But people are still visiting this blog, so thought I'd update it with a link to my story on Ghana's Fridaywear, which aired on great the PBS show "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria".

Meanwhile, one of my Ghanaian friends, Helena Cobbinah, has been in Sudan for much of the past year, as part of the African Union's peacekeeping force in Darfur and now in the southern regional capital. I'll post photos of that as soon as I figure that out.

I've learned the basics of editing digital files, both visual and audio, editing digital still photos, and, thanks to my Mac-fanatic colleague Dick Van Wie, I've learned at every juncture why Apples are the ONLY computers worth buying (of course I don't own one!).

Meanwhile, as I'm tangled up in technology here in on the edge of Silicon Valley, I read the news out of West Africa, and it is not good. The peacekeeping in and rebuilding of Liberia is lurching along in fits and starts. One of the many latest developments there is the proposal to transfer power from the transitional government to a 'trusteeship' of so-called 'international experts.' The idea apparently arose because of the high level of corruption in the current transitional government.
(http://allafrica.com/stories/200506170080.html)
I do remember a meeting I had a few months ago in Washington with an international businessman, who said he believed the corruption in Gyude Bryant's transitional government was among the highest in Africa.

Liberia's elections are still scheduled for October, and I'm sure the Liberians in Buduburam, Ghana, are watching events there closely. Many of the Liberian refugees I met in Ghana were at once optimistic for their country and wary of believing it safe for return. Of course, many had returned in 1996 during a period of 'peace', only to flee again and lose more family members when the country imploded in another paroxysm of violence. If I was a refugee, I'd be waiting and assessing the situation before going back, too.

And then there's the disturbing news out of Niger, to the north, of a drought and food shortages. This strikes close to home for me, since I spent more than two years in Niger and consider my village there, Diomoga, as a second family of sorts. Niger was devastated in the late 1980s by a long and severe drought. The drought this year was coupled with a plague of locusts, further decimating the crops that are a struggle in the best years. While drought and food shortages are bad enough, what's worse is that a UN appeal for aid for Niger was reportedly not heeded by a single donor:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4605775.stm

I suppose with so many appeals for aid from so many corners of Africa -- and around the globe -- there comes a point of no response. But to know how desperately on-the-edge Nigeriens live in the best of times, it's heartbreaking to think of more hardship piled on top of them.

Some of my fellow returned Peace Corps volunteers (or 'rpcvs') are organizing some money transfers over to our villages in Niger, to help in way we can most directly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Stop at a traffic light at any major intersection in Accra, and hawkers will walk up to your car, with huge bowls perched on top of their heads filled with water sachets. (The throngs of hawkers at these intersections sell nearly everything but the kitchen sink).

Typically I buy bottles of Voltic water, produced somewhere up near Lake Volta. But in a pinch, I'll buy a sachet.

The first time I did this, acting confidently as though I'd done it a million times, I squeezed the bag while biting off the corner and all the water in the sachet spurted all over me while the taxi driver dissolved into giggles.

I still can't get it quite right, but the water squirting onto me is a nice relief from the heat anyway.

The plastic sachets have created a major waste management problem in Ghana. There are very few garbage cans to be found anywhere, and as in so many African countries, litter is common. Empty water sachets carpet the streets and gutters here. Ghana's vice-president formed a National Waste Management Programme last year to tackle the issue.

The program has run into some problems, but the sachet pollution is a topic of discourse here, and a Ghanaian journalist has even produced a documentary on the sachets. The doc will be screened at the upcoming first annual Environmental Film Festival of Accra (sadly, I will miss the festival).

So it's natural that since I first set foot on African soil so many years ago, I have loved West African snacks.

In Niger, I adored beignets, farine masas, grilled taro root dipped in ground piment, sweet dates, kooli-kooli ground peanut chunks, and Lebanese frozen chocolate bars. In Ghana, I've learned to crave what I initially thought were inferior snacks. Here, plantains are King Snack, and pretty much the only snack. Everywhere you go there are plantains. Fried whole plantains. Grilled plantain halves. Thinly shaved fried plantain slices. Tidy round plantain chips. Baked plantain slivers. Whatever snack is available, it seems to almost always be based on the plantain.

Once in a while, a young boy or girl walks by with a load of fried taro root chips on their head, and I eagerly snap up baggies full of the salty white and purple chips.

I recently found myself waxing poetic with a Togolese chef about the crispy sugar-dipped beignets and piment-laced corn fritters of our neighboring francophone countries... I think I may be overdue for a day-trip to Lome, Togo, for some serious snacking.

Here in Ghana they call the used-clothing markets "obruni waawu", literally "a foreigner has died." The used western clothing is affordable for the poor, and considered fashionable by the hip. Ghana imports more used clothing than any other African country, running a clothing and fabric trade deficit of nearly forty million dollars a year.

The clothing arrives in huge plastic sacks bound with thick metal bands. It's amazing to watch someone open a bundle, and see the layers and layers of tightly packed clothes burst out. I have no idea how they get so much compressed into one bundle -- it's like they use a giant Ronco vacuum-seal device from the TV infomercials (hello, KRON-4?!).

Visiting the Kantamanto market is exhausting. Filming there, as I did last week, is an order of magnitude worse.

Today is a national holiday (yet another one!), so this morning I headed to Kantamanto to look for a couple T-shirts. Luckily my intuition was right and it was a very quiet day there, with only about one-third of the vendors open. I eventually found a couple decent T-shirts, for which I paid about 2,000 cedi each (roughly 30 cents).

