Arrival - June 2003

We arrived in Accra last week and are slowly settling in. The weather is hot and muggy, like New Orleans in August, although this is reportedly the "best weather of the year." Man, if this is the best weather, I wonder how we are going to handle the hot season, when the city reportedly turns into a dust bowl and the temperature reaches 100 F in the shade? We have been assigned to a new, large, four-bedroom house surrounded by eight-foot-high walls, razor wire, a large gate and our own 24-hour security guard detail. Our yard is empty but for a few shrubs, grass in need of watering, and one flowering tree. Abdul, our new gardener, recommended to us by our Embassy-assigned “social sponsors”—people assigned to ease our transition to life here--promises to turn it into a beautiful garden of tropical flowers, palm trees, and magenta hydrangea bushes flowing over the walls of the compound.

Roosters crow in the morning. I can see ladies walking on the road outside our gate with big baskets on their heads. Our doorbell rings constantly by people who want us to hire them as domestic servants. Oh yes; our neighbors burn their garbage under our master bedroom window. What did I expect? This is Africa.

We live in the part of town called Labone. You are immediately pegged as a newcomer when you pronounce it like The Bone. It is actually pronounced LaBONEee. Our house in Labone is a 15-minute walk to the U.S. Embassy, which few Americans working there would dare to take, given that they would arrive looking like they had just stepped out of a swimming pool, given the combination of heat, sun and humidity. Most people drive to work, take taxis, or like my husband, have the Embassy drivers take them to work until their personal vehicles arrive. Our house is also conveniently located within walking distance to the Embassy's commissary and sports field for American officials--I visit both frequently. Accra’s commissary is not as well stocked as others I have shopped in, but it carries some gems that are not sold on the local market, like Ben & Jerry's ice-cream and DiGiorno's frozen pizza. Foreigners and Ghanaians get together many times a week at “Bud Field”, the Embassy's recreation area and sports field to play soccer, softball, football and ultimate Frisbee, my new favorite sport. Alas, our house is not located on the water line. Although we live a five-minute drive from the Gulf of Guinea, it took us a week to even see the ocean. But given our recent beach excursion, where we found out what the primary purpose of a beach is in West Africa, perhaps not being on the coast is a good thing when you live in Ghana.

Before I explain what beaches are used for in Ghana, I must say that the level of Ghana's poverty is striking. As a career development worker, I loathe to admit that living in the U.S. for a few years has softened my shell of resistance to extreme poverty. But I have not seen this level of poverty level since my time in Angola in the mid 90s, and there you could see the remnants of the apartment buildings and factories and farms and government buildings that existed before being ravaged by war. Ghana is still being built for the first time. Colonialists must have just focused on Ghana’s plundering rather than its development. Another difference between Ghana's poverty and poverty in other countries we have previously lived and worked in (places like Bosnia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico to name a few) is that there is no escaping it. There are no neighborhoods where you don't see poor people here. In other countries we have lived in, poor people in the capital wear shoes. They have houses with roofs. They can find running water. Most have indoor plumbing. But not here. Infrastructure-wise, there are few sidewalks, fewer streetlights, and many unpaved roads. And the roads that are paved are in serious need of repair. For example, we have a dangerous, six-foot hole in front of our house spewing sewage. From what I have heard about Ghana's budgetary situation, I imagine we will spend our entire three-year tour here without it being fixed. City government offices and federal Ministries here barely have furniture, telephones and computers, so Ghana clearly has other priorities than fixing a hole on the street in a rich neighborhood.

Being overseas without a job, and now as the wife of a diplomat, has been a harder adjustment for me than I realized it would be. I’ve never been known overseas as just “the spouse” before; I always was "Amanda who works at XXX." Now I'm just "Amanda, Chris' wife". At official or social events, few bother to ask me what, if anything, I do for a living. When the conversation turns to work or Ghana, or economics or development, no one turns to me for an opinion. I feel invisible. It is as if no one expects I would have anything to say other than where to go grocery shopping. My husband is terribly worried about me and how I’m coping. So when we heard the U.S. Embassy's Community Liaison Officer was organizing a trip to the beach our first weekend in town, we jumped at the opportunity to get out of town and see more of the country.

