was holding a baby. In fact, she was breastfeeding the baby from her fully exposed right breast. You’d think that I would notice such a thing when I first saw her from no more than ten feet away—but I can only suppose that my brain didn’t really process the scene because the proportions were off: her right breast was (not kidding!) as large as the baby itself. And it wasn’t a very small baby. I think her breast was more than twice as big as my head. That’s just incredible.

Don’t you wonder what your Top Three would have been, had you walked through Ashaiman market today?

Thursday of last week I returned home from work by taxi and pulled up to the gate to my house. As we pulled to a stop I noticed that across the street, in front of another house’s gate, stood a group of school children still in their uniforms. The uniforms are brown bottoms—shorts for boys and bibbed overall-style dresses for girls—and light yellow collared tops for all. I recognized most of them from the neighborhood. There were about seven of them, and I’d say they ranged in age from six to ten. All bunched up together, they seemed poised like a group of carolers waiting for someone to answer the door.

Sure enough, as soon as got out of the taxi, they began chanting and pumping their fists: “Serious! Serious! Serious! Serious!” (Ghanaians say it SEER-yus.) It wasn’t my first time being chanted at here, but in past instances the cry has been “Obruni!” (oh-BROO-ni), and it has always seemed better not to encourage it by reacting. But my interest was piqued; why was I “serious”? As I fumbled with the key in the gate I weighed my options.

I turned to them and said loudly across the road, “Hey! Who is Serious?”

“You! You are Serious!”

“I thought I was Jake. Why am I Serious?”

One of the older girls broke away from the group and ran across the street towards me, beaming a wide smile. She came to face me, stood up straight, and hollered: “Cause you’re a ‘ARDWORKIN man!”

At this punchline, she and the rest of the group burst into rollicking laughter. The others cascaded across the street and crowded around for high-fives and a couple minutes of general merriment. It was, without a doubt, the best I’ve felt in weeks.

Lest anyone think I am acquiring a devoted fan club here, I will note that nothing like this had occurred before or has occurred since. It was, as far as I can tell, a one-time thrill. I still have no idea why they were all assembled there in front of the neighbor’s gate on that Thursday afternoon, looking as if they were anxiously awaiting my arrival. In fact, I don’t even know whether or not they were making fun of me. I can only guess from their giddiness that, at the time, I was a goofy and incongruous neighborhood character who needed to be addressed. Whatever the motivation, the encounter made me feel light as a balloon. I’ll take a Ghanaian under-13 cheering section any day of the week.

Also from the sublime/ridiculous file: On Tuesday’s ride home from work Oti saved a kitten and nearly killed a tro-tro full of people. We were driving down a narrow section of High St (the main road) that runs through South Osu, a dense town area. Like most improved roads in Accra, this one is bordered on both sides by open cement sewers about 1.5’ wide and 2’ deep. It was nearly 7:00, and completely dark. The dim headlights of Oti’s Opel Astra illuminate only a few feet in front of the car, so even at a modest 25mph objects in the road ahead seem to materialize out of thin air.

One such object was a little grey-and-black striped kitten that appeared in our path, scurrying across the road from left to right with back bowed in a moving crouch. Oti let out a muffled Oooh! and, eyes on the cat, swerved to the left so we could straddle it between the tires. When we swerved I looked up and my eyes met the headlights of an oncoming tro-tro rambling down the road as only a tro-tro can. To help you appreciate the way these vehicles move, the way they rattle and bounce and list to one side, the baldness of their tires, their utter ricketiness, I will try to post a video soon. It suffices for now to say that it’s not the kind of vehicle into whose path you’d want to swerve.

But swerve we did, and the tro-tro responded with its own evasive maneuver. With the agility of a three-legged cow it lurched to the side and teetered on the edge of the sewer, its topheavy bulk leaning precariously over the ditch, until in an instant we passed each other and it lurched back towards the center of the road. As we continued driving in opposite directions, Oti and I could not help but hear the fading spasm of yelling and the wheezing honk of the tro-tro’s overused horn, which was quickly drowned out by the rattling of our own vehicle. The whole event lasted maybe four seconds.

Oti ensured the incident’s induction into the Hall of Absurdity with his elegantly ambiguous summary: “Oh! We didn’t hit it!”

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?

Piloting + sacking

While Accra continues shamble along as only it can, I have found myself less captivated by its peculiar rhythms since I’ve returned. Familiarity leads to monotony; or is it the other way around? Yes—I think it’s the latter.

In the past two weeks work has been the focus. We’ve reached a major hurdle—the beginning of the pilot—and I think we’re in the process of clearing it. But this is not a simple run-and-jump deal. Every miniscule movement of our collective striding legs is an excruciating coordination of myriad twitching nerves.

