I’m sitting on a step watching a three-year-old boy play in a muddy yard. He is a perpetual motion machine: jumping and spinning, shirt over his head, chubby tummy exposed. He falls to the ground, rolls around, climbs the steps and jumps off again, stomps his foot in a puddle. He’s been playing on his own for almost an hour now, with no sign of slowing down. Everything is exciting to him, every action a science experiment. If he stands on a step and inches backward, how far can he go before he tumbles off? How small a part of his foot will support him? How high can he get the puddle to splash?
I can’t help thinking of a three-year-old boy I knew in California, the son of a friend. The last time I was at their house, he ran through the living room in his cowboy suit brandishing toy guns, then ran out into the yard and drove his plastic car around a toy filling station, came back in and colored with his magic markers, changed into his Ninja eye patch and cape, and then cried that he was bored and needed something to do.
Bengo and Kojo were eager to take me sightseeing, but Katie and I wanted to get on the road. As compelling as my time with the two men had been, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for another day in their presence. Later, back in the States, I received a letter from Bengo, proposing marriage. He was in graduate school now, he said, and would soon be moving into a government job that would allow him sufficient income to begin a family. He said he’d never forgotten our conversation that day in Kumasi. He longed for a wife he could hold such frank discourse with, on so many topics. Ghanaian women, he complained, thought only of their hair and their clothes. I wrote him back, saying I was honored that he’d thought of me, but I was hesitant to start an involvement at such a distance. I couldn’t see myself making it back to Ghana anytime soon, I told him, and I wasn’t ready to commit based solely on the information we already had. I asked him how Kojo was doing, whether he was in graduate school as well.
Bengo responded graciously to my letter, saying that he’d always known I was practical and wise. Kojo, he said, had married a German girl and moved to Berlin. He had not written to Bengo, but Bengo had heard from a mutual friend that Kojo had abandoned his studies and was selling African beads on the street.
After leaving Kumasi, Katie and I decided to take a detour before returning to Accra. We wanted to spend a week in the village of Afranguah, the site of our first work camp. We missed the children there. There had been other villages, and other children, but these particular kids remained sharply etched in our memories. There was Yao, of course, but also Essi, Abba, Baba, Kwesi, Kwabena, Efuwe, Kukue, Mansah, and countless others. They danced in my mind: their skinny legs and radiant faces, their tiny hands clinging to my fingers, tentatively stroking my inner arm to see what white skin felt like. At once shy and bold, impossibly eager, achingly open, they darted and danced and laughed and sang, parroting English words and teaching me Fanti ones. Katie and I wondered aloud whether they would remember us. They were children, after all, and several months had passed.
The moment we stepped off the tro-tro from Saltpond Junction, a swarm of little bodies engulfed us, all of them hugging and cheering and jumping up and down. How had they gathered so quickly? I wondered. It seemed impossible, unless someone from the junction had run ahead to tip them off. The village minister, Billy Akwah Graham, had extended an invitation to the foreign volunteers to stay in his home whenever we chose to visit. Now the children insisted on carrying our luggage to Billy’s house. Our overstuffed backpacks rode above their heads, hoisted by six or eight little arms like chief’s palanquins. As we walked through town, women stood in doorways, shouting their salutations. Ama Akrabba, the village grandmother, ran from her house, beaming a toothless smile, to crush me in her leathery arms. Even the slacker men who hung out streetside, drinking apeteshi all day long, called out “Eh! Obroni!” grinning and waving.
Billy Akwah Graham had the largest and nicest house in town. Made of cinder blocks and stucco and painted a clean white with blue wooden shutters, it sat on a hill at a slight distance from the other houses. While extended families often shared a single room, Billy’s home actually had extra rooms, entire unoccupied spaces surrounded by walls. He was a Ghanaian anomaly: a financially solvent rural bachelor in his thirties. He shared the house with his adolescent nephew Kofi. When recent college graduates came to Afranguah from Accra or Kumasi to fulfill their national service requirement by teaching in the school, they, too, stayed in Billy Akwah Graham’s guest rooms. Someday they would stay in the teachers’ quarters our association had begun to build, but for now they remained with Billy, sometimes for as long as a year or two.
