Market Day, Monday

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart 

- unknown

 
Today was market day in Mafi Kumase. It’s an important day around here, because it is the only market day within a reasonable distance, and the only day that one can catch a tro out of Deveme with any certainty.

I ride in the front of the tro, with the headman Seth. James asks him to take me to the transport driver who brought the gravel for the KVIP, so I can get a receipt for the grant. I follow the headman through the village of Kumase. We immediately meet a man who the headman says is the brother of the driver. He joins us. We pass old mud-brick buildings small and crowded together, slowly returning to earth as we make our way south through the village.

I can see how my friend Karen Bennett became an engineer. Sometimes I wonder what sort of construction material could they use to build their houses to keep the heat outside, something that might withstand the heat and humidity, along with the rains of the tropics. The constant cycles of wet and dry, when Harmattan blows in from the north off the Sahara. What could they use to build a house from, made from local materials that might actually insulate against the heat? Is it even possible to do so? Would mud and straw and dung together and a foot and a half deep, that’s half a meter thick, make a stronger insulated wall, as Karen was researching in her senior project back in 1990? 

The old Acacia trees that blocked some of the sunlight on the south east side of the house, were cut down because of the electrical lines. Now the concrete bricks of my bungalow soak up the heat of the day, then act like a solar oven throughout the night slowly giving off their heat, so slow to cool. It’s so hot and stuffy at this time of year, that if it weren’t for the fan moving the air around, I would feel as if I were suffocating. That's how I feel on a night when the electricity goes out. It would be nice to have thick adobe walls to keep a place cool during the day. I gather from what Ghanaians say, that the old huts and houses built of mud do stay cool during the heat of the day, like adobe.

So, I ask myself the next pertinent question - do the people who have lived here all their lives find this heat as debilitating as I do? For them is this really a problem to solve? The headman and his friend, they don’t seem to be suffering from the heat. They are wearing long dark pants. Is it just me who wants to strip down naked and jump in a cool pool? 

We walk on, the sand shifting underneath the soles of our feet, the exposed sandstone soaking up the heat beneath us as I follow them through the maze of mud huts and concrete houses.

There’s a good chance that the people here would find the adobe house, that I have designed in my mind, cold. They go around at dawn and dust with windbreakers and quilted or padded jackets. My guess is, they are happy with the way it is, living in the heat. Which is the way it is with many things - they are happy with the way it is. I hear a few complaints about the heat, mostly from the teachers who probably feel guilty about not teaching when it is so hot that both they and the students are falling asleep, turning the hard wooden benches in the ICT lab and the library into beds under the fans with the slatted windows open. Or outside, they lay down on the bamboo benches under the Acacia trees. Still, others move along, languorous is the heat, and they are happy with just a little shade with a two-yard on the ground to nap. It’s a way of life. A stress free way of life. Would they like my cooler house?

I can see the minaret of the mosque, just a small mosque. It orients me. Sister Happy’s spot is nearby on the main the cross street. We continue through an unfamiliar landscape, simply because I never use this route, though I could avoid all the crush of the market that happens on that road if I ever need to.

My usual route on leaving the quote Deveme tro station end quote, is to follow my established route through the market, making purchases as I go. First to the peanut butter lady, now her mother, yesterday here daughter; or so I imagine the old wizened woman is her mother. She has a hard time counting the money, perhaps a consequence of a time when many women were not educated. Then to Manuela, a lovely lady, whose stall is full of produce favored by the western palette - piles of apples on a round tray, often topped with purple grapes or a few pears, potatoes with eyes already developing on their faces, lettuce, green onions, cucumbers, and mangos. I never buy my carrots from her. She favors fat ones. I like the ones sold by a young man down the way. Depending on the day, I may favor his apples and cabbage too. Then pineapple and bananas at a stall where the lady and I exchange good morning greetings in Ewe. Sometimes I buy bananas across the way, but they usually rot too fast, before the week is out. I take a right and wend my way to the egg lady, whose stall is near the gari part of the market, before I end up fighting my way through the main market drag to Sister Happy’s spot. It’s crowded with tros headed to Accra, Ho, Sogakope, Akatsi, and other parts of the Volta; carts making their way to stalls or buses and trucks; vendors, women with trays of veggies on their heads, a pile of cabbage carrots and bell peppers, a basin full of sachet water, drinks like sobolo(from hibiscus) and solom(from maize) or mountain of colorful fabrics, even a tray with jewelry; people making their way to and from one place to another. Yes, buses, beat up old buses, going gods know where: vendors villages and the hawkers hovels, cities like Ho and Sogakope and Accra too. 

We finally emerge near the main intersection, the place where Mafi Kumase usually has its station. We cross the intersection, headed in the direction of the police station. To the left rises the singular rock with its reservoir on top. It’s huge. The reservoir is the size of a large house, and it looks small on top of the rock. When we sit down in the shade of some thatch, we have a view of that rock. I want to climb it before I leave.

