Ghana, The Redux

So, finally jetlag is receding, and I feel like a coherent narrative of the trip is within reach. This is not a travel blog, so I'm not going to give a day-by-day, but this was my last big pre-ttc trip, so on that thin premise, I suppose it is vaguely relevant. (And besides, there is always the argument for distraction from ttc issues.)

Anyway, the first thing about Ghana is that it is hot. It is almost scorching: 90+ degrees on a cool day, 100+ on a hot day, unrelenting, breezeless, sunshiney heat. The roads are red dirt. The houses are red dirt. The south, outside of the big cities, is hilly and jungly with palm and banana and tall emergent trees in the (ever diminishing) rain forest. The north is flat and desert-ish, with stark sandstone escarpments jutting at odd angles from the otherwise featureless land among baobob trees that jut at surreal angles from the ground. Between the south and the north are little villages of varying degrees of devastating poverty, interspersed with a larger town/city every hundred or two hundred miles.

It is not a country with a concentration of attractions in any one area. There are beaches in the south, a few nature reserves and "craft village" areas in the center, and architecture and pottery up north. Movement between villages is difficult: the roads are awful- two lane disasters, pocked with potholes and speed bumps. Technically, I think Ghana is a land of right-side drivers, but in reality, the driving happens where the potholes aren't, which involves a lot of sudden braking and swerving and hair-raising near-misses with oncoming traffic. Public transit can be large buses that service the big cities (half a dozen or so in the country) or "tro-tros"-- mini- minivans run most often by a kamikaze teenager and his compatriots who swerve and brake and never fully stop to let passengers on or off. For this and the practical fact of our limited time, my mother and I reluctantly decided that hiring a private driver was the best thing we could do. We were not happy to make the decision-- aside from the added expense, we both felt that it was, on some level, cheating. But it turned out to be one of the best thiings we did, and I would never recommend anyone do differently if they wanted to see large areas of the country without spending months and risking, quite literally, life and limb to do so.

Kwame, our driver, was not only the least-terrifying driver I have spent extended time with in a developing country, He helped us plan our trip to maximize the time spent doing and minimize the time spent driving. Perhaps as important as his driving and planning, was his ability to act as translator and intermediary for us in negotiating fair prices and hiring "guides". Hiring guides in Ghana, we found, is not discretionary. If you are white ("obruni") and wish to walk through a village, look at a farm, see a historical or ecological site, you are immediately besieged upon arrival by ten or so young men and boys vying to be your guide. Kwame helped us determine when it was necessary to hire one (just one! A negotiation could last a long time to establish this!) or when we could go on our own. Most often-- I would say 90% of the time, we were not allowed to more than walk along a road or through a public market without a "guide". Most often, though, the guides did offer some enrichment to whatever it was we were doing, by explaining the historical and cultural context of this architecture or this reserve of this mosque.

We started at the south, where we visited an old slave port, and saw the appalling buildings where Ghanians and Ivoirians and others were starved, beaten and brutalized before being shipped to America. We stopped at a nature reserve and took a "canopy walk" along rope bridges strung from the tallest trees in the jungle in a circuit about 90 feet off the ground. We went to a monkey reserve where the mona monkeys and neighboring village had lived for generations in mutual harmony until the missionaries began convincing the animist and muslim population that there was nothing wrong with killing monkeys (thank you Jesus.) We visited markets, endless markets where women from far-flung villages would come bearing enormous containers on their heads on the appointed day, set up their makeshift stalls and pile their huge mounds of cassava, yam, tomatoes, chickens, oranges, dried fish, dead and live goats, plastic buckets, soap, jeans and t-shirts, clay, charcoal-- whatever you can think of-- and wait for buyers. We visited a "factory" (I would have called it a shed) where they make beads by pounding broken glass into a fine powder, mixing it with dyes, sifting it into molds, and firing in a hand-stoked kiln (all without protective masks). We saw the weavers at work making kente cloth- that bright, geometrically patterned cloth that is emblematic of Ghana. Each geometric pattern/color has a specific meaning, which we learned and instantly forgot. We visted the big national game park where we took walking safaris among baboon troops and vervet monkeys and warthogs-- and yes, even an elephant within 50 yards (I did not get closer, and was glad of that when Mr. Elephant charged a group of intrepid photographers who ventured too near.) We spent an entire day with Kwame tracking down the ingredients and implements (begged and borrowed from strangers and graciously returned) to make a native dish when we found the hotel fare -- over-cooked spaghetti with what appeared to be suspiciously similar to ketchup-- unacceptable. It was fermented cornmeal paste and a searingly hot salsa with dried and salted fish and it was delicious. We ventured within a stone's throw of Burkina Faso, but our time had run out and we had to turn back around. It was there that I spent a feverish night with my insides exploding outwards, no running water or electricity. After a morning under the mosquito net while my mother visited a nearby pottery-making village, I had recovered enough to make the journey back south. We spent days hiking up sandstone escarpments and, yes, we found a huge complex, a mall of Jesus camps at the top of one particularly arduous hike. I envisioned the thousand of trips up those very same steps that I had just travelled with bags of cement, metal reinforcements, sand, wood-- how do you build something like that atop a high cliff in the middle of nowhere? We found bat caves and waterfalls and wonderfully remote villages where I was tempted to think "This is the REAL Africa", as if.
Finally, we spent our last two nights at a beach-- THE beach, because it is one long continuous beach from Cote d'Ivoire to Togo-- where we walked our feet to raw nubs in the rough sand, enjoying the sun, and each other's company.

I am SO SO glad I took this trip with my mother. I do not have a very close family in the sense that I would not think to call them to help me through an emotional crisis, but we are loving, and I feel like we did get closer through this trip, my mother & I.

Unfortunately, AF appeared an entire week early, which means November was a lost cycle. I started peeing on ovulation sticks a couple of days ago just to see if my body was doing anything, but I may have missed the window of opportunity-- it didn't occur to me until CD14 and so far the tiny faint little lines say "not today." I started taking my prenatals again (yellow, pee, constipation-- that's why I stopped before.) In roughly two weeks I will be going into to the RE for a baseline ultrasound and a
fistful of prescription papers. Then we will be officially in business.

I am very excited to be finally starting for REAL after over a year of prepping, perseverating and procrastinating.