On the second day, I approached a volunteer called Ballistic, who was planing some wooden boards.
“Can I try that?” I asked.
“You cannot do it,” he said, without looking up.
“I’d like to try,” said I, bristling.
At which he reiterated, “You surely cannot do it.”
I got on his case then, asking him how he’d like it if he asked me to teach him an English song, as he had the previous day, and I responded that he couldn’t learn it? After that he became my committed teacher and remained so for the next several hours, resulting in numerous uneven boards and two very sore arms.
It was the month of June, right in the middle of Ghana’s long rainy season, ostensibly the coolest time of the year. Even so, the midday sun was so excruciating for us Westerners that our workday had to be arranged around it. On an average day, we rose around five-thirty, started work by six-thirty, and broke at eleven-thirty. If it was overcast, or breezy enough to be tolerable, we’d return to work around two for a couple more hours. The rain usually hit in the late afternoon, washing away the heat and leaving the evening fragrant and cool.
Every afternoon, as soon as we finished work, I’d tear back to the schoolhouse where we slept, grab a bucket of water and a calabash bowl, and duck behind the woven reed screens we’d set up for privacy. There, I’d shed my clothes and dump calabashes of water on myself while I soaped off the day’s grit, leaving a few inches in the bottom of my bucket for a final whoosh of cool. Then, while the other foreign volunteers hung around the camp trading travel stories, I’d scoot down to Minessi’s hut to spend some time with baby Yao before the evening meal.
Afranguah was a village of several hundred souls, with neither running water nor electricity. The inhabitants were poor, but not destitute. The children were bright and energetic, thin and scrappy, without the swollen bellies and patchy, red-tinged hair that signal malnutrition. The village had a deep borehole with a pump attached which yielded clear, sweet-tasting water, thanks to a far-reaching cooperative effort between the Ghanaian government and several international aid organizations.
An unpaved road ran through the center of town, surrounded by rectangular cinderblock houses smoothed over with stucco and topped off by corrugated tin roofs. Paths leading away from the center led to more cinderblock houses, interspersed with rectangular mud huts. My favorite of these huts had big yellow flowers growing out of its thatched roof. The surrounding countryside was lush and verdant, thick with vines and a jumble of deciduous trees. The jungle, a European volunteer told me, had been chopped down hundreds of years before and replaced by this secondary growth. The landscape was lovely, with its fecund red-brown earth, but it lacked the rain forest’s primordial complexity.
Minessi lived in one of the small stuccoed houses gathered around the center of town. She could usually be found in the communal courtyard outside her hut, washing laundry or preparing fufu. The women of Afranguah made fufu by pounding boiled cassava or yam in a large bowl, made from a scooped-out tree stump, until it acquired a smooth elasticity. While the Ghanaians loved fufu, most foreigners found it an acquired taste, due to the peculiar consistency. The proper way to eat it was to take a fistsized handful and swallow it down without chewing. Since doing this produced a gag reflex in the uninitiated, we novices took smaller bites, chewing it like gum until it broke apart.
The women threw their entire bodies into the pounding. Using heavy wooden pestles four to five feet long, they repeatedly flung their arms high above their heads and brought them down with tremendous force. Each time I watched Minessi do this, I was struck by the extraordinary grace and dignity of her movement. While most of the women in the village were short and stocky, Minessi’s figure was tall and tapered, with wide hips and a long, elegant neck. Her arms were lean, sinewy ropes. Her pounding looked like a ritual expulsion—a fierce, elegant dance.
On a typical day, Minessi would look up from her pounding as I approached. She’d smile her languid, unhurried smile and unstrap Yao from her back. Her near-black skin was smooth and lustrous; her wide-set eyes tilted slightly upward. It was obvious where Yao got his looks. The schoolteacher Amoah, an effusive, genial man whose hut was next to Minessi’s, would greet me each day with a warm cry of “Sistah Korkor, you are welcome!” Amoah’s three children would run up to me, and we’d trade exuberant greetings in Fanti. Then I’d sit on the low stool in front of Minessi’s hut, take Yao in my arms, and rock him, singing softly in his ear. He’d explain a few things to me in his own language, a kind of universal babyspeak, which resembled neither English nor Fanti so much as the call of a rapturous bird.
