West African Days

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April 19, 2005

Back in the good ol' USA

After an action-packed final week in Ghana, I sadly left my new friends and the fascinating country, and made the 20-hour trip home. Well, not quite home. I'm back in Washington, DC for a couple weeks to finish up my fellowship. At the moment, that pretty much means logging tons of tape.

I arrived here last week, thrilled to see that the bitter cold of February in Washington has been replaced by a city beautifully in springtime bloom, with fruit trees and dogwoods blossoming, and tulips and daffodils lining the streets. On the flip side, I'm in a sticker shock so extreme that my addiction to Starbucks chai tea might finally be broken.

The streets of DC are paved and clean, cars and busses and subways purr along efficiently, and people clad in business suits scurry along the wide, smooth sidwalks. It's comfortable, but I miss the vibrancy and raw life of Ghana. I met such a wonderful group of Ghanaians and foreigners, and I'm missing them already -- from my hosts Madame Cobbinah and Jerry & Catherine, Mahmoud, Jerome, Janet, to my cabana boys, Prince, Nat and Freeborn, my driver, Eric, my cameraman, Rahim, my journalist friends Kwasi, Colleen, Drake, Jaime, Bonnie, and Ato, and finally my many newfound friends in Buduburam, from Cephas to Samson to Miata and Miss Alice and Mr. Bah.

Ah well, more adventures lie ahead, hopefully ... and more West African days, inshallah.

Posted by Cathryn Poff at 12:57 AM | Comments (5)

April 10, 2005

MIA

It had been a whirlwind week with lots of filming and running around, but all was going well, more or less. And then one day I was boiling hot and just couldn't cool off. I looked around my taxi at my driver and crew and they all looked mildly warm, while I was drenched in sweat and about to collapse.

Since that day, I've been somewhat down for the count and having all sorts of wild feverish dreams that involved chickens walking upside down on the ceiling, the air-conditioner unleashing a tsunami in my bedroom, and gigantic cockroaches invading the house.

A bit frustrating, as I'm trying to wrap up here but had to postpone some things when I just couldn't get out of bed.

Today I'm back on my feet and looking ahead to two last hectic days in Ghana. I fly out on Tuesday evening.

I have so enjoyed being here, seeing a new part of West Africa and meeting some tremendous people. I've also hardly seen any of Ghana beyond Accra and Buduburam and the infernal road between the two, and I'm dying to see more. It'll be tough to board that plane on Tuesday.

I hope to post a couple more items here before I leave, so stay tuned.

Posted by Cathryn Poff at 5:35 PM | Comments (2)

April 6, 2005

Ishmael

As some may remember, on the plane to Accra last month, I happened to sit next to Ishmael, a young man who hailed from Buduburam.

The first time I went to Buduburam, I asked Alice Abraham, the director of the Libierian Refugee Welfare Council, if she could help me find Ishmael. He had given me his aunt's name and her neighborhood's zone number. Buduburam is a town of more than 40,000 people, and comprised of permanent cement buildings now, but there are no street names and no addresses.

Alice helped me find my way through the maze of narrow dirt streets and eventually to the house of Jackie, Ishmael's aunt. Ishmael was off in another town that day, but Jackie brought him to meet me the next time I was at Buduburam. I have checked in to say "hi" to quiet young Ishmael often when I've visited the settlement.

It turns out that his parents sent him here not on vacation, but for some discipline. He had apparently been getting into some trouble at home (Philadelphia). As I've learned, many young teenagers who migrate from here to the U.S. have some adjustment problems, and it is common for parents to send them back here for a year or two. Their parents are reportedly worried about their kids getting into trouble in the U.S. For recent immigrants, trouble with any sort of authority is something to be avoided at all costs. I remember happening upon this same phenomenon in American Samoa.

The last I saw Ishmael, he was soon going to be heading to a boarding school around Cape Coast. Boarding school is common here for Ghanaian kids, and I imagine Ishmael's parents are able to swing it and deem it a good option for him at this point.

He seems like a good kid, and I suppose that at 12 and 13 years old, the transition from Buduburam to Philadelphia may have been a bit baffling and rough.

Posted by Cathryn Poff at 1:50 PM

April 5, 2005

San Francisco in Accra

My taxi crawled through the afternoon traffic, windows rolled down all the way, the black and gray clouds of exhaust streaming in. I was hot and sweaty and dying for some sort of very cold refreshment. We were almost home. Then the Fan Milk man appeared and I leapt out of the cab.

