Ah, So That's Why The Ocean Tastes Like Tears

Thursday morning I got a phone call. I was in the internet cafe at the time, sitting next to the air conditioner (which is only one of the reasons I love the place), so I couldn't hear very well.

'Ryan, they have zzxkt. Some fisherman have brought it in. It is snrrrkkktscht. Will you go?'

Now, I wasn't certain what the fisherman had brought in, but I was aware that the anchovies had started running, and that the local people were very excited about this, and also I was very not excited about it.

'Edmund, I'm sorry, I can't hear you very well,' I said. 'And anyway I'm busy right now posting some stupid thing about Dan Brown for some reason,' I could have said but didn't. 'Can I call you back a little later?'

On my way home, I was stopped by two men I hadn't seen before. 'Are you coming from the shark place?' they asked.

It wasn't a question I had been expecting. Did they mean America?

'Excuse me?'

'Some fishermen pulled in a shark. We are going to see it. Have you been there?'

Oh.

Suddenly I wished I had paid more attention to Edmund's phone call. Sharks, for the record, are more exciting than anchovies. A lot more exciting. This is why there is no such thing as Anchovy Week.

I did need to go home for a few minutes, but as soon as I could manage I locked up my room and set out to see the shark. It then occurred to me that I had forgotten to ask where the shark was, and not knowing was inconvenient as a practical matter but it also meant that I was now on a Quest to Find the Shark. Oh, this was going to be an adventure for real!

Shark!

After checking with a few people ('Ah, so, this might be a strange question, but...') I learned that the shark was in the next town over, and I was heading to the roadside to get a car when Dickson spotted me.

'Hebert, where are you going?' he asked.

'Oh, I'm going just down the road to the next town,' I started to explain.

'You are going to see the big fish, eh?'

A shark is a big fish.

I told him that yes, I was going on this exciting quest, and he decided to join me. We took a car and were soon walking down the beach toward a crowd of people gathered by the water.

'They say there were two,' he said.

'Two?'

'Earlier, there was this one, and a bigger one. When this one was trapped the other one was making a noise and trying to help it.'

Waiiiiit a minute, I thought, that doesn't sound very sharkly. Do sharks help each other? Do they make noise? That sort of sounds more like OH NO.

The beached whale was already dead when we arrived. Laughing children were climbing onto its back in groups of five or six to have their pictures taken. Its skin was dried and peeling in places. I walked around to its head, where a man was collecting money for the photos. The whale's tongue lolled out the side of its mouth, looking dusty.

And this just sucks. Maybe I should have been just as sympathetic about the shark, but you know, sharks are inherently kind of unsympathetic. They have rows and rows of sharp teeth and they use them to engage in feeding frenzies. They can hear you struggling and they can smell your blood. They don't even have bones! Essentially, they are scary monsters.

But this... just... awwwww, maaaaaan.

There's a moral to this story, but I have no idea what it is. So I'll just say it's this: sometimes, you think you're going to have a close encounter with nature's most perfect murder machine and then all you get is a big chapped mammal with a dusty tongue and a sad friend. Sometimes, that's how life works out.

Damn it.

Shit.

In Defense of Garbage

So this is not timely or anything, but last week I finally got around to reading The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown is not really somebody that I ever paid any attention to before, but now that I have read the book I have started noticing something: people love to talk about how much they hate Dan Brown. Because Dan Brown is Not A Good Writer.

Look, Dan Brown uses 'literally' when he means 'figuratively.' Look, on this page Dan Brown used the phrase 'seemed miles away' to describe a place that was actually hundreds of miles away. Look, Dan Brown thinks the plural of 'millennium' is 'millennium.' Look, there is product placement in this book and he also says things about history that are not true in real history! I noticed these things too, you guys! I was outraged! And then I decided to read just one more chapter because, anyway, each one is only three pages long and is likely to contain MYSTERY AND ADVENTURE.

My outrage became just an additional aspect of the book's entertainment value, and even in complaining about it later I've written 'Dan Brown' six times (err-- seven now) and each one of those times makes it just a tiny bit likelier than somebody is going to stop someday and pick up one of his books in a store and say 'Hmm... Dan Brown. I've heard of him. Maybe I should see what all the fuss is about.' Because that's what happened to me. Because that's the game that Dan Brown is playing. And Dan Brown is better at it than you. Ten.

Dan Brown is Not A Good Writer. Also, McDonald's will make you fat. Also, Las Vegas puts up glitzy facades to hide shoddy construction and broken dreams. Also, Britney Spears probably can't read music. What they all have in common is that they don't care, and they are targeting customers who also don't care, who are called Most People. They are cynical masters, not so much of writing, cooking, city planning or music but of stripping these crafts down to their barest essentials of stimulus and response, turning up the volume and cashing in.

The reaction of a lot of intelligent, caring people, who are often creative themselves and who may be deeply concerned about the future of human endeavors, is rage. And I sympathize with this. It's frustrating to see such self-evident garbage enjoy wild success when so many carefully-produced works go unappreciated. It may feel like society is going straight down the drain. Despair if you want. All I can say is that things are probably not getting any worse than they have been. Silly, meaningless entertainment has most likely been dominant for most people throughout most of history. Good art is probably not going away any time soon, even if it's only ever a minority of people who are interested. Of course, maybe you know this, and are not concerned with anything more than distancing yourself from the tastes of ordinary people, in which case, quit it.

Here's the thing. If you're not dead-set on despairing over this stuff, you might consider embracing it. Go to McDonald's sometime. Not often, or you might die, but you can go and get some french fries. They will taste like nothing but salt and grease and you can tell me that you don't love them but frankly I won't believe you because your ancestors starved to death on the savannah to make sure that salt and grease would be forever delicious. Go to a club, have a few drinks and listen to Britney. You can probably avoid shaking your butt if you try real hard, but why try? Let the woman do what she does. If you don't like Dan Brown's stupid novels, that's fine. Some of us think they're fun, even if they're useless tripe. Take a deep breath; they're certainly not worth getting upset about when there's mystery and adventure to be had.

