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