Kumasi Update

I have a few posts in the pipeline on general topics such as water, markets etc., but it occurred to me that probably you would like to know what we’ve actually been doing here in Ghana. It’s now almost a month since we arrived and previous posts have only got as far as our arrival in Kumasi in early June.

Well the answer is, not a lot, but although I can’t speak for ActionMan, I haven’t been bored at all. With such a lot of people to talk to or play with, or mother, and such a different environment, there’s always something interesting happening, and if there’s not, I have my writing and my books to resort to.

Our first few days here were spent getting settled into the family routines and checking out the immediate surrounds. The typical day starts more or less as follows: Get up at the crack of dawn. Brush your teeth and bucket shower. I’ve never really understood DadaK’s obsession with brushing teeth before eating breakfast, (you’d be surprised at the conflict it’s caused) but I begin to understand it now I’m here. It can be a few hours before you eat in the mornings, and it’s nice to have a fresh mouth while you wait.

I usually pop in on Nana for a while and attempt to have a chat. She’s confined to her room because she can no longer walk without assistance. If there’s no-one around to translate our conversations are very short because she’s bit deaf and has trouble with my accent, and my Twi is not up to complex discussions. Most conversations are related to food and what people are doing. “I am going to eat rice.” “Asiedu is sick.” “Kwadwo Mensah has gone out.” Etc. She is sometimes in a lot of pain from rheumatism and when that’s happening I sit and listen sympathetically while she cries and entreats God to relieve her suffering. I like being able to do this. The rest of the family, having to live with it all the time, don’t appear to have a lot of patience with her suffering, nor the time to pay attention.

At about 8.00am Serwaa asks me what I will eat this morning, and I almost always reply: “Ampesi”. It’s one of my favourite Ghanaian foods: Boiled yams and plantains and sometimes cocoyams (taro), with a spicy stew based on either taro leaves (nkontommre) or eggplant (naadua), laden with palm oil and enriched with ground pumpkin seeds, egg, and trace elements of tinned sardine. The first couple of weeks we were here I gorged myself on ampesi to the point where I was overeating so much I got constipation. Not a condition you expect to get in a third world country. I pace myself now.

ActionMan also loves ampesi, especially with yams. One day I came home to discover Serwaa elated because he had eaten 10 pieces of yam. This was after he’d been sick, so I guess she was also pleased that he’d recovered his appetite.

This meal arrives somewhere between 10.30 and 1.00. If I can’t wait I have street food early on: Koko, a sweet-sour, gingery millet porridge, and Kosi – deep fried bean cakes – and find something to do for a few hours to help me work up an appetite.

If I don’t stay home and play with Treasure, (aways her preferred option) I might walk to an internet cafe, and sometimes I go shopping or on excursions. One morning I spent a couple of hours with DadaK trying to find a fax machine. There are “communications centres” everywhere here, offering phones, photocopy, fax, mobile phone credit and sometimes internet access. The problem is, that although many of them have signboards outside promising a fax, they don’t actually have fax machines. We went on a long taxi ride, on what I became convinced was a wild goose chase. No, they didn’t have fax, but maybe the one down the road …. after about eight false leads, we did actually find a fax in a print shop. The helpful taxi driver even sprinted out of sight down the road to check, leaving his keys in the ignition and presumably his cash under the seat. Clearly Ghanaians trust obruni.

Another morning we went to visit the school ActionMan will probably – eventually – attend. It’s allegedly a Montessori school, but I have my doubts. Indeed, the Principal acknowledged the difficulty of adhering to Montessori principles in Ghana. It’s not an inspiring environment, with overcrowded, unpainted concrete classrooms mostly bare of equipment or any signs of creativity. But the uniforms are nice.

After discovering that he can’t get onto his favourite online game here, ActionMan has tended to stay at home when I go to the internet cafes, re-reading his books, watching DVDs and playing on his PSP to kill time until the children get home from school. After school they play chasing, fighting, soccer, Uno and Oware (a Ghanaian board game). He has made a few trips of his own into the city markets to purchase weapons and DVDs. As I write, he’s planning a trip to buy a bow and arrow.

Illness interrupted our holiday plans about a week after we got here and for the next two weeks we mainly focused on rest and recovery. The first thing was diarrhoea, although if you have to get the runs, this is definitely the kind to get: once or twice a day you have an overwhelming imperative to get to the toilet fast, and the rest of the time you feel completely fine. After a couple of days it just went away. It’s a relief, because my previous experiences with Ghana Gut have been prolonged and painful. This time it was mostly painless and kept us regular. Almost everyone blamed the mangoes we had eaten, and even people who had not warned us against eating them (almost everyone) took great pleasure in saying “I told you not to eat mango!”

The next illness to strike was the common cold, which spread through the whole family and left me with a chesty cough for a couple of weeks. ActionMan had either a short bout of the cold or a bad case of rhinitis and afterwards, running a high temperature, complained of a pain in his side that felt like when he’d had pneumonia a few years ago. I wasn’t going to wait around and see if it got better by itself, and off we all went to the clinic: ActionMan, me, DadaK and Maame Yaa.

We arrived at the local Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) hospital clinic in Kwadaso about lunchtime and it was packed. This is the kind of thing that easily triggers a tourist tantrum: sick child, crowds of sick foreigners languishing on hard wooden benches in unbearable heat, white guilt about wanting a better service. I didn’t succumb to the tantrum, but I did skip the queue because DadaK was sufficiently worried about AM’s shortness of breath and increasing pain that he insisted on it being treated as an emergency. I was worried he’d bribed people, but only one of the people we’d spoken to accepted a ‘gift’ when we were leaving, so I felt reassured that they were mostly moved by compassion.

