more, from Ghana

(Wednesday) kids and burning wood

[Digression]

A technical note: it’s clear by now, that Internet access is not a guarantee in Hohoe, Ghana. In the spare hours (late, after dinner), I can walk to the village. If it’s not violently storming. But it’s a toss of a coin whether the power, or Internet will be functioning.

Once I do have a signal, it takes forever to load a photo. If I want to read email and upload pics, the process of uploading just ten photos will take two hours. The Internet café (café by name only) closes at 9. Yesterday, the owner sweetly kept it open for me for another half hour. He enjoys watching the TV there and his assistant spends her idle time on Facebook (in Ewe?), so I don’t feel too bad. And, I pay by the hour. But even so, I could not open all my messages and I could only load a limited set of photos for the day. (I write the text at the home base, when most everyone is already asleep, so at least that’s ready to go. But if I make a mistake, there’s no opportunity to make corrections. So you have to live with my mistypes.)

Is it all a nuisance? No, not really. The Internet café late at night is a special place. People drift in to watch the Ghanaian sitcom and hearing their laughter in the room is precious. As is watching the young women – the few lucky ones who can afford it – get on Facebook and stay on it for one, sometimes two hours.

The café is very open – the front of the building is completely exposed to the street and the bugs in the evening can be ferocious. Not mosquitoes. Those are evil and much more discreet here, but other tropical nuisance bugs that love crawling across my MacBook as I load photos. I’ve learned not to care.

The walk home, around 10 p.m. these days (and a tad of a violation of home base rules, which are: stay out if you want, but if it’s late, walk in groups, just in case) – I have come to love that as well. Hohoe becomes calm. Not quiet – the cabs still cruise the main road and look for passengers, but there are fewer people, fewer open shops, fewer sounds. The goats are the biggest noisemakers.

Last night, as I was about to turn away from the main road to walk along the dirt track home, I passed a group of five people of various sizes. The tallest – a man with a tub on his head, asked me who I was and where I was from. He knew I was yevu but he couldn’t tell from my back if I was a man or woman (I wore below the knee pants and my hair was pulled back) so he asked first -- are you a woman?

Women really do not wear pants here. It’s not frowned on (as above the knee skirts would be, for example), but it’s just not done.

The man introduced me to his wife and his three children. Older kids. Two of them had tubs on their heads. Empty tubs. They must have been coming back from a successful day of trade.

It was such an insignificant and yet deeply satisfying exchange. After, I walked home, for the first time, by the light of the bright moon. I did not need to flick my flashlight. I could spot a snake, were one to pass in front of me.



[Morning]

Wednesday morning is spent teaching and I have a geography lesson, a math lesson and an English lesson prepared, ready to roll.

But I digress so often in class, that I worry whether pedagogically this is wise. (I consult with one of the volunteers, who’s president of the school teacher’s union in her district in the States. She reassures me to keep contextualizing. That life is not lived in compartments and neither should all the lessons appear that way. It feels good to have the support of someone who is actually trained in teaching methods.)

The headmistress at Happy Kids asks if I could take school photos. Great. I’m happy to do this. I promise to make for her a book of school photos when I return.





I talk to her at length during recess about the orphanage and school. She started small – to give kids a chance to develop a love of books, she tells me. Happy Kids is a private school, funded entirely by small contributions from parents who can pay. It grew. I ask how is it that there are so many orphans. (And hers is not the only orphanage in the district). In the class that I teach, out of twelve, she tells me, six have mothers but no fathers. But the mothers could not afford to care for them any longer. Two have no parents at all, two come and live there for the week, returning to their parents, who are quite far, for the week-end. The rest (two) have parents who have chosen Happy Kids because it is a private school.



the preschoolers come over at recess


What’s with all these private schools in Ghana? So that even Hohoe has at least a half dozen up and running?

There is a predictable answer. Ghanaian women have lots of children. And you can see this. On the street, kids outnumber adults by far! Both tradition and imported Christianity have affirmed for the people here that it’s important to reproduce.

