Why so little news?

More than two weeks between blog entries. Faithful readers (you know who you are, all three of you) may wonder whether there’s nothing happening, or we’ve grown tired of recounting our adventures, or the internet has crashed. A brief word of explanation.

The last—poor internet service—was a huge problem in my first month here, and to some degree in the weeks after Susan arrived as well, but much less so now. The USB modem we have for use at our flat is of relatively little use (always slow, sometimes completely nonfunctional, usable only with my computer and not Susan’s). But at the Calvin office at IAS I have now installed an effective system for my use and the students’ (involving a 10 meter cable to the one Ethernet port that works and a wireless router). During class breaks (and once in a while during class, I fear) students can even do high-bandwidth activities like post photos and update Facebook. Between classes someone is always streaming a favorite song or sharing a Youtube clip.

All the previous Calvin groups had to go out and find public cybercafés where they paid by the hour for poor connections. The IT person here at IAS had recommended that I install a wireless system for to use, since there’s now a fast Ethernet port in the seminar room, but I wasn’t sure it warranted the expense, so I asked the students to do as they had til now—buy time at cybercafés and pay to print their essays there. But then my very first experience using one of the print shops—the one that had been recommended—left me with an infected USB drive and many hours of work to salvage its contents and clean up my hard disk. So the wireless system looked like a very good idea, and I have also allowed them to give me papers on a Calvin USB drive that I print at home. (There’s a printer here in the office but it’s very temperamental and demands to be fed one sheet at a time—and even that sometimes causes digestive problems.)

Each of the students brought a laptop, and nearly every graduate student at UG, and some undergrads, now carry laptops around with them as well. Technology availability has advanced enormously here since 2005, and this is just about the only area I can identify where prices have remained steady or decreased a bit. And faculty are very skilled at getting grant agencies to buy them machines. Osman, our faculty coordinator, was sitting in his office the other day typing on his laptop, which was set up in front of the large flatscreen monitor of his desktop, next to his large laser printer, with his video projector beside it – all of them the fruit of grant-funded activities.

But our silence should not be taken as a sign that life here is boring. The main reason is our always unpredictable but usually overfull daily schedule. New demands pop up constantly that many hours trekking from office to office to obtain forms, writing letters, making phone calls, and trekking back to the office to get the right form. The latest was our discovery this week that, where Ghana Immigration had always granted each arriving visitor 90 days’ stay in 2004 and 2005, this has been reduced to 60 days for most—and not even that some of them. Four of our students, for no discernible reason at all (three from the US, one from Canada, two with multiple-entry and two with single-entry visas) were granted only 30 days’ stay. On top of that, the renewal fee used to be about $25 US for up to three more months, and now, we have been told, it is $40 US per month.

The 2009 Ghana director’s report warned that it took two weeks to get the necessary support letters from the International Programmes Office for the students, five weeks to get the separate letter from the Registrar for him and Marty, but it made no mention of the urgency of a task that previously didn’t come due until our last month in Ghana. (Policies must have changed before 2009 or he would have flagged this.) The upshot is: four of our students are already in the country illegally. But I’m happy to report that I found a way to fast-track the process: I got an appropriate letter from IAS to the registrar, certifying the need for renewals for Susan and me and for all 16 students, in just one day, and the registrar’s assistant assured me Monday that his letter would be ready on Tuesday! (Postscript: it wasn’t.)

The days do not look all that full on the calendar. I teach my class in Ethics and Development on Monday and Wednesday, attend the Peoples and Cultures lectures on Monday and Wednesday, and listen in (I sit in my office with the door open but don’t take notes) to most but not all of the African Literature classes and some of the Politics and Development classes. I haven’t been attending the drumming and dancing classes regularly this year, though I plan to make more regular visits in the future—to brush up my skills (as if I remembered anything useful in an area of human activity for which I am so woefully prepared by nature and nurture). Every Monday morning Susan and Charles go shopping in the morning, and then we have some preparations while Charles is cooking for the dinner we serve to the students and a few guests. But I have no departmental or committee meetings, no lengthy commute, and few other times blocked out, and Susan has even fewer. I spend a lot more time in informal conversation and counseling with students than would usually be the case on campus, and here this involves Susan no less than me.

And then there are the periodic medical crises—too frequent in our first weeks here! Already four students have made use of the Nyaho Medical Centre for urgent problems, some of them requiring an emergency trip in the middle of the night. Four more have been down for a few days—missed classes, feeling miserable, nothing more serious—with digestive ills of one sort or another. Immune systems and digestive tracts need time to adjust to new challenges, I think, and a few students have been knocked down again and again.

Susan and I have been fortunate. Our only illness has been a severe head cold that had me in its grip for most of last week, but that cleared up before it spread to my chest. Susan felt as if she was getting it for a few days but is better now. She also suffered a fall last Friday—stepping back from an opening car door she put her foot in the deep gutter that runs alongside most roads here, suffering scrapes and bruises to her lower right arm. But those are healing up now too.

