Since folks keep asking me what it is that I do here, I decided to show everyone by making a photo diary. Today I'll be taking a picture about every hour. Let's go.
I woke up at 6. Went running up the big hill behind my bungalow along this path:
to admire this view:
about 730am, after showering, I'm hanging my running clothes on the line on the back patio, where my laundry has been hanging since Sunday, always getting rained on before I have a chance to take it in dry. I included my fingers to show that, despite increasing callous, they are still no match for two weeks laundry at a time. It's okay, though, they'll heal before I have to do laundry again.
about 830 I'm sitting at my desk, checking email, the nytimes online, and facebook (of which I'm now, guiltily, an avid user).
930, after starting this blog, I'm off to talk with my health coordinator about what there is to do today. I get lectured for giving a memo to the District Coordinating Executive (something like the Governor) yesterday without running it by my Health Coordinator and the Cluster Coordinator, both of whom, obviously, were not in the office yesterday and therefore were of little help when the DCE requested that I produce it for him that afternoon.
1030. Writing an addendum memo to follow up the one I was just lectured about, and drafting a Recipe/Instruction sheet for the production of a simple porridge to be used by our Community Health Workers for the rehabilitation of mild and moderate malnutrition.
11:20: Snack: Nkatie and Kwadu (peanuts and bananas) sold for a few cents from atop a villager's head this morning
1230: working on this month's medication and supply requisitions
130: standing on the front porch of the office, drinking a sachet of water, watching some guy bend Rebar for the construction going on next door. The building across the way is the District Assembly.
All the computers here are full of viruses. Noone seems to have learned basic computer hygiene yet, such as - don't install everything that pops up on your screen from the internet. Anyway. at 230, I was trying to install new AntiVirus software on an office computer that keeps infecting my pen drive with viruses. Thank god for Macs.
just after 330 two of my Health Facilitators came to visit. They dropped off some off the Clinic's monthly requisition forms and picked up some monthly data sheets which they'll fill out shortly. Owusu is on the left, Godfred on the right.
430: online chat procrastination
530: Driving home to take in my laundry, eat and putz.
630: Dinner and a movie. I realize it looks a bit suspect from this distance, but actually, tonight's bean stew concoction was one of my better showings
730: packing medications for tomorrow's Medical Outreach Clinic.
830: Classic timing! Back in the office. Electricity goes out as I take the photo. My laptop, left: logging tomorrow's outreach drugs. Desktop, right: why can't I get the viruses off this computer!?
930: why am i still here?
1030: ahhhhhhhhh
Subtitle: Names I've been called on the street
Obroni
Kwasi Obroni. - Kwasi is the name for sunday-born (i think), and apparently all white men are born on sunday until proven otherwise. And according to Liz, white women are tuesday-born. Who knew?
Yesu
Jesus
Second Jesus
Modern Jesus
Pierced Jesus
Osama bin Laden
I've gotten Osama bin Laden about 3 times. What can I say? Long beard: christian messiah or islamic fundamentalist. You decide.
Subtitle: Electronics are allergic to Africa
Okay. As you may know, I'm pretty basic, frugal, thrifty (cheap). I came to Africa for the year with a big backpack and my travel guitar. Even so, I'm sometimes susceptible to the calls of gadgets and technology. Africa may have cured me of this predilection.
I brought with me a solar-powered charging doodad called a Solio. It's pretty cool, really. Charge it in the wall, or set it in the sun for a day and use the many adaptors provided to charge all kinds of electronics -- phone, ipod, camera. It's less cool when it decides it will no longer charge any piece of electronics for more than a minute at a time before shutting off. And since I don't really have time to sit there and hit the button to restart every 60 seconds, it's pretty much a loss. Luckily I brought the normal chargers with me too.
I brought a phone with me. A motorola that I bought in Chinatown NYC a few years ago and, luckily it works on the African network. Unfortunately it had laid dormant for a year or so, and the battery, I discovered too late, was completely gone. After not quite a day of light usage, it will spontaneously shut off when people call and the ringing puts a strain on the battery. Obviously, no replacement battery is available.
I decided I wanted a phone with two features: Quad-band (which means it will work on any world network) and long battery life. And I wanted it without expensive extras. I found a few models online which had what I was looking for. I couldn't find them here. It turns out that it was still cheaper to buy the specific phone I wanted from ebay and have it shipped to Africa, than to buy one of the much fancier phones with those features that are available here. And it turns out that I'm stubborn enough to wait.
After interminable weeks and months of poor cellphone function, by some miracle of the Ghanaian mail system, the package eventually arrived carrying my lovely new phone, which worked beautifully for 2 days. For only 2 days. So yeah. E-bay seller: Do you accept returns, from Africa, months after you shipped the item? I'm still waiting on the email answer to that question. And I'm back to my cripple phone. Which wouldn't be so bad if my Solio worked so I could charge it easily. Crap.
Subtitle: Home is what you're used to
I took a long weekend last week and travelled with Liz (the stanford friend in Accra) to the Volta Region. The Volta is a dammed river in eastern Ghana that constitutes the largest man-made lake in the world. The region is cool, mountainous, and has both Ghana's highest point (about 1000m) and West Africa's highest waterfall. It was a great trip!\. We hiked the peak, went trail-running to the waterfall, jumped in.
Still, it was a lot of tro-tro time (which is Slow time), and I arrived travel-tired in Manso Nkwanta early Tuesday evening.
I was greeted by akwaaba's from coworkers I hadn't seen in weeks, had a happy chat with the owner of the corner grocery on the way home, and drove a project truck to the bungalow in the sidelong light of my favorite time of day, which coaxes texture out of the hillsides formerly flattened by the power of midday's light.
It felt like home!
