Shangri La

I’m writing this across from the kidney pool in the back of Hotel Shangri-La. A group of Ghanain women walk by. The Danish man with them explains – ‘She doesn’t want me hanging out with you.’ He slurs slightly. ‘I think she’s jealous.’.

Another man, at the bar, offers to take a young woman anywhere she wants to go. He puffs a cigarette and licks thin lips. She asks him – well, anywhere in Europe.

We all want what we can’t have until we have it. The grass is greener and so forth. My plane is leaving for London in twelve hours and I’m here at this hotel to kill those hours dead.

For the past several days I’ve had a feeling of déjà-vu. Tamale is new and different, as though I’ve come for the first time, again. Already things from only a few months ago are hazy and I know that it’s going to all go blurry once the dust is gone out of my shirts and shoes. That’s sad. There’s a whole world vanishing. I’m desperate for a Kodak moment, distributing disposable cameras.

I hold out hope that it won’t ever vanish entirely. I’ve got a new scar that will save me from getting a tattoo. I’m not cool enough to be a hipster anyway.

I can picture the grass at Beacon Hill park, Our Town, and downtown. They’re far away, no context, like postcards. These rich swimsuits in the pool, these fat expats, the old man serving tables and me, we’re all here in limbo. I’m waiting for the next life. Twelve hours.

Fin

My contract officially ran out on Friday. All done.

Not really, of course. There's still a few videos to wrap up and a few loose ends to take care of around the office. I'm hoping to spend the next couple weeks getting to know Tamale a bit better and seeing friends, etc. My time has suddenly become very valuable. Supply and demand.

I've been running a film workshop over the past few weekends. It's Hafiz's dream to eventually set up a film school in Tamale so we've started this class with a few local kids. We have some attendance issues but it's going well overall. We wrapped up the camera lesson today. They're getting it. Hopefully we'll shoot a short narrative film next week. It'll take some supervision but it's exciting too. They're getting it. I feel warm and fuzzy.

The local film scene here is this fantastic grass-roots thing. Making cheap movies for a grand or so and showing them in markets and small communities for a few cents a head. Why can't it be like that in Canada? I miss movies, putting one shot in front of the other. Scenes and scripts instead of budgets and connections. Friends and favours, too. I don't want to be successful or arty, or have a career. I want to tell stories for no money and show them to my friends.

Smile

Photo credit to Jacob.

We had the new benches made just in time. When Jacob and I arrived at the office Wednesday morning we found a mob of SHS 1 students, all arrived a day or two before they were due to pay fees at their new schools. I don’t know how many students we ran through, but we laid out around 9000 GHC in school fees.

This is the big crunch for the organization, the time of year when the office always has at least one person waiting in the foyer. Samson and Benedicta skip lunch. We improvise, lining up students, scrawling names on pieces of scrap paper and holding them up for database photos, associating names with faces. It’s easy to confuse them. Seems like everyone has the same haircut.

Ran out of ink in our whiteboard marker. Ran out of space on the camera. Ran out of the office to grab water for twentysomething people.

Today we’re picking up the bits and pieces. Everyone we couldn’t get to yesterday comes back. The photos are all processed. I’ll pick out a couple of students to interview, good talkers with a bit of energy.

Entering girls into the database, taking down names that I still don’t hear right the first time – could you spell that? Trying new ways to make them laugh, or relax, loosen up. Interview technique. Learned the dagbani word for smile – it’s lama. I think they’re only smiling because I make such a mess of the word. But a smile’s a smile so I can play it up a bit and get what I need. Everyone I meet here is someone who’ll talk a bit more when we roll by the schools in a week or so, collecting interviews. Everyone who smiles here opens up a little more next time.

The Plural

Saliminga saliminga saliminga. I can make fun of Samson when he’s talking to a group of students, telling them I need their photo. Saliminga saliminga saliminga, I have a name you know. An introduction is made.

Except now it’s come to Salimisi. That’s plural.

Jacob got here a few days ago. I took the government bus down to Accra to pick him up at Kotoka airport. There’s a list on the lonely planet website of the most disappointing cities in the world. Accra’s number two. He’s from number one, Detroit. I think this means he’s moving up in the world, or I could have the ordering of the list confused.

It’s a different

For the record, 24 hours is a long time to spend on buses.

The Sandwich I Had Today

Or what I'm up to. In brief.

I had another bout of sickness in the last week or so. A little malaria and then a little typhoid. Minor cases of both.

School's back! Every morning the office is crowded with a bunch of new or continuing sponsorship applicants. Girls, mothers, brothers, younger and older siblings. We've had more postsecondary applications than we can handle, but we're doing what we can. I'm not directly involved in this, except that every time someone gets accepted I line them up against a wall and take a photo for the database. I've learned how to say 'smile' in Dagbani - it's 'lama'. They laugh because either 1) They're surprised or 2) I'm mangling the pronunciation. Either way, I owe Mcluhan a beer.

