Life in Besease, February 2007

So I caught malaria...!! I guess it was somewhat inevitable after my bold words about how healthy I was feeling... I began to feel ill last weekend and spent an agonising 24 hours with violent vomiting and diarreoah and as it was 'lights out' my misery was only heightened by the lack of a fan! So there I lay with a small flickering candle and several children peeking through the wire mesh that is my window chanting "Luisa is sick, Luisa is sick" in twi! Being so ill actually made me realise how truly public life is in Ghana - it felt like half of the village walked past the window, or through my room, to look in and witness the obroni heaving over a bucket and lying flat on the floor with wet rags on her head!!! The next day Amanda and Carrick took me to the local clinic run by catholic nuns and after my hand with a massacred with a needle they diagnosed me as having a 'light case' of malaria. So I am taking a colourful cocktail of obscure and unknown medication - when I asked the nurse to explain to me what each pill was she said "because you're sicko, they're to make you feel better"... I'm well on the road to recovery now though and feel much better although my energy levels are very low which I find immensly frustrating! So life continues... the children are becoming more and more familiar with me, and I with them. The new volunteer who was supposed to arrive last weekend didn't, and so I face the next month alone again. And as of Tuesday I will feel much more alone as Amanda has now completed her required hours at social welfare so she departs Ghana for good with Carrick. Wow. We have grown quite close over the past month and I really value all her help - she is so familiar with Ghanaian culture and custom, she even speaks twi! So being with her is really fun and her presence will be sorely missed by all. In saying that, a UK Ghanaian man, Daniel, is going to come for a few hours each day to help me do some more physical work around the home - the children couldn't believe it when they first saw him "a black man?" they said "a black man is going to help?!". They are so used to the volunteers being white and female that they couldn't believe it and looked at him with a bewildered curiosity. I think his presence will be a real value - especially as the home has more males than females and they could benefit hugely from a positive male role-model. Even if only for one month. I wish that there could be more permanent volunteers here as I think what the home lacks is consistency - children need stablity and routine in their lives - but living in Besease can feel so exhausting that I think you would need to be superhuman to live there for any real length of time. I have finished drafting the manual however and am implementing a set roster which is to be laminated and set on the wall so hopefully this will provide at least some consistency in the role of future volunteers and the work that the children are expected to do.

The heat continues. And, strangely, the rains are increasing. It is dry season however but it has now rained (and when I say rained, I mean the skies open up and release a fury upon the earth!) four times since I have been here. This is unusual but all the Ghanaians who I speak to say "the weather is changing all the time, you can't go by the old seasons anymore" - the rains are not due to come until April / May. I love it when it rains though - everything is refreshed and the colours are so intensified. I love the colours here - everything has such colour - the little shops (which are like little wooden shacks with doors that open outwards to display their wares) are painted bright blues and bright greens (and all have some reference to religion in their title as if enticing the good will of the spirits: "If God wills it Rasta-Hair Dos" or "Blessed Jesus Fried Rice"!!) - the ground is always such a brilliant terracotta red, and the greens of the forest are intense. Life is colour here. Colour and smell. I read a fantastic passage about the smells of Africa by a Polish man, Ryszard Kapuscinski, who lived in Ghana and it is so good (and so accurate) that I feel compelled to record it here:

"Something else strikes the new arrival even as he descends the steps of the airplane: the smell of the tropics.... we instantly recognise its weight, its sticky materiality. The smell makes us at once aware that we are at that point on earth where an exuberant and indefatigable nature labors, incessantly reproducing itself, spreading and blooming, even as it sickens, disintegrates, festers and decays. It is the smell of a sweating body and drying fish, of spoiling meat and roasting cassava, of fresh flowers and putrid algae - in short, of everything that is at once pleasant and irritating, that attracts and repels, seduces and disgusts. This odour will reach us from nearby palm groves, will escape from the hot soil, will waft above stagnant city sewers. It will not leave us; it is integral to the tropics".

