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.