Nerve-Jangling Highs & Lows

What I've Learned In Africa:

1.    It is impossible to keep your feet clean here even if you wash them several times a day. Dust/dirt roads and flip-flops are not a good combination.

2.     Nothing can stop a mosquito intent upon sucking your blood in the night- not spray, not long sleeves, not nets. Nothing. They are invincible and far more strategic than you would expect from a winged insect.

3.     If you drive a taxi here you don't need to follow road rules, when you can just beep manically all day long at everyone and everything.

4.     On a related note, you can put as many people as you can physically fit into a taxi…as long as you can afford the police bribe if you’re stopped.

5.     Not having a running water supply is no big deal. Just grab a bucket, head to the outdoor tank and get over it. Anyway, it’s refreshing and environmentally friendly to wash in cold water from a bucket--we should all do it. 

6.     Power outages in a hot climate are, however, a very big deal- because we have no fans and it gets ery hot and sweaty very quickly and not in a good way. 

7.  Camels are a viable mode of transport, possible the most efficient one here and certainly more comfortable than a packed trotro.

8.     If there’s a building with an ocean view, its worth climbing to the top, even if it means getting dizzy on a looong spiral staircase and rickety ladder. 

9.    For some reason they mostly love to play American/British pop music from the 80’s and 90’s on the radio here. Which is fine and not annoying at all when you hear the same Rod Stewart song for the third timein one day.

10.  Don’t take directions from Ghanaians in shantytowns; they probably don’t understand your English and will always confidently say “go straight” even if they don’t know and will end up in you getting nowhere fast.

11. Better to trust Google maps which always knows the way, even in said obscure shantytown in middle-of-nowhere Africa.

12.  Don’t rely on the taxi drivers here to know the way to anywhere either; they are as clueless as you are and probably haven’t been in the city much longer either.

13.  It’s actually no harm to accidentally brush your teeth using the tap water occasionally or a get couple of mosquito bites…I’ve done both and am still alive (If I contract cholera/malaria when I’m home, I will take this one back).

14.  Living in a place where there are beach parties 7 nights a week is good for the soul. 

15.   Nobody needs a hairdryer, contrary to my life-long belief. Didn't have access to one for 2 months and I never looked better if I say so myself. Anyway the humidity renders hair styling useless.

16. Avoid eating snail kebab, even just as a culinary experiment. I don’t care what the Frech say or if it is a ‘delicacy’, it tastes dis-guuuust-ing.

17. I can handle most things that living in very basic accommodation in a developing country can throw at me, except the COCKROACHES! Can’t. Deal. With. Them. Someone please just get those icky creatures away from me.

18. I can now use a tin opener if the tin doesn’t have that little tab to open it. #lifeskillz

19. When I have enough experience/financial security to make completely independent life choices, I will definitely live somewhere with a climate that allows you to wear just a dress and flip-flops and still be warm outside at any time of day or night. In fact, if I don’t sort a life plan out soon, I might just stay here and become the guy who sells coconuts from a wheelbarrow for a living.

20.  If there’s a choice between staying somewhere comfortable or going somewhere risky.... GO!!!

Food, Glorious (?!) Food

Banku, with tilapia fish and red and green chilli pepper sauce

Ghanaian food is quite simple- you can have plain rice, jollof rice (spicy rice in tomato sauce), chicken-with-rice or fish-with-rice. The small fish is called tilapia and arrives on the plate fully intact with head, tail and sometimes an eye or both looking up at you. The portions of rice are HUGE, enough to feed a small family, and at first when I didn't finish even half the plate my colleagues were very concerned that I was sick or about to fade away- definitely not the case. 

Yum!

If, for some strange reason you don’t want rice that day, you can choose banku (lumps of fermented corn maize) or kenkey (bigger, more sour lumps of corn maize wrapped in corn leaves) or fufu (a gooey pulped ball of crushed yam or cassava served in a soup). These have to be eaten using your right hand to pick bits off the lumps and dip them in the sauce- it is frowned upon to use cutlery or your left hand. The chilli pepper sauce comes in green, red and black with varying levels of hotness, even the mildest of which makes my eyes stream, my tongue burn and my face turn chilli-red. My colleagues at work advised me to ask for gravy as a sauce with my lunch since I clearly can’t handle the hardcore stuff- so I was happily anticipating some Bisto-style goodness. But no, this was not gravy as we know it. Ghanaian ‘gravy’ has the texture of minced meat and still tastes spicy, but I’ve learned to love it - anything to relieve the plainness of rice.  While I'm enjoying the culinary experimentation, I do miss having a plain old cheese sandwich for lunch.

