Saturday, 11 June 2011—Accra, Kakum, Elmina, Cape Coast (Part One)
It is a struggle to keep up with my notes and blog entries because of the volume of material that I want to record. This is going in on Sunday morning, while waiting for Osman to come by. All the writing, of course, is on top of the ongoing lesson planning that I need to do and the fact that I have to be finalizing my preparations for the workshop on Friday. I learned yesterday that in addition to the social science teachers, Ms. Akapame and the chairs of all the other academic departments will also be attending the workshop.
I was up at 4:30 on Saturday in order to get up to the entry by 5:00 and help Osman with loading onto the AGISS bus for our excursion to Cape Coast. Over the next half hour, students slowly came wandering up towards the bus from their rooms at the school, or entering through the front gate. Osman and I headed down to check with Isaac, the school driver, who lives here on the school grounds. His building is much like mine, but the verandah has been ½ walled, ½ screened in, which gives a little more enclosed space. I am proud to be wearing my Accra Girls History Students Association polo shirt with the school crest on the front and a picture of the Big Six (the founding fathers of Ghana) on the back. I only know Kwame Nkrumah, and need to learn about the rest so that I can explain who they are when people ask about it as I wear the shirt back in the U.S. The girls wear their AGHISSA shirts atop their regular school uniforms, but the dark blue polos give them a very different appearance today. The girls’ names are printed across the bottom on the back of the shirt. This will certainly help me some today as I am speaking with them, though I may have to ask them to perform a pirouette in the middle of our conversation to get a peek at the back of their shirt.
The officers of AGHISSA are responsible for much of the arrangements today. They have lists of the students to check off, have to get the food from the kitchen that is being taken along for the students (two large plastic baskets with Styrofoam take-away containers), and are in charge of the money that is paid for admissions and toll fees on the highway as we move from Accra region to Central region in which Cape Coast is located, and must record all these costs.
High seats on the bus will be excellent for observing the scenery as we pass, and will give me a different perspective than the view afoot or from Osman’s car. I will also see much that is different because of the early and the new areas we will be passing through. I am sitting in the front window seat, probably my favorite for this situation, and so I will have views both ahead and to the side. I will have to be fast with my camera, though, in order to take pictures of passing scenes.
As 5:30 nears, Isaac appears and opens the hood of the bus to check things before we set off. While we are waiting, the girls milling around and talking excitedly, an entire lorry full of water sachets pulls in through the gate and heads off down the road towards the dining hall. It is just before 6:00 AM when the girls queue up at the two doors to get on the bus, and then we are off, fifty students and four teachers, including Mr. Lah and Mr.Alogum (sp?)along with Osman and me. Passing Zongo, from my higher perch the neighborhood appears as a patchwork of corrugated roofs in shades from gray through rust red, peppered with the tires, concrete blocks and other weighty objects that are used to help hold the roofs down. The minarets of some of the smaller mosques only rise about another story above the expanse of roofs. This view contrasts sharply with the constant colors and activity that characterize Zongo for me when we pass through at ground level in Osman’s car.Along the main road, people are out exercising and jogging at this coolest hour of the day, just before sunrise. The shops where I see activity this early mostly seem to those where food will be sold, and the proprietors are starting fires and cutting up the items that will be cooked. Trash fires are also burning at this hour, with smoke rising or drifting through the streets and among the houses.
We stop for petrol at a Shell station. Here, attendants in matching blue vests pump the gas, though Osman must get out of the car to pay for it. Gas (diesel) is about Gh₵1.50 per liter. At the current exchange rate, which is about Gh₵1.50/U.S.$1.00, this comes out to around $3.60 per gallon, or just about what it is in the U.S. For diesel, this may even be a little less than the U.S., as I am thinking of the U.S. price of regular gasoline and diesel seems to usually be a bit higher. Of course, relatively speaking, petrol prices here are much higher than at home when one takes into account average incomes in the two countries. I must remember to ask whether the price of fuel here seems to fluctuate in the same ways that it does at home. The gas station is right next to the Accra YMCA and the Y’s national headquarters. I wonder if they’d honor my membership as a guest?
