Pineapple Lodge

The hotel teller was a slim lady wearing a tight black and white custom made dress in Ghanaian print.

“Could I see one of the rooms? My supervisor is coming for two weeks and I want to see if it’s suitable”.

The reception was already more inviting than the previous place we checked. It had old 70s-style low level chairs with brown fabric and plastic tropical plants, and it definitely smelled less musty. The open stairs up led onto a balcony walkway, and although the room might not have had the surgical stiff generic cleanliness of a Holiday Inn, it had a good view and had taken well to the ageing process.

“We’ll take it”
“When are they coming?”
“Next Friday. We can put down money now”, Isaac said.
“No you can’t do that. We don’t do it like that”
“We mean, she’s coming for two weeks and we can pay it all now”, Isaac and I chimed.
“No, you have to pay from today and stay today”
Isaac exerted, “All hotels make bookings. And you pay in advance, so that when you come you know you have somewhere to stay and the hotel knows you are true to your word”.
“Yes” I added, “it’s quite a fundamental element of going on holiday- knowing you won’t arrive in a new place and have to sleep on the street”.
“No”.

The subject was raised again with the manager in the lobby downstairs. He was wearing an orange polo shirt, neat brown suit trousers and brown sandals.
“But if we give you the key, and somebody comes between now and then, we can’t tell them to go away”, he sighed hopelessly.
“No”, Isaac said, “We don’t take the key now. The room can be rented out between now and next Friday. I am a taxi driver. If I pick someone up at 4:00, it doesn’t mean that I don’t work between now and 4:00”.
I liked his logic.
“But we can’t tell them to leave when it comes to Friday”.
It seemed incredulous to turn away two weeks’ custom and money on the table. The room may well go empty the whole time if we went somewhere else.
“Please come back Monday and we’ll see what we can do then”. It was a compromise after all. But not one I thought Helen in the UK would be thrilled about.

Not an average Monday

Today I decided I’m going to get a move on with ‘making a difference’. So I sat and wrote a communications strategy proposal and worked all through lunch and kept writing until I finished it. This will primarily involve setting up a blog that will keep donors and potential volunteers informed, whilst keeping the homepage dynamic and feed into the microfinance field. Then there will be a good old-fashioned newsletter with a modern edge as a hand-out to clients to keep them up to date with company news and new products and to create some level of rapport between staff and clients. I thanked Youtube for its up-to-date marketing tutorials that included seminars from non-profit organisations.

It was very quiet in the office, with only the hum of deep thought and keyboards clicking. At one point James, who was employed to chase up and monitor loan defaulters, turned to me and said in earnest, “Fiona, do you believe in mermaids?” Entirely baffled as to the context in which he was talking and wondering whether the question could at all be a serious one, I waited for him to continue… “Because, I’ve seen this video on Youtube, and they look real”, he turned his computer so I could see, and sure enough in large on the screen were women in the sea with long scaly and quite beautiful blue fish tails.

On the way home, Isaac took me to see a tailor to have some trousers made, and I flicked through some fading 80s magazines to select the style I wanted and was properly measured. I got in from work to discover Troels hitting a rat to death in the bathroom with a frying pan. I asked him if he wanted to go for a swim with me, which he did, so we took a taxi to Labardi beach and swam until the sun went down and the moon came up to replace it. Then we went to one of the beach bars for a cocktail. After about ten minutes, it was pretty obvious that they didn’t actually have any of the ingredients for the pina coladas to hand and had embarked on some kind of mission out of a desire for our tourist cedis. Meanwhile I was getting viciously attacked by violent vampire mosquitos that could fly against the sea wind and had teeth when they bit into you, so we decided to leave.  Back at the pad we collected Leonard and Sonja the American Peace Corps volunteer, and headed to the Senegalese Italian restaurant for the opening night.

Through the glass front, the ice-cream parlour has bright lights where you can sit and order frozen desserts like banana split, waffles, torta cioccolato and dolce mattone. And the outdoor section was mood-lit with the glow of the wood-burning oven and low lighting, where stood two of our now very tired Senegalese flatmates, Matar and Moussar. I had an amazing pizza with imported goodies- olives, artichoke, parma harm and oyster mushrooms- and considered how being in Africa really wasn’t as cheap as I thought it was going to be.

The gelato was piled high, with pieces of fruit and clumps of chocolate next to each tray to indicate freshness. Dark chocolate with a consistency thick like fudge and similarly tended to white chocolate that had to be tasted alone in order to get the delicacy of its flavour. There was sharp passion fruit and also pistachio that was subtly rich and nutty. The tiramisu had a light sprinkling of cocoa powder across the top of its white peaks and decorated with a few lady fingers. There were things I didn’t understand like the Moringa leaf, non-descriptive names like Marron and Gift, and less commonly found flavours such as ginger and bitter chocolate. The crème caramel oozed a dark reddish brown sweet liquid and the fragola contained strawberry seeds in the icy pink sorbet.

In the Village

On Friday we left early because Isaac had invited me to spend the weekend with his family in the village he grew up, and a new chief was going to be installed. It was in the Central Region and would take over two hours to get there. We waited for Keziah, a girl from the office, as she was coming with us. However, after not answering her phone and not showing, Isaac said, “I think Keziah has disappointed us”. We picked up Isaac’s brother on our way out of the city. Keziah’s absence lowered my mood because I didn’t want to be the only guest and I had been looking forward to spending time with one of my female colleagues outside of work.

We pulled up at the petrol station and Isaac told me to hand over 80 cedis, which seemed like an incredible sum compared to other things here, and I started to feel a bit like I was funding their trip home. I experienced a lift when we past palm trees and the sea, giant coconut trees and small jungles of banana leaves. Excitement was hampered because I still felt drained of energy after being ill, and thought that I ought to be resting. I really wasn’t looking forward to being the honorary obruni in the village.

Greetings began as I’d expected- a number of people spying my arrival, some grinning with friends or shouting, “Obruni, hi”, a number of grubby handshakes as people were interrupted grounding cassava or in some other kind of manual labour. The village consisted of simple crumbling earthy houses surrounded by vegetation and dusty outdoor spaces with chickens pecking and small goats grazing on debris. There was the old church with children sitting on the wall outside, watching shyly. I was ushered in to various buildings to meet Isaac’s relatives. It was difficult to tell which of Isaac’s sisters were really sisters, and which were aunts and great aunts or cousins.

Isaac said it would be better if I went to meet the chiefs now, because at the ceremony the next day they would be too engaged in other activities. It was growing dark as we headed over to the ‘palace’, which turned out to be a slightly nicer crumbling old building, with a Romanesque feel as windows of the rooms around the square faced into the courtyard in the middle. There stood a simple throne on the far side of the square courtyard, made of animal skins and red leather. We were invited into one of the rooms on the right, and I was seated in between two gentlemen positioned opposite the door. The room swelled in the evening heat and the air was muggy. I tried to not let it overwhelm me that I was placed in a small stuffy room in a ring of men with an African chief sitting on the bed.

We returned to the house where Isaac grew up. In the dark and dirty yard with a cracked concrete floor, where there were moth-eaten kittens and lines of hand-washed laundry, I was given a chair, which was wiped down, and told we were having ‘rice’. I knew by now that this could mean I was having just about anything as an accompaniment to the rice. I felt agitated, if we were all going to sit around a communal bowl and eat together I would need to wash my hands. I was quite surprised after some time to be handed a very white and clean plate with a metal spoon with fluffy white rice and a simple salty onion omelette.