But what’s the pilot anyway? For that matter, what’s the project for which it serves as preliminary research? These are questions I have not yet answered in this rambling blog, and I will try to do so in the following paragraphs.

The project I was hired to work on is an Interest Rate Sensitivity Study for individual microloans. The set-up is as follows. I work for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a US-based NGO run by development economists. Most generally, our output is papers to be (hopefully) published in academic journals. More specifically, those papers tend to be write-ups of field experiments in economic development—particularly in the science of evaluating development programs. The question that guides IPA’s research is, broadly: What works in development, and why?

In some remote corner of that question lives microfinance; in some nook in that corner are microloans; in one cranny of that nook are microloans; and on one grain of sand in that nook is the individual loan product offered by Opportunity International – Sinapi Aba Savings and Loans (OISASL). IPA has partnered with OISASL to investigate the following specific questions: How do individuals at various poverty levels respond to different interest rates in microloans? Do particular interest rates attract certain types of borrowers? Are people’s abilities to repay dependent on the interest rate offered?

To answer these questions, we have designed the study that has just entered the pilot phase. For the first two months of my stay here, we pounded the hot pavement of Accra cataloguing some 7,000 businesses large and small—everything from sidewalk stands selling mangoes to more sophisticated operations in permanent buildings with multiple employees. These 7,000 were divided into 125 geographic clusters (think of a cluster as comprising all the businesses on a given city block), and to each cluster we will randomly assign one of four different interest rates.

Next we developed a poverty-level assessment (in the form of a short questionnaire) and promotional flyers inviting first-time customers with OISASL to apply for loans. Then comes the labor-intensive step—marketing. It proceeds as follows: an OISASL marketer approaches one of the catalogued businesses, asks the owner the poverty-level assessment questions (e.g. How does your household get drinking water? Do all children age 6-17 in your household attend school regularly? What kind of cooking fuel do you use?), tells him a little bit about our promotional offer, and hands him a flyer advertising loans at the interest rate we have assigned to his cluster, inviting him to come to the branch and fill out an application. Repeat 6,999 times, and we’re done with that step.

Once the business owners have flyers and we have their poverty-level information, it just remains to track their responses. (A) Who comes into the branch? (B) Who continues with the application process? (C) Who is approved? (D) Who is able to repay?

We will accumulate the data necessary to answer those four questions in the year or so following the marketing campaign. Then all that remains is analysis and, finally, writing the paper itself (happily we have Dean Karlan, a rising star in development economics, to do the bulk of the last step).

So that’s the project in a nutshell. The pilot is essentially a short-term, small-scale implementation of that mess. We have selected four clusters (one at each interest rate) and are now marketing to the businesses in them. Our goals for the pilot are (1) to refine our marketing technique, (2) to streamline the reception of study participants in the branch, and (3) to get some estimates of (A) – (C) above. Once we have a sense of what percentage of people will come to the branch, we can set about preparing to handle the additional workload associated with the full study. We will not attempt to study (D) in the pilot, as repayment data only builds up over the life of the loan (typically 6-12 months).

For (2) above I probably should have written “damage control”. It is ultimately a dangerous thing to advertise different rates to different people, especially when many of those people are Ghanaian petty traders, a notoriously gregarious variety. The concern is that we will have a lot of irate customers coming into the branch and laying into the individual loan officers: My friend owns a shop just across the street, and he got a lower rate than me. Give me the lower rate! One reason for randomizing interest rate at the cluster level (as opposed to at the individual level) in the first place was to minimize this issue. If we offer everyone in a given cluster the same interest rate, then hopefully friction will only occur at the edges where it borders on other clusters.

Incredibly, Ghana exhibits extraordinarily resistance to even this most rudimentary instance of advance planning. As I said before, many of the businesses we’ve catalogued are street-side stands. Sometimes goods are laid out on a blanket spread on the sidewalk; other times they are stacked on a table. In downtown Accra these stands are ubiquitous. They seem to occupy 75% of passable sidewalk, and in many areas, especially where there are “rough” (dirt) roads, they spill out into the street. While this makes walking in the city an exhausting exercise in dodging and jostling, it also means that one can buy anything from fresh produce to toilet paper to stereo systems without walking more than a couple blocks. From the seller’s perspective it means a wealth of loosely (if at all) regulated commercial space in a heavily-trafficked market; and a typical sidewalk stand operator has staked out a physical location and a regular customer base that he returns to everyday.

