The Welcome Wagon, August 2003

My nights are no longer a refuge from stress-filled days. My normally dream-free sleep is being invaded by vivid, drug-induced nightmares. As an international development worker who has lived in malaria zones in the past, I'm ashamed to admit I let myself be convinced of taking Larium, the controversial anti-malaria drug, by the State Department’s Medical Office. The people there put the fear of God in me. I took Larium back in the 1990s while in Angola, and still got malaria. Their response? "If you take Larium and still get malaria, it won't be as serious!" They must be handing out promotions based on how many State Department employees and family members can be convinced to take the drug. A smaller part of me justifies my Larium acceptance as penance for becoming a State Department spouse. Whether I want to admit it or not, as the spouse of a Diplomat overseas, the State Department controls many aspects of my life now. Where I live, what sort of job I can obtain, how I act and what I can say in public, and more importantly, what I can't. One wrong move and I can be counseled or sent home, to the detriment to my husband's career. I no longer have the luxury of speaking my mind in public and ignoring without consequence the advice provided by our State Department to Americans overseas. I figure I might as well accept my fate and, literally, take the medicine.

My nightmares are intense. A recent one ended with a bomb going off and me hanging off the side of a building in the U.S. hoping someone would come save me. Last week, my husband woke me up at 3am because I was whimpering in my sleep. However in my nightmare, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, “Call 911!” as I looked down on a dismembered body after being in a float accident with the entire Clinton family.

Another side effect of the Larium is that in the middle of the night my mind races so much I can’t sleep. I think of things I need to accomplish, conversations I need to have, professional opportunities I should explore. I experience a milder form of this under normal circumstances when I am under pressure at work, not an issue for me now. Visualizing beach scenes or yoga breathing or thinking other happy thoughts usually make these thoughts go away, but these techniques don't seem to affect drug-induced mind racing. I'm exhausted. It's a bummer that I can’t recollect any of my seemingly productive, mind-racing thoughts, whereas the nightmares remain crystal clear.

I’m also experiencing intense waves of rage and sadness. If a plastic bag of groceries breaks, I want to burst into tears. When I bang my elbow on the front door, I want to smash the glass window. The feelings last only a few seconds, but during them I feel like I'm about to go postal. How much of this is Larium-induced I'm not sure. It could just be that I'm having a harder time adjusting to my new surroundings and life than I thought I would. The Embassy nurse suggests I give it a few more weeks to see if the side effects die down. I almost convinced the Embassy’s Community Liaison Officer let me write about my Larium nightmares in the Embassy newsletter, but apparently the nurse rejected my offer based on the fact it might discourage others from taking their anti-malarial medication, something that the U.S. Ambassador here is adamant about.

Drugs or not, moving to a different country always means experiencing a series of dramatic highs and lows. In spite of last night’s mind racing, this morning I feel awake and positive and ready to transmit my latest thoughts via email. I want to try to stay positive and write about the things in Ghana we are learning to appreciate. I’ll save the stuff that stinks for a low day.

One good thing is the fruit. Mangoes, pineapples, apples, bananas and watermelon here burst with flavor. The pineapples are so naturally sweet, you can feel your teeth rotting with each bite. The mangoes are a perfect texture—not too stringy, not too mushy—with just the right amount of tang. The watermelon tastes like watermelon-flavored gum. Fruit in Ghana tastes like fruit in season—not like the watered-down stuff we get year-round in U.S. grocery stores. Our newly hired maid, also recommended by our Embassy-assigned "social sponsors", makes us fruit salad every day. Yum.

One great thing for those of us without a car in Accra, is that taxis are cheap and plentiful. The government subsidizes gas prices here, so a 10-minute taxi across town costs less than $3. Our quarters are not quite urban, but I can step outside my house and five cabs will pass by within three minutes. One of our Embassy-assigned guards posted at our house decides which taxi is nice enough for me to take. I must have become his friend when I bought him a fan after he complained to me about the mosquitoes. I am guessing from his reaction to my gesture, that this sort of treatment is not standard among the U.S. diplomatic community.