After saying my temporary adieus we left. On the drive to the guesthouse, it was very dark outside the car and definitely time for bed, but when I saw the clock on Isaac’s dashboard it said 7:30. After Isaac’s car headlamps had disappeared, in my room in the Guesthouse, I suddenly felt very alone. The bathroom seemed to look like the one in scene from ‘Psycho’ and there wasn’t a top sheet on the bed but a kind of itchy blanket. I turned on the TV, which the night guard had informed me only had one channel, and if I wanted to change it, I would have to ask at reception. An advert conveyed that at 8:00pm the following evening, ‘Nigeria’s Got Talent’ would be on. Then there was some incredibly cheesy Latin American series showing that I couldn’t work out which country it was from, but it would never be aired in England because our stomachs couldn’t take it.

Saturday

Isaac arrived at 8:00 to pick me up. I felt exhausted and thought I might rather stay in bed and read my book for the morning. But instead, I got in the car and was taken to his sister’s place. On the way, he informed me that Keziah had been admitted to hospital with stomach pains. It turned out she has a low blood count and would need to have tests.

The house was a few doors down from where we’d eaten the previous night. The walls were lined with posters of African women modelling different Ghanaian popular dresses. These are generally rather more flamboyant cousins of the Western dress, with extra frills, layers and locally patterned cotton. In the corner was an old-fashioned pedal sewing machine with a beautiful wooden base and black and gold metal body. I was introduced to two sisters. There was a young boy who gaped at me until his aunts made fun of him, and then someone handed me a toddler with cute hair bobbles on her head, pierced ears and a giggly grin. I sat her on my lap while everyone chatted. She ate from a bowl that had the word “かわいい” (“kawaii”) written on it in Japanese, which means cute and small. When eventually she clambered down, there was a little damp patch on my dress. I held the fabric up to my nose and confirmed that it was indeed urine. Isaac’s sister patted the toddler’s wet bottom, “Oh well,” she and Isaac said, “it will soon dry”.

After a while Isaac said he was leaving as he had some village matters to attend to. I should stay there and rest as the ceremony wouldn’t be until 2:00 in the afternoon. I was really quite relieved as I wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere, and they put down a slim mattress on the floor for me to lie on in the living room. The TV was on and we lay silently watching a Ghanaian soap opera on the old box TV. The actors were speaking in English. A man with a sex addiction enjoyed making women pregnant and had seemingly impregnated most of the women in the village. Then he started doing it while they were sleeping and helped out infertile husbands. Then he had to admit to all the women what he’d done and explain himself to the village priest. Another guy confessed to his wife he was gay. By the end the protagonist wished she could “turn back the hand of time”, but concluded, “it’s all wishes now”. Despite all the drama on screen, I was relatively relaxed, though I didn’t sleep. Then we watched an Indian movie about a high-profile Brahmin girl who falls in love with her bodyguard until it was time to walk over to the procession.

The ceremony wavered between being extremely interesting- with the display of traditional outfits and shaking hands with the chiefs as they paraded around the square- to tedious, as ceremonies often are drawn out, and I couldn’t understand any of the Twi coming through the microphone. I noted that the programme read ‘chief enstoolment’, which didn’t conjure nice connotations.

Children dancing with beads around their ankles and under the knees wearing orange and brown dress came to lay handkerchiefs on the knees of people in the crowd. Drums with metal edges instructed their movements like the Pied piper. If you wanted to dance with the children you get up with the handkerchief and mirror their movements. If you don’t feel up to it, you have to lay out some money for them to take. I got up to dance and was led into the middle of the square trying to imitate the dancers in time to the music. I felt conscious that there were a lot of eyes on me, but I decided it was best to not make eye contact with anyone and thus I was impenetrable to their gazes. The floor beneath my feet was of reddish beige sandy earth, with ageing huts made of crumbly clay bricks all around. Everyone got their camera phones out.

Isaac’s brother, Sammy, revealed that Isaac had once been invited to be a village chief- appointment was down to hereditary matters and election based on personal merit. But he’d felt he was too young to take up the responsibility at the time and it may be a possibility later. One of the chiefs came over to shake my hand, and then he asked me if I’d like to share his hut that night instead of staying in the guesthouse. I leaned in towards Sammy and asked,
“Is he serious?”
“Yes, he’s serious”.
I thanked the chief for his kind offer and said that I was quite settled into my room in the guest house, but how about next time. Now I just had to make sure I never came back, or at least that my next visit outlived him.

The light was fading as the chiefs retreated to the palace and the crowds dispersed, leaving only empty water sachets as evidence of the festivity. The moon was set at half mast, which indicated I’d been in Ghana for about five weeks.

The moon takes on a more powerful presence in the sky here than at home, which is probably down to the lack of street likes, making it brighter and more luminous. It’s also a different shape, which makes it more noticeable and shifts shape from bottom to top rather than right to left. Leonard says in German when the moon waxes and wanes they say it is losing or gaining weight. Being in Africa somehow makes you more aware of your mortality, which is reflected in the moonlight and you gain a sense of the vitality of being a part of the Earth.

“Tomorrow we will buy a goat and slaughter it, and you will see how it’s done”, Isaac announced in the car on the way to the lodge.
“Umm, OK”.

Sunday

Isaac and Sammy came for me at six o’clock. Although with the firm belief that if you’re going to eat meat, it’s better not to be hypocritical about the death of an animal, now on the other side of twenty five, the fervour of convictions in youth is already waning in favour of comfort, and I thought it might rather be preferable to stay in my room and read my book.

I was holding a baby when they brought the goat out. We were standing in the courtyard at Isaac’s family home. It was a small bush goat, and I thought it was probably best not to go over and pet it. I hoped the scene wouldn’t be too shocking and I drop the baby. With a huge blackened knife, Isaac’s nephew slit its throat and blood ran out. Then he started hacking its throat and I realised I was patting the baby in rhythm to the hacking, more for my own comfort than for the baby. The deed was done; the goat was now dead and the baby had soiled itself. The smell of goat blood and baby poo expanded and enriched the air.

The skins were too thin to use as leather, someone informed me, but they’re sweet to eat. So the animal was carried over to a fire outside and rotated, singing the hair. The smell of burning fur reminded me of the goats at the family farms in childhood that would chew on the feed and gobble the paper bag. Now furless, the animal was given two baths until it looked like a piglet and then placed on a mat of banana leaves and dissected.

I tried to explain that I only eat the meat and fleshy bits, but this seemed to discard most of the animal and as such appeared rather wasteful. Neck, head, legs, intestines, liver, heart and lungs were laid out ready to be washed. We drank coffee and ate McVities Rich Tea biscuits imported from Manchester that Isaac had brought from the city, while one of the sisters set about cleaning the intestines. Isaac looked over and said that was his favourite part.

I went with Sammy to look at the community food garden. It was like a permaculture haven. I could see that okra grew from the nectar of a giant yellow flower, and that the difference between banana and plantain is that the banana trees are taller and the bunches have a purple dragon tails. There were garden eggs that I’d never seen before, and I tasted raw peanut for the first time. They are root-like and wet before they are dried, salted and toasted. There were huge racks of cocoa beans drying in the sun, and when you crack open one of the pieces it’s a deep shade of purple and smells like cooking chocolate. After collecting the plantain, we had to take it back to the house:

Then Sammy, Isaac and some others took me to see their cocoa farm. We walked through the jungle, and Isaac pointed out a tree which is indigenous only to Ghana and Israel and produces a kind of pod that smells spicy like cinnamon. I didn’t know I didn’t know what a pineapple plant looked like, but apparently I didn’t. Only one fruit grows on each plant and it takes about six months for it to grow. I gained a new appreciation for the amount of tender care nature takes in producing one of these delicacies for us to eat. I tried to recall some of the things I’d been taught in school, but the source of our food, and ultimately our survival, was not one of them. It was pleasing to see all of the cocoa trees lined up, each with about five or six orangey red pods. One of the men spotted a large crab disappearing under a log and fetched it out with a big knife. He weakened it, but kept it alive so it would stay fresh for longer.

