the ring of fire

rehearsal-baseball-game-dinner-fireworks videos: the ring of fire and the final bang (download and view). I recommend watching them at night with the lights off.

. . .

ouroboros: back to school

"The Ouroboros (also spelled Oroborus, Uroboros or Uroborus) is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle. It has been used to represent many things over the ages, but it most generally symbolizes ideas of cyclicality and primordial unity. The ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations. In the last century, it has been interpreted by psychologists such as Carl Jung as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche. The name ouroboros (or, in Latinized form, uroborus) is Greek (οὐροβóρος), "tail-devourer". The depiction of the serpent is believed to have been inspired by the Milky Way, as some ancient texts refer to a serpent of light residing in the heavens." (Wikipedia)


I love the internet. Somebody made a banana ouroboros. Not ever having eaten snake ouroboros, I can't say that banana ouroboros is tastier, but it would probly go better with cheerios.



. . .

polka ... goes international

My statcounter tells me that I now have or have had readers in Canada, France, the U.K., Austria, Switzerland, and Spain. This is cool. It also makes sense. I think that maybe Ghana is the five places without any location. But why on earth do I have the most hits in the past month from people in El Reno, Oklahoma? Okies, speak up! I can't think of a single person I know there, so: who are you and why are you reading this? I'm also curious to know who's in Independence, Missiouri, Norwalk Connecticut, and Boca Raton, Florida (Piroska? Is that you?). Please do share.

In less meta-blog news, school starts tomorrow. Not so much to say about that at the moment, except it will be nice nice nice to see my peeps again. I no longer have a fever, although things are still awry down south. I'm hoping I don't have the awful parasites Kristin has been hosting. My apartment is slowly returning to A-apartment order, though I think it will be a few weeks before all is put right again. There was a plant massacre in my absence, which is sad, but happily almost none of the plants to which I was most emotionally tied died. The worst loss was a pretty little petunia growing out of a can! that I received from my sister Jeanne for Xmas and kept alive for a year and a half. I hope that another one finds its christmas way to me again this year.

Part of my slow-moving apartment-putting-to-rights was an olde time favorite of mine: online shopping! I bought a rug, some buttons by marimekko (a terrific Finnish design company), and a postcard album. I'm especially excited about the postcard album because I have a huge number of postcards that have long been needing a permanent home. In Annapolis, they sat on a ledge on the wall, and often fell off; most of the time since then they've been in a box or in a pile.

It was terrific seeing the family last weekend; I just wish I'd been less exhausted. I don't regret all the other travelling, but I wish it could have been more spread out, with perhaps some downtime in New York before it all began. But I got to see some law school people, some high school people, and a buttload of family people, and it makes me happy.

Here's my new rug:

















I hope it looks as nice in person. or in rug.
Time to sort thru the suitcases. Oh yeah, and tomorrow's Aaron's birthday. Happy birthday Aa!

. . .

smooch!

My brother Shum and sister-in-law Diana are married. that's the big news. I don't have the pictures to prove it because I was using a manual camera, but I swear it's the truth. Instead, I will just have to salute them with New York's Finest:



congrats, family!


please return your seat to the full upright and locked position
I stepped today off the sixth plane I have taken since I got back from Ghana exactly 16 days ago, and the 8th in 17 days. And we're not done yet, folks! Aaron's Maine Birthday looms brightly next weekend. I was very nearly run right over today by a young woman racing to offer herself to be bumped for a free flight. She smiled at me and said, as if it excused her shocking behavior, that she especially needed it because she, a pesky med school applicant, was going to have to fly all over for her interviews and didn't get reimbursed. I started to explain that I, too, might have such flights in my future, but it wasn't worth explaining what a clerkship was. Her elbows would fit right in in Ghana, though. And in med school, probably. This is starting to sound a little like a medical school rant, which is unnecessary (but maybe a little bit funny?), and dumb, since I really have nothing against med school or med school applicants. Let's explain it away with the confession that I'm feeling feverish, and not from excitement. Hopefully just exhaustion. But that isn't allowed to stop me from stuffing my clerkship applications tomorrow. School starts Wednesday. Thank heavens above Jessie will be here to help ease the pain.