The drive to and from Cape Coast was hard to stomach. Once we got out of Accra's Friday afternoon, bumper-to-bumper traffic and seemingly-endless markets lining the roads, we drove for hours through rural areas on bumpy, pot-holed roads. My nausea was encouraged by our mode of transportation--a minimally air-conditioned van, filled with other Embassy newcomers. One of its passengers could not contain his contempt for the Ghanaian driver of the van who never stopped receiving calls on his cell phone via a wireless device firmly attached to his right ear. “Take that thing out of your ear!” he yelled when his back-seat driving instructions were not being obeyed. Every few kilometers or so we would pass a village where, on the side of the road, we would spy women and girls wearing second-hand t-shirts and African fabric wrap skirts, walking with babies strapped to their backs. The children wore ragged clothes and either no shoes or flip-flops. Goats, chickens and sheep roamed freely in the villages, and the few concrete single-story commercial buildings were surrounded by tin-roofed shacks, underneath a maze of telephone or electrical wires. I have never lived so shamefully well compared to the local population.

In spite of the trip there, I liked getting out of town and seeing a different part of the country right away. It was also handy to meet a large group of newcomers from the Embassy. We all stayed at the Anomabo Hotel, a beachfront hotel of rustic little huts on the water surrounded by hundreds of palm trees. We were lucky to find a hut available with air conditioning, given how we have not yet acclimated to the humidity and heat. The skies are mostly overcast, but the near 90% humidity makes it feel much warmer than the 85-degree heat. The humidity reminds me of the rainy season in El Salvador, when my clothes would get moldy just by hanging in my closet. The hotel’s clean sheets and strong disinfectants can’t hide the mold smell emanating from the pillows, the curtains and the mattresses in the rooms.

During the day, we took tours to the nearby tourist attractions, including former slave castles in Elmina and Cape Coast. Being white and visiting slave castles made me feel about as proud as I did visiting the Hiroshima museum in Japan. I spent the entire time wondering to what extent my ancestors from Europe were involved in the slave trade, and how poorly my Puerto Rican relatives must have been treated by their colonizers. Hearing about the uses of each room in the castle, and how people moved through the bowels of the building to the "Doors of No Return" was at once fascinating and sickening. I felt more like a voyeur than a new arrival, trying to make sense of Ghana's history, and where if at all, I fit into it.

Perhaps more impressive than the castles themselves are the views from the roofs. Towards the ocean, you see rough surf, canoe-shaped, multicolored fishing boats, and birds diving into the water. Look towards the cities for a view of thousands of people going about their daily business, cars and buses spewing exhaust, market stalls packed together along the road, and fishermen making nets and repairing their boats. The surf smashes against the rocks and slave castle walls, cars and buses honk incessantly, and people are talking to, and yelling at, each other over the din. But the smell rivals the view in terms of its intensity—dried fish, salt, sweat, exhaust fumes, feces, urine. The ghost-filled castles are serene getaways in comparison.

One sunset, feeling somber and sweaty after a day of slave-castle touring, my husband and I took a walk down the beach from our resort. Tall palm trees line the short, white-sand beach, and the breeze was blowing away the malaria mosquitoes. The beach was empty and the scene was quite beautiful at first, until we started noticing scattered pieces of newspaper and food wrappers and black plastic bags in the sand that became more prevalent the farther away we got from the resort. A few men also appeared from the brush, walking down to the water and then returning to the tree line. In spite of the garbage, for a brief moment I thought to myself; "Wow, forget driving in traffic jams to the Hamptons or Rehoboth for a crowded and expensive weekend at the beach—for $50/night we can stay in quaint accommodations on the water and have a beach all to ourselves!" Then, in front of us, a skinny, local guy stood up from a crouching position. He had been taking a crap and proceeded to wipe his ass with a shell. He dropped the shell in the sand, pulled up his pants, turned and walked back to the tree line. Turns out the beach is mostly used as a toilet in Ghana. So much for beachfront living. And a lesson for those friends brave enough to visit us in Ghana…don’t collect sea shells.

