Accra, Ghana

Home is a funny thing. I have thought and written about it enough that I now bore myself when it comes up, and though it may take me a bit longer than most to say where home is, I have decided that there is no easy answer, for anyone, anywhere, to say what home is. But I know there are shades of home, levels and zones of comfort that grow on you, so that even after just two weeks in one place, when you go to another, you find yourself wanting to go back. Back home.

That’s how I felt as I slid back into Ghanaian territory a few days ago, in spite of the officer who yelled at me for trying to take a photo of the border crossing. Maybe home isn’t a place you--or at least I--ever reach, but at least you can feel it when you’re moving towards it, a few sometimes grimy steps closer to what you know, even if you’ve only known it for two weeks. After preferring taxis for most my time in Ghana, a tro-tro (a van with lots of people in it) was suddenly and pleasantly familiar, certainly moreso than whatever means of le transport I could find in Togo. Then sitting in the tro-tro, knowing where I was going, knowing even where I would be sleeping that night, felt like I was eight or nine again, back from a family vacation again, coming out the doors at Kai Tak, walking into our apartment, floors always freshly cleaned while we were away from home.

There is a suburb in the northeast of Accra called Achimota, far enough from the center of town that taxi drivers snarl a little when you tell them that’s where you want to go, before invariably saying, “Traffic!” and bumping up the fare a few cedis, at least for us obrunis. Achimota is home to the African Brewing Company, which produces that universal liquid form of sustenance called Guiness, as well as Star, one of the two major local brews. A nearby roundabout, ABC Junction, is named after the brewery, though it is not so much a junction or a roundabout as it is a good-luck-to-you convergence of traffic from all imaginable directions on roads yet to be paved. Coming from Accra, if you survive a left turn at ABC, it will take you down a small road, past a mysterious Chinese Recovery Clinic, before a right turn down an alley leaves you at the foot of the Telecentre Guesthouse. Or, as hundreds of Unite For Sight volunteers have called it for varying lengths of time over the last few years, home.



It’s hard to say what stood out so much about Ghana, or at least Accra, but that gives the mistaken impression that it was unsatisfying, that I flew all this way to a part of the world I’d never been to before and can’t really show much for it. Though we travel almost by definition to seek out what is exotic, it felt reassuring and maybe even more worthwhile to find myself in a part of the world I’d never been to before and not OMG my way through each day. That which was at all exotic, at all weird and previously unheard of, was really not so much, or else how did it become so familiar, so fast? It takes but a few days to get used to sucking a milkshake out of a bag (genius), or water out of a bag (less genius), or really just sucking anything out of a bag. It takes even less time to find yourself stuck in an Accra traffic jam, sticking your hand out of the window with some pesawas to buy whatever random crap--and it is a lot of crap, and it is very random--the street vendors have to offer. They are street vendors like anywhere else in the world. In Accra, they just happen to actually be on the street, in the middle of the street, running up and down the street to give you change once traffic starts moving again. And after all, everything they sell is, kind of like me, made in China at some point further up the manufacturing stream.



That which was familiar was intensely, intimately, familiar. Ghana, where every little chop bar offers this one dish, jollof rice and chicken, which is only one or two spices removed from my family’s consensus favorite meal in the Vietnamese suburbs of Sydney: 炸雞紅飯. Ghana, where every young man is wearing either a soccer or basketball jersey, often the ubiquitous Samsung written on Chelsea blue, but even, every now and then, “Starbury” emblazoned across the front. And Ghana, where every few blocks on small side streets a couple guys have set up refrigerator-sized speakers that blast out more 90s RnB than I have heard, at least outside of my own earphones, since about the eighth grade. It’s on the streets and on the radio, always, the kind of music I know better than any other: Joe, Dru Hill, Blackstreet, K-Ci & JoJo, Brandy, Monica, and other random songs I can karaoke by heart from soundtracks of movies I never saw because Set it Off and Hav Plenty were not ever going to be released in the theaters where I grew up.



Oh and Ghana, where girls get in the club for free but guys pay a small fortune just to enter, never mind the overpriced drinks. Home.

The last couple nights at the Telecentre, when most of the other volunteers had already left, I hung out at night on the couches in the lobby, watching the surprisingly good movie channel and chatting with Naomi, one of the girls you might call a night receptionist but really just sleeps on the couch, watches the movie channel (or Africa Magic!), and chats with volunteers. Turning 21 next week, she told me how she had for the first time gone to a club just a few days before, and how happy she had been to dress up and dance and just enjoy herself. She’s studied business in college but now wants to start over and switch to nursing. She is single and lives at home with her mother. So basically, that Times article last week on twentysomethings that everyone who is twentysomething read the first couple pages of is almost just as much about Naomi as it is about me, or you.

