The Go-Away Bird

Stories and pictures from one grumpy but curious American's sojourn in Africa.

[go-away-bird]

The Big List of Pretty Much All the Things I'll Miss About Ghana (It's Longer Than You Think)

1. Meeting another expat for the first time and feeling comfortable discussing my various digestive complaints within 10 minutes.

2. Often having a doctor friend around to dispense advice about said digestive complaints/malaria symptoms/uncategorizable mystery illnesses. (This is true of our time in Swaziland as well.) And, unlike in the U.S., doctors don't seem to find it annoying when their friends ply them with medical questions - compared to what they deal with all day, my sudden heat rash probably seems like a piece of cake to diagnose.

3. This is going to sound awful, but the freedom and the means to pay someone to do just about anything - carry something heavy, dig a hole, fetch you water, peel a mango, drive you into the next country, make you a custom bookstand with a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer carved into the back (have not done this one - yet). I hate that labor is cheap in Ghana because people don't get paid anything near what they should. But trying to accomplish basic tasks amid stifling heat, byzantine bureaucracy, and/or occasional language barriers can make your life extremely, unnecessarily frustrating. Paying someone - any one of the thousands of people around you who will gladly be paid - to do these things instead makes it less so. It runs counter to my nature, but when you remove the barriers of high cost and a highly regulated and compartmentalized economic society - as in, no one's going to claim they can't do these things for you because it's an insurance risk or it's "not what they do" - paying someone to do things for you is great. 

4. A pub quiz (that's trivia night, Americans) that's way less PC than anything you'd find in the States. 

5. Being able to smile at and greet people on the street without being thought hugely weird. Unexpected full-fledged conversations still disturb my introvert’s soul, and street harassment is still and always just street harassment, but looking other human beings in the eye from time to time is quite nice.

6. Alluded to above, but: buying a mango on the street and having it peeled, cut, and packaged in a tidy box or bag, complete with toothpicks, all for less than a dollar. One of Ghana's most gratifying little pleasures. 

7. Chasing chickens.

8. Watching chickens attempt to fly.

9. Watching chickens cross the road (never gets old).

10. Being consistently greeted with "You are welcome!", especially from the guards at Shaun's office.

11. Quiet, well-behaved children.

12. The exhilaration of hearing the power click back on after a 24-hour outage. I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be that excited again.

13. Knowing the true value of a cool breeze.  

14. Frozen Fandango.

15. Wednesday night Scottish dancing, the best and most unlikely form of weeknight entertainment to be had in all of Accra.

16. Spending 90% of my time in either flip-flops, running shoes, or bare feet.

17. Trust in strangers. Every day here, we’ve depended on people to give us information or transport us safely or negotiate a fair price or take care of our house or otherwise help us do what we needed to do. Many of those people didn’t know us from Adam. Was this a tad risky? Yes. Was it necessary? Yes, yes, yes. As hard as it is to give up the habit of Googling for all our answers, we had to accept long ago the fact that the information about Ghana in guidebooks or on the Internet is just not as useful (and definitely not nearly as current) as what real-life people here have to say. Sometimes all you have to rely on is a stranger’s word, or a stranger’s help. This is a surprisingly freeing mentality once you embrace it. It also requires a similar level of trust in you from the entire community, and it’s highly unlikely that we’ll find that wherever we settle in the States.

18. A relative of #17: the extreme helpfulness you tend to find in Ghanaians. Shaun recalls a time on New Year’s Day this year, in a rather deserted, upscale-looking area of an unfamiliar town, when he wasn’t sure if it was okay for him to pee on the street (this comes up from time to time here; roll with it). As he hovered uncertainly near the gutter, some bystander encouraged him with a smile and an “I know what you’re doing! It’s okay!” (I am not a fan of street peeing and the enthusiastic way men embrace it here, but the principle stands.)

19. Egg and bread, which, despite its simplicity and the fact that egg sandwiches in various forms do exist everywhere, is an experience unique to Ghana and cannot be replicated at home. Something to do with the bread.

20. Getting custom-made shorts, dresses, headbands, and even full-on suits for very, sometimes unbelievably, cheap.

21. The Ivorian restaurant in our neighborhood where you can stuff yourself with grilled fish, couscous, plantains, and - if you’re lucky - avocado salad, plus beer, for, like, five dollars.

There’s more, I’m sure, but I’m sitting in the airport now awaiting our flight to Turkey, and a day of dashing around moving things and inhaling dust bunnies has left me exhausted. Plus, how can I really know what I’ll miss until I’m gone?

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Two weeks' notice

Sixteen months after first stepping off the plane in Accra, Shaun and I are now preparing to leave Ghana - for good - in just a few days shy of two weeks. Two. Weeks. Almost everyone in my life knows that Ghana has not sufficiently charmed either of us to induce us to stay a full two years; we'd been talking about it amongst ourselves and loved ones for months, and we'd set a tentative date of departure back in early January. But, of course, these events have a way of creeping up on you. What seemed impossibly distant is now living with us, entering our dreams, eating breakfast with us every morning. USA! USA! USA!...

Though there are certainly things we'll miss about Ghana, and though the USA! is not a perfect place to live on a number of counts, both Shaun and I are approaching this date with the excitement of sailors crawling to shore after a month lost at sea. Partly this is because Ghana has become an increasingly difficult place to live, as the dumsor that used to trouble us only occasionally has now reached unprecedented levels. Truly unprecedented: everyone has said it's the most extreme lights-off schedule in memory, with 24 hours off for every 12 hours on. 

