Between Cup and Lip part II

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.