I like cheese

It’s been about two weeks since my last confession. Oh my many sins!
Evenings, when I usually compose my bliggity blogs, have been occupied recently. We have a permanent porch-party ongoing, plus all the usual school stuff, choosing classes and applying for clerkships and loans and whatnot, plus errands and goodbye parties and what-have-you, and then there’s work, both from CHRI and from other sources that I sometimes do in the evenings. Tonight was a wine and European cheese party on the roof of one of the buildings in the compound, the cheese brought back from Germany by a returning German obruni. I have never loved goat cheese so much.

So anyway, here’s what’s new:

Home
There’ve been some presto-change-o’s here at home. A swarm of Kristin’s young colleagues have taken root (can swarms take root?) at Obruni House, including Carolyn, Jessica, and Agustin (Gus (pron. Goose=my new favorite nickname)) (Gus has actually come and gone. Bye Gus.), and some more Germans have moved in. Have I mentioned the many Germans? One of them is our new roommate, Chris, and then there’s the Rather Dopey Dutch Duo, Dirk and No, The Other Chris, and Timo, Rugged Man From Nowhere and Everywhere. Others moving in and around the compound include Simon and Reuben, the Stefans, a Mathias, that Married Couple that Live Up There, and, um, I’m sure there’s others I’m forgetting at the moment. Kristin and Zach are still staples; I spend all my weekends traveling with Kristin and all my weeks working with Zach, so I see a lot of them.

Timo has a blog: http://timoinghana.blogspot.com. He's designed obruni house t-shirts for us, which you can check out on his blog.

I’ve been making mad additions to my wardrobe with the help of Auntie Vera, the seamstress who lives in a blue wooden largeish rectangular box on stilts in our driveway, and also the Man Tailor Across the Street, as well as Bernice, another neighborhood clothes constructor. Every Friday is Official Wear Your Traditional Clothes Day in Ghana, and I think I will continue this custom in New York City.

Work
I’ve been slaving away at a comprehensive document that “identifies the gaps” (this is a phrase I hear about a hundred times every time I discuss my draft with my boss) between Ghana’s international legal reproductive health obligations and existing laws and policies. It’s waxing on 80 pages now. Heaven help those who have to read it. I hope I never do. It has been interesting, though. Homosexuality is not mentioned in any international covenant that touches on reproductive health that I have read. This is convenient for Ghana, because “unnatural carnal acts” are illegal here. There’s no law on sexual harassment, and contraceptive use is startlingly low.

Tomorrow my boss is taking us to her aunt’s funeral, just as a cultural experience. I’m really looking forward to it, which sounds pretty morbid, but funerals are big deals here (if you ride around the country on Saturdays, you’ll see heaps of people dressed up in fancy black and red funeral get-up) and it should be edifying.

Thursday is my last day of work! This is hard to believe. The past few months have zippered right on by. While I’ve been here several people have come and gone, staying for just a month at a time. The latest is Nimmi, who’s cheery and pleasant to have around. She also holds the distinction of being the only obruni (well, honorary obruni—she’s ethnically Vietnamese, but hails from Chicago) I know to have gotten malaria since I’ve arrived. Ghanaians get it all the time, I assume b/c they don’t take malaria medicine all the time. Contracting malaria seems to be pretty routine here; no sweat, just go to the clinic and get a pile of drugs. Colleen is still around, too, though she’s leaving next week. She was a trooper today, bearing up under my cantankerous hungoverness (gin-and-juice party last night on the beach, fabulous by any measure—I peed outside three times, plus got soaked by surprise waves). Colleen went up to Mole, a big park with lots of big animals in it, and saw elephants and got charged by a baboon and had to hitchhike home in the rain. Ghana is Great. (And Colleen too, of course.) This seems to be only nominally about work anymore. I’ll move on.

