Left behind

In Ghana, particularly in the northern portion of the country, it is considered extremely rude to use your left hand.  You accept packages only with your right hand, you present money only with your right hand, and most especially, you eat only with your right hand.  

This presents some problems for a left-handed person. 

I am a left-handed person.  I am a stubbornly, impossibly left-handed person.  I am left handed, left footed, left eared and left eyed.  I am unthinkingly, instinctively, intractably left handed. 

I found eating right handed slightly easier than eating with chopsticks.  I mention this because we had rice at every meal.  (Except breakfast, when we had beans.)  Fried rice, jollof rice, plain rice, saffron rice, vegetable fried rice.  Rice with palava sauce, rice with tomato sauce.  All of it delicious, and all of it, as it turns out, rice that slides easily off the awkwardly held right-hand-held fork of a left-handed person. 

Eating with my right hand felt like trying to maneuver a crane.  So much room for failure between plate and mouth.  Some meals, I just went native and ate with my fingers.  Then, the challenge was optimal use of the one tiny napkin that comes with the meal.  All good practice for Morocco, where I will be staying with an actual Moroccan family, eating out of a common bowl.  I believe my multicolored print shirts will find their way into my overnight bag.

Ghana presented many challenges to the Western mind and body, right handers as well as left.  I stayed four nights, in three different hotels.  Here’s a catalog of hotels:

Nights one and two:  no hot water.  No water at all coming from the hot tap.  TV does not turn on.  Ceiling fan rattles and buzzes and apparently shorts out overhead light.  Air conditioner out of reach and cannot be adjusted.

No one takes your word for anything.  First remedy for “no water” is “you have to turn on the hot water switch.”  Second remedy is “we fixed it.”  Third remedy is the man turns on the emergency cut off behind your back and shows you the water is working (and now, in fact, it is), making you look both cranky AND stupid.  Then he tells you that the reason it’s turned off is there’s a leak and they don’t want you to use it. 

This hotel has a dining patio overlooking the beach, a lovely place to spend a few hours waiting for your food to arrive.  We are a table of 8, and our dinners straggle in over a period of three hours, in no particular order.  We joke that they have to go and catch the fish, butcher the chicken.  It might be true. 

View from the hotel restaurant

On day two, I order fruit with ice cream instead of dinner.  It comes promptly.  Ice cream in one dish, fruit in the other.  Mostly watermelon.  I have had watermelon on easily 90% of the days of this voyage.  It is a staple for breakfast on the ship, it is dessert at every meal in China as well as at Chinese restaurants in Vietnam, Burma, and India.  The ports we have visited run on watermelon and rice.

Completely non-ironic hotel art at Hotel 1

Night three:  Room is nicely equipped with a brand new, energy star refrigerator and two bedside lamps.  One of the lamps has no bulb.  The other lamp has a plug that does not fit into the African socket.  The bulb in it does not work in the lamp with the African plug.  The fridge is not plugged in.  It and the TV share a single socket.  That’s okay, though, because the fridge plug is also a Euro plug, incompatible with the African socket.  VERY energy efficient this way.  Air conditioning is off, does not respond to the remote control.  (Oh, THIS is how you adjust the air conditioner you cannot reach!)  AC is also not plugged in.  Once plugged in, AC works, but remote does not.

We have had a long day, mostly in the bus.  I find that people are ordering food to be delivered to their rooms.  Looks like I will be dining solo.  On my way back to my room, I see a computer room. Three monitors, three keyboards.  One computer.  The internet doesn’t work. 

I take a refreshing shower and wait for my meal.  For two hours.  At ten, I try to call the restaurant.  The phone does not work.  Unlike the lamps, it is plugged in.  And dead.  I get dressed and walk down two flights to the restaurant, which is empty and closed. 

The next morning, even the Ghanians are complaining there is no breakfast.  Breakfast is a piece of toast, a spoonful of beans (canned pork&beans with a few raw carrot shreds) and some raw cabbage.  There is evidence there was also pineapple and eggs.  I take the last fork, but the beans are not worth the struggle.

