Time, Safaris and Crackhead Earth Day, April 2004

Ghanaians live by a different clock. In my experience, they are either annoyingly early for appointments, or insanely late. Neither will be accompanied by an apology or an explanation, and both seem to be perfectly acceptable. Few events start on time. Since nothing starts on time, no one shows up on time, so even if you wanted things to start on time, they couldn’t because no one would be there.

The other thing that I can’t get used to is all the cultural celebrating and commemorating that takes place accompanying activities in Ghana. No speech or concert or official event can take place without an hour of speeches beforehand from chiefs and politicians, singing from the children’s choir or dancing from the local dance troupe accompanied by drummers. An event without commemoration is simply not done. The first time all the dancers and drumming is mesmerizing. The second time is amazing. But by the third time, I have to admit it starts to become a bit repetitive for me. Now all I can do is focus on how inefficient it all is.

Stevie Wonder recently gave a benefit concert in Accra. This was a big deal since few Western musicians or bands make the trek to West Africa to play. The invitation explicitly stated that we had to be at the theater at 7:00 pm sharp as Stevie was going to perform first. Like sheep, we arrived at 6:45 pm. We stood in line outside until the doors opened at 7:30 pm. It took an hour for a few hundred people to get inside the theater. And then we waited for Stevie.

As part of our pre-Stevie entertainment, Tom & Jerry cartoons were playing without sound on the screens flanking the stage. They were playing the old, racist Tom & Jerry cartoons with the black “mammy” maid where you can only see her legs in the maid outfit. Thankfully the sound was turned off so we didn’t have to hear the soundtrack. I wondered, was this just good old pirating, or did Hanna and Barbera purposefully donate the entire, racist Tom & Jerry collection to Ghana as some sort of sick joke?

After about an hour of Tom & Jerry, at 8:30 pm an announcer told the crowd that Stevie was running late. Then the commemorating began. An excruciating hour passed with local musicians playing Stevie Wonder covers mixed in with praising the Lord.

Finally, at 9:30 pm, two and a-half hours after scheduled, Stevie Wonder finally showed up. The crowd went wild. Then, to our collective horror, Stevie was led from the stage into the audience to enjoy the commemorating with us. At about 10:00 pm, Stevie was led backstage and the organizers brought out more local singers. By 10:30 pm, the crowd started booing anyone who dared to come on stage. Even the normally very polite Ghanaians were screaming for Stevie. People started to leave. Finally, at 11:00 pm Stevie Wonder started his set and played until 12:45 pm. It was a school night so everyone was exhausted the next day, and those from work who had avoided the event were smug, saying they knew better than to attend what surely was going to be a WAWA (West Africa Wins Again) event.

I’ve heard my share of WAWA experiences these days. Remember the urban myth about someone finding a rat inside a Coke bottle? Well, my girlfriend found a thumb-looking white object in a Sprite bottle at the beach a few weeks ago. She thought it was a piece of ice, until the Sprite got warm in the noon sun, and the thumb-looking object just stayed there and bubbled away. She didn’t have the stomach to inspect the object and she wouldn’t allow the rest of us to do it either. So we gave the bottle back to the waiter at our beach resort and pointed out the object to him. He wasn’t even fazed. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. He didn’t offer an apology, or even another soda in replacement. So maybe that rat in a coke bottle thing really did happen—in Ghana.

The Sprite experience paled in comparison to her most recent tragedy. One night I received a call on our answering machine from her husband saying, “Hello social sponsors. We are just calling to tell you our house blew up last night. I’m not kidding, it blew up.” We were their Embassy-appointed social sponsors, so they were letting us know they had moved. One night, they woke to a violent explosion that blew out all the windows on both floors of their house, along with the front and back doors. An entire wall in their kitchen collapsed. They had just received and unpacked their shipment of household effects a few weeks prior to the explosion, so they lost almost everything. The investigation following the event uncovered how a worker had crimped closed an escape valve to a hot water heater located in the kitchen of their house. The pressure built up over time and eventually the heater had to blow eventually. Luckily no one was in the kitchen when it happened or things could have been a lot more tragic. It was just one of those freak events that no one thinks will ever happen to him or her until it does. The Embassy has since sent workers to all the houses in the housing pool to ensure a similar event won't be repeated in another location.

In other WAWA news, my husband and I took a trip up to Mole National Park in Northern Ghana over Easter. Mole is the closest thing to a safari you will find in West Africa. It’s a twelve-hour drive to Mole from Accra, via some pretty nasty roads in the South, but once you get to the Northern, drier part of the country, you can comfortably cruise on the well-maintained, paved, two-laned highway. Mole Park’s motto is “Where people and animals live together”, and that could not be more true. Our first morning in Mole we woke up at sunrise to see the animals accompanied by a ranger guide. He had heard that an elephant was in the village next to the hotel so he took us there first.

