Jan regularly hauled back suitcases of stuff from the States, much of it donated by friends, for her Kof-town kids, everything from books to shoes and backpacks to pencil sharpeners that weren’t made by Gillette. Tired of being called obruni (“That’s not my name!”), she made sure the kids knew our names, to which they invariably added the prefix “Uncle” or “Auntie.” That made it easy to tell which kids didn’t go to school and thus had virtually no English: they were the ones who shouted “Auntie Max” and “Uncle Jan.”
Jan held school of her own after dinner most evenings. Several kids would come up to do homework and get a little extra practice in English, the lack of which would pretty much guarantee a life of penury in Ghana, despite the obvious cultural importance of their native tongues. They would spread their workbooks around the dining room table and use the Burro whiteboard as a blackboard. One night, as the younger kids played a round of Memory, a preschool game with cards and symbols, I helped an older girl named Elizabeth with her composition homework.
The assignment page of her workbook dealt with the subject of “Homes.” First she had to write a sentence describing her home, based on one of several prompts: flat, bungalow, condominium, hut. “I live in a flat,” she wrote carefully, which seemed debatable considering the concrete bunker with no indoor plumbing or cooking facilities that she called home. Then again, it wasn’t exactly a hut, bungalow sounded far too charming, and it certainly wasn’t a condo. The next section dealt with describing the rooms in the home, with prompts like living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, and terrace. Elizabeth’s home had no kitchen, dining room, or terrace; even the concept of a living room seemed a stretch; Ghanaians live outside. “Why don’t you write a sentence describing how many people sleep in your bedroom?” I suggested.
She held up her fingers and counted: “Sister … sister … sister … brother … grandma … me. Six.” She wrote: “Six people sleep in my bedroom.”
The last section was called “Near the Home,” with a list that included market, park, MRT station, and “hawking centre.” There were no parks (except for the cracked concrete expanse that hosted the Thursday bead market and various school and church pageants), and all of Koforidua was one giant hawking centre. On her own, Elizabeth came up with “bank,” several of which stood nearby. She wrote “Our house is near the …” and then she slowly penned B and A. “What’s next?” she asked. “R?”
I made the N sound.
“N! What’s next?”
I made the K sound.
“K?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m going to urinate.” And with that, she set down her pencil and repaired to the relative luxury of our indoor facilities.
3. Mena
Mena was the old deaf lady who lived behind the courtyard and hand-washed our laundry when we got tired of doing it ourselves—meaning after about two weeks into January. I didn’t know her real name; Mena is a contraction of the Twi words me ene, or “my mother,” and is typically used as an honorific for any older woman—like we would call an old woman generically “Grandma,” although Mena was in fact Precious and Pamela’s real grandmother. She was bent over with arthritis and had just a few teeth, but taking in laundry was one of the only ways she had to earn money—not that she would have starved without our cash, as she was surrounded by supportive family, but every cedi counted. There was no set price; we gave her a bag of laundry, it came back clean and folded the next day, or the day after (delivered by one of the children in the courtyard, who expected a coin or a banana), and we paid what we wished, generally around ten cedis, which was a lot of money for an old lady in Koforidua. Whenever we returned from a stay in the United States, Mena knelt at our feet and made a prayer sign, in gratitude that her benefactors were back, dirty laundry soon to follow.
Communicating with Mena was always a challenge because she talked mainly with her hands—not formal sign language but her own invention of wild gesticulations, accompanied by guttural vocal sounds. She seemed to be a naturally animated person, so that even the most routine communications were delivered as if she were directing firemen to a burning orphanage. Quite how I’m unsure, but the children in the courtyard were able to comprehend her; mostly what they comprehended was Mena’s generalized desire to beat the tar out of any child within arm’s reach, so they kept their distance—especially Kwabena, the ten-year-old who did not go to school, spoke no English, and was the punching bag of every adult in the courtyard. Whenever Mena passed Kwabena, she would give him a slap just on general principle.
