A few months after our initial meeting, I came back from a project on the northern coast to find that Hannah had gotten romantically involved with a Ghanaian volunteer who went by the camp name of Rambo. Rambo was devilishly handsome, with silky skin the color of polished walnut, pronounced cheekbones, and striking gray-green eyes. He dressed to fit his nickname, in Western tank tops that exposed his enormous biceps, camouflage pants, and heavy-soled boots. He was studying mathematics at Legon University and was rumored to be a brilliant student. He came from that minuscule portion of the Ghanaian population that could be called middle class, meaning he had been raised in a home with both a television and a phone. His father had some mysterious government post, which Rambo cryptically described as “near the top.” He spoke flawless English in a deep, purring voice, and was famous for his ability to drink any European under the table when it came to apeteshi , the strong home-brewed liquor that was popular in the Ghanaian countryside.
Throughout the steamy afternoons and into the balmy evenings, Hannah sat beside Rambo on the steps of the hostel. She listened intently as he talked to the other African volunteers in Fanti, Ga, or Twi, his arm slung heavily across her shoulders or hooked around her neck like a boa constrictor. Often she leaned over to kiss his cheek or nibble at his ear. He allowed this briefly before pushing her away with a murmured reprimand.
She began to wash his laundry on a regular basis. As I sat in the dirt courtyard behind the hostel with my plastic bucket, wringing the dust from my own grungy socks and shirts, I’d see her laboring over the heavy camouflage pants or scrubbing away at a spot of dirt on a white tank top. When I suggested to her that Rambo could just as easily do his own laundry, she shrugged.
“How do you say, when you are with the Romans . . . ?” She giggled nervously.
Hannah had little time for her old friends.
“I have known this man,” Gorbachev grumbled to me privately, “and I have not liked him. I am very sure that he seeks only to marry a white sistah so that he may leave this country. He wants to be a doctor in Europe or America, where he can make a lot of money and own many cars. Our Sistah Abena, she is so innocent. She trusts every person.”
A week later I returned to the empty hostel from the Makola Market in the middle of the day. The Makola Market was the largest in Accra, and its endless rows of outdoor stalls provided the ideal place to revel in the beauty of African fabrics. I was laying out my purchases—three exquisite batiks dyed in richly saturated blues, purples, and greens—draping them across my bed to admire, when I heard a strange, stifled sound, like someone choking. Looking around, I saw, through the gauzy veil of a mosquito net, a huddled lump on Hannah’s bed, covered by a sleeping bag. Alarmed, I rushed over.
“Hannah? Is that you? What’s going on?”
In one violent motion the sleeping bag flopped flat on the bed and there she sat, shaking and red-faced.
“He will marry her!” she screamed. “He is all made of lies! He will marry her!”
“Who? Who will marry who?”
“Rambo,” she sobbed, throwing herself at me through the mosquito net. I ducked beneath the netted shroud and wrapped my arms around her. She heaved and wailed against my shoulder.
“I’ll kill him!” she cried. “I will give him petrol to drink. I will turn him into a rat. Then I will make him marry only me, after he is dead.”
“Hannah, Hannah, sweetheart . . .” I murmured. She sobbed in my arms for close to an hour, occasionally breaking away to hurl accusations at Rambo and his unnamed bride.
Eventually, the story came out. That morning, while Hannah was still in bed, a former volunteer named Isabella had arrived from Spain. Rambo had introduced her to the omnipresent crowd on the steps as his fiancée. He’d been anxiously awaiting her return, he said; they would be married at the end of the month. Hannah heard the commotion and wandered out in her oversized T-shirt to find Rambo lip-locked in the sort of public display of affection he was never willing to engage in with her. When he came up for air, Rambo met her eyes for a long, cool moment, then looked away. She ran and threw her arms around him, shouting that he was hers. He pushed her away, and told the astonished Isabella—whom Hannah alternately described as ugly as a rhinoceros and beautiful as Sophia Loren—that this crazy girl had been hanging around the hostel bothering the volunteers and would soon be shipped back to Sweden or Germany, wherever she came from.