Heading on, we come to the corner near Holy Spirit Cathedral, where we have curved (the Ghanaian term for a turn) to go to Osu in the past. We pass a neighborhood of two story buildings of a style similar to that of the DuBois home, one dated 1923, mixed in with newer 4-5 story apartment buildings. Older buildings have wooden shutters to admit the breeze, some of which are closed, some ajar. The newer have glass windows and portable air conditioning units in the walls. After weaving through the city on streets much like the larger, though by no means big in an absolute sense, main streets that cut through Zongo, we come to a wider boulevard with a median and two, now three lanes passing in each direction. We cross a drainage/river, littered with debris and trash, as most such waterways seem to be here, but its banks serving as habitat for cows, and surely for other animals, though I do not see any as we pass by quickly on the bridge above. We cross a railroad track, no trains in sight, but with hundreds of people passing along the tracks. Where there are this many people in Ghana, there are sure to be vendors to serve them, and indeed there are, both walking around with their wares atop their heads, and in small sheds set against the buildings that border the railroad’s right of way.
The boulevard, which Osman confirms is Accra’s Ring Road, brings us to a modern warehouse district with large buildings, including a Pepsi plant, then past what must be Accra’s automobile row, with dealerships for every imaginable maker—Kia, Nissan, Skoda, Nissan, Tata, Audi. The buildings of the dealerships themselves, however, resemble more the three story warehouses we have just passed, though with glass windows across the first floor, much more than they do the designer showcases that are characteristic of many American auto dealers. We come to a stop light, and passing through suddenly find ourselves in a massive traffic jam—at 6:15 in the morning on a Saturday. Osman had set our early departure both because of the many activities planned for the day and to avoid as much as possible this kind of heavy traffic. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he wanted to minimize the time we spend in such heavy traffic, since it doesn’t seem that there is any way to avoid it completely.
The slowed traffic is partly caused by the presence of a large market, both indoor and outdoor that sprawls on both sides of the roadside and is already busy. Also nearby is a large bus depot with many vehicles and line of people waiting to board. Invariably where the traffic slows as it does here, the jam is made more chaotic by the presence of vendors darting between the traffic to sell their wares to those in the slow-moving vehicles, nimble despite the loads of plantain chips, cell phone cases, watermelon slices, loaves of bread, and other goods they carry atop their heads. I need to get a good series of pictures of what people carry in this way—it would be hard to fathom in the United States. Meanwhile, I am writing down some of the larger and more interesting items in my field notebook, and will compile a list at a later point. As we pass the Accra Academy for Boys, the girls send up a cheer, something that will be repeated each time we pass a boys’ secondary school along the way.
There is a distinctive style of writing used on the signs that adorn the rear windows of the tro-tros and taxis—kind of wavy letters. The signs themselves remind me of the names that people give to boats, but tend to be much more religiously themed. The various slogans come in English, Arabic (most often transliterated into English), and what I assume to be Akan. Many have some kind of a religious message or reference. Business signs here also often have a religious connection to them—a distinctly Ghanaian way of naming the various furniture shops, food stores, and other and other businesses. Examples of such names make up another list that I am compiling.
We pass a major construction project—a large modern divided highway overpass where the work is raising lots of dust. It is just 6:30, but work is in full swing, which may help them manage to avoid the heat of midday. I see engineers with transits, forms for concrete pillars, a yard full of rebar, and a large crane moving a load. Just past the construction zone, traffic suddenly lifts, and Isaac has us cruising at 100 km/hr. At this speed, sitting in the front near the hatch that covers the diesel engine, and with the windows open, it is quite noisy.
We pass through an area with many different types of residential construction materials, the equivalent of the concentration of home remodeling and hardware stores on Manchester Road west of I-270 in St. Louis. I see concrete blocks and paving stones, large decorative iron gates for houses and schools, rebar, decorative columns. These shops must supply the materials for the new homes, some quite substantial, that I see dotting the low hills which make up the landscape here in the Weija district.
Heading west out of Accra, we must stop at a toll booth. Slowed vehicles means… yep, a variety of hawkers trying to complete transactions before vehicles and their occupants pass through the toll barriers and the signs that read “No Hawkers Beyond This Point.” At the police checkpoint just beyond the toll booths, one car is pulled over in front of the tan and blue police buildings, but we are waved right on through.
