Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  In his place was Nkansah, the young Krobo medical salesman who had taken Jan and me to the “secret farmers” a year earlier and who seemed intent on conquering the world. Also new in the office was a full-time route driver, James (not his real name), who had approached Whit at the local car wash about a job for his twenty-two-year-old daughter. After hiring his daughter as an office administrator and battery technician—she was a fast learner and had the charming but unsettling habit of curtseying to “superiors”—Whit hired James himself. Then there were the Americans, who could be divided into two groups: the Mormons and the bean counters.

  The Mormons, of course, were the four interns from BYU’s Marriott School of Business. Jennia Parkin and Tara Hair shared what was usually Jan’s bedroom (she was back in Oregon), and Justin King and Andrew Stewart were sleeping in my former bedroom. When they weren’t out in the field doing research, they huddled over MacBook Pros and worked diligently on spreadsheets and reports on Burro’s business and marketing plans. Housekeeping apparently ran a distant third on their priority list. Had I been asked in advance if I believed Mormons to be culturally disposed toward residential cleanliness, I would have certainly guessed in the affirmative; they sure seem clean. Yet based on the general indication provided by this cohort, I would have been wrong. I had never seen the Burro quarters in such disarray. Trash was piled everywhere, dirty dishes languished on every surface, and the refrigerator was a science experiment. Then again, they were college students.

  One in their group, however, could not be held accountable for the hazardous wastes inside the fridge. Jennia, blond and cherubic-faced, was disarmingly frank about her food phobias, which might reasonably complicate a one-month sojourn in Ghana. “What are you eating here?” I asked.

  “I brought all my own food from home,” she replied.

  “For a month?”

  “Yeah. MREs.”

  “You brought military meals ready to eat?”

  “Well, similar. Check it out.”

  She led me into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. On the shelves normally reserved for spare sheets and towels were dozens of Hormel Compleat meals. “Three hundred calories each and shelf-stable,” she said with pride. “The real MREs are a thousand calories.”

  “So you brought, like, a suitcase of these over from Utah?”

  “Two,” she said. “I also brought fruit leather, trail mix, Clif Bars.”

  “And you haven’t eaten any local food at all?”

  “I bought some peanut butter,” she said.

  “Oh my God, you ate the peanut butter?”

  “Why?” she asked, putting a hand to her mouth.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “I tried a piece of grilled corn.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my father-in-law once contracted dysentery from a piece of street-grilled corn in Yugoslavia. That was actually one of the few foods in Ghana that I avoided. “Well,” I said, “bon app!”

  The bean counters were the mother-and-son team of Debi Nordstrom and David Martin. Debi was a Seattle business consultant whom Whit had met through Cranium’s former CFO. David had just graduated—literally, a few days earlier—from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An economics major, David told me he had been balancing his own checkbook since he was six years old, and after watching him power-slam data into QuickBooks, I believed him. They arrived in Accra the night that I flew in, ready to whip Burro’s books into shape and explore Ghana. Burro was putting them up at Rose’s modest but charmingly appointed home, a few miles out of town.

  Most of these people were in the office on the morning of my accident. The night before, I had noticed that the antenna of my cell phone was loose, the plastic threads at the base having been stripped. So when we got to the office that morning I scrounged around the storage room for a tube of Super Glue and sat down to fix it. The glue was old and the tip was clogged shut. I took out my pocketknife and dug around the tip while squeezing the tube and pointing it down at the desk, over a slip of paper. To see better, I had taken off my glasses. I was trying to squeeze the tube lightly, but Super Glue tubes are made of fairly rigid plastic and you have to apply a good amount of pressure to get any movement at all. Suddenly the blockage cleared—but instead of squirting down at the desk, in the direction I was pointing the tube, it cleared at an odd angle, sending a fountain of Super Glue straight up and directly into my right eye, bathing my cornea in glue. Naturally, I blinked. Except as soon as I blinked, that was it; my eyelid was sealed shut.