I couldn’t understand much of Mena’s sign language, but the basics were accessible enough. If she meant to say your laundry would be ready later that day, she would point to her wrist (not that she actually had a watch) and make several tight spirals with her finger—signifying hours. Laundry that would not be completed until the next day was indicated by a wrist point followed by a wide circle drawn in the sky—the passing of a day. Equally easy to understand was Mena’s opinion of your payment, which was theoretically voluntary but in practice subject to her stern regard. When you picked up your finished laundry and paid her, she would register happiness with your donation by kneeling in supplicant pose and bowing her head. Displeasure at the amount (for reasons that were never clear, perhaps a stubborn stain that required more work) was met with a scowl followed by finger wagging and grunting vowels, ending with the universal hunger gesture of hand to mouth. In this way we managed a crude business rapport over several months and many bags of laundry.
4. A Bitch Named Future
Jan and I invited the families around the courtyard to dinner one Sunday. Somehow over the course of the weekend it transpired that Pamela and her best friend Savannah would teach Jan and me how to make fufu. From this grew the addition of peanut soup, and once you make a pot of peanut soup in Ghana, you are setting yourself up for a big event. So that’s how it happened.
It began around three in the afternoon, when Jan and I took Savannah to the public market, quiet on Sunday but many stalls still open for business, with the shopping list she had written down. For the fufu we needed two simple ingredients: cassava and plantains, green and quite hard. Her list for the soup, spelled perfectly in English, read:
Groundnuts [peanut butter, made by hand and sold in thin plastic baggies knotted at the top]
Onions
Tinned tomatoes [what we would call tomato paste]
Ryco [a brand of bouillon cube]
Pepper [meaning ground dried chili peppers of an incendiary variety]
Chicken [bought hacked up and frozen from the cold store]
Back at the flat, Pamela joined us in the kitchen and we began to make the soup. First the girls peeled and chopped several onions, then tossed them into our enameled cast-iron pot along with the chicken pieces, the “tinned tomatoes” (maybe twice as large as an American can of tomato paste), and the bouillon cube. They added salt and copious handfuls of chili powder, covered the pot, and turned the heat on high.
Next we moved on to the fufu, which required peeling and cubing the cassava and plantains. This was being done outside in the courtyard, at the foot of our stairs; I was in the kitchen washing a few dishes when Jan came up and said, “Max, you’ve got to come down and see how they cut the cassava.”
I went down and noticed that Jan had been peeling the cassava root as I would—with a twin-bladed vegetable peeler. She had not made much progress. The girls, on the other hand, were almost through the whole basket of roots. Wielding massive long kitchen knives—almost machetes—in one hand and grasping a cassava root in the other, they deftly whacked the plant lengthwise, splitting the skin like bark off a log, then effortlessly tore the whole clean. A couple more whacks—again, holding both knife and plant in bare hands—and the roots were reduced to large chunks suitable for pounding. The plantains, of course, were simple to peel.
Into a pot of water went the washed plantain and cassava chunks, and onto the stove. “Uncle Max
, please, we need a rubber for on top,” said Savannah. It took a minute for me to figure out they meant a plastic shopping bag which, laid over the boiling water and under the lid, helped to seal the steam.
By this time the chicken had steamed sufficiently in the other pot to add the liquid. Savannah and Pamela tore open the baggies of peanut butter and squeezed them into a large plastic bowl to which they had added water (from the tap, not completely safe; we generally cooked with purified water). Using their hands, they stirred the mixture and added more water until it reached the consistency of gravy, then poured it into the pot. We threw in a few snails for good measure, and let it all simmer. Although I did not have a cigar or a crime novel, around this point in the proceedings I truly felt like Felix Naggar over his Nairobi stove.