OH, except Zach and I tried fufu last week! (Technically this is still about work, since it was during my lunch break.) Fufu is a starchy gooey mushy (I just learned that mushy is also a slang german word for vagina!) lump without much flavor that comes swimming in a variety of soups (I got light soup—lighter than palm oil soup, but not much else), with a big chunk of meat (goat, in this case) plunked in. You eat it with your hands. You don’t chew the fufu, you just swallow it. Maybe if I was going to be here longer, I would try a little harder to like it, but as it is, the whole bizniz was just too foreign for me (and Zach too), and I gave up and finished Nimmi’s spaghetti. Anyway, at the end you get a bowl full of water to rinse your hands in and some dish soap and ta daa! clean hands.

American Embassy
The Fourth of July party at the Ambassador’s residence was fab. Terrific army cover band (they sang a song by the Black Eyed Peas! and Sweet Home Alabama! and Message in a Bottle! and other Popular Favorites), decent attempt at American food (the “hamburgers” were more like “bunburgers”), free booze, and lots of bureaucrats! I introduced myself to an Alcoa executive and his wife (Australians! they like to party!), a guy from an NGO focusing on reproductive health (strangely), and some boring american dudes. But best of all, I ran into the chairman of the board of CHRI (not just the Ghana office, but all the Commonwealth), who is a partner at a law firm across the street from our office, and where one of our two lawyers also works. I’ve met him a couple of times for office stuff, and recognized him and went up to say hello. But the best part about all this is: his name is Uncle Sam! Uncle Sam came to the Fourth of July party!

All throughout the party the band was playing just great music, and nobody was dancing. Nobody! And nobody was even clapping when they finished songs! and the vocalists, especially the young woman, were really great! so there I was, all dressed up, and feeling a little young and out of place, and you, my dear readers, can just imagine that I was itch itch itching to shake it all about. A couple hours into the reception, I was talking to the Alcoa couple again, and I looked over and saw 2 women dancing! so that was that—I joined them and we danced, just the three of us, for like 40 minutes, when finally other people started joining in—some important chiefy people, some snooty folks, and finally the Ambassador! It was great. Best Fourth in a while.

Travel
Cape Coast
Two weekends ago, Kristin and I went to the Cape Coast region for the weekend. The coast of Ghana, especially, is known for its old slave-holding castles, and there’s a big one in Cape Coast, and another in Elmina, right next to Cape Coast. We’d heard “good” things about the Elmina one, so we toured that castle. It’s very similar to going to Holocaust sites in Germany, or museums—weird to feel touristy in, revulsion-producing, hard to understand. I have some pictures. One strange thing that I learned was that not only did lots of Africans die in those hell-holes, but Europeans too—governor after governor would come and die of malaria, yellow fever, etc., living only for a couple of months at a time, some of them. Partially because of this, no European women lived at the castles, so of course there was constant rape of the African women being enslaved. Ugly place.

After the castle, we walked around Elmina a bit, a cute little town. They were celebrating their yearly festival, the origins of which Kristin and I completely failed to understand. Something about swimming out to ships to get stuff. Really, no idea. There was no evident commemorative swimming, either.

From Elmina we went back to Cape Coast (sort of a transport hub) and caught a tro-tro to a town a little north of CC. That town (I forget its name at the moment) was useful because it was walking distance from Kakum National Park, where they have a suspended walk through the canopy of the rainforest. So we got up tres early the next morning (5, I think?) and walked with our guide to Kakum, where we hiked up to the canopy walk. The canopy walk itself was pretty terrifying (I think the guide said it was like 400 feet up? maybe?), but the platforms on the trees connecting the suspended bridges were lots more safe-feeling. And we actually got to see some monkeys! running up and down trees, pretty far away, but close enough to know they were monkeys. There were lots of pretty butterflies, too. We saw the sunrise from the platforms, gazed our last at the monkeys, and then our guide took us on a short medicinal-plant-and-tree hike. If he really knows what he’s talking about, there’s some serious pharmaceutical cash to be made in that forest. Except it’s hard to imagine PharmaCorp stripping naked and performing the necessary ceremony in front of this one particular tree—our guide told us, quite seriously, of one man who worked at the park who had cut the tree without the ritual and lost his son as a result. It was hard to take this seriously, but dying children are not the sort of thing that invites jokes, so Kristin and I just nodded and oh no’d.