“But that’s ridiculous!” I sputtered. “She’ll hear the truth before the day is out. She’ll know he can’t be trusted.”
But Rambo and Isabella had taken Isabella’s things and left the hostel. Hannah had run after them, trying to grab the luggage out of Rambo’s hands. Several of the assembled men held her back, chuckling and clucking, trying to soothe her. Now she no longer wanted to live in the hostel, no longer wanted to see the faces of those men.
Hannah had long ago befriended Sistah Essi, the feisty, sparkly-eyed young proprietress of a tiny beachside restaurant called The Last Stop. Located about a quarter mile from the hostel, The Last Stop was a favorite volunteer hangout, a breezy open-air shack with sand underfoot, located a short sprint from the ocean. Essi lived with her two daughters, ages one and three, in a room adjoining the restaurant. She assured Hannah it would be no problem for her to pitch her tent on the beach, and offered Hannah meals in exchange for helping out in the café.
Hannah’s good nature returned after a week or so, but her eager-to-please, puppy-dog energy had been replaced by something calmer and more distant. That was when she began her walking. At any time of the day or night you might see her, striding through the streets or along a red dirt path above the beach, chin and chest thrust forward like a woman on a mission. She walked that way for hours, unafraid and unapproachable, perfectly poised on the crust of Africa, perfectly alone.
“Where’s she going?” one volunteer or another would wonder aloud as we sat on the balcony of the Wato Bar, another favorite hangout, watching daylight turn to dusk. As the cloth wicks on the kerosene cans took flame one by one in the streets below, we’d crane our necks just in time to see Hannah slip quickly between the food stands and disappear.
As time went on, she became fluent in Fanti, which she practiced with Gorbachev and the other African volunteers while serving us our food at The Last Stop. There were over sixty languages spoken among Ghana’s eighteen million people. Fanti belonged to Akan, the dominant language group, which most Ghanaians understood. Hannah’s English, too, sounded increasingly Ghanaian, her accent, sentence structure, and turns of phrase growing more African with each passing day. Her relationship with the African men had changed, too. She no longer flirted the way she once had. She was friendly, even affectionate, but a distance remained.
“Why don’t you go out with Gorbachev?” I asked her once. “He’s such a sweet, gentle man, and you know he worships you.”
“Eh!” she clucked. “Ghana men and me, we are finished. Ghana men are weak!” she shouted, echoing a common insult the African volunteers threw at each other on the camps. “Now I want only Ghana. Ghana here,” she pounded the table. “Ghana is sooo sweet. Amsterdam was never my place. Ghana here, this is my place.”
When the rains came, Hannah began spending nights in the small room attached to The Last Stop, with Sistah Essi and her two girls. Hannah and Essi had become very close, and often when Gorbachev and I went down there for a midday meal I could hear them giggling behind the kitchen partition while they chopped vegetables and stirred the stews. Sometimes I had to call out three or four times before Hannah would come out and greet us with a friendly, “ Eh! Sistah Korkor, Brothah Gorbachev, you are welcome!”
Essi’s husband, Kweku, was in the army and came home every month or two for a few days. He was known around the hostel as an odd character and a heavy drinker; the Ghanaian volunteers were reluctant to visit The Last Stop when he was in town. Whenever he appeared, Hannah moved back to her tent and, as though by tacit agreement, her relations with Essi became
stiff and formal. Kweku was suspicious of her motives for working at The Last Stop, and one night she heard him shouting through the walls, while the two little girls whimpered and wailed.
“They are so rich,” he shouted in Fanti, “to come here, from so far away, and stay for many months, doing nothing, buying whatever goods they please. Why then should she work like this, eating our food?”
Hannah could not make out Essi’s reply, but when she heard what sounded like a hand striking flesh, she put her head under her sleeping bag and counted to a thousand. She offered to leave the next day, but Essi begged her to stay.
