I’ve taken a long break from the blog, to assess life, to work, to study, to take my time, to consider why I felt such a strange dichotomy between what I wanted this blog to be and what people expected it to be.

Unsurprisingly, like life in general, there was no epiphany. Just a slow dawning. Here are my thoughts about expat life in Ghana. No handy hints, no answers, just my honest opinion.

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There are a 1000 ways to be an expat here. The experience of the diplomat is different from the experience of the company employee with a highly engaged HR team behind them, which is different to an employee with virtually no company support behind them, which is different to the business people who come on their own accord to make a life and a business here, which is different to the foreign spouse married to a national. I can’t tell you how it will be. Will you have a driver? Accommodation paid for? Utilities paid for? (lucky sods the lot of them).

But I can tell you what will make or break your assignment.

Your expectations and your attitude.

It is as simple and as difficult as that.

If you are coming from the developed world, your accommodation will not be the same. It may be a fabulous colonial era house, with the accompanying responsibilities of guards and a retinue of staff to manage. It may be an apartment in a compound, or a more modest house. But you will have problems with tradesmen, frustrations with ongoing power shortages, maybe densely mysterious electricity bills (ours have increased by approx. 150% in the last few months), a lack of water or a burst pipe, sometimes the internet will be flaky, sometimes it will be uninterrupted for weeks, maybe at dial-up speeds (hello this week) or maybe just great. There are 1000 ways to be frustrated here.

Getting paperwork done is always nicer out-of-doors

There are an ever increasingly number of malls and grocery stores for you. But you will not find the same brands, or the same quality. But the choice is increasing all the time. Maybe you’ll buy a Valentino dress or maybe you’ll have your local tailor custom-make you a  wax print outfit. Colour will become part of your wardrobe. More often than not you’ll find sushi wraps (nori) or tamarind paste or golden syrup. You will go to several grocery stores to do your weekly shopping. You will learn to make balanced choices between $20 punnets of strawberries or 30c for a kilo of bananas, or 70c for the world’s greatest pineapple. You might bemoan a lack of decent red meat, or eat a lifetime’s worth of chicken. Regardless, cheese will become an item to treasure. Your baggage allowance will be used up with precious, delicious treasures when you return from a trip home. There are 1000 ways to be complain here.

You will sit in traffic during the week and you will celebrate the empty roads on a Sunday morning. You will try and avoid meetings with the traffic police, but it won’t always be successful. Maybe you’ll drive a sexy black Range Rover, maybe you’ll catch tro-tros. At the traffic lights you might choose to shoo away the window washing boys, but I promise, your heart will break with the endlessly cheerful, skateboard riding, disabled men. Some days you’ll shelter in the air-conditioned cocoon of your car avoiding contact with the outside world. Some days you’ll wind your window down and buy plantain chips and phone credit at the traffic lights and chat about the football, or decline the marriage requests for your daughter who is sitting next to you. There are 1000 ways to be frustrated here. There are 1000 ways to be delighted.

Sick of crowded shopping malls…then roadside shopping is for you. So convenient!

Maybe one weekend you’ll go to the beach. At the city beaches you might not swim, because no one wants to swim in effluent. But maybe you’ll head to Kokorobite, where you can bemoan the plastic bag(-fish) that swarm at your ankles. Maybe you’ll choose to play beach volleyball with the Rastafarians and buy lobster fresh from the sea balanced on the ladies’ heads who walk up and down the beach. You can watch the fishermen with their beautiful, unwieldy dug-out canoes drag their boats and catch into shore. You can choose to look at the beauty of their actions or you can choose to look at the plastic bags in the net. The choice is yours. There are 1000 ways to see a situation here.

Maybe you’ll head further afield and visit the UNESCO Slave Forts that dot the coastline. Maybe you’ll visit Sodom and Gomorrah where the world’s e-waste is sent. Maybe you’ll buy your herbs from an urban farmer whose field sits between apartment blocks and highways. Maybe you’ll visit a local school. There are 1000 ways to remember the luck of birth is a throw of the dice.

You’ll feel like socialising. Maybe you’ll sip Verve Clicquot atop the highest building in the land. Maybe you’ll sip beer at a chop bar on the side of the road, with Chelsea vs Man United playing at full volume. Maybe you’ll dance to the ancient beat of a West African drum. Maybe you’ll sip a G & T at an embassy residence. But you will meet wonderful people from Ghana and everywhere else, the only similarity you’ll share is a common language and the fact that you live in a small West African country. There are 1000s of people to meet here.

I can’t tell you what your life will be like here.

All I can suggest is an open mind. It will not be just like home.

But that’s the point isn’t it?

Kythera sits like a tear drop at the bottom of the Peloponnese. a rocky island around which the waters of the Aegean and Ionian seas flow. From where I sit, I can see both the sugar cube houses of the Aegean, scattered amongst the brown terracotta roof tiles of the Ionian islands to the west, and further again, to Italy. The landscape too is a mixture of these island groups, the sooty green shrubs with small copses of pine forest, and grey limestone ridges and promontories of austere beauty, which plunge into the cerulean sea.

We spent the day at the beach today, which sounds not so unusual for a tourist in Greece. But, for us, with a dermatologist grandfather in the family, it is a guilty pleasure to lounge in the sea and afterwards, lie on the hot pebbles soaking their warmth through our wet swimmers.

Our beach of choice today was Fourni beach, accessed down a dirt road whose fine dust coats the cars. The beach is a stretch of pebbles, no more than 200m wide, with a small beach shack selling souvlaki and cold beers. At the end of the beach is a sea-shell pink one room cottage with an arbor painted a dusky blue, which Bill and I dream of as a holiday house. For our kids the lure of this beach are the limestone cliffs, which plunge into the sea, giving them water so deep it is impossible to touch the sandy bottom. They leap, like Icarus, into the blue dome of the sky, momentarily flying, before plunging into the deep blue sea below them.