I see a group of five or six donkeys chasing each other. This is a first, but I’ve seen plenty of cows and goats, some of which graze outside the AGISS wall along Achimota Road in the mornings and evenings, along with chickens and their chicks, including near some of the staff housing at AGISS. There are relatively few dogs—most are small mixed breeds—and even fewer cats. Just as such animals can be seen foraging here and there both in Accra and in the more rural areas that we are now entering, so too there are various little gardens tucked away in the middle of areas of other activity—a few rows of maize growing along wall behind a home, or various other patches of plants that I cannot identify being tended or harvested.
There are numerous automobile, motorcycle, and especially tire dealers along the way. All seem to sell used vehicles and parts with the exception of the one strip of dealers in Accra. Many of the tires seen on vehicles are well-worn, so the availability of replacements, even used ones, is important, though it results in more than a few sets of mismatched treads. Some of the cars in these places are up on blocks or resting with the undercarriage directly on the ground, sans tires and many of their other parts that have apparently been salvaged for other uses. We regularly pass cars stopped on the side of the road, with occupants out peering under the hood, or with tires being examined, hazards inescapably associated with the older age and well-used condition of many vehicles. Even in the smallest villages we pass, though, there are taxis, which along with the tro-tros that move along with us towards Cape Coast, are the main form of vehicular transportation for many Ghanaians, both for local travel and over longer distances such as we are travelling today.
There are many buildings under construction along our way just as there are in Accra. Typically these seem to use poured concrete for the foundation, support pillars, and stairs, with concrete block filling in to form the walls. I see several places where workers are trenching out a rectangular form that I assume will become the location of a future structure. As with the student block near Ayree at AGISS, large bamboo poles—2-3 inches in diameter—are used to support the forms for pouring concrete for the second and subsequent floors. Many buildings that are clearly occupied on lower floors appear to have been planned with future expansion in mind, as their tops are not actual roofs, but floors for a future second or third story, with long bunches of rebar extending up out of the existing pillars below.
We pass through Kasoa, a neighborhood with a large market underway near a roundabout. Slowing traffic at this important intersection means an onslaught of hawkers again, and I am able to take some pictures. Kasoa marks the boundary between Greater Accra and Central Region to its east. “Central” seems to refer to the region’s position along the coast rather than within the country as a whole. Moving out of Kasoa and into the countryside again, in addition to the coconut palms that are found even in Accra, I now see plantain groves. Scattered among the vegetation are periodic termite mounds, pillars of red earth up to five and six feet tall.
We pass an (illustrated) sign showing “No Defecating,” then immediately after a public toilet facility, which I noticed first because of its unusual low light green-painted surrounding wall. Through the entrance I glimpse a number of similarly painted concrete enclosures and an illustrated sign showing how to use the facilities. There is a certain incongruity here in that there is not much else of anything else located right around this facility, so I wonder if this a kind of a travelers’ aid for those traveling the Accra-Cape Coast road.
We pass GomoaDominas, a small rural village. I have to wonder about some of the words I see and how they may have been borrowed from European languages into the various Ghanaian languages. Near AGISS there is a shop sign with “Jehowa” in its name that Jonny confirmed does mean Jehovah, and I have to wonder if “Dominas” here is connected to the Latin “domini.” Rural housing in this village is different—the buildings/houses nearest the road are constructed with adobe style mud walls, and thatched roofs. There are a lot of buildings alI along the way even in the rural areas that are virtually identical in construction to those found in Accra, so I don’t know the significance of the difference in construction here. It may well be a matter of economics—the building materials used in these particular structures must surely be less expensive than concrete, concrete blocks and rebar. I also wonder if the location says something about the status of those who live in these buildings—are the places nearer to the road more or less desirable locations compared to other places within the same village that might be further from the exhaust fumes and the noise of passing traffic? Or perhaps I’m just overthinking all of this?
Laughter and short shrieks come from the students inthe back of the bus as Isaac barrels over the low speed bumps that are placed three or four in a row across the road before any population center or tro-tro pull-off.
