The Sene district hospital is at one end of the town of Kwame Danso, so we had to walk nearly the length of the town center (probably a mile) to get to the neighborhood we were visiting. We left the hospital grounds and headed up the street. The road in town is quite nice—much better than the pothole-pitted dirt that connects Kwame Danso to Atebubu—and it supports a lot of traffic, mostly motorcycles, bicycles, and the odd cassava truck or tro-tro, usually overloaded with many people sitting on top, 15 or 20 feet above the ground. I can’t imagine what it’s like to go over the rougher road on one of those things.

The road into town passes a couple of schools and football fields—quite nice by Ghanaian standards, which means they are quite level, large, and about 60% grass—and it is neatly lined by mangos and other trees. Because they spread their branches at about a pleasant 10 feet, in the rural areas mango trees are key points around which people gather and sit or sleep on benches, and walking into the town you can also usually see a troupe of children under each mango tree, using either a long stick, stones, or unripe mangos to dislodge ripe mangos from their stems. Soon we begin passing the first buildings of the town center, little shops and shacks on both sides of the road, selling, as everywhere in Ghana, phone cards, water satchets, bread and rolls, etc., but they are fewer and further between than in Kumasi and look like they offer less variety. There is also a nice looking pistachio-green mosque, with megaphones arranged around a tower and several men and women in distinctively Muslim dress talking in the street nearby. Also different from Kumasi is the large number of farm animals, especially goats, sheep and chickens, that wander between houses and across the street at all times.

It was fun walking as a little group half-Ghanaian, half-Obruni. As usual, people called out to us and kids went hoarse yelling ‘obruni,’ but it seemed clear that we were there with a purpose and somewhat networked into the community. The nurses all wear white uniforms that are astonishingly free of the omnipresent red dust here, and the women also attract their share of attention—partly because of the uniforms, which in addition to being blindingly white can only be described as scandalously well-fitting.

The center of town is marked by the tro-tro station and small market—a couple of open spaces usually bustling with people selling things, and four or five tro-tros waiting to fill up and depart. There is also a ‘spot’ (bar) or two there—one of which we visited on our first afternoon until we were driven out by the smell of sheep urine pervading the patio. And there is a building and patio that presents the bigger football matches, which are not shown on the only television channel available here.

Past the town center, the nurses turned into a neighborhood, walking past the street-side shops and among the houses. Off the road, the houses immediately become more basic: at first, they have plaster walls (probably cement blocks underneath?), usually painted a pastel color like peach-ish, with a dark band of black or navy blue up a foot and a half from the ground; corrugated aluminum roofs; and poured cement floors. But soon the walls become increasingly smeared with grime, clearly representing years and possibly generations of use, the roofs become thatch and the floors neatly swept dirt.

At first we thought the nurses were looking for particular children. We stopped at our first house, a plaster hut with a corrugated roof and several women sitting on ancient-looking benches in front of the door. The nurses spoke to the women, and one of them went inside. Pretty soon they had retrieved several comic book-sized pamphlets and handed it to the nurses. The nurses flipped through the pamphlets, and spoke again to the women, who produced a small child about a year old. For some reason, it took them a long time to deal with this first child, and a considerable crowd of kids had begun gathering around the little station the nurses had set up on a bench in the courtyard—a couple of coolers containing vaccines and a box of syringes. About fifteen of them, from barely walking to about 10 years old, the older ones holding the youngest on their backs or on a hip, looked quietly up at us with huge brown eyes. We said hello to them in Twi, and only a few answered, either from shyness or because (as we learned later) they were not native Twi-speakers. The smallest tottered over and clamped onto a finger with their tiny fists, and the others continued staring with adorable, innocent but inquisitive, amazement.

After setting up their coolers and a cardboard needle-safety box that unfolded like a bankers’ box, the nurses went to work. First they called over a couple of mothers and handed them little red capsules that looked like the covers to bicycle tire nozzles. These were Vitamin A supplements, and the mothers and kids knew exactly what to do with them: the mothers lifted their kids’ chins and the kids opened their mouths, then the women bit the ends off the capsules and poured the contents into the kids’ mouths. Many of the kids were so weirdly obedient that they continued standing with their heads tilted back and their mouths open after the mothers had turned away, and had to be told to stand up straight and swallow. They didn’t give any reaction to the taste, but one of the nurses said it tasted good, but not sweet. We considered getting a hold of some to find out, but thought that obrunis stealing vitamins from rural Ghanaian children might be morally questionable. (According to Tom, Vitamin A supplements in developing world public health were begun by a doctor in Nepal, who started giving them for eye health, but discovered that they reduced overall mortality, for unknown reasons.)

The nurses’ other project was inoculations: for about every five kids who got the vitamins, on the basis of the contents of the pamphlets, one got a pair of shots, one in each arm. Most of them were very brave: the smallest cried, but the older ones took them with mostly curiosity. One little boy, looking up at the nurses closing in around him, rolled up the sleeve of his shirt for each shot, and watched the needle go in and out without response.