Bill and I sat on a rare patch of smooth rock and watched our youngest from a distance chat to a middle aged, portly man. They were both perched on the edge of a 5m high cliff above the water. We couldn’t hear their voices, but we knew their conversation. The middle aged man sat apprehensively close to the edge of the cliff, and his repeated gazes into the impossible blue below showed his nervousness. Jock sat patiently, waiting his turn for the leap into the blue. The only nervousness for him was mine, as I watched my boy, braver than me, making ready for his jump. The middle-aged man noticed us watching their conversation and he called across the rocks to us:

‘I only started to live when I was 49.’

He smiled, and leapt into the blue.

In the surreal, wonderful world of summer holidays, I’m writing to you from Greece. In a whitewashed hotel room, with furniture painted in inimitable shades of Greek sea blue and green. The bed sheets are white and covered in the rough woolen blankets, which here retain a rustic beauty, but anywhere else would be described as ugly. We’re staying on the edge of the old town, not far from the port whose ferries ply the waters of the Cyclades. Tonight, there will inevitably be calamari and gyros and salad with feta and olives whose salty brine tastes of the perfect sea that surrounds us.

There you have it, the post card image of Greece. It is the perfect tourist cliché that, like all clichés, retains a truth. But Greece is nobodies’ darling at the moment. I understand the frustrations of both the international community who have been pushed to the limits of their patience waiting for reform and results, and the Greek populace, living under ineffective austerity measures. Capital controls have been in place for a week and the government has finally submitted their proposals for debt reform. By the start of next week, decisions will have been made. As the media is so fond of repeating, we are at crisis point.

But here, in the tourist bubble, it is barely evident. Tourists still scramble over the alabaster beauty of the Acropolis, and down into the cool shaded streets of the Plaka in search of ice-creams and ouzo served on ice. Apart from queues at ATMs, the only other evidence of the current crisis are the multitude of international journalists filming from the rooftop pool bars with the implacable stare of the Parthenon as their backdrop. And here on the islands, the beaches and lanes are still crowded with summer tourists, and I have been surprised to hear many Greek voices amongst them. The clichés of abundant hospitality are evident, and I am left to wonder whether it has always felt this helpful, this overtly welcoming, or if the current situation has made many business owners more grateful for our business. Practically, some businesses advertise VISA/Mastercard capabilities, some accept them as a matter of course, and some are insisting upon cash payments.

These cash payments are another of the clichés of Greece, along with tax evasion being the national sport, and accusations that Greece has, quite literally, been resting on her laurels for the last 2000 years. But as she inches closer to the most serious in a current stream of deadlines, can we imagine a European Union without Greece?

While she may not be the darling of Europe, surely she is the sentimental favourite. She gave us more than democracy and the Olympics. She gave us the fundamentals of the western ideologue in both rational thought and a sense of beauty in art and architecture. But in this modern world, it’s clearly not enough. After years of ineffective austerity measures, and a debt so large it is nauseating, it seems crunch time has come.

With my hair stiff with salt, sitting under a cloudless sky, a thought struck me: Greece suffers from an image problem of the most intractable kind. Think of all the reasons we love Greece: the languid summer, the late nights of delicious food, the marble dust washed from our feet in waters impossibly perfect, and an inescapable sense of stopping to savor life; all steeped in a history of the highest caliber. But when these are held in contrast to the mountainous debt, this image of Greece starts to feel irresponsible. Not quite fiddling while Rome burns, but certainly swimming.

Does our popular image of Greece count for her or against her?

Do we imagine her drinking ouzo under a bougainvillea-covered arbor while the debts pile up?

Do we imagine a European Union without its cultural cornerstone?

Were Greece a less glamorous country, less of a sentimental favourite, would I feel so inclined to forgive her?

As an outsider, it is difficult to reconcile. Up to this point, the stubborn stance of the government in the face of the phenomenal debt and government and banks literally running out of money, it seems incredibly arrogant. But years of frustrations over the austerity measures, culminating in the ‘Oxi’ vote are a last gasp at independence. From my conversations with taxi drivers and restaurant owners over the last few days, the mood here (in my albeit very unscientific study) is cautiously optimistic, with a feeling that Greece, along with Spain and Portugal, are needed for the euro.

The Oxi stand in Syntagma Square.

The next few days will decide how much Europe needs, and wants, Greece to remain in the Euro zone. For all the culture Greece has given us; what is evident is that it is time for a change here, both on a fiscal level and a cultural level, however painful both of these may be. This change seems to be reflected in the latest proposals that include tax rises on shipping and scrapping of the tax discounts for the islands.

While Greece with always be part of our past, and though she will always remain geographically in Europe, I do hope she remains part of the Europeans Union’s future as well. I hope Europe can find a way for Greece to save herself, and she can show us all that she is more than the languid summer beauty and classical ruins of our post-cards.

In a country full of discarded goods from the developed world, ironically we were searching for the discarded furniture of Ghanaians. Old wooden furniture, some of it dating from the colonial times of British West Africa’s  Gold Coast. While we have no interest in recreating the past, the furniture is beautiful, made of solid hardwood, with the low, elegant lines of the 1940s. I’ve rescued some of this style of furniture before — from being thrown down an old mine shaft.

