After the rain

Look what a little (okay, a lot of) rain will bring.

It rained on Thursday, water and dampness stayed around until Sunday, and Monday these flowers were out. And this is just a small sampling of the flowers that have bloomed. Hedges are covered with blossoms; fields that last week were dust and scrub are now dotted or covered with flowers. A lot of the flowers will be familiar as Canadian houseplants, just ten times the size and living year round outdoors. As well, the grass is greener and everything looks a little less parched.

It has rained twice more since last week's deluge. Nothing as spectacular though — a slight rain on Tuesday, that consisted of a series of squalls around 6:00 - 7:00pm. Again, late yesterday evening we had another series of small outbursts. The pavement is dry this morning and the gutters didn't get a real workout.

But the best thing is that today it is actually cool, about 25 degrees C. Last night after the rain fall I headed out to the theatre in a long sleeve shirt. This morning I put on a short sleeve shirt, but I would be quite comfortable in long sleeves.

The theatre is becoming a weekly event. The Department of Performing Arts has an outdoor theatre and each Thursday, Friday, and Saturday either the students mount a play or a visiting production is staged.

Last week, Veena thought we were going to see a social drama by an Algerian playwright, but it turned out to be a farce, "Run for Your Wife", put on by the students. All the references were rewritten for Accra, and it was a blast, especially with the audience around me roaring with laughter, sometimes at jokes and references I didn't get.
 

Last night I attended with my grad student, Prosper. I was late and dashed across campus in my long sleeve shirt without breaking a sweat. Last week's performance started on GMT (Ghana Maybe Time) and as I trotted I hoped that tonight's would do likewise. It didn't. But I arrived just as the lights went down and was guided through the dark to my seat. Two bonuses I enjoy are that faculty get in free and we seated in the front row (not so close to make this a negative).

The play was Capek's RUR (most famous for being the origin of the word robot). It's not a great play, but it was played for laughs and ended with a great sequence with all the robots doing a synchronized dance number — doing "the robot" of course.

I got a blackberry!

At least, that is what these are called.

Nothing like either of the blackberries we find in Waterloo.

They were just given to me and I'm not sure what the tree looks like.

They are fuzzy inside and out. The whole thing is about the size of an adult thumbnail (mine anyway) and is like velvet. 

You can split them quite easily with your fingers. And inside is a fuzzy meat with a concave disk-shaped seed. The meat has the texture of a soft nut, sort of like a damp peanut (that sounds bad, but it is actually quite tasty). And the flavour is reminiscent of a blackberry. 

If anyone is familiar with these, post a comment.

Anticipating Rain

I started taking pictures of road side gutters as soon as I arrived in Ghana. They are, if nothing else, impressive. In Canada, a gutter is formed by the slope away from the crown of the road meeting a 15-20cm curb. Here the gutters are formed from concrete and are built down from the grade of the road — they can be as much as 45cm wide and 60cm deep.

The gutters are ominous and, to my eye, present a real driving hazard. They are not set apart from the roadway. Instead, where in Canada we would have a curb that rises from the road way, here, in most places, the roadway suddenly plunges down, with a slash certainly large enough to allow a tire down.

Form obviously follows function; I expect when the rainy season arrives it will pour.

Anna-Marie and I were introduced to tropical rains on our first full day in Cambodia. While out for dinner that evening it began to rain heavily. On the ride back to our new home, the tuk tuk (an elaborate cart pulled behind a motorcycle) stalled when the "puddle" on the road rose up and flooded the engine of the vehicle. While we sat sheltered behind plastic tarps that formed the sides of the tuk tuk, friendly Cambodians dashed out into the rain with rags to help our driver dry the air intake on his engine.

A few days later we stood in our living room and watched as the rain water mounted the 30cm curb at the roadside, and then the 5cm rise up to the driveway, and then the 15cm step up to the front side walk, and then the 15cm step up to our front door, and finally was lapping at the sill of our door. Another centimetre or two and water would have spilled over into our house, which we learned it had done before.

