Ghana
Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 8:05 pm
As normal, blame Moi for this post. He is the one who encourage me.
I have done some work in Ghana in west Africa in the last year. West Africa has a reputation as the death of white man. It is low jungle loaded with goodies like mosquitoes and snakes and tsetse flies. I took my malaria medicine, although it does not prevent all types. In the area here I worked there are cobras, although I did not see one. I was sitting in a seat on a camp porch and this long slender grass green snake came slowly around the corner of the building, checking as it went. I just watched it as my philosophy is not to fuck with things which do not fuck with me. At one point it looked at me for a few minutes, then kept going. I memorized the head which had a wide mouth like the Joker or Cameron Dias. I looked it up later when I had internet and it was a green mamba. The one that looked really wicked to me was a big, stout jet black scorpion . You just knew you didnt want to mess with it. It had a leg span of about 9 inches.
Because of all the ways to die, the whites kept to the coast. That gives Ghana a different look than some of the places In Latin America where I have worked. Whether on the Spanish or Portuguese plan, the conquistadores occupied the entire continent from coast to coast because of the inland mineral wealth. Their architecture brought from home makes for quaint villages and some attractive cities. That did not happen in Ghana. It is just poverty with no charm and little natural beauty in the sense of a Yosemite or Yellowstone. Having said that, I have to point out one neat feeling. Bamboo occurs in stands many feet in diameter which spread out over your head. All the normal jungle vegetation is subdued around a bamboo stand, making it like a green grassy respite from the crappy jungle dangers. Occasionally it worked out that we were due for a break when we came up to a bamboo stand. It was wonderful. It is like you are surrounded by peace and rich oxygen. It just has a different feeling. I even had the thought that I would like my retirement house to be in a bamboo stand.
It also is a long commute. Somebody asked me about that and I told them that coming back was a 48 hour slog beginning with 6 hours in the tumble dry cycle. Bush roads are not good. Once you get to pavement, there was another 6 hours of jammed traffic to Accra, the capital. Once you get showered and cleaned, it is off to the airport where you spend a very long time in very hot and humid lines. Nothing like starting international travel soaked to the skin in your own sweat. Then there is a 14 hour flight over the Atlantic which is usually bumpy while you are trying to sleep. There are various routes to get there. NY is direct. You can also re-acquaint yourself with the sterling example of 1960s warehouse architecture and technology called Heathrow. The best is on Delta-KLM thru Amsterdam. What a neat airport the Dutch have and the Dutch attendants are beautiful! I would gladly ad two hours to my travel to go thru Schiphol. One advantage to going to Africa is everyone seems to be in a good mood and there are lots of interesting conversations in the departure lounges.
What Ghana does have is gold and a lot of it and for a long time. Way back they used to send gold by camel caravans to the Mediterranean to trade for salt. Venice, Italy got its start as a low marshy place where it was easy to build salt pans for evaporation to produce salt. Venice was one end point for African gold which got them started on financing and trade.
Another thing Ghana did was give the Portuguese a target once sailing technology got to the point where they could begin to venture out of sight of land. There was the gold, which people knew vaguely came from someplace to the south, plus a rumor of a lost colony of Christians to be found. The Portuguese picked their way south, establishing points on the coast (but, again, not going inland). Once they started, they actually kept going further and further. They had rounded the tip of Africa and got past India to the Spice Islands in the south Pacific before Columbus ever thought of going west to those islands. I have been impressed learning about all the Portuguese colonies scattered along the whole route. They once had the inside track to India. One place I really want to sit and contemplate is the little harbor where the Portuguese starting exploring the world. I want to look out and see what they saw and think about how they changed the world.
The people are the reason that people enjoy going to Africa. While not entirely true, a common type of person is like Michael Clarke Duncan, the huge black actor with the absolutely likeable personality who played in the movie The Green Mile. They are just so likeable you cannot stand it. You see a lot of people in peak physical shape with great white smiles. I was interested that with all the physical giants and muscular people around, in the area I was, the people chose as their representative, called the Chief Farmer, a man who was shorter and slighter than me, but a smallish man who was always very neat with how he presented himself to the world. Obviously physical strength and size are not the only factors people use in choosing their leaders. The diversity of dress is incredible between traditional of all the tribes and modern. We Americans are really a boring bunch. We all dress relatively the same.
