An American in Africa

To Ghana With Love...(sob!)

2007-12-14T13:10:00.000Z

Okay, move complete, boy withdrawn from school, cars and appliances disposed of, dog shipped off to the U.S. and all that remains is to stuff ourselves and our six pieces of luggage onto the plane tonight.

As an epilogue, I'll tell you what's next for our three favorite Ghanaians.

Stephen has the option of taking over the day guard job at Ted's company house, if he wants to. But we have spoken with InterCon Security and our glowing reports of him, while not the first, are apparently what they needed to offer him a better position with their company and if that happens, he will be getting a promotion which is no less than he deserves. Cross your fingers.

Mark has decided he would like to go back to school and we have helped set him up in his own place so he can do that and not have to break in the new owners of our house. He will continue to sell phone units and mow lawns to earn money and finish his education.

Duke, of course, is going to continue driving for the company, except in a better car with a more important guy. ;-)

We will miss them, and so many other people we have to leave behind, like crazy.

For all the kind people who have commented that they will miss my blog, thank you so much for hanging out with me all this time- it's been a hoot.

If you love Ghana, you can head over to Obroni Observations (there is a hot link on the right hand column at the top) and read Barb's pithy posts if you haven't already discovered her. She is one of the people I will miss the most.

And as I head to a country that does not have free range goats and chickens (in this case free range means suburban neighborhoods) I think I might miss even them more than I realized.

One of the only goats we have ever seen tied up in Ghana lives just a block from our house and we have watched him twang at the end of his rope or just wrap it tightly around the trees for so long we had almost stopped noticing him.

But we took this picture yesterday, to remind us always... and he was obligingly wrapped around three trees.

My parting shot of Ghana and a big thank you to the people here who made it such a great ride...

Bye Bye!

International Moving, Ghana Style

2007-12-11T08:30:00.000Z

As our friends and families (and their poor, abused address books) are well aware, moving is a hobby with us (this current shift will be to our 14th home since 1978) but this particular move is a new experience for us...

After our books and kitchenware were packed up in boxes, almost everything else ended up being wrapped like packages in the red and white paper you can see everywhere...

The guys doing our packing were very typically Ghanaian- polite, careful-ish, and not only willing to take direction from us, but desperately in need of it.

This was a real departure for us- our many house packers in the U.S., and even the ones in Australia, were brisk and efficient and although they always comply with our suggestions/requests, they mostly wish we would dry up and blow away.

Not so here.

We were sought out frequently to give our opinions or instructions for a million different things, which took some getting used to after years of being trained by our U.S. movers to shut up and get out of their way. ;-)

As the day progressed, the house began to look more and more like this, everywhere you looked...

We kept them from packing the things we needed this week by putting that stuff in the "Off Limits" room, which was controlled chaos...

...and Duke spent the day looking for things to do and ways to help.

Because he is Duke.

Here he is, sweeping the dog hair off our bedroom floor in his "Boss and Mom Are Moving" clothes.

The big surprise was Elliot.

We brought him on the porch to meet the movers when they first showed up and he smelled their shoes and hands (remember, strange dogs are not generally a favorite of Ghanaians, so our movers were very brave and patient to deal with this), and then let them do their work without freaking out and barking at them.

As a matter of fact, quite often as we moved through the house, we would see Elliot getting a passing pat on the head from one of his new best friends as they went about their business.

Here he is, exhausted, taking a little breather next to one of his new pals...

Finally, all our stuff was boxed and bagged, wrapped and taped, and the container showed up.

Things were loaded into this container and will be taken to the port where they will be crated in plywood boxes and put into a Maersk sea container for shipment back to America.

Unless it falls overboard.

Which apparently happens with alarming frequency. Cross your fingers...

Here's the truck backing the container into our driveway (that's Stephen on the left and Mark on the right)...

and just a few minutes later, completely onto the property...

This was a sharp contrast to the container truck that delivered the same stuff to us in the spring of 2005.

On that day, the truck maneuvered for a good thirty minutes OUTSIDE our gate, gathering a knot of interested kibbitzers as it did.

Then it made roughly twenty attempts to back through the gate as each spectator gave advice and instructions (usually conflicting) to the accompaniment of a chorus of "Brah, brah, brah!" which is Twi for "come".

We thought, at the time, that they were saying "Blah, blah, blah." which was a great way to start our life in Ghana with a laugh.

So life in our little house in East Legon has come to an end, and we are living in a hotel this week, waiting for Cooper to finish his final exams.

It's the same hotel we lived in for six weeks waiting for the sea container to arrive from America, but in the time we have lived here it has changed ownership. With the new owners came a list of rules for the swimming pool, carefully painted on one of the signs we have come to love in this country for their clear, open instruction on so many aspects of life.

No pussyfooting language about "Intoxication"- just don't swim DRUNK, and by the way, don't spit OR BLOW YOUR NOSE into the pool.

I offer my sincere thanks for that particular instruction.

And instead of nattering about safety and liability, they point out right up front they won't be responsible for Death while using the pool. So there.

I'll post again before we make what are sure to be our tearful farewells to a swell country, and the people therein...

...in the meanwhile, be very very glad you don't have to move, and if you don't think it's so bad, please come to our house in the U.S. and help unpack. :-)

Say It Isn't So!

2007-12-01T15:00:00.000Z

Well, this is the entry I have dreaded for a long time- the one I was hoping I wouldn't have to write for quite a while.

In the middle of December, we will be moving away from Ghana. :-(

I'll pause here for you to take a moment to become as bummed as I am.

We made Duke cry, and he made Jane cry, and they lied and told the girls that they had just put medicine in their eyes and everything was fine.

The good news is that they are mostly over it.

The seven of us (Duke, Jane, Christa, Erica, Us and Coop) spent the day together last weekend and Duke went swimming!

Kind of.

And while they are sad, they accept it and Duke is even a little excited because when he doesn't have us anymore he will be driving for the Project Director whom he likes very much.

The Project Director's wife is a nice woman (with a big dog, just for Duke!), but she won't let him come into stores with her and the rolling frat house that Duke and I had will be shut down for good.

No more teasing the street vendors, no more bat harrassing, no more honking and waving and hooting and "shortcuts" to Siberia. But he'll have a nicer car to drive, and that's something.

Anyway, the project isn't finished (far from it), but we had told Cooper when we came that it would be for two years. We never expected it to be really only two years, since we have never had a project finish on time, ever, but we forgot to mention that to Coop.

The time overrun coupled with the full onset of adolescence gave him a little angst about missing "real life" and just doing things "regular".

The poor kid just wants to go to the mall with friends and see a movie in a theater and load a YouTube video in less than 10 minutes. He wants to make a phone call and not have to redial four times in the middle of the conversation because the phone disconnected, and he wants to eat fast food.

I don't blame him. I wouldn't be a teenager again for all the folding money in Las Vegas, but I wouldn't have missed the first time around either, so we are taking him back to let him be a "Real American Teenager" for the last 2.5 years of high school.

He's earned it.

We have expanded his horizons so many times in so many ways, often against his will, in the last two and a half years, and he has been a trooper ever since we dragged him out of California all those years and three moves ago, coming along without complaint- it just feels right to honor this request from him to take advantage of this last period of what could be the easy life before he has to assume the responsibilities of an adult.

So the whole family will repatriate December 15 and Ted will return to finish the project on a rotating basis- time with us, time at work- living here with other company employees in a house they will share. Not the perfect solution, but one that will work.

Next week is packing/moving week.

Yech.

This move is particularly complicated because we have things that will go with Ted to his new digs, things to ship by sea, things to ship by air, things to carry with us, things to sell, and things to give away.

Usually we just have a giant garage sale and move the rest to the new house.

I will try to see the humor in the coming week's events so I can tell you about the moving experience from here without going 'round the bend.

Meanwhile, I want to leave you today with some recommendations if you are ever lucky enough to come to Ghana.