I didn't have to wait for the rainy season. On Thursday, for the first time this year, the skies opened up and let loose. There have been a couple of threats of rain before, but nothing ever happened. On Thursday I was working away in my office when just before 1:00 I noticed it was getting dark out. I wanted to get some fried rice for lunch from down the lane and thought I had better go now, just in case it actually did rain.

Five minutes later as I left the vendor with rice in hand, the rain came. And came. And came. Quite soaked, seconds later I ducked into a portico and waited it out. I also ate my lunch, watched the walk and lawn in front of me disappear under the water, a frog hop by (awakening to the newly wet world), traffic creep through the increasingly large puddle filling the round-about in front of me (with water up to the running boards of the largest SUVs), and listened to the clock on Balme Library chime 1:15, 1:30, and 2:00.

I didn't have my camera with me, but I suspect there will be many more chances to capture the rains in the coming months. By all accounts, this was an atypical rain fall: big and early. The damage it caused around Accra covered the news for the next two days. And only today, Sunday, have the concrete walks around campus looked dry.

When finally the rain let up and I ventured from my shelter I notice a car on the far side of the round-about trapped in one of the massive gutters. On the round-about the gutters are actually set apart from the road by a low curb, painted white. But during the rain storm the curb, gutter, and part of the grassy knoll in the centre of the round-about were obliterated.
The driver, executing too sharp a turn, and without any visual aid, turned into the gutter, and his car now sat on it's front axle in the road.

On returning to my office I took off my cold, wet shirt with some silly idea that I could continue working — in my cold, wet pants. A few minutes later, again dressed in my clothes, I headed home for a warm shower and dry clothes. 

The rest of the day was cooler as a result. But where I am used to a good rain breaking a heat wave, the opposite happens here. The rain drove away the haze that has sheltered me from the equatorial sun since my arrival. Friday arrive bright and hot, much hotter than it has been in weeks. Still, it took till today to evaporate, or for the ground to absorb, all the moisture.

In this photo you can see the high tide mark left on the grass by a ring of leaves. This is the spot where a day before the driver got stranded.

Shopping

1. This is the campus Supermarket, what we would call a convenience store:

As you can see, they sell toilet paper and Fru-telli juice. But they also sell the usual run of convenient store items: groundnut butter, schnapps, freshly bottled fruit smoothies, and 2 litre cans of mosquito repellent.

They don't worry about people taking the shopping carts, for as soon as you leave the sidewalk, which is only to be found directly in front of the building, the carts stop rolling in the soft Ghanaian dust. 

Last week the insides were painted with super toxic enamel paint that a week later you can still smell a block away. But much to my surprise the paint has dried. I just wouldn't want to spend much time in the store until it has finished off-gassing (probably around August).

2. This is the real convenience store (found at every intersection), what we would call dangerous or at least illegal:

 

At every traffic light on the major road (really a highway) from the University in Legon to downtown Accra (and on most secondary roads) crowds of sellers swarm out into the stopped cars with goods for sale.

And everything is for sale, from cell phone scratch cards (for recharging the time on your phone) to fruit, vegetables, snacks and drinks, to belts, blue jeans, dress shirts with ties, to toilet paper, tooth brushes, mops, pails, light bulbs and hammers, to newspapers, magazines, DVDs and CDs to home-cooked meals and, my favourite, the guy selling wall maps of Ghana. It's staggering on first encounter what people are selling, and buying.

I've actually seen a vendor sell an item into a car window, collect money, run to his stash on the curb for change and then chase the car up the street with it.

3. And then this is the "night" market (most shops closed by 7 or 8 pm, but open all day except Sundays), located across the street from the Supermarket and very near the International Students' Residence:

And here are some of the stalls in the night market. Ghana is famous for small businesses that invoke the owner's religious spirit:

Car bums...

or Accra from the back seat of a taxi.

Some one must have started all this, but I'm sure no one remembers the origins.

The messages began on tro tros, and reflect a general Ghanaian attitude toward religion: open and always. Now it's everywhere; mostly on taxis and tro tros. And there seems to be a secular element creeping in — "no weapon" and "yes man" — though perhaps I'm just missing the religious references. It makes a ride more interesting than looking for out-of-province plates.

These have on occasion helped me find my cab in a queue of waiting taxis.