Then, the sun beating down on me and sweat rolling down my back, I took shelter at the nearby "God's Grace Fast Food" snack stand. They were out of fast food. In fact, they were out of all food. But they did have a cold Coke and a chair with an umbrella over it, which at that point was like manna from heaven.

And so with that high-tech missive from the Canadians, I found myself spending Easter Sunday in expatriate comfort at White Sands Beach, an hour west of Accra and just off the Cape Coast road.

Breakfast in Accra was chocolate croissants and tea at Vasili's, where even a Catholic priest in his white robe and pink sash stopped by for morning sustenance. Then into the air-conditioned SUV of Mustapha, a young Lebanese friend of my Canadian friends. He plugged his iPod into the car stereo, set it to 'shuffle' and off we went.

The entry fee means that hawkers aren't milling about the beach, and it means the beach isn't being used as an outdoor toilet facility, which is the case with most public beaches here.

We bought our entry tickets, quickly claimed a palapa, spread out our towels, and plunged into the waves. We got in some good bodysurfing, swimming, naps, and snacking on hummus, calamari and fries (they're "Mexican fries" here, not "French fries" and most definitely not "Freedom fries"). We even rented the 3-person catamaran for an hour, a bargain at 80,000 cedi, which is about nine dollars.

It was a blissful escape from the dust, heat, grime and stressful hum of everyday life here. Of course, there were still African moments, like our kebab order taking three hours to be filled because there 'are no kebabs' they said, even as platters of kebabs continuously streamed past us.

Interestingly, a Ghanaian company was holding its five-year anniversary celebration at the beach (on Easter?!), and the employees set up under the palapa next to us. They cavorted in the waves, held beach footraces, and staged a hilarious game of tug-of-war in front of us.

Every day I'm reminded of the parallel universes I inhabit here. I spend my days with Ghanaians and with Liberian refugees, who have rich cultures and impressively strong family ties, but are often scraping along to just barely get by in pretty dire circumstances. But I spend many evenings -- and today -- with expats like me, who can afford three-dollar pina coladas and four-dollar pizzas, and who have access to air-conditioned cars with deliciously tinted windows and two thousand songs on an iPod.

But it's an accident that Iso is here in Ghana at all.

With a Liberian mother and Sierra Leonean father, Iso ("ICE-oh") grew up in Liberia until civil war broke out, then fled to Sierra Leone. When that country dissolved into its own civil war, Iso bounced among refugee camps in the two countries. He eventually made his way to Ghana, where he was able to bootstrap a life.

As I hung out with him the other night, it struck me that he is just one of hundreds of thousands of young West Africans whose lives have been spent in chronic limbo, fleeing from one war only to have to flee another, losing contact with their families and making their way as best they can.

For men like Iso, fleeing war meant not only not being murdered, but not being abducted into one of the militaries and forced into killing. For women who escaped wars so gruesome they defy explanation, the best case scenarios have often been brutal. Rape was all too common. Prostitution and HIV are prevalent, and teenage motherhood is a not-so-bad outcome.

By all standards, Iso is a success here. But he told me he doesn't feel he's accomplished much until he gets a college degree. He had just begun university in Liberia when Charles Taylor's rebels invaded from Cote d'Ivoire in 1989. Iso's career is hot here, but he's hoping to go to Corvallis, Oregon to study at Oregon State University, of all places. Strange to be here talking to an African war refugee and hear he's dreaming about my faraway home state.

There are so many youth of war who are now heading toward middle age with lives derailed, dreams still deferred, and families scattered across thousands of miles, if still alive at all.

Religion is evident everywhere around me. The streets are littered with restaurants, shops and companies named with faith in mind. Some of my recent favorites include "Praise God Cell Phone Repair", "He Is Risen Chop Bar", "Shower of Blessings Boutique", "Faith Chemical Store", "God First Spare Parts", "By God's Power" medicine stand, and "The Finger of God Beauty Salon". When the business name is not a profession of faith, some add postscripts giving full credit to their higher power, as with the "Happy Home Fashion" shop.

City taxis and tro-tros (that's 'bush taxis' to my Niger friends) profess their faith on fenders and windows. "Well Done Jesus" is spelled out in adhesive letters on the back window of the taxi in front of me. "It's God!!!!!!" reads the front fender of a tro-tro bound for the coast. "It's a Miracle" proclaims the bumper of a tro-tro heading to Buduburam. (It usually IS a miracle that these tro-tros are moving).

While more than seventy percent of Ghanaians are Christian, according to the 2000 census, somewhere around twenty percent are Muslim. Most Muslims are in the north, but I have happened upon many stores here in the south named in praise of Allah.

Today, Good Friday, is a national holiday and the thousands and thousands of churches in Ghana are filled with worshippers. Even Mahmoud, a Muslim friend here, is heading to the mosque this morning for a special prayer session... Or maybe he just gets to go to the mosque for midday prayers since he has the day off. Unclear to me, as are so many things here.

"Cool" is a relative concept, of course. Yesterday morning dawned gray and menacing. A huge thunderstorm hit around nine in the morning, and the rest of the day was spent in the refreshing 80- to 85-degree range.

It was the first time on this trip that I haven't had to use my little sweat towel to wipe the dripping sweat from my face and neck throughout the day. Most Ghanaians carry small towels or big handkerchiefs for just this purpose. They're carried either in your pocket, handbag, or perched on your shoulder. One of my first days here, I bought mine from a street hawker while stuck in pollution-choked traffic near the Kaneshie market. It's a small towel somewhere between washcloth and hand towel size. It's a necessity, and at a price of 2,500 cedi (30 cents), it's one of my best investments so far.