Festivities

London must be looking and feeling very festive at the moment. You can spot a few Christmas trees in Accra, but it feels a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack!

I’ve enjoyed a few interesting celebrations over the last week. Starting with a Japanese festival in a park in Accra. You can’t imagine my joy at discovering a park! The festival was showcasing JICA, the Japanese volunteering service, and the work they do in Ghana. There were hoards of Ghanaian kids demonstrating Japanese dance, men and women walking round in some amazing kimonos and great food being freshly prepared. Sitting there, enjoying a Japanese pancake, watching the dancing, visiting a few stalls, I could have been in a park at home.

This was closely followed by my first Eid outside of the UK, part of which I was lucky to spend with a Ghanaian family. Ironically the way they spent their day reminded me of Eid morning in Brum. I went to a mosque in Burma camp first thing, which is in the military barracks, so everything was very organised and efficient! The mosque accounts were even written out on the wall. The atmosphere was incredibly lively, with drummers, people in brightly coloured traditional wear, and I sported a dress in semi-African print fabric. Did a lot of people watching and befriended a few people. A cow was sacrificed afterwards; it’s the first time I’ve seen it done and I oscillated between curiosity and feeling extremely queasy. Cakes, pastries and drinks (minerals) were given out afterwards, and there was a scramble for the best ones. I offered my juice to a few young girls and they snatched upon it before the offer had barely left my mouth, but then shared it equally amongst themselves.

 

The week ended with a film premiere at the National Theatre. The building was designed by the person who designed the National Theatre in London and there are similarities. The film was a little budget and amateur, set in the 1950s and toying with everything from tribal clashes, the innocence of young, first love, peppered with humour but not really scratching the surface. The cast all came up on stage at the end, and we took advantage of free food, drinks, and enjoyed the atmosphere and (more) drumming.

And finally, I cooked a vat of biriyani for Accra VSOs this weekend, which made it seem like it was properly Eid. With the accompaniment of some classic soundtracks from one of the Indian volunteers!

Speechwriters use the same rhetoric the world over

Attended my first ministerial event last week, and was surprised, delighted, and thoroughly amused, to find the structure, format and some of the rhetoric so familiar. Clearly speechwriters adopt the same clichés everywhere. Not good speechwriters, ofcourse!

A visit to the doctor

I have been plagued by a cough that won’t shift for the last 10 days. It is exhausting and is forcing me to take it easy, not travel, socialise less, stay in and rest, which is all v. frustrating. Menpao cough [I hate the cough]! I also braved a trip to the doctor, where I learned two things – I have lost about 6 kilos since being here, and medication is prescribed in abundance. I left the clinic with a goody bag containing cough syrup, antibiotics, anti-histamines, vitamin c tablets, multivitamins along with doctor’s orders to avoid at all costs cold showers, fans, air conditioning and other draughty conditions. In which case I’ll be going in for heat stroke and invariably another tonne of meds. Vicious circle. Antibiotics are kicking in and I hope the evil lurgie will be gone by the weekend.

Bridges and crocodiles

They are iconic and exist the world over, some more renowned than others. Sydney Harbour, Brooklyn, Tower, Charles, the views from Waterloo and Hungerford being firm favourites of mine, Humber, the Severn, and the amazing Adome in Akosombo in the Volta region. Akosombo is so green and lush, on a massive scale so you get a breathtaking 360  degree view of natural beauty and the bridge spanning the river is incredibly iconic. Too much to capture, even with a wide angle lens. Again, it’s hard to reconcile this wonderful feat of engineering with the surrounding natural beauty and discovering this in the middle of Africa.

A boy of 10 will row you up stream and back, probably to fund his schoolbooks, as you take in the wonderfully pure water, trailing your fingers through it, resisting the urge to jump in. In a hotel close by, you can take it in more, eat tilapia if the service were better and appreciate the mini zoo. Crocodiles lounging in inch deep water, their backs so dried out by the sun that they look like carcasses, grinning less, sleeping soundly, their mouths agape like an old man’s, minus the drool. Monkeys scampering, looking like they would murder a cigarette. So incredible and random.

You know you’ve been in Ghana six weeks when you...

• don’t wince when your taxi driver swerves suddenly into the path of oncoming traffic
• become impatient when he doesn’t
• stop taking photographs
• start saying words in a variation of the local accent for maximum comprehension
• forget frequently that you are in Africa
• have a rolling list of things that people could bring, package, send to you from home
• invest in a handkerchief to dab perspiration from your face, elegantly
• bump into people you know in random places
• wake up at 6.30am and feel you've slept in
• buy pure water sachets through your car window... and plantain chips, coat hangers, phone top up and anything else you just might need
• eat street food without a second thought
• think in cedis
• know people other than those who were on your flight
• start feeling chilly when it’s overcast
• have moved house three times
• ferry an assortment of washing basins, gas cylinder, pots and pans when moving house
• recognise tro tros and their mates
• have marmite, oyster sauce and kellogs special k in your kitchen cupboard
• start building a collection of locally tailored items
• run out of mr kipling’s cherry bakewells.

An ode to a tree

A tree has suddenly been chopped down in the garden at work. We’re puzzled to the point of hysteria by exactly how such a snap, comedy action has happened and what the motive was. Each time we speak to someone, the plot thickens. It is a fine cactus tree, probably worth a lot, now lying crestfallen. Overnight someone has hacked it into smaller pieces that scatter the driveway. Sometimes the eccentricity of the people you meet can befuddle. And the lack of logic to purely follow orders without stopping to think if it’s in jest, or makes sense. Who’s to blame and who will be held accountabIe, we don’t know. Maybe it’s a case of the juju. Here’s the fallen tree. Victim of an impulsive outburst. Or throwaway comment. We’ll never know...

Weekend at the beach

Beaches in Accra are a bit dirty, but if you head out 45 minutes or so to Kokrobite, you get gentle idyllic ocean, where I was referred to as 'roman sister'!

View from Big Milly's

Just outside our beach house

Fishing action

More fishing related activity

Playing in the sea

Smashing snails for the bbq