Ghana 6. Life & Death

Hans’ Cottage is a hotel and restaurant with a difference – it has a boating lake. Full of crocodiles. Hiring a pedalo has never been more fraught with danger; we watched from the safety of the bank as a group of Ghanaians paddled gently around the oversized pond, several pairs of reptilian eyes following them from surface of the water.

Having just come from petting one of the larger specimens that was sunning itself on the bank, I felt no need to prove my bravery / stupidity further. The croc in question seemed oblivious to the crowd of nervous visitors who were taking it in turns to dart forward and have their photo taken while gingerly placing a hand on its tail.

Waiting my turn, I was equally frightened of the hatchet-faced matriarch who was policing the show, armed with a stick and a plate of meat scraps in case the main attraction should begin to show an unprofessional interest in the customers.

We had stopped at Hans Cottage on our way back from visiting Kakum National Park, an area of semi-rainforest sporting a network of treetop rope bridges that lays claim to being Ghana’s top tourist attraction. Ghana being, well…Ghana, this is equivalent to being crowned Miss Swindon. What little wildlife survives in the forest keeps well away from the aerial walkway, although the views out over the canopy are impressive.

This is a good thing, as the alternative is looking down. 40m above ground level is not the best place to realise that the narrow, swaying walkway on which you’re standing is constructed out of aluminium ladders with planks of wood bolted across the rungs. Our guide reassured us that they replace all the suspending ropes every six months. I didn’t feel like asking when maintenance was next due.

We were staying in Cape Coast, a small town about four hours West of Accra best known for its grisly monument to the slave trade. Like many of the old colonial forts dotted along Ghana’s coast, Cape Coast castle was a prison for thousands of Ghanaian slaves before they were herded from the underground dungeons through passages in the cliff face to the slave ships moored below.

We hurried uneasily after our Ghanaian guide as he explained that the floor of the still-fetid men’s dungeon through which we were walking remains an inch thick in compacted human excrement, the slaves having been forced to eat, sleep and shit where they stood, packed in their hundreds into the sweltering, cramped gloom. Suffice to say that many died there before ever reaching the ships.

While we felt sombre and guilty the Ghanaians in our group chatted and squealed with delighted horror at the near total darkness. “It’s the African-American visitors who are most visibly affected.” said our guide. “Most have come to Ghana for the first time to retrace their roots.” At the Door of No Return, beyond which the slave ships once waited, lay a pile of funeral wreaths, left by those whose ancestors had once passed through here and, unlike many, had survived the journey to the New World.

This grim colonial legacy means that Ghana is possibly the only place in the world where being wrongly identified as being American rather than British isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That said, 99.9% of the Ghanaians we’ve met don’t seem to bare anything close to a grudge about their colonial history. It seems to be a real effort for Ghanaians to stay sombre about anything for long.

As we took a taxi along the coast road to nearby Elmina we passed a convoy of cars travelling in the opposite direction; horns blared and people hung out of the windows. “Funeral” said our driver cheerfully, leaning on his horn and adding to the din.

Ghanaian funerals frequently outstrip weddings for the expense lavished upon them. Just as parents in the West will spend vast sums on their children’s weddings, so Ghanaian families will get themselves into considerable debt in order to lay on, for no better phrase, the funeral of a lifetime for their parents. Funerals will attract hundreds of people and often last several days, typically beginning on a Thursday with the lying-in-state. This is strategically planned to allow the vocal outpouring of grief to morph, over Friday and Saturday, into a massive party. Come Sunday everyone staggers to church rather the worse for wear.

I regret to say that all this is learned second-hand and that we are yet to be invited to a Ghanaian funeral. Just as we might tell a visitor to Britain that they simply must experience Soho on a Friday night, so Ghanaians often tell us, with a rare hedonistic glint in their eyes, that we have to go to a funeral while we’re here.

Statistically our chances are fairly good. Despite being highly developed for West Africa, average life expectancy in Ghana is still pretty low at 57 years. A high mortality rate combined with a culture of lavish funerals has generated a profitable funeral industry with some unusual entrepreneurial opportunities. The cost of a funeral can be significantly reduced by the financial contributions customarily made by guests. If however both you and your expected guests are poor, then you have a bit of a problem.

