The Surprise Birthday

In the evening we had a surprise party for Owen. Our Program Coordinator had fabricated a ‘host home meeting’ with Owen and his counterpart to get them out of the house beforehand. When they finally came back, walked through the door, we turned on the lights and shouted ‘surprise!’ and I could tell from the flash of terror that momentarily crossed Owen’s face that we had indeed surprised him very much. There were balloons decorating the room and a high table with a beautiful pearl embellished table cloth, which I later learnt had once been his host mum’s wedding dress. We had fizzy drinks, gizzards (which I accept is chicken and asked no more), and an iced cake that had cost us almost £20 in English money. We played games and danced (except me because I have given up dancing). Recounting this makes it sound like a scene out of an Enid Blighton book. It didn’t feel that way at the time, but if I’m honest, perhaps it should have.

Fear nothing. Except snakes.

After one uneventful evening visiting a home of volunteers, I got back to my house where we encountered much excitement (relayed to me by the volunteers that were somehow in my house for unknown reasons) and this was because they had killed a snake. People were shaky, it must have been a big deal, everyone was surging with no-longer-necessary adrenaline. I was taken to see the body of this offensive viper and was amazed at how small and generally underwhelming it was (not that I said so). The theatrical performance continued as the boys proceeded to pick it up using a plank of wood and drop it in a bucket, then fill the bucket with paper and plastic, before setting fire to it. My housemate turned his back, warning me that the snake would come back to life so I should be careful and stay well away. Then when the fire was dying down, they put more fuel in and burnt it all over again! I understand that when it first appeared in the garden the UK volunteer present had been bundled indoors without an explanation and locked in...for her own safety. While the boys repeatedly set fire to the ashes of the snake, I sat on the veranda with the ladies and listened to one of the in country volunteers explain to me how through jewjew magic Ghanaians would send snakes to kill each other. This is what makes them so dangerous. It seems that if a snake has been bewitched even the non-biting type will kill you with one mouthful.

I don't believe in jewjew magic. And without it I'm still not sure how dangerous the local snake population would be.

How not to behave on a date

So I met up with Eli again last night (not that the first soiree was documented on this blog, it wasn't particularly story worthy). If you were to ask my ‘why?’, which you would be well entitled to do, I would not be able to give you a satisfactory answer, except for the fact that a second date tends to follow a first date and although I’m a bit more at ease now in Ghana, I don’t want to burn my bridges, just in case I need someone to talk to in the near future. Yes, it has got to the point where I agreed to go on a date just so that I would have someone to talk to for an evening. It's a lonely place! This is tragic! If there is one thing Eli is good at, it's talking. Actually, to be fair on him, last night he was rather good at listening too, and he had to be because I told him exactly what I thought about men, relationships and romance (for anyone not in the know, I unfortunately consider all of these things to be a great compromise). It occurred to me as I was about half way through my tirade that I may have accidentally struck a match under the metaphorical bridges that I had resolved not to burn. This was not, after all, what one usually considers to be acceptable date etiquette. To his credit, Eli took it well within his stride and we ended up making a deal that he would be a friend to me, as long as I kept an open mind and I should tell him if I did fall in love and want to get married to him. This was a deal I was happy to agree to and I shook his hand to confirm it with a great deal of happiness.

The place we had gone to this time was a bar in which I was told they served the coldest beer in town; 'a pretty good USP' you may be thinking. The walls were painted yellow and black and were topped with the most barbed wire I have ever witnessed to be protecting a pub. When our first beautifully cold drinks were brought to us (shandy, because Ghanaians apparently don't typically drink very much alcohol) I was pleased; but Eli was not impressed and asked the waiter where the properly cold ones were. Apparently there was no ‘properly cold’ shandy, and so once I’d finished my first drink a suitably temperate beer was brought. I couldn’t really see the difference myself, they all seemed quite cold, and indeed condensation was streaming off the bottles, down the sloped table and into my lap, which just goes to prove it.

