Lucky to be me

After that last post, the flowers immediately shriveled up and in swept the Harmattan. I have been thinking about inventing windshield wipers for my eyes (sandshield wipers?) with Visine as wiper fluid. Everything is filtered in a layer of fine dust so that you keep blinking to try to get Ghana back in focus. Someone described it as Accra being a “smudge” and that seems accurate. It’s a bit cooler because the sun is also a smudge, though today is like a thick sauna out there. But some people are wearing sweaters, which we can’t even imagine.

Madina library writers pretending to be "detectives."

I have promised a description of what I am doing at the libraries. First of all, I am one lucky woman. Kathy Knowles of the Osu Children’s Library Fund is allowing me to create little Writing Clubs, and I feel like falling to my knees next time I see her, I am so grateful.  

At Madina, the library closest to us, I go every Monday and Tuesday afternoons. The kids come rushing up to me shouting, “Madame Theresa, Madame Theresa!” and their little fuzzy heads are suddenly in a big crush around me. (A student volunteer from Canada, Dominique, also gets mobbed.) At Osu (Wednesdays), there are more boys than girls and they are a little more reserved, but equally as excited. 

Prosper putting the finishing touches on his book cover.

What do we do? The idea is to generate creative thinking, as well as writing skills. Kids here learn mainly by rote. There are few, if any, textbooks, so most of the learning in classes of 80-plus kids comes from a teacher writing on a blackboard, and then students copy it in their exercise books. There is not a culture of reading or writing for pleasure.

So, lucky me, I get to jumpstart their imaginations, and throw in a few writing skills at the same time.  

The “Writing Club” kids have written stories about random animals in weird settings (e.g., goat driving a trotro, leopard scoring goals for the Ghana Black Stars ), they have learned how to create characters and settings, and then come up with problems and solve them without making the solution too easy. They have written about their earliest memories, and last week in Osu they made “Menus for your worst enemy.” (Thank you to Teri Hein of 826 in Seattle for that huge hit!) Things like that.

One challenge is cultural differences. So, for example, one day we played Scattergories while waiting for all the kids to arrive. A card says “In the Garden,” and the other card says the letter “C.” A kid yells, “cassava!” while I was thinking “carrot.” And “A Girl’s Name” brings yells of “Persephone,” and “Patience.” We were writing about the library yesterday, and some began the story, “One Harmattan day … .” 

Earliest memories had a lot of “and then I was beaten” in them, as well as many pots of hot soup spilling on them. But also lots of “my brother pinched me,” a universal early memory!

Culture aside, I figure kids are just kids. Those menus? How little-boy is this: “Toasted penis soup.” Or “scorpion brains with rice.” “Snake teeth with mud.” (The little girls had a bit more trouble, they are too nice to their enemies.) 

Now we are embarking on creating some actual books. This week, we made an “About the Author” page complete with photo (thanks to our chugging-along portable Canon printer) – huge excitement! 

One lucky woman at Kathy Knowles Community Library in Osu.
Photo by Deborah Cowley

As I say, I am soooo lucky!

Just add water!

“It’s like a little miracle,” said Carl, our friend from Canada who has been teaching in the Philosophy department for the past year. Just watch, he said: When you get a rain after one of the prolonged parched spells like we’ve been having, the fields will explode in flowers.

That was hard to imagine. As Theresa mentioned in an earlier post, the most notable thing about the fields and trees when we returned after Christmas was how reddish brown everything is, covered with a thick level of bone-dry dust.

But then the other day it did rain, not for long but very hard. The car was suddenly clean; the air was refreshed; the sun was a more normal color at sunset, and you could actually see things in the distance that had previously been lost in a deep haze.

And two days later, the miracle happened. Everywhere we looked – out our kitchen window, on the walk to the pool, up the hill toward the administration building – there were patches of gorgeously delicate little white flowers, sticking their heads up, pointing toward the sky, waving in the breezes. Where could they have been hiding? What did they think as they emerged from the rock-hard soil into the blazing sun?

That’s not all, either: along with the clumps of flowers came an explosion of fat moths. Where had THEY been gestating, and in what form? There are hundreds and hundreds of them, under trees and clustered in corners of the building and flying madly all around. At least there were hundreds – the snowy white egrets think the moths are a good development, and they’ve been wandering around the yard, their long necks darting forward occasionally as they snag another one. Crunch.

Our friend and sometimes driver Gabriel tells us that egrets aren’t the only ones: people capture the moths in buckets (not very smart moths, but then, they haven’t been alive long enough to learn anything), remove their wings and eat them – just like with grasshoppers in Uganda, but not in such large quantities (we haven’t seen them for sale on the street, for example), and I think I’ll pass on this delicacy.

