Week #18

This is a photo of eggs coming to market.  Can you imagine the mess if this vehicle were to be in an accident?

It was Marsha’s turn to scream this week.  She went into the bathroom on Sunday night, turned the light on, and started screaming.  I jumped up just as she yelled “it’s not a snake!”  I think that was a suggestion as to what kind of weapon to bring.  I grabbed the toilet plunger.  As I got to the door she was pointing at the corner behind the toilet.  It was a cockroach, the second one we’ve had since arriving in Ghana.   He was backed into the corner.  The cockroach was probably as scared as was Marsha.  As I mentioned in one of my first blogs these cockroaches are something to be reckoned with.  They are big enough to put saddles on.  I bravely stepped forward, with my toilet plunger in hand, and tried smacking him with the plunger part.  I couldn’t get him because he was in the corner.  So I turned the plunger to the handle and tried poking him with the end.  He dodged the end and charged us.  As I tried to turn the plunger again Marsha deftly stepped on him with her flipflop.  I was so proud of her!  It’s amazing how the cockroaches crunch.  We disposed him/her down the toilet and inspected the periphery of the bathroom looking for his/her home.  We discovered a loosened tile near the base of the bathtub and promptly sprayed bugkiller behind the tile.  Take that, you home invader!  Marsha has shared the cockroach experience with others this week.  It’s interesting how the bug grows in size with each telling.  We’re lucky to have survived. 

I had a second encounter with bugs this week.  Not an actual encounter, though, just an observation.  I was running the stairs for exercise and noted a dragonfly moving very slowly along the periphery of the ground floor.  I stopped to observe.  It turned out that the dragonfly was not moving on his own.  He was dead.  He was being carried across the floor by an innumerable company of ants, small enough to barely see one individual ant, but when together they appeared to be a black spot underneath the dragonfly.  I watched the progress while I continued running the stairs.  During the course of twenty minutes the ants moved the dragonfly about10 feet across the tile floor over to the wall of the building.  They moved the dragonfly into an opening at the base of the wall and had to bend his wings to get him under the edge.  To bend each wing a number of the ants would crawl up onto the upper edge of the wing and with enough ants on the edge the wing would then slowly bend down while the remainder of the ants moved the body into the opening.  The entire procession eventually disappeared into the opening.  For all their work I hope the dragonfly was a culinary reward.  

 

This is a picture of another critter, a gecko inside the laundry room at the MTC.   Geckos are good intruders.  We don’t scream when we see geckos.  They eat bugs.  Too bad they aren’t big enough to eat cockroaches.  The next picture is one of an outside gecko, about 10 inches long.  

The rainy season started on Monday.  The morning was sunshine and heat, the usual Accra weather.  At about 11 a.m. the clouds rolled in, the wind picked up, and the rain started.  It poured.  It poured for two hours.  All of the gutters filled to overflowing.  (I don’t think I’ve described the gutters before.   They are concrete.  They are deep:  18 – 24 inches, deep enough that if a car drops a wheel into the gutter the car is on its underbelly.  We’ve seen cars in this predicament several times.)  By two in the afternoon it had stopped and cleared.  But the moisture in the air was like a sauna.  One could see the humidity as well as feel it.  It did the same thing on Tuesday morning and on Thursday.  It has rained at night the remainder of the week.  It hasn’t rained yet today.  One week of rain and everything in Ghana that was brown is now green.  And the temperature is a little less hot.

I indicated in last week’s blog that I thought I would have to thin my tomatoes this week.  I didn’t have to thin them.  The rain did it for me.  Instead I had to salvage the few that weren’t beat into the ground by the rain.   I staked them.  This is a picture of my poor tomatoes during the rain.  

  
 

Last item:  Marsha and I had our first experience with a chief.  Despite Ghana being a democracy there is still a strong tribal tradition in this country.  Many day to day activities are regulated by tribal law instead of government law.  Every Ghanaian can tell you what tribe he or she is from.  They can tell you what language is spoken by their tribe.  They can tell you their tribe’s history.  They know who their chief is.  Many of the tribes continue to have tribal markings:  cuts on the face placed in infancy that “mark” which tribe the child is born into.  Permission for certain activities such as marriage still have to be approved by the chief.  Etc, etc.