A few lizards moved into the house with me. They shit on the floor and I clean it up. I chased one around with a broomhandle yesterday. Got him in the head. Ex-lizard. Then I had to clean up the blood, which wasn't much fun. He's rotting in my front yard right now, the little bastard.

Looking at a few options for when my contract's up. Hafiz is possibly going to get funding to make a film, which I could help with. Getting to know some of his friends who are local filmmakers, which is... nifty. There's also a local development newspaper I might see if I can help out with. We'll have to see.

Tony the Chicken: A Photoessay in Reverse Chronological Order

Poor Tony.

The Same River Twice

There's a hot, humid stream outside my front yard. The bullfrogs keep me up nights and I'm reading Huckleberry Finn. Time to go rafting?

Back 'at home' in Tamale at this point, which is a strange, strange idea. The feeling I had on the bus, seeing familiar landmarks (old rusted roadside taxi! White Volta bridge!) was the same one I've always had coming home. Same neurons firing. I think it's a standard response that we all have when returning to familiar territory.

And so on and so forth. My mom left on Monday, dropped her at the airport. It's the LAST TWO MONTHS now which is different, distinctly different from the amorphous 'just about forever' way that I've been thinking about my remaining time. The unlimited potential has become, well, not. My plans to learn two languages and play flawless Dylan on the harmonica are ... tricky.

It seems like a very empty house, now. But they've hired a new videographer. I spoke to him on the phone. He's coming out in October. The times are, as the man said, a changin'.

Improv Theatre (Travel, part 1)

Somehow I spent five months in Tamale and wound up assuming that everywhere else in Ghana was more or less like this. Accra was a big, busy Tamale spread out over a large area. The coast was Tamale, but on the beach. Kumasi was big Tamale with an arts scene. Obviously, this was wrong, and I've spent the last ten days or so proving it to myself. This will be a multipart saga.

I had no plans setting out. I had several edits to finish for Create Change, and my mother to pick up from the Accra airport at a very specific time. We coordinated bookings at the Kokomlemle Guesthouse in Accra. I took a twelve hour busride, springing for the STC coach. The man in the seat next to me complained about corruption in professional Ghanain football. He had managed a team.

I talked to the woman in front of me, who was the only other foreigner on the bus. She was a homeopathic practitioner (doctor?) from the San Francisco bay area in Ghana to work on a project distributing free herbal malarial prophylaxis to schoolkids. I am of two minds about this. One, that her work was inherently problematic, and Two, that it was damned interesting. I'd lay good odds her medicine is about as effective as sugar pills in preventing malaria, but that's just my bitter materialist talking. I think my good side kind of liked her. We both ate terrible roadside pastries, at any rate, which is some sort of bonding experience.

When I got to Kokomlemle they told me I had never called them and that all their rooms were full. I suppose I'm used to (expecting?) this sort of thing now. I got them to dig out the register, where someone had written down a reservation for me. Apparently the person hadn't told anyone else about it, and they'd forgotten. They mentioned this as though it were due to circumstances beyond their control, or was possibly my fault. At this point I was a bit angry, mostly because they seemed totally OK with leaving me without a place to stay in the middle of the night in Accra. I'm organizing the boycott: Tadhg! Shannen! Don't stay there again.

The hotel next door was full. A man outside asked me what I was doing and I told him. He was friends with someone who worked there and they were renovating some rooms. I took one. Lucky.

I met up with Zeenat (who reads this, sometimes, hi Zeenat!) the next day. She was staying with a gregarious woman named Hajia Ikenu. Hajia has two gold teeth, both installed to commemmorate a Haj completed. Hence the honorific. Zeenat somehow knew one of her sons who was working in the UK. Because Hajia is remarkably generous, even in the context of Muslim hospitality, my tenuous connection to her through Zeenat resulted in a place to stay for me and my mom. I helped Zeenat cook a Bangladeshi curry, which was one of the few times I was allowed to help out with anything. I picked up my mom from the airport and Zeenat went North and so we stayed with Hajia in Accra for three days.

Close Readings

Mole Park is a strangely westernized oasis. (With Gallaghers? Sometimes.) There's a whole spectrum of missionaries, tourists and families, university groups (generally fine arts or health sciences) and volunteers from all over Ghana. We're at the peak of the tourist season, classes still not back in regular session, and I keep hearing this from everyone. How many times have you been to Africa?

Once, in my case. Other people there, two or three times, on safari in Tanzania maybe, or helping orphans in Rwanda. I don't want to get preachy and say that they're just tourists, etc. It's a cheap shot and off by degree, not completely. But I talk to the missionaries and they've built a school. I know several communities around Tamale that could use a new school block. How many do they build a year? One? And how much was airfare for your group of twelve?

I don't dispute that work is getting done, but it seems as though the work is secondary. Voluntourism is tourism, OK, obvious. So why is it more attractive than regular tourism? Do we really think that building a classroom was the most effective aid that twelve bright and motivated and (relatively) rich people could have brought to a community? It seems unlikely. Resume fodder? Good vibes? I'm not denying that helping people is A Good Thing but I question the stress on those fragile capitals.