One solution is to employ a funeral-broker of a peculiarly Ghanaian type. Usually a well-connected man, the broker will use his social sway to turn an unremarkable passing into the social event of the month. Wealthy guests beget wealthy guests who not only up the ante of your funeral with their presence, but also help pay for something grander than you could have afforded by yourself through their generous donations. The broker takes a cut from the donations and everyone goes home happy. Except the deceased, who’s six feet under by this point.

Crocodile petting aside, our brushes with death in Ghana have thus far been limited to a few hair-raising tro-tro journeys conducted at break-neck speeds along rutted dirt roads. In a bid to live life more on the edge, last week I made that most ill fated of observations that “amazingly neither of us has really been ill since we’ve been here…” Cue a 3am bowl movement that measured on the Richter scale followed by all the other symptoms of malaria. We accordingly spent the morning at the local hospital, where I joined the ‘malaria-test-while-u-wait’ cue. Other than the used blood-test needles going into an open tissue box, the whole place was pretty sanitary and 45 minutes later (unbelievably fast for anything in Ghana) my thankfully negative test result was handed to me on a slip of paper.

Whatever flu-type bug or food poisoning I was having instead of malaria went as fast as it had come, which was good because we were being interviewed at dawn the following day for Ghanaian breakfast television. We had met Parlos the programme’s producer at a high-life concert he was covering several months before, and during a more recent chance encounter he said that he had a daily business slot to fill and would we like to take part?

After a 5am start and an hour-long tro-tro ride we arrived at Net2TV on the outskirts of town, where we were shepherded to the top floor of a large and seemingly empty office building. Here we were ushered through a door into the comparative clamour of the gallery, adjacent to the studio, from where the live broadcast was being stage-managed.

Just before 8am I was fitted with a radio mic and was led into the studio. Louisa had opted out of taking part on the grounds that my ego was enough for one sofa. The presenter was cued and as we beamed live into the homes and chop-bars of sleep-befuddled Ghanaians I launched into a witty and erudite account of our emigration to Ghana.  Thirty seconds in, Parlos the producer walked on to the set in front of the camera, stopping me short.

“I’m afraid our transmitter’s just died and the whole station has gone off air. We’re not likely to get it fixed before the next programme’s due to start. Any chance you could come back and do this again at the same time next week?”

I should have known that I was in a more reliable situation when playing with that crocodile. “Of course” I said, wishing that I were still in bed. But then this is life on the edge, Ghana style. Time for another Lemsip.

PS: I was going to write about the weird world of Christmas in Ghana, but my train of thought got diverted. I’ll do it in the next instalment. In the mean time, the Ghanaian Signage of the Month Award for December 2010 goes to a car window sticker I saw the other day that read:

Caution! I drive like you do.

which in Ghana is about as threatening as it gets. Happy Christmas one and all!

Ghana 5. Opinion

Since arriving in Ghana two months ago the initial onslaught of unfavourable comparisons to life in Britain has gradually paled into normality. Accra no longer appears to be the surface of the moon, looking instead more like Bradford with a few additional open sewers. The roads are still terrible and it’s still hotter than hell; we’ve just got vaguely used to it.

Sweating is a Ghanaian national pastime that I picked up pretty fast and now excel at. On the roads street hawkers walk between the frequently gridlocked traffic selling face flannels and handkerchiefs intended for mopping your brow. If you think the British are boring when talking about the weather, try having the same conversation in Ghana:

“It’s hot today, isn’t it.”

“Yup, really hot”

“Even hotter than yesterday.”

“Definitely. Really hot.”

This is possibly one reason why conversation with Ghanaians often turns quickly to politics – there’s simply nothing more to be said on the weather front.

When it comes to politics Ghanaians don’t necessarily want to discuss taxation and civil liberties. Ghana’s politicians are its Z-list celebrities. They are Ghana’s former Big Brother contestants, obligingly providing the tabloids with a constant stream of lurid stories usually involving sex, drugs or (preferably) both.

One Canadian journalist working here complains that, in contrast to much of Africa, there’s too much freedom of the press in Ghana. Libel laws are rarely enforced and so the tabloids simply print what they want. As all the newspapers - tabloid and broadsheet - are owned or funded by one of the main political parties, you can usually guess who the villains in each are going to be.