As we arrived back at the courtyard, I saw the cat with a giant red and blue lizard in its mouth disappearing under one of the tables. Rather than putting me off eating the goat, the morning’s experience had been more affirming in assuring that all parts of the animal were essentially the same, and since I’d seen the intestines etc. being properly washed, I tried to think of them as no less edible. In the end I didn’t know what part of the goat I was eating when the soup was brought out, and we had it with fufu, which is pounded cassava. It didn’t seem to matter that much as it all tasted the same and it all tasted good in the subtly rich and spicy sauce. The crab was floating on top of the dish, and Isaac told me to eat its shell, legs and all because it contained a lot of calcium.

In the afternoon, two new women arrived; one was very old and frail with no teeth and her skin drooped. Isaac introduced her as his grandmother’s sister. He said that she had once been married to a white man who had come to Ghana to help build the road that went past their village and they had fallen in love. The man had since passed away. It was only later when Sammy mentioned the road had been built by Koreans that I realised the man had been from Korea. I suppose comparatively speaking, Koreans are still very white, and genetically are a lot more similar to Caucasians.

As we were leaving, I finally felt relaxed in the village. I then knew it had been heart-warming to have spent time with Isaac’s family. We went home via Khakoum, which is a forest reserve and you can walk on a rope platform above the trees. It was really cool to have a pie-eye view of the nature below and see great lengths of jungle spread into the horizon. I appreciated the drive past the beautiful coast as we headed back to Accra.

When I got home, the Senegalese guys were busy dissecting two sheep on the balcony. This now seemed completely normal. Troels, Ivan and Scottish Katie were there and had just come back from an adventure looking sun-crisp. They’d gone on Friday night to some town where the guesthouse was full and ended up sleeping on the floor of the house of one of the ladies in the market. The next day they’d taken a ferry at 6:00am for 12 hours up the river somewhere. They’d helped a fisherman catch his batch at some point and eaten fresh fish, and they’d spent a night in beach huts in a gorgeous location by the sea. By now the mutton was in the oven, with the meaty bits and the ribs on the top shelf and the organs were neatly laid out on a baking tray below, sizzling nicely. 

Total Eclipse of the Heart and Partially the Sun

On Sunday it was good to do nothing. I woke at 5:00am and wrote and wrote. At 11:00 I could take my medicine. At 1:30 we sat together in Mummy’s courtyard and through special glasses watched the moon slowly, slowly, eclipse the sun.

It was like the rays had the same strength as before but there were fewer of them and the courtyard became dimmer and dimmer. The orange segment moved from the right to the bottom to the left top corner, almost disappearing but then coming back a full burning orb, enlightening the earth below once again. Isaac had said that, “after the moon and the sun make love, the earth becomes very hot”.

At 3:00 Isaac came to take me to meet Frank and collect my wood carving. I was impressed, it was well cut and had a nice glossy black finish, and the sides were tinged red which made it more striking. It was up to date too, with the separation of South Sudan marked on. We went to the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) trade centre, with stalls selling crafts from all across West Africa. Frank was still sizing me up for marriage. He wanted to know if I drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes.

Not really looking to buy, we retired after two market blocks to a café with plastic tables and chairs outside and ordered goat kebabs and Coca-Cola. After chatting for some time, Isaac conveniently had to go off somewhere to get something.

“So”, Frank began, “When are you going to come and visit me in Abury”?
I had to let him down gently. He sank deeper into his chair than I thought possible and stared hard at the market stands. The look of utter deflation was grander than I could bear to witness. I didn’t know what dreams and fabrications had been combusting, but they were vast and deep. Somehow the key to my heart admitted entrance to a fan of longings. His eyes drooped, his lips quivered; he sighed and wouldn’t talk, and stared at something far away.

He couldn’t be serious, how could he be serious? And where was Isaac? Slightly annoyed and overwhelmed by the drama and responsibility, I began, “You don’t even know me, we met once for 20 minutes. For some reason you want a white girl”.
“No”, he said. “I don’t care about the colour of your skin; it’s because when I see you I feel it in my heart”.
“Would you still love me if I was blue?”

I regretted it. Somehow, somehow, the feeling was genuine and I was mocking him. Were those tears?

The heart was totally eclipsed and I had to face the facts: I had made two boys cry in one weekend.

Isaac came back and I paid for the goat kebabs and the drinks, and we drove Frank to the bus station. He was so forlorn he forgot to say goodbye to Isaac. He rang Isaac in the car on the way home to apologise and say thank you. When I got home, I discovered Kati was back from Kumasi, and the prospect of female company seemed to make the sun linger in the sky a little longer.

Saturday Evening in the Hospital

When we got home after the beach, Troels, Ivan and I scooped up Leonard, piled into Ivan’s company car and drove to the pizza restaurant. We were stalled several times by the tired and bumpy engine. The setting was well-lit, the waitress was lovely and smiley, “I like your earrings”, I said. They were big and sparkly and lit up her face. But somehow I’d forgotten not to make that error. She quickly removed them and said, “now, they’re yours”. Eek, Ghanaian hospitality! It’s exceptionally rude to refuse. I got round it by saying, “I really like them on you; please, I don’t want to take them away”. The pizza was good, but I couldn’t eat it all. My chest was hurting now; I couldn’t sit comfortably.

In the car on the way home, every time we went over a bump I gave a little yelp with pain. Troels caught my face wincing in the rear-view mirror, “Guys I think it’s really bad”. Ivan turned round from driving and said that we should go to hospital. No, I didn’t think we needed to, it’s just the side effects of Mefloquine; it will go away tomorrow. I guess I didn’t want to give everyone the hassle of waiting at the hospital, pay another series of expenses, and then have the embarrassment of being told to go away again.

We arrived back at Mummy’s place and again the discussion of the hospital was brought up. Leonard concluded, “If you are in Europe you can say- let’s see how you feel in the morning- but here, you might be dead by morning”. It seemed a little dramatic, but since we had all received news from Ivan this week of a 26 year old French embassy worker who’d been found dead after two days in his own vomit, it also felt plausible. OK let’s just wait 20 minutes and see. I’ll make a decision. After 10 minutes Ivan found me crunched in pain on the sofa and so we piled in a taxi and went off to hospital.

It was the same process- payment followed by waiting outside the doctor’s door with the receipt. I was called in. The doctor kept a determinedly vacant expression throughout his examination.
“Is it bad that I mixed the anti-malaria medication?” I asked.
“For now, it’s OK”.
The words were utterly meaningless. Troels interpreted it later as, “yes it’s really bad, but there’s nothing you can do about it now so don’t worry about it”.

The doctor sent me to the lab for a malaria test. I had to queue at the kiosk to pay for it first. A sample of my blood was taken and we would have to wait one hour for the result. It felt like a very long hour. We walked slowly to an ice-cream place next door, the pain was intensifying and walking was difficult. There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of wondering why you’re ill.

