Oh never mind

In Canada we are fond of the expression: If you don’t like the weather just wait ten minutes.

That’s probably true for most temperate zones. But tropical and equatorial weather is different. Many places on the planet you can set your clock by the weather. For instance, every day at 5:00pm it may rain.

Ghana’s weather is equatorial. There are seasons — hot and wet, hot and dry. This is the hot, dry season.

It rained this afternoon.

Not a little sprinkle of water that disappears as soon as it hits the ground. This was a short but real downpour. I was on the tro-tro coming home from campus. So I didn’t get too wet — all the gaskets around the windows leaked.

But the tro-tro ride home is staged. In the middle, at Madina Market, we have to switch. This is done at a tro-tro station. Anna-Marie, rightly, points out there is something very Orwellian about a tro-tro station. A station is a compound, usually behind street front buildings. They are not paved, have only minimal order to them — I know which quadrant to head to for the tro-tro to Botwe, where we live. But then I have to start asking in anyone knows which tro-tro is going my way. And stations tend to have a separate entrance and exit. Plus there are tin speakers mounted on poles with destinations blasted over the crowd in such a complex of competing messages that none are really comprehendible. Count on the ground being covered with years of garbage.

This is not a place you want to visit when it is dry.

This is really not a place you want to visit when it is wet.

Most of the ground here is quite impervious to rain, staying hard and keeping its form, just letting the water run off. But not all the ground is like that. And when the surface is uneven and water pools, and when hundreds of trucks in a very short time stop and start, over and over again, the ground must give way.

So I carefully picked and danced my way across the yard to the area where the Botwe tro-tro is usually found, avoiding puddles, small lakes, slick inclines of mud — an oozy, red layer on top of a hard layer.

The ride home on this second leg takes about 20-25 minutes. Today it took that long to get out of the tro-tro station. Trucks were sliding about the yard. No driver was more courteous and less aggressive than usual. Two trucks decided to swim upstream, causing a lot of yelling, honking, and arm waving, and causing a great delay. My tro-tro ran into another with a pretty hefty force. Another outside my window did the same.

But finally we squeezed out the exit and sat on the main road through the Madina Market for another 15 minutes, creeping forward amidst a slightly heightened chaos.

But it rained today. And now the sky is clear, the haze washed away, and a cool breeze blowing across my yard. That the haze is gone will mean tomorrow it will be hotter, but by Wednesday the haze will be back, blocking out some of the heat of the sun.

And instead of the usual red glow that slowly turns to black, we have a real sunset, with blue sky above brilliant white clouds, fringed with red and orange, and rays of sunshine dispersing through them. 

So forget all that stuff I said about Mars.

My Life on Mars

Lately I have been thinking a lot about life on Mars.

All Mars photos courtesy NASA

Not the possibility of some semi-petrified microbial remnant, trapped in ice or rock. But about real humans — Earthlings — eking out an existence in a hostile, impossible environment. I found myself on line looking up lists of great science fiction movies and thinking of a pair of movies that came out back to back a decade ago: Red Planet and Mission to Mars. 

But I’ve also caught myself thinking of Sinclair Ross’s book, As For Me and My House. 

What’s the connection? 

Dust. Lots of dust. 

In Ross’s book, set in the dust bowl, Mrs. Bentley watches the prairie dust build up against the windowpanes, like snow. And the increased accumulation is visible, measurable in real time. 

For decades, movie astronauts that found themselves on the red planet battled small, giant, or dead Martians. But in more recent fair, they also battle with dust: desiccated, powdered matter. Dust becomes the true enemy, seeping into equipment essential to sustaining life and returning to Earth. 

Like Mrs. Bentley I can watch the dust grow around me. I sweep my desk clean in the morning and by noon leave trails in the new dust as my fingers move across the surface.

And while my computer certainly is not as important as one on Mars would be, I have experienced dust related malfunctions. 

A year ago I was warned the disk drive in it would soon be dead from a two-fold attack. Dust gets into moving parts that literally grind to a halt and it also forms opaque layers on optical readers. So far, the disk drive is hanging in, but other ports have filled with dust, causing temporary malfunctions. 

The power supply, USB devices and the headphones have all failed of late. 

Like my computer, my nose, eyes, and ears have all failed as well.

It has not rained in over a month. And probably won't for another month. I've indicated in previous posts, there is not a lot of grass or other vegetation in our neighbourhood. The roads, the paths, empty lots, many yards are bare Ghanaian red soil. I pad around the neighbourhood on soft red dust.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a real desert country — in the Sahara, not two countries down wind from it. Tens of millions of people do; millions of Ghanaians grow up with this dust, and deal with it on a daily basis. The means of coping are everywhere, and probably largely unconsidered by Ghanaians. As dealing with snow is just something Canadians do.

