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Published: October 14th 2008
I must apologise for the delay in posting this entry - it’s been sitting hopefully on my laptop for over a week, but every time I have a moment to actually post it, I get called off to do some real work! Normally I sneak onto the internet before 9 in the morning, but when I have morning assignments I often don't have time to procrastinate!
I live in hope that by about this time next year I will have posted an entry for week 4…
Anyhoos, here’s the update:
Three weeks have flown by already, and in spite of all fears to the contrary, I feel like I’ve really got used to things out here! I don’t think it’s got any cooler or less busy, but the heat no longer seems to be the only thing I can think about when I’m outside, and it’s no longer daunting crossing the packed tro-tro parks and marketplaces.
I’ve picked up some basics of the local language, Twi, and coming out with a few well-timed phrases is guaranteed to bring a grin to the face of even the most grumpy stallholder or taxi driver. They think it’s classic -
View from Mrs Djan's Gate
About 7 in the morning, and all the kids are going to schoollooking at you with the kind of fascination that you would expect if they’d just seen an elephant do the hula. Then after the first basic exchange they tend to get over-excited and rattle off something utterly cryptic, meaning you then have to come clean that you only have a vocabulary of five words, but it’s a great ice-breaker nonetheless! The little kids love it when they shout ‘Oburoni’ and you shout ‘Obibini’ (the opposite) back at them, and taxi drivers are less likely to overcharge if you throw in a few words of Twi for free!
There is now a complete tribe of us staying at Mrs Djan’s house. In addition to Frankie and Aletta, there is a girl from Wales, called Jane; Akima, who comes from Grenada but who is working in England; a Canadian called Angela who arrived last weekend; and my new-found fellow intern at the Graphic, called Elise. She is from Adelaide and is in her last year of a journalism degree, and so is another useful mine of information when it comes to the finer (and, it has to be said, the less fine) points of the trade. Before coming to Accra she
Bone Street
This is the road I live on was in Cape Coast for two months, working at an orphanage for half the time and at a radio station for the rest. This means that she’s very up-to-speed with the Ghanaian way of life and very much at ease with most people. It’s so nice to have another person working at the Daily Graphic and she’s here for the next two months, so about the same length of time as me.
Life in the house is good fun, especially now there are so many of us. It means there’s always a group to make weekend plans with. It’s so nice to get out of the hectic crush of Accra for a day or two. During the week Projects Abroad organises a few things for the volunteers including a monthly party and a quiz night every Tuesday. Last week the ‘North Kaneshie Ninjas’, as we named ourselves, managed to win, but it may have been because Frankie had heard all the questions in the ‘riddles’ round before. There are lots of Ghanaian ‘spot bars’, as they are known, and, for moments of pining for home, there is Ryan’s Irish pub, a bizarrely convincing oasis of imported bar-stools and board
games which can completely fool you into forgetting which continent you are on for an evening. I have also heard rumours of salsa dancing and African drumming classes, which some of the others have sampled, so perhaps even in Africa I’ll manage to carry on my tradition of taking on too many extra-curricular activities…
My birthday was a really good day. I was so pleased to come into work and read all the messages that people posted during the day, and quite a few people at work remembered and said Happy Birthday - which after three working days wasn’t bad going. I got home for dinner and found that Aletta and Frankie had managed to get hold of one of the few chocolate cakes in Accra, making a trip to the western supermarket to find it. Happy Birthday was sung, evening wear and make-up was brandished and we headed into Osu, the district with the best nightlife, to have a few drinks. The evening started off in fairly authentic fashion, with Star beers and Savannah Dry cider in one of the spot bars, but after a couple of drinks (and a lot of slightly exasperating attempts by every man
Darkuman Police Station
The nearest landmark to our house who walked past to try and squeeze a phone number out of one of us) we caved and tracked down American-style doughnuts and a round of cocktails at a shamelessly western sports bar. Nonetheless, it was one of the most memorable, and still the most culturally adventurous birthdays I’ve ever had, and I was really touched that my housemates went to so much trouble.
For my second weekend Aletta and I headed out to Aburi, a village in the hills above Accra. Everything was so fresh and calm compared to the capital and there were lots of little craft stalls to browse. We came across the beautiful village church and because it was Sunday morning the building was absolutely crammed with people - I’ve never seen a church so full. The whole village had turned out in their Sunday best, the women having taken their white cotton dresses out of their protective wrappers for the occasion, and all the men were in shirts and ties. As we walked past we could hear the hymns carry out of the church and into the village where almost no-one was still in their homes, and I accepted an invitation to step in
De-Mod Tro-Tro Stop
The shop and the newstand (selling the Graphic!) next to the place where I catch the tro-tro to work and listen to the service for a little while, marvelling at the number of teenage boys joining in - a sight you wouldn’t see in most English churches. Here Christianity is still the foundation upon which everyone’s lives and opinions rest, and the pivot around which communities turn.