I really appreciated their willingness to come with me and sit for over two hours. Through boredom they had become quite amusing. The series of jokes kept resulting in us all laughing, except that for me the movement in my ribs caused excruciating pain which made me panic slightly and the panic made me stop being able to breathe, which worried me more, and I would have to bite my arm or walk away and not look at any of them. The expression “cracking up” had never really meant so much.

Ivan turned to me and said in his French accent, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand how, if you are now taking two malaria medications, ‘how you can possibly have malaria?”

I went to retrieve the results from the lab and brought back the sheet and waited again outside the doctor’s room. I was holding the answer, but despite Leonard checking over the boxes closely at length with German precision, its contents were meaningless to us. There were two people ahead of me in the queue.

In the medical examination room, the doctor looked at the paper with a blank face and started writing. I sat patiently and he kept on writing.
“Excuse me, but what is the result?”
“The result is as I thought when I first examined you”
“Ah, yes?” My fists were quite tightly clenched.
“You have a chest infection… the result for malaria is negative”.

Relief spread through me thawing the tension from the top of my head to the ends of my fingers. A chest infection! It explained everything over the past month- the fatigue, the blocked ears, the goose bumps and odd feverish spell, the almost passing out with exercise, the cough that hadn’t yet gone away, the acid feeling in my throat, the mouth ulcers, the headaches and now the excruciating pain in my chest. The vomiting was food poisoning, the stomach ache was chilli and the rash was probably the Mefloquine. Each morsel of unexplained occurrence was deliciously accounted for.

Sometimes it’s knowledge we crave above all else. As a race we don’t do well without answers. But unlike the existence of our universe, I was holding the answer to this and it’s antidote in the sweaty palm of my hand. I took the slip of paper he gave me to the clerk to pay and then to the mini onsite pharmacist window where I saw the clerk had written someone else’s name on my form and I had to go and change it and then come back again for the medicine. I had an injection for the pain, in a little room called ‘injections’, but I had to wake the nurse up first who was in a deep sleep lying on the counter and I had to shout quite loudly, which was difficult.

I came back and found Leonard sitting in a wheelchair close to the entrance next to an amused Ghanaian couple and he was pointing out some of his grey hairs to them. My ribs rocked with silent laughter; finally we could all go home and sleep.

And just as the episode was coming to an end, I became slowly aware, like a clam opening on a rock, that the intensifying pain in my mouth wasn’t an ulcer but a wisdom tooth coming through jagged and jutting into the inside of my cheek. A new chapter was simply beginning.

An Interlude with the Killing of the Cat

I was quite amused to arrive at Mummy’s place the other day to a lively argument between one of the Senegalese guys, Aboo, and a Ghanaian girl. The man turned to me, outraged with disbelief, and said, not quite getting the word right, ‘They killed a cake; right in the street, I saw them earlier, they slit its throat’. After taking some seconds to realise that the cake was a cat, I understood that some people in the street had closed in on the furry street prowler and committed the deed on our road to prepare it for cat soup.

‘Your people are animals’, he declared. The Ghanaian girl was standing her ground, ‘you eat snake in Senegal’. ‘A snake is not a pet’, he cried.  Not accustomed to eating either cat or snake, as a traveller from the West, with the vigour of our ancestral explorers, we tend to get our knife and fork ready for anything. Additionally, political correctness and a modern trend of inclusiveness and self-critique have made us limp opinionators. As a blog writer, I felt more of an impulse to document the killing of the cat and to write about it later rather than comment on the killing itself.

As far as I could see, the people who were hungry seemed to benefit from both having streets cleared of stray animals and some fresh meat on the table. The only party that truly didn’t benefit of course was the poor cat. Personally, I was very glad that I hadn’t witnessed the event or seen the pot of cat soup.

Beach Time and Kenkey

On Saturday I had arranged again to go with Nana and Kassa to Kokrobite beach. Kati was on a business trip to Kumasi this week, and so Ivan and Troels to joined us.

“This malaria medication is killing me”, I thought. “It’s like utter poison”. The pain in my chest hadn’t gone away, my mouth felt full of several ulcers and my throat felt like it had a light bulb in it. My instinct was to stop taking it. It’s quite interesting being faced with the choice between your current health and physical being and the likelihood of a future tropical disease. Leonard, Ivan and Troels had all opted for not taking it for this reason. They think the medication itself is worse than malaria.

We went to go swimming, but Nana and Kassa stayed behind because they can’t swim. It’s incredible that even something as simple as swimming could be such a privilege. The ability to float and push out your arms and legs until you move out to sea, all the time with the security of knowing you can just repeat the activity to come back again and battle the waves if necessary. Without it the water would instill a deep fear and unknown nemesis.

Swimming in the sea is generally my favourite thing, but this time it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I could sense that the activity made you need to breathe more and expand your lungs widely to let the air in but it cramped too much. The complex activity of inhaling and exhaling, which the body achieves unconsciously, now became something I had to think quite carefully about. And the current was too strong, and you had to swim against it like a treadmill to avoid being washed down the beach.

When we arrived back on sand, our Ghanaian friends had bought us kenkey; and in true Ghanaian hospitality, wouldn’t accept any money for it. Kenkey is ground corn wrapped in banana leaves, which yellows it and gives it an interesting flavour. We had it with dried fish, spicy beans and a chilli and onion salsa. I find it interesting that people describe the starchy food before the others.
“What did you have for dinner?”
“Rice”
It’s not important that they had curry or fish or whatever with the rice. For us we describe the protein.
“I had chicken” or “We chose the fish dish”.

Later I walked to the end of the beach and Nana accompanied me. Nana took off his shoes and left them next to a small fishing boat while we continued our walk. Security in a country is often a matter of feeling it out gradually rather than something you can easily ask specific questions about or gauge upon arrival. I’m not even sure I’d trust my shoes to still be there after twenty minutes in England, or five seconds in South Africa.

Further down the beach Nana tried to put his arm around me. “Oh no”, I thought, wriggling free, “Not you too! You were doing so well”. I had said to Kati how nice it was to have some genuine local friends with whom you could get past the small talk. The mellow walk back was appeased only by the incredible deep purple sky with clouds behind the orange orb, lit up with red flames.

The Multinational Raving Peacekeeping Unit

Work is getting tedious as I spend time in the office with no windows, transferring data onto the online system, writing Chairman’s CV and try to develop an internal flow of communications strategy.

The only eventful thing that happened last week at work was that I was taken for lunch by a colleague. It’s an eatery that’s really popular with FR staff and looks like a small canteen inside. I took one of the only available menus on offer: okra soup. Not a massive fan of okra anyway because of its somewhat gloopy consistency, the challenge was intensified with the addition of cow stomach stew. It was OK when I started off when I was hungry, some rich spices compensated for the jelly strings and I ignored the crunchy bits in the meat, but gradually it became an ordeal as I dipped the banku in the sauce and tried to grab at the spicy soup with my hands. Colleagues were looking at me with interest, and so gagging was not an option. I tried to let the fact I was eating fermented food with cow insides wash over me and contemplated how we are cultured into only eating certain things.

I quite enjoyed giving Isaac an olive from the foreign food shop in the car the other day. After a few minutes I turned to him and saw the majority of the olive was still outside his mouth and he’d only tenderly chewed on a mere corner of it. Chicken gizzards and offal are so popular here that they’re actually imported to Ghana from Europe. Nana says that he likes Tilapia head so much he could almost leave the fish body.

Still experiencing the acidy feeling in my throat and after sleeping about 13 hours one night, I went to the pharmacist to ask about changing the anti-malaria medicine. I explained the effects of the doxycycline and she suggested I take one Mefloquine tablet to test if it was any better. She assured me it would start working straight away and it wasn’t a problem to mix the two drugs.