Public school teachers have low wages and so they supplement teaching with other work – private preparation of students for level examinations, for example. They have scattered commitments and their teaching suffers. Not to mention that the class size is large. And so the parents feel that at least in private schools (charging, as Happy Kids does for the few paying kids, fees of, say, the equivalent of $230 per term) their children will have more of the teacher's attention. And, in private schools, you are hired or fired at the discretion of the director. Presumably if you can’t teach, you’re out. I get the feeling that the director is still keeping an eye on my rather freshly hired regular classroom teacher.

In class, I talk with the kids about letters, words, numbers, counting, adding, subtracting – the usual rabbits that you can imagine I’m pulling out my hat.


Story reading is always so popular, but I can’t tell you how little relevance our books (including the ones I am using from the small library at the home base) have for the lives of these kids. Rather than explaining: in America, it is this way, I change sentences and read what is not really written there. I do have one good book about Goldilocks – she’s white and blond and she visits a house that is fancy as hell, but she at least has dreadlocks and the bears eat porridge and that’s a chunk better than all those books where the kids eat pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast and have cubby holes in school and who have sinks and bathrooms and rubber boots when it rains and warm coats when the weather gets nippy.

At Happy Kids, the young children go off to the side to pee and the little ones don’t quite make it and so you watch them as they stand and the pee trickles down to their feet. In the toddler room, the cement floor gets washed down periodically because otherwise, the smell of urine is too strong.

For breakfast it’s porridge, for lunch it’s rice and beans, for dinner it’s... rice and beans. The headmistress tells me feeding twenty-five orphans and a handful of borders is a challenge.

And then the morning lessons end and they go off to their lunch and we get picked up and have our home base meal.


[Afternoon]

If you are a tourist in Ghana, chances are you’ll want to see the Wli falls. They’re the tallest in Western Africa and they are majestically beautiful. The CCS (Cross Cultural Solutions) staff always plan an outing to them for the volunteers. The falls are about an hour from where we live and work. There are a few shop there, as well, where men carve ebony and mahogany and other timbered masks and figures.





But even as it is a tourist destination, there's only one pair there this afternoon – a man and his son, and they are from Germany. It’s a return trip for the dad and he wanted to bring his kid to let him see this very fascinating, very different culture, but we can see that the kid is freaked by it all, so that when the dad walks away for a bit and he is left alone, he cries and cries and does not let a single Ghanaian come to his help. He’s okay with our volunteers.

It reminds me how for the littlest ones at Happy Kids, the immediate reaction to seeing me, yevu (white one), is trepidation. But there, very quickly, as in all aspects of their young lives, they pick up their cues from their friends and if their friends want to touch yevu, they’ll follow suit.

We hike up over bridges through dense forests  until we are at the falls.


 


Our volunteers plunge into the pool to rinse off under the crashing water. I’m happy just to catch the spray and to look at the hundreds of bats that fly in and out of the caves high up in the cliffs...











... and the rainbows that form at the side.





I didn’t write much about the volunteers here, on Ocean, in the same way that I would avoid writing about colleagues or students back home. I will say this – each CCS person has her or his own reason for volunteering in Ghana, but really what counts is that they are volunteering and working so hard in their placements. That's impressive.






Butterflies. Did I mention the butterflies? The cocoa and the butterflies, the African lilies, the ferns. But mostly I'm thinking of the butterflies. Childlike and impatient. Scattering quickly if you approach too quickly or get too close.












The van is working well again. We rumble back to the home base, away from the high cliffs and the villages below, where people cut bamboo and gather sticks, carrying them deftly overhead.


















The sticks are for the evening fire. Ghana at night has the scent of burning wood.

from Ghana, continued

(Tuesday) more lessons

I feel more confident, more prepared in the hot little classroom outside Hohoe, Ghana. I graded all their “paintings” (all got star stickers and comments of the type we all are so used to giving back home – nice work! good job! My impression is that teachers are less carrot-y here. I don’t think the parents would like me for a permanent position; they favor tough discipline.)

