The US Embassy's new building in Accra is all gray concrete gilded with silver windows. It doesn't hulk or loom or do anything but just sit, one of several identical tall buildings in a neatly manicured compound surrounded by high walls that, while not outright hostile, are not really inviting. But then, no one can just open their arms these days, because all kinds of people will step in and rip them off. The American Flag flies proud and tall. White men in matching suits (which have always creeped me out since I started watching the X-Files, thank you Moulder) move swiftly from one air-conditioned building to the next, on some secret conspiratorial mission involving too much paperwork and too few coffee breaks. I never thought before about the fact that after going through security and handing over my cell phone and being spit out of the processing building onto the complex proper I am standing on actual American soil. The Ghanaians manning security were less jovial than other Ghanaians I have encountered but not by much. They still laughed shyly (or not-so-shyly) when I said medaase instead of thank you and eye instead of I am fine. The woman who came to the gate to collect us and lead us to the embassy building proper wouldn't look out of place in Makola Market. It was not until we entered the embassy building, with its paneled walls and, yes a prominent triptych of Bush, Dick and Condi, that I felt really different. The building is, of course, air conditioned to freezer temperature, no different from any other official or semi-official building here. But most other buildings don't have uniformly gray-beige industrial carpet on the floors and halfway up the walls, or paper towels in the bathrooms, or corridors that remind me of going to kaiser, doors all sporting large silver boxes just begging for security codes. We were ushered into a medium sized conference room where new and matching chairs were set up in neat rows waiting for us, called to order by a table at the front. By this time, the disorientation is complete, and though we KNOW we are in Ghana, it still feels like we are back in Kansas. It even SMELLS like an American building in some incomprehensible way. This whole situation, of course, makes us laugh, so we sit sideways in chairs that feel decadent and giggle to each other like children about how strange it is to feel not strange for a moment.
The arrival of the man we are meeting with, a Public Affairs Officer, according to his card, engenders even more laughter. He has no chin and a pudgy, pasty face surrounded by your stereotypical sandy non-colored hair. He has a pot belly and is a little short, and somehow familiar in a way I didn't know I had missed. His very ordinary American-ness makes him an oddity in our world, where the average man we see is very fit and at least a little beautiful, dark, and proud and elegant in an alien way. But Mr. Hodges is here at long last to welcome us to the Embassy. I was prepared for a pat speech, presented as it is to every group new to Ghana. in other words, full of information that we have either already learned or already discarded as not worth knowing. Poor Mr. Hodges is already going to get booed or snored out, or sit talking to a stubborn audience, and he doesn't even know it. That is the origin of the other half of the laughter. But this junior employee of the Foreign Service is only a few years older than us, and has not forgotten what students, and twenty-something travelers, are like. And he surprises us. Instead of launching into, say, a power point presentation from hell, he sits at the table and tells us that he knows we have been here for a while. So he is going to speak briefly about the embassy and then just open it to us for questions. So he talks, for about ten minutes, about the embassy, and the way he spoke, the PC statements and glib words, reminded me of home too. When he starts answering questions he gets ones ranging from "How do I add more pages to my passport" to "What kind of benefits do diplomats get?" to "How did you decided to join the foreign service?" and he answers them all. With glib state department-approved phrases sometimes, true, but with no small amount of honesty as well. From his stories about being in Ghana it is obvious that he loves this country very much. And from his comments about working for the government, it is obvious that while he doesn't like a lot of the policy that he has to uphold and promote here, he is able to make the job work, and he really really loves his job. He made me want to sit for the foreign service exam.
He also took us the the embassy canteen, where we were able to get real actual American junk food (not Ghanaian knock-offs), which sparked a mini-orgy of Doritos and milky ways and diet coke. and later, resulted in a few sore tummys.
The visit to the embassy was overall a positive one for me. Mr. Hodges, in his normal American-ness and with a bag of Fritos in one hand, is forever burned into my mind as America over here. He mentioned that one of the reasons he enjoyed his job so much is because while he has to introduce policy that is less than optimum sometimes, he fills the "space between the cup and the lip" and can make that policy easier to swallow. If an embassy is supposed to be a stepping-stone between two disparate cultures, I think the American Embassy in Ghana, for all that it is yes a bastion of empire or whatever, does a good job of bringing two cultures closer together. I still had cultural jet-lag leaving thought, and driving back past the plantain lady and the little kids in dirty flip-flops and the stands selling all kinds of everything. It was nice to go home for a couple of hours.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Between Cup and Lip part I
Today is a beutiful day. Lately we have been having sunny mornings and cloudy afternoons, with high humidity that stays to play after dark, so you lay in bed trying to sleep, sweating and reaching with every molecule of your overheating body for whatever slight breeze might blow by. Today, though, is sunny through and through, hot but not humid, clear, and gorgeous. And today we finally get to see the US Embassy, which we have had a standing (and constantly postponed) meeting at for three months now. It's Ghana.
Or maybe today just feels like a good day because it feels like there is less trash lining the roadway. The grass is greener today than it has been in a long time. All the laundry out on the lines seems white, and glowily backlit by a proud and strong mid-day sun. Even the traffic is more demure than usual. We have been on the road for twenty minutes now and I haven't heard a single horn.
I definitely feel like I have been reborn into the world. Everything is brighter somehow. The trees we drive past are growing a strange new fruit, branches bending under soccer balls and basketballs. The empty lots of weeds and low plantain trees soak up the sun. A shady glade shelters two little stores overflowing with neat, bright stacks of buckets and overflowing baskets of melons and eggplants, okra and onions and mangoes. A plantain-seller fans her coals crouched under the roof of her little shack. The cheerfully staged families on the Barclay's billboards don't even seem contrived. Maybe it is my recent illness, or making a new friend, or maybe I have come out the other side of the cloud of depression I was under for a couple of weeks. Whatever it is, I feel fresh, brand new, adventureful and pregnant with the joy of possibilities. I feel like I can take on the world, like I am in the right place at the right time. This is more in sync than I have been in a while.
Or maybe today just feels like a good day because it feels like there is less trash lining the roadway. The grass is greener today than it has been in a long time. All the laundry out on the lines seems white, and glowily backlit by a proud and strong mid-day sun. Even the traffic is more demure than usual. We have been on the road for twenty minutes now and I haven't heard a single horn.
