prêt-à-partir / ready-to-where

Kailea & Isla

2011-07-27T16:30:00.020-04:00

Meet Isla, at just 12 weeks. I had the pleasure of photographing the beautiful mom and baby recently here in Toronto. (And Grandpa Ken, who stopped by too.)

A hint of spring

2011-04-09T12:45:00.004-04:00

While winter's grip on the city has proven tenacious, spring is slowly creeping in. With a gorgeous weekend ahead you might even say it's marching in like ... pipers at a Saint Paddy's Day Parade! (Like ham-fisted metaphors on a silly blog post!) That's embarrassing, I seem to be having a delete malfunction.

Anyway - a few snaps, courtesy of me and the poladroid.

The serious-minded photographer in me would like me to be ashamed of posting something I sent through a web app, but whimsy wins when spring is in the air!

Enjoy!

The Saint Patrick's Day Parade

2011-04-09T12:40:00.025-04:00

Oh, what the heck. There's more!

(p.s. Please excuse the lame Picasa slideshow functionality. If you can't see the slideshow, you'll need to open the post in another page. If you want to replay the slideshow, the big play button will frustratingly link you directly to my Picasa album, but back in the original window it will be replaying. Whimsy ... ruffled but not defeated.)

Past Lives

2011-03-08T14:00:00.004-05:00

Brandywine Meadows

2011-03-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

Gemma & David

2011-03-01T19:00:00.002-05:00

To the dogs

2011-02-19T12:00:00.009-05:00

Happy New Year!

2011-02-04T18:00:00.002-05:00

Merry Christmas To All

2010-12-22T10:00:00.036-05:00

... and a very happy New Year!

The Off-Season

2010-12-21T13:30:00.002-05:00

Berry Merry

2010-12-11T14:30:00.006-05:00

It's Winter, Truly

2010-12-07T18:00:00.007-05:00

Have I told you how hot it is in our apartment? If you're living anywhere like this city right now, you're probably not going to want to hear about it. Some quirk in the building's furnace means that it's about a constant, oh, 28 degrees centigrade in here at all times. The water is coming out of the faucets either warm or hot these days (not splendid for drinking), but as it's minus 15 outside and we don't have to pay for it, I'm really not complaining.

Lying, sweating, in my bed, it does feel like it was just yesterday that I was riding my Bixi bike around town and tossing and turning through sweltering summer nights. In fact it was actually just yesterday that, as I stood in the kitchen making chicken pot pie (which was excellent, thank you), I watched the gathering snow steadily creep up the kitchen window to form the drift that now covers, sincerely, the bottom foot and a half of that window, not to mention the rest of the city with it. So, here we are and it's really the season. Maybe the city will make a proper show of its famous snowy winter this year - I, for one, would be thrilled (not that you want to hear about it).

City of Lights

2010-12-06T13:30:00.005-05:00

Great Big Sky

2010-11-30T14:30:00.006-05:00

The Feeling of a Place: Snow at Kits Beach

2010-11-29T14:00:00.009-05:00

Down On The Corner

2010-11-28T10:00:00.010-05:00

First Snow

2010-11-27T18:00:00.004-05:00

This is today...

The White Desert (Part 6)

2010-11-26T10:00:00.007-05:00

The White Desert (Part 5)

2010-11-25T10:00:00.004-05:00

The White Desert (Part 4)

2010-11-24T10:00:00.005-05:00

The White Desert (Part 3)

2010-11-23T10:00:00.006-05:00

The White Desert (Part 2)

2010-11-22T14:00:00.028-05:00

The Most Magical Place I'd Never Seen: The White Desert (Part 1)

2010-11-21T21:00:00.024-05:00

I wonder sometimes what travel must have been like before people like me set about making it their lives’ ambition to ruin the surprise for everyone else. It’s an amazing thing to arrive at a place you’ve never seen before, and an experience that’s becoming increasingly rare. That I found such a place in a country as toured through the ages as Egypt is a mystery as amazing to me as the landscape of the White Desert itself. (And surely it’s with a heavy sense of irony that I encourage you to keep scrolling on.)

This particular journey begins away from the fertile and crowded Nile River Delta, some 400 kilometers west of Cairo. A dull-looking square on the map, the Western Desert actually stretches from the Mediterranean and the Nile all the way to Egypt’s borders with Libya in the west and Sudan in the south. From the verdant oases and the ancient, North African caravan routes to the formidable Great Sand Sea, the romantic notions this place inspires in the mind of the impressionable traveller are almost too much to bear.

Our travels start at Bahariya Oasis, one of the few relatively lush spots in an incredibly dry expanse, and continue south through increasingly spectacular and fantastic landscapes. In the Black Desert, crumbling black-topped peaks litter the desert with millions of dark rocks which run down the sides of the mountains like dried lava. Some distance further, we’re driving off the edge of a great dune (was it Naqb as-Sillim, the Pass of the Stairs?) and down between the enormous island mountains that mark the beginning of the White Desert. From there the ground becomes hard and chalky, and snowy white rock formations like whipped meringue crop out of the ground in a landscape truly as awe-inspiring as it is bizarre. This is where we camped for the night, under the stars and amidst these great, calcified monuments that have been carved by the desert winds, somewhere in the quietest 300 square kilometers in the world.

Rock Formations of the White Desert, Egypt

2010-11-20T17:30:00.015-05:00

I'd hoped to bring you the full post on the White Desert today but, as other photo duties called, I'm afraid it'll have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, being mindful of keeping my November promises, I'm pleased to present another peak of the splendour that's in store. (It's gonna be that great.) Until then!

Four-Wheeling in the Western Desert, Egypt

2010-11-19T17:00:00.005-05:00

Go Fly a Kite, Alexandria, Egypt

2010-11-18T17:00:00.004-05:00

More from the Colour Yellow

2010-11-17T12:00:00.004-05:00

Grey Days

2010-11-16T10:00:00.003-05:00

Grandpa's Cup

2010-11-15T16:30:00.003-05:00

More fall in Squamish, British Columbia

2010-11-14T16:00:00.004-05:00

Derbyshire Peaks: By Speedwell Cavern

2010-11-13T10:00:00.004-05:00

Derbyshire Peaks: The Moorland Plateau

2010-11-12T10:00:00.004-05:00

Derbyshire Peaks: Lady in Red

2010-11-11T10:00:00.003-05:00

Derbyshire Peaks: Cliffs of Castleton

2010-11-10T10:00:00.010-05:00

Derbyshire Peaks: Climbers near Chapel-en-le-Frith

2010-11-09T10:00:00.014-05:00

Boats at Conwy Bay, Wales

2010-11-08T10:00:00.009-05:00

Fall in black & white

2010-11-07T18:30:00.008-05:00

Evening over Midan Saad Zaghloul and the Mediterranean Sea, Alexandria, Egypt

2010-11-06T10:00:00.001-04:00

Food stalls at night, Djemaa el-Fna, Marrakesh, Morocco

2010-11-05T10:00:00.031-04:00

Orange, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec

2010-11-04T10:00:00.006-04:00

Squamish, British Columbia

2010-11-03T10:00:00.011-04:00

Derbyshire, England

2010-11-02T10:30:00.011-04:00

Is this thing still on?

2010-11-02T10:00:00.019-04:00

Oh hello there stranger,

I'm sorry, I didn't realize anyone else was here. I just came by to drop off a few things, see if the switches still worked. Not in bad shape though, eh? Just a few cobwebs here and there.

Well, welcome back. As you can see ready-to-where has undergone a little transformation. So, after much ado and a very extended break I suppose I'm now pleased to let you know that I'm relaunching this site (there, relaunched!) as a place for photos and stories about adventure and travel. With lots more to tell and explore, I hope you'll join me in this next little phase of my creative life.

To start things off on the right foot (that's the productive one - the left is very silly) I've decided to take on a Completion Project of my own, inspired by the lovely Christine (of adventures recent). That is, before I've entirely outpaced my hard drive space with everything ever-new, it only seems fair that some of the old stuff should get to see the digital developing room. And so starting today I do hereby swear to post one photo every day for the month of November. Then we'll see where that gets us, eh?

I look forward to seeing you soon!

Anne

Bright Colours, Soft Launch

2010-11-01T18:20:00.003-04:00

Fall in Montreal...

You know: Some reflections on travel

2009-07-23T13:00:00.007-04:00

You know you don’t deserve to travel when …
You’re standing 30 feet away from wild elephants with nothing between you and them but the 50 degree heat and you think, “I’d really rather be watching this on tv.”

You know you’re fed up with bureaucracy when …
You’d consider an unplanned side trip to Togo if it meant avoiding another visa fee in Ghana.

You know he must have had a tough time too when …
The Brit you meet admits that he loves and misses England.

You know you’ve been hungry when …
A flight attendant serves you the best meal you’ve eaten in three months.

You know you’ve gained some distance when…
Looking back, you think you might have liked fufu.

You know you’re rundown when …
A common cold knocks you out for 19 days.

You know your Canadian politeness has paid off when…
While simply trying to extricate yourself from a pricey sale, you accidentally bargain the price down to less and a third of what it’s worth … and he sells it to you.

You know you’re tired of the hassles when …
You can barely let go of the fact you’ve been scammed long enough to appreciate that you’re still standing in front of the Pyramids.

You know you’ve stayed in some dodgy places when …
Is there a bed? Is there a door? We’ll take it!

But you know you’ve had it good when …
You start to think that more than $10 for a room or more than $1 for a sandwich is highway robbery!

You know it’s your goat when …
You just know.

One month in Morocco: Part Two (The good bits)

2009-07-23T12:00:00.008-04:00

We certainly didn’t suffer our whole stay in Morocco. On the contrary, we threw ourselves headlong into the café culture, enjoying a cuppa or two in the wide boulevards of the Ville Nouvelles and in tiny Medina cafés. We discovered the most charming feature of Moroccan cities in these old, walled towns where it’s said that life in their cramped and winding streets has carried on in much the same way for hundreds of years. You’re liable to believe that claim when you see mules teetering along the cobblestones, burdened with their loads, so long as you can ignore that the treasures they carry are as often bootlegged dvds and gold lamé caftans as the traditional carpets and hides. We explored a bit of Moroccan cuisine, enjoying simple couscous and lamb tagines. We celebrated the reintroduction of dairy to our diets, gorging ourselves daily on yogurt drinks and cheese. We improved our French, though found it entirely impossible to decide which language to use since we were regularly spoken to in English, French, and Arabic, in addition to being heckled in Spanish.

Morocco had a few downsides. In addition to dealing with our mounting travel fatigue, we had to unlearn the rules of Africa and acquaint ourselves with the customs of the muslim world. Among the most unfortunate casualties in this new adventure was the nerve I’d gained through so many weeks at the farm – commuting solo to and from the library, or even just approaching people, asking questions, or taking chances with new experiences. Unsure if the scrutiny was real, I began to rely more on Sam to do the talking for us and started to imagine that I felt less safe here than I had in the arguably more dangerous territory from where we’d come.

Still, our experiences had hardened us against that thing most commented upon in the travel books: namely the persistence of the Moroccan touts and shop owners who, if you’d believe what’s written, would stop at nothing to lighten the load on your wallet. On the contrary, we found it refreshing to be able to constructively respond to the people engaging us – a smile and a sincerely uninterested “no thank you” seemed perfectly polite and sufficient, whereas we had always previously been at a loss for a response to “Hey, white man!”

By the time we were feeling reasonably recovered from our illness, we had already experienced some great travel highlights across the country.

In Casablanca, the most cosmopolitan and European of Moroccan cities, we gaped at skyscrapers and the dizzying heights of the Hassan II grande mosqué, the second largest mosque in the world. We drank coffee and ate sandwiches, french fries, chocolate, and sorbet.

An utterly civilized commute by train brought us to El Jadida, a modern and relaxed town catering to Moroccan holiday-makers, West of Casablanca on the Atlantic Coast. Around the quiet cité portugaise – the Portuguese medina – we walked the bastion walls next to the sea and peered at the wooden fishing boats docked at the pier. Inside the medina we visited the old, sixteenth century cistern: a dark, vaulted room out of a fairy tale, where a single circular opening in the ceiling reflects the many pillars in a shallow pool of water. Despite our sickness we couldn’t resist our first dip in the Atlantic, though we had to work hard to muster our courage among prying eyes.

We pressed onwards to Essaouira (“Ess-a-wi-ra”), the self-titled “wind city” which lived up to its name. We took a long stroll along the wide, blustery beach while simultaneously dipping our feet in the sea and politely dodging the persistent touts offering camel and horseback rides into the dunes. We walked too far, got sunburned noses and then painfully sniffed and sneezed our way through a delicious seafood lunch.

In search of our cure in a warmer climate, we headed by bus to Marrakech. We wound over green hills lined with olive trees and wheat bales and believed we were in Italy. When the ground had grown flatter and the mountains moved higher into the distance, we pulled into the city and found a taxi to the main medina square. In the Djemaa el-Fna, this expanse of bustle and noise, we saw snake charmers, musicians, storytellers, and henna painters weaving in and around the crowds buying freshly squeezed orange juice from a neverending line of stalls. We decided that the best tasting juice was the sweet, chilled and already-squeeze variety – sold as “freshly-squeezed” and emphatically looked-down upon by our guidebook for its reputed adulteration with water and squash.

