Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  Late that night, deep in the rain forest between Abidjan and Accra, in a room furnished exactly like the one I’d slept in the night before, I unwrapped the brown paper packages. My light-colored clothes gleamed in the dark room. They were spotless. Every trace of Moroccan grime, dust that I’d thought permanently ground in, was gone. Someone must have spent hours, to succeed so thoroughly where I had repeatedly failed. Each item, every shirt and sock and pair of underwear, lay neatly pressed against the brown paper, brighter and more beautiful than when it was new.

  3

  The Girl Who Drank Petrol

  When I think of Hannah, I always see her in the same spot. She’s near downtown Accra, striding along a red dirt path above the beach. Flecks of ash dance in the air. Beside the path a woman sits on a low stump, roasting plantains on an iron grill, while far below the raggedy silver ocean laps at the pale sand. Hannah walks fast, feet turned out, cheeks pink with exertion, curly golden hair bouncing, chest and chin up, bright green eyes fixed straight ahead. She is purposeful and oblivious, at home in her city, her Ghana, her world.

  The first time I saw the Dutch volunteer called Hannah, she was sitting on the sun-bleached wooden steps of the volunteer hostel at high noon, surrounded by African men. I’d arrived in Ghana from Ivory Coast the night before and was making my first tentative sojourn into the achingly bright day. The assembled men shouted boisterously, cheerfully one-upping each other, vying for Hannah’s attention. She reclined against the top step, all pink cheeks and yellow curls, flirting and sassing like some kind of postmodern Scarlett O’Hara. I was just about to scoot past her onto the footpath into town, when she turned to me abruptly and said, “Did you know I almost died?”

  “Really?” I asked uncertainly.

  “Yes!” she said brightly. “Only two weeks ago! I had malaria, but it was the kind where you are not aware that you have it, and you become more and more . . . how do you say . . . like a slow and creeping worm? You walk like this,” she stuck out her arms like a zombie, “and laugh all the time like this,” she demonstrated a vague, high-pitched giggle, “and you have no desire to eat anything. I ate no food for five days. Then when I went to the hospital, the doctor said if I had waited one day longer I would have died.” Her accent was soft and rounded, difficult to place.

  “Our sistah was looking sooooo skinny!” one of the African men chimed in. “We make her chop fufu six times a day now, so she will be plump and beautiful again.” He poked her in the side.

  “Chop fufu?” I said.

  “Chop,” said Hannah, gesturing toward her mouth and chomping her jaw up and down. “Fufu is Ghana food—you must try some very soon.” The man poked her again and she giggled, “Stop it, Gorby!”

  “Gorby?” Everything felt bewildering in the hard, flat light.

  “My camp name,” he said, extending a strong, slender hand. “Claude Mensah, a.k.a. Mensah Mensah Gorbachev, at your service.” He grinned at me with such genuine warmth that I giggled in response.

  “But we just call him Gorby,” said Hannah. “Don’t we?” She rubbed her hand across his close-cropped hair. “And he is my dear, dear friend. Gorbachev is his camp name. And this is Ninja, Momentum, Ayatollah, and Castro.” I shook hands all around, dizzied by the wattage of smiles. “At camp, the Africans take foreign names and the foreigners take African names. Have you been to camp yet?”

  I shook my head. “I just got here last night.”

  The work projects, which took place in the rural areas, were called camps. Foreign volunteers paid $200 for a year’s membership and then participated in as few or as many camps as they chose during that time. At camp, the volunteers were given room and board. When not at camp, they were welcome to stay here, in the Accra hostel, for as long as they liked. The hostel was a low-ceilinged wooden building, painted olive drab like a military barracks, which housed both a volunteer dormitory and the organization’s offices. The dormitory was a long, low-ceilinged room, which fit about thirty bunk beds. Each upper bunk had a hook above it on which the volunteer could hang a mosquito net. Those on the lower bunks attached their nets to the metal lattice of the bed above. The overhead fan worked sporadically, and the rough wooden floor bestowed many splinters on tender pink soles. Sunlight filtered in through small, screened windows. In midsummer, when the hostel was packed with volunteers, the bunks were supplemented by mattresses on the floor.

