John’s Crawlspace

So I’m sitting in a Starbucks on my laptop on a rainy Sunday afternoon, writing a blog post about my experience volunteering in Ghana. There certainly are no stereotypes to be found here.

In my last Ghana post, I had gone “into town” (to Hohoe) to celebrate my birthday with some people, and I ended up staying with a friend in town (Jerusha) instead of taking a taxi the entire way back to the orphanage. Jerusha woke me up at 6 the following day so I could catch a tro-tro back to the orphanage – I had a class to teach at 8.

When I finally got off the tro-tro at Ve Junction, I saw Isaac walking down the road. When he saw me, he yelled for me… It turns out he was out looking for me. He walked with me back to the orphanage, and when we arrived, Father told me that they were very worried about me since I never came back the previous night. He told me that he waited for me at the junction until after 11 pm, and that he was up all night waiting for me to get back. I felt pretty bad, but I had told them several times before that they didn’t have to wait for us at the junction every time we left the orphanage. Also, I had no way of contacting them, as they never gave me any of their numbers.

We decided that it would be a good day to go to the monkey sanctuary. I typed up some more exams, and we left the orphanage at around 2 pm. We took a tro-tro to Logba-Alakpeti Junction, and then took a taxi to Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary. We paid the cab driver $3, and it cost $5 for the guide to lead us through the sanctuary. He walked us through a small town (which pretty clearly was dependent upon the revenue generated from the tourism aspect of the sanctuary) where he purchased some bananas. I dunno if I’ve mentioned this before or not, but bananas in Ghana were absolutely enormous… Like literally twice the size of a large banana here in the US.

Anyway, once we were in the rainforest, he started making these loud, obnoxious kissing noises. At first it was weird, but after a few minutes it just got really annoying. Soon enough, ,we saw monkeys diving (thats the best way I can describe it) through the branches all around us. They were heistant to get close and take the food from us, the guide explained, because their had already been several tours today, and therefore the monkeys had already eaten several times. Eventually we found some monkeys that were hungry enough to come close. He peeled the top of a banana and crouched down, and sure enough the monkey (hesitantly at first) came right up to him and ate the banana out of his hand. Not only did he eat it, he peeled it too, while the guide was still holding on to it. It was like watching some creepy little human peel a banana. You’d almost think we were somehow related to these things!

It was Cortney’s turn next, and he told her to hold onto the banana firmly (huh huh) so the monkey couldn’t just grab the whole thing from her and take off with it. A few minutes later, I got to feed one of them a banana too. It was pretty cool, and definitely worth our time and money. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some zoo in the US where you could feed monkeys, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be as cool as this. We continued to walk through the rainforest, and before I knew it, we were back in the village where we started… The whole thing lasted about a half an hour, it went by much faster than I thought it would. Afterwards, we each bought a kente cloth for $3. The kente weavers in the village right by Ve Deme Orphanage wanted like $20 each for theirs, so this was a pretty good deal. I’d probably make some kind of joke about hard labor and young children working all day long in the scorching hot sun to make the kente cloths, but… Well, that wouldn’t be a joke, because thats where these cloths come from. Ha. The kids actually don’t seem to mind at all though – We went to visit the weavers by our orphanage several times, and they were always friendly with us and seemed happy when we would visit.

When we were ready to leave, the taxi driver was sitting there waiting for us, which was pretty cool, because this place wasn’t near any sort of “main roads” (if you could even call them that) at all, and it would have taken us a long time to get back to the junction road where we could catch a tro-tro. Walking more than a mile during the day in Ghana is actually dangerous because you risk heat exhaustion, the sun is just relentless as I’m sure you can imagine.

I might have touched on taxis before, but I don’t think I really explained how bad most of them were. Clearly automobiles don’t have to pass any type of inspection in Ghana, because the majority of them are literally falling apart. This particular taxi was the worst one I remember being in. Springs poking out of the seats and stuff isn’t really a big deal, but the entire dashboard was missing in this car… Meaning that you could see everything, there was no paneling behind the steering wheel or anything, it was just all gears and stuff. I have no idea why I didn’t take a picture of this, I think I might have been feeling really sick at the time, as was the case for pretty much the entire second half of my trip.