But there has been little time to write—and less time for each of us to read what the other has written and make comments. I wasn’t able to finish my account of our travels in Uganda last May til late summer, and Susan is still polishing up her account of Ethiopia trip. She has been in Akropong since Tuesday with the students, observing activities related to the Odwira Festival there, and as soon as I post this short entry (if I delay and let her review it we wouldn’t be able to post it til next week) I’m headed up there too for the rest of the week. (So all the errors and infelicities of this post are to be blamed on me alone.)

So please stay tuned, faithful readers. Our lives are very full of challenges and interesting experiences, and you will read about many of them in due time! In the meantime we would love to have emails from you with questions and responses and just general chitchat. Write to dhoekema@calvin.edu or sbhoekema@gmail.com – we would love to stay connected in a personal way as well as by posting notes on our experiences for you to read.

To market, to market, to buy cloth and beads

One of the social and cultural features of daily West African life that keeps drawing us back here is the market. (Markets are much less visible in South Africa or East Africa, and less important to the domestic economy, I think—at least in the mostly urban areas where we lived.) In every major city there are several large markets, usually open every day, with a dazzling array of colorful cloth, vegetables, cooking ware, hardware, and everything else a vendor thinks someone might buy. In smaller cities, in towns, and in villages that serve as regional trade centers the markets are more likely to be on a weekly or twice-weekly rotation—or a four-day or five-day cycle, disregarding the Western week. Buying and selling is only one of their functions, of course: they are also occasions to see friends and family, catch up with the news, and show off new clothes. The markets we know are mostly urban, with sellers in their booths day after day (and in some cases living in the booths, or in informal shacks in market compound, at night). Most buyers just stop in to make a few purchases. The social function is more important in rural markets, where both buyers and sellers may have traveled for a day to the market town.

We had read about the Wednesday and Saturday Agomanya market in Krobo Odumase, at the center of the area where the Krobo people still make fused-glass beads in the traditional way. The Bradt guide singles it out as a favorite of readers, not just for beads but for everything else. Realizing that last Saturday was one of very few entirely open days on our calendar, Susan and I made an excursion there accompanied by one of the Calvin students.

Did I just arrive in Ghana yesterday? Have I never driven anywhere here? I looked at the regional map and guessed that it would be a 45 minute drive. In my dreams! There was heavy Saturday morning traffic in Madina, and then roads were destroyed and turned into rutted wilderness tracks at several points. A big funeral was going on in nearly every one of the dozen small towns we passed through—the streets were lined with men and women wearing black or brown funeral cloth. One of the funerals had spilled over from the family compound to fill the main highway through the Akuapem region, so police officers were there to divert us onto a dirt track that snaked along behind houses for a couple of kilometers. All in all the drive there took two hours (it was a bit less on the return trip). Even worse, the market was not exactly where the guidebook said it would be, and I was beginning to worry that we’d made the trip in vain.

“No worry,” as many taxi back windows say. There was no signboard and no visible market shed. The market stalls were not visible from the tarred road but began down a couple of narrow dirt lanes. But the crush of taxis and trotros, and the steady line of people carrying their purchases home on their heads pointed the way. And the guidebook is right: it’s one of the liveliest markets we’ve seen in Ghana, and also one of the most enjoyable. Nobody pressures you to buy or pursues you if you look at something and ask the price but then decline to buy.

Why ask the price, you may wonder: aren’t they posted? In your dreams! Seldom in any market in Ghana have I seen prices posted for anything. OK, now and then you will see a hand-lettered piece of cardboard by the tomatoes or avocados separating the “GHC2” from the “GHC5” stacks. A few vendors of ready-made clothing pin pricetags on some items (but then often quote another price when asked). Still, no matter how many hundreds of items a vendor has put on display, whether bolts of cloth or bead jewelry or kitchen appliances or vegetables or fruit or athletic shoes or automobile parts or stuffed animals or school exercise books (all of these were on offer yesterday), if you pick something up a price will be quoted instantly.

But then we come to a perplexing hermeneutical question: what does this number mean? One must never assume—with naïve Western ears—that it means, “If you wish to buy this you must pay me that many cedis.” A better translation—would this be called “dynamic equivalence” in Bible translation—would be, “Let us begin discussing this item and see where our discussion may take us, but here is a number to start our discussion on a sound footing that acknowledges our respective situations and resources.” I’ve noted earlier in our Kenya blog postings that a price in a craft market is a function with at least three variables, to which I now add a fourth: (1) what the seller paid (if she didn’t make it herself) and (2) what others in the same market or town are charging (I left this out earlier), and then the seller’s expert estimate of the (3) wealth and (4) gullibility of the prospective buyer. Most sellers, especially in craft markets, have figured out that there’s not much to lose by assuming very high levels of (3) and (4). (In selling vegetables and fruits, (3) and (4) are mostly ignored.)

