A Million Minutes in Africa

We buy our vegetables at a little vegetable stand in our neighborhood. It’s next to another little stand where plastic bowls, mops, and wastepaper baskets are sold. African shirts are on offer at yet another stand nearby.

Looks like it’s mango season — yum.

Many Accra shops are these types of roadside stands, although there are also some supermarkets and even a mall. Other vendors in our neighborhood sell handmade baskets, beaded necklaces, paintings, and grilled plantains. (A lady with a small baby on her back grills the plantains on a hibachi-type grill.)

We left DC back in September. Movers packed our household effects into giant crates on September 22. Our understanding was that the crates would then be shipped to Accra. It turns out that our stuff is in… Baltimore! Yes, over the past 55 days, the movers managed to transport those crates about 40 miles. It seems that we won’t be seeing that stuff any time soon.

The good news is that our vehicle (which left our DC street a few days before the household effects) has arrived. Hooray! That means we can now take weekend trips out of town and see more of Ghana. Exciting.

You may have been wondering what our house looks like. It’s not typical of all Accra houses, but it is typical of our neighborhood. Here’s a picture:

You can tell that it’s a duplex, attached to the house next door. Fortunately, that house is occupied by a friend.

No, we still haven’t played any tennis in Accra. However, we did have a brush with tennis fame. Serena Williams came to visit Ghana last week. I took pictures at the meet-and-greet reception, but they all came out blurry, despite the fact that she was standing still at the time. She’s tall and looks like she could beat up just about anyone. While here, she held a tennis clinic for underprivileged Ghanaian children. I wasn’t there but heard it went well. She also handed out antimalarial bednets for Unicef and assisted in a vaccination campaign. A friend of ours was Serena’s “control officer,” meaning she had to accompany her everywhere. One of the things she learned from the experience was that you can zoom right past traffic when you have a police escort. We’ll have to remember that for future reference.

Went mountain biking yesterday on some trails near the airport. A friend said motocross riders use these trails sometimes. For maximum sunburn, we left the house at noon. It was hot, and the dirt on the trail was loose. Stupidly, I had not switched my ideal-for-commuting-in-DC slick tires for big ol’ knobbies, and I paid the price. Trying to descend a steep hill at an angle, I went down when the tires slid sideways on the crumbly red dirt.

Embarrassed, I got up to dust myself off and continue riding. However, the dusting revealed bloody palms and a seriously road-(trail-)rashed leg. Dan squirted water on the wounds to clean them out. Ouch.

Guess I should’ve worn gloves. Oops.

Fortunately, one of our riding companions had a giant bandaid for the bloodier palm.

We rode home safely, and I cleaned the scrapes. Visited the Health Unit today to have someone look at them. The guy said, “Did you fall down go boom?” I guess the usual scrape victims he sees are typically far younger than I.

Everything’s fine except my pride. To do: get knobby tires and gloves, learn to ride bike properly.

We’ve been in Accra for just about a month. Weeks before moving, we sent out change of address notices to our banks and other companies with whom we do business. However, till yesterday, we had not received a single piece of mail. What did we get yesterday, you ask? After a friend accompanied me to the mailroom, the mail guy looked around and found the package we mailed to ourselves on September 24. Nothing else, just the package, but we were really glad to see it.

We couldn’t remember what exactly we sent, so it was a surprise to find out. It was just the leftover stuff that was still in our apartment after the movers had taken everything else away. Among the stuff was oreo-type cookies (yay!), Teva sandals that Dan thought he had lost, and the cord that connects the camera to the computer. Finally, I was able to upload some photos to a few back posts of this blog. If you already read them, look again.

Shai Hills Wildlife Reserve lies between Akosombo and Accra.  It was neither the best time of day (mid-afternoon) nor the best time of year for a visit, but hey, we were passing by, so why not stop?

Our group of 7 consolidated into 2 cars along with the mandatory guide, named Simon. As we drove along, he told us about the animals and answered our questions. The first animals we saw were a troop of baboons, perched on and about a building that looked new but unused. Simon said it would eventually be a museum, but for now the baboon troop lived around it.

This troop is one of about 15 troops living on the reserve. The staff tries to keep this troop near the museum for tourists to see. They keep them there by feeding them things like bananas and biscuits. (“Biscuits” in Ghana are cookies.) Simon said we could feed them if we wanted, but we didn’t feel right doing that.

The path (not a road) through the reserve required a high-clearance vehicle, and Dan enjoyed driving our friend’s Jeep on the uneven surface. High grasses were all around us, with an occasional tree here and there, or in some parts, a small grove of trees. After a while of driving, we realized that we lost the other vehicle, containing half our group. We went back and discovered that they had stopped to look at a group of kob, a type of antelope. We caught sight of the kob and gawked till they bounded away into the distance.

Further up the path, we stopped for a short hike to a cave full of bats. This cave, according to Simon, used to be the dwelling place for the chief of the Shai people, for which the reserve is named. It was pleasantly cool but smelled unpleasantly of guano.

Millipedes live there, too.

Other than some hornbills (birds) and more kob, we didn’t see any more wildlife there. Still, it was enjoyable and interesting. Simon recommended visiting Mole National Park in the north. He used to work there. It’s much bigger that Shai Hills and contains more species, including elephants! We look forward to seeing that sometime within the next 2 years. I hope they don’t feed the elephants biscuits.