Street names are a rarity outside of central Accra, and as we drove through the town I tried to remember the directions. Across the bridge, turn left at the first mosque, the one with the green tower, and further along another left, at another mosque. We bounced along dirt roads, sodden to mud after the recent rain, past cows grazing, their rickety pens behind them. A mobile phone tower on a small rise, standing incongruously amid the cement block houses and the cows and the ground strewn with plastic bags.

My friend got out of the car and walked down a lane, she returned, smiling, yes this was the place.

After greeting the owner we were shown into a small courtyard. Some small, old items of furniture had been brought out for us to look at. A small glass fronted cabinet strewn with mouse shit and skeletons contained a black and white photograph of a young woman. It was a studio photograph with artistically blurred edges and the girl, half-smiling, doe eyed and clutching a bouquet, seems on the brink of her adult life. The cabinet also contained a thick book, it’s glue unravelling by the years and the weather. We opened the book, it was clearly a bible with its tissue thin paper, but written in Twi. Next to the bible was a slender book. As I opened it, the pages fell open to ‘Things to do in London’, which seemed too fabulous as my friends with me are about to move to London, and then we saw it was a diary from 1940. For each date, an entry was made, in pencil. But it was as incomprehensible to us as the bible, it was all in Twi. Was this the young woman in the photograph’s diary? Was the studio portrait a memento for her family as she, a young woman from British West Africa, headed off in mid World War 2, to London?

We were lead down a narrow path between two houses, with a muddy, fetid gutter running down the middle to a building on the edge of a small field. Another cow-pen sat in the middle distance, the palm and coconut trees softening the shock of the ground covered in plastic bags. Some children followed us, with the half curiosity of kids keen to break up their day. The owner unlocked the door and we peered into the darkness, a faint light provided by the doorless opening on the other side of the building, through which a cluster of plantain trees was visible.

The room was piled high with furniture; chairs for the verandah, heavy cupboards and wooden chests, some bearing adinkra carvings. Chairs were pulled out into the sunshine and we proceeded to match pairs of them. The children drifted away as we debated which ones of these broken beauties to bring home.

We took our time, as we thought this was the only room of furniture we would be looking at. Content with our decisions, we were surprised when the owner, whose English was not strong, lead us down another gap between houses, to a small stand-alone house. It was newly built with it’s concrete render unpainted. Inside, this tiny, two-room house was also piled high with old furniture. Some was beyond repair, with broken legs and missing drawers. But high up I spotted a wooden chest, 5 feet long and carved with delicate holes, a pattern of guinea fowls and tribal symbols. It too was dragged into the sunshine to inspect, along with a wooden cupboard. Its heavy 1940s façade hiding a back of rough soap box wood, and inside a delicately faded and torn wallpaper lining of pink roses, and the shelves still bearing their Sunlight soap box origins.

Across the way was a typical older style Ghanaian house, with many small rooms facing directly onto a central communal courtyard. The biggest of these rooms was opened, and more furniture, dusty and dirty, piled high. As we were leaving I spotted a bentwood chair, its legs incongruously silhouetted by the outside light. How does a finely made bentwood chair make its way into a dusty storage room in rural Ghana?

More doors were opened, this time into smaller rooms with hot pink and azure blue walls. And outside, tin pressed inlays decorated wooden doors too old to save.

Hot, tired and visually overwhelmed, we headed back to the owners courtyard, ready to finish our purchases and head home. But another door was opened and we entered two tiny rooms strewn with thousands of bead necklaces, pressed tin oil canisters and piles and piles of kente cloth.

In a country without street signs or a comprehensive phone book, knowledge of traders like the one we visited are passed along through word of mouth, often acquiring a certain mysticism along the way. ‘I’ve heard of that place’ expat friends will say, ‘but I don’t know where to find them’. We pass on this knowledge to each other wanting to share these hidden treasures. But at the end of the day I was left with a lingering sense of… perhaps, loss?

Africa is always touted as the continent of opportunities, and there are some fabulous home-grown examples of successful businesses here, but with unemployment, and probably more significantly, under-employment rife here, it seems a terrible shame to let this furniture rot. As now as we hunt around to find someone to help us restore the furniture it seems, again, like a missed opportunity.

I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it is more than a missed opportunity. This furniture is clearly not desirable for the majority of Ghanaians, perhaps it is a reminder of times past, or maybe it is just deeply unfashionable as this country makes its way in the 21^st century.

In all, I felt it was a day of forgotten treasures whose time had passed. Discarded by their owners in favour of newer, more modern, and in all probability, glitzy, cheap Made-in-China gilt furniture which lines the street stalls and markets of Africa. It felt like a loss…the faded silk kente and the wooden dovetail joints, made by artisans many years ago, rotting in the tropical heat.

A direct line to God. Let’s just hope the network isn’t too busy.

From the country that brought you Azonto music and kente cloth, today let’s enjoy the exuberance of a fantasy coffin! To say that funerals are a big deal in Ghana, might just be the understatement of the century. Let me give you an example. Not long after we first arrived, my husband was approached by one of his colleagues who informed him that he would not be at work in 2 weeks time because ‘I have to bury my father’. Coming, as we do, from a culture where the funeral happens generally 3–5 days after death, he was somewhat taken aback. How could this be? How did he know his father was going to die in time for his funeral to be in exactly 2 weeks? It all seemed very mysterious, not to mention a little macabre, when the truth was revealed.

The man had been dead for months.