***

Ok, why am I defending Dan Brown (thirteen) in a blog that so far has been about a trip to Africa? I am doing this because I am going to die.

Here's what happened:

I was sitting in my room talking to Pearl's sister when she noticed my copy of The Da Vinci Code on the bed.

'What's that book about?' she asked.

Oh, you sweet devoutly religious girl. 'It's a murder mystery,' I said.

'I wish you would finish it. I would like to read it,' she said. Okay, I thought, she wants to borrow a book. Let's find her one that's a little less blasphemous. I saw Life of Pi beside the chair, which was perfect. Good entertaining story, pro-religious message. I handed it to her and she glanced at the cover, seeming somehow completely unenticed by the idea of a little boy in a lifeboat with a tiger.

'Life of Pee.' she said, before picking up The Da Vinci Code again. 'You know, I think this first one looks better.'

Sigh. 'Well, I actually finished it a few days ago. I was reading it for the second time,' I said. (Shut up. I am not ashamed.) 'Would you like to borrow it?'

'Thank you.' She put the book in her purse.

You know, the fact that I don't go to church is shocking enough for most people here. Now I've given someone a book that discusses murder, goddess worship, bloody self-flagellation, the crimes of the Church, and Satanic rituals. And that's just in the first thirty pages. It's not completely impossible that I will end up being burned at the stake for this. And I feel like if I'm going to die for something, it ought to at least be something I have a stated opinion about.

Dan Brown, you may have cost me dearly. And you're not even a good writer.

Posts Too Long.

Sorry. Will be briefer.

Malarkey

A little before 4am, the muezzin begins sounding the call to prayer and all across Adabraka dutiful Muslims begin their focused worship. In my hotel room, I am on my knees, in a low bow. However, I am not a Muslim, and my head points West, away from Mecca. Instead, I am hunched over the toilet, vomiting.

'Allahu akbar' the muezzin sings.

'Oh god' I groan, as I double over again.

* * *

This was my second trip to Accra in a week. I had come the previous Friday to sort out a problem with my student visa for the UK. I left Keta around 3am so I could make the 3-hour trip, find some breakfast, and be at the British High Commission when it opened. Unfortunately, once I arrived I learned that what I wanted to do counted as an inquiry, and inquiries could not be made on a Friday. Inquiry days were Mondays and Thursdays (between 7:30 and 11:30), so I would have to come back on Monday. I went back to Keta that evening. I was feeling tired, as one would expect after so little sleep and so much pointless travel, and anyway I had a headache so I went to bed early.

Saturday morning I woke up to find that the headache had spread to the rest of my body, which was also drenched in sweat. I noticed that my room was extremely hot. I also noticed that my room was extremely cold.

Plan A was to stay in bed for the rest of my life, and it was a pretty appealing plan. I was still leaning heavily toward it even after the woman who brought in my breakfast advised me to go to the hospital; however, as kind of an afterthought I did pull out my Lonely Planet, open the travel health section, and flip to M. This is where I learned that 'Anyone who gets a fever in a malarial area should assume infection until a blood test proves negative, even if you have been taking antimalarial medication.' The next sentence included the charming phrase 'reduced consciousness and coma.' Also, 'death.' So that was pretty motivating, but on the other hand, going to the hospital meant that I was going to have to get out of bed and stand upright and put on pants, so the decision was not as clear-cut as it may seem. After deliberating for a while, I eventually convinced myself that of all the reasons not to go to the hospital, 'I'm too sick' is probably the dumbest. So off to the hospital I went, which was probably a good move because shortly after I got there everything started going dark and wobbly and hurrngh-I-think-I'm-gonna-no-wait-false-alarm-but-can-I-just-sit-here-for-a-minute, and then I was rolled off to the wards in a wheelchair.

I have been pretty fortunate, health-wise, my whole life, and this was actually the first time I have ever been admitted to a hospital. Well, except for being born. And I don't even know if that counts as being admitted, though I certainly was discharged.

(Rimshot.)

The nice thing about doing research on maternal health was that people at the hospital knew me. Just after I was admitted, word somehow made it to my contact at the Ministry of Health. He phoned up the head midwife, who came and made sure I had everything I needed. She moved me to a private room, which was very welcome, and she brought me a mosquito net, which seemed a little like closing the barn door after the horses had escaped on motorcycles to Switzerland but was nonetheless appreciated. Also, she bought me lunch. Kindness beyond what is reasonable.

After lunch a nurse came in.

'Do you like injections?' she asked?

I looked in her face for signs she was joking. She had to be joking, right? Yeah, she was joking. She was acknowledging that the treatment was going to be a little unpleasant, but hey, what can you do right? 'Not especially,' I said. 'But they're fine.'

The nurse looked worried. 'You don't? You don't like injections? Wait here.' She walked out of the room.

'Wait!' I called after her. 'Injections are fine!' She didn't stop. What answer had she been expecting? 'Injections? Yeah, I friggin' love 'em! Sometimes I get a few friends together and we all inject each other with grape juice just for yuks. No better way to spend a Saturday, am I right?'

Injection Nurse came in a few minutes later with another nurse.

'He doesn't like injections,' said Injection Nurse.

'Injections are fine,' I said.

They did give me an injection of -- well, something. And then they hooked me up to an IV drip of antibiotics followed by sugar, and I started to feel like a human being again and suddenly it occurred to me that I was in the hospital.

'So,' I asked, as politely as possible, 'do you know, are they going to do a blood test, or-- I mean, what am I waiting for, I guess?'

The nurse kind of raised her eyebrow and chuckled. 'Oh, so you want to go home, eh?'

Huh. This was unnerving. 'Well-- well, yes. If I can. Do you know when that might be?'

At this point she openly laughed. 'Oh, get comfortable. You will not go home today.'

She left.