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (roughly analogous to the Mayor’s office) has decided to put an end to this in one fell swoop. In preparation for Ghana’s Golden Jubilee 50^th Anniversary on March 6 of this year, the AMA is undertaking a number of ambitious projects to improve the look and feel of the capital. While these improvements are ultimately intended to benefit the residents of Accra, most people readily admit that the reason they’re being made—and made quickly—is so that Ghana can put her best foot forward for all the important folks (read “first world tourists and politicians”) coming in for the celebration. In addition to widening some major roads and installing trash cans in public areas (wow!), on Monday they began the systematic “sacking” of all informal street vendors, from hawkers (people selling on foot, carrying their goods in large baskets balanced on their heads) to tabletop stands.

“Sacking” really means forced relocation to one of two locations that have been set aside for the vendors. Most Ghanaians I’ve talked to are thrilled with the results—in the space of three days the downtown streets have been rendered passable again, and the whole area is undeniably cleaner and less chaotic. Until Monday afternoon Makola, a twelve-square-block area just a few minutes walk from the OISASL office, was the densest market in Accra, with vendors completely filling the streets. On Tuesday morning it was unrecognizable: wide, empty thoroughfares with cars timidly poking along, still not sure if they really belonged there. In corners and against the sides of buildings were piled great drifts of broken and abandoned wooden tables and racks—the dusty, brittle bones of the marketplace.

There is reason to believe that this new arrangement does not constitute a free lunch. For one, the largest area that the AMA has set aside for the vendors is just beside Kwame Nkrumah Circle (known here as “Circle”), which has the dubious honor of being Africa’s largest roundabout. It is easily the most congested area in the city, and the addition of thousands of hawkers and vendors—not to mention their customers, who would otherwise have no reason to go there—is sure to exacerbate the problem. Fortunately Circle is not on the tour bus route.

Above, I introduced “sacking” by way of saying that Ghana had resisted our attempts at planning ahead to avoid complaints about offering different interest rates to different people. About half of our 125 clusters are in areas that have been, or will soon be, sacked. So whereas we had hoped that those clusters, and the vendors comprising them, would remain geographically distinct (even if only separated by a street), now they will be busted up and the sidewalk vendors among them will corralled as tightly as possible into one massive pit.

Recipe for disaster? Maybe. Then again, if things were easy, they’d be too easy.

Much love and cheer from Accra,

Jake

Dust & fighting.

No—it’s not a Clint Eastwood movie. But those two signature Wild West themes have featured in my week so far.

We are now in the grips of the season called the Hammarton. It normally lasts about two months, from late December to the middle of February. Typically it separates some very hot and dry months (October-December) from some very hot and wet months (March-April). It is a little pocket of agreeably mild temperature, with highs typically in the low 80s. There’s even a breeze. But every rose has its thorn; and this thorn is made of choking dust.

I’ve asked a number of Ghanaians and have heard a variety of answers, but most agree at least that the signature winds of the Hammarton come from the north. When wind comes from the south it picks up moisture from the Atlantic and brings humid air into Accra. Although it only rained for about ten minutes total in my first two months here, it was almost always humid and sticky. But when the winds come from the north they carry with them the sands of the Sahel, the desert belt south of the Sahara. The northernmost third of Ghana lies in the Sahel, and I shudder to think what the Hammarton is like up there. In Accra, some 400 miles south, it’s incredibly dry and dusty. The haze is so thick that during the day you can look directly into the sun without hurting your eyes. And the dust is fine as silt; it goes everywhere the air goes. It sneaks between doors and their frames, between the panes of louver windows. There is a film of dust on everything, and it builds up overnight (literally). Today we had the house cleaned, and tomorrow morning I will be able to write “wash me” with my finger on the glass top of our coffee table. I know this for certain.

And if it were only the coffee table, or everything in the house, I probably wouldn’t mention it. But any dust fine enough to sneak through a well-fitting door is also fine enough to sneak through the forest of little hairs inside one’s nose that are supposed to act as an air filter. From there it is only a short journey to the throat and lungs, and that’s when Hammarton becomes very frustrating.

For the first week back it seemed as if the air was just dry. Then yesterday my throat started to feel a little scratchy. This morning I woke up with that feeling where you can’t take a full breath, and with no voice at all. I’ve lost my voice before, but this felt more like the time I tried to swallow a scoopful of protein powder—so dry that the throat winces and contracts, all the water gone from it. Sadly, this has persisted all day. Everyone here says it hasn’t been like this in years. It’s cooler and windier and dustier than was expected. Most every obruni I know, and some Ghanaians, too, are having a hard time with it.

Myself, I do like the cooler weather, but the dust is too much. Even after a dozen or so mugs of tea with (local Ghanaian!) honey today at the office, my voice is nowhere to be found. Damn you, Hammarton.

So even though the Hammarton (let’s just say “dusty season”) in general doesn’t have much going for it, and even though this one in particular is lousier than most, there is one saving grace: pronunciation. I don’t know why, but when Ghanaians intone the word itself they invariably do so with great gusto. Even when it’s said slowly it is zesty, saucy, more like a catchphrase than a meteorological phenomenon. And it always sounds like “Hammertime”. So that’s a throwback right there.

