Closing Thoughts

What an incredible adventure that was. After a few days, it still seems strange to be back in a place without tro-tros, street food, dirt roads, and stifling heat. Everything is so clean, so well-maintained; everyone is so neatly-dressed. And have you seen Vancouver? The buildings are all huge! It's going to take me a little while to re-acclimatize.

As the title says, here are some general thoughts about my time in Ghana that I didn't manage to squeeze in anywhere else. I've tried to arrange them in a roughly logical order.

I think the strangest thing of all was being a visible minority. Wherever I went in Ghana, people knew I was an outsider as soon as they saw me. What they did with that knowledge depended, of course, on the individual. Some Ghanaians see white people as gullible fonts of cash, and would try to sell me things at absurd prices, or offer to carry things or lead me where I was going so that they could ask for payment afterward. There are also those who see white people as a chance at a green card. On more than one occasion, I had someone approach me and ask me to help them get to my country; if it was a man, there was a good chance he'd ask me to give him my sister. As a man myself, though, I got off relatively easy. The girls on the trip were deluged by marriage proposals and professions of love from strangers or near-strangers. And then there were those who seemed just to want to say hello and exchange phone numbers. Sadly, due to my experiences with the second group, I found that I grew suspicious of these people. I started to wonder if they were genuinely friendly or if they were only interested in befriending me so that I could vouch for them to the Canadian immigration authorities.

It's hard to blame people for wanting to come to the West. There's a widespread perception in Ghana that the West is a land of great wealth, and there's some truth to that. Many, perhaps most, want to go there and work not to become rich themselves, but so they can send money back to their families in Ghana. A wage that is modest by our standards is ample by Ghanaian standards, since money goes much farther there. In most places, street vendors sell substantial meals for fifty pesewa, or about thirty-five cents Canadian, and that's eating out. I'm not sure it's possible even to cook for yourself that cheaply in Canada. To put it further in perspective, the minimum wage in Ghana is seventy cedi per month. That's about forty-five dollars, or about as much as a Canadian minimum-wage earner makes in five hours.

Speaking of food, it may be much cheaper than ours but it's just as tasty, if somewhat lacking in variety. Seasoned rice dishes such as jollof rice are common; more exotic, by our standards, are a family of dishes which consist of a fist-sized ball of dough sitting in a bowl of soup. One picks pieces of dough off the ball with their fingers and scoops up some soup with it, and then sucks the whole thing off of their fingers. Eating this way is pretty messy, but worth it as these dishes are all really good. They are differentiated by the kind of dough involved. Banku and kenkey are made with fermented maize, while fufu is boiled root vegetables. People could often be seen making banku in large batches, kneading the dough in a giant bowl or cauldron using an enormous wooden spoon. I've found a recipe for banku online, which fortunately doesn't require these implements, and though it seems labour-intensive I'm definitely going to try making it myself.

There were a few things about Ghanaian culture that bothered me. On a handful of occasions I encountered some innocuous racism. The most egregious example was a guy who insisted that, because I was white, I could tell whether some old British Guineas he had were gold or silver. Sexism was more common and more abrasive, manifesting most frequently in the assumption that I could give away my sister. And while we didn't encounter it ourselves first-hand, there's also a lot of homophobia: homosexuality is illegal in Ghana, and at one hotel we stayed at, the curiously paranoid rules list dictated that two men were not allowed to stay in the same room unless they were father and son and one of them was under eighteen.

Doubtlessly these things will change, though it may take a long time. And these kinds of negative experiences were outweighed by all the positive ones we had. We saw people at their best when we were in Sandema. We spent enough time there to become part of the community in a small way, enough that those around us didn't see us as naive rich people to be exploited, if they ever would have to begin with. I've talked before about the friendliness and openness of the people here, and this was most evident during our time in this small farming town.

One of the most fascinating and wonderful parts of the trip, for me, was exploring the most remote parts of the country. The lifestyles of the people living there were, I imagine, not much different than they had been for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. The architecture in particular was what struck me. In Kadema, a farming community near to but much smaller than Sandema, we saw a number of marvelous and elaborate mud compounds, and in the small village of Ewe people just east of Princess Town, the buildings were all constructed of wooden sticks and palm leaves, and thatch. Often the only signs of modernity were occasional pieces of heavily-worn Western clothing. Exploring these otherworldly places made me feel as if I'd traveled back in time. This is an something I intend to seek out more of.

Some recognition is in order. To Taha and Kelly, our fearless leaders; to Joe Abobtey and the kids of the HCC; to Beatrice, the SRC manager whose work I've probably made a lot busier; to all my fellow OG travelers; and to everyone else I lived and worked with in Ghana: thank you all for making this one of the greatest experiences of my life. With luck we may see each other again. In any case, we'll be in touch.

And that's about it! Well, almost. There's one more post coming, and it should be up in just a few days. It concerns one more of our companions in Sandema, whom I haven't yet mentioned in these pages, so stay tuned. Much appreciation to those brave few who read all or part of the ponderous tome-fulls of text I've been leaving about on this blog. Thanks for reading, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.

Charlie Sheen

On Wednesday, May 25th, we got a goat.

Unfortunately I wasn't woken at six to go to the market and witness the actual purchase, but I'm told it was quite the experience. The vendors were apparently quite adamant about showing off the (huge!) testicles of the various goats to prove that they were male and in-tact. He was very vigorous and easily-spooked. He would jump and flip in his attempts to get away from us, which due to his rope meant that he ended up doing barrell-rolls and 360s all the way home. Inspired by his evident crazyness and the white speckles around his nose, we decided on a name that morning. We tied up Charlie Sheen beside our house, and started giving him fruit and vegetable peels and other kitchen scraps.

