Akwaaba

They say that you appreciate something more when you go without it for a while.  I’ve certainly found this is true…for example, in my current circumstances, Jif peanut butter, my car, dim sum, private outdoor space, spicy eggplant at Honolulu Cafe.  But for heaven’s sake, I think my recent experiences with Internet access go far beyond anything anyone should have to put up with (if they are paying good money for “reliable” service).   After several weeks of spotty service, I’ve had not one minute of Internet service for an entire week until tonight, and I still haven’t figured out whether the Internet service that I do get results from my frequent calls to my service provider or is simply part of the normal lifecycle of my resident Internet gremlins.  Who knows.   Anyway, when I got home tonight and saw the little green Internet light, I leapt for joy and decided I’d better try to tell you about at least one thing I’ve done in the last few months, before the little light turns itself off again and I am marooned for the next month.

So back we go to May, when I went to a little village in Ghana with a team from my office, to build houses with Habitat for Humanity.  The village was called Nkwantakese, near the commercial town of Kumasi in central Ghana.

Nkwantakese has been a Habitat site for a number of years as the local elders have been trying to upgrade the village.  Consequently there is an old village and a new village.  In the old village, many of the houses look like this:

The new houses are intended to improve the quality of life and reduce overcrowding, and those who were going to live in the houses we worked on were pretty excited!  The houses were all designed locally and each site was headed by a builder – we just provided manual labour.  At the beginning of the week, the house I worked on looked like this:

(As an aside, do you see any shade on the worksite?  Nope, didn’t think so.  I didn’t either.)

We filled the foundations (I became dirt packer extraordinaire) -

and moved blocks (yes, they were heavy, and yes, thank goodness for firemen’s chains) -

and made mortar -

and built walls (bricklaying is an awful lot of fun!) -

and got awfully tired, dirty and sweaty!

But by the end of the week, we had a recognizable (if not entirely complete) house, and we were awfully proud of ourselves.

We had been working in several teams, and at the end of the week the elders of the village blessed one of the other houses, surrounded by just about every resident of the village.

The villagers were incredibly warm and welcoming and made us feel right at home, with drumming and dancing (on a rainy night in the village library, which was very exciting particularly after the power went out!), children’s games…

and a pretty serious soccer match in the driving rain, for which all the village men from the age of about 8 up showed up wearing proper soccer jerseys and cleats, and completely shamed us relative amateurs…

(and yes, the haze is in fact rain – by the end of the match it was raining so hard, we spectators couldn’t see to the other end of the field)

One of the things I have noticed during my travels in Southeast Asia is the large number of Ghanaian missionaries.  It has always seemed a bit strange to me – why and how would a relatively small and unprosperous country like Ghana produce such a notable number of missionaries?  But then I went there and realized just how religious the Ghanaians are.  Quite apart from the number of churches (the Baptists and Presbyterians are doing quite well there!), religion was evident even in quite mundane aspects of everyday life.   Driving from Accra to Kumasi we passed businesses such as the God’s Child Gear Box Specialist, the God is Able Cold Store, and the Milk and Mercy Store (By His Grace).  This was my favourite (St. Paul’s Special Kebab, in case you can’t read it), which we passed every day on the way to Nkwantakese:

The Action Chapel in Accra was advertising something called “divine acceleration”, which intrigued me.

I was struck also by differences between Ghana and Lesotho, which I have visited before.  On the flight from London to Accra I was seated next to an official from the Ghanaian Ministry of Health, who told me about struggles that Ghana has had with health, agriculture and education.  He was quite proud of the fact that HIV infection rates have dropped because people are talking about AIDS openly – and indeed, I saw signs like this, which I never saw in Lesotho -

A little scary perhaps, but if the government is posting billboards like that, surely it is a far sight better than the funeral parlour billboards in Maseru.

There is a passage in Paul Theroux’s book Jungle Lovers (which is set in Malawi) in which a character is unable to tell whether something is in a state of construction or destruction.  I had a similar, somewhat disconcerting, impression in Ghana.  There was also a sort of friendly, satisfied jumble in the street – car parts and bakers and hair salons all coexisting, never clearly one thing or another but each thing belonging where it was, as it was.

It was only a short trip, but an interesting one, and one that taught me a lot about an area of the world that I don’t know much about.  If you have a chance, I encourage you to look into Habitat for Humanity – a great way to learn about a foreign way of life and contribute to a community at the same time.