If you are an Obroni, and want Obroni stuff, you will have no trouble finding it without me.

What I am going to share are the places we love that are a little out of the way or where we are often the only Obronis but that have become some of our favorite places to spend time.

Start with Chez Afrique. It's in East Legon, near the French School, off Lagos Ave. a few streets. If you want it, you will find it. Good food, cold beer, music on weekends, lower prices on weekdays. We only eat "inside" if it rains (inside means a roof and some six foot walls...)- 99% of the time we eat on the patio out front. Grilled chicken, chicken kabobs, Okra stew, kelewele, RedRed and cole slaw. We've never paid more than 20 bucks for both of us, stuffed to the gills and well lubricated.

Papa's Peace Bar. A very strange and wonderful place also in East Legon. Head for Accra on Lagos and take the first left. After about a block, Papa's will be on your right.

Osekan Resort. Easy on the resort part, but you can't beat the location, right down by the beach in a place where the waves break wildly over the rocks. You can get sea food and have your hair curled (or straightened, depending on your DNA) all at the same time. Inexpensive, good service, and a unique experience.

The basket lady on 5th Circular, near Home Touch. This woman has really nice baskets in all the good "Bolgatanga" styles and she will reward you for being a faithful customer. Even your first time she will give you a "small price", and you won't need your aggressive negotiating skills.

China Palace- the one in East Legon is better than the one in Dzorwulu, but they are both reasonably priced and cheerfully staffed, just don't get the satay. The one in East Legon is near the Living Room and American House. Follow the billboards.

Big Milly's Backyard, Kokrobite. You will find a lot of Obronis (young, backpacking, free spirits) here, but it's 100% African in atmosphere and experience. Eat lunch outdoors in the shade with sand for a floor, a picnic table to sit at, and chickens wandering through the restaurant... after lunch you can stroll the fairly clean beach and watch the fishing boats and fishermen who work from the beach here.

Aylos Bay Resort on the Volta River (on the way to or from the Cedi Bead Factory). You can sit in the shade at a large table and watch the Volta slide by (along with fishermen) and eat very good food at terrific prices served by happy, kind people. Spend the night if they have room. And be sure to check out the sculptures outside the restrooms.

And finally, even though a banana is a banana is a banana, if you are in East Legon on Lagos Ave. please stop under the big shade tree about a mile past the Ange Hill Hotel. The woman there sells only bananas, so you will be able to spot her next to a plywood clothes store. She will need your business to make up for losing mine.

And if you buy apples from your car, try to do it sometimes from the guys on the Motorway at the light in front of the Fiesta Royale hotel- 1GHC for three apples. And you can point to the exact three you want.

And try to go to Accra Central. You will make as many friends as you can handle and the experience is one of a kind. :-)

Mother Nature's Little Joke

2007-11-18T14:30:00.000Z

I realize that a good portion of my blog entries have soft porn involved, somehow, even if it's not intended.

You can probably chalk that up to the basically immature nature of your Blog Writer, but sometimes I just can't help myself.

When we were on vacation recently at Axim Beach, we made ample use of our little front porch, from which we were treated to the sights and sounds of the Atlantic Ocean, and the native vegetation.

Call us potty minds (and you would be very close to the mark there!), but this plant, growing vigorously between our Rondavel and Coop's, just gave us both the giggles. Every time.

If you are puzzled, here is a closer view...

If you still wonder what the hell I'm talking about, consider yourself a mature adult, and a truly Non-Potty Minded Person (which means you aren't related to me by blood).

If, however, you are snorting and maybe even guffawing, let me know and we'll get together for a drink and to share some jokes that are really in bad taste. ;-)

Ghana has fine-tuned my baser nature.

For the better.

A Crappy Problem...

2007-11-09T13:00:00.000Z

Today's subject is a bummer.

But it's something that we keep getting smacked in the face with, and it's probably one of the biggest cultural disconnects we have encountered here.

Certainly it's bad for Ghana.

You know I love Ghana, and especially Ghanaians, and god knows America is not a world leader in environmental issues, but the problem here is bad and getting worse...

The beaches here are huge natural waste sites (both household garbage and human effluent), and littering is not considered a problem by the majority of the population. I won't point out the human waste in these pictures, but it's there. Trust me.

Witness these two excerpts:

ACCRA SEWERAGE IMPROVEMENT PROJECT November 2005

...The sanitation situation in Accra is in a very bad state. Of the twenty existing sewage treatment systems in the Accra
metropolitan area, none is in working order...

[The ailing and barely functional Achimota Water treatment plant was shut down completely in March of 2005 because it conflicted with a roadworks project along the coast. Because of that, we got a news story more than a year later...]

ACCRA, 1 August 2006 (IRIN News) -

For well over a year, more than 80 percent of the sewage generated by the two million people of Ghana’s sea-front capital of Accra has been dumped in the ocean, untreated...

... "It is not an acceptable international practice," Appiah told IRIN. "But it is a mighty ocean out there. As far as I am concerned, it doesn't do anything bad to anyone."...

====================

Yes, you read that right...an official of the government in Ghana said "it doesn't do anything bad to anyone." How do you begin to fight that kind of ignorance?

As opposed to the coastlines of developed countries, in Ghana only the poorest people live close to the beaches (especially in Accra) because all the garbage, effluent, and trash ends up at the beach or in the ocean.

At least the garbage that isn't just dropped directly on the streets and property of Accra.

Water "on the go" can be bought here in "single serving" sized plastic bags for a very small price. When emptied, these bags are simply dropped on the ground, resulting in a constant line of empty, discarded plastic bags on every street in the city, along with the sort of trash and litter that was so common in America (and sometimes still is) before the Anti-Littering campaigns of the 60s and 70s.

Having grown up with the Iron Eyes Cody crying a single tear for the littering of America's highways and rivers, I developed a horror of litter and littering that I passed on to my son.

But after almost three years in Ghana, I have to catch myself occasionally when I have "inconvenient" trash in my car- the temptation to just chuck it out the window is very real. It would be a small addition to a monstrously huge existing problem.

But I don't.

Thankfully my distaste for litter is ingrained enough to stop me from actually contributing to the problem, but how will we ever educate Ghanaians to the enormity of this issue before it overwhelms the city and country?

If I can be tempted, with my anti-litter upbringing and pampered lifestyle, how can you communicate the urgency of the problem to the average Ghanaian?

One of the community service projects at Lincoln School is to clean up the beach in La (the beach community in Accra). Cooper participated in that his second year here, and he came home sad, disillusioned and not a little grossed out.

The younger kids were prohibited from picking up some of the things on the beach, but the senior school kids (like Cooper) were confronted with more than just trash- they picked up condoms, syringes, and many many plastic bags filled with human feces.

On the beach.

Within walking distance of major international hotels that will never ever attract the guests they seek because of the condition of the local beaches.

Even a country as forward-looking as Ghana will be prohibited from becoming the modern destination the Ghanaian government constantly talks about and wishes for as long as the streets and beaches of the country are full of garbage and human waste.

The Toothmobile

2007-10-31T10:00:00.000Z

Cooper's dentist.

Remember when Coop got his braces and I told you about the dentist having his chair and equipment in a converted recreational vehicle?

Well, by popular demand, I have pictures!

Behold, the Toothmobile...

and once inside, you would never know you weren't in a regular dentist's office...

I tell you, Africa and Africans can just make stuff work. The Doc has it hooked to his generator, so there's no worries about power.

They are working on a new office in a regular building on their property, so the fun won't last long now...

but when we look back on Cooper's experience with braces we'll always have the Toothmobile.

:-)

Ghana, The Beach, and Everything

2007-10-20T10:10:00.000Z

October is fall break time at Lincoln school (can you believe they've been in school for nine weeks already????), so Ted burned some vacation time and we took off.

