The leaving of Humjibre

So, sadly, after 13 amazing months we have to depart. sniff.

I'll be so sad to leave this place, my friends, my dog and the warmth of the air and the feelings.

Enchantingly, these things are normally written in a cafe sitting next to some dude downloading some ropey skin flick. As I wait for the pages to download with about the same alacrity and sense of purpose displayed by the drowsy fat flies that buzz around the room a spirit of ennui infuses my ponderings like someone elses' fart. Well not today, today i'm feeling mawkish and sentimental.

For those who can be bothered to stay with me, I'll try to get at what I like about Ghana and the other bits of Africa we've been to in the last 18 months. It's the unexplained sights like a grown woman carrying a 4foot plastic bag of wotsits down the road, or the DIY signs that make you question the sanity of the author enticing you into a shop, the elongated greetings which snap your fingers like an arthritic pianist, the way you can become a brother in the time it takes to crack a cheesy joke, the way people will laugh with you even though they clearly don't understand what it is you're whittering on about.

Habermas, a dead German fella with rubbery lips and a line in arcane Frankfurt School social commentary, talks about the feeling we get when life is subjected to the efficient, predictable, calculable and controlled clutches of the machine. The way we feel when we're talking to a taped voice on the phone, punching in numbers and swearing at another waste of a lunchtime. He talks about the feeling of anomie that results. Africa, in contrast, always in contrast, feels like a last refuge of glorious chaos.

Of course, this comes at the cost of an often calamitous unpredictability. People are rightly very suspicious of the institutions we in the West cling to. Oral property rights, kleptocratic police, uncivil self-servants and telephones that work when they feel like it make everyone cynical and distrusting of authority. Good on 'em, I say.

We had one short term volunteer with us who wondered why we were doing 'development' since the people were so happy. In response, I told her 'Bollocks', I mean they'd be even more chuffed if their kids weren't at constant risk of disease and had a decent school to go to etc etc. But village life does have its consolations. I've never had so many people who know when I'm ill or that pray for me when I'm travelling in my entire life. And I was a teenage villager in Wales. I guess that would change if every farmer got into their 4x4s and drove to their plots each day instead of renewing those communal bonds by walking and waving their way to work. But then, I'm sure that the 4x4s would be individualised in some unexpected way, so that's cool with me.

So, in our tiny way, we'll continue to work with GHEI and try to find other ways to contribute to lifting the people of Humjibre and others like them out of poverty and into shiny new Hummers. Though we hope they'll be painted orange and green stripes and have a sticker of a baby in a straw hat in the back window.

The Abeyie House

Having left the village at the end of September, we are now staying at Ishmael's house in Accra. The house sums up much of what contrasts between life in Ghana and that in the UK. Its therefore a great way to celebrate our time here before we push off.

In a nutshell, the atmosphere in the house is open. The windows and doors are always open. The windows let in a sea breeze which makes the blinds dance and the doors swing open to new visitors every couple of minutes. The courtyard is the heart of the house. This is where a crowd is always gathered to cook, sit, pray, and chew the fat. Yesterday we must've met half a dozen 'Aunties', as well as another dozen friends and neighbours including a seamstress, a masseuse, a cobbler and a government minister. There's always movement but nothing is ever rushed.

My blood being Scouse, it's the banter I like best. The hand gestures are great and would even put a Venetian to shame. I love the way you look your fellow banterer up and down to indicate the taking of measure before attack. It's mostly repetition of course, but I've been howling with laughter at the many ways people find to say the same things. The performance is the whole thing, the result is unimportant since the dispute is nearly always irresolvable abstract. Among the things up for discussion yesterday were whether King Arthur was pissed off with Lancelot, whether Ronaldinho is as good as Zizou, whether its better to shake the hand of, or hug an old friend. As I was brought up fighting four older brothers, I know how to barney and have the advantage of surprise so I can hold my own.

Talking to Ishmael's mum last night, the matriarch of the family who laughs longest, loudest and usually last, listed the eleven people who currently live under her roof. Mostly friends or relatives from the north, she epitomises the sisterly solidarity which helps up (and sometimes drags down) the African family unit.

The women wear beautiful gowns in every loud colour. Many of them have facial scarification and some have semi-permanent blue colour on their lower lip. Some of them even have gold caps on their teeth to denote that they have been to Mecca. The men squeeze their bodies into suits, the boys into clothes which hang off them like they would any teenager in Brixton. There are the occasional touches to flip the script like tying laces at the bottom but in general they look like any kid on MTVBase.

The house is fasting for Ramadan. That doesn't stop them trying to be hospitable and cook for us during the day but we normally make ourselves scarce till its time for them to break their fast in the evening. We're planning to stay with them until Eid Al Fitr on Friday or Saturday to help with the ritual scoffing. That will be our last day in Ghana but we will go with good memories and full bellies.