Minessi spoke a bit more English than the other women in Afranguah, which is to say that her vocabulary extended beyond basic greetings. Our conversations went something like this:
MINESSI: You like Yao!
ME: Yes, I do.
MINESSI: You like Yao too much!
Then she’d begin to laugh. Her laughter was like a thunder-storm, starting as a rumble, low and distant, occasionally building to a full-on roar. Soon I’d be laughing with her, and Yao too. The three of us spent a lot of time like that, laughing together for no reason at all.
“Minessi, listen,” I said one day, holding Yao’s mouth close to her ear. His breathing was raspy and labored. Minessi listened for a moment, then looked at me, confused.
I imitated the breathing, exaggerating it for effect. She gave me a long, wary look, then shrugged. I let the subject drop, but not before kissing Yao’s silky forehead and whispering in his ear that he was trying to scare me, and he should cut it out right away.
Two days later, as Minessi took her daily stroll past the construction site, she stopped and gestured to me. I set down the short pile of cement blocks I was balancing precariously on my head and skipped over. She looked at me for a moment with an anxious, indecisive expression, then whispered in my ear that she would like some money to buy medicine for Yao. Could I bring some to her house tonight?
Sure, I told her, how much did she need?
But she didn’t want to talk about it now, in front of everyone. She hurried away before I had a chance to kiss Yao.
When I arrived at Minessi’s house that afternoon, she was neither pounding nor sweeping. She was sitting on the front step, quite still, with Yao in her lap. Amoah saw me approach and called out “Sistah Korkor!” as usual. Hearing this, Minessi sprang up and dragged a stool out of her hut for me to sit on. She then disappeared again and returned with a plate of kenke and shitoh. Kenke was another Ghanaian staple, made from fermented cornmeal. It had a grainy texture, which was much more palatable to me than fufu’s odd plasticity, and a flavor that reminded me of sourdough bread. Shitoh was a sweet, dark paste, like plum sauce with a bite.
Minessi handed me the plate and gestured that I should eat, while Yao reached out his arms to me and gurgled in his throat like a dove. After I’d eaten, I swung him onto my lap. He looked up with a smile of pure delight, then stuck his fingers in my mouth and coughed. Minessi stood watching, not saying a word.
“Minessi?” I said at last. “You wanted some money for medicine?”
She glanced over at Amoah, who was playing with his children and seemed not to hear.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“How much do you need?” I asked.
Silence.
“Please tell me, Minessi. I want to help. I want to help Yao.”
“Please, you give 1,000 cedis,” she blurted.
I looked at her for a moment in astonishment, then exhaled a short sigh of relief. Less than two dollars stood between my darling and his medicine.
“That’s fine, Minessi. No problem at all.”
I reached beneath the waistband of my cotton skirt for my money belt and pulled out a small, sweaty wad. Minessi stared as I peeled off two 500-cedi notes, then watched my hands as I replaced the rest. She dropped her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, not looking up.
A
week later, our time in Afranguah was coming to an end, and Yao’s breathing was no better. It scraped and croaked. I asked Minessi whether she’d gotten the medicine, and she nodded. I told Yao to get with the program and shape up. I hugged Yao and Minessi and Amoah and Amoah’s three children. Everyone squirmed and laughed uncomfortably in my embrace. I told them I’d be back to see them after my next project.
Back in Afranguah after a month’s dusty labor in the Eastern Region, I couldn’t wait to see Yao. I wedged myself into a packed tro-tro for the bumpy ride from Saltpond Junction to Afranguah. In Afranguah a cadre of children greeted me with enthusiastic shouts. They accompanied me as I dumped my luggage in the cinderblock house belonging to the town minister, Billy Akwah Graham (his father met the American preacher in person once and was deeply impressed), and ran down the hill to Minessi’s mud hut with its corrugated tin roof.