Such a foreigner drinking the coconut milk from a glass!

Visitors are advised to avoid eating salad here unless you’ve bought and chopped it yourself because it could have been washed in dirty water that will cause you to turn cross-eyed, your limbs to fall off and/or die a horrible death. The fresh fruit here is amazing and so cheap from the stalls lining the streets. They have juicy pineapples, oranges (which are green), mangoes, watermelons, guavas and the ubiquitous plantain (from the banana family). You can have the plantain fried, baked, boiled, sliced, as crisps, sweet or savoury; all taste delicious. At lunch time, we get coconuts from a guy with a wheelbarrow full of them; he chops the top off with a machete so we can drink the milk, then use the top to scrape out the husk to eat. 

When we go out for dinner, the service is inevitably slow and chaotic. Several items we try to order from the menu are ‘out’ that day. A request like no olives in the salad or no corn on the pizza will be forgotten/ignored. They don’t bother attempting to bring everyone’s food around the same time. Even though they write down the order, someone’s food or drink always gets lost, meaning another 30-40 minute wait. On one occasion, two of us went to get lunch at a quiet hotel restaurant. I ordered an omelette and my friend ordered a hamburger. More than half an hour later, the waiter appeared with one plate- it was a burger bun with egg in the middle. We were starving and not impressed. 'This is Africa' is the catch-all refrain to excuse such things. 

The most fun is trying to pay the bill- No-one in Ghana EVER has change for any denomination, so if you try to use a 20 cedi note to pay for something that costs 12 cedis, they will huff and puff and disappear for ages to scrape together the coins from somewhere. The bill will often contain different prices to those on the menu. When we query this, the waitress will vaguely answer “Oh, that was the old menu, it’s changed…” The stress of organising all this would drive us to drink, if it weren't for the fact that ordering a drink would mean repeating the whole rigmarole all over again!

“Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth, turn as the days turn . . .”

Group shot outside our house

     Homer’s mythological Greek hero Odysseus wept and rolled on the ground in despair thinking of home and his family, while trapped on Ogygia Island by the beautiful nymph Calypso. While I haven’t witnessed any of us here resorting to topophilic floor-rolling (or, for that matter, being trapped here by beautiful nymphs), it’s nonetheless clear that some are finding it hard to be so far away from their friends and families, in a culture so foreign to their own. Some days it’s worse, because after an especially bad or boring day naturally you miss your support network, and the people who know and understand you best. It becomes easy to slip into nostalgic thoughts of what fun everyone at home might be having, while they could also be dreaming up similarly idyllic scenarios about you.

      During my time at university, I lived away from home more often than not, sometimes in a different country for months at a time, so this couple of months is not a big deal. All the same, over the past year I have gotten used to living close enough to home to see my family almost every weekend and I miss that. Last Friday was my first night to go out on the town with everyone. One of our group, who had come out with us, clearly wasn’t really in the mood to for partying. It is his first time living away from home, so I asked him if he was feeling homesick. He answered, “I am… But it’s not so much about missing home, because I am having a good time here. It’s more that I can’t believe that they are all so easily carrying on as normal without me there.” Touché.

Enough or not...it will have to do

     Tolstoy wrote that “there are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way”. This is very true of us westerners who have landed ourselves in the heart of Ghana- things which at home would cause us to be outraged and uproarious have here become facts of life that we adapt to and get on with, because that is what everyone around us is doing.

Akwaaba-Welcome to Ghana

     When I first arrived in Accra, the power at the house would sporadically cut off for a couple of hours. There was a schedule on the wall of when the power outages were planned. Apparently no-one informed the guy with the switch about his supposed schedule, or if they did he chooses to ignore it. This was slightly inconvenient of an evening, since no electricity meant no light, no ceiling fans and no internet. Which left us (the ten interns) with very little to do, except troop down to the hotel nearby and sit using their internet, or go out somewhere new for dinner (otherwise known as playing Stomach Russian Roulette... almost everyone has had some degree of food poisoning since we've been here).

     In the house, Mrs. T. -  in whose house we are all staying - simply lit candles and advised us to use our torches. The house does not have a generator because Mrs. T. doesn’t like the loud noise they make (though we can hear the one next door anyway). She also is keen for us to have an “authentic experience of Ghana”. Which seems fair to me - we did sign up for this after all. But the Ghanaian people at work look at me in disbelief when I tell them about our power and water issues and tell me such things shouldn’t be happening these days. So one of the more cynical amongst us has expounded a theory that the programme coordinators are just cutting off our utilities at random, filming us Big Brother-style all the while, for their own amusement or to sell to an African television station as hilarious reality TV. He is someone who is evidently not luxuriating in his African experience. 

