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.