I definitely feel like I have been reborn into the world. Everything is brighter somehow. The trees we drive past are growing a strange new fruit, branches bending under soccer balls and basketballs. The empty lots of weeds and low plantain trees soak up the sun. A shady glade shelters two little stores overflowing with neat, bright stacks of buckets and overflowing baskets of melons and eggplants, okra and onions and mangoes. A plantain-seller fans her coals crouched under the roof of her little shack. The cheerfully staged families on the Barclay's billboards don't even seem contrived. Maybe it is my recent illness, or making a new friend, or maybe I have come out the other side of the cloud of depression I was under for a couple of weeks. Whatever it is, I feel fresh, brand new, adventureful and pregnant with the joy of possibilities. I feel like I can take on the world, like I am in the right place at the right time. This is more in sync than I have been in a while.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
I Dream of Kaiser, or why malaira is a bad plan
i have been not-regular about taking my doxycyclene (malaria prophylaxis meds) in the last several weeks (bad idea number one) because i have not been eating regularly (bad idea number two) and when i take the pill without food in my stomach i puke EVERY time, no joke, its happened several times, which is, of course bad ideas number three to 1000000. and as a result of awful choices i was awoken at 6:15 on Wednesday morning by the dual needs to strangle the Volta girls running for office (who feel the need to advertise their campaign platforms of silly things at SIX IN THE MORNING by no other means than BULLHORNS. you know the kind with sirens, which you use to get peoples attention before using it to blast them with your propaganda? THOSE bullhorns. which are loud. and since i live in the four story, prison-like Volta annex (made of echoey CONCRETE), they feel the need to bombard ALL FOUR SIDES of the annex separately with their messages, because OBVIOUSLY at six in the morning there is SO MUCH noise that no one can hear their POLITICAL DRIVEL over all the SLEEPING GOING ON. ps, this has been happening all week and for serious the fastest way to get me not to vote at all is by making the electoral process something so inhuman as a shouting match between people who think that ALL of their constituents want a wake-up call that earling in the morning. but anyway, end to the) [don't forget, I woke up with dual needs, the other of which was] to make the awful achy hot feelings i was having go away, and preferably take their pounding headache friend with them. and to recap a paragraph of digression, death to politicians and i have a fever, 6am Wednesday morning, while my roommate is cuddling and complaining with her boyfriend seven feet away from my sweaty forehead. And to top it all off i have an Arabic test at 11:30, 4 1/2 hours away. what to do? well, of course the first thing i did was to lay in bed for a while, miserable. then i texted Sarah and Lauren, who are truly amazing women, and Lauren came over with a thermometer. i had a fever of 101.something, so i drank some water and wrote a note to my prof. telling her i couldn't sit for the exam. then i told Lauren all the rest of my symptoms, ie muscle aches, joint pains, slight nausea, and how i hadn't been taking my pills like i should. she had malaria like 2 weeks ago, and she said that was pretty much exactly how she felt. i was getting worse, and Mikaela and Steve got up to go to class. Lauren took my note to the prof and ran to the pharmacy across the street from campus and bought the (heck of cheap) malaria medication and some juice. i started the regime, took a series of fevered naps, woke up in the even ing, drank more juice, ate some chicken soup from a little powdered packet, made just for me by another girl Kayla, called my parents (who were pretty much like GO TO THE HOSPITAL THIS INSTANT PS NOW), and took my temp again ( 102.9 now). Which freaked me out. so i drank more water, juice, decided to go to the hospital first thing in the am, etc and tried to take a shower because i smelled like sweat and felt GROSS, but ps cold showers while you have a fever are not so fun, kids. so i pretty much got wet and got out. then i tried to sleep but it took forever, and i kept having dreams that i got better and i felt good until i woke up, which is for serious the worst kind of dream to have. then somewhere along about 2am i vomited up ALL the soup and juice and half my insides, crawled back into bed and watched the amazing lightening and thunder minus rain, which took up the rest of my night. in the morning i asked if Mikaela would go with me to the hospital. and she said, "Yes, of course" but when she got back from her shower she did the Mikaela thing and backed out of it and gave me 2 cedis for the taxi instead. so i got this girl Melissa to go with me, who is very timid and such and didn't know where the hospital was or what to do there anymore than i did. but beggars cant be choosers, especially beggars with a fever and the like. so we set off in the taxi to the hospital which was across the street from campus and a bit down the road (a 20-min walk). when i got there i stepped up to the crowd at a window marked Enquiries and did the Ghanaian-standing-in-line-thing, involving lots of pushing. in an ideal 'i have malaria' world the minion/helper i brought along would have done this for me, but what can one do...the help these days...tsktsk. so i told the guy at the window that i needed to be tested for malaria, and he asked if i was a student. i said yes,and he yelled indistinctly at me for a minute. i asked what he said and he pointed around the corner and said "Stand in that queue." Turns out that That Queue started right next to the one i was in, had about 8 people in it, and would be violating 3rd world health regulations if it moved any faster than it was, which was pretty much not at all. after a minute i started to feel dizzy and took a chair while Melissa stood in line for me (god bless minions...help these days is SO good...). For an hour. and a half. while i sat in a plastic chair and watched an endless parade of brightly dressed Ghanaian women and their big-eyed children file by me and take seats on benches or places in line. some leaned against the dirty painted cement walls or pillars, but no one violated the sanctity of the sunny, happy grassy courtyard except for aged nurses in uncomfortable shoes who were moving back and forth between rooms. all of us were sitting under eaves, outside, and in shade only because of hte angle of the sun. in all my waiting i never actually saw someone see a doctor, or be called into any of the sticker-covered wooden doors that apparently hid top secret audience chambers, but were NOT consultation rooms. at least it wasn't too hot, and there were no flies. so. Finally it was my turn, and i told the guy at the window htat i was a student and needed to get tested for malaria. he told me that all students have to go to the clinic on campus at the central cafeteria (which is NOT central AT ALL...its way out in the boonies). so pretty much i had wasted my time and money and Melissa's too. Naturally. it would be too much to go to a hospital and actually get what i need when i am sick, what is this, America? i was actually feeling a little better than when our adventure started, and i hailed a taxi to take us to the doctor at the central cafeteria. when we got there and found it ( bottom floor, hidden under the stairs up to the lecture hall on top and guarded by unreadable signs, and uncomfortable bench and unbreakable bars on the doors), i of course just opened the door and walked in. This time i walked into familiar territory. Not because it remotely looked like a hospital, but because miserable people crammed onto benches while a harried nurse in used-to-be-crisp white dress wandered in and out was old hat by now. So i told her i needed to be tested for malaria, and she waved to the medical records/enquiries window. at which sat a little sign scrawled on scratch paper declaring that they were closed and that all further people should go to the hospital across the street. from whence i had just come. i peered in the window, and was told on no uncertain terms that they were closed. when i told them i had just been sent by the hospital to them, they shrugged and said they only had one doctor, and he was all full for the day with the (fifty thousand or so...seriously lots/tons of) patients already checked in. by this time i had already spent 3 cedis on a taxi and i was really tired, so i decided that i would go back to my hall, eat something, take the pills i had already bought and take my temperature. if it was higher than 100 or if i threw up again, i would go back to the hospital right away. if not, i would take a nap first. my fever was at 99 and my lunch stayed down. after a nap the fever was all gone. i had more food, took more pills, watched a movie, got two visitors from my Arabic class, sent by Saleh, the ta, and went to sleep.
