"Welcome, prof! Long time you have not come to us!"

I encounter such greetings in so many places here, on returning after nearly five years away. This one was from Agnes, the older woman who oversees a fruit and vegetable stand where Susan and I used to shop regularly, halfway from the Legon campus to the center of Accra (across from Maxmart, if you know Accra). The stand is just as wildly colorful, just as crowded with carefully arranged stacks of every imaginable fruit of the tree and the vine and the bush, as when we last shopped there in 2005, but it has grown to three times its former size. The young women are mostly new, though some slip me shy smiles of recognition. The older ladies are the same, and seem no older. “Welcome!” they say, with a firm handshake: “Have you been well? Why have you not come longtime? How is Madame? Why she is not with you today? How is your beautiful daughter? Is she still in Ghana?”

I always come home with twice as much as I intended to buy—partly because it all looks so enticing, partly because they throw in a generous “dash,” often without even telling me what it is. Once it was several passionfruit, another time a third pineapple. Yesterday when I bought two avocados Agnes dashed me three more and also slipped in four custard apples. The avocados are not the little 6-ounce Haas avocados you can find at Meijer—they are big mamas, the size of small cantaloupes. And all five are hard as rocks. I wanted to use them for the supper I made for the students last night, but they need several days to ripen. At the end of this week—when Susan arrives—we’ll be eating avocados for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But it’s really my fault that none are ripe. I should have said when I wanted to use them. I asked for a pineapple for today and another for tomorrow, a large papaya for today, and bananas for later in the week, and that’s exactly what I got. I am not buying many veggies yet, except tomatoes, because my stove is an extremely finicky and temperamental appliance. When the maintenance supervisor from Commonwealth Hall came to troubleshoot, the burners lit instantly and stayed on for several minutes; but as soon as they left, they went out. When Abraham was here (yes, the same Abraham we visited in London) yesterday and tried to see what might be wrong, it worked flawlessly. After he left, no dice. The principle seems to be that it works only when there are at least two people in the kitchen. So maybe after Susan arrives we’ll have no more problems. (More prosaically, I suspect that it has a bad LP gas regulator, with some sort of intermittent blockage.)

The same scene of welcome has been played out over and over again. The receptionist at IAS, the ever-cheerful Jamimah, greeted me warmly by name the first time I walked into the building, as did many of my onetime faculty colleagues at the Institute. At Legon Interdenominational Church, many people welcomed me back and expressed surprise that it has been as long as five years since I was last there. The proprietor of Wiltex café, located outside a residence hall on my walking route from Commonwealth down to IAS, greeted me warmly when I stopped there for lunch on Friday and said he was sure he had seen me walking past earlier in the week. And when we took the students to the Art Center, a sprawling craft market in central Accra, the vendors from whom Susan and I bought some of our favorite pieces of sculpture came out immediately to welcome “Prof David” back to Accra. And of course they wanted to show me some especially fine pieces, remembering our interest in older pieces from a variety of traditions, on which they could offer me a very special price. (Yes, I did succumb: I bought a small Dan mask and a Yoruba twin figure, both exquisitely pieces that fill some gaps in our collection. And one more touristy akwaba figure that caught my fancy.)

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. On arrival on August 7, the faculty coordinator from the Institute for African Studies who said he would meet my plane was nowhere to be found. But John and Victoria Sackey were there, unannounced, to welcome me “home.” Dr. Osman showed up fifteen minutes later—and it’s fortunate they both came, because my luggage and that of the one student who traveled with me from Dulles would never have fit into one car with the two extra people. When we arrived at the flat that Calvin has hired for the past few years, adjacent to Commonwealth Hall in a lovely spot far up the hill from the main campus gate, there was Ben Asiedu of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, to be sure I had the keys I needed for the flat and for the Calvin car that had been stored at ACI since last December. What a warm welcome!

The flat, which I saw and had doubts about last November, is exactly as I remembered: adequate in size (if not nearly as spacious as the house in Haatso), ideally located within a half-hour walk of the Institute for African Studies and the International Student Hostel, reasonably well equipped (after the porters brought over the furniture that was stored at the hall, and Ben delivered the printer and kitchen equipment that was stored at ACI)—and dark and airless as a mausoleum. At some point—whether before or after Amy Patterson first occupied it as Calvin director in 2008 I don’t know—Commonwealth staff decided to enhance security by nailing down every shutter on every window, except two that open onto a front veranda that is pretty dark itself. And these are very heavy shutters, through which hardly a sliver of light ever penetrates.