On the way back, we saw 2 signs for separate but related businesses:

We had the opportunity to see a little bit more of Ghana over the weekend. We headed up to Akosombo, where a couple of Dan’s colleagues organized a mini-triathlon. We were not competing in the triathlon, just manning the bicycle station and supporting the competitors. Since the triathlon was abbreviated to a 2.5-mile run, 500m swim, and 16-mile bike ride, the founders dubbed it “The Aluminum Man” (a reference to the super long and difficult Iron Man triathlon).

Due to the oppressive heat and humidity, the race was scheduled to start early — 6am. Believe it or not, people were actually up at that hour on a Sunday.

Nine competitors began the run in a village, going down a paved road lined with lush green trees. Soon they made it to the put-in point of the swim on Lake Volta. The previous day, some people in our group had scoped out the place and used machetes (known here as “cutlasses”) to hack out a path for the triathletes to follow from the road down to the water. It was so steep that someone decided to provide a rope, securely fastened to a roadside post, to hang on to while descending to the lake.

Meanwhile, we were on the opposite side of the lake at the Aylos Bay Resort, waiting with the bikes.

Some local kids in canoes were supposed to show up to canoe alongside the swimmers for safety, but they didn’t show up. Dan noticed that our hotel had a canoe and asked to take it. He paddled out and served as the lifeguard. (Some of the participants are experienced swimmers, but those who aren’t were relieved to have some backup close by.)

Not everyone swam. Due to rampant bilharzia in the water, all had been warned that swimming there could cause illness. Two competitors decided not to risk it and ran for the swimming portion. Time was added to their completion time in order to be fair to the swimmers.

Dan and I rode our bikes after the last cyclists rolled out of Aylos Bay. The idea was to help stragglers or people with mechanical problems. Sure enough, we encountered two. Dan switched bikes with someone on a Huffy who was having difficulty. It was such a crummy bike that even Dan had trouble riding it. The short cranks made it impossible to stand up and hard to pedal normally. Later we came across a person with chain problems, which Dan fixed. He’s everyone’s hero.

The two non-swimmers (avid bikers both) finished first, but after adding in the penalty time for not swimming, the race organizer, who did all three events, won. All were done before 9am. We celebrated with a post-race breakfast at Afrikiko Resort.

It was fun to have some part in the triathlon, but also to see another region of Ghana. Lake Volta is the largest man-made lake in the world. The roads around Akosombo are excellent, lined with thick and healthy-looking vegetation, and refreshingly trash-free. It’s pretty.

Our UAB (unaccompanied air baggage) arrived last week. That’s a shipment of stuff we thought we’d like to have before the bulk of our belongings arrive in the “household effects” shipment in a few months. My initial thought was hooray! I opened and unpacked the boxes with glee. But when I was done, I was disappointed. Was that all? Where was my new crossword puzzle book? Why had we put tennis rackets and balls in the UAB? It’s way too hot here to play tennis any later than 7am, and there’s no way we’re playing that early. Where’s my yoga video? No Trader Joe’s ginger granola? Out of our hundreds of books, I didn’t think to include a single novel in the UAB? What were we thinking?

Well, the good news is that we did include some essentials: the cappuccino machine, a few cookbooks and our bicycles. For the rest, we eagerly await our household effects. We may or may not see them by the end of 2006. Cross your fingers!

Last week we went to see a local cloth dyeing operation, where they use the wax-resist process. (I was under the impression this process is known as batik, but someone told me that batik is different, so I’ll just refer to it here as wax-resist.)

It was about 10 in the morning and hot as could be. It felt like the sun was right on top of our heads. The dyeing place was not marked with any signs; we only found it because our friend had been there before and remembered where it was. It consisted of a small building adjacent to a open-walled area topped with a roof, plus a roofless gravel and dirt area where the completed fabrics were spread out to dry.

The first step in the wax-resist process is to apply wax to the cloth, using styrofoam blocks with designs carved into them. Some of the blocks were carved with geometric designs, and others were carved to look like something in particular, like a leaf or a flower.

Two men applied wax as we watched. They would dip a foam block into a steaming vat of hot wax, then press it repeatedly to form a pattern on the plain white cloth.

Next, a woman would bring the cloth into the dyeing area, which was even hotter than the sunny yard because of the multiple vats of hot dye sending huge quantities of steam into the already humid air. A man took a piece of cloth that had been stamped with wax and submerged it in a vat of dye. He stirred it with a long stick for a while before fishing it out. The areas that had wax would remain white, while the rest of the cloth would become whatever color the dye was — red, blue, or any number of other colors they had there. Sometimes they would repeat this process with different colors, resulting in a multicolored cloth.

After the cloth had been dyed and wrung out, two men would spread it out and put it in the sunny yard to dry. The many pieces of 12-yard-long fabric, each with a unique color and design, looked gorgeous lying next to each other in the bright sunlight.

Anyway, we couldn’t resist buying some cloth after observing the dyeing process and seeing the beautiful results. Not sure what we’ll make with it yet. A shirt? A dress? Our friend makes quilts with it.

Before we came to Accra, we were told that English is Ghana’s official language. However, there are some differences between U.S. English and Ghanaian English. For example, a plastic bag that you might get when you buy something at the store is called a “rubber.”

For another example, yes means “no.” I asked a taxi driver if he knew where my destination was. He said “yes.” Then it became apparent that he didn’t know.

Turns out, as we learned in a newcomer orientation yesterday, Ghanaians say “yes” because they want to please. They do not mean “yes” in the American sense. It was recommended that we not ask questions that could only be answered with “yes” or “no.”

Hmm… this requires further study.

Must learn some of the local language, Twi (sounds kinda like “tree.”) First word learned: medassi – thank you. A useful word that results in smiles from the recipient.