Traffic patterns

That amazing semi-public semi-private transportation provided by the ubiquitous tro tros never cease to amaze. They reflect the chaotic driving of Ghana better than anything.

They drive down the narrow shoulder, honking madly. They are the first to enter the crazy dance that occurs at intersections. Four-way stops are for amateurs. Here everyone rushes into the intersection, honking their horns. Then each driver noses their vehicle around and tries to intimidate the other drivers to give way and somehow or other everyone manages to make it through.

Tro tro drivers are by far the most aggressive drivers, followed by taxis and then by anyone with an SUV. What amazes me is the fearlessness of civilian drivers with gleaming new Mercedes or Camrays. These cars rarely have a mark on them but are right in there, metaphorically elbowing their way through the traffic. Some, however, definitely provide a visual lesson on the perils of the road. 

One difference in the tro tros since 2010 is the very worst of them, those held together with masking tape and bobby pins, appear to have disintegrated or been consigned to a tro tro graveyard (sorry, the taxi was driving too quickly for a picture). They have been replaced by almost respectable vans.

The slogans painted on the back windows give pause. There are the usual biblical references to a chapter and verse of a Psalm. Many of the slogans strike me as a little militant. Among the “God is Love” and “Live in His Peace”, are “Angels on Guard” and “God Fights for Us”, although these are counteracted by “No Weapon”.  Most interesting, perhaps, are “Fine Boy” and “Good Husband.” It is unclear whether this is the driver’s aspiration or an advertisement for a wife. It seems scarcely credible that it is his wife’s endorsement. 

Incidentally, it appears that there are no female taxi or tro tro drivers in all of Ghana, although a lot of the SUVs are piloted by women.

There is a new fleet of tro tros as well. At first, it seemed that the same black vehicle was here and there and everywhere but then matching white ones appeared indicating this must be a single fleet, united in their slogan: Allahu Akbar, a sign of how much more visible the Muslim community is in Accra.

One final note is the occasional tro tro or taxi that deviates from the usual slogans. Occasionally there is one with a football slogan or a decal of the beloved Black Stars, Ghana’s football (soccer) team. One tro tro had a clenched black fist emerging from the Ghanaian flag. Most unusually, are the taxis and tro tros that do not signal their affiliations and beliefs and have clean, blank back windows. These are the hardest to read.

The frightening truth of being a Ghanaian woman

The frightening truth of being a Ghanaian woman

Or a woman anywhere in the developing world for that matter. Today my office mate was talking about doctors and medical care in Ghana. He and his family live in the North Eastern Region and are a three hour drive from a hospital and anything like formal healthcare… Except his story makes you wonder. His wife was in labour 4 days and it was clear that there was a serious problem. The attending doctor (I don’t know if he was a specialist of any kind but it seems not) refused to call in the surgeon to do a Caesarian. The child ended up dying in utero and only then did they perform a Caesarian section to remove the little corpse. Then, to add insult to injury, the grieving parents were expected by custom to provide a “gift” to the physician that was responsible for this untold suffering. This is the story of educated people (lawyer and teacher) with the financial means to pay for health care.

The paper made much recently, of the Minister of Health who has agreed to provide funding for 100 women to have their fistulas repaired. A hundred women, who suffer from the unnecessary ripping and tearing that is too frequently the result of giving birth without appropriate healthcare. I’m not being critical of traditional midwifery here. There are hundreds of villages without midwives either, especially in the north of Ghana. And the results for women who are maimed in childbirth? Not sympathy. Rather they are frequently ostracized  by neighbours and driven out of their homes but relatives revolted by their oozing, stinking bodies.

Any wonder there is a television show to inform women that they don’t have to die in childbirth? Too bad it isn’t available in the north where the majority of deaths and fistulas from unattended births occur. 

From Road to Infrastructure

What a difference a couple of years can make. When I first came to Accra in 2010, I regularly travelled through a highway construction zone. It was a fascinating mess. Huge piles of red dirt, scaffolding made from wood, construction workers wandering up and down without safety harnesses, the only concession to the dangers of such work being the occasional hard hat. This was a highway to nowhere that abruptly stopped.

But there was, towering over the construction site, an enormous billboard acknowledging the wonderful US Millennium Challenge Fund that was helping to pay for the highway construction. Last year, I passed through the same intersection, with the construction finished and the highway filled with hurtling traffic and honking horns. Still towering over was the Millennium Challenge sign.

Today, on the way to work, crossing that very intersection, lo and behold, there was the sign, this time just a hulking empty skeleton of a billboard, providing the ghost of a memory of previous gratitude, while oblivious drivers speed off in all directions. But…  maybe memory and gratitude are more enduring and just a little twisted. Suddenly, I noticed another sign, small, at the side of the highway, informing me that this is now the George Walker Bush Motorway. 

So, from the highway to nowhere in 2010, the Millennium debt is now paid in perpetuity. George Walker Bush Motorway.

Random Accra

My new roommate. I’ll say no more.