We wanted to stay in Ghana, but we didn't want to spend our time bouncing over dicey roads looking for badly signposted attractions, so we made a couple of reservations on a couple of beaches and headed west, toward Takoradi and the border with Cote'd'Ivoire (the former Ivory Coast).

Our first stay was at Axim Beach Resort, about a half hour past Takoradi, set on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic, with a nice beach at the bottom of the hill and really fun "rondavel" chalets. Here is one of the signs we followed for many miles back into the bush on the way to the resort...

Here is the stone from the entrance to reception...

You may remember that "Akwaaba" is Twi for

"You are welcome".

This is our chalet...

...and then looking downhill to ours from Cooper's chalet...

(yes, he had his very own room, complete with TV and personal remote. He was a happy boy).

And what a surprise, considering these crazy shy Ghanaians... there was a very interesting carving on the door of our chalet...

She really skeeved Cooper out. :-)

Especially since Ted and I were so pleased to have her on our door.

Cooper's door carving was some warrior or farmer or something boring, which suited him just fine.

We, on the other hand, appreciated having a door that made us giggle every time we went through it.

The beach at Axim has a very small tidal fluctuation, and the surf pounds pretty heavily day and night- people pay a lot of money for machines that replicate that sound, and we just sat on our little porch and let it wash over us, so to speak.

Although Ted and I both admitted to thinking the occasional wave set sounded an awful lot like the ubiquitous jets that zoom over our house a couple dozen times a day...it's all relative.

The beach, looking back toward the hill on which sit the rondavels...

and a shot of the rondavels themselves, nestled in among the palms...

This is Coop making the most of the surf on a day that threatened rain, but never quite managed it until way after bedtime...

When we sat on our porch, these are the views we had...

On our third night there, they had what was billed as a "Burn Fire and Bufet" on the beach.

They set up a really nice buffet after dark and then set a bonfire on the sand for our pyromaniac enjoyment. It was pretty special and very well done.

By this time, of course, poor Coop had enough of rustic African beach living, and we headed out to our next resort- a place built to attract Obronis (although it still surprises us even after all this time how many things about "obroni" hotels still scream AFRICA).

We checked into the Busua Beach Resort, from whence these views came...

(Had we been in America, we would have suspected the Disney
Imagineers of planting this island, two perfect palms
and a grassy hummock for effect. It was just too perfect...)

It was a very nice setting, with a very clean beach.

And really boring. :-)

But Coop was happy, so we sat on the beach for a few days and read our books and swam with him and just relaxed without worrying about getting any cultural advantages.

The upside was our excursion out into the neighboring village and our subsequent discovery of the African Rainbow hotel and its fourth floor rooftop bar, in which they happily served us dinner.

We sat up high, watched the ocean, and ate some terrifically good food- first by ourselves, and then with Coop when we dragged him away from his cushy hotel room and out into Africa again.

While we were busy staying in resorts and reading on the beach, we also managed to do a little exploring.

One of the first things we did was head out the beach road west toward Cote'd'Ivoire from Axim.

This particular region of Ghana was devastated in the 70s by a blight that caused a "wilt" on the producing coconut palms and wiped out the local economy. All this time later, the stumps of the dead palms linger as a reminder...

There are living coconut palms there now, but nothing like the amount that provided them with a living wage so many years ago.

If you ever find yourself on the road to Cote'd'Ivoire, this is what it would look like...

The trick is to stop before you actually get to the border- no Mexican border town can compare to the chaos and corruption of the Ghana-Cote'd'Ivoire border.

And just to keep you from wishing we had taken you with us to sample a new country, feel free to check out any travel guide for our neighbors to the West. Its current condition is simply not conducive to casual visitors.

Or visitors. :-(

But we didn't need no stinkin' foreign countries to entertain us- we had Ghana and what Ghana has is...

Rubber Tree Plantations!

Who knew?

Here is a shot of rubber tree saplings:

and here they are all grown up:

The trees are tapped just like Maple trees in the U.S., except a sticky white rubber comes out instead of maple syrup!

We wanted to stick our fingers in the collection cups really bad, but since we were trespassing to get these shots at all, we decided not to press our luck and had to settle for imagining how odd and gooey that rubber must feel...

Finally, after a week of resort living we had to head back to real life, but we stopped at one last resort to have lunch in an outdoor restaurant set directly on the beach near Biriwa called Anumobo (feel free to rearrange the "O"s and "U"s in that name any way you like- we saw it spelled every conceivable way on signs, in guidebooks and even on their own menus and Reception desk).

They served us traditional Ghanaian lobsters, which faithful readers remember from our jaunt to Osekan Restaurant in Accra. Today however, you get to actually see them (I remembered to take a picture when I had only eaten four of them and there were still some left!).

This is some seriously good eatin'.

And a lovely finish to our relaxing "All Ghana, All Lazy" vacation.

Kente 101

2007-10-08T16:50:00.000Z

Ghana is (or it should be!) famous as the home of Kente cloth. It is woven by hand in sharp, bright colors by men of the Ashanti tribe.

The "usual" Kente comes in strips about 4-6 inches wide and five or six feet long. If you want a garment, many strips are sewn together to make a large cloth.

There are tons of patterns and each one means something, e.g. "the extended family is a strong force" or "God's Eyebrow" (the ashanti description of a rainbow).

Once again, because my sister Judy came to visit, I finally managed to take some (seriously bad) photos of a Kente weaver doing his thing.

In this badly exposed, poorly framed, confusing picture, you can see

a) the long threads used to weave the cloth lengthwise (this goes on for 25 or 30 feet),

b) the weaver waaa-aaay at the back of the pic, and

c) a finished strip on the far right side in front of Ted.

Heading back to where the weaving guy actually sits, for a marginally better picture you can see the "pedals" for his feet.

This is a complicated set of thingamajigs that the guy manipulates with his feet and toes to keep tension, switch layers, and who knows what kind of cool stuff that one could only understand after much practice and many botched practice cloths.

You can just barely make out the pattern of the cloth he is weaving if you click it bigger and look between his hands.

For the 50th Anniversary celebration, we bought this Kente strip from the guy down the street...

It's at least twice this long, but I couldn't get the whole thing in the picture and still let you see the details.

The fabric is good sturdy cotton-type cloth. Fairly tightly woven so you can't see through it.

When we were in the forest up north to visit the sacred monkeys last spring, our Park Ranger Guide had some kente cloth bookmarks available for purchase.

I couldn't decide on one, so I bought seven. ;-)

Here's a few of them close up...

and here's the whole collection...

And that's your crash course in Kente cloth.

Need for Speed

2007-10-01T13:30:00.000Z

After more than two years without a mall, a movie theater, or a crappy fast food restaurant, and more than a year since they took away his sad little neighborhood half pipe, you probably think Cooper never gets to have any teen-aged boy fun.

Never fear.

Accra has a Go-Kart track.

I kid you not.

¢70,000 (about $7.50) will get you 15 minutes on the track in a Go-Kart held together with spit and baling wire at the La Raceway.

La is the neighborhood the track is in, near the beach. And this is what it looks like...

Not bad at all. It's a fairly long course and the turns are sharp enough and the guys hit the tires often enough to thrill themselves a little.

Because when you are 15, it's all about risk and skidding and passing your friends.

And when you go to the Go-Kart track outside America, you don't have to worry about all those pesky safety rules and liability disclaimers.

Not that they don't care. This sign for instance...

If you click it bigger you will get the full flavor of the serious nature of the danger of motor sport. :-)

And they did have this sign in the pit area...

Of course, they didn't have any flags or even a flag man. Just a few guys with a watch. When your fifteen minutes are up, one of the guys walks out to the track and points at the pit when you drive by.

Works the same.

Here's Coop and two of the three friends who went Saturday just after their first fifteen minute session. They spent the next twenty minutes dumping adrenalin and discussing how much drift they got (as in Tokyo Drift) and debating the merits of their particular Go-Kart.

