Kaitlyn’s Journal #4

Asisiriwa Day 13

20 November 2015

I live most in the morning, when the air still moves coolly down through the mountain roads, slowing even the taxi drivers into reason. Unfrenzied and bright, these mornings are different from the November mornings of home, which I am thankful for when going outside to bathe in the still-cool mid morning. As the air moves languidly through the cocoa valleys, the insects quieten and the birds burst into their tittering, twinkling songs, in sweet tunes that themselves seem cool.

A morning above Asisiriwa.

In the mornings I want to sleep, wrapped in the single bedsheet, until I am forced out by the heat of the day. Fractured into waking by the cloying heat, I will emerge, sullenly, back into my body–a body made of water and meat, a body that sticks to itself, a body that grows and dies. The afternoons here are intense, the heat saturating everything, even the colors, which become brighter, harsher, all oranges and greens and yellows. Everything and everyone looks hot, stuck in their bodies, wrapped in their skins and clothes. Even the indifferent things look hot–the standing fans lazily oscillating or standing impotent in the dumsor afternoons, the cars that rattle like zombies sputtering with mechanized stubbornness, the laundry hanging on bowed lines the way they hang on bodies.

In the mouth of the afternoon, we are all outsiders, awaiting the swollen reprieve of evening, drowning ourselves in our sweat and sachet water, fanning ourselves with filthy handkerchiefs, seeking shade, seeking wind. Flies and mosquitoes hum without fervor, somnolent in their dipping flight, confusedly seeking shade and water on irritable bodies. No one eats; it is too hot. Many sleep, lying statuesque and prone on improvised benches–low walls and barristers, compound platforms, steps, the street. The common injustice of bearing a body during the apex of afternoon unites us and suspends judgment. There is understanding. There is sympathy. The only thing to do in the afternoon is bathe for a long time. If you cannot bathe, you simply endure until nightfall, which you enjoy thoroughly because you are owed.

Brady and Quist (a teacher in the village) enjoying a hard-cooked meal in the evening.

At night, we are all visitors. The night truly belongs to the symphony of insects, split by the shadow of bats. Night is an alien time, when the creatures sensible enough to escape the hot stillness of the afternoon emerge in the full resplendence of their existence. Lightning bugs twinkle through twilight shadows, small green echoes of the brightness of day. Young mosquitoes and midges swarm and die, paralyzed by light and sheer numbers, and are trampled underfoot on steps and porches, becoming simply dust. Great fat flies and crickets buzz madly and creak out their chirping melodies under a blanket of stars, hidden by the shadow of tired, sunbleached grass. Mice and geckos and agamas scurry along the walls and floors and ceilings. Spiders spread their wide legs and lie flat against the cooling walls, ignoring the masquerade of insects, watching like dark stars the spectacle of the night.

Suddenly, the bats! Swooping like black comets through the clouds of bugs, diving like sharp shadows into schools of moths and flies, the bats dodge gracefully into the night. They are silent until they misjudge and fly onto the verandah, flapping in a panic against the doors and walls like beached fish until they can return to the cool ocean of their fallen night.

All we can do is watch, fanning ourselves half-heartedly with our kerchiefs stained by the afternoon’s dripping heaviness. Occasionally we swat at flies and flying ants that land in dazed ecstasy on our shoulders and arms, brushing them back into the dance of their thanatos. We will sweep them up in the morning.

When the immense mass of the bugs becomes too much, we retire to our rooms, still warmed by the lingering shadows of the afternoon, and wait for the night to reclaim its territory, cooling the kilns of our houses. When we have fans, we switch them on impatiently, demanding wind, putting our faces right up to the cage, chilling finally the beads and streams of sweat. We go to bed begrudgingly sharing the fan’s small breeze.

—

The rhythm of our small days here is punctured by trips to Kumasi, to the city, to the place of many roads. It takes about two hours to get there, first by a shared taxi to Kuntanase, then by tro-tro to Kejetia station. Electricity and internet access await us there, and we gleefully take advantage as soon as we regain cell reception on the road to Kuntanase, thumbing our phones impatiently, reading news voraciously, demanding that our friends and family awaken themselves from the middle of their American night to talk to us. Sometimes we even find the gift of air conditioning, which, after the rhythm of dumsor in Asisiriwa, plus our growing appreciation of the simple standing fan, quickly makes us quite chilled. The temptation to put on a sweater is excruciatingly sweet to me, filling me with a bittersweet blend of nostalgia and irony that pleases me immensely. I relish it, allowing myself the full appreciation of my senses in the long moments of cold in the internet cafes, archiving the experience for recollection during the dumsor afternoons in Asisiriwa, when time seems to stop and I feel stuck in an interminable oven.

To get to the arctic internet cafes, however, we must first trek the hilly streets of Kumasi, dodging the innards of Kejetia Market, which has recently been forced onto the streets for renovation. Vendors and hawkers swarm the streets like soldier ants, planting their stores on gutters and small patches of empty sidewalk, so that we must pick our way like mountain climbers through the debris of the spilled market. We are branded by white skin in these exposed bowels of Kejetia, and largely ignore the calls of “Oburoni!” “White man! White woman!” and dodge those who try to seize our arms. The vendors are not long disappointed. Their success is ensured purely by sheer probability, and Kumasi’s status as capital of the Ashanti kingdom and prime tourist destination means that more oburonis will soon follow behind us.

The madness of downtown Kumasi.