A common conclusion to any political conversation here, regardless of allegiance, is that a) all politicians are crooks, and b) being a political crook is an admirably lucrative business that can set you up for life, should you play your cards right.

Oliver worked in IT in the States for several years before settling back in Accra. A successful Ghanaian businessman, he now runs an upmarket coffee shop catering to rich Ghanaians and ex-pats. His menu is exorbitantly over-priced, but his opinions are on the house.

Like most Ghanaians, he venerates Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence from Britain in 1957. Oliver argues that in developmental terms Ghana is only ten years old – the period when Nkrumah was in power, until he was forced into exile by a military coup in 1966. Nkrumah worked for the good of Ghana, building the country’s first hydroelectric dam, expanding its education system and revolutionising the transport network.

Since then, Oliver argues, every subsequent politician has neglected Ghana in favour of furthering their own offshore bank accounts, and Ghana’s development has remained stagnant.

You only have to stand amidst the high-rise banks of central Accra, or visit the bustling shopping mall on the city’s outskirts to suspect that this isn’t quite true. In the same vein, while Nkrumah instigated some landmark developments within Africa, he also left Ghana in severe debt and imprisoned thousands of political opponents during his reign.

In Britain, delivering an opinion on even the smallest question of right and wrong usually requires a cup of tea and a sit-down first. In Ghana, it seems that everybody comes equipped with an unshakable, ready-to-serve moral standpoint that can nonetheless be tweaked as necessary to suit any occasion.

On the way to work this morning, our tro-tro driver leaned out of his window to yell angrily at the taxi next to us. The taxi was straddling the inside lane, thoughtlessly preventing our driver from overtaking the near-stationary traffic by driving up the hard shoulder.

Right of way here is entirely subjective. During rush-hour, crossroads become vehicular Mexican stand-offs, with four cars all trying to turn right at the same time and no one backing down. Imagine the last scene from Reservoir Dogs with added street hawkers trying to sell the participants phone cards.

Our status as obrunis – foreigners – puts us at a tactical disadvantage when it comes to weighing into Ghanaian arguments about the state of the nation. During several different conversations I’ve made the mistake of complementing Ghana as a model democracy within Africa. This has earned me the kind of indulgent smiles usually reserved for Downs Syndrome debating competitions.  

“Our democracy isn’t like your democracy” said Senyo, a combative TV producer we met in a bar a few weeks back. “Here, it doesn’t work and we don’t gain anything from it. It just helps us to secure foreign aid. How can you applaud a democracy where illiterate masses vote depending on how dark a candidate’s skin is?”

I think you can only be despondent about democracy if you are lucky enough to have it in the first place. Nonetheless, like Senyo, others amongst Ghana’s intelligentsia who we’ve chatted with are frequently dismissive of this, West Africa’s poster-boy political system. This is of course according to the ‘only Jews can tell Jewish jokes’ rule – you are only permitted to criticise your own. Woe betide any obruni who takes issue with Ghana.

A few weekends ago we drove up to Aburi, a small hilltop town just outside Accra where the city’s wealthy elite have their country retreats. We’d been invited to go there by Henry, a Ghanaian software developer who made his fortune through computerised cash-registers. Henry’s house in Aburi is a lavish safari lodge on stilts, reached by a near vertical dirt track that almost justifies his giant orange Porsche 4x4. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s extremely funny, Henry would be a bit of a cock.

As we lounged around on his raised terrace looking down on Accra and the sea beyond, Henry held forth about what he sees as the West’s love-hate relationship with Africa.

He had recently attended a trade conference at which a British delegate had criticised the BBC for perpetuating a ‘war, AIDS and corruption’ image of Africa that is scaring businesses away from investing in Ghana. This speaker was followed by a second Brit who emphasised the benefit to Ghana of maintaining its trade relations with Britain and not rushing into the ever-widening arms of China.

When it came to Henry’s turn to speak he raised the issue that if our national media is hell bent on scaring off potential investors in Ghana, then who is Britain to say a word when Ghana decides to go to bed with China? It’s the diplomatic equivalent of slagging off your ex to anyone who will listen but then getting into a stink when you find out they’re dating someone else.