Then they got ready to start their second session...

which included the track guys gassing up each Go-Kart with a little jug of gas and a Flintstones funnel.

Nana's ride needed a little help, and as one of the kids said when we were all through-

the track guys go "Oh! It's not working? Let me fix it with this paper clip."

and off they went.

It's just like home.

And nothing like home.

All at the same time.

But at least Cooper gets to be a big high school dork with his friends sometimes.

Chili Peppers!

2007-09-24T10:00:00.000Z

On our very first road trip we saw tons of Ghanaian Red Chili peppers drying on the roadsides and at the time I thought to myself, "I'll have to get a picture of those sometime."

Cut to now, more than two years later and I finally got my picture.

Dopey me was thinking those peppers would just hang out waiting for me and my camera, because, hey! this is the equator and everything blooms 365, right? D'oh!

Luckily, when my sister was here, we were covering some of the same ground, at the same time of year, and VOILA! lots of roadside peppers, drying in the sun.

This is very much along the lines of the pumpkin patches in Mississippi that so astonished us (and provided our friends with no end of mirth and merriment)- where hundreds of Hallowe'en pumpkins were left on an empty lot on Brookway Blvd., unattended at night, and no one thought (or saw fit) to steal, smash, or otherwise annoy them.

In Ghana, if you didn't chop and stack that pile of wood on the roadside- don't even think about picking it up and taking it home to your cooking fire.

If you didn't build that furniture on the roadside, "locked" up for the night by being tied inside a plastic tarp- don't consider taking it home for the family room.

And if you didn't PICK those chilis, don't pick those chilis UP.

They aren't yours, and no Ghanaian would consider taking them.

So there they were, on the side of the road.

Or more accurately, in the middle of the road- drying in the sun, unattended.

I'm sure there were people keeping an eye on me from somewhere not too far off- even if they weren't the chili owners.

"What on Earth is that Obroni doing NOW?" ;-)

These chilis will be used to make "Ghanaian Gravy". Not shito (that's got fish and stuff in it), but the basic oil/onion/chili paste that is served in small bowls with small spoons with every Ghanaian meal whether you are in a Chinese restaurant or a neighborhood chop bar.

It's thick, it's dark and dangerous looking, and it's lethal.

Whenever we eat with Duke, he always mixes chili gravy into his rice.

And we always moan and congratulate him on his asbestos constitution, because even though we can eat a lot spicier food that we did when we were less well-travelled, we still can't manage about 60% of Ghanaian heat.

Interestingly, these chili peppers are also used as Elephant Deterrents. Seriously.

Apparently elephants don't like chili peppers, so cloths are smeared or soaked with a paste of them, and hung near crops in the north part of Ghana- instant elephant repellant.

If only you could smear it on yourself and get them to stop and lick you before deciding whether or not to kill and eat you, it could be a lifesaver. Although your skin might never recover.

Ghana, Meet My Sister

2007-09-17T10:00:00.000Z

My sister Judy was here this past week, and she got a whirlwind tour of Ghana. Or at least the parts of it we could get to in a week.

And that meant, of course, that I got another crack at the the Kpandu Pottery works and the Cedi Bead Factory.

More pottery!

More beads!

And both places had all kinds of new stuff. Color me happy.

If you've been reading since the beginning (the last pictures of Kpandu were sometime around October of 2005) you will be pleasantly surprised by the tidy new "showroom" of pottery.

Here's Judy trying to decide if she wanted a bowl with bumps on it (she ultimately chose a different bowl).

Everyone here was so happy to meet her- Duke has had the whole week marked on his calendar as he looked forward to driving her around Ghana.

And we had a lot of fun seeing Ghana through her "new" eyes, having forgotten how things looked to us long ago when it was all so strange and different.

The passing parade didn't disappoint, either. We followed a truck full of thatch for some village's roofs...

and a tro tro overloaded with people and smoked fish...

and yesterday, as a parting gift, we were lucky enough to run across two enterprising young men and their cart...

Judy took the picture- I was so excited I forgot I had a camera too!

These four wheeled carts are very common here and young men and boys pull them all over Accra with a variety of salvageable goods on them.

A long time ago we saw the hulk of an entire burned out car on one and never hoped to have the good luck to spot something like that again when we had a camera with us.

Go ahead and spend a little time wondering how they got the car onto the cart at all... :-)

We spent a good chunk of Wednesday afternoon with Duke, Jane, and the girls- we went to a local play ground with a bunch of fun kid stuff to play in and on, and then piled onto the porch for pictures...

As we wandered through the Tetteh Quarshie Arts and Crafts Market for the second time Friday morning, searching out the perfect gifts for her family, Judy (with Duke's enthusiastic help) used her newly acquired savvy about negotiating the cost of items and almost gave the poor woodcarver a stroke trying to settle on the price for a small carving she wanted.

It was a hoot watching her and Duke tag team this poor man who had been pleased to see us return.

I know we overwhelmed Judy a little, and she will never complain about Illinois potholes again, but I hope when she got on the plane Sunday morning she wished she could return to our little corner of Africa and all the smiling people.

Mark, Small Business Owner

2007-09-04T17:00:00.000Z

Whew! Did you miss me?

Since my last post school has started, and along with it came all the back-to-school craziness including Back to School Night which we never miss because it's the one night all of Cooper's teachers tell us how much they like him and what a charming, funny guy he is.

Because later in the year, for the mid-semester Parent/Teacher Conferences, we hear about how charming and funny and disruptive he is... not as much fun, although over the last eleven years we have gotten used to it, and until 3rd grade his teachers considered him more charming than disruptive.

We have a pledge from him this year to buckle down and try not to get shut out of every decent college in America because he is so charming and funny and disruptive (which translates into lazy and unmotivated and scraping by on the least amount of work possible while getting the most amount of laughs in class...).

Anyway. That's where I've been.

But this post isn't about Mr. Charisma.

This one is about our Mark. And his new store.

Actually he's had it all summer.

In Ghana you can have a phone in your house, if you have electricity and stuff and you are cabled up to the phone company. We have electricity (usually) but no phone cable, nor do many of the people in this neck of the woods. Or neck of the palms.

You can have a mobile phone, if you can afford one (the basic ones here go for anything from about $90 U.S. to $500 U.S.), and can afford to keep buying SIM cards for them (pay-as-you-go calling).

You can use a pay phone, if you can find one- I've only seen them outside the Ghana Telecom offices, although there may be more around I haven't noticed- suffice it to say they aren't common.

Your final option (and a popular one it is), is to go to a Phone Vendor. The are set up all over Accra- and for that matter, much of Ghana.

The vendor gets a 'transfer chip' from the cellular phone company (which costs a buttload- around $500 U.S.), and then they set you up with a phone and a banner and you are open for business.

We floated Mark a loan for his chip, he scored a box/table, a bench, and an umbrella from which hangs his banner.

Then he set up shop on Jungle Road about a block from home.

Here he is this afternoon, with Elliot who loves Mark dearly but can't stay at the store because even though he behaves he scares away customers.

Jungle Road is a busy place- lots of traffic, both foot and car, lots of activity day and night. Good for business.

Unfortunately, everyone else thinks so too, and within two blocks of Mark's store there are at least four other Phone Vendors on any given day.

But you know by now that Mark is a swell guy. He is cheerful, friendly, cute as the dickens, and I believe pretty attractive to the ladies.

Whenever we leave the house, if we go past Mark's Phone Store, he usually has a few people on his bench. Even if they aren't all paying customers, the other umbrellas rarely have anyone under them.

We choose to believe that Mark is the most popular phone store on Jungle Road.

And he has already paid back a big chunk of money while still sending money home to his Mom, so we are pretty sure that we are right.

Yay Mark! We are so proud of him, and he loves that phone store.

His work around our house is never neglected. Everything gets done and done right, but then we see him wander by the front window and down the driveway carrying his umbrella and phone, off to his second career.

