Ah, yes, the frog(s) …

We have had a situation here, as they say, and thanks to Sarah’s insistence you now get the whole story. 

About a week ago, Bill got up during the night to go to the bathroom (hey, we are older than we used to be!), and when he lifted the toilet lid a fairly large frog (4-5 inches?) was looking up at him. “I don’t know who was more surprised, him or me!” Bill told me in the morning. The frog skedaddled back the way he had come, meaning down through the pipe or whatever they call it. Bill flushed a few times to help out. 

The next day, no frog. We laughed about it to one of the campus administrative assistants. But she took it very seriously. “If a frog can get in, so can other things,” she said reassuringly. She took action, calling the Most Important Person on Campus: the one in charge of water (which is another topic) and plumbing. 

That evening, there the frog was again. He’d dash back so fast we couldn’t possibly catch him, though Bill did try. He’d get back just far enough that we could see his little feet peeking out, and then – flush – he’d go away. But then, 15 minutes later, he was back. It was freaky, especially for the gender that sits to use the toilet! 

We named him Kermit and pleaded with him to go away for good. That (sleepless) night, I heard him swimming in the toilet. He was doing laps and backflips, I swear. His buddies were outside ribitting, and once I heard him croaking back, or maybe I imagined it. In the morning, hi Kermit. 

Facebook friends provided funny but not useful solutions. So, the Most Important Person came after a few more calls, and said he was so sorry about this. His solution was to dump chlorine down the toilet – even though I apparently looked sad at the idea that Kermit would die just so I could sit down. He promised to send "artisans" to look at the lines outside (where there is a giant hole with open pipes gushing into it – we can hear the sinks draining into the hole, but the toilet apparently, supposedly does not). 

Kermit was gone after the chlorine bomb. (He truly did croak this time!) So it became a story to tell.

Until a few nights ago. In the morning, Bill said, “I think I saw a frog in the toilet last night, but maybe I dreamed it.” No frog all day, and then in the evening, I picked up the lid and a smaller frog – not Kermit - zipped back down the drain. He was less noisy and persistent than Kermit, but still there – and now we were out of water. We have a big garbage can with water in it, and use that to flush the toilet when we run out, but it’s not easy.

The next morning, we called the MIP again. It was a holiday – someone (probably MIP) put cardboard over the grey water drain hole (huh?), and we waited. Last night, middle of the night, it was my turn. Up with the lid – the frog was laying all splayed out in the water. I didn’t really examine him before flushing, but I think he was one dead frog. (Please, no comments about the contents of our toilet being deadly.)

The Person came again today. He said he thought the frogs were coming in the front door (no), that they hatched in the toilet (probably not so), and that he would have the artisans come to bomb it again. And really and truly he would look at the pipes for holes, though they did before, honest! He said again how unhappy he was that this happened. 

 This post is getting long, I apologize. But one more thing. We have geckos and one day there was a little teeny one that was not healthy. He just kind of sat in the corner and occasionally moved his head. So I asked Bill, my hero, to use his little trick of putting a glass over the gecko and sliding a card under him, and then letting him go outside. Bill has used this on bees at home often. So he confidently headed in with the glass and card, and then I heard an “uh-oh” and ran in to see. He had accidentally cut off the tip of the tail of the baby gecko. We told ourselves it would grow back, but then we (Bill mainly, I couldn’t!) watched while the tip wiggled and wiggled for a long time on its own. 

In other words, our karmic debt is growing. 

Will we have more frogs? Will Important Person google it like I did (uncapped clean-out pipe, duh – is that broken cement square to the left a clean-out)? Will we have Something Else? Stay tuned.

Check out the web album

We added a link to our Picasa Web Album at the bottom of the column on the right.  You can see lots more about what we are doing there; sometimes we don't get around to updating the blog, but we do add photos!

Around campus

One of the things we wondered about when we were coming to Ghana was whether we wouldn’t feel too isolated living here on the campus. In Kampala, after all, we were anything BUT isolated, with steady streams of people in cars and on foot going past our apartment, and with the sounds of the metalworkers hammering away in the nearby market (not to mention the much more annoying sounds from the DJs in the local bar on Saturday nights).

And while we are a bit more detached from city life than we might like, we find it is growing on us. That’s partly because this really is an extremely peaceful and pretty place, an enormous expanse of trees and lawns and lovely university buildings, and partly because it is an amazingly vibrant campus, with all sorts of interesting stuff going on all the time. Such as: Early in our stay, we were walking along and heard the throb of African drums. Investigating, we found ourselves standing in an open doorway along with a few other onlookers, as a group of students practiced some sort of traditional dance, with their instructor at the center of a group of drummers pounding away.