We spent the morning walking through the neighborhood, drawing a small crowd wherever we stopped. The nurses would set up a station on a rough wooden bench under a mango tree, kids would quickly gather around to stare, and women would go into their houses to get the pamphlets. We stood around and watched, and waved to kids, and at a couple of houses I got into impromptu soccer games with kids.

One nurse described to us what was happening: each Thursday is a designated clinic day for well-child checks and shots; but for various reasons, some mothers will not bring their children to the hospital those days. So the outreach days are for trying to reach those children. Since the hospital staff do not carry a master list of who has had their shots, they rely on the little pamphlets, which mothers keep for each child. So the system relies on: (1) the mothers being bought-in to the health program (willing to submit their kids to the shots) to begin with; (2) the mothers keeping track of the pamphlets; and (3) actually getting a hold of the mothers if they don’t come to the scheduled clinic. It’s difficult to tell from casual observation how well the system is working, but apparently Ghana’s public health outreach has been quite successful. And from everything we saw, (1) the mothers were eager to get their kids checked out—they really hurried to get to the nurses, and waited in line for a long time, often to only be told their kid didn’t need anything; and (2) the mothers were amazing at keeping track of the pamphlets, which probably are often the only paper material in the house—many mothers emerged from houses carefully unwrapping the pamphlets from plastic coverings, and sorting between a half dozen to find the right kid’s.

About 11:30, we walked back to the hospital and everyone collapsed from the heat. We were very impressed: the nurses had efficiently and compassionately protected several dozen kids from deadly diseases, and improved the health of many times that with vitamins. It had all been recorded in the pamphlets, which probably would be available for review any time a kid is sick. And these nurses are young people: all in their twenties, two of them had only arrived the week before, and were beginning their national service. Seeing them work independently and conscientiously reminded me a little bit of political canvass offices—right down to the handmade charts on the wall, on which marker writing indicated the number of inoculations of various kinds given (in the thousands), the number of vitamin supplements, and lots of other statistics.

And our time in the village had been very pleasant. Almost all the village houses are away from the road, so there are few dangers to kids running around and playing. So the women sit in the shade of their houses, or tend the fires that they keep just outside the front, and the little kids tear around, chasing goats and playing soccer, or working in the small gardens that people keep between houses. It looked like not at all a bad way to grow up.

As we were sitting waiting in the van, a bookseller came by and tempted me into looking at a pamphlet he was selling on contemporary political leaders. We’ve been talking quite a bit about the state of Ghanaian politics—advertisements, mostly billboards, from the December 2008 elections are still everywhere—but we’ve only begun to get a grasp of them. Plus, the seller informed us that a certain Barack Obama had recently been elected as the first African-American president and we may have heard of him and want to learn more. We bought one for a cedi and a half.

The ride was happily uneventful and very pretty. We bounced through the outskirts of Kumasi and made a long climb up some hills from which we had vistas of the rainforest all around. At the steepest point there were nice views of a sort of butte a ways away, with a clean rock cliff on one side and smooth-looking green fields on top. It was sunny but not too hot, and sitting in the back we had a good breeze from windows on both sides. And the road was surprisingly smooth and empty almost the whole way, so we wound up making it to Atebubu in 2 hours instead of the predicted 3.

There, two fellows in a green hospital pickup truck met us. Kids grabbed our bags and tossed them in the back, and we climbed in. The trip from Atebubu to Kwame Danso, the town where the hospital is located, is only about 20 miles, but it took an hour because the road is dirt and pothole-ridden.

We sat at the café for a nice hour, drinking coke and washing off our feet and watching the scene. Then we headed for the museum. After paying, we were ushered into the castle’s main courtyard, which is a large open space taking up most of the area inside the walls. At one end, there are twin staircases leading to some upper rooms, and at the other is a two-story building that was originally the Portuguese church. All around the courtyard, at ground level, are arched doorways into the various rooms of the castle, and all the walls are painted white, so it was strikingly bright at midday. And there are two plaques that are interesting. The older is a Dutch plaque from several hundred years ago, dedicated to a governor of Elmina who died after only four months in Ghana, presumably from either Malaria or Yellow Fever (during the slave era, West Africa was known as the ‘graveyard of Europeans,’ for those two and a couple of haemorragic fevers). The newer, from around 1960, is an apology by Ghanaian leaders for their ancestors’ roles in the slave trade.

Before our tour started, we went inside the courtyard’s building and looked at an exhibit describing the history of the area and the castle. In brief, the castle was build in 1482 by the Portuguese, who had gotten tired of paying middleman prices (and being edged out) to the Arab traders who brought West African products (mainly gold and ivory) through the Sahara to North Africa and Europe, and thought they could get better prices by trading directly on the West African coast—which was soon to be known as the Gold Coast, the name of the British colony in Ghana until independence in 1957.

