“You made it,” he said, turning to embrace Annett. “How was your journey?”
She seemed to fare slightly better with the hug she received, perhaps due to her years of boxing training. “It was fine,” she said.
I shook out my arm, trying to resuscitate it. “The bus driver didn’t seem to know where Kissi was, though. He kept saying it was ten minutes, for two hours.”
Djarbah laughed. A deep, heavy, booming laugh. The ground shook. Some leaves fell from the tree we were sheltering under. Surfers in Papua New Guinea reported larger than usual wave activity. “Ghanians are not so good with time. I think maybe that we do not require it like you do. We are not a nation of precision.”
It would be an understatement to say that this was an understatement. We’d already noticed back in Accra that if you stopped people and asked for directions, not only would they not know the answer, your having asked them the question seemed to make them also suddenly uncertain of where they were. They were like cartoon characters running off a cliff, able to keep running just as long as you didn’t make them look down.
The car groaned as we turned off the main road onto a smaller dirt path so uneven we bounced down it in first gear, which felt oddly in keeping with the hip-hop music blaring out from the stereo. I felt as if I were in an MTV video from the early nineties. Djarbah acknowledged every person we passed. A short man in an imitation Barcelona kit shouted something at him, making him howl with laughter. An under-construction skyscraper in Abu Dhabi imploded. At one point the road got so bad, and we were driving so slowly, that a friend of Djarbah’s was able to shake hands with him through the window as we passed. No doubt regretting it straight after. Again, the handshake ended with the click finish—the Ghanaian clickshake.
Timidly, but now in second gear, we turned left into the town of Kissi. Kind people would describe Kissi’s dirt roads, unnamed streets, and waterlogged football pitch—goats munched on the centre circle’s last blades of grass—as “unspoilt,” “rustic,” or “picturesque.” I’m a moderately kind person and will commit to only “authentic,” “has potential,” and “exists.”
The car stopped in front of a large brick building at least three times the size of any we’d passed. “We have arrived, Adams.” Djarbah’s home was imposing. It served as Future Hope People HQ, and so needed spare rooms for the NGO’s volunteers. During our visit it would just be Djarbah, his wife, Monica, their four children, and us. Djarbah went to the boot and removed all our luggage, which he carried with just one hand, as if it were a punnet of strawberries. Monica was waiting on the large veranda and preparing fufu (a substance made from yams smashed repeatedly with a giant wooden club).
“You, sit,” Monica said, pointing to some plastic chairs. “Welcome.” She compensated for a lack of English vocabulary with an abundance of enthusiasm, never once letting her wide smile slip. It could have eclipsed the sun. She did big well. In Ghana, big is beautiful, because big implies wealth, suggests you’ve calories to waste. I had no doubt Monica received admiring looks while out buying further unnecessary calories. While we waited for that fufu, I thought about how weird a human quirk it is that we consider whatever is exotic or mostly unachievable beautiful. So while we Europeans are heading out to the tanning salon to get darker skin and sweating our way round laps of the park to lose weight, there are Asian people covering their faces to keep their complexions white while the citizens of Ghana double down on fried chicken to try to stay un-trim. We just love to make it hard for ourselves. We are, in many ways, quite ridiculous.
A few minutes of veranda relaxation later, three miniature humans appeared at the home’s gate, dressed in school uniform. These were the family’s three oldest children: Nana, their son, and daughters Julia and Judith. Nana was nine. Their youngest, Theresa, just two, was already playing at our feet. No sooner had they arrived than Nana had a broom in his hand and was busy sweeping the already immaculate living room. I cornered him and practised my clickshake on him. He was kind enough to only laugh quite hard at the poorness of my technique.
“You’re surprisingly calm,” I said to Annett, as we climbed into bed that night. A dozen sharp mattress springs protruded into the flesh of my back. “Ow.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You expected me to be freaking out by now?”
“Well… maybe, a bit. Or at least optimising their kitchen drawers.”
