Nkawkaw

Nkawkaw from above

Since I got to Ghana, I've been so busy trying to established myself in Accra and get settled into my new job that I hadn't even left the city until very recently.  Finally, last weekend, I went up to Nkawkaw to visit a friend who lives up there and works as the chief engineer at a radio station called Obuoba FM.  We met before over the net when I applied to his station without realizing that it was in the Eastern Region, a 3 or 4 hour drive north of Accra.   When I came to Ghana, he provided me with contact after contact at the radio stations around Accra until I got hired.  He even came down to help me in person once.

I got to Nkawkaw by bus, and as soon as I arrived my friend took me directly to his radio station to show me around and introduce me to his coworkers.  He explained that the transmitter is located on top of a tall local mountain (the Eastern Region is one of Ghana's most mountainous) and that Obuoba consequently has the widest broadcasting radius on Ghana.  The Obuoba signal can be picked up in 7 of Ghana's 10 regions.

The next day, we went up to the top of the mountain where I got to look at the transmitter and the broadcasting tower.  The mountain has also become famous as a launching site for paragliders, who come mostly from abroad during the city's Easter Festival to jump off one of its ledges and float above the city, eventually landing in the soccer stadium.  On top of the mountain, we met a sightseeing couple from the Brong Ahafo region on the mountain who had come in a car, so we joined forces and for most of the morning and part of the afternoon and drove around the mountain towns together.

I found the scenery around Nkawkaw and the neighboring towns incredibly striking, especially in contrast to Accra's urban and often crowded aesthetic.  I've included a couple of my favorite pictures from our trip below.

A side view of the cliff face that overlooks Nkawkaw

Shrouded in the morning mist a little before 9 am, this is the mountain that houses Obuoba's transmitter.  It's also the mountain from which the first two pictures were taken.  I took this shot from the opposite side, in a town called Obomeng.  The concrete blocks in the yard are for sale and will most likely be used to build houses.

The Obuoba FM tower.  This picture was taken too close to the tower's base and doesn't give the viewer a proper sense of the tower's height.

The Obuoba transmitter

Up close

A cluster of telecom and broadcasting towers elsewhere on the mountain

The Butuase Waterfall in the mountains around Nkawkaw

A rock ledge at the falls

Waste Not Want Not

The waste not want not doctrine is observed closely in Accra: used goods of every kind are available so long as you know where to find them, and most people are very sensitive about wasting food.

For example, it's common for people eating chicken to eat the bones and cartilage.  In the US, the only person I've ever seen eat chicken bones is my grandmother, who grew up during the Depression, and she only eats the marrow.

Many also put their leftovers to good use.  The other day, my neighbor prepared a meal for his uncle and I that consisted of banku (a fermented mixture of ground cassava and corn with a texture somewhere in between tamales and mashed potatoes) with smoked fish and "pepper," a salsa fresca-like sauce made out of chilies, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger, all fresh.  When the three of us had eaten our fill, there was still quite a bit of pepper and some fish bones left at the bottom of the communal bowl.  For dinner that night, the nephew simmered the mixture in oil, transforming it from fresh pepper into tomato stew, another popular local recipe that essentially consists of the same ingredients.

That same day, these two also introduced me to a local drink called chibuku or shake-shake.  Chibuku is the lightly alcoholic juice (around 3.5% by volume, they tell me) that brewers squeeze out of malt that they have already used to brew beer.  The chibuku that we bought was produced by the brewers of Club, the most widely-sold beer in Ghana.  The drink is slightly carbonated (that's why the closed carton looks inflated in the first picture,) mildly sweet and full of a fine sediment that mixes with the liquid when you shake the carton or swirl your glass, hence the name.  I found it pleasant and refreshing enough, especially with food (although most Ghanaians won't drink anything until 30 minutes after eating) but I'd be surprised to see it become popular in the states.  It costs about $.75 a liter whereas Club usually costs between $1.50 and $1.75 for a 22 ounce bottle.  If shake-shake really is 3.5% alcohol by volume, then a carton of it has about 7.5% more alcohol than a large bottle of Club.

And that's what struck me most about chibuku: it's so clearly a product of the ingenuity that Ghanaians apply in building their consumer habits around the hard scrabble realities of life in the global South.  It's tasty, relatively cheap (albeit not compared to certain locally produced hard liquors), and most importantly, made from readily available resources.

To my neighbors and other Ghanaians, of course, the drink is more a treat than a sign of relative poverty.  The nephew, a devout Christian, recently told me that while many Ghanaians recognize that their diets are defined by their purchasing power, they give thanks for all their meals, bountiful and meager, and are not bothered by the lack of variety in the food they eat.  The message seemed to be that pleasure is fleeting but life is precious.

Lights Off

Lights Off is Ghanaian English for a blackout.  It's a term that I learned after only a short time here.  Right now, we're in the middle of a weeks-long series of power outages because the West African Gas Pipeline, which carries fuel from Nigeria to other West African states, was damaged by a boat (a pirate boat, I heard,) that crashed into it while fleeing the Togolese navy.  Although Ghana recently discovered oil off its southwest coast and relies on certain other sources of power like hydroelectric dams, this pipeline supplies most of the energy destined for public consumption.  Official estimates on the repair time so far have ranged from early October to late November and may very well continue to change as time goes on. [Update: officials now estimate that this round of blackouts may very well continue through the end of 2012.]

During the energy shortage, blackouts have occurred at least every few days.  At first, they were more or less regular, coming once every three nights, and fortunately for me, these nighttime blackouts last only four hours in my neighborhood.  Elsewhere, power normally goes down from 6 pm to 6 am.  Recently, the blackouts have begun coming more often, with my neighborhood seeing an additional 12 or 13 hour daytime outage every three days or so.  It took a few days for the ECG (Electric Company of Ghana, a public agency) to acknowledge this increase, and since then blackouts have become even more frequent. 

Tonight I'm optimistic that I'll be able to cook my dinner with the aid of an electric element because the lights went off last night and blackouts tend not to occur on consecutive days or consecutive nights. 

A lot of people sleep early when they go off around 6 pm because many Ghanaians routinely rise with or before the sun.  I usually stay up so that I get an extra hour or two to iron clothes, check emails, and so on.

Here are a couple of long exposure pictures that I took after sundown during last night's blackout.  You can see the grid line beyond which the lights stayed on, and there are some headlights, flashlights, and generator powered bulbs in the foreground.

Mocking the Serious

A couple of weeks ago, my neighbor was telling me that Ghanaians often joke about things that happen during the somber pre-burial rites typical of funerals, a ceremony that marks the time when the people closest to the deceased say their final goodbyes.  He told me about a boy's funeral he had gone to some time back.  When it was the father's turn to speak, the man couldn't contain his grief so he stuffed his already saturated handkerchief into his mouth to stifle his sobs.  An appropriate time later, when the father and a group of his friends were relaxing together, one of the friends teased him about the handkerchief and everybody laughed about it. 

More recently, my boss was very upset about a mistake that had been made in my department, and while he was reprimanding us he kept repeating the words "shame on you."  When he stepped out, it took only a couple of minutes for one of my coworkers to start parodying the mantra.  A day or two later, a couple of my coworkers even teased the boss about it and shamed him back in front of the rest of the department.  I was surprised to see that he took it in good humor. 

These kinds of one liners and offhand insults do not summon the full seriousness of the original event.  Instead, by making humor out of a painful or uncomfortable moment, people put distance between that moment and the present.  As best I can tell, the mockery signals that the group has moved on or is at least capable of doing so.