Minessi was in the courtyard, pounding fufu with a long wooden pestle. She laughed when she saw me with my entourage and shouted, “Eh! Sistah Korkor! You are welcome!” I ran to hug her. Yao was on her back, and I covered his little head with kisses. Minessi leaned the long stick against the scooped-out wooden bowl and unwound the cloth that held Yao to her back. She handed him to me.
I looked deep into his soulful eyes and was shocked to find them glassy. Then Yao coughed: a wrenching, guttural cough that sent a shudder through his whole body. I looked up at Minessi in alarm. She started at my expression, taking a step backward.
“Yao is worse, Minessi, he’s worse.” A shrill panic came into my voice. “What happened to the medicine?” I asked.
“It is finished,” she said. “Every day, one spoon.”
She went into the hut and brought out a bottle, empty and carefully washed, with the label still on it. Examining it, I saw that it was a kind of drugstore cough syrup, cherry flavored for children.
“Oh, Minessi, who gave you this?”
“Saltpond Junction. I tell him Yao is sick. He says it is the best. From England.”
“Minessi,” I took her hand. “I want to take Yao to see a doctor. There’s a hospital in Saltpond, right?”
She shrugged and looked at the ground.
“I’ll pay for it, okay? Whatever he needs. But let’s get him there as soon as we can. Can you go today?”
“I must tell my husband.”
I’d forgotten she had a husband. Where was he all day? I didn’t remember ever seeing him. There were so many more women than men in Afranguah that I’d scarcely registered it. Most of the young men had migrated to the cities, looking for work, while the women stayed in the village, farming and caring for the children and a few elderly parents. While the women carried water, pounded fufu, nursed babies, and bent over the millet stalks in the fields outside of town, the few remaining men (with the exception of Amoah, the schoolteacher) spent their days hanging around the bar, drinking apeteshi—or so it appeared to me. I was struck now, not for the first time, by how little I knew about the people I considered friends.
When I stepped outside Billy Akwah Graham’s house the next morning, Minessi was waiting for me. She was wrapped from head to toe in beautiful printed cloth. The cloth was bright orange and stiff, as though just purchased for a festival. Yao was strapped to her back, asleep. I leaned close and kissed his soft cheek, listening to the low uneven motor of his breath.
The walk from Afranguah to Saltpond Junction, where we could catch a tro-tro to the midsized town of Saltpond, took about forty-five minutes. The heat of the day hadn’t settled in yet, and I enjoyed the cool silence as we headed down the dirt path through the luxurious greenery. I asked Minessi where she’d learned English, but she didn’t seem to understand the question, answering only “yes.” I asked her if she wanted more children.
“No!” she said firmly. “Finished. Four children. Enough.”
“Four children? I thought you had only Yao!” I looked at her closely, wondering how old she was. Her queenly bearing made her seem older, but looking at her dewy, unlined face I guessed that she was in her early twenties.
“Three girls!” she laughed. “They stay with my sistah. Cape Coast.”
“What are they doing there?”
“School. Her husband, he is guide. At the monument.”
The “monument” in Cape Coast was a fort, built in the sixteenth century, that was later used as a base for the slave trade. Tourists came from all over the world to bear witness to that grim piece of history, following the guides through the waist-high dungeons where African men, women, and children once lay shackled in darkness, waiting to be shipped overseas. All that foreign income probably provided Cape Coast with better-equipped schools than those in Afranguah, which had neither paper nor pencils nor books.
“You must miss your girls a lot,” I said.
“I will go to them. I want to learn.” She touched her hair and gestured: twisting, braiding, arranging; her long, tapered fingers moving nimbly through the air.
“You want to be a hairdresser!” I cried, absurdly delighted by this small confidence. For all the laughter we’d shared, Minessi had a kind of detachment, an underlying reserve that I’d never been able to penetrate.
She nodded. “Then I go to live in Cape Coast, too.”
At Saltpond Junction we waited for two hours while the tro-tro accumulated passengers. While I wandered around outside with Yao in my arms, Minessi preferred to sit in the sweltering vehicle, holding our places. She leaned her head against a window, gazing out.
