After months of sloth and slack, a little prompting from Branigan sr. has motivated the promised but ignored conclusion to the Ghana Chronicles. For a recap of pt's 1-7, click here. And for new readers, all underlined passages can be clicked to link for related or extended information.
Part 8.
Return. Wilisto is reading the revolutionary Latin American writer Paolo Freire, washing clothes, clowning with the girls and partaking of our food. It’s good to be back in David’s warm spartan home, knowing that the bikes will soon arrive and the workshops will kick off the final stage of this journey. The room is clean and warm, stocked with musical instruments, books and cooking supplies. A storage area holds the tools David uses to tend his small vegetable garden, and two cisterns collect water for bathing. The home is high-end on the village scale and was built specifically for the rotating Peace Corps volunteers who come through. It has electricity, a tin roof and a composting toilet, all luxuries in this part of the country. David is still off at an orientation seminar for new volunteers, so we have his place to ourselves; that being a relative term considering how many locals are visiting us on a 24hr basis. One of these young folks is Shargy, son of the community elder Moses. Shargy looks like a teenage Miles Davis. He speaks in proverbs and asks probing questions that at first are a bit unsettling, but quickly disarming and humorous. Here’s a Shargy (which by the way is pronounced ‘shaggy’) proverb: Butterflies should not think of themselves as birds. Indeed.
We go to sleep anticipating an increase in activity as we plan to follow Faustina and Nurse Leticia through their daily routines over the coming days. Wili will help us teach Leticia to ride a bike for us and we will follow Faustina on her daily journey to school.
As I drift off into the haze of half-sleep that I’ve become accustomed to here, I mull over something that Shargy said to me just before he took leave for the night; in order for Africa to move forward, it must let go of it’s traditions and history that hold it’s people back. An interesting insight from a boy living in a small village.
Riding Lessons. We set off early for the clinic to rendezvous with Nurse Leticia, and already the rains threaten. Just how much of a threat would be revealed later in the day. By the time we reach the nurses quarters, a light drizzle has begun, but Leticia is undeterred. I loan Wili my parka and set up under the eves an unused storage building just behind the main clinic offices, affording a view of the open plain between Leticia’s residence and the hospital. The lessons begin and at first it’s a bit comical, as would be any adult learning to ride a bike for the first time. Leticia is fiercely determined, and as the rain increases so does her resolve. At one point during their efforts the volume of rain became severe, so there was a break in the action to collect water in basins and fill the storage reservoirs for the coming dry season. Tricia pitched in to help with a large washtub balanced on her head, and everyone freaked - it’s too heavy too much first time carry on head! She stubbornly insisted so they gave her a smaller bucket and the water brigade commenced. When the reservoir was full the cycling lessons resumed.
Amazingly, we realize that she plans to master the machine in just a few short hours. Pausing to catch her breath she explains to me that the puddles motivate her not to fall because she does not want to get muddy. She only tumbles twice and in fact does get the physical mechanics of cycling down in small time. Wilisto is as amazed as we are, telling me it took him days to learn to ride as a child. It has been raining with increasing ferocity and as a pack of shouting children run by we learn that one of the levees has broken, meaning fish are flopping around waiting to be caught by hand. Leticia admonishes them not to run a certain way because the flooding also means that the pit where the clinic discards it’s used needles has also overflowed. What the fuck!?! We think and say out loud, but there is nothing we can do. This is Africa, and even though the nurses carry the proper boxes for disposing of sharps, apparently the next step is to just dump the full boxes together in a pit that get’s burned once a week. The mud swirling around our feet takes on a new toxic menace.
On the way back to our village, we discover just how dangerous this storm has been. The same levee that provided fish for the masses and flooded the toxic disposal pit has also washed out the only road. Four feet of rushing water blocks our path, so we turn to embark on a two-hour journey the long way round. We’re riding bikes with all our gear on our backs, which is barely comfortable on short distances. The crowd at the breeched road begins shouting wildly – we can’t ride the long way or we will surely be consumed in the even heavier rains bearing down. Everyone grabs our gear from us and starts ferrying us across. All of the good Dr. Spiria’s lectures about avoiding rivers and standing water wash through my head as I wade into the current and make the push to the other side. I take a quick inventory of the cuts and scrapes on my lower body and wonder which ones will get infected first. At least we’ve got the industrial strength portable pharmacy back at David’s.
Soaked and sequestered back at the Peace Corpsman’s house, we take stock of our situation. The small video camera is DOA, having been carelessly dropped by me in my haste to move out of the rain earlier. At least it will lighten the load of the camera pack. Clothing has been taking around three days to line dry in the humidity. Now that the air is predominantly water, ‘dry’ is a cruel joke. We stuff our boots with old newspaper and pathetically hold the insoles over the two-burner stove. Next up is a fun read of the medical texts in the first-aid kit. Our toxic floodplain crossing presents a host of exciting possibilities – billharzia anyone? We decide to play it safe and start dosing Doxycycline with diner. With days ahead of us before we can wrap up this phase of the project, our morale is low and ebbing. I think of guys like J. Michael Fay and J. Craig Venter, slogging across the jungles of the world trying to cure the planet and I think – I’m a pussy. Meanwhile it rains and rains and rains.
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