i woke up feeling MUCH MUCH better, to the point where i went to class for the first time all week (my Friday section, one hour...at least the WHOLE week wasn't a waste, right). i told saleh what was going on, and he said he tried to visit me, but got the wrong number so he sent someone else. its gonna be fine about the test, i am still drinking juice and sleeping, and i have all weekend sans roommate to make up my class work. plus i got dream girls on DVD along with 15 other movies (they come 16 on a disk for 5 cedis, of mediocre ripped quality but still AMAZING)...it is the innercitykidsdancefortheirfuture mix, with things like take the lead and stomp the yard and some other ones that are even worse, so i have some truly quality films to get through.
i woke up feeling MUCH MUCH better, to the point where i went to class for the first time all week (my Friday section, one hour...at least the WHOLE week wasn't a waste, right). i told saleh what was going on, and he said he tried to visit me, but got the wrong number so he sent someone else. its gonna be fine about the test, i am still drinking juice and sleeping, and i have all weekend sans roommate to make up my class work. plus i got dream girls on DVD along with 15 other movies (they come 16 on a disk for 5 cedis, of mediocre ripped quality but still AMAZING)...it is the innercitykidsdancefortheirfuture mix, with things like take the lead and stomp the yard and some other ones that are even worse, so i have some truly quality films to get through.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Mustang Sally
Mikaela left for the Volta region yesterday, so I was left on my own devices in the evening. John and Anita's frined Roz was coming to Accra from Cape Coast to join them on an adventure today, and she invited me to hang out with the three of them at Anita's house for dinner. Which was fantastic. Anita is working for some NGO and living in a REALLY NICE house off the ring road on the Circle trotro route. We had pitabread pizza and pasta and cucumber salad, amazing and wonderful and all that. Then, instead of heading back to campus, we walked down the road (in the pitch black, by the way) to this hotel/restaurant complex, which houses Champs. I have been hearing about Champs since the third week we were here, mostly because it is the 'American' or 'International' hangout spot, they serve quasi-mexican food, and they air sports games, and american movies on sunday afternoons. So i was actually kind of excited to go there and see what all the fuss was about. This was what all the fuss was about.
The cealing looks lower than it is because of the dozens of flags hanging from it. Opening the door and walking down the four steps feels like entering the basement playroom of some jock. A bar sits along one wall, resplendent it its glory but dominated by the giant monitors flashing lyrics to random songs, and the one flat tv screen airing remixed ESPN programs that jump from baseball to horseracing to football to racecars. A black and white tiled kitchen in the back corner and u shaped leather booths lining a brick wall compltete the not-in-england anymore, pubish feel. But what it really feels is fake. The air is thick, with smoke, ten-decibles-too-loud music, and the ugly jangling sound of conversation shouted akwardly over everything. The booths are all full, and the tables in front of ESPN, and a small clump has drifted to the elbow of the bar. A beautiful Ghanaian man comes up in a jersey uniform and hands us menus as we crowd into some extra space in the first booth, sharing table with this norwegian girl and her ghanaian escort and an unhappy-looking, chain-smoking british woman. Oh, and just about everyone patronizing this place is obruni, by far the highest concentration of white people i have seen in a long time. I feel ugly for the first time since landing in Ghana.
We sit, try to chat, John sulks a little, and I just stare, watching as people slowly filter in for karaoke night, which starts at ten pm. By that time the room is packed, not even standing room, and the bad music starts. Right in front of my face is the rear-end of a really attractive Ghanaian woman who is wearing long, curly blonde extensions in her hair and a red rubber band of a dress streched from cleavage to asscheeks, and held in place by force of will alone. Oh, and black leather boots that go up to her thighs. And the man she is with? Is he equally sexed-out? Nope. He is in his fifties or really awful forties, balding, sweating, on the fat side of plump, and definitly too pink of face to be wearing the orange and green african print tent he has decked himself out in. I guess he must be really interesting or really rich, because the mostly-legs girl is hanging on his every word and laughing like he's Eddie Izzard and Brad Pitt rolled into one, which is really not the case at first (or second, or third, or Im-trying-not-to-look-at-you-anymore-but-I-cant-help-but-stare) glance. And the real treat of the evening was the guy who sang Mustang Sally really really badly and made me wince for my entire culture, that there was a need for a place like this in a place like Ghana. Who comes to Africa to go to an american bar?
At around ten thirty the power went out and we decided to take off because John was getting more than a little irritated (you know how a cat will twitch its tail when its annoyed? and then after a while the twitching gets more? and then 'without warning' it will either attack the offending thing or stalk away like the embodiment of affronted dignity? That was John.). Only when we opened the door the entirety of about six massive black clouds had decided to dump itself on the two square inches right in front of the door, and the mother of all african tropical storms was raging outside. So we played candle-lit foosball for a while waiting for it to abate and finally just decided to go for it and ventured out into the literal wall of water. We got soaked and the taxi drivers (who all conspire to charge everyone more money when it is raining) tried to charge us an exorbitant ammount to get back to campus (5 ghana cedis!!! scandalous!). John came out of his Affronted Dignity funk enough to stand out in the rain bargaining with shameless drivers while Ros, Anita and I stood in relative shelter and urged him to just take the high fare. John won and got us a taxi that charged us the right ammount. In the back seat all the way to campus we chatted in spanish (John and Anita have taken to using Spanish as their secret language here, because almost no one knows it, and they all talk about us in front of us in Twi and Ga and pidgin. its AMAZING fun to have a secret language). The power was out at campus too, so Ros and I showered by candle-light and got into bed no less wet and no warmer but at least clean. With Mustang Sally stuck in my head.
As an evening out on the town I did not enjoy myself as much as I did going to the Bush canteen on campus, but as an ethnographic study it was invaluable and very interesting.
The cealing looks lower than it is because of the dozens of flags hanging from it. Opening the door and walking down the four steps feels like entering the basement playroom of some jock. A bar sits along one wall, resplendent it its glory but dominated by the giant monitors flashing lyrics to random songs, and the one flat tv screen airing remixed ESPN programs that jump from baseball to horseracing to football to racecars. A black and white tiled kitchen in the back corner and u shaped leather booths lining a brick wall compltete the not-in-england anymore, pubish feel. But what it really feels is fake. The air is thick, with smoke, ten-decibles-too-loud music, and the ugly jangling sound of conversation shouted akwardly over everything. The booths are all full, and the tables in front of ESPN, and a small clump has drifted to the elbow of the bar. A beautiful Ghanaian man comes up in a jersey uniform and hands us menus as we crowd into some extra space in the first booth, sharing table with this norwegian girl and her ghanaian escort and an unhappy-looking, chain-smoking british woman. Oh, and just about everyone patronizing this place is obruni, by far the highest concentration of white people i have seen in a long time. I feel ugly for the first time since landing in Ghana.