I think Henry has a valid point. Ghana is not Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’. It has WiFi for goodness sake. It’s a shame then that he followed this story with another rib-tickler about him and his mate scamming a Swiss company for a work contract, a business trip and a suitcase full of Rolexes. As often seems to be the case here, when others are the corrupting influence its injustice, but when you’re the corrupting influence it’s just…Ghana. That’s my opinion anyway.

PS: I have been neglecting to revel in the eccentricity of Ghana’s business names. To this end, the first Shop Name of the Week Award goes to:

“Sow in Sorrow Reap in Joy

Welding Spraying & Fitting”

In a similar vein, there seems to be a trend for taxis and tro-tros to sport cryptic slogans across their rear windows. Thus the first Window Slogan of the Week Award goes to the frankly mysterious:

“Still Batman”

Brilliant.

Ghana 4. Work

Okay, so this entry is somewhat overdue. I’ve actually started writing it on several occasions over the past few weeks, but it seems to have been interrupted by the time consuming banalities of Ghanaian daily life. Take clothes washing for example: in a tropical climate the most you can hope for out of a pair of boxer shorts is two days. Like most people here we don’t have a washing machine, so at least once a week I find myself head down, scrubbing gussets and t-shirts in a bucket of water that was already vaguely brown when it came out of the tap.

That said, last week a bit of domestic exertion proved a welcome distraction, as I spent the majority of each day glued to a computer screen. We seem to have now filmed pretty much all the footage we need for the promotional films that we’re making for The Organisation. As such, I’ve been staying in the house, editing these in earnest, while Louisa goes out around Accra with different volunteers to capture the last shots that we still need. Having never picked up a TV camera five months ago, Louisa is now shooting footage of a quality that will soon see me demoted to tea boy.

Our efforts however are beginning to look somewhat wasted. In the last few weeks we have run into several former volunteers now living elsewhere in Accra. Their individual accounts of problems at the hands of The Organisation have confirmed our growing impression of a very badly run business masquerading as an NGO. It would appear that several other filmmakers have been here before us, though their footage is nowhere to be found. It seems increasingly likely that The Organisation has either lost it (very possible), or that it was never given to them by our morally-torn predecessors. Suffice to say that we currently feel like the PR officers aboard the Titanic.

With only a matter of weeks left volunteering with The Organisation anyway, we have accordingly redoubled our efforts to find work elsewhere. Carving out our niche in Ghana’s media is proving tricky: it’s highly developed with new digital TV stations popping up all the time, yet the majority of people working in it are on jealously guarded contracts. We have been hanging out with several Ghanaian television producers who have been very friendly towards us, although I suspect we are in a queue of people lining up to curry favour with them. Getting a job in Ghana is very much about who, rather than what, you know.

For me, networking is akin to attempting a DIY vasectomy, but it seems we have no option. To this end, last week we gate-crashed a reception at the British Council being held to recognise people with degrees from British universities. We had invitations as we technically qualified, but I suspect that few of the eighty or so Ghanaians in attendance had spent three years vomiting alcopops into their shoes to get where they are today. After several speeches and the cutting of a cake, we found ourselves mingling with none other than the British High Commissioner. As I mentally recited “Ferrero Rocher…Ambassador’s reception…” mantra-like in my head, I thrust our business card into his hand and laughed recklessly at his anecdote about Swindon.

Thus far the only person who has called since the event is an I.T. specialist who had insisted that I dance with him when the band started playing. Undaunted of course, our Unique Selling Point may yet be that we can at least get the job done. One of the big three mobile phone networks in Ghana trades under the slogan “the network that really works” setting a new benchmark for aspirational advertising slogans. In its working life, Ghana suffers from a mass culture of presenteeism. Turning up at the office (on time optional) is effort enough; anything actually achieved between the hours of 9am and 5pm is an unexpected bonus.

Before I get lynched for veiled racism by a mob of angry Guardian readers, these are not my words but those of a panel of Ghanaian business leaders, speaking at a conference we were filming the other week. BarCamp is an international network of informal conferences for young entrepreneurs, and we had gone along to the 2010 event in Accra to dip a toe in the waters of commerce. In the face of loan restrictions and interminable red tape the mood amongst delegates was defiant. The representative for the department of trade and industry was nearly flayed alive on announcing blithely that it currently takes five to seven years to get a trademark registered here.