I also have a lesson plan for today: a list of songs, some arithmetic ideas, reading games, alphabet scrambles.



these three always try to understand and do what is expected of them; only one lives at home.

Most kids are strong in one way and weak in another. The littlest one is always quiet at the beginning. She never engages until at least an hour into the morning. The young boys are terrific drawers. Three kids are math stars, understanding the tricks I put to the problems instantly. Writing is tough for most everyone. I wonder if I should do more writing with them. The teacher surely has her own teaching agenda, but she uses this week as time to back away from it. She is curious what I do on my own.

The headmistress sits in for a while and now I have the teacher sharing a seat with a child and the headmistress too, squeezed next to a little boy who seems quite used to sharing space. (Did I mention that they can easily squeeze a family of ten into one taxi?) Everyone participates. My age range has suddenly grown: from 4 to 52.

I write a lot on the board and I notice my hands are becoming completely black. Why is that, I wonder. The chalk, after all, is white.

Oh, I get it. The eraser. It’s a small, hand sewn pillow and it has seen many many dirty little hands. I ask the teacher if there is water to rinse off the black. A one word command from her and a boy is up and running. In a minute he is back with a pail of water and he pours it on my hands, a little at a time so that I can rub them clean. Or cleaner. I smile and tell him thank you, that’s fine, but he keeps on pouring, small spurts, until the bucket is dry.

And now I talk concepts. Pretend and real. Five legged unicorns. Cows that fly. Imaginary animals. A lead-in to reading them a Dr. Seuss book. Man, I love Dr. Seuss books! Left foot, right foot, high foot, low foot.

I ask them to draw pretend animals. I tell them to put feathers on goats and ten legs on cows if they want. Against my better judgment, I draw some examples on the board. It’s an invitation to ignite the copying instinct rather than to set the imagination rolling, but drawing animals had invoked, for the first time, concern. Teacha, I can’t draw animals. I show them how easy it is to draw a sitting cat. Two circles. Even the youngest one can do it and she does. The ornamentation she gives that cat is something else!

Recess. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Put away your drawings, we’ll finish them later.

But recess becomes interminable. My teacher has gone off on her break and my little class is filled with even younger kids, preschoolers, who have come to touch yevu yevu.



the preschoolers at Happy Kids do not wear uniforms; too much money.


They all want the hug, and I switch them to high five so that we don’t trample each other down all recess long. Some of the little ones pick up the drawings tucked into the desks of my own class group and they fold them and scrunch them and I am thinking – I have thirty kids here, some of them quite rambunctious. A young girl (11 years old) comes over and introduces herself. Ah. She is a recess monitor. She is charged with “looking after things.” She is one of the orphans here (she describes herself as living at Happy Kids) and she knows all the kids very well. She helps with the youngest, I redirect the preschoolers, but really, I would very much like recess to be over.

In Ghana, time floats. 

The fifteen minute recess is now reaching close to an hour. I nudge the helper, and she finally nudges the toddlers' Madame and we return to our class spaces.

Stories, colors on paper, complicated addition, easy reading games.

And by lunchtime, we’re in the van and heading for home base.


Yes, it's true, there is an afternoon plan today as well for the volunteers – it’s to go to the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary. Troops of mona monkeys live here and they are so sacred to the people of Ghana that they have survived for centuries, even as other herds failed. They had the luck that the locals saw in them their ancestral spirits and this, for years, made them untouchable. When imported Christianity eroded the traditional beliefs, the troops of monkeys dwindled, causing them, by the end of the last century, to be virtually extinct. Only in the last decade, in part as a result of contributions and encouragement from the international community, the forests were preserved and the monkeys were left to reside in peace there.

There is a burst of rain on our drive over to the forest, but it disappears around the bend in the road.





We buy bananas and we are told how to feed a monkey should we see one emerge from the forest: hold the whole banana! Don’t peel it! They want to do this themselves.

