Go and Come another day

Rainy season – what does that mean exactly? I’ve been hearing about the rainy season since my first visit here, but still can’t really figure out when it is. The best I can figure is based on a bit of trivia I heard one time: that Chicago and Seattle get approximately the same annual rainfall. Seattle would definitely be described as “rain-y” while Chicago would not. This has to be because Chicago receives most of its annual rainfall in big thunderous downpours that, while delivering a lot of water, are relatively short. In contrast, Seattle’s rain comes day in and day out for most all of the winter months (November to June!). Perhaps light, but indistinguishable and continuous.

In Ghana, December, January, February are decidedly dry and dusty. That was easy to sort out. However, it seems to rain with a fair frequency during the other months of the year, with perhaps an exception for August. So how does one define rain-y versus just rain-ing? Well, I’ve decided that April, May, June, and July seem to be the months in which it may rain all day for more than one day in a row, and thus, must be the rainy season. At other times of the year, the rains are more Chicago-esque in their power and brevity.

In any case, when it rains for long, the drainage systems are stressed to the point of failure. After that, water begins to collect anywhere it can and flooding can be rapid and dramatic. Here is a photo of the courtyard in the compound behind our building during one long rain. It was only mildly flooded, but prompted Precious’ mother to tell me about a flood that occurred when Precious was about 18 months old. They had taken her to a neighbor’s house in the compound so they could attend to their own water issues. However, the neighbor’s house also began to flood and they all fled to the next safe haven – but they forgot to take Precious. So, then 77 year old Me’ena (literally, “my mother”, the honorific for an old woman), her grandmother, waded across the already deep and angry courtyard to rescue her and carry her to safety. These days, 82 year old Me’ena is nearly deaf and shuffles along without any of the new arthritis miracle drugs available elsewhere. But she loves to laugh and does my laundry every week. She charges three times what I could pay the woman who cleans our office, but every time Precious has new flip-flops, shorts, or t-shirts and says “grandma” when I comment on them, I figure it’s the best $6.00 a week I can spend.
XO

Round and Round We Go

What’s it like day-to-day here, from a business perspective. A lot of people ask me that. How do you startup a business in Ghana?

Well, I can't speak for all businesses, and our business is not like any other business that I’ve seen here. The level of service we provide, not only to our customers, but to our resellers is quite different from anything I’ve seen here. Sure, there are companies that deliver – Coke, Unilever, etc. – but they are huge multi-nationals with high volume turnover. Also, they’re selling wholesale to retailers who know how to sell things or, in smaller towns, to local wholesalers who can then sell to small mom & pop (mostly mom) shops in outlying villages. In any case, the retailers who take these everyday products usually have shops or bars or restaurants. They put the stuff on the shelves and people come and buy it. It’s pretty straightforward. We, on the other hand, have to train our resellers how to present and sell our product, because it requires a lot of explanation. They must also be trained to visit their clients regularly and collect the batteries when they lose their charge, replacing them with fresh ones. That makes it a business that never rests. Twice a week, for each of our routes (eventually six unique routes per branch), we drive a circuit delivering fresh batteries and other products.

Some resellers are actually in the towns where we stop, but most of them have to come to the road to meet us, often from several kilometers into the bush. They make this trip by foot, bicycle, or if they are lucky by taxi. We meet with them at shops or drinking spots or just under a tree depending on the location and the number of different retailers we meet in that location. The transaction during the stop is managed through the use of colored bags and simple paper forms.

Each reseller has five string-top bags. They have a large red bag for dead batteries, a large green bag for fresh batteries and a small blue bag for any batteries a client says didn’t work well. These we test extensively and re-condition, if necessary. They also have a small green bag and small red bag so they can carry around a few fresh batteries wherever they go in case they run into someone who needs to exchange. We learned that one the hard way. One of our resellers was carrying around a few fully charged batteries in his pocket, along with his spare change, and nearly set his pocket on fire when the spare change finished the connection of (+) to (-).