To borrow a term from a Ghanaian friend of ours, the man had been kept “in the fridge” for several months before the funeral took place. When you think about it, it does make sense, by delaying the funeral, more people have the opportunity to attend and pay their respects to the deceased. For a senior family member this would typically involve people travelling from overseas to attend the funeral, whose celebration of life extends over several days. And on a practical level, more people attending the funeral, means more financial contribution to the family (it is customary to donate money to the deceased’s family, to pay for the expenses and distribute any remaining according to seniority in the family). So, in a catch-22 situation, the longer you wait for the funeral, the more people may attend the funeral, the more elaborate it can be, the more people you need to attend the funeral to help pay for it.

Depart this life in style

And nowhere is the elaborate nature of a Ghanaian funeral more profoundly demonstrated than in the fabulous coffins of the Ga coastal people. Perhaps you’ve seen these coffins before; wonderful giant fish and crabs for the fishermen, cocoa pods for the farmer, a pen for a scholar, a tro-tro for a mini-bus driver, a Nike shoe….for a guy who really liked Nike shoes! And, of course, the Ghana Airlines plane to whisk you to the afterlife in style.

For the man who has everything…a beer bottle coffin.

One of the fabulously surreal aspects of living in Ghana, is that I recently had the opportunity to visit a coffin maker. His name is Eric, and for those of you in Accra, who might like to visit him, his details are below.

He works in a tarpaulin covered shelter, down a small lane of the main coastal road of Accra, at La Beach, just down from the fabulous Artists Alliance Gallery. Despite his modest surroundings, his coffins are wonderful works of art. All are created with no use of power tools. I have so much respect for artisans like Eric, who manage to create fabulous pieces with very basic tools, while we in the developed world have every possible tool for every possible occasion.

Mini boat coffin boxes and fishing net coffins

Eric showed us giant beer bottles and mobile phones, coffins made to look like fishing nets full of fish and giant roosters. His work has been shown in exhibitions in England, but his main business is work for funerals. He can make only 20-30 coffins a year, for despite the terrific outlay for most (Christian) Ghanaian funerals, a fantasy coffin is an expense many cannot afford (starting at GHC1000). For those not in the immediate need of a coffin (and lets hope that’s most of us), he makes small boxes in the shape of lizards, fish, flour sacks, and the ubiquitous beer bottle. I’m sure he would turn his hand to anything a customer requested. But for the Pentecostals out there, he told us that they can only be buried in bibles or eagles…no mobile phone coffins for you! Here is a short video of Eric explaining his latest commission, a small sports car to remember a brother killed in a car accident. [email subscribers, click to play].

He told us that fantasy coffins started with the funeral of a Ga chief some years ago. It was the Ghana Airways plane.

Coming from a society with a largely British heritage, where funerals are typically sombre events in an increasingly secular society, a Ghanaian funeral can be somewhat of a shock. I very sadly had to attend the funeral of one of the staff from my husbands work a few years ago. I wrote about that experience and Ghanaian funeral culture here and here. While our funerals have their traditions, the extent, the layers of tradition (and sheer length) of a Ghanaian funeral was quite profound experience of different cultural values. To borrow a line from a BBC Nigerian journalist, Nigerians (and I extend this to Ghanaians as well), are ‘notoriously religious’, and combine this with the strong traditions and a love of (loud!) music and singing, and an intent to ‘celebrate a life’ rather than mourn a death, a fantasy coffin seems quite logical. The funeral I attended was an Ashanti funeral, and hence they did not use a fantasy coffin. But over the last few years, I do notice that fantasy coffins are becoming more popular. Even in the local town in Ashanti Region where my husband works (which we lived in for 2 years and regularly visit), one of the local coffin makers has started creating houses, pens, bibles, and, in a largely cocoa growing area, cocoa pods for the farmers.

To me it seems a pity to bury such a wonderful work of art after their brief public use. And to be honest, I’d love a coffin in my home, as a work of art or a piece of furniture, rather than a macabre reminder of the transience of life. Do you think that is a little bizarre? Friends assure me I am being a bit weird, and many Ghanaians would feel uncomfortable in my home as a result. But Eric has come up with a solution, as he also makes cupboards as well as mini-boxes. But I find the thought of a giant fish or crab incredibly appealing.

Please don’t bury me in an iron!

If you had the opportunity to choose a coffin that represented your life, what would it be? After seeing a coffin in the shape of an old-fashioned iron being made in Eric’s workshop I know if I was buried in one of those (or a vacuum cleaner)…I’d kick my way out!!

[For those in Accra, the Artists Alliance Gallery, just down Labadi Beach road also has some great coffins in their gallery].

Over the last three years in Ghana I have seen desperately poor, tiny villages. I have seen the hopelessness of mentally ill, homeless people. I have seen simple, heart-breaking poverty. But I have never seen anything like Agbloboshie. It’s not far from central Accra, close to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital on the banks of Korle Bu lagoon. Locally it’s known as Sodom and Gomorrah. They were twin cities razed by God with ‘hellfire and brimstone’ as punishment for men’s sins, but has now come to be associated with a hell on earth. Perhaps you’ve heard of Agbloboshie, as it is a well known dumping ground for e-waste from around the world, and has the dubious claim of being one of the 10 most polluted places on earth.