After Kakum, we had brunch at Hans Cottage Botel (don’t ask, I don’t know), saw a “tame” crocodile (they “tame” them by feeding them meat)! and randomly ran into Colleen. I think that was the last of our adventures for that weekend—we wound our way back to Cape Coast, and found a tro-tro homeward.

The Volta Region
This past weekend, Kristin and I took Friday off and went to the Volta region, which is northeast of Accra. It encompasses Volta Lake, which is the largest manmade lake in the whole wide world! I think over the course of the three days we took a total of 11 tro-tros and probably about 10 shared taxis. First we went to Akosombo, where there was a textile factory we wanted to tour. That didn’t work out—apparently one has to apply in writing, 3 months in advance, to get a factory tour. And even offering to pay them a little something something gained us nothing but more shaking heads. This was very disappointing. But we shook it off, and took a tour of the dam that makes the lake. That was cool—it’s pretty big and impressive, especially in a country not exactly famous for its terrific infrastructure. Lots of power lines in view. Also, apparently the Ghanaian version of Camp David overlooks the dam. The dam project was the pet of Nkrumah, one of the big independence heroes around here (half of everything is named Nkrumah). Interestingly, Kristin and I ran into a woman when we were in Ada Foah who was researching big dams and their environmental impacts (I think?), and she was developing a thesis that while everybody always blames the WTO etc. for big unworkable money-sapping projects like dams, documents from the era seems to indicate that it is in fact the African leaders who push the projects, rather than the WTO. But she thought this would probably not be a very popular hypothesis. Apparently critiquing the WTO is a more fashionable activity.

After Akosombo, we lunched overlooking the Volta River below the dam, and then, crossing the river and continuing northward along the lake, we tried to go to what was supposed to be a great market in a town called Dzemeni (pron. like a British person saying “Germany”). But the market was kaput for the day, so we just wandered down to the lake and played with the kids a bit. The lake is very beautiful. Beautiful. yep. It’s also filled with lots of gigantic treacherous stumps from when they flooded the area with the dam ~40 years ago. I have pictures of this too.

Our next destination, where we would spend the night in the Freedom Hotel (me to taxi driver: “Take me to Freedom!”), was Ho. It is impossible to recount them all, but let me assure you, my readers, that there were copious Ho jokes. My favorites include the Ho Academy, the Ho Rehabilitation Centre, and our imaginary new store there, Ho Bags R Us. Anyway, before I got to Ho, I had another unpleasant run-in with a crazy person, who made gestures toward my breasts and announced very loudly that he could see them (I doubt this). I informed him that this was a very rude thing to say. Kristin and I went back to our chatting with the tro-tro driver, and the crazy man reappeared, this time angry and shouting even more unpleasant things, but he was very kindly borne off by some other fellows with nothing else to do than watch the obrunis discuss transportation with a tro-tro driver. Anyway, we were Ho-bound.