(Small interjection: writing this up brings vividly to mind an transaction we conducted from the window of our car a few months ago in Addis Ababa—buying water and phone top-up cards from small market booths near our lodgings in Addis, with the help of our driver, who summoned a young man to fetch what we needed from the booths and carry it to us. That’s a common practice anywhere in Africa that you find market booths at roadsides. These are items with standard prices. But it was our first day there, and only later did we realize that the enterprising teenager had added a 100 percent markup for the arduous task of carrying our items and our payment five or six paces between car and booth. And the driver evidently thought that a fair enough arrangement.)

Susan is a master of the art of bargaining, with few equals. I have vivid memories of her conversations with sellers in the Maasai Market in Nairobi. She’d ask about some popular tourist souvenir—a pair of carved salad spoons, say—similar to ones we had bought recently for, say, 30 Kenya shillings (about half a dollar).

“These I can give you for a very special price,” she would be told: only 150 shillings.

“You think I am a UN worker,” she would reply, “but I am only the wife of a professor, and my husband’s salary is very small. I am an mzungu but not a rich mzungu. I will give you 20 shillings.”

“Aiee! Madame, if I sell to you for 20 shillings I cannot buy rice for my children tonight and my wife will be very angry because I am giving my goods away for nothing. But I see that you value high quality, so I will sell to you today for only 80.” And so on, till they got to 30 or 35.

That’s the way it goes in the “National Cultural Centre” here in Accra, a grand name for a sprawling complex of little craft and fabric shops where you can find some of the best traditional carvings and drums, and some of the most aggressive market vendors, in Ghana. The asking prices for tourists are usually sky-high, and bargaining is a long process. If you end up walking away, you will be pursued relentlessly wherever you go in the market, and out to your bus or car, the price dropping another notch each time you make what you think is your absolutely final decision not to buy. It’s annoying, yes. But it’s also part of a complex social interaction that seems to be valued even when it doesn’t result in a sale. Susan and I remember times during our previous visits when market vendors would say, “I have given you my price. What is your price? Do not go away—talk to me!”

On Saturday at the Agomenya market, we threaded our way through narrow lanes amid crowds of people coming and going, many of the women carrying their purchases on their heads. No tourists, nobody except us just looking around in amazement, just shoppers. (Exception: just before we returned to our car we saw two elderly white ladies looking at cloth.) Along the first lane, just wide enough for vehicles to squeeze through between the people, were electrical appliances, sporting goods, shoes, kitchenware, and one shop with a fantastic assortment of stuffed animals and plastic infant toys. We could see that the market stalls stretched a long way on each side. We soon caught sight of a row of booths full of beads—every color and size and shape, spread out on the rough wood table and hanging from nails in the framing overhead. Most were locally made from fused glass, with bright colors and rough surfaces. Each vendor showed us which beads were “new” and which were “old,” a category that includes beads restrung from old necklaces and beads created by melting and remolding broken or damaged beads. There were also long strings of tiny imported glass beads—strings of “waist beads” that a woman wears through her entire life, from a week after birth when she is outdoored til she is prepared for burial.

Our interaction with the vendor at the first booth was one of the oddest and funniest we’ve ever experienced. Susan looked over beads that would be useful for her pottery, while I just looked for the most intense colors and most interesting patterns. I held up a string of large, dusty blue circular beads and asked how much. “Five cedis.” Another similar string was next to it: can you give me a better price if I buy both? “I can give you two for two hundred.” Two hundred thousand? Yes, two hundred thousand.

A word of explanation: it soon became evident Saturday that Kroboland has not really come to terms with the 2007 revaluation, when a new Ghana cedi was introduced with a value of 10,000 old cedis. Vendors kept switching back and forth between 10 and “100,” meaning 100,000. These groundnuts cost 20,000, meaning 20 pesewas. The bread rolls cost one cedi, or two for 18, meaning 18,000, meaning 1.80 new cedis. We soon found that it was easier to pretend the revaluation had never happened and to talk only in thousands of old cedis.

But that was only part of the oddness: the vendor had just told me two necklaces cost four times as much as one. “Didn’t you say this was fifty?” I asked, translating back to old cedis. The man looked puzzled and repeated that I could have two for two hundred. When he realized we still weren’t communicating very well he turned to a young man sitting beside him, who told him—this is my guess—that “five” in English means 5, not 15. (Or perhaps he told him that it means 50,000, not 150,000.) Then as we went on talking about these beads and some others that Susan had selected, he kept throwing out numbers in English, some of which made sense and some of which were far too high or too low, then turning to the young man to explain to him what he had just told us.

All this was very friendly, and we were providing amusement not just for the two or three other people in this booth but for the neighboring vendors as well. It was also very time-consuming. At last we worked out a price that the vendor never actually accepted verbally, but he began putting all our purchases in a plastic sack and cheerfully accepted what we gave him: the first price he quoted, 50,000, times three for three strings of beads. (And the way that you pay 150,000 is to hand the seller a 10 and a 5.) So in effect we had managed after lengthy negotiation to being the price back down to his initial (but evidently unintended) asking price.

And then, even though we had pushed him pretty hard, he was so pleased with our purchases that he “dashed” us a long string of narrow conical beads—giving it not to Susan but to Hannah. (It isn’t anything she would weark, so she gave it later to Susan, who sees pottery possibilities.)

