Junie's Online Thoughts
Friday, April 23, 2004
We went to a concert at the W.E.B. DuBois center tonight. The group was tight and awesome. The lead singer was this thick, sexy woman. On one part, it was because the dancers could take such unadultered joy in their bodies. But mostly it was because that woman could SHAKE THAT ASS. It was the most agile, complex, thorough ass shaking I've ever seen in my life. She needed special muscles to do that.
Its full day number two with no power. Ants have overtaken the frig AGAIN. ARGH.
When we stopped by the Togo embassy to get Jeremy's VISA, there were two guys mowing lawn with a push lawn mower. I have never, in all of my time here, seen anyone using a lawn mower. Everyone uses machetes. It was such a familiar and foreign sight/sound, that I just had to laugh.
The power went out yesterday afternoon and hasnt come back on since. Our tank is too low, and without the electricity, we dont have enough oomph to make our shower work. The frig has created a big pool of water on the floor from all of our food sitting without coldness....AGAIN. Its such bullcrap.
We're going to Togo and Ho this weekend, and putting off Secondi until the week after next. We won trivia last night so we have to stick around for Thursday's game. So it goes....
Thursday, April 22, 2004
By all indications, I have GERD--gastro esophagal reflux disease. Its almost always triggered by food, but smoking, obesity and stress make it worse. Of course, all the trigger foods are ones I eat almost every day--caffeine, chocolate, mint, garlic and onions, anything with tomatoes, citrus, fatty or fried foods. Basically all the good stuff.
We went to the Akai House Clinic to see the doctor. I told her what I had been experiencing for the last few years, and that all my attacks seemed to have gotten worse since being here. Right now Im on Tagament when I have an attack, which is an H2 inhibitor--it lowers the production of stomach acid. She said that Tagament is quite old, and now they prescribe "the purple pill" or Nexium, a proton pump inhibitor.
Here's a blurb from their website: "The lining of your stomach contains millions of special cells that produce acid via "acid pumps." It is the job of these pumps to produce the acid that helps in the digestion of food. NEXIUM works by decreasing the acid produced by these acid pumps. NEXIUM turns off (deactivates) some of the pumps to keep acid production under control. By reducing acid production in the stomach, NEXIUM reduces the amount of acid backing up into the esophagus and causing reflux symptoms."
She gave me a prescription to take one every day for a month. Then I should only take one when I have an attack. Every time I want to eat the meal that triggers a reaction, I should take a purple pill and it will stop the attack. After paying 350,000 cedis for that four-minute doctor visit ($40), we stopped by the pharmacy. They didnt have enough to fill my prescription, which would cost 1,300,000 cedis for five packs of seven pills ($150). Ouch. I'll get some tomorrow, I guess, after swinging by the bank. I'm just wondering if it would be cheaper to buy them here or get them back home...of course it would cost me way more for the doctor visit there, especially without insurance.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
I planned on making chili, but as I checked my email yesterday, I was hit with a fierce feeling of yuckiness. My stomach hurt, I got heat flashes, I had to run to the bathroom. I walked home, after buying six corn muffins, took a Tagament, and curled up on the couch. Nauseous, hot then cold, sore, dizzy. It passed soon after, but I knew I couldnt eat chili.
Jeremy came home from the Archives and Embassy--he had mail! Hooray! (Thanks Trish, Heidi and Marta!!!!) He made a beautiful and tasty (but light) veggie miso soup with tofu. Just what I needed. After supper we read on the sofa, and about an hour later I went into the kitchen to do the dishes. I'd left the bag of corn muffins on the counter. Next to it was a three inch thick line of ants flowing from it, up the window, across the wall and onto the roof. I threw the bag into a ziploc and then into the freezer, sprayed Raid all over the place and cursed the efficiency of the ants.
This morning as I made oatmeal for breakfast, I removed the ant bag from the freezer. I tell you, the bottom of the ziploc was covered in tiny curled up ant corpses. I tried to salvage the most ant-free of the muffins, but half of them had to be tossed. The ant bastards had burrowed into them...Im not about to work THAT hard for some stupid muffins when I can buy more on the street for 500 cedis each (thats about a nickel.)
I feel a little better today, but after email, Im going to the Akai House Clinic to talk to the doctor. I fear I might have an ulcer, which in my hypochondriac mind turns into my stomach imploding and shooting acid all throughout my body, thus killing me in the most painful way possible. And, Jeremy keeps pestering me to go. He seems to think they'll have some magic medicine. I doubt it, but we'll see. The Tagament works most of the time....I'd just like this stomach crap to stop completely. It's gotten progressively worse over the last two years---moving from once or twice a year to about once a month. I hate it. So I'm finally going to see a doctor.
That's it for now.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
It's soooooooo hot here today. I was hoping that the rains yesterday would cool off the air, but nope. Its back to normal.
Im not feeling very well today---dont know if Im coming down with something, or if I just slept poorly last night.
In either case, I dont really have a lot going on today. Making bean chili tonight. The water's back on in our neighborhood. Jeremy has a severe neck ache and is at the archives. That's about it.
Monday, April 19, 2004
I've been having some disputes on what I got for the answer to the pure water question and what others have gotten. I admit that the pure water bag system is much clearer to me here, and perhaps I could have worded it differently. But here's the answer I got: In those three days, we would use 322 individual pure water bags, and would need 11 giant bags (there would be eight leftover pure water bags). There are 128 ounces in a gallon, and 322 x 16 equals 5152 ounces, or 40.25 gallons.
Change of plans. We decided, after wasting away the day in bed, listening to the rain, that we would go to Takoradi on Sunday so Jeremy could have a full week there instead of just 3 1/2 days with the rest wasted on travel time.