The 24/12 cycle has proved materially different from the 12/12 one. Our refrigerator, which was designed to retain cool air for 12 hours of outage, cannot do so for 24, and the 12 hours of power that follow aren't enough to cool it again before the next long bout. Unable to rely on the fridge as anything more than a glorified cupboard, we've had to adjust how we eat. Cheese is pretty much a no-go. I've helped a liter of milk survive by toting it to Shaun's office, stashing it in the fridge there for use in coffee and tea, and bringing it home once I thought I could use up the rest of it that night and/or the next morning. At home, I buy individual small cartons of chocolate soymilk to put in coffee: just pop one open each morning, dump about two-thirds of it in the cup, and chug the rest (the chocolate/coffee combination is decent, and Shaun claims it even works with tea). Bread has to be consumed quickly and watched carefully for mold. Eggs are no trouble, as we don't refrigerate them anyway. (If you've traveled abroad a bit and wondered why the U.S. seems to be the only country on earth to refrigerate its eggs, I encourage you to read - well, skim; it's boring at times - this article about why that is. Apparently it's not, or not quite, because Americans are fussy and paranoid about their eggs.) More delicate fruits and vegetables need to be eaten within a max of 48 hours; root vegetables can bear up a good bit longer, but given how little we usually cook anyway, are likely to end up forgotten, wrinkly, and sprouted in the drawer. And apart from the struggle of keeping the food alive, there's also the fact that having the stove or oven on makes our small space unacceptably hot if there's no fan or A/C going. 

The long and short of it is that we've been eating out - a lot - and I will admit that we've both had a few "dinners" that consisted of mostly bread, mostly chips, or mostly candy. After an initial week of confusion and some sad farewells to condiments and juices that went before their time, I developed a few defensive strategies, like making a simple dinner just before I knew dumsor was coming (usually around 6:30 pm) and then briefly reheating it. And we've had several pleasantly unexpected bonus nights and days of power, because the schedule isn't rigorously followed. But cooking at our leisure is essentially a lost cause. 

Did I mention we're leaving in 11 days?

When we do, on March 13, we're going to Istanbul for a few days' vacation, then flying into JFK on March 18. And after spending some time in the NY/NJ area, visiting friends and family, we'll head south to explore the cities that might end up being our home. From the 13th onward, the odds are good that we'll never experience a 24-hour power outage again - never be awakened at 5:30 am by the roar of a generator, never have to leave a load of laundry trapped in the washing machine for a full day (the lights went out mid-cycle, in the middle of a rinse, so the washer door was locked), and rarely have any reason to live without ice. 

These are all good things, of course. But, as I've expressed to a few people here and at home, I worry a little about how quickly I'll get soft. I don't want all this character and patience I've built here - and they haven't come easily; I tend to resist such virtuous undertakings - to be washed away in a few weeks. Along with my sense of wonder at the ease and functionality of the developed world, I hope I can hold on to my ability to hack it in less-than-optimal circumstances. I don't know how to build my own armored vehicle or underground shelter, but when the apocalypse comes and the power's knocked out, I want to be there with my trusty headlamp and a fistful of triple-As in my hand - ready.

[go-away-bird]

"Number two present"

If I do say so myself, possibly the coolest souvenir we will bring back with us from Ghana is this one: 

That's right - as a belated birthday gift, I got my husband a Heavy J original creation, a handmade Ghanaian-style tribute to The Karate Kid. 'Cause I'm the best wife ever.

P.S., turns out Heavy J is actually quite skinny.

[go-away-bird]

New Year, New Weirdness

Another year, come and gone, and with it so many internally debated potential resolutions (e.g., post more often on my blog!) and so much deferred desire for a different way to spend New Year's Eve, now that I'm grown. What interesting traditions are out there for thirtysomethings who are capable of staying up until midnight (well, with a nap beforehand) but past the stage of drinking champagne until we vomit? A bonfire, such as my parents sometimes have, is a great choice, but that will have to remain stowed away until we're living someplace more rural.

Anywhoooo, Eve aside, I find it's always good for the soul to kick the year off doing something completely new and unusual. I began 2010 by diving into the ocean off a cheesy pirate-themed pleasure-cruise boat in Brazil, and I still consider it one of the best New Year's Days ever. This year, Shaun and I and some friends had the treat of attending a local "fancy-dress" festival in Winneba, down the coast a ways from Accra. Shaun's boss, Kobi (who has been a terrific guide to all things Ghanaian since we first arrived), has family who live in Winneba, and he drove us all down for the occasion, picking up his dad along the way. 

The festival, which, according to its very own Wikipedia page, has been going on since the 19th century, involves town residents dividing into troops - apparently these are year-round divisions, with fans and allegiances, much like sporting teams - dressing up in fantastic costumes and masks, and parading and dancing before a team of judges. There are brass bands, stilt walkers, and giant puppets (in the case of one troop we witnessed this year), and you get the impression the costumes have been worked on for months. 

I can't recall what the prize is for the winning group, other than a big trophy and everlasting glory, but both competitors and spectators definitely take it seriously - the big, tent-lined public square in which the contest was held was totally packed. 

Like most popular events in Ghana, it was a bit too hectic and crowded for me to love long, and I was eventually relieved to escape. But it was still a welcome change of pace - as all new years should be.

[go-away-bird]

Why Ghana's worth visiting, in 1:27

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLpXp-I5jsw

No, not for the awkwardly akimbo expats, such as one you might see hovering in the middle around 0:27.

On his second sojourn in Ghana, our friend Nick brought a DJI Phantom quadcopter drone with photo and recording capabilities, and has since been producing and sharing beautiful aerial footage of some of our favorite sites. This was taken on a trip to Wli Falls a few weeks ago. More of his stuff (and more to come) at Fly High Africa. 

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A touch of ennui in the ranks

Aw, don't be like that, Tumblr. Welcome, basurasagrada.

[go-away-bird]

Junk science

The day we left Accra for the U.S., August 30, Shaun and I visited the super-cool Wheel Story House, a tribute to the brilliance of those who see opportunity where the rest of us see trash. 

The dog is real.

So-called "junk architect" Sammy Ansah built the original structure of the Wheel Story House using the wood from 500 discarded spools of electrical cable. Like this one, which has graced the interior of our garroom since February:

The house has since expanded into a wildly eclectic compound of buildings, some of which have been divided into apartments for tenants. The wheel wood has been supplemented by stones, broken coffee mugs, license plates, scraps, and found objects of all sorts.