We wandered on happily through other sections of the market—vegetables and fruits, second-hand clothing, shoes, plasticware, hardware, plumbing and electrical supplies—til we found a both with beautiful tie-and-dye (that’s the Ghanaian phrase) and wax print cloth. Susan and Hannah bought a few yards each. We had seen no other cloth sellers, and the choices and prices were good. The young woman tending the booth was evidently not authorized to negotiate prices, so she called her older sister, the booth owner, who readily knocked off a few cedis. (Like other younger people we met in the market, they tended to be more confortable talking about new cedis.) We asked where to find the bead sellers, wondering if the few booths we had seen were all of them, and she dispatched a young man standing nearby to lead us to a new section of the market, where there were about 20 bead vendors along two rows of stalls.

Susan cannot be held responsible for her behavior when she gets around Ghanaian handmade beads—and I’m no better. But we showed some restraint: we bought beads from only about half the vendors there. The prices were far below what they are at Cedi Beads, where we will take the students on Saturday for a tour and demonstration. At shops and markets in Accra the prices would be two or three times higher. These vendors were selling only beads strung roughly on raffia, though, not finished jewelry. No doubt most of the jewelry vendors we see around Accra buy their beads at markets like this and then arrange them in necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.

As we were tearing ourselves away from all the beautiful beads, the first vendor we had purchased from came over (his section of the market was not very far away), just to say hello and wish us well as we purchased from his competitors.

Wandering back in the general direction of the road, we came upon an entire shed, with two rows of market stalls, full of cloth sellers. The variety was dazzling and the prices very good. We ended up with two pieces of print cloth for shirts for me and a couple of interesting prints that we will either use as tablecloths or give as gifts. Relentless as she is when the asking price is high, Susan either paid the first price here or asked for a small reduction, maybe 5 percent. In this context, where nearly all the buyers are local and the atmosphere is very friendly and low-key, we were usually quoted prices right from the outset that were at the point we would have ended up after several rounds of discussion in more urban and tourist-oriented markets.

Somehow shopping at Target just doesn’t compare.

Central Region field trip (link to Picasa web album)

The smallest police payoff in the history of Ghana

I’ll fulfill my promise and relate this story, which begins in the demented imagination of whatever traffic planner laid out the approach roads around the new Accra Mall. To get to the mall from the university (i.e., from the north), I have to take the exit for Tema, cross over the highway from which I have just exited, then take another exit for Tema rather than go straight toward Tema, double back and drive directly past the mall entrance, proceed to a roundabout circle and return on the other side of the road, and enter. In effect I have proceeded south, then west, then east, then west, then east again to the entrance.

But I must not try to exit where I entered—that puts me directly on the toll road eastward to Tema. I have to wend my way through the parking lot to another exit, drive down to the same roundabout but take a different unmarked exit to reach the northbound road back to the university. By the fifth or sixth time I could recognize all the turns I needed to make, most of the time. Fortunately, if I take a wrong turn and need to cross several lanes of traffic or back up in the wrong direction to a different road, and if I can signal my intentions with a wave of my hand, Ghanaian drivers are generally very obliging.

The very first time I drove to the mall I managed to find my way in eventually, and then made the mistake of exiting the same way. No problem, I thought: I’m heading for Tema but can just turn around at the first intersection. But there are no intersections. I was immediately on the toll road toward Tema, and there were no roundabouts or exits for about 8 km til I reached the toll booth.

I paid my toll—all of 50 pesewas ($0.35) and explained to the attendant that I was only trying to return to Legon from Shoprite. “Just ask the police officer behind the booth and he will open the gate for you,” she advised. I did just as she suggested, but the officer on duty was not quite ready to cooperate.

“I am sorry, sir, but only authorized police vehicles are permitted to pass here. You are in an ordinary saloon car, so I cannot permit you to pass.”

I explained my predicament, but he would not relent. “You must proceed to Tema and you can reverse your direction there.” That would be about 20 km of pointless driving. Was it not possible to make an exception?

“I am sorry, sir, but I cannot make an exception. But it is the weekend. Perhaps you have brought me something?”

I had in my hand the small coins that I had pulled from my pocket and had not needed for the toll—a grand total of 21 pesewas, or $0.15. I held my hand open.

“That is only 21 pesewas!” he told me, unnecessarily. Yes, I said, I know, I am sorry, but I have spent all my money at Shoprite already. So I will have to drive on to Tema.

“Oh, no, sir, that will not be necessary. Let me have your small small money. Please pass here, sir, and have a good day.”

I’ve told this story to several Ghanaian friends, and all agree that never in the history of modern Ghana has a policeman done a traveler a favor—let alone a European traveler—for so small an incentive. I’m glad to be able to contribute this small chapter to contemporary life in Ghana.