By the evening, I was disconnected from the IV line and feeling better. Physically better at least. Because it was at about this point that boredom began to set in. Having thought I was coming into the hospital for a quick blood test and to maybe collect some pills, I hadn't brought anything with me to pass the hours. The hospital doesn't serve food, so Pearl had to bring me meals from the compound, and I managed to get her to bring me a few other things as well -- change of clothes, toothbrush, phone, and (oh thank God) a book.

I'm actually not much of a reader in normal life, as I tend to get distracted by the internet and TV and talking to people and beer. This is why it's taken me over a year to read Tristram Shandy, and before that I spent almost as long reading Swann's Way. However, in the weeks since my arrival, I hadn't had regular access to any of my distractions, and so I had finished Tristram, started it over at the beginning, and finished it again. What Pearl brought me was a copy of Eats, Shoots, & Leaves I had found in a bookstore in Accra. Unfortunately, it was pretty light reading, and within a few hours I had finished it, started it over at the beginning, and finished it again.

Before I went to sleep, the doctor stopped in with Injection Nurse to check on me. 'How are we feeling?' he asked.

'He doesn't like injections,' said Injection Nurse.

'Injections are fine,' I said.

I told him I was feeling much better and I asked him if I would be able to leave the next day, which was Sunday.

'It's that I have to be in Accra early Monday morning,' I explained. 'It's a visa thing.' This was of course true, but I was also being strategic. It was a way of saying 'Now normally I wouldn't be a troublemaker. It's certainly not that I'm a big baby who just wants to go home to his own bed because hospitals are scary, evil places that smell like chemicals and sick people. No, far from it; in fact, I am relaxed and ready to accept whatever your medical judgment deems best for me. It's just -- well, you know how bureaucracy is. I'm afraid it's out of my hands. SO GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE.' Without actually saying any of that.

'I see,' the doctor said calmly. 'I'll have a word with the staff. We'll see what we can do.'

Feeling pretty good about these words of hope, I flipped off the light, tucked the edges of my mosquito net under the mattress, and went to sleep.

* * *

The next day, with nothing to read, I discovered a new hobby: pacing around my room like a tiger in the zoo. Quite a lot like that, actually, because two walls of the room had windows onto the outside corridors, and people passing by would look in to see the strange, pale, agitated creature that had somehow become trapped in the hospital. I started imagining a little placard for myself outside.

YAVU (Homo sapiens albus). Young male, North American variety. Native to urban environments. Omnivorous when pressed, but in the wild subsists largely on grilled cheese sandwiches when available. While quite good-tempered in its native habitat, it becomes threatened and confused without reliable internet access. Highly vulnerable to malaria; reacts poorly to captivity in confined spaces.

Two men came in to check my vitals and seemed startled to find me out of bed and prowling. After they took my blood pressure, one of them told me I was in the normal range.

'And the temperature? Is there any fever left?' I asked. I really was feeling better, but also I was covertly gathering information I would use to argue for my release.

'No fever. For sure they will discharge you tomorrow.'

Not good. 'I was hoping today,' I said. 'I really need to be in Accra early tomorrow morning for a visa thing...'

'Oh, ok,' he said. 'I will tell them.'

After a few more minutes of tigerpace, a new doctor came in with a few of the nurses I had already met. ('He doesn't like injections, Doctor.' 'Injections are fine'). He spoke to me for a few minutes, did a quick examination, and announced that I seemed to be healthy and would be able to leave the following day as planned.

'Doctor,' I said calmly, trying extra hard not to be **that patient. 'If it's medically necessary for me to stay, I understand. However, if it's at all possible to discharge me today, I really need to be in Accra early tomorrow morning.'

It wasn't possible. And I get that. They needed to finish out the full course of IV antibiotics. Fine. Frustrating, but legitimate and not anybody's fault. And anyway the doctor assured me that they would finish first thing in the morning and discharge me with enough time -- barely -- to make it to the embassy.

I settled in for a pacing party. I had mixed feelings about being on display the way I was. On the one hand, privacy is important to me. On the other, so is having attention paid to me by young women in nurses' uniforms. There are benefits to being a curiosity.

Not that it did me a hell of a lot of good. Honestly, I don't really understand how anybody manages to flirt across cultural boundaries. How do you hold eye contact just half a moment too long when you don't know how long you're supposed to hold it in the first place? Because flirting, at least the way I do it, is the art of just barely hinting at a suggestion. It's showing affection that's maybe just the least perceptible shade past the edge of friendly, and then you escalate in tiny gradations if and while your behavior is reciprocated. The other party, of course, is welcome to jump over any of the intervening levels if she likes; otherwise, the process takes somewhere between a few months and the rest of your life. Settle in; I'll get there eventually. It is also extremely possible that I flirt this way because I am a coward.

'I like whites with blue eyes.'

I was startled out of my musings on the impossibility of flirting by a strikingly gorgeous woman giving me a ludicrously direct compliment. An awkward and racialized compliment, but unmistakably a compliment.

'You cannot tell your wife that you are here. She will worry.'

Well well well! Now we're getting somewhere, I thought. She's checking to see if I'm taken! None too subtle, hon, but no worries. I can work with this.

'I don't have a wife.'

'Oh, well your fiancee then.'

'No, I'm not engaged.'

'Really? Why? At your age?'

Well this seemed to be going south incredibly quickly. 'How old do you think I am?'

'Oh, I would say you are between thirty and...' she trailed off. SHE TRAILED OFF.

'I'm twenty-six.'

Her eyes widened. 'No.' She said. 'You look much, much older.'

'Oh.'

'Just-- your face. And your body build, everything.'

'Okay.'

Naturally, after this exchange I was feeling like a champ. This was to get worse when Pearl brought me my dinner. In chatting with her, I learned that Pearl also had malaria. Apparently she had spent the last few days untreated, because, well, the medicine knocks her out, and she had to bring me food in the hospital. She would start treatment after I was released.

She went home and I sat in my bed feeling like a big turd.