Over the week a rash came; it started on my left leg and spread to my arms. It wasn’t worryingly purple or anything, but my skin was irritated. Then came a pain in my chest just under my left rib. I rushed to a different pharmacy to read the Mefloquine instructions and saw that indeed it was a side-effect. The pharmacist assured me it wasn’t a problem to just return to the first medicine (the doxycycline).

Everything was relatively under control. Friday night came along and with it Halloween in Accra. Not generally celebrated here, the expat community gathered for a party at an American’s house. It was a multinational raving peacekeeping unit on the roof; people from all over were united by one substance that has lubricated such affairs for centuries: alcohol.  I quite soon realised the situation required one to stay relatively sober and not to stand too close to the edge. New partygoers would arrive, take in the scene above them, take a picture and then start up the ladder. It was a relatively good outcome overall as only one person fell off the roof in the night and ended up in hospital.

Wli Falls and the Volta Region

And so ventured an English(wo)man, an Irishman, a Frenchman, a German, a Dane and a Canadian lady at 5:00 am to the trotro station. Share taxis were haphazardly parked in seemingly unarranged slots in a dirt arena, lined by hectic market stalls and people busily preparing for the day ahead. We were exceptionally lucky to pile in the back of the 12 seater people carrier to Hohoe and take the back two rows for ourselves. The seats were unusually comfy and the rust was reduced to just a few peeking corners of chair legs.

We were off to the Volta region and a beautiful waterfall at Wli. With the thrill of leaving the city, I barely even noticed the bumpy ride or lamented the fact I wouldn’t be able to nap. A moment of sleep would have meant missing the natural beauty that was emerging on either side of the bus from the city behind us. Suddenly there were farms, luscious mango trees and children playing in front of simply constructed huts.

We changed to a taxi at Hohoe. At Wli we set our things down in a sweet, bright and simple guest house where there were chickens pecking on the lawn outside. Our hike to the waterfalls started through some low-lying mangroves. Our guide was keen to point out the purple pineapples and the trees which grow up and around and slowly suffocate the original dweller. Then we started to ascend. We ascended 500 meters fairly quickly. I was sweating more than ever and was aware that I didn’t feel good. The acid feeling in my throat lingered.

Leonard was talking to me but I couldn’t hear him. I could see dots and a vein in my head was throbbing. I felt a little panicked. I just didn’t really understand how I could have run a triathlon just over three weeks ago and now ascending several hundred meters was making me feel the need to pass out. At 850 meters we reached the top falls. I couldn’t work out if it had been worth it or not, but I enjoyed the sensation of fresh water spray splashing my face and soaking my clothes all the same. We sat down to eat some bananas and peanuts.

The way down was considerably easier, although the use of those muscles turns your legs to jelly. At the bottom was our reward, the huge pool of freshwater that had water coming over the edge at the top of the cliff behind and crashed into the bottom depths. The scene was surrounded by mountains and rocks. We all waded into the water.  Closer to the falls the spray was so intense you couldn't keep your eyes open. After enjoying the swim, everyone scrambled back to shore. I surveyed the scene and then suddenly wondered where Kati was. Several bats circulated around the cliff sides.Then I saw her come out of the waterfall with a tall muscular man.

When they reached us, we exchanged greetings and he introduced himself as a Togolese border guard.
“I like your friend very much”, he announced to Troels, Leonard, Colm and Ivan and requested their permission to take her out to dinner that evening.
Kati interrupted and said, “I have a husband!”
Oh, but that wouldn’t be a problem, he assured her; the husband was very far away… Then he challenged Troels, who is very large, to a press-ups match. He quite quickly and evidently won and retuned to Kati’s side, “now we can go for dinner?”
“Well, I still have a husband, and so it will not be possible”.
Eventually he saw she may have some genuine feeling behind the rejection and turned to me, “You, what about you? Are you married?”
So evidently the second favourite, and finding lying quite difficult, I supposed now was a supreme moment to practice, “Yes, I have a husband”. He turned back to Kati. I was becoming both quite perplexed and full of admiration of her smiling countenance and warm responses as she humoured him. She had this charming smile that reflected the light of the waterfall and lit up the surrounding mountains. By now my brow was lowered, a scowl was surfacing and it took some effort not to burst forth with the following oration, “Enough! Away with you and your parasitic effusions! Return to the Togolese border and harass us no further”. Then the Togolese border guard turned to the men and asked permission to take out both Kati and I. It was time to leave.

That evening we went to a German-owned lodge to eat. The grass was kept trim and a huge dog bounded about the premises begging anyone who’d look at him to play football. The waterfall stretched tall upon the mountain in the background and fell behind some pretty pink and purple flowers. The sun fell and we sat down to an unusually European feast of spaghetti bolognaise and curried sausages.

The next day we took a trotro to a neighbouring village where we had heard there were some caves. The trotro dropped us at the local tourism office. 

The price would be 6 cedi per person for a guide to take us up the hillside to the caves. When the guide arrived, he told us that the price was now 8 cedi. Unable to really protest over what was beyond our control, Leonard and I handed over the incremented amount. When it came to Ivan’s turn to pay, he enquired, ‘is the price still 8 cedi or has it gone up since my friends paid’?

It involved more climbing. Somehow I felt slightly better than the previous day, although climbing in the heat was still taxing. The caves were cool and some involved climbing. The guard showed us where people used to live, sleep and hold conferences in the dark clammy quarters. In one cave, full of bats, we only noticed in Leonard’s picture afterwards, that there was an incredibly large and hairy spider that probably could have snatched the life from any one of us if disturbed.

On the trotro back to Hohoe, the van was filled with so many people that the money collector had to balance outside of the van and hold onto the roof. Kati counted 29 people including babies. We changed to a different vehicle at Hohoe and travelled back to Accra, winding around potholes and avoiding oncoming vehicles. When the bus stopped at the police check-point, ladies selling donuts and spicy yam chips on their heads rushed over, and men holding barbequed giant land-snail kebabs waved them temptingly by the van windows.

The light faded until a curtain of darkness enveloped our tro tro. On the main road, as we were closing in on Accra, our headlamps lit up a pile of people at the roadside. And down the bank I could see there was a car upside down and on its roof. There were flames licking the back seats and I saw to my horror that there were people still inside. The van stopped and we all rushed out. Fifteen people or so were pushing the car until it was righted again and the fire was extinguished.

Our driver hailed his passengers back to the vehicle. As we moved off, we were informed that the driver of the car was dead. And just like that the light is out. We couldn’t help but think about his family and children that had been left behind. It was a morose car that moved its sombre passengers slowly back into the city centre that was still grinding its machine and puffing smoke high into the sky.

The bus driver evidently knew some back roads to avoid traffic, and it was down one of these dark lanes that a group of kids had set a line of rocks across the street and wouldn’t move their barricade until the driver gave them a tip. Eventually he got out and chased them with a stick. The journey had seemed to take a very long time, and from the bus station we took a taxi home and as I got out, I felt released from the car like a butterfly leaving its chrysalis.

Vivid Dreams and Hypochondria

The malaria pills are driving me nuts; vivid dreams see me chasing Ryanair flights with never-ending obstacles, friends dying of strange illnesses and unexplained events that take a long time to play out.