And now we are two . . . off to Cape Coast

I am delighted to convey the news that Susan arrived on Thursday to join me for (nearly all of) the remainder of my time in Ghana! Her flight from Philadelphia to New York and then to Ghana went smoothly, and she got through immigration and customs in record-setting time, less than half an hour—while I was immobilized in the morning traffic (and surrounded by vendors). She took a long nap Thursday morning and then came to IAS to meet the students.

She got no time to rest from her journey. At 6 am Friday we set out on a two-day field trip to the Central Region, to visit the coastal forts and the national park at Kakum and witness the Fetu Afahye festival that takes place in Cape Coast at this time each year, one of the biggest traditional celebrations in Ghana. It’s just as well that Susan isn’t on Ghana time yet.

I am writing this on the evening of our return. The trip went very well, with one unfortunate exception—two students victimized by pickpockets in the intense crush of humanity at the festival. One lost a small digital camera, the other a cell phone. A third felt a hand in his pocket (where he had nothing but toilet paper) and turned to face the thief as he slipped back into the crowd. Just a moment before these thefts happened a stranger had called me aside to say “Watch your pockets!” (probably because he recognized a thief at work nearby) and I had passed the warning along. By and large it was a very friendly and welcoming crowd, but I think thieves were lying in wait for tourists at a place where the procession of chiefs ended and the noise and bustle were at their highest. I’m not sure we will recommend visiting that festival again. I was eager for the chance to see and photography the colorful flags that symbolize the history and role of the seven asafo companies of Cape Coast, which are kept hidden in their shrines 364 days of the year. I saw three flags, but the bearers did not wave them high for all to see: they kept them mostly furled and used them simply as props in asking for money from bystanders.

A new opportunity this year arose from the recommendation of a friend, a dean at Portland State University, that we contact a Ghanaian PSU faculty member, Kofi Agorsah, and visit his archeological excavation at the oldest European settlement along the coast, Kormantse, about 30 km west of Cape Coast. He is working with another archeologist from Portland and a crew of 30 students from PSU, Cape Coast, and UG Legon. He invited us to stop at Fort William, a large British fort at Anomabu, between Kormantse and Cape Coast (and the location of some of the most spectacular posuban shrines that I have included in some of my photography exhibits from Ghana). There we were given a tour of the fort and a chance to talk with the students as they washed and brushed bags of artifacts, mostly pottery fragments, collected at the site. It was a fascinating visit, and Kofi invited us and the students to come back another time and swing a pick at the site with him. (Actually the principal tool of archeologists these days is not the pick but the toothbrush—that’s what everyone was using.) All the students stay in tents lined up on the battlements, overlooking the fishing harbor and the sea. Very picturesque!

After this “30 minute stop” detained us for more than two hours, we decided to stop only for lunch in Cape Coast and then visit the castle at Elmina, where we had an excellent guide to that beautiful and dreadful site. We went on to our lodgings for the night a bit west of Elmina at Brenu Beach Resort, where most of the students and I battled with tremendously powerful breakers in the warm waters of the Gulf of Guinea, then enjoyed a splendid buffet supper featuring local calamari, lobster (small rock lobster), and a huge cassava fish, perhaps 10 kg, that a local fisherman supplied for the kitchen that day. Saturday morning we did the canopy walk over the rainforest in Kakum National Park, which is always a highlight for the students (though Susan and I found that the price had quadrupled, and the quality of the guide service declined considerably, since 2005). It is a beautiful place, and one of the richest concentrations of wildlife in West Africa, with elephant, bongo, many species of duiker, giant forest hog, leopard, and pangolin, plus 300 species of birds. We heard lots of birds (none of them identified by the guide) but the only members of the animal kingdom we were able to see in the thick forest cover were butterflies and millipedes. We had a lovely lunch at Hans Cottage, an odd country lodge with a pond where huge crocodiles swim lazily about. We saw more birds there than in the forest: dozens of weaverbirds popping in and out of their nests, a kingfisher swooping down to fish in the water, and hornbills passing noisily overhead.

Then we went on to the festival. It was great fun to see the chiefs in their palanquins, preceded by dozens of women and young girls dancing their praises and followed by huge fontonfrom drums carried on the heads of young men so that the others walking behind them could beat out rhythms for the dancers. But I don’t think we have ever been in such a tightly packed crowd, or one half as noisy. And then the thefts put a damper on our spirits on the ride home.

Itinerant peddlers

In traditional village life the daily routine was broken from time to time by the arrival of a traveling merchant with a variety of goods to sell, carried by donkey cart or wheelbarrow or bicycle. Such a vendor plays a key role in one of Sembene Ousmane’s films (perhaps it’s Moolaade). Whatever necessities and luxuries could not be produced in the village—“Holland wax” printed yard goods, commercial soap, manufactured tools and hardware, shoes—would be put on display, to admire and even to purchase. No doubt even today there are thousands of villages where traveling peddlers provide most of the “import goods.” But these days they would have to compete with residents who travel to town for work, daily or weekly or monthly, and bring purchases home for their own families or others.