I was cheered up a little later by a visitor. A nice thing about being sick is that sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised by who turns out to care. Gilbert, who works at the internet cafe and with whom I had spoken only a few times, stopped into the room to say hello and ask how I was doing, and we chatted a while. He said he got malaria about twice a year.

When speaking to Ghanaians, I usually try to avoid overly-colloquial language because I'm never sure it'll be understood. But I decided in this case to risk it.

'Gilbert, malaria sucks,' I said.

'Big time,' he replied instantly.

* * *

I woke up Monday at around 6. As long as I was discharged by 8, I could still make it. I waited and waited. Nurses came in to check my vitals, which were still fine just like they were fine yesterday and can I go home now. I mentioned to them that I did need to be discharged quickly because I needed to be in Accra in a few hours. I was no longer all that concerned about being a bothersome patient. Finally somebody came and hooked up the last IV of cipro and I watched it drip, drip, drip into the chamber. It finished. It was just a minute or two after 8. And I would be able to leave as soon as they came to do my blood test.

Wait, what? Oh right. So it turned out that the lab isn't open on Sundays, and it is barely open on Saturdays. So they couldn't actually test before to see if I had malaria. They had treated it as malaria, and I had gotten better, and those two things were either connected or they weren't. But they still needed to the blood test to confirm. They would come by to draw my specimen shortly.

I waited and waited, and the hours passed and hope was lost and my Monday plan became definitely a Thursday plan. By lunchtime I was serene. I would be discharged eventually and I would make it to Accra at some point within the next few days and I would make my inquiry on Thursday instead of Monday and if that meant that there was no longer time to sort out my visa before my flight, well-- let's worry about that later. Anyway, surely they wouldn't give me any trouble at the border once I explained that any failure to have my documents in order was due to malaria.

'Ah, the old Nigerian shivers! Well that's quite all right, old bean,' I imagined the border guard chuckling through his mustache. 'I had a bout of the stuff myself whilst serving his majesty in Rhodesia.' Oh, and also, in my mind the guard is like a hundred and fifty years old apparently.

'Dreadful business,' he would mutter, placing his pipe back in his mouth and polishing his monocle. 'Anyway, welcome back to Merry Olde. Pip pip!'

Just as I was getting comfortable with this image, a crowd of orderlies and nurses burst through my door. 'They say you need to leave right away because you have to go to Accra today today!'

I blinked. It seemed as though the dozen or so people who I had told about the visa issue over the past few days had all been walking to the administrator's office incredibly slowly, and had all arrived there at the same moment early Monday afternoon to bang on the door and demand my release. Suddenly, everyone felt that it was very urgent for me to leave -- except me, because of course it was several hours too late. But I did want to go home, so why not? I played along, checked myself out, and tasted sweet freedom.

* * *

Being able to actually make the trip to Accra the next day felt like an incredible luxury. I had talked up this trip for days. I had begged for it. And now I was actually there! A friend was passing through town after her own fieldwork in Liberia, so I got to spend time with her. It's amazing how much one can miss the ability to use sarcasm trusting one won't be taken at face value. These little vitally important cultural understandings. On top of that, I felt completely healthy, I didn't have a single tube connected to me, and I was taking enough antibiotics that I was sure I would never get sick again.

'Go ahead,' I said, chatting with someone back home from an internet cafe. 'Name any item in Accra and I'll lick it and be fine.'

Later that day, I got food poisoning.

* * *

By the time I made it to the British High Commission I'm sure I was visibly green. I checked in and waited with a huge visa-seeking crowd for an hour, straining to hear my name. When I was called, I approached the counter, where a tired-looking, middle-aged English woman took my forms and looked them over.

'And when is your flight?' she asks.

'The 27th.'

She stopped for a moment. 'You know,' she said, obviously annoyed, 'there's only just barely enough time to process this before you leave. Why on earth did you wait until the very last minute?'

Sadly, it was a rhetorical question, and in any case she had neither a pipe nor a monocle -- just a stamp and a long line of too many people asking her for help. Now wasn't the time. I muttered an apology, she stamped my forms, and she sent me on to the next desk. I am sorry to have irritated her. I can only hope she reads my blog.

UPDATE: Blood tests found no evidence of malaria. What actually happened will be an exciting mystery forever.

'Hey, can you take my picture with the sick white person? Thaaaaanks!'

Globalization and its Disorients

I spend a lot of time confused lately, and that's because I grew up in one culture, and I am now a visitor in a very different culture, so there's a constant disconnect between reality and my expectations. At least, that's the simple explanation, and it's true, but it's only part of the reason. It's easy to think of cultures as these distinct and monolithic entities that stand in some kind of contrast to one another, but at the same time, cultures also kind of smoosh up against each other and features are constantly leaking form one into another, being imported and filtered, repackaged and repurposed, mixed up and made weird. And a lot of the really jarring moments arise more from the strangeness of those combinations than just from the relative difference between one way of life and another.

Now, I don't get a lot of opportunities to watch Ghanaian TV, but when I get them I take full advantage. In my first ten days in the country, I had a TV in my hotel room in Accra and I got completely drawn in by the African soap operas. My very favorite is a period drama called Pendulum. Oh, how I love Pendulum. The theme song, which plays (in its entirety!) during every break between scenes, informs the audience that the show takes place 'before the intervention of the white man,' when 'our forefathers had the solutions to their problems.' The idea, I guess, is to give Africans a greater sense of pride in their heritage and encourage them to look for the wisdom in their own traditions and values. Which is admirable.

Admirable, but not good television.

Based on what I saw of the show, what I suspect happened is that TV executives realized pretty quickly that nobody wants to watch a soap opera about people who already have the solutions to their problems. So, directly counter to its stated purpose, Pendulum seems instead to focus on sensationalistic plotlines about the backwardness of traditional society. Where Western soaps might feature an evil twin or a faked death, Pendulum will have a girlfriend who can no longer stay with her boyfriend after she is told that his father buried her father alive. Now that's good television.

