I was escorted home by a swarm of dragonflies.

13 Nov 06
2.15 PM, Woe

The mangos are starting to turn—a rich pink dripping slowly from the stem, saturating away the fresh yellow. At night the cool sea air mixes the coming sweet with the last slight burn from the shallot fields, each gust bringing a new nuance of Woe into focus.

Young chicks and goats are venturing out for the first time. Clusters of uniformed kids are finding their way back to school: brown and orange playing their way to primary, crisply pressed blue and white to the senior secondary.

School resumed today, more than a month after public school teachers declared a national strike. The time will not be made up—no snow days, no outside tutoring. For the primary school kids, the lessons will be absorbed into the next few months. Those in secondary, though, are still expected to pass mid-term exams. Small groups have been meeting at the library to study, limited to the subjects kept in the library working to maintain some rigor over the curriculum.

It has been a good week. I went out to Noah’s a few days last week. He took me to a new 2-story in construction, built by a man who’s now in the states. It looks like a new stucco/tile house in suburbia, save that it’s in Woe and built completely out of cement. It’s big—excessively so, introducing these Americanized spaces like “sitting room” and “breakfast nook.” The whole thing cost 15 million cedis (around $1,700). ; Seeing that a bag of cement costs about 62,000C, a meal at a restaurant 15,000C, a ride to the next town 2,500C, and a handful of fish only 1,000C, the shift in economic scale is huge.

It’s posing a bit of a challenge as I work on designing for my 90’x90’ plot. I’ve had to concede a few realities:- I have a specific target audience—families who can or might in the future afford to construct with permanent materials. Many families start building permanent structures as they have money, one course of block at a time. Often too expensive to complete, tuition or medical monies are stuck in an unusable foundation.
- I’ve been trying to design construction in phases, choosing and using materials in a more adaptive way. Even in talking with Noah, there is a limit to how much can be pushed. Four adjacent windows is more digestible than a stacked open block wall. Proposing a roller screen for the porch had him laughing for minutes.
- Although I have spent time learning to understand the dynamics of a family compound, I have never designed one. These notions of public and private are getting tricky. If I align the buildings to the sun and wind, they cut the square plot in almost an exact diagonal. Currently, most houses are stacked on the perimeter, bedrooms and kitchens all in a line. Laundry, cooking, bathing all happen in the public courtyard. Being invited into the ‘house’ is being invited into everything—there is no private space. So when I started to look at this diagonal scheme, with a ‘front’ yard for guests and ‘back’ yard for washing and laundry, I was stuck. It takes something genuine away. It’s liberating to be here in a culture where everything is shared. I want to be mindful to not design my own learned insecurities into this plan.
- I’ve started to think about how to best document this, so that if the phasing works, and construction works, Noah has tools to talk about the process.

I am heading over to Noah’s tonight. I’ll take dinner with his family, then head over to the plot. (I lugged my tent here—I have to use it at least once!) At 5.30A we’ll start planting okra. I’ve never planted okra, so this should be interesting. ; By 10P, we should be done, and I plan to go to the beach to swim and cool off. The catch should be dragging in just around then. There was a sea turtle caught sometime last week. Its shell was left on the beach as scrap, the sand saturated and soft from the fat. Although they are protected, the meat is too tempting when the remaining catch is small. Most teams will disperse it amongst themselves before the authorities are notified.

On a fun note—I’ve been feeling not so hot since this morning with a sore throat and sinus pressure. I had similar symptoms last trip. I thought it was an ear infection Thursday, then by Saturday I realized it was malaria, stuck with an emergency-only hospital through the weekend. (Malaria is not an emergency.) I’m just hoping now it’s a cold. :) But if not, I can only laugh. At least it’s Monday—four viable hospital days ahead!

I’ll be heading to Ho on Friday, then either that afternoon or Saturday morning to Korforidua. Even though I have two weeks left, I’m still feeling anxious about time. Long days but ridiculously short weeks… Doesn’t really make sense.

Until next week…