. . .

p.s. neither the elbower nor I received a free flight.

tastier spam

I got an email today that claimed to be from someone named SCIENCE. It's good to finally communicate one on one, without the mediation of those pesky SCIENTISTS. Maybe we will understand one another at last.

Also, "Kyle," another spamslinger, served this up to me:

It has been since we've gossiped.
just wanted you to hear about the project, that has been advising me lose
my gut.
You should stop by at [website]

give them 11 sec and that's it to begin.
It was super decisevely having someone to support me out.
I apologize I have been so overdue with it. Call me

escarpment as though some all disagree powerful hand had
I kill integrated if you do not let
sleepy that they must have dive already


Are YOU sure? Who comes up with this stuff? Kyle's a genius! Spam is entertainment!

In other news, my time in Nebraska is finished and we roll to Kansas City. Look out, nephews! buh-BLAM! auntie me's coming to town.

. . .

goodbye 475-3981

you were good to me. you were the number i could remember best for a while after my parents moved. you can leave a message if you'd like to. sayonara, 475-3981.

. . .

psssst

Ghana wasn't big enough to contain Timo ten Feld's blog. Now you shall know his velocity here.

. . .

thug life

is nothing like the Good Life they celebrate here in Nebraska. Or so I imagine. Nebraska is plenty* rainstorms viewed from the porch, garage sales, farmers markets, and thrift stores rich in Americana, family love, hair cuts, laundry on the line**, fresh tomatoes, sweet corn, and basil, and noisy-ass crickets***. I've been kicking it high time with Sarah W. Thompson, Harris P. Lehl, Tc (also shaking down America for a few short weeks till the bro gets hitched), and the folks. Lots of time being spent on clerkship applications, but they'll be done soon.

Sarah Keene Parady's Wyoming Wedding was tres beau. She was iconoclasticly lovely in copper, and Jeff looked great too, in dress jeans and cowboy boots. I think that Jeff's mom gets kudos as my favorite local wyominger. Plus I got to chill with my NYU girls Navneet and Susanna, who taught my a great new car game, Chuck, F%*& or Marry. And many thanks to Cameron and Daphna, who drove me from Salt Lake City, UT (possibly my all-time favorite city to fly into, for the views, topping even NYC) to Rock Springs, WY. I Like Them. They R Kool. Daphna lives in Rome most of the year. We bonded. And even if Rome wasn't enough to do it, she and Cameron and SKP's friend Rachel and I were all in a minor car accident together. Everybody's fine, except the cars, but it added some flava flave to the weekend. My whiplash was temporarily enough make SKP's mom give me a muscle relaxant to chew on, though. That was great. It scored me some quality shut-eye, which I needed, cause of the whole jetlag + getting up at 3:30am to get to the NYC airport to fly to SLC bizniz.

Next week Mom, Tc, and I will chug on down to Kansas City to visit the KC McShanes (starring my nephews! Mark! and! Ian!), then we'll all (incl. them and Dad) will fly to Pittsburgh for Shum-Dude & Diana's wedding! woo! then school starts. boo! But really, it will be fine. And it looks like the year will yield lots of zippy trips--hope to see SWT & HPL in NYC, TJC & Dr. RLY in Boston, Dr. JEC in Alaska AND NYC, Adelle getting married in Mexico + me visiting her in Portugal, the fam at Thanksgiving, and maybe even Zach & Timo's wedding in Oh Canada.

hearts to all,

. . .


*plenty is a good ghana word. work it! we are plenty handsome!
**This does not always coordinate well with the rainstorms. Nor with the very proximally located birdfeeders.
*** no. not noisy ass-crickets.

p.s. I don't know that person in the Good Life picture. But maybe you do.

i'm going back to new york city i do believe i have had enough

The title is my favorite new york homecoming song lyric (bob dylan). Alternative title: hot showers, sushi, and green tea ice cream all have their times and places. none of which times or places seem to be in Ghana.

