Cape Coast

The drive west, out of Accra and into the jungle:

Despite the overcast light due to it being the rainy season, isn't Cape Coast just lovely?

Accra Adventure

This morning, Fran and Naomi worked to grind the corn that had been fermenting for a few days in water into a meal for making banku. Fran also saved the oranges, tangerines, and limes before they went too ripe by squeezing them into juice, which was delicious both with breakfast and dinner.

I spent today down in Accra, meeting up with Maddie. She's the sister of a friend of my boyfriend, and is working on an international internship teaching HIV/AIDS education classes to 12-15 year olds at a school here. She'd already been here for three weeks when I landed in Accra last weekend, and the day finally came when the two of us were free. It was a lesson in traveling solo in Ghana for sure, I had to take a cab to a place I'd never seen before to meet with someone for the first time. One great thing about Ghana, though, is that no matter where you are, you can stop someone on the street and ask for directions. If they don't know, they'll ask someone else who does or point you in a general direction and tell you to ask anyone in that area, they'll know. When searching for a restaurant Maddie had been to a few weeks ago, we were delivered personally by a woman we askedto a place to grab lunch (not the same place, but still good, still close to the ocean). I got some red red with fish, a really popular dish around here. It's ripe plantain and cowpeas (black eyed peas) cooked with palm oil which gives it a bright color, thus the name. My fish watched me as I ate, though. It was a bit uncomfortable.

On the way back, my lesson on travel in Ghana continued, as my taxi broke down on the Motorway several kilometers from the road into Community 18 where I'm staying. I had to wave down another cab, get in with three strangers, and go first to where they needed to go before heading back to the house. No problems, I'm getting familiar with the area enough to find my way back to Abattoir Road and through the more residential streets.

Dinner was some boiled cocoyam, yam, and ripe plantain accompanied by the leftover palm nut soup and some fried beans. All in all pretty good. Dessert, of course, was fresh mango (which is so unbelievably good here, I don't even like mango very much in the states).

Baeta, Day Three

Today's lunch was reheated light soup with more smoked fish added, along with some gari. Gari is awesome, it's this slightly fermented cassava meal that has a taste reminiscent of sourdough bread. It swells up to about double its size when water and soup are added, is mostly starch and fiber, but has some protein in it according to the composition index I got form the Food Research Institute. Surprise surprise, it's also a good source of calcium.

Barbara came to see us today at the house to properly finish our series of interviews with her. She has some really interesting stories of the meals she's had to serve, of how she got her school started, of how she tried to make it a practice not to borrow money from anybody (she only borrowed twice in her life, and paid the debt off promptly). She told one story of how she served Jimmy Carter breakfast when he was visiting, and he took a liking to the Tom Brown porridge because it was served with groundnuts, groundnut being the local term for peanuts.

I'm having Maosi make me a dress from the fabric at the top of the stack in the picture to the left. She says it'll be ready tomorrow, I'm very excited. I'll be sure to put up a picture or two!

Things to look out for later in the week: Ghana plays USA on Saturday, any and all of you reading should watch for sure.

Food Research Institute (and more Fufu)

Today was spent breakfast- and lunching at Barbara Baeta's with the intention to record some more interviews with her. Barbara the ever-hospitable, however, had several guests over for both breakfast and lunch and so we couldn't get the intimate conversations with her that we managed to capture last week, but we did get some quick recordings of her guests talking about their history with Barbara. We had fufu and palmnut soup again, but Barbara has her way of making peasant food feel decadent and gourmet. Between breakfast and lunch, Barbara accompanied Fran and myself to the Food Research Institute where we met with several of the faculty, learned a whole lot, and walked away with 1) the promise of more pineapple chuff flour and 2) a booklet entitled Compositions of Foods Commonly Used in Ghana, published in 1975 but promised to be fairly accurate. I wish I had had this thing earlier in the semester to help me begin with the compositional breakdown of the recipes Fran hopes to publish (that's been an ongoing project since the start of the spring semester, and will continue into the fall for sure). It's got things broken up into food category, such as grains, doughs, fruits,nuts, etc, and it's really interesting to see what they have compared to what the USDA has published in their nutritional database(from which I was working all spring).

