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.

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?