Cultural Lesson #4: Feeding Oneself

Questions about Ghanaian food have been among the most frequently asked of me, but I’ve been hesitant to write about how I’m meeting this basic human need because I feel like I should know more before I write anything authoritative on the subject. But here I go…

As far as I understand, Ghanaian food is essentially a mushy thing, in a stew, eaten with one hand which you cup together like a spoon. Ghanaians eat meat boiled into a soup, usually chicken or fish, though I’ve also had beef feet and goat. The soup is often red and really spicy, and then a dough ball of either fufu, banku, rice balls, or kinkey is put in the soup. I only recently began to be able to tell the difference between these four – they are made of different combinations of corn, cassava, and rice flour which are pounded together until they look like goo.

I find the portions in Ghana to be massive, and it’s been embarrassing filling the stereotype that skinny people don’t eat enough. I’m finally able to go out with my Ghanaian friends without embarrassing them now, but for my first two weeks, I literally could only finish a third of my plate. When I cooked with my roommate once, she said “That’s too small even for Ghanaian baby”.

Cooking at home, one can really appreciate how Ghanaians manage to consume such large portions – cooking is some serious exercise in this country.

My roommate always starts cooking by pulling a stool into the middle of the kitchen and peeling vegetables onto the concrete floor. The first time I caught her doing this I immediately realised why there is a complete lack of counter space in our kitchen. Also, unlike my love of cutting things into tiny bits with a variety of different knives, my roommate seems to hack away at her food at an appropriate rate considering the size of our only knife.

She periodically stands up, hollers something through the window, sits down, and moments later a child appears in our house with a bag of something for her.

“OH” [strong Ghanaian women seem to belt an impressive “OH” at least every few minutes]
“So…you can just call young children to go fetch you things?”
“OH!”
“Do you…pay them or something?”
“NO-OH!”
“And they’ll just…do that for you?”
“OH!”

She stands up and hollers something else through the window. I hear an “OH” from another woman outside, and three children enter the house with a huge pounding bowl and a 6 ft pounding stick.

I, of course, get no explanation.

Three Ghanaian minutes later our neighbour enters, and the ladies begin pounding mashed yams into goo. I am amazed at how easily these women can work together – one stands and pounds the yams with the heavy pounding stick while the other slips the ball of yams underneath the pounder, ensuring there is always yam under the surface of the stick.

It’s my go – I can barely bring myself to pound at the yams, because all I see are my roommate’s fingers slipping just under the head of the pounder. They let me pose for a picture, and then they resume doing it properly without my interference.

“So…you can just ask your neighbour to come help you prepare your food?”
“Why must you ask so many questions? Wouldn’t you help your neighbour in Canada?”
“But my neighbour would never ask! We must always say yes, and so we have to be careful about asking.”

[I’m always careful to explain myself in an effort to encourage people to explain things to me]

When all is done, my portion is about 1/3 the size of hers, and the nightwatchman’s portion is about twice the size of mine. She’s so embarrassed about offering such a tiny portion to him that I offer to give it to him on her behalf. I figure he’ll assume that I don’t know any better because skinny people don’t eat enough.

Cultural Lesson #3: Seasons [or lack thereof]

I’ve heard all sorts of theories to explain various cultural work ethics – back in my archaeology days, it was minimal energy output for maximum energy input, I’ve heard theories about how the heat slows people down, religious theories such as the protestant work ethic, and even a theory that simply states “the closer you get to the Mediterranean, the less people obey traffic laws”. What I’m proposing though [and I’m sure it’s too obvious for me to be the first to think of it] is the seasonal theory of variations in work cultures.

Ghana has no real seasons, just short bursts of downpour during the “rainy season”, but nothing that really affects anyone’s daily behaviours. The sun always sets around 6pm, all year round, and there’s always something to eat in season.

In the west, especially in Canada, we have an incredible range of temperatures and weather across the year, instilling a sense of urgency in our culture. Having grown up in Vancouver, I certainly try to optimise every sunny hour that’s made available to me, and considering the 4pm sunsets in the winter, you certainly won’t catch me indoors during daylight hours.

Our culture is clearly constructed around time management, where time is understood as being linear – it can be spent, but never acquired. In Africa, time is considered circular, almost endless and always available.