The flowers in the fields…the moths in the air: it’s one more reminder that although we don’t have the same sharply defined, months-long seasons here that we do at home, there are seasons nonetheless. They are just short, and – no surprise! – very, very intense. Blink, and you miss them.

Back in the swing of Ghana things

We’re back! And as if transitioning from the snow and ice to the heat and dust isn’t enough, we have been having a little trouble with jetlag. Must be getting old … 

Kwame met us at the airport with his big smile and shiny taxi. Soon enough we were back at our flat, where all was pretty much as usual, sans frogs. But the usually blue sky was blocked out by the red dust – the end, Kwame assured us, of the Harmattan winds. Still, the sun remains a huge melon through the haze.

And the campus? When we left in December all was green and blooming, but now it is brown. Outside our little compound there is a sea of brown leaves blowing back and forth in little waves of crunchiness. (Okay, so that last is a bit of a stretch, but I am getting ready to return to the writing clubs at the libraries and I need practice!) Inside the compound the ginger plants are brown, but not dead. They say they will return with the rain. Which it did do yesterday, great torrential waterfalls pouring out of the spouts, splashing into the spare bedroom before I could get the shutters closed.  And Bill was out in little Abena, the Tuesday-baby car, trying to avoid being washed away.

Our neighbors, Hudu and Husseina, were over the other night with a friend, Abu. Hudu, who lived for several years in Canada, had asked us to bring him snow, so we presented him with “instant snow,” which comes in a can. He mixed it up right away and declared it “just like snow!” Abu was so impressed. Hudu mentioned that the only thing missing was the cold, and his friend said, “Is snow cold?”

And there it is, a snowball!

Abu, Hudu and Husseina mixing "snow"

Beach bar getting ready for the Sunday night beach party

Today we went to the beach outside Accra and sat in little blue chairs breathing in the aromas of humanity combined with salty air. (Don’t ask.) Bill indulged in a large beer so that I could use the excuse to drive us home – yes, I’m attempting the Ghanaian streets. After all, I drove in Uganda – nothing could top that! And, actually, dodging potholes is a sport. It’s like one of Cameron’s video games, with motorcycles and tro-tros and taxis all trying to divert you into a bad spot.

Statue of former-President Nkrumah and friend pointing the way for Ghana

Some American kids I met this afternoon asked if it was hard to come back after being home. Oddly enough, the answer is no. It’s familiar – and fun. Our friends are still our friends. Mary and her daughter Salome still throw in extra cucumbers at the night market. The swimming pool people erected some weird fences and new signs (“Do not urinate in the shower,” in the women’s; “Flush the toilet, think of the next person” in the men’s -- to which Bill responds, “give us a little water then.”). Sure, the power was off this a.m., and I am dripping as we speak. A gecko just dashed up the window screen. And, sure, we had to “watch” the Australian Open on play-by-play, old-fashioned text on the BBC website. Call us crazy, but reading writing like this:  “Djokovic, stepping in for a return, stumbles as if he's spent the evening drinking hard liquor and it's Nadal in the ascendancy, holding to love for the second game on the trot…” makes it all worthwhile.

And so it goes …

Not a moment too soon...

“You’re lucky you’re leaving now,” a fellow professor in my department said to me the other day. The reason? I had asked her a question about the murkiness of the air outside.

                This is, I guess, sort of a follow-up to the previous blog post, which mentioned the bright red sunsets, and the pink dust that was swirled up into the air by passing vehicles.

                In the few days since I wrote that, things have visibly changed, and yesterday, it finally clicked with me: the air looked different. When I tried to imagine how to describe it, the best I could come up with was what it’s like when the very first wisps of fog start blowing in: you can’t actually see anything there, as you can later when you see the water particles and the dense mass of the fog; instead, you just have the impression of murkiness – you know, sort of like what some of us have when we realize that it’s time to put on the reading glasses.

                The air was just starting to look thick. Things 40 or 50 feet away were perfectly clear. A couple hundred feet away, there was this indistinct thickness. And in the distance – a thick haze like the pollution over Athens on a hot day.

                “Ah,” I said to myself. “The harmattan has definitely arrived.”

                This is a seasonal phenomenon in Ghana that nobody seems to like, natives and short-timers alike. It’s the name of a wind – a wind like the mistral, or the Chinook. This one originates in the Sahara, and blows south until it reaches, well, our flat, and then blows out to sea. It carries the finest possible dust with it; it picks up more dust from the dry earth everywhere; and it reverses the normal northerly wind direction that typically brings moist air in from the ocean. The result is hazy air, painfully chapped lips, hotter days. Not a lot to recommend it!   

                It is, they tell us, far more pronounced in northern Ghana, where the dust is thicker and the winds get stronger. Here, at least so far, the wind hasn’t been all that strong, although I have noticed more leaves blowing off trees and being tossed around.