We visited our first real souqs, those winding market streets where only the bravest beams of sunlight penetrate into their narrow, trellised alleys. We saw carpets and lanterns, silver kettles and trays, tea glasses and colourful slippers piled up against layer upon layer of all manner of fabric and cloth. We walked around the gardens by the Koutoubia Mosque, visited the grounds of a ruined palace, and marveled at the intricate zellij tilework of the Saadian tombs. We ate at McDonalds.

One night in Marrakech we mustered our courage and ventured out after dark into the square, which had transformed over the course of the afternoon. Now filled with hundreds of outdoor food stalls, crowded with smoke and touts and eager diners, we picked the most local-looking one we could find (free of tourist wranglers) and waited our turn to grab a seat at the narrow counters surrounding the grill. Under the halo of incandescent bulbs, two of the frenzied men in aprons doled out sausages and bread on small metal plates, and poured tomato salsa from a pitcher. When our turn came we ate as more and more people gathered round to wait their turn and the cooks kept their pace through the noise and billowing smoke.

From Marrakech another train brought us back through Casablanca and on to Fes, home of the oldest living medieval city in the Islamic world. Reputed to be a tourist-swallowing labyrinth of streets and dead-end alleys, we proudly found our way in and out with relative ease. Staying on the top floor of a sparse little medina hotel, we could peer out of our “tower” down to the pedestrian arteries of the old town, or out over the sprawling roofs which betray nothing of the city below. With five minarets within shouting distance of our window, we were regularly blasted at all hours by calls to prayer.

We suffered a resurgence in our illness but recovered in time to brave the souqs and emerge triumphant but sweaty from our first real experience in bargaining. We wound through the back alleys to the famous leather tanneries, where the cramped city suddenly opens into a sea of dye pots, ammonia and drying hides. Through the heinous smells and the sun’s heat workers wade in and out of the colourful paint pots as a neverending succession of donkeys tramp in and out. Among the piles of poop Sam might have felt nostalgic for his days at the farm, but he didn’t say. We visited another medersa – one of the religious teaching colleges – and admired more spectacular tile and plasterwork.

Nearing the end of our journey we spent one night in Chefchaouen, an unusually beautiful and isolated mountain town where the buildings are awash in white and blue, and the friendly residents have an unfortunate-though-luckily-bygone history of murdering tourists. (Just the first few, really.) Next in Tangier we opened the hold of the bus to unhappily discover that our bags had spent the journey marinating in a liberal dousing of olive oil. Despite views of the Med the city was likewise damp, depressed, smelly and forlorn (but how much can you really expect from just one country?) and so we left.

One month in Morocco: Part One (Purgatory)

2009-07-06T03:20:00.002-04:00

May 7th to June 2nd, 2009

It seems that our narrative has fallen behind. In case you were curious we’re still on the road, with just a few more weeks to go but, oh, the stories we have to tell you! One month in Morocco (part two ahead) and then we jetted off to Egypt and back in between visits to see family in London. And now, just to make sure you’re positively green with envy, we have indeed found ourselves a sailboat. So you’ll have to forgive me, but we’ve spent the last few nights anchoring in sandy little turquoise bays by some islands off the Cote D’Azur; I’ve just been so busy swimming and snorkeling and exploring and reading that I haven’t found time to get back to this blasted, overdue blog!

Back to our story.

Morocco was a big change for us – a change we’d been breathlessly anticipating – but nothing could have prepared us for the sheer bliss we felt in our first few days there. Nothing we did escaped comparison to our earlier travels, and any troubles or hassles our guidebooks warned us about seemed insignificant in light of what we were increasingly coming to see as the gauntlet we’d survived in sub-Saharan Africa. Although we reminded ourselves often that we were still in a strange city in a foreign land, we couldn’t help relaxing as we relished even the simple pleasure of a slow, meandering walk down the street.

Adding to our excitement was the delight of discovering that the Moroccan travel of our imaginations was possible in the real world and moreover was accessible to us. For a time, each place we stayed outdid the last in both its fairytale qualities and amazing deals. The tiled halls of our hostel in Casablanca were followed by an outrageously inexpensive room in a converted mansion in the seaside town of El Jadida. In Essaouira we stayed in the picturesque Medina, winding through narrow lanes packed with shops selling colourful cloths and shiny trinkets to find our hotel in a lovely little two-storey building centred around a fig tree growing in a small, open courtyard. At the time of our arrival in the early afternoon we could spy another guest through his open door playing Spanish guitar on the other side of some leafy boughs. In Marrakech we stayed in the walled Medina once again where, from one of so many narrow, nameless lanes, our hotel opened out into a tall, bright courtyard, four storeys high, with colourfully tiled walls and a sunny rooftop café.

The weather, too, was heavenly. A week or so into our stay at the EDYM farm, I’d shoved my only sweatshirt to the absolute bottom of my bag unable to comprehend why I’d even packed it. However, as we spent our first week in Morocco working our way along the Atlantic Coast we were thrilled to dress for the day in sweatshirts and long pants (jeans, which hadn’t seen the light of day since Canada), probably in direct contradiction to most of the other travelers who’d ventured South in hopes of sun. That we were in the company of so many other travelers too was a big change, and we reveled in what we imagined to be the relative anonymity afforded by that company.

Far be it for us to make it too easy on ourselves, though. It could have been many things: the stress and exhaustion from constant travel; the long bus rides and sleepless nights in intense heat; the drastic change in climate after stepping off the plane in Morocco; the poor diet that had seen each of us lose at least 25 lbs (you thought maybe we were exaggerating, right?). Whatever it was, by our second night we were sick, and for 19 days both Sam and I suffered with what we contend to be the worst head cold of our lives.

That we were bitterly disappointed by our sickness is not surprising. We had so looked forward to the vacation we felt we’d earned that we had more than a little trouble letting ourselves be sick and recover, and certainly this contributed to our sad state lasting so long. Our resulting approach to travel was, in retrospect, a bit of a comedy. Some days we mustered our energy and our tissues and braved the towns, only to walk too far and burn our chaffed noses in the sun. Other days we gave up entirely and hunkered down in our rooms, moaning into our pillows about the injustice of it all, only to go out again as soon as we felt even a tiny bit better.

Eventually we relented, as much as we could, and decided that we’d just have to stay in Morocco long enough to get better and see some of the country as well. As a result we probably got an interesting perspective on some of the towns we visited, staying much longer than a tour company might prescribe, and becoming a little more familiar with the guy who sold us water and cream cheese sandwiches in between naps, and going for “the usual” at the internet café.

That we stayed long enough in some places to tire of some really spectacular sights is perhaps not as deserving of pride. During our first few days in Marrakech, I wrote home about the heartbreak of squinting my watery eyes and ducking my stuffed-up head past the Djemaa el-Fna, a huge open market square where musicians, storytellers, artists, and acrobats from all over the country come to perform and ply their trade. Nine days on, however, I found myself increasingly noticing the lack of melody and rhythm displayed by the costumed men on drums and pipes, and Sam and I had given our illness the inauspicious title of “The Curse of the Djemaa el-Fna”.

Another interesting side effect of being sick was the short, unplanned tour of the Moroccan medical system we got as a result. This was my treat, of course, as with Sam’s and my polar opposite approaches to sickness and recovery I am the one to err decidedly on the side of go-tell-someone-and-get-them-to-give-you-something-to-fix-it-fast. I tried pharmacy drugs, felt a bit better, gave the rest to Sam, and then plummeted into misery once again. I went to see a nice doctor who spoke very little English, and I mimed my various symptoms and general misery before he prescribed a list of drugs that I only vaguely understood the purpose of. Upon returning from the pharmacy once again I played that game we enjoy at Christmastime, in the hazy afterglow of a turkey feast, whereupon you try to read the French side of the riddles and jokes from your bilingual Christmas cracker, except that this time there’s no English version and instead of a punchline it’s the vital warnings and possible side effects of the powerful drugs you’re about to ingest. (“In the case of prolonged treatment, never stop brutally your treatment but follow the recommendations of your medicine for the diminution of doses. This medication must never be taken if you have experienced … something.” Ha! Ha!)

In actual fact I was able to understand enough to realize that I was allergic to the prescribed antibiotic, and so in Fes we visited another doctor. He spoke more English (and I more French) and was very kind but nevertheless ruthlessly shoved some kind of pliers up nose, rubbed goo on my belly, and roughly pushed me into a dark, full-body-sized machine where – with my face and chest squished against some kind of x-ray pad – I mustered a chortle and said, “Yup, this’ll make the blog.” Deeming the antibiotics unnecessary and diagnosing my symptoms as at least partially due to allergies, he prescribed antihistamines (to the pharmacy again) as well as some of the things I was already taking. On this new regimen, I finally started to feel better. Without all the accompanying drama, Sam had slowly been recovering as well, and about 20 days into our Moroccan travels we began to feel like ourselves again.

We've been up to stuff

2009-06-15T08:55:00.012-04:00

We may have been MIA with our entries but we've been busy. See some photos below of things we'll be blogging about in the future.

A fountain in the wall of the Hassan II Grande Mosque in Casablanca.

An orange tree in the courtyard of a sublime Casa cafe.

What we did a lot. These are at the train station.

The medina wall in El Jadida dividing the old fortified Portugese town from the new.

Sam performing calisthenics during a paddle in the Atlantic, also El Jadida.

Birds circle the fish grills by the seaside in Essaouira.

Vendors sells freshly squeezed orange juice into the night in the Djemaa el-fna in Marrakech.

Hundreds of food stalls dish out quick meals (if you can manage to grab a seat) in the Djemaa el-fna, Marrakech. This one was serving up sausage links with tomato salsa and bread.

The landmark of Marrakech, the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque.

Laterns sparkle in a packed stall in the labyrinthine souqs of Marrakech.

Sam enjoys train travel Moroccan-style from Marrakech to Fes.

A tannery worker pulls hides from the dye pits in Fes.

Anne was there too. Enjoying the mountain air in Chefchaouen.

Wheat fields and tourists dot the mountains around Chefchaouen.

Sam and Granma enjoy an English pub lunch in Chistlehurst.

Local teens race horses along the Giza Plateau during our sunrise camel ride.

Some rock piles near Cairo.

Some of what remains of the Avenue of the Sphinxes, which once connected the temples of Luxor and Karnak, Luxor.

The Funerary Temple of Hatshepsut on the West Bank of the Nile River, Luxor.

We tweet

2009-06-13T14:24:00.003-04:00

Inspired by t-lex (and, I suppose, in consideration of our increasingly slow blog output rate) ready-to-where is experimenting with Twitter! New today, the "rtw express lane" will feature my less-than-140-character deep thoughts about whatever moderately remarkable thing just happened that I couldn't wait to yell from the metaphorical web rooftop. (Anyone else notice it's crowded up here?)

Yes, this will mostly only please our parents and make me a little less bored once I've done all my usual browsing at the web cafes, but why not give it a go?

The Escape

2009-06-07T11:50:00.007-04:00

Bamako, Mali
May 3rd to May 6th, 2009

Where were we again? Oh yes, Sunday May 3rd Sam and I boarded the 6:30 am, 12-hour bus from Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso to Bamako, Mali.

A short history of our ever-changing travel plans for Mali follows.

During long afternoons at the EDYM farm and out of our mammoth Lonely Planet Africa guidebook, we originally planned a rather exhaustive tour of the southwestern part of Mali, spanning the spectacular cliffs of the Dogon Country, along the Niger River, and down to the bustling metropolis of Bamako. From there we planned to board the train, the Bamako to Dakar “Express”, whenever that happened to arrive and continue on to Senegal, from where we would fly a few weeks later to Morocco.

In early drafts of this adventure the latter train journey, described as “an African epic” by our guidebook, was thought an experience not to be missed. (Highlights include guessing when the train will get there with correct answers varying from 45 hours to 60 hours to never, keeping a close eye on your belongings while Africa speeds by the grimy windows, and enjoying fitful sleeps in your custom-sewn, $5 Joe Fresh sheet-bags.) Some family and friends may remember us optimistically enthusing about the excitement of leaving “whenever” and romantically bumming around Bamako until the train was ready to go.

However, even before leaving the sweaty clutches of those afternoons at the farm, we had already started to change our plans. If you’ve been following the news of late, maybe you’ll also know that Mali these days is not the most ideal travel destination. Despite meeting travelers who had had recent positive experiences traveling the country (and later more who intended to keep on trucking), we were starting to feel wary of the reports of Tuareg fighting making its way out of the desert, not to mention the recent kidnappings of Canadian diplomats and European tourists. By the time our sub-Saharan fatigue was setting in the Canadian Government was advising against non-essential travel to the country, and we were dreaming of another trip, another time when we would take that slow ride up the Niger River to Timbuktu.

That being said, we weren’t ready to abandon our dream of agony-on-rails and so we continued westward from Burkina Faso, for a quick pop into the country to book the train and go.

Enduring the long, un-air-conditioned ride from Bobo, our resolve was tested as we watched strange new terrain unfold around us. Mali’s landscape is fascinating, and huge, smooth boulders defying gravity in dark stacks by the highway hinted at what is surely a spectacular, mountainous landscape in the Dogon. Luckily we were tired and grumpy enough (and possessing just enough common sense) to stick to our new plans and arrived in Bamako with our singular purpose in mind.