On the day a resellers are scheduled to meet us, they have two choices. They can come in person or they can send their locked bag to the drop point by way of a taxi, trotro, small boy or girl ("small" used this way can apply to anyone up to ages in the 20's) on the way to school, someone going to market, or any other method they can come up with. When they meet us or send their bag for the route, the reseller brings/sends: the large red bag of fallen batteries, the small blue bag of potentially faulty batteries if there have been any complaints, new customer forms if they have any, and whatever cash they’ve collected. We count their dead batteries (we actually use a scale to weight them to determine the number – counting is slower) and make sure the paperwork and batteries match the cash in the bag. Then we count/weigh the items they need in return (fresh batteries, additional devices – lamps, phone chargers, etc., blank forms, and so on) and place all that in their bag, write a receipts to document the transaction, and move on to the next bag or reseller. Each transaction should take about 5 minutes, but when there are issues or discrepancies, the time can drag out considerably.

We used to take turns doing the route, but now that we have two routes, it requires someone to go out four days a week, so we’ve hired a route administrator. Since one of the key requirements of this job is being able to drive, it narrowed our selection considerably. In the end, we hired a man who had been a driver for Guinness. Funny thing is, he doesn’t like beer but loves wine.
XO

All In The Family

It’s wonderful having a family in Ghana. I feel so welcome in Tim and Shika’s home and they have become cherished friends. Tim is our business partner at Burro and my Scrabble Husband. He is also a successful business man (outside of Burro) with many interests and Shika is brilliant and also a talented leader in the non-profit sector, heading the Ghana office of a South African NGO. She can also cook like you wouldn’t believe.

Tim is not a cook, by any means, although we swears he “knows how”, but I can attest that he can mop a pretty mean floor, which he did at our offices in Koforidua back in the early days - before we had any employees - when he was staying up here one night a week with Whit and me. Before we got someone to sweep and mop regularly, Tim was a bit appalled by the condition of our floors and swept and mopped them one morning before his (first) shower. He said it was just for exercise, to wake up and loosen up, but I think there were ghosts of once-a-week-bathing-barbarian-oburonis from a bygone time when earlier generations of pre-Ghanaians were appalled by the hygiene and habits of an occupying (mostly male) people.

Anyway, I digress. Tim and Shika are terrific and have 5 very nice, polite, and hardworking children. If you had ever been to their house you would know that Tim mopping our floor was a reach back in time for him. He and Shika work very hard, and I’m sure have done so all their lives, but there are some chores they no longer do themselves. They expect their children to work hard as well. As part of their “training” as Shika calls it, learning to be part of a family, learning to work hard and contribute, learning to respect and care for their elders, and, I suppose, in preparation for how to someday raise children of their own, they all have chores – by American standards, lots of chores.

Of course, they live in a part of the world where clothing is still washed by hand and line dried, where a fair amount of cooking is done over coals, even in the city – because some foods just need to be cooked that way, even if you have a stove, which they have. The heat can be stifling and the air dusty, so floors are tile and are swept daily and mopped often. Food is fresh, not pre-prepared, so there are vegetables to wash and peel and dice. And there are no dishwashers.

While the training and expectations of children are not exactly the same everywhere in Ghana, these are pretty common. Children are polite and respectful everywhere I go. I can hardly take a bag from the trunk of the car without a child taking it from me and carrying it upstairs. I don’t think I’ve ever made two trips in from the car in my entire time in Ghana.

At first it felt strange, partly I suppose because the children are black and I was afraid they were helping because I was white and there was a perceived servitude thing left over from the British occupation – and likely, too, because I am a product of my society and admit to a hyper-sensitive PC white guilt - I would feel weird expecting black children in my neighborhood to carry my groceries from my car in America. But in the end, it is what kids here are expected to do for any adult regardless of color, and you know, I would love it if a child of any color helped me carry my groceries from the car in America.

So, this weekend, I went to Tim and Shika’s and they had a full weekend planned. But when I go there now, I just join in whatever they are doing. So, Friday night we went to a wake-keeping for one of Shika’s uncles who had died. She would miss the funeral on Saturday because in the morning her youngest son, Lim, was being baptized and then she had to go to her own Auntie’s funeral in her hometown of Keta, about 2 hours away. I went along to all of it. Fortunately, the Ewe are not so fussy about what you wear to pay your respects, so the fact that I didn’t have traditional funeral attire was OK. However, I did wear the same skirt most of the weekend. Thankfully, I also had one black blouse.

Lim was baptized on Saturday morning, and then on Sunday morning took his first communion. I think it was my first time sitting through a Catholic mass that wasn’t a wedding and my first time in a church service of any kind in quite a number of years. Turns out, I don’t miss it. But it was nice to be there for my “small boy”, 11-year old Lim and interesting to see how things are done here. All the parents and their first-communion kids (the entire fifth grade at the adjacent Catholic school) were dressed entirely in white. Lim was excited and nervous, and read two passages during the mass. We were all very proud of him.

