Bernard Woma's family's home in the Northern Region. More photos »

For Thanksgiving, we managed to put together a huge meal with the usual foods: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and even a pie. The procurement of the live turkey and its beheading was done by Auntie Rose, and my carnivore comrades tell me it was good, although more hot pepper was used in cooking the turkey than they expected.
Right after we ate, we boarded a bus with the Dagara Bewaa African music and dance troupe, led by Bernard Woma, an accomplished musician who performs all over the world, and set off on a twenty-two hour ride to the Nandom, a town on the northern border of Ghana. Nandom hosts the annual Kakube festival, where dance troupes and xylophone players compete before the chiefs of many northern villages. Dagara Bewaa were the returning champions, and won again this year.

The trip up north was not too terrible for me, considering my motion sickness, since I was lucky to get the front seat. Ghana doesn’t offer the road-trip conveniences of things like highway rest stops, truckstop restaurants, or smooth pavement, though, so it was a tough journey, especially when the heat of the sun in the northern region beat down on the bus.

We passed through the green humidity of the South to the dry, mostly barren and dusty North. We passed through villages with no electricity and no water, where people live in the most basic and desolate conditions. Just dirt, a blazing sun, and filth. Places where nature had obviously won long ago, but the people stayed and live out short, hard lives there anyway.

One of our milestones was a town where it was possible to buy food. There were naked children with extended bellies and herniated navals sitting in the streets and piles of garbage with chickens plucking through them everywhere. A blind man stood stubbornly at the door of the bus and sang crazed versions of missionaries' songs.

I had an egg sandwich, and the others ate fufu and drank pito, which is a fermented millet drink popular in the North. We stopped later in the middle of a field and bought jugs of pito from a smiling woman with teeth like thick nails sprouted from her purple gums. She sat under a lone tree with three other women and a heap of Frytol vegetable oil jugs filled with the drink.

We went to the childhood home of Bernard Woma. The house has a central, small courtyard and then five areas for the five wives. The house is a series of little mud brick huts stuck together, with holes in the roof to let light through. Bernard’s late father is buried under a huge mound of concrete in the center of the courtyard, in order to protect the house, Bernard said. The first wife, Bernard's mother, is buried in front of the house. The other wives get buried off-site. Tough luck!

Bernard has thirty-four siblings, many of whom were at the house to meet us. When Bernard took out his xylophone and drums, all of the brothers began dancing and playing music. The jumping and stomping created a huge cloud of dust, but it was wonderful to see how happy the men became as they moved.

Once we arrived in Nandom we milled around the village, where we watched weavers making cloth for badakaris, the traditional garmets men and boys wear in the north.

Next, we sat before the chief on wooden benches and drank pito from bowls made from the fruit of the kalabash tree. We presented the chief with a bottle of Schnapps, which is customary. The chief was pleasant, but he didn’t say much. I heard he had just returned from Italy. Chiefs have it made. They even drive around in new SUVs. I’m curious as to whether foreign aid has a hand in this; unfortunately, a lot of foreign aid seems to buy comfort for aid workers and chiefs disproportionately to the relief it provides the general populace.

The Kakube Festival was a well-attended event, since there were xylophonists and dancers from many different regions. It all happened in a dirt field next to the former convent where we stayed. Chiefs sat under huge, ornate cloth umbrellas and the rest of us stood on the perimeter, watching the performances. There was a market going on as well, so we wandered over and bought fabric and various curious objects. We ate beancakes, which are deep-fried balls of a dough made with beans.

For me, the fun ended on Monday morning, when I woke with a high fever, and then spent the rest of the day getting weaker, having fierce chills, and then bloody diarrhea and vomiting. My travelling companions took great care of me, and we decided I must have contracted malaria. I took a dose of the emergency malaria medication we brought along, but I didn't improve. There was really nowhere to get help, so I had a terrible evening and night of feeling deathly ill. I couldn't easily stand up, and I couldn't even keep water down.

We decided it would be best to try to get me back to Accra and go to the hospital there. So my friends put a mattress in the tro-tro and I was loaded in, along with a vomit can and plastic bags for my running stomach. Everyone else loaded in, along with five live guinea fowl. We took off, and I spent the next twenty-one in utter misery, even though everyone was doing their best to make me comfortable.

When we finally reached Accra I was admitted to the hospital. It's the best hospital in Ghana, but that is not saying a lot. They had me flop around on chairs in the lobby while I waited to see a doctor, then had me walk from place to place to collect stool and blood samples. Before any step, I had to pay cash at the cashier's window and get lab papers stamped. None of the bathrooms had soap, making all of this very disgusting. It was determined that I had a bacterial infection of my small intestine and colon.

I was hooked up to an IV and loaded, for the two days, with serious doses of antibiotics, including chloroquine, cipro, and metronidazole. The malaria drugs I had been taking were making the mix too much to take, so I had to have more stuff pumped in to make it all work. I also had five painful shots in the rump.

The room I was in was full of sick people and a whimpering baby, along with cockroaches crawling up the curtain and a bed that caved in under me. There was an air conditioner, but I noticed the other people requesting two and three blankets, so I had to turn it off. The conditions made my will to recover quite strong. The doctor agreed to release me after the second night, when I promised to take eight horrible pills a day for the following five days.

By the end of the week I was able to walk around a bit. Returning to Geekhalla one afternoon, I was dashed a pair of windshield wiper blades. Dashing is a system whereby people give each other small tokens of appreciation for favors or for nothing at all. Before that, I had been dashed just once before when I received an extra banana when buying fruit at a produce stand. I didn’t know the man who gave me the blades, so maybe I still looked a bit ill and he felt sorry for me. It was a nice, wacky end to a hard time.

Everyone has been very kind with visits and wishes for a speedy recovery. I’m only sorry that I missed half of the festival!

Photos from this trip »