We are so very lucky. Sometimes they hide so perfectly in the forest that a only a several day visit can guarantee a sighting. But our staff knows the good hours, and well, we’re just lucky. The monkeys come out to the clearing and, attracted by our bananas, they saunter over to snatch them away, scampering off to eat them up in the bamboo trees.



































It's an intensely beautiful sight.

The village here is a traditional one, where people make a living out of agriculture and kente weaving.





We see many of the mud and bamboo huts in this region. A few of the better huts have spaces outside to shower, much like here:





We pack into the repaired volunteer van. Or maybe not so repaired: it breaks down seven times on the return trip. Ah well, it gives us a chance to get out and take a look around at the scenery. This, just outside Hohoe:





One of the (older) volunteers and I are dropped off at our own village’s kente weaving hut to look more closely at the densely woven strips of fabric that is so much identified with West Africa and especially Ghana. I wish I could always keep in my head the rhythmic clacking sound of the skilled weavers moving their threads back and forth. (Note the rubber band on his briefs. Obama and Oprah are commercially important in Ghana.)





And now it’s time for an evening meeting with an invited guest to our home base – a social worker who monitors child labor practices and child trafficking in Ghana. I am immensely interested in this and the hour is so very well spent, even as it reaches a stupendous crescendo outside as another storm gives a violent sweep through the region.

The power has been out for most of the day and though the home base has a generator, it, too fails now and then. Lights flicker, but at least we have that. Water is unavailable as well and we’re all used to it. There is a barrel with water from a well and you can carry some in with a bucket to take care of the basics.

After dinner, I do my now routine walk in the dark night to the village, to make sure all electricity is off there as well. It is. The street is shadowy and people walk aided by the light from cruising taxis.

No internet tonight. Maybe the next day. Or maybe not.

from Ghana

(Monday) lessons

Well, I wouldn’t have guessed this day would go in the way that it does. Not when I first signed up for international volunteer work, not when I received my placement at the Happy Kids Foundation in Hohoe, Ghana.

Our volunteers are variously placed – a school for the deaf, the district hospital, Happy Kids. The three of us who are assigned to Happy Kids have been warned: it’s not very structured. And some teachers are challenged by English, which is why it is especially useful for them to have an English speaking volunteer in the classrooms. Kids here learn Ewe at home. English is a second language and predictably, some kids learn it faster than others.

A taxi takes us to the school. There are no private cars in Hohoe, not even salvaged wrecks. If you really need to move quickly and longer distances, you take one of the cruising taxis. The equivalent of 35 cents, anywhere in the district (it loads up with passengers along the way). The volunteer van is once again broken and we have a ways to go.

The volunteers that have worked here before warned me: at Happy Kids, be prepared to take a class for the week. And be prepared to teach the first day.

You mean assist the teachers?

No. From day one, you’ll be alone with the kids.

Well now.

It’s hard to prepare not knowing their ages, or what kids in Ghana learn in school, or what level they’re at – no, let me rephrase it – it’s impossible to know how to prepare without this information.


We rumble along a rutted lane and we come to a clearing. The kids are working in classes shaded by dry palm leaves. Three separate spaces. (There is a fourth class of preschoolers – these play in a half open cement structure.) I am escorted to one class – the largest one, with twelve kids. Ages 4 to 12. That’s a big spread. [I should note that all photos are with appropriate permissions from the school.]



my class; their Madame is in the back


A really big spread. Nusi, Bright, Porshe , the twins (Christian and Christ)... the ones in matching uniforms, the ones with mismatched uniforms and ones without uniforms at all... socks, flipflops, bare feet – they’re all here. Where do I begin?

There is an old blackboard and I ask for volunteers to come up and write their names. And I pass out a sheet of paper. Let’s start with writing your name on that as well.


Too ambitious. Half of them are not there yet and the remaining ones struggle. I scale it back a bit.