The tribal chief came to church today.  He arrived with four other men, all wearing tribal dress with the flowing cloth draped over one shoulder and around the waist, the second shoulder bare.  One of the escorting men carried a large umbrella shading the chief from the sun.  The chief had a gold ring on each hand about the size of a teacup.  I wish I could have been closer to see the design.  Each ring appeared to be the image of an animal.  But I could not get close enough to see the rings clearly.  And the chief’s sandals were straight out of a Nieman Marcus catalogue.   They were a dark brown with inlaid gold in the straps and a central raised ornament on each sandal that appeared to be made of gold.   They definitely were not the sandals worn by the Ghanaians on the street.  When the chief left the building his escorts surrounded him, and provided him umbrella protection from the sun.  The umbrella was also a Nieman Marcus accessory.  You can’t buy one like the chief’s on any street or market here.   

Have a good week.   This is a picture of five missionaries that arrived yesterday afternoon.   They came by the apartment on their way to the MTC.  They had missed the Saturday morning session at the MTC where I start their hepatitis B immunizations.  I gave them their first shots in our apartment.  

 

Week #17

I’m going to describe Cape Coast today, but before I start I want to share a few events from this past week. 

I planted my garden – two flower pots with tomatoes.  The seedlings came up in five days.  They are about two inches tall right now.   I will have to thin them this week.  I don’t know why I’ve waited until May to plant tomatoes.  I could have planted them in January.  Ghana is like a giant Edward’s Greenhouse:  the temperature fluctuates less than 10 degrees F from day to night, the daylight is 12 hours long, and the humidity is constant.  I’ll keep everyone up to date on the progress of the Ghana Tomato Project. 

Here’s a picture of my garden at one week.

Marsha and I went to get our Ghana drivers’ licenses on Thursday.  The process here puts to shame any inefficiency associated with Ada County Licensing.   Give thanks the next time you are in Ada County Licensing if you only have to spend an hour.  Marsha and I spent three hours getting our licenses.  And it would have been much worse if we hadn’t had Kofi Bolley with us.  Kofi is the church employee in charge of vehicles, and, therefore, I suppose by logic, the one in charge of those who drive the vehicles.  Kofi did most of the work for us.  Thank goodness for Kofi and the Ghc 200 we gave him.  We parked outside the licensing building and waited in the car (air conditioner running) while he went inside.  We waited about an hour.  Kofi returned to the car with forms that needed to be filled out.  He filled them out for us, had us sign then, and attached a passport photo to the application.  He then took our Idaho drivers’ licenses and disappeared for about forty five minutes.  He came back with a form indicating that we had passed our driving test.  Pretty impressive for not having left the car.  I suspect some of the Ghc 200 went towards our successful passing the test.  We then climbed three flights of stairs and went down a long, narrow hallway to a very cramped office where we signed some forms and wrote our cell phone numbers on the paperwork.  The office was so small that only one person at a time could step up to the desk and sign papers.  There were many standing outside waiting to go in.   Kofi left us again.  We waited in the narrow hall for a half an hour and then went to a second office where we placed our right index finger onto some kind of scanner, signed an electronic signature, and had our picture taken.  The clerk then produced a “temporary” paper license good for three months.    Apparently they can’t make the permanent plasticized licenses on site.  Kofi will go back in three months and pick up our “permanent” licenses.  Amazing process.  And Kofi even gave us back Ghc 10 .  What a deal.  A driver’s license with change back. But I don’t think I’ll ever complain about US government inefficiency again.   

 

This is a picture of some flowers that grow in abundance outside our apartment stairs.  We don’t know for sure what they are called.  They look like the Bird of Paradise flowers of Hawaii.  There are different bunches of these flowers around the apartment grounds, all a little different in color.  They are always in bloom.