Shaun worships at the altar.

In a place like Ghana, with insufficient housing but an abundance of trash, it's always great to see someone like Sammy killing two birds with one stone. 

[go-away-bird]

On Ebola fear

Understandably, people back home ask us all the time if we're scared of Ebola, living in West Africa as we do. Actually, this happened more frequently before the disease arrived in the U.S. and the U.S., as is its wont, suddenly became the center of the universe where Ebola is concerned, but more about that later.

The answer is a little more complicated than the question. If you want to know whether I'm worried that Shaun or I or someone we know will contract the disease, I'll say no, for all the reasons enumerated in this article written by the indispensable Atul Gawande: Ebola is not easy to get; it's mostly health care workers and victims' family members who contract it; until a person with Ebola is symptomatic, s/he isn't contagious, so (in theory) it should be easy enough to contain the disease by screening; and so forth. Despite the chaos it's wrought in this part of the world - and it doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon - and the fairly justifiable outrage over the U.S.'s failure to contain it on its own shores, all of the above remains true and, to me anyway, reassuring.

On the other hand, watching the death toll in Africa climb above 4,400 is pretty scary. Knowing the likelihood that Ebola will come to Ghana (according to a recent Northeastern University study and anyone with a brain who lives here, quite high) is also scary, although again, less for my sake than for the rest of the country's. While not as poor as Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Liberia, Ghana is still slogging through an economic crisis, and its persistent power generation issues have intensified lately, hurting its prospects for GDP growth and the business outlook in general. An Ebola outbreak in the midst of all this would be a shattering blow. Then there's Ghana's well-known and much-celebrated funeral culture, which calls for family members to wash the deceased and line up to pay respects to the body. Typically big, joyous affairs, funerals here also tend not to occur until weeks after the death - a huge no-no for Ebola, which is most contagious in a victim's final days and after death. 

But I guess the thing that I find sadder and scarier than any of these immediate implications is the way it's seemed to push Africa (yes, the entire continent, because even though only a small percentage of this landmass is currently affected by the epidemic, the monolith of "Africa" is taking the rap for it) even deeper into marginalization by the rest of the world. Ebola was once considered something that happened only to poor populations in unimaginable foreign lands, places that appeared so bleak on cable news that most of us essentially wrote them off as lost causes - abstractions of suffering, hardly experienced by real human beings. Now that it has begun its creep into our home, do we see this as an opportunity to recognize the global nature of the disease, to draw on homegrown expertise from the countries that have successfully contained it (in this and previous outbreaks), to unite as one against a common foe? Yeah, no. An article highlighting an illustration by artist Andrés Carrilho explains why: Americans (and the West in general) can easily ignore thousands of people dying from Ebola if they're out of sight and out of mind, but give us the inkling that someone is even infected on American soil, and boy, have you ever got our attention! Then it's draw up the bridges, bar the doors, and lock the gates - America is under attack from Ebola, and it's Africa's fault. This is why we need tougher immigration laws, comes the indignant cry. If anything good possibly comes out of this - other than the CDC undergoing a bit of useful trial by fire when it comes to containing infectious diseases - it will probably be that the search for Ebola vaccines and treatments will be intensified now that the virus has reached wealthier shores. Forgive me if I don't cheer wildly.

I am not really that much of a people person, which is partly why it's been hard for me to hit my stride of living in Accra; without tons to offer in the way of scenic beauty or, frankly, seamless functionality, Ghana's best asset really is its people. I presume this is true for many developing countries. I can't fully appreciate it in the way a more extroverted visitor would. But neither can I remain completely unmoved when it becomes so patently obvious, in a case like this Ebola outbreak, that a whole continent of living, breathing, working, playing, wishing, and hoping people is being treated as a faceless threat. And if I weren't here, close to the epicenter, I'd probably think of them the same way. That's scary. 

[go-away-bird]

Coming homeish

The U.S. offers some truly great things, like bowling and fall foliage. 

Attempting to maintain this blog over the past nine months or so whilst* also holding down a full-time job/life has been a potent reminder of why you should always keep your blog up to date. If you don't, then you'll spend a good portion of your next post, when you do get around to it, apologizing for the lapse and summarizing what's happened in the intervening weeks (fine, months). And the longer the preceding silence, the more summing up you have to do, and this does not a fun blog make.

But in Ghana, you get to see chickens doing this, every day.

But now that I've been out of a full-time job since the end of August, and now that Shaun and I have returned to Ghana from our monthlong trip to the U.S., I have ample opportunity and zero excuses.

This post is about two homecomings that took place a month apart, and the fact that Ghana can now be considered a home. It is not going to be about telling you everything that's happened since I was writing about the World Cup...however, just to acknowledge that certain things have happened, I'll list a few of them:

1. In July, I was informed that the business news site I'd been working for since February was going to be shut down, that I'd spend the next six weeks helping out with a custom research project, and that after that my job would come to an end. 

2. On my last day of work, August 29, I turned 32, and Shaun and I spent the evening eating takeout, doing a jigsaw puzzle, and painting small cardboard objects. And it was glorious.

3. The next day, we got on a plane for the U.S., and two weeks later, got married (for the second time) in a beautiful, jumbled, occasionally improvised ceremony in front of 150 friends and family members.

4. At the end of September, after a crazy two weeks of fitting in as much quality time with folks as possible and traveling from downtown Atlanta to the Catskills and a few places in between, we returned to Ghana.

