Low Expectations - October 2005

I have experiences pretty much every day that make me stop and ask myself what I’m doing here. Today, I had three.

The first was this morning when I commented to our Nanny, “Wow, Elias seems to be relying a lot on his pacifier these days.” She replied, “That’s because when I feed him the bottle, he pulls on my breasts.” Wha?

Then at 10:30am I received a call from our handyman/driver. He is lost in the city, trying to take our son to a playgroup. Can I give him directions? This is after our morning’s clarification session:

Me: Abdul, can you take the nanny and the baby to the playgroup at Pippa’s Gym this morning? He has to be there at 10am.
Abdul: Yes, madam.
Me: Do you know where Pippa’s Gym is?
Abdul: Yes, madam.
Me: Ok, so leave at 9:40am and you will get there in time.
Abdul: Yes, madam.

The kicker was on my way home from work, when I spotted my charity case (the lady on the traffic median with the two kids and a baby strapped to her back). While I waited for the traffic light to change, I grabbed my purse and started rummaging through it to find money to give her. After I found a few bills, I rolled down my window and yelled and honked over the traffic to get her attention. She didn’t hear me. Then I saw her do something that made me catch my breath. She grabbed her toddler and slapped him across the top of his head. Hard. Then she did it again. And again. Before I could stop myself, I was screaming, “No! Why!” She never heard me nor saw me. The light changed and the cars behind me started honking and I put the car in gear. As I drove by I saw the tears streaming down her toddler’s cheeks.

The thing is, five minutes after each of these situations passed, I had almost totally forgotten about them. It was as if they had never happened.

It’s because I think I’ve given up on West Africa. I have fallen under the curse of low expectations for this place. A recent dinner party companion (a Ghanaian who spends half the year in Canada) speculated that one of the reasons Ghana is such a mess is because people who stay and work in Ghana don’t have a clear idea of how well things work in other places, or how things could be different. And the ones who have had this exposure tend to not want to come back to Ghana.

Maybe that is part of it, but another part is due to the fact that when you live here long enough, you realize that if you get upset about every little thing that goes wrong, you will just be mad all the time. So after a few months, you start to let the things slide that used to infuriate you. You don’t even realize it at first. Then before you know it, you let more and more situations slide that are ridiculous. The bar becomes set so low that one day you wake up and don’t expect anything to work at all and you are pleasantly surprised when anything goes right. That is when you know you have the curse.

One of my American girlfriends returned to Ghana after spending most of the summer in the U.S. While she was gone, her phone line stopped working. Upon her return, there was no running water in the house. That night when she was cooking dinner, the gas on her stove ran out. Then the electricity went out. She and her husband just shrugged and went to bed. This is what happens to you when you have been here for four years. Imagine what its like after twenty? Sometimes it takes an outsider to bring things back into perspective.

My new boss arrived Ghana a few weeks ago. He lived in West Africa before and is a pretty optimistic guy, so if he ever had the curse, I think living in America for a while temporarily cured him before he came back to the field. On a recent business trip to Senegal the flight was an hour late. No explanation at the airport, no apologies. The food on the plane was disgusting (I chastised him for not bringing food – he knows better!) and when we arrived in Dakar, there was no one there to pick us up at the airport like we had arranged. When we got to our hotel and tried to check in, he didn’t have a room reservation, and the rate we were quoted was higher than our government perdiem. By breakfast the next morning when he couldn’t get a cup of coffee to save his life he was about to lose it.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Awesome hotel! At least we can still get rooms! I’ll pay extra just to have a view of the ocean where I can’t see anyone going to the bathroom!” That night we walked a few blocks on a safe street to the very most Western tip of Africa and ate a really decent French meal on the water. There were no mosquitoes in my room, I had clean sheets and a comfortable bed. For the first time in about nine months, I slept soundly all night long. Other than missing my husband and baby, I was having a fine time.

My husband recently corrected me when I described how nice the Accra Zoo was to a newcomer. “Nice?!?” he exclaimed. I stood corrected. It can only qualify as “nice” after you have been here for a while, and you have fallen under the curse. In fairness to the Accra Zoo, it is a shady, quiet, and never-crowded place. It costs a dollar for foreigners to enter. There is a playground for kids and benches for people to sit on. You can have $1 cold beers right outside the gate on a hot day. You can see all the animals close-up. Zookeepers throw meat to the crocs and hyenas and you can watch them chomp away. The African gray parrots are really cool and some of the monkeys are quite rare.

At the same time, someone with no frame of reference would probably be shocked. It is, after all, a “third-world” zoo. One chimp named Jimmy was orphaned when his mom was killed for bush meat in Liberia. He was taken to a nightclub and chained up next to it for a while until he was rescued and brought to the Accra Zoo. So, many of the animals are probably similarly traumatized. The cages are small and they escape from time to time. One of the last times we visited, one of the baboons had escaped (at least it wasn’t the lion). And it’s hard to stomach some of the unsupervised kids and adults who don’t read (or care to heed) the many signs saying clearly not to touch or upset the animals. Two weeks ago I saw a kid put his hands into the male lion’s cage. He’s lucky he didn’t get it bitten off. And last week I saw an adult taunting one of the female lions while his friends cheered him on. I had to fight to keep myself from yelling at them. At least there is justice in the world though—when the bad zoo guests annoy the chimps, they start throwing their poo at everyone.

Many of you read these updates and think that our living here is some sort of sacrifice. It’s not. It’s a choice we made. And actually it is not a sacrifice at all when you compare it to other places we could be sent to for the type of work we do. There are many other places that can eat you up and spit you out damaged, like I imagine living in Sudan, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan would do to me. I’m sure these places have all the same strange situations, cultural quirks, frustrations and generous and kind people as can be found in Ghana, but they are far more dangerous places to live and work. And far more hopeless than where I write from. When I feel like I do these days I have to remind myself that we chose to be here. We are healthy, have good jobs, and we live extremely well. We have to count our blessings.

I have no conclusions, no happy final thoughts. All I can share is the text of a sign I saw in a bathroom stall at my office that made me laugh. It also helped me remember how much I like Ghanaians and why it can be fun to live outside the U.S.:

“Ladies—kindly make sure you leave no PP remnants after using this decent place. Also make sure that the thick tissues dropped in here are totally flushed, if this means waiting to flush a second time. It is a bit embarrassing to come in here only to see things that were not meant for others to see. Thank you for helping make this place look like the name given it—ladies.”