We saw a Ghanaian doctor who diagnosed “chest infection” and prescribed antibiotics, after ruling out malaria and typhoid and declining to do an x-ray. Later I realised they don’t do them on the premises, so I understand why he didn’t want to. We would have had to make a special trip in to a hospital in the city and then come back another day for the results, so it was actually better to get the antibiotics straight away, rather than wait.

We went home with four different pills, including bromide, in case it was really a digestive problem, and vitamin C. Combined with malarial pills, the vitamins I was giving him, painkillers and anti-diarrhoa drugs, he was taking quite a cocktail. I remember now from prevous trips, that Ghanaian doctors tend to over-prescribe because so many of the children they treat are malnourished and suffering a variety of ailments.

ActionMan’s temperature soared that night and there are few things as scary, for a parent, as nursing a sick child at 2.00am, with no idea what they’ve really got, and no confidence that they’ll get good care if you try and find a doctor – assuming you can even find transport to get you there. I gave him paracetamol and sponged him with cold water, and was able to sleep myself after he’d cooled down a bit. The whole scenario reminded me of anxious women at the sickbeds in 19th Century novels like Sense and Sensibility and Little Women. After that fever ‘crisis’, he improved quickly and was fine until he finished the antibiotics a week later, when the problem flared up again.

In a panic I called my travel insurance company and burst into tears at the sound of the doctor’s Aussie accent. He recommended we go back to the SDA clinic for continuity of care, so we did. This time we saw a Cuban doctor who referred us for an x-ray and liver function tests. It turned out that AM did have pneumonia, so he prescribed different antibiotics (but only one drug) and ten days on, AM seems to have fully recovered.

On our follow up visit last Friday the doctor recommended two girlfriends (“In this country you have two, one for the day and one for the night”) and soccer to help him fully recover. The safe sex message that accompanied this prescription made ActionMan squirm in his seat, but I was quite pleased it was delivered. The young nurse / Twi interpreter tried to rescue AM from his discomfort – or interrupt the talk about condoms and girlfriends – by telling the doctor he wasn’t doing any of that, he was “holy”. The doctor exclaimed “He’s a virgin!?” and poo-pooed the idea that 14 might be too young for sex; he himself had started at 11. And clearly he’s still having a good time.

My final verdict on the SDA hospital is that it’s not as bad as it first appeared. As we discovered on subsequent visits when we didn’t jump the queue, there is order to the crowds of people and it’s really not much different to going to a medical centre back home, where I’ve sometimes had to wait much longer to see a doctor, than I did at Kwadaso. There’s also lots of beautiful clothes to look at, which helps relieve the boredom – at least for me. Most people seem to dress in their Sunday best to go to the doctor and I enjoyed checking out the fabrics and styles. I saw quite a few patterns I haven’t seen elsewhere and made a mental note to look for in the markets. Textiles are an important part of Ghanaian culture, but I won’t rave about them just here.

Since the success of the last bout of antibiotics we have started to get a bit more active and have gone to Mensakrom, shopped at the Kumasi Cultural Centre, attended a Graduation and a Durbar, and danced at a funeral. Well, AM didn’t go the funeral, and wouldn’t be caught dancing, so that was just me. But I’ve run out of time, so you’ll have to wait until next time for updates on these more exotic and touristy activities. I’m not sure how long you’ll have to wait because this week I’m hoping to go to the Northern Region of Ghana. I plan to go as far as Paga near the border with Burkina Faso, where there are friendly crocodiles, but I don’t know if there are internet connections. So exercise patience – to bo asi.

Who’s who

Before I write any further on my life in Ghana, it’s time to introduce the family. It’s a significant point of difference between Africa and the western world, that I could describe who I was staying with in the US in a sentence or two, but here in Ghana, it will take several pages. Partly this is because I’ll be mentioning them more than my US rels & friends, so I want to give a more detailed picture of who everyone is, but mainly because it’s a large extended family and a bit more complex than your average Australian – or American household.

Starting with the immediate circle of those who are visiting from Australia, there’s DadaK and his other children, ActionMan’s half-siblings. The oldest boy is 9, and I’ve decided to call him 50 Cedis. It’s been tough coming up with a name for him. I considered “The First Black President of Australia”, because I think he has the political skills and the charisma to be that. But even reduced to an acronym, TFBPoA is a bit of a mouthful. 5O Cedis, on the other hand, captures his present day interest in all things hip hop, (including the moves), whilst acknowledging the Ghanaian roots.

After 50 Cedis comes Abrantie, 7, whom I’ve introduced in an earlier post (Music for Gentlemen, May). Abrantie means gentleman, but I’ve been having trouble remembering why I called him that recently. Something about a soft centre?

The third boy, who’s 4, is G Ketewa. Ketewa means little, or junior, depending on the context. G. Ketewa is the littlest boy, although only in size. These Australian-raised Ghana boys all have huge personalties, and G. Ketewa certainly knows how to make his presence felt and has high expectations of getting the same rights as taller people. This expectation is continually frustrated.

