Four walls and a keyboard: Greetings From Tamale

Four walls and a keyboard

'I love talking about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.' ~ Oscar Wilde

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Greetings From Tamale

September 18, 2006

Let the bus stories begin! This morning we had to catch the bus to get to Tamale. This is a good example of ‘hurrying to wait’, haha. Our STC ticket said we had to report at the depot at 5:00 for our 6:30 AM departure. Banahene was at our guesthouse at 5:00 to pick us up. We get to the bus station, and we had to pay for our baggage by the number of kilos total our bags were. So we did that (mine came out to 30,000 cedis, or about $3.00). Then we waited......and waited. At about 6:30 there is a message over the loudspeaker that our bus was delayed until 9:30. So we wait some more....and our bus finally leaves at 10:30! Yep, that’s right, four hours AFTER expected departure.

Then the mayhem began. You basically had to follow the crowd that you knew was waiting for the Tamale bus, because there were no signs on the bus itself. And you had to push to ensure that your luggage made it into the baggage, cause holy, some people brought a lot of stuff!

Our seat were assigned and luckily Jeanine and I shared seats side by side. Was it ever a bumpy ride, and long! Our bus ride was about 12 hours. There were about 5 pit stops for gas and pee/food breaks.

It was a good way to see the way the countryside changed as you moved further north, at least until it started to darken. Immediately outside of the suburbs of Accra the terrain was rainforest, and there was a band of mountains, it was very beautiful. It was very green and lush, hot and humid too. Thank goodness the STC bus had air conditioning, otherwise I don’t know if I would have made it!

The at some points the road was under construction, so we had to slow down because there wasn’t much road left to travel on! At other times the bus driver was going so fast that you got butterflies in your stomach when going over a hill!

We got into Tamale around 11:30, and the driver for the Tamale office, Vasco was there to meet us. He took us to the guest house right away, but most of the rooms were already taken, so I got a pretty shady room for the night. No worries though- I just slept there, and they assured me that I would get a better room the following day.

September 19, 2006

We’ve been eating a lot of eggs for breakfast- and the Ghanaian way of eating them is in a flat omlette (not folded in half) with onions and tomatoes or peppers mixed in, and toast or bread. The staff at the guest house made this for us this morning, and then Vasco took us to the SEND office in Tamale. I already like Tamale much more than Accra- The roads are wider and in better shape, it isn’t as busy, and the people don’t harass us as much. Things are also a lot cheaper than Accra. There is a substantial Muslim population here (the guesthouse is called the Muhad Lodge), and I was woken early this morning by calls to prayer over the loudspeaker.

We met a lot of people at the SEND office at Tamale, so many that I still don’t have names straight. Their power was off this morning, and I expect it will be off regularly throughout the next few months. Right now the Volta Lake is low, which is where the hydroelectric comes from, so electricity outages are common across the country, and there are government-organized blackouts regularly. This is the first time it’s happened in about three years, or so I’ve been told. Hopefully it fixes itself soon!

We were given a detailed itinerary of our orientation at the Tamale office, and I assumed that because they had noted below that the regular hours would be 8:30 to 5, that they had a full plate ahead of us. So it was a surprise that the first meeting with Bashu and Diana took less than half an hour, and that was all that was scheduled for the day! We learned about the first projects of SEND Foundation, HIPC Ghana monitoring, and what they intended to do in phase 2 of the monitoring program.

So after that Vasco took us for lunch at the ‘G’ restaurant and bar. We were surprised when we saw other ‘obrunis’ in the restaurant, and sadly, a little excited about it. We were told later that Tamale is the expat capital of Ghana, because there are so many NGO’s based in the city doing development work in the north.

After lunch Vasco took us to the SEND Youth Office, where there is a resource centre for youth groups in the city and the Youth savings credit union. We met people in the office there, and learned more about how the credit union works in Tamale. Everyone was very friendly and excited to talk to us about what they were doing.