In fact, despite problems such as this, we keep on meeting Ghanaians who have chosen to move back to Ghana from lives abroad for the opportunities the country currently has to offer – Daniel, the PR exec who lived in Balham for eleven years; Parlos the Boot’s chemist who returned here to successfully become a TV presenter – to name but two. If you have the mind to be an entrepreneur, then urban Ghana currently seems to be the American frontier, both in terms of opportunities and challenges.

We managed to leave all this business talk behind this weekend, getting on a dilapidated tro-tro and heading North-East to the Volta region to visit the world’s biggest artificial lake. Dammed in the early 1960s, the Lake Volta hydroelectric plant feeds power not only to Ghana but neighbouring countries such as Togo and Benin as well. In an unusual use of local resources, a German company has recently begun work with an underwater saw, logging trees for timber that are still standing on the lake bed from when the area was first flooded.

At nearby Wli we climbed several hundred metres up through dense, steaming forest to the upper reaches of one of the highest waterfalls in West Africa. Our guide was a cheerful hunchback called Ousman who described changing jobs from tailor to farmer to tour guide as we wheezed our way up the precariously narrow path. At the upper reaches, as with the lower falls, our efforts were rewarded with a massive plunge pool into which we waded in our stinking clothes.

The falling water is so fierce that it blows thick spray hundreds of feet into the surrounding undergrowth, which is far more lush as a result. The spray is blinding and you must wade backwards, shielding your eyes, if you want to attempt to get under the main cascade. Here it feels more like someone is tipping bags of gravel on to you from a great height, such is the force of the water. I staggered back to the edge of the pool jubilant with the knowledge that after that kind of cleaning my boxer shorts would be good for at least another couple of days. 

Ghana 3. Water

The water supply has been back on this week, although it’s been coming out of the pipes accompanied by a large quantity of brown silt. This makes ‘washing’ and ‘cleaning’ possibly two different things, but so long as my developing layer of topsoil keeps on replacing the sweat, I’m happy.

On Sunday evening last week we returned to the house from a weekend away to find the water still off – day five without. According to Joe, one of the local shopkeepers, it was because of engineering works just around the corner where they are building a new water treatment plant. Other neighbourhoods further away still had water, and locals armed with buckets could be seen heading to the nearest working tap to fetch in water for cooking and cleaning.

By the end of last weekend our house’s meagre reserves had run very low – the huge plastic bin in the bathroom was now empty – and the volunteer coordinator said that we had to all stop washing until further notice. This, in a country where you can be sweating by the time you step out of the shower. Unsurprisingly there was a lot of grumbling at this and many people headed round to Joe’s to buy the last of his drinking water just so they could have a wash.

Thankfully I was pretty clean at that point. We had spent the weekend at Ada-Foah, part of a delta of around twelve islands at the mouth of the Volta River, where it meets the Atlantic. The coast of Ghana sports some impressive beaches, but most are plagued by rip tides that make anything more than paddling a life-threatening undertaking. In contrast, the gently lapping lagoon beaches along the river are perfect for swimming. I spent a lot of time in the water, mostly rescuing toy boats that local kids were racing from a tiny inlet out into the lagoon.

Back in Accra, sod’s law had it that on Monday, only hours after The Organisation paid for a tanker to come and replenish our supplies, the water came back on. This was just one of several recent episodes that have made us very grateful to have a running shower at all.

The week before we had travelled four hours east of Accra to get some footage of a rural orphanage where one of the volunteers has been working. To describe the place as a one-horse town would be overdoing it. It’s just not that developed. Accordingly, the washing facilities were the ubiquitous ‘bucket shower’: an outdoor cubicle into which you take a bucket of cold water, a bar of soap and a strong constitution.

The orphanage is home to around thirty young people, mainly boys, ranging in age from eight to twenty. The situation is complicated by the fact that at least seven of them appear to be the children of Pastor David, the guy who runs the place. Fran, the eighteen year old volunteer who has been working there, was understandably a bit taken aback to discover on arrival that many of her new charges were the same age as her if not older. Yet after ten weeks there she had become both councillor and friend to them all, and was genuinely sad to be leaving.