     The water supply at our house ran out on Monday night. It’s now Wednesday. We can fill big blue buckets of water from a tank outside for doing the dishes/washing/flushing the toilet. We naïvely assumed that the water would be back on today because last time it ran out, the supply was turned back on the following Wednesday; thus giving credence to the “never assume” maxim, especially true in Africa. So this morning Victoria and I went to the outdoor swimming pool shower at the hotel down the road. It just occurred to me that being able to shower outside at 6.30 a.m. and then walk home in a t-shirt and shorts with wet hair, and not feel remotely cold is pretty great. At the time, I was too busy keeping one eye on the wriggling upside-down cockroach who was sharing the shower with us, to make sure he stayed upside-down and in his corner (which he did until Victoria led him to a swift and crunchy demise with a whack of her flip-flop). 

     Mrs. T. tells us that the water would not run out if we were better at rationing it. We maintain that if you have ten extra people living in your house, plus the other family who are also staying here (it’s a big house), you can’t expect the same ration that you’ve only had to share among your own family until now, to be enough. Also we are not used to rationing. It’s not our fault. Waah. Maybe it will be back on tomorrow morning, at least enough for us all to have a shower. But as Tolstoy, like a pragmatic Muscovite, said "enough or not, it will have to do"...

To Taxi or to Trotro: The Accra Commute

    My commute to and from work provides plenty of drama, entertainment and the occasional "Ohmygodwearegoingtodie" moment. The dilemma is always whether to go by taxi (faster, but driven by friendly lunatics) or by trotro (cheaper, but a case of too many people in a small space).

     In Accra, there are hundreds of taxis, since pretty much anyone with a driving licence who finds has time on their hands can just find a car, pay a 15 cedi (5 euro) fee, and take to the roads as a dubiously qualified taxi driver. In fact, should one wish to avoid the bureaucracy and nuisance that sitting an actual driving test entails, they can just buy the driving licence too. 

     The vehicles employed by these Formula One wannabes would have the NCT inspector cheerfully inking his “fail” stamp before ever glancing past the car door/bonnet. Rolled down windows constitutes the air conditioning; not exactly effective in standstill traffic. The seat-belts are sometimes still attached, but they are always broken, so I've given up attempting to wear one. Where a radio should be, there is often merely a radio-shaped hole. The radio has either been stolen/removed to prevent being stolen/sold by the taxi driver. In unabashed PDRDs (Public Displays of Religious Devotion), taxi drivers display stickers with large yellow letters on their rear windows, with such inspiring slogans as “The Lord is my Portion”- I don’t know either. However, they do have rusty pint-sized fire extinguishers attached to the windscreen on the passenger side. So that’s reassuring. 

     
As soon as you step outside, passing taxi drivers begin to beep/hiss/make a kissing noise/wave their arm at you/pull in. This is a normal way to attract someone’s attention here, and is not intended to be offensive. Instead of you hailing a taxi, the taxis are hailing you. They assume that white people will not walk anywhere and can afford to always take a taxi. Which is kind of true, since last Sunday four of the interns rented a taxi driver for half a day for 10 cedis each (equivalent to 3.50 euro). Here, we are rich. 

No need to worry, the fire extinguisher is here!

     So you ask them for a price to get to your destination before you get in- no fixed fares or meters here. With understandable opportunism, they start off by trying to charge us obrunis (foreigners) a price over double the average rate. For my six mile trip from East Legon where I live, to Cantonments where I work, they start out with 15-20 cedis (about 6-10 euro) and I try to haggle it down to half that (I give them the full fare in the end but I like practising my haggling skills-not much call for that in Galway!) They will argue the fare for a while, citing the traffic/the distance etc. but they usually capitulate to the passenger’s price in the end, though occasionally they drive off in a huff and you have to start again with the next one.

Tempted to just take a camel to work like these guys

     The traffic here has to be seen to be believed. It can take anything from forty to ninety minutes to get from my accommodation to my workplace, depending on what day it is (Mondays are by far the worst). The highway has approximately four lanes (there are no markings for this, that’s just how many cars can fit alongside each other on the road). But when the taxi drivers feel like it, they edge in and 'create' another lane, which leads to a manic beeping outburst from the other irate drivers. No matter how beat up the cars are, the horn is always in working order and used to full effect! Drivers seem to ignore the traffic lights most of the time, and instead take direction from policemen who stand around most junctions or at intervals along the road. But sometimes they do stop at a red light. I haven’t figured out what the system is for knowing when to ignore and when to obey the lights. At roundabouts, the aim seems to be to all jam into the middle of it until nobody can move anywhere without slow and careful navigation to emerge unscathed on the other side.

