First, the good news—I moved back to Abrafo. Actually, I’m back in Odumase. I’m living in a hyphenated town, Abrafo-Odumase, that’s purrfect somehow. Just yesterday my neighbor informed me that I’m actually living in Odumase and she indicated the dividing line, which is more or less the Methodist Church and clearly downhill from my place. Odumase literally means “under the odum tree,” and odum trees are native to the rainforest. The suffix “ase” in Twi means under (O-dum-aussie). Sadly, there are no odum trees left in town; however, they’re numerous in the park.

The new chief, Nana Appiako III (na-na op-pea-ack-co), put the cabash on the radio people. After the order held for two weeks, I got all my things and moved back to A19. Even though the villagers aren’t certain why I’m here, they seem genuinely glad to see me back in town. The park employees, who live in town, seem especially thrilled with the return of their prodigal volunteer. The NGO boys don’t seem to care, or notice for that matter, except they wanted the guest house for another visitor, oh well!!

The bad news is that the radio has come back on as of just yesterday. I enjoyed the two weeks without it, but they can’t seem to maintain that silence. I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m frustrated, mad, simply beyond words. I won’t be able to live here with it going again and I’m not moving back to Pedu. This might just be my pink slip so to speak?? Should I buy the thing? Even thought that’s the wrong message to village--white girl shows up and wants things changed?? Urgh!! Obviously, more on this later…. I can’t think about it yet….

Despite that grim news, I have lots of little things to note since last posting: the rainy season has begun and that means that it rain everyday a little or buckets. This place gets 200 inches in a year and that’s 5 times Indiana’s average. Oddly enough, the rains bring cooler temperatures. I can’t find Cape Coast temperatures online and I don’t have a thermometer, so I often note Accra’s temps, which now are something like 72-84, whereas, before the rainy season they averaged higher, maybe 74-92. Storms here are spectacular, incredible lightening, but no real winds, tornadoes, or hurricanes (odd!). The slightly cooler temps translate into a sheet some nights, but not the whole night. The Ghanaians exclaim, “it’s cold.” They have no idea!!!

My dog, Wyoming, or Odom, which is her Ghanaian name and means grace (ah-doom), is growing by the day. She has an even temperament, likes to chase goats and sheep, and especially likes to sit on my lap—an African lapdog. In the next week or two, I’ll drag her into Cape for a rabies shot. I don’t know what I’ll do about her reproductive system, esp. since I’ve heard that Ghanaian vets aren’t very good. One thing at a time….

Once back in A19, I decided to hire my favorite girl, Alice, to fetch water, sweep, etc. Life is just too short to dislike your “small girl,” which is exactly how I felt about the earlier gal that the landlord recommended. I pay Alice well and we have started a savings account for special things. On the subject of hiring, I also have a Twi tutor, although Peace Corps will reimburse my tutoring expenses. “Master Paul,” as he is called at the private Jr. High is quite patient and helpful. I’m feeling hopeful about this language thing, but it isn’t easy for me at all.

Then there’s the World Cup insanity. Ghana is wild for their Black Stars. There’s a really sweet unity here for their team, actually I’m told all of Africa is cheering. I watched the Ghana vs. US match with a room full of Ghanaians and it was an Anthropology moment—for those goals that jumped up and down, hugged, danced and screamed, not so unlike us, but distinctly African. I have a Ghana flag hanging on A19. If they win today, I expect riots of celebration. Stay tuned!

Now for the longer story, one close to my heart or more accurately closer to my stomach; I’m thinking about food, actually, I’m always thinking about food. No sooner do I finish one meal than I start thinking about the next. Besides Mom’s goodies, I thought that my food focus originated with hiking and backpacking, keeping the fuel coming, but evidently not, since it persists here and this is not quite hiking or backpacking. Really, I do wish it otherwise so that I could wear size 8 pants, but oh well!! By the way, here “pants” means underwear, and “yes,” I’ve blundered more than once causing the Africans to blush. They’re called, “trousers,” here, which sounds slightly more civilized anyway. Ok, where was I going with this ramble?

Oh, yeah food. The food topic is mammoth, just think of the enormity, all the processes--packaging, advertising, storing, shipping, preparing, production, etc. Drug around by the food chain could be interesting, maybe? I wonder, how did we get this particular stuff and not some other stuff? For instance, what about pasta? How many wet and sloppy or worse yet, hard leather-tough prototypes came before someone perfected lasagna noodles and what about THAT shape? What made that shape ideal? I’m certain someone knows the answer (probably that Kimball guy from Cook’s Illustrated and I miss that rag more than I can say). Regardless, I’m heading for Darwin and food evolution (would elegant design work as well?), so I’ll just stop there, but you get my drift. The subject is too enormous to get your mouth around.