Agbloboshie is easy enough to visit, a simple taxi ride will take you there. My daughters, some interested friends and myself recently took a tour, though the word tour seems contrary to the life there. Adjacent to one of the extensions of Makola Market, Agbloboshie is a slum, home to over 50,000 people. From a distance it resembles a patchwork or mosaic, and your eyes struggle to distinguish one dwelling from another, for it is a labyrinth of tiny shelters made of cement blocks, scrap metal, wooden planks and tarpaulins. Part of the lagoon is so choked with plastic and discarded fridges and electronics it looks as though you could walk across. There is no running water outside of communal pumps, and power, like much of Ghana, is patchy at best. Wider streets of dirt, broken cement blocks and masses of rubbish give way to narrow lanes no wider than a person. As you pass into these narrow lanes, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the darkness, the ground is uneven and you need to watch your step carefully. Sanitary infrastructure is limited to shared, filthy toilets or small cubicles make of scraps of tin which drain directly into Korle Bu lagoon, or people urinate directly in the streets and gutters. As we passed through this labyrinth, all I could think of was a mediaeval sprawl, with the darkness, the mud and the deprivation. In these close living spaces I thought a little about Ebola, but more about Cholera. Amidst the endless discussions on Ebola, Ghana has been experiencing a cholera epidemic, and while statistics are now declining, over 27,900 cases have been reported with 217 deaths (as of 29 November 2014).

But why would you visit such a place? Why would we want to take this voyeuristic journey into deprivation? While I had always been interested in visiting Agbloboshie, my second daughter was doing a science project which needed to be on a local issue which had ramifications beyond the world of science, so coincidently, she chose e-waste in Ghana. And while I was ‘tut-tuttted’ by some for taking my daughters to such a place, I thought the first hand experience of seeing where the waste of the first world completes it’s journey was a good opportunity for us all. But of course, what they learnt was more than about the e-waste. It was about endless desires of the developed world, about the trap of poverty and massive environmental degradation. I hadn’t actually heard the phrase ‘slum tourism’ before I visited Agbloboshie, but that is the term that slipped into my mind as we walked through the slum. The idea of slum tourism sits uneasily with me, like the celebrities, arriving like gods, choppered into starving African villages. What do these people gain from allowing us a window into their misery?

To visit Agbloboshie, you need a local guide, but this requires no previous planning. Alighting from a couple of taxis, any group of foreigners (of whatever colour or creed) are immediately recognisable. You will be approached by a local guide, who should pass on any money collected at the end of the tour to the local chief. While it is far from being a transparent process, at the end of our tour we were invited to visit the local chief to see the money being handed over. While we declined, I do hope the money was spent on the community.

Our guide was helpful and interesting, answering our questions in a matter of fact manner. While we were expecting to just see the e-waste, it was really a tour of the slum. We passed along the edge of Korle Bu lagoon, one of the most polluted waterways in the world. Stagnant water with bare banks littered with rubbish, a dead waterway. Our guide told us that when he was a child people would come for picnics in the grass along the banks of the lagoon. Even today, we saw cows grazing on the far bank, the green grass splashed with the bright plastic of water sachets, plastic bags and wrappers. Turning into the lanes of Agbloboshie, we passed tiny shops selling used motor oil and discarded junk from the first world. Heading deeper into the slum were tiny houses, through whose open doors we saw women preparing food. Some smiled, some met our eyes and some stared straight through us. Our new clothes and good shoes were for me an embarrassing symbol of all we had and they had not. Walking deeper into the tarpaulin covered lanes, my daughter pointed out the number of cigarette butts on the ground, a rare site in Ghana. I told her I did not know what it meant, but as the wafts of marijuana and the beat of the music grew stronger, I felt increasingly uneasy. We walked through a small room, with doors on both sides. Men with glazed eyes and blank expressions sat around the room, and beautiful, young girls, with elaborate hair, excessive make-up and short, cheap, inappropriate western dresses smiled at us. I will never forget their gentle sad eyes which met mine as they shyly stroked the arms of my daughters as we walked through.

Back in the bright sunshine, in the smell and the heat of midday along the stinking banks of the lagoon again, we could see on the far side of the water clouds of black smoke, for we were approaching the e-waste site. Piles of discarded plastic, the backs of tv sets and computers, gave way to scorched earth of blackened dirt and plastic. Groups of men and boys clustered around fires, retrieving the metals left after the burning. Behind them acres of plastic waste spread out like an apocalyptic carpet. Seeing us take photographs, they tried to make us stop, but the narrow lagoon in front stopped any confrontation. I can only guess they were ashamed of the way they earnt a living, not knowing that we were sympathetic observers. We crossed the lagoon again and walked through an African market, like the countless others on this continent. After a few hours walking in the heat and stink, we were starving. Catching a smell of meat cooking on an open charcoal fire, my (near) vegetarian daughter exclaimed, “That smells delicious”, only to be confronted by a dozen blackened cow’s feet for sale. We laughed, as did the kids playing fuzzball on a nearby table. The cane weavers, making huge beautiful baskets, which unfinished looked like starbursts, asked for their photographs to be taken. In the sunshine of the market, with some shared laughs and smiles between the mountains of produce, our humanity felt shared. Certainly we were still obvious foreigners, but away from the slum and our strange tourism in the communal space of the market, life felt almost normal again. As we hung around the entrance to Agbogbloshie at the end of our tour, waiting for the money to be donated to the chief, a cheery guy atop a ladder called down to us, “Hey, come live in the slum with us! It’s not as bad as it looks!”

E-waste is shipped to Ghana in containers marked ‘Second hand goods’ or even ‘Development aid’, where it can be purchased for ‘disposal’. The plastic cases of computers and other electronics are discarded, and with no waste disposal, accumulate in massive piles in the area. The electrical components are then burnt so the metals in the circuitry can be collected, and sold as scrap metal. It is a common sight everywhere in Accra (and elsewhere) to see men pulling trolleys of scrap metal. These trolleys filled the lanes around the main street of Agbogbloshie, waiting to be recycled. The health of the men and boys doing the burning is obviously affected by their work. Our guide told us that lung and stomach cancers were common. There is also the obvious ramifications of a lack of education and opportunity for these boys, in addition to pressing health concerns. This is not to forget the release of toxic chemicals into the waterways and land, or just the colossal amount of rubbish generated by the ‘recycling’.