Anyway, the taxi took us back to Logba-Alakpeti Junction, and from there we caught a tro-tro back to Ve Junction. From Ve Junction, we’d always just walk down the road to the orphanage, it was less than a mile from there.

We got back to the orphanage around 4, and I remember Father talking to us for an hour or so. This was a pretty common occurrence at the orphanage. We’d sit down on the benches/chairs outside of the building where Cortney and Margie stayed (where the ‘commons area’ was) and Father would talk to us about all kinds of stuff. The topic of discussion (lecture?) on this particular day was the rapture, and the mark of the beast. It was very interesting to me at the time, but I could tell Cortney and Margie were not amused. I really wish I had a tape recorder or something with me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be the only one who would be interested in hearing recordings of this stuff. A lot of it was pretty crazy, radical Christian stuff, but this guy was very knowledgeable if nothing else. That’s not say that I agree with what he had to say, but he definitely knew his stuff.

Later that night, the kids were all singing religious songs outside. At this point I was actually familiar with some of the songs… Religious songs are very popular over there, and you hear them on the radio in tro-tros/taxis, and playing on stereos in larger towns and stuff all the time. Not to mention the kids were always singing them. Anyway, I was clapping along to the songs, and they were very amused by this. Then I remembered that I bought these treble and bass “shakers” in Hohoe (they were made from coconuts or something, very basic percussion instruments), so I went and got those out my room. The kids really got a kick out of me playing along to their songs. Later on, Cortney and I drank some awful ‘gin bitters’ called “The Pusher”. I have consumed rather large amounts of some seriously awful cheap liquor in my day, but this stuff was pretty bad. We weren’t in a position to be picky though, and it was nice to be able to have a drink (and by drink, I mean sitting in a mud hut, taking turns swigging warm rotgut gin out of a plastic bottle, and laughing at the cringing faces that we’d make after tasting it, and trying not to vom on the floor) at the end of the day. It’s just dawning on me now as I’m typing this, though, that these are some awesome memories.

The next day, I woke up around 6:30. It was a Thursday, and normally I teach two classes on Thursdays, but both of them ended up being canceled that day. The children were working in the morning (they were building a bamboo fence along the road) and studying in the afternoon (they had exams the next week, most of which I typed up). We had “red-red” (my favorite) for lunch that afternoon. Simon gave me a pretty cool bracelet that he made for me… Although I suspect that he had one of the other kids make it and then he took credit for it. Since it was our last day at the orphanage (we’d be leaving early the next morning) we took some pictures with the kids. These pictures didn’t have all of the students in them, I think it was just the kids that actually lived at the orphanage, and some other students that happened to be around.

We had plans to meet Jerusha and Sunny in Hohoe for drinks one last time before we left. We weren’t leaving until the 11th, but our plans were to spend the weekend in Accra, since that is where the airport is. When we were getting on the tro-tro to Hohoe, some old dude grabbed Margie and tried to get her to sit down next to him. She has no problem being confrontational, so she pulled away, and was very vocal about how rude she thought he was. Throughout our trip, Ghanaians were obsessed with Margie because she is black, but she “talks and acts like a white person” (according to them). So I got a lot of laughs out of her interactions (err, confrontations) with the locals. Anyway, Margie and I took the two seats in the back of the tro-tro, and Cortney ended up sitting down next to this old pervert, which was hilarious to me. I had no problem laughing about it, if at any point it became a threat of some sort I would have dealth with it accordingly, but at that point it seemed harmless to me.