Fan Milk is a local creation, and is frozen yogurt or soft ice cream sold in small plastic bags, sort of like well-branded water sachets. Fan Milk is sold mostly by young people on bikes with Fan Milk coolers attached to the handlebars. One Fan Milk packet is 2,500 cedi, or 30 cents.

As I tore into my icy Fan Milk, a parade of hundreds of boisterous young men took over the street. They were dressed in black and red, and they were walking, biking and riding on two huge flat-bed trucks. Nigerian crooner 2 Face's hit "African Queen" blared from speakers on the trucks.

And then I saw the men in dresses. Red dresses. Their hair done up in women's styles, they sashayed down the street waving. Other men had their jeans pulled down far enough to reveal red sequined thongs. I couldn't believe it.

"Hey," I asked the CD vendor standing next to me. "What is this?"
"Oh, it's the university kids," he replied laughing. "Today is their day."

He went on to describe something like a 'senior' skip day in the U.S. The emphasis here, he told me, was that the students get to just act as crazy as they want to for a day. These students, he explained, were from University of Ghana, Legon (a suburb of Accra).

As the parade flowed by, people in cars and along the roadside laughed and waved.

"This doesn't bother people?" I asked.

I had to verify with him that certain of the parade-goers in drag were really men. It felt like just another day in my hometown of San Francisco, but Ghana is a religious and fairly conservative country.

"No," he said, chuckling. "It's their day."

The parade passed in about five minutes, and the street was instantly enveloped in choking gridlock again.

I asked my hosts here about the parade, and asked other expats and Ghanaians about the parade. Most of the expats hadn't heard of this tradition and didn't believe it. The Ghanaians just laughed and said "Yeah, that's their day."

Just goes to show the multiple layers of every society and how just when you think you have even the slightest handle on a place, something happens that makes you realize you don't have a clue.

Posted by Cathryn Poff at 2:25 PM

April 4, 2005

Flashing in Ghana

Some have predicted that as poor countries develop, they will leapfrog over several stages in the technological revolution. And so it is happening here in Ghana.

Cell phones are everywhere and being used in numbers that 'land-line' phones never were. In Accra, it seems everyone has a cell phone. Every taxi driver I've met has a cell phone, as does nearly every professional. And those who don't have their own cell phone often share one cell phone with their friends and family. Phone time is purchased on "snap" cards, which are sold at "snap" booths on every street. The usual card is 75,000 cedi for 256 units. Each unit is worth less than a minute, though I don't know their exact worth. I do know that my units seem to tick away with alarming speed.

The streets are dotted with "space to space" tables, usually a wooden table adorned with a cloth banner and an umbrella overhead. There are also zillions "communication centers", housed in and on everything from wooden tables to sizeable buildings. At these tables and booths and stores, people can pay a fee ("small-small money" in local lingo) to use a cell phone or land-line to make a phone call. The fee depends on the telecom network of the number you're calling. I think the "space to space" refers to calls made only on the Spacefon network, but I'm not sure.

The cell phone culture here confused me initially, but I'm gradually mastering the intricacies.

Nobody seems to have voicemail, and it is generally impossible to leave messages. Cell phones are often turned off, because people frequently seem to run out of units and battery power.

Ghanaians "flash" a lot, which means calling a number, letting it ring once or twice and then hanging up. We used to do this as prank calling in seventh grade, but it's serious communication here.

Rahim, my cameraman, tells me that Ghanaians flash to get around the cost of calls. They set up codes, so that one flash means 'hi, I'm thinking of you', two flashes means 'I'm leaving work now', or whatever meanings they assign among themselves. People might flash to let me know they're thinking of me. That doesn't require a return call. But they might flash me because they're running out of units and need me to call them (only the outgoing caller is charged for time). That requires a return call. I still don't know how I'm supposed to discern the meaning of each flash.

