Les Togolaises

This past weekend I left Ghana for the first time since coming here, and yet in some ways I hardly left at all. On the other side of the country's border with Togo, things look more or less the same. The signs are in French, and the food brands are slightly different, but immediately it's hard to tell that you are in another country.

Some people still speak English, especially in Lome which is right on the border, but for the most part French became the language we used to get around. (And by "we" I mean me and the one other girl on my program who speaks French. We left the boys early in the day, and frankly I'm not sure entirely how they got from place to place.) It was incredibly encouraging to speak French and have people actually understand me. Perhaps more useful was the ability to understand what people said to me. I still have not been to Paris, but from what I hear I would be terrified to speak French there. In West Africa, though (and it might be different in places like Dakar) everyone speaks slowly with imprecise verb conjugations, so I fit right in.


In some ways walking down the street was much the same as it is in Ghana: instead of "Oh, there is my sweetheart!" it was "Ma cherie!" from the men, and "Donnez-moi un cadeau" (give me a gift) from the children. Somehow being accosted in French is easier to deal with... Actually shopping was a bit difficult, however, not because of the language barrier, but because of the new currency. We knew how to translate cefas back into cedis, but it was still really difficult to bargain for good prices. Everyone in Ghana kept telling us that everything was sooo cheap in Togo, but because of our white skin and inexperience in bargaining in cefas, we paid a lot more for crafts and things than we would in Accra.

We were ripped off beyond anything I have ever seen in Ghana at this fetish market, also known as a crazy tourist trap. In the end, I ended up paying $US 10 for a little "traveller's fetish" that I plan on sewing into my backpack. It better bring me some freaking amazing good luck. When stuff like this happens - when people try to charge you $20 for a cab ride which should cost 2 - it's just incredibly annoying, as if we have no idea what the exchange rate is.

Though I guess we made up for the cash we spent in the markets with all the free alcohol we drank both nights in Lome. (Let me assure you, this is far from a typical weekend of partying in Accra. Maybe it was the reputed craziness of Lome, or maybe just the craziness of a certain Saudi Arabian man staying at our hotel...) Long story short, different people in our group (which was larger this weekend as we travelled with study abroad students from another Ghanaian university) befriended a very generous Arab man and a Togolese pop star. Mohommad bought the whole group countless rounds of beers and several bottles of high quality alcohol, which was lucky since we had just arrived were stuck in the hotel with no local currency Friday night. Saturday night was another story. It started with possibly the most expensive Taquila I have ever had, and ended in the hotel swimming pool (don't worry, the two were at least 6 hours apart). In the middle there was some kind of exclusive club where we got a live performance from one of Togo's hottest pop stars. Yeah, I still have no idea how it all happened, but it was great.

Yet the best part of the trip - the best part of any trip I have made in Ghana - was the homecoming. Perhaps one of the greatest aspects of travel that I have discovered is the fresh perspective it gives you on "home." And of course it is a mark of how long we have been here that Accra feels like home.

PHOTOS: Stolen from the internet for now, I'll have my own up soon enough.

African Journalism: II

As you can tell, I never quite completed the "series" of entries about journalism in Africa that I had envisioned way back at the beginning of this semester. That one chance visit to a local press house was about as close as I got to having a journalism internship this semester, which is more or less how I wanted it. I thought it might be cool to visit a few newspapers or radio stations, but in the end, well, I really just got lazy. But I think I have also decided that I do not want to *study* journalism as a political scientist, even though it interests me. I want the flip side - to study politics (and society, life) as a journalist.

Strangely enough, one of the biggest journalistic influences that I have encountered here was a book written by an American writer and brought to Ghana by another American. It only took me a week to read Philip Gourevich's account of the Rwanda genocide (and the background and aftermath), We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. I couldn't put the book down. I already knew what would *happen,* and I knew the history and politics surrounding the images made famous in Hotel Rwanda and other accounts. But he just pulled the whole book together so amazingly well. To my mind it read like a narrative, not of the genocide itself, but of an author's journey of discovery. If I am lucky enough to get the opportunities that he got to travel to the places he did and interview warlords and presidents... maybe in 20 or 30 years I could write a book like that. Or maybe a single column.

OK, so anyone who knows the journalism world knows how unlikely it is that I will have a job at a place like the New Yorker in 10 years that would send me to a place like post-genocide Rwanda. But if I ever get that chance I hope I take it, and I hope I approach it with the clarity and compassion that he has. I don't want to be a travel writer by any means, but I want to be a travelling writer (ideally being paid by some English-language publication). I sort of feel like an idiot going back to the States and (hopefully!) taking a job at some community paper or other. I wonder if the skills really transfer, and by that I mean I doubt that they do. But people seem to think that is the path to the kind of job I want, and I really hope those people are right. I'm not sure what path will get me to the point where Philip Gourevich was - do I work for a publication until they pay to send me to Africa, or do I work in Africa until a publication will pay me to write about it? Do I go to graduate school for journalism or international affairs? Or both? Or neither? I don't know.

But I know what kind of writing I want to be doing in 20 years. Can I write my reading list on my resume too?

Fatigue

As is probably obvious, I am starting to have less and less to say about Ghana - it has been nearly 3 weeks since my last post, and while my creativity and motivation is not COMPLETELY dried up, both are getting quite low. There are still things I want to write and talk about - books I am reading, how being here has probably changed my priorities for my life and career - but the epiphanies are no longer daily as they were a month or two back.

I get on a plane in 30 days. That image - of looking out the window as my British Airways flight leaves the runway - is in my head almost constantly now, and there isn't much keeping my mind in Ghana. Only half of my classes are still meeting, and, as I discovered a few weeks ago, I can skip going to any of them in a given week and still not really miss anything. The people and the culture no longer strike me as new and different, and I am getting frustrated with the degree to which I stick out and all that comes along with that. While I'm not sure if I have accomplished all that I came to Africa for, it seems that I have already gotten out of it everything I can hope to.

Since spring break I have been on the road 2 of the past 3 weekends, and I have two more trips planned before the end of the semester. This travel, stressful in its own way, is the only real stimulation I am getting in Ghana. I am insanely jealous of everyone in Europe who can take bullet trains across the continent - the farthest you can really get in a weekend away from Accra is a few hundred kilometers. Travel in Africa is extremely difficult, even within a relatively safe and modern country like Ghana. Going between countries, especially Anglophone-Francophone or vice versa, is even harder - I can get a cheaper flight to Europe than I can to Morocco, I discovered last week. That is absurd.

So far, I have had two little beach weekends, basically. The weekend before Easter was Ada Foah, an idyllic little village that lies between a large estuary and the ocean. We only spent one night, but it was perhaps the most relaxed I have felt while in Ghana. Easter weekend was a little bit of a disaster in poor planning, but we made a nice save and went to another little beach town to the West of Accra where we stayed in a slave fort-turned beach guest house. (You would think such a resthouse would be creepy, but it was really adorable, despite the smell...) The pictures may seem beautiful, but it's strange how the beach can actually get old. In two weeks our program is taking us to Togo, and after that I am hoping to do a weekend trip out to a very cool, very hippie lodge near Takoradi, the largest of the beach-front cities (next to Accra).

PHOTOS: The estuary at Ada Foah; the view from the fort at Senya Beraku.