Random Ruminations

To be honest, nothing really fazes me here anymore – at least in the sense that the things once considered foreign are now becoming normal. Don’t get me wrong, everyday something bizarre and random will happen, but the sight of a naked man bathing in the median of the highway or turning a corner to be greeted by a little girl pooping in the grass does not even warrant a passing comment to whoever I may be with. Consequently, I’ve been finding it difficult to discern what exactly would be interesting to write home about. Nevertheless, for better or worse, here are a few things I’ve been ruminating about:

- When I was seven, I received the game Ants in your pants as a present. Ants in your pants was a hilarious and clever game that involved flicking plastic ants into a bucket shaped like a pair of overalls – genius! I don’t know if it was the colorful playing pieces or because my sister never would play other board games with me, but I just loved that game. Recently, I was at the beach when a platoon of ants found its way into my pants and I learned a valuable lesson. Ants in your pants is humorous, but ants in my pants is painful and awkward.

- Ghana has tainted my love of breasts. I consider myself a connoisseur of the chicken breast sandwich and eat them so often that my friends sometimes refer to me as chicken and chicken as Brian. I really don’t like when they do that. Chickens run wild here and I’ve witnessed enough chickens grazing in the same open sewers that people defecate in to consider becoming a vegetarian. How fowl is that? Furthermore, I’ve been in two different taxis that unsympathetically ran over a chicken – a cloud of feathers trailing behind us. I don’t know if it’s more disturbing that the driver never slows down as we pass a herd of animals on the road or that the road kill will be someone’s impromptu meal tonight. These experiences are really testing my loyalty for my beloved meat.

Ghana has also forced me to change my conception of the female breast – reduced from a delicate sexual force to a vending machine. Mothers just love to pull their boobies out of their shirt anytime and anywhere. I’ll be having a conversation with a woman and without hesitation or pause in the conversation she will scoop up a breast for her child and I have to focus so intensely on retaining eye contact than I can no longer maintain a coherent conversation and have to promptly run away. Working in a refuge for teenage pregnant street mothers I have bore witness to more breast feeding than any young man should have to endure. Remember that old show, Scared Straight, where they took juvenile delinquents into a prison and had Machete Mike and Pedophile Pete show them what prison is really like, deterring them from a life of crime and entertaining America all at the same time. Well, that’s kind of what it feels like when I find myself sitting in a room with a dozen young mothers and their crying infants and I promise myself over and over to practice safe sex. Furthermore, cramped in a tro-tro with a lactating woman dripping her homemade brew on my leg marks the absolute most uncomfortable I have ever felt.



- People will piss anywhere here. I’ll be talking with a friend and they’ll just stop and say, “I am going to relieve myself” and I’m like “dude, we’re sitting in traffic.”

- You never know what you’ll get with a Rasta Man. Some would love nothing more than to smoke you up and philosophize and some would love nothing more than to smoke you up and then steal your wallet. Rasta men always come across as outlandishly friendly and will invite you into conversation with a welcoming greeting that offers no conventional reply, such as “it’s nice to be nice”. You can have an entire conversation with a rasta man only to realize that the only thing they actually said was “Ya, Rasta mon” over and over and over again. The other day I was sitting in a tro-tro praying I would get to my destination before I was beaten. A Rasta man was preaching about Rasta to the man sitting next to him but really addressing the whole car. He spoke of the philosophies of the Rasta way of life [which are interesting] but then suddenly launched into a tirade against the evils of the white man. Being white, and a man, I squirmed in my seat and hoped he wasn’t a good public speaker. I was comforted a little by the fact that nobody really seems to take the Rasta men seriously here but he continued his rant about the white man still treating Africa like its their colony and I cringed because most of what he was saying had truth to it. Sitting unnoticed in the back of the tro-tro, when I got off for my stop he said. “oh my God, there was a white-man sitting here the whole time” and extended a friendly hand. He asked what I thought and I diplomatically told him everyone is entitled to their opinions and he agreed. Then he announced to the rest of the tro-tro that I was probably with the CIA and I nodded to confirm that indeed I was and told him that I’d be sure to keep watching him.

- When someone asks “are you afraid of me” I become afraid of them even if I wasn’t originally.

- I think sleeping when standing up is only possible in space and in Ghana. I don’t like to generalize, but all Ghanaians seem to posses the uncanny ability to fall asleep instantaneously, anytime and anywhere. People will lean on you and eventually rest their head on your shoulder to sleep on the tro-tro. In the workplace, it seems perfectly acceptable to take a nap at your desk. The heat has to be a factor but I think it is also learned at an early age. I can’t tell you how many children I’ve had to peel off the pavement at the nursery who unsuccessfully tried to make it to their mat before surrendering to the cement.

- The top four links displayed on the homepage of the internet café I frequent: Google, Yahoo, Ghanaweb, and US Visa. How crazy is that? The disparity between the incredible demand and the lack of supply for a visa entry is astounding and really makes me appreciate the opportunities that were afforded to me just by being born in a prosperous country.