I know the student group there to test water quality found E. Coli in the tapwater and passed it on to the health authority in Kumasi. That's something. I wish they could stay in the country and call Ghana Water Company every day until they actually did something about the problem. We found one of our harvesting tanks damaged the other day, nobody from the community called the office, we just sort of stumbled across it. It'll get fixed now, but how does a big organization like Unicef deal with this? We've seen their boreholes in disrepair and the community unable to afford replacements. What happens next? We can build things, but can we keep them? Or is that not we came here to do?

Conversations With Strangers

I am running. A woman asks me if she can have my contact number. This is not uncommon. She asks me if I'm married. Uh oh. I'm not, I say. How long am I here for. 'Til November. So you would marry a Muslim. Well actually I'm not really very religious... My husband split. Oh, Sorry. So I will write my number for you and you will call me. I don't really have... I pat my pockets. What's his name? (I'm talking about her kid) Cedric. Hi Cedric. So I can go with you to your house so I'll know it? Well, I'm just out running. I can run with you. I don't know, what about Cedric. A small boy runs up with a pencil and scrap of paper. Here, I will write my number so that you can call me. OK. She writes it. She says it out loud. I take the paper. So you will call me? Sure, OK, sure.

So now I guess I can't run down that road any more.

The Riot Again

The riot at Ghanasco was a while ago, but we're still feeling the fallout. I'm posting this because I think there's a deep-seated flaw in the way that the school is approaching the problem, and even in the way that the school system perceives its students.

I can't remember if I've touched on corporal punishment before. In any case, it's common in the Primary schools and is used, I think, more due to lack of training for the teachers than anything else. It's applied arbitrarily and in some cases indiscriminately. I waved a boy out of the background of a shot one time, and the master went after him with a stick. When I captured the interview audio, I could hear him crying in the background. I don't like it, maybe nobody likes it, but it's here and common. Although I've heard adults talk about it having a profoundly negative effect on their school experiences, there doesn't seem to be much inclination to get rid of it. Even children, given authority, walk around carrying sticks.

Punishment in the case of the riot, I think, is no less arbitrary. What we know is that students burned a motorbike and possibly damaged a police van. Police used teargas on demonstrating students. Students threw stones and vandalized school property. According to one girl, who seems to be the most reliable, things started when the masters tried to take away the cellphones students kept in their dormitories. The head prefect locked them away for safekeeping, and refused to open his trunk when asked. The teachers opened it anyway, and stripped the prefect of his rank. The students, unhappy, demonstrated.

This may or may not be what actually happened. In any case, every single student is being told that unless they pay 75 Ghana Cedis, they can't come back to school. This includes the day (nonboarding) students, none of whom were present at the time of the riot. This includes students who are innocent, guilty, or, as most of them probably are, somewhere in between. It amounts to over 75 000 GHC. That's about $60 000.

There are lots of problems with this. The main one I have is the lack of interest on the schools' part in differentiating between students who took part in the riot and who did not. The money is being described as a 'punishment' (and we were advised by the school not to assist our students with the fine, since it was intended to punish them) and also as a method to recoup the losses suffered by the school and police department. A committee assigned to investigate will reveal names of involved students, so in either case it makes no sense to impose a universal penalty. To do so is to deny the agency of students, and to refuse to recognize them as individuals. Or people, really, which is why there's a paragraph up there about corporal punishment. Deterrence cannot exist when punishment is arbitrarily assigned. The school seems more interested in punishment then it does in discipline, or education.

I say education because many of these students cannot afford the fine they are being asked to pay. And if NGOs sponsoring the poorest students are asked to stand aside, what exactly is it that the school is expecting to happen? These students will have to drop out.

The school has lost the basis of its authority. It can justify punishment as a corollary of social education, but it can't justify punishment to which excludes all possibility of education. The students here are more dedicated to their studies than we ever were. If the fine and the subsequent expulsions stand, the students will be justifiably angry. I wouldn't be surprised, having rioted once, if they rioted again.

Pictures of Elephants (Mole Park)

Funding had just come through on a new rainwater harvesting tank, and we were investigating the possibility of siting it at a small community called Dingoni. That's where I ran into a group from Unite for Sight, which helps people in the Tamale area with free reading glasses and glaucoma surgery. I struck a conversation with one of them, since I've found that chances to meet Westerners are reasonably rare.

I should point out that that was a couple weeks ago. I'd since dropped by to see them a couple times and they invited me to go to Mole with them this past weekend.

Every week or so I talk to Shannen andhe generally tells me I should take a break and go to Mole. I've found so far that I don't really have the time. Theoretically, it would take about four hours to get there, but that doesn't account for the bus breaking down. Apparently this happens most trips, meaning a Friday morning departure is pretty much required. Fortunately, these Unite for Sight folks have a van.

In my head I have this picture of Mole as sort of this lush rainforest capital P Paradise. Very Jungle Book, if that wasn't about a different continent altogether. Sher Khan, Baboo, etc. Watercolour backgrounds and cel-shaded monkeys. I was surprised how accurate that turned out to be. Obviously without cel-shading. The hostel is on a ridge overlooking a large expanse of jungle, which is generally a bit misty. You can see baboons skirting the crest of the ridge and hanging out in the trees. Warthogs were eating the lawn.

