Konni: My first Rocky Horror Picture Show Halloween

For me, Africa has been full of firsts. Some have been predictable: first time seeing hippos in the wild, first time seeing a village full of topless women, first time eating rat, first time catching malaria, first time drinking millet beer and palm wine. Stuff like that. But I've also been becoming more western out here, accumulating bizarre firsts that are fairly inappropriate to this continent: first time joining a country club, first time going on golf outings with caddies, first time owning two motorized vehicles, first time supporting two employees (servants?) who attend to my security and cleanliness, first time rubbing elbows with western diplomats, first time learning how to surf, first time staying up until four am to watch American sporting events, and now, first time watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

For a quarter century I avoided the Rocky Horror Picture Show with total success. That was for theater kids, loud and dramatic people who wanted to change my attitudes about sex. And if I was going to watch a midnight movie it was damn well going to be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I never planned to watch this "show" but I also never planned to celebrate Halloween on Niger's border with Nigeria in the company of twenty odd Peace Corps Volunteers, as one of them put it, with "every white person for three hundred miles".

Their transit house at Konni is halfway to Agadez and was our logical stopping point. We just tweaked our schedule to arrive in time for their festivities. It seemed like a normal get together, modestly stocked with alcohol, well-equipped with western music and a crisp sound system, several pots of food. And it was Halloween, so I didn't pay much attention to the people who were dressed in a somewhat provocative and semi-gothic fashion. I started paying attention when Sean reappeared in an eye-catching outfit that was supposed to make him "Brad Majors". Whatever. So it's a theme party and Sean is making us all more welcome by being a good sport and playing along. A few hours pass and somebody stops the music to say that we are going to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Okay. It's a bit strange that they would insist that we watch their movie; but they'd gone through the effort of rigging up a projection system and they seemed into it, so I moved to the viewing area and waited. Giant lips started singing about transgender aliens and entirely too many people began singing along.

Suddenly, Sean was standing in front of everyone in something I wouldn't wear in front of a mirror; alongside him was a girl I'd never met; they were acting along with the movie behind them as the audience barked "Janet" and "Oh Brad". Within a matter of minutes it became clear that the most outrageously attired celebrants at this party were dressed as characters from this movie and had every intention of acting out the entire thing. Last night I realized that the Rocky Horror Picture Show does not feature man eating plants. Before the screening began, I was sure that the most scandalous moment of the evening had already been provided by a tall girl in a vampire's cape who intoned "AAAaaalllaaaahuu Spank Bar" prior to slapping a crossdressing man square in the ass with a board of religious verses. But I was wrong. This show corresponded to an uncanny degree with my teenage suspicions about the true nature and style of the theater crowd. This is how I feared they would behave. They wanted to do these things to me. And there was Sean, um . . . into it.

By the time the spectacle was concluded, many people were asleep on the ground, paired off beneath mosquito nets or singing loudly. Only the most vile alcohols had survived the earlier stages of the party and I didn't have the need. I lost energy and retired for the evening. I was lifted out of early sleep by some ecstatic shouts about a shower party; I shuddered and let them pass ignoring giggles and splashing as I drifted off.

To be fair, this was the best conceivable way to celebrate a pagan holiday and these people should be forgiven all of their trespasses against good taste because, for the most part, they spend two years trying to be patient and sensitive cultural ambassadors in rough and invasive circumstances. If they grew a little irreverent, they chose a good day for it. I'm also the last person to exclude anything from the world of acceptable jokes. There can be a problem with an audience. There cannot be a problem with a joke.
* posted by Nathaniel at 2:28 AM  —  0 comments

Niamey, Niger October 27, 2005

This is a broad sweeping apology to all of the people with whom I should be communicating. I was spoiled by the infrastructure of Ghana and slightly misled into believing that I would have frequent opportunities to charge my laptop and visit internet cafes to be connected with my friends and family. Those expectations are being dissapointed. My allotment of computer time is typically spent editing our articles and writing blogs; it doesn't leave time to prepare emails and the internet cafes of Africa are not ideal for banging out personal correspondence—especially with these bedeviled French keyboards.