At dawn each morning I hear the neighbours sweeping the walks and driveways. The family in my boy's quarters also follows this dawn ritual. And on our morning walk, the dust in front of shops has been neatly swept, always in a herring bone pattern. Paint brushes are sold in great quantities in shops and by street vendors throughout the city. Most are not used for painting. Instead, every taxi driver has one out at every red light, dusting the dashboard of the car. The slats on my windows, and the sills below, require regular micro-sweeping.

This is Ghana's winter, dry and unforgiving. I've grown up and lived in one of the most water abundant patches of the planet. What would it be like to live in a real desert?

Ghana

Mars

Or, what it would be like to colonize Mars?

Live better electrically

Most evenings this is what our house looks like.

Anna-Marie headed off for New Zealand on January 9. The next evening the electricity went off — as they say around here “Lights out”.  As in: “Everything in the fridge went bad because the lights were out.” On campus the lights go out occasionally but not usually for very long. Many departments even have backup generators, though Philosophy does not.

Moving off campus put us in a different world. Some neighbourhoods are good with consistent electricity and few brown outs. We don’t live there.

Before we moved into the neighbourhood (long before?) work started on upgrading the electrical grid. New poles have been erected with high-tension wires and every few houses there is a separate transformer. But none of this is connected to the power supply, and at the pace they are going I have little hope we will see it all powered up. It is just too large a neighbourhood, it is too expensive, and there are too few workers.

Since we moved in at the end of September we have probably experienced ‘lights out’ on about a third of the days. Most times this is a few hours in the evening (hopefully, but not always, just after cooking, doing the dishes, and showering). We also experience (twice) daily brown outs, where the lights dim and ceiling fans slooooow down.

This is particularly hard on fridges. When the current drops the motors work harder and quickly burn out. Almost every fridge in Ghana is hooked up to some sort of power protector. This is not a surge protector. When the power drops these devices prevent any power from passing through. That is, they shut off the fridge. Almost every morning and evening our fridge shuts off.

Some times the fridge will be off all day. Cleverly, to preserve some of our food, Anna-Marie filled a pail with water and put it in the freezer. It stays there, and when the power goes out, even for long periods, the cylinder of ice radiates cold even as it melts. So far it has never completely thawed and we have never had to throw out something from the freezer.

We had a fairly good run of ‘lights on’, but on the Tuesday after Anna-Marie’s departure, the lights went out around 7:00pm and didn’t come back on until Wednesday around noon.

That was a long stretch. But for the next ten days the lights went out around 7:00pm and came back between ten and one. This gives me an option. I can sit in the dark outside and get eaten by mosquitoes but have a bit of breeze blow over me. I can sit in the dark inside and hum to myself (and still probably get nibbled on by mosquitoes and have no breeze). I can head to the bed and get under the mosquito net. There I can read by flashlight or try to sleep. I’m good for about an hour of flashlight reading and since the local mosque starts up with the call to prayers around 4:00am, early to bed is very attractive (even with the lights on).

This means lying on the bed, under the net, with no fan on. I woke the other night when the power came back on (I’d missed turning off the radio) in a pool of my own sweat. Well, not really a pool but between two cold, wet sheets. Even with the harmattan, at bedtime it is still about 29 degrees. Later, around two or three, it will drop down to a very refreshing 26. Chai and I have had many pleasant morning walks of late.

But this week things may have changed. On Wednesday, the neighbour across the street came calling with a proposal. Anna-Marie says he is the closest thing we have to the King of Kensington; he does seem to be the spark plug in the neighbourhood improvement committee.

The proposal: For forty cedis per household he can get the electric company to switch our end of the street from one transformer to another; essentially reversing the flow of the electrons down the power lines of our street. We have been connected to an overused transformer at the bottom of our street. But for a little cash the ten houses at the top of the street can be connected to a different, under-utilized transformer. Total: 400 cedis. And they could do it Friday (uncommonly quick). Which makes me pretty certain the workers left whatever job they were supposed to be doing on Friday for a little cash job.

A came home around six on Friday to find them just finishing up the work. I think the last connections were made by feel as the sun quickly set. As they finished, up the lights came on, went off, quavered. But when they were on I was convinced they were brighter. This is very hopeful.

Finally, around 7:00pm they were done and every house on the street had ‘lights on.’ The lights were looking bright, the fridge was purring, and the fans were making more cooling wind than ever before.