For foreigners like me, flashing can lead to some cryptic conversations. I dial a wrong number, realize it's wrong as it starts ringing, and I hang up. Later, the owner of the wrong number calls me back to ask why I called. Because they can't really understand my English and I can't really understand their English, the conversation goes something like this:

"Hello?" I answer.
"Hello?" he says.
"Hello?" I ask.
"Hello? Hello?" he says.
"Yes? Who is this?" I ask.
"You flash me?" he shouts above the loud music in the background. I think he's in a rock concert.
"I don't know," I admit. "Who is this?"
"HELLO?" he yells into the phone. He seems to be getting closer to the music.
"YES! HELLO! I AM CATHRYN!"
"HELLO?!" he demands. "WHO ARE YOU?"
"HELLO!" I'm back to the beginning.
Loud pulsating music now. No voice.
"HELLO?" I say again.
"HELLO? YOU FLASH ME?" It sounds like he's crawled inside the music speaker now.
"NO! WHO ARE YOU?" I answer.
"HELLO? WHY YOU CALL ME?" he asks.
"I DON'T KNOW," I yell with resignation. "WHO ARE YOU?"

...and so it goes. Needless to say, I dial very very carefully now.

But I often have that sort of conversation, dotted with lots of "hellos" and confusion, with people I actually know.

This past weekend we were headed to Buduburam for a shoot with a Liberian dance troupe. I called Mr. Koffi, one of the troupe leaders, to let him know we were on our way. The ensuing conversation was like the one above, but on steroids. By the end of the call, I thought they were heading off on a pilgrimage for some sort of holiday. When we arrived, it turned out George Weia, a major Liberian soccer star, was coming to the camp, and that's what Mr. Koffi had been telling me on the phone. ?!

I've belatedly learned to use text messaging a lot, to conserve on units and to have clearer communications across the language barrier of two groups of native English speakers who can't understand each other's English.

Before I came to Ghana, Professor Ben Fred-Mensah, a Ghanaian who is a professor at Howard University and lecturer at Johns Hopkins SAIS, provided me guidance and advice about my impending trip here. When Ben informed me that he would be loaning me a cell phone during my stay in Ghana, I thought it was a very generous luxury. (He also informed me that the cell phone had been confiscated from his 16-year-old daughter here, because she'd been talking on it too much -- teenagers are the same the world over, eh?).

When Ben's nephew, Henry Mensah, met me in Accra to give me the cell phone, I felt a bit indulgent. But ever since that day, my cell phone has been my lifeline and as crucial to me in my work here as it is in the U.S.

In fact, I now face the maddening task of getting my phone book off my cell phone here before I hand the phone back to Henry...

Posted by Cathryn Poff at 6:16 PM

April 2, 2005

Dutch wax

No, it's not like a bikini wax... and it's nothing like a Brazilian wax. Dutch wax is the expensive version of colorful African cloth. If you've been in West Africa, you know "wax" fabric well. It's in every market and adorning many women and men, particularly at special occasions. "Wax" refers to the manufacturing process, not the texture of the fabric.

Yesterday Mr. Van Damme (unfortunately it wasn't Claude) gave me a tour of the Ghana Textile Printing (GTP) factory in Tema, where the Dutch set up business in 1966 to produce wax cloth. They don't let people in often, and definitely not cameras, and as we were walking through the factory filming, he murmured "We rarely do this".

"I know," I replied. "Why now?"

"I don't know!"

We laughed, and I think he figured he was too far in to have second thoughts, so we proceeded with the tour.

We weren't allowed to film certain parts of the fabric waxing and dyeing process, because there are apparently proprietary techniques involved.

I've bought my share of wax fabric in Africa, but until my tour, I didn't have any inkling of how labor-intensive it is to produce it.

There are something like 27 steps in the process of getting from white cloth to the brightly printed cloth. The first color on the cloth is printed, but subesequent colors are added by hand-blocking, which is astounding when you think of the millions of yards of wax produced in GTP's factories alone. The training process for hand-blocking color onto the fabric is 7 months, full time. Mr. Van Damme says they pay the blockers well, and jobs in the factory are prized. The blockers are all men, and they are all buff.

The company has its own cloth designers, who have come up with countless print designs. Before it is made public, each design is copyrighted and theoretically protected for fifteen years. In reality, the designs are copied within weeks of going public.

GTP and its parent Dutch company, Vlisco, are facing decreasing demand as Ghanaians opt more and more for Western dress. Vlisco/GTP is also facing crushing competition from the Chinese, who are actually copying GTP's designs, slapping a facsimilie of GTP's label on the cloth and selling it at half the price. They produce their knock-off textiles by machine, and the quality is much lower, but it's impossible to tell until after you've washed it a couple times. I was stunned when Mr. Van Damme told me that they estimate somewhere around 60% of the GTP cloth being sold in markets in Ghana today is not the genuine article, but rather Chinese copies.

Posted by Cathryn Poff at 5:08 PM | Comments (1)