Special apologies have to go to the people who don't sometimes call me to hear apologies in person. My Polish entrepeneurs I am neglecting. My doctoral candidates in the United States I am neglecting. Past colleagues and co-tenents of Gambia I am neglecting. I wish it wasn't so. My former students neglect me as often as I neglect them and that is as it happens to be. All the same though, I wish more of them would write.

Later this week I will have focused things to say about Niger, which New York Times columnist Nicholas E. Kristof recently called "the most wretched place on earth" after a visit that I've heard lasted little more than a week. American media on Africa tends to deserve profanity and suspicion. Perhaps I'll be prepared after a week or two of travel throughout Niger to make massive absolute judgments because my emotions have been tweaked by the sight of bony kids or dying mothers, but probably not. Long term residents uniformly doubt the necessity of the extreme media attention on Niger this year; more on all that later.

Now it is Ramadan and everyone is hungry most of the time. But Niger street food in Niamey, during Ramadan is nuanced, nutritious, extremely cheap, widely available and good.
* posted by Nathaniel at 8:02 AM  —  6 comments

Niamey: Full Recovery in Funderland. October 27, 2005

Niger is twice the size of Texas, home to something like 15 million people. The rural areas are neither fertile nor comfortable nor profitable. Ordinarily this would mean that Niamey, the capital city, would be inundated by struggling people who have abandoned their "dead end" outlying villages for the city jackpot. Somehow, this hasn't happened. Roughly 80% of Niger's population lives outside of urban areas; this allows Niamey to present an easy going neighborhood feel. Apart from the market area, traffic is no problem; exceptionally wide sandy roads branch off the paved ribs of the city giving access to residential areas with many healthy shade trees.

Lost and looking for a hotel in these areas, I felt like I was in a sort of theme park or gated community. Down nearly every street were the headquarters of huge NGOs-Save the Children, World Vision, Oxfam, Care, Concern, Tender Feelings, Tearfund, Great Righteousness, UNICEF, Dubious Guilt Assuagement and the others. They have all moved in to spacious and well maintained compounds, formally residential, still very homey. Almost all of the city's copious billboards spoke their messages: People Deserve Food, No to Hunger, Education is for Everyone. Children have the following list of ten rights. You tell 'em. Obviously, the people of Niger have been in need of slogans. It's ingenious! Why hasn't anyone else thought of such functional tools for positive change? Since Niger has the lowest literacy rate in the world, its people should be able to get the point real easily and since they are so empowered it shouldn’t be long before they restructure society and become immune to drought.

In Ada, Ghana we ran into a Niger Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) who shared information about our campaign with Drew Schmenner, a third year PCV in charge of coordinating Peace Corps Niger’s HIV/AIDS initiatives. Almost a month ago, Drew let us know that we were welcome to stay in his house for our time in Niamey. (Accommodation in that city is unusually expensive since it tends to cater to the healthy budget of an aid worker or conference attendee.) We touched base with Drew on our first morning in Niamey and then moved into his living room.

This was the first time on our trip that we have stayed in the private residence of young hospitable westerners. It differed tremendously from Peace Corps hostels that we have occasionally used in that it was not a public space, crowded with people venting frustrated social energies. Drew's house was full of people coming and going to work, while Peace Corps hostels contain volunteers at their most shiftless and idle. Our time in that space was necessary. Somehow Benin had gotten under my skin and pissed me off. Or maybe it was the speed of our traveling recently that threw me into a funk by preventing me from getting any writing done. Or my psychological health is deteriorating. Whatever it was, I recovered. And I recovered, in large part, because it was easy to do so in Drew's house.

A well adjusted and content volunteer can be a wonderful thing. Drew was also situated within a tiny and beautiful web of the tastiest and most varied food we've eaten in a while. A Senegalese woman cooked up immaculate dishes that reminded me of a better Gambia. A couscous mixmaster combined dashes and handfuls from about thirteen different plastic bowls of powders, oils, leaves and sauces to create boo-zu, which is mixed by hand in front of you-by hand is a misleading phrase because its first connotation is artisinal craft of superior quality; I mean for it to conjure up an image of the serving woman's food covered right hand, squishing through my oily couscous mix perhaps twenty times, as if she were kneading it or enjoying the sensation; then handing it to me. I know people who wouldn’t have let their own mothers handle their dinner like that. When someone does that to your food in front of the inevitable gallery of people who have gathered to watch the white man eat street food, one's face must not betray the thoughts: that is so f------ revolting, what does she wipe herself on? Who and what does she touch? I'm going to crap my brains out. Instead one must portray eagerness to consume food; one must don the soft face of someone who feels lucky and grateful. In any case, it contained leaves and vegetables so I went back and had it a few more times.

