Tema and Ada Foah

I hadn’t given the sun much thought until Saturday morning. It is obviously always there, even when it’s hidden by big black rainclouds. The high temperatures make it hard to forget. When you talk to Ghanaians in bright sunshine they will very sensibly steer you into a shady spot. Other than that I hadn’t considered it further. I was in Tema, Ghana’s main port on Saturday morning. There is nothing to see and no real town centre. I was between tro tros and the only thing worth looking at was the ‘Presbyterian Church on the Greenwich Meridian’. The church had a guard’s booth, which I thought was a little unusual. The church was modern and nothing special. I walked through the gate and smiled at the guard. He asked me my business. I said I just wanted to look at the church. He said there was a charge and produced a neatly ruled hard back exercise book with a list of charges in the front. After the concessions there was a one Ghana Cedi charge for adults, a two Ghana Cedi charge for foreigners and a five cedi charge for ‘rich persons’. I tried my usual line that I was a volunteer, resident in Ghana but this did not wash. I enquired whether I might fall into the category of ‘rich person’. The guard looked me up and down and thought I might. I assured him I wasn’t and I reluctantly settled on being a non-rich foreigner. I thought for the money the guard might act as guide but once the fee was fixed he lost interest in me. The Meridian is marked by a line in the grass along the church’s boundary wall with a couple of curious posts at either end. A little south of here it vanishes into the Gulf of Guinea and presumably it does not resurface until Antarctica. While thinking about this I realised that the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day had just passed and that the sun must just be returning south from the Tropic of Cancer some 18 degrees or so north of my current location. Sure enough the sun was to the north of me, as it had been since April. I was just used to the sun always being in the southern sky. I had registered when I arrived in Ghana last September that the sun was very high in the sky and in the middle of the day there were virtually no shadows at all but that was my last thought on the subject.

Leaving Tema, I spent the next couple of days in Ada Foah a small town in the Eastern Hemisphere on the west bank of the River Volta just north of its estuary. The town fits neatly between the river and the ocean. On the ocean side stands a distinctive Presbyterian church. Saturday was obviously grounds tidying day. There were a good number of parishioners at work with tools and flowers. Some of the men were busy scything the long grass with their machetes. Still nearer the sea was a tiny British cemetery, totally forgotten, many of the graves were almost completely destroyed either by vandals or the waves. I could only make out one name – Captain A. Cooper, died April 11th 1926, aged 50 years. West of the town, the strip of land gets gradually narrower. There is a small fishing village which I visited after the church. It is punctuated by small lagoons crossed by wooden bridges. In one, boys were punting around dropping, lobster pots for crabs (crab pots?). It was a peaceful spot. I was greeted politely by everybody and occasionally steered back towards the correct route through the houses. I was invariably asked where I was going, although heading towards the headland there was very little choice in the matter. There were young men mending nets, ferrymen negotiating the estuary with boatloads of passengers, one man was weaving rushes into wall panels and, as usual, children were everywhere, many of whom were inclined to follow me around. Those that saw my camera demanded: ‘picture, picture!’. Eventually you relent, take the picture, show it to them and they all get tremendously excited. The pictures are usually good but it doesn’t seem quite right to take them. I did, however, say a firm no to the small boy who wanted a picture despite the fact that he was not wearing a stitch of clothing.

I spent much of the rest of Saturday at a very pleasant small hotel overlooking the river. I enjoyed beef in red wine sauce with chips and a couple of beers at a leisurely pace and watched the assorted vessels pass by.

Highlight of my VSO experience?

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the passing of Ghana's Disability Act. The Ghana Federation of the Disabled held an event in Accra to highlight the event. VSO supports GFD with volunteers and a number of us were drafted in to help with proceedings.

Guest speakers included the minister responsible for the act and senior representatives of the main disabled people's organisations in Ghana. There were two songs performed by a deaf school choir. The newly crowned 'Ghana's Most Beautiful' was also there. She intends to devote part of her year to helping people with disabilities and she outlined her plans. Hopefully she won't have to spend too much of the year having to stand next to tall obrunis . To the left is Mboje, VSO volunteer with GFD.

"She is not correct"

Many Ghanaians assume that all obrunis are wealthy and in most cases, relatively speaking, we are. The ex-pat obrunis are in general far wealthier than the average VSO volunteer. This perception means that I am regularly asked for money. The kids who having politely greeted me or just shouted ‘obruni, give me thousand’, are not a problem. They can be dealt with easily with a look of mock surprise and indignation. They never persist and know that they are just trying their luck. Obrunis in Koforidua are not that common so they have to make the most of any opportunity. When I go away for a few days there are the people who say, ‘so what did you bring me from Tamale/Accra/UK?’ In these cases I am just apologetic and say I didn’t bring anything for them.

There are other requests which are harder to deal with and before I start on this I have to say I totally understand why people ask and I do not blame them for doing so. Ghana is a developing country and obviously the majority of people have very little. I very rarely do give away money, partly because if word gets around I would be inundated with requests and partly because I know that if I agree to give every time I am asked I would have nothing left. I am left trying to salve my conscious with the thought that theoretically my work here is donation enough.
With the people I don’t know, I have no way of telling how genuine the need is but others are all too apparent and very sad. There was the boy whose flip flop had broken and needed a small amount of cash for new ones. Footwear is a good indicator of relative wealth and is something of status symbol. At work, my colleagues and I wear shoes. Sandals are worn by some and the poorer people wear cheap imported flip flops. The very poorest, of course, walk bare foot.
This week I was buying porridge oats and jam at Mobil 2, neither commodity bought by the average Ghanaian and probably regarded as luxury items. I was approached in the entrance to the shop by a young lady. She asked if I would buy an ice cream she could take back to her young child. This would entertain the child while she did some household chores. She then decided to introduce me to some of the goods on sale in the store pointing out that there were products designed to be convenient and nutritious, effectively wonders of the modern age. She spoke calmly in good English. When she left the shop, the assistants noted that I had clearly made a new friend and said that the lady was ‘not correct’. This is an expression I hear from time to time. There are many expressions in Ghanaian English which have different meanings to other variations of the language. I have not quite decided whether ‘not correct’ in this context meant that the lady’s behaviour was inappropriate, ie that she should not have been begging or that she was, to use another euphemism, ‘not right in the head’.

