Rolling my sleeves up: a weekend on the ground!
Trip Start
Jun 12, 2005
1
13
21
Trip End
Aug 18, 2005
University of Ghana Legon, Ghana
Monday, July 18, 2005
I participated in both ends of Ghanaian culture this weekend. Friday we visited the Hotel Shangri-La -a very upmarket place with a palm tree lined pool with a swim up bar. We tried to pass ourselves off as guests but the rings of dirt around our feet (or maybe it was my filthy hair) gave us away. We paid the fee to use the pool and relaxed for a few hours next to foreigners of all types.
That evening we visited an amazing jazz club, conveniently located at yet another incredibly swank hotel. The hotel, the Golden Tulip, was up, up market. Rooms are over 200 US dollars a night. Their jazz club featured a performance group from Cameroon that perfectly blended international jazz staples into a blend of African percussion -as well as executing some great original tunes. Surrounded by bureacrats and what looked like international criminals and/or pop stars, I sipped my incredibly overpriced beer and hoped that I didn't smell too gross (the water in the dorms had been off that day) as gorgeous women in designer clothes floated by on clouds of expensive perfume.
The next day, we went to work at the orphanage. I had visited Osu Children's Home previously, a premier institution of its kind in Ghana, but my closer look this weekend revealed an breathtaking lack of resources and care for the children that live there. The capacity for the orphanage is at least twice-overloaded at this point. Most children there are malnutritioned, especially the babies who are entirely reliant on caretakers for nutrients. I spent the bulk of the time in the "babies house" where infants 0-2 lay 3 to 4 in a crib, often lying for hours in their own vomit and excrement, and with little or no movement. The women who were exployed there were too few and too tired, most of them could barely support their families on the income they were receiving; many had been abandoned by husbands and for one reason or another left without any other support.
Most of the children were sick-the infants especially seemed to have a lot of fever. Most had diahhrea, coughs, malaria, ringworm and other skin and hair problems related to their lack of exercise. My basic plan was to exercise as many of them as possible starting with the least responsive and working my way up. Many of the really tiny babies would barely wake up to eat. The ones with obvious kwashiorkor (swollen belly, sticklike limbs) showed surprising strength when I worked with them (even though they refused to eat the bread that was doled out at one point). Many of the children looked like infants because of their small size and development abilities, but upon a closer look you could see they had quite a few teeth and must have been older. This is the best orphanage in Ghana, you can imagine what the others look like.
That evening myself and two other girls were invited to a birthday party for Samual Ntiwusu, who is a graduate student at the University of Ghana in Philosophy at the African Studies Department. We wound our way through the muddy garbage strewn paths between compounds to reach his families. His real house is in the north, this compound served as a base for him while attending school. The attendants at the party were predominantly migrants from the north. One fellow was a pharmicists who works for the Ghanaian equivalent of the FDA. Another fellow was the son of a very prestigious chief in the North. There was a man who worked for the Ministry of Tourism. It was quite a gathering!!
Ntiwusu did the party in style, he greeted us wearing a traditional Northern smock (sans cap, unfortunately) and was ecstatic over our present of bottled wine ; there were about 7 of us in a room the size of an American bathroom, soccer blared in the background as we were served steaming hot tuo zafi -a porridge type starch made from pounded cassava and unique to the tribes of Northern Ghana. This porridge is served with a really gross "slippery soup" that is indeed slippery, slimy, oily, and full of mysterious chunks of animals that require great chewing effort to get down. My companion was a little squeamish but I managed to eat practically all of the food offered and to even try this really funny drink called Malta which is made from hops, malt, sugar and some other stuff. Malta is made by Guiness but it is non-alcoholic and tastes like Life cereal but sweeter. We drank boxed wine, had shots of akpeteshie, this wonderful Ghanaian hard liquor that burns like fire and makes your head spin, and we talked all about Ghana and America. This great meal was topped off with mango -our friend is privy to the American habit of dessert! The party attendee's were educated, young and ambitious and incredibly hospitable. I have an invite to get my hair braided for free, an open invite to Ghanaian dinner, information on the late night boxing matches that occur on the weekends, an offer to attend a Nigerian movie, and many wonderful insights into the burgeoning Ghanaian identity these Northerns happily shared with me .
