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For the past week I've been working in the small town of Manso Nkwanta. I'm writing now from my desk, in a comfy little office shared with the cluster manager. I have a wireless connection to the internet which they have linked by satellite through an Israeli company such that I can only get the Google page in hebrew. Out my window are gorgeous green hills of the ghanaian rainforest. It's not the canopied type of rainforest that I've always imagined, but rolling hills dense with plush vegetation and punctuated by gangly branchless trunks which wind up to the sky and splay into flat-topped green hair-do's of various styles. Occasionally a bleating goat leaps itw way off of the bush trail and into the clearing behind the building. A dwarf goat.
If you step behind the office building and look to your right you'll see the town school:
If you hadn't looked right, however, things would be less picturesque, as you would be staring into the refuse pit-come-men's restroom located behind the office. A generator often rattles loudly outside, because the nation is severely underpowered and has rolling blackouts throughout the country which last 12 hours every other day. One day 6am-6pm and the next time 6pm-6am. On daytime outage days here they run the generator. I'm in the office late tonight because, in addition to the rolling blackouts, my neighborhood (dirt road out of town) is experiencing a localized blackout. You know, a good old-fashioned, non-scheduled, fried-squirrel type blackout. I haven't seen any squirrels, though, and I sure as hell aint expecting a ConEd truck anytime soon (They're on it!).
So yes. My guesthouse. Arachnid companions aside (haven't seen him lately), my housing is perfectly livable. I'm living in a government bungalow that has been given to the project. It is about a 20 minute walk to the project office, on a route which passes through town just enough to attract some undue attention as I buy a hardboiled egg for breakfast, or walk off into the darkness at night. The bungalow contains two two-bedroom flats. I'm living in one with a project manager. There is talk of my moving to another guesthouse once it's refurbished, since I'm squatting in quarters assigned to another managerial position which will soon be re-filled, but only time will tell on that one (who is refurbishing what now?).
Indeed, the entire project staff lives in somewhat temporary feeling dwellings. The town is far too small to attract families, so families remain in Kumasi, Accra or elsewhere while the staff (mostly 30 to 40-something men) work in the village. On Friday afternoon there is a mass exodus to the more populated parts of the country, and a trickling return of staff members throughout Monday. Without the imposition of home life in the village, the staff is freed to work impressively long hours.
I've not been able to sleep much past 6:30am in this country. Perhaps it's a special irony that the cell phone alarm that has awoken me for the past year is of a rooster's cry -- the roosters here are a bit less reliable in terms of programmability and consistency of timing. They are also without any type of snooze capabilities, although they tend to wander away from the building eventually. That said, the project staff often arrives at the office by 8am and routinely works into the night, with the last staff (my flatmate) sometimes making their way home at 10 or 11pm.
My work responsibilities are still a bit unclear--although it's been made obvious that all chart-making in excel will be deferred to my relative expertise--so I'll leave those specifics to another time. Suffice it to say that I'll be doing something to try to help the struggling people of The Bonsaaso cluster, Amansie West District, Ashanti, Ghana.
The project cluster is a group of 30 small villages ranging in population from about 50 to a few thousand spread over perhaps 30 or more square kilometers of rolling countryside and populated by quite friendly, but wholly impoverished villagers, some adorably cute, like these,
screaming with every picture taken (this one was snapped surreptitiously) and veritably stampeding to see their digital image.
And some saddenly malnourished, like this little one, who is actually nearing 3 years of age.
There is much work to be done, and I will talk about it all in time. But now onto lighter things.
It's terribly tiring being white here. I might have occasionally slipped unoticed through the relatively lighter-skinned crowds of Mongolia or China (very occasionally), but here it is not so. There are three phases of realization which are easily recognizable on the face of your typical rural ghanaian youth as they see me through the window of my passing car. The first is a blank stare -- the dark face broken only by two bright almond shaped eyes. This is a moment of disbelief. The second is the phase in which those two almonds become glinting saucers and are joined by the soft pink of a gaping mouth. The third phase--the proliferative phase--is that in which the gaping mouth begins to move, calling many another pair of saucers, each with screaming mouth, to attention. “Oboroni!”
Such commotion generally follows me. Along with frequent mutterings and snickerings of Yesu (jesus). Imagine, then, what might happen if Jesus came to your Jehovah's Witness Convention...
Like many of the project workers, I chose to spend this past weekend in Kumasi. When I first arrived in town a week ago I crashed with a new friend, Bright, who I'd met over an internet hospitality network (www.couchsurfing.com - a good site, check it out). Now, a week and a half later, I have becomes acquainted with a dizzyingly large circle of friend's and well-wishers, many of whom, like Bright, are Jehovah's Witnesses. The Ghanaians are a fairly religious (mostly church-going, sometimes mosque-going) people, though the Jehovah's Witnesses I've met in Ghana do not seem to be particularly more active than any other denomination. Regardless, this past weekend Kuakye (/kwache/), Bright's uncle, invited me to join them at that Sunday's "convention."
What goes on at convention? I asked. Since I got a very funny look in reply, I assumed he just meant congregation-- the normal weekend service, simply rendered with a classic post-colonial lexical twist--after all, all the oil tankers here say "highly inflammable liquid." Much like those oil tankers, I was wrong.* They meant convention. A large event in which the 6 JW churches from the Kumasi area drove out to the large open-air grounds outside of town, and conducted all day services in Twi. That and they stared at the white guy.
Make that, the awkwardly dressed White Guy. Inasmuch as I didn't have any nice clothes with me, my new friends were nice enough to dress me. I was given pinstriped black pants and a blue shirt with vertical brown stripes (of the kind of strip mall fashion that is familiar enough in america). When they gave me the white tie with diagonal black stripes of irregular thickness, I had to put my foot down. But my explanation ..."ummm, I think too many stripes" seemed to throw off one of my hosts, who also happened to be wearing stripes with, well, stripes. His outfit was less egregious, though, so I tried to reassure him. I was eventually able to find in their wardrobes a plain red tie which didn't wholly clash, but functioned well to embody my stylistic ethos for the day: obviously not my clothes. The point is, one sure way to make an all day Jehovah's Witness convention being conducted in a foreign language at which people already stare at you like you're on fire less comfortable, is to put you in someone else's questionable clothing.
Travails aside, I have survived thus far. And hope to do so until my next post…
* It turns out, if one looks at Merriam-Webster online, that inflammable does, indeed, mean flammable. Am I the only one who thought that inflammable was the opposite of flammable? Embarrassed as I am by the possibility that I have, in fact, been mistaken about this for 26 years, I will leave the post as is, for your amusement.
