The Amazing Shrinking Planet

I stroll across an unusually green campus yesterday en route to a meeting with my Study Abroad group. We are heading to Peru soon. It’s hot, and I scramble to make a pit stop at the departmental office where a box of new Flip cameras awaits. The cameras are for an ongoing video and photography project, and I speedily pick them up now in an attempt to squeeze every last minute out of this shrinking lemon of a day.

Glancing to the left outside the building, I see three young men sheltered under a Russian olive tree, and one of them looks astonishingly similar to the guy I’d wrongly profiled as a terrorist on board my May Lufthansa flight to Spain via Frankfurt. (For those of you who read the story of the presumed terrorist, you’ll recall that the man proved to be a harmless but nervous flyer with a penchant for Disney films like Bolt).

It’s him. I’m sure of it. But can it be him? Is it just my imagination working overtime, trying to pick up a summer shift or two in these topsy-turvy economic times?

I make a deal. I’ll head into the main office and back, and if the Bolt fan is still here, then I’ll make contact. Heck, I’m already late.

Box of Flip cameras in hand after the office rendezvous, I return to the Russian olive and see that now four young men are huddled around the bench stationed neatly below the welcome shade of the tree. They’re likely on break from a summer school class.

And so I promptly make my move. Seconds later, I find myself speaking aloud to a young, dark haired, smiling man of around 20 years of age:

Excuse me, I know this may sound strange, but were you recently on board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt? My speech is fast, I’ve hastily down shifted to a New Jersey dialect.

Nervously smiling, he replies: I’m sorry, but my English is not so good, I am an international student from Saudi Arabia. Still smiling. I wonder if he’s scared of me.

It’s him! I give it a second shot, this time much slower, and add: I remember you from a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt in May. Was that you? Back in May?

With aid from his friends, he tells me that indeed, it was him on the flight! He was headed to Saudi Arabia and shares how I, too, looked strangely familiar.

I explain that I’m a professor here on campus. Has he ever taken a geography course?

No.

Would you like to?

Sure. (Though I suspect he could teach me a thing or two about geography).

We introduce ourselves and shake hands. And just like that, I am speaking with the young man and his friends about their futures, about life in Colorado, about Saudi Arabia, and I am late, oh so late, for an appointment that is designed to prepare my own students for an educational, cultural, experience abroad. Under the hot Colorado sun, the irony lies naked at my feet.

Did I tell him I thought he was a terrorist? No.

Did I learn something from all this? Uh, yes.

The Bolt loving terrorist is now stalking me.

Kidding.

Home!

Our hotel in Ghana is basically a gated compound designed to protect us from some unseen Evil; each morning I scan the landscape from the comfort of my 2nd story room searching for Voldemort. From my window I catch a glimpse of the extended family of around ten living just over the hotel’s cement wall in ramshackle, off-the-grid, wooden homes, all of them plotting to break the bars and steal my stash of Aveda shampoo as they sit around the collective fire and pound fufu.

Although the mosquitoes seem to have been given reliable keycard access to my room, for me there is no alternate exit, as the windows are barred shut, and the malfunctioning, smoke detector missing a battery causes just the slightest bit of alarm, as I lay awake at night listening to the spectacular thunder and rain. When we advise the hotel personnel that new batteries are needed for the smoke detectors, housekeeping promptly posts red and black signs on the back of each room door which simply read, “no smoking”.


But I’m not complaining. In fact, I never grumble about the absence of hot water, nor do I make known to the receptionist that the shower has been on strike for 3 straight days.
This may be due in large part to the slight embarrassment I feel when the other Obrunis make regular appearances at the front desk to request this and that, their voices becoming increasingly curt as requests go unrecognized with each passing day.

The only real frustration comes when housekeeping sprays the hotel room with pesticides to root out the mosquitoes. Malaria is serious business, but I’d spent hours driving around the suburbs, upping my carbon footprint, in order to procure a bottle of my favorite Deet free insect repellent, aptly named Repel: Lemon Eucalyptus, and in five minutes I’d been gassed by a bunch of well-intentioned Ghanaians.

I believe there’s a not-so-secret part of us that wants things to go slightly wrong, because that’s just when the remarkable seems to happen. So when five of us spill out of a taxi late one night, and discover that the compound gate is already locked and the security guard nowhere to be found, I don’t hesitate to climb the menacing fence that stands between me and a 10pm phone call with the Engineer. It is fun and easy enough to traverse the spikes, but as I let my body (and my guard) down on the other side, the stubby length of my inseam fails me, and in response, my favorite pants split. Technically, they rip (but in a very compromising place). And, after the jeering from colleagues subsides, I jog back toward the hotel to get some help, where inside the security guard is seated comfortably in the lobby, eyes glued to a Nigerian soap opera.

Back home in Colorado now, I sift through a mound of African trinkets - carved wooden masks, yards of kente cloth, Ghanaian chocolate bars, powder glass bead bracelets – a collection of curiosities delightfully out of context here in our suburban home. I just received a surprise phone call from Kojo, our driver back in Accra, a perfect jump start to the day. I unpack sunscreen, separate laundry; eventually stumbling upon the now infamous pair of pants, I run my fingers across the new, expertly stitched seam.

