What weeks 5 and 6 brought

Sunday March 1st we finally met the chief and elders of Have – something that Paul would have liked us to do much earlier, I’m sure, but for whatever reason it had been delayed.   We were welcomed very warmly, in particular because we’re Canadians, and we were given a brief history of the work of other Canadians and the Canadian Government who have supported development in Have for many years.  (This included work as far back as 1983 when the Canadian Government funded a generator for the town before it was hooked up to the electrical grid.)   Otherwise, we had a not-uncommon busy day-about-town with Paul, which found us on various errands and then (after being served two generous 600 mL bottles of beer, the first with Paul’s best friend Constant, and the second with a visiting mentor of his) eventually found us – cautiously, nervously – drunk on a Sunday in this Christian town.  Before I realized I was hot, I was tired, dehydrated, and sobering up while waiting interminable minutes on the hot road for a tro-tro to take us back to the village.  One benefit of the beer, however, was that lunch of fried yam chips and tomato relish tasted amazing!

Monday March 2nd my replacement arrived at the library.  Her name is Ruby and she’s a 20 year-old high-school graduate and the granddaughter of a local woman.   Lately she’s been living in Accra with her step-father but she’ll be attending the library training school when the funds are found.  I’d gotten pretty used to my solitude at the library but since I knew it should be the dream of every volunteer to be rendered obsolete, I was happy for the company.  So far Ruby and I are getting along well except that she thinks I’m “soft” on disciplining the kids.   I told her it’s just that I leave the disciplining up to her now, since she’s tough and the kids don’t laugh at her as much.  Also it’s true that I am soft when it comes to the really little ones who just like to look at the books for the pictures – it seems to be the prevailing opinion among the adult visitors to the library that if the kids can’t read then they’re just causing trouble, but since it was my hobby for a great many years just to “look at the pictures” I feel like using the library for anything is nice.  I’ve taken a cue from Ruby, though, (who tells the primary school kids to go home after they’ve perused one book) and I usually tell them it’s time to go after two, but sometimes I go soft and tell them to come back “later” rather than “tomorrow”.

Wednesday March 4th Sam came into town midday for a hair cut and our language lesson.   The former had been planned for Monday but was scrapped when we missed our appointment with the barber.  This was our first experience of real frustration with African punctuality when Ruby casually arrived back late from lunch and Jimmy (Paul’s nephew and our eager guide and shadow) wandered off to the market at the last minute making us 30 minutes late at the barber.  There are other barbers in town but after I watched one cut Kilon’s hair by scraping his head with a bare razor braced on a comb I suggested Sam ask Paul if he knew of someone with a pair of clippers.  So Wednesday Sam successfully got his hair cut, but he continues to puzzle with the “experiment” of his beard.

Friday March 6th was Ghana Independence Day and so both Sam and I got the day off work.  The activity of the day was watching the school-children march around a field in town, and so for several hours Sam and I sat and watched in the sometimes-shade of a tree (and both managed to get our first sunburns as a result).  We learned that only the best marchers from each school are chosen for this parade (this from Raymond, our Ewe teacher, who interpreted for us), and that it’s very serious business (this from the children’s faces).  Between 20-40 male and female students each represented every school and each group marched in turn around the perimeter of the field to the top where they saluted the Ghanaian flag, a local government representative, and a police officer.   The best part had to be the march that they did, which was an odd arm-swinging, foot-dragging, goose-stepping, almost-dancing sort of thing to a constant drum beat and the accompaniment of a motley band.   The whole town showed up and sat around the field and cheered on each delegation, with some proud parents and grandparents occasionally breaking out of the crowd to hoot and holler alongside the marching students.  The wee primary students were some of the cutest and even I felt a twinge of pride when I saw that a particularly quiet and precious little librarygoer was leading her brown-and-white-checkered classmates, having earned the distinction of the group leader’s sash and white gloves.   On the way back to the village we stopped at the Lacumba Spot – a local drinking spot – and enjoyed our one and only Ghanaian vice: ice cold Fanta in glass bottles, 50 cents a piece.

As the heat and our discomfort continued unabated over the weekend, Monday March 8th felt like a rotten start to the next 5 weeks.  In addition, some new frustrations and challenges came to a head for us at the beginning of the week.  Sam and I discouragingly reflected that in some respects we still felt just as alien here as we did weeks ago and that we were beginning to harbour a great resentment for what we were feeling are some widely held prejudices against us. If we were tired of “Yevou” before, after five weeks we hated it.  But more than that we hated the increased frequency with which we seemed to be hearing any number of ridiculous statements starting with “The Whites…”  Particularly hurtful were an unconnected series of insinuations about “white” (read: western) culture that suggested that we are more selfish than Africans.  From a Ghanaian perspective, where large extended families live together and are involved in each other’s daily lives, the way western families live apart and prefer privacy may naturally seem distant and maybe even selfish, but the assessment is completely superficial as far as we’re concerned.  Even at our best (and we were not), Sam and I often needed to let off steam, and too often found ourselves ranting “Why the eff are we here?!?”

Adding to our frustrations was the food situation, which in the last week or so seemed to reach a critical new low.  Breakfasts, which were once our favourite meal at least for their predictability, lost their (little) appeal, just like the rest of the food.   Every morning is still the same with some variation of porridge (heaps and heaps of it; sometimes thick, sometimes thin), or if we’re very unfortunate “rice water” – which is like wet, overcooked rice pudding.  Usually we’re served some kind of egg, which is at least the highlight, but even that disappeared early this week when, we presume, we ran out of eggs before market day.  There’s also the very sweet bread (the only kind), if it’s not infested with ants, but then our last batch was almost inconceivably sweeter.  (The Ghanaian tolerance for sugar has taken even me by surprise.)   Otherwise it basically feels like for every decent lunch (and please understand that our standards are now very, very low), there’s fufu for dinner.

