Life in Ghana

Accra, as Ryzard Kapuscinski put it, is a village that has managed to replicate itself a thousand times. It is an insular, safe and unremarkable place, a spread-out hodgepodge of Westernized estates, squat towers, shanties. Like in the village, its inhabitants have a severely limited sense of direction: the city is entirely navigated based on landmarks (go left at MegaTV, just past Aviation House) – street names are unheard of.

And, as in village, there are many dirt roads. Currently, in fact, I have a moat around my house. I’m staying at 7-bedroom mansion with a Harvard research team, and the exposed plastic pipe that runs along the sunken dirt road burst a few days ago. The street children squatting across from us bandaged it with a plastic bag, but this didn’t last long. So over the past few days the whole street has flooded and city officials remain nowhere to be seen. Someone, however, created a series a series of dirt islands in the middle (so you can hop island to island down the street) – very dangerous for returning home drunk (no streetlights, of course). And the water level is still rising…

Most of the time I’ve been working in Accra, but last week I managed to get outside on a data gathering trip to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city. The trip was unremarkable – fairly lush tropical forest along the way, poor towns, etc. – except for the bus ride itself. Each bus ride began with an ~hour-long Pentecostal service delivered by a preacher man standing in the aisle as the bus hurtled down the road. When the first passenger joined in, bellowing in tongues as the preacher chanted “jesus, jeeeesus,” I initially thought that he was shouting over the sermon on his cell phone. Even the 6am bus ride featured prayer time.

And after the sermon finished, the quack medicine salesmen/women got up. Each in turn, they advertised their malarial cures, impotence creams, and blood purifiers. The jovial crowd laughed both at and with these charlatans, but still bought the products. Finally, in the worst stage, came the Nollywood movies. The problem with these movies is not the mind-numbingly poor soap narrative, but rather the screeching, nails-on-chalkboard audio quality, played a maximum volume. It’s literally unlistenable, and deafeningly loud.

So, for future bus rides, I’m going to track down a semi-mythical VIP bus that costs twice as much but, allegedly, plays terrible western movies instead (Lord of War, no doubt).

Anyway, that’s my life thus far in Ghana. Next week I’ll be starting at Technoserve, changing gears a bit after working on the research project.

-Piotr