G. Ketewa is not entirely a psuedonym, because some of the family here do refer to him as that, although of course they say his name, not G. Like both DadaK and ActionMan, Ketewa is a Monday-born boy (Kwadwo – pronounced Kwadjo), and like DadaK, he’s his mother’s third born son (Mensah). By coincidence this is the same as DadaK, and so instead of naming him after the prophet Amos, as planned, DadaK and Obaapa named him G, after his dad. This is a fairly common practice in Ghanaian families. Here in the family, G Ketewa is called Ketewa to distinguish him from his Dad and reduce confusion.

In fact there are four Kwadwo Mensahs in the house. ActionMan is one of them, because DadaK uses Mensah as a surname, and the other is a cousin’s child whom Nana’s adopted, but I’ll refer to him as Daniel. On one occasion, when one of DadaK’s nephews, who was named for him, was visiting, we had five.

Are you still with me? Hope that wasn’t too confusing! The family do have ways of managing this confusion, e.g. by using Ketewa, and in ActionMan’s case by tacking his other African name on and calling him Kwadwo Asiedu. I begin to understand why Ashantis have lots of names – in any given situation, there’s a range of possibilities to chose from, to distinguish an individual from others – and am glad that we stuck to Ghanaian naming practice when naming ActionMan.

Speaking of which, nearly everyone here calls the youngest child (Treasure) by her Ghanaian name of Maame Frimpoma, rather than her English name, which is mostly used n Australia. And I’ve started calling her Treasure in real life. I’m wondering if I should change it her blog name to Ohemmaa. Oheemaa means Queen Mother, and she certainly rules the roost here. The mothers of Kings, in Ashanti culture, are more important than their wives, because you can only be a King if your mother belongs to the royal lineage. As her grandparents were co-founders of the family village of Mensakrom (the name’s a coincidence), Treasure may actually qualify as royalty, if the village ever gets big enough to have a king.

Treasure has started calling me J___ Maame, which is very cute, and I assume it’s to distinguish me from all the other Maames in the house, not all of whom are mothers. But I’ll get to that.

The person without whom this establishment would not exist is DadaK’s Maame, Nana (means Gradnma, but sounds more like Mama than the Aussie ‘Nanna’). DadaK’s mission in life for many years has been to give his mother a more comfortable life and he finally succeeded when about five years ago she moved from the village into this house, which he’s been building (remotely) for longer than I’ve known him. However Nana of course is very old and so she needed people to move with her to look after her. Her daughter’s family moved with her, and also two young women she adopted.

These two women are two of the other Maames. As I mentioned, babies are often named after other people, and these two girls were both named Maame Yaa, after Nana. This gave her the right to adopt them, which she did when they were children. Maame Yaa Penne is 26 and I first met her as a ragged teenager in the village. She’s now chief cook and bottle-washer for Nana, making her soup and fufu separately each evening. She’s also a seamstress with a collection of stylish wigs. I’ve yet to see her natural hair, and perhaps never will. When I need to go into the city, and on the already numerous occasions when we’ve had to go to the clinic, Maame Yaa is often our guide and chaperone.

Maame Yaa Ketewa, as you will immediately guess, having paid attention earlier on in this post, is the younger of the two. She’s in her late teens and is an apprentice hair-dresser. She’s very quiet, but every now and then surprises me by snorting with amused contempt when someone misinterprets my English, and correcting them. She’s usually right too. Hiding her light under a bushell, that one.

Nana’s daughter, Georgina, is really the main boss of the household. In her early 40′s, Georgina is Nana’s only surviving daughter and her youngest child, so she is also a Treasure. One daughter died in childhood, the other as a young woman from complications in childbirth. I’ve stayed in Georgina’s home the last two times I’ve been to Ghana, and we both agree that her English and my Twi have improved since last time. She is a fabulous cook. Everyone younger than her calls her Serwaa, which means Auntie, even her own children, so I will too. To Treasure, she’s Maame Serwaa.

Serwaa’s husband, Akonta, who I mentioned in my last post, hasn’t been around very much because he’s been working with a trotro driver, Bra John, who also has a room in the house. Bra John usually lives in a village near Mensakrom and spends the week driving around that area. He took us to Mensakrom when we went on an overnight visit earlier this week. Every Friday, he and Akonta come home and unload plantains, red plantains, cocoyam roots and leaves and sometimes cassava and avocados from the roof of the trotro. Sometimes he leaves on Saturday, other times he spends the weekend here.

Serwaa and Akonta have five children, although strictly speaking, the two oldest are from Serwaa’s first marriage. Her oldest boy, Gyamfi, came to Australia with Obaapa and the baby 50 Cedis, back in 1999. He’s now 21 and a panel-beater in Sydney but he came back to visit with DadaK, so for the first time in almost ten years Serwaa has all her children under one roof.

Serwaa’s oldest daughter is Afia Serwaa, whose beautiful smile I first captured on film on my very first visit to the village in 1993, when she was 9 or 10. She’s now 24 or thereabouts, still has the beautiful smile, and braids women’s hair on the verandah for a living.

Serwaa’s next daughter, Martha, is 17 and waiting to hear her Junior Secondary School results. If she gets good marks she can go to Senior Secondary – only another four years in uniform! In the meantime, she’s looking after the small grocery store that Serwaa has up at the local shops. She’d like to be a journalist, but if all else fails I reckon she’d do well as a model – she’s stunning. Martha and ActionMan have a lively, flirtatious relationship and when not threatening to beat him, she has offered to braid his hair for him. However since The Haircut in Germany, there’s not enough left to attach hair extensions to, so he’s settled for trying on Maame Yaa’s wigs instead. And very fetching he looks in them, too. Martha’s own hair is short and natural – apparently this is compulsory for school students.