Think of the Starving Children in Africa!

Among the many classic clichéd phrases I will be able to use with greater authority is this little doozy. Never mind that I do actually hate wastefulness, I will particularly enjoy giving my nephews a hard time with this one. (I’m such an old grouch already.)

The kids here, on the other hand, love waste. Among the gifts made at ‘placky bottles ‘r’ us’ are cars on strings, full percussion sets and mini sets. Recently a kid near us has taken to using an old toothpaste tube as a car. Another kind hung around all day at the barber’s, managed to avoid being beaten while collecting all the fuzzy hair left on the ground. He then found some sticky material from I don’t want to think where then stuck the skuzzy shavings on to his face in a beard. He then wandered around the village with a gnarled stick saying that he was an old bloke and that the young ones know nothing.

Being confronted with your own waste is quite a sobering experience. There’s no binnies picking up your black bin bags round here. We compost. Which I like. I enjoy the production of good soil. It’s also good for our plants. We plant the seed. Nature grows the seed. We eat the seed. Wow, peace and love man. But I’m not David Bellamy and neither are you (or maybe you are, in which case why aren't you on the telly these days?) so I can’t believe you’re in the least bit interested. Our other rubbish we burn. That is if the kids don’t scavenge the sparkliest bits of detritus first.

In the absence of Barbie, the little girls like to make dolls out of old husks of maize. With all the care in the world, they will comb the stringy bits like hair and carry the thing round on their backs. That is until the husks start decaying and a putrid smell puts them off.

My little mate Kwasi Atta was nearly moved to tears recently as I’d been collecting bottle tops (what he calls “kinters”) for him and presented them in an old Nescafe jar. By his own reckoning, he is now a rich and powerful man. Certainly Kwame, the cute kid with the wonky eye, thinks so.

Our Day Out

We take the students out of the village every year for ‘educational purposes’ and cos basically its a laugh. In the past, we’ve given the students their first bewildering sight of the sea and taken them to hospitals to see organs in jars and this year we decided to go to Lake Bosumtwi near Kumasi.

The plan was to gather outside the Anglican Church at the unGodly hour of 4am. That's still the dead of night, when the air is thick with dew and mosquitoes. I sat there waiting for the kids to arrive thinking that this is no way to earn a crust when out of the murk came an old woman bent by age and presumably insomnia. Her frail old frame looked ghostly as she emerged from the vapours and headed toward the gong at the top of the hill. The gong is beaten to tell people the time, just when they probably least want to know it. To me, it acts as a reminder to roll over and brace myself for the loudspeaker dude who comes on the tannoy later on. The gong is basically a rusty old car wheel, minus tyre etc, strung up from a tree. It takes a fair old clack for it to make any noise but this old bird whipped out something like a spanner and ‘CLANG’ she whacked it for all the village to hear the birth pangs of a new day. She then comes back at half hour intervals to clang Humjibre awake. So there are definitely worse gigs than mine.

As usual, we set off a bit late but made good time to get there by 9am. Bosumtwi is a beautiful place, completely round and with high forested hills encircling it. Apparently its still filling slowly and consequently displacing the villages that huddle on the narrow shore. The lake is important to the Ashanti people for various reasons( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosumtwi_crater the belief that when a member of the tribe dies, Bosumtwi is where the people return on their way to meet their ancestors. One of the taboos is that the fisherman have to paddle on flat boats that look remarkably like surfboards. It looked a bit tricky to be fair.

To my knowledge, a universal African trait is the involuntary snorts and whinnies that are made to express surprise. In Ghana these vary from ‘esee’ for something that’s a mild turn up for the books to ‘aiieee’ for something that really turns your head. As the bus came over the lip of the hill and we caught our first glimpse of the lake the noises inside the bus would make a hyrax blush. The kids had a top time at the shore too playing games and trying to swim. I was in the water kicking people off the ‘teacher’ dinghy for some hours myself until I felt a sucking on my foot that turned out to be a leach. Slimy creatures that suck your blood tend to put me off swimming, for some reason.

We sang songs and played games on the bus home and lingered in Kumasi so the kids wouldn’t get back in time to do their chores that day. When we eventually rocked up to the village we were about to park when a cry to take the bus on a spin was heard. So we toured the village with the kids singing their hearts out and bragging loudly of their trip to ‘heaven’.

P.S. No snakes, sweets or chickens were stolen during the course of this excursion.

Pearly Gates Application Form

When people tell me that we have done well to come out to Africa and work for peanuts to help the people of a small village in the bush I answer that we’re privileged to be able to come and do this work. I am constantly humbled by the generosity and kind spiritedness of the people of this village. I will be forever grateful that I have had the opportunity to spend this year in Humjibre. How many people can say that they take their dog to the rainforest for a walk?