Here's a story I forgot to share last week:
In Ghana, there are no good witches. If you proclaim to be a witch, and depending on where you live in the country, you can either have the powers to hex only your family, or hex others not within your family. Witches can make people sick or die, they can kill crops, they can render people rich or poor (if they render them rich, either they become poor later, or someone else must become poor to make up for the exchange of wealth), make people sterile or impotent, or just create havoc within their community. I dont know why there are no good witches. Maybe its about terminology--and good witches instead become healers and traditional herbalists. But the word "witch" always means something sinister and scary and bad.
Jon, the previously mentioned Canadian researching the transformation of medicine specifically in the Ga ethnic group, went on an interview last week with a lady who worked at the Korle-Bu hospital in the 1960's. Jon ended up asking her about witches and fetish priests (we went with him to the fetish and mami-wata shrines), because that's the bulk of what he is studying right now. (You may remember my previous story from him about how fetish priests would pay people to come to the morgue and buy the clothes/hair/fingernails/blood of accident victims). Jon asked the woman if she ever had any experiences with juju. She answered--only once. One night, sometime around midnight, she and some other nurses were sitting in a loungey sort of room. She heard noises outside the window and asked the others if they heard it. No, but she was prompted to look. When she opened the door to the outside, she saw a little boy--maybe around ten or twelve years old--lingering around the doorway. She called the head security man. He tried to find out who the boy was and what he was doing there. He yelled, and probably beat him a little bit, mostly because the boy didnt say a word. Finally after much coercing, the boy told them that he was a witch. The boy further explained that he had been meeting with his coven, eating human flesh and souls. He had been talking too much, and as punishment they returned him to human form (in some instances, witches take the form of bugs, animals or spirits when they "eat flesh", which can either mean actual human bits or a combination of skin and the essence/spirit that makes up a person, usually resulting in the previously mentioned bad things--sickness, impotence, poverty, etc.), and thats why he was outside. He couldnt pass through the walls since he was no longer a bug (in this case, he claimed they turned into cockroaches and other insects), and was stuck outside in the shape of a boy. The nurse told him that she didnt believe in that. What was he doing outside the hospital? He replied that he was admitted as a patient and told them his name. The nurse called down to the children's ward and asked if they had someone there by his name. Sure enough, but the kid's nurse claimed she had just put that boy to bed. The nurse urged her to check his bed and make sure he was there. Minutes later, she informed them that strangely enough, the boy was not in his bed or in the ward. The boy, maybe in revenge, told them that the rest of his coven was also admitted as patients in the hospital and he could identify all of them. The nurses led him through the hospital, and he identified a number of people there, all seemingly sick. Confused, they asked the nurse why the boy was claiming they were witches. Then they brought the boy back to his ward. The next day, as a test, they completely rearranged the wards and patients, and again asked the boy to identify the other witches in his coven. Despite being in different places, he identified the exact same people in the hospital. With further investigation by the doctors, every one of the "witches" had been admitted with strange wounds that never seemed to heal and they had all been in the hospital far too long for their illnesses. Because they were spooked, they discharged each and every one of them from the hospital.
It makes for a great ghost story, and such superstitiousness around here makes it believable. I love witch stories here--despite the fact that they paint such a horrible picture of witches. Every week, I try to get one of the two issues of the P & P (People and Places), a tabloid. And nearly every week, they will print a story involving a witch. Usually the witches attend a Christian revival of some sort and amidst the festivities, admit that they are witches, that they had put a hex on their families and are now begging for forgiveness and salvation. Or witches will be caught in the act of eating someone, cursing someone, etc and be punished. Or a well known fetish priest will either threaten a Christian pastor or convert to Christianity and renounce his magical ways. Or a man will "defile" (the word here for rape) a child, and at court claim he was taken over by a witch or Satan and that's why he did it. It's all very culturally interesting to me. When we met the Peace Corps folks from Niger, they too had numerous stories about fetish priests and spiritual mediums from Niger and Nigeria. If I were to ever to a research project in Ghana, it would be about witchcraft or the mmoatia (the little white dwarves with backwards feet that live in the bush and do magic). Little is written on either, but plenty of folks know stories about them. Its all so darn fascinating.
Anyway, now that we're staying in town, we're just running errands today and making pad thai for supper tonight.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Well, we put off going home until 11 pm on Friday night, and sure enough, we had power. The next day we had water. Except for a five-minute shut down last night, we've had both since then. THANK GOD. I would have snapped. The water itself still isnt flowing in the neighborhood, but they had a tanker fill up the huge cistern. Hopefully it will last a while and when it runs out, they will get more. I have such little structure here, when it gets interrupted, my whole life just goes to pot. If I cant cook, cant read in the house, cant clean--then I start to go stir crazy. I need my house-frau routines to keep my mind occupied--since nobody in this town wants to hire me for a real job. I gotta take what I can get to stay busy and feeling productive.
Today we've been soooooooooooo lazy. Unbelievable. We finally got out of the house and came to Busy. Jeremy and I are leaving for Takoradi tomorrow. Im coming back on Tuesday--just want to keep him company that first day and do something new. He'll be there until Friday. We have a rough plan of the next two months and how/when we'll travel. We need to border hop the first week of May, and Jeremy needs to spend two more weeks in Takoradi, one week in Kumasi and the rest of the time wrapping stuff up at the Accra archives. Then we're done.
Here's the plan--we leave Ghana on June 24th, and get into Amsterdam on the 25th. We stay five nights, then fly out for Atlanta on the 30th, getting in by 11pm. By mid July, we (hopefully) should be situated in our apartment, with the car and the cat, and with me looking for a full-time job. It feels so good to have a concrete plan, instead of all these loose organic hypothetical dates.
I'm going to wait a few more days to post the answer to the pure water quiz. Keep your guesses coming.
Until then, I'll write more in a few days.
