Sundays in Ghana...

My life is a bit surreal.

A typical Sunday, (when there are no visitors to entertain or take on coastal beach tours), means waking slowly and luxuriously anywhere between 10 and noon. The lie in is standard and savoured each week.

I shove the weekend’s dishes to the side (househelp arrives tomorrow), and cook up a bacon and egg affair with a variation or two. Now that I’m on my health diet, I usually make some high fibre flax pancakes as well.
We sit down with last week’s Sunday Times (it has been mysteriously couriered to our office for the past two years every Tuesday…) and enjoy brunch.

We might download some music from the Internet or put itunes on through the rigged up laptop/stereo and blast our favourites for a few hours while puttering around.
We might grab some magazines and head out back by the pool to have a swim, but mostly just a dip to cool off.


TV comes on about 5 or 6pm, while I see what’s in the kitchen to make up for supper. If I'm really ambitious, I'll have set a roast in the slow cooker earlier... By now the dishes cover almost every visible surface… should I wash them? No! What would Gilbert do tomorrow when he arrives? To be honest, every Sunday night before flipping the kitchen light switch, I feel a twinge of embarrassment. Or is it guilt. Imagine someone seeing my kitchen like this?! But I let it pass – Sundays are a day of relaxation, and plus who am I kidding? I haven’t washed more than 5 successive dishes in more than 8 years…

Sunday evenings, lie on the couch, watch old series or documentaries on our satellite TV, maybe rent a movie and hook it up on the projector screen for a home theatre, and eventually heave our lazy selves up to bed after 11.

But this is all so isolated.

Outside the concrete walls of our vast yard, protecting our fortress, there is buzzing action on Sundays, from long before 6am. If I randomly wake very early, and listen closely, beyond the airconditioner hum, I can hear rhythmic drums. Sometimes I hear this in the distance all night.

But by 6am children across this country have handwashed their uniforms for school tomorrow and are scrubbed up and poured into their Sunday best. Sunday is church day.
From every direction, off in the distance, I hear on Sundays, the hopeful and vibrant sounds of the revivalist churches. They're called 'Charismatic' churches here. Drums and guitars and tambourines, and the massive rhythmic heave of the soul of the people, in unison, once a week, praising their God. Church here is an all day affair on Sunday. It is only by 2 or 3pm the multitudes make their way out of the churches of every description, from colossal opulent temples to half built concrete structures, to makeshift worship centres of plastic chairs, under the trees.

Sunday is fufu day in Ghana too. Fufu, being Ghana’s national dish is quite a labour intensive endeavour in it’s preparation. Everywhere in compounds, apartments and houses around the country, women are boiling plantains (large cousin of the banana, left to ripen to black on the outside), and yams and cassava, for the ritual of mortar and pestle – mashing the tubors into a gummy ball.

This ball is then placed at the bottom of a bowl, over which is poured one of three traditional soups. Light soup is a tomato/hot pepper based broth with any variety of fish and meat added. Then there is palm soup, made from the oily orange flesh of the palm kernels which hang in clusters, red skinned walnut sized seeds, at the top of all palm trees. (The method of extracting the thick fleshy pulp is again quite a long, labour intensive process). The last is groundnut soup (peanut soup). It’s base is natural peanut butter, sometimes made from scratch as part of getting supper ready. Both these soups also have the tomato/hot pepper/various meats added.

Once tummies are full, washing has been done by hand, hung to dry, it’s then pulled in after dark and ironed, and everyone drifts off to bed, mostly exhausted. It’s about 8pm.

Tomorrow is another day. By 6am the children will have completed their chores and be scrubbed up and suited up, ready to head to school, or for the many others, ready to hit the streets to sell…

By 8am, I will rise and stretch and jump into the hot shower. I can hear Gilbert downstairs, the dishes clanging. He will have cleaned a space, big enough to get breakfast ready. When we come down the places are set at the dining table, we wolf down some eggs and coffee (decaf these days), and head out the door, connect the ipod to the stereo in the car… and head to work.

Obama, the Mama, the myth and Drama

I’ve decided to blog about Obama. There comes a time in every blogger’s life where they have to blog about Obama.