I have awarded this distinction before, but we were also served the best meat ever. Maybe this meat will hold on to the title a little longer than the others since it was made by a Hausa man. The Hausa people are known across Africa for their butchering skills and their mastery of mixing animals with spices and high temperature. There were also good chips, home made pistachio ice cream, legitimate cheese burgers and passable malt liquor. This stuff was all good budget eating.

Finally, Drew helped me to top up my ipod, which is now bursting at the seams. This was huge, because my collection (following its devastation by Gambian burglars two years ago) was weak on rock. I had to axe some of the less deserving music to make room for titles that Sean, Tuuli and I can all agree upon. We’ve got options now and I had the opportunity to make playlists for all of the countries between here and South Africa. I hadn't originally made lists past Chad, since I assumed that our mission would fail.
* posted by Nathaniel at 7:42 AM  —  0 comments

Leaving, Benin Mid October, 2005

Leaving is not a town in Benin; I have benin Benin long enough and I mostly want to be Leaving, Benin. Although this evening, I met two wonderful food vendors who are sweetening my final night here. I stopped for the first woman because she appeared to be frying plantains and fried plantains are the business. They are sweet and delicious, slightly caramelized, piping hot and served with salty pepper sauce that makes me weep. This woman, to my asinine disappointment, was not serving fried plantains. She was not serving fried yams or fried mystery tuber or fried yellowish crescent. I learned this by forcing her to explain to me why she did not have salty weeping man pepper sauce for her plantains. She had cheese cubes.

Prior to this, I had assumed, more or less correctly, that the only cheese in West Africa is Laughing Cow (vache qui'rit) and I don't care what sinister diet craze may or may not have legitimated this synthesized troll discharge, Laughing Cow is a culinary miscarriage and an evil thing. So when this woman said she had fromage that was clearly not individually packaged for maximum waste and inconvenience, I would ordinarily have assumed that she was a liar or a fool; but the guide book had told me to look out for "red skinned cheese" in the north of Benin. In front of me was a tin bowl with dried meat bits filling the lower spaces and some chunky orange brown, rough stucco looking semi-cubes filling the top. The vendor didn't care whether I bought them or not. She seemed impatient with me for my insistence on the pepper sauce issue. But she said "fromage" and "fromage" is a very sexy word. So I bought some—four pieces—and walked to our tree shaded resting bench.

It was good. Perhaps to feel younger or perhaps because we are becoming less articulate, we have started saying "hella". The cheese was hella good. It was hella. It didn't taste anything like cheese at all. I went back and bought twelve more pieces. Nevertheless, the woman was still misguided in her decision to include no pepper sauce with her spectacularly unique and wonderful product, so I bought some from a kindly woman across the road who just happened to make her own version of pepperoncini. This she accompanied with the typical hate paste and the concert effect was fantastic. I have heard many West Africans speculate that it is a predilection for dairy products that makes white people stink so much. From white people, I have only heard baseless invective about the stench of Africans.

Anything else about Benin . . . no. Not really. It has been rather dull. It made me feverish and sleepy. It made me want the trip to stop. It almost made me hate eating paste and sauce based meals—I am a sucker for any new color of "pate" and that has lead to my consumption of some remarkably sandy, beany, gooey and flavorless varieties.

Benin also made me more aware of how many countless NGOs, volunteers and social workers are making their business off this continent. A comprehensive treatment of the human response to the AIDS epidemic would require hundreds if not thousands of people if it wanted to avoid a staggering time lapse between coverage of one country and another. It is miserable to know that one's coverage will always under everything be arbitrary. Still. We will try to find projects that are either representative or exceptional. We are refraining, for the time being, from mentioning projects that do not impress us.