- I hate it when you make eye contact with someone you know walking towards you but they are still hundreds of feet ahead of you and too far away to say anything. That doesn’t have anything to do specifically with Ghana, I just find those situations to be particularly awkward.



- I had to visit an office in Ada, a coastal town two hours east of Accra, for work. It was slightly unnerving when I realized I was the only one who wasn’t wearing a surgical mask. I clutched my kidney and hoped I didn’t inadvertently walk into a black market for organ donors. Boy was I was relieved to hear that a helpless endangered whale had washed up on the nearby beach and the masks were for the accompanying stench. Traveling back to Ada the next weekend, I was lucky enough to have been granted the opportunity to document the decomposition of a 15 foot whale. I learned two things from this experience: 1)Whatever job I eventually take will not justify complaint because it will be infinitely better than the responsibility of tearing apart a putrid beast whale with a chainsaw and ice picks and burying it in the nearby sand. 2) Rotting is not a graceful process. Feel free to cremate me.

- Some children, showing their excitement at seeing a foreigner will feverishly wave at you. If you try to outlast them in waving you will lose… and risk looking crazy.

- The equivalent to window shopping here is sitting on a tro-tro or along the side of a road and seeing what is on top of people’s heads. Anything that is less than 125 pounds will at some point be gracefully carried on someone’s head. Carrying items on your head is an amazingly efficient way to travel but sometimes it seems a little excessive. Today, I saw two women animatedly talking to each other flailing their arms about. Both had their hand purse balanced on top of their head. Anytime I attempt to carry things on my head people just smirk and say “my friend, let me carry that for you”. I just tell them nay nay because I have aspirations of fame for being the waiter at that restaurant that carries all the dishes on his head. Think of the tips!

- Walking is an acquired skill here. The stations are reduced to mud pits when it rains and the walkways are full of potholes and uneven terrain. Tripping is inevitable and falling into a sewer is a constant concern of mine. Ghanaian’s are just great walkers. I can only assume that walking through a bed of rocks, jumping over a pipeline, and crossing makeshift wooden bridges in heels with your groceries on your head is an incredible feat.

- It’s weird to see where all my used clothes that I have been donating since I was eight have ended up. I swear I saw someone wearing my ‘Walk with Israel in 94’ t-shirt. Just yesterday, I saw a vendor in the Makola market wearing a ‘not only am I perfect, I’m also Irish’ t-shirt. I found this hilarious and then overwhelmingly depressing.

- For a country that has a flag that resembles a stoplight (red, yellow, green striped), there is actually very little adherence to traffic laws.

- Last month, Jay-Z came to Accra as part of a 6-city tour of Africa under a UN and MTV sponsored campaign to preach access to safe water drinking in Africa. Jay-Z talked of bringing his music to his people who are not otherwise able to access it. You’d think he was talking about the general population but by charging the exorbitant fee of 600,000-1,000,000 cedis ($65-$110) per ticket whites, Lebanese, and the Ghanaian elite made up the demographics of the audience. Jay-Z is a dick. I think Reggie Rockstone, the God Father of Hip Life summed it up best when asked about the concert:
“African Americans romanticize Africa, you know. These are the big wigs, these ‘cats’ got money and they’re trying to act like there is nobody here. When they go to Europe they don’t charge that much plus they try to do ‘collabos’ with these European artistes. Is he saying that we don’t count and then he comes here and charges like five times the price? They will pin the over-pricing on the promoters but if people are getting pimped like that, Jay Z is the king of his castle and he could have made a statement about it so at least we know he is not about extorting people. Matter of fact he was supposed to be getting water for these same people who love his music. How the fuck do you turn around and over charge them. Motherfuker didn’t even take a picture with any of the artistes who opened for him…. Jay Z didn’t think we were important so he came in, made his money and that’s all that mattered to him.”

- I got a crappy haircut here and was a little self conscious until I realized that there is no such thing as a bad hair day in Ghana. This just has to be true because nobody seems to have any hair and my jew-fro, no matter its condition, is admired, if not just for the sake of novelty. Virtually every guy has the same haircut – a neatly buzzed skull. Most women also opt for a buzz or extensions. Still, I think I’ll go somewhere else for my next haircut.



- Being the #1 killer of people in Africa, Aids is obviously a serious and important issue. My roommates work for the Ghana Aids Commission and they will tell you that Ghana has been able to maintain a pretty low occurrence of Aids at 2.7% relative to the rest of Africa. I really enjoy the creativity and bluntness of some of the safe sex billboards around Ghana. The above is one of my favorite. I particularly admire the creativity behind the C and the N.

- I don’t have a television here but I am aware that Survivor Africa has recently begun. This program has the same premise but is unaffiliated with CBS’s Survivor series and consists of Africans battling it out in Panama. What could they possibly throw at these people? They have a word here for surviving in the bush under extreme environmental, physical, and social stresses: life.