I left Ghana under a cloud. My good friends Zach and Timo were mugged/attacked one night after they left a club literally around the corner from our house. Timo sustained a big knife wound on his face, requiring stitches, dentistry, and drinking straws. This happened while I was travelling in Burkina with Tc. Just after I returned to Accra, another friend, Jessica, fell victim to an alleged Nigerian taxi scheme, wherein the culprits lure unsuspecting whiteys into taxis and then whisk them away to dark places to steal their money and cause other harm. Jessica wasn't hurt, but her purse was stolen, and when she noticed that they were driving the wrong way, she had to jump out of the car. You can read further descriptions of these incidents on their blogs: http://zachinghana.blogspot.com, http://timoinghana.blogspot.com, http://fierceinvalids.blogsource.com/ (guess which is whose). These and other, similar incidents reported in the expat community pretty much did away with any complacency we had about our safety in Accra. The last day or two, we were all quite nervous in taxis, around motos, and in the night. It was a sad way to leave. I don't like and resent feeling threatened, especially in a place where I otherwise experienced little other than goodwill.

However, my departure was otherwise lovely. Free mornings with Timo and Jessica, drinking tea and eating Hot Lime Pepper and groundnut paste (not at the same time) on whatever's at hand. Lots of sweeties came to the buy-one-get-one-free-pizza-on-my-last-night dinner at the Osu Food Court (sounds worse than it is, although it does have its own fake McDownalds Playland area, complete with screaming kiddos). The pizza is good though.

The next day, my last, my core crew came out to lunch with me at Haveli, a terrific indian restaurant. Happy eaters included Zach (newly back from Kenya, which was too fresh for him), Timo (healing nicely, though it still hurts him to laugh [they stole his smile: a new after-school special]), and Kris (our droll German roommate, very liberal with the antibacterial spray), plus Jessica, Candace, and Mark (all work at CDD, where Kristin worked, and terrifically likable; Jess and Mark are Obruni House staples; Candace doesn't live there but she might as well), as well as Simon, another German who used to live at Ob.H. (Kristin was still travelling in Mali.) Then we hauled my stuff to a taxi (no small job; kudos especially to Zach) and then to the airport.

I had too much stuff. Too much stuff in my checked luggage, too much stuff in my carry-ons. The fee for the too-heavy checked luggage was only $25 per bag, which is great b/c it's much cheaper than mailing it (I assume). However, I didn't have any cedis left, there are no cash machines in the airport, and they wouldn't take credit cards for less than $400. I had to put in a frantic call to Zach, who, with Jess, heroically chipped in 600,000 cedis (approx. $60) and brought it to me at the airport (Zach, Jess, Candace, and Timo were waiting for me, along with one of my carry-ons, at the hotel bar). This maneuver was successful, and I finally managed to check my bags. However, I didn't want to wait for the receipt for the $50, so I just said I'd come back for it when it was time to board the plane, and went off to join my comrades at the bar. This was a strategic error. When I came back for the receipt, they noticed my too-heavy carry-on luggage. For some reason, the fee for this was $150, and this was a fee I was not willing to pay. In part because my friends had already left and there was no way they were going to have another extra 1,500,000 cedis on them, and in part because I had none left myself, and in part because I still couldn't use a credit card or access a cash machine. However, I had heard of other ways to deal with big fees at the airport. People in Ghana do NOT like crying girls. No. Not at all. So, if sufficiently convincing, this is a very nice, if shameless, way of getting people to do what one wants. But, alas, I cannot cry on command. Instead, I discovered, I can fake the noises and the face-scrunching and the face-wiping of tears, especially with the help of a large part of a large beer, and, accompanied by moaning about my student/volunteer status, and my ruse seemed to do the trick. I wasn't sure what I was going to do if they called me out on the faking. Maybe laugh. Don't know. But in any case it worked, the lady told me to dry my tears (check! already dry!) and that I wouldn't have to pay.