Aha. Benin also gave me the opportunity to browse the best French book store I've seen in Africa. I bought for myself a lovely French novella entitled, "Police Python" and a beefy French/English dictionary with which to accompany it. I was not filled with pride when I noticed in a small box on the rear cover—after I had slaved my way to page eleven—that the book's target audience is eleven and twelve year old children; also, I was not proud to realize that the book started on page six. I don't really know how to feel about being completely absorbed by it. The lead character is a village boy from Benin trying to receive a sacred Voodoo python that a poacher sold to a Parisian jewelry maker. I have not felt compelled to share many details from the well written and moving books that have helped me to maintain sanity over the past few months; but, for some reason, I felt the need to share the basic plot of "Police Python". When I finish this book, I can start "Surfers of the Unknown" (recommended for twelve and thirteen year olds and based on the life experiences of surfers who are mixed up with the paranormal; during the upcoming landlocked months, this will be my connection to the only thing I could imagine doing for the rest of my life—not reading minds.). This is the only way that I will practice the French language on my own.
* posted by Nathaniel at 6:23 AM  —  5 comments

Cotonou, Benin October 16, 2005

I don't like Benin. I might even dislike Benin. It is easily my least favorite country that we have so far visited and I feel this awful urge to crap all over it in my public writings. This feeling began to establish itself during our first two days in this country, which we spent at Grand Popo and Ouidah, respectively a simple beach village and the Voodoo capital of the world. The beach village, though renowned for being the country's best, was bland and unexceptional. The beach was monopolized by abandoned and poorly conceived hotel/camping sites and the ocean itself was extremely perilous. I have never experienced such immediate downward and outward bound currents. These sucked back with such power that waves were piled up into two meter high walls that incorporated all of the water from the previous waves onto which they should have broken, leaving them to crash onto dry sand. This meant that riding waves was humping sandpaper and swimming was trying to stay on your feet in a manageable zone of about two meters that immediately preceded the part of the sea that was ready to swallow you whole. Since both of our guidebooks had advertised the treachery here I had expected it to be fairly unimpressive and reasonably negotiable; but, for once, about the ocean, they were right. It is frustrating to be in my second straight coastal country with no opportunities to surf, even if the waves are poorly suited to the sport.

In this beach town a pattern began to emerge. A Beninoise man lied to us about the presence of cheap local food and then overcharged us for tiny half portions of fish. Locals also proved unusually ready to make us feel ridiculous and unwelcome by chortling and snickering about us in public places such as restaurants, cafes or bars. In Ouidah, a teenage girl completely mischarged us for her gooey bean sandwiches on stale bread, slithered her story about when confronted and refused to treat us fairly, all the while smirking at the only other table of diners, who had been making jokes at our expense from the moment we walked in. This sort of reception is totally unusual in West Africa. Local food sellers have been welcoming and fair and passersby or fellow diners have been far more likely to ensure that we are treated fairly than to giggle and point. I hate being treated like this and so Benin has started inching its way towards my doghouse.

Ouidah, also, was lame, lamer than bad clowns, as lame as relying on people who get lazy and disappoint you. The world center of Catholicism is the Vatican, which is impressive; the world center of Islam, whether Mecca or Medina, is impressive; Hinduism, Buddhism and most other major world religions have some awe-inspiring structures bestraddling their points of origin or points of focus. Voodoo, which supposedly sprang from Ouidah and its surrounding region, is represented there by some amateur painted sculptures and an artless concrete egg strewn with pampered and dinky pythons. Incarnate Voodoo deities also tend to look very much like malignant piles; the egg yolks, chicken blood and bird feathers that are regularly smeared across them do not improve their appearance. That said, after I finished being underawed by the public face of Voodoo's homeland, I realized that Voodoo wasn't in the habit of extracting great sums of money from its practitioners and faithful members in order to construct ostentatious and self-important buildings. It was also comfortable keeping its secrets, without making a great stink out of doing so, which might completely excuse the hokey modesty of the town. Ouidah's deity is the python; numerous people there are facially scarred in a way that resembles a python bite to either cheek and to the forehead. This can either appear disfiguring or attractive.