I was riding with the manager to a hotel/restaurant seven kilometers away where we went every two or three days for a hot shower and something you could call a meal. He had to drop by the plant to check things and was outside for a long time. When he got back in the truck, he made a comment about having to settle a dispute. I asked him what caused it. I was thinking the usual alcohol, drugs or women. He said that was a remote area and the people had never had one day of schooling. Their vocabulary was very limited and they get into tiffs because they do not have the words for their emotions. He just helps them understand. I had the thought that was probably the human condition at the time of Christ and that Bible stories were originally on a level to communicate with that level of non-educated people. Not to pick on Christianity, but the same would be true of Mohammed, Zoroaster et al.
Ghana does have the usual divisions between tribes and Christian Muslim religions. There are several languages, but the language of the Gha people is dominant. The country generally is building like crazy. Accra, the capital, has an old historic center where you just plan on spending three hours driving to get to the hardware store because of gridlock. But if you go out by the airport, things move faster and from one spot out there I did count seven of those spindly tower cranes used for high rise construction. Do you know anywhere in the US with that much construction? The thing is that Ghana does not appear to be set up with municipal governments that provides paving, water and sewage, etc. You drive over a dirt jeep trail road to get to a brand new home. New suburbs are going up all around Accra like Los Angeles in the 60s. Those do have paved roads, but the quality of construction lacks a little. They like metal roofs and they are obviously made with the Larry the Cable Guy theme of git her done. Metal may not rot in the climate, but it also can be bent and bashed and made to fit. A fellow American was bitching about the quality of building materials and kicked a cinder block lying on the ground. It broke open along the supermarket plastic bag which was incorporated into the sand. That is why an Accra mall roof collapsed a few months ago. I got to where I could tell the Muslim neighborhoods. They were always ramshackle slums with narrow streets. I do not know if it is a self-choice or an imposed choice to be segregated and poor.
I like to send emails with pictures when possible to my family. My son made the comment that there rarely was a white guy in the photos. I spent several weeks being 100 kilometers from the nearest honkey. Some days I would have one local guy with me. Sometimes when I just wanted to check one or two things I would head out thru the jungle by myself. You commonly met people going the other way on the trails and everyone except myself had machetes. I was used to that from the jungles of South America and never thought a thing about it and never felt in the least threatened. People greet each other passing on the trails and get on with their day.
So this one day I woke up and they told me that it was Sunday a no work day. I answered that if it was Sunday, then I wanted to go to their church. That caused a lot of discussion and they finally said that I could go with the cook. I rummaged thru my suitcase for my cleanest drab, dirty shirt and waited to meet the day (thanks country music for that line). She showed up in a stunning brilliantly colored dress. We got in the truck and I was thinking man in drab clothes and woman looking like a flower, that is almost like being married. It took some maneuvering to get to the church up on the little hill. We had to find a way around the central plaza which was blocked by tents and people. Saturday is burying day and an important chief with five wives had been killed in a car crash. They had filled the plaza for his funeral and it was still going on Sunday morning. Food, women in the open spaces moving to the music you know, a typical funeral. We picked our way around that and up to the church on the hill. They started off with singing and music. It is interesting that the musical instruments set the tone of church music. They had like big jungle drums and a honkey tonk piano. At one point everyone formed a conga line snaking around inside the church. Then things settled down to what to me was a regular church service. The minister was just like you sent to central casting for a hell fire and brimstone black minister. It was kind of like Catholic with a lot of standing. Our cook whispered to me that I shouldnt worry she would tell me what to do. So it started. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Man, after a while I was really starting to feel married. When the sermon wound down, they passed the plate. Many people have no money, so they would donate food plants or eggs which were auctioned off to much applause. A final blast of drum beat and honkey tonk piano and we headed out the door after a bunch of people came up to welcome me. An wizened old lady asked the cook if we could give her a ride, which we gladly did. She got out to go to the funeral and asked me if I would marry her. I told her I would get back to her after running it by R. I have learned that in the third world, wizen old ladies are often younger than me. My wife was born the year I graduated from high school and I have learned that a honeymoon with a younger woman can plum tucker a fellow out.
I was quite taken with the idea of being an important chief with five wives. I talked with the Africans about it and we even came up with a name Chief Abruni. That is Chief Honkey to you foreigners. They had a good laugh about the idea.
I had one of those little incidents flying across the country that stick in your mind . The flight attendant came down the aisle and made a comment to me, You seem a very happy man. Without thinking, I answered, Of course, I am going back to Africa. In all honesty, I am not sure I can pinpoint why I felt that way, but I did.