     Most taxi drivers are from rural areas surrounding the city and don’t have the first notion about where the place you want to go actually is, even if you mention a supposedly well-known landmark nearby. However, they tend not to mention this detail until well into the journey. This ends up in me attempting to give directions, or them shouting out the window at other drivers along the way. They drive erratically, either never indicating or always leaving one indicator on for the whole journey. The entertain themselves by swerving back and forth across the lanes as they go, tailgating big Pajero jeeps, trying to overtake trotros on either the inside or outside. But the most uncomfortable aspect of traveling by taxi is that because I am a white girl, the drivers often quiz me  about my religion/ marital status/ do I drink alcohol/ have I studied the bible/ will I marry them/ why not/ do I not like black men/ can they have my number anyway. Em...NO?!

     

Some of the more roadworthy trotros

So mainly because of the hassle of explaining to a different random driver every day why I can’t marry them (the first day, the driver politely asked me to "please wait, I have to urinate" which he proceeded to do at the side of the road, then got back in and blithely continued with his marriage proposal), I decided it was time to figure out a trotro route that could drop me off anywhere remotely close to work. A 'trotro' is an ancient Hiace van, from Germany, Holland or some other country where it is has been deemed no longer roadworthy and has most likely been sold for scrap, in which rows of seats have been installed. They fit about 20 people inside with a seat each, but they will squeeze in as many passengers as want to to get in. It costs from 50 pesewas to 1 cedi for a trip (about 10-25 cents).To get to work, I have to take two trotros and then walk for about 30 minutes. 

With a mysterious caption on the back...

     The trotros follow various fixed routes but do not have a timetable or any sign to indicate when/where they are going, or anything that looks like an official stop. Instead the driver’s assistant sticks his head out the window and uses hand gestures to show where they are going- pointing straight up means Accra, making a circle means they are going to the Circle stop, fingers all pointing down means Labadi Beach. These are three of the main stops. Then when they are close to any group of people standing by the side of the road he will shout what sounds like “Accra-cra-cra” or “Labadi-manLabadiLabadi” to let the passengers know the end stop, and if you want to get in you make the same hand gesture as them and they will pull in abruptly. Passengers have to hop on quickly and squeeze in somewhere because they are already moving on again before the door is even shut. Sometimes it seems like the driver is taking off without the assistant, but he always jumps back into the moving trotro at the last minute and slides the door shut. After sitting for a while, the assistant will turn around and whoever has got on will give him their fare. They don't talk, just tap you on the shoulder and then you hand them 1 cedi. Eventually he might turn around again and pass back some change in coins. They don’t give change to white people (I wouldn't either if I were them). 

Colourful trotros from above

     In the evening, it is too dangerous to walk back alone to the main highway where the trotro passes and try to figure out the right route in the dark. It gets completely dark around 6 p.m. and as a white person, especially female, you are asking for trouble to walk alone in the dark. Here pedestrians never have the right of way. In fact, they don’t seem to have any rights except for the right to run like hell out of the way, while cars fly past beeping. There are no footpaths anywhere, and where a footpath should theoretically be (to my Westernised mind) is an open gutter a.k.a mosquito breeding ground about a foot deep and filled with…well, you can imagine. So while trying to keep out of the path of cars zooming along at random, you also can’t keep in too far, for fear of landing head over heels in excrement. It's fairly certain that being hit by a car would be less detrimental to one’s health than falling in. When Oscar Wilde said "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars", this was not the kind of gutter he meant. If you were in a gutter in Accra, the only thing you would be looking at is the quickest way to end your life.  So for now the safest way is to hedge my bets and take the trotros into work in the morning and then a taxi home...and try to keep looking at the stars*!

*Metaphorically-speaking...it's not possible to see any stars due to pollution/ smog/ cloud cover.