At 7:10 the entire city was plunged into darkness.

Epilogue:

The city-wide outage lasted about 4 hours. Jokingly, I claimed our street, not facing its usual black out, had overloaded the whole system. Again, Saturday night we had our usually black out, but this time it was much shorter. And the really good news is that we haven’t had a brown out since the switch over; the fridge has continued to run.

Happy Anniversary!

It’s one year since I arrived in Ghana. Admittedly, I was back in Canada for June and July, so have only been here for ten months, but I think it still counts. I’ve certainly been here long enough to figure out some likes and dislikes.

And, after five months in country, Anna-Marie took off this afternoon for a month in New Zealand. As I type she is airborne to Lagos, Nigeria. Then, on to Dubai, Bangkok, Sydney, and Christchurch.

Most of her time will be spent in yoga boot camp, but her intensive course of training for yoga teachers will be bracketed with about eight days of sight seeing, shopping, and eating. For the sight seeing, she has taken the camera, so this post is cobbled together from images already stored on my computer.

Here, then, is a tale of two countries.

Seven things I like about Ghana:

Photo credit: Pitts and Zwiebel, Vanderbilt U.

1. There just aren't that many mosquitoes. While they can be deadly, their population is nothing like what we get in Manitoba, or even southern Ontario, which also carry deadly diseases. The first five months I was here I think I saw about six mosquitoes and got bitten two or three times. Now in evenings there are lots of mosquitoes but we make sure the doors are closed at dusk and sleep under a net. I’ve still only been bitten a half dozen times, but did get unlucky in October. But the suffering from malaria is no worse than a bout of Canadian flu, and the anti-malaria drugs clear it up in three or four days (which can be shorter than the flu).

2. The food is spicy. Almost everything comes with some sort of hot sauce, or just is hot. There only seem to be about a half dozen vegetables sold in the markets, but one of them is chilies (actually several kinds).

Stews, rice, kabobs, soups, grilled or fried meat and fish, it all comes with heat. And if the heat of the food isn't enough, every dish comes with one of two or three hot sauces that are peculiar to Ghana.

I read that Ghanaian food will never become popular in North America until they change the name of one of the ubiquitous ingredients, shito sauce (though pronounced Shee-toe). This is usually chili, palm oil, and dried shrimp, but I have a friend who makes and sells a vegetarian version, which is better than many shrimp based ones I have tasted.

3. It's always summer. Truly, there are several seasons, though the differences are subtle. They are distinct enough that I can say I like the rainy season and the harmattan the best. We are in the harmattan now. It is a wind that blows down from the Sahara Desert. You would think this would make it hot and dusty, but it makes it cooler (though it turns the sky red with dust). Especially at night and early morning it is cool. Every morning the metal roof on our house is dripping with dew, and plants actually thrive from the night dew. There have been several morning dog walks where I could have worn a long-sleeved shirt.

4. Cool mountain waterfalls that you can swim or shower in. Unfortunately, I don’t have one in my backyard, but a few hours drive takes us up into the mountains where the water is clear, fresh, and fun. This was unexpected. Fresh water in the tropics is usually alive with nasty parasites. But when we went to East Volta we hiked along gorgeous mountain trails through the jungle and were rewarded with a splash in some magnificent, clean falls.

This region is home to some of the highest points in West Africa and many spectacular falls. We stayed at an eco-resort (modest, but great location) that allowed us to get close to the weather (spectacular evening storms and morning mist) and the wildlife.

We are car shopping.

5. The music. We don’t get out much to hear the live stuff (and didn’t in Canada, either) but it is all around us. Yes, some of it is terrible, but most of it is fantastic. Like another country we have spent a lot of time in (Cuba), Ghana is a musical land. Everyone plays something (usually one of a dozen different kinds of drums) and there is always music drifting over from somewhere.

Taxi drivers view the trunk of the car not as a place to put luggage but to put giant home stereo speakers. I’m talking speakers each the size of a good suitcase. Hip hop and hip-life are too common, but I've been introduced to some great music this way.

6. The sheer joy of having electricity and water. This sounds like a back-handed compliment. But in Canada, we take these two simple things (actually really complex systems of technologies) so for granted that we use them unthinkingly, and so, without appreciation. As an example, in Canada, even though my water consumption was measured and I was billed for actual usage, I have no idea how much we used each month, nor really, how much it cost.