These two girls, along with the two Maame Yaas, do the bulk of the work around the house: sweeping, washing clothes, cleaning, fetching water, food preparation, chaperoning obrunis. Maame Yaa Penne even washed our shoes one day. None of us honoured guests have to lift a finger unless we really want to.

Next comes Owuraku (sound like O-rare-koo) ActionMan and I both have fond memories of Owuraku, because he is only six months older than AM, and last time we were here he spent a lot of time with us. On one occasion he walked several kilometres with us to a neighbouring village. I was impressed by his stamina, because AM demanded to be carried most of the way. They both remember this occasion, although they were only three or four, perhaps because we stopped at a farm to drink palm wine. Don’t worry, it’s not alcoholic when fresh from the palm. Or so I’m told. Owuraku and ActionMan have quickly re-established their friendship, largely based on a shared enjoyment of wrestling (with each other) and watching action DVDs.

Owuraku is a serious and likeable young man who, like the rest of the family, has a beautiful smile. Also like the rest of the family, he is alternately shocked and amused by ActionMan. AM’s friends and family in Oz will all understand this reaction. His ability to simultaneously annoy and entertain obviously transcends cultural differences.

ActionMan also has a great ability to play rough, and this is much appreciated by the two youngest members of the family: Obaaku, Serwaa’s ten year old daughter, and Daniel. A few days ago ActionMan came home from a visit to the Kumasi Cultural Centre (an arts & crafts consumer paradise), with a wooden pipe, a walking stick and a gorgeous blue tie & dye shirt. He spent the evening pretending to be a cranky old African man: hobbling after them, brandishing the walking stick and yelling in abuse in a reasonably convincing Ghanaian accent. “You bad children! I beat you!” He had everyone under the age of 10 running around the house in hysterics. That was all six of ours plus two of the neighbours, Boahema (aka Catherine) and Kwesi, so it was a pretty wild night.

So that’s it. 19 of us altogether, if you don’t count Boahema and Kwesi, although perhaps I should, they spend so much time here. So far, I’m enjoying it. It does get noisy and the children demand my attention a lot, but there’s enough quiet time to compensate and I can always escape to the internet cafe. Plus the secret of getting time to yourself, I’ve realised, is not answering when people call your name.

The Road to Kumasi

The road to Kumasi runs through green, hilly country. From the road you can see grasslands, with plantains (they look like banana trees, but they grow single, not in clumps) and cassava popping up everywhere. To the east, a line of hills follows the road, sometimes very close, as at Koforidua, sometimes distant and hazy.

It’s probably the best surfaced road in Ghana, but it’s only two lanes. I estimate around 70% of traffic in Ghana is public transport: government buses, mini-buses (tro-tros) and taxis, so once you are out of the city, there’s not really enough traffic to merit wider roads. The cites, however, get very congested. Of the other 30%, I’d guess 20% is trucks and company cars, and the remaining 10% are private vehicles. I’ve figured this out by random counting in a few different spots, and it always comes out much the same. And Ghana is one place where the US and Australian fashion for 4WDs would actually make sense, given the state of most roads. But they’re not common.

The trip was smooth, even in a tro-tro, and while ActionMan buried himself in a book, to emerge occasionally with requests for food and water, I relax and watched the familiar road unroll. After ten years it seemed much the same. The road, as usual, was lined with rickety wooden produce stalls. Often there’s no-one in sight, but a table apparently in the middle of nowhere is piled with fruit, or chillis and tomatoes, or yams. For a long stretch about two thirds of the way along, the main products were pottery grinding pots and plastic bags of gari, which is dried and ground cassava. The shallow grinding pots have a metallic dark chocolate glaze, and are stacked up invitingly, shining in the sun. I wanted a photo but I didn’t have the window seat. Next time.

We had a pit stop half way. Literally, we stopped at the side of the road and whoever needed to hopped out to wee on the verge. Not much modesty here about body functions. I learned last time not to drink too much on long journeys, so I didn’t need to go but I got out to stretch my body, feeling very cramped and with a numb bum from the hard seat.

When we drove into Kumasi, I also missed a photo of an Irish pub. Big green shamrocks on white walls. Guinness is a popular drink here, they’ve even gone so far as to make a non-alcoholic version, (Malt), to be found wherever Ghanaians gather. ActionMan loves it; I think it’s disgusting.

We piled out of the tro-tro somewhere that I vaguely recognised in the middle of the city, and transferred to a taxi for the last leg, with the help of some teenage girls who hang around that area in the hope of a few pesewas in exchange for their assistance with carrying baggage or shopping. I still wasn’t entirely sure of the currency, but I think the tips were about 30p each.

We arrived in Asuo Yeboa around 1.00pm, to AM’s disappointment, because his brothers weren’t due home from school until 4.00pm. But it was another emotional reunion with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law and the rest of the household, and of course with Treasure, AM’s sister. We were assured that Treasure “wo nti brofo” (doesn’t understand English) anymore, and she didn’t speak much to begin with, but there was no doubt she recognised us, and she didn’t hold back for long. We were surprised by the fact, when the brothers got home, that the oldest had acquired a strong Ghanaian accent to his English. It’s worn off a bit now, but he’ll still throw it on every now and then when he wants to make a point about something. It’s a very expressive accent.