We sit, try to chat, John sulks a little, and I just stare, watching as people slowly filter in for karaoke night, which starts at ten pm. By that time the room is packed, not even standing room, and the bad music starts. Right in front of my face is the rear-end of a really attractive Ghanaian woman who is wearing long, curly blonde extensions in her hair and a red rubber band of a dress streched from cleavage to asscheeks, and held in place by force of will alone. Oh, and black leather boots that go up to her thighs. And the man she is with? Is he equally sexed-out? Nope. He is in his fifties or really awful forties, balding, sweating, on the fat side of plump, and definitly too pink of face to be wearing the orange and green african print tent he has decked himself out in. I guess he must be really interesting or really rich, because the mostly-legs girl is hanging on his every word and laughing like he's Eddie Izzard and Brad Pitt rolled into one, which is really not the case at first (or second, or third, or Im-trying-not-to-look-at-you-anymore-but-I-cant-help-but-stare) glance. And the real treat of the evening was the guy who sang Mustang Sally really really badly and made me wince for my entire culture, that there was a need for a place like this in a place like Ghana. Who comes to Africa to go to an american bar?
At around ten thirty the power went out and we decided to take off because John was getting more than a little irritated (you know how a cat will twitch its tail when its annoyed? and then after a while the twitching gets more? and then 'without warning' it will either attack the offending thing or stalk away like the embodiment of affronted dignity? That was John.). Only when we opened the door the entirety of about six massive black clouds had decided to dump itself on the two square inches right in front of the door, and the mother of all african tropical storms was raging outside. So we played candle-lit foosball for a while waiting for it to abate and finally just decided to go for it and ventured out into the literal wall of water. We got soaked and the taxi drivers (who all conspire to charge everyone more money when it is raining) tried to charge us an exorbitant ammount to get back to campus (5 ghana cedis!!! scandalous!). John came out of his Affronted Dignity funk enough to stand out in the rain bargaining with shameless drivers while Ros, Anita and I stood in relative shelter and urged him to just take the high fare. John won and got us a taxi that charged us the right ammount. In the back seat all the way to campus we chatted in spanish (John and Anita have taken to using Spanish as their secret language here, because almost no one knows it, and they all talk about us in front of us in Twi and Ga and pidgin. its AMAZING fun to have a secret language). The power was out at campus too, so Ros and I showered by candle-light and got into bed no less wet and no warmer but at least clean. With Mustang Sally stuck in my head.
As an evening out on the town I did not enjoy myself as much as I did going to the Bush canteen on campus, but as an ethnographic study it was invaluable and very interesting.
The boys are back in town (false alarms for christ)
so i was getting dressed after my shower this morning and I hear what sounded suspiciously like a second wave vandal incursion. i put on pants and went outside to witness, and all it was? a handful of preaching students with a band and a bullhorn, begging and imploring us to accept Christ as our Saviour, etc. i would rather have the entire population of commonwealth than these awful singers. i was actually kind of excited to talk to another commonwealth boy about stuff. alas, alack, not vandals but warriors for Christ.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Say What? Word Play in Ghana
[this post is dedicated to Matt and Hoda, my linguistics friends, who would love to just listen in on my life here. I know it.]
One of the reasons I chose Ghana for my study abroad destination is because the primary language of instruction here is English. Or so I was told. Since my arrival it has become apparent that while English is the official language, no one actually speaks it on a daily basis. As illustrated by one statistic (quick and dirty) and two personal examples.
Boring part first: according to a study done on English education in Ghana (which is really awful, by the way), only 30% of the population has a working knowledge of English although it is the ONLY official language of the country. But all business, education, health, and government is conducted in a language that less than half of people can actually understand. Which means that less than half of the population can participate in those things with out a translator. So if Kwame who lives in a village in Northern Region comes to Accra to makes his way in te world, he will arrive, rent himself a bicycle and icebox, and hire out as an independent contractor selling FanIce products (little plastic pouches of vanilla, chocolate or strawberry 'ice cream,' yoghurt, and orange juice) for 30 peswas a pop. At the end of his workday/week/whatever, when he gets paid, he will go to Stanchart bank, or Ecobank, or (god forbid!) Barclays, to open an account. Only all the forms are in English, and he can barely write his name. So he gets one of the ladies or gentlemen to help him, but to do that he has to stand in line and...anyway, banking is complicated enough in this country without the added stress of not knowing the language.
Now personal examples: To start off, I have probably waxed on and on about the joys and wonders of my Arabic class. It is amazing. One of the most fun things about it might be the fact that sometimes (lots of times, actually) the TA Saleh teaches it because for whatever reason the Prof cant be bothered to come. And Saleh is hilarious for many reasons, but one of my favorite is how he speaks. Before I say anything else, let me just say that this man is very smart. He speaks Arabic fluently in addition to the at least two other languages that he knows [side note: the average Ghanaian knows three languages if they are not Akan and went to school. They know their local language learned from the cradle, they know Twi because it is hard to function in southern Ghana without at least SOME knowledge of it picked up off the street if nothing else, and they know English taught poorly at school. When I say taught I mean that when you enter primary school in Ghana they start teaching IN English. So if you don't know math, geography, history, whatever, you LEARN it in English, to which you may have had no prior exposure to...not smart. But I digress from the digression]. So Saleh is smart and educated and knows several languages. He is rather fond of saying that he can speak Bad English well, though he has to work had to speak good English. This was to explain to us that if we need him to repeat anything he will. And when he wrote on the board in class, something along the lines of "These letters can not be joined" it showed up "Dese letters can no b join." Exactly like that. And when he lectures and is trying to explain something that someone doesn't understand, he will call on the person by saying "Yes, m'boss?" and reply to their question in Pidgin English, Twi, or a mix of the two that is not really intelligible to me. The rest of the class gets it, because amongst university students, the lingua franca is pidgin. Almost no one speaks English on an informal level here, and I can feel that when people talk to me. It is outside of their easy, light realm of conversation, which might be one of the reasons for the hard work I have to put in to talk to people, to really communicate. Because no one here, or very few people, think in English. And there are some thoughts that are harder to have in one language or another, or harder to translate from one language to another. Everyone has to work harder when the language of communication is English. This is also evident in the level of written work submitted here. I thought the simplicity of a short paper I wrote would reflect badly on me as a student, but in comparison to Ghanaian work, my simple paper is a better grasp of the language. So English may be the language of instruction here, but it is not applied the way I thought it would be.