Most neighbourhoods, ours included, don’t have water and sewer lines. All our water is trucked in, and stored on site in our polytanks. Last week I was calling the University, again, to try to get water delivered to the house. Every two weeks we need to get our tanks filled. The University has the best price, but can be very unreliable.

Here's how it goes. First I go to the Housing cash office and pay 50 cedis for the delivery of water (the water itself is free — if I buy the same amount from local deliverers it will cost about 80 cedis). I then take my paper work across the yard to Transport to arrange the delivery. At both offices the essential person can be out. That means I may have to make two trips to pay, and on a really bad day, also two trips to arrange transport. The offices are about a 15 minute walk from my office. The record so far is about two hours to arrange water. Then, the guy in transport will tell me that the water is not running and they can't book a delivery until it is. Or I will book a delivery and later the truck driver will call to tell me the water is not running.

It took me a while to get the translation of this. The water is pumped from the ground at some secret location and the huge pump is old and breaks down a lot. The last time we needed water it wasn't running for about two weeks, we ran out, kept calling, and finally went with the local bandits after about a week without water.

I now know that our extended household uses about 1000 gallons of water every two weeks. And if we use it faster, or the water isn’t running, we will spend a few days without water. It’s a game of chicken. If we order the water too soon we can’t take it all and the tanker truck drives off with part of our precious supply. If we order too late, hoping to coordinate the delivery with the last drop popping out of our faucet we are in for a drought.

And because 100 Cedis is a good chunk of money we have really ratcheted up our conservation efforts. The dishwater goes on the garden and we’ve adopted the cottage country couplet:

In this land of fun and sun, we don’t flush for number one.

7. My job. The University administration can drive me crazy sometimes (as in Canada, but in different ways) and so can the students (as in Canada, but in different ways). But the best students are great, the courses are new and exciting, and the overall atmosphere is very relaxed and conducive to research, teaching, and a high quality of life.

On the other hand … seven things I miss about Canada:

1. The variety of food. The Ghanaian palette is very finite. Rice, gelatinous goo (that’s descriptive, not pejorative — fufu, banku, kenkey), fried chicken and fish, grilled tilapia (mostly farmed in Lake Volta), red red (spicy beans and fried plantain — a favourite of ours — it gets its name from its colour, both fried in palm oil which imparts a red colour).

And most of the vegetables are from my B list: okra, cabbage, aubergine, and green pepper (nobody lets one get ripe). Available but hard to find and very expensive are potatoes, cauliflower, carrots, lettuce, and cheese. Impossible to find, in addition to ripe peppers, are broccoli, mushrooms, brussels sprouts, herbs, arugula and other little greens. On my A list and readily available are tomatoes, shallots, onions, and pineapples, mangoes, coconuts, and oranges like you have never tasted.

And of course I miss the variety of ways one can mix all these things together. We just bought a small oven (we already had two cook tops, one electric and one gas, for when there is a gas shortage or when the electricity goes out) so now we have added pizza and chocolate cake to our menu.

I have a sweet tooth for dark chocolate and I thought moving to the world’s second largest supplier of cocoa would mean chocolate heaven. But cocoa is a cargo crop, brought here to supply the appetite of the West. There is no chocolate culture, and no good chocolate available in the country. Even the one chocolatier I’ve found, catering to Western customers, makes a poor rendition at an inflated price. Several stores sell familiar brands (exotic in Canada, and even more expensive here) but frequently they have been frozen and melted several times before I get them.

2. Quality consumer goods. This is a complex one. I think the shame is on us. China is a great supplier of goods to Ghana, as it is to Canada. The difference is that most good here are what we would find in Dollar Stores in Canada — only selling for exorbitant prices here. Anna-Marie describes it this way: All China’s seconds end up in North America’s dollar stores or Ghana’s luxury stores.

The double standard is that what we won’t pay more than a dollar for is subsidized by charging much more to people with much less money. So thanks largely to China, Ghanaians have access to an array of goods not available in the past, but the quality of these goods is atrocious. I suspect many Ghanaians wonder what all the fuss is about as they throw out some gizmo that broke on the second use or never really worked at all.

To underscore the double standard, the South African chain store, Game, was bought last summer by Walmart. There is a Game outlet in the Accra Mall. It is a bit like Canadian Tire.

Save money. Live better.

In North America, Walmart provides quality goods at the lowest possible prices (often impossibly low prices, driving manufactures out of business by demanding the goods at lower and lower wholesale costs, at the same time fueling the Chinese manufacturing dynamo). But here, Walmart/Game is the most expensive store in the land, selling comparable goods to those in North American stores at the highest possible prices. Game caters to the affluent.