Asuo Yeboa is a suburb that’s a relatively new development. There are a lot of half-built houses and the roads are very rough. Although it feels a bit like the middle of nowhere (think one of the newer western suburbs of Sydney), DadaK reckons property prices will go up quickly, because the widening of the highway that passes through the suburb will improve city access. So it feels like Eagle Vale, but really it’s Marrickville. Hmm. I had a few seconds of considering land investment, until I realised we’re not talking big bikkies here: spend 2,000, sell in 5 years for 6,000.

Nana, DadaK’s mother, chose well when she bought this land around 15 years ago. It’s on top of a hill so it gets whatever cool breeze is blowing. Believe me, that’s important. You can also see plenty of sky, which I like, and watch the storm clouds roll in. The house is two self-contained flats, and DadaK booted out the tenants in one half when he came over from Australia (they did have fair warning apparently, as it was in their lease from the beginning that they would have to move when he came. Many Ghana leases offer permanent tenancy.) Altogether there are three bathrooms, a big lounge and dining area, an indoor and an outdoor kitchen, eight bedrooms and a big verandah. Most of the rooms have ceramic tiles, although the tilers seem to have lost track of the pattern sometimes, and there’s electricity that works most of the time. The water situation will get a post all of its own soon.

On one side there’s a vacant block filled with corn, cassava, plantains, rubbish, and possibly snakes. It looks good from a distance. The yard is dirt, but DadaK has plans to level and cement it. It all takes money. There’s a coconut palm, an avocado tree, several small orange trees and there was a pawpaw until last week, when the section of wall it was growing in got washed away by heavy rain.

The nearest shops are less than five minutes walk. There’s a cluster just up the road, including AM’s auntie’s general store, where we catch taxis into town. A woman at a small desk under a beach umbrella sells mobile phone recharges. The general stores sell small essentials such as a few teaspoons of sugar tied up in little plastic bags, tiny tins of fish and tomato paste, stock cubes, drinks, lollies, toilet rolls and filtered water. Others have a range of more perishable items – dried or fresh fish, shrivelled orange chillies, tomatoes, onions, garden eggs (a small pale gold or orange egg-shaped eggplant). Nothing can be cooked without these basics. In the morning one of the stores sells bofrots, large donut holes sweetened with honey, and in the early afternoon a lady sets up to sell corn roasted on a grill over a basin of charcoal. This is one of AM’s standby snacks.

We can catch a taxi or walk to the bigger shopping area, which is the centre of Asuo Yeboa. We are not allowed to walk the shortcut without a chaperone, because apparently the little swampy valley we walk through has – or had – ruffians lurking in it who wouldn’t hesitate to cosh an obruni for her money, with a cement building block. It’s a pity, because it’s the most direct and prettiest way to get to the main shops. The road goes back and forth through a maze of deserted streets – well-maintained tarred roads that pass grassy, uninhabited blocks that belong to the government.

The Asuo Yeboa shopping centre, if you can call it that, has more to offer. I say, if you can call it that because in Ghana major roads are perpetually lined with small businesses and it’s hard to tell where one suburb ends and the next begins. This is where we catch taxis or tro-tros into the city or elsewhere, and so there are many more hawkers beside the road, mostly selling water or newspapers. We also shop here at roadside stalls for bread, pineapples, mangoes, oranges and bananas, and there’s a couple of pharmacies, a lot of street food, shoe stalls, clothing shops, and some light industry. Carpenters display enormous beds and bedroom furniture out the front of their workshops, metalworkers display fancy security grilles and gates, and crowds of uniformed apprentices overflow from hair salons or dressmaking shops.

This is also where I saw Osama bin Laden and George bush staring at each other from portraits outside a graphic artist’s studio. The next day, Osama was grinning at a semi naked woman pulling a top off over her head, below text along the lines of Stop AIDS Now. Was it an attempt at reverse psychology?

ActionMan has also discovered cheap DVDs: 20 films on one disk for GHC3 ($3). He’s stocking up on action, thrillers and Kung Fu, plus Mr Bean and some Disney cartoons for the little ones. One of the Internet cafes I use is on this stretch of road. It’s the closest, if I use the swamp shortcut, but it’s also the least reliable, with a very slow and patchy wireless connection. I am allowed to walk alone to the other cafe, that has cable access and air con, using another road that’s considered safer. It’s not far either, except it feels like it is a long way in the heat of the day.

If we want anything more, like birthday cakes, as we did for ActionMan’s birthday two weeks ago, we need to go into the krom, or city itself. This should be about a 10 minute drive, but traffic jams can turn it into more like half an hour. AM, who ventured into the city on another day in search of slingshots, had more success than I did in finding what he wanted. He came home with several slingshots and a totally lethal butchers blade, which he was very taken with because, as well as having a serrated edge, it had a tooled red and black leather sheath, typical of northern Ghana leatherwork. He won’t be bringing that home to Oz, I assure you.

The birthday cake was harder to find, partly because cake shops of any kind are thin on the ground, and partly because most Ghanaians’ idea of a cake is far, far removed from your standard European idea of cake. Before I went on this excursion, ActionMan twisted my arm, looked me in the eye and in his best cold hard bad guy voice said, “You will get cheesecake or pavlova. Understood?” Yes, understood. But impossible to deliver. I think both of these are alien concepts in Ghana, unless, just possibly, you can get them at one of the big hotels. I haven’t found a big hotel in Kumasi as yet, because it’s not the kind of thing my chaperones know about, because I haven’t had enough internet access to look online, and because we’ve both been sick too often to spend much time shopping in the krom. Maybe this week.