Another thing which was not correct this week was the offer I was made on Friday morning. A group of men sitting just off my road to work beckoned me over. They pulled back a sheet to reveal two very scruffy, but decidedly dead cats. Both had blood stains on their necks. I know that cat is eaten here and regarded by some as something of a delicacy. Later, when I mentioned my encounter at work, I was told this was not correct. This was not because I was offered cat but because you should never take a cat which is already dead or where the means of death is even slightly ambiguous. The offer was also rather ironic. For the past three weeks I have been cat sitting for one of the other volunteers. As I write this there are two young tortoiseshell cats peacefully sleeping within a foot of my lap top. They don’t like leaving the house and in the circumstances this is probably just as well.

I have visited Wli Falls once (see earlier item). I buy the Daily Graphic maybe twice a week. What are chances then of opening Saturday's paper and seeing that the Graphic took a picture on the day I visited and that I would (just) be visible in it? 1. is the centre page spread. 2. is a detail of the picture. 3. is a picture I took just before the Graphic and 4. shows me at the falls wearing the purple t-shirt. Click on the picture to open a larger version.

Street Food

The tiny plot of land beyond my garden wall just appeared to be open wasteland. Every now and then a herd of cows would briefly graze there and move on. A couple of months ago, the scrub was burnt bringing flames rather close to the wall. I was, therefore, rather surprised to find when I returned to Koforidua, after a few days away, that a crop of corn taller than me had appeared there. This was, if nothing else, testament to the fertile soils of Ghana’s forest belt. The cobs are almost ready to harvest. They will then be sold by street vendors, adding to the amazing variety of snack food and drinks which are available in Koforidua throughout the day. Some vendors have fixed spots others keep on the move selling their wares from bowls or glass cabinets carried on their heads. Tro tro stations are popular pitches and the vendors will drift from one tro to the next, paying particular attention to the ones about to depart.

The corn is sold in two variations and the going rate for a cob is ten pesewas. Boiled until tender, the seller will then peel back the skin so the purchaser can inspect the corn before agreeing to buy. She completes the peel and rinses it in water before handing it over. The alternative is grilled on a brazier. Plantain is also sold, grilled in chunks of different sizes and invariably accompanied by a tiny polythene bag of warm groundnuts. The coconut sellers spend their time trimming as much of the unnecessary material away from the nut with machetes before finally removing the top when a sale is made. Once you have drunk the milk you pass the shell back, the seller then cracks it open. He then either passes back the fragments, with a scoop to remove the tender white flesh or he removes the flesh himself and gives you the pieces in a bag. The orange sellers make their preparations by deeply scoring the tough skin of the oranges. This makes them much more pliable. When you buy one you just make a hole at the top of the orange and you can just suck and squeeze out the contents, making no sticky mess. Yam is sold in pieces deep fried and sometimes with grilled, smoked fish. Not fish and chips as I know them but bearing some similarities.

Drinks are usually sold in clear polythene bags, filled on the spot with tea, coffee, hot chocolate, porridge and so on and then tied up. To drink, you bite off the corner and suck out the contents with care. Ice water is sold in the same way but the safer, option ‘pure water’ is filtered and sold in sealed square plastic bags called ‘sachets’. (Ghanaians pronounce the ‘t’ in sachet. It was quite strange in Burkina Faso where the pronunciation was the more familiar French ‘t’-less version). The sachets can be bought individually or in fragile sacks.

‘Rich cake’ is a fairly dry and relatively expensive plain cake which is a cut in a variety of ways, often heart shaped. Better value are the round, doughnut like cakes, which are deep dried in oil. Very occasionally I buy these from a lady with a stall near the ministries who fries them on the spot. I would buy more, but I rarely manage to find her there.

The spot at my garden gate, other than offering bottled lager, Guinness and minerals is also home to a French speaking kebab seller. Over a barbeque made from an old car wheel, and in common with 99 % of kebab sellers all over Ghana, he grills two varieties of kebab. There is the skewer with alternating brown meat (goat or beef) and onion, which is then dipped in very hot spices. Then there is the skewer with the sliced pink sausage. The sausage is very pink indeed. The packs in Intermart say they are beef. The consistency is good, with no lumps of fat, gristle or other unidentifiable matter, but I would not like to hazard a guess as to what is actually in them.

A new addition to the spot is an egg and bread stall. Eggs fried into omelette with a little onion, tomato and maybe salad (even bits of corned beef and fish) are sold in hunks of tea bread.

An interesting combination is provided by the Fan Ice seller. These guys ply there trade from hand carts. The carts have insulated compartments for ice creams and on top of these will be a glass box with warm meat pies. I did once see a man buy something from each compartment. You can always tell if there is a Fan Ice seller in the vicinity by the distinctive sound of the horn he blows.

My favourite is cosay (sorry, I’m not sure of the spelling). It’s a burger shaped disc made from deep fried spicy bean paste. In Koforidua it is served in a long tea bread roll. My enjoyment of this certainly amuses by colleagues.

This is not an exhaustive list of Ghanaian street food. It is possibly to buy full blown meals, stews which you take home in your own bowl or pan or in a plastic bag. Some dishes come wrapped in leaves. What this does demonstrate is that, if you have the money, it is difficult to starve here.