If I were to step outside right now (9 pm), I would enjoy a lovely cooling breeze rising from the campus below. If I moved inside the veranda, I would catch just an occasional stirring of the same breeze, through the fine mesh screens. But inside the house, all the stale air of the past week remains—stirred up by ceiling fans, cooled when necessary by a couple of ancient AC units that wheeze and thump and eventually bring the temperature down a bit. Split AC units are standard here—silent in operation, mounted outside with a narrow tube leading to a fan unit high on an interior wall—and are installed in every academic building and office and many homes (including our Haatso house). But when the hall decided to install AC in this flat, they boarded up the only exterior window in the master bedroom and installed a window unit that, from its appearance, appears to have been military surplus from World War II.

I have managed to pry open one narrow shutter in the kitchen, so when I am working there I sometimes get a bit of moving air. I’m working on some others, so far without success. I have asked the maintenance staff of the hall to remove the heavy batten they placed over the shutters for the rear patio doors, but they made no commitment and I’ve seen no indication that they intend to do so. I could not leave those doors open for ventilation, since there is no screening. But if I opened the shutters in the morning, at least I could verify, while sitting at my dining table, that it is day and not night outside.

Sorry—no more whining! In nearly every respect except the shortcomings of this flat, it’s a joy to be back at Legon. And the flat has its pluses. The kitchen (assuming the stove will eventually work) is much roomier than the one in the Haatso house. There is only cold running water, as is usual here (I use an electric kettle for washing up), but it has never stopped running on the weekend, as it often did in 2009 before the hall installed a new rooftop tank. And the point-of-use hot water heater for the shower works well. The students are jealous, since there are only cold showers in the campus hostels. They warned me that they may ask to use the restroom at my flat when we meet there and come back half an hour later with wet hair.

My biggest worry after seeing the flat last November has proved to be unfounded: we really can gather all 16 students here for Sunday evening socials. (In Haatso I held one of my class meetings at the house each week, but I’m not going to attempt that here—the students would have to balance books and notebooks on each other’s backs.) Our routine is to spread out comfortably inside and out on the veranda while we eat and chat, then pack the chairs tightly into the living room for our discussions, hoping that none of those seated near the kitchen will need to cross the room to use the bathroom before we are finished. We could just pass them over our heads across the room if necessary.

And as for those 16 students, 15 of whom arrived on August 11: they are coping admirably with all the stresses of living in West Africa, negotiating trotros and markets and the badgering of craft vendors with aplomb, and in general showing a commendable level of maturity and curiosity. I think it’s going to be an outstanding semester. They are flexible and patient, not even complaining when (as on Friday) the bus that we were told would arrive at 9 am arrived at 10:40. They’ve learned to carry a book everywhere.

A worry for recent directors has been students’ insensitivity to local modes of dress, insisting on wearing what’s comfortable even if when standard American campus dress would be conspicuously informal, verging on indecent, by local standards. But this year’s group has erred on the side of caution instead: “Prof, do you think this top will be OK for the festival? Will we be meeting the chief, so I should cover my knees and shoulders?” And they are thoughtful and considerate young people, toward me, toward each other and toward Ghanaian friends and hosts.

I will not know til later how seriously and consistently they will take their academic work, but early indications are encouraging. Shared textbooks are passing from hand to hand all the time. At the two sessions I have held of my class on “Ethics of Development and Cultures of Africa” nearly all the students have come to class well prepared, with good questions about the assigned readings and interesting observations from their first weeks in Ghana. I had only email contact with these students in the spring while I was in Kenya, and the interviews with applicants were conducted by Off-Campus Programs staff and returning Ghana students. Indeed, there were half a dozen students I had never met in person until they arrived in Accra. But every one of them is an active and constructive contributor to our discussions, and I look forward eagerly to helping them come to know West Africa more closely.

Let me close this entry with the thought that went through my mind one day last week—“what a joy it is to live among Ghanaians again!”—and the incidents that motivated the thought. I went out to shop at the fruit and vegetable stand, and the young woman who waited on me insisted on carrying all my purchases to my car, parked some distance away. Even at Maxmart, a big Lebanese-owned supermarket catering to expats where courtesy and hospitality can sometimes descend nearly to American levels, the stockers and cashiers were friendly and helpful. Driving back to campus, I needed to make a left turn across traffic, and an oncoming driver—a trotro driver, no less, a breed known for their brazen defiance of every law and every courtesy—signaled by flashing headlights that he would wait for me to do so. When I let a taxi driver slip into the traffic in front of me on campus, he waved a gesture of thanks out his window.