On Monday we got another talk from Paul about our feedback to him, which unfortunately in our dismal moods felt a bit like a lecture.  We haven’t given much feedback, and I’m not sure whether he was thinking of the food or the accommodation or something else, but again he was quite insistent that he wanted us to be honest with him and tell him what we wanted.  He reminded us that if we don’t like something and we don’t tell him, that we’re potentially creating a bad situation for the next volunteers.  While we acknowledged privately that this is a valid point, it doesn’t help us negotiate a way to address some of our worst grievances – namely, oh say, the food and racism.  He seemed to want something and so I told Paul that I’d really like a shower (that was day six without them).  This made him laugh, so I guess he was glad I said so, even though he said he knew.

The problem may be simply that, apart from wanting regular showers, we really like our accommodations at the village just fine.   It’s offered us some much-needed privacy from the prying eyes that find us when we’re out and about and, from what we’ve heard, sometimes invaded the village accommodations of previous volunteers.  During the last week’s horrible heat wave we really could have used our fan, but the generator just won’t start.  We told Paul this but he hasn’t been able to get Kilon to the village yet to have a look at it.  (And we know he’s working on a long-term solution for the water so it’s seems rather unfair to continue to complain about it.)  I told Paul that we are happy (with what we think he can help) and that otherwise we just have a hard time asking for things.

As for the food, which we agree is by far the worst thing to deal with, we feel that we’re in a trickier spot.  After Paul’s entreaty I decided that I’d ask for more fruits and vegetables, since that’s something he mentioned early on that he was trying to encourage Florence to feed us.  Otherwise we don’t really know what else we can ask for, because as far as we can tell we’re just eating what people eat here.  Paul has said that he thinks Florence doesn’t feed us enough meat either, so I guess we can mention that too, but where we’re from meat is expensive so we’re quite self-conscious about making this request.   Nevertheless, although the timing was bad, we took Paul’s talk to heart and asked on Thurdsay to never again be served African “bread” – an indescribable mashed-noodle-like-loaf, the colour and consistency of a hard mozzarella cheese, with the granular, pocketed interior of an Aero bar; and absolutely in Sam’s opinion the most vile food imaginable.  Still, Sam and I agreed that no matter how much we hate fufu, we can’t say that we don’t like it – it’s the national dish and everyone just seems too damn proud of it!

Tuesday March 9th was a better day and I got to skip the library and play photographer for the day when a team of Dutch engineers arrived and took a tour of the area.  I don’t actually know what to call them – engineers, scientists, social workers – but the three of them make up a team who is working with Paul and EDYM and the village of Wodje (just south of Have) to create an irrigation scheme for some of the almost 1200 acres of farm fields between the town and the lake.  The three men met the chiefs of Wodje and as I watched their stifled bewilderment and mild discomfort (been there!), I briefly enjoyed feeling like I wasn’t the biggest stranger in town.  After a hot motorcycle ride out to meet some of the farmers, followed by the Dutch and their guides in a truck, we headed back to our favourite hotel where we all had lunch, except Sam, who got to enjoy neither the day off work nor the charming and amusing company of the lanky Dutchmen.

Wednesday March 10th was a big day at the library because it was the first day with power!   I moved up a big step in the world Tuesday night when we were hooked up to the electrical grid and so now I enjoy a fan and power for my laptop!!!  (All of the wires and fixtures were already in place, but the power had been disconnected at some point during the last six months or so when the library was closed.)  Paul has temporarily moved the EDYM offices to the library as well (which were temporarily closed and out of power since an over-height truck pulled down the connecting line), and so there is a rather small but hopeful possibility of using the internet here at some point in the future.

Wednesday also saw a vast improvement in our Ewe lessons when I suggested to Raymond a new lesson structure as an alternative to the two interminable hours of dictation of complicated phrases and vocabulary, which was making our task of learning increasingly insurmountable.  We knew that this had worked when Sam found himself singing what he thought was a nonsense song during his hours of sweaty and back-breaking work, only to realize that he was actually speaking Ewe: the words to his song were, over and over, “Doh lé ñiéwu” which is (phonetic) Ewe for “I am hungry.”  (Whereas I really felt myself suffering for food last week, Sam’s been feeling the pain more recently, and has begun to show the signs, often in unintentionally odd behaviour.  Case in point, a few days ago as I read a book with my flashlight I heard a low whisper coming from the dark and, when I shone my flashlight, found a startled Sam who said he’d been imagining that he was eating a burger.)

Friday March 13th we finally had a big rain and, although it continues to be hot, I think we can say that the heat wave that had us suffering temperatures in the forties is behind us for now.   It may still get hotter between now and when we leave – and will certainly be hotter as we head north – but I feel a cautious optimism in thinking that it would be nearly impossible to experience anything worse than what we felt last weekend, and so I will live through this heat.  The frequency of the rains has increased and I had the incredible pleasure of waking up Sunday to the sound of rain on the roof and (I could have sworn) the smell of Bruce Beach in my nose.  Moreover, the overnight rain was so cool that I reckoned our thermometer had the temperature too high at 25.   At any rate, I lingered in a very fresh shower Sunday morning and considered that I hadn’t been so cold since we stood on the tarmac at Heathrow (in clothes suitable for neither minus 20 nor plus 30) waiting to board the shuttlebus to our plane.

Unlike the miserable and never-ending week five, week six passed rather quickly and we are now counting in days and weeks, not weeks and months, until our departure.