'What!' shouts the boyfriend. 'I must find out if this is true.'

'Yes. I must find out. If this is true.'

He says this in English, though, which makes practical sense because it's the lingua franca, but it also kind of detracts from the believability of the premise. It doesn't help that the production values are shoddy; looking at low-quality digital video and trying to forget that there's a camera on the set is like looking through a dirty window and trying not to notice the glass. So instead of immersing yourself in some imagined faraway past, you become extra aware that these people are actors wearing silly costumes sitting in mock-traditional huts and speaking a European language. Which is a fantastically odd thing to be able to watch on TV.

Of course, they also broadcast a lot of American movies, and it is from a late night showing of Snakes on a Plane that I pick up another surprising feature of Ghanaian television, which is that it's ok to show topless women but it's not okay to show somebody taking the Lord's name in vain. In the US, I've occasionally seen edited-for-TV movies that will throw a bleep into '*** damn it' but here you apparently can't even say 'Oh my ***.' Presumably you're allowed to type it on the internet, but I'll use the asterisks just to be on the safe side.

That a society could be so uptight about sacrilege but so blase about nudity seemed totally inconsistent to me until I got out to the countryside. I need to start by clarifying that my little corner of Africa does not look very much like a National Geographic special. People live in brick houses, they talk on cellphones, they drive cars, and they wear jeans. For the most part. But occasionally, you will see somebody in traditional dress, and you know, it's a hot climate so you get people in their traditional clothing and odds are you're gonna see a boob or two (in my experience, usually two). Of course, young people tend to be more Westernized, so usually the ones who go around topless are elderly women who, one gathers, have spent all their lives happily un-brassiered.

Now, of course I am a sophisticated and culturally sensitive traveler who is well aware that body taboos are arbitrary and the appropriateness of clothing can only be evaluated within its own context and anyway I'm a guest here so there's no excuse for being judgmental. Having said all that, I will also say this: yucky.

But every once in a while you do see a younger woman dressed in this way, especially those that belong to certain religious groups that have ceremonial clothing standards. While I am meeting with someone at the Municipal Health Directorate to discuss a patient survey I've been working on, one such woman comes into the office. I step aside and the two of them converse for a while in Ewe. Which incidentally is pronounced Eh-vey and has nothing to do with sheep.

Ghana is a former British colony, so conversations in Ewe sound a lot like dialogue in a Bollywood movie, where English words and phrases are thrown in here and there, so usually I can understand just the barest gist of what's going on. In this case, what I hear is 'Zzzz zzzzz zz zzz zzzz family planning zzz zz zzzzz zz Norplant zzzz.' Because this woman, on whom shoes would have looked weird and anachronistic, has been enjoying the fruits of modern contraceptive science for several years and is now coming in to have her implant removed. And it is at about this point that I start to wonder if anything will ever surprise me again after this summer.

On my way out I pass through reception, where a radio is playing country music. A singer with a Western drawl is going on about homesickness.

Thank God for the radio
When I'm on the road
When I'm far away from home
Feelin' blue

Good one, universe. But it's maybe a bit contrived, don't you think?

Learning Small Small

This is a geek post. If you don't want to read some pretty nerdy content (seriously, verb conjugation figures fairly prominently in this), then instead you can go to www.google.com, type the word 'fart,' and click the search button. You can come back here when you're done.

I'll give you a minute to make up your mind.

Now, for those of you still here, I'd like to begin today with a brief discussion of the Romans (hey, you were warned). So, the Romans didn't write spaces between words. This is, of course, because the Romans were stupid. I mean really, other than rule of law, and the aqueducts...

That last part was a Monty Python reference. Are you sure you're in the right group?

Anyway, I was sitting under a tree today reading Tristram Shandy and a man approached me. He leaned down to me and said:

'Agbeleklem'

I flashed him my signature look (confused, apologetic stare), and he pointed at my book. 'Gbele.' he said. Then he pointed at his eyes. 'Klem.' Then he walked away.

And I sat there for a minute, sort of puzzled, and then somewhere in my brain two neurons gave each other a little fist bump and I went 'Ohhhhhhhhhh!'

'Agbeleklem' is 'A gbele klem' and that means that suddenly, after three weeks here, *all of the phrases I've learned are made of words.* I spent the next half hour rifling through my notebooks for Ewe phrases and rewriting them with spaces. 'Come back soon' isn't 'Nagbokaba;' it's 'Na gbo kaba,' with 'gbo' meaning 'return' as in 'Magbo,' which is actually 'Ma gbo,' 'I'm back.'

THIS IS AMAZING!

'See you tomorrow' isn't 'Etcho miadogu,' it's 'Etso mia dogo,' 'Tomorrow we meet.' Because 'dogo' is meet. And 'mia' is we!

Ma gbo, I'm back, a gbo, you're back, e gbo, he/she is back, mia gbo, we're back!

'Mie gbo,' Dickson corrects me.

Wait, what?

'Well, we came back together. Mia is for things that we each did individually, mie is for things we did as a group. So if we leave together from somewhere, it's "Mie dzo," but if we leave and go our separate ways, it's "Mia dzo."

'OH YEAH dzo like how goodbye is "Ma dzo!" so that means "I'm leaving!"' I say, crossing out 'Majoo' in my notes. Wait. I have it written down that 'dzo' means 'to fly.' I have this written down because earlier I was asking about the high school motto, 'Dzo lali,' which means 'Fly now' (as in 'or never').

'No, "fly" is "dzo." This is "dzo."' He repeats the two words for me so I can hear the difference, but all I can think is that he sounds sort of unsure about the second one but really definitive about the first one.

And then I realize that Ewe has tones.

(Shit.)

And that's bad enough, but then he starts explaining how the together/individually distinction somehow also applies to the first person *singular* pronoun, and he tries to clarify this with some example about eating an orange, but I am really not having an easy time seeing which of my actions are things I am doing *with* myself and which are things I am doing as an individual. If that is even the distinction, which it probably isn't.