The flights went by without incident, which is surprising, giving the liquid-bombing scare going on in England at the moment. I carried on plenty of shampoo and soap and what-have-you, and I was coming from Dubai, for goodness sakes, but no one said anything at all (I was ignorant of the situation anyway). I did almost miss the second flight, even though I was sitting right next to the gate, just because I didn't happen to hear any of the boarding announcements (was reading). But then I looked up and saw "Final Call," so I made it just in time and so it really isn't too great a story. All my luggage also made it, nothing even broken, I got home within a reasonable amount of time, my subletter did not abscond with all of my things, and only 6 plants are dead. Not too terrible.

I am so tired and my head so heavy and my neck so jellied that ... I am tired. I think it's around 4 am in Ghana. And I will arise again at 3:30am, NYC time, to fly to Rock Springs, WY, via Salt Lake City, Utah, to witness law student extraordinaire Sarah Jane P.'s metamorphasis into Sarah Keen P. by means of happy nuptials with one quiet Jeff.

I can't even finish all the green tea ice cream. I hope to write more about my travels with the Burkinabe Americanos, and post my photos sometime, sometime. I'll be in Rock Springs for 2.5 days, then Nebraska for 9 days, then Pittsburgh for 3, then back to New York for a week, we train our new Environmental Law Journal Rookies, school starts, and I retire with Aaron & Co. to Maine for birthday pie. then somehow the rest of the year follows along, I graduate, pass the bar, and do good work. can I get an amen, sistah?

i wonder where my checkbook is. hmm.

good night,
. . .

jiggety jog

I'm in the middle of a googlathon of buses and planes. Things are fine, I'm coming home.
. . .

i hate the friend

hello! I'm briefly on a computer in the Peace Corps office in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. There are movies to watch and dinner to make, but I just wanted to stop in and say that we've been having just the best time. Kristin and I met Tc and Josh (PCVs) at the Green Turtle and maxed and relaxed for four days. Then we went back to Accra, ate indian food, tofu and mint salads, steak, and terrific spaghetti, biked through mountains, and painted nutrionally informative pictures of anthrpomorphic vegetables on the walls of a nutrition center in a Liberian refugee camp an hour outside of Accra. Tomorrow Tc, Kristin, Cary (another PCV) and I will be going to her village, and then down to another Josh's village for a party. sweet. I'll be back in Accra on the 8th, and leaving for home on the 9th. suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuushi!

. . .

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.

. . .

'round the outside, 'round the outside

hey leaping lords and ladies. It's been a while since I rapped atcha. Hope to post a nice long one this evening, but until then, you will have to make de do do do, de da da da with this sparkling slice of filla:
__________________________________________________________
[From the Cornelia Street Cafe, near NYU School o' fLaw]

Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street
Between Bleecker St and W 4th St
New York, NY 10014
(212) 989-9319

Dear Reader,

We're very happy you have agreed to participate in our marathon
reading of Homer's Iliad at Cornelia Street Café, July 17 - 20. There are twenty
four of us, one for each book of the Iliad. Here are some details about your
reading, which you will need to know in order to prepare for the event:

Please check the schedule below to confirm which book you are reading,
and on what night. We ask that all readers arrive at Cornelia Street Café
a few minutes early (no later than 6 PM) and check in with me (Kurt) so I
know everyone is present and ready to go. I'll either be upstairs at the
bar, or downstairs in the performance room. You'll know me: I'll be the one
with the anxious _expression on my face. If you can't find me, find Angelo, or
ask one of the bartenders who I am.

________________________________________________


Jessie and I went to a more hard-core all-night reading of the Odyssey last year, and it was amazing: great greek food, a beautiful space, and hearing 80% of the Odyssey in about 14 hours was spectacular. You can see pictures here (but you have to sign up first): http://annescanon.rhymm.com/digipics/nyc/out/odyssey/

word.

. . .

more mentos

For some reason, Mentos candy are cheap and plentiful here. But they have lots of arabic on the wrapper, along with the english, and are billed as "Chewy Dragees." mmm, dragees.

we want a picture, not a belly-itcher

Here's the video that I meant to upload last week, with the people celebrating their victory over the U.S. YOu follow the link, download the file, and then watch it on your computer.