I hate to say it, but 48 hours there was enough for me. In the rural evening (it’s dark at 6pm) no one can hear you scream. There’s little electricity and even less to do, so most people go to bed around 8-9pm, as did we. Which was a good thing, because at 4.30am we were woken by a knock on our door. I struggled out from under my blanket of mosquitoes to find Pastor David standing outside; he announced with a beaming smile that he was ready for his interview. Having not been there when we arrived, he had travelled four hours by tro tro back from business in Accra to be filmed by us, but had to return there early the following morning. Accordingly he’d caught a few hours’ sleep then got up “a bit earlier than usual” (!) in order to speak to us. Under the light of a 12W bulb and through the fog of sleep it was all going at bit Heart of Darkness, although our Mr. Kurtz was impressively lucid. In contrast I am not, nor will I ever be, a mornings person.

Rustic quirks aside, it was great to be out of the city, and the orphanage did have some plus points over our usual metropolitan wasteland. For one thing, the drinking water tasted better. In Accra, as with everywhere else, you have two options: bottled or bagged. At around 1 Ghana cedi (about 50p) for 500ml, bottled is ten times more expensive, so most people drink the plastic-tasting Bell’s water bags that can be bought from cool-boxes on nearly every street corner. The same volume, these are tough, clear plastic bags that you bite the corner off then suck. It’s rather like drinking from a breast implant.

Alongside eating spare ribs or flossing, drinking from a plastic bag ranks as one of those activities at which it’s impossible to look sophisticated. It’s a gamble trying to put a bag down mid drink, and if you do, it’s easy to forget which corner you’ve opened. I often find myself sucking fruitlessly at an unopened corner while water trickles down my leg.

Speaking of legs, today was both the Accra international marathon and half marathon. Quarshie, one of the Organisation staff, was running the full distance and several Canadians that we’ve met were doing the half, so we went along to watch. In a bid to avoid the heat of the day, both races were due to begin at dawn. However, this being Ghana, both started late. Consequently the full marathon runners were only beginning to cross the finish line at around 10.30am by which time it was beginning to bake. Several Ghanaians ran barefoot or in flip-flops; one of the runners was an eight-year-old Ghanaian girl who did it in a swimsuit. Although there were several dramatic collapses across the finish line, it was astonishing how many runners seemed largely recovered within an hour of finishing. As we left the eight-year-old girl was running around, playing happily with a friend.

After a strenuous morning spectating we deserved a rest. The race finished down by one of Accra’s few bits of tamed beach, so we paid the entry fee to go and sit at one of many bar-restaurants competing for custom on the sand. Alongside basic amenities, the entry fee to the beach pays for a team of litter pickers to continually sweep the sand, gathering the vast amounts of rubbish washed up by each tide. This is a feature of all beaches in Ghana, where the sea appears to be the final destination for much of the nation’s waste, organic or otherwise.

By far and away the most common item to litter the beaches are discarded drinking water bags, washed up in their hundreds. At the beach resort in Ada-Foah the local kids made their toy boats, origami-style, out of them. I’m sure there’s a point to be made here about the cycle of materials et al, but it’s too hot right now to try and be profound and I’ve just upended my water bag down my leg, so I’m going to sign off and take a shower. Just a little more silt and I’ll be ready to sow a new crop of cassava in my armpits.

Ghana 2. Survival Guide

Two weeks into life in Ghana and I’ve become acutely aware of the many hazardous decisions that daily life here thrusts upon you, if not actually how best to respond to them.

Take food for example. Dining out here presents you with two options: Western-style restaurants or the street ‘chop bars’. The former offer the range and luxury of British Beefeater restaurants circa 1989 at prices to make your eyes water. Alternatively, you can throw in with the latter: the street vendors whose ‘chop bar’ shacks of varying shapes and sizes serve up variations on a theme of starch + something once living. At around C3 (about £1.50) for a massive portion of fried chicken and rice these are excellent value if you don’t mind dining on a mini roundabout next to an open sewer.

Nearly all of us volunteering here with The Organisation are doing so on a budget, so a common goal is to seek out those elusive chop bars capable of at least shielding you from diesel fumes while you eat. Thus far, a five-minute stumble down the ring-road has produced Papa Nesto’s, whose laminated tablecloths depicting Japan’s finest sushi add an international twist to an otherwise distinctly Ghanaian menu.