Monday night, before I lost my voice, Justin and I went ate a delightful Indian dinner at the Banana Leafz Kitchen in Osu, the upscale nightlife district of Accra. Afterwards we were walking back towards the main road. When we reached it we saw a white tro-tro pulled to the side with its door swung open. (Some tro-tros have a sliding side door on the right side and a narrow aisle to allow access to the forward-facing bench seats; others, rigged for maximum passengers-as-sardines capacity, have a bench along the right side—leaving an even narrow aisle—and only a paddywagon-style door in the back. This was one of the latter.)

When we first noticed it, about a hundred feet ahead, two men were standing on the street and more were pouring out onto the street, as if from a clown car. They were yelling and, as we approached, the smaller of them pounced at the larger and laid a lightning-fast right hand into his skull. I kept my pace and crossed to the far side of the street, watching as people continued to emerge from the cramped vehicle. In a flash the two were on the ground, the smaller one with his head buried in the other’s chest, fists flailing at his head. The larger, in turn, was pummeling the smaller man’s skull over and over.

Justin had been crossing to the other side with me but then diverted towards the pair and stopped just a few feet short of them. By this time only a couple more passengers had made it out of the tro-tro and they gathered around the two. Everyone looked confused. It was a strange picture, a few Ghanaians and 6’3” Justin in a tight ring around the brawling men.

A few seconds later the crowd had grown and had apparently decided enough was enough: a couple men took off their shoes and started thrashing the snarling pair. Another man slipped off his leather belt with a flourish, raised it high above his head, and began laying into them furiously. There were terrible slapping sounds and the two continued only a short while longer. In the ferocity and desperation of the fighting men; in the way that the bystanders beat them indiscriminately to a stop; in the ragged, bristling panting that followed as they eyed each other afterwards, separated by the man brandishing the belt; it was more like a dogfight than anything else.

By this time Justin had returned to my side of the street (he had left the throng of bystanders around the time when the shoes came off). He said, “I was trying to decide whether or not to get in that.” Let me pause to say that Justin’s interest here was thoroughly that of a Good Samaritan. Nonetheless—get in that? Really?

We began to walk away as the two fighters continued to yell at each other across the belt-man’s outstretched arms. One of them lifted up his shirt to reveal some injury to his torso, then ducked quickly around the belt-man and the pair were at it again, this time tussling into the middle of Oxford St (the main road), stopping traffic there as the crowd, now numbering close to twenty, moved amoeba-like to envelop and separate them.

When we turned our heads for good it was away from a cacophony of yelling and car horns.

Back in the saddle.

Home was so delightful that it flew by like summer camp and the sojourn is too quickly acquiring that dreamlike quality that characterizes the best experiences. Now the game begins: “It was only ___ days/weeks ago that I was _____.” If I can make a temporal chain back to it, it must be real; I could skip a stone across the days back to New Years, back to Family Band Take Two, back to 7 Fairfield.

The first 24 hours back in Ghana I was stricken with a fairly dreadful combination of jetlag and comfortlag. The latter is a condition analogous to the first, except that in comfortlag the body is slow to adapt to a change in—or dearth of—things that make it feel good. Family, good food and beer, friends, down comforters, New York City, and driving a car are all relevant examples. My mind forgot that these things were no longer at hand, and so it operated as if they were. It was like arriving at a friend’s apartment and finding it vacant. There was nobody home, and I felt sharp pricks of loneliness for the first time since I began this journey.

But it passed, largely under the radar, due in no small part to the fact that another raucous workweek began the day after I arrived. Back at the office it’s “business” as usual. On Thursday I desperately hope to begin the Pilot Study, which is really a small-scale mock-up of the interest rate sensitivity study I came here to do. But before that ship can sail, I need to (further) train the marketers and loan officers, requisition a color printer and ink for flyers and then print them, convince the management team that everything is going exactly according to plan so they can just lazily wave the thing on, pitch a couple slight changes in operating procedures, and requisition two desktop computers for the loan officers to use. Incredibly, it appears that this may be within reach.

So it has been a busy two days thus far, and the rest of the week should follow suit. By Friday I probably will have forgotten all about Belgian brews and the people I care about. Just kidding. Lest I create the impression that noses are being scraped up on the grindstone, let me relay two scenes from today.