After Tamale, it was a distinctly surreal experience. There was a swimming pool, for example. I realized I hadn't been in a swimming pool in at least a few years. One of those things that you stop doing when there's no longer someone else to organize it for you, I guess. Being suspended in water felt strange and foreign, at least for a few seconds. Then it felt sinful - like a waste of a precious resource. I'm half serious and half not - in spite of any vague guilt, it, more than anything else, felt kinda nice.

I feel similarly about the Unite for Sight crew. We played a game called Bananagrams, and someone was joking about Harry Potter and I talked about classes and Victorian lit with a girl in the front seat of the van. And it was all a big relief and so easy to do. But I feel bad in a way, because I talked to Shabahn about going to Mole and somehow those plans never materialized. And some Westerners ask me to go, and there you are. I felt weird when I got back to the house in Tamale, like I was in two places at once, or two countries. I blamed it on a sweaty and sleepless dormroom night and passed out in the middle of the afternoon, A/C on full.

So here's some pictures of elephants.

.

Fever

I always preface my conversations about this sort of thing with a disclaimer. I know next to nothing about football. I even slip up some times and refer to it as soccer, which is a specifically North American blasphemy.

There's a party in the streets every few days. I see motorcycles draped small children waving flags. People (before the last match anyway) keep asking me who I support. Ghana is the obvious answer. Occasionally I point out that I'm not American, which counters an assumption that I have realized is rarely made. Canada's pretty involved in the NGO sector out here and we've got a reasonable number of expatriates. We've hold about as much mental space out here as the States.

I admit that I wanted to see the USA lose. I compare the Canada-USA relationship with Ghana-Nigeria. This is more or less a lie, but it's like the lies they told you in your younger Science classes - a simple explanation to a complex problem and maybe we'll get into what's actually going on in some indeterminate future. I saw Bill Clinton on TV, next to Mick Jagger. I have a nice image of them sitting in a Joburg bar. Bill Clinton is crying softly over his beer and muttering about ball control. Mick Jagger has his arm around the ex-President's shoulders. They commiserate.

In any case, the USA lost. The crowd in the bar went nuts, just like they went nuts when Ghana scored. Or had a free kick. Or subbed in a popular player. I learned what a vuvuzela is. It's a long horn, popular in South African football tradition. It blows a B flat and can cause hearing loss.

Ghana is now the only African team left in the cup. If they beat Uruguay in the next match, they'll be the only African team to have ever made the semi finals. I wonder what that party'd be like?

No Longer At Ease

There's a book by Chinua Achebe called No Longer at Ease about corruption in Nigeria circa 1960. It's about a Nigerian educated in England, who comes back to a government job and a cultural disconnect fromhis family and tribe. He eventually loses all hope and becomes hopelessly corrupt.

I had a conversation today with a man who used to know Shannen back when CC was just getting started. He picked me out because of the motorbike - marked with a logo on either side. He told me the story of how he lost his job, working as a security guard for the Volta River Authority which is the main power company here.

The way he tells it, he was one of the few security people who weren't helping themselves to company property. He made an issue of it, and was ostracized by the rest of the crew. His boss reassigned him to a new posting with only one other coworker who was also considered 'difficult'. The hope being that they would screw up, which more or less happened. The other guy stole a motorbike, which was a pretty stupid move.

The police found it quickly enough, and arrested the coworker. The corrupt boss wrote to Accra, saying essentially 'we had two guys there and a motorbike went missing'. The man I was talking to subsequently lost his job.

He makes a point of emphasizing his commitment to principle. He repeats that he can't stand to watch stealing. His kids are in Bolga now, being taken care of by their grandmother while he tries to find work in Tamale. He talked about trying to take up his court case again. The first time, he says, someone bribed his lawyer not to show up. He blames Africans in general, and thinks that they are universally corrupt.

I'm not really sure what to make of this relatively common attitude. I've seen it from villagers and urbanites, people who are relatively well educated and people who aren't. Often it's a phrased as a joke - oh, you know Africans. It sounds like Canadians joking about being the 51st state. Uneasy. It's hard to argue against history, and there's just no standout theories.

I was at Taha community today, filming the installation of a piping project we're working on. The work stopped around two o'clock because one of the children of the Assemblyman of the community had died of malaria. I was with a man named Dawuda, who (as one job among many) is in charge of collecting birth and death data from communities in the area. He has been working to try to get people in these areas to take sick children to the hospital. They say they have nomoney, and aren't willing sell a precious cow to pay the doctor. They have many children, and they are often sick. Dawuda would like them to sell the cow.

He's fighting against a culture, in the same way that the Volta Authority man was. It's an uphill battle in both cases. Cultural practice seems to exist in a self-perpetuating state. It normalizes itself.

So Achebe's protagonist finds. Initially he resists, of course, and stays clean for a while. Eventually, his personal life falls apart, and he sinks into a despair from which he emerges a corrupt and unprincipled bureacrat. We're chameleons. We match our environment or sometimes we get eaten.

