My phone alarm -- a horrid polytonal rendition of a vaguely familiar opera cliche -- woke me around 8:30 am. My roommate Tim, a rising NYU senior, showed no signs of life for at least another half hour. I was sweating because the AC in our room had gone off. In fact, it goes off every thirty minutes or so for no apparent reason. That's fine during the day, when we usually leave it off anyway, but during the night I have to wake up every few hours to turn it back on. I walked downstairs into the kitchen/common area of the house. It has three bedrooms which are occupied by two girls and four guys, all NYU students (except me). My two other male housemates, Adrian and David, were already awake, dressed, and playing Super Mario on their laptops. Many of us have reacted to this drastic change in culture and environment by reverting to suburban, pre-teen pastimes. Don't get the wrong idea, though -- those two are actually quite active and spend a lot of time playing barefoot soccer with the locals.
I tried to boil some water to make coffee only to find that the gas was inexplicably off yet again. So I just mixed my instant Nescafe coffee grinds with some bottled water and condensed milk and downed it as quickly as possible with a bowl of Cornflakes (we found ten boxes in the cupboard when we moved in). Then I came upstairs, where Tim still had yet to move, and went through the process of turning on the hot water (it involves pressing a big red button on the wall, flipping some switches on a large, totally unlabeled device mounted in the bathroom, and finally turning a nondescript faucet before actually turning on the shower. It took us three days to realize we had access to hot water.) I shouldn't bunk the housing, however. We live in a beautiful compound in Labone, one of the nicest areas in Accra, and the fact that we have hot water, a kitchen with a fridge, air conditioning, and the occasional burst of gas makes this place comparatively luxurious. In fact, I really love it.
Around 9:45 I heard Sammy, the program's driver, laying on the horn outside. We weren't supposed to leave for class until 10, but Sammy usually starts beeping a minimum of 15 minutes early, and for good reason. We are an unreasonably slow group in the morning, and most Ghanaians wake up very early. Sammy is a very adept driver and a really nice person, but I think he hates us.
We piled into our van and counted our numbers -- fourteen in all, thirteen students and our TA Sarah. We congratulated each other on all making it -- during the first week, at least one student was always missing to vomiting, diarrhea, or other affliction (including me for two days).
After a short drive to the NYU academic center we had the first of our meetings with the reporting class, which is taught by our program leader Frankie, an NYU journalism professor born in Nigeria. During this meeting we discussed a few articles we'd read, got our assignment for next week (a 500-word tourism piece) and discussed ideas and sources for our capstone project, a 1,000 word story of our own design. By noon, class was over. Tuesdays we have a class called "The Cultural Context of Journalism in Africa" which largely covers the (biased and unfair) way the Western media reports on African issues, but we didn't have it this week because the professor was presenting at a symposium in South Africa (an obvious cover for going to the World Cup).
We were expected to go off on our own to start researching our tourism pieces. A girl in the program said she was going to try and go to a nature preserve outside of Accra and see if she could do a story on a new monkey preserve there. I had little interest in starting my piece (I am the only graduated student in the program and, therefore, the only person who is not overly concerned with my grades) but as much interest in seeing monkeys as your average American tourist. All in all five of us decided this would be a good way to pretend to be doing research and set off to arrange a cab.
We flagged one down outside the academic center, which isn't too difficult because every other car in Accra is a cab. The first driver we found had no idea where we were going. After driving a few minutes, he pulled over without explanation to a small produce stand, took our guidebook, and consulted it with this seemingly random stranger for a minute. He then came back and told us it would cost 60 ghana cedis (around $40) to get there. We aren't too uncompromising in our dealings here but we aren't suckers, either. That's a ridiculous fare in Ghana. Our driver thought he could call our bluff but we've wisened up a bit. We found a driver who offered to take us for 20 cedis and we were off.
This driver, whose name we learned was Samuel (not unlike our program driver), was an average Accra driver. His cab was held together in places with duct tape and he drove with his elbow on the horn most of the way (it took an hour in the traffic to get about twenty miles, which isn't too unusual to somebody who's been driving in NYC for awhile). He used the horn for a broad range of communications, which seemed to include "get out of the way," "hello," "how are you," "don't you dare," "you are a Godless man" (I think he actually said that to a few fellow cabbies) or maybe "I have a car full of clueless Americans who want to see monkeys but haven't got the slightest clue where they are going, can you please help me?" When we finally made it to the main highway out of Accra, he was upset with the traffic and decided to take only side roads. These less-visited roads had features like waist-deep trenches and free-flowing streams, as well as all the stray and grazing chickens and goats you could ever want to see. I didn't mind the turbulence too much, however, because the locals were genuinely pleased to see us oggling their neighborhoods. A lot of kids ran up to the cab to say hello, and the men at all the "spots" or mostly outdoor bars that we passed looked up to wave and offer the driver directions back to the main road. Many of them also gestured that we should get out and join them, but our driver was a man on a mission and would not slow.
When we finally arrived in the town near the preserve, Kokobrite, we had no luck getting help with directions. Most people on the road had no idea what we were looking for. We finally flagged down a Rastafarian on a bicycle who listened to us and asked what we needed a nature preserve for. "Monkeys!" I said. "We're looking for the monkeys!" "Oh," he said, "the monkeys. Well, it's not really a forest. It's like...a stand of trees. And you probably won't see the monkeys. They don't come out during the day." By this point, I was completely disenchanted with the idea of the monkeys anyway and recommended to my companions that we just explore the area a bit and then head home. Our driver told us about a great beach nearby and offered to wait for us if we wanted to go see it. He took us to Bojo Beach, a breathtakingly beautiful sand-bar beach just a few minutes from the phantom nature preserve. We ended the day with a bit of serendipity. The beach was only open for another hour and most people had left, so it was just us, the surf, and the sand. If you know me then you know that I hate beaches, but I gladly plodded through the surf with a beer from the tiki hut bar. We had a very pleasant drive back to Accra through nightfall and I felt like I waved at every single person we passed.
That's it for now. I'm going to Cape Coast and Elmina with my program this weekend, so look forward to an update soon!
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