However, I have to admit that some of the guards are a bit strange, which may be why others are not dishing out the favors. Some of my husband’s colleagues have come home to find the guard sacked out in some of the most impossible places and positions (sitting up in a chair, on the floor of the guard house, laying down in the back of the house under a window, etc). One night my husband and I heard a strange noise—someone or something chanting rather loudly underneath our bedroom window. He went downstairs with a baseball bat to check it out. Turns out it was just one of our weekend guards praying loudly while he was doing the rounds walking around our house. My husband asked him to take it down a notch. We never saw that guard at our house again. Maybe he only wanted to guard the faithful?

Here, if you want to buy fruit and vegetables, you don’t go to one of the two, large grocery stores, you go to the huge market in the center of town, or to one of the hundreds of small stands set up on streets throughout residential neighborhoods. I made friends with the fruit and vegetable lady across the street from our house. She didn’t have tomatoes for me last night, so I had to walk a few blocks to her competitor. Afterwards we cut a deal. When I want particular vegetables I’ll ask her ahead of time and she’ll bring them the next day. She can't afford to keep a large inventory--at dusk every night she boards up what she hasn’t sold in her telephone-booth-sized wooden shack with a padlock. I can't imagine how she can get by on the profits from the produce. The last time I shopped with her I bought lettuce, avocado, carrots, cucumber, mangoes, oranges and pineapple, all for about the equivalent of $2.50.

Also ubiquitous throughout Accra's neighborhoods are fabric sellers who also set up impromptu wooden "shops" on the side of the city's residential streets. Mostly these shops consist of a wooden table set up under a tree for shade, draped with fabric. I am constantly catching rainbows of bright colors from the corner of my eye when I whiz by these stands in a taxi or car, quickly reaching for a pen and paper to write down where they are so I can return another time. I'm trying to figure out which stands have the most appropriate fabric for couch pillows, curtains, tablecloths or napkins. I have my eye on some Indian-inspired patterned fabric, with broad stripes of red and gold and oranges and yellows that look like raw silk from afar, on a stand located on my street.

The women of Ghana all wear busy-patterned, colorful, African fabrics as a matter of course. The poorer women wear their fabric without tailoring, most often as a wrap-around skirt or as a baby-carrying device. The better-off Ghanaian women have their African fabric outfits tailored into combinations of skirts, tops, headdresses, dresses and shawls. Some of the outfits are made entirely from Kente cloth, kente being the name of Ghana's traditional weaving technique. Kente comes in a variety of colors, but I most often see women wearing black, and white, or black and red Kente outfits I’m told is funeral attire. I don't think I'm brave enough to wear any African fabric clothing just yet. Right now I'll just admire how stunning the Ghanaian women look in their custom-made outfits.

Moving to Ghana as part of the U.S. Embassy means you get hooked into an automatic social network. The closest thing I can compare it to is joining a sorority at college, but without the ethnic or economic exclusivity. From the moment you land, there is a group of people who help you out, no matter what. During our first week here, people from the Embassy community made us dinner and took us grocery shopping. Drivers employed by the Embassy took us shopping and to restaurants. We were invited to dinner parties, and asked to join sports teams. Everyone is so nice about welcoming newcomers that you feel absolutely compelled (even though you are basically assigned) to do the same for the next person or family who show up. I guess the downside is you are forced to socialize with people you may not have chosen as your friends under different circumstances. Anyway, with all this support, I feel like being lonely or bored is not a choice.

Having a career—that is another story. Living in a poor country means there are many jobs here for development workers, and luckily for me, the U.S. and Ghana have a bilateral agreement so spouses of diplomats can work in the assigned country legally. In terms of options, the U.S. has two U.S. Agency for International Development offices here--one for Ghana, and one for West Africa. The United Nations must have a dozen different offices here, from the United Nations Development Program, to the World Food Program, to the International Office on Migration. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund both have offices in Accra, and signs directing you to the offices of international and national non-government organizations (NGOs) and consulting firms that feed off the donor agencies are on practically every corner. The challenge for me is going to be finding a job that I would find interesting, in my field of economic development, and to be perfectly honest, well paid. I wish I could say I was one of those idealistic development workers who doesn’t care about salary. I spent the last 10 years slowly building up my salary to the point where I eventually made as much as people in government or international organizations without Master’s Degrees. So no, I don’t want to take a salary cut at this stage in my career.