Day 4:  No fake lamps.  No lamps at all.  No fridge.  No expectations to be dashed.  No shower, buckets in tub.  No towels.  I call for towels.  Someone comes to check.  No hidden towels, no towels I somehow missed, really, there are no towels.  A man brings me towels, towels such as you would have grabbed off someone else’s towel rack.  As in, not folded, slightly damp.  Possibly taken from a clothes line somewhere, but I would not bet on that.  I debate the relative merits of a bucket bath followed by air drying vs sleeping in dried sweat/sunblock/DEET and fall asleep.  Sometime in the night, I hear a crash, as the light in the hallway outside crashes to the ground. 

2D camera does not capture creepy 3D JC.

At 5:45, I get a helpful call from the desk:  your bus is here.  The early risers are taking a morning bike ride, the rest of us are leaving at 7:30.  It’s not my bus.  The desk argues that it is.  “I’m not getting on it,” I say and hang up.  The guy across the hall, the one with the loud voice who has not shut up even for one minute in the last four days, is going on the bike ride.  I know this because the room has cross ventilation and the windows do not close.  There are open windows into the hallway and I know my neighbors quite intimately.

I think, well, there’s plenty of time to air dry now that I am wide awake.  However, there’s no water.  None at all.  No hot, no cold.  Not in the sink, or tub, or toilet.  I call the desk.  “I will come.”  Ghanian English for, <shrug>.  No one comes.  This also has the benefit of keeping them from discovering the dark hallway full of glass.

I walk outside to enjoy the relative cool of the morning.  Ghana’s daylight is from 6 to 6, year round.  I go back in to get my things for the day.  More lights are out in the hallway.  I find there are four steps, not three, down to my room.  It is not a pleasant revelation.  Still no water. 

Hotel 3 walkway

After breakfast (hotdogs and cabbage, eggs, dinner rolls), the non-bikers go to the craft market.  When we get back, the water is running, but the lights are now strobing.  It’s too late for a bath, but there’s no hot water anyway.  There’s a water tank, the shutoff valve is open, but there’s no hot water to the room.

To be fair, there were also many enjoyable things about Ghana, and I will write about them, too.  So that I do not sound entirely like a cranky American tourist who expects four stars in her hotels, let me say that I have no problems with cold water, or lengthy waits, or adapting to the culture, or carrying my own potable water.  What I object to is being told there are amenities that do not exist.  I can sleep without air conditioning in Africa, but if I pay for air conditioning, I do expect that it will be functioning.  I believe that a hotel that includes breakfast should have it for all the guests, not just for the first half.  I brought my own shampoo and soap, but thought towels were part of the deal. 

And, for the record, I accepted the “bush stop” bathroom cheerfully, if not with the enthusiasm of the 5 little boys who conducted scientific experiments to see which kinds of contact caused the “touch-me-not” plants to close up.  I have discovered the ideal volume of drinking water to minimize both dehydration and need for facilities.

Restaurant of Hotel 3 has stunning view

Stop thinking about that movie, right now!

A couple of the hotels had some stunning local art.  Hotel 1 had beautiful wood carvings--whales and crocodiles 8 feet long and elephants 4 feet high.  It also, inexplicably, boasted the horse with sunglasses.  Hotel 3 had a sculpture garden which included the woman holding her baby aloft (something you aren't likely to see, as they are securely wrapped on their mothers' behinds until they are old enough to be looked after by a sibling).  It also had freakishly large Obama eyeing the Chrysler Building at the front desk and creepy 3D Jesus on the job in the bedroom.

Obama, another leftie.  He has visited several of the countries on our itinerary and left a host of images, on local goods as well as tourist goods.  It is quite impossible to think of his predecessor memorialized on a calendar or a keychain.

Happy birthday today to my left-hand buddy, currently serving as my right-hand gal.  You exceed any expectations I could possibly have.