The capital city, heretofore only existing to me in the pixilated illustrations of the circa 1990 computer game Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego (current rank Ace Detective, thankyouverymuch), was our biggest city yet. Crossing the street (a whole day’s activity), proved inconceivably more perilous than in cities past, as Bamako traffic combined all the speeding cars of Accra with every dense and weaving moped army of Burkina Faso. For us, the city’s sights didn’t have much to recommend them and so Monday morning we hit the streets on foot to find breakfast and the train station. We reflected on how confident and acclimatized we felt, and how we were really adjusting to this hectic but exciting life on the road.

Our intelligence told us the train should leave Bamako around Wednesday, arriving in Dakar Friday or Saturday from where we would begin our truncated tour of Senegal. (Travel fatigue and Canadian government websites advised against touring the southern Casamance region of Senegal and so we had similarly edited our itinerary for that country.) However, arriving at the train station we found out that the train had left Bamako last on Saturday, was scheduled to leave Dakar on Wednesday, and would peut-être leave Bamako only the following Saturday. To two weary travelers, in no mood for peut-êtres, this was the worst possible news. We could wait for the train, take another train to Kayes further North in Mali and then a 48-hour bus to Dakar, or find another means of transport out of Mali. The irony of this being exactly what we had dreamed about three months ago but now exactly the worst possible scenario was certainly not lost on us. Finding a quiet-like place a few blocks from the station, we sat and discussed our options. Quickly it was decided that we had only one – we weren’t as young as we were three months ago and so Tuesday we’d book flights to Morocco.

For all of our complaining, we had prepared ourselves for another two weeks of this adventurous brand of travel and our new plans sent us into a bit of shock. I started to feel the twinges of regret – that perhaps we hadn’t seen or done enough, that maybe we hadn't taken full advantage of the unique opportunity of being so far from home, or at least that we might have been too busy wallowing in our suffering of late to enjoy ourselves – all of which I agonized over to Sam back at the hotel. Sam, for his part, felt suddenly that he hadn’t eaten enough mangoes.

However, Mali had a few more adventures left in store for us as we headed off Tuesday morning to find our flight. Negotiating the treacherous streets once more we visited no less than four different travel agencies. Our preferred booking method would have been the very fast internet around the corner from our auberge, but every search engine we tried had the frustrating habit of refusing to search for flights originating in Africa. On our way to one agency recommended by our guide we stumbled into a very busy and tout-full market area where – tired, hot, and frustrated – I committed the cardinal sin in dealing with hustlers and not-so-nicely asked some very persistent ones to leave us alone, for which Sam earned some insults and shoving around before we extricated ourselves to the nearby post office.

A little shaken we continued on, now to the bank to withdraw the necessary cash to pay for the flight. We discovered this to be another charming aspect of booking flights from developing nations – you’ll have to do it in cash, even if that means withdrawing close to $1000, or in many cases surely more. Our guidebook had warned us that we wouldn’t find any working ATMs within the country and so we’d dutifully withdrawn all the cash we expected to need before arriving in the country. The problem was, of course, that what we’d planned to spend on the train tickets was a fraction of the cost of even our cheap flight.

Taking stock of what we had on hand, we toured four different banks to try multiple ATMs with no luck. We tried the undesirable option of withdrawing money from our credit cards to no avail, either because we didn’t know our PIN or because the machine accused us of trying to withdraw too many bills. (What’s $1000 in fives?) Defeated and starting to get worried, we returned to the hotel to gather our emergency cash. (If needing to pay for the last available means of transport out of the back of beyond Africa doesn’t constitute an emergency, what does?) Stashed in money belts, secret pockets, hidden flaps and, in some cases, sewn into the seams of clothes, we gathered everything we had and went back to the bank. Gouged in the exchange we still mercifully eked out just enough CFAs to cover the flights and, exhausted, went back to buy our tickets for the next day. When we were handed the tickets – on the first pieces of glossy paper we’d seen in months, even advertising in-flight duty-free shopping – our shock went into overdrive.

As a sweet goodbye to this region of Africa we spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday morning doing what we always did – ducking through the constant noise of people and traffic, grabbing the least dodgy side-of-the-road skillet fare to eat, enjoying a really cold bottle of coke to drink wherever we could find it, and sweating through one last sleepless night in the oppressive heat. Wednesday at check-out time we hauled our bags over to the fast internet, and then headed to the airport, only 12-plus hours early, to wait for our 3:00 am flight to Casablanca.

Arriving in Casablanca around 7:00 am we took our soiled packs and selves through the shiny airport to the sleek city train into downtown. In the Medina, the old walled town, we walked the sunny, tiled hallway of the youth hostel, took hot showers and lay down in our cool room to nap. Upon awakening we walked out past the cruise ship port into mild Atlantic breezes and ate sandwiches on a quiet street, followed by coffee and ice cream in a restaurant built into the old city ramparts, where large white canopies covered crawling trellises and tinkling tiled fountains. Knowing neither the fitting allusion nor the grim prediction he was making, Sam leaned over to me, smiled and said, “If it all goes sideways from here, and there’s no conceivable reason it should, remember we’ll always have today in Casablanca.”

Get Lost

2009-05-29T09:46:00.004-04:00

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Fes, Morroco

Sam and I meander through the souks of Fes el Bali – the largest, living medieval city in the Islamic world. Enjoy occasional guest appearances by my scarf (my sincerest apologies – it’s evidently what you get for taking blind, chest-level video) and find the wheelbarrow man who almost missed his cue. Amazingly, despite what it might look like, I didn’t bump into anybody. What you hear me say to Sam: “Where are we?”

Some Things are the Same

2009-05-29T09:45:00.004-04:00

Stop!! The man in the back of your toboggan has two heads!

Elephants!

2009-05-29T09:43:00.006-04:00

Sunday, April 26th, 2009
Mole National Park, Ghana

Planet Earth did it better, but ready-to-where can deliver wildlife too. Here, blurry elephants drink at a watering hole.

(Blogger dumbs down the quality even worse than Sam's camera, so make that very blurry elephants.)

The Bumpiest Bus Ride in the World

2009-05-29T09:36:00.006-04:00

Saturday, April 25th, 2009
Tamale to Mole National Park, Ghana

Sam, Anne, and the Dutch nurses ride three hours along a washed-out, washboard dirt road from Tamale to Mole. Watch Sam’s head (and my shoddy camera work) try to compensate for the bumps! That sound you’re hearing is the bus shaking apart.

What Are the Chances?

2009-05-29T09:33:00.003-04:00

On the road from Have to Accra
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

ready-to-where is back online!

2009-05-29T09:25:00.005-04:00

Hello again! We’re back, finally. Sam and I have both been out with a terrible head cold and allergies since arriving in Morocco (you’ve been reading ... surprised we got sick?) but we’re finally feeling better and getting back to the business of travel and blog!

While we whip up the missing entries, please enjoy a few this-and-that photo entries and a small selection of sloppily-recorded video we’ve been haphazardly collecting along our way.

More to come soon.

- a & s

A funny thing happened on the ouay to Ouagadougou

2009-05-10T14:35:00.010-04:00

The funny thing was we started to enjoy ourselves.

Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso
April 28th to May 3rd, 2009

Perhaps it was the French-inspired cuisine (baguettes!), the charmingly laid-back and friendly attitude of the Burkinabés, or the knowledge that we had really left Ghana behind us, but we arrived in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou on Tuesday April 28th feeling like we’d earned a new lease on our trip.

We had taken a rather bold risk on our way out of Ghana (at that point not really uncharacteristically) by waiting until the border to buy our visas. But – apart from our startled realization that we’d really have to start communicating in French, really all the time – we found no trouble getting what we needed from the friendly, chain-smoking, jauntily-bereted border guard on the Burkina side. A cab, bus, and cab again later and we arrived in Ouagadougou to find that I had indeed been successful the previous evening, in my then-garbled French, in securing us a room at our desired hotel – or at least there was one available avec ventilisation, sans climatisation.

Actually, we should have taken the latter (that’s AC to you) as our ventilisation turned out to be pretty ineffectual against the unrelenting heat and dryness that we would continue to encounter (during, eventually, nine sleepless nights in a row) as we traveled northwards. In fact it seemed as though, as soon we arrived in Burkina Faso, we just couldn’t keep up with our thirst. For all our harping about the sameness of the lorry-park or roadside offerings in Ghana, we’d become accustomed to being able to find those ubiquitous sachets pretty much every time we turned around. In Burkina Faso we started to have to work harder as actual shops replaced roadside stalls and as the climate pulled every drop of moisture from inside us out.

Having spent two and a half months under the same mango tree at the farm we were interested to see the landscape outside the windows of the bus evolve into the increasingly dusty and scrubby Sahelian plains outside Ouagadougou. Just as soon as they had, though, we were heading by bus into the green valleys of the southwest to Burkina’s second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso.

Our guidebook told us we’d be charmed by Bobo and it didn’t disappoint, not least because of both the lovely auberge where we stayed in the middle of town and the impeccable timing of our arrival there. Still the cynical and harassed Westerners we were in Ghana, when our taxi driver asked if we’d ever seen an “African Mask” we assumed he wanted to sell us some curios and so we replied in our best French, Thank you very much but we’d really just like to go to the hotel. Weren’t we surprised then to see him point out the window and find the “Mask” walking by – a man covered from head to toe in colourful fringe like a scarecrow, carrying a whip and a crook and intermittently followed by and chasing packs of young men around town.

From the balcony of our hotel, facing over the main intersection and square, we got a great view of the action below and no understanding whatsoever of what the meaning of it all was. Our best guess is no better than a play by play of what we saw. There were large bands of young men, some dressed in humourous costumes, roaming the streets after the Masks. (We saw, for example, what were perhaps “videocamera operator”, “shutter-happy tourist” and one, according to me, “knee-socked, colonial safari-man” or, according to Sam, “blazered, effeminate sea-captain.”) The masks, as many as twenty, walked around the main square acting like they didn’t care about the young men getting progressively closer and baiting them until suddenly they did and the chase was on! If you were caught by one the boogeymen they spanked you on the bum with their whip or crook and the crowds roared. This continued – the men creeping up, the masks not caring, the masks chasing – for a few hours, with the occasional extra excitement of the masks sometimes running up into the various peanut galleries, like our hotel balcony. Around sundown, everyone gave it a rest and went off to dance by the mosque.

Our time in Bobo was generally spent wandering the streets, positively green in comparison to cities past, and taking a short trip out to the town of Banfora on Friday May 1st. From Banfora, another little dusty spot made popular by guidebooks, we took a taxi to Lac Tengrela from where we boarded a pirogue for two and set about scanning the waters for pods of hippopotamuses. Blessed with the same uncanny luck we had in Mole, and a very helpful fisherman in the stern of our boat, a few minutes later we actually saw some. For 10 or 15 minutes (all the time we could handle in the midday sun) we watched the heads, backs, and bums of about six in all including at least one biggie and one wee one. Pleased with our success, and not terribly keen to negotiate private transport to the other sights in the area, we headed back to town and to the bus back to Bobo. On Saturday we took a wonderful tour of the local mud-and-stick mosque where, to our great pleasure, we were allowed to roam inside and the good-natured guide spoke slowly enough for us to understand almost everything.

As the sun was rising Sunday we left our hotel for the early morning, 12-hour bus ride to Bamako along with Francis, a friendly English traveler and also former Ghana volunteer who we’d met the previous evening on the hotel terrace. Setting off – this time with visas already in hand, and our attitudes towards our travels warmed by our time spent in Burkina Faso – we looked forward to Mali, the third country in our continuing odyssey.

A breakfast kiosk in Ouagadougou where we stopped two mornings for our oeufs et pain.

Other spectators watching the Fetes des Masques from the balcony of our hotel in Bobo-Dioulasso.

A Mask delivers the bad news.

There were little ones too. Each Mask had a posse of local boys or men who were safe from the beatings.

A couple heads of hippopotamuses spotted from our pirogue on Lac Tengrela.

Our lovely cheapie in Bobo.

Impressions of Sam inside the grande mosqué in Bobo.

An exterior of the mud-stick mosque. The sticks, which are intermittently replaced, are for beauty, structural support, and climbing when the mosque needs repair or cleaning.

Photos While-U-Wait

2009-05-06T15:15:00.008-04:00

Some months ago I hinted at the possibility that I might be taking way more photos than you could ever reasonably want to see (2987 and counting), but that I was having trouble loading even a small number of those to the web here. Well, clear your calendar folks because I have been tirelessly loading those photos - on mindnumbingly slow internet connections from Accra to Ouagadougou and beyond - and they're now available for your viewing pleasure.

For the full story, here is a link to my flickr page where you'll find a series of collections covering everything from our arrival in Accra to, thus far, almost the end of our stay at the farm.

For those with a little less time on their hands, try the not-intentionally-ironically-named Quick Tour in which you'll find a collection of the highlights.

We are now in Bamako, Mali waiting for a plane to Casablanca from where we will update you on our week in Burkina Faso and the strange circumstances that have brought us here, to surprisingly fast and free wifi at the Bamako Airport surrounded by a mob of soccer-mad Malians hollering in support of blue-and-whites of Chelsea (we think) on the lounge tv.

Oh yes, and I'm still working on the captions. :)

Pains, Plains, and Park Entry Bills

2009-05-04T06:00:00.001-04:00

Kumasi to Bolgatanga
April 21st to April 28th, 2009

On Tuesday April 21st Sam and I arrived in Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city and the capital of the Ashanti Region, feeling pretty travel weary. After leaving the Coconut Grove Tuesday morning we’d taken our first bus from Cape Coast – a step up in our transportation odyssey that had been looked forward to since my library days watching the local orange buses speeding by and thinking, Imagine the comfort! Unfortunately our expertise in tro-tros didn’t translate and – after receiving no significant help from two of the grumpiest ladies masquerading as bus company employees – we were yelled at by our bus driver for not being able to find our seats (were they assigned??) and eventually found ourselves squished into the very back row of the bus where I baked for four hours in the sun, and a little boy slept on Sam’s lap and then burped in his face.