The Freedom Hotel in Ho is great. For I think $12 a night, we got a bed, a shared bathroom (with toilet paper and shower head!), breakfast, and a rooftop bar. Saturday morning, we checked out some of the local shops (not worthwhile), then grabbed a tro-tro to Tafi Abuip/fe, a kente cloth-weaving village. The tro-tro dropped us off at the junction to Abuipe, and we walked 4 km in the hot hot hot sun, with backpacks, till we finally hitched a ride with some dudes in a 4x4 into “town.” The village was pretty much as it was billed to be, a bunch of Ghanaians weaving cloth. It was cool, and yes, I have pictures. From there we went to Kpando (pron. Pando), and Fesi to see some pottery, mostly small animals (anteaters, rams, elephants, guinea hens, etc.). Yep. From there we got caught in a rainstorm (mostly Kristin, as I was especially well protected by my emergency secret backpack poncho), and discovered that we couldn’t go to Amedzofe (pron. A-mAY-jo-fay) that night, so it was back to Freedom (Ho). They were surprised to see us, at the Freedom, because we had left so definitively in the morning, and so they had given away our room, too, and had none left at that rate, nor the next rate up, either. It seemed as if we were going to have to pay 250,000 ($25) for a luxury room that we didn’t want, when suddenly a window opened that I hadn’t noticed, and a man appeared in it, and said, “What do they want? What do they want to pay? Give it to them!” So just like that, for no reason I can understand, they rented us a room with its own bathroom, TV, air conditioner, gigantic bed, and pool-overlooking balcony for the same low low price of $12! It was really nice of that man, but I really don’t understand why he did it—it was like he didn’t understand capitalism or something. He had the room, we had the money, Q.E.D. But not, as it turns out.

Sunday, we explored the Ho Market a bit, then tro’d off to Amedzofe, which is up in the mountains, so far up that it was actually chilly (=great). Amedzofe wins the prize for Best Wack-o Ghanaian Town. It had maps of the world and the U.S., with only Ghana, Brazil, and Portland Oregon labelled. It had a Ghanaian guy who had been married to a North Carolingian, and who therefore spoke with a nutty Ghanaian American accent (he said “you guys” a lot, and told us he knew the SHIT out of New York). It had a seemingly pleasant old man who laughed when we said we work for human rights NGOs and bragged about beating his wife and cackled about how he would punish me were I his wife. It had its crazy drunk man quota, who told us he was a doctor, a lecturer, owned a hotel, a VERY nice house, and ALL THIS LAND. And it had a ridiculously difficult hike involving hoisting oneself up and down a mountain by ropes, all to a pretty little waterfall.

I dug Amedzofe. It was really hard to get out of, though—we caught a taxi along with two large women, one large man, the driver (a pastor; I asked him if he prayed every time he drove up and down the mountain and he said: Yes. I pray.) and a little girl named Solace, who managed to sleep throughout the whole harrowing, beautiful ride. Kristin and I were crammed into the passenger seat; this did not work very well. So down the mountain we went, on horrid bumpy roads, unpaved, roller-coaster-like, 4x4-demanding. The views were spectacular, though. In some other little town, we caught a tro-tro back to Ho, picked up our things at the Freedom, and nabbed our final tro-tro to Accra.

In the taxi ride home, the taxi man rather abruptly and entitled-soundingly demanded that I marry him. I said I was married (false), and he said then that he’d like to marry my daughter. This of course won’t work, as I don’t have one (true), so he said he would marry Kristin instead, then. She exclaimed that she, too, was married (false). There was some silence, then he just announced “You hate the black man.” Kristin quickly reassured him that she was in fact married to a black man (false), and this seemed to pacify him on that score, although he still insisted that I should bring one of my friends to marry him. At this point, I tried to convince our taxi man that he should woo women with his charms, make them fall in love with him. He thought about this for a minute or two, and then said, just as abruptly: “Love me.” (Charming, but not the sustained effort a girl really wants.)

The trip to the Volta was great, but not relaxing. The Green Turtle should do the trick.

Tc
I get to see Tc on Friday! [Junior Sister (as they say here), Peace Corps Volunteer, Burkina Faso.] Kristin and I will meet her and bf Josh Post [PCV, Burkina] at the Green Turtle for 5 days of Green Turtle. We’ll be camping on the beach, playing cards, writing postcards, eating fresh fish, drinking Green Turtles, bodysurfing, and not bargaining about anything at all. Next week we’ll return to Accra for a few days, then zoom up to and around Burkina for a week or so, and then it’s time to come home. home! Half the time I am quite ready to come home, the other half the time I want to stay here for a lot longer. I think if the prospect of law school weren’t looming going home might be a little more attractive. But I really do love it here, most of the time, so it will be sad to leave.

. . .