Hello everyone,
It’s just after 9 PM Sunday evening and I am settled into the guest quarters at AGISS (Accra Girls Senior High School), a wide building with a long covered porch across the front, from which doors lead into the sitting room, dining room, kitchen, toilet and shower room. With the exception of the 10 by 12 sitting room that is connected to a similarly sized bedroom, none of the rooms is connected to each other—each is entered from a door on the porch. Osman, my host teacher here, and Ms. Akopolo, the head house mistress who is in charge of overseeing the residence blocks for the 600 or so boarding students, and who lives in the house just across the yard from my front porch, have both made sure that I have some food and everything else I should need to be comfortable in my rooms.
On my flight from Washington to Accra, I sat next to an interesting Ghanaian—a pharmacist named Ernest who has branched out into wholesale pharmaceutical sales, importing car parts and vehicles to resell (he was coming back from Virginia where he has a brother, but where he’d also purchased and had shipped four shipping containers of luxury cars and SUVs), and importing dog food. He told me that dogs have just become popular here in the last few years, largely to provide alerts against intruders, which is why he purchased his. He was having problems finding food for them, though, and realized that other people were probably having the same problem, so he began shipping containers of dog food here. He’s quite the entrepreneur, and comes from a very well-accomplished family in Kumasi, where I’m heading in my free time. He invited me to get in touch with him while I am there.
I am very happy to be back in Africa, and have been grinning from ear to ear ever since I landed—I don’t expect that will wear off soon, either. Osman and Jonny, one of the math teachers here at AGISS where I’ll be teaching, picked me up from the airport, which is quite near to the school. After giving me a chance to drop off my bags, they took me out to eat. How funny—the name of the place was Southern Fried Chicken, and it had a Mississippi riverboat as part of its logo. I laughed when I saw the sign and had to explain to them how important riverboats of this kind had been in St. Louis history. The name of the restaurant was a bit of a misnomer, though—they did have chicken, but also a bit of just about everything else—pizza and pasta, Indian curries, Lebanese food, Chinese, hamburgers. I was a little disappointed walking in because I’d mentioned to Osman how much I was looking forward to eating Ghanaian food. I needn’t have worried though because they had that, too. I had red-red, a mix of beans (actually what we’d probably call black-eyed peas, though probably cowpeas which are similar and come from West Africa) with onions, tomatoes, spices and chiles, along with fried plantains (much sweeter than on the rare occasions we’ve had them in St. Louis, where they arrive green and relatively tasteless) and fish. I was reminded very quickly that when one orders fish in an African restaurant that is near the coast, that is what one gets… a fish, or at least in this case, a half one. The real thing here was much tastier than the fish in the so-called “fish and chips” that I ate at one of the airport restaurants in Washington yesterday during my five hour layover.
To drink, I had to try Malta Guiness. Malta is a non-alcoholic sweetened malt beverage that I’d read about in Wife of the Gods, a Ghanaian detective novel that I read yesterday, starting on the flight from St. Louis to Washington, and finishing during my layover. Like the detective novels of Qiu Xialong that I read before going to China in 2005, it gave a nice taste of the flavor of a lot of different aspects of Ghanaian life, both rural and urban, traditional and contemporary. Malta Guiness is the favorite beverage of the main character, Darko Dawson. I’d recommend it as an entertaining book for anyone interested, but mine will probably not make it back to St. Louis as I think I’ll donate it to the library here at AGISS, instead. That’s one more way to lighten up my bags to make way for other things on the trip home.
Speaking of luggage, I was fortunate that United’s international flights to Africa allow passengers to take two free checked bags. If I’d have been going to Europe or Latin America, I’d have had to pay for the second bag, which I’d have been willing to do since it was full of materials for the school here, but I was happy to save the money. I tipped the scales at 53.5 and 55 pounds for my two pieces of checked luggage upon arrival at the ticket counter in St. Louis, surpassing the 50 pound limit on both counts. That required a little quick rearranging, with some of my lesson and workshop papers going into my backpack to carry on and a little redistribution of the rest. That still left me a little over, so a few of the donated girls’ magazines didn’t make the cut or the trip to Ghana.