I see that there are three challenges here: they’re all young (in one way or another), they know only spoken English and the young ones hardly even know that, and the resources that they have had to work with are very scant.

Teacha, teacha! The kids call me that to get my attention. Their regular teacher has few control issues. They cane kids here and she has a stick in hand to make the point. (Though they know that volunteers don’t like to see this and they try to restrain its use in front of us.)

The teacher sits down to rest. Flies buzz, the heat intensifies, she dozes... Who can blame her. The class is mine. Now what?

I have a few songs, movements, introductions up my sleeve, but they’re random. I brought my photo book about Madison and they just could not get enough of those images of snow and ice and autumn leaves. Here, near the Equator, the temperature is uniformly the same. Hot. The season are “dry” or “rainy,” though I have to say, that’s a tad unbelievable as we are ostensibly in the dry season and there have been violent storms every night so far. Even as they never last.

And so I teach. And it becomes clear that instruction here is based on repetition and the kids will repeat most anything you tell them. Sometimes you have to remind them that it really is a question and then that the guessing usually doesn't work.

I teach them clapping games and they love those! I reach for these games when the energy level gets to be high, too high – toward the end of the first morning period.

There is the boy who will raise his hand for most anything and then grin a large grin for you without having any answer. And the little one, the 4 year old who likes to curl up on top of her table when she is tired. If Madame notices, there is a large rap with a stick on the desk. The little girl seems unruffled, though she does scramble back to the bench.

And by the end of the period, I am not too far from wanting to curl up somewhere as well. The spread is too large. Keeping all twelve engaged when clearly one on one would work so much better is the biggest challenge of all.

A boy rings a bell. It’s recess.

But it’s not recess for me at all. I want to say – run and play, but they don’t want to do that. They hover around me and others, the youngest preschoolers come out to look at my photo book and it is clear that so long as yevu teacher is there, they will be right next to me, wanting to play hand games again, with hot little sticky hands in this little school in the tropics.

After recess, I have them draw. The teacher gives me pencils to distribute. I have brought paper and colored pencils from the home base, but there aren’t enough and so they have to share. And they do, though not without scuffles. The older ones quickly learn that they can get one from me if they sit and raise their hand rather than clamor after me – teacha, teacha! I want orange! (The colors of choice are orange and brown. Or whatever the child in the seat next to yours is using.) They swap their coveted colors with their savvy classmates. By the time they reach age eight, they know how to trade efficiently and effectively.

You have no idea how long these kids can keep going on drawing a picture! I tell them on this first day, draw anything! I suggest a flower or an animal, but most draw houses with mango trees at the side. One attempts a picture of himself playing soccer with his twin. One does random figures.

I think this is surely going too long and so I go back to arithmetic, but it’s hard to tear them away from their “paintings.” They hand them in. They expect to get them back with a teacher’s mark the next day. Hmmm.

I read a story, borrowed from home base and I ask them afterwards – what was this really about? It was one of those “try it, you’ll like it” kind of messages and I have the feeling that something in that message resonates with the teacher even more than with these kids (the teacher has the unfortunate habit of answering questions I throw at the class – why didn’t the rabbit want to climb the tree? He didn’t know how!).

And then it’s noon and the car for volunteers is here. The kids are real huggers and they warp themselves around me several heads deep. I don’t know which are the orphans and which have families. The young ones love to be hugged, hands reaching for yours, again and again and again. I think it must be that at one time they were wrapped so closely to their mother’s body. All babies are carried that way – in a sling on the back until they are ready to walk and it must be jarring to suddenly have nothing warm next to your small chest.



pulling away from the school


And if this wasn’t enough for day one of the week at work, in the afternoon, after a lunch of fu fu (a favorite here: a yam dumpling in a spicy chicken tomato broth)...


 

...the new volunteers head out for market. (Monday and Friday are full market days in Hohoe; on other days it is more limited.)

I’m not even going to describe it. A few photos cannot show off the variety. The colors of west Africa: the fabrics, the dried fish, peppers, okra. All there, all on this very very hot afternoon.





