Don’t let them get wind of this in Canada

Ladies Kitchen Insurance. That’s right. Apparently there are a host of special hazards and accidents in Ghanaian kitchens but no fear. Ladies Kitchen Insurance can be bundled with home and auto. It is so indicative of the gendered nature of household labour here.

Except at Suma Court where we have a new chef. An excellent man from Burkina Faso who only speaks French. I knew all that time pouring over the menus and snooty French restaurants would come in handy. I am hoping for crème caramel again! An unexpected treat!

Sartorial Hawker

Seen on the road, and me without my camera …. An elegant young man, sunglasses, gleaming white shirt, pinstriped pants and natty, astonishingly bright chartreuse bowtie. What was he selling? He was holding three or four pairs of polished and gleaming men’s dress shoes. More remarkable is that fact that his own dress shoes were also gleaming in defiance of Accra’s ubiquitous red dust.

This young hawker stands in contrast to another, a middle aged woman walking with a red plastic laundry basket on her head. The basket was over flowing with brassieres, hanging from the sides, threatening to tumble from the basket: red lace, utilitarian white, sexy black, purple with astonishing padding, bras of all shapes and sizes…. But how you get a good fit at the intersection is beyond me….. and the driver won’t engage in conversation so it must be a little risqué.

Signs of the times

They ride ponies, too! As an addendum to Animals of Accra, another creature to add to the list, although not personally sighted, must be the polo pony

…. unless I am misled by the sign for the Accra Polo Club. Incidentally, this has surpassed the “Golfers Crossing” sign in Achimota Forest as the most incongruous site in Accra in my estimation.

And then try this do not trespass … a little different from our

Canadian custom of closing the campus roads one day a year!

Finally, there is the sign that captures the historian’s eye. The intersection of three eras captured on one traffic sign: colonial; traditional and generic modern.

This little piggie goes to market

So immediately upon lamenting the absence of a pig sighting, what is ahead of us in the traffic but a pickup truck (they ride lower that ours and are not nearly as intrusive on the road as a result) stuffed full of half a dozen pigs clearly on their last journey. These were not happy pigs. There was one teenage boy in the back with trying to keep them all lying down but really, six swine against one boy… you know the rest.

The pigs weren’t tied down or on leashes or in cages or anything like that. He just had to keep grabbing whichever one was trying to make a run for it and stuff it back into the truck. It was like a life size game of wack-a-mole with a lot more wriggling and a lot more screaming and better odds for the wackees. I do mean screaming:  not the boy but the pigs. I had never heard a sound like really unhappy pigs being led to slaughter. 

Animals of Accra

Animals are found everywhere in the heart of this busy city; packed in side by side with shelters of varying sturdiness, commercial stalls, chop bars selling meals, often cooked over a wood fire by the side of the road, there are animals. On my way to work there are two places where enormous majestic cattle forage by the side of the road or wander along in search of better (I cannot say greener in this red landscape) pastures. These aren’t nice little Jersey dairy cows but rather big African cattle with long horns, wandering at will, with no apparent keepers. They just know where they are going and how to get there.

Goats roam at will as well, nibbling grass by the roadsides or running into the fields and woods that crop up now and then. They travel in small little groups of three or four nannies, occasionally with a little kid.

The billie goats are in evidence nowhere. Clearly, they are deemed too cantankerous to roam through the markets and along the sidewalks without supervision.

Chickens are definitely free range and literally everywhere: mother hens with broods of chicks scratching around for bits and pieces of grain by the chop bars. Sometimes there are two or three hens, scrawny and scraggy, keeping each other company as they dart back and forth through the traffic, proving Darwinianism is at work in Accra. Most chickens and roosters are thin, with saggy feathers, clearly not the best of foragers. Some, however, like the ones that live across the street, are lush with shiny plummage. The rooster has a grand cockscomb and tail feathers and chases the girls all over like a randy bachelor. Meanwhile, the girls seek refuge in our compound, coming across the street to forage in peace. Occasionally, however, they are too bold and self-assured and they round the corner into the territory of the dogs that bark and chase, and sometimes catch one of them. But the survivors keep coming back utterly unperturbed.

Unlike the animals that run free, I saw bunnies in corrals, clearly well cared for because they ran straight to

the fence expecting a treat or a meal. They, alas, like all animals here, are not family pets but rather will eventually end up as rabbit stew.

No sightings of pigs, although I’m told that people do raise them in the city. We drove past a sign for a pig farm one day on the way to work but there was no evidence of swine of any age, shape or size.

This little lizard, well, not actually so little, lives in the courtyard among the plants and trees that provide a little shade. It is curious and comes remarkable close if one is quiet and still. 

There are other little lizards scampering here and there – the size of domestic chameleons. Sometimes I see them in my room but they scurry off. I don’t mind too much because they catch mosquitos, which I don’t find much of a problem, perhaps because of these little reptilian friends.

Dogs are everywhere in evidence though none will make it into the Westminster Dog Show. They tend to wander at will like all the other animals of Accra, which is curious because there are always one or two street hawkers with arms full of leashes and dog collars. Once there was a man walking what looked to be a pit bull on a leash along the road. And there are frequently cages of puppies for sale along the cool shady section of the road that goes through Achimota Forest, the largest greenspace in Accra. We have two dogs at Suma Court: Jeep and Spike.

