Ghana pt 2

I'm online again while on vacation, this time from Takaoradi, down the coast from Accra. I'm putting some more photos up that were hanging on my flash drive, just because the speed is so much better here. Things are good, we are having some adventures with PC Volunteers here in Ghana, and they are taking care of us. It's a lot of fun to compare our experiences and observations about the countries and cultures. And, they are a kick ass group for the most part. It's interesting how much of the experience here can be as much about Peace Corps as it is about Africa, but that is an obvious over-simplification - the two are much too interwoven to be able to say which is what.
Today we are heading to Busua, where Amy thinks the center of the eclipse's path will pass over us. We have just acquired some glasses to view it safely (I hope), and now just need to nail down a place to stay tonight. Then, pray for a cloudless morning tomorrow...

I'm running out of internet time, may post again before too long.

Ghana

So, now I'm here in Accra. We flew over yesterday after a couple days of Kombo trying to get things ready. When we arrived we realized that maybe we were a little too Peace Corps in our attitude - none of us brought a guide book, we didn't have any clear picture of what we were doing, and we were, in short, completely disorganized. But, my few travels with Toby have served me well and I was happy to be having adventures without structure. I am travelling with Amy Poff and Wendy Portman, they are both older than me, Wendy is pretty laid back within her comfort range, and Amy is not quite laid back about much. Flying, for example, is a real problem for her. I finally made a connection of who it reminded me - B.A. Barracus from the A Team. So, the hops down here - stops in Freetown and Monrovia - were adventures just in watching her white knuckle the takeoffs and landings. And, we saw a wrecked plane just off the runway in Freetown, which did wonders for her confidence.
  So, after an afternoon and evening roaming around a bit of Accra, we are going to try to get our bearings a bit more solidly and then head west down the coast today. The roads are so much nicer, and transport seems to be a bit more organized, so it may only be a two or three hour trip, instead of the six or eight the distance would take back in Gambia.
  The internet seems to be fairly available here, so I may try to make regular posts. And, it's faster! Whooo! So, we'll see.
  Love you all, having a blast and doing my thing...

solar!

Well, I just spent a big chunk of change on the pieces to get solar power running in my hut. After a good deal of discussion and figuring, I got two 100 amp hour batteries, a 25 amp charge controller and a 35 watt panel. The panel is small, and I will probably upgrade to having a pair of them soon, but that's the easiest part of the system to grow, and the rest is designed with growth in mind, so if feels like a smart way to start off. And, I managed to not spend all of the money I got out, so I have some more cash to play with as I get this or other projects rolling. And, the big deal is that I managed to get all of it together and on the mail run packing list, so they are taking it to Farafenni for me - hopefully without breaking the panel! It's a lot of gear, the batteries are big and heavy, so it's a huge help.

  I've been down here just over one day now, and I feel like I've gotten more done than in all my other trips. I decided that I simply had to approach Kombo more like a New Yorker, get all ramped up to deal with the different way of business here, and kick butt. So, I've been on a mission since arriving, and have been successful for the first time in "getting junk done". The Greater Banjul area may not feel like New York to many people, but that attitude has helped me enjoy it more here, and not get lost with my Africa style, which seems perfect in Fara Fenni but not so much here.

  I've finally started missing American media - March Madness to be specific. My Dukies have done well for themselves this year, and I might have some Muslims praying to Allah for J.J. and Shelden and the gang. And if they win it all, I'm going to ask somebody to buy me the games from iTunes. Because this is just too much to pass up. And, those smart people at Apple have now removed the final obstacle to me never owning a television again - I can just buy one of their video iPods and want hour long commutes so I can watch basketball. Ah, life...

  I'm a road warrior these days - got up at six yesterday to get a vehicle here, up at six today to get my work done, up at six tomorrow to get on a vehicle back up-country to a party at Lamin Koto (next to Jangjanbureh Island to you map watchers). St. Patrick's Day party with Irish people! (And Brits) One of my remaining tasks is to find some draft Guinness in cans to lug up. Probably not going to get too many, but one or two will be winning party gifts. Irish whiskey is a more intelligent gift in terms of portability, but this was requested and a touch more affordable.

  And then next weekend I'm back down here on my way to Ghana! That's starting to feel very soon, I'm looking forward too much (another one of those Gambian English expressions), and the vacation time will be very welcome. I never expected to have a Peace Corps experience where I couldn't find enough time to sleep, but here I am, running on a sleep deficit for ten days or so. Insomnia is back with me, and though I've started figuring out tools for getting past it, they tend to require a few long, uninterrupted nights consecutively, which I haven't had. So, I'm in bed for short hours, I don't sleep much, and I actually remembered those grand sleepless days at Duke yesterday. Who knew West Africa could be so busy? It has to be some commentary on my lifestyle that I can't find a consistently slow pace, even here. But, I love my life at the moment, and I'm certainly not complaining about being "the busy volunteer". And, most of my good friends here are similarly busy - Haji, Woman, Sarah, all have as much work as they can handle.

