maaha (=good afternoon in twi)

Hello! I’m back!

Weeks are busy here. Last Monday Kristin and I moved into what we affectionately call “Obruni House,” which means “White People House.” Our landlady, Auntie C (Auntie/Uncle is a term of respect for an older person; if someone were more my peer but still older, I might call her Sister/Brother), also owns a big apartment building and two other houses (at least), all in the same compound, and which she rents out to short-term obrunis (hence the nickname). So the entire compound is filled with (for some reason a high concentration of) Germans & Danish, plus now at least three Americans (Kristin, her colleague Katrina, me) and one Canadian (Zach, my colleague). Auntie C is a tough old lady who can’t be bothered to keep us all straight. So anyway, we live in one of the houses, Kristin, Katrina, Zach, Simone (German) and me. Our house is very basic, but pleasant. We each have our own room, plus a kitchen and living room, two showers and two toilets, a nice porch, and 3 ½ refrigerators, of which only 1 ½ work, and one of the working ones will shock you if you touch it in the wrong place.

I suppose I should mention that here race doesn’t have quite the tension that it does in the U.S., at least in my experience. People here (especially children) shout “obruni” at me, quite good-naturedly, as I walk down the street, to which I respond with “obibiní,” “black person,” to the giggling delight of all. Everyone stares at and talks to me, and this is normal and doesn’t make anyone feel guilty or embarrassed. I suppose if this regularly had negative consequences (other than being sort of annoying and getting charged more for stuff), I would begin to resent it more, but people are generally so nice that it’s hard to feel bad about it.

No one here EVER expects me to know any Twi, which I have learned a few words of, so whenever I say “thank you,” (medaase) there’s always a doubletake, and usually either more giggle or a smile, and if they get over their astonishment quickly enough, the appropriate response (oso medaase, I think). It’s kind of sad that so few white people here ever learn any Twi that they’re shocked when I say anything in it.

Anyway, on with the news. Our new place is great, serves our purposes nicely, and costs about half what we were paying at the hotel. It’s nice to have a kitchen and common space to hang out in. Unfortunately, we also have much less contact with Ghanaians. At the hotel, we chatted daily with our hoteliers, Kofe and Kofe and Kwabna, and Akan, as well as other hotel dwellers, plus our daily strolls around the neighborhood to buy fruit, bread, water, and dinner resulted in very nice regular interactions with several people. That doesn’t happen so much in our new neighborhood, Osu. Now we live with white people instead of black people, so of course we see less of the black people. Also, Osu is a tourist neighborhood and general city hangout, so it is much more impersonal and less overtly friendly. So we miss Asylum Down, our old residential neighborhood, quite a bit.

One nice woman we have met in our new ‘hood is Auntie Vera, our new seamstress. She’s a wonder at copying our western clothes. I wore right through the bottom of my favorite brown linen pants, and now I have two new pairs, exactly the same, in brown linen and blue. I have most recently asked her to copy a dress from a picture, so we’ll see how she does. If there’s something wrong with it, alterations are free, so I’m sure it’ll turn out great.

Work is fine. My boss has returned from the U.S. and she utterly changes the atmosphere of the office. People are constantly calling and stopping by to see her, suddenly there are constant meetings, and plenty of work to do. She’s a local celebrity—sometimes the newspapers (which I love to read—they’re comically dramatic, partisan, and will do anything to fill up space) will insert her picture for no apparent reason next to any story that might conceivably have anything to do with human rights, regardless of whether or not she’s involved in the story or was interviewed or anything. I think that today we will submit an article I wrote about the status of a right to information bill (like the Sunshine Act) and why we need it to the newspaper, which I think they will print as “news” (like I said, they need to fill space). And more recently I’ve been researching reproductive health—what obligations the government has through international and regional covenants, and the constitution, what it has done to fulfill those obligations, and what it has yet to do. There is a lot of research required for this, but I haven’t progressed very much because of all the other stuff going on at work. Last week I accompanied my boss and our Police Accountability project manager to the Office of the Minister of National Security (!!), where they debriefed him on the PA project and duly received his support. That was pretty cool. And so little security involved! no patdown, no id required, just a polite request to turn over any phones, cameras, or recording devices. The Minister himself was a typical politico, liked to talk, but gave Edmund plenty of time to talk about the project before his speechifying. My job was to take notes of the conversation, minutes, which I’ve never done before, and which inspired me to want to learn shorthand (and then I quite coincidentally found a book teaching shorthand and the market this weekend!).