But, in answer to the question of what do I actually do here, I will list a few things for those who might be interested. We recently opened a brand new library building with 1,400 books which can comfortably seat 50. And it has been packed every night so far. Adjacent to the library is the classroom where I and a couple of local teachers teach an after school programme for Secondary School students. We also opened a computer centre with 10 computers and a fully trained member of the community oversees this. Then we do health projects like outreach and conduct surveys that lead to interventions such as deworming and bednet distribution/ retreatment. We also have set up cocoa cooperatives which are really bearing fruit for farmers now. Plus we have facilitated other livelihood diversification programmes. We also teach a free-to-all programme of Sciences, Math’s and English for students. Then we also help bright and responsible students get to further their education by providing scholarships. I’m proud of the organization and, though it is small, it is perfectly formed.

So there you go St Peter, do we get in?

Genital Shrinkage

Since you are taking the time to read this, you are obviously a discerning and well-read individual. Or maybe you go scouring the internet for mentions of genitals. Either way, this story should be of interest.

It is Ghana in the dark days of the 1980’s. The political climate is twisted, the dress code ugly and the music made by cheap synthesized effects. Flt Lt. ‘J.J.’ Rawlings is wearing his signature aviator shades in Osu Castle, the seat of the President of the Republic of Ghana. His brand of military dictatorship is creaking and the IMF is called in to wreak their usual havoc. Cocoa prices were down. Bribery and corruption was up.

About this time an odd rumour broke in Accra. A woman was accused of causing her lover’s genitals to shrink, just by touching him. Reflective of the angry anarchy of the times, a group of unemployed men assembled and strung the accused up. The mob rides once more.

The papers were full of it. Nobody seemed to question that the dude’s thing had shrank, only that the frenzied masses were a bit out of order tackling it themselves. Suddenly the whole country is awash with rumours of similar happenings. Emasculated men pointed an accusatory digit at their wives, best friends, people they touched on the tro-tro, children etc etc. A frightened and similarly diminished mob would then do the dirty work. Hundreds were attacked in the months that followed, many of them seriously hurt and even killed. And why didn’t the authorities intervene? Because they were AWOL basically. In other words, the whole thing blew seriously out of hand.

Eventually, things calmed down. People started to get more savvy and would verify the accusatory man’s claim by stripping him naked in the street. Funnily enough, this also worked to reduce the number of accusations. It is now just a strange footnote in the history of this fine country, but one that reminds us once again how precious a man’s family jewels can be. Especially when, due to the effects of mass unemployment and widespread poverty, there’s no other way he can prove to himself that he is a man.

Number leakages

In the dark days at the end of the last millennium, the UK sought to cheer itself up by instituting nationwide government-sponsored gambling in the form of the national lottery, or lotto, or bingo, or whatever the f*ck it’s these days. As you might be able to tell, I have always held a dim view of this tax on the poor, stupid or desperate. In Ghana the situation is not much different, except, happily enough for the exchequer, there’s a lot more poverty and desperation to feed on here, although on the stupidity aspect, I think we can say it’s about a draw.

The form that a national lottery takes is, like most things, reflective of the national character. In the UK, we laud the winners and make celebrities of them, building them up and up whilst waiting hungrily for their downfall. In Ghana, the lottery is shrouded in secrecy, rumour and arcane ritual. Every week a kind of newspaper is printed with every set of winning numbers since the ‘70s. Looking at this thing is like staring into the mind of Stephen Hawking doing sudoku. Thousands of numbers stare back at you daring you to work out a pattern. And that is what so many in this time-rich country do. You will see them, head hunched over the pages, eyes scrambling across the page, palms feverishly gripping the paper till the cheap ink runs.

Some weeks, the rumour of a certain already-picked number spreads through the country. This is called a leakage, as though the numbers are a closely guarded government secret, and because this cuts your odds down the tickets fly out of the stalls that week. To explain, the Ghana lottery works by punting on 6 numbers out of a possible 99, making the usual odds of you winning similar to betting on Jamie Carragher to be the season's top striker. (To all grownups who don't obsess about football, these odds are rather slim). So, to get one number free is quite a bonus. This happened the other week and several people told me about how much they were going to win and what they were going to do with the proceeds. Not to spoil the happy ending with the truth or anything, but suffice it to say there were no Humvees bumping along the Humjibrean mean streets the next week.

Coke is it!