The other example is less formal, but still interesting. This past weekend I got my theater feet wet again working as an assistant stage manager for another girl on the program, Mary, who was managing a Ghanaian production. The director, Sadat, is a shortish, in-his-20's Ghanaian, and he ruled over his 25 or so actors with an iron fist. Or at least iron vocal cords. The show consisted of two short plays, on Ghanaian and one Nigerian, with a combined cast of heck of lots of people. I was (not gonna lie) really excited to be doing theater again, because I have a tendancy to idealize it, and forget how much stress and work it is (although the stress might be why I love it...stage managing and long research papers are not what most people do for fun). And in many ways this was just like my experiences working backstage on amature theater in the US. There is an alchemy that happens, and over the course of (for me) five days, these people became my best friends, and that is consistent. The feel of expectant tension before a show, when the audience is waiting and you can hear the rustling from backstage, is the same here, though punctuated by a group prayer to God or Allah, depending on who leads it. But there were some things that were uniquely Ghanaian, like punctuality. Pretty much no one was on time for call, and some people showed up fifteen minutes AFTER the show was supposed to start. But that was fine. What I really didn't like was how Sadat yelled at the cast. He would get emotionally angry about things that he should be professional about, and it was quite a challenge to work in that environment. The most interesting (and frustrating) thing about notes after the shows was how he would slip into Twi without thinking. And everyone understood except the two oborunis (Mary and me), who sat there and just watched as important information was imparted in a foreign language... And at one point Mary brought it up, and Sadat apologized, but said that it happened so naturally that he almost didn't notice when he stopped speaking English. I am learning Twi, and honestly being backstage with several willing expert Twi tutors was wonderful, but I do not know enough to follow a complex debate about blocking and double casting.
It feels weird to be in a world where the 'official' language is hardly used. Of all the things I anticipated about Ghana and planned for in my head, I was not expecting my language to make me this much of an outsider. When I walk down the street with my ears open there is no doubt that I am in a foreign country. Most days I love it, and some days it makes me very homesick.
One of the reasons I chose Ghana for my study abroad destination is because the primary language of instruction here is English. Or so I was told. Since my arrival it has become apparent that while English is the official language, no one actually speaks it on a daily basis. As illustrated by one statistic (quick and dirty) and two personal examples.
Boring part first: according to a study done on English education in Ghana (which is really awful, by the way), only 30% of the population has a working knowledge of English although it is the ONLY official language of the country. But all business, education, health, and government is conducted in a language that less than half of people can actually understand. Which means that less than half of the population can participate in those things with out a translator. So if Kwame who lives in a village in Northern Region comes to Accra to makes his way in te world, he will arrive, rent himself a bicycle and icebox, and hire out as an independent contractor selling FanIce products (little plastic pouches of vanilla, chocolate or strawberry 'ice cream,' yoghurt, and orange juice) for 30 peswas a pop. At the end of his workday/week/whatever, when he gets paid, he will go to Stanchart bank, or Ecobank, or (god forbid!) Barclays, to open an account. Only all the forms are in English, and he can barely write his name. So he gets one of the ladies or gentlemen to help him, but to do that he has to stand in line and...anyway, banking is complicated enough in this country without the added stress of not knowing the language.
Now personal examples: To start off, I have probably waxed on and on about the joys and wonders of my Arabic class. It is amazing. One of the most fun things about it might be the fact that sometimes (lots of times, actually) the TA Saleh teaches it because for whatever reason the Prof cant be bothered to come. And Saleh is hilarious for many reasons, but one of my favorite is how he speaks. Before I say anything else, let me just say that this man is very smart. He speaks Arabic fluently in addition to the at least two other languages that he knows [side note: the average Ghanaian knows three languages if they are not Akan and went to school. They know their local language learned from the cradle, they know Twi because it is hard to function in southern Ghana without at least SOME knowledge of it picked up off the street if nothing else, and they know English taught poorly at school. When I say taught I mean that when you enter primary school in Ghana they start teaching IN English. So if you don't know math, geography, history, whatever, you LEARN it in English, to which you may have had no prior exposure to...not smart. But I digress from the digression]. So Saleh is smart and educated and knows several languages. He is rather fond of saying that he can speak Bad English well, though he has to work had to speak good English. This was to explain to us that if we need him to repeat anything he will. And when he wrote on the board in class, something along the lines of "These letters can not be joined" it showed up "Dese letters can no b join." Exactly like that. And when he lectures and is trying to explain something that someone doesn't understand, he will call on the person by saying "Yes, m'boss?" and reply to their question in Pidgin English, Twi, or a mix of the two that is not really intelligible to me. The rest of the class gets it, because amongst university students, the lingua franca is pidgin. Almost no one speaks English on an informal level here, and I can feel that when people talk to me. It is outside of their easy, light realm of conversation, which might be one of the reasons for the hard work I have to put in to talk to people, to really communicate. Because no one here, or very few people, think in English. And there are some thoughts that are harder to have in one language or another, or harder to translate from one language to another. Everyone has to work harder when the language of communication is English. This is also evident in the level of written work submitted here. I thought the simplicity of a short paper I wrote would reflect badly on me as a student, but in comparison to Ghanaian work, my simple paper is a better grasp of the language. So English may be the language of instruction here, but it is not applied the way I thought it would be.
The other example is less formal, but still interesting. This past weekend I got my theater feet wet again working as an assistant stage manager for another girl on the program, Mary, who was managing a Ghanaian production. The director, Sadat, is a shortish, in-his-20's Ghanaian, and he ruled over his 25 or so actors with an iron fist. Or at least iron vocal cords. The show consisted of two short plays, on Ghanaian and one Nigerian, with a combined cast of heck of lots of people. I was (not gonna lie) really excited to be doing theater again, because I have a tendancy to idealize it, and forget how much stress and work it is (although the stress might be why I love it...stage managing and long research papers are not what most people do for fun). And in many ways this was just like my experiences working backstage on amature theater in the US. There is an alchemy that happens, and over the course of (for me) five days, these people became my best friends, and that is consistent. The feel of expectant tension before a show, when the audience is waiting and you can hear the rustling from backstage, is the same here, though punctuated by a group prayer to God or Allah, depending on who leads it. But there were some things that were uniquely Ghanaian, like punctuality. Pretty much no one was on time for call, and some people showed up fifteen minutes AFTER the show was supposed to start. But that was fine. What I really didn't like was how Sadat yelled at the cast. He would get emotionally angry about things that he should be professional about, and it was quite a challenge to work in that environment. The most interesting (and frustrating) thing about notes after the shows was how he would slip into Twi without thinking. And everyone understood except the two oborunis (Mary and me), who sat there and just watched as important information was imparted in a foreign language... And at one point Mary brought it up, and Sadat apologized, but said that it happened so naturally that he almost didn't notice when he stopped speaking English. I am learning Twi, and honestly being backstage with several willing expert Twi tutors was wonderful, but I do not know enough to follow a complex debate about blocking and double casting.
It feels weird to be in a world where the 'official' language is hardly used. Of all the things I anticipated about Ghana and planned for in my head, I was not expecting my language to make me this much of an outsider. When I walk down the street with my ears open there is no doubt that I am in a foreign country. Most days I love it, and some days it makes me very homesick.