Anyway, Eli was by now very tipsy, since he never intended to drink anything as intense as a beer. When the 4^th bottle was brought it had ice in it - Eureka! Now I know what the fuss is about! I can honestly say this was the coldest beer I’ve had in my life.

There comes a point, once a certain number of bottles have been consumed when one has to enquire about the location of the toilets in whichever establishment one is in. Eli went first and I watched him stagger off. I went second, feeling not at all equal to him in my inclination to stagger, and was shown to a rather disconcerting toilet block. The bright yellow walls were about shoulder high, there was no ceiling, and there appeared to be no toilet inside it. However, there was a urinal.

I have never in my life used a urinal and I didn’t feel inclined to start last night. For a start, I’m not particularly sure how I would approach the problem; which way it would be easier to face; or if I would have to stand on one leg. Usually in Ghana, ladies toilets are just an alleyway, giving you the privacy to squat on the ground, sometimes there is a gutter or a drain to aim for. Here there seemed to be nothing. The floor was made of wooden slats and I couldn’t tell if it incorporated a drainage system. I wondered what the ladies in this room were supposed to do and if any of them had been as confused as me, or if the answer was very obvious to the majority of visitors. Still, a couple of bottles of drink on an empty stomach does wonders to allay concerns such as this...

So there we have it. I went on a date in which I spouted anti-romantic venom and weed on the floor! Surprisingly, I can’t help but feel that it actually went better than the first date on which I behaved myself perfectly. If there’s a moral to this story then I dread to think what it is!

Boys! Boys! Boys!

As a result of following up on the friends that I made while bumbling about the village looking for someone to talk to in a state of acute boredom, I've now started to get a little more embedded in the community. The walk of loneliness may have been a tragic resort, but it actually turned out to be quite effective. Little did I know, that I would soon wish that a good fewer people, specifically men, would stop speaking to me!

Anyway, today I went with my friend Emmefah to visit her shop (actually I went to visit her mother to help cook ‘banana things’ but I was usurped and taken to the next village to join Emmefah in her shop). I know that she paints and so I was very disappointed when she opened the double locked blue metal doors to reveal the shop inside, selling wheel barrows and tins of paint.  It wasn’t the type of painting I had in mind. I'd visualised her own artwork. Owing to the metal walls and roof, it was also extremely hot so we sat, me on a wooden chair, her on a little stool, under the big tree on the opposite side of the road, where there was shade and a light breeze and we could keep an eye out for customers.

Before too long her brother came along and proposed to me. It occurs to me that if I were the type of person to flippantly accept marriage proposals, I would already have a husband by now. If I weren’t the type to flippantly accept marriage proposals, then there wouldn’t be much point in issuing them. He elaborated that I’d only be his wife in Ghana, then I could go home again and resume my English boyfriends. I was as polite as a person can be without expressing agreement and taught him to play rummy (since he said he’d like to take our honeymoon in Las Vegas). Unfortunately, the deck of cards I keep in my bag are a deck I picked up in a hostel; they’re Little Britain themed and all of the number 8s have a picture of a slim white man cross dressing as an obese, naked, black woman (with boobs so saggy that the nipples are out of shot, which I suppose is a good thing, but is not very flattering). The brother didn’t seem too phased.

Somewhere in the middle of this, a car drove passed and pulled over. The drier lent out of the window and started hissing (a widely recognised flag for attention, it’s the equivalent of shouting “hello there” or “excuse me”) it was a bit awkward so I turned to my would-be-fiancé and asked if he knew the guy. Then the driver shouted my name and I realised that the awkwardness was due to the fact that it was me who was supposed to be doing the greeting.  It intensified a bit when he asked if I recognised him and I didn’t. Turns out that 4 days ago at the swimming pool, he had come up to me at the end of the day as I left the changing rooms, he’d told me that he’d been watching me and he liked what he saw. Then he gave me his number. As he did so, another guy hovered at his elbow to also issue digits. I politely took both sets and promptly deleted them in order to not clog up my phone book with useless contacts that I was never going to use. So upon being caught I felt guilty, and I took his number again through the car window, sent him on his way and returned to my spot under the tree, where I very awkwardly asked the brother arbitrary questions about his family…but he was clearly still more concerned about the driver of the car trying to steal his would-be-bride.