Near GomoaAdawukwaa, we cross what at first I take to be a marsh, before I notice a strong current indicating that it is actually a river flowing swiftly and well beyond its banks in flood. The brown water swirls around the trunks, limbs and leaves of vegetation that at other drier times of the year must stand well above the river’s banks. Wide flat areas allow the river to spread between the road and distant hills. Atop the hills, the silhouettes of tall trees with high canopies, some partly obscured by mist or clouds instantly evoke for me images of similar scenes from the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania and the Lutheran Language School outside Morogoro, where I studied Swahili in 1994 during my first stay in Africa..
We just passed another Mormon church, the third or fourth I have seen already today.easily identified by the identical nature of the signs in front of each. Later I see a football (soccer) game in progress, even though it is drizzling slightly. In just the few seconds of the game that I observe as we drive by, I can tell from one or two crisp passes in the few seconds of the game that I see just how much practice/skill/ball control players here must have, playing football and nothing but football the whole year round. Near AGISS and in the adjoining neighborhoods, I have seen numerous games underway in the evenings on almost any open ground, no matter how small or irregularly shaped. Down the hill and across the road at the bottom of the school grounds is what Osman has told me is a community center, with a regulation field, and uniformed teams running and practicing.
We have to move partly into the opposite lane briefly to go around a large truck with barrels piled atop its cargo area that is stopped on the side of the road. Its triangular red warning sign is placed behind it in the road as a warning, but the sign is also preceded by a dozen or so clumps of tall grass, pulled out from the roadside and placed on the pavement every 5 meters or so as further warning to oncoming vehicles.
It’s Saturday, so many towns we pass have markets in full swing. Some of the cooking done by vendors here is in large two-foot diameter metal pots, (even larger ones are used in the AGISS dining hall kitchen) over three raised cones of earth or clay as supports. Outside the towns and villages, there is no shortage of places to by snacks or beverages at the many thatch-roofed stalls along the roadside, which also seem to sell the fresh produce of the region—plantain, cassava, pineapples. At one point a man dangles a kid goat by its hind legs towards passing cars, offering it for sale. We pass the God With Us Carpentry shop, which sells…coffins.
Osman seems to have great confidence in my teaching at this point. He frequently leaves me alone in the classroom for extended periods while he tends to other business. He has mentioned how impressed he is with the lessons we are doing and tells me that there are many positive reports about my teaching from the students, reports which also are making their way to Ms. Akapame, the headmistress. I am glad that my workshop is at the end of my stay because each day’s experiences will allow me to better understandby that time both the constraints and the strengths that shape instruction in Ghanaian classrooms, both of which I will need to take account of if the methods I am presenting are to prove useable.
I get my first glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean off to the left. We pass the ruins of one small castle on a hill overlooking a beach, just before we come into the town of Anomabo. Here Osman gets up to speak to the girls. Anomabo, he tells them, was the site of the largest slave market used for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (in Ghana or as a whole?) He asks them to consider several questions today: Why did the Portuguese begin to explore the West African coast starting in the fifteenth century? If the slave trade began in the 16th century, why did it increase in the 18th century? What were the domestic and international consequencesconsequences of the economic activity that took place here, that is the purchase and sale of human beings? I see some fishing boats pulled up on the beach, and a few large fancy buildings, but for the most part Anomabotoday seems to consist mainly of a dense collection of small dwellings between the highway and the sea, the road through the town dotted with signs for some of the beach resorts that lie between Anomabo and Cape Coast.
