Christina ~ May 18

 

I’ve been staring at the white space I’ve created at the top of my May 2024 writing document for maybe 20 minutes, thinking about Ghana, about being sick (which I am right now), about the times I was sick in Ghana, about Abu Iddi in Wa and Alhaji Ibrahim’s son Mukhtar in Kumasi, about Tom Ansah at the university, the boyfriend, a Christian not a Muslim as were the cattle traders, a person un-connected to my research, my R&R, someone I could get some relief from the stress of always being in a research head, for as an anthropologist everything was data, well, possible data. I’m thinking about tomorrow, when I’m supposed to go to Cape Cod with a friend but may not now because I’m sick, with all the symptoms of the bout of covid I had last summer even though the home test I took yesterday showed a negative result, about how I needed more covid tests so I can test myself again today and tomorrow, about how by using DoorDash I was able to get two more covid test kits from CVS in less than a half hour, about how different the world is now in 2024 Northampton than it was in 1978 Ghana, where I had to walk in the heat and the dust to get anything, how when I first got there I searched the market for instant coffee and toilet paper, things designated as “essential goods” by the Ghanaian government, but impossible to find because the minute they became “essential,” they went into the black market, how I learned to live without coffee, without toilet paper, using the local newspaper as everyone else did, which was no problem with the plumbing since I often lived in places where wasn’t any plumbing, just a raised cement seat, a hole you stood on, crouched over rather than sat on, something I didn’t realize until one morning I opened the latrine door and found a little boy crouched over the hole, the hole I’d been sitting on for weeks, never realizing that people put their feet where I put my bottom. And how you don’t know what you don’t know much of the time.