So the Portuguese sailed down and started trading directly on the coast: mostly, European manufactured products like pots and guns (also booze) for gold. They build Elmina Castle (which they named St. George’s Castle) to support the trade and protect themselves from European competitors, who over the next three hundred years did their best to bombard each other out of existence in West Africa. Interestingly, it sounds like they were very friendly with the locals, who leased them the land and encouraged them to stay and trade.

It wasn’t long before the gold trade turned into the gold-and-slave trade, and soon just the slave trade. Chillingly, from what I’ve read the slave trade was so driven by economics that the relationship between the locals and Europeans hardly changed—Europeans kept giving the locals guns and alcohol, and the locals just starting substituting people for gold. They got the people further inland, where Arab slave raiders and the Ashantis were making a killing (and the Ashantis an empire) by raiding rural areas for people, and trading them to the Fantes, who in turn traded them to the Europeans (maybe this is the origin of the phrase ‘selling someone down the river’?). Guns and alcohol went upriver: the Europeans didn’t have to set foot inland, and could simply trade for the end product on the coast—and that’s all they did; before colonization in the mid nineteenth century, the European powers didn’t bother to have any significant presence inland of the coast. (Ironically, colonization here seems to have been partly precipitated by the end of the slave trade; when the English decided to stop buying slaves, and focus once again on gold, there was so much friction between the Ashantis and the Fantes over trade that the English decided to invade to ‘stabilize’ things and ensure a steady supply.)

I think Ekow Eshun makes a good point in Black Gold of the Sun (black gold refers to people) when he notes that at least at first the Europeans were simply tapping into an existing trade for slaves in West Africa. But he makes it sound like there was a kind of social context for slavery in Africa that was different from what the Europeans adopted—maybe as there was in ancient Greece. Extracting Africans to work in white societies added fairly horrendous new dimensions, such as a hugely increased demand, which wound up removing tens of millions of people from the continent; the deportation of people away from everything they knew—rather than capture and servitude in at least a familiar social context and environment; and a racist ideology, which made it possible to see Africans as subhuman and treat them as such.

In any case, from the 1500s the Portuguese were using the castle as a holding point for slaves being shipped, a system the Dutch continued when they captured it in the late 1600s by bombarding the Portuguese with cannons from a nearby hill. Almost the whole tour reviewed the castle’s slave system, including big dank halls (dungeons—and they really are) for holding hundreds of slaves; the ‘room of no return,’ through which slaves walked on their way to being loaded on the boats—supposedly (and likely true), no slave who went through that room ever saw Africa again; and the balcony from which the governor would survey the female slaves in the courtyard below to choose his bed partners (the tour had an extensive and fairly graphic focus on slave rape). Also the second-story hall used by the Dutch for their Dutch Reformed Church, which coincidentally was located directly above the female slave dungeon.

All of this piqued our historical curiosity: we debated the efficiency of a business model in which over half of the goods were lost en route—the rate at which slaves often died on trans-Atlantic voyages (we concluded that as good capitalists the slave traders probably had the costs-benefits worked out). And we noted that it looked like a great deal of the castle was original—from the stone walls covered in grime and green moss to the rusted and twisted iron bars of the condemned men’s cell, in which disobedient slaves would be packed until the last one died.

All in all the history of the place did not entirely live up to its bright and cheerful exterior. So it was nice to know that with the slave trade a distant two hundred years behind us, we could take a cheap taxi (driven by a poor black person) through dirty and smelly streets of poor black people, to the clean and manicured beach resort, where the all-black staff served the almost-all-white (ok, actually just ‘mostly’ white) clientele Fantas and beer and got us lawn chairs and umbrellas for sitting at the pool. Freedom certainly is, as they say, on the march.

We left the resort’s beach area—under 24-hour surveillance by nightstick-armed guards—and walked up the beach. In the distance we could see fishing boats pulled up on the shore and a group of fishermen pulling in a net, and at first it was a peaceful walk on a nice beach. Before long, the beach became much less nice: first we started noticing the usual trash that accumulates everywhere in Ghana, like the little bluish ‘satchet’ bags that hold purified water; then people pies frequent enough that we were soon treading very carefully through the sand; and before long we saw people in the process of making fresh deposits near the surf.

We continued along and passed the fisherman, about 20 men and children pulling on the lines of a massive net stretched out into the water. There were several men swimming along the perimeter of the net in the water, guiding it. Given the condition of the beach, this did not increase our interest in eating locally-caught seafood.

A little later we passed half a dozen men working on fishing boats—chiseling out the hulls on 50-foot long tree trunks, and building up the sides with ribs and planks. We were relieved that no one paid us much attention, since the guidebook warned that children on the beach were likely to mob Obrunis with demands for pens and money. In the end, I think they were mostly surprised to see Obruni walking carefree through the community latrine—not a place locals probably think of as a place for a pleasant walk.

