Four Months In, Still Kickin'

A few days ago, the final group of JHR volunteers in Ghana marked the halfway point of our stay here. In four months, the organization will leave Ghana forever after a five-year term, and the six of us - Sophie, Zitner, Indica, Brennan, Nicole and myself - will be bidding our newsrooms and our Ghana lives goodbye. After four months, my feelings are decidedly mixed, and I suspect four more months won't rectify that. Many of my colleagues have already written posts far better than mine about their "four-month feelings" and I'm not entirely convinced I should follow suit. This is an oft-belaboured point round these parts, but good writers generally tend to write about their travels long after they've come home. Graham Greene wrote about living in Sierra Leone when he was back in England; Hemingway wrote about Paris long after he'd left. I imagine Margaret Laurence's glorious stories and novels about Ghana in the 1950's were penned once she was back on Canadian soil thinking about Canadian things. In keeping in this fine tradition, Alison "Run-On Sentence" Lang would probably do best to leave the more serious contemplating for when she's come home from Ghana and is sitting alone and jobless in her childhood bedroom, a dog and a glass of Ontario wine at her side, feverishing contemplating what to do next.

That being said, I know there are things I like here. A not-particularly brief and hastily-written list of them follows. I encourage my colleagues to comment and add their own.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS....ABOUT GHANA

+the way BBC reporters and anchors refer to it as "GHANER"

+picking up heavily sweetened Nescafe coffee in a bag on my way to work

+the bare-naked girl who is about six who comes out before her bath at the coffee stand and starts yelling “AMA!” at me. Her Ghana day-of-the-week name, as I later learned, is also Ama.

+delicious egg sandwiches that cost the equivalent of one dollar

+being chased down the streets of Anomabo by children banging on tins and pots screaming “OBRUNI-BA! OBRUNI-BA!” (white girl, white girl!)

+ shito sauce. No, this isn't a euphemism for some kind of gastrointestinal problem, but in fact the name for the deliciously hot pepper or "pepe" sauce that accompanies virtually every meal here.

+a woman at Anomabo gesturing at Eric’s piercings and then gesturing at her crotch

+my work days, which can begin with everyone quietly reading newspapers and then just as quickly turn to – raging arguments about Robert Mugabe! Grown men wrestling each other and dancing to reggae! People yelling and asking questions about each other’s sex lives!

+the devil strawberry vodka, Cardinal, that has often led to that phenomenon known as "white woman dancing" that I warned about in an earlier post;

+the way people look at themselves in the mirrors while they dance at nightclubs here;

+when one colleague told me I make him feel “like a human being” and gave me a copy of a book he had written;

+most men’s dress-up shoes have a slight heel, which means the men walk around the newsroom clacking like women in stillettoes;

+talking with Angela (a former neighbour) about church. “I don’t have money, but it’s okay,” she told me. “Tomorrow I get small money. I know my God is taking care of me";

+kenke with tomato, onions and avocado;

+watching Hannah do aerobics on Saturday mornings as our neighbours watch in confusion;

+watching Sophie and Hannah teach Ghanaian men how to do yoga;

+ little kids

+ the woman who said "Oh! Sorry baby!" when I ran to catch a trotro and in my haste smashed my head on the roof

+omo tuo (rice balls in palm nut soup);

+eating groundnuts and roasted plantain every day (and watching my colleagues descend on the food in a feeding frenzy when it arrives);

+ the fact that you can get out of any awkward situation, argument or scenario through wordplay, jokes, or even merely a smile

+the bar near my house where women in the neighbourhood go to smoke cigarettes, drink soda and talk trash;

+the horrible angle shots exhibited in the Nigerian films that are hugely popular here;

+a colleague’s request that I find him a “white woman with a big ass”;

+developing a wonderful cameraderie with the women I live with, from travelling together to rushing home from work and stripping off our sweat-soaked and impractical business-casual outfits, smoking on the porch and griping/exulting about our days, sharing illnesses, loneliness, work frustrations, heartbreak and tears, and laughing like maniacs at basically everything. If it were not for these two ladies, I probably would have gone home by now. They know who they are. Thank you.