Presently the brother left and Emmefah and I were deep in conversation. Then, much to my annoyance, the driver returned. Instead of calling to me, he called to her (‘what a player!’ I thought). It turns out that he was explaining himself to her and apologising for the way he had presented himself the first time. Then he came around the car and spoke to me. To my surprise he actually turned out to be very articulate and quite perceptive about what I thought of him (i.e. yet another pest who doesn’t know me and who gives me their number anyway for no good reason since). He talked about going for shandy (because a couple of bottles of beer would get him tipsy and he wouldn’t want me to be feeling tipsy as that wouldn’t be right) and dancing; also a trip to a fabric factory and his scheme to help the elderly. He promised that he wouldn’t be calling me all the time and clamouring for attention if I risked giving him my number. Also he promised that he would be very responsible because he wanted me to live a long, happy life and come back to visit Ghana in the future (which obviously couldn’t happen if he took the first opportunity he had to harm me). I came to quite like him. He seemed quite sincere, and most importantly very chatty (a quality I can’t seem to find in enough people!) then he gave us both company note books, tried to sell my friend a bank account, hopped back into his car and drove off. We giggled like little girls and agreed that he wasn’t so bad after all.

When I got home, nearly 12 hours later via a day at work, I told my elder host brother, Daniel, about my marriage proposal. I expected him to be surprised but frankly, he can’t believe that I haven’t got a boyfriend or some plan to get married. After all, a girl really should marry at about the age of 20 and he probably wouldn’t consider marrying anyone over the age of 25, and on that basis I've very nearly missed the opportunity to marry at all. We had a nice long chat about the nature of love and the point of it but he kept coming back to the fact that he couldn’t believe my indefinitely single status (which I personally quite like because I consider boyfriends to be a bit of a nuisance and I was the one to question what the point of love was - I mean, seriously, it does get in the way of a lot of rational decisions!). Daniel has now given me a shortlist of recommendations: 2 of them are my housemates, at least one isn't single and the other sounds like a nymphomaniac.

I laughed and said I’d need some time to properly consider them…I don't.

Making friends in Ghana

As has already been noted, I've been feeling quite lonely in Ghana. One of my solutions to this was to go for a walk and make friends with the people I bumped into.

One of the people I met was 'the lady at the bottom of the hill'. The first time we said hello, and the second time I invited myself in (the semi-detached is not the posh type, there are no fences keeping me off the square of mud outside the house that I’m going to call a yard) and asked to have a closer look at what she was doing. The truth was that I was bored and had time to kill, but for all the difference it makes, I was also genuinely interested because it had something to do with food. I watched and learnt as she showed me how she mashed plantain with banana with her hands (explaining kindly that I could also use a blender for this part if I preferred) then she mixed in some wheat flour and deep fried it in a vat of boiling oil that was next to her. She was making two types of things (and I can’t remember what either of them were called, however I did learn the word for delicious, which I retained instead: “Daveve”) the other one was similar but had egg in it and the four that was poured in was corn flour mixed with some spices. When I tried it, I can vouch for the fact that it certainly was, never before has a cakey thing been so very spicy! She vacated her chair and invited me in, but I’m sad to say that by this point, I no longer had time to kill and had to hurry off, but as I did so I was given a bag of deep fried cakey-things (her better selling variety too) all for free and promised that I would come back. I haven’t fulfilled this promise yet, and I should have, but I will go back and cook a batch for her. I hope benefiting from some close supervision.

It just goes to show, you can't make generalisations - not everyone is unfriendly!