It’s Sunday, so I noticed right away that the traffic on the way from the airport to the school was lighter than I expected. Jonny also mentioned that more shops are also closed today than will be during the week. Despite this, there is a sense of vibrant, if very small scale economic exchange all over the place. The neighborhood right around the school is called Maloba, but it is known informally as Zongo, which refers to the fact that it is home to a lot of people who have migrated to Accra from the northern regions of Ghana. Osman lives in the neighborhood, along with his wife and daughter, who just returned to Accra after living with Osman’s family in the north for a number of months following the birth. Zongo, which has expanded greatly over the past decade, is a maze of streets lined with small shops and market stalls, street vendors and hawkers, and portable sellers of everything imaginable. The narrow streets are full of pedestrians, with cars passing through in both directions, often just squeezing past the walkers with the drivers pulling over just at the last minute when a vehicle from the other direction has narrowly beat them to a chokepoint in the road that is only wide enough for one vehicle to pass at a time.
We stopped by briefly at Osman’s house, meeting a number of his neighbors on the short but winding walk through the narrow alleys and small courtyard leading to his home. All were very friendly and welcoming when I was introduced, as has been everyone here at the school. There are a lot of people crammed into very small spaces in Zongo. Even on a slow day like today there was a lot of activity—everybody is out—with half, it seemed trying to sell something to the other half who were looking to buy. A number of the shops are so small that much of the business actually gets conducted out front in the street, or at least on the narrow space that in some places passes for sidewalk—hair braiding, cooking spitted meat on a grill, haggling over prices.
The activity on the street extends to praying. Many of the residents of Zongo are Muslims (the northern region of Ghana from which many come is much more heavily Muslim than the south, reflecting the spread of Islam southward across the Sahara). One of the five daily prayer times occurred as we were driving around, and I saw a small group line up by twos in an open space in front of one of the shops. Facing towards Mecca, they knelt and began to pray. I had seen this as well at afternoon prayer time as we were leaving the airport. As AGISS sits on a hillside overlooking much of Zongo, the minarets of some of the neighborhoods mosques are easily visible, and when it is prayer time, the calls to prayer can be heard from half a dozen different locations below. Here, azan is the name for the person who elsewhere, and in my teaching is called the muezzin, the mosque official who gives the call to prayer five times a day, broadcast over speakers mounted in the minarets.
AGISS includes both Christian and Muslim students. As today is Sunday, the Christian girls had an evening prayer service. Actually, it was more like a late afternoon service—here close to the equator, the length of the days and nights varies far less than in higher latitudes like St. Louis. It was full dark here by 6:30, a real change from St. Louis, where at this time of year, the days are approaching their longest and it is light until after 9 PM. Another difference here is that it grows dark very quickly—without the long dusk and gloaming of more northerly locations. Back to the service…this consisted of quite a bit of singing, some of which I could hear parts of while Osman and Jonny were giving me a tour of the school grounds. The service was quite lengthy, extending through my tour, still going on after we’d returned from our second shopping run through Zongo, and going on without interruption even through a twenty minute power outage. The latter, which came just as I began to unpack my luggage, had Osman and Jonny returning to bring me a battery lantern, though I was doing fine after managing to locate my small flashlight. Everyone is quite concerned that I am comfortable—Ms. Akapame, the headmistress, had two of the workers at the school deliver a classroom-sized (three foot diameter!) standing fan for me to use in my sitting room. I haven’t plugged it in yet—I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll create a mini-cyclone out of all the neat stacks of papers and maps that I’ve pulled out and organized to have ready for my classes and workshop.
On the subject of storms, I’ve already had a couple of people ask me about the Joplin tornado when they have heard me say I am from St. Louis. One, the son of the headmistress, actually has a friend who attended Webster University in St. Louis. It is quite amazing how news travels in today’s interconnected world. You can’t go 100 meters in the areas I’ve been so far, it seems, without coming across a shop or vendor selling cell phones, or SIM chips for phones (all of which have to be officially registered with the government according to a new law that goes into effect this month). Osman and Jonny suggested that the easiest way for me to keep in touch with home will be to buy a SIM chip and phone credits to use on an extra phone that they’re going to loan me. As I said, they’ve been doing everything possible to help me get set to make the most of my time here.
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