I think Vasco was worried about what we would do for supper so he took us to the Catholic Guesthouse, near our guesthouse, where he asked if they would make supper for us. So at 6 we walked over there, and they have a bar (surprising hey?), so Jeanine and I splurged on some Shandies (I originally ordered a Star Beer, but the last one was bad). I think it would be pretty easy to get tipsy here.....the beer bottles were huge, about the size of Powerade bottles, and 7,000 cedis, or 70 cents. But I was admonished by Banahene’s girlfriend Cassandra to stop drinking beer because it is bad for me, so I might just try to clean up a bit!

Supper was very good, it was spaghetti with guinea fowl, which is kind of like chicken but different too, hard to describe. And there was so much! After eating only a meat pie and some cookies yesterday on the bus ride, three square meals today was too much!

We got back to the guesthouse, and I watched a Ghanaian soap opera, called This Life to Live, or something like that. It was pretty interesting. This rich man comes home to his wife and daughter one day, and tells his wife that because she hasn’t been able to produce a son that he moving in the woman that bore him a son, and that she had to abide by this. So his wife relents, and this woman moves in. After the commercial break, the man comes into his house with his two wives, and tells them that his priest told him that one of his wives was trying to kill him. So he searches the women’s ‘boxes’ or suitcases, and finds bad charms in the first wife’s box. They were planted there by the other woman, but the first wife gets kicked out of the house. So the second wife turns into an evil stepmother to the daughter, and I think then the second wife kills the husband, and the episode ends with the lawyer opening up the husband’s last will and testament. OOOOOh, the suspense!

September 20, 2006

Again this morning we went to the office, and had a 20 minute meeting regarding administration and finance. They are very supportive. They are going to let us have our mail sent to their office (which will ensure that we get it quicker), plus they said we could call anytime we needed photocopying or supplies, or clarification, etc. We were also shown how to make claims for expenses incurred during our fieldwork. After that, we read....and read. I read many reports leading up to the HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Health project, which I guess I am assessing the impact of on farmer co-operatives and out of school youth. In many of these reports they had the itinerary for workshops/meetings, and it struck me again how deeply religious Ghana is. Every meeting began with a prayer. Even reading the names of shops on the sides of the street, like Jesus Blood Hairdressing, and God is Everywhere Electronics. The shop at the STC bus stop was called Except God (I think they meant to say Accept).

We spent the majority of the day sitting in the board room and reading, and listening to the animals outside. I am not sure if I mentioned this before, but it is very common to see goats and chickens running around free everywhere, grazing. Even in the city. So there were chickens and goats running around the SEND office. In Accra I asked Banahene if they ran around wild, or if someone owned them. He assured me that someone owned them because goats and chickens were very expensive to keep.

So anyway in the afternoon Vasco drove us back to the guesthouse, and we decided to walk up to the center of the city to eat and to get internet access (because we were pretty sure that the power wouldn’t be out there). On the walk up we had many people wave at us and say hello and that we were welcome. It was really cute to see the kids waving at us, and you couldn’t help waving back.

Also on the way we saw something that pretty much convinced me to give up meat, except Whop-J’s or Mac-D’s, cause their burgers aren’t really meat anyway. This one stall had some dead goats laying out, flies all around, and off to the side a man was hacking meat up with a machete, bits of meat, fat and bone flew everywhere, all over the sidewalk. Thank goodness he stopped while we walked by!

This evening we tracked down an internet café, but the service was so friggin slow! I saw that Dusty and Mat both tried to say hello, but I wasn’t able to respond back, the computer couldn’t process things fast enough for me to reply! On the way to eat we did see a newer looking internet café, so hopefully that one has better service for tomorrow evening. I intend to use the internet as much as possible over the next few days because it might be a while before I have access again!

It was funny- we grabbed a taxi back to the guesthouse, and I asked the driver how he was doing this evening. He said he was good, and then he asked us right away if we were Canadian. We said we were and he laughed and said he thought we were because Canadians are so friendly!

posted by angelina @ 4:09 AM

2 Comments:

At 8:10 AM, Anonymous said…

ANGIE!!!! I'm so glad it sounds like you're really doing good there - and I'm so happy you have internet access, if only for a little while!
At 9:56 AM, Anonymous said…

Wagner! Thanks for the update! It's so good to check your site and see that things are still going well for you! 12 hours on a bumpy bus - good on ya for getting through that - I don't know if I would have!
Miss you lots and lots!!! Keep the posts coming while you can!