I did successfully scam the invite to the big party last night, and there, was, indeed, dancing--more on this later.

cheers.

. . .

jose can you see?

happy fourth of july! I'm working on getting into the US embassy's party today. It's invite only, but they sent an invite to my boss (not even American! sheesh!), but she can't go, so I want to go instead. We will see.

Ada Foah was beautiful. I popped the cherry on my new tropical tent with all its breezy screens. It wasn't exactly restful b/c it was super windy and it starting sprinkling in the middle of the night. But it was fun and that's what counts. Ada Foah is a long spit of sand between the mouth of the Volta (Kristin: Georgia O'Keeffe would love it here.) and the Atlantic. It isn't very wide--you can walk across it in five minutes. From where we were, we walked all the way around the tip of the peninsula, and it took about an hour and a half. I took lots of waving-palm-tree pictures. It rained on the second day, but it was still nice enough.

On our tro-tro home, Kristin and I nearly died a few times in quick succession--it's not exactly clear what happened, but I think our tro-tro got cut off very dangerously by another tro-tro. This pissed off our tro-tro driver and the mate (the guy who takes the money and yells where the tro-tro is going to attract passengers), so we had to pass them very dangerously. Then, while we were passing them, the other driver made a rude gesture, which incensed our mate enough to make him think that throwing a big bucket of oil at the other tro-tro was a good idea. Then everyone on the bus started yelling at our mate for doing such a stupid thing for the next 10 minutes. It was all very dramatic. This made me start thinking about whether I was wearing clean underwear (check!) and then what if I had an autopsy and that the autopsifier could check if my teeth were brushed (check!) and if I was wearing deodorant (check!) and see what my last meal was (cookies and instant lemonade) and really what my meals were for the last four days (yes, it's true. sometimes I poop all the time and sometimes not at all. kind of a digestive rollercoaster). This amused me and made being terrified not so terrible.

Back to work.

. . .

ahoy

Today Kristin and I are off to a tropical paradise--a beach with the beautiful name of Ada Foah (pronounced "Fo," I think), so remote that there are no roads to it and someone has to take you there on a canoe. It's right between the Volta river delta and the ocean. I'm going to camp there.

My buddy Zach has a photo site to which he has uploaded pix. I think if you scroll around you'll find pictures that look suspiciously like a tropical paradise--that's Ada Foah. He also has pictures of our Obruni House and Kumasi. I need to find a way to upload my photos. yep.

Yesterday Kristin and I went on a marathon shopping trip. We got up pearly early and took a tro-tro (cost: less than $1) (I got to sit in the front--great b/c you can see everything, but also hard not to imagine your gruesome death in a not-too-improbable vehicular collision) to a town called Aburi, about 90 mintues away. Aburi is up in the mountains, and has an incredible view of Accra, which is on flat land near the ocean. And they have a gigantic wood market there, to buy all those African masks that everybody (except me) brings home from Africa. There are lots of other pretty little trinkets there too, and they make them right there, in ramshackle little huts. There were wood shavings everywhere. I cannot understand how they make money, since they all sell basically the same stuff (although I did see a unique giant wooden statute of a Sixers basketballer) and are all clustered together in the same little place. The ones on the road and at the ends of the rows must make the most money. After our wood curio shopping, we had hiked up the road into Aburi proper and had us some lunch--our favorite fried chicken and jollof rice (spicy tomato rice). People in Ghana generally really enjoy playing their stereos very loudly, but this was taken to an extreme in Aburi. We were really hungry and tired, but we had to turn away from a couple of different little restaurants because the music was SO loud. Anyway, the fried chicken was great.