  One of the aspects of Peace Corps that comes into sharp focus is that people are always leaving. They are always arriving as well, but now it's starting to be people I've become close friends with on their way home, and it's sad. Happy for them to have completed service and be going on to another adventure, but sad for us to lose their company. So, we make new friends, we miss our departing friends, and hopefully learn something about the impermanence of all things. To all of you who I met here and have now gone on, we miss you, and leave comments or send email or, you know, telepathy or something.

  I am officially declaring myself cured of parasites. Now, I get to rebuild my digestive tract from all of the firebombing chemicals I have been ingesting. So, another thanks to those of you who included friendly helping pro-biotics in your care packages!

  This is officially complete ramble now, so I'm done. Trying to upload photos to flickr, so check there if you've got time. Love you all,
Zac

Great things

It's been a long time! That's something that people here say even if you saw them last week. I'm not sure exactly what the cultural basis is for it, but I'm always hearing it.

I don’t think I really got nearly effusive enough about what happened for me with Christmas, so I’m making up for it. To all of you who sent anything, you are why I’m able to get up and charge through every day now. You are why I didn’t wilt after five months living with parasites. (I feel a little more free to discuss now that it’s over, and it very much seems to be over. What an experience.) You are the reason that I get to live large and have adventures. And to all of you who spent half of my monthly stipend on postage (I get ~D4200, more or less equal to $150), jeez louise do I owe you big time.

It’s now early March, and I’m still sitting on a trunk and a half worth of goodies. Scrubbers, soaps, batteries, clif bars, snack foods, I’m a volunteer king here. When my pals come to visit, they come to love each and every one of you almost as much as I do. I never have to face bread and peanut paste if I don’t want to. Actually, peanut paste, my staple all through Ramadan, hasn’t been found in my diet since January. Seriously, it was way too much stuff, especially after I just got a package from Charles and Diane! So, please know how much I appreciate it even though I’ve failed to harp on it sufficiently until now.

The internet is a perishable commodity here, and it has been spoiled by generator issues at the internet cafe and by a failure to pay the bills at the high school. When I first asked them, they said that it was the phone company's fault, and now we are struggling to establish what happened and who can fix it. Well, I am struggling to get anything to happen, the people here at the high school are struggling to do something, and Gamtel (the phone company) is apparently struggling to get to work at all. C'est la vie.

Life here is grand right now. I'm healthy again, seem to feel stronger and need to eat less, and have more margin for dealing with the various events here. For example, yesterday I played in a basketball tournament (we won, due mostly to my precision passing and failure to run across half-court for offense more often than not) but it was during the afternoon, and probably over 100 degrees the whole time. I'm a bit lost on temperature in degrees these days. It's hot enough so that if you sit on a metal bench that's been in the shade all day, it feels hot through your clothes. But, it's completely managable these days. May and June may be a different story.

Saturday night we were even out partying until late, and I drank too much beer, then we went to the lumo in the morning and got a bit dehydrated. This past weekend was the volunteer visit for the group that's currently in training, and I had one guy with me and Woman and her site mate in Soma each had one as well. The four of them came up with a pair of German volunteers who work for the World Food Program, and we hung out with a Lebanese man and a South African who work on the road building projects. It was an ex-pat weekend, and we had a great time.

Wednesday I'm headed down to Kombo to work on my solar project, to get details for my upcoming trip to Ghana nailed down, and to say goodbye to the woman from Korean who’s been living in my compound. She’s been here about two months, and she’s due to go back to the UK, graduate from her program and head home after two years away. It’s been great having another true English speaker in the compound, and someone who sees the culture from the outside. I have a lot of respect for her and her ability to come here and work and learn so much. Thankfully, she’s leaving before the heat gets to kill us, and she’s invited me to Korea, so maybe I’ll go see where Toby used to live and the Lee family and all of that. Who knows?

I just put up the first post I had ready to go, so hopefully this will get up as well. It’s gotten to be fun to use the internet this way, where it’s more of a crapshoot if things will happen and it’s like winning the lottery when you get everything done.

I’ve moved outside more and more recently, especially at night. Today I woke up on my outdoor bamboo bed for morning prayer – a first – and was cold! I only took a sheet to sleep with, and may need a towel or something tonight. It’s great! I’m already thinking about getting a bigger bed out there (this one is a single, and I hang off a little much). That and more baths are central features of the return of the heat. But, I’m doing well with it so far, and like I said, May and June are going to be a different story.