I have done some work in Ghana in west Africa in the last year. West Africa has a reputation as the death of white man. It is low jungle loaded with goodies like mosquitoes and snakes and tsetse flies. I took my malaria medicine, although it does not prevent all types. In the area here I worked there are cobras, although I did not see one. I was sitting in a seat on a camp porch and this long slender grass green snake came slowly around the corner of the building, checking as it went. I just watched it as my philosophy is not to fuck with things which do not fuck with me. At one point it looked at me for a few minutes, then kept going. I memorized the head which had a wide mouth like the Joker or Cameron Dias. I looked it up later when I had internet and it was a green mamba. The one that looked really wicked to me was a big, stout jet black scorpion . You just knew you didnt want to mess with it. It had a leg span of about 9 inches.
Because of all the ways to die, the whites kept to the coast. That gives Ghana a different look than some of the places In Latin America where I have worked. Whether on the Spanish or Portuguese plan, the conquistadores occupied the entire continent from coast to coast because of the inland mineral wealth. Their architecture brought from home makes for quaint villages and some attractive cities. That did not happen in Ghana. It is just poverty with no charm and little natural beauty in the sense of a Yosemite or Yellowstone. Having said that, I have to point out one neat feeling. Bamboo occurs in stands many feet in diameter which spread out over your head. All the normal jungle vegetation is subdued around a bamboo stand, making it like a green grassy respite from the crappy jungle dangers. Occasionally it worked out that we were due for a break when we came up to a bamboo stand. It was wonderful. It is like you are surrounded by peace and rich oxygen. It just has a different feeling. I even had the thought that I would like my retirement house to be in a bamboo stand.
It also is a long commute. Somebody asked me about that and I told them that coming back was a 48 hour slog beginning with 6 hours in the tumble dry cycle. Bush roads are not good. Once you get to pavement, there was another 6 hours of jammed traffic to Accra, the capital. Once you get showered and cleaned, it is off to the airport where you spend a very long time in very hot and humid lines. Nothing like starting international travel soaked to the skin in your own sweat. Then there is a 14 hour flight over the Atlantic which is usually bumpy while you are trying to sleep. There are various routes to get there. NY is direct. You can also re-acquaint yourself with the sterling example of 1960s warehouse architecture and technology called Heathrow. The best is on Delta-KLM thru Amsterdam. What a neat airport the Dutch have and the Dutch attendants are beautiful! I would gladly ad two hours to my travel to go thru Schiphol. One advantage to going to Africa is everyone seems to be in a good mood and there are lots of interesting conversations in the departure lounges.
What Ghana does have is gold and a lot of it and for a long time. Way back they used to send gold by camel caravans to the Mediterranean to trade for salt. Venice, Italy got its start as a low marshy place where it was easy to build salt pans for evaporation to produce salt. Venice was one end point for African gold which got them started on financing and trade.
Another thing Ghana did was give the Portuguese a target once sailing technology got to the point where they could begin to venture out of sight of land. There was the gold, which people knew vaguely came from someplace to the south, plus a rumor of a lost colony of Christians to be found. The Portuguese picked their way south, establishing points on the coast (but, again, not going inland). Once they started, they actually kept going further and further. They had rounded the tip of Africa and got past India to the Spice Islands in the south Pacific before Columbus ever thought of going west to those islands. I have been impressed learning about all the Portuguese colonies scattered along the whole route. They once had the inside track to India. One place I really want to sit and contemplate is the little harbor where the Portuguese starting exploring the world. I want to look out and see what they saw and think about how they changed the world.
The people are the reason that people enjoy going to Africa. While not entirely true, a common type of person is like Michael Clarke Duncan, the huge black actor with the absolutely likeable personality who played in the movie The Green Mile. They are just so likeable you cannot stand it. You see a lot of people in peak physical shape with great white smiles. I was interested that with all the physical giants and muscular people around, in the area I was, the people chose as their representative, called the Chief Farmer, a man who was shorter and slighter than me, but a smallish man who was always very neat with how he presented himself to the world. Obviously physical strength and size are not the only factors people use in choosing their leaders. The diversity of dress is incredible between traditional of all the tribes and modern. We Americans are really a boring bunch. We all dress relatively the same.