                “As early as 1671 English adventurers spoke of it,” writes Allan A. Metcalf in a book I found on Google, “one of the few words of Twi [one of the local languages of the south of Ghana] that have entered the English vocabulary…. In 1845 the naturalist Charles Darwin saw the harmattan ‘raise clouds of dust high into the atmosphere.’"

                It will continue for who knows how long – probably until we return here in late January, maybe longer; with climate change seemingly affecting Africa particularly strongly, nobody really seems to know how these phenomena will act these days.

                So this is why my friend said I was lucky to be leaving. We just hope the dust hasn’t infiltrated EVERY corner of our flat by the time we return!

               

What season did you say it is?

                Theresa is already home in Seattle, but I still have a few more days in Accra, where, incidentally, it is currently 53 degrees warmer than it is back where she is. Or make that HOTTER. So the blog must go on!

                We have talked a lot about whether they do or don’t have what we think of as “seasons” here. The length of day never varies; the temperatures never cool down. There is supposedly a wet season and a dry season, although nobody really agrees on when each will start and end.

                But you do see changes in the vegetation – and one of them, in the past month, has been a number of trees on campus suddenly bursting into quite lovely bloom. The ones in the photo are typical – we pass these on the way to the swimming pool. We don’t have any idea what makes trees suddenly bloom when what we think of the triggers of springtime (thawing ground, longer days) simply don’t exist. Perhaps it is because it has been sooooo dry now for such a stretch, which people tell us will last until maybe next March. But it adds a nice visual highlight!

                The dry weather also means there is pink sandy dust everywhere, including in the air. The guy sitting in an open stall selling phone airtime over near the fruit and vegetable is now wearing a filter over his nose and mouth and protective glasses, because he’s right next to a busy dirt roadway. A more attractive result of the dust is that when the sun sets these days outside our kitchen window, it is a huge, enormous red ball – very spectacular.

                Meanwhile, in another topic I’m touching on because it is related to the natural world (can you tell that I’ve been teaching my journalism students about transitions?), here’s another odd sight on campus. Right near those colorful trees there’s a large football (soccer) field. Lately, it has been populated by two clumps of very big birds: loud, obnoxious black and white crows; and the slightly scary looking black vultures that also roost in tall trees on campus.

                Not quite sure what they’re doing there, but they definitely are hanging out in their two groups, sizing each other up a bit but mostly staying on their own. It almost makes you think that if you tossed a football out there, they’d move it down the field. Goodness knows they’re big enough to do it…

Butterflies, bats and beauty

The hike got a lot steeper than this!

Our car’s inaugural trip was to the Volta Region, a hilly area east of Lake Volta. We first went to a small town called Biakpa, near a monkey sanctuary, though we opted not to go see the monkeys. It was nice enough just to be in a high, relatively cool place and do some hiking. We walked up Mt. Gema, a knob above a beautiful little village called Amedzofe. Amedzofe is full of little houses painted all kinds of colors – bright pink, pastel green, yellow with blue inside veranda arches. The people were extremely friendly, and Bill and I spent a nice evening just wandering the town talking to everyone. We also hiked down into a valley to a waterfall – a hike that included a rappel down a rock wall. 

We met up with some friends on the Biakpa portion of the trip, then meandered on our own to see the big waterfall of Ghana, Wli Falls. We figured this would be anticlimactic for us, since at home there are so many high waterfalls, but of course everything is different here. For example, all along the trail we were accompanied by flitting colorful butterflies. Bill said, "It's like we are in a Disney movie," because the butterflies would fly just ahead of us on the path as if they were leading us to some magical place. When we got to the waterfall we thought we saw birds flitting in and out of it, but upon examination with the binoculars we realized the “birds” were huge bats. And then we realized that on the rock wall next to the waterfall there were hundreds – maybe thousands – of bats. They had big wingspans so we guessed they were fruit bats. Later that evening our host at the Waterfall Lodge told us the bats fly in big groups (what do you call a bunch of bats – it’s a “murder of crows,” for example, but bats?) to the fields to feast on fruit, including her pawpaws (papayas).

On one hike, to Tagbo Falls near the village of Liate Woti, the path was scented by plumeria trees. Our young guide Wisdom told us that the Ewe people (originally from “Togoland” – we could almost spit across the border to Togo we were so close) call the trees “forget-me-not trees” because wherever you see five plumeria trees together there is a cemetery. So we spent the rest of the trip watching for groves of plumeria, and suddenly saw cemeteries everywhere. 

Kente weaving is done in strips on a wooden loom.

On the trip we visited a village where men and women sit outside their huts doing intricate kente weaving; and a small factory where they make beautiful multicolored beads out of every kind of recycled glass imaginable – some pictures are on the web album, link to right.

Toes are an essential part of the process!

A good trip with a mix of culture and exercise – our favorite kind of vacation!