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!
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