The malam who I went to see sent me a message the other day - the spirits had told him that I am to be robbed!! He was concerned and so made me a special alm for protection which is a small vile of clear oil - before I travel anywhere I must dab the oil into the palm of my hand and using the first finger of my right hand put a spot of the oil onto my forehead and chest and rub some on my forearms and the spirits will protect me. I must say it has acted as a wake up call to me to be more cautious in my dealings, sometimes I forget that I am in Africa and become too relaxed about personal safety.

I am becoming tired of the starchy diet and long for fresh vegetables - after a month of the Ghanaian diet I can feel the difference in my body - I can't wait to cook for myself again! Ghanaians use oil like a vital ingredient in their meal and I don't think I ever want to eat white rice again in my life after I leave Africa!! At least fresh fruit is available and so I try to eat as much as possible - it revolves around three varieties though: pineapple, banana and orange.

On Thursday Carrick and I went to a monkey sanctuary in a village, Boabeng-Fiema, about 180k from Kumasi. 180k seems like an easy distance when thinking like an obroni but to travel 180k in Ghana took us five long, hot, dusty hours in a tro tro! Most of the road was dirt and very uneven, the van rattles and crashes over the holes, the windows shaking and dust coming in everywhere! The dust is so fine that it permeates everything! You have to hold a handkerchief over your mouth and nose but still it settles in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin - everything is covered with a soft layer of red and you can feel it irritating your lungs the entire ride! The monkey sanctuary was definitely worth it however - the people of the village believe that the monkeys (two species, the Mona and the Colobus) are 'children of the gods' or that they are the souls of the ancestors. Therefore the monkeys can do as they please, roaming the village to scavange food, eating from the plates of the villagers and taking food from cooking pots!! If a monkey's body is found dead then it is buried with full honours by the local fetish priest, laid out in a small wooden coffin and buried in a cemetery which is reserved for the bodies of monkeys and the fetish priests. Each grave is marked with the monkey's details: sex, age and the date it died. It was a beautiful sight! I loved that the animals were so respected by the villagers and the monkeys were very sweet, unafraid of humans (aware of their protected status?) they came close to us and ate peanuts that we fed them. We left the village by about 4pm and caught a ride back to the closest town with a German man who was there - by the time we found a tro tro returning to Kumasi it was 6.30pm and already night was falling - night comes quickly here, sunset lasts about 20 minutes, and I was filled with the thoughts of warnings of travelling at night! In the distance we could see lightning flashing in the sky and halfway through the journey the storm was upon us - rain poured in the van and the driver was skidding around - trucks and other vans zoomed past us and us past them on this dirt road, honking their horns as the only measure of safety, everyone driving so fast that I felt terrified, apparently they must go so fast in order to skim over the tops of the bumps... it was a long journey back and I must say for most of it I was clutching my pounamu and fearing that I wouldn't ever get home again!!

But all was okay and the malam's protection prayers must have worked! The following day I heard from a friend, Hedy, who I met while in the northern region - Hedy decided she wants to travel to Togo and Benin with me so we will cross the border from Ho on March 7th! I'm really happy that she will accompany me as she can speak French (and they are both Francophone countries) and she is a really interesting, outgoing and positive person - the perfect travelling companion!! I can hardly believe that in less than a month I will be leaving Ghana - it has gone so quickly! Next week I will travel to Accra to get my onward visas and to visit Ma's family (the mother of the orphanage) in Tema... it will be nice to have a few days away from the orphanage.

Last week it was announced that the Ghanaian government will reissue the currency (cedi) and knock four 0's off every bill. They say to "make it easier to count" but it seems to me to be more of an attempt to hide the increasing inflation problem in the country. The more time I spend here the more I see that the government tries to hide all its problems rather than confront them. I have spoken with Ghanaians about this and they agree - because Ghana is a child of massive IMF and World Bank "assistance" they want to appear like all of the programmes instilled by these organisations have worked successfully when in reality they haven't... the currency reissuing is quite representative of their system... when it doesn't work, cover it up. Like the problems in the education system, the health system, social welfare etc...

Well, as usual, time is running short and I must get going with the day's activities to be home in time to run the study group...