What’s interesting though is that Africans have some of the shortest life expectancies in the world. Life expectancy in Ghana is 47 years, hence their inability to understand why I haven’t gotten myself married yet [though considering how accepted cheating on one’s spouse is in Ghana, marriage doesn't seem to have quite the same weight as it does elsewhere. I told some Ghanaian women that in Canada, if your husband cheats on you, you get everythingin the divorce settlement -- they loved that.].

Japan, on the other hand, has the longest life expectancy, and yet the Japanese might just have the most heightened sense of urgency of anyone on the planet. Japan and Toronto are two of the most punctual places I’ve ever lived, and they happen to be the two most extreme climates I’ve experienced. [Another very interesting thing about Japan is that they also have the highest suicide rate in the world – connection between long life and suicide?]

Today, for example, is Friday. Due to rotating power outages, our office doesn’t have power every Friday from 6am to 6pm [yes, I’ve tried mentioning to have the central business district trade with another neighbourhood to be without power on Sundays from 6am-6pm when everything’s closed anyways, but people just laughed at me for that crazy suggestion]. In North America, when the tools to do your job are stripped from you, you would hardly be expected to waste your time coming to the office. In Ghana though, one of my friends at work was actually reprimanded for being one hour late last Friday, despite the fact that she is entirely unable to do her job without electricity. Ghanaians seem to distinguish between “working” – mostly composed of socialising - and completing “work tasks” -- a small proportion of "work".

It’s an entirely different way to construct one’s world, and it can be tricky trying to explain to my work colleagues why I get frustrated when at 4:30pm they give me a 3 hour “urgent” task to do, meanwhile I was at work at 8:00am waiting for 2 hours for someone to come to the office.
Luckily for me though, an unscheduled power outage occurred at 5:oopm that day, and I got to go home on time afterall. They may expect a circular understanding of time from my linear self, but I can always count on a power outage to bail me out, no matter what the season.

Cultural Lesson #2: The Benefits of Homesickness

Not that I even have a "home" to begin with, but fine. I’ll admit it. If you couldn’t tell from the amount of time I spend writing, I will spell it out for you: I AM HOMESICK.

I had no problem surviving the lonely birthday, I’ve never complained about the complete lack of water, toilets, lack of lighting in both my bedroom and the living room when I don’t turn on the light before 6pm [tonight I turned on both lights at 6:10pm after getting home from playing football with the neighbourhood kids, and neither light is working, so I only have the glow of my laptop for the rest of the evening, unless I want to hang out on the concrete floor of my kitchen], plus the weekly scheduled power outages.

But what I didn’t survive is opening my iTunes for the first time since I arrived. Specifically “Your ex-lover is dead” by the Stars.

Should I torture myself and listen to Buena Vista Social Club too?

I thought I was too old for homesickness. When I was 21 and moved to Japan for the first of three times, homesickness almost killed me. But then I learned to treat it like an emotional experiment. I started tracking my bouts of homesickness and realised that they generally followed a four week cycle – the cycle started the day I realised I hadn’t even thought about home in a long time. The next day I would wake up almost de-capacitated from homesickness, barely able to drag myself out of bed or deviate from conversing about the mountains, the ocean, and what northwest coast rainforests look like.

When I next settled down after leaving Japan, I was in Montreal and had mostly gotten over homesickness, despite Montreal still being 5000 km from where I grew up, and unfamiliar in terms of language and culture [I spoke French when I moved to Montreal – I still had to learn Quebecois]. I had few friends to distract me from myself, I was experiencing the effects of seasonal depression for the first time, and I was even quite lost about what exactly I was doing in Montreal. I soon realised that the same cycles of homesickness I had had in Japan were being manifest as even less desirable emotions in Montreal, and I had a minor epiphany:

When you’re away from home and homesick, everything that’s bad is experienced as homesickness. When you’re settled in a normal life, everything that’s bad is experienced as terrifying things such as…oh, ho hum….grappling with your own meaninglessness in the world….loneliness…..boredom from the monotony of normalcy.

It was around this same time that I developed a philosophy that I have chosen to live by for six years now, and counting:

Life’s a distraction. Go get distracted.