After, we take the long walk back to the home base, past familiar homes and neighbors.





And there is still more at the base: Cross Cultural Solutions – the international volunteer program which I joined – links the volunteers with local people and groups that can make sure we understand at least some of the culture and traditions of the region. This afternoon a group of drummers and dancers from the village next to ours comes to the home base to show us the tradition of story telling through rhythmic movement and song.





Ghana, of course, was a major slave sending country in colonial times and the story was of slaves digging escape routes out of the muddy soils of the rainy season.





Yes, we were encouraged to learn some of the traditional steps. Teaching songs in the morning (Head and shoulders knees and toes! Knees and toes!), learning music in the afternoon.










Late in the evening I again hike down to the Internet café and this time I am not so lucky. A storm comes thundering in from the mountains and rushes through Hohoe furiously and frantically, dumping the rain, flashing severely then rumbling out to the West. I dash into a bar and wait it out. The smell of Hohoe after a downpour will be with me for a long time.

from Ghana

(Sunday) the heavens let loose

A hazy morning sun. Big lizards on a wall, basking in the heat.





For breakfast, you pick up -- whatever. Cornflakes for me. And mmmmm mango.

The woman who helps at the home base comes and goes. I’m thinking maybe visiting a church would be a good thing to do here on a Sunday morning. (I know, surprising, coming from me.) Everything is closed now, the day is warm. Last night, I had asked at the Internet café if they open on Sundays. After church, he tells me. When will that be? Twelve maybe? Or two? They hate to be tied down by a clock here.

She’s happy to escort us to her own church – the Revival Assemblies of God in Hoho. She’s used to it. Herding volunteers. There goes Ata with yevu yevu.

At her church she tells us to sit with the English school group. There is a lesson before service and today the discussion is about this “Central Truth:” That God has the final say in choosing those who should work for him. And it’s a back and forth, and the very small group (the other dialects command larger crowds) tosses ideas about what God would like to see in a leader. Some people offer ideas, some take notes.

The service follows. It is... lively. It’s in Ewe, with an English translation. And sometimes it’s in English, with an Ewe translation. All of it is filled with music and movement. They sing, they dance, they pray, hands raised, they sway to the music, rhythmically, emotionally.


 


When the dancing snakes to the front, our hostess (who is so good at telling us when to take photos and when to hold still) asks us to move with the rest. The white people are dancing. Halleluja.

I ask the volunteer program director later – so what do they think of Americans here? You have to wonder. The only white people I see are the volunteers. Our director deftly answers – in Accra, they would recognize the idea of you being “American.” But not here. In the villages, you are simply white people.

So what do they think of white people here? 

They are curious.

Fact is, Ghana is a friendly country. It’s how they describe themselves – the social means more than the commercial. If you set out somewhere, set aside time to talk, because rushing a spontaneous verbal exchange is rude.

We walk back from church in the heat of noon. There is no shade in Hohoe.





Children. Let me tell you about the little ones here. What stands out – and everyone who comes here will say this – is how happy they are. They play, yes, simple things: poke at a pile of earth. Watch the people go by. Chase each other. And the little ones always beg for a picture. Photo! Photo! -- they beg, and if you show them the result, they burst into spasms of laughter.





This little guy was the shy one. His mother urged him to come up and ask for it, urged him so strongly, helping him inch forward, but in the end he couldn't. I see him and take the photo and show him the result, and he smiles, but in the end he is more fascinated by the entire event of having an exchange of this sort with yevu – white person.





Lunch. We eat outside, because it’s cooler in the shade than in the house. Good foods. Rice, chicken, beans, mango. Mmmmmm mango.





In the afternoon, we have the long long informational meeting. There is a lot to consider. When we begin our review of our placements, I have a lot of questions to ask. One reason I was so keen on coming here is because I teach Comparative Family Law back home and I talk about the interplay of culture, religion and the imported laws in certain African and Asian countries where that relationship is very complicated. And I teach too about another set of complicated issues – international adoption, from both the perspective of the sending nations (Ghana is one) and the receiving ones (the US, for example).