Kumasi sits like a queen holding in her capacious wrappers the enterprising and determined spirit of her people, bordering (in some corners) on doggedness, but ever bright, ever towering, ever stately. Artists cram the streets, punctuated by food vendors, in long malls of souvenirs, provisions, phone credits, and food. Hidden in recessed pockets are small markets full of fruit and vegetables and fish. Near the post office sit the paper vendors selling postcards, stamps, greeting cards, and all manner of office supplies, pens, and books. Everything is brightly colored but a little dull, either from dirt or from the sun’s bleaching gaze. Taxi drivers call out to any and everyone, asking them where they are going, waving one hand like a question mark, gesturing with the other to their car, looking at them along their noses with their faces upturned.

It is a bombardment of stimuli, a full frontal assault on the senses, inevitably compounded by heat and headiness. It is the necessary odyssey we face to return to our adopted home in the wide expanse of the internet, where our loved ones seem closer, where we remind ourselves that the world of Asisiriwa, that land of the lotus eaters with its idyllic idleness, is not ours–that we belong to the world of action, of retaliation, of the dramatic and bombastic news cycle, of social media, of self-awareness, of irony. We remind ourselves how it feels to be cold. We return tired, drained from the energy required to be present in the world of the internet, from the expectations of homesickness, from the polite and disinterested queries on the progress of our project. We often return into the thickness of twilight, where shadows retain their corporeal sturdiness before slipping into the misty dreamworld of night. We walk back to the house, greet Acheampong, undress tiredly in the bedroom and fall asleep slowly.

It occurs to me that everything is a rhythm here. Village life, our city visits, the ebb and flow of dumsor. We fall easily into routine, but routine makes the days smaller. The only thing that changes is the literacy center, growing rapidly and seemingly with abandon. Like a child, it grows more and more each time we look away. Like a child, it consumes before it provides. Unlike parents, we can choose to pause its growth–a decision we may be forced to make if we cannot keep up with funding.

Kaitlyn working on her computer and unsure that anyone should be taking a picture of her.

Soon it will be Thanksgiving, and then it will be Christmas. The routine of life, though small, spreads the weight of time and makes it bearable. I am no longer so nostalgic. I no longer await the future as expectantly and impatiently–unless it is afternoon and I await the coming of the night. But I do not await it as a marker of time’s passing; it is simply the coolness I anticipate, succumbing to the blithe smallness of rural life for a time, believing momentarily that this must be the world, that this small moment and this small life and this small body must be the gears of life, grinding forward interminably, bound only to the passing of days by the timeless rhythms of the sun, of the moon.

A return to simplicity may not be the salve I sought, but it is nonetheless the salve I have received. And I choose to receive it. Nsa aka.

Kaitlyn’s Journal #3

Asisiriwa Day 7

14 November 2015

I am ravenous, devouring books like a person who has been starved, walking barefoot through a desert, delirious from thirst and hunger, not realizing they are deprived. I have not realized how I’ve been deprived until I began reading again, and now I am ravenous.

Kaitlyn reads books and practices Twi with some of the local kids.

I will read all the books we brought with us for the library in the next six weeks, because after that, it is entirely possible that they will no longer be as readily accessible, just sitting, waiting in the suitcases we packed them into back in Denver, because they will live in the literacy center. But a strange thing happens when you read a book you enjoy, which is that, at its end, you feel as though it belongs to you. The two of you have experienced things together, have traveled together, have changed together, and now belong to each other. I belong to these books. They belong to me. But they have come for a specific purpose–to serve the literacy center–as have I. This ambiguous, amorphous thing, this idea currently being poured into existence with the aid of masons and carpenters and architects and engineers–this literacy center is like an arranged marriage suddenly, to which both I and the books are betrothed, though we now belong–have always belonged–to each other.

—

New arrivals to the funeral greeting the family in a counterclockwise direction.

The man who had died was 109, and when it was our turn to walk around him, laid in state in a large glass case like a piece of jewelry, we saw his arms covered in gold glitter–literally, glitter–and his body–a real human body, only dead–wrapped in kente cloth like the swankiest mummy you’ve ever seen. Gold rings, hammered into bulbous shapes–an elephant, a sphere–hung on his withered hands, black and shrunken by time and death. His face was speckled by the glitter, making him look somehow ridiculous, somehow gaudy, as though he had been peeling some sort of dusty fruit carelessly, too quickly, and had made a mess. Someone should have told him to be more careful.

Kaitlyn and Prof at the funeral.

His mouth was slightly open, as if he were simply sleeping, breathing lightly, the corners of his mouth dry and taut, his nose smallish and pointed. There was a piece of glitter too close to his mouth, and one too near his eyes. It sparkled insolently as we progressed, counterclockwise, around his glass case. Prof, in his opulent black robes, spoke of the man’s activity–“He would walk to the lake–you know the lake which is just there?–until only one, two months before his death”–smiling his strange half-smile as he spoke, looking only at the man, who had been his brother. A young woman in a red and yellow dress moved past us, crying.

Later Prof told us how his daughter had begun senior high school at Aburi Girl’s School. He was only allowed to visit her the secondSaturday of each month, and she was not allowed to call home, except under extreme circumstances. She is fourteen.

“Today is a visiting day,” he explained while eating kenkey with pepper and sardines, a small plastic glass of wine languishing near his bowl. He could not attend. “I have sent her senior brother in my stead.” He smiles fully when he says she looks exactly like him–“just exactly”–but falters when he goes on to say her absence from the house is keenly felt. It feels like an empty house now, he says.

“I will not see her until sometime in December.”

—

The low thud of drums is audible even from our room, in the stately house with a veranda on the edge of town. The funeral continues.

A goat wanders briskly into the yard looking for whatever it is goats look for. Aponkye, I think to myself, practicing in the slow, unhurried way I practice language.

Life slowly grows smaller.