We always make a big deal out of waving to him when we drive by because he always has such a big smile on his face.

We hope having Obronis make a fuss around his store is good for business.

And if you are ever in East Legon and need to make a phone call- look for our Mark! ;-)

Stars and Stripes Forever

2007-08-15T12:00:00.000Z

A long time ago I mentioned that there are no shortage of American flags flying in Accra- they are flown to attract ex-pats, show how global a hotel is, and just because people like them.

It's by no means limited to America- the most popular are the EU, Japan, Germany, and Canada, and of course Ghana. The flags are all handmade, although they often don't look it. Ghanaians are terrific at copying everything from flags to furniture, down to the smallest detail.

When they feel like it.

When they don't, you get hilarious attempts like the common efforts to reproduce a maple leaf on Canadian flags that resemble nothing so much as a smudged handprint, or even an Oak leaf. Cultural disconnect.

But last weekend, we spotted our absolute favorite in the "Flag Interpretation Sweepstakes". This was proudly flying at a used car dealer not too far from our house, out past the University...

Now don't get me wrong. It's technically a regulation flag- thirteen stripes, seven red/six white and 50 white stars on a blue field.

But so completely off that it just makes us giggle every time. We are SO easy.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!

2007-08-06T14:40:00.001Z

Wow. I feel like I fell down the rabbit hole. Life has been a hectic blur ever since we got home from vacation and it's just starting to get back under control.

First, when we got home, I made Cooper a Dentist's appointment in between loads of laundry. Got him in the Monday after we returned.

He needed to get his last three baby teeth pulled.

Yes, he's fifteen.

No, I'm not the worst mother on Earth- that bad woman doesn't bother to get them yanked at all!

Anyway, they were pushing one canine on top and one on bottom all out of whack, and he inheirited his father's happy front tooth gap, and we opted to fix both those problems sooner rather than later, with Cooper's agreement.

So over a period of four days, the poor kid had three teeth pulled and a full set of braces put on his teeth.

And then tightened.

He couldn't eat at all Thursday.

He ate a little Friday.

He improved over the weekend.

He's back to normal today.

Except he flashes when he smiles now.

For your viewing pleasure, here is his mouth the first half of July, and then the second half of July.

That's our boy!

His dentist is very cool. He's UK trained and spends part of the year there and has a swell little practice that he and his wife run out of their home. His actual "office" with the chair and drill and stuff is in a GMC bus that has been outfitted with very modern equipment (Ted calls it "The Toothmobile"). It's kind of a hoot.

And Coop's teeth are already moving (the braces have already been tightened again!), so cross your fingers for a quick six month fix, and he'll be free!

Elsewhere in our lives, Ted lost a filling (same dentist- no braces for him though), the pool sprung an underground leak that caused a geyser in the pump room and sucked about six inches of water out of the pool, and the kitchen developed a new leak that seeped up into the floor tiles and soaked the whole "downhill" side of the kitchen.

Ted's got a nice new crown, the pool deck has been dug up and repaired, and we're just going to live with the kitchen leak (what's one more????).

While all this was going on, Duke's stepmother died. Her funeral was last weekend and then Sunday Jane's brother died unexpectedly, which was a serious blow to her- he wasn't very old and they were very close.

I hope things will stop being interesting now. That Chinese curse (May You Always Live in Interesting Times) is starting to hit really close to home.

Hedonism on the Sea, The End

2007-07-24T13:30:00.000Z

I need to mention here that there are ports we stopped at that I haven't mentioned because we either didn't get off the ship or we just spent the day at a beach- not terribly interesting. :-)

Next time we did get off the ship was at Cadiz, Spain which is a very nice place- but we only had one day in port and I wanted to take my guys to Sevilla. I had visited there in 1973 with my high school Spanish class and along with Toledo it was my favorite city in Spain, so I dragged them onto a bus and we headed away from the cool coast to the hot interior.

Of all the castles and palaces we have visited in Europe, the Alcazar in Sevilla easily makes the top 3. It's huge and ornate without being gaudy and has the loveliest gardens anywhere. These agapanthus are everywhere throughout the grounds...

and the gardens go on forever...

The palace itself is full of tiles and mosaics and was constructed in the Moorish tradition

(with some ugly gothic additions by Charles the V).

There are tapestries on the walls, and lots of halls and stairs and windows and doors.

Doors for much smaller medieval people-

(note 21st Century boy for scale)...

We hired a horse drawn carriage and took a tour of town, then headed back to the ship.

If I was you, I'd be a little curious about the ship, so we'll take a break from our Southern European tour here to see a little more of the Monster of the Seas.

It's hard to convey how big it is with numbers like tonnage and stuff, so I'll tell you they put maps on every deck and after two weeks on board, we were STILL checking the maps for to see where we were or where we wanted to be.

Here's the one on our deck...

They have a little red dot for "You are Here", so no matter where you are, you're back at the red dot. :-)

On the Promenade they had little ship models to help you find your way around.

Hopefully you can make those pictures big enough to read some of the words- the "Promenade" was a shopping mall and elsewhere on the ship there was an ice rink (yes, we have been ice skating on the Atlantic!), a 30 foot rock wall, a mini-putt golf course, a basketball court, a Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream store, a Johnny Rockets restaurant, and the usual bars, casino, theater, etc. etc. etc.

There were vertical open areas that went five decks or more- it is a truly wild feat of engineering (there was even a program on our stateroom TV that documented the difficulties of building ships this massive with so much open space...).

Here's a shot off the lobby of deck 10 looking straight down. You can see the stairs on deck four and the center foreground is even lower.

The half circles on the sides are the glass elevators. Four elevators on each side. Incredible.

One of the coolest things was the "Peek a Boo Bridge".

You can go on deck at the front of the ship and hang out in front of aquarium-like windows, except instead of fish, it was the ship's bridge!

Very Star Trek.

Our favorite of all the bars was the English Pub because you could sit on stools at barrel tables out front and watch the passing parade.

And just in case you are curious about the staterooms, here is a picture of ours.

Cooper's bed is the fold out sofa on the left foreground. I'm standing next to our bathroom and facing the sliding glass doors to our private balcony. I'm telling you we were in heaven!

When we could tear ourselves away from our floating paradise, we got off again in Lisbon Portugal.

Lisbon is a very nice city- full of killer hills just like our beloved San Francisco, and sharing a Golden Gate Bridge 'wannabe'...

It's a double decker bridge and not exactly as majestic as the real Golden Gate, but it's cute and we got to sail right smack under it coming and going.

We started our Lisbon explorations in this pedestrian mall...

and wandered around until we found this:

It's what the Portugese call an "elevador" and it is used to hoist people up from one street to another on their massive hills. This particular one was designed by an apprentice to Mr. Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame, and it shows. :-)

Just for local color, I'll share this picture of a major plaza in Lisbon,

and the sign contained on one side of it that cracked us up...

We have no idea what a 'bombeiro' is, but we like them anyway just for their name!

Back on the ship for a hop up to the northwest corner of Spain and city called Vigo.

They have jumped on the big decorated cow bandwagon that we've encountered all over America and Europe and they cracked us up. Here is a selection of Vigo cows (note that the last cow is the best because it has Ted in its picture)...

and two really nice fountains we stumbled on as we wandered...

and some gorgeous Hydrangeas in their city park...

It's a very nice little city that speaks a hybrid of Spanish and Galician which torqued my poor brain something awful.

So, over a period of two weeks we traded our usual explorations of a single country for little quickie excursions into many different places, but in return we got a stable, reliable, incredibly pampered experience on our giant Ship of Dreams.

On our last port stop, we took this photo of our home away from home and I'll put it here as my parting shot for a truly memorable trip.

Hedonism on the Sea, Part 2

2007-07-21T17:00:00.000Z

First stop in Italy was Livorno, which is just a short hop from Pisa, and the leaning tower therein. As a side note, on the way to Pisa, the road was lined with large shade trees, underneath which were- at 100-300 yard intervals- pretty women wearing very little clothing. Some had plastic chairs, some didn't. One was speaking to a man in a car who had pulled over under her tree...