My hosts see me struggling and comfort me. 'You will learn small small before you go,' they say. 'Congratulations! You are trying!' It's totally sincere and not at all condescending, which I think you have to be Ghanaian to pull off.

So, in the end, I had about an hour of feeling like I suddenly was really getting the hang of this Ewe stuff, followed by a heartbreaking realization that languages are hard, and that in all likelihood, every time I've left a room for the past three weeks, I've been telling people that I'm flying.

On the upside, I now know that if you mispronounce the high school motto, it means 'LEAVE RIGHT NOW.' I've got to remember to ask someone whether that's as hilarious to a native speaker as it is to me.

Delightful.

Hey, So, How About This Weather?

Yesterday I woke up at 4am. I've been doing this a lot, and I started to wonder what's wrong with my sleep cycle that I keep waking up in the middle of the night. And then I remembered that I go to bed at about 8pm every night. So actually that's probably why.

After lying in bed staring at the ceiling for a little while, I heard raindrops pinging into the roof. Then it started raining a little harder, and then a minute later it was, as they say, pissing it down, coming down in sheets, straight up somebody ticked off Poseidon and we're all about to be washed out to sea kind of weather. This lasted for half an hour, then it stopped. The compound was flooded and thousands of tiny black almond-sized frogs had come out from wherever tiny black almond-sized frogs stay when they are waiting for it to rain and were jumping around having the time of their lives.

I was a little surprised by this whole series of events, because I had thought this was the dry season. I mentioned this to someone and was told that, no, the rainy season ended in June but the dry season won't start until October and this is an entirely different season known as 'not the dry season.'

Stupid, stupid equator.

Upgraded!

So I am no longer merely Yavu.

Some of the kids have started calling me 'Yavu Yavu Gaibo.'

I'm not totally clear on the translation, but I think basically it's 'Whitey Whitey Beardface.'

I mean... I can't argue that it's not accurate.

Specifically, these kids.

Earning My Gold Stars

The way to eat most soups and stews here is to dip a ball of dough into it. Depending on the kind of dough (and the local language where you are), this is called akple, banku, fufu, kenke, or any of a dozen other things I am useless at keeping straight. It is always served with a little basin of water, and the idea is that you wash your hands in the basin, pull off a piece of dough, dredge it through your food, and eat it.

One of my first times eating akple (at least, I think it was akple), I pulled off a hotter-than-expected piece of fresh dough and burned my fingers. Fred, who I was eating with, saw this happening and said 'Oooh, quick, put your fingers in the water.'

This was a sensible solution, and I feel kind of silly for not having come up with it myself. At home, if I ate a piece of food that was too hot, I would reach for my drink without thinking about it. But I remember this happening when I was a little kid, and having to have my mother tell me 'Oooh, quick take a drink take a drink take a drink.'

This is what fieldwork feels like a lot of the time. It's a reversion to childhood, where you have to be explicitly taught the things that any reasonably competent adult knows instinctively. Blunders are patiently corrected. Small triumphs, like doing my laundry or knowing the proper way to shake hands, feel like major accomplishments, and are basically treated as such by others. 'Very good, Yavu!' they seem to almost be saying. 'You did that all by yourself?' And then I squeal with delight and trip over my shoelace.

I should say that this is to the enormous credit of my host communities, both here and in Bolivia. If I hadn't had the good fortune both times to stumble upon people willing to adopt a fully-grown special needs child, by now I probably would have accidentally set myself on fire or shot my eye out or something.

On Being Famous

It took me about this long to put together that the word I thought meant 'hello' actually means 'white man.'

Every day here, when I leave my compound and walk the 15 minutes or so to the district hospital, or the 20 minutes or so to the internet cafe, or wherever, I am stopped at least a few times by people calling 'Yavu! Yavu!' I smile, and I wave, and sometimes we chat a little and I try to speak some Ewe and they laugh at me. This was a much more idyllic scene before I realized they were SHOUTING RACIAL EPITHETS AT ME. The fact that this is done in a consistently friendly manner is, in its own way, all the more unsettling.

Also, apparently the women who live in the compound have nicknamed me 'bread.'

So here I am, a genuine curiosity of the first order and a local celebrity. Walking down the street to constant cries of 'hey whitey!' I always knew someday I would be famous. I had... well, I had just hoped it would have more to do with the content of my character, I guess.

Today an old woman with no teeth told me 'White man, I will marry you.' What can you say to that? You're all invited to the wedding.

The Importance of Being Perfect

On my first day back in Keta, Perfect introduced me to Success.

Wait. Let me explain.

The British give Americans a hard time for being overly earnest, but man. We have nothing on the Ghanaians. In addition to their local names (Korshie, Gobah, Kofi, etc. depending on what day of the week they were born), everybody has an English name, some of which are actual English names but a lot of which are just English words being used as names. A lot of them also have religious overtones. So you'll meet people named Perfect, or Success, or Innocent, or any of these other things that we would never use as a name because we believe in irony and we believe in jinxes and we know that when our children grow up to be flawed, underachieving or guilty then having a name that proclaims the opposite is just going to invite mean jokes.

While the names given to children might display a simple, heartfelt religious devotion, the names given to businesses are pious beyond any consideration for relevance. For some reason this is especially true for hairdressers, which all have names like God's Grace Barbershop or All Things From Jesus Hairstyles or Thy Will Be Done Beauty Saloon.

That last one is not a typo, and it's not just one place. There is a whole group of hairdressing establishments here that advertise themselves as Beauty Saloons. Which is amazingly great. Because, firstly, once it's pointed out, salon and saloon are totally the same word. Or once were, certainly. Plus, it suggests any number of bad jokes about beer goggles. 'My wife looks good when she's been to the salon, but she looks better when I've been to the saloon.' That sort of thing.

Here's the rule: Anything that combines etymology, booze and jokes gets an automatic thumbs up.