After about a mile we were on the beach immediately alongside the heart of the village, and ahead faced dark red rocks rising out of the sand before the castle. The human waste reached a peak here, and we explored the red rocks, but they were also covered with it. The smell was also becoming overpowering, so we turned into the village to find a route to the main road. We walked up a beaten dirt path to the village, then threaded our way between corrugated-roofed houses and fish-drying racks covered with small silver fish drying in the sun (and pigs sleeping underneath them). Everywhere chickens and goats and one duck ran around, and thanks to the fish the smell remained intense—but not exactly fishy, just stifling. Finally we found ourselves on the main road and finished the trip to the castle.

which have driven us crazy on our other bus trips. They all seem to be heavily oriented around conflict: most scenes begin with one character yelling at another—since we can’t understand them, it’s difficult to tell for what. There is also a type of scene we have seen in a number of movies that involves a man walking in his front door, apparently after committing some infraction, and being assaulted by the women in the house. They yell at him, throw things, and hit him with chairs. They aren’t comic scenes—they look dramatic or even melodramatic to us—but our fellow Ghanaian passengers often find the most conflictual and even violent scenes hilarious. But for us, along with the incredible volume with which they are blasted in the buses, they are very stressful. Instead of all that, on this bus trip we had very pleasant, if still eardrum-shattering, Ghanaian gospel music videos.

We got off the bus in Cape Coast and took taxis to Hans Botel, a quirky little resort sitting on a pond inhabited by at least four crocodiles. The first one we saw was sitting next to the restaurant on the shore opposite us when we arrived with its mouth open. At first we thought it was a statue because it was sitting so perfectly still, but when we went to the restaurant it was still there, and quite real. And it was massive, probably seven feet from nose to tail. Apparently they sit still with their mouths open to get air circulation to cool their brains.

We had a very nice evening drinking beer and having dinner in a little gazebo on part of the pond (we spotted, among other birds, the weird hornbill and brilliant blue kingfishers), and in the morning we went to Kakum National Park, a park famous for its walkways suspended in the trees. Apparently it was built by a team of Americans, Europeans and Ghanaians, and is now a major attraction. After a couple of miles of hike up hill from the park center, we came to a little wooden house from the second storey of which the walkway was strung off the hillside. The walkway itself looks like it is made of steel ladders end on end, covered with wooden planks. All of this is set in heavy duty nylon mesh, and suspended by a series of steel cables. Before we began walking, our guide walked out and demonstrated its strength by leaning out into the mesh and hanging there. So it was very sturdy, but after a couple of sections of the walkway we were a long way off the ground, which disappeared under the first canopy of rainforest. There are seven sections altogether, and in the middle we were most of the way up the biggest trees in the forest—just before their branches jutted out from the trunk in the upper canopy. It was also very beautiful from the highest points. You can look out there and see the whole canopy of rainforest stretching into the distance in front of you.

We only spent a couple of hours at the park—we did the main attraction, tried some fresh cocoa (you kind of suck on the sections of white flesh that surround each seed, which is the part chocolate is made from—it tastes a little sour, a little sweet, and a tiny bit like chocolate), and were ready for the beach. So we found our cab drivers and headed out, grabbed our things at Hans Botel and drove the final leg to Elmina and the coast.

Unsurprisingly, the family was a huge hit with Mama Julianna. They brought her some gifts, and she had had a surprise dress made for J’s mom. Julianna proudly showed them the beautifully done rooms in her house, and said that J’s family “all resemble each other,” which she thought was pretty funny.

The first several days they were in Kumasi J was working, so I played the role of dutiful son in law and showed them around. I tried to lose them to heatstroke right away by walking them through Kumasi in the morning sun, through the busy market streets around the Kejetia tro tro station and up the main hill, but they made it all the way to the Cultural Centre. They were only slightly overwhelmed by the chaos of the streets, and they liked to see all the people out working and selling things. J’s little sister, who recently lived in Fiji, particularly liked the bustle of town, and they noted out how friendly people were to us.

When we got to the Cultural Centre, about 11, I tried to get them to slow down, knowing that they wouldn’t notice the heat and dehydration on their first day, but they wouldn’t hear it and wound up nearly getting heatstroke by walking to get Jenni at the hospital at the deadly 12-2pm time.
Then we all had lunch in the Cultural Centre, nice jollof and fried rice and fried noodles, and we drank coke and fanta limon, both of which are delicious here—we think because they’re made with sugar and not corn syrup. They’re sweet, but not too sweet, and there’s no sugar crash afterwords. Plus the Fanta limon, which is a greenish yellow color, is nice and sour.