Arriving back at the Institute, Jamimah greeted me with a broad smile and a warm word of welcome as always, as did each of the lecturers and graduate students who were standing around in the entrance area. Samuel Abokyi, our grad student assistant, came to discuss his difficulties finding lodging for next weekend in Cape Coast but said he would travel there on Friday to find rooms and place a deposit. (He was successful.) A student knocked on my door by mistake, looking for another lecturer, but then asked me a number of questions about Calvin and thanked me warmly for the information, saying he would look at Calvin’s website and consider applying to study there.

In the morning I had brought my sheets over to the porters’ desk at Commonwealth and asked for clean ones, and they told me to return in the afternoon. They brought out a clean set, but would not give them to me: instead the porters motioned to another staff member to carry them over to the flat for me. When he arrived he asked, “May I put them on the bed for you?” He worked and worked at it (it’s a king-size foam mattress, very tightly squeezed into a wooden frame, and there are only flat sheets, not fitted) and got the sheet very taut. (But even though I had requested two sheets for each bed he left the other one folded up: Ghanaians don’t use top sheets and don’t seem to get the concept.)

None of these helpers expected a tip, and each would have behaved in just the same way to a Ghanaian buying fruit or picking up sheets. And I just remembered another example: on the way from IAS back to my flat I picked up a load of laundry from an on-campus laundromat. (Yes, there are mechanical washing and drying machines in Ghana now! Mostly in laundromats.) The parking attendant at Akuafo Hall, an elderly man seated on a chair near where I parked, called out to me to be sure to close my windows and lock my doors, so I did so. When I returned with my basket, he apologized: “If I had known you were picking laundry, sir, I would have carried it for you.”

Life in Africa is about relationships, it is often said, not about priority lists or schedules or individual entitlements. This is evident in the way people use their money and their time, in the way families support each other even when scattered across several continents, and in the way births and weddings and deaths are marked. And it is no less evident if you just come to Accra and spend an ordinary day shopping and working. I’m an American, not an African; but this seems like such a sensible and way to live. And that’s one of the reasons why, much as I miss Susan and other family and friends, coming back to Ghana feels like coming home.

Postscript just before posting this on 30 September: I took a student to the hospital early this morning and have been back and forth since. She had a severe allergic reaction to something, causing fainting and weakness and low blood pressure, but she’s been admitted and put on IV antibiotics and fluids, and she’s steadily improving and becoming herself again. I’m sure she will be well enough by Friday to join our first field trip, to the Central Region. But what connected with this closing theme was a little encounter with a compactly built older man who was on duty as parking attendant this morning. He had summoned an aide with a wheelchair to to carry the student, then only half conscious, from car to clinic when I arrived at 5 am, then directed me to a parking space. When I went back to the car about 7 to get some papers, he called out to me, “And how is the daughter doing now?” (Actually he said “son”—many Ghanaians mix up genders in English. He wasn’t suggesting that I am really her father, only linking us as part of an extended family in the traditional way.) I said she was resting and feeling much stronger already. “There is no need to worry,” he responded, with a big smile: “God will do everything!”

First weeks in Ghana (link to Picasaweb album)

Out of Africa, to the West Country and homeward

These entries are going to be a little out of chronological order. I finally completed my account of our travels in Uganda near the end of our time in Michigan and posted it; Susan is still polishing up her account of our trip to Ethiopia—a fascinating land that seems a million miles from all the other places we have been in Africa—and will probably post it after she arrives here in Ghana in a few days. I have been here three weeks, the calendar is just about to turn over to September, and I have a little time to breathe after the first few frantic weeks getting Calvin’s Ghana program organized.

And you are reading this blog (all three of you!) to share our impressions of Africa, not of West Michigan. So this entry will be brief (by my standards, if not by yours). On leaving Kenya in late May we made a week’s stopover in the UK. (The extra cost was only $50 each—when else can you travel to Europe for $50?) Susan did all the planning on the internet, fulfilling a long-held dream of visiting England’s West Country, which I remember in considerable detail from the family trip we made in the spring of 1966, during my father’s Cambridge sabbatical. Using a cottage rental site Dot recommended, she found what sounded like a charming flat to rent in the tiny fishing village of West Looe, on Cornwall’s south coast about halfway from Plymouth to Land’s End. The cost was high, but nothing in the UK comes cheap. Since they required a week’s rental we booked it for all but our first and last nights. Our hope, and our initial plan, was to spend a couple of days with Dot and Roger, but Dot had rehearsals and concerts every couple of days and could not make a trip south, and we decided it made little sense to leave our expensive hired flat empty to spend two days on the train in order to have a day with Dot (who would soon be in Michigan). So we spent lots of time talking on our mobile phones instead.