It’s always interesting to compare two country’s reactions to a scandal that reflects upon both. From what I gather, the arrest and hearing of the two British schoolgirls caught smuggling cocaine has been treated with the usual condescending concern for human rights abroad back in good old blighty. The red top rags have been full of vitriolic editorials spouting thinly disguised racist commentary and chest-beating defence of these two little Howard Marks wannabes. It’s all standard fare for what is rightly known as the silly season on Fleet Street. Since most of the politicians are on some junket holiday in Tuscany or the Barbados, it’s left to stories about flesh-eating diseases, vicious dogs and those bloody Europeans to fill column inches and stoke the national ire.

Here in Ghana, the reaction has been a little less excited. We’ve been subjected to months of a cocaine saga involving a stash of missing snowy white powder evidence, some red-faced coppers and a cover-up that is creeping steadily up the Police Force. People in these parts are getting quite jaded you could say. With this new story breaking, it seems increasingly obvious that Ghana is part of a latter-day Atlantic trade triangle involving Columbian farmers, Ghanaian or, as it now seems, British mules and Cockney ad exec cokehead doorknobs. I’m not one for editorializing as you know, but suffice to say, I’m not sure who I pity more.

Tattoos, Leopard Skins and the Queen Mother

One of the mysteries of the Humjibre people has been the presence of their names tattoed inexpertly on their forearm with a date of birth and apparently some kind of serial number. Normally you only see that kind of thing on concentration camp victims and prison inmates, so after tentatively asking a few people and getting only queer looks in return, I thought it best to leave the mystery unsolved.

Anyway, it turns out that a few years back a group of travelling salesmen arrived in the village offering to tattoo people for a very cheap rate. Well, you know how these things go, one dude gets his name and number hot needled into his arm and everyone wants to do it. Apparently, for a few balmy days it was all the rage in Humjibre. Why? Well, one good reason is the very real chance that you'd be decapitated, this is Sefwi land after all.

The Sefwis are part of the Akan family, which means their language is similar to the dominant Twi of the Asante and they even pay fealty to the Asantehene, Chief of the Chiefs of Asante. However, Sefwi culture is different in some important respects, one of them being their faith in the medicine that can be derived from a disembodied head. The Ghanaians who work with us from other parts of the country often joke about how their friends thought they were crazy (or 'off their head' to use a bad pun) to come here and we often read headlines such as "Horror at Sefwi" in the national rag, the Daily Graphic.

So it was with no little discomfort that we took the news that the Queen Mother of the village had died. For British readers this might seem laughable as we are used to the image of a gin-soaked, nicotine-stained, doddery old hag as Queen Mother but the Queen Mother in Akan culture holds a position of considerable power and influence. In fact, it was the Queen Mother, Yaa Asantewaa, who began the Asante Uprising that nearly repelled the British from Ghanaian soil back in 1901. She is the King Maker and is the only one who can physically touch the chief, which is an allusion to her ability to slap him down. Anyway, all this means that there should traditionally be a lot of bloodletting when she passes to the 'next realm'. Especially since she had been on her throne since 1953, for longer than Ghana has been independent.

I may have mentioned that the loudspeakerman is not one for understatement, (even the footy scores are spat out like a curse), but when he starts announcing that no-one should leave their house after 10pm, you start to listen. So, for the last few days and until Monday, we are under curfew. Probably bollocks of course, but I like my neck how it is thank you very much.

Ilona and I donned our blacks and went along to the funeral. The usual blaring Hiplife was replaced by the royal drummers. At the Yam Festival, I had had a bit too much palm wine and was freaky dancing so I now get on with the drummers really well. They were using special leopard skin drums and since they had been going for days spent the time in between dances to compare blisters. The beat they pound is really asynchronous and like nothing I've heard elsewhere. They begin as if they're all playing a different tune then it somehow coalesces and you feel yourself dragged along. The dancing is cool too. It reminds me of a guy I once saw after a music festival in Copenhagen dancing to the 'please walk' music at a pedestrian crossing. There's a few town drunks but one in particular that always gets up to boogy. This time, as the drummers saw him stumble towards the area used to dance, they looked at each other and cut the dance off dead. Everybody was laughing at the poor guy in mid gyration. That kind of thing is common at these get-togethers and there's always a bawdy undertone. Witness the guy dancing with four women pretending to worship at his feet. Or the way that young guys will dance in a way that looks like they are pretending to hump each other for the girls to watch.

Recently, I was asked in front of a crowd where I was from, and I answered 'me firi Humjibre'. They lapped it up and it added to the feeling that we're treated in almost a chiefly manner. I hope this means I don't need my name penned on my forearm...

Ode to a Scruff

We whistled
you came
you'd never be so obedient again

You dig holes
and eat shits
chew plastic bags to bits

You bite skirts
and bark mad
but when it rains you look sad

Your favourite place
is on our laps
we cuddle you like saps

You growl and gnash
you lay down the law
what'll we do when you no longer nose on our door?