[Life’s a distraction? From what you ask? Insert issue here. I invite questions/challenges on this one…it’s more simple/complex than it sounds]

Today, my life’s a distraction from homesickness.

Two Faces of Accra – fun in the sun, pollution and poverty

Pictures from this trip are at: www.photobox.co.uk/lgudaiti@alumni.sfu.ca
I have fun and entertaining material for sixteen [and counting] "cultural lessons" [including one specifically inspired by my trip to Accra: Cultural Lesson #16 – experiencing intercity public transit, Ghanaian style], which I am in the process of slowly fleshing out into words, but I'm going to take a minor detour and talk about my weekend in Accra for a moment while it's still fresh in my mind.

I reunited with three fabulous ladies I met at an intercultural workshop in Toronto, just a week before I came to Ghana. We enjoyed a brilliant weekend of pristine beaches, some of the warmest hospitality I've experienced over the course of my extensive travels, and some great laughs over beer. However, we were also exposed to some harsh realities of poverty and the more disturbing effects of urbanisation which need to be reflected upon as we thrust ourselves into the 21st century and begin to witness what our new globalised world is going to look like.

Ghanaians are some of the friendliest and most welcoming of people, who tolerate religious differences and co-exist peacefully across tribal, religious, and linguistic lines. Ghana is a constitutional democracy which enjoys a relatively free press. Ghana is also doing much better economically than most of its neighbours. The four year development plan I am working on at the municipal scale is part of a national effort to elevate Ghana's economy to being one of "middle income" status among the world's national economies in an effort to officially climb the ladder of development [as defined by Ghanaian authorities’ interpretation of the standards set by the Millennium Development Goals] rather than continue to be compared with the world’s most desperately poor economies.

Like in most countries, young people in Ghana are moving out of the countryside and into the cities, uninterested in the agricultural livelihoods of their parents. On a national scale, this contributes to food security issues, unemployment, HIV/AIDS rates, drug abuse, and other consequences of sudden changes in population movements that the socio-economic infrastructure cannot keep pace with.

But what does this actually look like? How does it smell? How does it sound? How is this actually experienced in the lifestyles of people?

People don't often see photographs of African cities, and I think I understand why. Accra seems to me like a village sprawled across a huge landscape of 3 million people. But it never feels like you've arrived. You see a tall concrete wall to your left, a dirt path to your right, and signs indicating that you're in the centre of the city. In the less prosperous neighbourhoods, you see dilapidated roads with paved open-air ditches [sewers?] separating the road from a row of 2 metre wide by two metre high vending structures made out of aluminium siding. In the more entertainment-oriented neighbourhoods, there are more permanent structures with two levels set back from the road, often with terrasses carefully fenced from the traffic, with sidewalks lined during the day with tables selling mobile phone units, roasted plantains, or other edibles. Between these neighbourhoods are the major roads that connect the city, and there's no chance of getting anywhere without a vehicle.

In Accra, I spent about 3-4 hours a day sitting in traffic. It's very difficult to take photographs in Ghana, and the only instances I took out my camera were when I could subtly sneak it through the window of my taxi. Not only are Ghanaians very apprehensive about having their photograph taken, once you pull out your camera it puts you in an awkward you-are-my-subject role, and I haven't felt comfortable taking photos much here. In one occasion, I narrowly escaped a potentially violent encounter with a Ghanaian who opposed my taking a photograph of someone else. A man had waved at me, I had asked if it was alright that I take his picture – an excellent representation of the tire district of Accra, he was one among a hundred men covered in black exhaust with stacks of tires waiting to be sold behind him – and he seemed pleased that I was interested in capturing this moment. As I pulled out my camera, a neighbouring man began sharply screaming "stop that!", and even got up and started running towards me making violent gestures at me, at which point the light conveniently turned green and my taxi took off down the road. For the next 15 minutes, neighbouring vehicles were asking my taxi driver what had happened, because they had seen how violently the man reacted towards me.