I usually try to finish on a positive note, but the waste, the environmental degradation, and the poverty of Agbogbloshie felt utterly overwhelming. Sodom and Gomorrah is a heady combination of the developed world not taking responsibility for their wanton consumer desires, unscrupulous traders sending the waste to Ghana, the government for allowing this importation to continue and their near complete lack of service provision, and the complications of the poverty trap of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And me? While I still feel very unsettled by the idea of slum tourism, I’m still pleased we visited. I can offer no solution to the problems of Agbogbloshie. While it is important for outside eyes to see places like this, and on a wider scale, for glamorous celebrities to highlight the plight of another African disaster, I find the longer I live here, the more confused I am and the less I understand about poverty, aid and service provision. While a couple of hundred million dollars might ensure a rehabilitation of the area, the fundamental problems of service provision, employment and responsible waste disposal are a longer term and fundamentally more difficult problem. Aid has come a long way in the last few decades, with more focus on empowerment than the well meaning bandaids (pun intended) of the developed world. On a local scale, aid can make significant, and one hopes, long term improvements to people’s lives. But an attitude of aid dependancy and slum tourism is so complicated. Maybe the only thing I can glean from our visit is the incontrovertible fact that the world is a deeply connected place. That old tv you donated to charity probably didn’t provide hours of entertainment to an underprivileged family, but a few cedis of scrap metal.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-most-polluted-places-in-the-world/

http://www.theafricareport.com/West-Africa/ghana-e-waste-pollution-plagues-accras-agbloboshie.html

http://www.blacksmithinstitute.org/new-report-cites-the-world-s-worst-polluted-places.html

Shopping in Marrakech souk.

This morning I am sitting in my new office, a little space tucked off my bedroom, with windows on each side which allows the breeze (and no doubt the harmattan dust) to waft through. While I look into other buildings, a giant palm tree tempers this view. And while I can hear the cars blaring their horns and roaring past on Tetteh Quarshie Roundabout they are far enough away to be a dull white noise.

Because we like a challenge (ha!), we moved house a few days before we left for our Christmas holidays, all in the middle of end of year celebrations and farewell parties and the simmering guilt I had over a university assignment due just after Christmas. So in this chaos, my little office became the dumping ground for those boxes you don’t quite know what to do with. And the boxes and baskets of sewing supplies and children’s report cards and letters deemed too precious to throw away. So I took great pleasure yesterday in stacking the boxes, organizing the books and bits and pieces of clutter, and with a new 2015 diary in hand, wrote out the school holidays, and looked forward to the year ahead. I didn’t allow myself to dwell on the instabilities in the mining industry, but simply felt grateful for a lovely new apartment and a clean(-ish) desk.

I’m not one for gratitude diaries which proponents tell me will increase my daily happiness and mindfulness of the moment. But I do think it’s important to take a moment every now and then to acknowledge all the simple good in our lives. Whether we dwell on tragedies in the wider world or the frustrations of daily life, it’s easy to get bogged down in the negativity. I think this can be exacerbated by the challenges of living in developing countries, where a bad morning can easily spiral into a nightmarish day. And combine this with being away from old friends and family, it can add up to a fairly miserable time when we lose sight of the bigger picture.

So clinging onto the refreshment a holiday brings, here are a few things which are giving me simple pleasures at the moment:

A clean desk and the sense of opportunity it brings.

An internet connection, even sweeter when it has been off for several hours/days.

Penicillin. Thank you. To this tropically acclimatized body those European flu bugs pack a real punch.

How lucky we are to have had such a great holiday, and the greatly extended pleasure of remembering it. I’m loving sorting through our photos, admiring our new Touareg carpet and my Berber earrings. The container of Saharan sand on Jock’s bedside table sings to me of wonderful opportunity and memories.

Printer ink. Truly.

Discussions with the children. Last nights dinner special started about the importance of not offending someone’s religious beliefs vs freedom of speech, obviously in light of the Charlie Hedbo tragedy this week. But it progressed, as these things do, to about ‘being principled’, and whether Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian are principled people…how does this happen?

The really lovely comments and emails I received after my last post. It seems as though, you, the discerning reader, are happy for me to explore any and all possibilities for this blog. Sometimes it will be about the meanderings of life and sometimes about life specifically here in West Africa. I am always humbled by you taking the time to reach out to me, particularly those Ghanaians in the diaspora who read this blog to touch base with home. As a non-Ghanaian, I am humbled by your praise, and can only say ‘Akwaaba’.

Let me know, what’s giving you simple pleasures?

Jock rocking it with the Berbers. Too funny!

Searching the Sahara for the three wise men….but found ourselves instead.

January is upon us with another season of Harmattan cloaking us in a grey blanket of dust. In my rapidly dwindling romantic notions of Africa, I am still surprised that the air here is not a cloud of red, (‘a rain of blood’, as harmattan is described by Almasey in The English Patient), but indeed it is a grey fog which leaves a film of red dust over everything. And if we keep up these romantic notions, can I extend this fog metaphor to the January time of reflections, resolutions, and for our family, anniversaries?

From the end of December, our family marks Christmas, the anniversary of my darling mother’s death, my birthday, our wedding anniversary, and in February (14, oh the irony!), our third Ghanaversary. This is all combined with the excitement, expectation, and to be honest, the sheer relief, of an annual holiday. So to say this time of the year is emotionally charged is somewhat of an understatement.