  “Fuck!” I think I said that several times, loudly, more out of fear than pain. It actually didn’t hurt at all. There was no sting from the glue; in that sense it may as well have been water in my eye. But of course it wasn’t water, and my eye was glued shut—permanently, as far as I knew. I would have been terrified if this had happened across the street from the Mayo Clinic, but here I was in a small town in Africa, in a state of complete panic. Whit and the others rushed to help me, but nobody really knew what to do. I remember being led to the shower and my eye going under a stream of hot water, which did absolutely nothing. I remember staggering out to the couch on the veranda, lying down moaning, and Debi bathing my eye with a warm towel. I remember asking Whit to check on my medevac insurance. “I want a fucking Lear jet to Germany!” I commanded him, obviously under delusions of self-potency.

  Justin came out; he’d been on the Internet, on the Super Glue website. “It says there are no known cases of permanent injury from Super Glue in the eye,” he said. “After about four days it will degrade and your eye should open.”

  “Fuck,” I replied. A word that had generally been a significant if selective element of my vocabulary was now representing its length and breadth.

  “He looks pale,” someone said.

  “Maybe he’s going into shock.”

  Whit hovered over me. “Maxy, we should take you to see someone. We can drive you to Accra, where there are good private clinics, or try the hospital here; they do have an eye clinic, and it’s supposed to be pretty good.” I found out later that Rose had called the best eye clinic in Accra, then insisted on speaking directly to the doctor, who recommended the clinic at the Koforidua hospital. “What do you want to do?”

  Driving through Accra traffic was excruciating even in good health. “Fuck,” I said. “Let’s go down the street.”

  I remember staggering up several flights of outdoor stairs at the hospital, shielding my one good eye from the glaring sun, holding hands with Whit and Adam, trying to imagine what the rest of my life would be like with just one eye. There was a huge waiting room, wooden benches packed with patients, babies crying, a grainy TV blaring from within its iron security cage, fans barely moving. I don’t know if it was the nature of my wound or the color of my skin, but I didn’t have to wait. They took me right in, asked me some questions, gave me an official Ghana health card, and stretched me out on the gurney.

  The health-care system in Ghana does not involve a lot of patient hand-holding. Doctors don’t call you into their diploma-lined office, swivel in a big chair, and sagely lay out the scenario and discuss your options; they just roll up their sleeves and go to work. So I was not consulted before the staff pinned me down and the large nurse started to rip open my eyelid with tweezers. “Sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I am!” I spit out, feeling like my eyeball was being skinned alive. Apparently my caregivers hadn’t consulted the Super Glue website.

  “We must cut off the eyelashes first,” she said after a few minutes of futile tugging. “They are glued together.” Out came the scissors, then more agonizing torture with the tweezers. “Men are not supposed to cry,” said the nurse.

  “I’m not crying, I’m screaming!” Still, every excruciating yank on my eyelid revealed a slightly larger sliver of formless daylight, so I held out hope that her brutal ministrations weren’t leaving me permanently blind in one eye. After several more interminable minute
s of persecution, she pronounced my eyelid fully opened. All I could see was a blurry kaleidoscope of moving shapes. “Now we must remove the glue from your eye,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Holy shit,” said Whit, who sounded like he was leaning over my face. More tugging and scraping followed; this time it felt like my eyeball was being pulled out of its socket. “Okay,” she said.

  And suddenly I could see again. There was the nurse. In her tweezers was a chunk of dried Super Glue the thickness of an orange peel and the diameter of a nickel.

  Next stop was the eye doctor himself, down the hall. Reassuringly, his office had all the familiar equipment, and his exam appeared thorough. “Your cornea has many sores,” he said, which I think was the Ghanaian way of saying scratches.

  “You can thank Nurse Ratched for that,” I wanted to say.