Did I mention before my trips to the courts? The first time, a couple of weeks ago, we went to the Supreme Court, where three justices read out their opinions (more than an hour each), and 2 justices concurred. The reading of the opinions was quite boring, first because we knew little about the case (after listening for quite a while I discerned that it was a procedural matter, rather than the conclusion of a case), and second, because it was very hard to understand the justices, all because they spoke softly and the microphones were inadequate, and some had very strong Ghanaian accents, which takes some getting used to. So it was a slow way to spend a morning, but it was still exciting to have gone to the Supreme Court. The second time we went to the equivalent of District Court to see my boss’ husband defend Mrs. Rawlings, the wife of the former president of Ghana, against criminal charges (I think conspiracy to defraud the state, or something similar). We got there quite early, which was good because later the courtroom became incredibly packed with family (including her husband, who is something of a cult figure here) and supporters and opponents of her husband’s party, lots of police in riot gear, and the press. There was one short case that was adjudicated before Mrs. Rawlings’ case, and after it the judge announced that all further cases that he would hear would be moved to another courtroom. It’s possible that this was meant to fool people into leaving, so as to make more room for security people (or so it was postulated by our friend the lawyer) but, whatever the purpose, it succeeded in causing lots of confusion, especially among those of use who had no clue what was happening. So we trooped downstairs, only to find that the Rawlings case had not, in fact, moved, so we went back, but of course our seats were long gone. In the meantime, many supporters from Rawlings’ party had shown up and were chanting outside, so loudly that it was very hard to hear what was going on in the courtroom. After lots of hubbub, a different judge finally entered, everyone bowed, and the trial began with a motion by our lawyer friend to adjourn until June 15^th (it’s not clear why). This was granted. Then the Deputy Attorney General, who was prosecuting the case, requested that the chanters outside be found in contempt of court if they continued to disrupt the proceedings. The judge thought that this was ludicrous and that they would go away later on in the trial. Apparently all this was political posturing. There seems to be an inordinate amount of political posturing here. So I hope to go back on Thursday to see what happens next in this installment—whatever it is, it should be interesting.

Last week, Zach and I accompanied our boss and some other interns to a meeting at one of the most expensive hotels in Ghana. The meeting started off with lunch—which ended with mm! crème brulee.

Last Friday, the World Cup started. Ghanaians are passionate about football (soccer), and this is the first time they have made it to the World Cup, so they’re officially nuts-o. During games, there’s no traffic in the streets and it’s hard to get a taxi or anything else. On Saturday, Kristin, Zach, and I met one of Kristin’s colleages, Augustine the Argentine, to watch Argentina beat the Cote D’Ivoire. We ate dinner and watched the game in a delicious Argentinean (technically South African beef, though), steakhouse, the likes of which none of us would have been able to afford in the states, and, by Ghanaian standards, was incredibly expensive. As it happens, though, we were late to the game because Zach, walking on the sidewalk alone in the dark (it gets dark early here because we are close to the equator—around 6pm), fell into a big square hole in the sidewalk. The sewers here are in large part open sewers. When I imagined this back in the U.S. it seemed a lot grosser than it is. They don’t usually stink, nor do they overflow (much). However, the idea of falling into one still is just about the grossest thing I can imagine happening here, and Zach fell into a BIG one (most are only about 2 feet deep, but his was such that he didn’t touch bottom when he’d already fallen in up to his chest). Luckily, he caught himself, or who knows how far he would have fallen or what would have happened to him if he fell all the way in (he said that some people from a tro-tro saw him fall, so we hope that they would have helped him). Anyway, he scraped up his knee pretty badly, and came home streaming blood from his shin. Truly wonderful. So we spent lots of time and products in cleaning him up, and hopefully his leg won’t become gangrenous and fall off. In the U.S., you’d sue for this sort of thing—in lots of places, the open sewers are covered up with cement blocks (I think usually the deeper ones), but the blocks will be randomly missing, resulting in gigantic holes in the ground. But nobody does here. And the government is probably what we law nerds call “judgment-proof”—you could sue, but they wouldn’t have any money to give you if you won. I think the pointlessness of suing here is probably one cause, or symptom, of why lots of governmental programs don’t work all that well. I also found out recently that there is basically no public interest bar here. No one does impact litigation. Hence there is no way to force the government to do anything, despite the many rights enshrined in the Constitution. If you want to achieve anything, like a substantive right to information, you have to work through the government, which is a tricky business. Essentially everything is done either through foreign NGOs, local NGOs with foreign funding, or through lobbying the government.

Also on Saturday, at about 5am, I was slammed with a new bout o’ the runs. yippee. That day, instead of eating rice and bananas, I ate steak and wine. Mistake. On Sunday, with the added symptom of headache, instead of staying home in our nice cool house, I made another Mistake and went with Kristin and Katrina and Zach and a bunch of Germans to Kokróbite, a resort beach about an hour away. The beach was beautiful and the waves quite powerful (the undertow switched directions in mere minutes, kind of scary), and the kitch-sellers plentiful, but I should have stayed home anyway. By the time I came home I had a fever of more than 100ºF and still the wicked headache; I finally took some cipro (antibiotic), but this didn’t sit well and in fact decided to reemerge the way it came in around 11 pm that night. So yesterday was miserable and I finally went to a doctor here (at a clinic for a law firm, where the founding partner is associated with CHRI), who diagnosed me with gastroenteritis (I think this = “stomach illness”) and sent me home with instructions to continue the cipro and to drink 3 liters of water a day. The rest of yesterday was quite tiring—I ate very little yesterday or the day before, plus I was reading War and Peace again—but today I feel much better, no fever, etc. yes.

And today, good news from work—I get to travel with the boss on Monday and Tuesday to Kumasi, Ghana’s second biggest city, located right in the center of the country, to do some kind of civic education on gender and something, I forget what, for some people, I forget whom. Tonight Zach and I are going back to Asylum Down to get some shoes made for him (I had some sandals made for about $10), and to pick up some clothes I had made when I was still living there, at a place called Prisdeen Enterprises.

So, the job so far has been great in terms of exposure interesting institutions and people. I really like some of the food (plantains, “groundnut cake”= peanut brittle, mangoes, bananas, fried chicken and the fries are delicious), although many dishes are acquired tastes that I have not yet acquired. And I’ve really enjoyed both the Ghanaians and westerners that I’ve met here. Oh yeah, and my new bank card and care package has arrived (thanks Mom!). Pretty good first four weeks. I'll do my best to post more regularly.

cheers!

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