24 September 2001

Now that I have been in Ghana for over one month, I have a pretty regular routine. I wake up at 5:48 a.m., due to the changing of the guard at the U.S. embassy’s consular section building next door. The guards like to shout, maybe in order to drown out the roosters. I wander downstairs to boil water for the morning cup of Nescafé, and invariably find Rose sweeping the driveway and porches of Geekhalla with a bunch of twigs tied together. She’ll usually greet me and then try to convince me that I want to eat eggs for breakfast. I disappoint her with my preference for oats, and head outside to gather the Daily Graphic and Accra Times newspapers from the Geekhalla guard, Theophilius. He wears a beret and gloves if the temperature dips below 65 degrees Fahrenheit. And so goes the morning--much like mornings anywhere; there’s coffee, roosters, and news.

I am lucky to be able to walk to the NetAfrique office. I usually say hello to the kids across the street, with whom I have a successful program of candy for stories, and then stop by one of the chop ladies’ stands for a juice box and some kind of baked good. To chop means to eat. I often see the slogan, "Chop Better" on the sides of street food shacks.

Around noon, I head out for lunch, often winding up at "La Cantina," a chop shop which advertises round-the-clock opening hours on a huge banner outside but is rarely open longer than lunch hours. La Cantina has no Spanish or Mexican food, as I foolishly assumed from the name, but it does have excellent rice and fish dishes.

So far my evenings haven't been filled with adventure. But it's pleasant enough to sit in an outdoor cafe or bar and chat with my fellow geeks.

Last week, Kerri and I went to see a Ghanaian-made film called, "Mariska." Mariska was the story of a woman who has rotten luck. Most of the bad turns had their root in the JuJu magic of her best friend, who was in love with Mariska’s husband. The movie lasted for well over two hours, and incorporated at least fifty or sixty of subplots, each resolved in less than five minutes. The music for the film was a lonely synthesizer, and the acting was something to behold. The filming was done right around Accra, though, so it was fun to see the city on the screen.

I have also found Accra’s jazz club, but on the night I went, there was no live music until much later in the evening. I’ll be going back! They’re planning a huge festival of jazz by local musicians, called "Sketches of Ghana," to follow "Sketches of Spain," I suppose.

This past weekend we set off for Cape Coast in a hired tro-tro. I am treated to riding shot-gun because of motion sickness, but it tends to be terrifying to see the road ahead while Charles, the driver, drives at 80 or 90 miles per hour. The roads are more pothole than pavement, and very narrow. There are children, goats, and general masses of people alongside the road most of the way, and it seems like we could have ended many lives quite easily. I guess people are accustomed to minding the speeding tro-tros, but it made me nervous. Also, we were passing aggressively on the narrowest roads while it was raining! I'm not sure I want to travel in the front again.

It was raining when we reached Cape Coast, so we decided to eat lunch and check in to the hotel, the deserted but relatively luxurious Elmina Beach Resort Hotel. It was bizarre and wonderful to step up to the door and have it automatically slide open and feel a rush of air-conditioned cold pour over me. The hotel tries to be a standard tourist hotel, so there was a dinner buffet, a pool, and even fluffy towels. Also, the rooms were right over the ocean, and although the trash and debris made the actual coast line disappointing, the sound of the waves was heavenly.

Shara ordered bush meat soup for lunch. Bush meat could be a grass cutter, which is like a huge rain forest rodent (and I call it weed wacker), a small deer-like animal, or any number of other wild animals. Hers turned out to be antelope. It looked atrocious to me, the sole vegetarian in the group, since it looked hacked off and had huge bones sticking out of the soup. Still, I'm glad someone in the group is the culinary adventurer.

We went to the Elmina Castle after lunch. Elmina was built by the Portugese in the 15th century and then bought by the Dutch some time later. It was used for trading first, and then for keeping and transferring slaves for over two hundred years.

There is not much left to Elmina Castle except the structure itself. It is not laden with decorative architecture or anything spectacular. It's mostly bricks and dungeons, gates and canon cradles. There are steep stairways and wooden floors in the governor's residence. The worst evidence was the female slave yard, as it was called. The yard, which was really just a 90 square foot area below the governor's balcony, was the place where the African women were brought so that the governor could choose those he wanted to rape. There was a narrow ladder that led to a trap door in the floor of the governor's bedroom. I guess the women were lucky if they conceived, since they were taken care of and their children would be prized as future workers at the Castle, since they would be loyal to the Europeans but able to be somewhat immune to the diseases the Europeans dropped dead from left and right.

But this is just one of the miserable details. To stand in one of the cells and try to imagine it filled with hundreds of people, half of whom would die and be left in the cell for months until the ship came, is to feel the some of the weight of it. Where you go with that weight or how it changes anything . . . I don't know. The castles were only the early stops of such horrible journeys and stolen lives.

Now they are empty, and I wish they could be used more for the needs of the people in Cape Coast.

Later we went back to the hotel and I floated on my back in the pool. It was gray and stormy weather, and the hotel seemed strange for its large size and vacancy.

On Sunday we left early for Kakum National Park, a protected bit of rainforest where we walked on a long, winding, forest canopy suspension footbridge. It was lovely to take huge gulps of breath of the clean, wet air. There were many different butterflies and birds (including vultures!). Some of the trees looked like houseplants grown into huge monster versions, with towers of dainty leaves fifty feet in the air.

Check out my photos from this trip »