Oranges are the only fruit

Afternoon, readers! (Always wanted to say that.)

Allow me to take you back in time before Christmas to a very simple moment etched in my memory.

I watched the pink sun set behind the trees, my legs caked in mud from an afternoon of football. In my hands I was carefully eating an orange which had taken a whole 20 minutes of preparation before I could take even one bite!

Even after four months here I still have sudden snapshots of a situation that make me think “wow, I’m actually in Africa”. This was one such moment. It was beautiful.

It got me thinking about the orange… and I think I can sum up my experience here with a single piece of fruit.

The first thing you need to understand about African oranges is that they aren’t orange. In fact, they vary from yellow to green depending on ripeness, each is bigger than a fist and is protected by a thick skin. To eat one you need a sharp knife and a good amount of patience* (see below.) The reward, however, is delicious - hands down the best fruit I’ve ever tasted.

This illustrates average life for the Ghanaian - without hard work, you'll get nowhere. Or my personal favourite: The Only Place Success Comes Before Work Is In The Dictionary.

Let me explain.

Something as basic as doing the laundry leaves callouses on your fingers, but that grubby shirt is now whiter than white. The women all have arms like tree trunks from hours of pounding cassava to prepare the evening meal for the family. To have a house to call your own, you must first buy a plot and build the house brick by brick yourself, saving small amounts of money to paint and furnish it over painstaking years. The daily life of buying, selling, buying, selling seems to involve such tight margins that often I wonder how they survive. 

For the luckier minority, there are bad teachers and lecturers to be overcome to become a graduate - and that's before we've even considered the corruption at most levels of society. Even then there may not be a job at the end of the road of higher education.

That's not to say it's all doom in Ghana - it's just a far more unfair way of life, where opportunities are limited unless you have money. Those who do succeed do so because of sheer hard work.

As a semi-tourist, I've found the same "hard work" principle to work the same for myself!

For example, greeting people is a big effort in Ghana. Especially for a boring guy like me. Everyone wants to shout "White man! White man!" "How are you?", which, as you can imagine, is tiresome after a while... But from these conversations I've made some really good friends here who I hope to keep in touch with for a long time. (I've also met my fair amount of nutcases, but you take the rough with the smooth.)

I met one man in Cape Coast who was completely deaf. Using makeshift sign language and lines in the sand I found out about his life, and it was one of the longest yet most amazing conversations I’ve had. 

Ghana lacks the means to adopt our materialistic culture which relies on the immediacy of everything. Hard work is the currency of the country.

That said, it's now under 3 weeks till I'm back in the UK, and it goes without saying that I'm looking forward to clean clothes and hot showers! Not to mention the food... Nom Nom Nom.

*Back to the orange…

Step 1: Use a sharp knife to slice off the outer layer of skin, taking care not to cut any deeper than a millimetre or so.

Step 2: Decapitate a small portion from the top, leaving ¾ or so of the orange remaining

Step 3: With your mouth over the opening, suck out all the juice you can

Step 4: Turn the orange inside out and peel away the remaining flesh to eat.

Enjoy!

FC Ghana

Ghanaians love shouting.

If you don't shout, you don't get heard...
Whether it be yelling the main concept of refraction to more than 50 students; trying not to get ripped off ("negotiating") at the market; or explaining exactly why, in a shouting match between guys watching the football on a Sunday afternoon, David Moyes should in fact not be sacked.

There's nothing that gets everyone shouting quite like football. In this country it's perfectly acceptable to spend hours discussing the freedom given to his full-backs by Roberto Martinez this season at Everton, the inadequacies of Man United's creative midfield options, and asserting that of course Ghana are going to win the World Cup - God is on their side, obviously. I would hope so given the amount of prayer meetings dedicated to this "miraculous victory"!
And don't even get them started on the Messi Vs. Ronaldo "best ever player" debate. (It's Ronaldo as he has more "swag" and Messi wouldn't survive in the premier league. Of course.)

For the record, most people are Chelsea fans - a legacy from the Drogba and Essien era. But then some support Man United and Arsenal at the same time... It's a bad time to declare yourself a Red, however.

They shamelessly love the drama, the skills, the media comments... In a previous post I said religion is what really matters here. Forget it - it's football that matters.

At the school I teach at, once of twice a week we take to a "park" riddled with bumps at a gradient of about 10%, to play some 4-a-side with tiny goals. It's all I can do not to fall over sometimes, the skill and strength of the students is incredible. Compared to them, I have the physique of mashed potato.

The women here have arms like tree trunks from carrying and preparing food. And even twiggy people can beat me in arm wrestles. It's embarrassing. Most Ghanaians find the concept of a gym hilarious - they do so much manual work growing up that "toning up" never enters their radar!

It's not a taboo topic to discuss someone's weight, either. I witnessed a hilarious encounter this week when a male student was commenting that a female student had "eaten plenty" over the Christmas break, and was now "too fat around the buttocks"! He got a thump on the shoulder for his trouble. I explained if he said that to a British girl he would do well to escape with all his limbs intact.
Luckily for me, I'm losing a fair amount of weight. I've started jogging in the morning, and the change in diet is clearly working wonders for my digestive system. Just wait until I rediscover fried breakfasts and biscuits when I get home...