Obviously, I have enough spare time to think and last week I was thinking about all the kilocalories involved in growing the food in Ghana. Industrial farming hasn’t reached this shore, at least not yet. Here, farming is hard manual labor with bad tools on clay soils. If you’ve ever had a garden, you’ll understand all that; if not then use your imagination because it is grueling, back-breaking effort to feed yourself and your family from the earth. I’m convinced that our ancestors were a hearty lot, in other words we came from good stock.

My Ghanaian home-stay brother, Stephen, who works for an agri-chemical firm said that the largest field currently cultivated in Ghana is only 20 acres (this is why they don’t have tractors, no need!!). If you know me at all, you should know that I’m crazy about farmers, they are part of my DNA. I can’t imagine a harder working, smarter bunch, who incidentally don’t seem to get there fair share of the pie. So go out a support your local farmer, they’re nearly an extinct species. But, I digress. Since I don’t have access to hard data, I’m guessing that in the US, you’d need to go back 100 to 150 years to find a time when the average farm was just 20 acres (and that probably came with a mule, or was that 40 acres?).

This is subsistence farming, providing only food for families with possibly a little excess to sell, but since everyone has the same excess the income for the producer remain very low, although good for the consumer. The farms here are what I’d call country-garden size with a little orchard somewhere in the mix—maybe an acre or two at most. None of them are linear either, the township and range concept never migrated this far west—so, all the gardens/farms look crazy-quiltish instead of the straight lines of the US. Which brings up the land ownership issue, suffice to say that ownership is nothing like our understanding of land ownership. Historically, the land was owned by the chiefs and parceled out according to some mysterious calculation (another thesis topic). People either tend their family land or hire the labor. The land issue seems a little feudal, a little share-cropping and then some component that has no equivalent in English, all in all a little confusing. At best, I’m attempting to describe moving targets—this is a complex and not easily reducible world.

I’ve been to “farm” twice with my Odumase neighbor, Sister Essi (s-e). Both times, I thought I’d die—I’m not kidding and you know I’m very hardy in most planting zones. While at the farm, we dug cassava, big bread-loaf sized tubers that want to remain in the red-red earth. We weeded with the cutlasses and a short-handled hoe that left me pitched forward in pinched agony after half an hour. Ergonomics is about fifty years away. We collected oranges and tomatoes. Then we cut two plantain stalks, one for her consumption and the other one to sale in the market. Plantains grow like bananas, they are biologically related, and one stalk sprouts about 20 bright green plantains, weights about 40+ pounds and is about 2+ feet long. We carried the whole mess back to her house, about 3 miles, er, well, actually, she carried most of stuff on her head and I had about 30 pounds of cassava in my backpack. I’m not kidding I was exhausted and dirtier than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

Women seem to do most of the day-in-day-out work on the farms. I don’t know what the men do really, besides sit around and play checkers, which they call, “draft.” To their credit, I’ve been told that men clear the land for farming--slash and burn agriculture. Geez, I started out just to talk about food and see where I gone and I’m about to launch into men, so I’ll stop this tangent and leave the poor men for another day.

Whew, I’m tired and I haven’t even gotten to the food yet. Growing the stuff and eating it doesn’t even begin to touch the full socio-cultural-environmental matrix. I’ve often wished that I was a little less interested in everything, but that’s me and if you’re reading this you probably know that’s how I think/feel. Everything here is somehow fascinating.

At the local open-air markets you can buy the following vegetables almost every day: tomatoes, green peppers, scotch bonnet peppers, yams (not like our sweet potatoes, think more like bland potatoes, but big as footballs), green beans, onions, cabbages, carrots, garden eggs, cucumbers, eggplants, summer squashes, fresh and roasted ground nuts (peanuts), cassavas (another tuber, bland in flavor), and kontomires (kohn-tome-air-ray; a green, which must be cooked due to possible amoeba infestations). Seasonally, we have avocados; they just went out of season. Many fruits seem to be year-round: bananas, plantains, oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples, papayas, and watermelons. Mangoes, star fruit and apples seem to be seasonal, although honestly, I’m still working out all these details.

Another day, I’ll try to describe the markets--they are other-worldly and the bigger the town, the wilder it gets. Cape Coast is the 5th largest town in Ghana and the market is big. Just about anything can be found there, next to the tomatoes you’ll find knock-off cassette tapes, next to black-black charcoal for cooking (oops, don’t wear white to the market). Generally, the markets are a series of small stalls, sometimes all of a particular item is together, other times not at all. In Cape they line the already too narrow streets, leaving pedestrians, bikers, cars and taxis vying for the open space. You dare not wobble into the road. Besides the roadsides, there are large roofed and unroofed market areas, again with either wooden stalls or at the very least wooden tables for goods. Always there is filth, goats, sheep, rubbish, the bump and grind or capitalism. The market people, esp. the market women are another story, another day….