Billy was a dapper, bird-boned man, always impeccably dressed in Western clothes. Although I had stayed in his house once before, when I returned to the village to visit Yao, I had never developed a sense of ease with him. He’d spent a fair amount of time around our construction site, conversing with the camp leader and the home secretary, but I’d never seen him lift a brick. He moved in the world with the practiced, sunny air of a politician, smiling and shaking hands, spouting vague, optimistic statements.
It was unclear to me whether Billy had a prior arrangement with the association or had simply befriended the camp leader. In either case, it was soon established that he would oversee the completion of our project by the villagers once our group had left, and that he would communicate any additional need for supplies to the office in Accra. It was he, as well, who would administer the sponsorship of children’s school fees, a project which originated with our brigade. Twelve or fourteen of the foreign volunteers, Katie and myself included, had agreed to take on the yearly fees of a school-aged child through the completion of high school. The fees were nominal to us, along the order of forty dollars a year, but enormous to the villagers. Billy chose the families and matched children to volunteers. The yearly checks would be filtered through him, since most of the families had neither bank accounts nor post office boxes, and he would supply the volunteers with updates and photographs of the sponsored children.
When we arrived at Billy’s house, he stepped outside the door, extending his arms in welcome. His nephew, Kofi, stood slightly behind him, smiling shyly. Kofi was fourteen years old and, like his uncle, always perfectly groomed. He had occasionally accompanied Billy on his visits to the construction site, but I’d never heard him speak. He’d simply stood there in his school uniform, watching.
Billy gestured for us to enter the house, shooing the children away. They backed up twenty or thirty yards and remained there, wide-eyed, bearing witness. He shouted for them to be gone, and they backed up a little farther and settled down to play in the dirt. Exasperated, he was about to shout again, but abruptly changed his mind and ushered us inside. The living room was simple and spare—a couch and a low table on a bare cement floor, no decoration of any kind.
“You must stay as long as you like!” said Billy effusively, “one month I hope, maybe two.”
“You’re very kind,” said Katie.
“Yes, thank you,” I added, “but we’ll be here four or five days at the most. We really just wanted to see everybody again. How’s the construction going?”
“Oh . . . very slow,” said Billy. “I try to make these people work, but for no money, they do not want to do anything. I tell them, this is for you, so that your children may be educated. They think that if they wait, the foreigners will return and finish the job.”
I nodded and sighed. Afranguah was one of the few places where I’d felt reasonably confident that the work we began would eventually be finished. I didn’t envy Billy’s role in the process, though. Getting people to donate their labor was a difficult task anywhere in the world, whether it was in their own interest or not.
Kofi showed us to our room. He stood by as we began to unpack, watching our every motion with a shy, eager look.
“Are you in school, Kofi?” Katie asked.
“Yes, in Saltpond. I finish in two years.”
“And what would you like to do then?” I asked.
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“I would like to attend University,” he said, “if only I could find the funds.”
“Surely your uncle will help you,” I said.
“It is too great a cost for him. He wishes me to acquire a foreign sponsor,” he said demurely, looking at his hands.
The days went quickly. We spent them with the children, sitting on the steps of Billy’s house when he was out, playing clapping games, braiding hair, trading Fanti and English words. One of our favorite activities was a verb game in which we took turns giving each other orders in Fanti. The children would call out words like “cry,” “laugh,” “dig,” or “dance,” and Katie and I would act them out, prompting wild laughter. Then we’d switch and have twenty criers, dancers, and laughers going at it with gusto in response to our commands.
Every day I dropped in to see Yao. He was crawling now, and he’d acquired a couple of single syllable words, which he shouted upon occasion. It was wonderful to see him healthy, his extraordinary eyes alight with intelligence. Although he didn’t remember me, we soon renewed our friendship, and he would climb straight into my lap when I arrived.