She rolled to face me. “Do you think I’m some kind of princess? That I can’t survive somewhere like this? I’m more rock and roll than you, Mr Couch Potato.”
“I don’t think you’re a princess,” I said, attempting to extricate myself from both the bed springs and the hole I’d begun digging. “But at home, if the Internet goes down for even thirty minutes our relationship is in serious jeopardy. Here we haven’t been online in four days. We’re barely eating, sleeping, washing—and it’s still sort of fine.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Earlier when I went to the toilet, the door fell off. Then I flushed the toilet forgetting that I couldn’t because there’s no water. Then I came back to bed, and it was so dark, because there’s also no electricity, that I walked into the bedroom door and banged my head, which fortunately didn’t fall off. The door, I mean. I didn’t even get that annoyed, for me. And I do annoyed well. I guess in Berlin, my expectations for how things should be are just so different, there’s no way I’d be able to stay calm. But here in Ghana, you sort of go into challenge mode.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “It’s not really fun in the classical sense of fun. The enjoyable sense. The let’s do this again sense.”
“No. In fact, I might need another holiday after to recover from it. Which is a problem, since I actually have a job, whereas you only have a hobby that’s gotten out of control.”
“Yeah, maybe because my normal life is such a holiday these days I want my vacations to feel like work.”
The next day Djarbah drove us to the local school. “Is this a private school or a government school?” I asked, as we ascended another fracture in the road that made him jump in his seat and knock his head against the car’s roof. The roof felt it; he didn’t. “This is a little bit complicated, Adams. In theory the government is supposed to provide education. But, well, the money never quite makes it to the school.”
“What happens to it then?”
He shrugged. “Corruption happens, Adams. The government school we are going to see now, Future Hope People built much of it.”
The school was four large rectangular concrete buildings set around a field, or what was probably once a field. Now it was an expanse of space. An ex-field. It was break time, and about a hundred kids were out playing, all dressed neatly in green-and-white uniforms. Above each of the classrooms, in white paint, was the name of the class.
“Are you ever going to tell him that your name is not Adams?” whispered Annett, getting out of the car.
“No. It’s too awkward now. Call me Adams as well, please, Annetts.”
Djarbah was one of his man-mountain strides ahead of us. We could just about see him. “I will take you now to meet the headmaster,” he said, “I’m sure you have some questions for him.”
Saying “I’m sure you” has to be the absolute fastest way of creating uncertainty in another human. Annett and I looked at each other with trepidation.
The headmaster was a small man with a round face and black circular glasses. It looked as though he usually lived underground and had popped up to check things out but wasn’t sure if he liked them yet. He greeted us enthusiastically in his office. His window looked out over the playing children. The clock on the wall was ornamental, I noticed. The air was a soup of thick dust. He sat on the other side of a large desk, flanked on either side by a woman. One wore a shiny silver shirt just the wrong side of form-fitting. The other wore an expression of subtle disappointment. The women were not introduced. Annett and I took a seat opposite the desk.
It felt like an interview for a job we hadn’t applied for. Djarbah stood near the door, I think because it was simply impossible that the furniture would have been sturdy enough to contain his bulk.
The headmaster looked reverently towards him. “Djarbah is a big man in these parts.” Ah, more of that great Ghanaian understatement. Djarbah belonged at the top of a beanstalk. “A great man. A great friend to the school. So you two are also from Future Hope?”
Annett and I traded glances, unsure where we were from and why exactly we were no longer there. I waited for her to say something. She waited for me.
“Are you volunteers, maybe?” he tried. This only worked to heighten our uncertainties about all the things we were not.
Annett shrugged. “No, we’re just on holiday.”
The man looked at each of the women in turn. The women looked at the man. Djarbah looked out at the ex-field. The headmaster chuckled to himself. The women chuckled. Djarbah excused himself and stepped outside.
