A Typical Day

5:10 am: I woke up to see if I my knee was feeling well enough for me to run on it. After hobbling down the hall to the bathroom and back, I decided it wasn’t and settled back within the canopy of my mosquito-netted bed. My roommate and I have been running with the Volta Hall team (our sorority-esque dorm), and what began as our quest for exercise has ended up with us getting roped into competitions and an 8k run in three weeks! The knee injury that spared me from running this morning happened last night. I was walking with Rebecca and texting my friend Andi in Accra, when all of a sudden I plummeted three feet down and my forward momentum jammed my leg into the wall of the gutter I had just stepped into. Luckily the gutter was dry, and my injury wasn’t bad at all, and the man who came to give me a hand turned out to be a nursing student and walked us all the way back to Volta.

5:30 am: Frustratingly unable to go back to sleep, I got up to read some papers on my computer about water and sanitation – I’m doing an independent research project on how to create behavior change in urban slums, how to get people to wash their hands with soap, etc. Behavior change is so hard but also interesting, especially because we can all relate to knowing we should do something one way because it’s better for us, but then do it another way because.. it’s easier, or habit, or makes us feel good, or whatever.

6:30 am: The battery on my computer’s about to die and our electric outlets haven’t been working, so I’m back to bed.

8:30 am: On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would have class, but today I’m free! After grabbing the last clean shirt that’s dry (the rest are drying outside my room on a drying rack after I handwashed them in a bucket with a detergent bar and lots of splashing and mostly futile rubbing,) I head down to the international students computer lab. I wonder why we have this lab – it’s really nice and has free internet, but what do all of the Ghanaian students do for computers/internet? For breakfast along the way, I tried corn porridge for the first time. It’s the gray brown milky looking stuff that is poured into a clear plastic bag and tied up, so that to eat it you have to tear a hole in one of the bag’s corners and drink it up. It’s definitely not my favorite, but it’s filling and cheap.

9:00 am: I wait for bout 30 minutes at the photocopy stand that copies all of the Geography department readings. The stand is outside, just under the awning of a building. I’ve been trying to get these readings for about ten days now, but everytime I come and ask for them, “They are finished. Come back tomorrow.” But today, gloriously, I get my stack of readings. I’ve never been so excited to be able to do my homework! They’re for one of my best classes too, Geography of Urbanization: The City.

10:00 am: I get free internet on my computer and read and write and check emails! An email from Christina, yay! I always am so excited to get emails from home, but feel like I end everyone reply with “ahh, I’ll write more later!” I guess I finally am.

12:30 pm: Andrew called! We didn’t talk for long but it always makes me so happy. While waiting for my egg sandwich (an egg omelet in a roll), I call the number I had saved into my phone earlier, and feel like such a development badass when I see “WorldBank” dialing on my cell phone screen. The WB Accra office secretary is finally able to connect me with the Water Sanitation specialist I’ve been trying to talk to (because he’s been out until just now). He tells me that the internship I’m trying to create, working on an Urban Water Project, is highly sensitive and because it involves the government, I might not be able to be involved. But I should still email him about it just in case.

1:30 pm: “Let there be light, baby!” – a text I send to my two roommates after having successfully hunted down the electrician, ‘Bernard’ who was hanging out in the back of our annex. Apparently all we had to do was flip a switch to turn our electricity back on, but unfortunately one of our light bulbs burned out at the exact time, so we never realized how easy fixing it would’ve been. When the electrician came in I had to quickly hide the mattress Irene, our Ghanaian percher roommate sleeps on because no one can know that there’re three of us because there’s not enough housing on campus for everyone so people squeeze in extra mattresses for their friends while the hall supervisor tries to hunt them down. Irene texted back: “N There was light!”

1:50 pm: Ran into two friends at the tro-tro station. Tro-tros are minivans converted into buses, except that they keep no schedule and are flexible about where they’re going and how they’ll get there. So you show up at a station and wait until you hear one of the mates calling “Circ circircirc” if you want to go to Circle, a big station in Accra. Or “kinesh kineshkinesh,” or “acrra cra cra.”

3:00 pm: Finally made it to Korle Bu, and found the man I was supposed to meet and interview for my independent research. He didn’t mind that I was late and told me about his research at UCLA and his daughter in Ann Arbor. He reminded me of a grandfather – he was so kind and patient with me, and left several times to go hunt down so and so’s phone number or the name of this or that organization.

4:00 pm: Bought a small mango at a street vendor and ate it out of the plastic bags they cut them in… one of the best mangoes I’ve ever had, especially because I ate it in the shade of a tree-lined street. I followed it up with a FanChoco, which is a genius invention – frozen chocolate milk in a bag. You tear off a corner with your teeth and suck it out, which is perfect for the hot weather almost every day. Interestingly, FanIce is always only sold by men. This particular guy was riding a bike, and when he cycled away I saw that he had written “Love” on the back of his bike.

5:00pm: After passing a beautiful mare and colt nibbling along the road, contrasting in a surreal way with the bright blue wall behind them and the chaos of the gritty urban setting, I spotted a bunch of bicycles and stopped to find out how much ($70 for a beach cruiser, but I should bargain more if I end up buying it) from a guy who calls himself Daddy. I also spotted an urban garden – rows of vegetables on a piece of land sandwiched between the road and a slummish settlement. Supposedly urban gardens produce 90 % of Accra’s produce!

6:00pm: Walked into an ArcBright meeting late with Rebecca – the nursing student who helped me with my leg yesterday is the president and invited us to this meeting. Apparently they do health education activities and might be really cool to work with. Everyone seemed really friendly and laughed when we both introduced ourselves in Twi: “Yefre me Adwoa.” Which means, my name is Adwoa, or Monday-born. In Ghana, you are given a name that corresponds to the day of the week that you are born on. Since we’re both Monday-borns, I’m Adwoa Kakra, or little, while Becks is Adwoa Peni, or big.

7:00pm: Got dinner from a guy near our dorm – rice and ketchup and mayonnaise and salad and a sliced up hard boiled egg all wrapped up in a bag again. Exhausted at this point, we settled in to watch the pilot of Arrested Development and catch up on work. Rebecca and I traded stories about our friends back home… I love and miss them all!

1:00am: Turned off the lights and closed up the mosquito net.