Overall enrollment is around 30,000 students plus all the rest of us. That’s a big enough population to support its own variety of storefront groceries and goods markets, a mini-African “everything but the kitchen sink, and maybe that too” market, snack bars and hole-in-the wall restaurants scattered about, and so on. I walk by the athletic fields on my 20-minute walk to my office, and there’s always something going on there. One day I counted little groups in different areas playing basketball, volleyball, cricket, baseball (yes!), football (soccer), and some sort of game that seems to combine football and dodgeball. Another day, there was a small group of students gathered under some bleachers to protect themselves from the drizzle, singing away under the direction of a conductor.

Not far from our flat is another large sports field. One of the first nights we were here we were out walking and heard a sort of murmuring, chanting sound from across the way, and saw several large groups of people. That gathering is repeated frequently, and sometimes goes all night – someone told us it is "the worshipers," complete with speaking in tongues, and Christian songs.

We were stunned by how well the university is kept up. This is a tough climate, and a tough region, for that sort of thing, but they have done a terrific job at it. Friends we’ve met who were here 10 years ago say this is a pretty new development – and it’s a wonderful one. The whitewash on the buildings is fresh; the gardens are well tended. Many of the departments (alas, not mine!) are housed in lovely complexes with courtyards and gardens inside; yesterday Theresa went to meet somebody in one where she discovered people having steins of beer at lunchtime – we will have to check that out further!

There are always people walking to and from wherever, and the lawns are crisscrossed by dirt paths serving as the shortest distance between various points. (Theresa edit: Bill is too nice. They walk on the paths to avoid snakes and scorpions!) One of these paths passes about five feet from our bedroom window, so sometimes, we feel like someone is about to join us in bed at night.

We’ve done quite a bit of walking ourselves, of course, exploring all of this. On Sunday we strolled to the top of what is called Legon Hill, where the massively grand centerpiece of the campus -- called Commonwealth Hall - is set, with its gigantic gardened courtyards and its ornate Great Hall. One of the courtyards there is framed with busts of all the university’s past Vice Chancellors – the chief officer of the school. A man who was there when we showed up pointed this display out to us, showing us the point (1965) at which the vice-chancellors' faces turned from white to black, as they have remained ever since. (One of the earliest (white) ones was Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer, diplomat, journalist, and all-around gadfly, so it seems – a breed I don’t think really exists so much anymore.)

And all of this is just scratching the surface. Yes, we are isolated in one way. But we are discovering so much, right outside our door. -- Bill

An Open and Shut Life

Bill here --- 

Window management. Who would have guessed that would be a big part of the Great African Adventure?

Bill is opening the shutters in our kitchen.

Our flat is on the ground floor, and security is an issue on campus, so we have to close things up when we leave for any period of time. But closing everything up is a major project! Because we’re in the tropics, there are a LOT of windows, all with outside shutters that can close to block the sun. Because we’re in the malarial tropics, the windows also have inside screened frames, so the breeze can come in but the bugs (theoretically) stay out.

So there are three layers: the shutters; the screened frames (on hinges so they swing open); and inside shutter-style glass windows.

When we’re here during the daytime, we open the outside shutters (if they’re not in the sun), close the screened frame, and open the glass windows. But that means if we decide to go out, we have to open the frame, close and lock the shutters, reclose and lock the frame, and close and lock the glass windows. All involving struggles with the ancient, slightly out of line and sometimes rusted bolt locks at each step.

                

And if it’s the kitchen windows, we have to brace ourselves not to jump when one of the resident geckos falls off the frame as we open it and scurries madly away.

                 

Here's the inside of our kitchen. The cooker (oven) doesn't work!

This may not sound like much, but this house has nearly 20 windows that we normally keep open, because it’s the only way to keep from dying from the heat when we’re inside. I timed it once when we were shutting the place down to go out. With both Theresa and me working at it, it took a full 13 minutes just to shut the windows (followed by washing up because the old wood is so dirty). You can see that there’s no such thing as spontaneously walking out the door.

               

Of course the reverse process occurs as our first move when we return home, and sometimes this whole cycle can happen two or three times in a day. Window management: a big part of our glamorous life!

               

To the Market

As promised, we spent Saturday at the Makola Market, a huge market something like Owino in Uganda. It’s in the old part of Accra, and the buildings are jumbled together so that you have to squeeze through little secret passages to see everything. Then the vendors are in teensy little closets (really doorways) crammed with goods. At one point, a woman said to us, “Come in!” but there was no actual “in” to come to. But it was nice of her all the same.

