some things one may eat here.

papaya, swollen is really the only descriptor for them... plucked from slender trees. maybe the most elegant trees i've ever seen. eaten with fresh lime juice.

oranges ... not orange at all but rather green and yellowish, surgically peeled down to the white. stacked in many little 3-orange high pyramids (which always seem so delicately erected) and sold at stands or on the sidewalk. the ghanaians suck the juice out of them and throw the white shells into the trench gutters.

green and brown coconuts the size of footballs, stacked six deep upon old heavy wooden carts with large tires pushed by sweaty teenagers. hard...soft...or medium. that's the choice. the seller will tap them gently, quickly with a blackened machete blade, selecting out the proper one for you... thick coconut and a little milk inside...or thin with liters...before slicing off the top. you stand cartside and drink out of the shell with empty coconut husks at your feet. hand the empty back and he'll slash it into halves with two stokes of the knife and a hollow popping sound. the motions always makes me think of war, of rwanda and its brutal murders, and i feel evermore embarrassed at my western ignorance which is the rule rather than the exception. I too see africa as one country, however subconsciously. the seller will cut an oblique slice of the husk off for a spoon and hand it all back to you. (the practicality of the way many things are done here impresses me.). you hand the seller 1500 cedis (15 cents).

coca cola in scratched and faded trademarked bottles for 20 cents

water in small plastic bags. women sell these from plastic buckets atop their heads and call out 'iswata'. here is water. empty plastic bags litter the entire city. probably the entire country. this filtered water is almost free.


~~~~~


current/recent reading
: Jihad vs. Mcworld, Benjamin Barber
: AIDS in the 21st Century - Disease and Globalization, Barnett/Whiteside
: Anarchism: Arguments For and Against, Albert Meltzer
: You Shall Know Our Velocity, David Eggers
: Life - A User's Manual, Georges Perec

comment here ~ vwong@planet-interkom.de

getting off the bus (called a trotro) today, a woman carrying many bags slipped, slicing the fingers of her left hand open on one of the many sharp metal edges extant on these destroyed and OSHA-unfriendly transporters. blood poured off of her hand and someone immediately started spraying the woman's bloodied fingers with some small vial of perfume. another good samaritan, a taxi driver, came running over with an oily bottle of brake fluid and was about to pour this vile liquid on her lacerations. i happened to have some bandaging tape in my bag and intervened before the guy poured this stuff.... dumping drinking water over her hand and wrapped her fingers up with bits of someone's torn handkerchief and tape. told her she should get to a doctor to have her fingers fixed up and to stay away from the brake fluid.


comment here ~ vwong@planet-interkom.de

some slogans stenciled to the backdoors of public transportation here~

one on one
no weapon
jah alone
jesus is so sweet
give all to god
'O' black man
don't rush
i see
who jah bless
it's almost time
holy ghost fire
holy ghost injection
why me?
who knows tomorrow
finger of God
that they all may be one
simple man
big aple (sic.)

comment here ~ vwong@planet-interkom.de

some songs being played in public that i recognized over the past few days:

power of love ~ huey lewis and the news
...i left the rains down in africaaaaa.... ~ toto (i think)
we are the world ~ doesn't coca cola own this song?


comment here ~ vwong@planet-interkom.de

jah sells bags, handmade out of leather or colored straw. They hang in even rows along a metal storefront grating painted bright yellow or white. the single-floor store behind the metal gate is empty and sealed, dusty and old with windows too dirty to see through. jah lives in a small room connected to this store, just next to where he spends his days selling bags and a few music instruments: a xylophone made of small wood slats and hollowed gourd shells with a pair of sticks with ends wrapped with rubber. also for sale is one of those typical african drums. all have been sitting there for quite some time, lined up carefully in front of the hanging bags. in jah's room, there's a mattress and a 12-volt battery to power a radio and a small light, some clothes hang to the side. it's quite dark and dusty there and i hold back a sneeze on the first visit. the noise from the busy commercial street outside is constant.

jah is bright and vivid, friendly in a selfless way, more reserved than ostentatious, more respectful than demanding, which is not often the case here, especially amongst the street vendors ambulating down the sidewalks with large cardboard boxes stuck through with cheap sunglasses shoddily engraved with brand names or large metal bowls filled with warm, damp, exotic fish... or pacing between cars paused at stoplights in the carbon monoxide heat of the afternoon selling pens or rubber tubing. with a youthful unstressed face, jah has short dreads and has taken recently to wearing a pair of fancy silver wraparound sunglasses like those bono ones that were trendy some distant fashion decade ago. jah comes across as too clean-cut to make it as a true rastafarian of which here there are more than a handful.