For me, the feelings that corresponded to these events were: 

1. Relief garnished with a slight wistfulness;

2. The happiness of a pig in shit;

3. Feverish elation;

4. Resignation alternating with dread, brief pockets of hopefulness, and, strangely, also relief.

We'd been looking forward to our trip to the States so eagerly, for so long, that you'd think there was no way it could live up to our expectations. It did, though. We ate sandwiches involving exotic ingredients, like pesto and roasted peppers and fresh mozzarella (!), delivered with unbelievable speed by cheery deli countermen; we reveled in bagels and Key lime pie, grapes and quinoa, tortilla chips and broccoli and ravioli and eggplant Parmesan and strawberries. We drove miles on broad, clean, smooth roads through the breathtaking fall foliage of the Catskills, on exactly the best weekend of the year to see it. We lay on grass and marveled at the number and expanse of parks in suburban New Jersey, and, more than that, how empty they all appeared during the week. We went bowling and ate Dairy Queen blizzards for dinner. We acquired esoterica like electric-toothbrush heads and yoga pants with such ease that it seemed like I could just stretch my hands out and find them filled - that's what America is, a place where, with what most Americans would call "a little" money, you can just get all kinds of stuff. You don't need to go out and hunt for it at the one place in town that might carry it, but that is probably out of it because, after all, it's the only place in town. You don't need to explain any of this. You will never suffer the indignity of feeling spoiled because you asked for something that the person you asked, and most of the country, has never heard of. In the U.S., the person you ask will know what you want and think nothing of your desire for it. You will never feel spoiled, period, because this is not what spoiled is in America. You have to be a celebrity to be seen as spoiled, a Kardashian. 

It was strange to feel that all this used to be home, and arguably still is. I used to live exclusively in this state of ease and unselfconsciousness and sureness of what I was to other people around me. It wasn't hard to get back into that state, either, which I found troublesome. I don't want to lose my sense of astonishment at that incredible feat of functionality that is the U.S., functionality underpinned by oceans of money, which I saw in everything - in the graded roads and maintained parks and happy sandwich makers - all of them different guises for the endless wealth of a wealthy nation. 

Even stranger than that was to realize, on our cab ride from Accra's airport, that Ghana is home, too, whatever reservations I may have about it and whatever the duration of our stay turns out to be. Home is not only the spot on a map where you usually sleep at night, but if you've usually slept there for ten months, it's where your life is. Something has happened there to make you laugh, or shudder. Something has made you laugh or shudder several times, till it becomes a running joke. You've found small things to look forward to. You have your places, where you go for air conditioning or shade or reasonably clean bathrooms or late-night egg and bread. You've drunk a lot of beers there.

In ten months' time, you've had serious thoughts about what's going to come next in your life. Probably some serious conversations, too. You've made mistakes and been burned, and cursed a blue streak over it, and then developed strategies to get around it. You may feel you hate the place, but hating means you're expending energy; hating means you're forming attachments, even if negative ones. And if you're lucky enough to have a partner in all this, someone who knows when to listen to you complain and when to tell you to stop complaining, and who will come lie next to you and hug you when you collapse into bed and swear that you hate this place, you really hate it - you'll end up hating it less, because that love happened there, in this place you think you hate. And then you leave and come back and realize that ten months has made it home, whether you wanted it to be or not.

  Pretty happy to be there, at Langma Beach in Ghana

* A fun fact I learned whilst working for a British outfit here is that in the U.K. and, I believe, many former English colonies, "whilst" is not just a quaint, old-timey way of saying "while." It is "while." It is the way of saying "while." They'll just go ahead and use "whilst" multiple times in a paragraph, which to me looks about as correct as using the word "plethora" multiple times in a paragraph, or "bilious." And they say we're all the same on the inside!

[go-away-bird]

The World Cup, or "I can't believe I spent a whole month talking about soccer"

Not sure if this is prayer or celebration, at the Ghana–Portugal game.

The first World Cup I ever caught bits and pieces of (which is the accurate description of my usual Cup-watching style) was the final match of 1998, when I was 15 and on vacation in Europe. I think France and Brazil were facing off, and France won. In 2006 and 2010, I was living in New York; I remember joining some folks at bars where the games were flickering in the corners, and probably two-thirds of the audience was there mostly to day-drink and catch up with friends whom they never see, because no adult in New York sees any friend without 45 days' notice unless said friend is also a co-worker or roommate. I have no memory of the 2002 Cup, and, as I was then living in Mississippi, a state that does not recognize the existence of more than one game called "football," I am not surprised by this. 

In Ghana, on the other hand, the 2014 World Cup was the talk of the country months before it began, as soon as the groups were drawn. Anyone who has paid a modest amount of attention to this year's tournament probably knows that Ghana had high hopes for advancing into the knockout stage this year, after their well-known and, here, constantly discussed heartbreak of 2010. 

Gathered in the middle of Oxford Street for Ghana–U.S. Part of the street was closed to traffic and a big screen set up at one end for each match.

So I got sucked into following the action, as much as one can do while still having only a thimble's worth of knowledge about it. This was inevitable. Because Ghanaian life, including soccer-watching, is conducted primarily outdoors or semi-outdoors, you could not walk down our block on a game night without hearing a television broadcaster, usually with a South African accent, hollering about a shot on goal or an offsides call. The little closet of a stand selling pirated DVDs, just down and across the street, had a tiny TV blaring the Cup. The liquor shop across the street in the other direction had the same. A newly opened wine store around the corner, doubling as a bar, set up a substantial screen in their lot. You could take a 90-minute walk through the neighborhood and probably catch a whole game, without missing more than 20 seconds at a time, via the ambient TVs alone.

Black Stars 4 life

Initially, the prospect of the crowds, the vuvuzelas, the ludicrous 10 p.m. start time of the June 16 opener against the U.S., had my peace- and quiet- and order-loving self frankly terrified. And now that the tournament is over, I think my fear of the vuvuzela remains completely justified. But ultimately - sadly - there wasn't as much revelry for the Black Stars as Ghana had hoped this year. Even more sadly, their respectable performance on the pitch was almost wholly eclipsed by scandal after scandal after scandal, though I suppose they can be happy to not have a player that inspired a bottle opener, or be the subject of a blog of tears.

