After a long silence....

Friday, August 08, 2008

I’ve been working in Jamestown for nearly five days now. Jamestown is (I believe) the poorest community where we do work. It is certainly the most crowded and run-down of our four neighborhoods. It’s also the most difficult to work in. The neighborhood is close to the ocean, which also makes it the furthest from our house in East Legon. Because I want to avoid the midday sun, I wake up at a grueling 5:30 AM, and leave the house before six. The car takes about forty minutes to get to Tema Station. This is the commercial center of the city, and the dirt grounds of the vast car/bus station are illegally crowded with vendors selling everything from fruit to cheap clothing to electronic equipment. From here I walk for twenty minutes down the highway that runs along the coast—past the memorial park dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah, the former Parliamentary House, the Bank of Ghana, and the Supreme Court. From there I cross past the downtown Post Office, and continue onto a dirt alleyway that brings me abruptly into the heart of Usshertown/Jamestown.

One of the first things I noticed when I came here last summer was that Jamestown seemed to be overflowing with people. It’s partially a function of the construction of the houses. In Nima, most of the houses are built as square compounds around an enclosed private courtyard, which tends to mask the crowdedness of the area. In Jamestown, many houses open directly onto the street, and the roads seem to belong to and be used by everyone and everything except motor vehicles. Besides this, I would hazard a guess that unemployment is high in Jamestown. Finally, there seems to be a cultural difference here—people are very much into each other’s business, and not too modest either. Something I automatically associate with Jamestown is hoards of soapy kids bathing in the streets in the morning.

I walk the block or so to Tete’s place quickly, trying to avoid attention (impossible, but I try anyways) and hastily duck into the small passage that marks the entrance to his compound. The area serves some privacy, although I still have to bear the attention of the four or five families that occupy the two-story house. Tete is our most reliable field assistant in Jamestown, and although he’s somewhat dodgy and speaks little English, he knows his way around and knows people in the area as well. I wait for about thirty minutes (Nana is chronically late) and watch (and am watched by) everyone in the small alleyway dividing the house from the open kitchen.

Collecting data in Jamestown is always a struggle, because every other person in the street wants to know what you are doing there, who you work for, and why. Not everyone is open to having strangers in the neighborhood, and Tete spends most of his time assuring everyone we run into that we are just studying “air pollution.” (Fortunately, most people don’t question why we are looking at the gutters if our interest is the quality of the air, as I haven’t been able to explain properly to Tete that my project deals with water and sanitation. Either that, or he thinks that we will arouse less suspicion if we stick with air pollution. Hard to say.)

Today we had to stage a bit of a covert operation to get the work done. We were marking the locations of the public toilets, baths, and dumping sites—all pretty sensitive subjects around here. So we agreed that as we walked around the area, Tete would quietly point out the locations to Nana, who would discretely use the GPS (pretending it was a phone) to get the location as Tete and I continued past. Then we would all reconvene in a less suspicious area and I would jot down the information. The upside was that I got to see the condition of the facilities, albeit from a distance, without attracting any unwanted questions and attention. It seems to have worked, which means that I won’t be back here for another while (a fact which both saddens and relieves me…Jamestown may be difficult but it is also, in its own way, an interesting and rewarding place to work).

Crazy Voyages

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Michael left this morning, meaning that starting tonight I will be all alone in the East Legon house again. However, Raphael has decided that he will leave all his equipment here and base his work out of the house during the daytime, which means that I will have company at least until he leaves for his studies in Cyprus. It has been raining for much of the past week, which has held up a lot of my research. I’ve finished the majority of my indoor sampling, except in Jamestown, which I will hopefully be able to start tomorrow.

Fatah invited us to the wedding of one of his cousins in Nima on Sunday, which was exciting for Michael since he hadn’t been to a traditional wedding here. We ended up spending a lot of the day hanging around at Fatah’s because we missed the morning celebrations and Ghanaian weddings (at least the Muslim weddings in Nima/Mamobi) tend to involve a lot of sitting and waiting. But the baby was there for endless amusement, and Michael and I practiced our skills at balancing things on our heads.

