happy independence day

today is Togolese independence day.  I forgot this fact until I biked past the soccer field in Kouka this morning and saw that it was full of parading people.  then I remember what the date was.  this was troublesome cause my major reason for coming into town was to go to the poste to pick up my malaria meds.  oh well.

the other day, Bry's APCD (boss) Rose visited Kouka.  I ran into her on the road outside the poste.  Her driver pulled the white PC Land Rover over and Rose said hi.  She also gave me an apple from Lome.  I took it home to share with the family.  they had never seen an apple before.  they liked it.

Ntido's baby, Alix, is super cute.  He's like 7 months old and has yet to reach that stage in his cognitive development where he realizes that white is scary.  So when I walk over to him now he holds out his arms to be picked up.  I am pretty sure he only does this cause he likes to play with my beard.  In the mornings he grabs my glasses.  Alix has almost restored my faith in reproduction.  Invariably, however, David starts yowling because he wants meat, or bonbons, or peanuts, or cause he's mad cause Jidah got the yam chunk that he wanted or cause another kid took the stick he was playing with.  Yowling must go on for at least 5 minutes.  Petite was so fed up with the yowling the other night that he smacked him.  Togolese parents do not discipline children under 5. hopefully Alix doesnt turn out like that.

Speaking of babies, Kodjo's wife gave birth to a boy last week.  I named it Joseph (to go with his brother John).  cause it is apparently the chic thing in Nampoch to have me name babies. . . .

I remember the first year I was here, it did not rain much in April.  The first big rain we got was around the beginning of May.  Then last year, it started raining in the middle of April.  This year it has been raining off and on since March.  Weird.  Although i still sit and watch many storm clouds pass south over Bassar and Sokode.

I found a pile of bird feathers on my floor this morning.  I am glad my cats cant talk cause I am afraid to ask. I will say though that, after finding chicken crap on my floor, karma sucks.

As I announced on Facebook my official COS (close of service) date is now July 18th.  People have been telling me congratulations, but I feel more like I should be getting "in deepest sympathy" cards.  I cannot mentally reconcile life here with life in the US.  it is somewhat schizophrenic.  We go down next week for COS conference.  I did not go to my stage's COS conference last August because I was extending, but I think that this conference will be good.

Oh well, at least this way I'll be back in time to catch the beginning of football season.

So, the new road to Kouka is going petite a petite. The funding for it (from the Germans) is slow coming in.  that and there are a lot of bridges that must be built.  This has, however, not delayed the commencement of the next stage of the road project, going north out of Kouka.  I guess all of its funding has already come in.  Anyway, I biked down the main road to Kouka this morning for a change of scenery and seriously could not recognize where I was as I got into town.  So crazy.  Then two europeans on dirt bikes ripped past me like they were on some race to hell.  I hope they dont kill anyone before they realize that the road they are on goes nowhere.  Eventually. 

little Alix

Kapokia trees lining a road in some village near Mango

D and myself 100 ft above the forest floor in Ghana

the world is spinning

Its mango season.  Again.  

I was riding out of Nampoch this morning when Kodjo flagged me down.  He said his wife is having contractions.  She was walking around trying to see if they were real or not.

(update: its a boy)

If you want to know something of my current state of mind, know this.  I am switching between “Spancil Hill” by the Dubliners and the Dropkick Murphys’ rendition of the same song, “Fairmont Hill.”

Fruit in the States generally sucks.  Except for apples.  And grapes.  I was thinking about this when we were eating pineapple for breakfast at this Rasta place in Cape Coast.  The pineapple he served us, while lightly bouncing to a reggae beat, was pale white.  About the same shade as my stomach.  Bit into it and the flavor explosion on my tongue about took my head off.  It tasted like how you hope every pinna colada you’ve ordered will taste.  It tasted like how that ¼ of a golden pineapple sitting in a plastic tube in Meijer’s looks like it should taste.  It tasted like Rasta guy had just biked over to the Garden of Eden and picked it.  It was that good. Like the bananas that I wax vocal about.  Coconuts?  Speak not to me of those hairy uniformly sanitized things piled in Kroger’s like so many discarded Rocky Mountain Oysters.  Speak to me instead of those fuzzy little balls of goodness whose meat whispers to my mouth secrets of nature.  Give me an avocado sprinkled with salt, pepper, some lemon juice, and I will show you manna.  Last night N’tido gave me some ungrafted mangos.  Little things more string and seed than pulp, but containing more flavor than any two of those nerfball-sized, insipid mangos that grace your produce section.  Give me a fruit that tries to choke the life out of my taste buds, I don’t care what it looks like.  

