Akwaaba Obruni!

Hello! I am living in the colorful, lively city of Accra in Ghana for the next month and so I’ll be taking my blog hostage with photos and videos of my life during this time.  I’ve been here a few days and I’m still struggling with how best to describe this place.  The heat always comes to mind first, but there’s more to Ghana than sweltering heat and buzzing insects.  The people and their culture are arresting at first because everything is so unfamiliar to me. It has been difficult to find the right way to describe something when I haven’t encountered anything like it before.

The only way I can do this so it isn’t an overwhelming amount of my own blabbering in a stream of consciousness is to try a summary of a few topics:

The People: You look around and wonder why everyone is staring at you and calling out things and then you catch a flash of blinding pale skin on your arm and realize that although you know you are white, damn, sometimes you forget how different you look from everyone else. I need a tan, fast. One volunteer had someone tell her: You must drink a lot of milk because you are so white. When I went out by myself yesterday into the city I got a lot of “Obruni!” (white person) and then a hello or a hey sweety, I love you. Etc. There was some touching or pinching of my arms, but for the most part it wasn’t too hard to go about my business without being too hassled. You get used to it. Or you have a nervous breakdown from the pressure of a dozen eyes and catcalls in the middle of a marketplace. I sat next to a girl on the tro-tro and the first words she spoke to me were, “I want to be your friend”.  After we exchanged names, there wasn’t much else to talk about so I left it at that.

 

Accommodations: Well, it’s very basic. No air-conditioning, so everyone sort of accepts that you will never be dry or cool.  Also no running water in our house – some parts of the city get it, but it’s temperamental at best.  That also means the toilet doesn’t work unless you flush it with a bucket of water from a nearby tank. (That only gets done a couple times a day…) We shower from the bucket also…makes cleaning hair kind of difficult.  I realize there are a lot of things I thought were essential that really aren’t that necessary.

 

Tro-Tros:  To paraphrase Nicholas Kristoff here, the most dangerous men in Africa are… the drivers*. Yes, this type of decrepit transport that defies mechanics and runs with only the basic metal shell of what one day must have been a van deserves its own category.  They are death traps of metal and rubber.  They are always crammed with 15 other passengers and a ‘mate’ leaning out the window.  They are cheap and they are hard to avoid.  Whether inside or just in front of their tires, I am always looking for my escape when the inevitable crash occurs. 

*OK, there are a couple instances that are more dangerous…a couple volunteers almost got mugged a couple days ago by a man with an AK-47 and a machete. But that’s more the exception then the rule and the volunteers said they were the “worst robbers” they’d ever encountered and didn’t know what they were doing so they actually didn’t steal any money.