Everyone says that Ghanaians are extremely nice people. And it is true. They may not be the most energetic people on the planet, but they are very friendly and genuine. The staff at the Anomabo resort took 2 hours to bring us our dinners, but when they did, it was with a smile. The woman we hired to clean our house a few times a week whistles and sings along to religious radio while she works at about 1/3 the speed my former maid in El Salvador did. People in Ghana speak dozens of local languages, and everyone we have run across so far speaks some English too, which is handy. Also, I don't get the feeling, like I did in Angola, that everyone hates white people. There are tons of foreigners in Accra and throughout Ghana, so maybe Ghanaians are used to us? And even on the few occasions when the odd person hassles me on the street to buy something, they still manage to say “please” and call me “madam” and don't insist when I decline their goods.

While my husband works away as the Economic Chief at the U.S. Embassy here trying to improve Ghana's economic prospects, I listen to the local radio to see if I can get a better sense of this place outside of what I can get from shopping and exploring other parts of town by taxi. Other than a few stations that play West African gospel music all day long, and in spite of having over a thousand-year old musical tradition, the music played on the radio is more American and Jamaican than West African. Last night I heard Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Yellowman, and many reggae remixes. Then there was Billy Ocean, J-Lo and Michael Jackson. Remember that saccharine song Michael Jackson sang with Paul McCartney titled “The Doggone Girl is Mine”? I relived it last night.

I'd happily surf the Net all day from the comforts of my air-conditioned house and scout work or consulting gigs, but unfortunately our house did not come with a working phone line. Apparently the landlord of our house forgot the phone number so the phone company doesn’t know what phone number to turn on. The Embassy’s general services office staff says it will take "a few weeks" to sort out our phone line. So in the short-term, they gave us a cell phone on which we cannot make international phone calls. I am relegated to one of the many cyber cafes in Accra to keep in contact with the outside world. One is across the street from our house, in a house converted into commercial space. One room on the first floor has white-washed walls, concrete floors, open windows, ceiling fans, six desks, chairs and refurbished PCs from the 1990s. It costs less than a dollar to surf the Web for an hour. You get what you pay for--the web service is dial-up and so slow I want to pick up the computer and throw it through the window. It takes up to four minutes to open an email message. I have to find a better cyber café.

Of all the places we have ever moved to, Ghana is the most exotic, and the most frustrating. This is a dangerous place for someone like me, who has a sense of urgency about getting settled once in a new place. I crave routines and crossing off items on lists. I love to get things done. But Ghana is foiling me at every turn.

For example, the Embassy doesn't have voicemail, and the phone system doesn't allow for calls to be automatically routed to others, so when I call my husband at work, his phone just rings off the hook. He can't easily reach me because Ghana's telecom infrastructure makes it difficult to call a cell phone from a landline, and he can't use a cell phone to call me from his office because of Embassy security rules. So there are days when we can't connect at all, which infuriates me to no end, delaying a comforting word or decisions for another time. Our house is new to the Embassy's housing pool and needs a lot of work. When I call the Embassy's General Services Office to arrange for things to be fixed or to ask questions about how to go about fixing them, I mostly get the reply that the person I need to talk to isn't there, so why don't I call back? Apparently, taking phone messages here is verboten. When I call the Embassy's motor pool for a ride, I am told that a driver is on the way, only to wait an hour or two for a car to arrive. So, I’ve started to take taxis, going out in the morning with a list of things to accomplish, only to arrive back at the house hours later, dripping with sweat and in total defeat, unable to have accomplished anything. The stores are closed, the owner is sick, there was a funeral, the person overseeing the store in their absence doesn't have the authority to help me. So things are accomplished at a much slower pace here than anywhere I have ever lived. I'm trying to stay positive about it, but I'm already secretly wondering if I can make it through three years (the length of our tour) here.

The restaurants here…what can I say? If you wanted to experience “slow food”, come visit. On the bright side (something I have to keep searching for, or three years will feel like thirty), at least the wait staff aren’t trying to move tables and rush us out the door. But the fact is, the quality of the food in restaurants and in grocery stores here is much lower than any other place we have lived overseas. However, after much trial and error, we are finding some restaurants with decent food here, mostly Chinese, Indian, or Western, but with prices similar to that in the U.S. So much for cheap overseas living.

There is more to tell but I will save it for the next update email. If you are up for an adventure, you know where to find us.