Well, looks like I haven’t updated in a while. Time goes by so fast here that I don’t even realize it. I can’t believe I’ve been here almost two months. Six months is really not that much time. Let me see if I can fill in here what I’ve been up to the last month since I wrote.
I’ve been taking some weekend trips with friends to get out of Accra. For our first trip flying solo we decided to extend out stay in the Volta Region, a couple hours north on the eastern coast, just a few minutes from Togo, after our program drove us up there for the day to visit a monkey sanctuary and go see some the Wli waterfall, the biggest waterfall in West Africa. We arranged to stay in a homestay that night and planned to spend the next day hiking Afadjato, the tallest mountain in Ghana (it's not very tall) and going to see some other waterfalls. We did do that and it was beautiful but everything fairly rapidly turned into a hectic mess when one of our friends started puking blood on the trail and had to be taken immediately to the hospital (actually not so immediately as he first persevered to climb the mountain and then had to arrange a series of motor taxis to get back to the main city). The hospital we took him to in Ho Hoe had only two doctors for the whole facility with patients spilling out to beds in the hallways, no running water, no soap in the bathrooms, and posters scattered throughout the hospital with detailed directions for the nurses to recessitate someone. He ended up having to stay overnight in the hospital there and when he got back to Accra he had to go immediately to the local hospital to spend a few more nights but he ended up being alright. We, or at least I, was a little scarred after all that on our first solo trip traveling Africa. If that one incident wasn't enough, we were all covered with bedbug bites from the homestay beds and I somehow contracted this eye infections that made all the area around my eye turn red and swell up so that I had to walk around campus looking like the victim of domestic abuse. After about a week to recover though, as my eye turned somewhat back to normal and when Gareth (the sick guy) got out of the hospital, that maybe a second shot at traveling was necessary. It was after all far too early in my Ghanaian adventure to quit traveling already. And we definitely learned some valuable lessons about bringing our own sheets and sticking to bottled water instead of sachet water) when we're not in the greater Accra area.
So we kept travelling. Recently we’ve been exploring the western part of the country on the coast heading towards the Ivory Coast, near to a smaller city called Takoradi. The first weekend we went to a town called Prince’s Town (although the locals changed the name to “Princess Town” because they couldn’t pronounce the colonial-given name of “Prince’s Town”), about a hour and half from Takoradi (which is itself 4 hours from Accra) via the Agona junction, and then last weekend we went to another town, also about an hour from Takoradi, called Butre. Both trips were awesome. Both towns tiny little fishing villages right on the beach. Prince’s Town was especially cool because we got to stay in a German fort from the 1600s (the Germans were never involved in the slave trade so it wasn’t creepy and depressing like many of the other coastline forts in Ghana) as its only guests. Originally we went to Prince’s Town because the people there are traditionalists, that is that they practice traditional African religions, and are known to have their fetish priest perform a ceremony where he calls a crocodile out of the water to feed it a live chicken and coke. Once in Prince’s Town we went to meet the fetish priest to inquire about watching the ceremony but he told us that because the town was in conflict (they were in the midst of a chieftaincy conflict with a neighboring village because the two villages, as they were a part of the same ethnic group, shared only one chief and each village wanted the chief to be from their town) then the gods were unhappy, and it was absolutely impossible to call out the crocodile under those circumstances. They did have a tiny tourist office (basically a one man phone booth) that was built for them by an Italian NGO so we consulted them and they took us on a tour of the mangrove forests to see the monkeys in the early morning which was actually really cool. I felt like I was in a water color painting. The lagoon we were on was perfectly still at that time of the morning so you could see a perfect reflection of the sun rising on the surface of the water. Our canoe was sort of constantly sinking though so we were a little preoccupied bailing out water. It was worth it though. Our guide told us that the lagoon was formed when a big bowl of water fell off a tree. We all agreed that it had to have been a rather large bowl of water though, and for that matter, a very large tree. The whole place was so beautiful though. Even in Butre where we didn’t really do anything except walk to the neighboring town of Busua, just to sit on the beach and swim in the water was awesome. The beaches are indescribably pristine and amazing in that area, unlike some of the trashy ones in Accra. They remind me of beach scenes out of Lost or something… something Hollywood and invented by man to represent perfection, but its unbelievable that it is so perfect naturally. The sand is white and soft and the water is a deep blue blue and the edge of the sand is greeted by rows of palm trees to provide a little shade. And the people in the little towns are so nice. They all greet you, saying hello or waving, and all the kids run up to you and try to hold your hand.