From Aburi, we took a shared taxi (cost: about $1) (shared taxis are taxis that go to and from specific places, and they fill all the way up before they go with the various people who want to go there) about half way to our next destination, the other half done in a tro-tro. Outside a town called Somanya is Cedi's Bead Factory, which has been operated by one family for several generations. To find it, you have to walk about half a mile down a little dirt path, where every once in a while you are reassured by a sign (Cedi Bead Industry: A Place Where Beads Talk) that you are indeed coming to the factory. It's less a factory than beautiful grounds with open air buildings (roof and walls that go half way up--don't ask me what holds up the roof) in which they hang out and make zillions of beads. Mr. Cedi himself gave us a tour of the premises, showing us the five different kinds of beads one can make with recycled glass bottles, how he designs them, fires them, polishes them, and strings them. The tour of the place was just delightful. Everybody was so nice and the grounds so relaxing and the activity so productive and pretty! At the end, we each bought a few strings of beads from the showroom, and then he gave us a another string each for a present. This is easily one of the nicest ways I have spent an hour here. And Mr. Cedi also volunteered a few people to drive us out to the main road, and then, when we told them that we were going to a nearby market, they drove us all the way there! very sweet.

The Agomanya market was our last destination. It's famous for being a bead market (MUCH cheaper than Cedi's) but it has all the other market stuff too, food and fabric, as well as some gigantic ceramic pots (beautiful but too big to take anywhere). Kristin and I went nuts with the bead-buying (and some cloth, too, of course). It was a buying day, for sure--but it was also my day-t0-buy-beads-and-wood-stuff, so I don't think it will be repeated. We were quite exhausted after the bead market, so it was time to go home again home again jiggity jog. From Agomanya we were able to catch a tro-tro straight back to Accra (again in the front seat), and along the way I saw my favorite sign ever. In order to understand it, you have to know that ueenmothers are female chiefs--the British called them Queenmothers, instead of Queens, or just Chiefs, so that they wouldn't seem to disrupt patriarchy so much (according to somebody at the abortion conference last week). So here it is:

Lover Boys Undertakers: We Take All Corpses, including QueenMothers and Chiefs!

ok, thanks, bye!
anne

blo me filla now

I’ve gotten bored with learning straight-up Twi, so now I’m cornering the slang. Blo me filla now is actually Ghanaian English slang (I think); I translate it as “blow (tell) me filler (information) now. Basically the same as “s’up?” I’ve also learned some bad words and gestures. The gestures are especially great. In one of them, you put your hand out in the same pose as if you were going to shake someone’s hand, but you spread your fingers far apart and shake the hand up and down and make a mean face. For another, you stick out your fist as if you were going to give a thumbs up, but instead you wave your thumb up and down a bunch and again with the mean face.

**Adult Content Alert **

Things have been busy. I spent the first part of this week at an abortion workshop for the media. The workshop was sponsored by an American organization called the Population Reference Bureau. The thrust of the workshop was pretty much: women are dying horrible deaths from unsafe abortions because they don’t know that abortion is legal in Ghana. Abortion, like premarital sex and children out of marriage, is highly stigmatized here, and so women don’t like to admit they’re pregnant in the first place, and then don’t like to ask for help if they need to terminate the pregnancy. And, while everybody seems to know about contraception, contraceptive use is very low; women who insist upon it are assumed to be promiscuous, and therefore unattractive. Men seem to think that condoms anyway reduce their pleasure. And there seem to be lots of misconceptions about how to use contraception, especially among young people. Myths about reproduction abound; one we heard about a lot was that many people seem to think that a woman can’t get pregnant the first time she has sex. Parents don’t talk to their children about sex, and I think “family life education” isn’t taught until higher education, so children learn only through their peers. The whole society is set up for an epidemic of unsafe abortion deaths; and in fact it is the single largest cause of maternal mortality (15-30%--numbers vary b/c of secrecy).

