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.