Eating & Sleeping

There are all manner of things here to wake a person: there are five other people, for starters. Then the cleaning lady, who comes shortly after 6 a.m. so she can wash all our clothes by hand, plus the dishes, the floors and the bathtubs before she starts her real job at a barbershop-slash-comm centre at a hut up the street. There is Uncle D, who owns the place, and starts his day around 4 a.m. He is like a chief, in the sense that all manner of people come to him for all manner of things. If they don’t ring the buzzer at the gate – which rings inside our half of the house as well – they shout out for him from the gravel driveway. “Unca D, Unca D, Unca D.” The first few times it happened, it took me a while to figure out that people weren’t saying “Look at me, look at me, look at me.” Then there’s Tony, the guy who lives in the compound and acts sort of like security and appears to live there for free, but no one is certain what his connection is to Uncle D. He whistles. Stops by and knocks at the door at 2 a.m. to make sure we’re all inside and safe and asleep in our beds. (We were until you started calling through the window, Tony.) Stops by at 6 a.m. to see John before he heads off to work, having never figured out that Jon hasn’t yet been awake at 6 a.m. Then there’s the Ivorian woman I call the Warbling Diva because she sings every damn morning, sometimes at the top of her lungs and only occasionally on key. Her favourites are Celine and Whitney, especially Whitney’s gospel tunes. Then there’s Mike, who sweeps the gravel before the cocks crow and drives cars over from Togo for tune-ups and resell. Since the garage is right outside our window – and when I saw window I mean a square of mesh nailed to a wooden frame – we can hear him starting up the cars every morning and smell the exhaust. The cars don’t start easily, so there is often a lot of engine revving, then the crush of the gravel. Then the obligatory honking of the horns, as no one here can open their own gate. Outside the compound, there is the guy with the bell who wheels around a wheelbarrow full of every little gizmo and gadget you could possibly want, from kitchen knives to batteries to flashlights to screws, nails, hacksaws. It’s like a mobile hardware store and he makes his presence known by ringing and ringing and ringing that bell. There’s the woman who sells chilies at 5:40 in the morning, yelling at the top of her lungs about the product on top her head as she walks down the street. Why anyone would need chilies at sunrise is beyond me. We’ve all talked about going out and shouting back at her. There’s the aforementioned cocks, who crow all night long, whenever the urge strikes them, sometimes in concert, sometimes solo. This often sets off the dogs, who have the loneliest, saddest howl, except one yappy little sucker who finally got the boot a couple weeks back. He would bark until he was hoarse and I have a feeling they made him into kebabs. And the planes overhead, which often sound like we live on the airstrip they’re so loud you can feel it in your ribcage. The surprising thing is I can sleep through it all, have been known to sleep through it all, including Tony calling into our window – all but the sweeping. And because it starts first, I can’t get back to sleep through the rest. Makes we long for noise bylaws.

We’ve been here almost two months. It’s mind-blowing. There are things I miss, most certainly. I miss friends, I miss family. I miss the comfort of knowing that both are close by, that they’ll help you and support you. That they’ll meet your for a glass of wine and listen to you complain about your job or your other friends. I miss going places with them, some on my own suggestion, some on theirs. I miss good conversation with people who know me and I know them. That they’ll welcome you over for a night or a weekend and watch you eat through the contents of their fridge as though you were still in university.. I miss the garden, I miss gardening with Mom. I miss the farm, the quiet, the solitude, watching the hummingbirds in the twilight of a great summer day out of the deck after a meal cooked on the barbecue. I love watching the cars go by. I miss reliable, logical public transit. I miss walking alone, unnoticed. I miss window shopping, I miss biking through the Annex and marveling at the architecture. I miss book shops and reading magazines at Chapters for more than an hour, then leaving without buying anything. I miss the pasta at the Distillery District but that’s about all in the restaurant department. I miss burgers, chips, chocolate chip cookies, Kraft Dinner with tuna and mushroom soup, lasagna, making nachos, making anything. I miss the rush and the crush of shopping in Chinatown, the variety and choice of shopping in Kensington. I miss showering without squatting. I miss not sweating constantly – I’ve got a heat rash already and it’s only September. I miss going to bed at night on my gorgeous pillowtop mattress without bug spray or a bug net. I am tired of all my clothes, which was bound to happen, but I thought maybe the princess part of me would hold out a bit longer. But no. It’s time to start having clothes made.

So, if I had to transport anything here it would be cream of mushroom soup, my mattress and the mosquitoes would be sacked. The rest I can live without, which surprises me constantly. Or maybe I can live knowing that I will see them again and until I do, I can live well enough with the memory.

