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"...