SORRY--DUE TO THE EXISTENCE OF FILTERS (THANKS, GOOGLE) I HAVE BEEN ADVISED TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT WRITING, MENTIONING NAMES, ETC. SO THESE FEW PARAGRAPHS HAVE BEEN REMOVED. HERE IN ACCRA EVERYTHING IS GOING GREAT AND EVERYONE I ENCOUNTER (ESPECIALLY THOSE I ENCOUNTER IN MY CAPACITY AS AN EMPLOYEE) IS ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. IF YOU WANT ANY MORE INFORMATION THAN THAT, YOU'LL HAVE TO ASK VIA PRIVATE EMAIL. CHEERS!

Yes, back in the saddle. Honestly, five days in (I started this entry Tuesday night; now it’s Thursday) it feels good. It’s easy to get lost in the days, in the mad jumble of sensations and events, in the unintentional comedy. At the moment I’m reminded of my favorite Bright Eyes lyric: “Oh! My morning’s coming back; the whole world’s waking up. The city buses swimming past, I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one.”

It is Thursday morning, 21 December. This evening I won’t fall asleep to the bzzzzzzz of the ceiling fan, but to the roar of jet engines. I’m coming home.

And I think I’m ready for a break. I’ve heard too much bad Christmas music and have spent too many consecutive days (6) without water. Last night I snuck into the 5-star Labadi Beach Hotel to shower in their health club locker room. (It beats the bucket method.)

But worst was this morning. Oti and I set out at the regular time and encountered a wall of traffic in the one-lane section of High St. At one point, a right turn only lane breaks off and Oti turned into it, zipped past about 50 idling cars, made the (legal) right and then a (legal) U-turn, and went to rejoin the line of stopped cars. An inconsiderate maneuver? Without a doubt. But one practiced by hundreds of taxi drivers every morning, and legal all the same.

Jeff, a loud, officious traffic cop, didn’t think so. He stormed up to the driver’s side window and demanded to see Oti’s license. Oti handed them over and then Jeff demanded that Oti open the door and let him sit in the backseat. You can guess where the story went from there.

As the three of us inched along, Oti explained that he was driving me to the office and to the bank, and that we were in a hurry because I was leaving today to return to the US. I apologized and told Jeff it was my fault we were rushing. Jeff introduced himself cordially, smiling, as if I might mistake him for another friendly Ghanaian. That was the worst part—the cheap shit veneer of friendliness, an obvious ploy for him to discover how best to extort us. Not ten seconds before, he had been barking into Oti’s ear from the backseat. Would I play the gullible tourist and pony up every cedi on the spot to get him out of the car? Or would he have to bargain?

“You should pay the penalty for your friend,” he said calmly.

“And what is the penalty?”

“800,000 cedis.”

This is a ridiculous, impossible price—more than 2 months’ pay for the average resident of Accra. In an effort to call his bluff I began to argue that we would need to see this in writing, that he should give us a printed ticket and that we would go to court to settle it. I actually entertained the thought that he might charge us with an actual violation of law.

But Oti had already taken out his wad of cedis and begun to peel off 5,000-cedi notes. It was not my risk to take, Oti’s license being on the line; and so ahead lay the filthy prospect of the bargain. It is the seediest, the most pathetic abuse of power, all the more obscene because of the banter, the back-and-forth, the dickering over 10,000 cedis ($1.10). To reject one offer, Jeff said, “Oh! That’s not a bribe; that’s a dash.” (A dash is something you’re expected to give a cop whenever he stops your car, even at a meaningless roadblock, even if you haven’t been accused of any violation.)

We settled on 80,000 cedis and I peeled it off my own wad, disgusted with myself and with the whole situation. If anyone should be willing to go through the rigamarole of Ghana’s “due process”, surely I, with money and (some) time to spare, should. But instead Oti and I succumbed to that time-honored tradition of lassitude and evasion of accountability that feeds the system of bribery in the first place. In bribery’s defense, it saves time and money—in the immediate—on both ends. And the only thing you give up is any inkling of respect for the integrity of the laws themselves, or for the people who enforce them. But, hey, what’s integrity, anyway? We’re talking tens of thousands of cedis here—almost $10—that’s real money!

As if to underscore the absurdity of the situation, Jeff shooed me away when I went to hand him the money. “Give it to your friend,” he said, and motioned to Oti. In doing this he seemed to be trying to create the illusion that this was not a shakedown. The driver was the one who made the violation; thus he would be the one paying the fine. This way everything was on the level. So I handed the bills to Oti, who went to pass them to Jeff. The final flourish was the hand-off itself. He first lifted his right hand up and back at head level, fingers full of money facing the backseat. Jeff hissed venomously “tsss!” and Oti realized his mistake. So he tried again, this time backhanding the bills down at floor level, where they were happily collected. Jeff resumed his cordial demeanor and motioned for Oti to stop. With a handshake and a hearty “Nice day,” he squeezed himself out from behind the driver’s seat and was gone, the next palm greasing surely just moments away.