 

We had a very sick missionary this week.  He had been experiencing renal colic for about a week and hadn’t called anyone.  He called me last Sunday night when he realized he had gone over 24 hours with pain and without any urine production.  We sent him to C&J Hospital, one of the smaller hospitals we have used in the past.  They didn’t have a urinary catheter (can you believe that) so they sent him on to Korle Bu, the teaching hospital.  Unfortunately, this is like sending Daniel to the lions’ den.  You really don’t know if Daniel is going to be alive in the morning.  The missionary made it to a ward by early morning.  He needed a catheter and IV fluids, both of which had to be purchased off site and brought to the ward.  He needed IV medications – pain meds and a diuretic, both of which had to be purchased from the pharmacy and brought to the ward.  He needed some blood tests, and, yes, you guessed it, he had to go to the lab and pay for them in advance.  And, by the way, he had to have his hospital stay paid for in advance. If you can’t pay you can’t come into the hospital.  He was seen by a urologist sometime in the early morning.  The urologist ordered a CT scan of his abdomen.  And you can guess what needed to be done.  The scan had to be paid for before it could be scheduled.  The contrast dye had to be purchased off site and brought to the radiology department with the patient.  And, because he was a white patient with white people helping him, the cost of the CT increased from the first quote of Ghc 240 to Ghc 340.  No pay, no scan.   I think you can you visualize this situation.  It frustrates me beyond description.  This place is a conglomeration of buildings spread out over an area of about a square mile.  Every time I’ve been there it has been packed with people, in the halls, lying on gurneys, lying outside on the benches, waiting in cars, standing in the streets.   It is equivalent to the large teaching hospitals of the US but without any of the sophistication of US medicine.  And it is all based upon a pay as you play model with bribery thrown in for good measure. 

The missionary had the CT scan 48 hours after admission.  It demonstrated a stone in his left ureter.  The urologist, who refused to call me or even come to the ward when I was there, indicated to the missionary that surgical treatment would be needed to remove the stone.  I did some quick long distance consulting with Dr. Bill Jones, a urologist from Boise.  I started making arrangements to get this missionary to Johannesburg, South Africa.  And then the missionary got better.  He passed the stone. We paid our charges and got him out of the hospital.  It was a tense 96 hours.

Before I get to Cape Coast let me describe another “first.”  We’ve seen some buzzards in the past, usually from a distance.  They are much less common than the vultures that frequently fly overhead.  But today, on the way up Independence Avenue Marsha and I saw two buzzards sitting together on a light post.  The light post angled over the road.  The birds were sitting out on the very end of the light post, watching the passing traffic, moving their heads with the passing traffic, just as you would expect buzzards to act.  They were smaller than I had anticipated.  But they had the buzzard pose that is often accentuated in cartoon drawings:  narrow shoulders, thin, curved, neck with a small head bent forward surveying all things below.  It was exciting to see them that close. 

  Let me describe Cape Coast.  The guidebooks say that Cape Coast is a tourist destination for Ghana.  The doctor that I replaced, Mark Stubbs, said that Cape Coast is “like Hawaii except for more goats and more garbage.”   I would tend to agree with Mark.  There are stretches of the beach with coconut palms lining the shore that look exactly like Hawaii.  The water is even appealing with moderate rolling waves, and narrow, sandy, beaches.  But on the other side of the coastal high way is poverty.  It is a tourist destination if you only look to one side of your view.  This next picture is what you see when you look to the side of the road opposite the coast.

 Cape Coast is actually two communities about 12 km apart:  Cape Coast and Elmina.  Both are sites of castles built in the early 17^th century by Europeans: the British, and the Portuguese.  The Dutch built a castle in Accra during the same era.   On his visit to Ghana last summer President Obama visited the Cape Coast Castle, the oldest of the three castles.