Once in Kumasi, Sam and I reflected that perhaps all the time we had in us for Ghana was about two and half months. Certainly we’d sometimes speculated that a better time might have been had at the farm had we limited ourselves to two months there. In planning our trip after EDYM our original challenge had been figuring out how to fit all of the our desired travel into the time we had before our supply of Mefloquine ran out (needing to be out of the “malaria area” with a month’s worth to go). Now so many activities were on the chopping block that we could potentially find ourselves more than a week ahead of schedule and additionally arriving in Bamako far too early for a Wednesday train departure for Dakar. Feeling tired and fed up, I wrote home complaining that the “adventure” of constantly being hassled and stared at and cheated and meeting unhelpful people and stuff never working was kind of losing its charm.

Compared with the hectic towns along the coast, however, we found Kumasi to be relatively quiet, surprisingly clean, and almost charming. In search of a few more souvenirs to send home, we visited the National Cultural Centre and the Kejetia Market: the former a quiet and leafy haven; the latter an incredibly clamorous labyrinth of choked and narrow corridors spilling over with goods and people in what is apparently the largest covered market in West Africa. It was hot, cramped, noisy, and smelly, but all in all kind of exciting as we got pushed around while trying to find and buy our various goodies, though I left never wanting to hear “White Man!”, “White Lady!”, “White Boy!”, or “Obruni!” (that's Twi for Yevou) ever again.

From Kumasi we took another, better bus to Tamale and started to notice the landscape changing as we moved North. The palms so ubiquitous in the South started to be replaced by fewer, hardier trees in a progressively flatter and drier landscape. The buildings and people were changing too: we saw fewer buildings made of concrete and more made of mud-brick; thatched roofs became more conical; and mosques replaced churches as we moved North. The men we saw in traditional dress were less often in the ballooning smocks of the South but rather negotiated their bicycles and mopeds in caftans. Plenty more women were driving around on those mopeds and bicycles that only continued to increase to incredible numbers as we traveled onwards.

The purpose of our trip to Tamale, apart from moving onwards and upwards, was principally to make the long and arduous trek into Mole National Park where we hoped to catch sight of a few elephants before leaving Ghana. Amazingly the trip didn’t disappoint, either in its difficulty or in the wildlife seen. Warned by our guidebooks that we might be waiting for a bus that would never come, we certainly felt that way as we baked, basting in sweat, for four hours at the most hectic and disorganized bus station yet. Every person had a different but equally adamant assertion about which bus was actually ours – the most helpful turning out to be those not employed by the bus company – but, eventually teaming up with some fellow travelers, we found our way.

At the park we spent two nights at the “Mole Motel”, perched atop an escarpment with an expansive view over a watering hole frequented by elephants, antelope, waterbuck, warthogs, and many birds and monkeys. Prepared to be utterly disappointed we instead turned out to be incredibly lucky, seeing no less than sixteen elephants, the closest no more than ten meters away. Other wildlife novelties were the warthogs that startled Sam ten feet from our front door and the baboon that tried to steal someone’s backpack from beside the pool. After an even bumpier and more crowded 4:00 am bus back to Tamale, we sought out the soothingly familiar tro-tros for our trip on to Bolgatanga.

Once in Bolgatanga, a town without much to recommend it but an excellent pizza parlour, we prepared for our exodus from Ghana. Via shared taxi we arrived the next day at the border town of Paga where, as if to warmly wish us Bon Voyage, we were mobbed by more enthusiastic would-be guides and taxi drivers than anywhere previously in Ghana but, un-tempted and undeterred, we pressed on. On the Ghanaian side of the border I thought for a moment I might not be allowed to leave as the official had trouble interpreting some of the many stamps, visas, and visa extensions littering my passport, but eventually he relented. On the other side we alighted our cab and, African-style, walked over the border to the Burkina Faso where we were met by a charming scene – border guards in berets, smoking cigarettes, and a friendly efficiency as we organized our visas and were welcomed into L’Afrique Française!

Capes and Castles of the Gold Coast

2009-04-29T11:31:00.016-04:00

Still on farm time, we catch the sunrise in Kokrobite.

A palm grove at Big Milly's Backyard.

Another sunrise, over fishing boats below the Fort of Good Hope in Senya Beraku.

A bumpy tro-tro ride on the way from Senya to Cape Coast.

Defenders of the gift shop, Cape Coast Castle.

Sam celebrates my birthday with a roadside coconut on the hike to Elmina.

St. George Castle in Elmina from afar.

A study in contrasts: the real thing, up close and personal with hustlers, garbage, and fetid waterways.

Sitting guard at the beach at the Coconut Grove. No hustlers allowed!

Along the Coast

2009-04-29T10:36:00.003-04:00

Accra to Elmina
April 14th to April 21, 2009

So after much anticipation and 10 sometimes very long weeks, Sam and I finally left Have and the EDYM farm on Tuesday April 14th. Our departure was characteristically not without a few hitches (both literally and figuratively as it turned out) as we discovered that our Village Volunteer “contact” in Accra was somehow not going to be in town to host us upon our arrival in the city. Additionally, the Easter traffic we thought we’d so cleverly avoided was in fact at its worst the day after the long weekend, and we waited two agonizing hours on the steps of the library watching every tro-tro drive by packed to the gills before we managed to flag down a private car heading in our direction and secure a ride; this at least an hour after Paul had to leave us on our own in order to make an afternoon meeting in Ho. Utterly relieved to know that we would make it into the big city at all, and mercifully before the dreaded nightfall, we reflected that it was a wild and therefore fitting start to the next chapter of our adventure.

Arriving in Accra we did have some more help, in the form of Paul’s niece whom he’d called to help us in our time of need, and she got us safely to our hotel (and into a decent room for a cool $16) where we settled in for the next day and half in the city. In Accra we rushed around to complete 10 weeks worth of errands to last us the next 4 through sub-Saharan Africa. We circumnavigated the city by tro-tro and on foot and got lost twice in the process, but found the average person to be helpful with directions and, to our surprise, the tro-tro mates to be honest and fair. The highlight of the visit, however, was our epic postal adventure in which we spent at least one hour in a picture-perfect example of inefficiency and bureaucratic ineptitude trying to send home the generous but mammoth gift of Kente cloth we’d received upon our departure from the farm (see How to Send Mail in Ghana).

After leaving Accra on Thursday morning, we had a whirlwind couple of days trying to adjust to life on the road. The biggest adventure by far was the transportation as we made our way along the coast mostly by tro-tros, and mostly from the garbled instructions of this driver or that mate hollered at us over the din of the tro-tro parks along the highway. From Accra we splurged for a cab to Kokrobite, since it was rainy and we weren't keen on lugging our bags around Accra, but after that we found it fairly easy to get from place to place, even cover long distances and relatively desolate dirt roads, just by shared taxi and tro-tro.

For example, from our accommodation at Big Milly's Backyard in Kokrobite we walked to a shared taxi at the town road which, for 60 cents apiece, took us up the long winding road to the main Accra-Cape Coast highway. There, we crossed the highway (at a crosswalk, though with no functioning crossing lights) to a place where cars were pulling up heading West (there may have also been a Tigo sign - a cell network advertisement that seems to denote a bus stop in the South). We shouted our destination - Senya Beraku, an isolated town a little farther West on the coast - to a few drivers before a taxi driver told us we wouldn't get a car straight there and should go to Kasoa first. So we took a tro-tro to Kasoa, a place we'd never before heard of, where we got out at another station and looked for a car to Senya. There we were again told by a slew of mates that we wouldn't find a direct car, and that we should instead go to Abutu Beraku, another mystery place (actually later found to be mentioned in our guide), so we did. In Abutu Beraku, another passenger pointed out a shared taxi going to Senya, and so we piled in. The taxi took us to the town and to the Fort of Good Hope where, only about 3 or 4 dollars poorer for our transportation, we booked a room for the night.

Thus far we’ve stayed in Kokrobite, a backpacker’s haven just outside Accra in a charming little rondavel by a beach which would have been idyllic if not for all the trash. In Senya Beraku we stayed in an 18th-century colonial slave fort converted into a resthouse with a fetching view over the bay where fishing boats surfed in and out below a steep rocky slope covered in refuse. In Cape Coast we found the dirtiest, diviest accommodation in town and somehow couldn’t pass it up, but enjoyed the engaging and well organized museum at the Cape Coast Castle, if not the accompanying heat which continued on unrelenting. If, as our guidebook claimed, the children of Senya Beraku were the noisiest in Ghana, then the husslers and taxi drivers in Cape Coast and Elmina were the loudest and most insistent. As a reward for all our struggles, on the morning of my birthday we rode by shared taxi to the Elmina junction, portaged 45 minutes with our heavy backpacks into town, and hightailed it by another cab to the Coconut Grove Beach Resort where we were granted early entry to our air-conditioned room and promptly set about doing all our filthy dirty laundry in the bathroom sink.

While not without it’s African quirks, the Coconut Grove was a bonafide resort and Sam and I acknowledged feeling no small measure of culture shock as we ate ice cream with my birthday lunch (our first good meal in …) and swam in the pool next to a picturesque, palm-lined beach, helpfully raked of trash by the resort staff. While perhaps the pool and the food should have been the highlights, Sam and I instead enjoyed most reveling in the relative cool of our air-conditioned room (although we found we had to turn the heat up from the suggested 25 degrees to around 32) and watching the non-stop movie channel on the tv.

Acknowledging the first week out as having been a bit of a gauntlet, we had a tough time setting out again after two nights of calm at the resort. Eager to continue onwards (and finally upwards – North towards the border and, as we always think of it, towards the Mediterranean) we still reluctantly packed our bags and – by car, by taxi, by bus, and by tro-tro – began once again to move along.

How to Send Mail in Ghana

2009-04-23T11:06:00.008-04:00

1. Be invited as the guests of honour to a ceremony inducting you as adopted citizens of a rural village (whom you will pay to feed, in your honour), and be adorned with 5.6 kilograms of ceremonial Kente cloth and jewellery which, unfortunately, they don’t want back.

2. Hitchhike to Accra (because your host and volunteer coordinator have failed to organize your means of escape) and find the location of the nearest, largest post office on your map.

3. Don’t go to that post office. Instead go to two, smaller, satellite offices conveniently located at opposite ends of the city (the second one because you got lost).

4. Be given directions to the post office you should have gone to in the first place. Go there via hot, slow, jammed-in-traffic tro-tro.

5. Alight from tro-tro and head in the opposite direction than you intended. Accidentally find post office anyway.

6. Enter through front entrance and allow attendant to inspect package (of said Kente cloth) by throwing it over a 10-foot-high glass partition. Parcel is too heavy. Have man throw it back and direct you around back.

7. Go around back, through a dodgy back alley, and enter Ghana circa 1920, minus anything that worked properly, plus 90 years of grime. Congratulations, you are now ready to start sending your package.

8. Approach window #1 for inspection of goods you intend to send. Unroll all carefully rolled goods and re-roll. Be sent to window #2.

9. Wait at window #2 for man who will wrap goods.

10. Have man at window #2 unroll and inspect all carefully rolled goods.

11. Buy wrapping from stall outside and try to convince man #2 to wrap goods, since you’re lacking tape and only trying to follow the instructions of his counterpart at window #1.

12. Wait.

13. Fill out a pink card with destination and return addresses of your parcel while you wait for man #2 to wrap someone else’s parcel.

14. Watch #2 mummify your parcel in tape.

15. Return to #1 and wait for instructions.

16. Buy snack.

17. Return to window #2 to retrieve pink card and take card to window #1.

18. Wait, because about four other people are at various stages of this process too.

19. Fill out ledger.

20. Take ledger as instructed to #2 and get advice on how to fill out or maybe just get a confused look and go back to #1.

21. Wait.

22. Weigh the package and have #1 do suspect mental math to determine the price.

23. Pay.

24. Wait.

25. Leave. You’re done!

Ghanaian Turns of Phrase

2009-04-23T06:58:00.001-04:00

(Yes, they speak English here. No, we don’t always understand.)

The Regulars (bona fide expressions):
“I will go and come.” – I am leaving and I’ll be back.
“I will take the lead.” – I’m going ahead/I’ll meet you there.
“Come on time.” – See you later.
“How is back?” – How have things been while I was gone?
“Have you taken your food?” – Have you eaten?
“You are invited.” – Come eat with us.
“You have seen it.” – You understand.
“Bus stop!” – I’m getting out here.
“I am coming.” – I’ll be right back.
“Requesting permission to fall out.” – I’d like to leave.

More Translations from English to English (the once in a while ones):
“Are you strong?” – How are you doing?
“By his grace I am also alive.” – Fine, thank you.
“She is guilty with time.” – Florence is always late.
“Small small” – Just a bit. As in “We will work, small small.” Or “You would like pepper (sauce) small small.”
“You are becoming deformed.” – You’ve lost weight and/or your beard is getting long. (Maybe?)
“She will release the water when she returns.” – When she gets back to the farm, Tina will give you some water bags from my room.
“Lulu’s idea is always the poorest!” – Lulu (the puppy) is not so smart.