A Change of Pace

I've never understood what Marshall Mcluhan meant when he said "the medium is the message". I've asked a lot of people. I asked the Quebecois prof who first introduced me to the term outside of its pop culture context. I once spent a day asking customers at the cafe what it meant, by way of making conversation. I've never gotten a good answer. It's too bad, but I'm beginning to suspect that Mcluhan is an academic, doing something that academics do. He has come up with a good quote, and he not going to weaken it with qualifiers.

I think he meant that the medium is pretty important to the message. Admittedly, that sounds pretty weak.

But it has a pretty significant effect on the videos I'm making. All this week, as I tore around town, trying to catch up on our video pitch for next year's Girls' Project (www.createchangenow.ca/donation/ghana-girls-education-2010) I was struggling to find a way to include a brilliant segment that I'd gotten from one of our sponsored students. She gave a really nice five minute answer to my vaguely-worded question about her family's background. Unforutnately, it didn't cut up well (few pauses, lots of pronouns) and in the end, the quote didn't fit. It was, after all, as long as the entire video was supposed to be.

So I'm thinking about turning this blog into a repository for material like this. Quotes, explanations, etc. that are interesting (at least to me) but don't fit in well with whatever I'm cutting together for Creating Change. I might even try to turn this blog into a subset of the video projects - a sort of special feature, and move the personal stuff (the boring stuff) off someplace else.

That's the idea, anyway. Here's the video in question. Apologies for heavy compression but I'm not sure about the upload capacity of the internet connection here.

The Riot

I would kill for a picture to go with this posting.

Seriously, though, there was a riot at Ghana Senior Secondary (Ghanasco) last Friday. We first heard about it when trying to schedule an interview with the head teacher there. They couldn't do it, they were busy with damage control. Fair enough.

The rumours have already been circulating. In the first version I heard in the office on Monday, students were reacting to a new ban on mobile phones in the school, and had torched a master's (teacher's) motorbike. Samson lamented the students' shallowness. They are surrounded by issues worth a riot. Why a ban on mobiles?

We have several sponsored students at Ghanasco. One of them, Aziz, dropped by the office this afternoon, and we grilled him about the riot. The students, he said, were rioting over an increase in tuition fees, which the school had raised from 500 to 900. (I'm assuming his figures were annual, and in Ghana Cedis). The students protested at the school, but were driven off by police with teargas. The masters followed, beating several students. The students, in turn, followed the masters home, where they blew up a motorbike.

Kaboom.

Aziz was hoping we could pay for some extra courses. There's no word on when the school will reopen.

The Future is Success

I interviewed a girl last week at Vitting High School. I asked her what would happen to her if she were to drop out. She'd go dancing and clubbing. She'd be influenced by her friends "not from the good side, but from the bad". She'd go around with boys. She'd get HIV.

This sounds a lot like the outside view on townboy culture. This girl, Beatrice, is a very successful student. I think her fear of this alternative path is a powerful motivator. It's a slippery slope, after all. There's a little flat area on the top full of books and grades.

A teacher at the same school explained the obvious differences in material wealth between rural and urban students. The rural students have only one uniform, which they have to wash every other day. They eat millet. They can't buy the supplementary textbooks or extra classes that the richer students can afford. They feel ashamed. The teachers tell them that when they finish school, and graduate, they can buy all the same things as the students from richer families.

I had short chat with one of the owners of Sparkles restaraunt. He asked me if I had a local girlfriend yet. I brought up Fatimah, since I'd been wondering how Ghanains dated. It's normal for the man to buy things for the woman, he said. But asking for things outright is 'too much.'

I guess there's a line. He called girls who cross that line "opportunists". Good word. They want passports, clothes, stereotypical things with social cachet.

I feel like there's only one story going on, and it's told in black and white. Beatrice is scared (and motivated) because there's only one alternative. Townboy culture. The other side of virtuous progress is rebellious laziness.

The nonporifts are using money to bring about a measure of social progress. This is a critical and important task, but it's still wealth generation. At Samson's Baptist church, they use donations to equip pastors. They help their youth through school, so that one day the youth can make Ghana a great and prosperous nation.

One day I'd like to meet a student who studies because they enjoy it. Of course, this isn't likely. They're all in school with good reason, dragging their families out of dire poverty. Useless knowledge is a luxury, art is a luxury. More than supermarkets, washing machines, and consistent power, it's one I'm having trouble doing without.

Sick leave

Had typhoid for about a week. The heavy duty antibiotics were a cure worse than the disease, which wasn't that bad. Got to experience 'mild delirium' which was less fun than it might have been. Actually it was a bit scary.

Fortunately, I am now making significant progress of my tropical-disease checklist. I am giving myself a by for meningitis, both because I have a vaccine, and because it is usually fatal. Cholera and dysentery await!

Eric

Oh and... (please)

Comment or follow! If I know who's reading, I can stop bothering all of you with email and facebook spam!