The morning after climbing the gate, I had walked through the steamy streets of East Legon searching for breakfast bananas and mangos, when I met Mary and Lydia, two young seamstresses who ran a shop sewing beautifully fitted African dresses designed for the curvaceous women of Accra. Admiring their handiwork, I asked if they’d be willing to do a repair job on the pants, and for the price of 2 cedis ($1.50), they agreed.

Remarkable! I believe I'll always cherish experiences more than things.

PS - Thanks to all for such wonderful comments. I appreciate your following along on this journey.

Cocoa and Coffins

Our last days in Accra were totally free and unstructured, so my intrepid friend Ann and I jumped at the opportunity to conduct some “field research” outside Accra. Our first stop was Tettah Quarshie, site of Ghana’s first cocoa farm, and named after the man who in 1879 brought Latin American cacao (cocoa) seeds from the island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea to mainland Ghana. Cocoa is now Ghana’s largest cash crop, and surprisingly, most cocoa production is not mechanized but harvested by hand using machetes and copious amounts of elbow grease and patience (there is also much debate over the extent of child labor on cocoa farms in Ghana). The ripe, yellow pods are cracked open to reveal clusters of beans coated in white, pulpy “mucilage” – which sounds far less yummy than they actually taste.




Later we braved the nightmarish Accra traffic to visit the legendary Ga coffin makers of Teshie. The Ga believe that individuals should be buried in wooden coffins that reflects a person’s profession (photographer, fisherman, pilot) – and sometimes – coffins are carved in order to reveal a person’s vice (cigarettes, beer). For the devotees of this blog, recall that last July I visited the National Funerary Museum in Houston, which houses the largest collection of Ghanaian coffins outside of Ghana.

Who knew that one year later I’d find myself standing on a rickety rooftop overlooking the eastern Atlantic chatting up the actual coffin makers of Teshie! Even more uncanny was the fact that the coffin in progress was none other than a cocoa pod, the most irresistible of vices! For the price of my now broken Nikon D90 – I could’ve walked away with that sweet and shapely cocoa coffin and been the talk of the Colorado suburbs.

Not to sound too morose, but what coffin would you choose if you had a pile of Wawa wood and a Ga coffin maker at the ready? Dibs on the cocoa pod.

Potholes: Past and Present

The road trip from Accra to Kumasi was not for the faint of heart. The entire journey was 170 miles but it took us 6 hours to navigate across this deathtrap to visit the historic core of the Asante nation. Stories about highway mortality here are legendary; some pedestrians have been left for dead on the side of the potholed road, having been run over multiple times. The intermittent but heavy tropical rain didn’t deter our driver from putting pedal to the medal despite major flooding this week. As a coping strategy my colleagues fell asleep while I took photographs out the back window.

In Asante we toured the Manhyia Palace Museum, former residence of two Kings of the Asante Nation, Prempeh I and Prempeh II, and frankly, a bit of a disappointment compared to our afternoon tour of the Central Market, controlled exclusively by Ghanaian women in a country where paradoxically, domestic rights are far from settled or equal. I took no images inside Africa’s second largest open air market (photo: outside market), largely because the walk-through experience was fast, close, personal, like swimming naked downstream in a tiny tributary with thousands of your closest friends, joining confluence after confluence of primary-colored waterways. Color and smell are all around. Women and their children stood, sat, all smiles when they saw the pale-faced, floppy hat wearing Obrunis; each of them peddled wooden plates of goat meat, chicken, or guarded tables full of spices, plantains, umbrellas, bric-a-brac, mirrors and combs. Hello, how are you? they’d ask, reaching out to touch our sweaty, sun-screened hands. It was amazing. I received more high-fives in that market than I have in a lifetime.

Later, kids outside the ticket booths at the Manhyia Palace were trying to peddle tri-colored Ghanaian bracelets and inadvertently (really, it wasn’t all their fault) knocked my camera to the ground, rendering the new lens useless. Casey would later joke that we “just can’t have nice things”. Thank goodness for the backup HP camera!

The Palace Museum – in contrast to the rawness of the Central Market - featured life sized and freakishly realistic plastic effigies of former Kings and the present Monarch; but all the talk of gold and Kingship left me jumpy and queasy in a country where sanitation and water are needed more than pricey remembrances. I’d also just learned that the cost of the new Presidential Palace in Accra set Ghana back 45 million USD, 30 million of which came on loan from India. As Obama makes his way to Accra on July 10, it’ll be a proud moment for Ghana, but let’s hope the government doesn’t blow a wad of cash on glitzy jubilees and instead allows the President to see Ghana’s many faces. With its car-choked cities and plastic water bottles, Ghana plunges forward clumsily toward the Great Modernity, but the past (and its potholes) are still worth a visit. Photos 3 and 4: Cape Coast Slave Castles (Ben and myself).

Feeling not so young in Ghana

It’s one thing to glance at a population pyramid to understand the nature of rapid growth in the developing world. Wide bottom, skinny top, high birth rate, high infant mortality, low life expectancy: check. For decades geographers have explored the pathways taken by nations who’ve managed to flip their rapid growth pyramids upside down, reducing births and extending lives. These structures give a snapshot of the raw population data and are like tasty chocolate morsels for the sweet-toothed geo-geeks of the world.