With two funerals and a baptism, Tim and I only got in a couple games of Scrabble, but I won them. It seems he started playing at the (highest) Genius level on the computer. He said he was up about 60% to 40% against it (he’s about 70% against me). Then the truth came out. At the genius level, the computer comes up with about five 7-letter words in a game (50 point bonus for each one - for you non-Scrabble fans) and he couldn’t keep up. So he started using his Scrabble dictionary handheld – it has a feature where you tell it your letters and it comes back and tells you the best word with those letters. Total cheating! So, karmically, he has forgotten how to come up with his own words. Waaah-hah-hah-hah!
XO

Oh, and did I mention...

In May, before I arrived, Max (Whit's brother and author of the soon to be published book about our adventures here) super-glued his eye shut, providing an opportunity to test out the local healthcare system. For all the details, see his blog post about it. In the meantime here he is, on heavy drugs (all available over the counter, of course)
XO

The Bottoms of our Feet are all the Same Color

July 1st is Republic Day – like our 4th of July, except it’s the next step after independence from the British (that day is also a holiday). See last year's post for an explanation. Anyway, last year on 1st July (as they say here), Max and I took the girls (Precious, Pamela, and
Savanna) to Boti Falls. Almost as soon as July 2nd, Savanna started saying “Where will we go next year for July 1st?” At that time, there was no certainty that I would even be here on July 1st, but I asked her where she wanted to go. She said Labadi Beach, which is in Accra, on the ocean.

So, bright and early on Thursday morning, July 1st, we piled in the truck – Precious, Pamela, Savanna, and Mary, who is the mother of Precious and Pamela. The drive was long, as all trips to Accra are these days. It was about 1 ½ hours to the edge of town and another hour to get through it – to the beach. As we crested the ridge overlooking the sprawling metropolis of Accra, and during the drive through Accra, Precious’ eyes were everywhere at once – it turns out she had never been to Accra and was a little overwhelmed. That was sort of funny because last year she was completely overwhelmed by the size of Boti Falls.

So we went to the Labadi Beach Hotel, THE 5-star beach hotel in Accra and I paid for us to use the pool. We had come early because I anticipated a huge crowd at the pool, which is what we experienced last time I went there in July. But when we arrived, at about 11:00, all the deck chairs were available and we chose four choice

BFFs

spots, poolside. Then I introduced them to the women’s changing room, where we changed into our swimsuits and each got a towel the size of a bedsheet. The girls wanted to go in the pool immediately, so we did. Then we ordered some lunch and went for a walk on the beach.

As soon as we stepped through the gate from the Hotel to the beach, Precious stopped cold and refused to take another step – in exactly the same way she stopped on the steps down to Boti Falls as soon as she saw the rushing water through the trees. Having never been to Accra before, she had also never seen the ocean. We tried to explain that it was just water and that on the other side was Auntie Jan’s home in America, but she was having none of it. In a replay of last year, I picked her up and carried her, with her eyes buried in my neck.

On the beach, you could definitely see that it was a holiday. Several beachside bars had big extended tent awnings set up with tables and sound equipment. The partying would start later, but the hawkers were already in full swing, including three or four guys riding full-sized mules (no little donkeys) that were skinny as rails, but pranced up and down the beach offering rides. Once Precious looked up from my neck and started to show some interest in the ocean, I put her back on her own two feet. At this point we were about ½ way between the gate back to the hotel and the edge of the water – maybe 50 yards/metres in each direction. Unfortunately at almost the same moment I put her down, one of these mule guys came prancing up offering a ride. Precious took one look at the mule and ran all the way back to the gate, losing her flip flops about halfway there.

I went to get her and we finally got down to the water. We dug a hole, but not really close enough for it to ooze up water - she wouldn’t go that close. Then I tried to get her interested in some seashells which took us a bit closer to the water. But the thing about the ocean is that it keeps coming at you, racing up to your feet when you’re not looking. At the end of the day, Precious decided she was a pool girl. When the older girls went to walk on the beach later in the afternoon, Precious was very clear about her preference for staying on the hotel grounds where the water stayed put and there were no gigantic four-legged animals.
XO