“Probably you have some questions?” asked the headmaster. I looked at Annett. She looked at me. I looked at the headmaster. He looked at me. Then I looked at the women. They looked at me. I looked at Annett. She looked at me.
“Questions, right,” I stammered. “Hmm… umm…” I tried to think of any kind of question; any normal human question. “What… errm… hmmm… How many students are there here at the school?”
Brilliant. Insightful. Relevant. Nailed it.
He’d almost certainly never heard this question before. He said an answer which I didn’t listen to because I was too busy constructing a follow-up question. This question was just as good, although, were one being critical, one might have perhaps noticed that, in many respects, it was exactly the same question but with the word students swapped for teachers. Five or six questions in, I ran out of steam. I nudged Annett with my foot. She didn’t acknowledge this. I nudged her again. This didn’t seem to help. I kicked her in the side of the foot.
“Ow. Why are you—”
“Annetts,” I said, “I’m guessing you have some questions as well, right?”
She gave me a you’ll-pay-for-this-later glance of death, and cleared her throat. “Djarbah said there is a problem with corruption in the school system?”
The headmaster nodded sympathetically. The women nodded too. The headmaster made a mmm-hhhhm sound. They echoed it. “There is more than enough money,” he said. “More than enough! But before us is the regional council, then the local council, and the board of education. As you can imagine, that’s many fingers. So, sadly, we are reliant on outside benefactors like yourselves.”
The two women nodded. One mmm-hhhmed. They were a slick operation.
My stomach fluttered. We were “outside benefactors”? I thought we were confused, naive tourists? Fortunately Djarbah returned just in time, ending both our identity and question crises.
“Adams, Annett, maybe you would like a tour?” he asked.
“Good idea,” replied the headmaster.
Mmmm-hhhm.
The headmaster asked one of the women to go get Mrs Ansah. Mrs Ansah promptly arrived. She was also quite blessed, calorifically, her top half seeming to rather overwhelm her bottom half, causing her to stoop like a collapsing wedding cake.
“How do you do!” she said, in what was supposed to be a question but was delivered as a statement of fact. She was very personable and seemed delighted to have company, perhaps deciding we’d be better behaved than the kids in her class. We weren’t sure exactly what we were going to be shown, because we were pretty sure we’d already seen everything.
She took us to the junior class, Basic 1. Twenty kids sat behind tiny wooden desks. She walked us to the front of the class, near the blackboard. It had the letters of the alphabet scrawled across it.
“Children!” They snapped to attention. “Children, today we have special guests, from Germany.” Special guests. That title we could live with. It was suitably ambiguous.
The class stood up. A chair in the back row tumbled over. “Welcome, sir! Welcome, madam!” they shouted. “How are you?”
Annett and I smirked at each other. This was unexpected, and a bit awkward. I waited for Annett to speak. She waited for me to speak. We really needed some kind of system. I was beginning to suspect we had one, albeit poorly defined, and that system was Adam-talks-first.
“Hello, class,” I said, trying to sound confident and like I regularly addressed Ghanaian children, or children, or people in general.
“We’re…” I gulped. “Good. Thank you. And err, how are you all?”
Without the slightest hesitation, they shouted, “We are fine.”
With this they sat back down.
Then no one talked.
Then we just stood there.
I had no questions.
Annett had no questions.
The kids had no questions.
They stared at us, some daring a whisper to a neighbour. I felt their little, innocent eyes piercing me. Probably they’d met many Westerners before from NGOs—kind, empathetic people here to help them, and to work with them to improve their country. I was not one of these people. I buy light bulbs from Amazon to save walking one street. I don’t take my organic waste out of its plastic bag before tossing it in the bin. I wasn’t even sure I believed in most aid work. I was here on some poorly defined inner quest. I was not one of the good guys. They could see this, I was sure. I looked to Mrs Ansah. She smiled. I looked to the teacher, who was reading something at his desk. He looked up, gave a brisk nod, and returned to his book.
