Obruni Mate

Alright, faith restored.

We went for drumming and dancing lessons last night with the wee kids who come over from Europe to be volunteers and teachers and such. Tara is roommates with two of them, Paul and Mark, who are both over here coaching football, and in exchange for footing the entire bill for their experience, their NGO does their best to make sure they’ve got plans every single night, whether its going to Champs for Quiz Night or doing African dancing.

So we showed up in this sketchy neighbourhood called Pig Farm – no joke – at 8 p.m. and sat down with a Djembe drum and learned that there are three keys to the drum, which are achieved with the open palm, the slap and the bass. My knuckle on my pointer finger is a little bruised this morning from the open palm, although my entire right hand was a little swollen from the slap. They taught us a few rhythms, which took me a while to catch onto. Anita was a natural.

Then we broke off into groups and did a little African dancing, which was a sad, sad display of disjointed white limbs and totally rhythmless movements. The football coaches were hilarious, and completely unafraid to make asses of themselves. The teacher had us hopping around and shuffling and kicking and waving our arms and shaking our bums and whatnot. It looked so nice when the instructor did it, nice and fluid. We just looked stupid. But it was fun. And difficult. We were a sweaty mess by the end. I think I’ll try to start African dancing as an aerobics class when I get back.

We left around 10:30 p.m. and headed home on a tro-tro, our preferred method of transport. Anita and I hopped on an empty tro-tro headed for Circle and she asked the mate if she could do his job for the ride. The mate and the driver are a team, but the mate does the lion’s share of the work. The mate is usually a boy, although rumour has it there are a couple women mates out there, and they’re usually about 14 or 15 years old. They’re responsible for announcing the tro-tro route, watching for people who want to get on, opening and closing the door, announcing the stops and collecting the fare and making change for passengers. We learned last night that it’s a lot harder than it looks. The driver and mate were very cool about it though. The driver was busting a gut laughing at Anita, particularly when we went through the police barrier with her little head sticking out the window calling “circ! circ!” When the guy stopped us he was like, “Oh, you’re the mate?” And she said, “I’m the obruni mate-in-training. Ooh kwe-hen?” which is Twi for where are you going. The title stuck. People watching the tro-tro were laughing and people getting on were also laughing. I’m sure that Anita will go down as some sort of African legend now, the Obruni Mate.