In Accra, a bustling city of something like three million (plus or minus a million, depending on who’s estimating), it sometimes seems as if there are as many shops as people: tiny booths made of corrugated metal or converted shipping containers that line the streets of many districts, wooden stalls by the hundreds in each of a dozen major markets in the city, all the way up to a gigantic South African-owned shopping mall with a Shoprite supermarket, a Game department store, a bookstore and cinema and a dozen more upscale merchants that went up about two years ago near the university—Ghana’s very first full-scale shopping mall. (The traffic pattern to enter and exit the mall is so convoluted that I suspect it might be quicker to walk the 2 or 3 km than to drive—and there’s another story attached to that I will save for later, the Smallest Police Payoff in the History of Ghana). Yet legions of itinerant peddlers still ply their trade.

Let me highlight two different groups. First, there is the swarm of hawkers who approach drivers while they wait for traffic at every intersection in the city that backs up during peak traffic times—in other words, nearly every main road. Always there are girls selling “pure water” sachets from a large basin balanced on their heads (small sealed plastic sacks of water for 10 or 20 pesewas, less than 15 cents US) and young men selling Fan Ice ice cream treats, also in sealed packets. These are usually carried in tall plastic-fronted wooden boxes balanced on their heads, with dry ice at the bottom to keep their goods from melting in Accra’s hot sun—one of the few things that men regularly carry and sell from atop their heads. Neither of these are out in large numbers, though, perhaps because the rainy season has persisted well into September, with comparatively cool temperatures. When the heat intensifies they will do more business.

At every intersection there are vendors of mobile phone top-up cards, which they hold out fan-like in every major brand and denomination. Others display CDs or DVDs, one arm holding up an elaborate display with titles visible, the other a stack of 50 or 100 more. Yesterday a boy no more than ten years old had three DVDs to sell, all American action movies, probably all pirated, He tapped them against my window again and again, convinced that he could wear down my resistance.

Usually there are a few young men whose upper bodies are festooned with “spares” (car parts) including steering wheel covers, seat covers, floor mats, compasses, windscreen wiper blades, ignition cables, and wiping cloths. And there is always a wide selection of plastic toys: windmills, battery-operated cars, knockoff video games, toy radios and mobile phones, dolls, and so forth.

Beyond these categories I never know what I will be on offer. Nearly always someone is selling shoes, juggling twenty or thirty pairs in both arms with more in a backpack or on his head. Just why anyone would ever buy a pair of shoes in the few minutes of being stuck in traffic is beyond me – should you stick one foot out the window to try them on? But if they were making no sales the boys would not be out selling every day. Often there are women with clothes to sell: dresses, blouses, men’s shirts, scarves. Others offer jewelry, cosmetics, and household and laundry cleaning products. Batteries are nearly always on offer, as well as small electrical appliances such as irons, toasters, electric kettles, and multiple outlets to plug them into.

And then there are the food vendors, with packets of groundnuts (peanuts), “sugar bread” buns, little fried dough pieces, meat pies, sliced pineapple, papaya chunks, and kenkey (a fermented cornmeal loaf) wrapped in banana leaves. A snack that is obviously very popular is hard-boiled eggs: women (always women) carry thirty or forty neatly arranged around the rim of a shallow tray on their heads, with a dish of seasoning in the middle. If you buy one for 30 pesewas, the vendor quickly shucks off the shell and seasons the egg—either with ground pepper or by slicing it in half and inserting a peppery sauce. And she uses a sandwich bag to avoid touching it, something now common for all the street vendors, even those who sell baked goods, and an advance in hygiene over practices of five years ago.

I nearly forgot newspapers—the only thing regularly sold on the street in US cities.

While sitting motionless for half an hour in this morning’s traffic just outside the university entrance I jotted down more examples, selecting only those who had just one product for sale. Here’s the list: Easy-Off aerosol oven cleaner, posters showing dress styles, soccer balls, pens (she had several hundred balanced on her head), socks (hundreds and hundreds of pairs, all men’s dress socks), Pringles, Mentos, and lint brushes. One young man jogged around the traffic with nothing to sell except a huge wall clock, three feet across. Another had two large framed prints of sentimental scenes from the American South.

Hawking in traffic is illegal, and very dangerous when the traffic gets moving. From time to time the municipal government announces a campaign to eradicate it and targets a few intersections where the hawkers are making pile-ups even worse. Police chase away anyone who defies the ban. This has some effect, but not the intended one; the hawkers just move a few blocks away.

On to a second category different from this perpetually moving flea market on the roads: the women (never men) who walk around the campus carrying fruit, baked goods, and toiletries in basins on their head, selling to students and staff. They congregate around a few buildings where large classes are held, sometimes sitting on the low walls with their goods beside them in groups of three or four. I passed such a group yesterday as I was walking from IAS back up toward Commonwealth. Just as I approached, all of the women took their basins in their arms and dashed away, crouching behind the wall or a parked car. A woman walking nearby chuckled with me at the spectacle and pointed to an approaching university patrol car: they are not licensed to sell on campus, she said, because they have no health certificates. This seems a little silly—are you really at risk if you buy your bananas from an unlicensed vendor? And the rule is mostly ignored by everyone, including these campus security officers who drove by without a second glance.