The other day we had together, I took them to Lake Bosumtwe. Once again, we took a taxi to the Asafo tro tro station and found the tro tro to Kuntanase, the hub town nearest the lake. We found the tro tro easily, paid our 45 pesewas (35 cents) each, and climbed in. The in-laws filled up the first row behind the driver, so I climbed into the back next to a guy who apparently spoke neither Twi nor English, as the guys a row ahead of me explained (I think the non-English speaker was Hausa, but never got a clear answer). They started quizzing me in Twi and I managed to learn a little bit while we waited for the van to leave. After about an hour, during which a single passenger filled one of the remaining 5 seats, I figured it would be worthwhile to pay the additional 2.25 cedis to make sure we had some time at the lake. So I asked the good English speaker to tell the mate I would pay for the seats if we could leave. He did this and we were just getting ready to pull out when two or three more passengers boarded and bought tickets from the mate. Then the mate closed the side door and we started off—without giving me any money back, which means that he had charged both me and the new passengers for a couple of seats. I wasn’t going to worry about what turned out to be 90 pesewas, but the guys I had been talking to didn’t feel that way. They assured me, “We will get your money back,” and as the van pulled out they started asking the mate quite direct questions in Twi, and although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, they said Obruni often enough that it was pretty clear. The mate’s response seemed to be something like ‘Why should I give it back? The Obruni gave it to us and it’s our money now.’ This was not satisfactory to one of my new friends, who lit into the mate, shouting apparently long treatises on the jurisprudence of tro tros and waving his arms in agitation. I can’t imagine what kind of argument he was making for such a long time, but each of his statements lasted minutes. In typical Ghanaian fashion, pretty soon half the tro tro was involved and shouting, all apparently taking my (mute) side. After about ten minutes the mate relented and 90 pesewas floated back my way. That’s the great thing about tro tros—there is such a strong code of how they work, and you’re always rewarded for riding them by the helpfulness and honesty of the passengers (and usually the mates).

Sitting on tro tros, waiting literally hours—sometimes days—for them to leave because two 35-cent seats still need to be sold also makes you think.

Second is the climate. The heat and humidity prevents anyone from moving faster than a modest pace for any more than a few moments. Ghana is a relatively formal country, and people dress very well here. For men, to look good that means wearing long pants and (usually) a long shirt. I find myself out of breath and sweating after even climbing a small set of stairs, and the heat seems to do something to us that makes us dizzy after standing up.

Third is the incredible busyness of the city. Kumasi is known for being crowded and busy, but in the scheme of West Africa it’s nothing atypical (and it has only about 2 million people – I can’t imagine what Lagos, Nigeria, with 17 million, must be like). Even walking down one of Kumasi’s modest streets, you will pass people selling food (oranges, plantains, coconuts, frozen yogurt, pineapple, cassava, etc. etc.), water, phones and phone cards, sandals, football shirts, and much else, from shacks and stands. And every road is usually packed with cars and people weaving between them selling things from bowls and boxes on their heads (yesterday I walked behind a woman carrying on her head a big silver bowl full of about 4 chickens).

Fourth is an interesting sort of cultural exhaustion mostly exhibited by people in institutions. There is an incredible bureaucraticness that makes it very difficult to do anything. Buying airline tickets (for J’s family to fly up to Kumasi from Accra) took us four afternoons of visits to banks (the only bank that seems to change travellers’ checks here insists on making photocopies of the checks’ receipts, which kind of defeats the purpose of carrying them separately from the checks) and the airline itself, which insisted on about 425 dollars in cash because they don’t take credit cards. Furthermore, they insist that student cards for a discount be presented at the time of purchase, which is a bit difficult for something flying into Ghana. And when I called British Airways Ghana today, a woman tried to sell me a 1700 dollar one-way ticket from London to Nice, and seemed unaware (and uninterested) that BA flies the route about 5 times a day, with prices as low as 100.

So there is an incredible inertia to working with institutionalized processes that both drags down everyone involved (clerks seem as exhausted as you—though completely unapologetic—at having to tell you the myriad reasons you can’t do what you want) and stands in stark contrast to the economics of the street, where someone will solve any reasonable problem you pose for next to nothing in a matter of minutes.

Ghana has a reputation for not having very good food, and that reputation is half deserved. The three main traditional Ghanaian dishes are fufu, banku, and kenke, all seem to be acquired tastes, as almost all the Ghanaians we have asked name fufu as their absolute favorite food, but we have had a hard time learning to like.

On Sunday afternoon, we were sitting downstairs in our patio when we started to hear this solid rhythmic ‘thump’ radiating through the house. It took us a minute to identify it, but then we remembered we were eating fufu, and realized it was the sound of fufu being pounded. Fufu is a kind of mash-dough of plaintains and cassava. It is made by pounding those ingredients (usually the cassava is boiled first) repeatedly with a long heavy stick, held vertically, in a big heavy wood mortar. When we got upstairs, Juliana was sitting in her kitchen on a small stool, picking up pieces of cassava with her right hand, cutting out ‘bad’ chunks with a bowie knife held in her left, and placing them each in the middle of the mortar to be pounded. Her house boy was standing over the mortar, lifting the stick up and slamming it down into the cassava as she placed it. I was already getting nervous about the well-being of Juliana’s fingers when she started a new move—dipping her fingers in a bowl of water and reaching into the mashed cassava to swirl it around between thumps. Every time the stick seemed to barely miss turning her fingers into bloody pulp. It was actually difficult to watch, but she said she had only been injured once, and needed several stitches when a stick wielded by a ‘friend’ smashed her hand into the mortar.