We were supposed to leave for Volta on Monday (two day trip) but unfortunately had to stay home because I got sick Sunday evening and was unable to sleep for much of the night. So I stayed home and slept in the morning while Michael went to town to get some cheap jeans (I should think about this…), and then we finished the last few episodes of the fourth season of (bootlegged) 24. Fortunately I was fine by afternoon and we decided to head out on Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday, after waiting most of the morning for the tro-tro we took to leave Tema Station in Accra (this took forever), we finally were on the road to Volta. We had decided to visit Tafi Atome, which is a small village where they have a monkey sanctuary. We got off at a small junction about 5k from the village itself, and I started heading down this dirt road. Michael thought I was crazy, but the sign was there, and we were really close to an area where Ari and I traveled last summer. We walked through a few small villages along the way before we arrived in the village. There were great views of Mt. Gemi, a small mountain where Ari and I hiked last summer.

Atome is set up well for ecotourism, and has a small guesthouse where visitors can stay in the village. For a ridiculously low price ($14 each) we could stay there, get all our meals, and see the monkeys. We arrived just before 2pm, and since the monkeys wouldn’t be out until after 4pm, we decided to see if there was something else we could do until then. We ended up discovering that we could rent bikes, so we decided to bike to another village in the area where they weave kente cloth. Mike hadn’t seen that, so we decided to go. It ended up taking just over an hour to get there. It was so great to be able to go cycling, even though the bikes they gave us had no gears and Michael’s chain kept falling off every time he hit a bump in the road.

The kente village, Tafi Aguibe, was smaller and although it seemed that its residents would like to open up to more tourism, they don’t receive many visitors. Almost everyone in the village weaves the cloth, and each family has its own distinctive pattern. Our guides estimated that there were, in all, probably upwards of 300 kente weavers in the village. We saw some boys as young as seven or eight weaving, but not many women (our guides explained that this was because women have other tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and harvesting to carry out). Our guides asked that we say hello to some of their friends and relatives in Atome as we headed back. We were racing against the sun during the return trip, and I managed to capture some beautiful photos.

Unfortunately, we missed the monkeys that come out in the late afternoon and evening, much to the disappointment of both us and our hosts. We had a quiet dinner in another part of Atome (served by a really adorable girl of around ten years old). We then spent an awkward hour or so in the town bar. There were very few women but a lot of men dancing kind of sketchily. Anyways…

In the morning we got up early to see the monkeys. We purchased some bananas for our guides, and the monkeys came down to get them. If you held onto the banana, the monkeys would try to grab it before giving up and peeling it from your hand before dashing away. The monkeys eventually came back towards the village, and I almost got a picture of one of the monkeys prowling around near a goat on its hind legs.

After breakfast we really wanted to get going to see if we could get to Mount Afadjato to hike it before heading back to Accra. Unfortunately, transportation was not in our favor. We were going to catch a ride out of town, but the driver came back to tell us that he was going to wait until 9:00 for another family that was heading to Hohoe. At this point, I figured we weren’t going to make it in time, so we decided to revise our plans and hike up to a waterfall on the other side of the main road. After hiking back to Logba Alekpeti (the junction we had been dropped at the day before) we started up the road to find the junction to get to Logba Tota, the village with the waterfall.

Unfortunately, we were intercepted by a man who told us he was going to Logba Tota, and that he would be our guide. Even though we told him many times that we didn’t need a guide, that we weren’t going to pay him, and that we would rather walk alone, he insisted on accompanying us up the mountainside. As we lagged behind him, he would periodically shout “We ah goin to LOGBA TOTA!” and some other incomprehensible words about how he couldn’t understand why we didn’t trust him, that his wife would make us some chops when we got to the village, etc. He would also come up to us periodically and point at a tattoo on his arm bearing his name and the name of the town, and tell us that that was his passport. He ended up taking us up this crazy winding path that went straight up the hillside and avoided some of the detours on the road.

Logba Tota turned out to be a beautiful mountain village facing Mt. Gemi. In town we were able to finally get him to leave us, and we got a much more amiable guide (provided by the town tourism board) who agreed to take us to the waterfall. We hiked about two kilometers down into the nearby forest to get to the waterfall. Although its size is not as impressive as Wli (the major waterfall that Ari and I went to last summer) it is much more beautiful because it is contained in this little cove-like depression among the trees. We ended up wading into the pool (supposedly safe for swimming, and I seem fine now) and up into this cave where we saw some bats and a stalagmite. Then we got to climb under the falls and swim back. It was so great to be able to take a swim…sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing I want to do with the weather here.

After that we had to get back to the junction quickly so that we could get back to Accra, as Michael was leaving the next day to head back to the States. So we started down and got stuck in a torrential downpour, and managed to soak our only dry clothes in spite of rain jackets (we got the other ones wet at the waterfall). So we had a very wet and slightly chilly journey back to the city, but the trip was still great!