Just outside IAS on Wednesday Samuel Ntewusu got into conversation with a woman selling baked goods from a basin on her head, a baby strapped to her back. They spoke for several minutes about something—was she a relative, or someone with whom Samuel wanted to place an order for tomorrow? No, he explained after she thanked him and walked on: this was a vendor whom he had encountered a week earlier accompanied by a child of about seven as well as the baby. He called her aside, he said, and reprimanded her: why are you taking your child with you to sell when she should be in school? Children belong in school, not selling on the streets, so that they can learn well and be prepared for future employment.

So what was this conversation about, I asked? “She told me that her child is in primary school now and thanked me for my concern. And I told her that when I get some small money I will give some to her to help her pay for uniforms and transport.” (Free public primary education for all was implemented in the early 2000s, just before our first visit to Ghana; but buying uniforms is a financial burden for many families.)

Two aspects of this episode are unimaginable in the US, yet completely normal here in Ghana: first, someone being accosted by a complete stranger telling her to take better care of her child and heeding his advice; second, the stranger assuring her that he will provide some “small money” to help her. Samuel is one of the most generous people we know, constantly distributing money and school supplies and yams and bags of flour and rice to friends and relatives and acquaintances whenever we travel with him, even though he has hardly a pesewa more than he needs to support Diana and their two children. But in Ghanaian eyes this isn’t really generosity: it’s just what every sensible person would do, taken to a slightly higher level.

A visit to the chief of the "Calvin village"

From our first time coordinating Calvin’s Semester in Ghana, Susan and I have tried to integrate that program for students with the continuing Sister City partnership between Grand Rapids and the Ga District, one of the administrative districts of the greater Accra region. Indeed, our first two weeks in Ghana together in August 2004 were spent with a Sister City delegation of pastors and church leaders in August 2004, preceding the arrival of our first group of students.

But logistics were always a challenge. Organizing transport to the district offices at Amasaman, 15 km west of Legon, was time-consuming and expensive. Host family arrangements worked out well for some, poorly or not at all for others. We visited schools and made plans to return as volunteers, but then communication broke down or students’ plans changed. Each year we felt we had made only a small beginning at effective collaboration. There were some great moments such as planting a pineapple field in 2004 and harvesting it in 2005—see the photo featured on Calvin’s main Ghana program page, with Susan and the students holding up the shoots they are about to plant. Frank Amoakah has told me he plans to revive that tradition in 2010 and 2011. But the linkage was loose for a number of years.

In 2008 and 2009 activities were more frequent and better planned, I think, now involving the newly separated Ga West and Ga East districts. When the National Democratic Congress won the 2008 presidential election, new municipal chief executives were appointed in every district. John Kwao Sackey, our longtime friend and our houseguest on Kent Hills for seven months in 2003, was elevated from second-tier civil servant to MCE—“mayor” is the term most Ghanaians use—of Ga East. He seems to be doing a very good job, and he has asked his finance director, Joseph Kojo Ata-Baah, to work on building up the district’s collaboration with Calvin.

And when you give Joseph a task, he digs into it with both hands and both feet, and things start happening quickly. We first heard about his plans on the Calvin campus just a month ago at a lunch meeting that I organized for Joseph and his counterpart from Ga West at Calvin in August. Calvin’s president Gaylen Byker agreed to host Calvin faculty and Sister City planners to welcome these two visitors during their brief visit to Grand Rapids. It took no more than a few days after I arrived in Ghana for Joseph and John to get some new initiatives underway. The least expected, and most promising, is the designation of a “Calvin College village” in a remote corner of Ga East.

On Tuesday I drove up to the Ga East offices in Abokobe, a small town and a historic center of Presbyterianism about 10 km from Legon. (Susan and I had attended the 150^th anniversary celebration at the Zimmerman Memorial Church there in 2005.) John and Joseph informed me that we would make our first visit on Friday to the village of Adenkrebi in the northernmost section of Ga East, on lands traditionally held by the Akuapem people. In this "Calvin village," they said, there will be opportunities for our students to get to know families there, help in the clinic and the schools, participate in planning for water treatment projects, and the like. It's a village where John's wife Victoria, now working as a pastor of an independent church she founded, has been active in organizing a group of women to identify critical needs in the community. Preschool and kindergarten emerged as a top priority, and she and John are personally paying the salary of the teacher.

This is a small agricultural village in a remote location, accessible by a truly dreadful road that branches from the main Aburi road just as you reach the top of the ridge. There are only 700 inhabitants, mostly farmers. Electricity arrived only 7 months ago. But the chief and village elders, and the district administration, have ambitious plans for expanding the school, improving housing, installing a water pump (there is now only a hand pump at the village borehole), and more. They would like Calvin students to come back year after year to help out and observe the village's development.