An hour later, the cassava and plantain chunks were cooked and ready for pounding. Back in the courtyard, the girls set up a station, assembling a bowl of water and another of the vegetable chunks. In the center of this operation was a carved hardwood mortar the size of a small stool, worn smooth from years of pounding, with a flat center and a wide lip. Joyce, who is Savannah’s aunt but also functions as her mother, sat on a bench and began to toss handfuls of plantain chunks into the mortar. Savannah stood above her, wielding the eight-foot-long pestle—nothing more than a straight tree trunk, roughly four inches in diameter. On the bottom of the pestle, the wood fibers had been pounded out into the shape of a mushroom cap, so that the surface greeting the vegetables was wide and smooth. As Savannah pounded in a steady rhythm, Joyce deftly added chunks of cassava and plantain along with a sprinkle of water; as the mixture solidified into a paste, she would then quickly flip and turn the whole mass, sort of like kneading bread, constantly repositioning the mound under the crushing pestle while slipping her hand away at the last split second.
This became hard to watch, because it was obvious that if Joyce and Savannah got their rhythm off, Joyce’s hand would be instantly mangled under the pile-driving action of the pestle. When I had been told earlier in the day that I would get a chance to pound fufu, I hadn’t realized that a woman’s hand would be at the mercy of my skill. “Just keep the same rhythm,” said Savannah when she handed me the pestle. “Let Joyce worry about her hand.”
Easier said than done. Try as I might to focus on my rhythm, I couldn’t stop worrying about Joyce’s hand—which of course caused me to lose my rhythm, which of course was the worst possible thing from Joyce’s standpoint.
The pounding proceeded without incident, however, and soon dinner was served. We had invited about twenty guests, and double that showed up—quite a party. Someone handed Mena a glass of wine with the warning, “Drink it slowly.” She sniffed it, took a sip, and sagely pronounced, “Beer!” It was also the only word of English I’d ever heard her pronounce.
The snails went quickly as they are a Ghanaian delicacy, on par with lobster in America, and were fished out of the stew by fast-moving children. For dessert Jan had made an apple crisp (South African apples, quite expensive, were generally available in the market) that the children thought strange; they much preferred the strawberry ice cream we had sent Savannah out for.
As bowls and plates were cleared, scraps of bones got tossed outside to the courtyard’s resident cur, a bitch named Future. This benign mongrel seemed generally better fed than the average slab-sided African pariah dog, perhaps because her agreeability encouraged human sympathy. Future’s charms were evidently not lost on the local canine studs, as she appeared to be constantly suckling new broods. Sometimes late at night I would wake to the terrible clamor of a dogfight somewhere out on the street; there are few alarms more piercing than the sadistic skirmish of a feral turf war, and I often wondered if Future was part of the fray, and if the next morning there would be, so to speak, no Future. But there she always was.
In the summer of 2010, Jan told me that Future had disappeared. Apparently there was a new shop in town that sold dog meat, according to Mary, who was Precious and Pamela’s mother, and dogs were disappearing left and right. They planned to get another dog.
5. Another Day, Another Doxy
Personal health required constant vigilance, given all the ways one could get sick, possibly very sick, in Ghana. Many of the serious diseases raging in the country, including cerebrospinal meningitis and polio, could be prevented with vaccines, and like all sensible Westerners (and most elite Africans) I had a full round of shots and boosters before traveling. But other afflictions were not so easily prevented. Cholera and dysentery—different bacterial infections of the intestine which begin with the foulest bodily eliminations imaginable and progress, if untreated, to death—coursed through the water of Ghana and lived on feces and food. Many of the insect-borne ailments had no vaccination, such as trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”), the fatal disease carried by the tsetse fly. Fortunately, tsetse flies are rare in southern Ghana, and even the ones in the north of the country are now said to be the noncarrying variety. Not so mosquitoes, which carry the parasites causing malaria and the viruses of yellow and dengue fever.