What I was unable to photograph from my taxis were dried up river beds, flowing only of garbage and sewage, lined with shacks where the shore line once stood. Wide 10 lane major thorough ways, with concrete dividers to separate directions of traffic, decorated with barbed wire to discourage jay-walkers. The five lanes each direction were actually occupied by 7 or 8 columns of traffic, so tight that I saw two fender benders [and one fist fight to decide which driver was at fault for one of the traffic accidents]. On the edge of the five lanes of traffic stood stalls selling products that were tinted black from exhaust fumes, and overhead were pedestrian overpasses so over-crowded that people looked as though they were being crushed while waiting to exit the overpass. There were people in the process of urinating everywhere -- in the ditches along the road, along fences, and even in the dried up river beds now filled with rubbish. At least every minute in the taxi -- whether I was along a major road or in the middle of a posh neighbourhood -- I saw someone whipping it out to take a leak. The walls defending the more official buildings in town often had spray painted writing on them which read "Do Not Urinate Here". Most of the schools in my municipality don’t have toilets, and I haven’t been able to ask my colleagues what happens when nature calls during class.

There are fun parts about the traffic too though. A great entrepreneurial infrastructure has been set up such that you can buy almost everything you need from the comfort of your taxi on your way home from work. At particularly busy intersections, it gets very exciting approaching the red light as hordes of vendors prepare to pounce. Queued up along one foot wide concrete dividers, hundreds of vendors with baskets of products on their heads are almost spilling into busy traffic, waiting for the light to turn red.

From inside the taxi, you hear the FM radio blaring talk radio, the sounds of horns honking everywhere, the wind blowing into your face from the window, cooling your skin from your last 10 minute wait at a major intersection. And then as the car slows down, the sound of the wind in your ears quiets, the honking horns begin to cease, and you are giddily anticipating the sounds of 100 people all demanding your attention at once.

I even saw a book on how to learn Twi for English speakers being sold at one of these intersections. I've been looking for one of these books all over the Eastern Region where I live, and yet some 12 year old boy offered to sell me one without even needing to step out of my car at Nkrumah Circle.

Accra seems to be full of extremes, something I am generally fond of in urban centres. I tend to fall in love with cities that enjoy a heightened sense of excitement, usually as a consequence of some conflict in the city -- Montreal, where francophone and anglophone Canadian culture coalesce to form a rocking social scene; Hong Kong, where capitalism meets communism and space is vertically-derived, rather than the usual horizontally-derived; Istanbul, where the east meets the west. Accra is alive with all the excitement of West African cities, yet this excitement exists spread across a seemingly village landscape, with rivers that have pre-maturely exceeded their best-before dates, yet the beaches are pristine and beautiful [and privatised].

How are cities preparing to meet these demands? Why are people fleeing the countryside? How are we planning on feeding ourselves when no one wants to tend the crops? How can cities in the developing world possibly be re-oriented to be more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly? How come music videos are essentially the same all over the world?

Cultural Lesson # 1: Work Culture

I’ve spent some time thinking about how I could possibly explain the African work culture in a meaningful way that could actually result in some sort of understanding rather than a dismissive attitude that Africans are “lazy”. I don’t quite understand it myself, I just feel like it’s not entirely bad, and that we could actually learn something that might enlighten how we view work in our various work cultures. In less than two weeks, my last two years of stress have been erased, and I am remembering what it’s like to be laid back productive, rather than stress-case productive.
My work colleagues tell me Ghana is 150 years "behind" Canada. I disagree. I think somewhere between desperate poverty and desperately trying to compete for excessive riches well beyond what is necessary so that you don't "fall behind", there is some sort of happy median. Somewhere between having a 47 year life expectancy versus the breakdown of collective responsibility and community, there must be something we can all learn from eachother.
I’m going to describe four days of my work here.

Friday. I am told that we will be working at one of my colleague’s houses because it’s our office’s neighbourhood’s turn to be without power for the day, and so we’ll go to a house in a neighbourhood with electricity so that we can work on our computers. I am told to wait at my house for the car to pick me at 9. At 9.30, they phone and say they’ll be another hour. At 11.30, I phone them and say I’m going to the internet café and to phone my mobile when they’re ready. At 12.30, in the middle of uploading something important, they ring me and say they’re ready for me, so I tell them to go take lunch and pick me after. I go home, pick up some Guinness en route, and at 14.45, they phone me and to say we won’t be working today because our colleague, whose house we were going to work at, wants to work on his car.