Vandal Incursion part 2
On the Saturday morning in question I was awakened by the sounds of gunshots and screaming, footsteps rushing past my room and a very male voice yelling "Stop running!" I knew we were under attack by someone. And I figured that it was probably not going to be good for me to stick my tired obruni head out the door, because it was none of my concern. until i heard singing. surely a seige and attack would not have musical acompanyment...i mean, i know i have a soundtrack, but i do not live in a live version of the pirates of penzance or anything. So i decided that since sleep was impossible, investigation was in order. In my pjs and headscarf I open the door and peer over the balcony to see a circle of maybe ten men in red shirts dancing around a drum in the courtyard, while more guys in red shirts run around the halls firing very primitive looking rockets that make the big gunshot bang sounds that awakened me, and chasing a couple of ghanaian girls. After about five minutes the courtyard was full of almost 100 men in various states of dress, undress, cross-dress and nakedness dancing and singing songs (which would sound like gospel songs if you didnt know what they were saying, which was some pretty dirty stuff). The vandals had come calling.
They danced (very suggestivly) and sang for about half an hour, a sea of red and black, hands in the air, jumping up and down in a semi-melodic chorus. Then someone from the center of the circle, standing right next to the drums, raised his hands, stopped the music, and quieted the crowd. Everyone sat down on the grass in a very odd parody of kindergarten story time, and they all waited expectantly. Off to the side of the rowdy dancing crowd I had noticed a group of bare-chested, shaved-head guys standing behind a banner with their heads down as if they were hiding or waiting backstage for something. Now one of them stepped out, and stood in the center of the crowd saying something in the pidgin english-twi that all the studens (especially the boys) speak. At one point in his announcement everyone got up and cheered and sang again for a moment before settling back down to their seats. Then the tallest of the shaved-heads emerged from behind the banner holding a horsetail, which is the indication of chieftancy here. He said something, got a rousing cheer, and then made an announcement in Enlish to all the Volta girls, who's heads were lining the balcony, peering into the courtyard. He invited all of us to Commonwealth for breakfast, and said that it had been prepared specially for us by his own hand. Through the whole of the dancing part of the program there was one Ghanaian girl in a yellow polo shirt down on the grass with the boys dancing. She was lifted up and carried around, and was specially included in the invitation. The chief stepped back behind his banner and the crowd dispersed to Commonwealth Hall for breakfast. It felt like the girls of Volta had been claimed.
They danced (very suggestivly) and sang for about half an hour, a sea of red and black, hands in the air, jumping up and down in a semi-melodic chorus. Then someone from the center of the circle, standing right next to the drums, raised his hands, stopped the music, and quieted the crowd. Everyone sat down on the grass in a very odd parody of kindergarten story time, and they all waited expectantly. Off to the side of the rowdy dancing crowd I had noticed a group of bare-chested, shaved-head guys standing behind a banner with their heads down as if they were hiding or waiting backstage for something. Now one of them stepped out, and stood in the center of the crowd saying something in the pidgin english-twi that all the studens (especially the boys) speak. At one point in his announcement everyone got up and cheered and sang again for a moment before settling back down to their seats. Then the tallest of the shaved-heads emerged from behind the banner holding a horsetail, which is the indication of chieftancy here. He said something, got a rousing cheer, and then made an announcement in Enlish to all the Volta girls, who's heads were lining the balcony, peering into the courtyard. He invited all of us to Commonwealth for breakfast, and said that it had been prepared specially for us by his own hand. Through the whole of the dancing part of the program there was one Ghanaian girl in a yellow polo shirt down on the grass with the boys dancing. She was lifted up and carried around, and was specially included in the invitation. The chief stepped back behind his banner and the crowd dispersed to Commonwealth Hall for breakfast. It felt like the girls of Volta had been claimed.
A Day in a Life of Vision and Style
[this post has been a long time coming, its true. SORRY! I got attacked by lack of internet and general business...there are more to come!]
I woke up this morning at eight thirty am to the insisten meow of little Ellie Mae, who wanted up on the bed, and had been trying to claw through the mosquito net to get there. The reason she wanted up? Not to visit with me. She wanted to play with my braids, which end up spread all over my striped pillow case with the tossng and turning I do on any given night. They are her favorite and forbidden toy. So I pushed out from under the wadded up patchwork blanket I bought from Jane (just two layers of cotton, exactly right for those slightly cool nights we get once every week or so) and kicked the mosquito net out from under my mattress (double benefit of keeping out mauling insects and mauling kittens). Mikaela had spent the night at Legon, so the other net-draped bunk bed was empty. I grabbed for my glasses and shuffled my feet into flip-flops for the morning journey to the bathroom, snagging towel, soap, and ‘sponge’ on the way.
I woke up this morning at eight thirty am to the insisten meow of little Ellie Mae, who wanted up on the bed, and had been trying to claw through the mosquito net to get there. The reason she wanted up? Not to visit with me. She wanted to play with my braids, which end up spread all over my striped pillow case with the tossng and turning I do on any given night. They are her favorite and forbidden toy. So I pushed out from under the wadded up patchwork blanket I bought from Jane (just two layers of cotton, exactly right for those slightly cool nights we get once every week or so) and kicked the mosquito net out from under my mattress (double benefit of keeping out mauling insects and mauling kittens). Mikaela had spent the night at Legon, so the other net-draped bunk bed was empty. I grabbed for my glasses and shuffled my feet into flip-flops for the morning journey to the bathroom, snagging towel, soap, and ‘sponge’ on the way.
The shower was cold, as always, but the bathroom was empty, so I got to enjoy it in peace, the other two shower stalls (decorated with signs begging bathers ‘Pls don’t Urinate in the SHoWer’) and the three toilet stalls silent. The spounge I have is an eight inch by fifteen inch piece of netting that works along the same principle as a loofah, but scratchier and less pretentious. The nice scraping it gives my skin, in conjunction with the cool refreshing water, have become an essential part of my morning routine. The unabsorbant towel I bought as replacement for the nice one from home that molded, however, is not an essential part of my morning.
Back in the (still empty) room I went through my wardrobe trying to find something that was a)clean and b) not already boring. The pickings were slim, but I put on jeans and a white tank top, the new seaglass earrings from Layna [thank you, they are AMAZING], and my flip-flops, still a bit damp from their bath, which are the universal footwear of this country. I grabbed my notebooks for Arabic and Russian/Us history, sunglasses, and my cell phone, and headed off to grab a roll and a sachet (little 400ml plastic bag of filtered water, cost 400 cedis or about 4 cents...the cheapest way to buy water, and usually the filtering company actually filters the water and doesnt just bribe someone to get the official seal, so usually they wont make you deathly ill...) before Arabic class. I didn't have time for my usual breakfast, which made me sad.
Breakfast is at Aunty Quivive’s little egg stand, which sits behind Akuafo Hall dining area in a cute little courtyard shared with a machine laundry place and the kitchen of Tacobel, a restaurant that serves the same thing as every other restaurant on campus: grilled chicken and chips, fried rice, star beer, and coke. The sign out front of it declares the extablishement to be ‘The Place Where Nice people Meet,” which may be true, but I have never been inside, so obviously it isn’t the only place where nice people go.