We had no questions.
After what felt like an age, but was probably only thirty seconds, Annett gestured with her hand towards the exit. Mrs Ansah nodded, relieved. We walked back towards the exit. Another potentially tricky social situation had been navigated. I stepped down from the classroom to the dry earth of the ex-field, wiping at the river of sweat on my brow. That had been intense. But soon this school visit would be over and we could get back to playing the card game Mau Mau with Djarbah on his veranda. We took a couple of steps back towards the car. Mrs Ansah, however, didn’t.
“This way,” she said, gesturing behind her. “Basic 2.”
Who had said anything about Basic 2? Yet she already had one foot inside its classroom. There didn’t seem to be a way out, not without causing offence. So we walked to Basic 2. And before long we were back in front of a class again. “Class, we have special guests, from Germany…”
“Welcome, sir! Welcome, madam! How are you?”
“We are fine. How are you?”
“We are fine.” It was word for word the same.
And then we stood there again. In silence. Question bereft. Twenty kids staring at us. I mumbled something about it being a very nice class and then tried to make for the exit. Outside, we took a few steps towards the car.
“So, Basic 3,” Mrs Ansah said, and ushered us into the class next door. “How many classes are there?” Annett whispered. Since they were so clearly marked in white paint on the outside, it was easy to tell. There were another six. The awkwardness was almost overwhelming. We were frauds. Frauds on display. Frauds not here to help. Frauds not volunteering. Frauds without questions. Poverty tourists. Rubberneckers. Mitläufer. For the next twenty-five minutes we toured the remaining classes to choruses of “We are fine.”
A skip in our steps, we stepped down from the last classroom and back across the field, to the computer centre, to collect Djarbah. We found him on its veranda, talking to a teacher.
“Our tour is over, Djarbah,” Annett said. “Everyone is fine.”
“Fine, fine, very good, yes.”
“So…” She nudged her head in the direction of the car.
“Ah, yes, Adams and Annett, I have some errands to complete. I have asked some of the older boys to give you a tour of the town.”
Two boys appeared, like rabbits pulled from the situation’s hat. I have no idea where they came from. Possibly a pothole.
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br /> “They’re good kids,” said Djarbah. “Boys, make sure you show them where they make the moonshine.”
“Don’t the boys have class?” I asked. Djarbah shrugged. He didn’t seem to view the next hour or two as being make or break in their education. He turned, smiled at the boys, and thudded off towards the car. Seismographs the world over recorded sudden tectonic activity.
The two boys grinned at us. They were some of the school’s older students, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old. “Hello, sir,” said the first, shaking my hand enthusiastically. “My name is Kofi.” He had an unusually soft voice and projected a strong it’s going to be fine aura. The second had a round face accentuated by a thick pudding of hair. He was called Michael. He fumbled for my hand, unsuccessfully.
“How are you doing today?” I asked.
“We’re fine,” they answered. This did not come as a surprise.
“What are you doing in Ghana?” asked Kofi.
“We’re on holiday,” said Annett.
They laughed. “In Ghana?”
With our new chaperons, somewhat hesitantly, we headed away from the school and back out towards town, avoiding the sun wherever possible, which was nowhere. Before long three other schoolboys, friends of Kofi and Michael, had joined us on the dusty dirt road to town. They were a funny, rambunctious group. Ghanaians have a playful, easy-going way about them. And they talk to each other everywhere. Which is important if you have few other ways of getting information. A sense of humour and a small ego are probably quite helpful when whatever it is you’re trying to do that day isn’t working, again. Since you can’t rely on the state for much, everything becomes a negotiation with someone. This makes mastering the dark art of conversation very useful—profitable even. Everywhere we looked we saw Ghanaians sitting, or leaning on things, and gently joking with each other. The pace of life was slow. I’d never been anywhere where there appeared to be so many people, doing so little, so harmoniously.
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 6
