Chapter 52...The day of birth and a day in the life of...

Last Tuesday saw my travelling feet happy again as I packed myself off for a slightly longer than long weekend away! I like to think, after two years out and about in this big wide World, that I'm quite good at this packing light thing, but I still manage to amaze myself everytime at how easily I fill a 30L backpack for just five nights away! As I walked the five minutes from my house to the main road to catch a taxi to the tro park I was cursing myself for stuffing in those extra 'just-in-case' tops and shoes, as I could feel the sweat prickling on my back! I then found myself even more annoyed as I arrived at the tro park to see a Tamale tro pulling away full and en route to the one place I really wanted to be! The protocol here, in true GMT (Ghana Maybe Time) is that you just have to sit and wait for a tro to fill before it departs and it was just my luck that the next Tamale tro to pull up was a 35 seater (this is big)...needless to say on a Tuesday afternoon it took a long time to fill, around one hour forty five minutes to be precise!

Eventually after a nap, a fight (not me) and being dropped at the wrong place I made it to TICCS to meet the EWB for his birthday! We celebrated in style with some 'Western' food at SWAD (crispy noodles and pizza), a variety of beers (Shandy and Star for me, everything else for the EWB), conversations we can't remember and great company (too many names to list here)... 

The next day, after a lie-in and slightly sore head for the EWB, we ventured to my current favourite food joint in Tama - Luxury! We chomped more food and attempted a mass rehydration to prepare ourselves for the adventure ahead... 

Jana has been the home of the EWB for the past seven months since arriving in Ghana. It is the equivalent of a small village, located just outside Tama town itself. When we arrived at 3pm the compound looked like any other in the Northern part of Ghana - a mud brown maze of circular buildings and walls where women were busy cooking, cleaning and caring for children...

Aminatu who is four years old carrying Nasara who is nearly one on her back! She could not tie the cloth herself so some of the older girls had to help her! The EWB says he has seen even smaller girls carrying babies on their backs!

But this compound and this family hold a very special place in the EWB's heart, and rightly so, they have been his Ghana family since he arrived and they have all  worked to build up the most magical of relationships that feels so natural to every single one of them. As we walked nearer to the women who were sat outside  the compound  their faces lit up with joy as they saw the EWB with me in tow! The EWB greeted in Dagbani and engaged in a very impressive small chat with the women who at one point all looked at me and smiled, which gave it away that I had been introduced. They shook my hand with beaming smiles and asked lots of questions all at once, all of which I didn't understand so the EWB had to translate between English and Dagbani, no small task with lots of excitable women around! After enough small talk we excused ourselves to head to the EWB's room located a little further out from the compound, but as is always the case in rural villages in Ghana when a new person arrives, we didn't even manage to unlock the front door before we were swarmed with children ranging from a few months to around sixteen. They are all very used to seeing the EWB around the village, but seeing me for the first time caused quite a stir and we found ourselves spending the next three hours before dinner trying to control a group of fifteen to twenty highly hysterical Ghanaian children, which I secretly thoroughly enjoyed, much to the EWB's amusement and fear!

Some of the children who came to greet the EWB and I as we tried to enter the room!

Something you don't see often on TV back home - smiling, happy African children!

As if Ghanaian children aren't physical enough I decide to introduce 'happy slapping'

One of the girls who must have been around sixteen sat in the tree collecting leaves to be used to cook soup. There were at least three or four other girls in the tree doing the same with absolutely no ropes or form of protection at all!

Is it wrong to have favourites?! I think Aminatu may be mine! Judging by her face though, I'm not sure I'm hers!

As the sun came down I really started to notice and appreciate the differences between my VSO home life compared to the EWB's. In Jana there is no electricity so no lights, fan or fridge.  No charging of phones, I-pods, laptops and cameras. No running water so no flushing toilet, but a long drop instead (luckily contained in a hut with a locking door, I was most impressed) and no powerful shower whenever you fancy it. Once again I found myself asking which Ghanaians I should be living among while I am here - the villagers like these in Jana or the doctors and lecturers like those in Kumbosgo? With that in mind, at 19:30 we strolled across to the compound for dinner using a small hand torch to light up the zig-zagged path back to the compound. We sat inside the coolest and biggest hut to eat our dinner of T-Z, soup and guinea fowl  with Hussain the head of the household  and some of his sons who were home after a long day of farming. I could just about see each thing that I was dipping my right hand into as I was collecting up enough food to fill my mouth full of interesting flavours! The guinea fowl was easier to rip apart than spooning T-Z and soup with your hand and even eating that highlighted such differences between my life of luxury and the EWB's 'down and dirty'/real way of doing things. I would pick up a leg or wing and eat a lot of the flesh from the bone then the EWB would practically consume the rest of the thing by chomping gristle and bone like a true Ghanaian, which just made me cringe! After working my way through what I thought was a decent amount of T-Z for a girl who only eats it once in a blue moon, I was told by Hussain that I must eat more otherwise the women will see it as an insult that there is more than half left. So I took my right hand back to the bowl and scooped up more T-Z rolled it into a ball then dipped it into the soup making sure I took a worthy amount to see some reduction in the pot. In my mind I wanted to leave more food behind so the women who worked so hard to make it and the children who used up so much energy entertaining me all afternoon would be really well fed tonight! I felt almost like I was going against my fellow women by sitting in the cool hut with the men chopping plenty of food when I had no idea what left-overs they would be eating outside, but as I have come to learn - to go against the well formed and understood system of hierarchy and gender roles is one you do at your own perel! So instead I did what I have come to do best in Ghana - bite my tongue and do things their way, which meant I left the compound to head for bed feeling fully fed and with a new found love of T-Z!

The EWB and I stood side-by-side outside the room (under the porch to avoid the start of the rain) brushing our teeth looking out into the village and that's when it really hit me, there were no lights anywhere as far as the eye could see! Not a single building was emitting light into the dark almost star-less sky! The only time this happens in Bolga is when we go through a temporary lights out, so for a split-second a sharp spike of fear ran through me that it is always this dark at night in Jana and no amount of emergency repairs would change that, but that thought soon left when the EWB told me how refreshing he finds it and I managed to see the darkness in a whole new light! Following an evening of rain we slept comfortably without a fan and woke naturally to sunlight shining in through the windows. It crossed my mind that the twelve hour countdown now began until the sun went down and the place was plunged into darkness again! Living by natural light for just one evening really did feel refreshing, not as refreshing though as outdoor bathing with a bucket of warm water, the sky up above, women and children chatting away in the compound and a slight Ghana breeze whipping past the drops of water on your body to cause a shiver! 

Once dressed and packed, my short visit to Jana was nearly over, but not before a breakfast of Koko porridge and kosay. I had never tried Koko before so this was a totally new experience for me and one that will take some serious getting used to! The sharp, spicy taste of the porridge is not one I would choose to start my day with, but luckily kosay being far blander I managed to chop enough of that to keep the women happy. The EWB and I then said our goodbyes and I was given many well wishes for my onward journey and told I must come back to Jana, which I promised I would. I jumped into the EWB's air conditioned work pick-up with the radio pumping some well known tunes and sped off back to Tama with it's lights, water, doctors and lecturers and very own different character to that of Jana! Leaving the compound; it's people; it's lack of English; it's rickety old tractor and a spectacular insight into a whole new way of life behind me, I really can see how that is home and how that is Ghana truly at its most raw and its best...until next time Jana...!