However, everyone seemed reasonably happy with the cake I eventually found. I cannot believe that I paid GHC15 for a very solid plain cake that was the size of approximately three Newtown cafe slices. Hmm. Make that two. But it did have icing, and I felt that it was worth paying a little bit more for a cake that looked festive. I got another cake without icing for GHC5, to stretch it.

Ghanaians are very good at making do with a very small amount of treat. I’ve seen children in the village bite a lolly in half to share it. ActionMan cut the cake himself and was able to divide it into enough pieces that everyone – about 25 of us, including the neighbours, got a mouthful sized slice. Alright, half a mouthful. We partied in Grandma’s (Nana’s) room with sparkling grape juice, malt, lemonade, plantain chips and some of the chocolates I’d bought duty-free in Germany. So even though people laughed at the cake, it was a fun occasion. And AM is now officially 14.

Catching up

We arrived in Ghana around dusk just over two weeks ago, after a luxury flight from Frankfurt with personal video screens and a wide selection of movies we hadn’t seen. ActionMan wasn’t happy with the glare on his screen so we swapped seats. I was happy with this arrangement as it meant I got the window seat, and to enjoy the extraordinary experience of seeing the Shara from 10 k’s above. It’s like flying over the ocean, in that all you can see is colour without depth, except when there are clouds – huge, bright white cloud castles floating above a bottomless, sandy haze. In the distance, a layer of cloud marks a border between sand and sky. What a gift to be able to see this sight.

From the ethereal to the earthly. If in the clouds I could imagine heaven, our arrival in Ghana brought an abrupt stop to the sense of unreality that haunted the trip until now. Ghana is real. After years of saving, months of planning, hours of doubt and moments of pure fear, we have reached the goal right on schedule. And there, after we finally make it outside customs and immigration (having meanwhile dealt with another lost suitcase), are DadaK and Obapaa waving & calling to us. It’s an emotional reunion, even without the children, who’ve had to stay in Kumasi and wait for us.

ActionMan’s jaw dropped from the moment we hailed a taxi, and the driver nearly ran into the gutter (they’re often almost a metre deep in Ghana). It remained dropped for several days. When he got into the taxi and discovered there was no seatbelt, he said to me “I suddenly feel very vulnerable”, but was quickly distracted when his father started haggling with the driver over the price (finally reduced to $6), and abused him for being too old and needing to be pensioned off. He was also astonished, once we left the relative respectability of the airport zone, that there were goats on the road, fires beside it, cars stopped in the middle of it and no-one obeying the traffic rules. If you want to turn across oncoming traffic you wave at them and just do it. If pedestrians are in the way, you “horn”. Well, it works.

ActionMan laughed and exclaimed the whole way to our destination. To top things off, the driver nearly ran into the gutter again when we arrived. AM was still so shocked that a week later when he rang a friend back home, the taxi, and apparent lack of road rules, was the first thing he mentioned. From what I overheard of the conversation, his friends are probably all now thoroughly alarmed, because he went on to list everything else he found shocking or difficult. Don’t worry, it’s not all bad.

In Accra we stayed at the house of Dada Finn, the patriarch of Obapaa’s family, an uncle who lives in Britain and like many expatriate Ghanaians has built a nice house back home for one of his daughters and a niece. His niece, Naomi, cooked delicious Fante meals for us, the most memorable being a stew with onions, tomatoes, chillies and fresh fish cooked in deep orange palm oil (abe) & eaten with banku (cornmeal dumplings). Aaah, palm oil, how I’ve missed you! In Ghana, home of palm oil cuisine, people can afford to be lavish with this special, addictive taste-sensation ingredient.

We stayed in Accra until we’d farewelled Obaapa, who was leaving for Australia the day after we arrived, and had retrieved our lost luggage. Fortunately the piece that went missing for twenty four hours didn’t have any essential clothes or toiletries, so I didn’t lose much sleep over it, even though it was the bag with the Milo. We killed time with an early birthday party for Obaapa and a visit to the Accra markets to buy cloth, a dress for a niece who’s been named after me, and more umbrellas. Yes, it rained again while we were having fun, but the gaggle of girls in the dress & umbrella shop were more than happy to have us obruni (foreigners) shelter there for a while, especially ActionMan. I promised to bring him back in five years for the proprietor; I foresee I could make a tidy profit out of having such a handsome son. Heheh.

It’s probably just as well the rain stopped us shopping; we’d got confused about the currency and could have ended up regretting it. In the past year the Ghana Cedi has been re-valued, but everyone still seems to be confused about it, even DadaK. Almost everyone still talks in terms of “thousands” and “millions”, but there is no longer any such thing, at least at street level. A 500 ml plastic bag of water used to cost 5,000 cedis but now costs 5 pesewas. That’s roughly equivalent to 5 Aussie cents, although I still only have DadaK’s estimate for the exchange rate, so I won’t be convinced until I see my Visa statements. One of the lengths of tie-dyed cloth ActionMan bought me as a delayed birthday present cost 35,000 Cedis, or GHC3.50, or AUD $3.50ish.

The next day we picked our bag up from the airport and started the next leg of the journey to Kumasi: a short bus ride to Koforidua. This was easily one of the most scenic drives we’ve had in Ghana; we drove north-east over the hills past Aburi, which is famous for its botanical gardens.

Obaapa’s family live in Koforidua. The idea was to meet them early on our trip so we didn’t have to rush back, also we were traveling with Obaapa’s brother Acheampong and he was keen to go there first. In fact I’m not sure he’s really a brother in the Australian sense of the word, but he’s related somehow. We traveled with an entourage – Acheampong and DadaK’s brother-in-law Akonta – who carried and protected our luggage, bought our tickets, haggled with taxis etc. Acheampong has also been roped in, or perhaps volunteered, to be our guide when we do our tour of Ghana in a few weeks.