Here is something I hadn't considered before living here: Because no African squad has ever progressed past the quarterfinal round in the World Cup, every African team that qualifies for the tournament - this year, that was Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Algeria - shoulders this unique burden of representing hope not just for its country but for the whole football-crazed continent. A great deal of positive thinking is required of both players and fans, and you could see it in the audiences here, who wholeheartedly celebrated every minor success even when the chances of victory seemed slim. It wasn't enough for Ghana, or any of its African counterparts, to make history, but one can only imagine the party when they finally do.

Happy, hugging fans after Ghana scored its first goal against Germany

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English-speaking country, my ass!

Ghana is an attractive destination for lots of Africa-bound foreigners because English is the official language and is spoken widely here. Everyone from street hawkers to office clerks to the president happily communicates in English as well as at least one local tongue (of which there are over 100, in a country about the size of England), which obviously clears away many hurdles for visitors. 

But, in the same way that Americans don't speak "English" according to those Brits with a habit of being annoyingly correct, Ghanaians speak a very particular brand of the language that does not always register as...the language. Hence this post's title (which I think was originally a quote about Australia - anyone happen to know where this comes from?). Now, considering the really excellent level of English skills in this country, this sentiment is far too harsh, much more so than what I feel nowadays, but I admit that it closely resembles my inner thoughts during our first weeks here, after innumerable attempts to take directions over the phone or negotiate with cab drivers.

To be clear, there are several ways in which English is used in Ghana. When talking amongst themselves, Ghanaians often tend to mix English and an indigenous language - Twi is the most common - so you might get a sentence that begins with an English introductory phrase like "What I'm trying to say is..." and then proceeds into Twi without a break. There's also Ghanaian–English pidgin, a more puréed combo of English and Twi that swaps the order of some elements and uses words like "dem" and "dey."(Which smacks of Black Vernacular English - Ebonics, to be less academic and more '90s about it - but based on my very limited experience, Ghanaian pidgin is pretty different.)

A World Cup–themed editorial cartoon with a dialogue bubble in pidgin. Quick explanation: the guy on the left (along with his poor, football-besotted pet mouse) is begging the electricity company to make sure there are no power cuts during the Cup. The response, as translated by my colleague Enoch, is "We don't care..."

Okay, but all that only explains how Ghanaians speak to one another. As an obruni, I am addressed fully in English, but it's a long way from the 'Murican that I'm used to talking.

For one thing: Ghanaian languages are tonal, like Chinese, and Ghanaian English is tonal, too. If you don't use the proper tone, there is a 98% chance (I'm guesstimating) that you will be misunderstood by the majority of Ghanaians. When speaking to tro-tro mates or drivers, for example, you never, ever use a rising inflection. If you're squeezed in the back of the van, trying to catch the guy's attention because your stop is coming up, and you're all, "Mate? Mate?...Mate?", interrogatively, he won't even turn around. You want a curt, solid "Mate." Boom. You're not asking, you're telling. 

Pronunciation-wise, Ghanaians always articulate their t's - none of this lazy slurring into d sounds that Americans favor. This is tiring to practice (it really is), but necessary for communication. They also don't pronounce r's at the ends of words. This is, again, strangely necessary. Ask a cab driver for the "National Theat-errr," and he'll give you a quizzical look. Ask him for the "National Theat-ah," and there's no confusion at all. Same goes for ordering "water" at dinner. Oh, I'm sorry, you must have meant "wat-tah"? I work for a publication called the Ghana Monitor, and every time I introduce myself on the phone, I have to repeat the name at least once or twice because I can't yet bring myself to say "Moni-tah." (Why this has proven especially hard for me, I'm not sure - maybe I haven't got up the nerve to speak Ghanaian in a professional, as opposed to casual, situation.) 

And finally: In addition to simply incorporating loan words and their traditional meanings, Ghanaians also put some English words and phrases to a whole range of initially confusing, eventually delightful uses. Here are a few super common examples.

When a Ghanaian says ____, it means:

1. I'm coming. = I'm on my way/I'll be right with you. (Without specifying when - this could be anywhere from two minutes to six hours from now.)

2. I go and come. = I'll leave and come back.

3. Please... = Used as we use it, but frequently tacked on to the beginning of a request ("Please, do you know where I can buy some Vodafone credit?"). Also can mean "thank you." You could ask someone "Are you doing okay?" and get "Yes, please" in response.

4. Sorry/Sorry-o/Sorry-ohhh... = Ghanaians say "sorry" to apologize for their actions, but they are also liable to say it anytime something unfortunate befalls you. If you trip and fall in front of them, or spill your coffee - "Sorry, ohhh, sorry."

5. It's finished. = It's all gone/We're all out.

6. It's spoilt. = It's broken (as in, the air conditioning, the lock, etc.).

7. He's not picking. = He's not picking up (the phone).

8. Come again? = The most common way of asking you to repeat yourself.

9. You said? = The second most common way.

10. Oh, chale! = (loosely) Oh, man! The Ghanaian r-less pronunciation of "charlie," meaning "man," "dude," "buddy," etc., is one of the most ubiquitous words in Ghana. (See #4 here for potential explanations of how "chale" became a thing here.)

[go-away-bird]

"We use our imaginations much more"

Yesterday Shaun and I went to one of the most awesome attractions we've yet experienced in Ghana, an exhibit at the Alliance Française of hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters.

We had first learned of the Ghanaian movie poster tradition from this fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal (sub may be required). Back in the '80s and '90s - cinemas in Ghana being presumably no less scarce than they are now - movie screenings seem to have been organized primarily by neighborhood dudes with TV sets and probably bootleg videos. To drum up publicity for these events, they hired local artists to create their own movie posters on flour sacking.

You can see that the works on display (and on tables) at the Alliance are of a pretty professional caliber, as some of these artists are now semi-famous and even get private commissions to do posters for favorite films. However, in the beginning, the artists often hadn't seen the movies they were attempting to market and didn't know much about them, so they added flourishes that they thought would make the movie a bigger draw - snakes, naked women, (more) blood and gore - regardless of whether these tidbits appeared in the movies or not. The WSJ article shows some adorably offbeat examples.