When the old dude turned around, I told him that Margie was not interested in sitting with him. He said, “I see a nice lady and I want her to sit with me so we can share fun and good times!” I asked him why he didn’t ask me to sit with him, and he was confused, and said “because you are a man, like me.” If we were in the US, I’m sure I would have kept going with it and tried to weird him out with some gay stuff, but I decided to draw the line there, since I didn’t exactly have ‘home field advantage’ or whatever you want to say. I figured it probably wasn’t in my best interest to try and weird people out by acting gay while in another country. Anyway, Margie turned to me and said “how can you talk with shit in your mouth?” I had no idea what she was referring to, so I just said something like “I just push it to the side.” I didn’t realize until later that night that the dude had apparently given me the thumbs-up, ‘shit in your mouth’ sign. This entire time I had been dying to do that to someone else, and someone ended up doing it to me, and I didn’t even realize it… Damn.

He was sharing some kind of nuts with Cortney, and I was getting bored in the back of the tro-tro, so I asked him what they were. He turned around and said “they give you more sperm, for the ladies.” What a perv this guy was. I said “oh yeah, because the ladies love that, right?” Once again, I decided to quit while I was ahead. He offered me one, but I decided I didn’t want any of his… Sperm nuts. Weird stuff.

When we got to Hohoe, Cortney and I went to the internet cafe, and then headed over to the Grand Hotel. We had a few beers, and I also brought the rest of “The Pusher” with us, so we had a few glorious swigs of that. Two guys who were eating at the next table over from us saw me drinking it right out of the bottle and were freaked out. They actually asked me why I was doing that. “You drink it like it is water!”, the one guy said. He then went on to talk to us about the US and all the states he had been to. He had seen more of the US than me, which I thought was a little strange. Anyway, the other girls were supposed to meet up with us, but only Margie and Jerusha showed up. Sunny had already left for the weekend, even though she said she was gonna stick around and have drinks with us one last time. So that sucked, but it would have screwed her schedule up or something if she stayed, so no big deal.

After a few drinks, we walked over to another bar. I think this was the first bar we had been to in Ghana. The night that Cortney and I first met Sunny, she took us to this bar, and we had been there a few times since. It was a nice little place, you sit down in a patio area outside and they usually had reggae music playing. Most of the bars there are pretty much the same (same prices, same three or four beers available). But I liked this one for whatever reason. The area where we were sitting had 6 or 7 tables, and was fenced in, but there was a gate in the back that was open, and there was a small village area outside the gate. Little kids kept coming up to the gate and signaling with their fingers that they wanted money, or food. Whenever our waitress/bartender lady saw them she’d shoo them away. It was pretty funny, and kind of cute too. It would have been different if they were homeless or dying of starvation, but that wasn’t the case. When they got shooed away, they would run back to a hut where some older people were sitting outside, and then come back a few minutes later and beg some more.

When we got back to the orphanage, we hung out with Isaac and some of the kids outside for the rest of the night. Simon asked me to bring out my iPod and the little speakers I had (I had shown it to him earlier and he was fascinated by it). I wasn’t sure to put on, but I was on a Ween kick for most of that trip, so I put some Ween on. I put on “King Billy”, “The Fruit Man”, and “Voodoo Lady”, and they loved it, they were all dancing to the music and stuff, it was hilarious. I really wish I had some video of that. I wonder how many times Ween has been played in a small village in Africa, and resulted in 20-30 kids dancing to it? Probably not many. They lit up the tree that smelled like farts with Christmas lights, and this was obviously a pretty big deal for them, the kids were really excited about it. When I saw the kids getting excited about something so small like that, it reminded me of when I was a kid, getting excited over little stuff like decorating the Christmas tree every year. But for them, it was one single string of multi-colored lights, and there were only 2 outlets available, so they could only keep it lit up while they were all outside looking at it, and then they had to unplug it.

I was hoping to make this my last Ghana post, but I just realized that there is a lot more stuff that happened on my last four days there… Enough to warrant writing another post about it. So keep an eye out for that.

Related Posts:

1. Ghana (Part Four)...
2. Ghana (Part Eight)...
3. Ghana (Part One)...

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