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.

"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?)