I have never seen most of these movies, and believe me, I have no desire to, but you can't help but be blown away by the skill of these artists. One guy, who goes by the name of Heavy J, is particularly impressive.

Two of Heavy J's creations, for Hellboy II and Iron Man III

The featured films included lots of "[martial art or its practitioner] vs. [another martial art or its practitioner inexplicably in conflict with the first]." Shaolin vs. Tai Chi?

Shaun had to inform me that Dolph Lundgren is supposed to be He-Man here.

Not part of the exhibit, obviously - this is a cool pencil drawing on a wall in the Alliance compound, what looks like the beginning of a much larger mural project. If you look very closely, you can see that the face is made up entirely of the phrase "I am deliberate and afraid of nothing," written over and over in varying shades and strokes.

[go-away-bird]

Dumsor dumsor

I started writing this post many days ago, just after Shaun and I entered the second all-night power outage we've experienced since moving to Ghana. The power shut off around 7 p.m. and was restored briefly when our landlords, a microinsurance company with a building on the same property, fired up their generator. After they'd closed up shop for the day, we were again swallowed up by the dark and still, and remained so until about 5:30, 6 in the morning. 

Lest anyone jump to pitying conclusions, I should note that the fact that we've been in Ghana for almost five months and have had only two all-night power outages makes us extraordinarily lucky. Also, the reason I didn't finish the post the same night I began it was not that my laptop's battery died or that I was too miserably sweaty to continue blogging, but that I decided I wanted to watch an episode of True Detective instead. We had fully charged laptops and cell phones, two solar-powered jars, two headlamps, a hanging LED light, and, crucially, a freestanding battery that we could use to plug in a fan in the former garage, now spare room (which I have christened the "garroom"). I admit, I am more dependent now on A/C than I may have ever been before in my life, including my life in Mississippi, but a fan on its own feels unbelievably good when the alternative is nothing. We also knew enough by that second night to move into the garroom, which has a fold-out bed, when the lights showed no sign of returning before bedtime. Our first night without power, we attempted to sleep in our usual room, in our usual bed, and found that the mosquitoes sharing our space, suddenly invigorated by the warm, unmoving air and sweaty skin, were harder to bear than the heat. Presumably because no one is usually sleeping in the garroom, or because its door isn't opened as frequently, they haven't yet infiltrated that realm (yet).

We were not always this prepared. As I said, we were fortunate enough to barely experience a single cut in the first few months we lived here. We have friends who put up without electricity multiple nights each week, and of course, for much of the population of Ghana, a night without electricity is de rigueur. We knew of this, and we tried to sympathize, but as with most things, we just couldn't know how good we had it. 

But a couple of months ago, I began to see rumblings in the press over a shortfall of gas from Nigeria, electrical plants knocked out of commission for one reason or another, and warnings that another round of "load shedding" would soon be upon us. Load shedding, as a term, was vaguely familiar to me, mostly from extremely hot days in New York when my office building would turn off all the lights to keep excess pressure off the grid. Forcing us to peer delicately into our computer screens, aided only by the ample summer sunshine that poured through the picture windows. Big woop.

In Ghana, the layman's phrase is dumsor dumsor ("off and on"), and it is a very big woop indeed. We started seeing evening outages at least a couple of times a week, from about 6 p.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. - not too big of a deal, since the generator usually stayed on almost that long. Then came the first Long Dark Night of the Sweat, which left us predictably dazed and grumpy. Then, as it is now my job to keep up on such things, I was e-mailed a schedule, distributed by the Electricity Company of Ghana, helpfully letting us know what days and nights we could expect to sweat it out until the end of March.

Surprising probably 100% of the population, this particular load shedding exercise appears to have ended earlier than planned. We managed to get away with only two 12-hour daytime stints without power and two nighttime stints. Our food, miraculously, never spoiled. Our water doesn't run solely off an electric pump, so we always had the ability to douse ourselves with a cool shower, which, like the humble fan, is not to be underestimated in times of duress. We aren't diabetics with insulin that needs refrigeration, or parents with infants that need...refrigerated things (okay, I am not well versed in all the ways in which caring for a baby during a power outage would be inconvenient, other than just having an uncomfortable baby, but I'm sure it's awful and I don't want to go through it).

All that's to say, again, that we are very lucky. No one here is fooled into thinking that dumsor dumsor is at an end, full stop; the demand for power in Ghana still outstrips supply, and various energy projects have been agreed to and announced and inaugurated and vaunted, but none of them is yet at the point of making a difference in the average person's life. So the average person adapts, takes advantage of what they have when they have it, and develops contingency plans. Our resources make us far from average people in Ghana (as do lots of other things), but we certainly have occasion to learn from them now and then. 

[go-away-bird]

A very necessary update

Since most of you reading this are (I imagine) primarily interested in what I've been up to in the three weeks since I last posted, here are the two personal updates that I'll get out of the way before returning to more Ghana-centric fodder:

1. Kittens. I've been up to kittens. In my last post, I trumpeted our discovery of Gifty's two little ones, which she'd been keeping secret until such time as she felt safe to bring them into our environment. Two whole kittens! And boy, were we thrilled. 

Well, since then, two have become five. It turns out Gifty had simply prioritized the two Originals (a nickname that has stuck to this day), probably feeling out over the course of a few days whether we could offer a suitable place to raise her entire litter. Because about four mornings after we met the Originals, she began adding to the collection. After Original Gray and Original White, there was Batman. After Batman, there was Harvey Two-Face. After Harvey, there was the Dark Knight.

Original Gray, a.k.a. "The O.G."

Original White, a.k.a. "O-dubs"

Batman, "The Excessively Pointy-Eared"

Harvey Two-Face, "The Loner," "Scaler of Potted Plants"

The Dark Knight, "The Mama's Boy," "The Gargoyle Face," "The Token Black Guy"

What's going to happen with all these little guys? We don't know exactly. All five of them plus Gifty are still camped out by our door, though their range has now expanded considerably as they've grown up - into the yard, around the front of the garage, even down the driveway a bit. We feed them and play with them as much as they'll allow us, and although we hope the cute pictures we've posted on expat sites and Facebook pages will lure someone into adopting them, we're not holding our breath. So, as with human children, we'll enjoy our front-row seats at scenes like the above for as long as we can, and try not to obsess too much about the future.