While on the topic of markets, with great certainty I can say that southern Ghana is the better place to live for food availability and variety. I am deeply grateful to be in the southern, food-rich portion of the country. My PCV friends up north where the Sahel plays its magic say that they have less food available year-round. Northern Ghana is more savannah than garden and the dry season there is really, really dry, dry-brown to be precise and while it’s a dry hot, it’s still hot, think Phoenix in the summer but without the rains and without the cool nights.

Besides the fruits and veggies in the market, there’s also fish in a million forms--fresh, smoked and dried, with endless permutations on those themes. So many varieties—things that swim, crawl, creep, slither and some things I’m certain don’t move, or have never moved, nonetheless, they’re all somewhere in the market. Some days in the market I simply marvel at the eye location of individual species—one top, on the sides, in-between, are those eyes? I’m a little embarrassed to admit that the sea is mysterious and a little unnerving to me. There’s something about the sea that I don’t trust, but more likely that I don’t understand. I find myself tiptoeing around the sea as if she’ll wrestle me into her watery depths over some old, unknown grudge. I’m always wary around the coastline—I know it’s a little crazy….

Seafood is the most common food in Cape Coast. For cultural realism, I sometimes bike/walk the side streets near the ocean where the fishing folks live to admire their nets and buoys, all in great heaps outside their homes. I’ll save the descriptions of their “from-shore” fishing methods for another day and never mind what is happening out in the brightly-painted boats with ragged flapping sails—maybe I’ll hitch a ride and tempt the Sea Gods? Incidentally, they don’t fish here on Tuesdays; it’s a day for the sea gods to rest (no fresh fish on Tuesdays).

Other meats, beef, mutton, goat, dog, chicken, turkey, pork, and guinea fowl are all readily available in the market and they are also in various configurations—still breathing (you’d like the white one with black speckles?) and in a multitude of post mortem options. I never really knew what slaughtering meant until I got to Ghana. I spent one unforgettable afternoon observing the creative use of hatchets and machetes on a beef carcass—it’s a miracle that I haven’t denounced meat, or more succinctly, butchery. No one has mentioned the animal gods resting, or for that matter the plant gods either?

Now that we’re past growing and gods, it’s finally time for eating. To my palate, Ghanaian cuisine lacks the variability of the US’s culinary hodge-podge and pales when compared to the robust flavors of so many others--think China, India or France. Ghana honestly earned this gustatory boredom, after all this was a British colony, the former Gold Coast. If not for high tea, you’d die in the UK from boring, dull food. Colonialism aside (as it that’s anything anyone could say that flippantly), food here is interesting if for no other reason than it is perfectly matched to the botanical setting and history. Recall that this is the equatorial zone and food is plentiful and seasonal, albeit somewhat restricted in variation. What is consumed by the locals is easily cultivated, cheap and consistently available. Actually, I’m rather fond of their simplicity—we are either having A, B or C—that greatly reduces the shopping/preparing/etc. process, so get used to it. Ok!

Besides the raw materials, you can easily obtain already prepared street food. The omniscient options on the street are called “chop,” and nearly the same menu is available everywhere from sit-down restaurants to street-side stalls. The restaurants just have more variety, whereas the street stalls usually have a specialty, such as fried egg-sandwiches, roasted maize, wachyie (beans and rice with a bevy of condiments) or my favorite treat, red-red, which is fried ripe plantain slices with an accompanying bean stew. (*Red-red recipe at the end of post.) Related to the “chop” option, there’s the fantastic phenomena of “head food,” or more succinctly food carried on the head in some sort of container—meat pies (pie crust around a wad of meat or onion), boo-fruit (Ghanaian donuts, round fist sized fried dough balls), Fan Ice (their idea of ice cream, more like icing in a plastic wrapper that you chew a corner off and suck dry), ground nuts, and my other favorite tro-tro snack—plantain chips, yup, thinned sliced, fried things with salt.

Because this is a pedestrian economy vs. a car-based economy, food stalls and everything else stalls, sell goods at foot intervals—or where another bunch of consumers might walk by—that means they are everywhere. Now this is empirical, but I’ll guess that there’s a stall selling some type of prepared food every ½ block in Cape Coast. There’s just one onerous aspect of street food, it is served in plastic bags that are filled then tied closed. Most people eat the contents of the bag by biting off a corner and squishing the bags contents, toothpaste tube style, into the mouth. Yeah, I’m learning some valuable skills while in Peace Corps.