Sunday. At 7.oo, my phone rings but I ignore it, anticipating that it’s a church invite. At 8.oo, it rings again, so I answer. After asking me if I had any plans, my work colleague tells me he will be going to the office. I, of course, offer to join him, and we spend Sunday at the office productively working on the 4-year Development Plan.

Monday. Work starts at 8.oo. I live with a work colleague who has a car, but I take a taxi in the morning because at 8.oo, I haven’t even seen her yet.

I get to the office at 8.05, and I’m one of only two people on my floor. One of my colleagues arrives at 8.25, and by 9 there are four people in our office all talking at each other at the same time. He says one sentence to one of them, then turns to me and dictates something I should add to the report, and then offers a joke to another, and then in all seriousness officially greets the Assembly woman who has joined us – basically, he’s dealing with all five of us at the same time, taking turns ignoring us, then addressing us, dealing us his deck of cards. This is how I find most important people here deal with business, an intriguing variation from North America’s linear time allocation system.

At 9.30, my other colleague walks in and says to pack everything, we’re working at his house because there are too many distractions at work. Since we’ll be working on two different reports, I should bring my laptop.

It takes us two hours to get to his house, mostly because we keep running into people and socialising with them – something that’s considered more important to a work environment than accomplishing work tasks. When we get to his house:

-Obaa yaa, have you taken breakfast?
-Yes I have, but if you’re having tea and bread, I’d be happy to join you.
-Have you had Guinness and bread?
-Tea will be fine thank you.

After he has taken an hour to go buy bread and prepare everything, we eat. When we finish, I get back to working with my other colleague and ask if he would like me to switch to using my laptop to free up his computer.

-Not now. I’m tired from eating.

And he proceeds to take a nap on his couch next to the table we are working at.

While my other colleague and I are working on the development plan, his phone is ringing literally every 10 minutes. He generally talks for about one minute, and then returns to work with me. At one point, he answers his phone and then gets up to talk in another room. As I’m waiting for him to return, I see him pull out of the driveway and take off, without saying anything to me.

He returns 1 hour later.

My description of this day continues much like this, but I think I’ll stop here. We decide that the next day, since one of my colleagues has to go to Accra to buy a car, two of us will work at the house again. I should go to the office and get the soft copy of the budget so that I can input it into the action plan, and then come to the house. As the car is pulling away I ask:

-What time should the driver come pick me then?
-Come at 8.oo
-If I come at 8.oo, you’ll still be sleeping!
-Uhh…8.30.

Tuesday. I’m at my house waiting for the driver. It’s 8.30. I start doing some sudoku puzzles from my calendar. At 9.45, my colleague who’s in Accra phones me:

-Obaya, you won’t be working at the house today. Our colleague is going to be at the Water and Sanitation Dept all day. The driver is coming to pick you, and you must go to Water and Sanitation to get the document for inputting
-What time is the driver coming?
-He’s on his way

Since the driver is already on his way, I figure there’s no use reminding my colleague that there’s a soft copy of the document at the office and that I’ll be picking it from the Budget department anyways.

We pick up the document from Water and Sanitation.
Chat, greeting, welcome, fine thank you.

I get to the office at 11.45. Before I’ve even had time to turn on the computer, someone comes in and asks me if I’ve taken lunch.

On turning 27.

13 September 2006
Rather anti-climactic really.I’m sitting here, Kenny G does “What a Wonderful World” playing in the background, remembering what I thought 27 would be.
When I was 15 years old, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. He was 27. I realised then that all the greats seemed to have not made it to their 28th – Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and now my dear Kurt! Clearly, life peaks at 27. In the words of Neil Young “it’s better to burn out, then to fade away.”
I’ve since decided that, at least in my case, life only gets better. I love knowing myself one more year, I love every year of experiences, every year of discoveries, and every year of learning something I didn’t think before.
Sitting alone in the restaurant of the hotel, where I presume I am the only guest, in a town where I am essentially a zoo animal, I certainly hope my life hasn’t peaked on this day.
If anything, I feel much younger than I did last year on my birthday. Here in Koforidua, I am entirely dependent on other people. I literally can’t eat, pee, drink water, go home after work, get to work in the morning, or do anything except sit in my room alone writing blog entries which I will still need someone’s assistance in order to find an internet café to post them onto my blog.
I have been super laid back about it all. It’s no secret that I am definitely someone who enjoys my independence, especially in terms of being given the flexibility to manage my own time, and having the freedom to explore the world that surrounds me. So far, I have been given a total of 15 minutes of my own time and the comfort [ie. daylight] to explore my world. It only took about a minute for me to be surrounded by children screaming.
“Obruny! Obruny! Can I have your number?”
“You can’t even reach my elbow.”
“But I will grow!”
“Are you even old enough to operate a phone without parental supervision?”