Aunty Quivive is in her thirtys, Ghanaian, and this week she is sporting a cute permed bob, which might very well be cornrows or curls next week, I never know. She is one of several women who operate little stands selling fried egg sandwiches, which are the cheapest, easiest breakfast around, and more tasty than the millet porridge or oats that are usually served. Of the egg ladies, Aunty Quivive is by far the best. When the obrunis first showed up back in July, she was doing fair business with a loyal group of ghanainas who work in the area of akuafo or elsewhere on campus. Since we ‘discovered’ her almost two months ago she has become the favorite morning dining place of our program and a fair number of the other international students, and the increase in revenue has done wonders for her. She has extended her opening hours to include Saturdays, added two girls to her staff, and started putting not only tomatoes and onions but peppers and spices into the eggs she serves up with sweet milky tea or milo (hot cocoa drink advertised as being ‘the food drink,’ presumably for its vitamin content, which is vital in a country where maintaining any sort of good nutrition and also consuming the calories needed to get through a day is way more challenging than you can imagine). At any given time in the morning there are at least two people I know sitting at the plastic tables Aunty sets up, talking and finishing their meal. This little out-of-the-way courtyard has become a hub of socializing, gossip, and general conversation between us now that the boys live at Legon and we have all got random things to do.
Making do with my bread and water instead of a leisurely breakfast, I headed over to the modern language annex for my Arabic class. It is in on of the large classrooms, which can seat up to 75 or 80 people and often holds more like 100+. The desks are all one-piece wooden affairs with slatted seats attached old-fashioned style to thick desktops complete with pencil slots at the tops, and are ranged in rows of three or four with narrow aisles in between. I make sure to get to class at least twenty minutes early because if I don’t sit in front the awful acousitics and thick Ghanaian accents of any given professor conspire to prevent real comprehension.
I have several friends in my Arabic class, including Quentin, who is another international student, from the University of Alberta but really from Belgium. We chatted today about his weekend trip to Togo and Benin, which he loved. In Benin he visited the world capital of voodoo, and got to see all the dead animals they had displayed for sale in the market. Fetish priests turn dead horseheads, bats, snakes, and all manner of other creatures into powders that, when mixed correctly, provide love potions, cures for assorted illnesses, and other wonders. Quentin said it was well worth the beurocratic hassle at the embassies to get visas, the difficulties obtaining transport, and the bribes he had to give at the border to get back into Ghana. I think a weekend in Togo and Benin is on my list of places to visit now.
Dennis 'the professor' and the other hecklers, Ghanaians who always sit in the second row and are pretty much the class clowns, were also entertaining today, and I was all set for a lively two hours while we continued learning basic grammar. Last week we did vocabulary and actually started reading, now that we know how to join Arabic letters. Each letter has three forms, and after we all learned the isolated letters we had to learn how each letter changes as you connect them. Now that we can put letters together into words and pronounce them, we can put words together into sentences! Waiting for us today was a lovely surprise. For the last two weeks or so the professor (a wonderful woman named Mrs. Mawusi) has not shown up to class, leaving all instruction to the TA. He is a wonderful, intelligent grad-student in Arabic, who knows the language, and has fun with us students (whenever I walk past the modern language office he is always out front, and always says hi. When I was sending Nathan a birthday text he wanted to know what I was doing, and wished my brother a happy birthday in Arabic, and when I was on my way to pick up mom's package he gave her his regards as well...pretty much he is amazing), but for all his energy he is very inexperienced at the teaching part of teaching. He does his best and gets through the list of things Ms. Mawusi sets up for him to teach us, adding his own side notes on things like Arab philosphy, education, and women's roles and needs [like the 'fact' that women dont know what they want because they marry rich bankers who are never home to take care of them, when they SHOULD marry poor arabic scholars and teachers, who will not make them wealthy but will help raise the kids and have interesting conversations.... a tempting proposition]. All of which just adds to the feeling of playtime and fun in the classroom, but doesnt get real learning done. Today Ms. Mawusi pretty much whipped us into shape, teaching nominal sentences, the definite article, and singular vs dual vs plural nouns in the space of two hours. Every time I leave Arabic I love the class and the language just that little bit more. It is so simple and elegant, and I feel like such an academic badass when I write things in it!
This evening I have my Russian history class, in one of the smaller classrooms in tingi-tingi, also known as the JQB Building, a monstrosity very close to the entrance to campus. There are at least a dozen classrooms and half that many offices, a canteen, and a photocopy and printing place housed in tingi-tingi, and the worst women’s restroom in the entire greater-accra area (seriously, this is not a joke...). All but one of my classes are in this building, and coming here feels like coming home. It is echoy because every surface is either painted cement or fake-marble tile, and there are (like most buildings in this country) no real windows because airflow is essential, so the temperature inside is the same sweltering heat pregnant with rain as the temperature outside. From within any of the rooms you can tell when any other class is finished by the crescendo in volume as students pour out into the dim lobby. And the lights go out on average twice a week, so any class that goes after 6:15 pm has to be let out early because no one can see to take notes or anything unless it goes back on by a miracle.
Russian/US history is taught by a little 50ish ghanaian man who stands at the front of the room and reads from a much-folded and wrinkled piece of paper, giving out the day's lecture in small bits repeted over and over so that students are able to write them down verbaitum in thin, cheap little notebooks. Which everyone does. This is the main method of imparting facts to students in most classes on the university. There are few books, so in order to make sure students get all the information they need, it is read out in half-sentence sound bites and dutifully copied down by students who seem to have no need for things like outlines and paraphrasing. And while there are some interesting facts buried within the heavy accent, akward phrasing, and gross generalizations about America and Russia, there are no connections, which I would think essential to a comparative history class.
This is a level 400 class, so all the students are in their final year studying history. At the begninning of the semester, the prof told us that level 400 is not a joke, and that we have to work really hard for the class and read the handout he gave us. And he then proceeded to teach the biggest joke of a history class I ever hope to take. He makes no connections, he doesn't really give voice to more than one perspective on the facts, and the handout he gave us (seventy or so pages organized into little mini-essays on all of the topics he thought we would need) is poorly written, full of quotations that are dropped in without any sort of citation whatsoever, and biased strongly against the burgeoning united states, which I find more amusing than anything else. That last actually provides a nice counterpart to the propaganda that was my elementary school american history. Its still odd to read about Samuel Adams as a "malignant propagandist" instead of a hero and things about malicious Irish immigrants, though. And the 'russian history' we are exposed to doesnt deserve the title 'history.' There is only one perspective on anything, and it seems to not have any room for actual facts. Very simplistic. And disappointing.