It’s when I go into towns like that when I really start to think about what I study; development. All that’s keeping any one of those towns from turning into 5 star hotel beach resorts with private beaches and a host of celebrity guests is the infrastructure necessary to make getting there easy – the bumpy dirt roads packed in the back of a Tro Tro with 20 other people that all have unique body odor scents, unsure of whether the breaks will actually stop you or if the doors will fall off or if the car will simply stop working doesn’t fit on the list of many people’s relaxing paradise vacation plans – and it is lacking the more-than-basic amenities that people tend to want in paradise like air conditioning, fresh water showers with the option for hot water, cold beverages, laundry facilities, and wide variety of food. My biggest issue when I really start to think about development is that I always come back to one big philosophical question, namely, what is the ultimate end, the ultimate goal, and do the means justify the path to it? I would say that many people are ultimately searching for happiness. Some seek money and health and relationships and other things as well but I tend to lump that all in the happiness category as they are things that tend to provide you with happiness if you are the type of person that seeks them. I always start to think though… will the people of these towns really be happier if their country develops? I see the children running around the dirt roads barefoot with friends and siblings, playing games or splashing in the water, living in a state of complete and utter freedom and worrielessness – a type of childhood freedom that I never experienced with my parents having to worry about me wandering away or being swept up by some bad guy. And the adults, although they do seem to dedicate a fair amount of time to fishing or cooking or bathing children, they also seem to have infinite hours to sit and talk with family and neighbors, or lay around lazy in the shade during the heat of the day. I know that as a complete, 100% outsider, all this is probably really easy for me to say about their lifestyle. And I know that they probably face all sorts of daily difficulties regarding sanitation or health or clean water or educating their children. But I still wonder, would building a Hilton Beach Resort next door really make them happier? The best way I have figured out how to rationalize development as a solution for attaining the final means, of giving people a better life, is that through development people gain opportunities. When they gain health and they gain education, a whole new world of doors are opened to them. And in that circumstance, perhaps they are better off because they can choose what life does make them happy. If the small town, beach side fishing lifestyle was not what made them happy, they can choose to move on to something else. The issue for me still lies though in the fact that development does come at a price. And often its not something that can be reversed all the way to the beginning. If ever these towns here in Ghana do get blown up and absorbed into the world of spas, piña coladas with mini umbrellas, and rich old men with their far younger, far more attractive, mistresses, I hope to never go back. I want to remember these towns forever as beautiful as they are now.
But yea… what else…
I started playing volleyball here with the men’s team which has been a lot of fun. They train every day but you are only expected to go two or three times a week it seems and although practice officially starts as 3:30 pm every day, nobody shows up until at least 4:30. Basically its totally Ghana-style volleyball. The players are super athletic and strong but have no fundamentals and very little knowledge of the game. I guess they have a coach but I haven’t seen him yet. They play on this old, cracked, cement volleyball court outdoors in the middle of campus. The net is pretty legit, and they even have lights to turn on as it is getting dark toward the end of practice. They don’t have antennas though. And there is no outer barrier to the court so if the ball goes out, it will roll across the field for days, or into the road and way down the street. Fortunately everyone in Ghana gets one another’s attention by hissing and everyone seems capable of hearing the hiss from at least a half mile away so you can usually just hiss and point to the ball if there is someone relatively near it and they will go get it for you. I still feel a little weird doing it because I feel like hissing at someone in the US would be so rude, but I’m pretty used to people getting my attention with it here, and its sort of a novelty for me every time I attempt it so I don’t have run after the ball and it actually works. When we were in Takoradi for a night before going to Prince’s Town, my friend Chris tested the limits of the hissing call by standing on the balcony of the second story of our hotel and hissing loudly to an ice cream man down the street and yelled “Fanmilk!” (the name of the brand of ice cream) and the man came all the way down the block on his little bicycle to thrown us ice cream up to the balcony. Needless to say, it’s a rather useful skill to master here.
I guess the other interesting thing worth mentioning since this post is already getting to be ridiculously long, is how big of a deal Valentine’s Day is in Ghana. They say its bigger than Christmas. We talked about it in my Spanish class a lot which was pretty interesting. Regarding that class there were two notable things said. Firstly, our teacher started the conversation by going around and asking people who they were in love with and the very first girl to respond replied “Jesus”. The other notable thing was just basically the cynicism of the girls in love, and the exhaustion of the boys with the holiday. The girls talked about how boys will break up with their girlfriends right before Valentines Day and get back together with them after just to avoid the holiday. After hearing the boys’ point of view though, I don’t know if I blame them. It seems that basically girls just make lists of things they want and want to do for Valentines Day and the boys have to comply and pay for everything and pick out the perfect gift to show they care enough without breaking the bank. I guess that’s not totally unlike many people’s Valentines Day in the US but here the whole holiday is just such a big deal that it sort of surprised me. And its totally not how I hope to spend any Valentines Day in my own life. I don’t see why commerciality is such an integral part or why the women can’t also contribute finances. Our teacher even asked the girls in class if they could see paying for something as liberating gender roles and empowering themselves as women, but the girls denied that. Relationships are still about stability and babies here. Marrying someone to provide that is still the most important thing. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in the 50s here.
Anyway… that’s it for now I suppose. Maybe I’ll write more often to keep people up to date and avoid these super long messages. But psh… finding the time and will to write more than once a month? Who am I kidding??
As for the title to this blog though... here in Ghana they say "tit bit" instead of "tid bit". I thought that was kind of funny.
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