3. Dog sledding. Before we left Canada, we booked a week outside Algonquin Park and went dog sledding, with the belief that people would (thinking stereotypically of Canada) ask if we sledded to work. Though we spent a half day at it, we had so much fun that we plan on booking a multi-day adventure when we return to Canada. To me, this stands in for all things winter in the Great White North. While in general I’m not a fan of winter (mostly too long) being away from home makes almost everything more attractive, and I have a deep appreciation for the deep white stuff.

No one yet has asked us about dog sleds.

4. Ease of travel. I don’t mean around the country, I mean down the street. Now that we are off campus, to get to work I walk up to the major intersection (two blocks north) and wait for a tro-tro. This can take one second to ten minutes depending on luck and the time of day. A variety of tro-tros pass here, all going somewhere near the Madina market, and I just get on the first one with a free seat. This means I might be taken to the Madina tro-tro depot or anywhere as far as ten blocks away. I then hoof it (a short or a long walk) and wait for the next tro-tro, to Legon (the University). Again, the wait can be short or long. The whole trip can take 45 minutes on a great day to two hours on a really lousy one. The same when home bound. But I often splurge (especially at the end of the day) and take a shared cab on one or both of these legs (one Cedi instead of 30-40 pesawas).

But worse than this, is getting into Accra. For instance, there is only one place we know of (and that anyone else knows of) where we can get tofu. This is a Chinese grocery store at the top of Oxford street, in the heart of Accra. Once a month we hoof it down there and buy pounds of tofu that then go in the freezer. To get from the University to Accra can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours depending on traffic. Rush hour guarantees the longer time, but any time of day the traffic can thwart your plans.

The governments here can be as dimwitted as the Conservatives back home; failing to learn from past mistakes repeated all over the globe and refusing to acknowledge 100 years of evidence about traffic and the environment.

The University and Madina (where we live) are severed from Accra by the Accra-Tema Motorway, which, acting as a barrier, in our case funnels all traffic onto one street heading into the city. Can you spell congestion?

To the above times add another hour to get to and from our place.

Then there are the little things. There is one cinema in Ghana, at the Accra Mall. From the University this can be a reasonably short tro-tro ride (ten to fifteen minutes) and from our house an hour and a half. A bit off topic, but the other day we hiked down to watch The Help; the only white people in a movie theatre showing a film about deep, nasty white racism. You can’t get that at home.

5. Rowing, and our own great outdoors. Moving to Ghana, I knew, meant giving up rowing (see above about parasites in the water). And I was reconciled to this. But it also meant giving up the fifteen minute drive to the quarry where Chai and I would go swimming in the summer and sliding around on the ice in the winter. It also meant giving up the Muskoka river, Moon Lake in Riding Mountain National Park, Banff Park, the stretch of the Grand River on which I row, and Vandy’s tiny pond where we scattered my father’s ashes two years ago. Both my parents, and I, have been avid wilderness canoeists and I feel a deep connection to the temperate forests, lakes, and mountains of Canada.

Though it drives me nuts, Canadians often describe themselves as inherently and essentially devoted to and defined by hockey. I’ve said it before, let me say it here: I could give a rat’s ass about hockey.

But I am devoted to the other great Canadian characteristic: I am drawn to the Idea of North. I have yet to canoe the Nahani River, or trek the spongy permafrost of Nunavut, or even wait for polar bears to rummage through the Churchill dump, but I am infused with the North — probably more than ever as I reside next to the equator. Ghana is the closest land on the planet to the centre of the map: 0 longitude, 0 latitude. That spot lies in the ocean somewhere south of Accra.

Yet, though I have fled the cold, it is the cold that defines me. And all things temperate.

A big shout out to the Cambridge Rowing Club.

6. CBC radio. As It Happens, Q, Tapestry, Spark, Ideas, Wire Tap… The CBC has podcasts, but most of the time our internet connection is so slow that we can’t get the shows we crave. Worse, unlike mp3s, podcasts need to restart from the beginning if the internet blinks off for a nanosecond (which always happens here, though often by increments much larger than nanoseconds). But in January the students and most of the faculty are away, and the internet is blisteringly fast and reliable. I have managed to download August to January of most of our favourite shows; something I have not been able to do in the previous five months.

In the mean time our alternatives are Ghanaian radio (talk shows in Twi or Akan, terrible hip hop music, or consistently on one station, really good high life music) or the BBC World Service (read “all football all the time”).

for illustrative purposes only (apologies to the family, I got this off the internet with no sources provided)

7. Family and friends. ‘Nuf said.