At one point, maybe because American Pie was on, and later another movie where Heather Locklear falls in love with a much younger surfer dude in Hawaii, Naomi started talking about relationships and lectured me about still being single at 27, which conveniently happened to be the same age as the surfer dude. She told me to remember some deep, if basic, truths about people, and love, and though it’s all been said before, it never hurts to be reminded.

That perhaps best describes my time in Ghana, where the other volunteers were all still in or just out of college, which is not a huge difference in years, but can sometimes feel like a different era altogether. Where I feel like I’m coming to the end of--or at least slowing--my hopscotch around the world, most of the others seemed to be just beginning. Where, a world away from home, I sought comfort in the familiar, others seemed to relish the strange and unexpected.



When the other volunteers were still around at the Telecentre, one of the other movies that came on was Under the Tuscan Sun. I like Diane Lane, but probably not quite enough to have watched Under the Tuscan Sun under any other circumstances. And yet sitting around on those couches with my newest of friends, the ceiling fans rocking gently overhead, the movie’s less than subtle theme of holding on to childish excitement and passion struck a chord. Twenty seven is too young, far too young, to need to be reminded of childish excitement and passion, but when everyone around you is at least five or six or seven years younger, it strikes a nervous chord; when you are less than two months from signing away your life to a law firm, it strikes a nervous chord.

I can’t say I’ll miss the horrendous gridlock, or the cold showers, or drinking water out of a bag. I can’t tell you that Ghana changed me in any major way, or that the experience has somehow altered the course of my life, that I am heading anywhere different today than I was a month ago. But on that long road to home, on this journey whose uncertain destination I am finally starting to embrace, my time in Ghana will be like one of the many speedbumps we rolled over on our daily van rides to those outlying villages in need of some basic eye care. It will be a place where from my hurried pace I slowed down, gently eased up and over a short break in my stride, and was reminded of the dangers of speeding through life.



If I can feel at home in Ghana, I suppose I can feel at home anywhere.

Keta Secondary

Late in the summer of 1967, a young Oxford graduate from Bristol landed in a town called Keta, on the southeastern corner of Ghana, just off Togo, where each year the lagoon overflows and makes it two hours harder to get to Accra. He taught Latin at Keta Secondary School for a year, the lack of hot water enough to make him grow a beard. When he left Ghana, he found a job with a British chemical company, for which he worked and traveled around the world, mostly in Asia, for the next four decades. And two years ago, he married my mum.

I went back yesterday to Keta, maybe something like the way us immigrant kids get asked how often we go back, to a motherland many of us never came from. The headmaster welcomed me with a now familiar Ghanaian handshake and finger snap--the kind I could never get right in middle school and still can't--bought me lunch and a pineapple/mango/passion fruit smoothie (excellent, says this juice connoisseur), and apologized that all the old records had been destroyed. But he ordered a couple underlings to dig up some old black and white photos, and through these I scrutinized the sore thumb white male faces for any resemblance at all to my stepdad. I found a couple that may or may not be him, tender-faced with a beard and full head of hair, in which he would be, incredibly, five years younger than I am today.

As I left Keta Secondary School to catch a tro-tro back to Accra, the headmaster predictably but nevertheless warmly told me that this, this little place in West Africa perched on the edge of a lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean, would always be my home. I thanked him for his kindness, and for lunch, and went on my way down the road that, for now, before the coast erodes again, still led back to Accra.

Manila, 23 August 2010

There is a lot of crap going on in the world right now, to a lot of people who don't deserve it. Of course, there always is. Right now it just happens to be lots and lots of flooding, worst in Pakistan, but real bad in China, too. Today, like any day in recent memory, a couple dozen Somalis made the simple decision to step outside their home and died for it. And I spent the day driving around the outskirts of Lomé, watching normal Togolese live lives that are for no good reason a whole lot harder than mine.

But if I feel injustice today--injustice, as in that soul-crunching chorus of what the hell was that for?--it is for the craziness that went down on this bus in Manila.

It is hard to think of a less offensive group of people in the world than the people of Hong Kong. I am biased, sure. But really: they are generally not very religious, have no military, are happy to be part of China but do not care for Chinese domination, dress decently well, queue in line better than anyone, and, like most people in the world, really just want to make a comfortable living above all else. Sometimes that includes going on vacation, as far as Europe or as close as the Philippines, maybe a long weekend or a couple days off what is surely close to the hardest-working environment in the world.

I felt the same way during SARS. All these people, just wanting to get by, and working hard to do that, held hostage, savagely killed--killed!--by a freak accident none of them did anything to provoke. It just seems so utterly unfair, so randomly cruel and twisted a thing to happen to a people who are all about playing it straight and by the rules. They're not even much of a sentimental people, but on June 4 every year they light candles, and when there's a big earthquake in China they donate billions, and today, all flags on government buildings are at half-staff. I just saw Donald Tsang on CNN, our ever stiff and unemotional leader, and he looked genuinely shocked and just completely sad.