  The hostel was for foreigners only. Ghanaian volunteers were expected to live at home when not participating in camps, although they were welcome to visit during the day. Ghanaians who complied with certain criteria could participate in the camps free of charge. No one seemed to know exactly what those criteria were, but all the Ghanaian volunteers were literate, spoke good English, and had families that were financially able to spare them. With a few exceptions, they were city youth, getting a taste of the countryside. Some of them seemed as alien to the lives and customs of the villagers as we foreigners were.

  A few local young men who were not volunteers hung around the hostel during the day, practicing their English and hoping to develop friendships with foreigners that would lead to marriage, employment, or at the very least sponsorship for a journey abroad. These men were clean-cut and solicitous, and many of the foreign women were all too eager to take advantage of the opportunity for roadside romance (and if that’s all it turned out to be, the men didn’t seem to mind too much either). As a brunette, I didn’t get quite the attention the blondes did, but I got enough. Too much, even. I was still far too confused about the relationship I’d left behind to think about flirting. Michael’s and my letters had slipped back into a tone of such intimacy it was as if we were still together. On my stronger days, this felt like a burden—I worried that my homesick heart was writing checks my itinerant body wouldn’t keep. But on days when I felt most unrooted, it was a tremendous comfort to know that he was there.

  Periodically throughout the day, Mr. Awitor, the head of the organization, emerged from an inner office to chase away nonvolunteers with harsh words in one of the local languages. He often added in English—presumably for our benefit— “If I see your face here again, I will surely telephone the police.”

  “We don’t mind them,” the foreign volunteers insisted, but he simply shook his head and walked back inside, murmuring under his breath that we would surely mind when our costly cameras and sunglasses went missing. The young men always reappeared an hour or two later anyway. Though Mr. Awitor’s tone was menacing, they’d learned by now that the threatened phone call was never made.

  Some foreigners participated in one camp and simply stayed on at the hostel for the rest of the year, bumming around Accra and smoking potent local marijuana, called “bingo” or “wee.” Hannah, however, had been in Ghana for three months and already participated in four camps.

  “We must choose your name!” Hannah clapped her hands with delight. “What shall we call her, Gorby?”

  “We must call her Korkor,” he said, “like my baby sistah.”

  “Korkor,” I said. It sounded like kaw-KAW. “What does it mean?”

  “It means second-born, in Ga,” said Gorby.

  “Are you second-born?” asked Hannah.

  “To my mother I am.” I was about to explain that my father had older children from a previous marriage, but Hannah interrupted.

  “Perfect! Gorby is . . . how do you call it . . . Soo-kick?”

  “Psychic,” I said.

  “Psychic! Gorby is psychic!”

  “What’s your camp name?” I asked Hannah.

  “Mine is Abena,” she said, “Tuesday-born in Fanti. Everyone here has a day name. But then there are also nicknames and family names and Christian names. Africans have so many names, it is very confusing.”

  “Not to us,” said the man called Momentum.

  “Only to girls from Holland,” added Gorbachev. He flashed her an adoring grin.

  Later Hannah confided in me that back home in Amstelveen, the suburb of Amster
dam where she grew up, she’d never considered herself attractive. She had not been popular in school, she told me. She was always isolated. Boys picked on her, girls whispered about her, and she had few friends.

  “But you’re so beautiful!” I stammered. “Not to mention smart, and sweet, and vivacious. You would’ve been very popular at my high school, I can promise you that.”

  She looked at me warily. “I don’t think I should thank you for telling me lies. I may be smart, but I am not beautiful.”

  “You’re—”

  “Stop it,” she said sharply, and something in her tone prevented further protest. “I know what I am. Anyway, it is all past. I am not in Holland now. I am in Ghana, and here I will be a new Hannah, a completely new girl.”