And now for something completely different:

Today, on a wall near circle 37, I saw "Ethiopia" scrawled in nearly unnoticeable letters across the corner of an ad for some breakfast porridge. I've pointed out the stickers on the backs of taxis and tro tros, and most advertisements and shop signs are hand-painted (even corporate logos like MTN and Coca Cola). There is, however, a severe lack of street art, of murals, of graffiti. There's no obvious paint covering graffiti up, either. So what is it about West African culture that stops this general practice? I know graffiti didn't emerge as a culture of its own in the states until at least the late 1970s, but painted vandalism and illegal murals have been around for a long time in western countries, especially in times of conflict. I'm wondering why in West Africa the only painted images on the walls are to advertise? I did a quick image search on google for West African street art and found almost nothing. A blog about street art that I follow, Wooster Collective, featured an artist in Senegal, but he's been the only one anywhere remotely near Ghana. South Africa is full of graffiti artists, could this be due to a feeling of us-vs-them that stemmed from apartheid? (Fran suggested that here in Ghana, there is none of that sentiment, that the general attitude of the population is one of hard work and community, that there is no oppressive "them", no "man" to rebel against, even in this packed and sprawling city of Accra.) Is it because of the intense Christianity that seems pretty much universal? In the north, where the population is more Islamic, is this trend any different? How about in Islamic neighborhoods in the south, since there are mosques and Islamic schools around here? This would definitely be something to look into during potential follow-up visits to Ghana when I have more time and more familiarity with Accra.

Week One, Down

I cannot believe I've been here for over a week, now. It both feels much shorter and much longer, like I was just in the states and simultaneously have been in this house for quite some time, now. I've grown accustomed to the time, the climate, the bugs (for the most part, I did battle with a cockroach that landed on my leg during dinner).

This morning, Fran Naomi (pictured below with her mother, who sells maize) and I went down to the Tema market to take care of some more shopping, and I took advantage of the time to play tourist. I snapped aton of photos, mostly of the people who sold us things. I also managed to stop a fabric seller and pick up six yards of cloth for six Ghana cedis (that's about four dollars, I'm pleased). I wish I had gotten a picture of her, but I was too busy worrying about finding exact change. She had the fabric folded up, stacked, and tied to a board that she balanced on her head, plus a few cloths draped over her arms. I also finished the skirt I was working on this afternoon! It needs to be run through my sewing machine once I get home, but for now it'll do the trick.

Alright, photo dump:

And the skirt:

Football, Frisbee, and Fufu

Today I stuck around the house, slept in a bit, got some writing taken care of for the night before and watched the first two football matches of the day. I'll quote a friend when I say it was shocking that out of two matches and three teams, there was no single victory to cheer for! Later in the afternoon, I went outside to throw the frisbee around some more with Eric and Frances. Eric and his friends had the disc overnight and probably at school, and so when I got it back, it was not only washed, my name had been re-traced in sharpie, and two more names were added to the list.

Eric's mother and aunt came outside closer to dinner to pound fufu. Fran had shown me pictures of the process before, but I was really curious, so I came over to watch. They knew I'd never tried fufu before, and offered me a piece of the un-pounded cassava (another first). It also tastes starchy and potato-like, and you can see in the pounding process, it's a lot like kneading dough for bread. One person works to release the gluten in the cassava by pounding with this big heavy piece of bamboo while another turns the fufu between pounds and adds water as necessary. I asked if they would let me pound, but I didn't realize how much force and movement was needed, and so I was laughed at for my few wimpy attempts. I have to work on my technique for sure.

PAY YOUR TITHE

After tackling some technical difficulties this morning, Fran and I took a cab into Accra to take care of some grocery shopping. Around here, it really isn't a one stop in-and-out ordeal when you have practically an entire kitchen to stock.


We waited around for a little while for the cab with Kay, one of the builders working on the house.




















I befriended some chickens that live in the yard (the same ones that kindly wake me up with the sun). First stop was the grocery store at the Accra Mall. It's a Shoprite, and I could only think of my friend back home, Becky, who works at a Shoprite in North Central New Jersey. It's absolutely true, you can go 5,000 miles, but in today's shrinking world, you'll still find things that are exactly the same. For instance, there's a shop that sells music near the house. They blast songs all day, and every once in a while I'll hear a song that's become pretty popular at least up at Penn State. Strange strange feeling for sure.




We went to a place called Koala further into Accra for fresh produce. it was a more popular place with foreigners, and I felt less awkward as the obroni in the crowd. (Obroni is the local equivalent to Gringa)






One thing I've come to really like are all of the super christian messages lettered across the backs of taxicabs and vans. The majority of the time, they're in English, but there's something almost humorous about them, in my opinion. I tried to get a few more pictures, but the battery on my camera quit during the ride. I'll be sure to get a more complete series of these pictures going. I've got some other plans for photo sets, but I'll talk more about that as I actually get to taking those pictures. The cabs also have a lot of great Ghanaian flags and some pretty fun bumper stickers.







On the ride back to the house, we bought some tiger nuts from one of the many venders that walk through traffic selling all kinds of things, from plantain chips to Ghanaian flags to the plastic vuvuzelas you hear during all of the world cup matches. We also stopped at a small shop on the side of Abattoir road, a dirt road full of potholes from the rain, to get some African yams. I'm talking big, heavy, huge, yams that would bring a tear to Okonkwo's eye, not the wimpy orange yams we see in American grocery stores. I'll be cooking with them tomorrow (judging by the pile, we'll be cooking with them for a few days). The tuna can is there for a size reference.