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.
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