Coming finally to Cape Coast itself, we pass around a roundabout where a road branches off towards the ocean and the oldest part of the town where the Cape Coast castle is located. A bulletin board prominently located at the turn off proclaims “Akwaaba,”the Akan for “welcome,” with pictures of President and Mrs. Obama. This is a reminder of the visit they paid to Ghana and the Cape Coast castle in 2009. We continue straight on for a short distance, then turn right (inland), heading towards Kakum National Park, our first destination for the day. We pass through a marketing district and by Wesley Girls Senior High School, where Raphael teaches and where Dave Bosso was last week. The market district sets me to thinking once again about the differences and similarities between economic activities in Ghana and in the U.S. In Ghana, a person can get many of the same types of goods as in the U.S., but in most cases, each must be purchased at a different small store. Here most people are entrepreneurs, the owners of their own businesses, while in the U.S., most are employees in larger establishments that sell a vast variety of goods. Where most people walk instead of drive to take care of most of their business, as they do here, there is little advantage to having a huge store, since the area from which one draws customers is determined not so much by one’s selection of goods as by the distance that people must travel to get there. Most people tend to frequent the businesses that are nearest to them, those within walking distance, for most goods. A couple days ago, in response to my question about why he chooses to shop where he does among the many small stores selling similar goods in his neighborhood, Osman cited cost, and after this the trust that builds up with certain store owners so that he knows he will get good prices all the time. Remember that in Ghana prices in most stores are not posted, so it is important to know the general range of prices for common goods and to know a seller who will be fair even in cases where you do not have good information about the price or quality of an item.
There is a police check point as we leave Cape Coast and set out on the road to Kakum National Park, which a sign states is 24 km. away, but again we are waved on through. This road is much worse repair, and the jolting of the bus increases sharply, as does Isaac’s maneuvering to avoid the large pot holes that are suddenly commonplace. The bumpiness of the road is evidenced clearly by the deterioration in the legibility of my writing as I try to record the passing cultural and natural scenery in my notebook. I glance at my watch and it is now 9:00. Time has passed quickly for me because there has been so much to see.
We pass a short, 100 yard section of chain link fence, the first I have seen anywhere in the country, protecting an area of large bamboo groves. The bamboo grows in clumps of perhaps 20 feet in diameter, with individual canes splaying out to the sides easily 30 feet or more, and intertwining with neighboring clumps so that the entire ground between them is shaded and bare of any other vegetation. The fence fades back into the undergrowth on either end and so seems designed either to be keeping something in or to be keeping something out, most likely the latter. I see bamboo used here for a number of purposes—fencing, wattle/daub walls, and split for still other walls. This is in addition to its use in construction as on the new student housing block near Ayree at school.
Ghana, too has its roadside attractions, in this case one identified by a hand-painted billboard proclaiming the location of the “Monkey Forest Sancturary—Mrs. Dolittle” down a side road. I can’t imagine what that would be like. A smaller, but more official-looking sign identifies the International Stingless Bee Center. We pass through a small village with people dressed in black and red for a funeral.
We arrive at Kakum National Park, where we must all disembark from the bus to be counted for the ₵1 (thecedi is Ghana’s unit of currency, currently worth about 67 U.S. cents) admission charge before re-boarding to drive on the short distance to the parking area for the visitor’s center. Just inside the park gates, I spy a six inch or so little lizard scuttling across the road. I surprised a smaller, two-inch specimen of a similar type on the inside of my bathroom door yesterday, actually putting my fingers on it as I reached around to grasp the door when I opened it in the morning. The ₵1 park entrance fee is very low and would hardly serve to pay for the salaries of the numerous park personnel I see as we get off the bus, or for the maintenance on the several very large and quite nice structures that we walk towards. Nor does it have to cover these costs. These are probably met many times over each day by the fees collected from visitors coming to enjoy Kakum’s signature attraction—the canopy walk. The price of the walk for our students is ₵5 each, but for foreign tourists this jumps to ₵35 (or roughly $25), which is a good bit by any standard. However, as a teacher for AGISS, and thus an honorary Ghanaian, my fee is slashed to ₵15.
We are issued neck badges, as are the students from another school group that precedes us. Our guide is Samuel Osowu, whom I later learn has worked at the park for 10 years. He tells us that the entry area is about 200 feet above sea level and that this area of the park was previously farmed so that the vegetation we see has only grown up in the last 23 years since the park acquired the land. Although the park and adjoining reserves cover several hundred square kilometers, the key part of the park is the 363 acres of protected old growth forest, to which the park would like to add. Samuel describes the forest as both a supermarket and a pharmacy, noting however that because many people don’t know all these uses, they may cut down the plants and kill the animals, thus wasting these potential, if as yet unknown resources. He cites the ways that bamboo from the region is cut heavily for uses ranging from cups to matting as an example of such destruction, and indeed, on our way to the park, I had seen what I now realize to be the burned stumps of several stands of bamboo in a recently cleared field along the road.