Since leaving Aburi Gardens a few weeks ago, I had received about 15 missed calls and 9 un-responded-to text messages from Frank the woodblock artist by Monday last week. They were all fairly benign, “hello Fiona, how are you?”; “How is work today?”; “to day I am not feeling fine”. By Monday evening I was losing my rag. I had given him my number because he was carving me something, but this was now bordering on insanity. When the phone buzzed again and the detail “Frank Aburi” flashed  across the screen, I looked at Kati and said, “right, that’s it…”; I seized my phone to write a purposeful response, but the message read, “Am doing your work maybe will finish it tomorrow. Will call you”. I sighed and went to bed.

I had fallen asleep on my phone and was awoken at 4:37 by the phone vibrating in the small of my back to a text message from Frank, which read “Fiona, to day is my birthday”. I rolled over and fell back asleep and when I awoke and moved onto my side, I saw that an army of ants had taken over the left side of my bed. I suspected the cleaner had sprayed bug spray, as something had caused the wings to fall off some flying insects which had then fallen on my bed. The bodies, however, still wiggled along like worms until they slowly perished. Several of these bodies had been captured by the ants that, in silent teamwork, were transporting them to some barracks somewhere. My stomach hurt from chillies the night before and felt like a little monster was trying to crawl out through the front wall. I lay there until Isaac came to take me to hospital.

The fatigue had become a point of worry, and I was starting to suspect that it might be down to side effects from the anti-malaria medicine, as the feeling of an acid lump in my throat- a known side-effect of the Doxycycline- had become a constant. The protocol is to queue at a grubby little cashier every time you need something new. It was a bit like a health duke box. First I needed to see a doctor, so I took my receipt and queued outside the doctor’s door. I explained the symptoms. Next I had to go and pay again at the cashier and take the receipt to the lab test, where they took a sample of my blood and I had to sit and wait for an hour for the results. Then I had to go back to the doctor, though having already been inside meant I could push in the queue. The doctor looked at the results, told me I was fine and recommended that I take multi-vitamins.

Great. Fours hours had gone by and I had discovered I was paranoid; I was suffering from hypochondria.

Gelato

I have a crush on a Senagalese gelato-maker called Bary. Bary handed me an ice-cream cone yesterday as I sat in the back yard seating area in a new wicker chair whilst the other workers continued to prepare the restaurant that will open on Monday. Boxes and wrapping lay across the newly tiled floor and in the background I could spy a clay pizza oven. Everything is clean with a modern edge, and native flowers have been planted next to a painted wall with small pebbles tucked around the stems. The faint smell of woodchip and plaster blended with vanilla and stracciatella filled the shaded retreat.

Bary and his Senegalese friends are shyer and more demure than their Ghanaian counterparts and they speak Wolof, which is like Arabic, and French. Bary says that Senegal is much more beautiful than Accra. He says the sea is blue as blue and the sand is white. Sometimes he swims 8km to a small island out into the sea. I tried to imagine swimming 8km, but I think I’ve only ever swum just under 2.

Bary says that if I marry him I will have to live in Senegal because he will not live in England. He also says that he is allowed up to 4 wives. People say that there are times when a girl shouldn’t lose her head when it comes to men. I think that this is one of those times as I imagine a life ahead as one of four of Bary’s wives by a beautiful blue sea taking on a new spiritual existence in prayer five times a day facing a mecca I’ve never been to. This seems to contrast quite distinctly from the English framework of reading the Guardian paper on Sunday and preparing a roast dinner. I think for now I’m content with ice-cream and the promise of freshly baked pizza.

Epitaph to a Cockroach

After making several appearances during my morning shower, I decided to name the cockroach Philip. Everyone else has seen Philip too, so he isn’t very bashful. He has very long antennae. Apparently some cockroaches can fly. I hoped Philip wasn’t one of that kind, but I made sure not to disturb him so he could go about his business.

Katie told me the news before we arrived home and when I went to shower I saw indeed it was true: Philip had been decapitated. His body lay limp on the bath’s edge. What was mostly worrying was that his head was nowhere to be seen. My new conditioner, imported from the Arab world, was positioned next to him. Could this be the tool in question? Troles denied all charges under Kati’s questioning. Leonard is a vegetarian, and if his stance towards living creatures extends, is an unlikely culprit.

We went out that evening and when we arrived back Troels returned from the washroom to say that Philip’s body was now missing and a mouse poo lay in its place. I didn’t realise mice were so opportunistic and carnivorous. They must also be pretty foolhardy to leave such blatant evidence at the scene of a crime. Leonard assures us that he has since seen another cockroach and named him Pedro.

A Busy Weekend and some Ghanaian Friends

Friday

While I write, someone is busy drilling the door back onto the Financial Republic Santa Maria Branch front of house. As it turns out someone drove into the shop front (somehow) yesterday evening and broke it. The entire security gate was also bent in. Although already developing a fine burnt amber rust, the metal gate isn’t being replaced, but is being bashed back into shape with metal tools. The sound of metal striking metal has reached a constant. Both the director and another chap had to sleep in the branch overnight for security reasons and are now napping next to me in the office while the air conditioning struggles to combat the 30°C heat and 66% humidity coming in from outside.

I’m busy developing a human resources database to store staff information using the computer software I may or may not have learnt much about during our IT training session last week.

Since writing the above, I received a text from a German girl called Sophie asking me if I wanted to go to her leaving drinks that night at Container. She had been interning at a permaculture centre near Aburi Gardens and would be returning to her studies in Germany. Container is a bar on Oxford Street that consists of a sprawl of tables across the side of the road next to a shack selling beer. There are canopies above advertising different Ghanaian beers, Stone, Star and Club. We sat at one of the plastic tables with a group of people Sophie had gathered while she was here. There was a large Norwegian lady with a Rastafari local boyfriend. I sat down next to Kati and a shy boy with a sprouting beard and slim baby dreads who introduced himself as Nana. Sophie’s friends were interesting and well educated, and it was nice to meet some men who were laidback and not just interested in pronouncing their undying love for you. Nana’s friend, Kassa, writes articles for a football magazine about African matches. Both are thinking about starting an NGO.

While we were sitting, some street performers came and began performing acrobatics in the road. They didn’t seem fazed turning summersaults and executing flexibility stunts on the floor where two minutes beforehand there had been a stream of cars; likewise, the cars seemed quite happy to squeeze past without the usual excess of tooting. It was probably one of the most impressive displays of informal gymnastics I’d seen; street kids ran to their teacher and spun summersaults from his shoulders; they tucked their legs under their ears so they were shaped like mini planets and tossed through the air like flying saucers, untangling in mid-flight. When they came to collect money from viewers, I caught myself thinking that if they could go to Europe for a summer they’d probably make a killing to come back with and get off the streets. Katie suggested I go up to them and ask if they’ve ever considered opening a savings account.

I went to dance with our Danish flatmate, Troels. There were huge speakers emitting thumping Nigerian hip-hop, which got your hips moving before you entered the sweaty dance space where couples were grinding to the beats. Troels was a necessary barrier to grabbing hands and amorous advances; although he himself needed a fair bit of help batting away unsolicited dance partners.

Back to the table I sat down next to a guy wearing a beanie with long dreads appearing from underneath. After saying I was from London, he commented, “Ah, I have a lot of sisters in London”.
“A lot of sisters?” I hadn’t heard the phrase before…
“I have seven sisters in total and four are in London”.

