These really long blog entries are getting increasingly more difficult to keep up with. Each week I am here presents new information and experiences that I want to document and share with everyone I love, but sometimes when I’m tired I want to just lay in a bed and be a couch potato and serially watch episodes of How I Met Your Mother on my netbook, like I did last night.  But now I’m in the UFS van with two and a half hours left to go until I’ve arrived at Jasikan, the town where I’ll be staying until Tuesday for my next outreach with the Crystal Eye Clinic. I’ve been told there is no running water there. Given this, I think that I’m fair game for no internet until I’ve returned to the Telecentre again at the end of this week. So this post is a delayed update of my life thus far in Ghana until Sunday, June 19, 6:03 pm GMT.

So it turns out I am missing another holiday for my dad.  Today is Father’s Day! Happy Father’s Day to my dad, my uncles, my friends’ dads, my friends who are dads, Grandpa Joe, and my forefathers. Without your masculine presences, I’m sure I would be among the females who would gravitate towards fulfilling your manly niches. And I’d probably become more manly than I already am. And that’s a rather scary thought. So, thank you for your existences and presences and influences. You are my chains of femininity.

Anyway, last week I was teamed up with the North Western Eye Clinic, which is another among the several UFS partner eye clinics in Accra. Monday through Wednesday I was out in some faraway village whose name I do not know, and each night I was there I stayed in a different hotel/motel/lodge/guest house/a word that probably does not exist in an English dictionary that properly defines these places. Monday night’s lodge had brown water in which I was supposed to bathe. When I first assessed the room, I noticed the toilet water was brownish and had just assumed that the last person to use the toilet had had a very fibrous meal for dinner. Then when my roommate for the week, Sayo, had begun to fill up the bathing bucket from the bath faucet, we discovered that our suspicions about the toilet water were wrong. Whoever ate that dinner must have taken his deuce in the main water supply for the hotel, because that water was brown, too.

Tuesday night, I was confronted by one of my greatest fears: cockroaches. Yep. The big roach I discovered on my shower bucket handle almost makes the lizards and wooly bears (this was what I called these black fluffy caterpillars in my youth) seem okay for a room for which I’m paying. I was absolutely terrified of the roach. Bugs and creatures usually don’t faze me. In my suite this year, I was the designated person for dealing with our surprise mouse guests. For some reason, cockroaches are completely paralyzing to me. They make me squeal like a dying pig and frantically run around in circles like a dog chasing its tail. Is there a term for cockroach phobia? Maybe this condition could get me on the Maury Show!

If it wasn’t the pineapple I had eaten from the street earlier that night, then maybe my cockroach anxiety had caused me to become sick in the middle of the night. I had awoken in the middle of my sleep to an extreme wave of nausea and no subsequent excretions. I haven’t been feeling well ever since. Now, whenever I eat food, I become nauseous. I just tasted one of my fellow volunteer’s boiled yams, which is a very simple dish, and I feel nauseous. My inadequate bacterial flora in my stomach for Africa can go to hell.

Thankfully, Wednesday night’s hotel was actually pleasant. There was hot water and only one or two spiders. I didn’t want to stay out in the rural villages for another two days if I was still feeling sick. Luckily, the UFS van departed to Accra early Thursday morning with the outreach patients who were referred for surgery. Since I was feeling sick, I wanted to tag along the ride, but that would have left the outreach team short of a volunteer. Kind, loving, generous, amazing Page saved my day and offered to stay in outreach and let me replace her in observing surgeries at the clinic. I was so flattered. I had been enjoying the many eccentricities of outreach, including the pink chicks I saw at one of the churches and the donut balls I was eating off the streets and getting to sit next to the optometrist Dr. Kchei (no idea how to spell it) and seeing really interesting cases, such as a displaced lens on a young female with Marfan’s Syndrome.

Taking Page up on her offer ended up being a great decision, because I was able to rest at the comfortable Telecentre and go to the eye clinic and observe surgery! It was amazing to meet the ophthalmic staff at the North Western Eye Clinic. Dr. G was a champ in powering through a straight 22 eye surgeries in about 7 hours. I watched all of them up close! IT WAS SO AWESOME! The reason UFS has its volunteers observe the surgeries is to have a designated witness and sign off that the surgeries are being performed. I was with Sayo. It was so cool to put on scrubs and look over the surgeon’s shoulder the entire time as he was doing his work. It was even cooler to see him work under stressful conditions, with the power coming in and out and the lights and fans going on and off. The surgery he was performing for cataracts is a “SICS” for small incision cataract surgery, which is a much more difficult procedure than what is done in the U.S., but uses much less resources and saves a lot of money. Because there is a large volume of outreach patients and there is only so much financial support available, cheaper and more difficult routes are sometimes taken. But still, quality is not compromised, and the end result is the same. And the surgery is way cooler to watch! It was a party. The next day was a bit of a failure because we were supposed to make it in time to observe the post-op patients. Unfortunately, taxi difficulties got the best of us, and, though we made it to the clinic, we missed the post-op patients and we were just occupying space.