After a good amount of cassava or plantain (they are pounded separately, then mixed together) and Julianna had stired them around with water a bit, the consistency changed from one like mashed potatoes to a more slimy, sticky blob. When it reached that, Juliana scooped the blob out and set it aside for eating.

We all had a try at pounding the fufu, which was fun. But Juliana still used her fingers between blows, which kept us from pounding very hard, but we realized how strong you would have to be to lift and drop the stick for two hours, as the house boy had done.

After the pounding, fufu is ready to eat, and it served as a sphere of dough submerged in soup—in this case ground nut (peanut) soup, with chicken. Now comes the difficult part, actually eating the stuff. Fufu is eaten with hands, which means that you need to reach into the soup to get a hold of a piece of the slimy dough, scoop it into your mouth without covering your arm in soup, and swallow the dough without chewing. (When we tell Ghanaians about our first encounter with fufu at a restaurant, they all laugh when they hear we tried to chew it. Apparently it is slurped down without chewing, probably because of its disgusting texture.) It turns out that swallowing without chewing does not improve fufu, mostly because we are so unused to doing that and it makes you gag. Typical medical students, J and Tom got to telling gag reflex stories, and that was pretty much the end of the meal. (John, as usual, was the only of us to finish, and I, in Juliana’s estimation, only got down 20%.) But Juliana’s fufu was much nicer—and her soup much better—than the fufu we’d had at the restaurant.

So the very traditional Ghanaian dishes we have not loved. But the odd thing is that there are also Ghanaian dishes that are delicious, but that you don’t see very much—on the street or on restaurant menus. Juliana has made us incredible stews, based on tomatoes, various spices we haven’t identified yet, and sometimes smoked tuna or salmon, that are eaten with boiled or friend yams (which are white—but apparently different from cassava and sweet potatoes) or cassava or plantains. She taught us how to eat the yams, which are sliced into rounds and boiled. With the yam slice on its flat side, you dig your thumb in near the edge so you break of a chunk. Then, holding the yam with your first two fingers, you scoop stew on with your thumb. The yam eaten this way is like potato except that it has a grain (hence the specific way of breaking off chunks), and it is quite dry and floury. She has also made us delicious rice dishes, both white rice with stew and fried rice with vegetables and smoked sausages. (These we eat with cutlery.) The classic Ghanaian fried rice dish is called jollof, and is hot and very good. In terms of meat, we have mostly eaten chicken and sausages, but we also regularly see goat and mutton, and occasionally beef on the menu. I don’t think we’ve seen pork offered anywhere yet.

That, along with one pizza meal, is what we have been eating most of the time. But there is also a lot of food available on the street—in fact, we’ve been amazed by the sheer quantity of food that seems to be everywhere. On every street, some people have coals burning and are making something—frying yams, cooking stew, grilling plantains (which are quite good). And then there is all the fruit. The common ones are oranges (peeled and with an end sliced off for sucking), coconut (with a slice chopped off, for drinking), pineapple, both whole and sliced, guava, a few mangoes (with an end sliced off for sucking). The coconut sellers are especially impressive: they usually have a big push cart covered with fresh coconuts and old coconut husks, and with huge machetes they slice around the end of a bunch of coconuts that they’re getting ready to sell. Then when you buy one they hold the coconut in one hand and hack around it with their machete, until they can break the top off. They hand it to you and you drink it, and when you’re done they chop up the husk, elegantly freeing the flesh, which they hand to you. As far as we have seen, most sellers are very hygienic: for example, when they cut out the fruit, the hand collecting the fruit is in an inside-out bag, which they turn ride-side out and hand you, so they never actually touch the fruit.

Tro-tros are the go-to form of transportation for most people in Ghana, both for getting around cities and between them. Tro-tros are small vans—they look like they have about the volume of an American min-van—but they hold 15 people, five rows of 3. (The only reason people can climb into the back is that the far right seat of the middle seats are these clever jumpseats that fold up so you can climb around them.) Tro-tros are operated by a pair of people, the driver and the ‘mate’ or ‘coleta’, who takes the money and jumps out to advertise at all the big stops. At the big spots they get very competitive: the mates open up the door and jump out before the tro-tro has stopped, and if they have space they shout the name of their stop—the one we know is “Ketia Ketia!” – short for Kejetia bus terminal, the central Kumasi tro-tro station—and try to hustle passengers away from competing tro-tros. When it’s busy, you often see them with their arms out, trying to prevent passengers from approaching competitors. At smaller stops they just lean their heads out the window and shout.