Unfortunately, I'm finding that the job market here for development workers is small, and tight. The better-paid jobs are scarce, or fixed, or you have to have been hired before you arrived in the country to be paid an internationally competitive salary. The other issue I'm facing is that there are many educated and qualified Ghanaians in the local labor market, and thousands more who would love to come back to work in Ghana if they could find a well-paying job.

In terms of the content of development work locally, I have to admit I’m rather surprised at how little has changed in international development over the last 6 years or so when I last worked in the field. But from what I have seen so far, the design of the projects in agricultural, small business, and microenterprise development in Ghana are almost exactly the sort of projects I saw and managed 10 years ago in Central America. The difference is that the projects here are even more limited in scale and impact, and West Africa has much higher levels of poverty and much greater need. I worry that this may be par for the course in West Africa. Or maybe its just me--three years of working in the U.S. with Foundations doing poverty alleviation work has spoiled me. I got to spend my days learning about the latest innovations in economic development nationally. I saw first-hand how constant innovation in development work was solicited from, and rewarded by, government, the private sector, and Foundations. As a consultant, I was encouraged by donors to think creatively about new solutions to problems. I was surrounded by people who were clearly interested in learning from the “doers”, rather than dictating how the work needed to be done. The thinking was, who else knows better how to conduct economic development programs for poor people than the ones implementing the programs now, interacting on a daily basis with the people we want to ultimately serve?

But that was the U.S., and this is West Africa. I am being reminded once again with the strength of a sledge-hammer what they never teach you in international development classes at graduate school; how most economic development work is designed and practiced overseas. Governments and international donors design development projects and interventions whether they know what they are talking about or not, and the grantees and contractors humor them and play along if they want the money, even if they don't believe in the design of the projects. So I haven't come across much happening in the economic development field here that is peaking my interest yet. But I have just arrived. It’s still early in the game, and this is supposed to be a positive update—time to change gears.

Last night we ran out of water. The water in the city is off and our maid’s many loads of laundry today apparently depleted our reserve tank. We mentioned this to our guard and he immediately got on the radio. In less than an hour, a 20-foot white tanker truck was backing into our driveway. It turns out the Embassy has access to its own well, and employs two workers on a 24 hour basis to fill up this mobile tank and do rounds, filling depleted water tanks at the houses in the Embassy's housing pool so we don't have to live without running water. I was impressed. I'm not used to this kind of support when living overseas. In the past, I was overseas working for international non-government organizations (NGO), where you are lucky if a staff member from the office picks you up at the airport when you arrive in country to take you to your temporary lodgings. Maybe if they are really nice, they will pick you up in the morning for work and take you to lunch on your first day. But after that you are on your own—to get around, find housing, go shopping, deal with water shortages, everything. So the support system of the U.S. government is quite convenient, and very nice. However, predictably, as soon as people get used to it, they inevitably want more. Many Embassy families quickly forget how great they have it compared to others (or how they live in the U.S. for that matter) and they start to get demanding. In our short time here, I’ve witnessed many an Embassy family member complain about the services that come with their free housing. They come off looking like spoiled jerks. I’d like to avoid turning into one of those. For crying out loud, Ghana’s GDP/capital is only $350/year. Most people only dream of having access to a car or a house with running water or electricity. Ok, we are not Ghanaians, but we do live here now, so we better get used to roughing it. Hell, if we wanted the “easy life”, we could have stayed in the U.S., right?

Now, that last sentence doesn’t mean I will return any non-liquid gourmet food items from Whole Foods sent my way! I mean, there is roughing it, and there is roughing it. I know, we chose to be here, but I still am going to allow myself to miss U.S. grocery stores. Enough complaining. I better close this email so you all will want to read the next one.