I think that if anyone wants to think of development issues in this city, they may want to think about introducing a family planning service. Isaac says that it’s a matter of education, and that people have to be taught how to think ahead about the financial costs of large families. On the radio I overhear discussions which indicate the number of babies here is also down to socialisation- women are under a lot of social pressure to produce babies. Couples who don’t have a baby within the first year of marriage are frowned upon and couples who can’t conceive entirely can suffer enormously from censure from friends and family. Women are often asked quite soon after the birth of their first child when the second one is coming and so on.

We ended up going to another club around the corner. At first the bouncers wouldn’t let me in with flip-flops. Someone came to my assistance and argued on my behalf and I was allowed to enter. The venue itself could be anywhere. It was classy with a white modern bar and tiled flooring and a raised dance area. It was the highest ratio of foreigners to Ghanaians I’d seen so far. There was a group of German students and some Lebanese business advisors. It wasn’t very big but there were strobe lights and a smoke machine all the same.

After a while I realised it is possible after all to have a bit too much fun. I decided to retreat. Nana and Kassa gave me a ride home. Nana had his dinner waiting for him on the back seat in a polystyrene box.
“Have you eaten Tilapia” he asked?
“No”
“You should have some. The banku will stop you getting a hangover. It’s the best thing for a hangover”. Despite not having drunk that much, I took his word for it.
We sat on the bench outside Mummy’s place and tore bits of fish off the bones with our hands. We took lumps of the ground up and beaten cassava and grabbed at the tomato and onion salsa. It was the freshest thing I’d eaten so far and probably far better than a kebab and chips at 4:00am.

Saturday

On the Saturday Isaac came to take Kati and I again to Aburi Gardens. I hadn’t expected to return so soon but there was an important cultural festival and there would be dancing.

There was a procession as chiefs were carried on thrones up the path through the town. Each was accompanied by a set of attendants, some held enormous adorned umbrellas to shade them, others fanned giant leaves to make a gentle wind and behind were some strong men bearing large drums on their shoulders. The chiefs were laden with so much gold (each generation chief has to contribute something new to display their wealth) that they probably wouldn’t have been able to walk under the weight of it anyway. Thick bracelets, gorgeous crowns with golden leaves carved into the sides and shapes like jewels on black velvet. One chief had a golden staff with some kind of bird in gold leaf at the top. Ghana did used to be called the Gold Coast under British rule and this was the first evidence of its abundance.

Everyone formed a square on the grass, some people had chairs. There was a microphone to the right next to a podium. One of the president’s chef advisors was going to make a speech. Everyone shuffled expectantly, waiting for the remaining Ashanti chiefs to arrive. The rains came without warning. Everyone squashed under canopies. A silver Rolls Royce rocked up in the centre of the grass square, ready to administer someone important to the canopy of chiefs. However the car wheel began to skid in the mud and couldn’t get to the red carpet. A serious looking security guard dressed in black with dark sunshades and a multi-coloured umbrella ran to assist. Bored of waiting for something to happen, we eventually left in seek of sustenance. The rains quenched, and at the café onsite we sat outside and ordered some drinks. A young man came over selling some hand painted cards. They were really good so after sorting through them I bought several. It turned out the guy had helped carve the tree stump that we had seen on Tuesday with his brother. He showed me some of his carvings and, liking his designs, I commissioned him to make me a wooden map of Africa to hang on the wall.

The young man introduced himself as Frank. He sat down beside me,
“I really like you”, he said as soon as he was seated. Declarations and praise come as hard and fast as the rains in Ghana.
“Here we go”, I thought.
“You know, you’re really nice. I want you to be my wife”.
By this time Isaac’s food had arrived and he offered me a chicken drumstick. I took it and proceeded to start eating it.
Frank leaned in closer, “I realllly like you. I do. I really mean it”. He spoke in a mellow tone and his eyes were soft.
I nodded and then tried to reach a hard-to-get piece of chicken from between the bones with my teeth. Frank smiled, “you’re really beautiful”, he said.
One of Frank’s friends had moved in sat down next to Katie.
Katie addressed me, “Fiona, you have some chicken around your mouth”.
“Thanks, Katie”. I wiped around, “has it gone”?
“It’s on your chin”.
“You’re really, really nice”, Frank murmured deeply. “Do you go to Church”?
“No”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know”
“Ohhhh Fiona, Oh Fiona, Fiona... You need to start going to Church now, because we will need to have our marriage blessed in a church and you will need to bring our children up well”.
“I’ll bare it in mind”.
“You are too good”
“Thanks”.

They escorted us back to the car making sure that no harm came to us along the way and checking the movement of oncoming cars, carts and people leaving the festival grounds. Isaac didn’t seem to mind that we’d both acquired life partners in the last 15 minutes. Eventually back in the car I wound the window up and watched as the foggy town got smaller and smaller at the top of the hill, leaving the gold-laden African chiefs, the party-goers and our lovers behind.  

Sunday

The next day I was pleased to have a lie-in. At 12:00 Kati and I took a taxi to meet Nana and Kassa at the bus station where they were waiting for us with Kassa’a car to take a trip to Kokrobite (prn. Kok-ro-beet-ay) Beach. It took about an hour to get there. As we left the city, the traffic thinned and the air became cleaner; I stuck my head out of the window at the back like a puppy and soaked my face in sunlight as the car sped along creating a strong breeze.

As we turned a corner along a long sandy red dirt track, beyond several low-lying houses there it was, finally: paradise. Palm trees lined the edges of finely ground yellow sand; beach huts rested beneath banana leaves and travellers’ dens housed fresh juice, vegetarian food and hippy paraphernalia. We enjoyed the afternoon just sitting on sandy wooden stools at a beach café where we ate yam balls and drank Guinness, which wasn’t Guinness but some strong tasting malt beer. At some point I wandered down the stretch of beach, past the area of leathery expats and sweaty travellers, past some housing on the left and groups of Ghanaian families. Towards the end of the beach I started to sense I’d come quite far and should be getting back. The sun was setting and the sky took on a deep orangey-purple. But it looked far away. A solution arrived as a man rode past me with a horse. I climbed aboard and trotted/cantered gingerly back to the others.  

On the way home to top off the perfect weekend the car pulled over so I could get out and vomit. Contaminated substance: unknown. According to the Norwegian lady at Mummy’s place, who did a Master’s degree in bacteria, it can take anything between 24 hours and 2 weeks for it to surface. I vomited again the next morning and spent the day moving between the sofa indoors to the plastic chair in the yard. I read Troels’s book about pathogens and tropical diseases like dengue fever, whilst tending to a painful stomach and warding off the residual cold and contemplated that it’s hardly surprising development is challenged in a hostile environment where your own country is attacking you in this cancerous cloud of bacteria and parasites. One tends to inflate things when one is ill.

Abogbloshie and the third Branch

Thursday morning I asked Isaac to pick me up from Venus coffee shop. A short walk up a backstreet from my lodgings at Mummy’s place takes you to Oxford Street. Oxford Street is pretty much like its equivalent in London- if it weren’t for the lack of pavements, busy flow of traffic with unchecked exhausts and street vendors in addition to shops and restaurants.Oxford Street, and the surrounding area, called Ossu are where you are most likely to find foreigners. There are some recognisable chains like KFC, but mostly foreigners from all over the world have chosen here to set up independent restaurants. You can find a host of delicious food but can also expect to pay at least five times what you would for local food. We enjoyed a very tasty meal last Saturday at a classy Italian restaurant with a lantern-lit outside garden, but we paid 30 cedifor a pizza, compared to the 3 cedi I spend on red red, rice and plantain for my lunches.