I also used the rest of the weekend to buy so cloth so I can have some clothes made to measure. It costs under £5 to have a dress made and there are all kinds of places to buy beautiful lengths of fabric. On my second Saturday here and bought some cotton at the vast covered market which I pass on the way to work. It’s in a bit of a different league to the one in Oxford, with three enormous floors, each riddled with an almost impenetrable warren of alleys and stalls. (I saw a nice piece of cloth on my first circuit but could not for the life of me find the same stall again!) Because there are very few ‘high street’ style shops in Ghana, the markets sell absolutely everything, from toothpaste to door locks and everything else imaginable. Elsewhere hawkers tend to try and sell you things
Frankie and the Cake
The icing tasted a little bit like soap, but the cake was good! on the main roads, coming to the car window to try and interest you in products as random as cotton-wool buds and underwear. I don’t normally splash out on those things in particular, but it’s often quite a handy system if you need a sachet of water or a piece of fruit.
At work I’m beginning to feel like part of the furniture, building up a modest collection of articles and getting to know people better. So far most of my articles have been joint efforts with other journalists whom I go along to shadow, but it’s a really good way to learn how things are done, and in the mean time I’ve also been able to follow my own train of thought and research feature pieces. My first full-length feature felt remarkably like the old-style essay crises of yore: me hunched over laptop at two in the morning dredging up dollops of inspiration which seemed to have been hiding all day, waiting for the smell of midnight oil burning before surfacing. I got it done and handed into the news editor, but it was a bit of a learning curve that whilst an essay simply gets handed in, a
feature needs to be pushed through the system, complete with photos and captions, in order to bag a spot in the next edition. Thanks to my impeccable organisational skills on this front, I have yet to see this seminal work on the subject of Tourism appear in print, but, as I keep telling Isaac the doorman, it’s due any day now.
Researching the feature was a great experience. I got to hang around the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations looking far more professional than I felt underneath and trying to nab five minutes with the minister herself. There was a bit of an embarrassing moment, when I had been sent to cover the arrival of the Canadian High Commissioner at the ministry, and on walking into the office of the minister’s secretary she thought that I, being white, was somehow connected to him. She was about to propel me into the inner sanctum when I realised they’d made a mistake, and muttered something about being with the press, at which point I was propelled fairly swiftly in the opposite direction to wait outside. All very embarrassing!
As part of the tourism project I was also instructed to
try and take a photo of an Oburoni on a tro-tro to accompany the feature. This has proved quite difficult. I tried to take a snap of Aletta on the way home from a weekend trip, but it did not go down well. This is partly because people were unwilling to be in the photo. There exists an attitude here, which has dwindled in England, that one shouldn’t really make an exhibition of oneself. Unlike many westerners, who seem prepared to sacrifice whatever body part necessary in order to appear in the media, Ghanaians are for the most part keen to avoid being photographed. Meanwhile there is also an immediate suspicion of anyone’s motives for taking a photo. It was one of the things I found very surprising at first, that Ghanaians are often genuinely sceptical as to why you would want to take pictures of their country. I can sympathise in a way - after all, me snapping happily away in a tro-tro is like somebody taking photos of the back end of a London tube, but I don’t think people realise what a novelty it is just bumbling around in a tropical African city like Accra. The trouble
The Monument at Independence Square
Taken during a day's sightseeing in Accra is, people here are very aware that the projections of Africa which reach the west are often of the continent as a hostile, under-developed, and crisis-ridden backwater, and so taking photos of dodgy minibuses can prompt suspicion that you are just a nosy tourist on a poverty safari. The upshot of all of this was that on producing my camera in the doorway of the tro-tro, all the passengers either death-stared me, or got out altogether, neither of which makes for a great picture. I whipped the camera back into my touristy rucksack, pretending that I’d just been polishing the screen, and have plans to try again another time - perhaps by trying to explain my reasons to the passengers first!
Anyway, I realise that this is a mammoth entry, and hope you have all arranged some kind of system by which you each read a section and compare notes later (a technique which, by the way, is also an effective way for a group of people to get to grips with an unread reading list!)
It’s been very strange realising that while I pile on the DEET and iron the tumbu flies out of my clothes, a
Independence Square
A big concrete parade ground new term is underway and I am no longer at uni! I don’t think I would believe that the Oxford circus was underway if I didn’t keep getting the JCR emails and the Freshers’ fair info! (It’s sad but true that over three years after I signed up for the windsurfing society, they’re still sending me emails, and this time I can be pretty sure I’m not going to be joining in).
Thank you to everyone, friends and family alike, for such nice messages and wall-posts since I arrived here - especially on my birthday! Extra special bonus brownie points to the troopers who have managed to post me things (India and Mike, you are both stars!) As much as I’m enjoying everything out here, I’m really looking forward to seeing all of you when I get back, and catching up on all the things I missed!
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