A student asks what animals are found in the forest, and Samuel lists leopard, elephant, antelope, bongo, birds, butterflies, monkeys and snakes. He also notes that many of these animals are nocturnal and that our best chance to see any animals comes from walking quietly (there’s not much chance of that, I think, with the large group that we have here). He says that there are no lions in this forest, at which several of our girls cross themselves. We begin walking, passing from the area of the visitors’ center into the start of the forest itself, hiking along a path that quickly turns into a climb up a fairly steep hillside. Some of the girls are soon huffing and puffing as we climb, and I laugh and tease them as I pass.
Almost immediately upon entering the forest, one’s senses of smell and hearing are affected. The air has arich, organic, clean scent after the diesel fumes and smoke of Accra. Sounds are deadened, and as I strain my ears for any noises that are not from our group or of the forest itself, at best I can detect a distant saw or motor of some sort, perhaps just imagined. At any rate, I am not accustomed to such an absence of human-produced sounds and the relative silence is striking. Vision is also affected as the dappled light making its way to the forest floor seems to highlight the objects that it falls on and drop the surrounding areas into even darker shadow. I slowlyfall to the rear of our group and begin trailing some distance behind, the better to be able to peer about and take some pictures—a grove of the massive 3-4 inch diameter bamboo like that I had seen from the bus earlier, the buttressed bases of massive trees with their canopy foliage obscured by the other lower plants of the forest’s understory, a row of marching ants on the ground, painted signs illustrating and identifying some of the forest’s unseen animal species.
As the climb levels off, Samuel gathers us around to tell more about the forest and about the canopy walk in particular. This forest used to stretch across West Africa, but its extent is now much reduced due to human activity. Active work in developing this park began in 1989 with a collaboration between the Ghanaian government and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that attempted to stop people from coming into the forest to hunt or to cut down trees for timber or to clear land for farming. Samuel confirmed later that this remains a problem today, though much reduced and constantly combated by the park’s rangers.
The canopy walk was initially the idea of an American researcher studying the park’s butterflies. The walk, constructed over a six-month period and opened in 1995, consists of a 350 meter long wood and rope pathway that is suspended by cables strung between seven towering trees. Viewing platforms built around the tree trunks serve as transit points between the different sections of the walk. From the start of the walkway, the ground drops steeply away so that we soon found ourselves some 40 meters above the ground, with the unique perspective of looking down upon, and out across the forest. The walkways are made up of a series of foot wide boards laid end-to-end lengthwise across a rope base, with webbed rope sides rising in a “V” to about four feet high as handrails, the whole suspended in a gentle arc from the wire cables that are anchored to the trees. The walkway doesn’t seem to sway at all, but it does bounce gently under the combined weight of the visitors. Even so, I found that by stepping carefully and slowly (and why would I want to rush?), I could easily maintain my balance and walk for the most part without even needing to hold onto the sides.
The view is spectacular. The ground continues to fall away towards the visitor center and beyond, where it is easy to discern areas that have previously been cut or are still now being farmed by the sharp drop off in the height of the vegetation. The large trees to which the walkway is anchored rise dramatically, their perfectly straight round white trunks still measuring well over a meter in diameter at the platform height of 40 meters, and continuing to rise above the platforms in the same manner for some distance before spreading their branches and topping out their canopy at over 70 meters. The white trunks of these giants stand out sharply against the verdant greens of the leaves of other shorter species of trees, both below us, and rising up the adjacent hill sides. The shapes of these trees are sharply different from the familiar round and spreading oaks, maples and hickories of home, and to me, as when I saw some of them first silhouetted against the hills during the bus ride, these shapes are one of the memorable symbols of Africa.
It is great fun to watch the others in our group as they traverse the sections of the walk ahead of me. Some of the students are bold and move determinedly from one platform to the next. A couple require some coaxing at the start, but Samuel is very good at this, doubtless having had plenty of experience with hesitant visitors, and I am proud to say that every one of the students gets out onto the walkway. In one place, as I step down from a platform onto the walkway the board bounces back up and knocks hard against the platform’s underside, startling the girls already moving across this section ahead of me, but for the most part even those who were moving very slowly at the outset become increasingly confident as they go on.