he's an immigrant here. his home is senegal, past three war-torn countries off to the west. one passes cote d'ivoire on the walk there, a country where he spent some time until the fighting drove him onward to mali and finally ghana. he hopes to earn some "small small" money somewhere, perhaps here, though probably not, maybe somewhere else. maybe cameroon. maybe tunisia. but the arabs, "they no like the black skin", jah informs. so maybe cameroon then. but for now ghana. accra. in the trendy part of town called osu, where he lives in a storefront. and, like almost everyone here, our hero longs to make it to europe or the even more mythic and proverbial and abstract "america". but how real america is here with jay-z and coca cola and wrangler jeans and country music. "yeah...america...is good. all is good in america. all is good". he says that often.

"why are you here?....this is the question. this is the question asked of the man with black skin everywhere by the americans!", the cab driver shouted at me, laughing. "why are you here?!".

jah comes from a francophone country and listens to french radio programs on his radio that he covers with a cloth to protect it from the midday sun. he speaks a bit of german. and a bit more english, essential in his new anglophone home. he always greets me in german, smiling. hand extended, a neighbor and new friend, though conversations are often short and center around "how it's going" for the most part.

jah gives us gifts: wooden elephant key chains, a leather bag, which m. insisted on paying for. he tried to give us a rattle, which a friend took, pushing 5000 cedis on him (50 cents), which he reluctantly accepted. it would be an insult, somehow, to decline the gifts. we try to give small gifts back to jah: items brought from home...a colorful picture postcard of berlin, a small bottle of jagermeister, a fancy red plastic thing for recorking wine bottles (retrospectively, a ridicules and desperate gift item)...or we bring him customers who buy small items from him, helping him along his financial way, though to where, I'm still not certain. he joined us at a free concert given a german pianist and composer of modern classical pieces and he enjoyed the strange, irregular rhythms brought by the bruneys to west africa. "i can feel it...i can feel it", he said, smiling, enjoying the complimentary coke and kebab paid for by the german government.

if you'd like to say hello to our friend jah, you can write to him here ~~~>

diamor20002000@yahoo.com

he would be pleased as pie to hear from you.


comment here ~ vwong@planet-interkom.de

....not much time these days...hope to post more soon.

-v

in the meantime, look! -> www.mcsweeneys.net

corrections and epilogue to the owl story epilogue. a mad woman had not locked herself into our upstairs neighbors bedroom as first reported. our upstairs neighbor had locked herself in her bedroom after her home was invaded by a frenzied, drug-addicted american and her not-really-a-policeman-but-dressed-exactly-like-one drug addict friend. another cop arrived (with a menacing looking gun) and, with the faux-cop, arrested our upstairs neighbor and put her in jail for some time. this fake cop story is a bit unsettling. no other dubious events of note have occured, a sign the hex has passed perhaps.

walking beneath some huge oak-sized trees this morning, i heard strange squeeking noises, loud enough that one would have to speak not just a little louder to be heard. i looked up the into these huge oak-sized trees and it took me a minute to focus. and what i thought at first were leaves were actually large grey bats. all these trees were covered, maybe infested brings a better image to mind, with these bats. a thousand would not be a bad guess, though it could very well have been more, hanging and swarming and making their unearthly bat-noises, circling the broad trees. apparently, they are not all nocturnal, as i had always thought.

btw. latest news says the pentagon is trying to fill up the long-vacant draft board position nation-wide. these are the people who decide whether or not to exempt individuals from the draft, if it were to be, you know...hypothetically speaking... reinstated, as our trustworthy friends at the department of defense say. an ominous sign of things not yet come to pass. a more sinister omen than white owls anyone? more here: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1105-01.htm


comment here>vwongatplanet-interkomdotde

owl story epilogue. over the day that following the owl incident, someone from a german development agency (kind of a peace corp equivalent) was murdered in his home; Honesty, the housekeeper, collapsed in the street and was rushed to the hospital; an insane american woman pushed her way into our upstairs neighbor's apartment, locking herself into the bedroom for hours and refusing to come out until she was forcibly extracted by the police and the embassy was notified re: her deportation back to the homeland. Again, I try to refrain from jumping to causal relationships. I suppose Honesty didn't see the owl, nor did the aid worker, nor the suicide victim, nor the crazy american. but taken together it's more than a bit spooky, I have to admit. if it keeps up, i'm visiting the local juju man. the friend with whom we're living is happy to hear we're moving to another place at the end of the week.