After Ouidah, we drove into Cotonou, the nation's defacto capital. This experience cemented my gathering malice toward Benin. The drivers, mostly on mopeds, but especially those in cars, were particularly pushy and inconsiderate; the city was splattered all over a dingy beach and around a river. Despite these two assets, it appears to have no charm whatsoever. The buildings are blockish concrete, ensnared by drooping tangled wires, mounted by crooked rusting antennae, encased by metal bars. Our map was also bungled in its usual way, which lead to a vexing tour of the industrial area and the commercial district. I want to leave this city as soon as our visas to Niger are processed.
* posted by Nathaniel at 6:19 AM  —  3 comments

Lome, Togo October 11, 2005

None of us are in any hurry to leave Togo. We are receiving tremendous help from a Peace Corps volunteer in Lome and have been impressed with some of the Togolese projects for people living with AIDS. Unfortunately, recent instabilities seem to have dried up international funding and made it easier to misdirect national funding in extremely damaging ways. Sanctions are such a dubious means of achieving goals in foreign policy.

But, Lome is completely agreeable. It is one of those fairly grid like coastal cities encircled by a ring and is easy to navigate. The Togolese of the capital seem to enjoy themselves in a very healthy and unpretentious way. Granted, their football team had just accomplished something unprecedented in their nation's history and a post-coital glow pervaded the city for our entire stay, but all of the spacious and tasty outdoor cafes with their generous seating capacity were not erected for the purpose of celebrating a single football success. It is heartening to see men and women, families and youth, scattered in different ratios throughout the evening, enjoying the fine food and drink of their country and doing so in public. It was heartening that every table seemed to prefer a different beer of the eight or so available there. It was especially nice to see young women on the street who seemed to be having an evening amongst themselves, uninterested in the sleepless urge of men.

For five days in a row, first thing in the morning we went to the central offices of the Red Cross, moving from there to whichever destination made work possible. The Togolese have a higher AIDS rate than many surrounding nations; their presence on the Lagos to Abidjan corridor of overland transport business is a significant contributing factor.

* * *

I am sick of hearing people say "Africa" in a despairing and superior exhalation of breath that is supposed to explain why everything goes wrong here. I am equally sick of hearing Africans say "Africa" in a defeated and fatalistic shrug that is meant to communicate the uselessness of struggle or persistence. Learned helplessness was only proven to exist in a batch of hideously unfortunate dogs by one pompous monster. Deliberately chosen sloth is everywhere demonstrable and everywhere rationalized. Although, I have to admit that I tend to quit whenever I am really getting my ass kicked and I would probably have turned to fraudulence and crime if I were born in the wrong circumstances or kept their long enough—in a purely Robin Hood sort of way, of course.
* posted by Nathaniel at 8:03 AM  —  1 comments

Lome, Togo October 9, 2005

We arrived in Lome this evening. The city is going mad because Togo just qualified for the World Cup. More when we find a good internet cafe.
* posted by Nathaniel at 11:00 AM  —  1 comments

Kpalime Region, Togo October 9, 2005

The border officials of Togo were not in uniform nor were they in their offices; they were hanging out in their towns (the office that processes the vehicle documents was 12 kilometers away from the border); they were accepting of the disturbance we created and glad of the opportunity to process something strange. They were situated halfway up the grassy mountain range that gives logic to the border between Togo and Ghana. The man who entered us into the goofy, standard issue, oversized, tag board register of arriving foreign nationals was easily the most delightful and friendly border official that I've ever met. He begged us to pray for the success of the Togolese football team. He begged us several times and smiled for twenty-five minutes straight. It was a completely disarming experience.

I have been expecting Togo to be a bit rough. While we were making the final preparations for this trip it made international headlines for the circumstances surrounding the death and succession of its former ruler. I thought we would have to drive straight and fast across the fifty-four kilometer stretch of coastal Togo. I thought it would be our first taste of menacing, militarized Africa. It seems, however, that anything that might have prompted the military to grow menacing or aggressive has been thoroughly dealt with, which leads to a somewhat reliable safety for visiting white people.