I’ve described some of these options before, but as a reminder, here’s the prepared food primer. Most of the indigenous food consists of a carbohydrate-base then a soup ladled over all. The carbohydrates are all bland and the soups are similar, although native peppers sometimes add a little tongue sparkle. Fufu is the most common carb and it is made from cooked, mashed plantain with either yam or cassava. Rice is made into rice balls the size of two clenched fists and corn is cooked and fermented and appears in several forms, from stew consistency to something resembling sliceable tamales sans innards—local names vary, but the maize stuff is known as either teasit (tease-it), kenkey (ken-kay) or banku (bahn-coo).

Soups are usually tomato based with onions and fish heads leading list of ingredients. Really, fish is in everything because it is cheap here and once dried or smoked it can be kept without refrigeration (most villagers don’t have refrigeration, keep in mind that 78% of Ghanaians earn less than $2 US per day or 20,000 cedis). During training we joked that even the breakfast oats smelled a little like dried fish—ugh! Regardless, the most common soup is called light soup and it rather like Old Mother Hubbard’s soup—some bones and some water. Palm kernel soup just adds those red colored kernels, the size of walnuts, to the light soup, and add ground nuts (or peanuts) and you have ground nut soup, although the peanut flavor rarely transcends the hours spent at a rolling boil. I don’t know why, but all Ghanaian foods seem to need the more-is-better cooking method, especially when it comes to boiling. I like to think that I’m eating highly sterilized food—auto-claved foods.

Fufu is the national food. The guys at the park even have it for breakfast down at the local chop bar, at the entrance to the park. They have told me that other food doesn’t rate as food. If they haven’t eaten fufu, then they haven’t eaten. This is a cultural thing. I can’t think of a similar American sentiment, but maybe it is there? McDonalds? Krispy Kreme?

Besides the raw ingredients and the prepared foods, you can buy canned goods and non-perishable groceries in little stores or stalls. One store that I frequent in Cape is about the size of a 7-11 store, but packed floor to rafter with mostly canned goods. They also have some cleaning products, liquor (nothing worth drinking) and most of the basics like flour, sugar and salt. I hadn’t seen tuna in oil in years until I got here. I can buy tomato paste, powdered milk (of course not skim), olive oil (on occasion), white rice and white pasta (don’t worry Mary, there’s still plenty for you), canned mushrooms, corned hash and what they call biscuits, but I’d call crackers. Some days they have bizarre stuff, like Big Lots, there for only one week, for instance a whole shelf of white vinegar, then poof, gone, never to be seen again.

Ok, now I’m out of gas and nearly out of time. I hope that’s an adequate peak into my wild world of food. Clearly, I can survive here and I manage to eat pretty well, considering all. I can buy enough vegetables & protein, although nothing here is fast, as in MICROWAVE and my electricity is out enough that I can’t keep perishables very long. Yesterday, for breakfast I had a banana, oats and coffee. For lunch I had a meat pie and an orange, then for dinner I had a beef stir fry with my daily Guinness.

Sure, there are foods I miss that I can’t buy here—Oreos (which I never ate that often, but here I’m craving), Cheetos, what are those little square cheese crackers called?, sugar free colas/gum, a tall skinny latte (special thanks to those keeping supplied with coffee, that one cup really makes my day), good cheese, healthy cereals, artisanal breads, lemon tarts, jerky (I can’t seem to get enough, maybe it’s the sodium?), toll house cookies…. Please don’t read that as a “please send” list. I’m in good shape right now, except for gum and jerky.

All in all, life is good. Ok, that’s my story. What is yours? I’d love to hear about it. Miss you all!

Healing to Jen, Carole, everyone!


As always, mucho love…Xo…d


P.s. Birthday wishes: Melynda Brackman, Mary Byrne (x 1000), Shawna, Reta, Dino, Amy and Brenda (oh, you fabulous cancer girls—miss you!!) Belated to you Miss Daisy—sorry!



Red-Red (or bean stew with plantains)

(a serving is approx. 1 cup of beans to 2 fried plantains)

--Puree an onion and a couple of seeded tomatoes and add to beans while cooking
--Cook 3-4 cups of white beans (these here are smaller than navy beans)
--Once cooked, add enough vegetable oil for the beans to move (guess ¼ cup?)
--Stir well and add cayenne and salt to taste (this dish should have a little fire in the beans)
--Keep warm while preparing the plantains
(here the palm oil adds a shade of red, food color? Just a little.)

--slice ripe plantains into 2-inch diagonals and fry in vegetable oil (they will need more time than you imagine, go for brownish but not burnt)

--serve warm, side by side on a plate

most Ghanaians add fried chicken or fish to this traditional dish

Enjoy!