Just afterward I was livid. I told Oti that I thought corruption like this will keep Ghana from becoming a “first-rate country”. (What an insulting, low thing to say to a friend about his own home. I feel ashamed to have said it, especially given Oti’s response.) He quickly, almost apologetically, proposed a solution. His good friend is a “big man” whose father is the superintendent of the traffic division of the Accra police. We could simply relay what had happened through the obvious channel and have Jeff sacked. Do the ends justify the means? Is the prospect of a “net gain” in Accra’s police force integrity reason enough to use the same backdoor tactics to punish Jeff as he used to punish us?

Why am I so torn up about the whole affair anyway? I think it’s because, while I know some fault lies with Jeff and some frustration stems from being put in the situation to begin with, ultimately I failed to do the right thing. High-minded principles, zero follow-through: moral masturbation. Even these paragraphs are preachy. I’m sorry for that.

Later in the day I was told that the two weeks before Christmas are well-known to be prime time for these activities. Hell, traffic cops have kids, too, and they want presents. Maybe this Christmas season is as good a time as any to revisit Kim’s epiphany from the depths of her dance with misfortune: “It’s all about the money.” But from the blissfully comfortable vantage points of 7 Fairfield and 481, in the warm company of family and friends, I hope (and expect) to roundly reject it. Home sounds good. And I’ll be there soon.

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.

Bright days on the Dark Continent

Friday night I got a call from Peter. Turns out that when I spoke to him last weekend the cause of the soreness in his back was, in fact, hard work: The snack bar is open!

First chance I got Saturday I cajoled virtually the entire VA house into coming to check it out. It sits on the edge of his uneven parcel, which borders on the parking lot/yard of a huge church beside High St. It’s a prime location, sure to get tons of foot traffic Sunday mornings. The rest of the week shouldn’t be too bad either since the churchyard is frequently used as a thoroughfare for the residents of the shantytown behind it.

The structure itself is about 8’x 10’ with a linoleum-topped counter on one edge and a plastic table and four chairs inside. Pieces of corrugated aluminum set on a simple post-and-lintel frame serve as a ceiling; and instead of walls a waist-high picket fence runs along the other three sides. Everything has a fresh coat of white paint. The western side, opposite the counter, is dominated by two large posters that serve as shades: Britney Spears and Allen Iverson. On the southern side, a hanging woven rug depicting Dogs at Billiards serves the same purpose.

The Britney Spears poster in particular is a ridiculous thing, 3’x 4’ in all, at least 3 sq ft of which is cleavage spilling out of a pink lace bra. Her eyes are dark and deep, but blank as deep space. Par for the course for her, I guess, but it seems especially lewd and soulless in the clean, honest churchyard snack bar. That said, it is definitely an oddity; not a vulgarity. The little snack bar is so neat and happy that it cannot be anything but downright charming.

Some other things you can find there are: a small glass display case with a dimly backlit sign that says “Hot Food!”; a juice dispenser with a clear plastic rectangular tank on top and a fountain that keeps the bright orange stuff circulating; a conspicuous shelf above the counter with three brand new blue-tinted plastic margarita glasses, each with a cartoonish foot instead of a base; a young girl (Peter’s daughter) hostessing and singing Christmas carols into the microphone of a dollar-store miniature electric keyboard. Yes, charming is an understatement.

We had spring rolls, samosas, water, Malta, and even a fancy blue glass of the orange drink. Peter’s daughter did the waitressing, his wife Emilia did the cooking (inside the family kitchen, which is now really one big fryer), and he did the managing.

While we were waiting for our goodies I had a chance to talk to him a bit more, and he filled me in on the rest of his activities this past month. In addition to the snack bar launch, he has opened an account at Opportunity International. Between his balance and the new business, it looks like he might qualify for a loan in the next couple months. Hard to say how thrilled I was—and am—to hear this news. Man! Getting ahead of myself, of course, but just to think that all he needed (in addition to a critical mass of desire and follow-through) was a suggestion and the names and addresses of a couple banks; and now he’s on the way! So it is a thoroughly inspiring and encouraging example. Hooray, Peter!

What a healthy antidote to the cynicism that builds up like so much tro-tro exhaust on my insides…

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In other pleasant news, things are finally looking up for Kim. She was days away from packing her bags and returning to the first world when she came knocking on the gate of the VA house last weekend hoping to find a room on the cheap. Kirsten, the plucky twentysomething Canadian landlady, tried to make whip up some room-sharing, cost-cutting solution, and while she was in the process Kim continued to scour the city for other options. In her search she serendipitously met Nadine, a German girl with a similarly worthless volunteer-placement organization, who was in the same boat with respect to housing. They teamed up and are now sharing a room in the New Town neighborhood, relatively close to both the long cement building (where Kim dances) and the epileptics’ orphanage (where she volunteers).