And it surprised me how quickly this subject threw itself in my lap on this trip: I had been standing in line to board at JFK and behind me, a white woman was explaining to someone next to her that she was going to see the sister of her daughter ("the daughter" is a girl she had adopted from Ghana a few years back). The sister still lives in Ghana with the mother. “The mother means well. She is not like the mothers in the States who abuse or neglect their children. She just cannot provide.” Uff... I’ll not comment. Let me just tell the story as it presented itself to me. And it continued. Are you going to adopt the sister? – the other person asked. “I don’t know. Maybe. God will show me the way.”

At the home base, Maskafui, our director, confirms that many women here do not fully understand what it means when a foreigner comes to adopt. They don’t get the loss of control, the severance of ties. And the orphanages are a mixed bag too. They’re fairly recent and some are good and they work with extended families and some are not so good and they children come and go and it is suggested that in places, there may be an exchange of money involved.

But we’re interrupted. Distant thunder turns into torrential rains. With balls of hale. The heavens release cool, refreshing buckets of rain. The locals will be happy. The volunteers rejoice.





The dry dirt roads are quickly flooded.





Evening. Dinner of noodles and a very delicious, spicy spinach, yams -- very white, very large, very stachy. And mango.





And yes, finally, after dinner I hurry to the Internet café, making my way between puddles on the dirt road.










And the connection is slow, but I am able to upload some and download some and after an hour, I feel once again, in this meager way, connected to home.

I walk back in the dark, flashlight illuminating the ditches and puddles. Makafui warns us: flash those lights! We have snakes, we have scorpions. All the snakes here are dangerous. Don’t step on one!

from Ghana

(Saturday) Arriving in Hohoe

Hey, that was no small feat! Running to catch various flight connections, then sitting for hours on the Ghana bound plane when it became clear that a passenger needed urgent medical attention, and then of course waiting for a few more hours as the airline tried to locate the proper suitcases that had to be removed with him. Then came the ten hours of bouncing around in the air, and finally we land in Accra. There is only one other commercial airplane here, a Virgin Atlantic, standing off to the side.

We crowd into the small airport, go through one set of formalities, then another, and yet another, and now we’re done and ready to go.

There’s a handful of us traveling to Hohoe to take part in the volunteer efforts here (as I said, nearly all much younger than me) and we are picked up by a van, driven by a local man who lives in the village next to ours.

There are several notable things about the drive from Accra to Hohoe. Three immediately stand out: first, at any point along the road where the driver is forced to slow down (say because we’re passing through a village, or because there are random bumps, or there is a police blockade), a swarm of sellers congregates at our side, hoping to entice with anything from grilled foods to shoes, socks and toilet paper.

Our driver cannot resist a stick of grilled...something.





These mobile venders are there, in addition to the village stands, so often selling mangoes, pineapple and banana, but really almost anything you could think of. One boy is trying to sell a dead animal which he dangles by the tail – looks like a rat, but I think there is another name for it here and yes, apparently some like it for dinner. There isn’t much traffic once you are out of Accra, and there isn’t a lot of buying either. But there is a lot of selling.


And as perhaps you would have guessed, most transport of goods -- purchased or sold – is not by cart, car nor bike – it’s on foot, carried on the head.





So far, I’m only snapping photos from the veering, rocking, bumping van, so please forgive the limited nature of what I have to offer.


 


It was a fascinating ride! And – my second point – it was a long ride. Some four hours. On – my third point – a pavement that is so potholed that really you must understand exactly how to weave around them or you risk losing some portion of your car to the road irregularities.





And finally I’m in Hohoe – our home base. In the Upper Volta region of Ghana. They say in this region you’ll find the highest concentration of Peace Corps volunteers, but we are not that, we’re here for short spells, filling in a need here, providing a small service there, teaching and learning, too, about a culture that is as foreign to us as ours is to them. It's not much, but you get the feeling that here, not much is very much indeed.