We were told to be ready at 9 am Friday for transport in the Ga district minibus (which holds only 13, so I always need to carry 4 or 5 additional people in my car). It showed up at 10:40. There was a complicated explanation -- something about the first driver getting lost and returning to the office and another driver coming instead -- but the students weren't fazed; they had all brought books to read while waiting in the hostel lobby. I went upstairs to the cybercafé and sent a few emails (or more accurately sent one and watched several more vanish into the ether because the connection was so bad it kept timing out).

On arrival we were shown into a meeting room where several of the elders were waiting for us, men ranging from 50 to 80 in age so far as I could judge, and soon the chief joined them. He is very young for a traditional chief--not more than 35--and was enstooled less than a year ago. Unlike other chiefs the students have met, he played the traditional role assiduously, wrapped in the traditional twelve yards of brilliantly colored cloth. He did not speak except in whispers to his elders and his linguist and acknowledged our thanks and greetings with just a slight bow. Even when there was raucous laughter all around the room, he didn't break a smile. The most senior of the elders, named Kwame, did most of the talking, explaining the village's history and its current profile. The Ga arrived here about 300 years ago, but established such harmonious relation with the Akuapem that--while other groups were in continual battle--they were given land for permanent settlement.

The chief runs an electronic repair shop in Tema, I was told, and speaks English fluently. But he gave no sign of comprehending what I or others said until it was translated into Ga (mostly by Daniel Sackey, John and Victoria’s eldest son, a UG student), and he spoke only in Ga. When we asked how long he had sat on the stool, the elders passed around big enlargements of the coronation ceremony last September, including photos of Nii (a respectful term of address for a chief) sitting on the lap of the paramount chief to symbolize his loyalty and taking an oath while holding the handle of a sacred sword that he would not neglect the needs of his people. Another photo showed him on the shoulders of several other men on the day before the ceremony, men who—so we were told--had just given him a sound beating. The purpose is to remind him of his duty to punish anyone guilty of wrongdoing more severely than they had beaten him. Once he is enstooled, of course, no one would dare to strike him.

In the room with us were a couple of dozen women of all ages--those in Victoria's group, I think--and a few men who aren't elders. Another thirty or forty men and women and children listened at the doors and windows. Elder Kwame (who kept reaching across to shake my hand again and again, "Kwame to Kwame," using my Akan day name) told us he looks forward to Calvin's contributions to the village, including supplying wives for men of the village -- he himself would take two. (One student heard a later remark that I missed: he wants two young wives to assist the two older wives he has now.) He told the male students they should look around too and pick wives from the village. When we came back from a walk to see the church and the school Kwame began by asking (in Ga, then translated), "Are you all back safely? Are you up to your full number?" I replied that we were but that I would be making an especially careful count of the women when we got back on the bus.

We were supposed to visit a nursing college nearby and also trek out to a sacred rock and a tree that was cut down and then miraculously righted itself again, but these were put off for another visit. Basically our audience with chief and elders was the only event on the day's program, and it lasted nearly three hours. Just when I thought we were about finished, and stomachs were rumbling with hunger, the chief rose to make a brief speech directly to us, still in Ga, which was translated. It was brief and straightforward, a welcome and an assurance of his assistance as we find ways of working together in the future. Then he abruptly asked through his linguist whether I would like to offer a toast and signaled someone to bring in a liter of gin. The linguist first poured a tiny portion into a glass, drank most of it, and poured the rest on the ground--traditional duties of the linguist, the first to establish that it is not poisoned, the second to honor the village’s ancestors (or maybe just a generic sort of blessing, since he didn't recite any names).

Then the linguist handed me the bottle. Following instructions from Joseph, I poured some into the glass and offered it to Kwame. He downed it, poured the last few drops on the ground, and then spat a little from his mouth onto the ground. He instructed me to do the same. The spitting, he said, is a sign that it is good gin. (It wasn't.) And then -- all this was at my direction, they insisted, because the gin was the chief's gift to me -- the linguist offered portions to all the students and then to everyone else in attendance. Most of the men accepted, as did a few of the women. In the Calvin group, hardly anyone declined. Portions were tiny, and after about thirty people had imbibed the bottle was still half full. A little later, however, after we had stood outside conversing for a while, I noticed that "my" bottle of gin had been drained.

The toast and libation were not quite the end, however. The chief apologized for not having opened our meeting with prayer and for a student volunteer to offer a closing prayer. Megan Dickens raised her hand and was motioned to stand at the front to lead us in prayer. Afterward Kwame shook her hand, and then to our surprise directed her to shake the chief’s hand—something no one else had been permitted to do. And Megan said he gave her a warm “Thank you!” in English.

This is going to be a very interesting venture! I'm pleased with the eagerness of the students to return and roll up their sleeves to work with the residents, and there were some great moments as we mingled today--mothers lending their babies to Calvin students, men from the village walking hand in hand with guys from our group to homes or farms, old women setting up a rhythm by beating plastic bottles together and then leading the students in dancing. Language is going to be a challenge, since few of the older residents speak much English (or Twi, I suspect), but we can enlist the schoolchildren as translators.

When we were finally permitted to leave and go to a restaurant for lunch, it was past 4 pm. But nobody complained.