I don’t miss blow-drying my hair, or the yappy yuppie dogs pooping in the park outside my window. I miss fall, but I won’t miss winter. I don’t miss the smelly subway at rush-hour. I don’t miss the Star, reading it or working for it. I don’t miss The New Deal or The Fresh Air Fund. I don’t miss the health beat or my desk, my phone, my little TV. I don’t miss writing about the tiniest improvements in drugs, the latest food that can clog up your heart, the idiotic things we do to ourselves that we pay for later in life, the policies that are meant to protect us from ourselves, the whining and complaining about the overwhelming lack of money for all those treatments that will save us from ourselves. I don’t miss the editors or assignments or features meetings, or researching graphics or scrounging for food that comes from anywhere but the cafeteria, or the feeling that Friday is only a couple days away.

I have developed a strange relationship with food here. There are moments when I am so overwhelmed with the desire to eat something specific it seems almost tangible, but there are more moments where I have zero interest in food at all. Food is very difficult to find around here, even though we’re positively surrounded by it. I never cook meat at home; it’s too expensive to buy at the grocery store. The little kiosks that dot the streets of Adabraka and other Accra neighbourhoods give way to fast food restaurants here, which are far more expensive and while JHR has begrudgingly upped our stipend, it’s not enough to eat at a restaurant every night.

We’ve found three good local chop bars, as they’re called, Epo’s, with delicious stirfries and jollof rice, Sabie’s fried chicken with rice or chips, and the tilapia place near Duncans. The guys at Epos are like the Cirque de Soleil of outdoor cooking. They work under a tent at the end of the next street, a gaggle of them and a couple kids. All their ingredients are spread out over three tables, in a collection of pots and pans and colourful plastic ware. They cook over a grill using woks and flames three feet high. I don’t know what they put in there that makes it taste so good – in fact, I don’t really want to know – but it’s delicious. They chop up a few carrots, some peppers and some onions, mix it with oil and a few flavorings and then spread it over some rice, garnish it with coleslaw and shito, the hot chili sauce that I scoop off and toss. It does terrible things to my digestive system and it’s so hot that my lips burn for hours after eating it. I don’t normally like fish, but I love the tilapia. The price of tilapia is dependent on the size of the fish, so it can range from c15,000 to c30,000 – incredibly expensive for street food – but it comes with a mix of vegetables that is the closest I’ve come yet to getting a full serving in one sitting. You eat the fish with your fingers, feeling your way around its spine and bones through it’s scaly little body. The only thing I don’t eat is the tail and I haven’t worked up the courage to eat through the head, even though the Ghanaians tell me it’s the best part and eagerly eat it if offered. We’ve made it a weekly habit to go to Champs on Thursday nights for a burger and fries – it’s a whopping c55,000, which is nearly $10, an obscene price in the third world. It’s an obruni place and serves Heinz with its fries. Or we spring for wood-burning oven pizza at Mamma Mias, again $10. For some reason, I would far rather find food outside the house than face having to cook in our sad little kitchen, with our little inadequate fridge, our substandard ingredients and hotplate.

The thing that really limits our options in terms of food is that none of us has developed a taste for kenke, banku or fufu yet. We may never. I cannot stomach fufu, which is cassava and plantain pounded together in a mortar with a giant wooden pestle. I like cassava when it’s boiled like a potato – it tastes roughly the same but is three times as dense. But the Ghanaians like it better as fufu, so they pound it until it’s practically slime, then they add in a plantain, which gives it a speckled yellow appearance and a slightly sweet taste. Banku is fermented corn meal, which comes wrapped in a ball and is slightly starchy feeling and tasting. Kenke comes steamed in a corn husk and is basically hard fufu.

All Ghanaian food is eaten with your hands, so you start every meal by rinsing your right hand in a bowl of water. You never, never use your left, ostensibly because you use it for other things that would foul food. So with kenke, fufu and banku, you pinch off a little bit, swirl it around in your soup or stew and swallow it. No chewing required. It’s so gross that I often find myself silently praying: just let me get it down, just let me get it down. The guys at work have been threatening to take me for okra stew, which Prue assures me is like eating thickened snot soup. I’m not sure non-stop praying will be any match for my gag reflex.

I personally much prefer groundnut soup, a spicy slightly squashy-nutty soup that comes with rice, banku, yam, whatever. I eat it once a week, splurging at a place around the corner that sells it with chunks of soft chicken for c30,000. I haven’t found it at a good chop stand yet, but when I do, I’ll likely pitch a tent and live right outside it.

I went for groundnut soup last night, actually, after a day at Aburi. Aburi itself was disappointing. It’s a little village built into a mountain just an hour’s drive from Accra, so as you snake up the hill, the vegetation gets lush, dark and green, the temperature dips and the humidity disappears. We went up to the botanical gardens, which turned out to be more of an arboretum than a garden. It was interesting, in a way, but not what we expected. After an hour, we both felt like we were crawling with bugs and that we hadn’t really seen or learned anything of substance. The strangest part of the experience was over by the rock garden, on a clearing near the palm trees and cocoa trees, where there were a handful of hard-core Christians wandering around waving their Bibles and speaking in tongues. It was a little like backstage at the Christmas concert, in the sense that each person seemed to take no notice of the next, but continued ranting and waving as though they were frantically rehearsing an important part and show time was in five minutes. It was kind of creepy, actually.