For now, I'm just enjoying being in a country where every other person on the street is wearing an obscure retro football shirt (we're talking Watford away, Rangers circa 1996, and even a couple of Wales rugby jerseys) and pretty much everywhere you go there is a football game to be enjoyed.

A belated Happy New Year !

I saw in 2014 in a Muslim town without electricity in Northern Ghana, with a cup of hot oats and some cheap Chinese fireworks for entertainment.

I should point at that it was a temporary power cut, but it did mean there were only a dozen of us who were committed enough to be awake at midnight in the pitch black. Well, us and a few hundred goats.

Three weeks ago me and my fellow volunteers left the dirt and familiarity of Takoradi behind and headed East for the school holidays. 

So, at the risk of this whole blog turning into a travel guide, let me tell you about our tour of Ghana.

Leg 1: Volta Region

The Volta region lies to the East of the gigantic Lake Volta, which sprawls across the bottom right-hand corner of Ghana, which was created by the Akosombo Dam 38 years ago, and at 8502 sq m is the largest man-made lake in the world (yawn).

We used a Rastafarian lodge in the small town of Peki as a base for our travels – the half-British owner made us feel right at home with a dart board and beans on toast for breakfast! Over the course of three days we visited the waterfalls at Wli (pronounced V-lee), climbed the Afadzato mountain, took a canoe trip on Lake Volta, and saw more species of butterfly than you could count. Supposedly the tallest waterfalls in Western Africa, it’s pretty surprising than no-one has taken the time to measure the height properly – estimates vary from 20m to 400m! Check out its helpfully detailed wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wli_waterfalls

Dusty winds from the Sahara blow across Ghana every January, meaning the views from the not-quite-a-mountain 885m Afadzato Mountain weren’t as spectacular as I hoped; I’m planning on visiting again before my flight home.

When passing through the region we narrowly missed out on the industrial town of Ho – such a shame for terrible joke fiend such as myself. Especially considering further North we stopped in Hohoe. Ho Hohoe… Merry Christmas!

Leg 2: Tamale

Next we headed for the Northern region in a ‘Rat Race’-style competition, which eventually ended in all of us desperately hoping we were all heading for the same place and not separate nowhere. Travelling in Ghana is pretty dicey at times, but as often happens the locals helped us out a hell of a lot. Hats off to ‘em.

Tamale (pronounced Ta-ma-lay) is proclaimed the ‘Capital in the North’, and it was so different to anywhere we’d been. All the women were wearing headscarves, the men were smoking 3p cigarettes, and there were countless motorbikes - many with three riders and/or children. The change in heat was what hit us, though. Gone was the humid, sweaty heat of the South, what replaced it was a dry, dusty heat which left you constantly looking for shade and water.  It felt like we were entering a new country!

Leg 3: Mole National Park

So Christmas morning was a bit different this year. Instead of a far too excited sister waking me up at 6am by bring in a stocking overflowing with highlighter pens, socks, tangerines, and other goodies, I was awoken at 6am by the chilling cold swishing around my elbows – and the bleary realisation that the camp fire was out again. Apparently 5 T-shirts isn’t enough to keep warm in Africa!

After saying good morning to the baboons we discovered we had been paid a visit in the night… Santa? Not quite. We saw some fresh elephant footprints no more than 20m away from where we were sleeping, and marks where the elephant had been digging the soil for salt, too.

We caught up with said elephant later in the day, rampaging through the dry forest in search of fresh vegetation. While we saw several elephants and plenty of monkeys, antelope, and amazing birds during the course of our stay, many of the animals were confined to the centre of the park during the dry season as the water holes within driving distance of the hotel all had all but dried up. Overall the safari experience was amazing (and cheap), but it’s a shame we didn’t get to see any lions, wildebeest, or the large herds of elephants.

Xmas morning

The highlight for me was Adam’s encyclopaedian knowledge of the latin names of all the animals in the park (hyena hyena: striped hyena), all pronounced with a perfect thick Ghanaian accent. David Attenborough eat your heart out.

Leg 4: Larabanga

Other than having an incredible name and an ancient mosque, there isn’t much to mark out Larabanga as anything special to travellers. In fact, the village has a terrible write-up in guide books. 

Looks can be deceiving, however, and it quickly became one of the highlights of my journey. A one nights’ stay turned into two, which turned into a week, due to the warm welcome we were given by the whole community. We ended up helping at an extremely poor orphanage run by an extended family network, and we were able to play with the kids and teach them some basic English and maths, as well as helping with medical supplies (this wasn’t me you understand; I’m too squeamish).

I played with the local football team, which contained a few Ghanaian Premier League players, and got one goal and two assists - 10 points, thank you very much! We kipped under the stars every night we were there, and it was genuinely so nice just hanging out with people there.

A couple of days after New Year I made the 17-hour journey back to the school in Takoradi relatively stress-free, thankfully. I enjoyed a long lie in the day after, followed by a well-deserved burger and chips, and other such luxuries.

It’s feels great coming ‘home’, and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into teaching again for my final month here.