Star Trek: The Wrath of Roach

Our journey through life in the village continues. As you may recall from my last post, we were having some problems with cockroaches in our outhouse. In fact, the English language has not yet adopted the words necessary to describe the monstrosity of these roaches. (Neither has our local language, Ewe, despite more extensive exposure.) They were each as long as one of my fingers, and there were upwards of forty of them living in our long-drop toilet at any one time, lurking out of sight during the day and emerging each night for a lawless poo-fueled bacchanalia in defiance of our bodily needs. Apologies to my younger readers.

Anyway, we dealt with this problem with a grossly North American solution: a giant can of RAID. For the environmentalists among us, I'm sad to report that the poison worked like a charm - our toilet stall was littered with dead bodies within minutes, while the trickle of twitchy refugees that escaped were hastily eaten by velociraptor-like lizards. We live in fear of finding a pile of dead lizards any day now, done in by a combination of gluttony and second-hand chemicals. In the interests of posterity (i.e. the two-headed child I have as a result of insecticide poisoning), the whole genocidal massacre was capture on video. At the moment, Jessi is struggling to post it to her own blog, for all of us who enjoy morally ambiguous humour.

Now, on to happier topics...the library!!!! Work is well under way, going at a pace that would have surprised me if I wasn't already familiar with the spirit of Nyive. This project is dear to the hearts of so many people in the village, especially the youth (who were the driving force behind starting the project).

Just to recap for everyone: when I first arrived in Nyive in 2007, they had partially constructed a small building near the school complex to eventually house a library. The interior was unfinished, and there was no prospect of books, computers, or personnel on the horizon without outside funding. After helping the local organizers to put together a complete project proposal and budget, I agreed to help them raise money. Enter you, gentle readers!

The first step is to make the building physically secure, which in this case means a finished ceiling. The buildings here are made from cement blocks, and have corrugated iron roofs. However, there's often a wide gap between the iron and the walls, leting in mosquitoes, bats, dust, and sometimes the weather. The simplest solution is a finished wood ceiling, made chiefly of plywood - simple but serviceable.

We bought the materials for this work last week, and the village carpenters were urged to donate their skills through communal labour. Now, not to be disrespectful, but anyone who's been to sub-Saharan Africa is familiar with the concept of "African time". Things just move at a slower pace here; it's a side effect of a laid-back approach to life, along with Ghana's admirable emphasis on analysis and consensus. No problem...I came prepared to watch work progress at a snail's pace.

Well, apparently, the snails in Nyive are racing snails. It took our seven carpenters one day to put up the ceiling. They had to build and take down scaffolding made of 2x4s throughout the building in order to do it, and they worked from morning until sundown, all for the price of a meal at the end of the day.

Seeing the progress they're making, and everyone's commitment to the library, is incredibly moving. For me, it's literally a dream come true. We're even going to buy some books today, partly to hoard for the library and partly to hand out to the school children who stopped by our house a few nights ago to ask us for storybooks. With luck, we will soon find a way of uploading the pictures and video we've taken so far, so we can share the experience with everyone who made it possible.

As for life away from work, we've been having some adventures with cooking! Jessi made a reasonable facsimile of rice pudding last night, which was probably the most interesting cultural exchange we've yet had. Several friends watched us cook, and were introduced for the first time to cinnamon, as well as the concept that mixing spices produces really interesting flavours. I know I sound like I'm being flip, but I'm perfectly serious. Aside from hot peppers, Ghanaian cuisine is light on the spices, partly because of the expense. We also got into a big mix-up over the term
"milk", which here refers to what we call condensed milk. They also have something here called "condensed milk", which appears to be even more condensed than what we drink. Both beverages come in small cans, cost an arm and a leg by local standards, and bear little or no relationship to the stuff that comes out of a cow's udder. They are not drunk straight, or really used at all, except in tea. Hence, there was some surprise when Jessi announced her desire to put some in our rice. Anyway, the result was delicious.

We spent the weekend relaxing in Peki, a town about an hour's drive away. It is higher in the mountains than our village Nyive, meaning a cool breeze blows there. In Nyive, the only genuine cool breeze is the rising wind that precedes a thunderstorm (yet another reason why we love the rain here!). My good friend, the local member of the municipal assembly, Veronica Anai, took us to visit her mother's family in Peki. We made an excursion to the Tafi Atome monkey sanctuary, a community eco-tourism project initiated by a Canadian in the 1990s. Visitors are led by a guide through the forest and get to hand-feed the Mona monkeys that live there. I had been there once previously, on a very dismal Canada Day weekend in 2007, when I awoke at 5:30 in the morning to be bitten by mosquitoes and led aimlessly through the woods by a surly young guide. This time was much, much better; in fact, the whole place has improved.

Along with Veronica, we took along her uncle Komla and his five-year-old son Edem, a precocious tot who had already expressed his desire to marry me. ("I knew you were coming, so I swept the house for you," he told me in Ewe when we arrived in the morning, to general laughter.) Edem boasted loudly in the car of catching monkeys, but when faced with the prospect of letting one get close enough to eat out of his hand, he freaked out and crawled screaming to safety. Safety, in this case, was Jessi's neck and shoulder region, where Edem accidentally jammed a banana into her ear before lobbing it at the indignant monkey waiting below.

Good times...