Parenthetical

I unexpectedly have another shot at internet access today! And probably will again on Tuesday! So I want to write more, while I’m thinking it. Perhaps a run-down of how the basics of life work here would be interesting:

Bathing: Fill a bucket from the house water barrel. Use a smaller pail to scoop water and dump it over yourself. Soap and shampoo. (The most common soap is Key brand. It comes in long yellow bars and you cut slices off as needed, for dishes or bodies. Since everyone uses Key soap and washes it down open drainage, everything kind of smells like the same chemicals.) Use their version of a loofah, if you’re so inclined, which is a long net-like thing. Dump more water. Honestly, I’m pretty used to it now, and I think showers will feel like an unnecessary luxury for awhile when I get home. At least, for the rest of the summer – cold buckets of water would be much less pleasant in a Boston winter.

Toilet: Some houses have toilets – both of the ones I’ve stayed in, in Ho and Tanyigbe, do. But neither actually flushes. If you pee, you just leave it there. If you poop, you fill a bucket of water and dump it directly in the bowl to flush the poo out to the drainage gutter out back. Toilet paper, if you bother with it (and sometimes it’s just newspaper anyway), goes in a trash can. But most people don’t have toilets, and no public places seem to. When we’ve gone out to bars (“spots” or “joints”), the toilet has been a small cement-floored room where you just squat. Sometimes there’s a urinal cake on the floor, which I find hilarious. I’ve gotten pretty good at the whole thing; it’s not as bad as it sounds. (Most guys just go on the side of the road. The dwarves think nothing of, when we’re walking somewhere, saying, “I gotta pee,” and stopping while I carefully look away.)

Housing: Traditionally, houses are made out of mud brick with thatched roofs and a separate kitchen house (usually out of wood with only three walls or maybe just a roof on stilts). Many village houses are still made this way, and when there’s a huge rainstorm, sometimes they cave in. But more modern dwellings in villages and almost all city dwellings are cement with corrugated tin roofs. People with enough money to do so paint them pink, blue, or yellow. Windows tend to have screens with translucent plastic horizontal shutters/blinds that you can push open or closed, but everyone leaves doors open all the time so it’s pretty poor bug protection.

City Layout: Houses aren’t in neat rows along streets. Only a few streets in Ho are paved (and none in the villages), and those are the main commercial roads. People live sort of haphazardly jumbled together off dirt lanes that connect to the main roads. It feels like you’re walking through people’s backyards all the time, since there’s no obvious distinction between dirt lane and dirt courtyard-between-houses, but that’s just how it works. No one gets mail delivered to their house or shop because no one really has an address; everyone who wants mail has a PO box.

Transportation: There are two main types of transport (besides walking): taxis and vans. Taxis are painted two colors (white and yellow, usually) and drive mostly around cities, though you can get them to take you to villages, too. They usually have some sort of religious slogan decalled to the back. They’re usually shared – you flag down a cab that might already have someone in it, and if it’s going in the same general direction as you, you get in. You pay per person based on how far you’ve gone rather than splitting a total cost, more like a bus than like our cabs. I haven’t done this alone yet, so I don’t know exactly how it works.

Vans (or “tro-tros,” which are sort of more like cattle cars than the regular vans – you sit on benches in rows facing each other in the back, under a low ceiling; these seem to do more village routes and the vans seem to be more for inter-city travel) are owned by some guy who decides he wants to be a van driver. They go between cities or along village roads (there are comparatively few roads in the country, and they’re kind of like subway lines: Amedzofe Road, which I took this morning, goes from Ho to Amedzofe, stopping at a number of villages along the way, but there aren’t really turn-offs). Much like cabs, only even more so, they look like they’re held together with duct tape and prayer. These are some tough roads to bounce along every day. But somehow they do hold together – I’ve almost never seen a broken-down vehicle, and only one vehicle I was in broke down, and that was a taxi in Ho after we’d gone three feet, because the driver hadn’t put enough petrol in. The key thing about tro-tros is that they don’t leave at a set time. You show up at the station, where everyone has their vans parked, and people are shouting their destinations, or asking you where you want to go. You find someone who’s willing to go that way, and then you wait for enough other people to want to go there to fill up the van (and I do mean fill). This can take 5 minutes or it can take an hour or more. But it does work, and the country would totally fall apart without these things.

There are modern metrobuses running a few routes (like the one from Ho to Tanyigbe) – bright orange buses purchased within the last couple of years from Italy. They come at a set time (a couple of times a day, in the case of the one I used) and cost a flat fee (mine was 2000 cedis, about 35 cents, but significantly more in buying power – 15 minutes of time at this cafe, for example). I can’t imagine they’ll hold up very long to these roads, but they sure do look nice now!

Food: I’ve talked about this some already, but there is not a lot of variety. For every meal, there is starch and there is sauce. The starch can be rice, a ball of sticky cassava or yam dough called fufu, a ball of sticky cassava-and-fermented-corn dough called banku, a ball of corn dough that is basically polenta but called akple, or sliced yams. (Yams, in case you don’t know, are not the sweet potatoes we call yams at home. They’re large, brown and hairy on the outside, white on the inside.) The sauce is usually tomato-based, though sometimes it’s groundnut (peanut)-based, and can have fish (usually smoked) or sometimes meat of some kind (beef or chicken or a rodent called grasscutter, which I think goes in sauce sometimes but I know goes on sticks as street food; goats and sheep are running around all the time, but no one makes cheese from them and only eat the meat on special occasions). There’s usually hot pepper involved, and a shitload of palm oil to cook it all in. Everything is hot (temperature-wise), but people always eat with their hands. I think they must have no nerve endings left on their fingers by the time they’re five. The other main dish is bean stews of various types. People also eat a lot of loaves of basically homemade Wonder Bread. And there is street food: meat pies, little sweet fried balls of dough or dough-with-plantain, fried plaintain chips, roasted corn, fresh coconut, oranges, bananas, popcorn, little baggies of groundnuts or unidentifyable liquidy things I haven’t tried yet, meat-on-a-stick. So I’m pretty much over spicy tomato sauce with smoked fish for a good long while, in case you were wondering. What I’m wondering is where their calcium and green-veggie vitamins come from, since I’ve had no green veggies and no dairy (save some condensed milk with tea for breakfast) since I’ve been here. There is plenty of food, people enjoy the food they have, people eat a lot (everyone’s always teasing me about how little I eat, because I can’t eat an enormous platter of rice at every meal)…but Americans are used to a ridiculous variety of food, so it feels monotonous to me. On the up side, almost everything they eat is local, so all the thinking I do at home about sustainable eating is completely irrelevant here.

Oh, since a couple of you asked – I did mention to the dwarves early on that I don’t eat meat at home, but was happy to try whatever was put in front of me here, since my reasons don’t apply here (see above). But they want me to feel comfortable and to feed me things I’ll like, so I really haven’t had any meat, except to try some street meat once (so gristle-y) and some of the chief’s chicken, and a couple of meat pies (which are usually yummy). Mostly it’s been lots of salted, smoked fish. I’m looking forward to getting to Cape Coast in the middle of this week, where I can have some fresh seafood.