The Programme

Last weekend I ended up at pool party, of all places. It was a bit surreal - I went with a girl named Fatimah, who, along with her townboy friend Wisdom, I'd met at Sparkles on Friday. It was weird. Fatimah didn't talk much so I kept asking half-questions about the school everyone was from (Tamale Polytechnique) and sitting in silence in between. Didn't have swim stuff.

A bit further into the party (they called it a programme) one of the reps from Ghana Water Co. showed up. I'd met him at a community meeting Create Change held the day before. He was with two college friends, eyeing the college girls. They asked me if I had plans for Fatimah. I told them I had a girlfriend in Canada but 'it was complicated', which seemed a good an answer as any. It was somebody's birthday. They poured beer and soda on him.

Fatimah called me later, and I dragged Siobhan to Sparkles to go see her, explaining that I wanted him as sort of an anti-wingman. She showed up with a friend and asked what drinks I was buying them. So I bought two sodas, made excuses for me and Siobahn, and got the hell out of there. I apologized to him later. He's a good friend.

Anyway, she keeps calling me. I keep saying I'm busy with work. I'm hoping she will stop after a few days. (Although, she called just as I wrote that. Argh.)

Might get in touch with Wisdom again. He's a bit ridiculous (he 'owns the streets' and bragged about selling weed to the President's bodyguards when they were here). He called himself a townboy. I told him he's only a townboy if I'm buying the drinks.

Samson's Farm

E-I-E-I-O.

Further down towards Bolgatanga, and past about five kilometers of side road, is the small community that Samson comes from. I went to meet him there early last week; he's starting a small project and wants me to help him make a short video to promote it.

Samson recently spent a year in the states, at an agriculture development workshop in Waco, Texas. There's a small plot of land behind his family home, where he's hoping to build a farm to demonstrate some basic techniques (transplantation, the care & feeding of rabbits) which should help fill some gaps in local agricultural practices. The will provide a rare source of protein, especially for children. The traditional view is that higher-value (and protein-rich) foods such as protein and eggs are too good for children, who are seen as easily spoiled by such luxuries. This leads to widespread malnutrition of younger children. A prevalent protein source could help change this attitude.

Right now there's just a couple rabbits, huddling in a cage in the store room of Samson's family's compound. The farm area itself is a bit of a mess - debris from the old rabbit enclosure covers about half of it. It blew down in a storm recently, and will need to be redesigned.

Samson's optimistic about the future of the farm though. There's possible funding through his US connections, and it's not much work to clear this small patch of land.

Traffic

“Candidate must be willing to learn to ride motorcycle. “

This is a line from the job posting that got me here. Soft sell. Pickup line for when I get back: I like long walks down the beach and uncontrolled intersections. Both under moonlight. Or dirt paths through small villages. Watch out, small, shirtless children. Staying in second gear to avoid stalling & murder.

Here they build speedbumps like they mean it. Slow down, one way or another. On the bike or not, as you like. Dirt roads mean dirt speedbumps, logically enough. They build them at least a foot and a half high so the erosion takes longer. In the meantime… found new ones on my road last night. Thanks, civil engineering. Who speeds down dirt roads anyway? Isn’t the whole mass of pedestrians and brave goats enough? I go thirty and feel like Evil Knievil.

Riding with two people is tricky. Our bikes max out at an optimistic 70 klicks with one person. I drove Peter, our water project engineer, to Kpanduli the other day. Well, Peter, camera, tripod, backpack, laptop, etc. We stopped by a filling station to buy purewater for the construction crew and I thought I heard the bike scream. We bottomed out the suspension just going from the paved road to the dirt one. At this point, my influence on our center of gravity was proportionately negligible. I pointed us in a direction and prayed against potholes. We came up to a herd of cows chewing cud in the road. I steered between them. Peter wasn’t happy. The animals are unpredictable he said. Be careful.

In the main intersection in Tamale there’s a board posted with stats on traffic deaths in Ghana, organized by city. Every morning I scoot through the traffic cluster underneath. I imagine the two story trucks that barrel down the road to Bolga, crammed with people, appliances and livestock. If I end up on that board, it better be for good reason. Not some cab door opened at the last minute or badly-timed outside pass. I’ll take a cow herd or a tro-tro flipping down the highway. Give me a fatal pileup with an African flavour.

Some local commuter will saunter up in the chaos to steal my helmet. Stupid saliminga should’ve learned how to ride the motorcycle. And steered around the cows.

The Wet

The rainy season's come early this year. Today I drove the Create Change motorbike through nearly deserted streets - just a few taxis and NGO trucks were out and braving the downpour. The whole town shuts down, and there's a small huddle under every awning and storefront. The rain, when it comes, doesn't last long. I was unlucky enough to have things to do today - visa renewal, in this case. I sloshed into the Vodafone internet cafe to print of a copy of my return ticket itinerary. Under their air conditioning, the little hairs on my arms all stood up and I noticed for the first time that they've been bleached blonde by the sun. I left a puddle wherever I walked. When I went for passport photos, the photographer was nice enough to let me use one of his spare canvas backdrops as a towel.