I think this is fairly normal for travellers, and not just special obruni treatment, because they all went to the airport to help Obaapa leave. With her overweight bags stuffed full of hair extensions she’d bought cheap in Togo, they had to get there early to bribe the small bosses before the big bosses arrived, according to DadaK. It worked, but she then got searched by Australian Customs. This is possibly related to the fact that in the past Ghanaians have tried to smuggle in foods that would wreak havoc with our primary industries, such as dried fish and live giant snails. (Though I, personally would think twice about putting snails in my undies and I think Ghanaian women would too!). The price you pay for good hair.

In Koforidua we stayed overnight with Obaapa’s eldest sister, Sisi, and visited one of her (same-mother/same-father) brothers, Kwadwo, who teaches at a private boarding school there. We got a tour of the school in the evening. In spite of old, weather stained buildings and fairly basic facilities, it was one of the nicer schools I’ve seen, laid out in lush, shady grounds. The students had lovely colourful uniforms. The boys wore shirts with a bright leafy green pattern on cream background, and the school crest in emerald green, tucked into long khaki shorts; the girls wore the same fabric in fitted dresses. I thought they looked great, tho I can’t see them being very popular in inner Sydney – way too bright & light for most Aussie teens I know.

It was lovely to meet Sisi, she’s a warm, friendly & hospitable woman and she looks so much like Obaapa. I always enjoy meeting people’s relatives because I love observing family resemblances – both the ordinary physical ones and the mannerisms and tones of voice. Sisi was a nurse in London until she retired a few years ago, and late 2007 she came back to be with her mother, who died earlier this year. Again, we were staying in a house built by an expat, and it was very comfortable and easy, compared to previous trips where I’ve been mostly in the village. Mosquito nets on windows! Lights! Fans! Fridges! Soft couches! Cake! Flush toilets! Except the toilets didn’t work because the water supply had been turned off. “This is one of the things I hate about Ghana!”exclaimed Sisi when she found out. “They turn the water off, they turn the power off, you never know when!”

I met two more brothers and another sister in Koforidua, and quite a few other relations, including an adult daughter of Akonta’s that I didn’t know existed. As usual in Ghana, there were lots of people to shake hands with, and it was hard to remember them all.

We only stayed overnight, we were all keen to get to Kumasi. We’ll be back, anyway. Fortunately DadaK did not, as threatened, rouse us at 4.00am for the government bus, we had a more leisurely start and caught a regular bus. When I learned that Government buses don’t have seatbelts either, I wasn’t entirely sure what the advantage was in catching them. Faster perhaps? Softer seats maybe? Assurance of immediate, rather than lingering death in case of accident? I guess I’ll find out sooner or later.

Before we left Koforidua I had the gratification of confirming that Obaapa is indeed an adinkra symbol. (Incidentally, I’ve been spelling it wrong, I’ll correct it later). In one of my first posts to this blog I explained that Obaapa means good woman and there is an adinkra symbol bearing the name. But when I checked adinkra sites and googled it, I couldn’t find it. I’ve decided Google is inadequate when it comes to Ghana. But when I came out of the house wearing a dress made from the cloth I’d bought when here in ’98, one of the women exclaimed “obaapa!” and I knew now that it wasn’t a story made up for tourists, a mistake, or my imagination. Obaapa exists!

Sorry it’s taken so long to get even this up to date – various complications which I’ll tell you about at a later date. But mostly, all is well.

Castles, caravans & cargo

Apologies for getting into the alliteration again, but if there’s one thing I noticed about German Rivers, it’s these three c-words. Castles littered along the hillsides, caravan parks along the foreshores, and barges carrying cargo, which incidentally, from what I could see that wasn’t under tarpaulins, was mostly coal, shipping containers and cars. We also got a good look at allotments – I don’t know what they’re called in Germany, but I assume it’s a similar system to what I first found out about in The Netherands years ago – where urban apartment dwellers have a little block of land they can use for everythng from growing vegies to boucing on a trampoline. I like the idea, it would make apartment living more bearable for me, to have that system in Sydney. Civilised!

On our last day in Germany we went to look at a castle from closer quarters. This was not as easy as you might think. German tourism seems more geared towards people with cars, and with more than a day or two at their disposal. If there is a website that offers detailed, comprehensive info about day tours to castles, I didn’t find it, even though I probably spent as much time researching what we’d do, as we spent traveling to & from, & touring the castle we finally went to. I’d also expected Frankfurt to have more information about castles, but again, if they have it, I didn’t find it. The focus is on the city itself, rather than the surrounding regions.

I narrowed it down to two options: Markesberg and Guttenberg, and decided on Guttenberg, mainly on the basis of the information that it had a falconry and a bird show. It was also one of the least damaged of the castles and was in the opposite direction to where we’d traveled the day before, so we’d be covering new ground (Markesberg is on the Rhine).

Overall, it was a good choice, for the view from the three different trains we had to catch was again beautiful, with the ubiquitous picturesque villages alongside the winding Neckar river, with the usual barges and watergates (locks). (I wasted a lot of pictures on locks the day before, I was so fascinated by them). There was also a beautiful walk from the station, alongside fields of rye fringed with red poppies and other wildflowers.