(And now that I have left the country, let me add that its military, which recently killed several hundred civilian protestors who were risking their lives to complain about the unconstitutional installment of their former dictator's rather inexperienced son, had obviously been given instructions not to stop or harass white people, which was convenient. Following reputation damaging displays of force or outcries about corruption, it is not uncommon for the dogs to be called off. In Togo, there were numerous children who looked well under the age of 16 who were dressed in the spiffy national butchering outfit, visibly proud as hell of their wonderful guns. I hate the people who make teenage soldiers exist. Yes, also 18 and 19 year old ones.)

The Kpalime region is world famous for butterflies, which are especially non-threatening creatures. It hosts nearly a thousand different species along with a large population of traditional artists and craftsmen, who are also not scary. Delicious baguettes replace the sweet wonderbread of Ghana. Germans left an outstanding legacy of varied and delicious beers (Awooyo must be the only amber ale in Africa, though I hope to be proven wrong). And the Togolese improve on Ghanaian staple foods with a creativity and attention to detail that some would attribute to the French; though it may have been here all along.

The clockwork evening downpour, caught up with us as we strolled into a miniscule mountain village on Saturday evening. We entered the one public space just before or documents, currency and camera would have been soaked. The whole town was intent on their handheld radio sets. Men of all ages clustered round whoever held the small machine and toyed with the meter long antennae, hoping for clearer reception. The radios are not powerful, the village is in the middle of nowhere and the thunderstorm was making everything more difficult. This was the Togo vs. Congo qualifying match for next year's World Cup.

I couldn't make out a single word of the broadcast; I could only register obvious changes in its frenzy and pitch. When tinny and static smothered shouting and jubilation made it clear that somebody had scored a goal, everyone drew taught, almost kissing, ignoring personal space to discover whether to cheer or curse. It could take up to three minutes for anyone in the entire village to hear with certainty who had prevailed and when that one person released a pent up whoop of glee, it traveled down the street as fast as humans can respond to sound with new shouting. Drunks and small boys danced around and practiced dubious aerial kicks. The match tottered one way and the other up to the score of 3-3 and then with minutes remaining, Togo scored the winning goal. The village flooded its one and only street, surging in a mini-mob of eighty people towards a general store with a small broad flight of stairs that enabled many people to dance and be seen. We had to return to our hotel's village with considerable speed, since walking these roads in the dark would be foolish. We heard the noise of village celebration for nearly a kilometer, not bad for a hundred or so delighted humans.
* posted by Nathaniel at 7:58 AM  —  2 comments

Wli, Ghana October 6, 2005

It has rained every evening for the last eight days. The easy, dry, consistently pleasant weather of the sahel countries is behind us. With the brief exception of Niger, the forecast for the next ten thousand miles is daily rain. Fair enough. We've rigged up and drive-tested a new and improvised tarp for the roof rack; I've got a new weatherproof tent and water cools things off.

Ghana attempted to further delay our departure by throwing something beautiful in our path. The waterfalls at Wli are the highest in West Africa and the consistent rainfall of recent days gave them impressive power. Just around the corner from this particular carved valley, myriad butterflies, warm weather and harmless rippling noises represent the surrounding calm. Anything within sight of the water's receiving pool is quickly dampened by the water vapors sent flying by the dramatic eighty meter plunge of the lower falls. It sends stormy and regular waves across its basin and into its narrow draining river.

We tried to go beneath it. It became impossible to see because of the painfully rapid, horizontal weaponry of the water's impact. It became impossible to ignore the deafened, dripping ears, or to relax the erratically assaulted body—even the taste of the water found its way into the caves of my face. This true sensory overload activated my primal fight or flight reaction and I chose to flee, as I generally do. Several times I tried to gather the nerve to fight through it and reach the magical cave I imagined as an incentive for my bravery or rash behavior. Even though my counterparts were ready to abuse my irresolution, I chickened out every time and so did they—typically after receiving a sudden and painful blast of water that seemed to warn of immediate death by flattening. Soggy and defeated, I sought to justify my cowardice by speculating about dangerous subterranean feeder currents, stray rocks and pointless death. The relentlessness of the plummeting water in this place was more terrifying than any of my experiences surfing along the notoriously hazardous coastline of West Africa. Even though the frights I have received from the battering of waves that sought to mix my last breath with their meaningless seafoam have remained with me for great lengths of time, I have never shrieked in miniature terror and gone running from the ocean like a little bitch.