At this point you may draw your own conclusions.

We, of course, opted for the smutty conclusion.

In all our travels I believe Germany is the only place (Ghana and the U.S. included) where we haven't seen practitioners of the world's oldest profession, and that's probably because we just weren't looking. It's the one thing that just about every country has in common.

But on to more enlightening stuff... Pisa is one of those places that it's fun to go to after a lifetime of reading about it. Once you enter the city walls, it's an easy shot to the Leaning Tower and it's exactly as advertised.

It's actually a bell tower, and this is the church to which it belongs...

If you get up close, this is the view to the top...

And on the face of the tower just about eye level are lots of these details...

We headed down this street just looking around...

and here's a shot of the Arno River as it runs through town.

All in all, a very satisfying stop.

The next day we were off to Rome.

I'm not sure what I expected exactly, but it was so different from my imaginings.

I always had a mental picture of Rome as a big flat city full of open piazzas and lots of ancient Roman stuff I guess. What it actually is, is a big, hilly city full of narrow streets and hidden piazzas with lots of ancient, old, new and indeterminate stuff all jumbled together.

To my shame, most of my ideas about Rome were apparently all obtained through movies. But the Rome of Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain bears little resemblance to what is actually there.

So we sucked it up (it's so hard when your illusions are shattered) and started exploring.

First myth busted- The Trevi Fountain. It's not round, it's not in the middle of a big piazza, and it's stuck on the front of a building. Had I not seen the street signs...

I would never have known what I was looking at. It's a lovely fountain - just not what I ever thought it would look like in person.

As you can see from these two shots to either side, it's strangely situated on a small wide spot deep in the city, surrounded by buildings and basically isolated from everything.

From there we headed for the Roman Forum. Ha!

For this monumental misconception, I blame Zero Mostel. :-)

The gaps in my historical knowledge of Rome are wide and deep and apparently the place that knowledge should occupy in my brain is filled to the brim with dippy Hollywood images and ideas.

It's not a single place- Forum to the Romans meant "market" basically, and it goes on forever. There are tons of ruins running through the center of Rome...

in all sorts of conditions and ages...

And it includes the actual Caesar's Palace (thanks for nothing Las Vegas!) high on a hill above the forum...

Lots of good history and interesting building practices here- new things were built on top of the old things and unfortunately, things built by unpopular leaders were destroyed to keep them from being remembered.

A flawed practice at best, since basically everything Nero did here that didn't burn was destroyed and he's probably as famous 2000 years later as many of his more recent peers.

Meanwhile... Note to Roman Tourism Authority: Lose the Centurions.

Seriously.

Although there was no shortage of tourists happy to pay costumed locals to have their picture taken with a guy who has a Mohawk whisk broom on his helmet, it doesn't add to the atmosphere in the forum, but does contribute to the wacky Hollywood view of Rome.

Not good.

Now all this time we have been catching glimpses of the Coliseum as we wandered in that general direction, and that was the big draw for Coop (teenaged boy + place where people were eaten by lions on purpose = worthwhile tourist attraction).

Finally, we headed for the Coliseum itself.

It's very cool, and even today it's easy to imagine it whole and filled with people.

The original stadium.

If you stand to one side you can see the cross section that shows the outer ring that used to circle the entire Coliseum.

We had a great time picturing the ancient equivalent of a TicketMaster admission ticket on papyrus or something that designated one's personal seat in the Coliseum as Gate LII, Row VI, Seat XXIV.

All the gates were really numbered that way!

No matter what, Zero Mostel, Mel Brooks, Monty Python and the rest of those jokers pop to the front of my brain. ;-)

That left the Vatican.

It was fun to see the plaza where all the people gather on important occasions and check out the windows in the Pope's apartments and stuff. My big aim here was to see Michelangelo's Pieta, and I wasn't disappointed.

The picture quality is not great because of the security surrounding the sculpture (this is the one that the crazy guy with the hammer went after a few years ago...), but in person it is a terrific piece to see- you'll have to trust me on that.

We didn't make it to the Sistine Chapel, mostly because although we have always loved the "Spark of Life" painting (known in our family as "Pull My Finger"), we had to choose between going there and missing the boat.

Literally. We chose the boat, and a gorgeous sunset from our balcony...

(Ted took this picture, and I made fun of him at the time,
so now I have to tell you all that it's his picture or he'll pout.)

Next up, the second week of vacation and some tidbits from The Monster of the Seas...

Hedonism on the Sea

2007-07-18T08:00:00.000Z

Longtime readers have slogged along with us on our vacations as we wander aimlessly through Europe checking into and out of hotels. This time we decided that even though there were still lots of places we wanted to see, we were tired of packing and unpacking.

Our solution? A Mediterranean cruise!

We do not fit the 'cruise' profile, but then- alot of people on cruises don't fit the profile. Basically, you buy a stateroom and choose to participate or not in a strange floating summer camp for adults and children while someone else cleans your room, makes your meals (in an endless loop of breakfast/brunch/lunch/snacks/dinner/snacks/room service), entertains you, and generally makes life as easy as possible.

If you are disciplined (or one of the folk we affectionately called FREAKS), you can use the well stocked fitness center (treadmills, stair machines, weights, etc.), take Pilates/Spinning/Aerobics classes, and just ignore the food and the lounge chairs and the hot tubs.

We prefer the food and hot tubs. And free room service. And the nice people at any one of the seven million bars on board who will, upon being presented with your 'Sea Pass' (room key/charge card/passport) which bears a special sticker, give you unlimited soft drinks for free (after you pay a fixed fee on the first day and then try to soda pop your way through more Cokes than you actually paid for).

Anyway, that was our solution to the hectic driving vacations we have been taking, and it began on one of Royal Caribbean's Voyager Class ships in Southampton England.

We flew to London, spent a day there making our annual pilgrimage to the Apple Store on Regent Street (coincidentally on the same day yet another batch of critical-thinking dropouts decided to try blowing up London again), then drove a rental car to Southampton where we traded our Vauxhall Intermediate car for The Navigator of the Seas, or as we call it, The Monster of the Seas.

This ship is massive. It has a 29 foot draft, is more than a thousand feet long, weighs almost 140,000 tons, and can hold more than 3,000 people. The top deck of the ship is more than 200 feet from the water, and it is a mildly worrying puzzle how the whole thing stays upright, although the Captain assured us that they had plenty of ballast and computer programs running 24/7 to make sure it was distributed correctly.

This is what The Monster of the Seas looks like...

and here's a shot looking down its length from the backend (or stern, as they fruitlessly tried to teach us)...

Our stateroom was deck 9 (second row from the top of the five rows of rooms with balconies) second one from the front. Except on the other side of the ship (starboard) from the picture.

Right by the flying bridge, which meant we could watch the Captain and his crew dock each time we came into a port.

We hung out on our balcony, clutching our binoculars, ready to help out, but they never seemed to need our input.

So we left England and sailed out into the Atlantic, just like the Titanic.

And for two days, this was our view...

For us, this was heaven.

Electricity and water on demand.

More food than we could eat.

A slight chill in the air on deck, but with our choice of five giant hot tubs.

Carpet.

Maid (or rather Steward) service.

Room service.

And did I mention electricity and water on demand? Whoot! We would have been happy if nothing else had happened for two weeks. Africa tends to re-order your priorities. ;-)

After two days, we sailed into Gibraltar and watched a shockingly small cadre of people (four on the pier, four on the ship, and three people steering) dock the Monster of the Seas without so much as a bump.

I can't even dock our ski boat without bouncing off the side bumpers, so I bow to the masters (and covet side thrusters on our little Larsen- THEN I could navigate, by god!).

