sedativegunk

I’m horrendously behind in my blog, so I thought I’d take a moment to try and catch up on the rest of my stay in Ghana. As I mentioned, I’ve been on the move quite a bit and will report on that as soon as possible. For now, suffice it to say that I’ve covered quite a bit of territory in Mali. After spending a couple of days in the dusty wilderness of the Dogon Country, I took a 4×4 up to Timbuktu and that’s where I am now. It is currently a cool 40C out, so I’m enjoying the relative cool of an internet cafe until later this afternoon when I will set out on a camel for a ride out into the Sahara to spend the night.

The Ghanaian Chatroom

One of the amusing things about working with Ghanaians, and I’ve noticed it more with them than any other group I’ve worked with, is interaction on the buildsite. No matter how hot the temperature and no matter how hard the work is, Ghanaians will chatter away about whatever. For Ghanaians, work is a social event. Things may start slow in the morning, with conversation revolving around what work needs to be done and who should do what. During this time, a good amount of this chatter is in English to facilitate the division of labour between locals and foreign volunteers. But as the day progresses, the chatter that may have started as a trickle becomes a veritable flood in the afternoon heat. We volunteers seem to “drop out”, conserving our energy for the task at hand. For the Ghanaians, conversation seems to bring the energy level up to the next notch. Once we volunteers draw silent, the locals are free to switch into their local language in which fluency allows them to bring up the tempo and the volume.

But it doesn’t stop there. The exchanges between people are so rapidfire as to overlap. Are they even listening to each other, I wonder. A third joins in, then a fourth and before you know it five or six people are all talking at the same time. Who knows what they’re saying? Apparently they do, because there will suddenly be an eruption of laughter that only propels the chatter to the next level. The speed accelerates, the volume increases, and before you know it, passing local women stop by, sit under the a tree and join in on the fun. A little self conscious by it all, I conclude that the locals are talking about their odd, sweaty and foible prone guests. After all, who wouldn’t? We volunteers are perfect targets! I’m sure they haven’t ever seen such a collection of oddities in their lives before. And besides, they can rest assured that we can’t understand a word they’re saying! Of course I can’t speak for the other volunteers, but I’m sure they had a lot of fun material with me. The following is a loose translation of what I suppose was said about me:

“Look at that guy! He’s bald and has orange hair on his arms! What were his parents smoking? Carrots?” – many gaffaws follow…

“And look at him sweat! He picks up his water bottle as often as he picks up the trowel!!” – HAHAHAHAHA

“We started working 10 minutes ago and already his clothes are filthy dirty. Is he human or a pig in shit? I swear, he picked up one brick and he’s covered from head to toe in dirt. Those Canadians seem to be messy people.” – HEHEHEHEHE

All the while, the conversation slows nothing down. The local masons carry on laughing and talking while lifting 20kg blocks into place on the wall. I’ve concluded that I’ve never seen such a strong and fun group of people on a build. They make it look so easy and inspire the volunteers to do our very best.

Progress!

As I mentioned in a previous post, we are on average an older group of volunteers, but a very productive one. By the end of our first week, we had finished the brick work on the first house and had made serious progress on the brick work of 3 other houses. During the second week, we impressed the pants off the locals by banding together in chains to move literally hundreds of bricks into place around the worksite (I lost count at around 2,000). Our most impressive feat was handbombing concrete in steel pans to fill in the foundations of the next round of houses. By our sheer numbers and hard work, we saved the local workers days of work by taking charge of filling the foundations. The foreman told us it usually takes the masons 2 days to do pour a foundation for one house. By our 3rd house, we had it down to 2 hours. The masons were hard pressed to keep up with us and the guys mixing the concrete were finally breaking a sweat. The last 2 days were extremely heavy going, but we pulled through and the team’s sense of accomplishment was significant.

All Work and No Fun? No Way!

Ghanaians are dancers. Within 30 seconds of getting a beat going on a drum you can have an entire village congregated. The kids will always be the first to arrive, but the adults will soon follow.

One night we were treated to the talents of a local professional drum group. These guys were something else. While pounding out complex rythyms on a variety of percussion, some would carry the chanting and singing, others were laughing, some were chatting with each other and others staring off into space. Clearly these guys have been doing this since childhood. More importantly than the drumming itself was the intricate dancing of the locals. It started with one woman who seemed to be a professional. She would pull up select members of the congregated masses to join, including our team leader who’s always a good sport for this sort of thing. At a certain point as if on cue the rest of the local adults would join all the while the kids were a frenzy of activity all around us.

And dusk turned to dark, with a bonfire growing before us and a backdrop of stars peering out of the sky, a community of people forgot about the hardship of the day’s work and let their bodies twist and gyrate to the music. And nothing seemed to please them more than the fact that their guests from far away joined them in the fun.