We did see our friends Abraham and Claire Waigi, whom we met when they were graduate students at the Akrofi Christaller Institute in Ghana in 2004 and 2005. Though they are friends from our time in Ghana, neither is Ghanaian: Abraham is Kenyan, Claire British. While Abraham works on a PhD at Liverpool Hope University, they and their beautiful 2 year old daughter Leslie are living with Claire’s father in Surrey, just outside London. Abraham very generously offered to pick us at the airport and accommodate us overnight. Better yet, they too were planning a trip to Cornwall, to visit Claire’s uncle on the north coast. So we traveled together to the town where we had hired a car to carry us the rest of the way.

I can’t describe what a delight it was to settle into one place for a week and explore the village and the breathtaking beauty of the coastline and countryside. We are nearly always on the move when we are traveling, and now we wonder why.

Getting to and from our flat was a journey in itself. We reached the car park via a circuitous little lane, so narrow that at some points Susan could have reached out and plucked flowers from the steep bank on the right side while I could have gathered other blooms from the window boxes of the houses on the left. Then we trundled our luggage down a steep access road, along another road for a half kilometer or so, then down three flights of narrow steps and another steep walkway to access our flat. It was a narrow three-story unit, in a row that stepped down the slope toward the town. It was comfortable and well equipped, with a balcony up on the top floor from which we could look out over the boats coming and going from the harbor.

To get to the village we descended another five or six flights of steps—the “street” in front of the houses was a staircase several blocks long—and then another steep and narrow lane til we reached the shops at the level of the river. There were only few shops on the west side, but they included a grocer and a charming pub, the Jolly Sailor, which has been a public house since the 14^th century. We were told that the beams in the pub’s family room were salvaged from ships in Lord Nelson’s navy that limped home after the Battle of Trafalgar. During our week the pub’s kitchen was never open—only the taps—but a healthy crowd gathered all the same on Tuesday evening for a song circle, on Thursday evening to sing sea chanties. The singing was lusty, in all senses (my junior high choir sang sea chanties, but none as bawdy as some of these), the ale excellent (hand-pulled, of course), and the company congenial. At the song circle—for which the room was packed, mostly with vacationing Brits—a visitor from Yorkshire led us in his favorite Dylan tunes; others shared West Country ballads; and I shared an American folk hymn.

Each day we plotted out a different itinerary with some common elements—a prehistoric stone circle here, a menhir there, a Norman church or two with interesting gravestones and memorial carvnings, and always a meander along a portion of the Coastal Path, the footpath that winds along the coastline of Devon and Cornwall for more than 600 miles. Miraculously, we brought Nairobi’s weather with us to notoriously rainy and cloudy Cornwall: apart from one rainy morning and some mist, early and late, we had sunshine nearly every day. There was a countywide art exhibition going on, with open houses in a hundred little artists’ studios in the cities and villages and on remote country lanes. We visited half a dozen of these, which sometimes entailed walking a mile or two on unmarked footpaths at the end of which, if we had guessed correctly, we would find a painter or potter or sculptor waiting for the occasional visitor. Once a chance remark about our recent travels led to the disclosure that the mother/grandmother of the mother and son whose paintings were on display had spent many years with her late husband, a physician, working in clinics in several areas of Kenya and Tanzania.

We ate well, usually taking one meal in a restaurant or pub and another as a picnic to economize, and we savored half a dozen fine pub ales made in St Austell and elsewhere in Cornwall. In the evening we would often wander across the town’s only bridge to East Looe, the commercial center, and watch the daylight fading from the waterfront and quay.

If only airfare to the UK weren’t so expensive! It would be delightful to spend a week in the very same flat each summer, hiking new stretches of the coastal trail each day, sampling the Cornwall ales we did not have time for, and perhaps making a foray farther afield to Stonehenge or south Wales. But we would want to get a few of our close friends to hire the adjacent flats, so we could share the delights of the West Country. And we’d need to arrange a repeat of our exceptional weather. Dot reported that, in the week after we departed, Cornwall was enshrouded in heavy rainclouds every day.

And then on to home, after a scare at the airport when British Air insisted we had to pay a $300 excess baggage fee. The free baggage allowance is four bags for travel between the US and Africa, two for travel to Europe, and our travel agent had assured us that on one continuous ticket there would be no problem with four bags. But BA insisted that because of our stopover the Europe rules apply. Fortunately, the supervisor agreed to make an exception this time. We had a short layover at Dulles, a long one at O’Hare, and arrived home on the afternoon of June 7. Everything was in good order at our house, thanks to Ken and Jan Sink, who lived there for a month before we returned and did lots of garden cleanup and the like.