“Sistah Korkor, Essi hates that man,” Hannah said. “If I were her, I would surely find a way to kill him.” We were sitting on one of The Last Stop’s uneven wooden benches at dusk, wiggling our toes in the cooling sand. A gentle breeze rose off the ocean, and a pale sunset tinted the foam pink.
“I know,” I said. “It’s awful. And I have the feeling it’s pretty widely tolerated, too.” The previous day, I’d overheard a Ghanaian volunteer telling one of the foreign men that if he himself had a sister whose husband beat her, he would not accept her back into the family. Her husband wouldn’t beat her for no reason, he explained; she’d had to have done something wrong.
“I wish Essi would throw him out,” Hannah said. Tears stood in her eyes. “She and I, we can run the restaurant. For what does she need him? He takes her chop money and buys apeteshi.”
I sighed. “She’d probably leave him if she could. Who knows what her options are? We can’t really see the full picture.”
“I see her! She is afraid, that is all. But I will help her. I will stay with her and help to run the café.”
“How long do you plan to be here, Hannah, really? Aren’t you going back to Holland, to school?”
“No, no, no!” She started to cry. “For what do I go back to that place? I am Ghana woman now. That place has nothing that I need.”
I left the next day to go to another camp, and didn’t see Hannah for almost a month. When I returned she was still staying with Essi, and she seemed more entrenched in her “Ghana woman” image than ever. She generally refused to speak English now, though she’d relent and engage in fragmentary conversation with me when pressed.
“Our sistah from Holland is now more Ghana than we Ghanaians!” Gorbachev quipped.
One Saturday night, Hannah, Gorby, and I went with a few other Ghanaian volunteers to Labadi Beach, on the outskirts of Accra, for a dance party. While a tight-knit interracial group danced beneath bright white spotlights and the disheveled silhouettes of palm trees, the three of us walked down the beach to a quiet place where we could smoke our extremely potent wee. Buoyed up by a giddy high, Hannah and I stripped off our skirts and charged into the water, which was scarcely cooler than the air. We stood holding hands, with the waves licking our waists, and looked out toward the horizon. There was no moon, and I could see no line between ocean and sky: just blackness, with sporadic zigzags of white that vanished as soon as they appeared. A thrill of danger raised goose bumps all over my body. I couldn’t see what was coming—I never knew the size of a wave until it broke around me. For all I knew, the next one would crash down on top of our heads and sweep us out to sea.
It was three in the morning when we crammed into a shared taxi back into town with three other Europeans. We were sopping and exhausted, hangovers already on the way. Gorbachev and I walked Hannah down to the beach by the Last Stop, but when we got there we experienced a jolt of disorientation: Hannah’s tent was nowhere to be seen.
“Did you move it?” I asked Hannah.
“No.” She shook her head in bewilderment, looking around her in a kind of daze.
“Thieves?” said Gorbachev.
We walked toward the spot where the tent had been. I stepped on something squishy, and when I reached down I felt fabric, slick and synthetic, with feathers leaking out of it. Exploring further, I found a zipper.
“Oh no,” I said softly. Taking another step I tripped on a slender plastic pole.
“This . . . this is . . . someone has . . .” Gorbachev sputtered, as we discovered pieces of clothing, paper, and plastic, ripped and scattered around the beach. Down near the water I stumbled over a mass of nylon, sopping wet. It was Hannah’s tent.
Hannah began to cry. Gorbachev was shouting, “Who . . . Who has . . .”
A burst of light exploded from The Last Stop. A male figure leaped out into the night with a flaming torch in his hand.
A torrent of abuse came from his mouth in Fanti, interspersed with sporadic words of English. Amid the torrent the words “spy,” “thief,” and “CIA” jumped out at me, and then, later, “white witch” and several times, “my wife.”
“She’s not your wife!” Hannah shouted suddenly. “She doesn’t love you! She hates you! She loves me!”
After that, everything blurs together. Kweku lunged toward us with the torch, and then Gorbachev was holding my hand and the three of us were running blind along the beach. At some point we turned uphill, staggering toward the porch light of the hostel, which glimmered feebly on the horizon. Hannah, on Gorbachev’s other side, screamed a string of Fanti words into the wind as we ran, stumbling and gasping, toward the light.