When I finally shook off the first round of kids, I noticed a football field where spectators were sitting along the edge watching. As I approached the game to join the spectators, the whole game stopped, and everyone turned and stared at me. I decided, in the interest of the sport, to continue walking instead, where I was shortly met by the next pack of roaming children.
I realised then that the closest thing I have to autonomy is my peanut butter. The one meal of the day that I chose when and where is breakfast – I pull out my Swiss army knife, my jar of peanut butter, and the loaf of bread that I was able to ask my driver to find for me because I didn’t know where to find bread. I don’t even have a napkin or a plate to eat from, and when I offered my driver some bread with peanut butter so that he could taste Canadian food, I had to present it on a sudoku puzzle. I think he enjoyed the sudoku puzzle more than the PB.
NB. For anyone who ever goes to a developing country, I cannot stress the importance of a Swiss army knife, a jar of peanut butter, and, most crucially, a couple roles of toilet paper. I’m not going to elaborate on this note in too much detail, but please, for the love of God, bring a role of toilet paper and a couple of ziplock bags. TRUST ME.
So my Ghanaian name is “Yaa”. I can also go by “Yaayaa” and “Obayaa”. In Ghana, your name is the day you were born. I may as well confess now that I have been lying to everyone for the last 27 years, telling them that I was born on Friday the 13th. I was actually born on Thursday, September 13th, which gives me the lamest of all the days-of-the-week-female-Ghanaian-names. Other days of the week include: Akosua, Asi, or Ese (Sunday); Adwoa, or Ajao (Monday); Abena, or Araba (Tuesday); Akua (Wednesday); Afua, Afia, or Efua (Friday); and, Ama (Saturday). Despite this repertoire of beautiful Ghanaian names, my name is Yaa.
My most common activity at work is to respond to enquiries at the door of the Municipal Planning Office.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Yah?”
[since it’s a female voice, and I am the only female on my floor, they instantly know it must be…]
“Yaa!”
“Yah.”
Even the boy names for Thursday birthdays are better: Yao or Ekow. Considering that my world is 100% male right now – I haven’t even really spoken to a woman in almost two weeks, and there’s no rubbish bin in any of the toilets on my floor – I should at least get to choose between Yaa, Yao, and Ekow.
But there’s no choice here in Ghana, social rules dictate that my name is Yaa. This relates to how I’ve been explaining Canada to my colleagues here in Ghana.
In Canada, you’re generally free to do whatever you please, as long as it does not infringe on someone else’s freedom. You can eat dinner alone, you can go to the bar alone, you can explore the streets alone. But, the other side of the coin is that you always feel alone.
In Ghana, everyone’s your sister, everyone’s your brother, and you are always loved and cared for. But you cannot do exactly as you please, and, as I learned this afternoon when I went for lunch alone, you’re never to do things alone. As no one was in the office and I was hungry [never stand between a skinny person and their lunch!], I was too hungry to care and decided to fetch my own lunch in the form of crossing the street and buying a minced meat pocket. My office colleagues were dumbfounded by my behaviour, and I remembered similar reactions from people when I lived in Italy, France, Japan, and Turkey.
Mostly, I was just surprised I was able to find a place to buy a small quantity of food. Not only is it difficult to distinguish between…say…a hair salon, a CD shop, and a restaurant [it’s not like they have neon signs here, when you’re used to commercial establishments fighting for your attention, it’s hard to recognise those that don’t leap out of the landscape at you. How to make a distinction between rows of undistinguishable shacks? In Japan, it was rows of undistinguishable shacks that had red lanterns out front, and you needed to find someone who read kanji to know if it was a restaurant]….it’s also impossible to find anything less than a huge meal in Ghana. So far, I’ve not been able to finish more than half of a meal, and there’s no such thing as doggy bags.
I just can’t wait to have my own space…where I can cook for myself…live without burdening my colleagues and driver…maybe even exercise a small degree of independence….remembering that I am indeed 27, not 7.