The border, just two kilometers from this emasculating cascade, opens onto a little frequented mountain road that feels like a smuggler's track for donkey carts. In the kilometers of no man's land there are several abandoned cars. If the Stingray becomes truly unfixable we will dump it in a place like this. If the car remains in any one of these countries that we are traveling through, we will have to pay several thousand dollars of import tax; even if it is stolen we will have to pay for it to become road legal for thieves. We would also lose the five thousand dollar deposit that secured us our car's passport. Leaving it in no man's land would bypass at least some of these pitfalls.
* posted by Nathaniel at 7:54 AM  —  1 comments

Ho, Ghana October 4, 2005

Sean and Tuuli were in a mood that I didn't share. There are still a few more nights that I can use to enjoy the safety of Ghana, so I wandered off. Ho is four or five big streets on a series of hills. A lattice work of undriveable roads and businesses contained in colorful, upright, wooden boxes fill the space between larger compounds or noisy "spots"—places to be. My fried rice and chicken is poor, though there is an astonishing quantity of meat on the chicken's neck—a portion that I have somehow not previously received. The starlings in Mali and Burkina did not contain this much flesh on a cleaved half carcass.

The cassette player just ate the sentimental american soft rock that scarred the peace here. It was left unmolested as it chewed and choked over the wind beneath my wings, which it swallowed after three amusing minutes. Now it is quiet. A man just approached me and asked if I was an american peace corps volunteer (I am not); he tells me of how he worked with them (he may have). His name is Wisdom. He is proud to say so and waits for the effect. Observing none, he continues his interview. People generally shuffle off when I say I've lived in West Africa for three years since it means that they have nothing to gain from me. He seems to draw a similar conclusion and leaves. Then I almost chase him down the street because his name is Wisdom. I imagine that I am missing an opportunity, that he is a messenger, a guide or a ghost. I have to focus on his baggy jeans and loose fitting nylon sports jersey, his noisy phone, pendant necklace and wrong guess.

I remind myself that Ghana is a giant miscast morality play. Sean's recent friends have included Promise, Wonder and Compromise. The more commonplace virtues and powerful nouns like Patience, Grace, Confidence and Glory are (nominally) all around us. We joke about meeting Thoughtfulness, Trickery and Incontinence; but, I am not Everyman and these poorly named people are not here to mold or inform me. All the same, I failed to invite Wisdom to have a seat or to drink with me. I didn't try to extract from him some sense of purpose or direction for my life and that seems daft.

The silent darkness of this place is more noticeable now. Everyone nearby was listening to our interaction; they learned that I am not particularly approachable; so, I now possess the immunity that I often seek and will not be bothered. But, I see my surroundings as if with thirty-five or forty-five year old eyes. I feel like the seedling of a lonely old man. I don't know why it feels like failure to imagine that I might become that: a middle aged man sitting alone on a quiet road, eating evening street food in a marginal city of the developing world.

The lights of distant and inaudible passing cars, children who shift their weight and stare at me from their places in line, other people speaking: none of these things diminish the impression that I will become this man who looks like failure.

I find a large receipt in my pocket, take my pen and start to cover it with words. It makes me feel better. When it is covered, I pay for my dinner and go to where my empty books are. There, I am thrown off to find that my friends and their mood are waiting where I left them, unchanged and jarring. In my head the phrase "like an old man" floats like small debris in bathwater, impossible to catch and dispose of.

A businessman today explained how he sustains a network of three hundred and fifty people living with AIDS. Organizations with millions of dollars are comparatively pathetic. His story will be in the Ghana section under a title referencing counseling networks or the Volta region. I don't know yet, because I have to write it tomorrow.

"God Will Provide Banku and Tilapia"—a restaurant.
* posted by Nathaniel at 5:25 AM  —  6 comments