  “I will give you some drops to take away the worst pain for a little while, but your eye will be uncomfortable for a few days.” As a semiprofessional kidney stone patient, I knew that “uncomfortable” was medical doublespeak for agony. Here I was expecting the whole hospital experience in Ghana to be completely unfamiliar, possibly satanic, but it was basically the same as ours, with the same vocabulary. I wanted to ask the doctor if he played golf and subscribed to travel magazines, then thought better of it. “The biggest danger is infection,” he continued. “I will give you a prescription for antibiotic drops. Use them three times a day. Come back next Tuesday and we will see how you are doing.” We thanked the doctor and went downstairs to fill the prescription and pay the bill. The total, including eyedrops, came to sixty-six cedis—about forty-six dollars.

  I was doing much better by the next morning, and better again the next day. My use of the F-word had returned to its traditional frequency. Within a week I felt my eye was back to normal, albeit without eyelashes and still a bit bloodshot. I ran into the big nurse on the street, and she treated me like a son. “Oh, how are you?” she said with a wide smile, clutching my hand with both of hers. “Your eye looks so much better!” I thanked her for helping me, and I meant it. I decided that while I would still want that Lear jet to Germany for a seriously traumatic injury (medical supplies in Ghana are limited and blood transfusions still carry the risk of HIV contamination), the country’s government-run medical system wasn’t nearly as scary as I had imagined. Nurses and doctors were just as caring and professional as their Western counterparts, perhaps more so. For the rest of my time in Ghana, I considered myself a proud, card-carrying member of the Ghana Health Service.

  2. Akosia

  “Whit, breakfast is ready,” I said. “And there’s a woman peeing in your backyard.”

  “That would be Akosia,” he said from his bedroom, sprawled out over the sheets with his laptop, crunching numbers. I brought in his morning mango smoothie, as usual. Some men might be humiliated to find themselves, at age fifty-three, serving breakfast in bed to their younger brother every day, but I didn’t mind. Our morning ritual of mango smoothies gave us a chance to talk before the insanity of the office, where at any given moment a half dozen people vied for Whit’s attention.

  I pulled up a chair next to Whit’s bed and took a swig of my own smoothie. “Akosia?”

  “She lives in the blockhouse in the courtyard. The landlady said I could evict her if I wanted, but I won’t. She has a little boy and another kid on the way. I mean, she’s got a sweet deal—no rent and free electricity, but no plumbing.”

  “So I see.”

  “I pay her to do my laundry.”

  “What happened to Mena?”

  “She still does Jan’s laundry, but now that I’m out here, it’s just easier.”

  “Does she have a husband?”

  “Victor. He travels a lot. I think he’s a bit of a rogue. I feel bad for her; she seems well educated and speaks very good English, but I don’t think she lives on much except what I give her for laundry and what she can grow in the backyard.”

  “Are those her roosters?” The property appeared to come with five cocks who started crowing outside our windows at the break of three A.M. every morning.

  “No, but thanks for reminding me. I need to ask her about them.”

  At this point her boy was stooped outside our kitchen window, emptying his bowels onto the concrete patio. His mother watched with a worried frown as he cried. “Oh man, that doesn’t look good,” I said. “The kid’s got serious runs.” Diarrhea caused by unclean drinking water is a major cause of child fatality in Ghana.

  Whit got up and went to the back door. “Good morning, Akosia,” he said.

  “Good morning, Whit,” she said. We walked outside; Whit introduced us and she smiled.

  “Your boy, he is sick,” said Whit.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Please, can you loan me some money so I can take him to the clinic?”

  “Where is your husband?” Whit asked.

  She frowned. “He has traveled.”

  “He left you no money?”

  “No.”

  “When will he return?”

  “Please, I do not know.”

  “When is your baby due?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Have you been to a clinic since you got pregnant?”

  “No.”

  Whit dug into his pocket. “Here is ten cedis—an advance against laundry. I want you to get checked for your baby as well, okay?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Thank you. Bless you.”

  “Oh, Akosia. Do you know who owns the roosters?”

  “Agbe,” she said, pointing over the wall of the backyard. Agbe was a nearly toothless hunter who trekked about the encroaching suburban sprawl with a cocked and loaded shotgun, on constant alert for ferrets, small antelope, and other game he could annihilate and sell.