Local dishes (usually carnivorous) include fufu – a sort of dumplings in soup; red-red (bean stew), and banku. This last dish is a kind of cassava-flour dough usually served with either a stew or soup, or more simply with a tomato and pepper hot sauce. The grey-brown banku dough is so dense that it actually exerts its own gravitational pull, sitting in your stomach like a ball of clay for several hours after ingestion.

All other Ghanaian food seems to follow a Fordist model of production: you can have whatever you want so long as it’s fried. And preferably once living. As Louisa has rapidly discovered, the word ‘vegetarian’ seems to be a recent and uncertain addition to the Ghanaian vocabulary. Rather like a transvestite asking where the toilet is, people visibly struggle to know how to respond when confronted with a request for ‘vegetarian’ food. Once you explain that you simply don’t want any meat in anything they usually relax. That would be plain rice then.

Food aside, other daily decisions fraught with danger include where to tread. Particularly at night the city’s open sewers present a potential death-trap, or at least an extremely unsanitary sprained ankle. Tropical dusk occurs early and very fast. At 5.30pm it can be daylight, yet pitch black only thirty minutes later. The alternative to what passes for the pavements is of course the road. While the battered tro tro minibus taxis look like they might fall apart if they so much as clipped you, Accra’s roads are menaced by some of the biggest, baddest SUVs known to humanity. The slogan of one regional car manufacturer is “drive to intimidate”. I kid you not.

Our volunteer placement here making promotional films for The Organisation comes with its own particular range of hazards. It seems that the ignominiously departed previous management left a trail of ill will in its wake. Supposedly straightforward daily shoots to film happy smiling orphans etc have been met with a suspicion normally reserved for Goebbels. Admittedly a lot of peacemaking by the new management is now taking place, but nonetheless I’m beginning to flinch during interviews each time I have to ask “in what ways has The Organisation affected your project?...”

After a slow start we have begun to make our rounds filming the volunteer projects that The Organisation pimps people out to. Thus far we have visited and filmed:

-       a planetarium

-       a project recording Ghana’s artistic history

-       a school for autistic children

-       an artist’s workshop

-       the Ghana Red Cross

Whilst aspiring to produce World in Action, in reality we seem to be shooting a third-world version of The One Show. Our hopes that the Ghana Red Cross would yield gritty front-line reportage were dampened somewhat on discovering that their current national campaign is concerned with improving road safety. Okay, so crossing the road here requires life insurance, but it’s still not exactly…sexy, is it?

Things may change tomorrow however when we venture several hours by tro tro out of Accra into the wilderness to the Rural Orphanage Placement. One of the volunteers is about to leave; as it doesn’t look like she’ll be replaced any time soon we want to capture any tearful farewells on camera. Unfortunately the volunteer in question has recently developed malaria (apparently alcohol does reduce the effectiveness of many anti-malarial drugs), so we may need to carry her out on a stretcher.

There’s also the immanent possibility of going out into the sticks with another partner organisation, Development in Focus, to film the TB clinics that they arrange for rural communities. Louisa’s long-held dream to live the life of a character in an Austen novel may soon be realised when we both perish of consumption. At least this offers more drama and romance than the all-too-real prospect of drowning in an open sewer.

Ghana. Episode 1.

We are in Ghana. It’s big! It’s cheerful! It smells like a Glastonbury Portaloo!  After a six-hour flight we arrived here pretty much without incident. Standing in baggage reclaim at Accra’s Kotoka International Airport we did begin to wonder if our hold-alls had gone on to Kenya. It turned out that we were just operating already on Africa Time, which is GMT+whenwearegoodandready. Truly, there is a corner of this globe in which an Alderson can be made to look punctual.

Behind the immigration desk at the airport was a sign that greeted visitors to Ghana thus:

-         We warmly welcome you to Ghana!

-         Paedophiles and other sexual deviants are not warmly welcomed to Ghana.

-         If you are a paedophile or sexual deviant it would be better for everyone involved if you would go somewhere else.