2. Surprising no one more than myself, after spending more than two months here unemployed, I interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a job, all in the span of about ten days. Even more surprisingly, it's more of a journalism gig than a communications one. I'm now the country manager for a brand-new Ghanaian business news site called the Ghana Monitor, an operation of a U.K.-based research firm that advises companies looking to expand into emerging markets. (The site is subscription-based, so unfortunately you won't be able to read more than the headline and first sentence of each story.)

"Country manager" is a pretty fancy term, but the team I manage is quite small - a business reporter and a researcher. I'm more what I'd describe as a managing editor, choosing what stories go up each day, writing some, editing some, assigning tasks. I've learned a lot in my first week and a half of work, and still have a helluva long way to go, but so far it's been - well - pretty fun. It's also given me something I badly needed: a productive way to spend my days. Not a moment too soon, too. I was this close to deciding to write a novel.

[go-away-bird]

Our (cat) family has grown!

Let's just skip all the needless hand-wringing over how long it's been, again, since I last posted anything, and get right to the heart of the matter: kitties!

Burgle, one of a few street-wise cats that roam our property after hours

Basically ever since Shaun and I moved to Swaziland at the beginning of July, we have been engaged in a quiet but persistent quest to gain the trust and friendship of a stray cat in our neighborhood and adopt him or her as a pet. I had decided to leave my grumpy, fat Bloom in care of a friend when we left New York, and even though I knew she was in good hands, I missed having a useless squirming lump of fur to call my own. And Shaun is as enthusiastic a cat fan as I am, an alignment which, I'm becoming increasingly convinced, is vital to the success of any marriage.

There was a whole array of stray cats in the vicinity of our house in Swaz, and we became fixated on a jet-black one that made its way up our driveway and into our yard on at least a few occasions. We set out food for him on the deck, every day. We moved the dish a bit closer to our doors, every day. We waited for the moment when we'd find his little face pressed plaintively to the glass panes in our doors, like some Dickensian orphan on a freezing Christmas Eve. 

The Swazi mooch who shall remain nameless

Yeah, he just took our food for three months and never wanted anything to do with us. Little shit. 

So we came to Ghana burned but undeterred. In Accra, you can see any number of cats slinking out of doorways, climbing over piles of cement blocks, and hurrying along the tops of walls. Almost to a one, these are scruffy, skinny, down-at-the-heels hobo cats - the kind of cats that need us, unlike Mr. Chubbyhaunches down in the Kingdom. 

There were a few regulars we'd noticed showing up in our yard as soon as we moved in, usually spotted only at night and quick to run away as we approached. One I named Burgle, for his sneakiness and wary look; others have appeared too intermittently to earn names yet.

In the past week, though, a small, pretty gray and white cat, who I christened Gifty (a fairly common Ghanaian woman's name), began showing up more frequently, during the daytime, and hanging around longer. I found her crouched outside by the air conditioner one day and decided to offer her a handful of the dried fish snacks Shaun brought back from our visit to Akosombo. She hesitated and nearly fled, but when I dropped them on the ground in front of her and walked around the corner, she ate.

The next day, she came around again, even more suspicious than before. I left another handful of fish on the curb lining the driveway and walked back toward our house. She ate. The next day, I gave her the dried fish plus a scoop of tuna. Of course, she ate. 

Gifty obviously knew a good thing when she saw it. This past Saturday morning, Shaun went outside and returned to the door a few minutes later. “Come outside, very slowly,” he said. “You might get hissed at.”

Gifty was standing, tense and rigid, near our bathroom door, about 20 feet from us. Under her, two tiny gray and white kittens were attempting to nurse, practically dangling from her belly.

I'd noticed that she had been a mother at some point, but I'd never imagined that she had kittens now. It seemed she'd kept them hidden away somewhere while she went out looking for food. Here was a pretty good source of food, she reasoned; might as well relocate the family. How she managed to move the kittens safely from point A to point B is unknown. They couldn't have been far away, but the thought of these half-pints traveling any distance through busy yards or picking their way around sewers is pretty unbelievable.

It's a whole new world.

Over the course of the day, the cats gradually moved to the shade underneath a table by our front door, and there they've remained, more or less, since. Gifty now only hisses when we bend down toward her or her kittens. We're leaving food and water for her regularly. The little ones spend much of their day sleeping and nursing, but they've started to explore the whole paved area around our doorstep, which means we have to both be careful of where we step and warn anyone else coming around the house (our housekeeper, the nighttime guard, the office manager at the business that is our landlord). It's our goal to get them comfortable enough with us that their mother will allow us to move them all into the yard, and into the garage at night. Gifty still, inexplicably, disappears after dark for hours at a time, leaving the two kittens curled up with each other in an adorable little ball and us to worry incessantly, but she comes back every time. I guess you can't begrudge her those old street habits.

Snacktime!

[go-away-bird]

We're supposed to haggle!

Obviously I am quite behind with my dispatches here, for which I apologize. But the reason is a happy one: Shaun and I moved into our house! 

We actually moved in two weeks ago, but there's been a great deal of settling-in and minor sprucing-up since then. I am fully in love with the place, though it is very, very small and very oddly put together. The main room, where we sleep, make dinner, dress, bang on our laptops, etc. (in the middle ground of this picture) is maybe about 15 feet by 12 feet. A separate, unfinished space - originally intended as a garage and hopefully soon to be transformed into additional living space, if we can get our acts together - sits perpendicular to this room (back left of the picture). It is attached to the main room, but entered through a separate door. The toilet, shower, and washing machine are contained in two small closet-like spaces, also entered via their own doors. A kitchen sink and bathroom sink sit just outside, meaning we do dishes and brush our teeth al fresco, which feels a bit like camping out. We find these quirks lovable, though they have temporarily confused our approaches to everyday tasks like cooking and bathing. But our favorite feature is undoubtedly the yard, a huge coup for a couple of greenery-starved Accra expats. 

