Into the heart of darkness and waiting to hear that “Mr. Kurt…he dead.” Actually though, the heart of darkness is not so dark. Primitive out here in this village in central Ghana on the border of Togo where people live in mud brick homes without television, dishwashers, or porcelain toilets, yes. But quite cheery and bright with the ever-present celestial heat lamp assaulting the season-less red earth and the black skin of the people.
Corn, cassava, yams, rice, mangoes, watermelon, pineapple, bananas. Every spare yard of earth is a bounty of starch and tropical fruit. Ghanaians eat what we might call “soul food.” It is, in fact, very similar to the cuisine of Southern blacks, which was brought to the United States by West African slaves. Plenty of spicy fish, tilapia, black-eyed peas, and red rice- It’s like a July 4th picnic every day.
Without adequate foundations, the colonial era roads are rapidly disintegrating outside of the major towns and cities. Locals fill the potholes in with sand and small rocks, and in this way, Ghana’s highways are slowly being converted back into dirt roads. Heavy rains made rivulets in the soft sand, and these eventually make way to streams and then to huge trenches that cars have to dodge around. There is only so much dodging that can be done and we passengers are inevitably rattled like fine china being handled by men from the unemployment line who were hired for the day by the moving truck.
There is a laziness that hangs over everything and everyone. Maybe it’s because of the heat, maybe it’s because people don’t have electric clocks, or maybe it’s because people just don’t have anything pressing to do or anywhere important to be. Frankly, I’m not bothered by the “island time” mentality because I don’t do so well at home with such rigidity. But I can see how it would bother some people. The van is supposed to pick us up in the mornings by 8:30, which really means 9:15. By this time we are rushing to finish our toast and grab leftover rice, granola bars and water for lunch. We amble down the road, stopping to pick people up, drop them off down the road, and load up supplies.
Right, left, then right again and we’re at the orphanage, a compound with three painted cinder-block buildings. The Classroom building is ready to have a second storey added on and the dormitory is waiting for electricity and a good cleaning. The kids shout and jump as we pull up and grab our hands when we get out. They go into hugging frenzies sometimes and all 98.6 degrees of their small bodies press against yours and really make for some discomfort.
I’ve made a point to tell the kids to stop grabbing onto me because it makes it awfully hard to walk. The older kids (in 4th grade) translate for me and pull the little kids off of me when there’s too much touchiness. It’s convenient having the older kids around because it allows me to be less stern.
Ghana is host to a number of the biosphere’s most undesirable inhabitants. The mosquitoes suck their fill from your ankles at night and leave behind their malarial compliments. Squiggly parasites slime their way through the shallows ready to find their way into an unsuspecting ear, mouth, urethra, or abrasion. I found a big deck of picture-flash-cards with white space left to fill in the appropriate word to match the image. I was puzzled by a few of them, but none more so than a drawing of a long white string being pulled out of someone’s leg. The string was wrapped around a stick that was being pulled by a disembodied hand. I thought at first that this was maybe a suture, maybe a nurse sewing up a cut. Finally, I asked a Ghanaian what it was and they said: “oh that, it’s Guinea worm. Lots of them in the North. Lots of people with deformities from it.” All of that on a child’s picture flash card.
Aside from the swarming, crawling, biting, sucking nasties, there are plenty of friendly reptilians and mammalians living among us. Goats and sheep walk down the streets and have to be dodged by cars and shooed by roadside vendors. Usually the animals get out of the way of cars, but I saw one unfortunate goat dead on the side of the road, stiff with rigor mortis, with his head twisted backwards and legs in the air. A gruesome sight.
Chickens cluck around in the streets and look for scraps in the bushes. They often wander into our hotel compound through a hole in the chain link fence behind the hedges. My Mom is an animal lover and so when a rooster wandered in she asked Joyce, the hotel manager, if she might feed him her extra toast. “Yes…you can,” said Joyce. “Well, you just throw it away, right?” Mom asked. “No, the boys usually eat your scraps.” Anyway, that was the end of Mom wanting to waste food to feed animals.
Big red and yellow skinks can be seen sunning around the orphanage. I watched a big one climb the steps, hopping eight or nine inches at a time, to get away from the curious kids who were chasing him. Little geckoes find their way into my room through a crack in the door and through the small hole in the wall where my broken air-conditioner is mounted. I don’t mind them much, though I think I heard one fall onto my bed one night even though he was nowhere to be found when I jumped up and switched on the light.
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