None of the windows opened, which made the ride to Saltpond a kind of low-grade torture that gathered intensity as the trip progressed. I kept my head down and breathed deeply, trying to ignore the sensation that I was a cauliflower trapped in a steamer. It was past noon by the time we arrived, and the whole town was wilting in the midday sun. We walked to the hospital, the sultry air dragging at our limbs. Yao, strapped to Minessi’s back, groaned in his sleep like an achy old man.
The hospital was a modern cement building with bare, scrubbed hallways. A few people waited in the entryway. It was nothing like the hospital in Accra, with its outdoor courtyard crowded with patients from morning till night. Perhaps the people in this region, accustomed to traditional methods of healing, were suspicious of these Western-style doctors and their unfamiliar medicine.
A nurse sat at the reception desk. She discussed Yao’s condition with Minessi in Fanti for a while, then wrote “cough” on the sheet of paper in front of her.
“His breathing, too, listen to it,” I chimed in. Minessi glanced at me uneasily. The nurse added a few notes to her paper, then told me I should go into the doctor’s office with Minessi and Yao to explain the situation to the doctor. I added that Yao already had the cough when I left a month ago. The nurse looked at Minessi in surprise.
“Bohsom?” she said sharply, which meant month. Minessi nodded slightly, looking caught out.
The cost of the visit was 200 cedis: astoundingly low by my standards, but what that sum meant to Minessi, I couldn’t say. Much of the village business was conducted by barter, and cash was extremely scarce.
The doctor was a young Ghanaian man in a white button-down shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, with a silver cross around his neck. Probably a recent university graduate doing his mandatory public service. He sat behind a broad desk, wearing a stethoscope, and spoke curtly to Minessi. She replied respectfully, her eyes dropped.
“Bohsom eko,” she murmured softly. One month.
The doctor brought his hand down on the desk in an impatient gesture, barking a response. I was dismayed to see the proud Minessi cowering now, her elegant posture literally shrinking under this man’s rebuke. She unwrapped Yao and set him, naked, on the desk.
“She feeds the baby mashed kenke. No milk,” the doctor told me in English. “Do you know what is kenke?”
I nodded stiffly. Minessi avoided my eyes. I was stunned that he spoke like that in front of her. Did he think she didn’t understand? If she was feeding Yao kenke, it must�
�ve been all she could afford. But wasn’t she also breast-feeding? I realized I didn’t know; I couldn’t remember ever having seen her feed him. For a heart-stopping moment I wondered whether she was guilty of negligence. My mind flitted to her other children, her daughters: why weren’t they with her? I quickly pushed away the disloyal thought. She was wonderful with Yao, so gentle and patient. If she’d stopped breast-feeding, there had to be a reason. And cow’s milk, which could only be found in tins, was certainly out of her range.
The doctor ordered Minessi to remove a small pouch that hung on a frayed red ribbon around Yao’s neck.
“I too have my superstition.” He winked at me. “I won’t touch the baby while this is on.”
Placing the stethoscope against Yao’s tiny chest, the doctor looked up and shook his head at me again.
“They feed the babies mashed kenke and then wonder why they grow pale and have no energy,” his voice rang with disgust. “I tell them and tell them but they won’t listen.”
He smiled at me ingratiatingly. In my periphery I saw Minessi adjusting her orange cloth, looking sideways at the bare walls of the room. When the doctor turned his attention back to Yao, I tried to catch her eye.
After the examination, the doctor again spoke sharply to Minessi in Fanti. She nodded, expressionless, head down.
He turned to me. “The baby has pneumonia. It is lucky that he is alive. He will have to sleep two or three days here in hospital,” he continued in a comradely tone. “One hundred cedis a day to stay here. Not so much, eh? But she is afraid to bring him. Instead she will visit the witch doctor. Then she will sit in her house until the baby dies. They can never find money for the hospital, but they will always find money for the funeral.”
Minessi was silent as we walked down the sterile hallway.
“That doctor was a jerk, wasn’t he?” I said finally, but she just stared straight ahead.
In the pediatric section, which seemed to consist of a room with eight cots—six empty and two occupied—they gave me a prescription to fill. We walked into town to find a pharmacy.
Somebody's Heart Is Burning Page 5