I saw her and Nadine out at a party Saturday night and Kim looked fabulous. As usual she refuses to feel sorry for herself and is committed to owning her experience in any way she can. For now, that means taking back the street: “Whenever I walk on the road I keep my head high so that if any of the robbers sees me he should know that I am not afraid.” It sounds too easy, maybe even naive, but somehow it is entirely believable coming from her. Her credibility lives somewhere between the inherent seriousness of Germanic accent and her smile, which is like that of someone who just got a gold star. She knows she has done well. And the rewards for her resilience and buoyancy are a heightened awareness to—and thorough enjoyment of—the fact that things are coming more easily now.

And that, too, is an encouraging example: sometimes you get a break when you need it. Of course, the truest truism I know still applies, as it has throughout Kim's saga. When it rains, it pours.

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So however late Oti is (even if he doesn’t show up or call in the morning or afternoon, like today), however slow and painful is the grinding rotation of the rusty gears that are OI's internal management, however foul the exhaust fumes, etc., etc., there is sunshine; there is hope.

By the way, Kim thanks you all for the good vibes. See? They helped!

My week with Oti began on Monday morning. We sat in traffic along High St, the main east-west road in southern Accra. Except for the first half mile from the house, High St is one lane in each direction. We were behind a tro-tro, the Ghanaian equivalent of public transportation. If it was like any other tro-tro, it was an old, rickety van whose inside has been gutted and filled with narrow rows of bench seats. Like most tro-tros, it was overflowing with people. Arms dangled out each side and the exhaust pipe wobbled under the rear bumper. It sent out a continuous stream of thick black particulate smoke; and whenever it inched forward it belched forth a big filthy plume. The unmistakably sulfurous, acrid, choking stuff wafted lazily through the car’s interior. The unconditional tolerance for this pollution (drivers never close their windows to keep the smoke out, very rarely comment or even grimace) makes me angry then depressed. If they don’t feel compelled to react—by rolling up the goddamn window—to that kind of direct assault on their health and well-being, how can they possibly be expected to _________ (insert some ambitious, well-intentioned goal here)?

But this isn’t that kind of posting.

I keep meaning to clock it, but I think the drive to work is about 4 miles. Most days it takes 25-35 minutes. Traffic here is fantastically unpredictable. Not completely so—the probability of hitting traffic is not the same every minute of every day—but, maddeningly, weekdays between 7am and 7pm it is always around 80%. Of course there is local wisdom about rush hour: 7-9am and 4-6pm, they say, are the worst. And maybe they’re right. But somehow, exactly one day out of each week there is no traffic on the way to work, and exactly one day out of each week there is no traffic on the way back. Which days these are is impossible to forecast. Further, the flow of traffic doesn’t seem to depend on things like accidents, stalled cars, obstructions in the road, or presence of traffic cops directing at intersections. Obviously there is no traffic report on the radio; actually I just chuckled out loud at the thought of it—that would imply the (impossible) existence of 1) a local newsradio station, 2) a privately-owned helicopter, 3) listeners who cared to know.

Thus, choosing to drive during the day means choosing to gamble with your time. And the residents of Accra seem completely indifferent to the outcome. Here it is important to clarify that they are not indifferent between winning and losing something of value; rather they don’t perceive the stakes (i.e. one’s time) to be valuable in the first place. So their astounding equanimity in this case comes not from non-attachment, but from an aversion (inability?) to thinking of time as a scarce or non-renewable resource to be utilized. If I spend four hours driving ten miles today, then that’s what I did today. There is no thought of what I might have done today, had I not sat in traffic—no awareness of opportunity cost.

Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done is done.” Ghanaians add, “So why think about it?”

This pervasive attitude touches many aspects of life and conduct. What comes to mind now, though, are:

1. It dramatically changes the relationship between planning and execution. Almost separates them entirely, actually. Plans are, at best, a loose suggestion. The only way I’ve found to be sure an action will be carried out in accordance with some design is to remind the actors of the design throughout the process. (Note: then it’s not “planning” per se, but instruction.)

2. It lends a quality of autonomy to most actions—things just happen, or they don’t. Thus, the passive voice pops up everywhere. If George is supposed to enter 50 surveys into the computer on a given day, our conversation will likely proceed as follows:

“Hey George, how many have you done so far?”

“I have done eight.”

“Wow. You have a lot more to do, huh?”

“Yes. I hope they will be completed.”

1+2=3. If things cannot be planned in advance, how can one have expectations? And if actions are perceived to occur on their own, then who are the agents? No expectations + No agents = No accountability.