After Russian history I head back through a darkened campus that is blissfully cool to my dorm room, where I will hopefully get to see Mikaela and talk to her, or maybe go over to Sarah and Lauren's room to see what they have been up to in the last few days. If I am feeling adventurous I will go to the bush canteen for dinner, which will cost me 5,000 cedis (fifty cents) for a bowl of fufu and groundnut soup (the most filling meal you can possibly imagine). Who knows?
Vandal Incursion part 1
this is the first part of the story of what happened at Volta Hall one saturday morning last month. by now you know how much i like setting the scene, so this is a word-picture of the university of ghana
Volta hall, where i live, is a compound entered through the porters lodge, where they have some benches, a counter, and five guys who sit around all day under a fan and try not to work too hard. They are the ones you turn your key into when you leave, pick it up from, get free toilet paper from, ask for help carrying heavy things, etc..they are porters in every sense of the word, including the one where if you bring them ice cream they will let you do almost anything, including sneaking boys out of volta hall after midnight. Because one of their most important jobs is to protect the sanctity of volta hall from nefarious males between the hours of midnight and eight am. because of course nothing bad happens before midnigt. ANYWAY. Up the steps, through the porters lodge, is a really pretty courtyard with a (nonfunctioning) fountain, pretty designs in the stone paving, grassy areas, tress, and little white pots full of exotic tropical vegetation (that got a little splattered with white paint last month when the porters repainted all the pots, pushing aside leaves as they did). Its pretty. straight through the courtyard is another set of steps leading up to the dining hall (which looks like the inside of a convent, no joke). To the right out the courtyard is a path leading to the dormitories, two long rows on either side of the path and a four-story 'annex' at the end of it, a square with another courtyard and tree in the middle, rooms on two facing sides, and the bathroom/laundryroom/kitchen rooms on the other set of facing sides. I live on the third floor of the annex, on p block (which only makes me feel like an inmate sometimes) all the way in one corner. its a nice room, and i can walk out the front door and look over the balcony to the coutyard below, bisected by cement paths, covered in patchy grass, and dominated by the best climbing tree known to man. Its a nice place to live. [volta's color is yellow, btw]
Just up the street from Volta Hall is Commonwealth Hall, which has turned out more scholars, judges, politicians and general movers/shakers than any other hall at the university. It has a reputation for more 'firsts' or high honors graduates, by about 90%, than any other hall. Commonwealth boys (single sex dorm, like volta but for guys) have VERY high academic standards and in addition they are the group that holds the university accountable for things like corruption, stupid policies, etc. The motto is something to do with the value of truth and action. So, you say, fine and upstanding young men who are the future of the country staying up burning the midnight oil to earn those good grades and keep the beurocrats on their toes. Well, that is only half of the picture. The other half is that when you work really hard you end up playing really hard too, and commonwealth boys are legendary for their parties, their rivalry with Mensah Sarbah Hall (which ten years ago resulted in a MASSIVE fight in which four people actually died, dead style), and their general shenanigans. Their nickname for themselves is the Vandals, (which they have some acrostic poem for, in which each letter stands for something good, like vigilance, academics, niftyness, decency, angelic natures, leaders of the pack, sympathy, or something like that. It is not supposed to have anything to do with vandalism in the destruction of public property sense of the word). Their color is red. Oh, and they are the ;'husbands' of the volta girls in the sense that the chife of Commonwealth has a special responsability to the queen mother of volta. And the whole chief thing is not really a joke like you would think. Apparently NO ONE sees the chief, his retinue of bodyguards are specially trained, and there is a complicated initiation to get close to him. As a prank last month the commonwealth boys kidnapped the Sarbah chief and held him hostage overnight up on commonwealth hill. All of this is completely serious, and these pranks have the import of ritual. None of what follows is a joke or exaggeration in any appreciable way.
Volta hall, where i live, is a compound entered through the porters lodge, where they have some benches, a counter, and five guys who sit around all day under a fan and try not to work too hard. They are the ones you turn your key into when you leave, pick it up from, get free toilet paper from, ask for help carrying heavy things, etc..they are porters in every sense of the word, including the one where if you bring them ice cream they will let you do almost anything, including sneaking boys out of volta hall after midnight. Because one of their most important jobs is to protect the sanctity of volta hall from nefarious males between the hours of midnight and eight am. because of course nothing bad happens before midnigt. ANYWAY. Up the steps, through the porters lodge, is a really pretty courtyard with a (nonfunctioning) fountain, pretty designs in the stone paving, grassy areas, tress, and little white pots full of exotic tropical vegetation (that got a little splattered with white paint last month when the porters repainted all the pots, pushing aside leaves as they did). Its pretty. straight through the courtyard is another set of steps leading up to the dining hall (which looks like the inside of a convent, no joke). To the right out the courtyard is a path leading to the dormitories, two long rows on either side of the path and a four-story 'annex' at the end of it, a square with another courtyard and tree in the middle, rooms on two facing sides, and the bathroom/laundryroom/kitchen rooms on the other set of facing sides. I live on the third floor of the annex, on p block (which only makes me feel like an inmate sometimes) all the way in one corner. its a nice room, and i can walk out the front door and look over the balcony to the coutyard below, bisected by cement paths, covered in patchy grass, and dominated by the best climbing tree known to man. Its a nice place to live. [volta's color is yellow, btw]
Just up the street from Volta Hall is Commonwealth Hall, which has turned out more scholars, judges, politicians and general movers/shakers than any other hall at the university. It has a reputation for more 'firsts' or high honors graduates, by about 90%, than any other hall. Commonwealth boys (single sex dorm, like volta but for guys) have VERY high academic standards and in addition they are the group that holds the university accountable for things like corruption, stupid policies, etc. The motto is something to do with the value of truth and action. So, you say, fine and upstanding young men who are the future of the country staying up burning the midnight oil to earn those good grades and keep the beurocrats on their toes. Well, that is only half of the picture. The other half is that when you work really hard you end up playing really hard too, and commonwealth boys are legendary for their parties, their rivalry with Mensah Sarbah Hall (which ten years ago resulted in a MASSIVE fight in which four people actually died, dead style), and their general shenanigans. Their nickname for themselves is the Vandals, (which they have some acrostic poem for, in which each letter stands for something good, like vigilance, academics, niftyness, decency, angelic natures, leaders of the pack, sympathy, or something like that. It is not supposed to have anything to do with vandalism in the destruction of public property sense of the word). Their color is red. Oh, and they are the ;'husbands' of the volta girls in the sense that the chife of Commonwealth has a special responsability to the queen mother of volta. And the whole chief thing is not really a joke like you would think. Apparently NO ONE sees the chief, his retinue of bodyguards are specially trained, and there is a complicated initiation to get close to him. As a prank last month the commonwealth boys kidnapped the Sarbah chief and held him hostage overnight up on commonwealth hill. All of this is completely serious, and these pranks have the import of ritual. None of what follows is a joke or exaggeration in any appreciable way.
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