When I get home from the market, my back aches from walking in the heat and all the food I'm carrying home. The muscles under my right shoulder blade are tight. I lay out the yoga mat on the floor and roll around on the tennis ball, easing it under my shoulder blade and along my collar bone. Kiana Dog comes to mind, me rolling around on that yoga mat, like she use to do in the grass under the coastal live oak tree in our backyard trying to scratch her back, the smell of cool Pacific fog mingling with bay leaves in the air. That’s the image that strikes me in the heat, while sweat is rolling down my brow and inching it’s way through the hair on my scalp. 

Life in Ghana, observations after ten months in residence

It’s been a ten months since I arrived in Ghana. I can hardly believe it. How time flies. And crawls at the same time. This post started as a letter to a friend. After all, I come from a generation that use to know how to write them.

I’ve been here long enough that I’m nominally used to Ghana, even if not fully adapted. One never gets use to the heat, the sweat dripping from the brow onto the sheet of paper your trying to write on, or pouring down the underside of the upper arm as your trying to hold a polite conversation. Or being called a yevu by a group of school kids as your passing. They never say it once. They always call it out over and over again. Or obroni, the Twi equivalent of the Ewe, yevu. These terms are for non-Africans, whether white or red or yellow. Both originated as derogatory terms for foreigners. Yevu is a contraction of aye avu, or cunning dog. It’s what the Ewe called the British a long time ago.

So here we go!

Field note #1, Living conditions or Camping 101:  No matter what I do to make my sparsely furnished, two bedroom bungalow into a home with its low flush porcelain toilet, I still have to flush the toilet by pouring water into the toilet tank, and the shower head is for looks only. It's bucket baths. I can understand now why Degas bathers really sat on stools. It’s so much easier to bucket bath seated.

Field note #2, Water: Drinking water from 500ml plastic water sachets, soft plump things - ends up adding to the increasing worldwide plastic pollution. Drinking from the filter that is provided by Peace Corps, a British Berkfeld ceramic filtration system, is great. But, I am always running out of water, that precious commodity that we cannot live without.

The water issue is a major one in Sub Saharan Africa, especially in areas like northern Ghana. Here is an interesting link to an article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how well intentioned development groups, such as NGOs and church-volunteer projects, that come to Ghana meaning to help end up doing worse by the locals than if they had stayed at home.

Field note #3: Transportation. There are no nice smooth bus rides on busses that leave at a scheduled time. One waits until the bus or tro fills before it leaves the station for a given destination, or one waits to catch a trotro or line taxi by the side of the road. One fellow volunteer posted on his facebook page - been waiting for a ride for four hours in 102 degree Farenheit. We are a hardy bunch! but oh how I miss being able to jump in the car and go anywhere I want...

Field note #4, The Weather: No, I'm not use to the heat, yet I don't have to suffer from 102 degrees under the African sun like my friend and fellow volunteer from Fresno. Thing is it may be 90 degrees, humid and feels like 102. I melt into a puddle of my own sweat all day, everyday. It may be cool outside, but I have no secure place to sleep outside. There are no 'compounds' in this basically thatched roof, mud hut village of 600, though people do have money according to the teachers. Don't know what they are doing with it. They are not building latrines, or reservoirs to farm water from roofs, or paying the teachers who teach extra classes to their kids. But I don't mean to grumble about my adventure, because overall, if I forget for a few minutes how very uncomfortable I am in the heat, there is much that is interesting, much to learn and much to see.

They say the hot season will end soon, when the rains come. Trouble is it's starting to rain pretty regularly, and still when it stops it's back to the heat once again.

Field note #5: Education:  The students are lovely, at the same time they are frustrating and irritating. There is no discipline in the Form 1 JHS (equivalent to 7th grade in theory, but not in fact). Being in a small rural village I've come to realize that for the most part they do not put a great deal of value on education. Then again, their schoolbooks are written for people living in Ghana's big cities. Could have laughed when a science 'activity' called for a tennis ball! Where the hell is the tennis court? In Accra where the wealthy Ghanaians, Nigerians and most of the expats live? Or in Kumasi at the home of the Ashanti king, who is rolling in gold. 

Yesterday a group of children sang a lovely song in Ewe, the local language I'm trying to learn, but seem to be forgetting as I try to teach the children English and then hole up to recharge myself! I asked my young friend Isaac what they were singing and he said, 'they sing about the dark and the light, Madam.' Later, after I filmed them singing (I posted it on FaceBook) he told me that 'they are singing about how their forefathers lived in the dark, but now we live in the light, the light of the one true God.' Missionaries have done their work well (I did not put that comment on Facebook!)

I could go on for days about how Christianity has so entirely swept Africa, always adapting to Africa -  drumming accompanies songs sung in native tongues.

I wouldn't mind doing another stint with the Peace Corps, go to a more temperate country with cooler seasons at least a good part of the year. Perhaps even few other amenities, like real flush toilets and running water and a greater variety of foods. I'm definitely out of my comfort zone here, if you hadn't noticed, and learning a lot. 

So here I've gone and dulled your eyesight. I'm trying to figure out how to balance the many faces of what I'm seeing here and there and everywhere. It's really no different from home, in the sense that we are always adapting to the people, places and events around us, eh? 

Enough, I need to go to bed.

With much love!

xoxo b