Friday March 6, 2009:
Ugh, where do we begin? How about with a colossal understatement? The last week or so has been hot. If you’ve already used all your adjectives, what do you write when it gets hotter?
We took out Sam’s thermometer today and confirmed that it was working. It went from it’s near-constant 34-35°C (in our room) down to a mercifully cool 29°C for a short time this evening after a small rain. We’ve been begging for rain for a week because we keep being assured that then it will cool down, but instead of the deluge everyone’s been promising we got one of the small showers that only wets the ground and “let’s the heat out,” making things worse.
Paul is out of town and has been most of this week. Monday and Tuesday he was in Accra deliver his thesis project (for a Diploma in Youth and Development Work) to the University Ghana, Wednesday he was in Ho at a meeting of a regional forestry board, and Thursday he left again for Accra for a conference of a Moringa association of which he’s a founding member. We expect him back tomorrow night at the earliest. Our water tank for showers ran out Tuesday and Paul was unable to reach his friend with the truck before he left. Tonight will be our fourth night without showers, and about a week into this increasingly brutal heat wave.
Making matters even worse than that is the food situation, which can only be described as grim. Sam's doing better than I am, I think because he's tougher and probably has a better (or less dark) sense of humour about it. Or maybe he’s just hungrier. As with most things I don't like doing but have to do, I have a hard time imagining things ever being better, or the current situation not lasting forever, and so I'm generally more sullen about it. I’m feeling pretty desperate for something other than our regulars: beans and plantains; spaghetti which has lately been too spicy; fufu and banku which I'm so hungry I'm devouring now; minor variations on rice.
That being said, I’ve been eating less and less this week (probably on account of both the heat and the food) and that, along with some mild dehydration, has created a very bad situation for my system, if you get my meaning. (I only wish to give you a full picture of my suffering.) When I consulted the Collins Family Health Medical Encyclopedia at the library it gave me a probable cause: starvation. This adds a particular irony to that old phrase, “Eat up, there are people starving in Africa.” I never thought they could mean me! Sam and I have made a pact to get out of the village tomorrow if only to experience the incredible freedom of deciding which bad food we’ll eat.
Saturday March 7, 2009:
I read the section on food in the introduction to the Lonely Planet Guide to Africa and did something just short spitting on the book and throwing it across the room. It was extolling the delights of the many and varied grains and root vegetables that are pounded into mush (amazingly from East to West, North to South!) and the stews (fish or goat or chicken!) with which they’re eaten.
Our favourite and most painful daydreams are about food – big macs or club sandwiches or anything crispy and fresh or "Porridge!" Sam loves to say, as we're eating our regular morning porridge, which we also hate now. We’ve planned every meal for at least the first two weeks of our return to Canada.
We decided to take the quick trip to Kpandu today to see if we could find working internet, even though we were warned by Paul that it would be disappointingly slow. The trip is really less about this than getting away from the village, where it will be almost too hot to sit around and certainly too hot to risk being co-opted into work. (We are a proud example of volunteers.) We think that it's possible that the only restaurant in town is a place called "Roses" where we came with Edward on our way back to the village during our Excursion. There we had something called a Club Sandwich and a Complete Salad, both of which were definitely weird but sort of not awful, so maybe we'll get them again. (As far as we can tell there's no lettuce in Ghana, and so anything green is usually cabbage and any salad is usually coleslaw, unless it's Florence's/Paul's and then it's fishy. So the Club Sandwich that we had was actually just coleslaw and the standard fried chicken between three pieces of the weird sweet bread. Like I said, not awful, but not great.)
When I checked my email in Kpandu I’d received a note from Mum about the heat. On Wednesday I called home to wish Dad a happy birthday and (as they stood on the breezy summit of Blue Mountain) I told them how I was essentially sitting in my underwear and still couldn’t keep myself dry. It’s the humidity that’s the real killer and that’s something we can’t get a measure of. We’re assured though that it sits at a constant 80% or so, or higher. According to Mum the weather network pegged it at 28°C at 3:00 am on Thursday in Accra, with 84% relative humidity making it feel like 41°C in the middle of the night. She recons that 34°C must then feel like 50°C.
At 2:00pm on Saturday March 7th I measure 42°C on the thermometer while walking back on the road to the farm, before a relative humidity that must be at least 80%. I measured the same on my lap in the front seat of the tro-tro coming back from Kpandu. What does that make it?
Paul didn’t return tonight and so we’re still without showers. Day 5. The club sandwiches were indeed weird again and pretty unsatisfying. We thought we’d try something else on the menu but we’re learning that a menu in a Ghanaian restaurant is less a list of things that are available to eat than it is a list of things that might have been once made in this or possibly some other kitchen. We noticed that these club sandwiches had egg in them, and decidedly less chicken. We also tried a Tomato Salad which didn’t disappoint – it appeared to be what it said it was and so we had what I think might have been our first veggies in a week. I might also be suffering from a lack of fruits and vegetables in addition to a lack of water. Knowing this, I still have trouble eating or drinking much and I had my ever-present stomach-ache by the time we arrived back at the farm.
Sunday March 8, 2009:
Things went from bad to worse last night with my stomach and I spent most of the night either pacing the driveway, curled up on the floor in a corner of our room (I was too uncomfortable to lie down), or in the bathroom. I will admit that I cried – from exhaustion and from hunger pains that may actually be indigestion since neither food nor water seems to quench my apparent hunger and thirst. I took some pills and eventually things improved, but not before the stomach pains made me throw up – once in a bucket in our room and another time in the bathroom after which I briefly blacked out and fell (not far) to the floor and forgot where I was.
Luckily we have nothing pressing to do today except wait on Paul and more pure water for drinking (we’ve run out and as a replacement Chachu’s brought us some bags of water that are either very old or have somehow otherwise taken on the powerful taste of the plastic and so they’re basically undrinkable). I am feeling tired but significantly better. The weather is about the same – hotter than hot and getting hotter.
When Paul returned this afternoon he brought drinking water and we headed off to the hotel for a drink. I opted for Fanta (one standard 600mL bottle of beer is usually more than enough for me and sometimes Paul serves us two) but Sam saved me and Paul’s disappointment by drinking beer as well. While we were sitting at the hotel it started to rain! It rained and rained and rained and I started dreaming of showers again. At day 6 without water, they can’t be far away, can they? (We would wait until Wednesday – Day 8.)
At EDYM village after the storm I measured 25°C!! Today marks our exact halfway point in this stay. Five weeks down, five more to go.
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