Let me interject one thing, here, to show how much the Ghanaians love our president.  Just inside the castle wall, at the spot where the guided tours start, there is a marble plaque set into the stone wall.  The plaque says “At this spot, on _________ (I don’t remember the date, sometime in July 2009) President Barack Obama unveiled this plaque.”  That’s all it says.  I’m not making this up. The Ghanaians all take pictures of this plaque.  I didn’t take a picture of the Obama plaque.  I took a picture of a plaque about 10 feet away.  It has been there for many years.  It seemed more appropriate.  

Back to the castles.  All of the castles were built originally as settlements/fortresses but they eventually evolved into prisons used for holding slaves in preparation to being shipped out to various parts of the world.  The history of the slave trading is more complicated than I had always imagined, having believed all my life that the Europeans captured the slaves, brought them to the castles in chains, and then took them to overseas destinations, such as the West Indies, where the slaves labored on plantations.  Contrary to this notion is the fact that most of the West African slaves were captured by their own countrymen, the dominant tribe, the Ashantes, who brought them roped together to the castles where they traded them to the European merchants for guns and alcohol.   Knowing this fact does not diminish, in any way, the pox on humanity for these two hundred years of cruelty, but it does allow me to view the Europeans with less disdain: they were simply businessmen, dealing in a buy/sell market, with the unfortunate commodity being humans.  One cannot walk these castles without feeling the morbid history behind the walls, in the corridors, in the dungeons, and at the large gate – the Door of No Return – where the slaves would pass through to be crowded onto the tenders and taken out to the slave ships.  I will put in a few pictures here to try and convey the feeling.  The first picture is the entrance to the male slave dungeon.   This is where the slaves would enter to be kept in captivity until departure.  The second picture is the door they would exit. 

 Marsha says I get a little carried away in my writing.  She’s probably right.  Let me describe the other “tourist attraction” in Cape Coast:  the Kakum National Park and its canopy walk.  I’ll do this without getting “carried away.”  The park is about an hour north of Cape Coast.  It is a true rain forest with a rope bridge canopy walk 350 meters long, suspended 40 meters above the canopy of the forest.  The morning we did the walk the sun was shining and the vistas seen from the canopy walk overlooking the forest were stunning.  The next two days it rained.  It is a rain forest, after all.  I’ll put in a few pictures here.  

This is a picture of the Coconut Grove Resort.  We did not stay here but we had dinner at the beach side restaurant.   

 

Let me conclude with some comments on our driving to Cape Coast and back.  Cape Coast is about 120 km from Accra.  It took an equal amount of time to get out of Accra as it did to drive to Cape Coast.  The traffic is miserable on the west side of Accra.  (We drove out on Friday mid day, which probably didn’t help the traffic mess any.)  The road is actually pretty nice.  There’s not a lot of potholes.  But there is an inordinate number of speed bumps.   Each community has speed bumps 20 meters apart all of the distance that the road passes through the community.  And there’s a community (village or small town) every 10 – 15 km.    These speed bumps are not a single speed bump.  There are usually 4 – 8 speed bumps each 5 meters from the next.  It makes for a lot of slow down/speed up driving.   The speed bumps are to obviously slow down the traffic.   There is a second deterrent to speeding.  Every 10  km or so there is a bright red roadside sign that says OVERSPEEDING KILLS, (not "speeding kills", but "overspeeding kills") with a smaller sign underneath detailing the deaths:  “At this site 6 people died,” or “At this site 32 people died” (I’m not making this up) and then the best one “At this site over 3 people died.”  How many over three?  Maybe three and a half?   Occasionally there are other red signs proclaiming OVERTAKING KILLS.  If the speed bumps don’t make you want to slow down I’m sure that the road signs do.  Who would want to be memorialized on a road sign?  

I’ve decided that Ghana needs a catchy tourist phrase, like Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, or the United States of America, the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave.  Maybe they need a catchy motto, like New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. Or maybe something along the lines of Remember Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.   Here’s some suggestions:  Ghana, the Land of Speed Bumps, or Ghana, the Land of Scary Road Signs.  Or Remember Only You Can Prevent Overspeeding.  