My Weekend With The Geeks and the English

After Monday's double scoop of clusterfudge ice cream (extra nuts), the rest of the week's research time was spent interviewing hospital staff, which was entirely successful and therefore not very interesting to write about. So I won't bother.

I spent the weekend in Accra, kind of because MakerFaire Africa was in town but kind of because I really wanted to get out of the village for a few days. Having said that, MakerFaire! What a strange and surreal thing. For those who don't know about it, MakerFaire is sort of a Bay Area institution in which weirdo hobbyists get together to show off all their DIY projects. In San Mateo it's a kind of 'hey look at this bike I made out of hemp and an old Nintendo' atmosphere but it's an entirely different beast in the developing world where small-scale innovation could actually be Kind of a Big Deal. I made a few good contacts, basked in the air conditioning and free wifi, and fell a little bit in love with this girl I met. This was probably just because I hadn't spoken to a white person or an American in two weeks, and she was both so it seemed like we had *an incredible amount in common.* Anyway I'll never see her again so let's assume she was a lesbian.

The other surreal event of the trip was stumbling into an English pub (well, walking in, stumbling out). This was not an Irish pub, which usually seems to be the only kind that gets widely exported, but an actual, honest-to-god bangers-and-mash carlsberg-by-the-can watch-the-manchester-city-match have-a-portion-of-chips-and-rest-a-while English pub full of drunken English expats.

Mind you, they didn't have pints. Right. No pint glasses at all. Other than that I have no complaints. And I guess you've got to leave something out or what would be the point of actually going to England? I'll be there in under seven weeks now.

Weird.

A Place To Put Such Things.

Ok, you bastards, you got me. After years spent adamantly resisting any urge to dip my toe into the blogosphere, I've decided to shut my eyes, clench my fists and jump bodily into the … well, if not the 21st century, at least the mid-1990s. I have found myself, not for the first time, in a situation where I just keep thinking 'you know, this would really be a blog entry if I had anywhere to put such things.' So here I am, finally expending the activation energy to begin what will, I hope, become a self-sustaining process. At this rate, I should be actively using Twitter by 2016.

So. Here is the situation in which I find myself. I am in Ghana! Fieldwork. Research. The important features of this will become clear if and when they become interesting. The relevant facts for the time being are: I have been here for three weeks, I have another six to go, and also this: in previous experience, I hate fieldwork. Hate. It.

You guys! This is the dramatic tension! What is this trip going to be like? Is it going to be scary and depressing and painful like getting punched in the face by your mom? Or is it going to be a fantastical adventure in faraway lands like joining the crew of a pirate ship with your mom? There's only one immediately obvious way for you to find out.

(By the way, Mom, I do not mean to accuse you of assault, much less of leading a secret life of swashbuckling and thievery on the high seas. Thanks for reading my blog!)

I Should Get You Caught Up.

I arrived in Ghana on Sunday the 26th of July, and my first 11 days in the country were spent in Accra at the Hotel President (not as luxurious as it sounds) making contacts, watching African TV and getting pretty good at spider solitaire. I wrote an entry about this at devstuds.blogspot.com, the group fieldwork blog for Development Studies at Oxford. Here is what I wrote to my classmates:

So, I am officially on day 3 in real live honest-to-god actual Ghana. I've been spending my time so far dealing with what most of you are dealing with - finding a place to sleep, figuring out how to change money on a Sunday, trying to understand the rules of haggling and tipping, and taking utterly terrifying taxi rides - and later this week I have my first Ministry of Health meeting which in theory will be the first step toward my running a bunch of focus groups next week in a village way off to the east. By myself. Which I still find hilarious.

When I was in JFK airport catching my connecting flight to Accra, I spoke on the phone to a friend who just (quite to her own surprise) found herself accepted to business school. She'll be starting in autumn. "I feel like the universe really called my bluff on this one," she said.

Indeed.

After getting some sleep on my flight, I woke up and watched the path of the plane on my little display screen until landing, and any encroaching sense of panic I had was mitigated by looking at that map and seeing how I was flying just over the heads of Kerrie and Ganle and stopping just short of Georgie and a bit south of Chloe, and this is not to get all misty-eyed or anything; it is more to point and laugh and say ha! you suckers are all in the same boat with me!

Best of luck and keep up the pokerface
Ryan

Update: Nothing has changed. I am still bluffing. However after Accra I traveled to the municipality of Keta, where I will be doing the bulk of my actual fieldwork at the district hospital in a town called, charmingly enough, Dzelukope. Jel-OO-ko-FWAY. Yep!

Keta Day 1 – August 6.

It is at certain moments in my life, like the one in which I am offered a shot of gin in the backyard of an Ewe chief at 9 in the morning, that I find myself thinking 'Well, I don't know what I expected my life to be like, but it wasn't this.'

'African wakeup,' the chief says to me, grinning.

In fairness, it's not a full shot that they give me. They're taking full shots themselves, but out of deference, I guess, for my presumed limited ability to drink hard liquor before breakfast, what they give me is really just a sip, but I still manage to kind of gag on it and end up with gin in my lungs. So even when I am presumed incompetent, I exceed expectations.

I am staying in a kind of semidetached bungalow on a compound owned by Fred, the contact in Keta I got from Alex, the contact at the Ministry of Health I got from Dennis, the contact at the NGO I got from Kataneh, the contact at my old job. I am always kind of amazed by how networking works. The compound was completely flooded by a heavier than usual rainy season. The rains stopped the day before Barack Obama arrived in the country last month. Which seems about right.

Because of the flooding, the compound has had to be completely repainted and refurbished. I try to help the men move furniture, and when it quickly becomes apparent that I'm getting in the way, I help the children move buckets of sand instead. Six years ago in Mizque, Bolivia, I helped out on a farm for about ten seconds before the men decided it would be better for me to go inside and help the women and children make biscuits. When there is masculine physical labor to be done, I seem to pretty often fall into the category of 'women/children/exempt' without meaning to. I would like to blame this on the clueless foreigner thing, but let's be honest, it happens at home too.