I promise that our lateness had nothing to do with the fact that Sayo and I had gone to the club Aphrodesiac’s reggae night in downtown Accra the night before and returned at 3 am. I promise. I promise that the woman who bit my face in the VIP booth did not prevent me from leaving the premises a sane person. Yep. That happened.

After leaving the North Western Eye Clinic, I was on the prowl for some Coca-Cola light. It is SO hard to find here, and I think it’s because they like their women “jiggly” here, in the words of Dr. Kchei. I miss my coffee and diet Coke so much. Oh god. I found a 12 pack. I felt like an ex-alcoholic after a drink; a serial killer after a long awaited kill; a teenager after his first piece of cake after returning from a few months at fat camp; a person who has found love; an Olympic gold medalist. All those amazing feelings.

I also realize that I’m yearning for something I never could have anticipated missing, and that is fresh air. There are a few smells that I will forever associate with Ghana. Some combination of soot, dirt, car exhaust, fire and burning, body odor, and must will do it. I love the outdoors. I love my home in East Northport that is parked within 2.5 acres of woods and where my dogs can run outside and roam and where I can lay in the grass on my backside and look at the stars and hear nothing but the sounds of the trees swaying and the birds chirping and taste the freshness of the air entering and exiting my system. I love that I can walk and run outside without the worry of feeling as if I’ve smoked cigarettes all the while. In Ghana where the streets are unpaved and there are few car exhaust regulations, it is never pleasant to walk outside, even when the sun is shining and the weather is beautiful. While in taxis or on tro-tros (aka the Ghanaian nickname for buses that drive around and casually pick people up from the sides of streets and are packed to the max with people and are amazingly cheap… I went on one this week and it was so exciting!), oftentimes there is no air conditioning, and the windows are open and I have to cover my face with my shirt because I can hardly breathe in the air from the outside. My clothes are usually filthy with exhaust and dirt that were stirred up from the many vehicles on the roads. I realize that when I decide where I want to live someday, I need to have fresh air. I need to have clean air for me as soon as I step out of my front door of my home. I love unpolluted nature. It is beautiful.

Speaking of nature, I am obsessed with the goats I keep seeing here. I never tire of seeing them. They always make me excited.

I also saw and fed a family of baboons yesterday! And then there was a pack of antelopes! Along the route to walk to see the baboons, I saw a millipede for the first time and some snails that I had also seen in their live form at a street vendor who was selling them as food. Ew. Along the cow tracks to see the antelope pack, I saw a crazy red crab-like beetle and some beautiful dragonflies. As we were about to leave, I noticed a tree above the car that had grape-like fruits on it. I asked our tour guide what the fruits were, and he said the tree was called a nim tree and that the fruits were edible. I was curious, and so I plucked a ripe yellow one off the tree after he showed me that they’re not dangerous to eat. I bit into it and was met by horrid bitterness and crunchiness. Well. Turns out you’re not actually supposed to bite into it. Rather, you suck the fruit until you reach the seed. This is also the case with cocoa fruit! Cocoa is taken from the inner seeds of the fruit that you can suck on. Cocoa fruit actually tastes like sour apple! It’z cray cray.

Lake Volta is the largest artificial lake in the world, and Ghana is its home. I swam in one of its waterfalls yesterday (like a boss). There were two waterfalls adjacent to each other. The right one was the female and the left was the male. The couple was named “Boti.” At first I was grossed out at the thought of swimming because the receiving waters were completely brown and the dude who was leading our group had said that there were tilapia and eels and crabs in the water. I had brought my bathing suit with the expectation that I wouldn’t be the only one who was going to swim. But I was. And I’m so glad I did it, because I discovered that the water was brown not because it was dirty but because of the waterfall splashing up all of the sand at the bottom, which was so comfy and smooth to my gritty feet! And I did not encounter fish. It was actually incredibly refreshing. And I have definitely elevated myself to boss status.

Eh. That’s all for now. Nap time. Ask me about the market and sunburn and Kahuna and corsets becoming illegal in Ghana and my body’s unwillingness to take down food without a grumbly fight sometime, because there were many interesting happenings surrounding such events.

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TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011
Mood: irritated.
This entry will be choppily schmoppily doowapdiddly fadroppily poppily written, for I am anxious and needing some place to vent and I have no outlets for stress relief here and I’m thinkin bout lots o thangs.

