Or, goodbye to the cahm-poos,
as they would pronounce it here, with absolutely no accent on either syllable
(an attribute of their own languages that spills over into English and that we
found very hard to get our mouths around, we’re so used to stressing one
syllable or another). Anyway: It’s worth a final goodbye to the University of
Ghana campus at Legon, which after all was our home for 8 ½ months (minus the
Christmas break). So, on my final morning at Legon, here is my list of some things
I will miss and not miss (and I suspect it is pretty close to what Theresa would
say, too).
MISS:
·
* The trees. Mango trees. “Pear” (avocado) trees.
Brightly flowering trees in yellow and orange and red. Neem trees. Wawa trees
with their huge buttressed base. And of course – the mighty baobab with its odd
structure: a massive fat trunk, and then just a rather small cluster of
branches coming out of the top. Kofi was right: they look like an upside-down
tree, with the roots on the top. And Kwame told us the trunk is like wisdom –
so large you can’t get your arms around it (a Nigerian proverb, another friend
said).
·
* Everything being done outdoors (in large part
thanks to all those trees). Tailors and their sewing machines under trees. Students
alone or in small clusters studying for finals under the trees. Beers in
courtyard cafes. Theater under the stars. Open-air markets.
·
* The seasonal surprises, especially the beds of
white or violet flowers that magically appear after rain showers, and even more
surprising, the blankets of tiny cactus plants around the base of trees.
·
*Visual treats, such as the colorful displays of
laundry hanging to dry outside the students’ rooms in their highrise
dormitories. Or, a somewhat different visual treat, discovering the bats that
appeared like clockwork at dusk every evening around the fountain at Mensah Sarbah
hall, swooping back and forth between the trees. Even Theresa came to enjoy
them, although they never stopped giving her goose bumps, and it was a favorite
place to take visitors and surprise them.
·
* The pool! It saved our life, because it was the best
way to get exercise in this heat. But it was also a social oasis; we made
friends with the lifeguards, I gave informal swimming lessons to random
students we met and to our friend Kwame; we bumped into our own friends there
and had pleasant afternoons going back and forth across the pool.
·
* The architecture and adornments of this place.
Cool statues…
·
* The Night Market, where we did a LOT of
shopping, especially before and after we had the car. Average shopping trip?
About $2.50. (Take that, Metropolitan
Market.)
·
* The meat-on-a-stick guys, always there when you
needed a quick sausage or chicken skewer, with a blanket of very spicy rub. My
favorite was dour-faced Peter, at Akuafo Hall. He never stopped addressing me
as “Boss” – but after I’d been going there awhile, he did start cracking a
smile when I arrived, a major victory.
·
* The murmerers! I don’t know if they would be on
T’s list, but you know, I will kind of miss them, the clusters of young
Ghanaians hanging out in the large field near us, praying and speaking in
tongues or whatever they were doing, sometimes all night. They were a bother to
Daniel, whose windows opened out toward that field, but they never really
bothered us, and you have to admit, it was something different!
NOT MISS
·
* The infrastructural challenges – shaky water
supply, shaky electricity supply, paint peeling and falling off the ceiling,
tiny piles of mysterious sawdust at the base of the cabinets. But they did seem
to solve the frog-in-the-toilet thing.
·
* The guys peeing on the tree about 10 yards from
our bedroom window.
·
* The 6 a.m. “sound checks” on the gigantic
speaker systems when another revival session, or wedding party at the Guest
Center, was getting ready to start.
·
* The mosquitoes and woodworms and millipedes and
who knows what other assorted critters.
* * And yes, the climate, especially since our flat
was situated in a way that didn’t catch the prevailing breezes, such as they
were. Especially in the second semester, when it got hotter, there were a lot
of nights when there was no breeze at all, and the overhead fans, while a
godsend, did little more than create eddies in the hot, stifling air. We would
wake up drenched in the middle of the night, pour more water into our
dehydrated bodies and lie there, listening to the music of the mosquitoes. I
know: the warm climate makes possible some of the things I will miss, such as
doing everything outdoors. But honestly – you could still do that stuff
outdoors if it were just 10 degrees cooler, you know? What would be so bad
about THAT?
And beyond just the
campus? On both lists – the people we met. Tony, the Ghanaian proprietor of
the Mountain Paradise Lodge where we had several pleasant outings, had a gentle
and wise philosophy. “All people make me happy,” he said. “Some when they
arrive…and some when they leave.” We certainly got to know people from both
those categories in Ghana. The ones we’ll keep close in our memories – and
there are so many of them – are the ones in the first group. Leaving them has
been sad. We have no idea when or whether we’ll see them again, so we just say
what people in Ghana say, knowing it may or may not happen: “Next time!”