But it’s a whole different ballgame to actually see the youthfulness of a nation in the flesh, with scores of children in flip-flops scuffing through the dirt streets, in seaside neighborhoods like Gamashie or in urban slums fringing Accra. In Gamashie, the average fertility rate is a whopping 10, higher than the national average of four. And though many speak of Ghana as a kind of southern Africa in miniature, easy, breezy, peaceful Ghana has its own unique story to tell.

There are so many wonderful kids in Ghana that it’s tempting to smuggle a few of them home. The field portion of our project focuses on a few neighborhoods in Accra and Kumasi, where a collection of NGOs are working to improve water and sanitation, increase family planning, and provide basic supplies for the smattering of educational institutions found in the shanties.



Schools exist - education was made free and compulsory in recent decades- but basic supplies (pencils, pens, books) are a real problem, not to mention the fact that kids work daily in the informal economy hawking plantains and boiled eggs in order to supplement incomes. Some kids, when they do make it to class, battle to sit at the front of the class, a true inspiration for a jaded stateside educator like myself. I curse myself for packing more sunscreen and shampoo than paper and pens.




The causes of poverty here, in this particular place, are both global and local. Global in the sense that the government has allowed commercial fishermen to strip mine the coastal reefs to the point of depletion, and Gamashie fishermen have been left high and dry with the remaining dregs. Inflation is high. Goofy post-colonial policies have led Ghana to export its own rich natural resources – gold, cocoa, rice - allowing other nations to process the goods and steal away with the big money. Ghana then struggles to buy back the finished products, but by then the price of a jumbo chocolate bar equals two days’ Ghanaian pay.



But I like it here. Two weeks without hot water? Who cares. The world has bigger fish to fry, Barton.

PS - Wadi (seen in green t-shirt) really broke my heart. He was the only kid not smiling and hung onto my index finger for most of the day. David (army t-shirt) outside Kumasi asked if he could "flash me", meaning he eventually got his hands on the camera so he could frame his own shots.

Goin' to Ghana

Confession: today I became a little jumpy about next week’s trip to Africa and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my spending hours perusing the internet for pictures of guinea worm infections when I should be reading about freedom and democracy in Ghana. Casey, incidentally, already knew everything there was to know about guinea worm.

What’s curious is that this edginess should have been erased by the fact that my body is somewhat bullet proof to several infectious diseases thanks to the miracle of modern day vaccinations, including, but not limited to: typhoid, Hep A, Hep B, MMR, yellow fever, polio, meningitis, rabies, and ipi-ipi (there’s really no such thing, but doesn’t it sound fun). Barring any dim-witted behavior, such as immersing onself in a pool of standing tropical water, or photographing mosquitoes next to said standing pool of water, or drinking that water, all should be fine for a few weeks.

But maybe this anxiety highlights what’s so fascinating about our relationship with Africa, especially those landscapes south of the Sahara. That is, our ability to glibly reduce a continent down to a skeleton of disease, warfare, and poverty, when that same continent gave birth to man, and to coffee. George Kimble summed it up best: The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.

This week I shall read through tomes on Africa in preparation for next week's trip across the Atlantic – geography, history, environment. I do this in anticipation of taking the longer view Kimble recommended. Still, I’ll be carting along the overpriced anti-malaria meds.

Note: Accra, Kumasi, and Cape Coast are the target destinations: will try to post pictures en route.

Farewell, Green Spain!

We arrived home safely last night after a very long delay in Toronto due to reasons that were never fully explained nor do they matter. It baffles the mind to think that one can casually stroll through the historic spaces of Madrid eating empanadas and ice cream deep into the warm spring night, and 24 hours later sit in your suburban American digs after an exhaustive morning packed with laundry, phone calls, and yard work, furry dog at your feet, thunderstorm on the afternoon horizon.



Five general conclusions have been drawn from the 3-week trip to Spain:

(1) Our photos do not nearly encapsulate just how green northern Spain is, so don’t judge the lay of the land by what’s been presented here. The Picos de Europa are the jewel of Europe and we’ve shamelessly shown snapshots of dime store costume jewelry.



(2) The trip was ultimately more expedition than vacation, a chance to test our mettle on training grounds used by some of the world’s greatest cyclists. We survived, and admittedly, were stronger for carrying all our own gear, but we have a long way to go before we thrive.



(3)As we’ve learned from past experiences in foreign lands ranging from wind-scraped Nebraska to sun-drenched Australia - the best journeys are those tackled without a plan.



(4)Abandonment of affectation is also critical; there’s no room for pretense if you want to make new friends. (Squeezing your legs into sausage casing-style bicycle shorts, slathering on the SPF 50 and donning a floppy hat will also guarantee that when you cycle into the next village, you’ll be seen as freakish but harmless).


(5) All countries shall heretofore be judged on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being best) for the degree to which they prioritize chocolate and canines in their everyday lives. After careful field research and analysis, Spain receives a 10.

Ciao!