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?