Me too. WTF.

Lomé, Togo

I am in Togo. I am not really sure why.

I actually know, or once knew, a fair bit about Togo. I knew the political parties, the important dates and places, and the human rights violations. They were one of our biggest constituencies at the time, Togolese asylum seekers. I remember one guy in particular, whose case dragged on for months, as I sat with him through re-interview after re-interview, trying to put together the missing pieces, the strained itinerary that led him from somewhere near where I am typing right now, over continents and across oceans, all the way to the UNHCR offices at 250 Shanghai Street, a half-hour taxi ride from where I grew up.

But I am not here, in Togo, to flip a script. As interesting as I found interviewing asylum seekers, it doesn’t exactly make you want to visit the places they were running from. And as far I knew before opening up the Togo section of my West Africa Lonely Planet, there wasn’t much to visit here anyway. Even after opening up the Togo section, there doesn’t seem to be much to visit. It’s not you, though, Togo. It’s me.

And yet here I am, here in Togo, just because.

Just because it was somewhere else to go, another border to cross. I enjoyed the volunteer gig in Ghana over the last 10 days more than I thought I would, but still would have felt cheated if I had flown all the way out here, dropped all that money on that pricey plane ticket (and a multiple-entry visa), and not gone to at least one other country, not crossed one more border. Just. One. More.

I am slightly addicted to border-crossings. I seek them out wherever I go, insisting on going overland even when it is not only more time-consuming and draining but often more expensive, too. I get a mild high whenever I enter the short--or sometimes not so short--strip of land between immigration checkpoints, always pausing to think about what happens when something happens in these no man’s lands. I am also always just a little afraid, ever ready to run through my options if they won’t take my passport, or ask for a bribe, or for whatever reason just go nuts on me for making their day.

Most of all, I am always, always in awe of how real a border crossing is, how removed it is from the newspaper headlines and presidential summits that proclaim something can be done about the way people move. Nothing gives the finger to international treaties and migration policies negotiated behind closed doors at the highest levels of diplomacy like a couple Togolese immigration officers sitting under half a wooden shack, their plastic chairs sinking into the sand as they write down my passport details by hand in a ginormous ledger book whose binding is on duct-tape life support. I get an unhappy grunt when I motion to borrow a pen to fill out the visa application. I do not borrow the pen. While I am being processed, whatever that means, dozens of others cross the line from Ghana to Togo behind me, and all the immigration officers can do is yell at them. Some stop. Some don’t.

When I pay my 10,000 CFA visa fee with a handful of small bills, the officer takes them and without a word hands them to the hustler who has been bugging me about giving me a ride into the city. Plan B begins rolling in my head, replaying the familiar, but still untested, dilemma of whether it is riskier to refuse to pay a bribe or to offer to pay a bribe. The hustler hands the officer back a nice, single 10,000 CFA bill. It turns out he is a human cash register/money changer/taxi driver dispatcher. I get dispatched, but not before my driver storms out of the car because, I gather, the hustler wants a commission from my taxi fare. The driver gets back in, everyone is still yelling, but I just want to go. So I close my door as the hustler asks me for some money, hoping very much that I am not closing it on his hand, and the driver becomes my best friend forever in the whole country as he drives away with purpose, ignoring the hustler’s repeated banging on the side of the car.

I record these details not because it is anything so crazy or out of the ordinary. I picked Togo because it was the less crazy country to go to that was adjacent to Ghana, and though each time I cross a border there is a good chance it is the only time I will ever cross that border, I know there are plenty other travelers--all of them psychotic--who do this all the time, all over the world.

No, I record all this because it is a way to relieve the exhaustion, because I am exhausted, and it is time to begin the process of accepting that really, I am just too old for this shit. Not because I think 27 is too old to be dragging yourself through dodgy border crossings. Much more because the thrill is dissipating. Instead of wanting to see more, I count down the days before I get to go home, wherever that is. The images still fascinate me, the impossibly wide and always very dusty cavern between policy and reality. The sounds, the scenes, still entice me, another slice of the human experience to fill in on this atlas, my coloring book. But the thrill; the thrill seems to be giving way to stress, to crossing over the fine line between, and yielding to frustration, to not this again, and what am I doing here, and why am I here alone?

Togo, this place where I can’t answer those questions, may just be the place where I hang up my too-worn solo travel sneakers. I am about done with this whole traveling alone deal. It’s time I take my talents to South Beach, time to stop going places just to go places, time to start going somewhere, with someone. It could be Togo, it could be Hong Kong, it could be anywhere; I still want to go everywhere. Just not like this anymore.