  I never found out what the old Hannah was like, but this new girl was a charmer. She insinuated herself into my brittle heart the way a child might, and in fact she was like a child, begging for attention, pouting when she didn’t get it, pointing out her own best attributes at full volume, basking in the world’s love. Among the volunteers, she was the favorite daughter of Africans and foreigners alike, doted on and pampered. She was a baby, really, not even twenty, and though there were others around that age (I was practically the grandmother of the group at twenty-six going on twenty-seven), there was something about her that made you want to protect her, to take care.

  Hannah had a flair for drama. Once she leaned over in the night to take a swig from her water bottle and got a big swallow of gasoline instead. She ran to the bathroom and spent the rest of the night vomiting. The burning sensation lingered in her throat throughout the following day.

  “I drank petrol!” she crowed to the group on the steps the next day. “You must tell your children and grandchildren this story, so that the girl who drank petrol will become a legend. You must tell them that after that day this girl had the power to light a fire with only her breath.”

  In Accra I was initially put off, as I had been in Abidjan, by the gaping holes in the sidewalk, the open sewers running down the sides of the streets, and the curbside food stands swarming with flies. The fumes of gasoline, human waste, and charred meat nauseated me. I was beleaguered as well by boisterous strangers who accosted me on the street, shouting, “What is your name? Let me be your friend! Give me your address! Bring me to your country!” I wondered sourly whether these overtures constituted the legendary Ghanaian friendliness.

  But within two weeks I no longer noticed the sewage or the flies, and I was gobbling up street food like it was going out of style. I relished it all—the dark green kontumbre with its texture of creamed spinach; the thick, savory groundnut stew (Ghanaian for peanut) with sticky rice balls; salty Jollof rice flavored with bits of egg and fish; tart, juicy pineapple; sweet oranges stripped of their peels but still clothed in their white felt under-skins; starchy cocoyams; kenke; banku ; shitoh; akieke . . . All the stews were heavy with palm oil, its drowsy flavor reminiscent of coconuts and cashews. But far and away my favorite street food was keli-weli, a spicy-sweet concoction made of small chunks of plantain fried to a crisp in palm oil, then sprinkled amply with ginger and chili pepper for a sharp, tangy bite.

  Simply put, I loved Accra. While embracing the amenities of running water and electricity, it maintained a character all its own. No New York–style high-rises to be found here. Instead it unfolded, neighborhood by colorful neighborhood, a curious mixture of African and European influence, opening outward from the center like an elaborate tropical bloom. Accra was alive. Every city block pulsated with energy, from the solid cement buildings of the downtown area to the tin-roofed shacks of the poorer neighborhoods, from the sweltering maelstrom of the Makola Market to the crumbling castle that housed the government offices. In any one of these places, you were as likely to see a man dressed head to toe in full African regalia as you were to see a woman in jeans, tube top, and high-heeled shoes. And the colors! Brilliant shades of orange and red, turquoise and lilac, fuchsia and teal. The African fabrics would make a flamingo look drab. The prohibitions against combining reds and pinks or circles and stripes were absent here. Fabrics of every description lived side by side in delirious dissonance, a dizzying visual feast. The hairstyles too were astonishing. Some adorned the women’s heads like helmets, with sharp spikes sticking out in every direction. Others were elaborate multi-tiered sculptures, their interlacing layers balanced against each other like houses of cards. Still others were interwoven with beads and ribbons, which complemented the colorful outfits with extra splashes of light.

  On top of all this, I’d fallen completely in love with the people. Strangers still waylaid me daily, but what initially felt like aggression I now saw as vitality tinged with humor. I understood that the people on the street didn’t actually expect to go home with me. They enjoyed engaging for its own sake, and while they were at it, they figured they might as well take their shot. This was the quality that struck me the most about the Ghanaians: for better or worse, they engaged. Riding across town in a tro-tro (Ghanaian for minivan), I often found myself in the midst of a rowdy argument, with people on all sides shouting at each other in the local language. These arguments were almost always good-natured, ending with laughter and backslapping when the participants disembarked. I recalled sadly that in the United States I had once taken a Greyhound halfway across the country without speaking to a single soul.