And then followed exactly two months, for me, or nearly three months, for Susan, of more or less normal life at home. Among the highlights were a grand celebration of my 60^th birthday on our first weekend home—thirty friends were able to come despite the short notice—and a week’s visit each, at different times, from Klaas and Krista and from Janna and Barb. Klaas rode the 24 Hour Challenge again, but since I had clocked no more than 100 miles on my bike since 2009 I skipped the ride this year and volunteered at the checkpoint instead, punching riders’ number cards from 4 to 8 am. Klaas did well—more miles than last year, and fewer digestive problems in the afternoon and evening. Krista had just gotten over a long bout of morning sickness, and was adjusting reasonably well to her grueling new schedule of three 12-hour night shifts as a nurse on the medical-surgical floor of Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital. (This is old news to anyone in our family: our first grandchild is expected to arrive in mid-November.) At the time Janna and Barb came up for a week Janna was just winding down her work as children’s book manager for Barnes and Noble—a job she enjoyed but for which the pay was just a smidgen over minimum wage—and preparing for her new position as Program Director for Asheville Community Theater. She’s worked with their summer children’s program for many years and knows the organization well, including its severe financial problems and its difficulty finding the right supervisory staff. So far she is finding the job challenging but also rewarding, and although it’s officially a part-time job (a polite fiction, of course) the pay is considerably better than in her previous full-time job.

In July we had an unexpected opportunity to gather all four Hoekema siblings for a weekend at our house. Dot had come to give a presentation at a conference at Calvin (sponsored by an independent software testing organization), Jim was in the middle of a lengthy Accenture project at the Chicago home office, and Helen was back from the Oregon Bach Festival, and we found we had a free weekend when we could gather by the lake. It was a delightful couple of days of swimming and sunning and catching up. We hosted a lunchtime gathering of Brink cousins, which lasted all afternoon as most of the guests enjoyed the warm lake water (see below). On Sunday morning Dot and Helen and I sang two trios at our church—always a joy!

For Susan summer was a time to reopen her studio and reacquaint her hands and eyes with the ceramic arts. In the past month she has been amazingly prolific, putting out kilnload after kilnload of wares to be put on display at the annual Art on the Riverfront art show in Grand Haven. It took place a week ago. Sales were not what she had hoped for, especially of her best (and most expensive) majolica lake scenes, at which she has been working so hard, but it was a good chance to think about how to display her work in her own solo display. And she had a terrific crew of friends (some from our Grand Haven church, at least one from our former Grand Rapids church) helping to set up and tend the booth and take down. Some visitors urged her to submit her work for sale through the Muskegon Museum of Art--not only a good suggestion but a recognition of the quality of her work.

For me, the summer months were a time for review of my Fulbright work at Daystar (including some frustrating and so far unsuccessful attempts to sort out the source and rationale for alterations in the grades I had submitted for my students), submission of several articles and book reviews (on topics related to philosophy, theology, and development in Africa), and a long list of projects around the house. We had decided last year that we should replace all the front windows of the house this summer, since thirty years’ wear and some shifting of the structure have made most of them inoperable. That was a huge financial commitment (about one-third of what we paid for our first house in Northfield), and it took time to get the units in, so in the end the project was done after my departure but before Susan’s. We have a friend staying in the house for the fall, which means fewer worries about freezing or other system breakdowns. And Susan decided not to shut off the heat in the studio, as we had for the spring, so we didn’t have to drain all the plumbing and move all the clay indoors.

One of the most remarkable features of this summer—will it ever happen again?—was the seemingly endless weeks of warm Lake Michigan water. Already in June the water warmed up to nearly 70 degrees F, then dropped down to the low 60s for a week or two, but then reached 70 again before the month was out. We hosted the Bosma family Fourth of July picnic once again, a commitment we made as part of our purchase agreement for the house (informally, not in the sales contract). Last year the water was so frigid that only the youngest kids ventured in, and not for long. This year it was in the middle 70s and nearly everybody was out swimming and kayaking and throwing frisbees. Week after week through July and early August, and for the two weeks after I left, the temp never dropped much below 70, and several times there were official temperature readings of 80 or 81. Storms came and went, but the common effect of swapping warm surface water for colder water from underneath never happened. It was pure bliss to be able to swim morning, noon and night when the air was hot, and to enjoy the shimmering stars overhead at midnight without feeling the least bit chilled. A wonderful gift—maybe a consequence of global warming, maybe not, but I’m lodging no complaints.

And then, on August 6, I left home – in order to return to what has become our second home, Ghana. That warrants a new entry and a new heading. (Didn’t I warn you that this one would be brief only by my standards?)