A Day in the Life

View from our room, through the mosquito net

The scene: A small bed, with a mattress that feels not dissimilar to a bouncy castle that has just been unplugged and is beginning to deflate. I’m sure one day soon I will wake up on the floor, having sunk completely to the bottom. Two identical beds for my roommates; a Chinese girl and a German girl. At the head of the bed, a miniature pillow in a blue floral case. At the foot of each bed, a disparate collection of suitcases, where most of our clothes are left in the absence of alternative storage space. One small dark wooden chest of drawers, whose middle drawer (assigned to me) promptly falls out if you open it more than a crack. Two wood-framed windows on either end of the room, covered by mosquito nets, permanently thrown wide in an attempt to tempt a breeze to give us a temporary reprieve from the sticky humidity and heat. Through the open window careens the constant cacophony of next door's menacing guard dogs barking, the pet goat family in our garden bleating and somewhere a turkey gobbling. One fan clicking and spinning precariously on the ceiling; we leave it on the lowest setting for fear it will spin right off if we turn it up any higher. Shoes and flip-flops are lined up under the beds in neat rows. Towels hang on any available corner. A bottle of mosquito repellant spray stands on the floor beside each bed (no bedside lockers here). To someone with my predilection for privacy and keeping my room in my own inimitable state of (semi-organized) chaos, this should be something of a nightmare living situation. But actually it works remarkably well. Every week-day, LeiLei gets up at 5.45 to get ready for work. Then I get up at 6.30, and Victoria gets up at 7. The times depend on our various transportation and distance from our workplaces. LeiLei takes a trotro (a minivan with up to twenty people), Victoria gets a lift with a colleague and I take a taxi.

My morning routine has acquired some new habits. After showering, I count how many new mosquito bites have appeared in the night. Despite our persistent precautions (nets, super strong chemical insect-repellant, long clothes, fan on, lights off) we all uncover a couple of new bites every morning. Those mosquitoes are intrepid little buggers when it comes to finding ways into our beds. Then I brush my teeth using bottled water (vital to remember not to drink the tap water, or get any in my mouth while swimming/showering, at the risk of contracting typhoid or any number of other dire and dangerous diseases). The tap water has a distinctly undrinkable whiff, but its relatively safe to use for washing, i.e. it hasn’t caused anyone so far to have an adverse skin reaction/break out in a rash which can apparently sometimes happen depending on the source of the water. 

Cairo Street, outside our house

After swallowing the little blue and white tablet that should hopefully prevent me contracting malaria, or at least make it less severe if I do get it, its time to go and see if those who were up early have left any breakfast for the late risers. Breakfast is slices of white bread with margarine or dry, and a few pieces of fruit; always pineapple, mango, or a green thing that tastes like a cross between an orange and a lemon. One day there was an option of Ghanaian porridge (recipe: take one baby, feed it with too much formula milk, incubate for 5-10 minutes until baby vomits. Serve warm.) I felt as though I could smell it on my hands the whole day. As our water supply can be intermittent, we use one half-filled big blue basin of water left beside of the sink for all of our breakfast dishes so as not to waste tap water. At 7.50, I head out the patterned white-and-blue gate, which contrasts strikingly with the 10 foot wall topped with coils of barbed wire surrounding it. It's time for my daily haggle with the taxi drivers of Accra, but that’s a story for another day.

If things are getting easier, maybe you're headed downhill...

    

“If things are getting easier, maybe you're headed downhill”- This is a Ghanaian proverb that perhaps explains the ennui I was feeling with life since university (post-university blues? Is that a thing?). Anyway, since my university travels which took me from Roscommon to Dublin, then on to the US and Germany, I am back in the West of Ireland working in procurement and life is certainly 'easier'. I have my degrees in the bag, an income, and I speak the language like the native I am. But as a routine is being established, I'm becoming restless and wanderlust is starting to set in.

So one day last month, as I surveyed my orange-walled, windowless cage (a.k.a. the office) and pondered the deeper meaning of my existence/whether to finish the tuna salad in the fridge or order pizza for dinner, an email with the headline “Chance to intern in Ghana or India” caught my disenchanted eye. A whirlwind of impulse decisions later and I find myself with a position in a marketing and advertising agency and the excited possessor of a Lufthansa airline ticket to Kotoka Airport, in Accra, the capital city of Ghana- for the 5^th of July! 

Visa for Ghana

With my usual efficiency and effectiveness, I speedily organised the necessary vaccinations and visa paperwork within hours while motivational tunes like Don’t Stop Me Now played in the background (I jest- My visa is still not processed and I will get my last vaccination the day before I travel).

 I've been told that I will be living in “a beautiful mansion in the heart of Accra”, along with nine other interns. My romantic imagination is envisioning a wooden structure with hammocks facing a spectacular African vista, while outside our neighbours Simba, Timone and Pumba will frolic past, cheerfully belting out Hakuna Matata…While my logical head warns me that it is likely to be more along the lines of summer 2010 in Montauk when I shared a room containing five beds, one bathroom and a mini-fridge with eight Irish girls and a local giant-ant swarm. 

Future neighbours?

     I'll be sharing a room with another girl intern- Will we get along? Will we fight over the bathroom? Will the work be interesting? Will we get to see and experience a lot of Africa? I know very little about what I am getting myself into- but at least now I am definitely headed uphill again!