Your God-Given Name

2009-04-23T06:46:00.002-04:00

It’s a Ghanaian tradition that people should be named for the day of the week on which they were born. This is said to be “the name that God gave you” and it’s as common to be addressed by this name as it is to be called by your Christian (or Ewe) name – the name your parents gave you. While in Have Sam and I were most often Sam and Anne, but also sometimes Kofi and Abran to those who found particular pleasure in initiating us to the local culture. For a little fun, and with apologies for my phonetic spelling, what follows are at least the Ewe versions (because between us we can’t agree what language this is) of all the day of the week names.

Monday/Joda: female/male - Ajo/Kojo
Tuesday/Branda: f/m - Abran/Komla
Wednesday/Kuda: f/m - Aku/Koku
Thursday/Yaoda: f/m - Yaoa/Yao
Friday/Fida: f/m - Afi/Kofi
Saturday/Memleda: f/m - Ama/Kwami
Sunday/Kosida: f/m - Akos,Akoswa/Kosi

God's in the Name

2009-04-15T08:26:00.006-04:00

Before we arrived in the country, our guidebooks informed us that Ghana is “15% Muslim, 70% Christian and 100% obsessed with spiritual worship”. Truly, evidence of this devotion can be found everywhere, not least in the comically pious names given to every shop, restaurant, and ramshackle booth in every town we have visited thus far.

The sentiments expressed range from the hopeful (Nothing But Prayer Electricals and General Goods) to the bold (Anointed Internet Café) to the downright threatening (Yours Is Coming Fashion Home), but the theme is consistent. Here is a small sampling of what we’ve found:

Messiah Barber’s Salon
Anointing Hair Craft
The Prophet Store
Peaceful Ark Enterprises
Count Your Blessings Enterprises
Time Will Tell Provision Store
‘God’ the Provider’s Shop
Jesus Fill My Cup Salon
Say Amen Communication and Business Centre
God’s Grace Fashion Home and Provision Store
God’s Time is the Best Fashion Home
Beautiful Zion Multi-Purpose Business Centre
You Can’t Touch By The Blood of Jesus Mama Rose Fast Food

And my personal favourite:
People Don’t Know But Who Will Tell Them Oh Father Forgive Them Meat Shop

Giving Back

2009-04-11T06:35:00.000-04:00

As we round the corner of our last week – our last weekend and, by the time this is posted, the end of our volunteering time – it seems appropriate to put into words some thoughtful reflection on what exactly this experience has meant to us.

Certainly, as the blog can attest, it has been an experience full of both joys and frustrations. We feel sure that this record, unfortunately, has probably been more faithful to the latter than the former. And while it’s difficult to say exactly what we will make of this whole thing a year from now, perhaps while braving the last of winter and (if we could even imagine such a thing) feeling a touch of cold, we can say now that our time here has been positive, exciting, and entirely the adventure we sought.

About Paul’s work, at EDYM and beyond, we can’t say enough good things. He has impressed us with his hopefulness, energy, and tenacity. We hope that our time in Have has leant a small measure of sustainability to the project and extended the promise of realizing Paul’s dreams for the program. Although we think that our small contribution has been worthwhile, we feel more than ever that true and lasting change for this or any community will come from the passion and commitment of people like Paul.

It would be a lie and entirely disingenuous to say that everyone we met was lovely. Certainly at times we felt like we were fighting a two-man losing battle against ages of misconceptions and prejudices. We met many people who seemed to appreciate why we were here but still more who understandably did not, and in those cases it was sometimes difficult to deal with their expectations. For one thing, we became keenly aware of the resentment we felt towards those who demanded things of us that we would have otherwise freely given.

Perhaps the biggest surprise (though it really should have been no surprise at all) was finding out that our time volunteering in Have was considered to be the beginning of a relationship with the organization and the community, not an end unto itself. As such, we sometimes found it difficult to feel as though we’ve given something substantial, knowing that the community still wants more.

Still, if we look for a little perspective, the unique and wonderful experiences of the last two and a half months are hard to ignore. We wanted to stay in a place long enough to feel as though we knew, if only in a small way, what it was like to live there. While Have and EDYM could not be described as a ‘home away from home’ for us, the challenges, familiarity, and finally the comfort that we eventually felt was well worth the gamble.

Seven, Eight, Nine

2009-04-02T08:23:00.000-04:00

To say that I have mixed feelings about our looming departure might be a bit of an understatement. As it stands a little over a week away, my current mood, as it has been over the last week, is one of decided conflict. When the heat is in the forties and I’m fighting desperate boredom at the farm, I’m ready as ever to leave. When Sam and I are planning our adventures to come or rehashing some ridiculous daydream of food, I’m just aching for us to be on our own, masters of our own destiny once more. But when I’m sitting at the library getting the regular visits from various friends that I’ve made, I feel exceedingly misguided and guilty in my eagerness to depart. Yesterday I felt that I could not have been more miserable yet today, as the tro-tro driver and mate waved to Sam as he saw me off to the library, I felt sad to think that in a short time we should just disappear to all these people who’ve become used to our presence here, and whose company we have enjoyed in our escapades around town. I even felt sad that I should not know exactly how to say goodbye to the nice lady who lets me use her toilet on the days I spend at the library, not to mention the other people with whom I’ve had more than perfunctory conversations. It would be fair to say that overall, I think, I am tired, and my nerves and emotions are raw.

In my better moods, I am trying ever so hard to be present in those moments of clarity when I’m really enjoying myself and completely aware of what a rare experience we’re having. One of those such moments came a few Fridays ago when Paul took me on a trip to a fishing village on the lakeside North of the farm, off the main road near Vakpo. In this village fishing is considered a very important and profitable business; so important that the village children are often found labouring in the boats rather than going to school. Because parents must pay to enroll their children in public schools (uniforms and transportation are the principle expenses) and because the young ones are considered more adept at diving and untangling the snagged nets, a lack of education is a serious threat to the futures of the children and the village.

However, near this village there lives a woman, whom Paul has made an acquaintance, who has taken it upon herself to open a private school for these children. Out of her pocket she has arranged a shuttle to and from the lakeside, about 2 kms away, and donated fabric for school uniforms. Teachers have volunteered and this woman feeds the crowd of 50-80 students one square meal every day, free of charge. The school buildings, if they could be called that, are rickety and impermanent at best, and Paul hopes to apply for funding to build more substantial structures which would protect the children from the elements, and provide a proper venue for their studies. My job on that Friday was to photograph the school and the nearby village in the hopes that these documents might strengthen the appeal. The whole experience was a real thrill and I reveled in my feelings of usefulness as well as the selfish excitement of having snagged such a juicy assignment. Speeding back to the farm on the back of Paul’s bike I knew that I was having a really, really good time.

As we entered our eighth week Paul had a few more surprises for us to break the weekly routine and we found ourselves away from the farm on various other outings. Saturday the 21st of March we went to the town of Ve-Deme, on the road to Hohoe, for a ceremony in honour of the local government representative who had recently been appointed Regional Minister by the new president. The order of the day was welcoming local dignitaries, honouring the Regional Minister with the conferring of bracelets by the local “Queens”, and drumming and dancing, as well as speeches. The next Monday Paul organized for two affable older farmers to take us on an admittedly not-so-leisurely hike (at times reminiscent of the sweaty tramp up Afadjato) up the mountains next to Have, in order to see and photograph some of the farmfields which perch on these slopes.

Otherwise our routine has been fairly set. I go to the library, where I work away under the relief of the fan and wait for about two o’clock in the afternoon when the children start to arrive. Sam works at the farm, hoeing this field or that Mango grove, watering the plants and seedlings, burning brush and always dripping with sweat. We struggle through our meals which are always disappointing, though we reflect that they are not so bad as they once were since we have forgotten what it was like to enjoy food. We brave the heat, which though it has been actually worse some days (we have measured up to 45 degrees) is on the whole much better, especially at night now that a rainshower is an almost daily guarantee. Showers (of the washing variety) come and go as well, but not for long spells. Guests drop in at the farm, and we are generally commended for our attempts at Ewe. By the time we leave Sam will have bested me in number of pages read, but I will surely take the competition of Gin Rummy.

We think of home and family and friends often. Though our fleeting and infrequent internet visits don’t allow for much correspondence from our end, we revel in each note which we read and then save, to re-read and read aloud once we’ve returned from town. For those who might be worried about our capacity to suffer this strange and hot climate, rest assured that we have mapped and memorized the location of the best burger joint in Accra and plan to spend my birthday and a few days thereafter in the blissfully named “Coconut Grove Beach Resort” on the sandy shores of the Gulf of Guinea, West of the picturesque and historic seaside town of Elmina.

HOW TOs for Ghana

2009-03-27T08:46:00.003-04:00

How to...

...say hello: “Mia-wézo/You are welcome!”
...shake hands: With a snap. When you pull your hand away you should snap middle fingers with the other person.

...drink it: From a bag! Tear off the corner with your teeth and enjoy. If you’re not finished, just let it hang from your mouth. In restaurants you’ll be served a chilled plastic sachet on a plate!
...eat it: With your right hand. There’s no Ewe word for “fork.” On the go? Then from a bag! I was not surprised to see a kid squeezing fried beans through the corner of one.
...take it home: In a bag! Everything from sweet milk to soda pop, powdered milk to garé powder is poured into little bags and tied off. Tear open and enjoy!
...carry it: On your head! If it’s heavy, nest it in a rolled-up scarf and then head down the road like it ain’t no thang. Lots of things can be carried in a helpful large metal basin, but it’s not uncommon to see anything from stools and tables to 10-meter-long bamboo poles resting up on top of the noggin. Florence once headed home from the farm with empty hands but her purse on her head. It’s just what you do!
...maintain good posture: See previous.

...go: You’d better like to squat.
...wash: Out of a bucket. Soap up and rinse, repeat.

...drive: Fast!
...pass another vehicle: Honk your horn.
...pick up passengers: Honk your horn.
...say hello to a friend: Honk your horn!
...make a left turn: Pull off to the right side of the road and wait until no one’s coming.

...get a ride: Wave your hand.
...get the right price: Say “Ao! Meñé-sigbé-o!/No! That’s not it!” and ask for your change or “balance”.
...make a Ghanaian roll with laughter: See previous.

...beat the heat: Just ain't gonna happen.

...tell if it’s your goat: If it’s your goat, apparently you’ll just know.

Water

2009-03-21T06:41:00.003-04:00

I know that we have continuously harped and languished over this tired point but, as it is particularly important to the subject of this post, let it be re-iterated; Ghana is hot. Subsequently water, especially at EDYM Village, is as precious as gold and almost as difficult to come by. The Farm does not have running water and must satisfy its various needs in a number of ways.

Drinking water, or “Pure Water”, comes from large purification stations and is distributed in individual 500 mL sachets (essentially a ½ L of water vacuumed sealed in plastic). This water is not free but definitely isn’t expensive at something like 5 cents a bag and, I can only assume, discounted when bought in bulk. The water is accessed by biting one corner and not-so-simply (there is an art to it) drinking from the bag. This method of distributing clean water replaced the environmental hazard of bottled water about 4 years ago and the public has quickly adapted (the empty sachets littering the ground everywhere stand both as evidence of this and a new waste issue). Anne and I go through about 2-3L of water a day - more when it’s hot - and are always in a state of semi-fear of running out.

Watering water (for the plants) comes from the reservoir: a large hole roughly the size of a private swimming pool dug in the middle of the EDYM grounds. This reservoir is fed by two large drainage pipes that direct the somewhat-organized pooling of rainwater from the surrounding area into the pit. This water is reclaimed by means of a one-bucket bucket brigade that consists of Chachu and myself.

Water used to shower and, I think, cook and wash dishes comes from two sources. The first is the numerous water barrels and drum cans strategically situated at the end of eaves troughs to catch the rainwater runoff from the various roofs at EDYM. When this supply is exhausted Paul must collect a group of locals and ‘hire’ his friend Constant’s pickup truck to make at least 3 trips to the nearby river Dayi that feeds into Lake Volta. The river is murky and still, offering little to convince me of its quality, and standing knee-deep filling jerry cans I can’t stop thinking about Bilharzia; the fact that Chachu drinks the water doesn’t go a long way to calming my nerves. The refilling process requires a series of tiring trips to and from the riverside up a 10m path carrying buckets and jerry cans. The whole process is grueling and definitely instilled in me a more prudent awareness of any wasted water at the farm.

Pump water comes, remarkably, from a hand-operated pump over a concrete-capped borehole and is only relied upon when the reservoir dries up. This method of acquiring water is reserved as a last resort as it costs money, is about ½ km away, and entails taxing work – namely Chachu and me rolling the water barrel back to the farm (or rather, me rolling the barrel while Chachu walks or pretends to help). This work involves me, some local kid, and rarely Chachu working a semi-efficient pump while a group of local ladies sit around and laugh at me.

There is a pumping station just outside Kpeve, though it looks more like a military bunker than a headworks. I can only guess that the few places in the area that do have running water are supplied by this facility but I have no idea how they pay for it or the layout of the distribution grid, if there even is one.

If there is any other way to get water we have yet to be shown it. Most of the time the ground is bone dry and baked so mercilessly that it cracks.

- Sam

Where We Are

2009-03-21T06:35:00.001-04:00

It occurred to me that we threw ourselves into this rambling blog rather quickly, and I have quite rudely forgotten to introduce you to the setting of our scene where the odd and amusing events of this trip so far have taken place. What follows is a little background.