This January also marks the one year anniversiary of the children and I moving to Accra. It has been, without doubt, the smartest thing we have done since moving to Ghana. School is great, we all have the simplest of happiness’s: friends! A social set. But the move to Accra has also meant a whole new adjustment, which to be honest swings from hectic happiness to feelings of jaded frustration and lack of focus. Clearly this has impacted my writing, as life in Accra has taken a turn towards the decidedly ‘normal’. This, combined with a loss of the sense of the new, means I have been less inclined to find the frustrating fabulous and the irritating exotic. As an example I renewed my drivers licence a few days ago. Around the licensing authority is a hive of related industry, a sprawling, dusty courtyard of sorts where photocopies and passport photos must be made, and of course food vendors, who all push their wares from bubbling pots of oil to brown stews and giblet kebabs. Inside the office are ambiguous queues of people, whose emotions range from frustrated to almost despondent. In a society where information is power, a few signs directing us to the correct proceedure would be inordinately helpful, but are, of course, absent. As my time here progresses I have become more determined not to pay ‘the dash’ to facilitate any official process. But after asking the security guard where I should queue first, their very helpful response was followed by ‘Remember to pay me small small when you are finished’. But 45 minutes later, with a small sense of pride, I walked out with a renewed licence, 10GHC worse off, and smiling only at the comment from a man sitting next to me who bemoaned ‘We can’t organise anything in this country’. I guess I can’t always find such mundane activities a perverse adventure, sometimes they are just mundane.

While my draft folder is full, the lack of blog posting is intrincally tied to the absurd fear of failure being worse than doing nothing at all. Even writing those words emphasises to me absurdity of failure on my own blog. But I have struggled with my voice over the last few months. From the feedback I get from people in Ghana, they want to read about the practicalities of life here (of which is there is not a great deal of information for expats online), while the swing to the more mundane aspects of life in Accra makes me want to write more generally about life. The writing is a strange dichotomy of wanting this to be record of our lives here and providing information that others may find useful or meaningful in some way. I have let this indecision about the direction the blog should take paralyse me as to posting ANYTHING! Ridiculous, I know. But I’m a classic first-born daughter, always looking for the gold star.

January is for most of us a time of reflection. I have used these last few days before reality comes crashing back down to read Gretchen Rubin’s ‘The Happiness Project’, and while I lack her focus on examining every aspect of my life, I do firmly believe that the human condition is to be happy. The most important thing I took away from the book was that for happiness to flourish, it must occur in an environment of growth. We all need to be working towards something meaningful, whether it is as simple (and as difficult) as enjoying our children more, to more challenging tasks like writing a novel or learning French or becoming an astronaut.. I have also read the supremely enjoyable book by Chris Hadfield, ‘An Astronauts guide to life on earth’. Chris is a force of positive energy whose focus is second to none. From a nine year old boy to accomplished astronaut and media personality, his drive and sense of preparedness is extraordinary. And maybe that’s the secret, that this is life….and we’d better make the most of it. It will be over before any of us realise. As a very good friend of mine says, there are three secrets to happiness: 1) Something to do, 2) Someone to love and 3) Something to look forward to.

And so January comes and I am probably no wiser than I was in December, but now have a sense that this is writing is for me. I hope this brain dump will break the proverbial wall, and the writing will flow more smoothly. Hopefully youwill derive some pleasure from it as well.

And before I procrastinate any more, how about I just push that damn “Publish to six degrees north’ button!!

Crossing the border to Togo has become, somewhat surprisingly, a must-do on my bucket list. It’s funny how a move to a new country can change your travel desires. A few years ago it was camping in the Barrington Tops, now it’s Togo, a narrow slip of a country, wedged between Ghana and Benin. With a width (at the coast) of a mere 56 km, a length of 458 km, Togo is truly tiny. A Francophone country, like Benin further east, why Togo is not simply part of Benin (or vice versa) is a mystery to me, undoubtedly a relict of the colonial division of Africa. The differences to Ghana, not only in language, are immediately apparent, but I am getting ahead of myself in this story.

Our girls had a swim meet in Lomé, the capital of Togo, and I thought tagging along would be an easy way to visit a new country. After all, it’s somewhat unlikely that we would visit Togo should we leave West Africa, and in the expat world of Accra fabled stories abound of French cheese and wine. Two very good reasons for me to visit.

Of equal stature to these stories of French shopping, are those of border crossings. My optimistic nature made me believe it would not be as bad as clichéd images of any African border crossing. But like many, many aspects of life in Africa, it is unpredictable.

The girls left with the school buses the day before us, and I followed their progress (on a very nifty app) on my phone. They seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time at the border, and I thought perhaps once they crossed the border, their Ghanaian SIMs would drop out, leaving them virtually stranded at the border on my app. The SIMs did drop out not long after crossing the border, but the length of time at the border was real. But given there were literally dozens of students from a UN worthy list of passport countries, it is hardly surprising it took hours.

Volta River flood plains: prime agricultural land in Ghana.

On Saturday morning we drove out of Accra. From the somewhat salubrious suburbs of Airport, we passed though the middle class neighbourhoods, and onto the dusty ugliness of the industrial Tema, Accra’s port city. Beyond Tema, the villages become smaller and the flat, agricultural land of the Volta river floodplains surrounded us. Like much of coastal Ghana, unless you can actually see the coast, it is not an obvious feature of the landscape. The misty salt air does not penetrate more than a few hundred metres from the shore, and it was only the slender coconut trees, clustered in small islands of the rice paddies which gave any indication that we were passing along the Gulf of Guinea. Towering mounds of bright red tomatoes heralded the harvest, with farmers and their children inviting us to purchase with the distinctive downward flick of their fingers as we passed by. The hours passed quickly for the road all the way to the border is good. I chatted with my travelling companion about the changing nature of aid, particularly to rural people. But that is a conversation for another time.