On Tuesday I told Oti to plan to pick me up at 4:30pm from work, unless I called to tell him to come earlier. At 4:45 I called to see where he was, and he hadn’t left the house yet. “But we agreed that if I didn’t call you should come at 4:30. And I told you that if it would be another time, it would be earlier. So how could not have left by 4:45, since we said 4:30 would be the latest possible time?”

“I was just waiting for your call.”

“Well, I think I will take a taxi, then, since you haven’t even left the house yet.”

“No, I am leaving right now. I will reach in 20 minutes.”

By 6:30 (only six times as long as he predicted) Oti had arrived. Turns out, after we talked at 4:30 he got into a discussion with his grandmother; then he left around 5:15 and hit traffic.

I told him that I would be clearer in the future about exactly what time he should come to pick me up; and that if he was going to miss his given time for any reason, that he must call me and tell me, so I could know. “Yes. I will do that,” he said.

Wednesday we arranged for 4:30. At 4:15 I called for an update. He still hadn’t left the house. “I was planning to leave the house at 3:30 but my friend called me and told me that the traffic was coming since 2 and it was so bad. So I know that if I went to pick you, I will not make it by 4:30. So I have been waiting until the traffic is finished. Then I will be able to come quickly.”

“Since you have not yet left the house, I will take a taxi.”

“No, I’m coming right now.”

When he arrived at 6:30, after repeated calls in which he was “very close—reaching in five minutes,” I told him why, given yesterday’s conversation, I was upset. “I am so sorry. I was planning to call you at 4:30 to tell you I will be coming later. And as I was coming the traffic was too slow. Then the car ran out of petrol and I had to walk to take the gallon.”

I wondered if, in one of my calls, he had said he’d arrive in five minutes while walking back through the creeping traffic to the gas station with an empty gallon jug in his hand.

“What will you do differently next time?”

Confidently he said, “I will come earlier.”

And, just like that, our discussion about calling, today’s plan about 4:30, any and all dissatisfaction, was completely and utterly erased. You could just see it.

Had it been any other week I probably would have tried to be stern, and would have taken a taxi on the afternoons when he was terribly late, then deducted it from his weekly pay. But this was Oti’s birthday week, a time for leniency. On Thursday he turned 24. So Monday morning I proposed that, if he wanted, he could get a few friends together and I would take them out for dinner, anywhere he liked. He seemed thrilled at the idea; he really wanted to do it! So at the beginning of each subsequent car ride I asked him whether he had decided on a place or a group of people to go with. “Oh, soon soon. By the afternoon/tomorrow morning I will decide.”

On Thursday Oti arranged to pick me up at 7:30 to go to dinner, location and attendees TBA. At 7:30 he arrived with his friend Obi, and we went to pick up his girlfriend Millicent. When we pulled up in front of her house a few minutes later Oti told me that they had been fighting the day before, so he wanted to make up with her and have her come to dinner. “I’m coming. Five minutes,” he said as he walked into the house.

Obi and I sat in the car for the next two hours. At some point I asked him if this waiting frustrated him. “It’s a long time,” was all he said. I felt slighted and even thought badly of Oti while we were in the car; I felt as if I had offered him something really nice and he wasn’t paying it any mind. At 9:45 he emerged arm-in-arm with Millicent.

“Well, I don’t think many restaurants are open now, but if you still want to have some dinner we can go anywhere you like.” Oti decided on a big fast-food place called Papaye, and we set out. We were about a half mile from Millicent’s house when the car ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on the side of the road. It was smooth, lazy, quiet coasting, and as we glided to a stop, I thought “Perfect.” But then, all at once, the sarcasm was gone. Actually, it was perfect, absolutely perfect, and it couldn’t have been any other way. It was almost like someone put a blurry film into sharp focus. Do you follow?

So we celebrated Oti’s birthday by pushing the car a short ways down the road to a gas station, waiting twenty minutes for it to be filled, then having sausage-on-a-stick and a beer at a spot beside the gas station. Oti and Millicent shared a sausage and kissed while they ate it, like Lady and the Tramp with a spaghetti strand. They were radiant.

The obvious clichés apply: it’s not where you are, but who you’re with; etc. But there is much more to this story. Most of this posting is criticism, and I think it still stands. There are many, many hurdles to positive change (timidly, “development”) here. The part about ignoring opportunity cost can even be applied to the above paragraph—what meal might Oti have enjoyed, if…? But Oti’s and Millicent’s radiance, and all our satisfaction, was and is undeniable. Thus, there are at least some tradeoffs to be acknowledged. Expectations can be met or fallen short of. Agents can succeed or fail. Accountability implies winners and losers. I’m tempted to say that these are facts of life, and must be acknowledged; but many Ghanaians think—and live—differently.