Have a good week.

 

Saturday, 8 May 2010

Marsha says that if I don’t get a blog written this weekend I’ll start getting hate mail. I don’t want that.

I appreciate the comments and feed back from the blogs that I have written so far. The effort to write a blog is worth it if just one person gains an appreciation for this country and what we are doing here.

It seems the first few weeks that we were here I couldn’t wait to sit down and describe our new surroundings. Each day was exciting, a new adventure. Now, I have to think for a while of events/items that would be appropriate to describe in a blog. Most of the “newness” of Ghana has worn off.

I had an experience about two weeks ago that was a little disturbing. I was driving my 5 km route to home, up Independence Avenue, and taking some videos with my GoVideo camera. I had the camera in my right hand on the top of the steering wheel. I was trying to capture the variety of street vendors working alongside the passing cars, on the edge of the road and in between the two lanes of traffic. If you haven’t seen a GoVideo camera it is about the size of a cell phone. I had it between my thumb and finger in my right hand, with the hand on the steering wheel at about the 2 o’clock position, pointing the camera forward, trying to capture on video what I could see as I drove the road. I had taken about four 20 second segments while moving slowly with the traffic. And then I came to a stop at an intersection. I kept the video camera going trying to capture the oncoming passing of the vendors. I had been stopped for only 8 – 10 seconds when I heard some yelling to the right of me. I looked to the right and the driver of the adjacent car had rolled down his window and was shouting at me (local language, I didn’t understand any of it but I got his message) and shaking his finger at the camera. I turned the camera off and put it in my lap. He continued shouting, not to me, but to all the vendors around us. They all stopped, probably 10 of them, and started coming toward me. All of them were shouting at me (still didn’t understand a word they were saying, but the body language didn’t require translation.) One of the vendors, a young woman selling dried plantains, stood at my driver’s window for several seconds, and hit the window with her hand. For the first time since arriving in Ghana I felt threatened. I patiently endured the insults and waited for the light to change.

So, what did I learn from this experience? First, I don’t think I’ll take GoVideo images while sitting at that intersection again. Second, I think I have a better appreciation for the dignity of these people. I obviously was doing something that was demeaning to them. I doubt they thought that taking their picture would “steal their souls.” (Quaint thought.) But I do suspect that my taking their picture was like unto taking the picture of an animal on display. It was offensive to them. I am sure I would have felt the same if our positions had been reversed. I wonder what would have happened, though, if I had rolled down my window and offered to buy something from each of them. Maybe the anger would have changed. Maybe not. I don’t think I’ll try to find out.

Another incident. This one is hilarious. It relates to the comment in my last blog that Ghanaians aren’t as conscious of skin color as we are. I think they are conscious of skin color, but not in the purely racial sense that we think of it. To them, white in contrast to their black skin does not imply a sense of tension that we unconsciously feel, in the US, when we think of blacks in contrast to our whiteness. As whites we are always careful of using skin color as a description of a person. The Ghanaians aren’t concerned about calling someone white. There is no implied racial tension. They would feel and act the same if we had purple skin. Maybe this doesn’t make sense, so I’ll describe the incident to explain the point I’m trying to make.

A week ago Thursday I drove to the Medical/Dental Council building to turn in my licensing application. (By the way, they didn’t accept the application; it turns out I’ve got to either “sit for examinations” or get an exception to the examination rule. They hadn’t told me about the “examinations” requirement when I picked up the license.) There is no parking at the Medical/Dental Council building. I parked behind the adjacent CocoBoard building. I had to walk through the lobby of the CocoBoard building. To get out the front door I had to walk through a turnstile, that, because I was exiting the building, had to be electronically released to allow pedestrians out. The incoming pedestrians could walk through the one-way turnstile. I stood for a moment waiting for the incoming pedestrians to come through the turnstile. When there was a break I looked at the man who controlled the electronic button. He acknowledged me and pushed the turnstile button. As I started towards the turnstile a Ghanaian behind me cut in front and went through the turnstile. I paused and looked at the man controlling the button. He acknowledged me again and pushed the button. I started toward the turnstile and for a second time a Ghanaian behind me cut in front to go through. The same thing happened a third time. At this point the man controlling the button was getting irritated. He looked at me, pushed the button, and said, in a LOUD VOICE, with a finger pointed at me, “White one! Go!” No one cut in front of me. I walked through the turnstile, privileged to have exclusive access. (If I had thought quickly enough I should have asked “Who, me?”) Had my skin been purple, the man with the button would have invited the “purple one” to go. Imagine a similar scene in the US. Do you think that the button man would have yelled “Hey, black one. Go.” Does this make sense?