The next morning, Hannah was gone. At my panicked insistence, Mr. Awitor made inquiries and learned that she had called her parents in Amsterdam, who had arranged for a ticket home the same day. By the time I awoke, she was already at the airport. I don’t know whether she got up at dawn and went to the beach to salvage her possessions. Some volunteers went down there to search, but they found nothing. She would at least have needed her money and passport, I pointed out, but Gorbachev said that Hannah always carried those things with her, in a money belt worn under her dress, “like a foreigner.”
For me she left no note, nothing. And I never found out whether she’d said goodbye to her beloved Essi. I didn’t go back to The Last Stop for many months. When I finally did, Essi chattered cheerfully, avoiding my eyes, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
“She loved Ghana so much,” said Gorbachev sorrowfully. “And this horrible man, he must drive everything to ruin.”
“But why would she just leave like that?” I asked for the hundredth time. “She could have found another place to live. And she could have visited Essi when Kweku was away.”
“Sistah Korkor,” said Gorbachev, looking at me sadly. “Our Sistah Abena, you know, she was a very kind girl, but she was not strong like you. It is very good fortune that she was born in this world to parents who were able to send for her.”
Later, when I was back in the States, I got a letter from Hannah. The tone was exuberant, filled with exclamation points. It sounded more like the girl I’d first seen on the hostel steps than the woman run off the beach by a friend’s irate husband. She was now in nursing school, she said. One day, she’d gone for a long walk in a part of Amsterdam that was unfamiliar to her and stumbled onto a Ghanaian restaurant. She went inside and was amazed to find all her favorite foods: fufu and pepper sauce, kenke, garden egg stew, groundnut soup, even apeteshi to drink. Imagine the waiters’ surprise and delight when she began speaking to them in Fanti! Soon she was going there every day. They invited her to parties, and she discovered a whole community— a little Ghana in Amsterdam. For the first time in her life, she felt almost at home in her hometown. And that feeling reminded her of what she’d nearly forgotten: how right it all was before it all went wrong.
“Oh, Sistah Korkor!” she wrote, and I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were standing before me, flushed and tremulous and filled with hope.
“I remember now how very sweet Ghana was! How tender the air, the nighttime smell of ocean. Also Essi, her laughter too loud at my ear. Now I know what I must do, and school is no longer boring! I want to study and learn, so I can take my degree quickly and soon, so soon, I can leave this place forever and go home.”
4
Yao
Love, ba
skets of love for the baby Yao. Gardens of it. Oceans. In a village swarming with children, each of them vital and mercurial enough to remind your heart that it can split wide open, Yao has made an impression on us all. Each day, men and women, African and foreign volunteers alike, set down our shovels for a moment, wipe the dust and sweat from our eyes, and watch Minessi as she strolls by, tall, dark, and regal, with Yao strapped to her back. Yao swivels his little head, working hard to take us all in with his enormous dark eyes. And what eyes! Compassionate enough to forgive a world’s transgressions, alert enough to awaken a planet asleep.
Forgive my gushing. I’m in love.
My first camp found me building teachers’ quarters in the village of Afranguah, in the Central Region. Unlike some of the projects I’d heard about, this one had the full support of the villagers and seemed destined to reach completion. The village women worked enthusiastically beside us, carrying buckets of water on their heads, pulling up weeds, hammering nails. Though the doors and window frames were made of wood, our primary building material was cement, which we mixed ourselves and molded into bricks, then left overnight to dry. At first it was unclear to me who was in charge—people just seemed to know what to do—but gradually a kind of hierarchy emerged. The camp leader could be seen from time to time consulting a piece of graph paper and instructing some of the experienced Ghanaian campers, who then passed on instructions to the more skilled Western volunteers. If I was assertive, some task or other would eventually trickle down to me. I soon discovered that I could just as easily sit in the shade doing nothing all morning without anyone caring or even noticing. I did my best to avoid this temptation.
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