Obruni observations

Non-Ghanaians are called obrunis here, which is meant as a non-offensive term for foreigner. I’ve had a few occasions where everyone protests a little at needing to shift over to let the ‘obruni’ out of the tro tro. After a month here, I feel like a lot of what I thought was different has just become accepted, but here’s an attempt to capture what I experience when I leave the house on most days – a random sign for a dog restaurant on my way to work, women selling doughnuts, opening the doors to little wooden boxes balanced on their heads to extract them for customers in passing cars and tros, the just bearable heat walking in direct sunlight. Women frying fish by the roadside, fanning coals to roast plantain, frying plantain chips, scraping oranges, slicing watermelons, the incredible sweet taste of the pineapples, vibrantly coloured butterflies, batik fabric, an abundance of beauty salons, the hissing to get one another’s attention, the dust, the absence of pavements, people asleep in shops and on the roadside, the gust of wind that is so welcome but blows grit into your mouth, everything you own turning the colour of the road,  open gutters, the beeping of the taxi drivers ever ready for business, the calling of the tro tro boys, the amusing signs on the backs of tro tros and taxis from ‘cause and effect’, ‘good friend’, ‘inshallah’ to ‘clap nicely for jesus’, the equally amusing shop names. 4am church services, roads that turn to lakes when it rains, patient babies strapped to their mother’s backs, crazy driving, relentless traffic, spectacular rain, coupled with repeated flashes of silent lightning that lights up the night sky, the hawkers and market sellers, all tiny micro businesses selling the same stuff, repeated again and again. And again. Only seasonal fruit and veg, the sweetest, juiciest sugar cane, second hand clothes markets, the universal availability of phone top up in the smallest denominations, ditto washing powder and milo. The red signs from the AMA warning you that a house isn’t for sale, the section in the newspaper warning against financial dealings with an individual who no longer works for their organisation, people living in shacks from which they do business in the day, girls wrapped in sheets waiting to use communal showers, rows of laundry hanging out to dry, goats running about, geckos scurrying, the calls of ‘oi Obruni’ and ‘one one cedi’ through the market, the incredible generosity of people who offer to pay my travel fare or buy my shopping.

And amongst this array of chaotic, jumbled, micro level bustle, where everything is so different to home, enough can be found – a diet coke, a sprite, some New Look sandals, Chinese food, colgate, an apple, to normalise it so it feels completely easy!