It was very interesting to watch the participants over the course of the workshop. At the beginning, nearly all of them thought that abortion was wrong and some even thought that women who die because of unsafe abortions deserve it. We didn’t count or anything, but I’m sure that all of them were either Christian or Muslim, and quite serious about it too. But as the presentations and activities continued, they were completely swayed. Part of it was just the getting the facts straight: knowing that abortion is in fact legal, and not just when the mother might die—so there’s the factual legal aspect. Another part was the overwhelmingly gruesome statistics—the practical aspect of women dying unless... They were also called upon to fulfill the journalist’s duty as educatoràunsafe abortion, and abortion at all, might happen much less frequently if the press took an active role in educating people in general about reproductive health, and targeting parents and young people especially. They heard a lot about their unique capacity to hold politicians and policymakers accountable. For instance, we took a tour of the post abortion care facilities of the biggest teaching hospital in Ghana, and it has one nurse, who comes in the afternoons. The gynecological surgery area (they called it the gynae theatre) had been refurbished (it was literally falling down, I think) and the President had a big news conference about opening it up last year—and it is still sitting empty, no tools, no furniture, nothing. So while the President got some political capital, the people actually got nothing. But I think many, or at least some, were also actually swayed from being pro-life to pro-choice. This was incredible to me, coming from the U.S. where, in abortion “debates,” nobody ever actually listens to anybody else or changes their minds about anything. It was also interesting because the pro-choice arguments that were used were sometimes pretty terrible. But (I think) they had not really been previously armed with pro-life arguments; they had only been told that it was wrong by their pastors and mothers and newspapers and everybody else. So when they were presented with actual arguments, even though some were bad, they didn’t have much with which to combat them.

I think they also learned a lot about straight-up journalism: how to tell a story without judging the players, how to research a story, and also how to advocate.

Toward the end of the third day, I was pretty tired of listening to other people have a conference, but on the whole I think it was (from the point of view of the organizers) a very successful conference. It was also, as a whole, quite interesting to me, first because I just learned a lot about abortion in general and abortion in Ghana, and second because I watched that transformation of people’s beliefs.

** End of Adult Content **

Oh, and Ghana lost to #1 Brazil, 3-0. Boo. But the Black Stars are returning home today, and the city is again abuzz.

The hotel we stayed at was quite posh—hot water! and air conditioning! (which we didn’t even use). And a balcony overlooking the sadly dirty and rocky beach, and clean and rock-free swimming pool. The food was great (ostrich! is! good!) although something decided I was having it all too easy and attacked my digestive system. There was also a guy there whose job it was to weave kente cloth, just for tourists to watch, and another couple of dudes who carved gigantic mancala boards in the shape of alligators. Perty sweet.

In other news, I have completed my selections for my clerkship applications. The whole process starts ridiculously early—the clerkship wouldn’t be till after I graduate. But interviews are in September or October, and I guess it takes a long time to assemble the application packets (letters of reference, resume, writing sample, cover letter, for 70 judges). I’ve been getting lots of pretty clothes and other things made with the wacky wax fabric they have here—my seamstress, Auntie Vera, lives right in my driveway in a little blue rectangular prism, and she does great work. I think I’m probably paying her rent right now. I think this weekend Kristin and I will take a day trip or two, hopefully at least one of them to a pristine beach somewheres. We have Monday off for a national holiday—I think maybe an Independence Day sort of thing? but there’s no big celebration or anything, so the beach should be a fine way celebrate. And I hope to go to the U.S. Embassy’s invite-only party on the Fourth; my boss has an invitation.

The overhead light just went out for some reason.

One crazy thing I saw in the hospital on our workshop site visit there was thousands of files marked confidential tied together with twine and sitting in a big heap on the floor of the obstetrics unit lobby. I would have taken a picture but I didn’t want to violate anyone’s privacy.

I want to upload the right video but using this connection it will take 3.5 hours. It will have to wait.

Enough writing for one day.

. . .

hmm

rumor has it that I accidentally uploaded a short video of a man scratching his belly instead of the jubilations I intended to share. I'll try to rectify this soon.

Time to retire to my hotel on the beach. bye bye.

party movie

Hey everybody. I uploaded a very short and fun movie that I took on my digital camera to www.yousendit.com, which hosts the movie for 7 days or 100 downloads. It's from yesterday, a large group of people celebrating the Black Stars' victory. It should be available here.
My friend Zach also uploaded a movie to the site, which you can see here.

let me know if it doesn't work.

. . .