The castle itself was impressive, with all the right ingredients: metre thick stone walls, archery slits, a classic privy jutting out from the wall, a dizzying tower and a commanding view of surrounding territory, which included another castle on the opposite hill. The museum, housed in one of the smaller towers, boasted a rack, a collection of rare wooden books, each made from and showcasing a different plant, and some ancient guns, the wooden butts as thick as telephone poles. There was also a collection of carved wooden trophy-style stags heads, a number of real, stuffed trophy heads, and numerous engravings of hunting by famous 18th C engraver Johaan Ridinger. I wondered if there are still stags in the surrounding forests. Somehow I doubt it.

I resolved that one day I’d come back to visit Guttenberg and other German castles at a more leisurely pace – and with someone who could join with me in savouring every moment. To be fair, ActionMan did spend a bit of time looking through the museum, but he’s more in the business of fast impressions than deep absorption – at least when it comes to historical stuff. He was more interested in the collection of birds of prey which were on display in the castle moat. Once again, he grabbed the camera and took off. He has some great pix of some quite sinister looking owls (online soon).

The Bird Show however, was disappointing. Had we been fluent in German it would probably have been at least informative & judging by the laughs, entertaining. But we aren’t. I wasn’t expecting it to be in English, but I was expecting it to be more visually engaging. Perhaps someone will correct me, but I think the Taronga Zoo bird show in Sydney is very entertaining without requiring the audience to understand much of what’s being said. Plenty of action & movement, and a flock of white doves swooping low over the crowd provides wow factor from the word go. The Guttenberg Bird Show had perhaps 10 minutes worth of winged action within about 75 minutes of lecture.

After patiently waiting for more excitement than an eagle snapping a dead chicken out of the air could provide, ActionMan resorted to the i-pod in a corner. Ok, that bit of action was exciting. We just wanted more. Unfortunately we were sitting in a spot from which there was no way of exiting without the whole crowd seeing us. I’m sorry to say I preferred boredom over embarrassment, but it did mean we missed the early train and didn’t get home until around 8.30.

This was another night of kebab for him and Pad Thai for me, but we did have a delicious lunch at Guttenberg, which satisfied my feelings that I should have one authentic German meal before we left. Apart from yummy pastries and cheese and salad rolls from the bakeries that are on every corner, we’d basically been living off anything but ‘German’ food: pasta, kebabs, Thai and Indian. ActionMan had a curry at Guttenberg but I had herb-crumbed lamb steaks with veg & potatoes – very tasty. Followed by such a large serving of ice cream with hot raspberries and whipped cream that I thought I’d space-warped back to the USA. It was a tough job, but between us we finished it off.

Unreality gets real

In earlier posts I commented on the sense of unreality I felt in the US, especially in LA, where there seemed to be such an over-indulgence in escapism. So I was surprised to feel, when we finally started our tourist circuit in Germany, a similar sense of unreality. I loved the old buildings. I loved the cobbled streets, I loved the castles on the Rhine and the pictureseqe landscapes. I couldn’t quite believe that any of it was real – that real people, who every night watched the German equivalent of Neighbours and put their feet up on Ikea footstools, lived in these amazing environments. But it was. No wonder us colonials feel the urge to recreate it all in theme parks and renaissance fairs.

Sure, many places have been tarted up for the tourist industry. Rudesheim, where we changed boats on our Main and Rhine river cruises, is a good example of quaintness overkill. My digital camera ran out of batteries shortly before we arrived, so until I get the regular pix printed & scanned, I can’t share with you the moss-covered cobblestones, the overhanging windows in narrow streets, and the row upon row of tourist trap gift shops.

Fortunately for us, amongst the postcards, keyrings & fridge magnets we found some umbrellas. It started raining while we were there, and stopped as soon as we got onto the next boat. We sheltered for a while in a shop that sold reproduction (and real) armour and weaponry, including samurai swords and some nasty looking knives. Or enticing, if you are ActionMan. He’s speculated about the legal age for buying knives in every country we’ve been in; not that it would do him much good, as you can’t carry knives half way around the world, or import them into Australia, in your luggage.

Rudesheim marked more or less the demarcation between the Main & Rhine as working rivers, lined with industry (some of which was actually quite photogenic), picturesque villages, vineyards, parks and farmland, and the Rhine as medieval fantasy river. There may have been castles before Rudesheim, (we saw so many it’s a bit of a blur), but after Rudesheim there was a castle, ruins, or other spectacular architecture every few ks. You’d barely finish snapping one, when another would loom before you. Even the entrances to railway tunnels sported little towers and crenellations.

The cruise culminated at the Lorelei, the legendary rock where sirens lured sailors to their deaths. Music from the famous opera was played on the boat’s PA as we passed by. The rock itself was no more impressive than any of the beautiful, rugged scenery we passed, but apparently it was a dangerous stretch of river, and you could indeed see that it narrowed and the current increased around this point.

We disembarked at Goarsheim and had one of those moments of tourist frustration when the train ticketing machine that had English didn’t take cash, and the machine that took cash didn’t have English (and wasn’t working anyway). But all was well in the end, and we had a pleasant trip back to Frankfurt, followed by ActionMan’s favourite German take-away meal: Turkish kebab. We were impressed to find it had two types of cabbage in it as well as lettuce, tomato & onion. I wondered if one of the cabbages was saurkraut, it had a very mustardy flavour. He had it three nights in a row (I didn’t). I know you’re meant to eat frankfurts in Frankfurt, but neither of us are keen on pork sausage & so we didn’t take the risk.