Home base: we sleep in rooms with bunk beds and mosquito netting. And fans, when the electricity is working. And sometimes there’s a trickle of cold running water and sometimes there is not.

Did I mention how hot it is? Temperature-wise, we’re only in the low nineties, but it is beastly humid. And so the first thing we do is strip down to acceptable levels of disattire. And within a short time, I set out for the village center, in search of an Internet café.

(Saturday) First evening in Hohoe

Well, the search for Internet fails. I have a few hours before the 6 o’clock dinner, and I do try, even though in the surrounding hills there is the rumble of thunder and they say surely it will rain. I set out on my own, computer in sack, taking my fist poke around the village.










But the thunder in the hills means that the electricity in the township is taking a pause (surely that is to be expected?). And even though I find a little hut with four computers in it and the shopkeeper is thrilled to have me sit down and try to hook up, he admits that he now has power, but the Internet is down. How long? Shrug.

Dinner at the home base. There are two cooks from the village who take turns preparing meals for the volunteers. They are careful about matters of hygiene, which is good because no one wants to get sick, and especially not right away, And the food is delicious! Pan fried potatoes, beans, lettuce and tomatoes and pieces of chicken. And the ubiquitous here, the hands down most delicious you have ever tasted mango. (Step aside pineapple, the mango wins!) We have a large supply of bottled water and some people throw sweetened flavors into it, but for me, this is just so perfect with the sweetness of mango still in my mouth, that I am completely satisfied with the first solid meal here.

I tell my fellow volunteers that I would like to try the Internet café again. One volunteer who has worked here for a week already, tells us there is actually a second place as well, on the other side of town and even though it’s dark and we are all so tired after the night and day of travel, we set out, flashlights pointing to the ruts and ditches, until we are on the main road again and we can see by the lights coming from the huts and passing cars.

The village road is not at all empty. And there are children everywhere! Young infants wrapped around a mother’s back, toddlers trailing after an older brother or sister. Children who look at us and smile and shout to their grownups in Ewe – yevu! Yevu! white person! White person! And they run up and touch me, take my hand for a second and smile and smile. Yevu! Yevu! The grownups smile and greet too, but they are more worldly than their babies. They have seen, thorough travels to Accra and yes, television, far beyond the village of Hohoe.

It’s a long walk and we do reach both shops with the computers, but the Internet (dialup, I am told) remains unavailable.

It’s 8:30 when we come back the home base again. I try to run some water in the tub, but it is a mere trickle now. Still, I am so sticky from the heat and the bug creams and days of travel, that I persevere. I fill a small bucket with the trickle and when I finally get enough to allow for a good rinse, I let the cool water run down my face and then down my scalp and back and you’d be surprised how much cleaning even a small amount of water will accomplish.

And now I really have to sleep. The young volunteers all slept far better than I did on the plane and I am so tired that I wonder if this itself will keep me from sleeping well.

It does. I’m under the nets and there is a fan blowing straight at the bunk bed so that I can feel the movement of air. I doze off for an hour and wake up confused and hot. I will myself to continue, knowing that it is going to be a project. Another hour of drifting through the surreal land of half sleep and now I am really awake and I wonder if it’s because there is enough air moving beneath those nets. Of course, there is plenty of air, but the minute you wonder, you soon conclude that there is not. I think – is it possible that I will be here a week and not sleep at all? Or only in spurts, when I drift off, only to waken again?

I am not a person who hates hot still air and here I have a fan not too far, and still, the net is the final clamp against the free circulation of oxygen that one takes for granted on the hottest days back home.

But I think about the street village walk and I think about the beautiful fabrics that women here use for dresses – long dresses wrapped around their proud and tall bodies (straight from years of carrying things on their heads) and those thoughts about the dresses and fabrics make me forget about the nets and thick hot air and I’m off to sleep. A good and fitful sleep at last.