In matters still capable of making the British squirm Ghana appears to be earnestly open. Alongside the (clothed) ‘Page 3’ girls in yesterday’s Ghana Mirror ran an article about the menopause. The next page was a full-page advert for the kind of cream that treats “embarrassing itching”. The paper’s international news included a story taken from the Sun about a disabled man getting his car towed. In Wales.

We were met at the airport by Kuarshie, one of the Ghanaian staff responsible for looking after the stream of volunteers come to work on the various projects they farm people out to. He appears to be one of the few staff managing to survive a radical purge of dead wood from the organisation, begun only days before our arrival by the new manager, Klwuha. Ethiopian by descent, she has left a job working in Holland for an oil company to be airdropped in here to Sort Shit Out.

Whether the organisation had really become as disorganised as she makes out is open to debate (just not with her). She is physically tiny, fiendishly organised and utterly terrifying. We may yet ride her coattails to some interesting parts of Accra, as she is embarking on visiting all the projects in the city that the organisation currently feeds volunteers to. Tomorrow morning we go with her on our first recce to see one of the organisations that we might film. Yes folks, what development project could more emotively reflect the needs of poverty-stricken Africa than…a planetarium. 

Alongside the obligatory orphanage and school for the deaf are a few more esoteric projects available for volunteers to help with, a reflection perhaps of the fact that Ghana is relatively wealthy by African standards. Yesterday we sat in a bar next to a Ghanaian wielding an iPhone. Frequently, requests to be your friend from people you meet on the street begin with “are you on FaceBook?...”

That said, Ghana still does a good line in rubbish-strewn wasteland. Accra looks like the surface of the moon, daubed with red and white Vodaphone advertising, to which someone has thoughtfully added a ring road by way of decoration. Some of the city’s most oft referred to landmarks are its massive noisy roundabouts, making it look like a post-apocalyptic version of Swindon. Accra is definitely not a pretty place, and on Friday afternoons those able to do so flee the city for the surrounding towns and villages, creating a gridlock of beaten-up tro tro minibus taxis and massive privately owned SUVs.

Driving in Accra is not dissimilar to driving in London – at any one time you may have up to four lanes of traffic, each notifying the other of where it bloody well intends to go by leaning on the horn. On the way back from the market this afternoon we watched a rather flash sports car careen into one of the open sewers that line each side of the road. I have a horrible feeling that it’s a question of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’, I fall into one of these myself.

Although the rainy season is supposed to have ended by now, there have been occasional downpours over the last few days. These have had the unexpected benefit of sluicing through the open sewer network, reducing the gag-inducing stench of the city to a more palatable odour, akin to that of a flatulent great uncle.

As we wander about town, trying to avoid falling into one cess pit or another, we get amazingly little hassle from local Ghanaians. Small children and teens occasionally shout Obruni! – ‘foreigner’ or ‘white man’ – as we pass by. Others, young and old, want to shake your hand and know where you’re from. The odd half-hearted attempt to sell you something is usually quickly forgotten if you offer your name and ask for theirs. We’re like Big Brother contestants opening a shopping centre  – passably interesting but by and large to be ignored.

It’s easy to forget that people of all ages tend to speak reasonable to excellent English. For the fact that most Ghanaians speak Twi (pronounced ‘chwee’) to each other, or Accra’s own Ga dialect, it’s disconcerting when a roadside stallholder of around 60 suddenly breaks into English to give you detailed cooking instructions for the unfamiliar root vegetable that you’ve just invested in from her stall.

Armed with a vague idea of how not to poison ourselves, this evening we managed to combine tomatoes, carrots and Unfamiliar Root Vegetable with super noodles in our first venture at home cooking. We are sharing a large house with around four or five other volunteers; unfortunately space is about the best thing the place has to offer. Louisa and I have at least been spared the single-sex dorm rooms. We thankfully have our own private room with just the one bunk bed in it. Louisa has the top as I still sleepwalk on occasion.

After six days here the initial shock is beginning to subside a little, and a growing filming schedule offers some potential order amist the chaos. On Tuesday we’re off to visit the Ghana Red Cross to see what there is to capture on camera there. I can’t think of a better place to be if tonight’s cooking takes its toll on our insides. Even if it does, until it rains again no one will be able to smell the consequences anyway.