More on the house later. Getting back to haggling.

As it was for Brian in ancient Judea, so it is for residents of Ghana: You must. You can't negotiate the price of everything, but I'd say that if you're conducting any transaction in a place that's missing at least one wall, a floor, or a ceiling, it's safer to assume that you should try, or risk paying much more than you should.

The effect, for those of us used to developed countries with vast formal economies, where purchases are made in carefully controlled environments according to obscure and ineluctable pricing schemes, is disorienting. When entering a new part of the world where prices are not fixed, the value system you've developed based on all your previous buying experiences starts to crumble. A vendor can conceivably quote you any amount she wants for anything. She could ask for 1 cedi for her three bananas one day, and double the price the very next day. An ice cream hawker can charge you an extra 20 pesewas for your vanilla FanIce just because it's the weekend (that really happened to a friend of ours). You don't have to accept it, of course; that's the point. But negotiation when you don't yet have a solid knowledge of what things “should” cost in this particular place is like feeling around in the dark for a tool you don't know the shape of. You are forced to assess what you really know about this thing that interests you - how much do you want it? How likely will you be to find it somewhere else for less, or at all? Why would a mango be so expensive when mangos literally grow on trees all over the city? And you must use that information to come up with a counteroffer - instantly.  

Another consideration, uncomfortably difficult to escape, is the fact that someone else has bought or will buy this item for less than you will pay for it, and that someone is probably Ghanaian. As much as we might like to avoid the thought, most negotiations Shaun or I have undertaken here end with the suspicion - the assumption, if I'm honest - that we've been ripped off because we're obruni. This has been backed up by conversations with Ghanaians, who openly confirm that white skin will probably tack on a few extra cedis to any rate. 

Again, if you're willing to invest time in learning the fine art of the haggle, you can usually bring the price down no matter your skin color. You cajole, you backslap. You call the driver/merchant “my friend,” “my brother,” “my sister.” You say, “But we only paid five last time!” You walk away and, for good measure, say you'll take a tro-tro instead of a cab, thereby painting yourself as both a cheapskate and familiar with the city, and maybe leading the driver to withdraw the obruni tax. 

As with so many things here, I've rebelled against the haggle, in my heart if not in practice. I long for the simpler, cleaner, more time-efficient method of plucking goods from shelves, keeping or tossing based on half-second glances at price tags. But mostly - as with so many things here - what I really miss is familiarity, knowing what things “should” cost, being equipped with the information to not feel like a chump.

And the Western, developed-world system has its shortcomings, too. What do we know about why things in stores are priced the way they are? How we decide if a set of hand weights is worth $27.99, other than the fact that that's what it costs at the store across town? If the price goes up to $29.99, is there a reason that makes the increase tolerable? Our decisions about what we buy in that system aren't necessarily any less arbitrary - just faster.

[go-away-bird]

Hissing, kissing, and other cultural quirks

Oxford Street in the Osu neighborhood - a great place to get hissed at, if that's your thing

After his visit to Accra in August, once he got back to Swaziland, Shaun remarked that it seemed to be perfectly normal there to make a short hissing sound between your teeth in order to get someone's attention - say, to draw a waiter to your table. “That's weird,” I believe I said at the time, then promptly forgot all about it.

What neither of us realized is that hissing is actually the dominant method of attention-getting here, and that this custom would call for a major adjustment on our part.

In the U.S., our association with hissing is distinctly negative. When we were kids in Houston, a great-aunt would sometimes take my sisters and me to see silly melodrama theater - you know, where the bosomy maiden is threatened by a mustachioed villain in a black hat, who ties her to the railroad tracks and so forth. The audience was supposed to erupt in cheers when the hero arrived on stage, and mark the villain's entrance by booing, throwing popcorn, and hissing. I also remember having some older relatives who would emit a disconsolate hiss as part of their response to hearing bad news. It's the sound snakes make, at least in our imaginations, and angry cats. And angry swans! Angry, hissing swans!

So, for a new expat who's just walking down the pavement here minding her own business, it's startling at best, highly annoying at worst, to hear taxi drivers and street vendors hissing at you from all corners. Annoying - but man, is it effective, way more so than “Hey!” or “Miss” or “Please look over here, I have something I need you to buy.” The “voiceless alveolar sibilant fricative,” a fancy linguistic phrase meaning the ssss phoneme, is one of the most common sounds in human speech because it's so audible. 

The funny thing is, while Americans don't like being hissed at (I'm generalizing heavily, but all the Americans I've spoken to here seem to share my feelings about the phenomenon, while promising that you do get used to it after a while), the sound pssst! is well known to all of us, serves the same purpose, and isn't in any way offensive. I mean, it would serve the same purpose, if we ever used it in real life. As it is, I think pssst is relegated mostly to newspaper comic strips and crossword puzzle answers, but presumably there was a time in American history when it was normal to catch someone's ear from across a room by pushing air through your closed teeth. What a difference a p makes. 

Weirder by far than the hiss is the kiss. Now, I used to be a lady living in New York, and during that time I sometimes heard men making loud kissy noises as I walked by. Those were come-ons, pure and simple. In Ghana, men also do this, but not just at women, and not necessarily to hit on them. Making a kiss sound in the air is also an attention-grabber here, and quite well suited for the job. As an expat woman, you may not like hearing that sound, but trust me, you'll hear it.

I've been told the kiss can carry an additional implication of more-than-friendly interest - a statement backed up by the observation that women never seem to use it on men, always the other way around, which indicates to me that a woman's kissy sound would leave room for misinterpretation. On the other hand, I've also seen men use it on other men, and no one involved batted an eye. Clearly I need to ask around a little more to clear this up; for now, I'm too busy practicing the voiceless alveolar sibilant fricative. When in Rome, and all that.