His name turned out to be apt in another way: he was loud. The first place we tied him was right outside the bedroom I shared with two others, and he had a habit of bleating loudly at about five or six in the morning, waking us all up. This was the source of some frustration with him at first, but we'd been waking quite early already, and I soon found I was enjoying the early starts.

In the first few days, I started to work on countering his skittishness by bringing him leaves and branches, which I'd read that goats much preferred to grass. Before long he'd gotten used to me to the point where he'd eat them out of my hand, though he'd still shy away if I tried to scratch his ears.

That Sunday, we brought him around to the back of the house, which isn't faced by any bedrooms, and re-tied him to our tree. While he'd seemed calmer while tied up, as soon as he was untied he began to spaz out once again, trying so desparately to resist that he ran face-first into the side of the house as we rounded a corner. Those efforts were in vain, but he didn't give up; that night, Sarah looked out a back window and saw that he was gone. He'd chewed through his rope and lept the wall surrounding the house.

We all rushed outside to look for him, but quickly realized we wouldn't have any luck in the near-pitch-dark. Some farmers who lived next to us assured us that he wouldn't go far, and we resolved to search for him first thing in the morning. Four of us went out at about seven and searched widely accross the surrounding farmland, but to no avail. We kept our eyes open for Charlie whenever we went out, and our neighbors had promised to do the same, but by the end of the day I'd begun to give up hope. I was toying with the idea of getting a second goat when, Wednesday morning, two of the older boys from the HCC brought him back to us with a new new goat-proof rope around his neck. They'd had to chase him quite some distance; "This is a very stubborn goat," they said. "We know", I said.

A few days later, Bismarck, one of the two who'd recaptured the goat, was visiting us when he heard Charlie's bleating, which had only intensified since his return. Bismarck told us that it meant Charlie was hungry, and that we should get a longer rope for him so that he could move freely around the yard to graze, rather than being stuck within a few feet of the tree. At first this seemed surprising given all the scraps we'd been leaving for him, but on a closer inspection it was clear he'd barely been touching them. It seemed our western perception of goats as being agressively omnivorous was at least partly mistaken.

It wasn't until the next Sunday that we bought a rope at the general store in town. I tied the new rope to the tree and was going to tie the other end around Charlie's neck, when Solomon, a boy from the HCC who was about eight years old, offered to tie it for me. Assuming that he would have more experience of goat knots than myself, I agreed, and he tied Charlie's neck with what looked like a secure knot.

The improvement was almost immediate. Ten minutes later we hadn't heard another peep out of the goat. I was so surprised that I went outside to check on him. I found only a rope. The knot around his neck had simply come apart, and he'd escaped again. Fortunately, it was midday, so I set out immediately to search for him, knowing he couldn't have gone far. Indeed, he hadn't - I found him a five-minute walk down the road from us, beside the small lake and near the HCC building. Seeing me, he bolted down the path between the road and the lake. I was a faster runner on the road and quickly overtook him, but just as I did he turned sharply and crossed the road to the grove of trees on the other side. Fortunately there were some men relaxing under those trees. I shouted to them for help as I ran after Charlie, and three of them jumped up and joined the chase as well.

Charlie led us some way from the road through trees and over scrubland, before stopping in another grove amongst some female goats. My three helpers moved slowly around the grove and I pointed him out to them, and the four of us formed a moving cordon and herded him and a female back towards the road. Finally we managed to isolate and surround him on a small dirt path. We slowly advanced, shifting to block his path as he feinted left and right. When we got within two or three meters he made a break for freedom, and almost made it. But the closest hunter reached out and grabbed one of his back legs as he ran past. Charlie's momentum carried him into the air and through a full circle, but not out of the hunter's grip. He was ours once again.

One of my fellow hunters tied a new knot around his neck, which was rather more expertly done than the last, and did not slip as I dragged him back to the house and secured him once again in the back yard. Charlie Sheen would not escape again, but the ordeal seemed to have broken whatever trust I had before earned. Over the next week Charlie remained much quieter than before, complaining only when he got his rope so tangled around the plentiful debris that he couldn't move freely (which happened at least once a day), but whenever I got within fifteen feet of him, he'd return to madly throwing himself around the yard. Perhaps he knew what was coming.

On Sunday, June 12th, two weeks after his first escape and one week after his second, we ate our goat.

I brought Charlie Sheen out of the compound on his long rope for a walk in the early morning, one last taste of something approximating freedom. He was as crazy as ever, wrapping his rope around trees and getting into fights with the smaller goats we met on the way. To prepare him, we had the help of our friend IB, a local police detective. IB came over in the morning around ten, and after lunch, we lit a brazier full of coals and set up a rack over it. We siezed Charlie beside the house. Holding him down, IB and a few of the boys from the HCC untied his rope and bound his feet together with string. Then they lifted him by his feet and carried him, upside-down and screaming all the way as only a castrated goat can scream, to his final resting place.

They laid him down in a clear space, near the brazier. A long, wickedly curved knife was brought out, and the deed was done. When his body stopped its spasms, the carcass was hung from a tree by its front legs and was skinned, gutted, and butchered. The head and organs were given to the HCC to cook, while the meat was spiced and roasted over a small coal stove. We invited all our friends from around town over for dinner that night, and ate Charlie Sheen with jollof rice. He was as delicious as he had been crazy.

Rest in peace, Charlie. Though we knew you for but a short time, you'll always be a part of all of us.