I know nothing about American politics and that is by choice. However, it seems the less one knows about the actual political system the better. The democratic campaign of 2008 is about emotions and faith. It is about getting excited and building hope around a person who represents the polar opposite of George Bush.

After being bombarded on the Net, the TV, the papers, the global media monster, the other day I decided to read about Obama and the only aspect that is interesting to me – Obama as a person. His family, his past, what makes him tick. I wanted to get a true feeling about whether his popularity is based on faith, fiction, myth or merit.
What I discovered surprised me. I learned that I could relate to his mother’s story – a middle class North American suburban white girl, intrigued and obsessed by other cultures, with the audacity to believe she could overcome the overwhelming challenges of loving a man from another world.



I learned that Obama’s mother was forced to realize that the union with her Kenyan husband was doomed from the start, found herself abandoned and alone when he was just a baby, and that as a single mom she wanted to establish some stability for her son. She quickly married again – never losing her thirst for exotic adventure, and moved the family to Indonesia. Obama was a privileged expat kid!! He went to the private schools and was even sent to a $14,000 per year boarding school back in that states (Hawaii) as a teenager. He did what intelligent, spoiled American teens do. He juggled schoolwork with becoming a junkie. He smoked joints and snorted cocaine.

A disturbing aspect of his troubled teen years was his proclaimed profound identity crisis and lack of self esteem as a result. And he accredited all of this to his mixed racial heritage.



He blamed his mother and her middle class caring grandparents who he lived with as a teen, for his identity crisis. He changed/shortened his name during highschool to Barry to fit in.



He idolized his absent father, and allowed the romantic and vague stories told to him by his mother as he grew up, to cloud his true judgment of his father.

The true story of his father’s life has been exposed though, courtesy of the media – however I am shocked that the conservative/republican ‘powers that be’ have not pounced on this information to grind his campaign to a screeching halt… after all, the sins of the father…
According to Obama senior’s relatives, he had 8 children in total, from 4 women whom he married concurrently. By western standards he was scum then? And a raging alcoholic who’s involvement in numerous drunk driving crashes eventually brought his demise. Hmmmm…

Obama has since written inspirational books glorifying his father’s life and struggles. But as a mother, learning what I’ve learned about their lives, I just have to assume he is deeply affected by the truth of it all. His father was nothing more than a sperm donor. Married already to a poor woman in his home village, before coniving an idealistic white lady at University in the States to marry him and bear him a child. He then moved on (to another American University, on yet another scholarship) without a glance backward. And he did not stop there. He brought another white American lady back to Kenya with him, married her as well and added more children to the flock.

There is also the fact that Obama senior was a muslim, with the name Hussein. Now what I know about Americans is that the masses have a reputation for being brain washed fear mongers who would, under normal circumstances have a field day with this type of info – drumming up a frenzied fear of the Arab enemy… Otherwise how would Bush have gotten as far as he did?

Anyway, Obama got through his teenage identity crisis by the end of college and got involved in the Democratic Party. He was determined and ambitious. He was smart and relatively charismatic. But Presidential material? I don’t know what he has done to compel people to believe he is the future of the USA. He is all about change and promise and the future. But one must examine his past and his track record in order to make a fair assessment.

The thing about this campaign is that there is no room for fair assessment. Just because there is no better alternative, does not mean Obama is the answer.

He gets the black America vote, despite being an elitist with nothing in common - no roots in slavery, no connection to the 'hoods' or the cultural markers that define this group.

He gets the middle class liberal white American vote despite their underlying racism and uneasiness. He is a chance for them to prove they are politically correct. He talks like them, they can relate...

Whoever says the issues are not racially charged is just dreaming. America is racially divided. They cannot help but to see his colour. There's a one drop rule in America! His close personal association with an extremist black preacher has been widely discussed. Yet still, he gains votes from every corner of the country in staggering numbers.

I just can’t help but think that the American public is so desperate for the promise of something new and different that they turn a blind eye to the glaring issues that would normally have thrown a candidate to the dogs before their campaign could even get off the ground.