Little kids calling me obroni and suffocating me with their voices and cuteness all the time is fun at first. So are the constant requests for my contact information by, well, everyone. By everyone I mean all the people I’ve encountered in Ghana who fall into one of the following categories: men who want to date me; men who call me their “wife” or who proclaim their love to me or who want a second chance after my first rejection of their marriage proposal; women who want me to be their best friend; school children who want to call me all day long and ask me questions (they’re still doing that, by the way); people who want me to give them my money. A few examples:

The main worker at the “hotel” I stayed at the past two days, after standing beside me as I took a picture of the two toads that I found on the hotel staircase, told me that he would give me his address so that when I go back to the U.S. I could mail him a camera.

The 80 year-old man I was interviewing for my research study had somehow felt more intimate with me than he did with the male ophthalmic nurse Dennis, and he had confessed to me that he had though that his bacterial conjunctivitis (eye infection) was the reason he was having erectile dysfunction, which was why his wife had left him. Unless I was completely mistaken and the translator had been making this entire thing a joke as a means of picking me up (which is very possible because he asked me for my contact information after the interview), I believe this Ewe-speaking elder was begging me to cure him of his condition, because he knows of “so many men who are older than him who do not have this problem!” So I wrote down Viagra and Cialis on a little slip and handed it to him. I desperately tried to drill the fact that I was not a doctor and that I was not adequately versed in the pharmacological literature surrounding erectile dysfunction to give him proper suggestions, and that what I wrote down were some options I had heard of that might be worth looking into. Hah. I guess this isn’t something I’m upset about. I live for instant classic stories like this one. But it is an example of how people here think I have superpowers (and, I’m letting you in on a little secret: I do have superpowers! Puauahahha). Ok, continuing:

There was a man yesterday at our outreach who asked me where I was from and when I was leaving Ghana. When he learned that I am from the US and leaving on July 30, he told me that I will buy a ticket and then bring him with me. Just to clarify, I am not bringing this man home with me.

At one of the North Western outreaches last week, a drunken man stormed into the church in which we were working and slobbered all up in my face and was shouting that I am a princess and that everyone should know that I’m a princess and that anyone who tells me I am not a princess is a liar and a terrible person. When he was too close for comfort, I tried to briskly get out of there, but he followed me. I’m a tough cookie, but I don’t think it would have looked good for my selfless volunteer image if I threw a punch or a swift kick in the tuchus or in the testes. I guess that makes hubris my tragic flaw, because after he had been gone for a while, he returned once again to haunt me.

People see obroni in the UFS van and smile and wave. It’s cute, but would you wave to us if we weren’t white?

I was sitting and eating my waakye breakfast on a stoop with four other volunteers for the North Western outreach last week when a hobo approached me and was all up in mah grill. I don’t even remember what he was saying to me. The only way to get him away was by passing him over to another volunteer, which was not what I had planned to do. Just sort of panned out that way I guess.

Other things I’m think about:
People in the United States will snap at you to get your attention. Here, they’ll hiss to get your attention. I don’t like it. I think it’s rude.

Can I bring home a pet lizard? There are these super awesome green and orange lizards here that roam around everywhere. Is there any rule against packing up a live creature in a suitcase back to the U.S.? Would my pet lizard make it through customs? I’m curious, because I’d tots take on one of these bad boiz.

I tried to pick up a goat today, but it ran away. Wahh.

I have been taking bucket showers and sleeping on sheets that I am provided with and using towels whose origins and the nature of whose washings I am unaware, and I’m really not caring all that much. Whenever I have an overnight outreach, I have no expectations for where I will stay. I don’t wear bug spray or sunscreen. There was no running water where I stayed the past two nights, and I didn’t care one bit. I am not averse to peeing and pooping in open fields. I’m pretty used to these conditions now (though I still use bottled water to brush my teeth and I’m still deathly scared of bugs. I see new ones all over the place, and each time I’ll scream and get jitters and “dance” (if you will) as if I am barefoot on a pile of burning coal.).

Popcorn bought off the streets here is absolutely delicious and rather cheap. I buy a huge bag of freshly popped corn for 20 pesewas (about 12 cents). I am on the hunt for it every time I am out and about.

I’m addicted to caffeine. I’ve been carrying around that 14 pack of Diet Coke and drink one every day around 2 pm. It puts me in an amazing mood.

Pineapple is where Spongebob lives and is also very abundant here. From watching so many street vendors cut up pineapple for me, I think I definitely know how to cut a pineapple like a champ.

Lalalalalalalala. Bye bye bwog. Time to bum chill in Wurawura, which sounds like “ra ra” when Ghanaians say it. Ciao.