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.