~comment here - vwong@planet-interkom.de~

sunday evening found us sitting at a popular accra bar, sparsely filled, situated directly on the coast next to a military firing range where executions of those considered corrupt took place in the 1960s. i imagine how the backs' of the condemned must have faced the ocean and their blindfolds bound extra snug, tied at the occiput. they would hear the waves so clearly. perhaps the clearest sound they had ever heard. and did they long to see the ocean as they died? we sat at the very far corner of a large terrace overlooking a rocky beach below and drank guiness that was just a little too warm. a mediocre band played music from south africa, from cote d'ivoire, from jamaica, chirpy and light and overly sweet, flattening the atmosphere like a fake smile. as i sat parallel to the gulf, receding from the conversation, i looked out towards the waves and black sky and the evening's half moon. i am fascinated by the moon here. it's halves and slivers and crescents are cut sideways, so the moon looks like the cut-out shape of a bowl , round on bottom, flat on top. and this small fact is so improbable, so unreal. it is something to me that needs to be made correct, to be righted, balanced. the same feeling i get reading newsprint laid out at an odd angle. so there is the moon. and in the distance i could make out the speck of a bird flying towards me. no, glided is a better word, despite the clichés. he was moving his wings, this bird, but his movement was gliding...he glided towards me, and the sound was no sound, but it was an immense absence of sound as he approached. he pulled this catastrophic silence along behind it.

when i lived in the bay area, we, those with dogs and the friends of those with dogs, would take ourselves and our canines out to a stretch of coastline shared by dog-walkers and hang gliders and walk a beautiful path between the Pacific and the hills and its bunkers. every so often a hang glider would pass by, rising upon some thermal or other. and there was this great rushing wind sound that always left an impression on me, it was both deafening and silent, like schrodinger's dead-alive cat in that box of his. this combination of extremes.

and this bird flew towards me with this exact sound in my mind's ear. and as he approached i could make out his face. wide, it was so wide, so broad and extended and disturbingly human, and more disturbingly beautiful and like the moon, so incorrect to me. this owl, this pure-white owl with eyes as dark as the night behind him. and all these clichés kind of come out of things like this, like this owl. here was this seed of truth from which these common, tired sayings arise, like the other over-used metaphor which came to my mind: his eyes were abysmal and infinite. and it seemed i looked into them for such a long time as he headed towards me and they grew in size and intensity as he approached. immersed in there conversations, no one else had yet noticed, . and then he moved passed us and away, west along the coast towards togo. and i screamed "owl...there's an owl" and then, as everyone shifted and turned in their seats, turned their heads and i was looking over my shoulder behind me, perhaps as those condemned men had wanted to to forty years ago. he stopped and hovered there, distant and white in the darkness. and we just stretched and strained our eyesight out toward this bird. ("Vögel" in german...somehow, it sounds more appropriate in german. stronger. "bird" sounds so weak.). and as we stared, he floated for a time and abruptly turned and returned to a point directly across from us maybe three meters away, illuminated by a yellow floodlight spilling out towards the ocean. and in the yellow light, he remained white and hovered, flapping occasionally and looking down at various angles, like he had lost something important on the way out. i could see his profile and his eyes still looked black and mad. and he didn't fly off, he hovered and looked and flapped and just waited for what seemed like minutes. i didn't move my eyes away and kept thinking about how this is far too long for him to stay there, with us watching him, as if we were seeing something we shouldn't be. as if we were privileged or cursed.

a few people were seated at the table in front of ours who also had an unobstructed view and they were not as amused or amazed.

"oh jesus. oh jesus!...", they kept crying. and i could only hear them peripherally, as i stared. the owl's face was hypnotic.

owls are considered the animal form of witches here. and witches here are as real as owls and half moons sliced sideways. a witch is a witch because she (for they are rarely men) is labeled as such. To the north, so i'm told, are towns and villages made up of witches, pressed into exile by their communities and families. and these are the lucky ones who are not stoned or beaten to death by their neighbors. there are signs here that ask one to think twice before stoning a woman for witchcraft, that compel those meting out their justice, their particular way of righting their world, to imagine the accused as a sister, a mother. these things still occur here. a belief in witchcraft is one way of ordering the world, of offering an explanatory model for phenomena seemingly inexplicable.

and to our neighbors, this owl was a witch, an omen, a sign of bad things not yet come to pass. to most of us, from germany, italy, the states and brazil, it was beautiful, rare, strange, an occurrence outside the ordinary. like seeing a whale surfacing or a total eclipse. and so out of the ordinary that the image, the sound, the experience and feeling of those moments is imprinted in me.

m. and i always exchange the stories and experiences of our separate days, my ordeals with bureaucrats and public transport, her dealings with classroom politics and student drama. yesterday, a coworker's sister's brother killed himself. i'm not a very suspicious person and my rationalizations usually hold up against most bad omens and i realize this event was somewhat removed from my social network. still, suicide in africa is something of a rare event in itself and i still chalk it up to coincidence despite arguments to the contrary that there are no coincidences. nevertheless, this death punctuated the episode with the owl. and well, the people screaming "oh jesus oh jesus i'm scared" believed and who am i, really, to deny causal relationships in this place where so many things to me seem off-kilter.
comment here ~ vwong@planet-interkom.de

what i've come here to do is to collect data for my thesis. my intention is to examine places where hiv testing is done in the city of accra and describe what i find. there are all sorts of rules written about how hiv testing should be done by organizations like the world health organization and the un, setting out guidelines on things like confidentiality, informed consent and how the testing should be carried out. so i'm trying to look at a cross-section of institutions where people come to get tested, places like clinics, organizations, hospitals, etc. both in the public and private spheres. to do this i've written out a 50 question survey and will interview a few different people at each place...doctors, administrators, counselors, etc.