Ive been watching American TV again since I was in Ghana and downloaded the 3^rd season of the Walking Dead.  I am, in my old age, or maybe in my isolation, somewhat surprised by the level of violence that permeates American TV.  Sure, I expect splattered brains on HBO shows, but on network TV?  What I find more interesting, however, is the ongoing, hypocritical Puritanism on the same shows towards sex.  Everyone (almost) has sex.  Not everyone joins biker gangs and beats up their rivals.  TV shows are rarely merely entertainment, usually they have some societal/cultural message they explore.  This is what makes good TV shows interesting. The violence in these shows suggests that America, as a culture, is more comfortable working through societal issues via the medium of fantasy violence.  That’s kind of scary.  Which kill more people, guns or boobs?  

Its been raining a lot recently.  Kadar took me down to D’s last weekend.  I was surprised how green Mt. Bassar was compared to my house.  Last Tuesday night a massive storm came through.  It soaked everything pretty well.  On my way into town this morning, I passed a lot of people out planting corn and other stuff.  

There is a natural gas shortage in Togo for some reason.  My egg sammie guy is down to his last tank.  Literally the next day after he told me about the gas shortage, D called me to say her gas tank was out.  We started a massive search to find someplace that had full tanks.  Bassar, no.  Kabou, no.  Sokode. nope.  Kara, maybe. . . nope, just kidding.  Not for a month.  Luckily, Kadar remembered that he’d bought a tank for his girlfriend in Kabou that she didn’t use, so we took that to D.  

I think that Nighan is pregnant. Again. 

My new favorite breakfast is spaghetti au gras with a hotdog omelet on top. or a calabash of tchapka

Another sign that rainy season is picking up is that a lot of people are walking around my village with plasters stuck to their faces.  Pasting together injuries from moto accidents on muddy roads. 

Something I’ve been thinking, from my weekly meander on Facebook, is the claim that guns are part of an “American” way of life.  I’ve just been wondering—how much time a year does the average American spend playing with his/her guns?  Couple hours a week? A month? A year?  A gun supplies what percentage of the average American’s yearly caloric intake?  25%? 10%? 1%?  I grew up with guns and I have a hard time seeing how my way of life would significantly change at all if strict gun control policies were enacted.  I certainly wouldn’t starve, or be somehow less “American.”

10 Ghanaian nights

D and I just took a vacation to Ghana.  These are some of my thoughts about it.  Describing my trip day by day would be boring for both you and me.  Especially since some days all we did was lay in air conditioned hotel rooms while we played around on fast Wi-Fi and debated which restaurants we were going to try next. 

We spent a couple nights in Kumasi, the former capitol of the Asante kingdom, many more nights in Cape Coast, former trading town and seat of the British Gold Coast administration, and a couple in Accra.  I went to a movie in a real movie theater for the first time in like 3 years.  And we ate real mexican food.  These were both amazing.

How to compare Ghana to Togo?  Or rather Lome to Accra?  In Lome there are sandy roads.  In Accra there are billboards advertising, and stores selling, iphone 5s and those new laptops that are half tablet.  And no sandy roads that I saw. 

Over the course of my Peace Corps service I have, on occasion, found myself thinking about slavery, and the slave trade, that used to be endemic to this area.  My area in Togo is on the border of what used to be the Asante kingdom and was probably once rife with slave raiders. This might actually be why the Konkumba developed a reputation as being really good with bows, but that’s beside the point.  Anyway, when we went to Ghana we went to the Cape Coast and Elamina castles—two prominent slave trading fortresses on the coast where the British, Portuguese, Swedes, and Dutch discovered that there was more wealth to be found in humans on the Gold Coast than from minerals.  The dank dungeons under Cape Coast castle are one of the creepiest places I have ever been in my life.  Something like 2 million africans are estimated to have passed through, either living or dead, the castle, including Michele Obama’s ancestors.  Slightly less dark, but even more soul-chilling are the “condemned” cells, where rebellious slaves were chained up in the dark, without food or water, until they died as a warning to others.   