There are rumors of electricity floating around. Bansang – a town between Brikama Ba and Basse for those of you with maps and affinities for the letter B – now has electricity for a couple hours one out of every three days. According to the rumor mill. It’s the only place outside of Kombo like that. (Except for our dear leader’s village, which always has 24-hour electricity). (Not that he lives there.) And there was a minute of electricity in Pakalinding, where Woman lives, last week. All the lights turned on in her house for the first time in two plus years. She thought it was on fire at first. Hers is one of two or three Peace Corps houses that I know are wired for power but don’t have it any more. I have installed a light and outlet that get power from the generator and potentially would get it from Nawek (power/water utility) if they turned on. Speaking of Nawek, I haven’t been able to get clean water for three days, due to them running for a briefer time than usual or, as of today, not running at all. Apparently they ran out of diesel. Insert sarcasm…

And speaking of running out of stuff, the generator here has apparently run out of life. Actually, they say it’s overheating, and is going to have to be shut down for the night in five minutes. So, I probably won’t get to post this today.

But maybe I will!

Dakar and Everything After

So I went to Dakar for a softball tournament. I’m not much on softball, so I really went to see Dakar and hang out with Peace Corps Volunteers from around West Africa. It was a great time, truly wonderful to be in a proper city again after seven months of Gambia, where even the Kombo region is an overblown farm town. Senegambia is one area of a lot of resorts, nightclubs, restaurants and all that, but it’s too touristy for Peace Corps blood, at least that which runs through my veins.

And then I spent a few days in and out of the Peace Corps medical office, trying to get them to figure out what’s wrong with my intestines. Or, hopefully, what WAS wrong with them, as today I finished a long, nasty course of medicine designed to kill more parasites than humans, though by a closer measure than I cared for.

I’m starting to learn that even in Kombo one can’t expect this place to run like the Western world, and everything takes four times longer. So, I will only try to do a couple of things when I go down, and not get sucked into life there, which can be easier in many ways but more irritating in many others – most “up-country” volunteers generally feel that Kombo sucks, even though we all go down sometimes to deal with the business of life and interfacing with the outside world.

And, with that knowledge hopefully comes the ability to get my solar project off the ground, now two full months later than I wanted. I’m planning to go down next week Wednesday, with a short list of tasks (though it grows longer every minute) and leave again on Friday. Quick trip, get my things done, submit paperwork for upcoming trip to Ghana to see the solar eclipse there! I’m leaving at the end of the month, truly quite excited about it, and perhaps I’ve even figured out how to pay for it. Life is different without access to an ATM.

In the past month, work has been in a new phase, as I try to require more out of my various counterparts than words, but it’s slowly been coming around, and they are adjusting to me as I’ve been adjusting to them. I feel very good about the ways that I’ve found to work with people – not too central, not allowing myself to do too much, and trying to get them to talk and think things through with me so that I can try to see their point of view. It’s challenging, with the cultural differences, different approaches to communication and intensity of work, but I have some very good days when I “get it” and they seem to as well.

It’s starting to get hot here.

I remember my trip to Mali to visit Charles, and how hot it was there around this time of year, and I don’t think it’s that bad yet, but we’ve had a couple of days where sweating was a constant activity for me from noon to eight, except while I was bathing. The great news is that it’s still dry heat. The un-great news is that some days the wind feels like a hairdryer. Today we had Harmattan winds, so the air was full of dust and sand particles. I used to dislike the Harmattan, but today it had the effect of preventing the sun from getting ungodly hot. Which I’m in favor of.

This weekend a trainee is coming to visit me here in Fara Fenni. The new health trainees are about halfway finished with training, have most of the tough things under their belt, and it will be a lot of fun to show him (I’m assuming) around the “big town” with our bars, internet café, market and all that. After living in Kiang, I remember what a mind blower it was to move here, and I suspect it will be a great relief. I’m even trying to organize a party for Saturday night. I’m still my mother’s son.

I realize I’ve written almost nothing about Dakar, except that it’s not here. There is a Club Med there. There are restaurants with French food. There are nightclubs where the DJ’s can mix one song with the next, instead of the ipod-on-shuffle effect that we get at the “clubs” here. There are endless hordes of hustlers trying to sell you anything. There are more than three kinds of beer. (Here we have JulBrew, the Gambian beer, Gazelle, a Senegalese beer, and Ghanaian Guinness, not to be confused with the nectar of the gods brewed in Ireland). And, it showed me that this country is really truly poor. Senegal may be a third world country, but here is ten degrees poorer. And ten degrees hotter. Crossing the border back into The Gambia, one immediately notices that the fences and walls are more run down, there is more trash, and you are harassed differently. And you start sweating again. Even with all that, I was glad to come back. This is home now, for the next 14 months, and I like what I’m doing here.

Maybe that’s a good spot to end for now. Things are great, I’m hoping my health is finally on a long climb back to where it was when I arrived, and I’m looking forward to a whole host of things. Just a bit trembling in fear of the heat.

Love to you all, more when I can, Zac