In the village next to the Mole Hotel where the families of the park rangers live, an old elephant hangs out from time to time, walking around quietly eating leaves and cracking branches off trees. The rangers say he is an independent, older elephant. After munching a few branches, he goes to meet up with his elephant buddies at the water hole, and then goes off on his own again. We were able to get within fifteen feet from the elephant, and he was awesome to see. When my husband got a little too close to take a photo, the elephant sort of turned his head in our direction and the ranger took his rifle off his shoulder and told us to back away slowly. He said that when the elephant looks at you and lines up in front of you, he is thinking of charging. Meanwhile, I was hiding behind an adobe house a respectable 25 feet away hissing at my husband to not be the subject of the next “When Animals Attack” video.

In this same village, monkeys and baboons run amok. The village has declared it illegal to harm any of the animals, so the monkeys essentially run around unhindered, stealing food, getting into houses, grabbing what they can. The best view of the monkeys is at the garbage dump on the edge of the village, which, incidentally, is also the village bathroom. So our West African safari experience included witnessing a baboon and a child going to the bathroom side by side in a garbage dump. Sort of took the romance out of the safari for me.

Later that morning, we returned to the hotel for breakfast. While we were waiting for our food, a baboon approached the Mole Hotel pool area, jumped onto a table, and picked up a woman’s purse, who had taken a dip in the pool. After a moment of initial shock, everyone from my table stood up, pushing our chairs back loudly, hoping we would gain the courage to shoo the baboon away. The baboon heard the noise of the chairs, looked at us, and then dropped the purse and ran away. Our wise-aleck travel partner dubbed him the “ghetto baboon”. We ate our breakfast while another baboon ran around shrieking on the hotel roof, while another one took a crap on someone’s Landrover.

The actual walk through Mole Park was hot (easily 90 degrees) and dusty (during this time of year, it does not rain much anywhere in Ghana), but it was also quite amazing. We saw elephants walking around in their natural habitat, antelope, warthogs, and other sorts of deer-looking creatures. The end of the walk through the dusty bush culminated at the water hole, where all the animals got together to bathe. There were dozens of elephants in the water and alligators lining the shore. We just sat there in awe and snapped away pictures. But the morning walk was definitely the highlight of the trip. The animals weren't out in force in the afternoon when it was much hotter, and there is literally nothing to do at the hotel outside of the swimming pool, which our fellow travelers dubbed the "science experiment". You can take a shower (when the plumbing works) if you can get over the fact that you will shower in the yellowish water pumped from the water hole that the elephants bathe in. Our travel partner commented how her elephant pee shower was surprisingly refreshing. None of the rooms have air-conditioning and temperatures in springtime hover around 90 degrees in the shade. There is no power in Mole Park, but the hotel is lucky enough to have a generator and they keep it on during the day so you can nap with a fan. Unfortunately, the generator is turned off at night when the mosquitoes are out in force.

The service of the hotel is pretty shoddy, and it is the only hotel for miles. Even though we had made reservations in advance, when we arrived there were no rooms for us. The hotel’s message service (a guy with a motorcycle and a cell phone in the next town who takes reservations by phone and relays them to the hotel) hadn’t shared our latest itinerary with the hotel staff. After some time of expressing our sadness and regret, the hotel staff thankfully offered us the driver's room until another room opened up. Other unlucky travelers ended up on the floor of the bathrooms next to the hotel pool, or in tents next to the hotel. The food at the hotel restaurant is both slow in coming (we waited around two hours for each meal to arrive after we ordered) and mostly inedible (some could be described as vile). At least the beers were cold. Ok, so Mole is not anywhere near East or Southern Africa when it comes to safaris, but visiting is definitely an adventure.

My last WAWA experience to recount is another of my husband's. A few weeks ago, his work section organized an “Earth Day” event in Accra. The U.S. Embassy does a great deal of Muslim outreach work, to build and improve relations between the U.S. and the local Muslim community. As part of that work, his team contracted a local non-governmental organization (NGO) to put on the Earth Day event in a Muslim community within Accra. Historically, and somewhat paradoxically, many of the places suffering some of the most severe environmental degradation (like West Africa) are not exactly leading the pack on conservation. Here in Ghana, Earth Day isn't exactly one of Ghana's most popular holidays. In fact, most Ghanaians still get more excited about a good old ultra-capitalist trade fair before they can be bothered to celebrate Earth Day. So, the crowd at the Earth Day event was thin, and since the press were going to be showing up soon, the NGO’s staff went out in search of bodies to fill the chairs before the TV cameras showed up. A bunch of the “extras” looked and acted like they were on drugs. After a while, so many extras showed up that the event organizer ran out of chairs. When a truck showed up later hauling extra chairs, the crowd surged towards it and a riot practically broke out.

One of the “extras” basically created havoc at the Earth Day event. He started fistfights, kept trying to steal the music instruments and fuel-efficient stoves, and at the end of the event, jumped up on stage, grabbed the mike and began a “shout out” before he was politely led off stage. My husband's favorite anecdote of the event was that the drugged-out extra was wearing a pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses with no lenses in them. Slightly depressed with the outcome of their Earth Day event, one of his work colleagues cynically renamed the event “Crackhead Earth Day”. Only in West Africa.