Consult a map and you’ll see that Ghana sits about five degrees above the equator in West Africa (on the underside of that big western nob) with it’s southern coast to the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean. From the coast, where the capital Accra lies, the country extends northward through green tropical farmlands in the south and past Lake Volta in the eastern and central regions, on to the dustier and dryer Sahel regions of the North. Beyond Ghana, if you were to travel northwards, you would continue through the mostly semi-arid Sahel (though you might encounter a bit more of the tropical belt), after which you’d find yourself, at about Mali and Timbuktu, squarely in the Sahara Desert. Live through that and you’ll come out around Algeria and the Mediterranean on the other side.

Back to where we are, though, which is between a two and four hour drive northeast of Accra (depending on the Accra traffic I guess), in the Volta Region in the eastern part of Ghana. The Volta Region encompasses the area North of Greater Accra, East of Lake Volta and West of the Togolese border. Geographically this area is more mountainous than other parts of Ghana on account of the ranges which extend this far across the border from Togo, but I should caution you to imagine nothing higher than the 885m of Afadjato, which kind of makes them just really big hills. Both geographically and culturally this area is close to Togo, where Ewe is also spoken, since the Ewe homeland was effectively cut in half by the division of German Togoland between England and France after World War I. We have so far met many people who have worked and lived in Togo, among them Paul’s brother Emmanuel and his wife Salome, who prefer to speak French over English.

The town of Have is one of many through which the main Accra road runs (here basically North-South) some kilometers from the lake. From Have the lake is not visible (though you can spot it to the West from the road at various high points further North and South of the town) and so the dominant geographical feature is the mountain, which also runs North-South and up to which Have is nestled on its eastern side.

A single two-lane, paved road runs for, oh, several kilometers through the town, and then splits in two at the Have junction where a more northerly-running road takes you to Hohoe and a north-westerly road continues to Kpandu and the nearby lakeside town of Kpandu-Torkor. At first glance all of the houses and buildings of Have seem to huddle and crush up against the main road, but the occasional driveway and a series of crawling and nebulous footpaths (over this gutter, under that washing line) also lead from the road to various small neighbourhoods and family compounds closer to the mountain or a short distance down the slope which eventually leads to the lake.

The most favoured construction method in Have – reflecting (I think) it’s slightly more well-to-do residents compared with the smaller villages – is the one-storey poured cement building with a rusty-red corrugated tin roof. This is the construction of both the buildings at EDYM and the library, and one that can allow for all the amenities of electricity and plumbing. The family compound, which usually consists of several buildings around a shared dirt courtyard, will often include a few more ramshackle constructions as well. These may be four- or three-sided buildings with plywood walls and roofs, traditional stick or bamboo-sided huts with grass roofs, sturdier mud-brick buildings, or some combination thereof. Most cooking is done outdoors even in the nicer houses, often over a fire on a porch or in a cooking hut, or on a propane burner. A delicious meal of fufu is prepared outdoors, hopefully with the help of one or two children taking turns pounding the cassava into dough with large pestles. Most families will also have a small enclosure for some very-independent goats.

On a tro-tro ride leaving the library, you’d drive through about one goat-dodging kilometer or so of the town (past a large football field, a police checkpoint complete with lounging and sometimes vigilant armed officers, and various stalls and shops) before you reach the junction and take a left turn for Kpandu. Beyond the Have junction on the road to Kpandu, the town peters out quickly and gives way to flat farmland heading away from the mountains. On this road there are about three or four more towns at the roadside in the estimated five or so kilometers to the EDYM signboard. Each of these villages is smaller than Have, and shows it mostly in an abundance of more traditional stick or mud-brick, grass-roofed huts and fewer cement buildings. Between the towns are brush and farmland though sometimes it’s difficult without a worker present to know which is which. Occasionally an almost imperceptible dirt road or footpath branches off from the road, and leads to small villages or settlements further afield.

Along the road after Have are the small towns of Have Ando #1 (Ando Numbah One), Sadzikofe, Have Ando #2, and then (imperceptibly separate from Numbah Two) you’ll know you’ve reached Jerusalem from the football field on your right and all around the smell of putrefying garbage. (Or is it the mashed cassava the ladies are bagging?) At about this point you should point out to the driver or mate the blue-and-green signboard approximately 300m ahead and closing, which marks the entrance to the dirt road to the farm.

Paul owns the buildings at the roadside – a large cement structure with, from what we can tell, at least two small bedrooms and accommodation for various animals, as well as two handsome grass huts for shade. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, it’s Paul dream to move the EDYM offices and the Moringa tea-bagging operation to these quarters, presumably (for the former at least) when the buildings are hooked up to the grid. For now they remain empty except for when Paul occasionally sleeps there, we think when beds at EDYM are full.

From the paved road, the dirt road extends South-West-ish past a local mill and borehole, and then some 600m or so (with Paul’s fields to the right or North, and other people’s to the left or South). Beyond the farm on the same road are more of Paul’s fields, in particular a mango orchard, and then presumably another village some kilometers farther along given the foot-traffic, though we’ve never seen it ourselves.

The farm has quite a handsome entrance from the dirt road, where there is a wide packed-dirt driveway fringed with long, low rows of green hedges. To the right of the driveway, behind a scrubby lawn, is the main long cement building lying basically East-West and parallel to the dirt road. To the right again of this building – what you first see of the farm – and running back from the road is a long nursery where until recently Sam spent most of his days. (He now has the harder and far more sweaty task of clearing the fields for the transplantation of various seedlings.) The driveway ends at the foot of another building – where we sleep – which, along with the main building, forms an L-shape which encloses the reservoir, part of the nursery, a small grove, and a nice mango tree for sitting under.

From the inside (not the roadside) the main one-storey building has three entrances. The left-most (and closest to the nursery, if you’re sufficiently turned around and following this tour) leads to a kitchen with a small, low table, some open shelves, and a kerosene burner. Off the kitchen lies a room of great mystery, which we’ll endeavour to peek into at some point in the future but as we’re usually kept out of the kitchen we haven’t yet seen. The next door leads to a wide room where supplies are kept, from which two small sleeping rooms extend, with windows towards the road. A third door leads to another supply room next to the driveway.

“Our” building (with the EDYM logo handsomely painted on the South end) extends basically North-South and consists of four rooms end to end: two sleeping rooms with small verandas (to the South); and an eating room and bathroom (to the North). Our room is large enough for a double bed on the East wall to the left of the door, a small table as you enter, and a chair. Two windows open on either side of the room – one at the head of the bed and the other at the foot, where there’s enough room to the wall to squeeze in the chair. That’s about it, and we’re lucky that Sam and I mostly get ready at different times in the morning, because if one person’s not occupying the bed there’s just enough room to knock into each other between the chair, the table, and the door.

Next door a room identical to ours houses Paul or various overnight guests at the farm. A third door leads into our eating room, where dishes occupy a large, high table and two armchairs flank a low one. (Ghanaian eating tables, at least at home, tend to be low – we guess on account of the communal dishes.) The last door leads to the bathroom, which consists of a communal space with two sinks, before two more doors open to tiled rooms each with a toilet and (water-permitting) a shower. Behind the building is a cement-floored stall with a drain, similar to those found at each family compound and used as a urinal and, with the assistance of a stool, a bucket-washing stall. (As far as we know only Chachu washes there, and as for its other uses we’re not sure, but it offers less privacy than most of the stalls we’ve seen in town.) Beyond that are more planting beds, a cooking hut, and a building intended for rearing grasscutter which is currently empty.

This is essentially our world. From our view at the farm we can see the lights of cars passing along the main road at night, to the East and West mountains which occasionally frame a spectacular sun rise or set, and all around fields of palms and cassava.

Some more pictures of our life in Have

2009-03-21T06:05:00.012-04:00

Having the power reconnected at the library has been a boon for my photo editing, but as I've yet to decide exactly how to post all of my photos, another small taste will have to do for now. When I get some more properly loaded (somewhere other than here), I'll look forward to directing you there. Until then...

The haircut and the beard.

Children marching on Independence Day.

A regiment of older girls.

My friend Roselyn who visits me at the library, and a box of the cakes and meat pies she sells in town.

A view from the back of a tro-tro.

Another sunset at the farm.

Sam, when he still recognized himself.

Some fetching palms.

Leafy greens at the farm.

Where road rules are few, "Jesus Saves".

A view from a restaurant in Ho.

An early breakfast of "grits", which was even more awful than it looks.

Miscellaneous flora.

Paul's bike gets a cleaning at the Washing Station.

Sam and Anne at the base of Afadjato (actually trying to instruct our taxi driver in the use of the camera, but there you have it).

What weeks 5 and 6 brought

2009-03-21T05:53:00.005-04:00

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.

The HEAT (or; You can run, but that’ll only kill you sooner.)

2009-03-21T05:44:00.006-04:00

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.

More photos from Ghana

2009-02-28T10:44:00.012-05:00

Sunset at the EDYM village.

A typical tro-tro (overloaded boot'n'all).

Laundry day at the farm.

Our humble abode.

Ho, the regional capital and home to the Anointed Internet Cafe.

Seeking shelter from the storm at the library.

Paul, casually waiting it out.

A hungry mommy Mona Monkey, at the Tafi Atome Sanctuary.

In front of Wli Waterfalls.

Right under the falls.

Eating with your hands for dummies

2009-02-28T08:35:00.008-05:00

Food

Let it be known that I love food. At least I love food that I love, which I am aware is as useful as it is informative. Bearing this in mind a trip to Africa, and possibly beyond, held for me a particular thrill in the promise of foreign savory dishes and exotic culinary delights. I remember thinking that, what can only be described as living in Ghana (at least for a short while), would provide the opportunity to become well acquainted with new and exciting local cooking. And acquainted we have become.

Japanese sushi - I crave, Chinese noodles - I hunger for, Indian - I delight in, Korean BBQ I have defeated; all of these cuisines (and many others) I have conquered with the care of a gourmet and the appetite of a gourmand. To Ghana I say, "touche" and respectfully bow out of the ring.

To say that Ghanaian cooking, and more importantly Ghanaian eating etiquette, is strange and foreign to me would be at least a slight understatement. Suffice it to say that living in this indomitable heat without electricity or the certainty of running water finds Anne and me dreaming, both day and night, not of air conditioned luxury, but of egg salad sandwiches (with crispy lettuce of course), pink lemonade, and chicken wings. Our meals instead consist of a variety of dishes that are made, predominately, from the pounding and mushing of a variety of bland root plants. The results are foufou, banku, and at least 2 or 3 other dishes that have sounds in the pronunciation not found in the English language (ie. I have no idea how to write them down), all of which are served in a large communal bowl and accompanied by, either on top or aside for dipping, a stew-like soup of meat broth and herbs, the favorite of the locals being a sloppy fish dish (the resulting stew is sloppy, I'm not sure what a sloppy fish is). The meal is then eaten with your hand, mind you the right hand only - most likely a tribute to times when the left hand was strictly regulated for other purposes, but now merely represents a taboo. The design is to take a small amount of the dish in question, approx. 1/4 of a handful, and roll it into a ball (anyway you can) and then dip it into the soup and slurp it noisily from your fingers. The important skill to remember, especially when dealing with foufou (as told to us by our hosts), is not to chew but to swallow whole whatever you put in your mouth. This can be seen in some ways as a godsend as the taste is lacking and chewing foufou would be an act of futility as it has the consistency of somewhat congealed fat, yum!

This somewhat colourful introduction to Ghanaian cooking complete, it is important to note that not everything we're served is a pile of communal goop and is often palatable. Everyday we are served 3 square meals from our somewhat indifferent cook Florence. Breakfast consists of oatmeal of varying consistencies, an omelette made with the local miracle plant moringa, and bread that tastes as though it was made with sugar rather than flour. If you so wish you can also 'butter' your bread with Blue Band 70% fat spread, which will invariably have a few dead ants in it that somehow bested its seal. Lunch can be one of the aforementioned Ghanaian delights or, and to our salvation, a dish of rice or thin spaghetti mixed with a tomato relish and finished off with either papaya, bananas, or orange slices - a note on fruit in Ghana: though very fresh everything tastes just a little less juicy than the imports at home. Pesticides? Western genetic tampering? Dinner and lunch are essentially the same and either could be substituted for the other. Our favourites are the rice and pasta dishes with a little chopped up (bones and all) fried chicken or mystery meat. Throw in fried plantains and beans and you have the complete menu at Chez EDYM.

The difficulty that we have is that we are not satiated by the food and are always harbouring slight pangs of hunger. We don't think we're starving by any stretch of the imagination but our trials have lead us to believe that there is a direct correlation between feeling satisfied with a meal and the amount of chewing that was involved. This leads to our deeming dishes such as jolif of rice (rice with some spices), which would generally be described as good or at least passable, to be instead delicious and a triumph of Florence's skill.

On the lighter side we are getting much better at making the required balls of goo and yesterday both agreed that banku "wasn't actually all that bad". Coke, Fanta, FanChoco (frozen chocolate milk that you bite the corner of the bag to drink while you melt it with the warmth of your hands and the Ghanaian sun), and Sri Lankan shortbread, though only available when we travel into a town, are a constant saving grace. There was a disagreeable incident with Digestive Biscuits and an invading ant colony that will always remain a sore spot.