Ha. I just looked at my blog for the fist time since my last post. That's supposed to be a Heart. Ben [heart]'s Ghana. Oh well. Maybe some of you see a heart.
But Ben isn't sure he's ready to ♥ Ghana.
Here's a topic that's bound to be amusing: my love life.
So far, I've gone on a total of one Ghanaian Quasi-Date.
Things that can make a date into a quasi-date include:
1) the date occurring on a Sunday afternoon (because she works nights).
2) the inability to communicate.
3) eventually being joined by your third-wheel of another Ghanaian friend.
But we'll get back to the specifics in a moment.
Here are some things that, a priori, doom my romantic adventures here to be little more than romantic misadventures:
1) being able to communicate basic thoughts is sexy. And not is not.
2) the glare from my skin apparently blinds people to personality characteristics other than whiteness
3) I have an aversion to being told to do things, am overly sensitive to the fact that many people are friendly to me because they assume (often subconsciously) that I'm rich and/or will help them get to America, and I therefore react adversely to emails such as the following:
Hi Ben, what's up? Guess all is well.
By the way, this is your price list.
Please try and buy me something from your village when you're coming to R. M. S..
Have the best of the day.
____________________________
R.M.S. stands for Regional Medical Stores. This is the government dispensary in Kumasi, and the supplier from whom we purchase most of our clinical goods. The email is from one of the girls who works there, and who I've contented myself to flirt with intermittently during the roughly 7 hours it takes to get the items for which you came. This ongoing innuendo is not only entertaining, but also functional, inasmuch as she is the girl who you have to convince to enter your purchase request into the system despite the fact that you still haven't paid for the last three requisitions you made. Thanks to the vicissitudes of the UNDP funding system, and the organizational habits of my health coordinator, this is always the case.
Anyway, at some point last week when I dropped in, I requested that she send me an electronic copy of the itemized price list for the available medications, and she obliged with the addition of the above request.
Now, who out there knows me? What are the chances that an email including the phrase "buy me something" will result in my showing up with anything?
I hope it's not just me, though -- it's kind of an awkward precedent to set for a relationship, right? We've interacted casually, and now it's time for you to start buying me things. That's not how I generally fall into relationships.
But it's not just this girl, it's far more deeply insinuated into the way that men and women interact here. It's the system that made a 19 year old girl who I'd never met ambitious enough to get my number from her friend Yaw (the general-hand around the office), start calling me incessantly, eventually show up at my doorstep for 20 minutes of stilted conversation, leave, and then call me 5 minutes later (from next door I think) and ask me to give her money for bus fare to the city.
And let me take a moment to clarify what "calling incessantly" means. It means that roughly 25 times a day, in bursts of three or four, my phone will ring once and become silent, assuring that I shoulder the pay-when-you-call burden of the Ghanaian cellular system. They call it "Flashing."
Being the stubborn man that I am, and taking into account that I'm often receiving concurrent flashes from several people whom I've never met, and don't particularly feel like talking with on the phone, you can guess how often these calls are returned.
Some people I do call back eventually, though. Like Ataa. Ataa of the quasi-date.
Ataa is the Twi word for 'female twin,' and if you're a twin, you're just called Ataa. Ataa works in Bantama, (the thumping-base-outdoor-bar-cafe area of Kumasi) in the bar that is frequented by my cadre of Kumasi'an friends. She has the easy-to-talk-to, already-seen-it-all sort of air that you often see in a bar-maiden. She was one of the few people who seemed to treat me like an individual from our first meeting. She is the one who the zoo animals disliked. She is also the one who began trying to short change me when I paid for drinks, requesting that I bring her things, and flashing me at a thentofore unprecedented pace.
After our quasi-date she immediately expected several daily phone calls (each of which had roughly zero conversational content). Her text messages rapidly invoked vocabulary of deep sentimental attachment, which increased in pitch in response to my apparent indifference, and eventually included a declaration of love ("I LOVE YU").
I demured.
We've yet to have our second quasi-date, but it might happen. While my casual, though pointed, withdrawal from our "relationship" confused her, we've remain friendly and flirty. I don't buy her things, I count my change, and she doesn't seem to get too mad.
But some vague lesson on the asymmetry of an Alternative American and a Ghanaian Standard have been learned. And I'm not holding my breath on a sub-saharan love.
Still, anything could happen.
I'm afraid not too much has been going on. Well not much that's particularly interesting, anyway.
I was in Kumasi last week for the ongoing HIV/AIDS counseling/testing training we're giving to our health staff. We're staying in a fairly budget hotel (even by my standards -- which is to say, I'm okay there, but even the Ghanaians are complaining), and the amusing sign you see in the last blog post is located above every toilet in the shared bathrooms.
I'm in the office now, but I'll be back in Kumasi this week for the second half of the training.
Let's see. Other news. I road my first Ghanaian Motorcycle this week, and, unfortunately, the lure of personal transport in a place where you can't count on anyone to do anything quickly is so great that I suspect I'll be riding more frequently soon. The project has a number of bikes, each somewhat apportioned to a specific person but often shared. And don't worry Mom and Dad. Most of the cars here are just as dangerous as your average motorcycle. Does that help?
Thought so.
In other news, I changed my flight ticket. I'll be flying into JFK on December 18th. Then I'll be heading up to Maine for the holidays and back down for some time in NYC and Baltimore before heading off to a new Millennium Villages Site (specifics still to be decided).
Some of you were present at the spectacle that was All-you-can-drink-Chinese-Food and Bull-Riding in Madison Square Garden in honor of my last birthday. Well. My father, the bull-riding aficionado, and always the planner, has already pointed out that the PBR (the Professional Bull-Riders Association, obviously) will be in the Garden again in my honor. So. January 5th bullriding? Anyone?
huh? huh?
Oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh!My Bad.
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430: online chat procrastination