Bill said the market reminded him of Lamu in Kenya because of the alleyways and stone walls and ditches everywhere. You crowd by women carrying huge boxes of everything on their heads, stacks of things like soap or shampoo or electronics, and then some towers of tomatoes thrown into the mix. Here and there are tables of huge sea snails oozing in and out of their shells, not sure I’m up for trying them! Ghanaians like spicy food, so you find lots of little deadly peppers (we bought some and found out the hard way!) in the food stalls.

Wish we’d gotten a picture of the two women sleeping, each in one of two big pots facing each other in a little stall. There were lots of people lazing about – I think it’s the heat.

The other Fulbrighter here, Daniel, came with us, and Bill’s assistant, Prince, was our guide. Prince helped us figure out the tro-tros, and led us through the market and didn’t even laugh at us all that much. Daniel wanted some goat meat, so we went to the meat section of the market. We’ve already discovered that Ghanaians don’t always want their pictures taken, so we always ask first and some say no. But the butchers were fine with it, even posing. Some had big cow feet/hooves for making soup, and others had piles of meat with hair attached ... we were glad to get back to the snails.

We didn’t buy any goat for ourselves. Okay, we are pretty brave, but open sewers and flies and meat – well, we know our limits.

Novices in Ghana ...

We arrived Tuesday night, and were welcomed at the airport by a sign that says, “You are welcome to Ghana” in one column, and in another says, “You are not welcome to Ghana if you are a pedophile or sexual predator. If you are a sexual deviant you should leave now.” (I am paraphrasing, but it was a little startling at the entrance to the country. From what we could see in our naïve research prior to the trip, there has been a problem with child trafficking so maybe it’s just as well to get the warning out of the way at the beginning!) We decided to feel welcome.

We were surprised that there were not the groups of missionaries on the plane we are used to from our Uganda trips. We asked our host from the embassy about that and he said, “Perhaps they are already here.” And truly we hear groups of students singing Christian songs loudly in the evenings in a big field near our flat, so I guess he’s right. 

The flat: it’s HUGE! We are on the University of Ghana campus in an area called Legon, which is quite far from central Accra. We have two bedrooms (though one has only a single bed, guests beware), a large kitchen with a small screened porch, a big living and dining room combo, an office, and a bathroom. There’s a TV we haven’t used yet, and as of today we have a stovetop to cook on. And a teeny fridge. 

 The university left us water and fruit, as well as some basic supplies, which is a big treat. Okay, so that’s the good news; the bad is that the water is pretty inconsistent. Which explains the two huge garbage cans filled with emergency water. Yesterday we had no running water at all. But we are like the boy scouts! Always prepared! So it was the REI solar shower for me last night, and now I know to take advantage of the water when it is running. Today, there is a trickle, so we are happy. Life’s little luxuries.

We have spent some time getting up and running with a modem and two phones. It seemed a little more organized here than in Uganda, but when we had to fill out numerous forms to get a SIM card, and stand in line for an hour – twice, because it didn’t work the first time – we realized we are indeed in  Africa! So most of our time has been in a mall – where we shopped at ShopRite and Game, just like we did in Kampala. It was a little surreal.

We are surprised there are no boda-bodas (those buzzing motorcycles hauling people and dodging traffic), just taxis and trotros (little vans full of people). We asked about it, and a taxi driver told us Ghana doesn’t have them, though neighboring countries do. They also have a bike lane along the highway, though we have only seen about three bikes. The traffic seems orderly – though everyone says otherwise. Maybe we think it’s easier because they drive on the same side of the road that we do in the states.  Another difference: Where we are, there are no rivers of people walking alongside the roads. And everyone is shocked when we say we walked from the university gate to the mall. We are lucky in that it isn’t horribly hot here right now; we’ll probably find out why no one is walking when it heats up.

We did manage yesterday to walk around the campus, and found a little market where we can get vegetables from vendors. It’s called the Night Market, but it’s open during the day. (Bill, in his jetlagged state, asked someone where the Evening Market was, and got a blank stare.) We tried to find the swimming pool, but went the wrong direction so ended up in the bookstore, so we dove into books. No suits needed.

Another Fulbrighter here, from Maryland, told us there is a yoga class at the fitness center (where the swimming pool apparently is) twice a week, so I’m going to tag along with him next week. It’s a half hour walk to the center at 6:30 a.m., but I am going to need yoga, I can tell! And Bill will need that pool. We’ll sort it out.

Next up: This weekend we plan a trip to the center of Accra, to the big market and to see the ocean. I have not taken ONE picture. We’ll do better this weekend. 

Oh, and Eric and Katharine, yes, the blog should be "Under the Ghanaian Sun" but we thought that would confuse people with all those "a's". We are always being asked, "Where the heck is Ghana?" and we thought "Ghanaian" would send people over the edge. Apparently  not some people!