I learned today that because I was born on a Sunday, my name is Korshie. I start introducing myself as such, consistently to howls of laughter. This is what anthropologists call 'building rapport,' and in my case seems to usually involve letting people laugh at me.

Keta Day 2 – August 7.

Went to the hospital today and got the full tour. The hospital administrator and I had a talk about data collection methodology that made me feel like this is going to work out just fine. I am also learning a few words of Ewe – not enough to be useful for communication, but enough to be useful for breeding goodwill.

There are moments when I feel isolated and stir-crazy and when I wish there weren't ants and sand on every surface of everything I own, but at these moments I tell myself 'Unclench, jerk. You're having an adventure.' And that seems to usually sort it out.

Keta Day 3 – August 8

I find myself saying 'mm' a lot in response to what people say to me. It's kind of like an 'oh' and kind of like a 'yes' without a lot of yes in it. It seems like a safe thing to say.

I went to the beach today and almost lost a sandal, but it washed back on shore a minute later. I watched crabs running around and helped some fishermen push their boat into the water. Into the Gulf of Guinea.

Not bad, Ghana. Not bad.

Keta Day 4 – August 9

Dear Ewe villagers: If you thought it was funny when I told you my name was Korshie, just wait until I show up at church in a chiefly kente shirt. Pure comedy gold, apparently.

Looking mildly uncomfortable to have my photo taken after not having seen a mirror in a week.

Fred asked the preacher (umm... Presbyter? Pastor? Vicar?) to do part of the sermon in English for my benefit, but he decided it would be better to pull me outside and witness to me directly while the congregation sang hymns. So we sat in white plastic chairs under a tree and he asked me if I believed that Jesus came down from heaven to save us all. ('The Jews don't believe,' he explained to me). The next time somebody asks me this question, I've got to remember to lie. Instead I told him I don't know. Well I don't! I was diplomatic enough not to add 'but I think probably he didn't.' Still, the preacher was pretty dissatisfied with my answer and now he wants to come see me at the hospital to discuss the matter further. Which is neat.

Keta Day 5 - August 10. Day 1 of Data Collection Rhymes With Blustertruck.

So I was reading H. Russell Bernard's Research Methods in Anthropology yesterday (which is as useful for making last-minute changes to your research plan as it is for killing cockroaches, which is very), and he says you should always ALWAYS plan to pretest your questionnaires because there is inevitably going to be something stupid about them that you didn't realize would screw everything up. So I thought, well, I think this questionnaire will be fine, but we'll see how it goes today and maybe make some changes if any issues come up. And I used it today and I didn't make any changes afterward. I didn't make any changes because the questionnaire is completely irreparably useless from beginning to end.

Basically, things get off to a bad start when I can't for the life of me convince the nurses that what I want is to survey every fourth patient who comes in. Despite repeated explanations, the nurse helping me (we will call her 'Clementine') consistently sends in each and every patient because she is either trying to be helpful or just trying to screw up my day so that I leave and she doesn't have to help me anymore. The latter would be kind of excusable, because she's actually the night nurse, and the staff shortage means that at 10am she's still here to ruin my survey.

But the sampling problems are kind of immaterial because it turns out that of all the pregnant women coming in for antenatal, nobody speaks English and most are also illiterate. I had actually anticipated this, asked about it, and been assured that it was not the case, but so it goes. The fact is I don't have an Ewe version of the survey so Clementine has to translate for me on the fly, and I have no idea what she is saying to the patients but she is definitely conversing more than necessary. At one point I can tell she is arguing with a patient and making her change her answer. Awesome, Clem. If this wasn't bad enough, there's this moment about a half hour in:

Clementine and patient chatting in Ewe
Clementine: She says yes. She knows where to go.
Ryan: Wait. The question is does she have a PROBLEM knowing where to go.
Clementine: Oh. Right. So the answer is no.
Ryan: ...

How long had we been reversing the yeses and nos? No way to be sure. So... there goes the last shred of legitimacy in what was already some pretty unusable data. Making day one of data collection a complete

and unmitigated

failure.

These things happen. And I feel better after getting my first internet time in about a week and speaking to Alex at the Ministry of Health, who basically fixes everything and gives me some advice that will allow me to do some actual useful work with the rest of my week.

Sadly, I am running low on is reading material. After having spent over a year reading Tristram Shandy, I'm blowing through the remainder at a pretty breakneck pace. After that all that's left is the Lonely Planet guide to West Africa and a bunch of books that are no fun to read because they're relevant to my work.

Keta Day 6 – August 11.

I'm taking mefloquine to prevent malaria, and while I don't get the psychotic episodes or hallucinations that some people experience as side effects, I do get the weird vivid dreams. Last night I dreamed

a) that my dear friend Zoe, while in India, had started dating Ed Asner, the announcer on the Tonight Show, who was about 50 years her senior. Apparently they met while taking a Hindi class together. Please note that Ed Asner is real, but he is not the announcer of the Tonight Show. He is an entirely different famous old person. The announcer on the Tonight Show is somebody else. Probably Don Pardo.

b) that I was recording a song I had written, to which the first two lines were

Well I took a Train to Tulsa
Starry Oklahoma

This was sung roughly to the tune of 'Why Don't Women Like Me,' which like Ed Asner is real and not my invention. I don't know how the rest of my version went though because after the first two lines my alarm went off.

A few nights ago I dreamed that I had a cookie jar that made a sound like a rooster when you lifted the lid, and that this was THE KEY to sorting out all my research problems. Even while dreaming that one, I was thinking 'Oh come on. A rooster? I'm just dreaming this because of the stupid roosters outside my window.'

Well look, you're not caught up yet, but I think I'm abusing the conventions of the medium by making such a lengthy post. Which is high-falutin' for 'I'm tired of typing.' So I'll fill in the rest at a later time.