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.