The reason they work so hard for passengers is that they depend on volume and speed for their money—each passenger only pays about 20 pesewas (15 cents) for a suburb-to-city ride. And tro-tros rarely leave big stops without being full, so they depend on filling up quickly at every stop and moving along. Despite this pressure, we have never seen a tro-tro that was overfilled, even though with each person sitting in a full seat there would be plenty of room to pack more people in. We suspect that this is a result of tight regulation (and remarkable compliance), as we have heard about with taxis and other transport services in Ghana, and there are sometimes police at the tro-tro stops, watching what it happening.

Once everyone is in, the tro-tro starts moving before the door is shut or the mate is back in. He jumps in, and after a measured amount of time (often several small stops), he turns around and collects money, tapping you on the shoulder to get your attention. They have excellent memories both of who has paid and how much change everyone needs—they usually collect money from seven or eight people to make sure they have the right kind of change. If they don’t, they lean their head out and yell at phone card stand operators, who always have lots of change. They will also call over a water or dried plantain seller for thirsty or hungry riders. It’s not exactly British Airways, but the customer service is better.

Despite various warnings, we’ve made tro-tros our main form of transportation around Kumasi. (Warnings not to use them are mostly focused on highway travel, which is apparently very dangerous, since the tro-tros are minimally maintained and seem kind of top-heavy. In the city they rarely get up to any speed.) It is both the cheapest way to get around, and pretty much the most fun—people are exceptionally friendly, maybe because they see so few Obruni there—we’ve never seen other whites take them. People get a kick out of Obruni doing non-Obruni things, and kids in particular think seeing us on the tro-tro is quite a scene. We almost always strike up a friendly conversation with other passengers or the driver, who help us get where we are going and give us lots of suggestions. Apparently J causes quite a scene whenever she rides a tro-tro alone (our landlady considers them much safer than taxis at night), with everyone pointing at her and laughing. She thinks the passengers are mostly giving the mate a hard time for picking up a pretty Obruni lady–and she has asked for translations but not gotten much out of them.

The other day I had climbed into the front middle seat and a very dark skinned guy climbed in next to me and said in a strong accent “de very faih and de very dahk togetha een the front” several times before I understood what he was saying and laughed. It turned out he was a policeman going to work, and we talked about the most prominent symbol here, a stylized Ashanti cowry shell that is attached to the phrase ‘gye nyame,’ which means ‘accept god.’ This guy compared it to the American saying ‘in God we trust’ and the Muslim ‘insh’Allah’ (god willing).

Tom has made it his life’s wish to be a mate on a tro-tro. He isn’t sure if he will give up emergency medicine for it, but he would like to spend an hour or so as a mate yelling “Ketia Ketia!” at all the stops. Given their amusement at us whites doing almost anything non-dork-touristy, we’re pretty sure the driver, mate, and any passengers would pretty much lose it if they saw this.

The other night we had a chance to quiz a tro-tro crew on their life and work. We had come home from Lake Bosumtwe and gotten off our shuttle in the southern outskirts of Kumasi to go to a pizza restaurant that had been highly recommended in our guide. The restaurant was in the swankiest neighborhood we’ve seen yet, with all these houses that would be mansions by any standard and, strangely, lots of radio stations and towers. After dinner we walked out to the main road and were lucky to catch a tro-tro into town just as it started raining. When we got to their main stop in the city, we were trying to decide how to finish our journey when the crew unloaded everyone and then turned to us and asked where we wanted to go. We told them and negotiated a price that involved two separate stops, and then it was just the five of us, plus the driver, the mate, and another guy who was apparently a friend along for the ride. They were all very friendly, and we quizzed them about tro-tro life, and they laughed uproariously at most of our questions. The mate didn’t speak much English, but we learned that he was 19, had been working as a mate for 4 years, hoped to become a driver, and worked from 430am to 10pm almost every day except Sunday. They liked the idea of having Tom along to be mate for a while, but we forgot to get their phone number and since they work another part of town we’ll have to find another friendly crew.

Saturday was our first weekend day in Kumasi after getting settled, and we took a trip to Lake Bosumtwe, one of the main day trips out of the city. We got up before 7 and ate bread and peanut butter (here called ground nut) and jam and walked up to the main Edwenase road. It took us a little while to get an empty cab that could hold all four of us, and when we finally did it was a pretty old one, and the driver wanted 5 cedis to go to the downtown bus terminal. Our friends thought 5 was pretty steep, and eventually haggled him down to four. Our taxi driver was listening to some morning reggae program that was playing a lot of songs about interracial tolerance. We hadn’t gone more than a half mile when the radio faded out and the car came to a stop. The driver had obviously seen this more than a few times, and he was pretty quick hopping out (I noticed there weren’t any keys in the ignition, just a handful of wires dangling together to the left of the wheel). He opened up the hood, messed around with something for a few seconds, and the car came back to life. After that the trip went smoothly except for the strong smell of leaking gasoline during the whole ride.