Repairing things with Minessi was not so easy. Although the tensions between us had eased, our relationship lacked the camaraderie of our early days. I tried to initiate a conversation with her about the hospital, asking her if I had done something to make her angry, but she either didn’t understand or didn’t want to engage. I soon abandoned the effort. Because of the strain, my daily visits were much shorter than they had once been.
The other children followed Katie and me around every moment that they were not in school or asleep, which for the littlest ones meant every moment of daylight. Among the company were Minessi’s neighbor Amoah’s three children: Baba, Kwesi, and Essi, and his niece, Mansah. Eight-year-old Baba had a smile that could light a dark cave to its unknown corners. With her laughing eyes and wide, flexible mouth, her entire face reflected an irrepressible joy that was absolutely contagious—you had to smile back. She was quick, too, remembering English words with astonishing precision. She never seemed to forget anything, from songs and phrases to hand gestures and dance steps.
Baba was the primary caretaker of her one-year-old sister Essi and her three-year-old brother Kwesi. Essi rode most of the day in a sling on Baba’s narrow back, while grave-eyed, dimpled Kwesi toddled beside her, hanging onto her arm as though it were a life buoy and the world a lake. Ten-year-old Mansah was more reserved. She was upright and slender as the millet stalks in the fields outside of town, her face long and foxlike, with the kind of elegant bone structure that telegraphs the shape of the adult face to come. She supervised her younger cousins like a cautious mother, the sober counterweight to Baba’s bubbling exuberance.
Also among our youthful entourage was thirteen-year-old Essi Abokoma, my personal sponsoree and language instructor. Essi Abokoma had luminous almond eyes and a deep, resonant voice, which consistently surprised me when it emanated from her small frame. Whenever she shouted I jumped a little, and this soon became a running joke between us. When she wasn’t at school, she spent hours pointing things out to me, patiently repeating their Fanti names, then painstakingly copying them out for me in my notebook.
At the end of a child-filled day, Katie and I were usually exhausted. A woman came in to prepare Billy’s meals, and we got into the habit of eating with him. Afterwards Katie and I would retire to our room to read and rest. On the second night, Kofi followed us, standing silently in a corner of the room.
“Can I help you with something, Kofi?” I asked, after a minute or two had passed.
He picked a pair of pink-framed plastic sunglasses from the top of my open backpack.
“You give me these,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Kofi, but I need those.”
He then picked up my straw sunhat, which was perched on the floor beside the pack. “You give me this.”
“Kofi . . . I need that too.”
“You give me this,” he said, pulling out a T-shirt.
“Kofi, I’m not comfortable with you asking me for things in that way,” I said. He nodded, then stood staring down at the backpack, saying nothing.
“Korkor and I are very tired, Kofi,” Katie said after another awkward moment had passed.
With a small, strange smile, he left the room.
Kofi hovered around us whenever we were at the house together. He carried the water for our baths, heated it on the stove, made tea for us, poured the milk and sugar, sliced the bread for our breakfast. As with Christy, we asked him to stop, to allow us to do things for ourselves. Katie and I felt much more at ease in the house once he had left for school. Every evening when he returned, he followed us into our rooms and began the low, steady litany: You give me this, you give me these. He pushed us to the limits of our patience, then slipped away.
As usual, I was in a complete emotional tangle about how to respond to Kofi’s demands. We were guests in his home, and the objects were certainly replaceable. But though I knew it wasn’t my job to teach Kofi manners, I couldn’t help resenting his demeanor. I thought of the way people in the U.S. complained about homeless people who were aggressive in their requests for change. “They’re hungry,” I’d often responded. “If you were hungry, you might not be so pleasant either.”
But Kofi wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t even poor, by Ghanaian standards. He was just . . . Well, he was Ghanaian, and I was American. And an above-average Ghanaian enjoyed a vastly different level of wealth than a middle-class American, even a downwardly mobile one like myself.