Crossing the border from Ghana to Togo

Approaching the border, the road widens to 4 lanes, half of which are choked with tro-tros waiting to take those who have walked across the border to Accra. Ahead we could see a grand concrete arch, bearing the emblematic Black Star of Ghana. Grandiose, yet unpainted, it seemed a suitable gesture for an African border. Several large concrete buildings reeking of bureaucracy were scattered around both sides of the border and at the approach to these a man directed us to the customs building. These ‘fixers’ are a common sight at any point of bureaucracy in Ghana, and I presume Africa. For ‘something small’ they will assist you, generally whether you need the help or not.

To cross the border in your own car, you need an ECOWAS Brown Card, which is an insurance certificate covering the ECOWAS states. I would advise purchasing it in advance from your car insurance company. If you have not purchased a brown card it may be possible to purchase one from the insurance agents at the border, or failing that, leave your car in Ghana, walk across the border, and take a taxi to Lome (which is right on the border).

Customs cleared, we headed to Ghana Immigration, a cluster of small, dirty offices near the concrete arch. Ironically, as Ghana is a wealthier nation than Togo, the immigration procedure takes longer, as photographs must be taken and passports scanned. We entered the no-mans land between concrete arch and the real border, a rickety boom gate surrounded by haphazardly parked trucks and buses.

Our man shepherded us to park in front of a small, open fronted office, which was manned by five Togolese Immigration officers. While my companion went to clear the car at Togo customs, Jock and I were free to watch the immigration process on the Togo side. The small office was full of young foreign volunteers, each filling out forms I presumed to be visa applications (we had our visas already in our passports). The immediate difference between the two countries was, of course, language. Five feet of road and we were listening to French with a smattering of English. I couldn’t tell which African language was being spoken, but I presumed it would be the same on both sides. This border and the languages that distinguish it reflect the recent past, the dividing up of Africa by the colonial powers, the African languages uniting the people for centuries before that.

Temperature checks for ebola by the Togolese Red Cross

Adjacent to the passport control office, which was filled with foreign, passport bearing travelers, was a narrow gap in a row of small shanty houses. What caught my eye, more so than the stream of women traders all heavily laden with parcels atop their heads, was a distinctive white bib with the Rouge Croix du Togolaise printed on it. In this era of Ebola, all the traders crossing the border were being temperature checked. In a bizarre demonstration of the lingering effect of colonialism, none of the foreigners were checked. [Although on the way home, random temperature checks were done on some of the children in the school buses, although not all].

With no passport scanners or cameras on the Togolese side, once the queue had cleared, our passports were stamped and we were quickly on our way. It was a strong contrast from the villages on the Ghanaian side of the border, to the Togolese side, whose capital city, Lomé is right on the border. People inexplicably pushing motorbikes across the border, mounted them and raced off into the city. The coast was immediately apparent. The coast in Accra is typically obscured by buildings, and never celebrated, but in Lomé the coast (at least from this ocean loving tourist’s perspective) was the focal point of the city. The wide clean roads ran parallel to the wide stretch of yellow sand bordering the blue of the ocean. So tiny is Togo that at the first roundabout the border with Benin to the east is signposted.

We drove to the host school, along wide, uncluttered roads, surrounded by motorbikes bearing people of all description: grannies, families, couples, men with gas canisters and refrigerators and single women. While motorbikes are common enough in Accra, there is never the swell of motorbikes at a traffic light, and very rarely would you see a lone female motorcyclist. But here in Francophone Togo, the motorbikes swarmed around us and we jealously eyed the smooth flowing traffic.

Was this lack of traffic, and the clean roads and beaches because in Togo there is simply not the population crush that there is in Ghana? (a crude comparison is a 6.817 million compared to 25.9 million people in Ghana) Was it something to do with cultural habits of cleanliness? Amazingly, I did not see one open drain over the weekend. The infrastructure seemed somehow better…better roads, better drainage, and hence less of the ubiquitous city stink. Perhaps this is in part to the attitude of former colonial powers to ‘look after their people’, as a French woman once described the situation in Francophone vs Anglophone West Africa. I’m not sure, perhaps a combination of them all. Certainly after the hustle of Accra, Lomé felt like a country town in comparison. I met a lovely Australian teacher at the school, thrilled to have met us, as we boosted the [known] Australian population of Togo from 6 to 10 for the weekend!

Our hotel, modest by Western standards, somewhat salubrious by African standards, beyond the very large port/industrial area, was right on the beach. We walked over sand to our room. No sooner had we dumped our bags than we headed to the beach to catch the last of the days light. Compared to the beaches in Accra, the beaches here were very clean. Only the high tide line was marked by the predictable plastic bags and bottles, old toothpaste tubes and single, lonely shoes. Like much of this coastline, the waves were rough, but we ran through the foam, dodging the thousands of tiny white crabs out for their evening meal.

The morning brought a delicious breakfast of croissants, coffee and juice. Another sign of the French. After a few hours of watching the swimming competition, a trip to a small supermarket rewarded us with stinky cheese and cheap French wine (“we look after our people’!!), and while the extent of the shopping may have been overestimated, it was still very welcome.

Four hours after leaving Lome, we were home.

I was naively surprised at how different Togo felt from Ghana. The language of course is the most obvious difference, but the pace of life, the cleanliness of the city, and the ‘feel’ of Lome left me pleasantly surprised. I’m sure as an expat it is a very quiet place to live, but for a few days break from the traffic and stink of Accra, it was a very welcome break.

It’s got me thinking, apparently the beaches in Benin are pretty fabulous too….