This change in the weather is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the communities around Tamale benefit. Their dams have all dried up over the last few months, and they often walk long distances (4 hours!) to find water. The rains will fill the dams again, water will be near at hand. On the flip side, our borehole construction season is coming to a rapid close. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get the driller truck to the planned site for the Wayamba borehole. Twice now, drilling attempts have been called off on account of terrain made impassable by mud. We're hoping that a few dry days in the next week or so will make it possible to get the truck in. In the meantime, the communities will still rely on the old dams.

Photos

Top: Sunset over Kotingli dam.

Left: My official visa renewal ID photo

Right: Girl drinking water from a newly formed pool in Wayamba. Fortunately, this water is unlikely to have been contaminated with Guinea Worm.

Football

I'm not having much luck meeting foreigners in Tamale, but it's been pretty easy to meet locals. When I first met Siobhan, I was probably overly suspicious that he was a townboy, but he's not. Actually, he's a pretty nice guy who's really into football. He knows a lot of players in the local semipro club, and he took me to one of their games. Photos! (That's him in the top right)

Fever Dreams

I got sick last week. So now I know what malaria feels like. There's at least one authentic experience chalked up. Sorry for the late posting.

Originally I thought it was the Kenke, which was a new food I'd tried the day before. My days have generally settled into a routine where I go out to a community in the morning, shoot some footage of whatever work or investigation we're doing there, and edit in the office AC after lunch. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go - to Kuokuo, where we'd like to put that new borehole - but there wasn't much chance to replicate the meeting that was going to take place with the community leaders. I rode out on the back of Samson's scooter with my guts tying themselves in knots.

Once we reached the community, I got some basic shots of the meeting, Samson, etc. I'd been feeling steadily worse, and had let Samson know I was probably going to throw up at some point. I checked to make sure if that was going to offend anyone in the village. It would probably be OK, he said. In the end, it didn't come up.

I spent the rest of the meeting lying on a bench in the shade, which the community had thoughtfully dragged out for me. If they hadn't, I'd have taken the ground. By the time the meeting concluded, I was pretty weak. The ground was sand and it looked pretty comfortable. My head was spinning and I was looking at the motorbike unsteadily, not quite sure that I'd be up for the long ride back to Tamale.

Samson was kind enough to let me hang out under a tree near the main road for about half an hour, waiting for a taxi that never came. By this time, I was pretty sure I had heatstroke, or something. I felt hot all over. Eventually I just climbed up on the back of his scooter and held on. Woozy, I stared closely at the small hairs on the back of his neck as we drove to a Tamale hospital. I could see the sun in the small beads of sweat which hung off them. When the bike pulled, I'd sway forward and my helmet would click gently against the one he was wearing.

The hospital had no AC, just three slow fans. Everything was cash up front. I sat in a heap on a bench in the corner. Samson had a friend who happened to be visiting the hospital and they told me what to do and when to do it. The doctor was on the phone, organizing a construction project. The lab tech used a fresh needle - I checked it out of the corner of my eye. They stapled the printout to itself for privacy, but not very well. I could read 'positive' and 'seen' and 'malaria parasites'. Samson loaned me seven cedis when I ran out of money to pay the miscellaneous fees.

When we went to get the meds that the doctor had written out for me, the ATM ate my debit card. There was a policy, apparently, against returning debit cards. I told the lady that I had malaria and couldn't afford medicine without it, which wasn't entirely true. I stopped short of telling her that she'd as good as killed me. That seemed like overkill.

I stumbled after Samson looking for a bank that would take my VISA. No luck. Tried every bank in central Tamale. Went home to get money. Samson went to get the drugs on my prescription. I passed out at home in a pool of my own sweat.

After that, not much. Took the drugs, felt terrible, slept fitfully overnight and was fine the next morning. No reeneactments of Heart of Darkness, thanks to at least five different anti-malarials. Isn't technology grand?

Good news in brief

Well, I got a call from Shannen (the director of Create Change, now back in Canada). We're looking for money to put in a new borehole somewhere, and it's looking probable that it'll be in that same community that the pastor/funeral story happened. Heaven on Earth? Well, not yet exactly, but maybe it's a start.

Hafiz's Sister's Wedding

I've been put in touch with a Ghanaian filmmaker named Hafiz. I know him through a mutual acquaintance, a guy who's one of the managers at a local hangout called Sparkles. Hafiz puts on "Theatre of the Oppressed" (http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/) productions in small local communities as a way of educating & politicizing the locals. I'm going, hopefully on Tuesday, to check out one of his rehearsals. He videotapes some of these, and, somewhat incongruously, is also interested in local-style narrative films in the Nigerian style.

Nigerian films are basically genre B-movies. They're horror, action, etc. on a shoestring budget, morally conservative, sensationalistic, and cheesy (to the cynical Westerner) as all hell. There's touches of Bollywood-style symbolic realism and manic overacting. I might get a chance to be a token white guy in one of these. I'm having trouble thinking of anything more fun.