Jeep

Spike

They are not pets but guard dogs. They mostly live around the other side of the building but occasionally saunter through the front yard amongst the parked cars and generator and random people coming and going. They stop in their tracks at the entrance, never putting so much as a whisker across the threshold but their big brown eyes yearn for a little pat. One night, I happened to look through the front doors and there was Spike, notoriously lazy, sleeping on the little table near the door, with Jeep lolling on the porch. They scarcely raised an eyelid when I took their pictures.

I am assured that despite their laid back ways, one wouldn’t want to wander in uninvited and unannounced in the middle of the night. They are, after all “Friendly Guard Dogs.”

The only creature that I might have expected to see and have not are cats. They are nowhere to be found. I’ve asked about cats to no avail. One person just doesn’t like them. Another murmurs ominous things about the dietary preferences of a particular Ghanaian tribe. 

It’s all troubling and traumatic as I think of little Jerome and Ambrose tucked safely in Guelph, with the heads on my pillow, napping without a feline care in the world. That is a good thing.

Ambrose    

Jerome

Music that transforms lives

One of the most important things that I have started trying to do in Ghana is to make a personal difference in addition to fulfilling my mandate. With the generous help of colleagues in Guelph, we shipped some computers to the Non-Formal Education Division. Those were a clear contribution to the administrative activities.

Now, I am trying to help out Theatre for Development. These remarkable musicians really do incredible work, and they do it in 15 local languages as well as english.

Songs to enhance agriculture or combat deforestation and encourage environmentalism. Songs that help mothers care for their children or improve the health of whole communities. But they are doing so with decrepit instruments.

In other words, nothing a little money can't help. So I've set up a crowd sourcing project on Indiegogo: Music that Transforms Lives. Funds will help to replace 20 year old equipment: amplifies, speakers, drums, pianos.

So if you're enjoying the blogs, past and present, or think Ghana is a great place and want to make a difference, give this a whirl and get involved in supporting this initiative.

You'll be glad you did!

Music that transforms lives!

Behind the walls

On my first trip to Ghana, I was fascinated by the walls of this city. Tall walls, short walls, elegant walls, shabby walls, new walls, derelict walls. Every type of wall surrounding who knows what (See City of Walls, August 10, 2010). Well, I’ve now been behind a wall.

A coworker invited me to spend time with her family given today is a holiday: African Union Day. So Suzy and her two daughters and my old friend Kwesi who drove me on the Cape Coast site visit last year, picked me up and we drove not too far from Suma Court. The roads though, were the tough unpaved country tracks with bumps and puddles and wandering goats, very different from Atomic Road and Video Junction -- my home turf -- with pavement invisible beneath the traffic speeding in all directions at once. But there was that same mix of housing that takes one by surprise: little shanties nestled beside mansions, as if protected by the embrace of their walls. At least we might assume they are mansions given the presence of imposing walls and iron gates. But all is not as it seems.

When we arrived at Auntie BeBe’s house we go through imposing gates and find a regular house. Comfortable but not a mansion despite the fact that the wall is topped both by large strands of barbed wire, like a jaw-toothed slinky gliding along the top but, lest that not be sufficient deterrent, jagged ugly glass shards are cemented the whole length of the wall, bristling and glinting in the sun. So these walls, worthy of Hollywood legends and Wall Street robber-barons, guard a modest house of modest people. The house only gradually reveals itself to me. The formal lounge/living room was comfortable but ultimately we repair to the yard to sit under a blueberry tree, moving lawn chairs along with the shifting shade. 

The yard is totally covered over with cement, except for the spaces left for trees to thrust through: guava, mango, banana, plantain and others with no English names.  We pick avocados, 12 at least (here called pear), from trees with trunks as thick, that grow high as maples. I think of the spindly little saplings we grow from avocado pits at home: can they even be the same species. Ghanaians, I am told, would rather eat the fruits of their gardens than mow grass, which seems eminently sensible.

Although there is a gas cooker in the kitchen, we cook and eat outside: a bbq by any other name. Tilapia on the grill. Banku (millet and fermented corn porridge) stirred over the coals. Rice, fried chicken, and a stew of fish and palm oil and vegetables, all served with spicy red chili sauce. We drink corn wine and ginger wine (neither alcoholic)  traditional to the Ebe tribe in the Eastern Region, but also red wine and Bailey's. The corn wine has a bit of a sour fermented taste to it (not unlike the sour of banku) while the ginger wine has pepper in it that really peps you up if you can stop coughing from surprise. These aren't soda pop for the faint of heart. A course of fresh fruits tops off the meal. When it is time to do the dishes, the house reveals another of its secrets; there is no running water, just that carried in by buckets from the big holding tanks that dot the yard.

What a glorious afternoon. Many generations of sisters and daughters and cousins. 

Great stories, much laughter and a privileged glimpse into Ghanaian life. 

NOTE to Readers: if anyone can tell me how to wrap text around the pictures I would be grateful!