Another Scorcher

(by Miia, posted by Chris)

We walk fast through Circle foot traffic. Vendors selling steaming kenke, steamed corn, sandals, shirts, shoe strings, stationary. We push through, past the beggars with deformed legs, past the small refugee children who cling to your fingers and try to remove your rings, past the women selling sachets of water and the men carrying boxes of bread on their heads. It's madness this and yet, somehow, the pulse of place alive with a kind of quickness you miss in the too quiet streets of cities in the north.

It's a hot day and we're sweating. Sweat dripping down my forehead, my feet hot, my shirt soaked and sticking to my back. The sun hits hard and the air so thick you can drink it. The trotro bus mates call out"Kaneshie, Kaneshie, Kaneshie", "Circle, Circle,Circle", "Accra, Accra, Accra" and you walk past fast as they call out, "Obroni, oko hein?" (White man, where are you going?)

It's day one post work and the first truly free day for Chris and me. So it's shopping day for souvenirs for friends and for us. Chris buys pieces of beautiful hand woven kente cloth, the pieces stitched together, and takes them to the tailor Anansi who, for$7, will sew a long sleeve shirt for him. I likeAnansi. He has sewn me things before and he does agood job. "I am a master tailor," he says.

So this is our last week. We are busy catching up with all our old friends. Friday night at the residences for the airforce with our friend Dacosta. Sunday lunch with Nana at her gorgeous house. Monday night with Nigerian-in-laws at a restaurant that serves GIANT African snails and gives you free massages and manicures and pedicures while you wait for your meal. Tonight Caledonian society and later this week a day trip to the village where we started our Ghana visit at the funeral of our friend David's mother. It feels weird leaving - exciting and sad at the same time. You get used to a place and you come to take in ways of being and ways of seeing. When you go home, it's hard to share your point of view because you are looking at things from Ghana even if your feet are on Canada. I know it from experience. I know the tears I've shed in the past when I've been disoriented and lost in those first months home. This time I'll be with Chris so maybe it'll be different. We'll see.

I am buying Ghanaian cloth. It's beautiful. It's a kind of living heritage. I call itUNESCO-World-Heritage-You-Can-Wear. Pret-a-porter-Ghana. Other exciting news that in just some weeks we'll be in Paris again and I will get to see my dear friend Benoit for the first time in five years. He'll get to meet Chris and we'll get to meet his partner. Always new adventures on the road ahead!

Much love, yet again, to all of you and for many, seeyou soon!
Miia