  There were nights when Hannah, Gorbachev, and I, along with Ayatollah, Momentum, and a shifting group of European volunteers, would smoke bingo (purchased from a mysterious man called Bush Doctor who hovered around the path near the hostel) and tear ravenously through the streets of Accra at midnight, searching for food. Eventually we’d find one of the few stands that hadn’t closed down for the night. The nodding attendant, usually an old woman, would wake with a start and make us egg sandwiches on thick chunks of white bread smeared with Laughing Cow cheese. We’d each down two or three sandwiches and a cup of Milo, a warm chocolaty beverage, before setting off for the hostel, our laughter echoing through the night streets, our running feet keeping pace with the rats that darted in and out of the sewers.

  “A rat stepped on my foot!” Hannah shrieked one night. “I am marked by the King of Rats! Like, do you know, ‘the Nutcracker’? Now you must tell people, I knew a girl who—every night at midnight exactly—she would get down on the ground and squeak like a rat, or no, a girl who had power to change a bad person to a rat.”

  Hannah’s need to mythologize herself touched me. It was what we all yearned for, I thought, to be seen, recognized. We all wanted to be heroes or martyrs, to create lives worthy of legend. She just wore her desire a bit more nakedly than the rest.

  Our volunteer efforts were a mixed bag. While some of the projects ran smoothly, others were woefully ill-conceived. The idea was simple enough: We’d go into a village, start up a project, and leave behind materials so that the villagers could finish the project after we left. The problem was that in many cases no one seemed to have consulted the villagers in advance. Unless there was a committed individual in the village to galvanize the community into action, the hospital or school might easily remain unfinished, while the building materials were slowly spirited away to patch failing roofs or add adjoining rooms to people’s homes. It was also unclear why certain villages were chosen for projects several years in a row, while others nearby remained unvisited. Since the presence of so many foreigners brought a lot of energy to the local economies, I suspected personal connections might be involved.

  One of the more disheartening stories I heard involved a camp in which the volunteers dug a foundation for a schoolhouse right next to an identical foundation that another group had dug and abandoned. When the volunteers asked why they couldn’t simply build on the existing foundation, they were told that it was forbidden to interfere with the work of another group. Another tale involved a village to which a group had returned several years in a row and done nothing but make bricks. As the story went, the village was
so overrun with bricks that the local people were using them as tables, chairs, even bassinets.

  Most of the foreign volunteers I worked with in Ghana fell into one of two groups: those who came with an already ingrained sense that the work we were doing here was futile (but doing it was marginally better than doing nothing at all), and those who arrived filled with hopeful romanticism about their own ability to “help.” Members of the second category were often terribly disillusioned when their projects hit a snag, and tended to resemble the members of the first category by the time they left. Members of the first group, on the other hand, were occasionally jolted back to the second by the sheer exuberance of Ghanaian life.

  Outwardly, I allied myself with the jaded camp—I’d done enough volunteering in the past to know that it often benefited the supposed help- ers more than the help-ees, but my cynical veneer was ridiculously thin. Beneath my world-weary affectation, I longed with my entire being to be knocked over the head by a driving sense of purpose. I approached each new project harboring a shameful secret: a vast, uncool reservoir of hope. In the guise of offering service, I came to the construction site seeking nothing less than redemption. Perhaps we all did.

  Whenever I returned to Accra, I looked for Hannah. She alone seemed peculiarly free of either grudge or expectation concerning our role here. She soaked up everything with unbiased delight. I envied her capacity for simple enjoyment and secretly hoped that if I spent enough time with her, some of it might rub off.