I was riding with the manager to a hotel/restaurant seven kilometers away where we went every two or three days for a hot shower and something you could call a meal. He had to drop by the plant to check things and was outside for a long time. When he got back in the truck, he made a comment about having to settle a dispute. I asked him what caused it. I was thinking the usual alcohol, drugs or women. He said that was a remote area and the people had never had one day of schooling. Their vocabulary was very limited and they get into tiffs because they do not have the words for their emotions. He just helps them understand. I had the thought that was probably the human condition at the time of Christ and that Bible stories were originally on a level to communicate with that level of non-educated people. Not to pick on Christianity, but the same would be true of Mohammed, Zoroaster et al.
Ghana does have the usual divisions between tribes and Christian Muslim religions. There are several languages, but the language of the Gha people is dominant. The country generally is building like crazy. Accra, the capital, has an old historic center where you just plan on spending three hours driving to get to the hardware store because of gridlock. But if you go out by the airport, things move faster and from one spot out there I did count seven of those spindly tower cranes used for high rise construction. Do you know anywhere in the US with that much construction? The thing is that Ghana does not appear to be set up with municipal governments that provides paving, water and sewage, etc. You drive over a dirt jeep trail road to get to a brand new home. New suburbs are going up all around Accra like Los Angeles in the 60s. Those do have paved roads, but the quality of construction lacks a little. They like metal roofs and they are obviously made with the Larry the Cable Guy theme of git her done. Metal may not rot in the climate, but it also can be bent and bashed and made to fit. A fellow American was bitching about the quality of building materials and kicked a cinder block lying on the ground. It broke open along the supermarket plastic bag which was incorporated into the sand. That is why an Accra mall roof collapsed a few months ago. I got to where I could tell the Muslim neighborhoods. They were always ramshackle slums with narrow streets. I do not know if it is a self-choice or an imposed choice to be segregated and poor.
I like to send emails with pictures when possible to my family. My son made the comment that there rarely was a white guy in the photos. I spent several weeks being 100 kilometers from the nearest honkey. Some days I would have one local guy with me. Sometimes when I just wanted to check one or two things I would head out thru the jungle by myself. You commonly met people going the other way on the trails and everyone except myself had machetes. I was used to that from the jungles of South America and never thought a thing about it and never felt in the least threatened. People greet each other passing on the trails and get on with their day.
So this one day I woke up and they told me that it was Sunday a no work day. I answered that if it was Sunday, then I wanted to go to their church. That caused a lot of discussion and they finally said that I could go with the cook. I rummaged thru my suitcase for my cleanest drab, dirty shirt and waited to meet the day (thanks country music for that line). She showed up in a stunning brilliantly colored dress. We got in the truck and I was thinking man in drab clothes and woman looking like a flower, that is almost like being married. It took some maneuvering to get to the church up on the little hill. We had to find a way around the central plaza which was blocked by tents and people. Saturday is burying day and an important chief with five wives had been killed in a car crash. They had filled the plaza for his funeral and it was still going on Sunday morning. Food, women in the open spaces moving to the music you know, a typical funeral. We picked our way around that and up to the church on the hill. They started off with singing and music. It is interesting that the musical instruments set the tone of church music. They had like big jungle drums and a honkey tonk piano. At one point everyone formed a conga line snaking around inside the church. Then things settled down to what to me was a regular church service. The minister was just like you sent to central casting for a hell fire and brimstone black minister. It was kind of like Catholic with a lot of standing. Our cook whispered to me that I shouldnt worry she would tell me what to do. So it started. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Man, after a while I was really starting to feel married. When the sermon wound down, they passed the plate. Many people have no money, so they would donate food plants or eggs which were auctioned off to much applause. A final blast of drum beat and honkey tonk piano and we headed out the door after a bunch of people came up to welcome me. An wizened old lady asked the cook if we could give her a ride, which we gladly did. She got out to go to the funeral and asked me if I would marry her. I told her I would get back to her after running it by R. I have learned that in the third world, wizen old ladies are often younger than me. My wife was born the year I graduated from high school and I have learned that a honeymoon with a younger woman can plum tucker a fellow out.
I was quite taken with the idea of being an important chief with five wives. I talked with the Africans about it and we even came up with a name Chief Abruni. That is Chief Honkey to you foreigners. They had a good laugh about the idea.
I had one of those little incidents flying across the country that stick in your mind . The flight attendant came down the aisle and made a comment to me, You seem a very happy man. Without thinking, I answered, Of course, I am going back to Africa. In all honesty, I am not sure I can pinpoint why I felt that way, but I did.