  “If you see Agbe, can you please tell him he should take his roosters away? They make too much noise.”

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  “Good luck with that,” I said to Whit as we went back inside.

  3. Nkansah

  Herding roosters might be a fool’s errand, but back at the office Whit and his team had made a lot of progress since my last visit in late 2009. The counterfeiting issue was solved with new battery coupons printed by Camelot, the security printer we had visited last fall, with a watermark and an engraved Burro donkey logo. Six thousand new, high-capacity batteries had arrived—each one holding 2500 mAh, versus 2300 mAh on the old ones. “And we’ve gotten much better at certification,” said Whit on the bumpy drive into town, referring to the process of determining whether a freshly charged battery was strong enough to be sent back into the field. Being able to cull bad batteries was essential to maintaining customer loyalty.

  “We’re doing one hundred percent testing of batteries before they go out, which has completely changed the game,” said Whit. “We had hundreds, maybe thousands, of batteries that were somehow damaged in circulation, and we weren’t weeding them out. We still occasionally get a complaint, but it’s nothing like before. Shit, we were losing so many customers. We had agents quitting, saying they couldn’t put their name on this. That whole problem has been eliminated. And we’ve learned we can’t test batteries right out of the charger. Several experts told us that’s nuts; you’ll get a false reading. You have to wait at least an hour, preferably eight to twenty-four. We’re also re-skinning the old batteries with new labels, which has helped with perception. We engrave them, so we know which ones are old and we can track them. I also got a hundred Sanyo NiMHs, widely considered the best in the world; they cost three times as much as ours. We re-skinned and engraved those, and we’ll track them through the system as well, to see how they compare.* So we’re learning a lot, and it’s all adding up. I can’t say there are no problems; you’re bound to have issues with all this growth, but we’re getting much better at our business.”

  Another big driver of growth was the battery-powered phone chargers I had brought over in my luggage—nothing more than a plastic c
ase holding four AA batteries with a pigtail wire that could be spliced to a mobile phone’s charge plug. The cheap carbon-zinc AA batteries sold all over Ghana (Sun Watt brand) weren’t powerful enough to charge phones, making Burro just about the only game in town for that application. The chargers, selling for three cedis, were a hit in nonelectrified villages, but they weren’t perfect; they didn’t work with every phone (some phones had circuitry that shut down the current, mistakenly thinking it was an overload), and cutting and splicing the wires to the phone’s AC charger was a pain. Whit was working with a Chinese company to bring in more sophisticated Burro-branded phone chargers that could be coupled with a diode to get around the circuitry issues, as well as a selection of charging tip adapters so customers wouldn’t have to splice wires.

  Also contributing to fast growth was a new Burro credit policy—interest-free short-term loans to villagers so they could afford the one-cedi battery deposit or the phone charger. As Whit designed the plan, anyone in a village who was deemed creditworthy by a committee of the chief and elders could borrow the deposit money from Burro, so long as they paid it back within a month. It was plainly modeled after the microfinance innovations of Muhammed Yunus, whose Grameen Bank relies on peer pressure to guarantee loans. As Whit explained it, “We make it clear to the chief that if somebody doesn’t pay us back, the whole village loses credit, and then we start calling back batteries. So you have to let the chief advise you on who’s creditworthy or it’s not fair. You can’t have the chief saying later, ‘Oh, you gave credit to Larry? I would never loan money to Larry. He borrowed my saw last year and never returned it.’ There has to be some accountability.” (Burro later refined the policy to make the agent responsible for the credit of his clients, which significantly improved repayment rates.)

  Then there was Nkansah. “I have no idea what Nkansah is telling people in these gong-gongs,” said Whit, since they were generally conducted in Krobo, “but he moves like three hundred batteries at each one. Maybe he’s telling them the batteries will make their penis large or their kids smarter, I don’t know. And he does this clever thing at the end where he says, ‘I need three volunteers who can read and write to help me sign up customers.’ So he’s pre-screening new agents in the village.”