Enough philosophizing. Let me describe a fence being built across the front of the empty lot to the east of our apartment. I put a picture of this field on the blog dated 7 February. You might want to look at the picture again to see the cattle crossing the empty lot.

As I mentioned on that blog Marsha and I watched the cattle come through the field every three to four days in February and March. We’ve not seen them the past two months. We’ve noticed as we’ve walked the neighborhood that signs on this property have been put up indicating that the property belongs to the government and that there is to be no trespassing. Maybe that’s the reason for the disappearance of the cattle. It hasn’t cut down, however, on the pedestrian traffic. So I guess that the government has decided to put up a fence. A concrete fence. (I’m really tempted to make a comparison, here, to US immigration fences but I’ll resist. I'll seize the opportunity, however, to make a comment about the Ghanaian government’s simple solution of building a fence compared to how the Obama administration would have handled the problem. If faced with this problem I can visualize President Obama holding a press conference to announce the creation of a new bureaucracy called the Wandering Cattle Department, with a billion dollar budget to teach cattle to read warning signs, a whole cadre of Keep Out enforcers, and an equal number of legal staff to represent the rights of the cattle when arrested by the enforcers. We’d have to build prisons for the delinquent cattle and employ a lot of cattle guards. And that doesn’t even address the Wandering People problem. That would require a second bureaucracy. Oh well, just a thought. I’d better get back to the fence.)


Three weeks ago I noticed a lot of men working along the street that fronts the empty lot. They were digging, by hand, a trench about five feet deep. I didn’t measure it but the trench was up to the heads of the workers. I could see their heads and watch the dirt being thrown from the trench. They dug the trench, about 40 yards long, in several days. They then started building pillars, first forming reinforcing bar into skeletons, and then building wooden forms around the skeletons. They then poured concrete into the forms. Once the pillars were done they started the solid block wall (not cinder block which is lighter but blocks that look like they are at least 60 – 70 pounds based upon how difficult it appears for the men to carry them.)

The men have done all of this without a backhoe or any other piece of mechanical equipment, without a transit, without electricity, and without concrete being delivered to the site. They cut the reinforcing bar by hand, as well as the wood for the concrete forms. They mix the concrete on site. Each morning water is carried in buckets by hand from a little stream quite a distance away to a location on the empty lot where piles of sand and gravel have been previously deposited. The concrete is mixed at this site. The concrete is moved in wheel barrows to the pillars and then lifted up to the top of the forms in what appears to be about a two gallon bucket. A worker sits on top of the forms and pours the concrete in the forms and tamps the concrete down.

This is a picture of the worker sitting on one of the pillars. The men who are building the block walls are doing it without any electrical equipment. They score and break the solid blocks instead of cutting them. The assistants bring the blocks, one at a time, balanced on their heads. I have not seen one of the workers wearing gloves. And by the end of the afternoon they are all shirtless, their skin glistening with sweat.

I would love to be able to photograph or video this process but I’m a little gun shy about using the camera without permission. I took these photos from our front porch balcony with Marsha’s little camera which has a 10 x zoom.

It is now midday on Saturday. The power to the apartment went out about an hour ago. We are on the generator at the moment.

I’m going to put two photos from Cape Coast in here. We were there last weekend for a Mission President’s Training Seminar. I’ll write more about it this week and post it next weekend.