It was interesting going to Kumasi and seeing the seat of the Asante kingdom, which, at during its heyday, had a population comparable to that of the US at the same time.  Togo doesn’t have history like that.  But the juxtaposition between Kumasi and Cape Coast is cool.   

The power goes out in Ghana too, just like in Togo.  This similarity could be due to the fact that Togo buys a lot of its power from Ghana.

The food in Ghana is awesome. We ate a lot of good vegetarian food, as well as the odd cheeseburger, well at least I did.  The food in Cape Coast was great.  There is this string of little vegetarian Rasta eateries there. Awesome food.  We also got some seafood pizzas to satisfy D’s lobster craving. 

I think I have mentioned before about hanging out with lots of Volunteers eventually stresses me out.  Ghana, at least where we were, is crawling with tourists and expats.  This took me awhile to adjust to.  I found myself wanting to whisper when we went to restaurants with bunches of loud british tourists near us. 

Ghana where you can walk down nice roads but you gotta watch out to keep from falling into the stinking gutter along those roads.

This being said, one of the coolest things that happened to us involved an expat.  We were eating out our final night in Accra at a pizza place. We’d gotten a bottle of a nice shiraz with our seafood pizza.  There was this expat guy sitting facing us.  I’d noticed him when we sat down, but I didn’t think anything about it.  Anyway, we were engaged in an animated discussion about Shakespeare when this expat dropped a card on our table on his way out.  Basically, the card said “enjoy the wine.” Our waitress came over looking bemused and said that he’d paid for our wine—it actually cost as much as our pizza.  She was really bemused when we told her we had no idea who he was.  Finally she decided “oh, he must know your father.”  Sure.  But, it was really cool. 

Another cool thing we did was to visit this national park near Cape Coast.  This park's claim to fame is an suspended walkway above the forest canopy.  This walkway is 30-40 meters above the ground is suspended between trees.  The trees much taller. Once I got over the swaying walkway--it is basically aluminum planks suspended in netting-- I was amazed.  Being 100+ feet in the air didnt really bother me too much because you cant really see the ground through the canopy.  That park is one of the few remaining bit of old growth forest in Ghana.  The place must have been incredible before before it was logged off.

I never thought that I would miss bad roads until I went to Ghana.  Ghanaians drive like accidents are something that happen to other people.  Always.  Despite evidence to the contrary.  West Africans generally view the future as something that may or may not happen later, as opposed to something that could be a certainty.   Accidents on Togolese roads are usually turned over/burned out vans and trucks, or old cars.  Ghanaian accidents involve newer cars in head on collisions.  On one curve I counted 3 wrecked cars in as many kilometers.  We went by signs saying “slow down! 4 people died here!” In Togo, speed limit postings are something to aspire to.  In Ghana they are like crappy Christmas tree ornaments that you hang up out of sentimental value and pretend like they don’t exist.  Passing is considered to be a civic duty.  Tailgating is patriotic. Crumpled wrecks along the road are the remains of drivers who did not pass enough.  Lanes are something you share, grudgingly.  Ghanaian drivers wear seat belts.  But these not viewed as restraining devices.  Rather they are a divine commandment from God Herself saying that He will not allow harm to befall the wearer.  Every little town on a main road deploys a legion of car-sized speed bumps to arrest the progress of blistering traffic.  The only other thing drivers stop for are police check points. Of which there is a surfeit.  One driver we had yelled at other drivers for not going through roundabouts right—then he tailgated people at 130 kph before he passed them and then cut them off.   

The vacation was really fun, but I am glad to be home again.  Here, I have my secret language, I know how much stuff is supposed to cost, and people treat me as an oddity, not as a tourist.

But, go to Ghana some day. Seriously.