It turned out the STC station was more of a landmark in getting to our ride, since what we were taking was more of a big van than a bus. We had to walk over Kumasi’s railroad tracks and down into a market area to find it, and down there, as usual, someone immediately approached us and asked where we were going. When we told him he led us through the market/transportation hub as it was getting up to speed for the day. There were lots of women and kids hanging out, sleeping and eating next to their goods, which included lots of fruits and vegetables, especially cassava and yams, oranges, little red palm nuts, flip flops, and dozens of booths where you can buy time for a phone.

There were also hundreds of tro-tro like vans lined up, and it looked like people were unloading them for the market day. I saw one with a herd of goats tied up behind it. We finally found our van and packed in with about 12 other people, and pretty soon were on our way out of Kumasi—it took about half an hour just to reach the end of the city (probably about 4km), then about 45 minutes (with several stops at villages) to cover the 25km to Kuntanase. Kuntanase represented the beginning of what appeared to be an elaborate sequence of tourist extortion: our tro tro driver dropped us off right amid a crowd of taxi drivers, who overcharged us for the ride to the lake and brought us to a “toll,” which is really a rope across the road where a guy charges “foreigners” 2 cedis each and “locals” 1 cedis each—though foreigners and locals are much less about where you come from and more about your skin color; J and I paid 2 each while our African American friend, whose parents are Ghanaian but grew up and goes to medical school in New Jersey, paid 1. Our guidebook warns about this racket, strongly suggesting the “toll” was more about private entrepreneurship than legitimate preservation of the lake area. Actually, my attitude was to pay and get on with our day, since our driver was obviously not interested in leaving the toll booth without us paying, but our Ghanaian-American friend argued valiantly with the guard, even getting a phone number to call. But we called it, and whoever they were said we had to pay. So we did, and made it into Abono, the village at the Lake. Once again, we were immediately surrounded by hustlers offering us crummy souvenirs and a lake “caretaker” who wanted to talk to us about the history of the area. We thought about taking a boat ride around the lake, but the captain wanted 15 cedis (about 12 dollars) per 15 minutes of trip, and we realized that because a couple of us had forgotten money and a couple underbudgeted for the trip (whose expenses were accumulating quickly), we wouldn’t be able to afford it. We were feeling rather unimpressed with the lake and the swarm of expensive and relatively unpleasant hustling.

Thinking that villages off the main road might be more pleasant, we followed a path along the lakeshore out of Abono, got tea and coffee and sugarcubes and watermelon under a veranda by the lake, and then headed up onto the main road to check out other villages. This main road was really a dirt road that went around the lake and lay quite a ways above the lakeshore. It was dusty and getting sunny and hot, but there was very little traffic and it was nice not to be hustled for a change. Instead it was quiet, and the plants around us were very green, while the road, like all the dirt here, was a warm shade of red. We passed banana trees and palm trees, some of them in carefully laid out plots, most of them just making up the forest around us, and we saw lots of the little lizards than are like squirrels here. And we often saw the lake below us, and the narrow hills rising up around it.

We went through about four villages on our walk, very rustic places with many buildings made out of the traditional (?) woven branches and some kind of plaster or cement (j maintains that its mud). We got some funny looks, probably both because of our whiteness and because we were some of the few people out in the midday sun. Most people were sitting in the shade of trees or houses, and waved to us or just gave us looks that were more or less confusion/disbelief. (One friendly group of guys invited us to stop for palm wine, which they obviously had been enjoying for some time.) As usual, kids were the ones to come greet us directly, and most were as adorable as ever, but some were also picking up the habits of their neighbors down the road, asking us to give them pens (apparently they get a lot of pens because that’s what tourists have in their pockets when the happen upon kids?) or soda or whatever they saw us carrying, like our water bottles. Jenni took pictures of the schoolhouse, which was a village in the middle of our walk. It was two “rooms,” neither complete—really just a roof and portions of four walls, which either had never been completely built or had been falling apart for a long time. On the interior wall between the two rooms there was a rough blackboard on each side and some open mud walls on which letters and numbers were written in chalk. And there were used-looking wooden benches and desks.

After about an hour of walking we were getting pretty hot and tired, and finally made it to the Rainbow Garden resort, a really beautiful little set of houses on about 5 acres on the edge of the lake. We had a great, if slow, lunch: J and I had pineapple curry on the best jasmine rice, and others had: yam chips with stew, jollof, and an enormous banana-chocolate sandwich (Tom, who also had more sugarcubes), and then walked down to the lake. Inexplicably, out of somewhere wandered two donkeys, who just grazed on the grass and moved on. After greatly discussing the risk of schistosomiasis, Tom John and James went swimming, and I talked to a black guy from south London who was trying to start a charity-funded lodge in Kumasi for teachers and volunteers to stay at while they work in the area.