I went to his sister's wedding today - the first chance I've had to actually meet the guy. We talked for a while, I met some of his friends - talked to one for a long time about the NGO he works for - and eventually I begged off to go do some work. Like write this blog post.

I'm pretty excited about this - Hafiz is a genuinely friendly guy, and the work he's doing looks like a pretty sweet topic for a documentary (maybe, maybe, wish I had a broadcast-quality camera). I think I can contribute as well - the filmmaking techniques here are pretty basic and I've got the good old BFA.

Thought I'd dash this off while it was fresh. Apologies for rushed nature of the post & lack of art. I don't like bringing a camera when I'm not working - too intrusive. Someone at the wedding took a photo of me and the bride - I'll see if I can get a hold of that, maybe.

The photogenic mob

When I show up to a school or community, there's inevitably a mob of kids trailing around after me. I guess there's not much else going on, especially in the rural schools, where class often ends early in the day. This is especially true if I have a camera out - video or still. The kids at the schools will run into the area I'm shooting and pose. Sometimes they'll start to dance or show off.
Most people here still shoot film, so I think there's a lot of novelty value to showing them the photo right after it's been taken. If I show them a picture of themselves or their friends, a crowd forms pretty quickly. I'll take some photos or video that I don't need, because they seem to get such a kick out of it. The viewfinder on our video camera flips around so they can all crowd around and have a look at themselves in live action I'm a bit jealous. I don't know the last time I thought some bit of technology was that cool.

It's mostly the rural kids that get such a kick out of this - I suppose they're less exposed to technology in the day-to-day. Or foreigners, for that matter. It's also the rural kids who have the worst of a strained school system, especially at the primary level. The kids above were writing exams about half an hour before I took the picture. I took a look at some of the them. One student identified cows, dogs, and goats as examples of C) Birds. Most rural students speak Dagbani at home and English inconsistently, and they naturally struggle to learn in a second language.

There's also a chronic shortage of qualified teachers. Some are simply unskilled 'volunteers' paid on a small stipend. Often they commute by bicycle to schools in remote communities. There is no guarantee that class will be in session for more than a few hours a day. It depends on the dedication of the underpaid teaching staff and the discipline of the head teacher. Occasionally, the head teacher is the one not showing up.

The students learn rote memorization from handmade 'picture' cards, which the teacher holds up to the whole class. Students often sit three to a desk because there aren't enough to go around. They share textbooks. Etc. I saw three students at the school where that photo was taken sharing a desk that must have been broken somehow. They were balancing a science textbook on part of the wreckage. They were alert and paying attention. Good for them - and I mean that.

The Categorical Imperative

There's a thousand examples to illustrate how poor some of the people who live in and around Tamale are. I've used one or two already. I like the preface to this blog because of what it says about heaven, although I'm aware that it also says something about poverty. After all, 'purewater' is just a 500mL bag of filtered water - they sell on the street for about five cents.

Still, I woke up a few mornings ago to a 9 AM doorbell. There was a guy there, a friend of one of Create Change's school liaisons. He didn't have enough money to pay an exam fee at school. Thanks to some mid-'80s IMF austerity measures, these run around 100 GHC. I think his idea was that I would pay for it.

I can live without that 100 GHC. But for someone I don't know? To get him through one exam? He's probably telling the truth. But I wonder how rich he thinks I am.

In the end, I told him that I'd ask around the office to see if there were organizations in his area that sponsored boys' education. There was one CCFC partner organization that might have done it. I passed on their name, but couldn't get a contact person.

Send me some Kant?

First post

Tamale is a small city in Ghana’s Northern region. About 200 000 people live here, or in villages just outside of town. Space here is organized differently - I think as an indirect consequence of the lack of resources and infrastructure here. There’s no garbage pickup, so people burn their garbage themselves. A smell of car exhaust and burning trash covers most of the town. In the distance, a giant stadium hovers on the horizon. You can see it from almost anywhere. It looks like a model from Independence Day.

Create Change, which is the NGO that I’m working for, is a small organization which runs out of an office on the second story of the Ya-Musah Story Building. Construction on our building seems to have stopped about three-quarters of the way through, and nobody seems to know when it will start up again.

We focus on water and girls’ educational projects, though the main goal is to educate women and to free them from bare subsistence. We sponsor girls through JSS (Junior High) SS (High School) and have recently taken on a few post secondary students as well. School is expensive, since Ghana stopped providing free education as part of austerity measures forced by the World Bank in the late ‘80s.

Those Create Change helps educate are able to support their families and practice the skills they learn through education in their communities. Water projects are built to provide a long-term benefit and are sited to benefit women and children in particular.

I’ve been in the country for some time, so I think it’s time to get this blog up and running. I’m going to try to keep it interesting – I’m only going to write when I have something to write about, and that will rarely be me or the sandwich I had for lunch. I’m boring and Canadian and you can get enough of that at home.

That out of the way, there's a lot here. Some of the things I've seen are sad, but interesting too. Not here to change the culture, at least not directly.

I’ll do my best to keep you posted, and you do your best to keep reading.

Thanks, everyone.

Eric