now what this project entails is a bit more complex than what i initially envisioned from the safety of my far-removed, first-world berlin living room. to begin with, there is a mammoth and convoluted bureaucracy of which kafka would be impressed. because i need ethical approval to do what i want to do, i need to go through certain procedures, which means basically collecting letters which a required to collect further letters from individuals at all levels of government. and these letters are then brought to a commission where they are slowly photocopied by apathetic secretaries who like to demonstrate their power by slowing down processes. these are then sent to twelve other individuals of importance who then meet and make a decision as to the ethical-ness of the study. then i get a letter back from them and can begin my work. i have been at this for five weeks now and am awaiting an answer.


the oldest fishing harbor in Ghana lies on the other side of a large prison, formerly one of the British empire's forts (christened James Fort after King James II, who ruled in the 17th century, it remains one of the many reminders of the complex colonial past here), heavy grey and monolithic, it supported the gold and slave trades of the 18th and 19th centuries, defending the coastline. High above, darkened windows with old, oxidized iron bars, vertical, thick and round, as one imagines prison bars should be. Between the bars are stuck rolled sleeping mats of various faded colors, the only details and signs of life within. there are hundreds of prisoners inside and from the number of mats, one can infer that the place is not uncrowded. our friend and guide, cyprus, says only ten have actually been convicted, while most await trial, sometimes for up to ten years.

steep and slanted steps, slippery with scum and salt water, wind around the back of the harbor from the street, down to the crowds and canoes and wooden shacks below. it smells faintly of rot and salty air here. one can observe the large grey rats run through the garbage-filled drainage ditches from the steps above, looking straight down upon them, they seem somehow more endearing than disgusting. part of the colorful life teeming here, along with naked, running children, laughing and yelling "how are you!" in tiny, powerful voices, certain and focused like commands and emaciated dogs with chains around their necks and large teats worn by long-ago weaned puppies and mothers of children who watch you with suspicion.

and here there are boats. and men working about them. large wooden canoes, heavy, serious and unsinkable. and one man paints tar carefully upon the side boards. and others are pulling in oars, broad and painted and heavy. they are the only oars appropriate for such boats, so large they look like metaphors for fatigue or power depending on your state of mind. hundreds of others mill about, neither waiting nor watching or working, rather simply being there. but they watch us also with suspicion as we pass through, from within the boats or beneath makeshift tent-structures made of tarp and bamboo. uncertain and meek looking, i feel powerless here and am happy cyprus is with us. with him, we are legitimized, tolerated. the waves of the gulf of guinea lap calmly at the boat's wooden hulls and the laughing of the children is comforting.






One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

-susan sontag, speech "on the great atlantic divide"

It's 17.30 and the heat outside is tolerably hot, a heavy warmth abetted by a clouded, dusky sky. not the usual pounding heat, delivering sunburns within minutes here to most of the bruney's (what they call us whiteys out here, said to be a term more endearing than derogatory, but the otherness implied is not lost on the speaker nor the receiver, even when said through a smile). sunscreen is a daily ritual. as is industrial-strength DEET in the evenings to keep the mosquitoes away with moderate effectiveness. The neighborhood internet cafe is cool, a rattling leaky air conditioner pushed through tinted glass windows, performing a halfway decent job of cooling the dark, faux-wood paneled room. the ceiling is low and fans hang even lower from the ceiling. there's a kind of makeshift bar with a fake marble top, a sign strung up with dusty, unlit christmas lights spell out the words "zone bar", but i've never seen them sell anything, drinks or otherwise. it's often quite full here. many of the customers seem to be males, looking at websites on business, marketing or management strategies or writing up business plans late into the night. and for about 6000 cedis an hour (about 75 cents), it's cheaper than my internet access at home. still, it's quite expensive for the average ghanaian. for here, a bus ride almost anywhere is about 10 cents. and you can buy a lunch for 30 cents. but luxuries of the west such as computers or pasteurized milk or riding in taxies alone have there associated cost, and it's still out of reach for many.

so this is the initiating point for this blog, in which i hope to find a forum and catalysation point to record some of my experiences. i've been here five weeks now and the time is moving forward rapidly, with october already come and gone. my opportunities of documenting aspects of my days seems to often to be pushed back in favor of thousands of other activities. and so i'm trying this out in order to better focus my attention on such an activity. we'll see how it goes....