So Friday was an odd day. They've been rolling blackouts through all of Tamale for the past week or so, which has been seriously hampering any attempt I've been making at productivity. You'd think they'd broadcast the times, or the reasons, for the blackouts right? Nope, Ghana just don't work like that ladies and gents. The point of this story though is that I ended up having a fairly serious disagreement with my boss. Seems he lost his key to the office, and since there's only one other key he wanted that one, problem is that I needed it to get into the office on Sunday to teach Mustapha computers. To try and solve this most vexing of dilemmas I suggested numerous plans, such as hiding the key, calling me so I could come in and get it on Saturday, or leaving it with the watchman. In the end I managed to get him to get him to agree to the last, but not before he went off on a hilarious tangent...well as least hilarious to me. Starts tearing into me, full of finger pointing, and yelling over my responses, about how all my options don't consider the security of the office and how resourceful thieves are. How resourceful does a thief have to be to pick up the labeled key you dropped and open a door? Security of the office? Sure there champ..Tried to play it nice but in the end I was laughing cause he was trying to pull that "I'm bigger than you" physical intimidation crap. This guy might be taller, but he's a fat, dagomba princeling...kinda throws him off that I look him in the eye and ain't culturally programmed to take his shit. To top it off he's a total chauvinist too, you should have heard his tirade on Thursday, I honestly thought he was going to say women have smaller brains. Speaking of which if the women in this country ever got a mind to, they'd physically dominate the male population..no jokes, their jacked. Anyway the guys a wanker, and guess what? Mustapha and I biked into Tamale, 17km, and he didn't give the watchman the key to let us in. Even considering the no go computer lesson, Sunday was an awesome day. Bought Mustapha lunch, biked back to pag, stopping to talk to his friends along the way, it was sunny and clear for the first time in a while, got some food and chilled out. There's this great banku joint along the way. Put on the aviators, did some reading/trying to mitigate my beater tan, and taught Hanan how to use the camera...which lead to a LARGE number of ridiculous pictures. Finished if off by walking into the bush, climbing a huge tree and watching the sun set. Ain't no pint at the pub, but still a good way to end off a day.
Interesting thought I've been having recently is how a community like Pag would survive the apocalyptic world that is being predicted with the demise of cheap oil. The global north, if it gets its act together, should be fine since it has the intellectual and technological capital to adapt when it has to. The south though has been steadily pushed by development projects and media influence into emulating the same unsustainable lifestyles, yet they do not possess the aforementioned capital in the same quantities. Strange to think that the people the burgeoning middle class in this country look down upon, the subsistence or small scale farmers are the ones that will best weather the storm. Pagazaa doesn't employ too many outside inputs, they have the tractor, but that is only to increase production for income generation, not to meet basic food needs. They eat, from what I've seen, almost exclusively community produced foods and have large, stable, livestock herds. Indigenous knowledge and teaching are still strong. Anyway it's just weird to think that the tsunami that everyone is bracing for would register as little more than a blip in their eyes.
Just found out the boss got malaria...ain't karma a bitch..
Hoist one for me,
Cheers