I arrived at the main office in Santa Maria as usual and was told I would be visiting the office at Abogbloshie market. It takes a long time to drive anywhere in this city and sometimes I feel like I spend as much time in Isaac’s car as anywhere else. At traffic lights sellers come displaying anything from chewing gum to board games and bubble blowers to drums or t-shirts. Occasionally beggars, who unfortunately are usually old or physically disabled, move between vehicles hoping for a few cedi to get by another day. The typical African setting of women balancing clay pots on their heads walking along dirt tracks in serenity has progressed to women weaving through the traffic bearing baskets of kitchen utensils, including spatulas, tea-towels and pans resting upon their heads, or metal bowls piled high with sachets of water. They serve as a reminder that however countries or cultures evolve, they will never develop in quite the same way.

I knew we were getting close when the roadsides started to get more crowded with street vendors and fruit sellers, people choosing handmade leather shoes and cheap imports from China. We crossed a bridge; the river widened as it flowed into the distance. Several meters from the bridge in the centre of the river lay a huge pile of rubbish. There were coke bottles and plastic wrappings, nondescript items and patches of dirty cloth. It was piled so high that when the tower couldn’t grow anymore some rolled down the back and started to form a new tower and so on.  Some rubbish was burning on the river in the background which produced an uncomfortable aroma. The banks of the river were covered in flakes of rubbish that were making their way down towards the floating heaps.

It was already quite late, about 11:00, by the time I arrived so I joined two field officers- two young girls- Abigail and Serwaah. The office manager introduced Serwaah as one of their best mobilisers of new clients. She looked only about 20 years old and had a wide smile but was too shy initially to say much. I was told Serwaah had a lot of clients to get through and we would have to move quickly. She was training Abigail how to meet clients, complete log books, collect savings and deal with loan clients. We moved through the market sharply. It was a huge expanse of stalls with vegetables everywhere in neat heaps on tables, wooden troughs containing red onions, sheets on the floor with small-time sellers offering just a few scraps. There were rows and rows of plantain and small shacks selling tins of tomato paste, sachets of Milo and some strawberry drinkmade in Ghana or toiletries imported from Russia. I struggled to keep up, curious to get sight of everything and not wanting to trip over table legs, muddy my feet in drains, or push past people through the narrow rows.

Only on the market did I realise why Serwaah was good at mobilising.Most of her clients were men who all seemed to smile a lot, or stretch out and rub their arms nervously when she came around with her big grin across her face. I had fun; lots of people were talkative but no one harassed like on the beach. My days have been better with the younger field officers and more relaxed than when I go out with the older ones or those in higher positions of authority. But the young ones are good at their jobs and their good people skills give clients confidence. I was surrounded by men selling plantain telling me about their dealings with FR.

Since up until now I’d only met fairly neutral, placid, savers or disgruntled customers, it was motivating to finally interview those with success stories. One man in a tiny wooden shack next to a dirty drain exuding a grimy smell built machinery for grinding corn. Since taking a loan with FR he had been able to buy bigger premises, where he would move to soon, and begin to sell more products. I met a man who had used his loan to buy an engine for a trotro and started a lucrative share taxi business. He was applying for a second loan in order to buy a second vehicle together with his savings. 

Several things have struck me about the role of field officers since starting with FR.One, to have mobile banking at all seems extraordinary. I tried to imagine in the UK every time I wanted to withdraw or deposit money phoning someone at the bank to come and give it to me or take money from me. Secondly the sheer number of field officers that are required to journey out to all corners of the city and meet with clients seems an enormous resource compared to the three or so clerks that sit behind protective glass at Natwest branches back home. Thirdly, I find it remarkable that this process happens daily. Surely weekly or even monthly savings would be acceptable and greatly reduce running costs for FR, saving vital funds for future loan customers. I asked the trotro driver if he would be happy to deposit savings three times a week instead of every day. He explained that field officers must come every day because there isn’t a savings culture. He said it wouldn’t work because people would just spend the money on the first day and have little to deposit the next day.

We sat down at one lady’s stand in the market on a mini wooden bench. We had to wait some time because her stall selling banku and other nibbles was so popular she didn’t have time to spare. Next to her stall was a huge poster advertising hair braiding. I bought some oranges from a lady opposite us. Abigail took the oranges and with a knife began to peel them. I know I don’t know everything, but I thought I knew all the ways to eat an orange. First it’s skinned with a long knife until only the white layer remains around the orange. They then slice off the very top but leave a bit so it acts as a flap. To eat it you enclose your whole mouth around the gap and squeeze with your hands whilst simultaneously grabbing at bits with your teeth. When you encounter pips you spit them on the floor. It’s actually quite a refreshing method when you’re thirsty, it’s hygienic and your hands remain clean. The only trick is perfecting the method, which I haven’t, to avoid getting a face bath.

The lady eventually came over and I learned that a loan had enabled her to build a wooden structure in the market from which to sell her snacks. This had greatly increased the size and popularity of her stall. She was talking about opening a sister shop on the other side of the market. Serwaah has agreed to help me collect client data as a company record and for producing the FR annual report.

As we walked through the market to return to the office we passed a lady with a metal basin on her head turning on a tap with one of her free hands. The mouth of the tap was built up high so she didn’t have to bend down or remove the basin in order to fill it with water. When the basin was full she moved off and weaved back through the stalls to her stand. We arrived at a section for yam selling. There were so many of them, almost a far as the eye could see, it was like a party of yams. How did people know which ones to choose? Yams are great big brown elephant feet, hairy tree trunk-like root vegetables.

When I went to meet Isaac, Abigail revealed he was her dad. This information was new to me. I was surprised to be hearing it for the first time. Isaac had mentioned he had children but I assumed his daughters were young for some reason. He never mentioned one was with FR. She was very sweet and modest, and had been helpful all day. It didn’t really surprise me that Isaac’s child should be like this.

I got home early for once and went for a jog.It’s not a bad way of gaining bearings for your surroundings. A left turn out of Mummy’s courtyard and at the end of our street is a main road. I crossed it, and with my nose to the sea, ran down a dirt track. Somewhere along the road the lethargy kicked in and I stopped next to a lady carrying water on her head. She explained that she lived at the church just ahead. When we reached it, the church yard had a pretty blue-washed picket fence surrounding it, with a simple white cross standing in the middle. Behind the church, waves crashed against the bank and made for an atmospheric setting, and the grey blue sky swirled in the background. Through the churchyard I found the beach and ran onto the sand. A boy sat to my left digging holes. I closed my eyes and breathed in the same salty air that reaches the beaches of Brighton and Hove, Hastings and Camber Sands. When I opened them, I saw tracks in the sand and followed them up to where three pink and black grubby pigs were snuffling around in a pile of rubbish.

That evening I had planned to make dinner for everyone and so had purchased some vegetables and other bits in the market to make a pasta sauce. The others arrived one by one back at Mummy’s and soon we were gathered in the kitchen. Leonard came home with chocolate and announced it was his birthday, which made me glad we were preparing something and heightened the pleasant, and now celebratory, atmosphere. It was quite a procedure, not least because nothing was clean and the water was off, so Leonard had a system going washing plates and utensils outside. Kati was making a mega salad with mounds of peels collecting on plates around her. I was boiling water on the electric plates without a kettle and balancing the frying of Aubergines, garlic and onions. I showed Sonja, the American Peace Corps volunteer, who’d just come to the city after spending two years up north in a village in the Ashanti region bordering Burkina Faso, how to peel tomatoes with boiling water. She got through about fifteen of them. We eventually sat outside under the stars to a magnificent feast- after the collaborative effort- with baguette and olives from the supermarket.