Malaria was the biggest concern because there is no vaccine, only a series of prophylactic drugs that may or may not prevent infection. Although most strains of malaria are not fatal in otherwise healthy adults, at least one is—and even the nonfatal versions might make you wish you were dead as you lie in bed, wracked with fever and night sweats. Meanwhile, the drugs all have various side effects. Lariam, the standard brand name for Mefloquine, is a synthetic analog of quinine developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1970s.* Among its side effects are vivid, hallucinogenic-like dreams or nightmares, depending on your point of view.
Malarone, the brand name for a cocktail of atovaquone and proguanil, is considerably more benign except for one major side effect: severe strain on the wallet. A daily dose costs more than three dollars when ordered online from Canada, and more than twice that at a U.S. pharmacy. Since most American health insurance policies won’t pay for malaria prevention at all, and virtually none will pay for more than thirty days of prophylaxis, a Malarone course adds up quickly over a long stay.
Finally there’s doxycycline, a tetracycline-type antibiotic that can cause stomach upset and, for some people, extreme sensitivity to sunlight—a notable side effect in a tropical clime. And you need to take it for a month after returning. On the other hand, doxy is dirt cheap and may provide the side benefit of inoculating against at least some bacterial bad guys.*
Sorting through all these options was only the beginning. Once you decided on your malaria drug of choice there was a daily debate over how to avoid side effects: Should I take it before bed and risk nightmares or sleeplessness? Or should I wait until morning and chance nausea? With dairy, or without? Before a meal, or after? These decisions sapped huge amounts of mental bandwidth. Meanwhile, we all carried stashes of ciprofloxacin, the powerful antibiotic used to treat dysentery, and arguments raged about the proper timing of a cipro course. Whit’s Seattle doctor told him not to panic at the first sign of diarrhea, which was most likely garden variety and not a serious infection; why risk building immunity to the antibiotic over nothing? My doctor in Maine, on the other hand, said, in effect, bullshit—if you get the runs in Africa, start the cipro, pronto. Since my doctor had actually worked for several years in Uganda, I tended to believe him. At any rate, we spent more time discussing our medications than a roomful of nursing home residents.
Of course there is a fine line between vigilance and paranoia, and awareness of the range of ailments tended to breed, if nothing else, a virulent strain of hypochondria. Every sneeze and cough raised the specter of tuberculosis. A muscle ache brought on worries of yellow fever. That skin rash could be nothing—or it could be a three-foot-long parasitic worm festering inside my thigh! One day I noticed, for the first time in my life, coarse hairs growing from the rim of my left ear. They were so stiff you could have scrubbed a pot with them, and there were none on my right ear. I panicked: What evil African f
lagellate causes boar bristles to grow from your left ear? I found nothing in the literature, but treatment seemed to involve careful application of a razor.
Africans themselves are no better; they pop more pills than the French, a habit facilitated by the easy procurement of powerful drugs from any pharmacist, without a prescription. Every time a Burro employee got a cold, he or she would race down to the chemist for a round of antibiotics. “It won’t help,” said Jan over and over again. “Colds are viruses; antibiotics won’t do anything.” She was preaching to a brick wall. Charlie and his family took deworming medication every three months, which actually seemed like a good idea—“especially if you eat a lot of fresh food,” said Charlie.
I finally did get genuinely sick in October. For some karmic reason that I cannot fathom, I am one of those chosen to experience regular episodes of kidney stones. Roughly every three years I am blessed with this exquisite form of torture, so I know the onset symptoms, and the treatment, only too well.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Whit asked as I lay groaning on my bed during the first, relatively easy round of spasms.
“No,” I said through gasps, imagining myself curled up in the fetal position on a wooden bench in some vast Conradian waiting room. “All they do at home is give me morphine, then send me home with Oxycodone. I bet you can get that shit at the pharmacy here.”
“Morphine?”
“No, Oxycodone. It’s a prescription synthetic opiate, but I bet you can walk in and get it here.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Max Alexander Page 22