We had arranged to join a tour of Gibraltar, a move which turned out to be terrifically smart on our part when we found ourselves being whisked through some of the narrowest, most congested, rock wall lined streets we have found yet on a bewildering ride through a maze of unmarked, twisty roads straight up the side of the rock, through narrow tunnels into wildly popular spaces with no parking lots. Eek!

But all we had to do was sit and watch while our driver/guide Phil did it all with ease and made sure we saw the sights of his country while keeping us in stitches with his sit down comedy routine.

Part of the show in Gibraltar are the Apes that inhabit the rock itself. They are smart, greedy, people wise, and way too eager to play the part of delinquent children.

The warnings about the Gibraltar Apes are plentiful and accurate- don't feed them, don't carry anything they can snatch (they will only play with stolen items if you are alarmed and show distress- if you ignore the theft they lose interest and toss the item over the side of the hill...), don't try to pet them, and don't stare at them because they take it as a sign of aggression.

Fine.

Then we get to the top of the hill and Phil rolls down his window. An ape jumps onto his shoulder. We quickly realize that all the driver/guides on Gibraltar are on a first name basis with the apes and that if we follow the basic rules about food and loose items, we will be able to play too. Here's a couple who kindly posed for me...

At one point, Phil looked at me and said, "Hey! You want one?"

And the next thing I know, I have an ape on my shoulder.

Who quickly moved to my other shoulder. And then to my chest. And then back to my shoulder.

As I turned to find Ted, I saw Phil unloading another ape onto Coop. Here he is with his own pal...

He is doing exactly what it looks like he's doing- grooming the human. He dug through Coop's hair looking for tidbits, and thankfully found nothing to eat.

Anyway, there is a lot to see and do on Gibraltar. The place is lousy with history and was a fun place to spend time.

Here's our parting shot of the rock...

Next up: steaming to Italy.

Back From Our Reality Break!

2007-07-16T13:45:00.000Z

Yikes! Thought I fell off the edge of the Earth didn't ya?

We had our first multiple week vacation in many, many moons and just got back last night. It will take me a while to dig out from underneath the mountain of laundry and share the highlights of our trip with you, but I just wanted to check in real quick and let you know we are home and I'm still kicking!

It was very nice to come home to Ghana last night. Not too hot and the power was on (yippee! it really made all the difference to come home to a house with lights), although it went off this AM at 6 practically on the dot for our 'regular' twelve hour outage... :-)

While we were gone the country switched to the new currency. Coop and I hit MaxMart for groceries this morning and I am still a little verklempt by the change. Everyone but me has new money and the prices are all listed in the new currency (without all the zeros). We have until the end of the year to adjust and get rid of our old money, but for now that's all I have and my brain still thinks in hundreds of thousands of cedis.

That will be my challenge for the coming week- to adjust to new monetary thinking... but it will have to wait in line behind all the stuff that didn't get done over the last two weeks and the unpacking, laundry, and reviving of our poor dusty, neglected house.

Anyway- hang around, I'll post again really soon with trip pictures and details and then we'll get back to life in Ghana.

Later!

Ghana Lackawanna

2007-06-25T10:20:00.000Z

Since we have been in Ghana, we haven't had to stop for trains.

Not that there aren't tracks- there just aren't any trains on them.

The last mention I can find of train travel here is from the 60s, when prices here were still in shillings and pence.

Imagine our surprise when we were out running around and suddenly a guy popped up in traffic lanes waving a red flag.

The guy wasn't too remarkable... since the stoplights are frequently not functioning, police or civilians waving branches of leaves are a normal site on many streets, and parking lot guards use red and green flags to stop traffic and allow people to pull onto streets all the time... but this guy was standing on a set of tracks, far from any parking lots or stoplights and snapping his flag pretty energetically.

Ted stopped the car because we take any excuse to pause and watch just about anything. ;-) The guy in front of us decided to stop too, and slowly everyone crept to a halt just before the tracks.

We looked at each other and craned our necks to try to see down the tracks.

Could it be a train? In Ghana?

We didn't see anything.

And there are new red and white striped steel barrier gates at a lot of level crossings in Accra (although at least one that we pass often in Dzorwulu has already been smacked hard enough to knock it down), including the one we were sitting at- although no one had bothered to lower either of them (they are hand operated gates, with a big weight on one end to hold them up when not in use).

I got my camera out, just in case something cool happened, and VOILA! Here came a train!

You can see the unused crossing gate sticking up behind the train's leading edge.

Then entire train consisted of two empty passenger cars with one engine pushing them slowly down the tracks in some kind of test.

People were dramatically unexcited.

Except us. We thought it was really cool that a country so desperately in need of more transportation options is working on getting some!

We immediately started picturing ourselves on a train like this, headed up north in the company of lots of people and probably lots of goats and chickens (they ride tro-tros, they will surely ride the trains!).

I really hope they get it organised while we are still here- train travel rocks, and trains through the African countryside- well, how could we resist?

This Means You!

2007-06-13T17:00:00.000Z

This is just one of those things.

There are lots of signs in Ghana, about as many handmade ones as "professional".

They convey all sorts of information and warnings and offers.

I suppose I should collect a good sampling for you, but until then we couldn't resist sharing this gem that popped up on the street near our house last weekend...

(Remember, many of the folks who live around us have, basically, a plywood box or less to live in- there is certainly no handy tiled bathroom for them to use. And remember also, that "farm" does not mean here what it might mean where you live.)

In Ghana it's more important to get your meaning across than to spell it correctly...

And don't you forget it.

African Wildlife of the Icky Kind

2007-06-05T11:30:00.000Z

This is a quickie to share one of those "Ewwwww!" moments that life hands us all sometimes.

Africa has these winged bugs. They have long thick bodies (about 1.5 inches or more) and long white teardrop shaped wings (2 inches plus, each!).

You never see them around except the first few times it rains really hard after the dry season.

Then they just appear suddenly at night, clustered together in a frenzy of bug love, or bug rumbles or some kind of bug social event.

We have driven through clouds of them. Smooshed thousands beneath the car wheels. Watched them writhe and clump together on the deck or the walls around the house.

And like most bugs, they are attracted by light.

And we have lots of lights around our pool...you know where I'm going with this, right?

So last week sometime I'm noticing that the pool skimmer isn't drawing well, and when I go outside to check on it, this is what I find:

Go ahead. Click it bigger. I dare ya.

Ewww! Both skimmers were completely full of these bugs. They were packed so tight the water couldn't even pass through them anymore. They were piled so deep I couldn't get my hand onto the skimmer basket without burrowing through (mostly) dead bug bodies.

So what did I do?

I called Cooper outside.

I calmly explained the problem and then told him to take care of it.

Didn't work.

He looked at me for a few seconds to make sure he had heard correctly, and then said,

"No way. You do it."

My boy loves me. But apparently not enough to battle ewwy bugs for me.

And I thought he was at least a little bit scared of me. But apparently not as scared as he is of ewwy bugs.

To his credit, he usually doesn't shy away from this sort of thing, but there is something about these giant, suicidal bugs that skeeves him out, and the fact that they weren't all necessarily completely dead just made it that much worse.

[n.b. last year I remember these bugs suddenly appearing, but Mark took care of them before I noticed a problem. This year, I'm glad to have saved him the effort- no one should have to do this job every time.]

So give us a half hour, some rubber gloves, a cardboard box, a plastic bag, some yelps of surprise and disgust, and we managed to get most of them up out of the pool skimmers.

This is just the bulk of the bugs in the first skimmer hole.

And when I say "we" up there, I mean that I did all the icky stuff and Cooper provided scrub nurse support.

I'll get him back. I swear I will.

Africa Day Getaway Weekend

2007-05-31T17:00:00.000Z

Africa Day was May 25th, so we took advantage of the three day weekend to go celebrate Africa and hang out at the beach...(we were helping chaperone the "Anti-Prom" - the brainstorm of one of Coop's friends who was not interested in the Junior/Senior Prom Friday night, considering the impracticality of finding a prom dress/tuxedo, and all the attendant trappings in a third world country. We were pleasantly surprised that the kids understood the dilemma at all, and happy to hang out at the beach with them as an alternative.)