Billy began to unnerve me as well. His mouth was locked in a perpetual smile that never seemed to reach his eyes, which were watchful and shrewd. One morning as Katie and I sat on the step outside his house, eating white bread and drinking tea, he came and sat down next to me.
“I want to come to America,” he said.
“Eh heh,” I said noncommittally, offering the familiar Ghanaian exclamation.
“Will you welcome me?” he asked, watching me closely.
“Yes, of course,” I answered mildly, looking away. I felt a twinge of apprehension. Ghanaian hospitality was so complete. All the people I’d stayed with had encouraged me to remain in their homes as long as I liked. They had provided meals and seemed to have limitless time at their disposal for my entertainment. Billy would undoubtedly expect the same treatment from me.
He continued watching me for some time while I stared straight ahead, chewing, trying to ignore the hot beam of his eyes. At last he turned to Katie. “What will you do when you return to England?” he asked.
“I’d like to go back to school and get a teaching certificate,” she said.
“You are a teacher already, no?”
“Well, yes, I’ve been teaching art to mentally ill adults, but if I get certified, I’ll be able to go for better jobs, at colleges and things.”
“When you get that expensive job you will send me money,” said Billy.
“Billy,” Katie said gently, “that puts me in a difficult position.”
“I simply meant that when you have more money, it will be more possible for you to help people,” said Billy quickly, backpedaling. “That’s how we are here in Ghana. If we have anything at all, we share it. We are very much interested in sacrificing ourselves to help our fellowman.”
After being with Billy and Kofi, the company of the children was a positive relief. They seemed to genuinely want nothing more from us than to spend time in our presence. Unlike children in the cities, who grabbed at our clothing and possessions in much the same way Kofi did, they never asked us for anything at all.
The day before we left, Katie and I went into Saltpond to purchase parting gifts for our cadre of kids. After looking around the market, we settled on brightly colored pencils and tablets of drawing paper. For Essi Abokoma, who had spent so much time teaching me Fanti, I bought a pair of sunglasses, since she had often admired mine. Reluctantly, we picked up a pair for Kofi as well. His behavior stil
l drove us around the bend, but we didn’t see how we could exclude him, given the lengths he and Billy had gone to for our comfort. For Billy we stocked up on foodstuffs both ordinary and special: bags of rice and tins of fish and condensed milk, palm oil and chilis and tomatoes.
That evening we gathered the children ceremoniously around us on the steps of Billy’s house. Billy stepped outside to act as our interpreter.
“You know we’re leaving tomorrow,” Katie told them. “We’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve spent with you, and we wanted to give you a small gift to remember us by.”
The children stood still and eager as Billy translated her words. They seemed to hold their collective breath. Katie pulled out the colored pencils and the tablets.
“There are enough of these for everyone to have five or six different colors,” she began.
She was about to ask them to line up and make their choices, but before she could get the words out, the children flew into a kind of frenzy, grabbing at the pencils and the small notebooks. Billy exhorted them to be calm, to no avail. The bigger ones intimidated the little ones, grabbing pencils from their hands. The mayhem continued for several minutes until Billy raised his voice in a deep, throaty shout. They settled down then, clutching their pencils and notebooks possessively, some of them glaring at others who seemed to have gotten more or better colors. A few of the littlest ones stood on the sidelines, wailing. Three-year-old Kwesi waved his empty fists furiously in the air. Katie and I exchanged alarmed glances.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I said.
“They are badly behaved children. It is shameful,” said Billy fiercely, giving them the evil eye. “They only wish that I will not tell their parents how they behave.”
“Oh, please don’t,” said Katie with alarm. “It was our fault.”
Billy sniffed, frowning severely at the chastened children. He then commanded them sharply, in Fanti, and they began to disperse. I called to the older Essi to remain. I hadn’t yet given her her present.
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