So yes, I didn’t talk to my friends in New York for the almost two years I was in Ghana but I was hardly without friends, without people, in fact I was always, almost always surrounded by people, the families in the courtyard, the women cooking in the open kitchen in one corner, a cement floored room where each woman had her own charcoal stove and low wooden stool, where she would surround herself with the things she was going to cut up and put in a big metal pot to make groundnut stew or tuon zafi, the children running around, laughing, shouting, the little boys with their plastic buckets at the water faucet in the center of the courtyard, my research assistant, the beautiful Abu Idi who would put me on the back of his motorcycle to visit the traders at the nightly kraal, our long dusty bumpy rides to the weekly market towns where the mothers would comfort their screaming babies, the babies looking at me aghast, the mothers smiling, saying, it’s ok, she’s just never seen a white person before.
Getting a real good sense of life in Ghana here. At least life in Ghana as it was in the 1970s. What a shock it must have been to have seen a white person for the first time. The poor kid.
ReplyDeletedizzying, I clearly see it, like panning the camera through the crowded days
ReplyDeleteSo visual. I can see, hear it all. Once again, not a word wasted.
ReplyDeleteYes, I loved the rich vivid descriptions
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