We headed to Elmina, about 2.5 hours after you clear Accra (which took 45 minutes!) and the next town after Cape Coast. Our destination was the Coconut Grove Beach Resort therein (or, as it said on some of the lounge cushions- Coconut Groove Beach Resort). ;-)

Elmina has a 'castle' too- remember that is the name for the huge British built whitewashed stone buildings they put up as forts and "holding tanks" for Africans being sold into slavery. Having been to the castle at Cape Coast, we decided to forego the dubious pleasure of seeing another.

You'll just have to imagine Cooper's deadpan delivery as he expressed a desire to NOT visit the Elmina Castle by playing tour guide...

"This is where we lived, ate, went to church, and sold human beings for profit. Here is the dungeon we kept them in without food or light, here is the door where they were loaded into smelly ships like cord wood. We hope you enjoyed your tour."

If you didn't know its purpose and history, though, the Elmina Castle would seem a very nice place, I suppose...

About a mile down the road is the Coconut Grove. This is the view from our room...

and this is the restaurant...

...and after dinner we sat here and just watched the ocean and relaxed...

The hotel is pretty nice- albeit with the usual Ghanaian touches (foam mattresses, line dried towels, showers without curtains or doors, etc.), but when you are hanging out at the beach with nothing you have to do, it's swell.

There was a village just outside the hotel grounds, and I apologise for the quality of this picture, but I include it because it's a good (if blurry) representation of the village. Those are mud houses, with palm thatch roofs.

Many of the people in Elmina are fishermen as evidenced by this inlet near the castle...

This is just a part of the "fleet" that moors in this inlet. Most of them were out fishing when I took the picture.

Here's a shot of an almost finished boat (they are carved from a single tree trunk and then painted bright colors)...

Lots of the village homes had fences around them, and all of them were made (logically) from palm fronds.

Coop has seen Ghanaians making these fences and he says they just do it- making it look so easy and simple.

We know it's not.

As we headed back to Accra, this was our parting scenery along the roadside...

Pretty good weekend. Pretty nice country.

Mimosa Time!

2007-05-22T15:15:00.000Z

Living this close to the equator makes the seasons a little hard to distinguish, although we do have dry and rainy seasons, the Harmattan, and relatively cool summers...

Even so, though, we are puzzled (both of us being completely retarded when it comes to botany) by the abundance of happy, flowering, leafy plants, trees, and bushes 365 days a year.

How do they do it? How do they know winter isn't ever coming? How do they 'rest' and recuperate from the hard job of making flowers and leaves and fruit?

Our yard is one big flowering extravaganza, and has been ever since we moved in two years ago (see my entry for January 2006 wherein I posted pictures of every flower in our yard...), not to mention our fabled PawPaw Tree (see May 2006- The Papaya Wars).

The exception to this rule is the Mimosa tree. The trees themselves stay fairly nice and leafy year 'round, but they flower only once a year- right around now.

Like they know it's spring.

And they go crazy.

Witness:

Is that not gorgeous?

A man who commented on my previous post pointed out to me that there was a good Mimosa to see near the University, and I agree- we had already taken this picture last weekend!

We aren't the only ones marveling at these abundantly flowering trees.

So I figured you all would like to see them too. :-)

If you've never been here, feast your eyes. If you used to live here, remember the riot of Mimosa Orange all over Accra every spring...

Enjoy!

The End of the 'Cedi Shuffle'

2007-05-15T08:10:00.000Z

We're gettin' new money!

It was actually announced at the first of the year, but with the changeover happening at the end of next month, things are starting to pop! In addition to what's pictured above, there will also be one and five cedi notes.

The currency is being 'redenominated' on July 1 because, as I've mentioned before, you have to cart around buttloads of currency to pay for even small purchases.

It currently takes an excess of 9000 cedis to equal a dollar. If dinner for two costs the equivalent of 50 bucks, you have to have almost a half million cedis to pay it. If you are lucky enough to have scored ¢20,000 notes on your last trip to the bank, you still have a pile of bills too thick to put in your wallet if you expect to then fold said wallet in half.

It gets really ugly if the bank only had ¢5,000 notes on the day you went. That would mean you need 100 bills to pay for dinner. About an inch of paper money. Yikes.

So, with the redenomination, the government is knocking four zeroes off the designated currency. Your ¢10,000 notes will become ¢1 (one cedi), a dinner bill for ¢500,000 will become ¢50 (fifty cedi). It will soon be possible to pay for dinner or a basket of groceries with one or two bills! Yippee!

Laugh if you will, but I can't remember what it was like to hand someone a single bill to pay for anything, ever.

We get new coins too! And considering that the average Ghanaian-on-the-street spends money on a lot of things that are incredibly inexpensive (kenkey, tro-tros, newspapers, etc.) they will be in pretty good shape to use coins.

Right now it takes two of the largest denomination (500 cedi) coins to make a dime. And two handfuls of the 50 cedi coins to make the same dime.

The new coins are pesewas (what they were in the old days before they became valueless and were withdrawn from circulation) and in addition there will be cedi coins.

All the stores are supposed to be displaying their prices in both the old and new cedis (and some actually are...) because the two currencies will exist side by side until the end of the year.

The gas stations have all switched their pumps, so my liter of petrol (or fuel- don't say gas!), costs me 87 pesewa. I think. But for now I just have to switch it back to the normal ¢8,700 per liter that I will still pay until July 1. (...and for those of you in the U.S. frantically doing the math- feel fortunate to pay whatever you are paying because it adds up to more than $3 a gallon here. Eek!)

There have been lots of TV and Radio ads with little vignettes and jingles to help educate us on the switchover. "The Value is the Same" song is a big hit with Duke's oldest girl. ;-)

And if you need help, there are handy dandy conversion charts like this all over town...

You can read a lot about it (if you care) at this website, which also contains links to the audio stuff...(click on the Media and Press at the top for commercials and jingles).

http://www.ghanacedi.gov.gh/

And if you can't remember the old money very well, my August 30 2005 post has pictures and everything! (just click the August 2005 link on the right and VOILA!)

Cooper Does Good

2007-05-06T21:00:00.000Z

Cooper's school requires community service from their students, more as they get into High School.

One of his choices this year has been to give up a couple of his weekends to travel to a nearby rural village and help Habitat for Humanity build a house. He was given a disposable camera to take both times and 'forgot' to use it both times. So we have no pictures. :-(

But our boy now has some fall back skills.

He can make cement blocks (the size of cinder blocks but without the holes), he knows how to use a pickaxe to trench for a foundation and then lay the foundation. He can plaster a wall that has been built from the cement blocks.

It's not the sort of house Americans are used to seeing in Habitat buildings...plumbing is not part of the equation and electrical wiring is an "add on" for people who can afford to have it done for them. The doors and windows are framed up and the house is built around them.

Rather than just the recipients of the house helping with construction, any villager who can help, does. And the whole village opens their own homes to the kids who come to help. Each village home that can takes one to three of the Lincoln students for the night.

Cooper has learned to take a bucket shower, how to cope with livestock (mostly roosters) wandering through his room at night, and how to be a gracious guest in the home of people who are sharing what they have with him, even though it's precious little.

The kids take the equivalent of about 13 bucks with them to help with the cost of feeding hard-working teenagers (and help buy cement in the bargain!). After dinner on Saturday they play a game of soccer with the village players and get to spend time just hanging out with their hosts.

Probably the best part is that he always comes home happy and exhausted. We couldn't buy the life experience and knowledge that he is getting for free from his time in Ghana.

Since I didn't get any pertinent pictures, I'll share a close up of the almost-fifteen-year old when he was just six months. He lived up to his early promise. ;-)