Taste of what’s to come? Bucket “showers”, Guinness, and rotating power outages

11 September 2006

My friend Sarah made so much fun of me when she saw how freakishly small the flashlight I had brought with me to Peru was.

Seeing that the candles –- my only other source of light this evening since the power has apparently gone out -- can also go out at the whim of even the mildest breeze through my window, I’m very thankful for a flashlight that is so small I can wear it as a necklace. As an unexpected gust of wind blows through my window, I know exactly where to expect to find my flashlight.

I came home from my first day at work a mere hour before sunset. After quick bucket “shower”, I took to the “streets” to “explore” – though most of the exploring was done by the scores of little boys approaching me as I took a turn around the “block”.

I came “home” eager to read some of the documents I had brought with me which should better prepare me for my job/life here, only to discover that the electricity had gone out, probably for the rest of the night.

“We’d better drink all of the Guinness before they get warm!”
[guest hotel staff laugh at my “joke”]
“No, seriously. May I have a Guinness?”

It’s quite remarkable how much Guinness Ghanaians seem to drink actually. Last night, when I was picked up by my colleague, the Municipal Planner of the New Juaben Municipal Assembly, the first thing we did in Koforidua was to have a Guinness. Today, my first day at work, and at the house of my other planning colleague he insisted I drink a Guinness while we discussed the framework for the Municipal Development Plan.

“Why Guinness? Why not Leffe Brune, or Newcastle Brown?”
“There’s a Guinness factory in Ghana. Though they used to say that it was ‘black tonic’.”
“Snuh?”
“It turns your skin darker.”
“I think the lager producers began that rumour.”

So far, I’m already averaging two Guinnae a day, and I actually suspect I’m getting lighter-skinned [though that’s more likely due to the fact that I haven’t actually seen the sun since I got to Ghana].
I was given a Sudoku calendar over Christmans, and have been doing the puzzles and then using the completed ones as coasters for my Guinness. Tonight, as the melting wax from the candles competes with the Guinness bottles for sudoku puzzle coasters, I can barely keep up with demand. Especially with the added obstacle of having to do the puzzles by candlelight.

At 18:45 the chanting begins. I heard this last night too, and what I don’t know yet is that I will continue to hear this chanting every night while I stay in the guest hotel in the poor part of town.
The visual obstacle posed by the bars across my window are symbolic of my own struggle to better know my environment – my six feet of obvious foreigness prevent me from getting any clear, unobstructed view of the world I am surrounded by. They also prevent me from seeing the source of the chanting.

What is all the chanting?My wild imagine starts flying and I'm thankful that at least those same bars that obstruct my view also prevent the locals from sacrificing me to the Gods of Ghana Hydro Power.
So far my work colleagues have been no use at explaining the sounds of the neighbourhood to me.
“Those are provincial noises. When we move you to the guest house, they won’t disturb you anymore.”

But I love the sounds! I only would like to better understand what they are. Where is that drum coming from? Is it a bar? Or just a dwelling? And from the other window I hear bass and people clapping to the beat. Is this occurring in the street? Or should I be drinking my Guinness next door instead of in my candlelit room? And the chattering from the other direction, which has a beat of its own. I can only imagine the source of this life which the bars across my windows and the darkness are hiding. These sounds of the neighbourhood seem be compose of a collective entity – a creature that chants, laughs, and raps by night, and crows like roosters as it wakes in the morning.

Like 100s of parties you are not invited to.

And then a thought occurs to me:Those same bars that are visually preventing me from entering their world also physically prevent me from escaping mine in the event of a fire –- a relative likelihood considering the make shift emergency lighting system the “hotel” staff have implemented in our state of powerlessness. As I sit strategising my escape route, either via removal of the air conditioner [assuming it would leave a me-sized whole via its removal] or through my room door [the most likely source of the fire in question], I add one more to my list of travel essentials.

1. Toilet paper
2. Swiss army knife
3. Freakishly small flashlight
4. Peanut butter
5. World map
6. Pictures of snow in Canada [when travelling to tropical climates]
7. Portable smoke detector