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.