I still love food, maybe even moreso. However, what began as an anticipated joyful culinary adventure has metamorphosed into a stoic resolve to weather the next few months and hold fast to the constant dream and hope that we will again see the Golden Arches on the horizon.

- Sam

A Slice of Life

2009-02-28T08:08:00.009-05:00

And so here begins our new series in which we are pleased to bring you, armchair tourists, a taste of what everyday life is like around the world (but actually more specifically our limited experience in Ghana and maybe wherever else we end up). We hope to explore a range of topics from transportation to telecommunication; waste disposal to wedding proposals. Got a predilection for plumbing? We might cover that too! Tell us your fancy! We live to tell you what little we know. (In case you miss it here, look for all of the above in our surely soon-to-be-published Lonely on this Planet: A guide to not understanding cultures around the world.)

Waste Disposal
Let’s say that our observations are that Ghana’s waste disposal policy is decidedly DIY. There is none. Garbage is everywhere. Once we saw a town with garbage cans near a tourist area. (At that same tourist spot there were both very empty garbage cans and trash everywhere.) Once we saw a group of kids picking up garbage along a town road, carrying a sign that read “Reduce Litter,” and on the same day passed what we guessed to be a town dump (a large area next to some homes and stores piled with garbage, some of which was burning). Otherwise, garbage lies at the side of every road, clogs every gutter, and litters every green space all the way up to the top of Ghana’s tallest mountain. Small garbage fires occasionally burn along the road or behind houses. The best way to dispose of the garbage in your hand is to throw in on the ground.

To be fair, the amount of waste generated by a single person in a day is really very low, especially by Western standards. The vast majority of food is bought fresh (sans packaging) and prepared at home; the notable exception to this being discarded water sachets. Nevertheless, our delicate Western sensibilities being what they are, it is plain to us that the small print (“Keep Your City Clean”) on every sachet and food wrapper is patently ignored.

Recycling
Paul collects the plastic sachets from the water consumed on the farm and piles them in a storage hole in the nursery. These are then sometimes used as planting bags for seedlings grown in the nursery. (Sometimes, depending perhaps on the planter’s enthusiasm for tediously cutting open one side of every pouch.) For all other plastic, cans, bottles, cardboard and the rest, see Waste Disposal, above.

*** Okay, editor’s note: Clearly, my first assessment of recycling in Ghana was very low, but after being offered just yesterday a frothy green liquid (to drink?), obviously homemade and rebottled in a used one and a half litre water bottle, I decided it would only be fair to mention that here. Water bottles are often reused for this purpose, and they’re not all. Truthfully it is pretty clear that everything in Ghana (like our mosquito net, and our generator, to start; like peoples cars, bikes, clothes, furniture, tools, and building supplies) is milked for the absolute full measure of its usable life before it’s passed on, maybe for someone to fix and gain further use from. Also, we have received warnings that if we buy bottled water we must check that the bottles are sealed, as some people make a business out of selling tap water under the label of “pure” simply in old bottles. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Another two weeks of fufu

2009-02-28T07:27:00.005-05:00

So, two more weeks and what do we have to say for ourselves? Well on the positive side we’re starting to get the hang of things and are really settling in. On the less positive side our settling in has been sometimes tough going, with so many foreign things (the weather, the language, the food, the place, the culture) to adjust to all at once. While these weeks (and consequently this post) have been somewhat dominated by a few recurring negative themes as we struggle over the first hump, even as I write this I feel the need to mention quite optimistically that I think in the last few days we’ve started to turn the corner.

Starting with the positive; things we are getting used to… We have definitely come to consider the EDYM Village our sanctuary – our home away – to which we’re always pleased and comforted to return. We are generally untroubled by our relatively sparse accommodations there and have even learned to bathe – relatively happily – African-style (with a bucket) when our shower water shortages extend for longer than expected. (I will admit, though, for all my camping know-how, that I exhibited some consternation upon my first African bath at being instructed by Sam to wash my hair by sticking my head in the bucket. This is done, I will say, with very little grace.) The only real complaint we have is that Florence’s cooking continues to leave much to be desired. But it should be said that to this our approach has remained one of steadfast politeness and so, given our host’s oft-stated request for honesty, we only have ourselves to blame.

The heat – our foremost foe early on – improved greatly after our first week and, although we seem in these last few days to be in the thick of another wave, our bodies and minds have become much more accustomed to it. We’ve also benefited from some nights of stormier weather which have brought the perfect combination of cool winds blowing in from nearby storms accompanied by actually very little rain (all the cooling of a storm with none of the sogging). In fact, the reservoir is so empty that the frogs have nearly all shut up!

When he’s not too busy with all the business of the farm or tearing around town on errands on his motorcycle (sometimes with us on board), Paul laughs a lot and has been kind to let us enjoy a good deal of his company. He has been very generous with his time with us, especially given all of his commitments, and has helped us greatly with whatever assimilation into this community we have managed. A highlight are our refreshing trips to a small hotel in the next town (owned by a friend of Paul’s and consisting of a few nice small buildings in a gated property, located preposterously at the end of an extensive lane of mud huts) where we have been a few times to enjoy bottles of local beer, a refreshingly air-conditioned room, and occasionally television programmes from South Africa’s AfricaMagic! Channel (which really deserve a blog post all their own).

I’m still going to the library each day and, after a few days of chaos, I have managed to establish a relative calm and a generally good rapport with even my most snot-nosed patrons. The crowd is kept to a minimum and kids are, good-naturedly, kicked out often, and everyone gets their turn and is invited back tomorrow. The small group of children who so vexed me in my second week (who’s staring at the door turned into a great game of who could get me most worked up, climaxing in sticks being thrown repeatedly through the entrance) leave me mostly alone, or actually visit the library properly, after I told on the oldest girl to her mom. Maybe it was that, or the progressively more mundane regularity of my appearance there, or possibly some more forceful instruction from their teachers (who also visit regularly), but the children are treating me much more like an adult of consequence rather than an alien with no bearing on their behaviour or, if necessary, punishment. I cannot tell you what a relief this is. Still, for good measure, I’m practicing my “Keep Quiet,” “Go Home,” and “Come Back Tomorrow” in Ewe.

Sam’s life continues along the relatively same path as in our last update. A notable change to his poop-shoveling routine is the addition of a helpful club (the discarded handle of an old hoe, found by Chachu), which Sam uses to pulverize the more reticent clumps of dirt. To the outsider observing Sam – sitting by his poop pile, spade in one hand, slowly thumping the poop dirt with the club in the other – this gives him the rather amusing appearance of a somewhat depressed caveman.

Just as I am the subject of much curiosity (especially from children) at the library, Sam too occupies his little zoo habitat of the nursery, for which the nearby road is a ready observer’s gallery. He is also practicing his “Alright, yes, hello, that’s enough, clear off now!” in the local dialect.

Chachu still provides most of Sam’s company and when he’s not – sort of subtly – asking Sam for money to start his farm or – expressly – asking Sam to take him back to Canada (because “Chachu is a haaard worker!”) he is using seemingly any excuse to take time off work to rest or complain (about life, love, or work we guess) to any passing friend who would likewise, presumably, appreciate a break. Chachu also takes Sam frequently to gather water at the local water pump where they stand around and watch everyone else pump water but never take their turn, while Sam takes abuse from the local women and children while trying to figure out just how the order of water-taking is decided. They often wait a long time, likely more out of Chachu’s mild enjoyment of being the procurer of such a strange curiosity as Sam rather than out of any ladies-first politeness. The charms of Chachu’s company are endless.

Which, I guess, brings us to some of the things we’re not getting used to. This is most prominently (before or after the food?) being gawked at all the time and our every movement being followed by curious stares and a chorus of “Yevou! Yevou!” coming from, mostly, children. (Literally this means, “White man! White man!” but apparently it’s hollered at any foreigner.) One little girl yelled herself hoarse about ten feet from us with just this word the other day while we waited to catch a tro-tro from our language lesson at the library. Sam also had the distinct pleasure this week of being addressed as White man” in English by a man he was meeting. Suffice it to say, what little charm the words hold in Ewe doesn’t translate to English.

Perhaps more aggravating than the ever-present “Yevou!”s (they’re only kids after all) is the readiness with which adults justify this habit to us, particularly by explaining the curiosity we must see that people find in every conceivable (and inconceivable) difference between us and them, which they will readily and earnestly point out. In fact, it is perhaps this readiness to point out our differences (physical curiosities mostly) that has taken us most by surprise and which sometimes leads us to believe that people must think we are nothing short of extra-terrestrials landed, most curiously, in their community in Ghana. At the very least, it’s tiresome and awkward; at most, it can really tax even one’s most charitable and enduring feelings about a universal brotherhood of humanity, which you might begin to wonder if they would even conceive of here.

On the bright side, any negative encounters (and there are many positive ones too) only increase our esteem for Paul and his incredibly warm and welcoming family, who are outstanding ambassadors for the community and his work.

To break up some of the routine, we have enjoyed a few excursions to local sights. Some are planned (like out trip to Ho two weeks ago, where we used the internet and ate pizza) and some are unplanned (with every day comes the hope of one of Paul’s impromptu motorcycle adventures – I’ve gotten to go up to see a town in a mountain with a view, and Sam has been to the lake). After our first successful independent trip (to Ho) we had our first and only pre-paid, Village Volunteers-organized “Tour of the Volta Region” this past weekend. The highlights included visiting a wild monkey sanctuary at Tafi Atome, swimming under the highest waterfall in West Africa at Wli falls (which was truly sublime), and climbing Afadjato, Ghana’s highest mountain (right next to and across the border from some taller mountains in Togo). The lowlights included almost everything else, mostly on account of our “guide” Edward. Let’s just say about him that when it was not his seemingly singular and determined preoccupation to wrest us of as much of our money as possible, he was utterly unhelpful, uninformed, aggressive, nosy, obtuse, and inappropriate, not to mention completely ignorant and wrong-headed in his approach to tourists and volunteers. A real prize.

Paul (who genuinely understands and appreciates the value of tourism and volunteers) expressed some reservations about Edward, but in the interest of not interfering with the arrangements made we decided to go ahead with the tour as planned, trusting the presumably good judgment of our sending agency. Perhaps needless to say, in such a foreign environment our frustration in stressful situations can sometimes be out of proportion with what the situation merits, but we think we saved our griping for each other. At any rate, with no more like-torture planned we will look forward to Paul’s knowledgeable guidance on our future tours.

Otherwise, we have started our language lessons with a teacher from the town and goodwill seems to follow our mangled attempts at communication in the local Ewe. So far, apart from having difficulty hearing – let alone producing – some of the required intonation and sounds, we are progressing decently. (For example, all of our Ps sound the same, whether they’re Ps or KPs, we have trouble with anything coming out of our noses, and the not-quite-a-W-not-quite-an-F-sort-of-WH-as-in-whale-“open F” is an eternal enigma.)

Also progressing decently, if not too quickly, is the speed at which we’re burning through our novels. Sam’s breaks on the farm have seen him all the way through all 1095 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo. I’ve burned through all 930 pages of Shantaram, all 125 pages of The Time Machine, and over 300 of the 550-odd pages of The Cider House Rules, not to mention a good part of Britain in the Twentieth Century: A Documentary Reader (all except the first courtesy of the Have Community Library). Together we’ve also covered all of Bill Bryson on Shakespeare, most of the Bradt Guide to Ghana, the Lonely Planet Guide to Africa (at least the relevant bits) and have started in on Journey to the Centre of the Earth. With all the contents of the library at our disposal, we can safely expect to run out of time or patience for reading before we run out of material. So far, I’m winning at Rummy.

And thank you for all of the comments and the well-wishing emails! We appreciate the notes immensely, even when we have not the time (what with all of this blasted blog-typing) to respond.

The Storm

2009-02-27T23:11:00.005-05:00

First came the pollen then the rain.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009. Anne and I had just finished discussing the particulars of our Ewe language lessons and were prepping to return to EDYM Village, Anne via a tro-tro, me on the back of Paul's 125cc one banger. The first thing we saw was a wall of white dust coming from the north. This dust, which obscured all in site, turned out to be a cloud of pollen that we have since learned forecasts an impending storm. The next thing to strike was the fast low flying, pitch-black, clouds guided and funnelled by the mountain that backs Have. It then started to rain, rain soon turned to water literally pouring from the sky in sheets, to a borderline hurricane. The wind, racing down the centre of Have, was deafening and terrifying in a very real and "Oh my God, I am so small" kinda way. It came howling down the main road threatening to rip anything and everything in its path apart. It's a complete wonder that all the shanty houses, of which Have mostly consists, weren't torn from the ground and tossed away.

We, and a few unfortunate pedestrians, sheltered in the concrete walls of the library to wait the tempest out. The rain lasted the better part of an hour in which time the road was turned into a river and visibility reduced to less then 30 feet. The sound of the storm was as intense, if not more severe, than the wind. The whole event felt so primal; savage. Everything here does.

The storm finally abated and Paul hailed a tro-tro for Anne while I collected myself for the motorcycle ride home. I almost had to hold my breath and close my eyes for fear as Paul tore down the slick streets as though they were smooth and dry.

The events of the last hour had pulled down a large tree and felled it across the road which would have forced us to stop had not a group of young men, in an effort and zeal so contrary to what I have so far experienced in Africa, sawed the tree in half and cleared the debris before we even arrived at the obstacle.

The tree wasn't the only damage that the storm had caused and this was evident on the ride home. In many areas I could see the remnants of what used to be thatched roofs strewn along the ground of the now flooded villages along the side of the road. The storm seemed not to phase Paul in the slightest and I can only assume that it is a common occurrence during the rainy season.