At the end of the walk there is an abundance of nervous energy among the girls of the kind of the kind that comes from having done something new and exciting, and this energy spends itself in a frenzy of picture-taking, frequently with me at the center of the activity. Coming across the last section, I cannot even get off the walkway for several minutes for all the girls who want to hop back onto the last stretch and have their pictures taken with me. I may well be the most photographed person in Ghana today, but I am enjoying sharing in this experience with all of my students. Eventually we have to halt the photographic orgy as Samuel needs to shepherd us back down the hill.
Walking back, I find myself again at the rear, this time with Samuel, and so am able to get him to tell me some more about the forest as we walk. I was not sure if Kakum was a true rainforest, but he confirms that it is, even if it does not get quite as much rain as the 300 inches or more that falls in some areas further to the west in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He shows me one massive rotting stump of a buttress, still seven or eight feet tall more than seventy years after the tree fell, and with a new tree of a different species, over a foot in diameter, growing from its remaining trunk cavity. Nearby is a saw pit, partly filled with water, which had been dug beneath the fallen trunk of the first tree to allow men with massive two person handsaws to cut it up in order to cart it away. Now trees that fall are allowed remain in the forest to continue the nutrient cycle. From the walkway, I had seen the swath of vegetation flattened by one such fallen tree, allowing light down into the understory and as a result stimulating the more rapid growth of what tend to otherwise be sunlight-starved and consequently very slow-growing species.
In as forest such as this, sunlight is the rarest and most valuable commodity for growing plants. There is rainfall aplenty, but one consequence of so much water is that minerals in the soil tend to leach out quickly. This seems somewhat incongruous given the lush vegetation here—over 200 different species per hectare in some areas of Kakum—but the soil is quite thin. Much of the organic matter is quickly recycled once it falls to the ground—many plants have great networks of roots very close to the surface of the soil in order to capture such nutrients. This is part of what gives rise to the large buttresses that jut out from the bases of the tallest species of trees—rising to six or eight or more feet from the ground and extending out from the trunk in some cases for a dozen feet or more. The other function of the buttresses is to help keep these giants upright, given that they lack deep taproots to keep them anchored in the earth.
Coming down the hill, some of the girls have congregated midway at a refreshment spot. A couple tell me that I should try the palm wine, and figuring that this is as good a place as any to do so, I buy a small Volt water bottle full. The palm wine has a somewhat sour taste to it, different but not unpleasant. Heading down the rest of the way with the students, we pass a good sized group of what look and sound like Americans, most decked out in their “trekking clothes,” as I might call them. Several give me a look, and I cannot help but wonder what they make of me, pony-tailed Caucasian that I am, but wearing a shirt that matches those worn by and who is walking along with a group of Ghanaian schoolgirls.
Back down at the Visitors’ Center, the girls eat their lunches near the bus and scan the souvenir shop. I also briefly browse for gifts, but knowing that everything is likely to be much more expensive here where so many tourists come, and having this confirmed by a couple of the girls, I opt to leave my buying for another day and join Osman and Mr. Lahfor lunch at one of the tables under the large open pavilion housing the park’s restaurant. We also eat boxed meals prepared by the school’s kitchen staff, and I finish most of my palm wine. Osman informs me during lunch that the heads of the other departments at AGISS will be attending my workshop on Friday, along with the teachers of the various Social Science classes. One of these is Mr. Lah, Osman’s good friend as well as colleague, who is the head of the Science Department, and whom Osman tells me at lunch has applied for next year’s TEA program. He has already passed all the preliminary stages on the Ghanaian end, which is quite an accomplishment, and I congratulate him. We talk about Osman’s experiences in the United States and what things might like for Mr. Lah if he is accepted into the program, before I excuse myself to go take a quick look at the museum/interpretive center. The exhibits are very well done and reflect a clear message of conservation and ecological responsibility. Several of the students are also wandering through the museum. Soon, however, it is time to head to the parking lot, which has filled up with a number of other school and tour buses, load ourselves back on to the AGISS bus, and head on to our next destination, Elmina castle.
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