We caught up with Anne and passed her on the long dirt road into the farm. We barely recovered from a slip in the last 20m to the door but arrived without incident and I jumped off the back the bike thanking both Paul and God for a successful return.

- Sam

Chachu's Prayer

2009-02-14T08:48:00.000-05:00

Chachu: "Dear Lord, Thank you for this work, we are happy to do it, but we go on break now."
Sam: "Amen."

A few pictures for flavour

2009-02-14T08:14:00.003-05:00

We are new to this blog, so what follows is a taste of our life in Ghana so far, in no particular order:

A nearby town on the mountain, with a view of Lake Volta. (Have sits below this mountain.)

My lunch at the library: beans, fried plantains, and mango.

The Have library.

Being a daredevil on the back of Paul's bike.

The paved road by the farm. Straight ahead for Kpandu.

Sam at work on the EDYM farm.

On the way to town in Constant's car.

A nice house in Have.

The Have junction. Left to Hohoe, right to Have, back to Kpandu.

This way to the EDYM Village.

An African sunset, from the farm.

One of Florence's culinary delights - seen here: Banku in a fish stew.

A view of the nursery.

The Holy Farmer himself.

Our place (the south-west wall) with the EDYM logo: "Love for environment is life."

We're in Africa

2009-02-14T08:06:00.002-05:00

Yes we are. How did we get here? Well, about a year and a half ago or more we started pining and planning for an adventure and, in an effort to prove we weren't all talk, we decided to actually do it. Sam quit his job in Vancouver (my job helpfully quit me first), we packed up all our belongings, and drove ourselves back to Toronto into welcoming arms and homes. One month later, we were on our way here. Our adventure starts with two and a half months of volunteering in Ghana and continues, we hope, for at least as much time again traveling through West and North Africa, and on to the Mediterranean.

We arrived in Accra, via London, on Sunday February 1st at night. I've probably never been more scared than I was during our first night in Accra. The ride from the airport to the apartment of the Village Volunteers In-Country Coordinator, Gunadiish, where we were staying the night, put the fear of Africa in me pretty substantially in the short 15 or 20 minutes it took us to get across the city. The streets weren't busy with cars but well after dark there were still people milling about, sitting beside the road in little ramshackle booths lit with kerosene lamps, and listening to music on their portable radios - a scene which, in the dark, gave Accra the look of one extensive shantytown. Sam and I both reflected later that we felt totally and utterly lost, and that if we were let out of the cab right there we would have had absolutely no idea what to do. Furthermore there were the smells (exhaust, diesel fuel, dust, and smoke from roadside fires sticking in the backs of our throats) and the heat, which was absolutely oppressive. To make matters somewhat worse Gunadiish's sister, who met us at the apartment (Gunadiish was, somewhat ironically, out-of-country) had to spend the night at the hospital with her baby and so, all alone, we locked ourselves into the strange place for the rest of the night.

Needless to say it wasn't a good night and, when the panic closed my throat enough and the heat made me dizzy enough, I started to be sick. By the time Paul, our host, arrived in Accra from Have village by the next day midday I was in rough shape (Sam, holding it together partly from taking care of me, was faring better). Though, once we left the "death room" (as we will now affectionately call it) and started to get on our way, things improved immeasurably. We visited a medical clinic to be sure that I was well, and I was prescribed some of the drugs I'd brought with me to combat a mild stomach bug that turned up in my blood test and which may have, but likely didn't, cause my vomiting. Finally, around 6:00 pm Monday evening with the sun going down, we were ready to head on to Have.

In the daylight the roadside huts of Accra were all little shops selling everything from water (in the ubiquitous 500mL plastic sachets) to food to cell phone credits to flags to clothes to haircuts to anything else you could imagine. As we drove along (Paul's friend Constant from Have picked us up in his car) kids and adults alike would weave in and out of the traffic on foot selling, it seemed, whatever they could get their hands on. During our drive through the city and on to the village Constant bought two drills, a belt, and a brush, and gave a man an iron, Paul topped up his cell phone balance, and they both had an evening snack on this drive-through shopping mall of Ghana's roads.

Where we are staying is the EDYM (Environmental Development Youth Movement, pronounced "Edim") farm, about 10 minutes beyond the town of Have, towards Kpandu ("Pandu") in Volta Region, Ghana. EDYM was founded and is run by Paul Kpai, a man in his late 30s, maybe, or early 40s, who was born here in Have but has been educated as far away as Cuba. Paul started his studies in Agronomy but now studies Social Science because he believes very passionately that a solution to both some of the poverty and the environmental degradation in the area (caused by deforestation and unsustainable farming practices) can be solved by engaging with the youth of the community and teaching them about the environmental problems and their solutions. Paul has also started a bit of a trend in Have, and seems to be at least partially responsible for encouraging some of the more affluent, educated, and successful members of the community to settle in Have after having business success elsewhere, and contributing to the growing prosperity of the village. (As Paul eloquently said, We cannot all go to work in the city. The city, after all, was a village once where somebody decided to stay.)

In fact it seems that Paul is also a sort of gardening consultant to the whole town, where we constantly met people who said "Paul told me to plant these trees here, for shade" or "Paul grafted these trees for me, for this exotic fruit." Paul hopes that the EDYM farm will soon serve as a training centre, though at present it works mostly as a nursery where Paul's particular specialty and passion is the Moringa tree. (Moringa apparently has very many nutritional and health benefits, but I'd encourage you to google it rather than take my poor explanation.)

Paul lives on the farm now, as does Chachu (or "Mr. Richard" a 24-year old farm hand), but Paul hopes to move the EDYM offices (now in town) and his brother Emmanuel's Moringa tea operation (now at the family complex in Have as well) to the EDYM farm. Paul calls the farm the "EDYM Village" or sometimes, with a laugh, "Our Holy Village," but so far Paul, Chachu, Sam and I are the only villagers. Florence, a middle aged woman who does our cooking, comes to the farm each day.

In our first days here there has been much to adjust to and more than a few surreal experiences. I would say that the heat was absolutely intolerable except that, somehow, we have been tolerating it and continue to adjust to being constantly wet. Sam's thermometer perpetually reads about 35 degrees Celsius, but he thinks it's broken and surely hotter, and this is also in the shade of our room.

Until recently Paul rented a couple of apartments in Have for volunteers but this was expensive, particularly in the sometimes long months between stays, and so Paul has been endeavouring to improve the accommodations on the farm so that it can be a home to volunteers from now on. We are the first, and so not everything is in place yet and some kinks are still being worked out. The first night we had no mosquito net and when it arrived the second night and was installed, with some concerted and confused effort by Paul and Sam, it proved to have several holes in it (like most things here, it seems, it was bought used), though we've mostly figured out the technique for blocking them.

The water for showers (stored in a tank outside the building) ran out our first Thursday, causing a mild bout of panic and frustration in Sam and me (we didn't have much except the guarantee of a shower) forcing us to realize that we still had some settling in to do in this very foreign place. Paul was away that night and so the refilling of the tank was put off until the next day. Since then, we've come to realize that this is a fairly commonplace occurrence and soon enough Constant will show up with the water truck (his pick-up loaded with barrels of water) and, one bucket brigade later, we're back in business.

The same night as the water fill-up a volunteer electrical crew showed up to hook up the generator to power our much-needed fan (maybe needless to say, the farm doesn't have electricity). Sam and I watched sheepishly as the group (some young guys from the town, starring Mike, an electrician and teacher at one of the schools) worked hard to get the motor running for us two pathetically sweaty white folks. The generator runs very erratically and guzzles fuel (Sam guesses it's about 30 years old, at least) but it's enough to run a fluorescent tube light outside and send a little stand-fan spinning like crazy. It's loud too and stinks of petrol and exhaust (which, mercifully unlike Accra, none of this countryside does) but just as we've learned to sleep with the other incredible noises, we've learned to sleep with that too.

And then there are the night noises. About three meters from our room the farm has a water reservoir (a big hole that collects rainwater and where frogs live). The frogs are nocturnal, we figure, because as soon as it gets dark they start wildly croaking at an incredible volume, and birds start squawking, and crickets start chirping, and the farm dogs start howling all in what can only be described as an unholy racket. I've only ever heard sounds like this before on the (heretofore absurd) sound-machine "Jungle" setting, and never at such an alarming volume. It's ridiculous, to say the least, and you will share in our stupefaction just as soon as I can post a file from my handy sound recorder.

On the food front, Florence is slowly introducing us to Ghanaian food. (To call Florence a cook might be giving her too much credit but she cooks for us and works hard, in small fits between naps, to feed us three meals a day.) Her specialities and our favourites so far include chicken (hacked up into little pieces bones and all, as near as we can tell, and fried) with spaghetti, fried chicken and rice, and fried plantains and beans (once the beans stop tasting like dirt, it's good-ish). We have also had the privilege of trying the Ghanaian staple of fufu (mashed cassava with yam or plantain in a veerry gooey ball) which you eat out of a communal bowl with your fingers and dip in a meaty, brothy soup. To quote the author of our of our books on Ghana, "It's probably fair to say that while you wouldn't want to travel in Ghana without trying fufu, you're unlikely to miss it when you return home." Let's say, we're getting used to it.

As for our activities, within a few days of our arrival we were taken to meet the chiefs of the local village (adjacent to the farm) and all of the traditional authorities in Have. We were also taken around to meet the teachers and headmasters at all seven local schools, since the children will be coming to see me each day at the library.

The library in Have was built a little over a year ago with the help of Village Volunteers (our sending agency) and donations raised. This was Paul's doing as well, I think, as he is engaged not only at the farm but also in helping to establish other useful programs in the community. The library had been intermittently open, when volunteers come I think, but a volunteer from the community is being trained now and will be ready to begin in April, when I leave, and so the hope is that this is the official opening of the library for good. This is where I will be every day.

Sam, on the other hand, has the slightly less auspicious and coveted job of working on the farm. So far this has involved filling thousands of little plastic bags with poop (well, dirt and poop), lining them up, and pushing Moringa seeds into them. The bags are small (little black plastic planting bags or sometimes the discarded 500mL water bags) and the pile of poop is big, but eventually he'll get to 5000 bags full and then the next job (planting vegetables maybe?) will begin, and so on. All we know now - we think - is that 5000 Moringa seedlings will be grown and distributed, free of charge, to local farmers or villagers. Things grow quickly here, we're told, and so we should start to see growth within six weeks.

Sam's company on the farm is Chachu, who is a bit of a character and speaks and understands only a bit of English, and so much hilarity (recounted to me upon my return from the library) and semi-constructive conversations ensue. (Sam learned, for example, that Chachu is saving money to buy land where he will farm rice, cassava, and ginseng. When Chachu asked Sam if he knew ginseng, Sam said yes and began to describe the shape of the root and its nutritional properties. Chachu looked confused, the conversation ended, and Sam only later realized that Chachu hadn't been saying "ginseng", but "Jason", the name of a former volunteer. Only then did Sam reflect that saying "Ginseng is my good friend" was maybe a rather too far-fetched way for Chachu to say that he intended to farm ginseng.)

So, as far as we can tell, our days will continue on like this. We'll rise by 6:00 am (when the sun comes up and roughly the time Chachu noisily sweeps the ground and deck outside of our room) and Sam will go off to shovel poop about 20 metres away. I will stay in bed, like the lucky lazy bum that I am, or generally occupy myself showering, reading, or writing until breakfast. Breakfast is ... whenever Florence serves it (she is not terribly punctual), usually by 9:00 am at the latest, and Sam will take a break and we'll eat together. After breakfast, I'll walk down the long dirt road from the farm to the paved road, where I'll wave down a tro-tro (a 10-12 passenger commuter van) and take the 30 peswas (30 cent) ride, about 10-15 minutes, into Have. Sometimes Paul will take me on the back of his motorcycle, and I will be equal parts terrified and exhilarated as we weave around potholes and beep at passersby. I'll open the library and then sit and wait.

Sam will work on the farm until 11:00 or 11:30 am, by which time it'll be too hot to do any more work for another 4 hours. He'll read, or sleep, or write, and eat lunch and then go back to work sometime after 3:00 pm. Theoretically my lunch will be sent to me at the library (but there are some kinks to be worked out there too) and then the library will close at 5:00 pm. Then I catch a tro-tro back to the farm, by standing at the side of the road, swinging my arm over my head, and pointing to my right (the driver's left) indicating that I want a vehicle turning left at the Have crossroads towards Kpandu, not towards Hohoe ("Ho-hwey"). I'll ask for Jerusalem, the town past the farm, and point to the EDYM signpost on the side of the road, where I'll be let off to walk back along the road to the farm, Sam, and dinner.

All meals are hot, all showers are cold. Sam and I shower and go to bed pretty much as soon as the sun goes down and so we're rarely asleep any later than 7:30 pm each night. We sweat all night, and start again the next day. On Thursday we take our malaria drugs and for the next few night have weird and vivid dreams. Weekends we have off, we hope, or else we will be making concerted efforts to get out of there like we did today, when we find ourselves (40 minutes or so in a tro-tro later) in the town of Ho. In our downtime we write in our journals, read our monstrous 900-page books (for Sam, The Count of Monte Cristo, for me, Shantaram), or play what we have decided will be the longest on-going tournament of Gin Rummy, ever. And every so often, as often as we can, we we will send updates to you.