The Help: A Tale of Two Houseladies

Wait, they're supposed to have uniforms?

As mentioned, running the household requires a few extra folks to  clean, cook and keep the place together. Househelp in Ghana is not only highly affordable for an expat, but also surprisingly utilitarian in practice.

In Canadian terms, Mr. and Mrs. O are fairly humble folk - they keep a (generally) clean and tidy house and property themselves and grew up without a dishwasher. Coming to Ghana, it was reiterated that househelp will be needed and one should discerned carefully. Groceries need to be bought (and haggled for at the market), food needs to be cleaned (and disinfected) and the harmattan winds fill the house with Sahara dust.

Mrs. O, being an at-home mother, has an aversion to help, including having strange people in the house in general. While other expats have a combination of live-in nanny, cook, cleaner and gardener, Mr. and Mrs. O decided that having someone come by a couple of days per week to shop, prep and cook food and clean the house would be plenty. And ideally they would be able to watch Little Miss from time to time.

So in the end, the couple is in a curious situation, with two part-time helpers.

The cook was highly recommended by a departing colleague as someone who is an excellent cook (others confirmed this unprompted). She does Indian curries, Mexican burritos, pad Thai and other fantastic dishes. She also reportedly watches children at Sunday school. Great, right?

Unfortunately, if she is great with kids, not so much with Little Miss. They just don't click. She probably considers Little Miss a whiny little princess who does not listen to adults. This is entirely a fair assessment, but for adequate compensation, the employers request checking one's opinions at the door. Her cleaning skills are also meh. However, good cooks are in short supply and in high demand from expats, so Mr. and Mrs. O are a bit beholden to her, lest they have to start cooking their own rice like shmucks.

Enter the cleaner: Noticing how great their neighbour's part-time helper is with their child and how clean their house is, Mrs. O decided to engage her for a day per week of cleaning and child-minding while Mrs. O goes out for groceries (yes, she enjoys this sort of thing).

Yet helpers are people too and they do not exist in a vacuum. Her job has downsides: while the work pays well, she has children and living in Accra is not cheap. Her commute is over two hours each way and she has little time to spend with her own little ones. So she is currently looking to get out of the game and get into the less profitable but more fulfilling dream of hairdressing. So Mr. and Mrs. O are not sure how much time they will have with her, but while she figures out her situation, they can keep her afloat.

This has been an interesting experiment in understanding one's perceptions of class, gender, humanity and humility. A person leaves their home and commutes to a much nicer one to do the chores that the employers are too lazy to do themselves at a price that the employers would not do themselves in their own country. Yet this is by local standards a well-paying job for women with little education and affords them a significant amount of opportunity. For Mr. and Mrs. O, while they live a life of privilege, this is also a paradoxically humbling experience - it reminds them of just how much they have and to be grateful for it.

Ugh, good help is so hard to find. *sips gin & tonic*

A Day at the Beach

Bojo Beach Hotel

In Mr. O's previous sojourn in Ghana, he wasted little time in getting out to see the country by bus, taxi and tro-tro. This time around, there are a few other factors at play, namely Mrs. O, Little Miss, getting them around safely in a vehicle with a child's car seat, food, drink, diaper bags and keeping everyone happy. In almost a month, the family had yet to leave Accra.

You cross a bridge. How cool is that?

Thankfully, there's Bojo Beach to let us get our feet wet, so to speak. Mr. O borrowed a vehicle for the weekend and the family drove out of town West down the coast. As a rule of thumb, the further away from the city, the better as West African cities tend to use the ocean as their waste bin.

Paradise by the dash boat ride.

Little Miss approves.

So about 45 minutes out of town, we arrived at Bojo Beach (not far from backpacker hangout Kokrobite), which is technically private land of the Bojo Beach Hotel, but sits across an inlet on a large sandbar. So to get across, you need to pay a small fee and take a boat. So it is quiet, clean and does not have the usual crowd of rastas, kids and vendors selling curios. It's no all-inclusive, white-sand resort, but it's enough to make one forget they're just outside a hectic city of four million people.

Little Miss took to the water immediately and needed to be carefully guarded against the riptide, as she found the crashing waves hilarious. Mr. O allowed her to take a few gulps of seawater as a caution.

Just as difficult was keeping her out of the equatorial sun. She has a sort of proto-wetsuit for fair-skinned children and it gets filled with sand rather quickly. So we kept her under a patio umbrella with sandbox toys and plied her with bites of tilapia and yam chips with ketchup (her favourite).

Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. O neglected their own epidermal health and got some solid sunburns. Do as I say, not as I peel.

As any parent will tell you, getting out of the house can be a logistical challenge and you have to keep your goals simple. A day at the beach for the family was the first step in a journey of their great adventure.

Beaches: they're really great.

Little Miss showing off her beach body.

The Adjustment of Little Miss

Trouble.

From the moment we realized that the plan to move to Ghana was in effect, we agonized over how to shepherd Little Miss through the traumatic experience of moving her from her familiar home  into a new environment with a new home, new culture, new climate and without her extended family, friends, comforts and the way of life into which she had grown.

We made sure to tell her many times about our journey - so much so that we developed sort of a call-and-answer routine that worked great as a party trick.

"Where are we moving to?"

"Gaw-nah!"

"How are we getting there?"

"In the big, big plane!"

Double trouble.

So she knew where she was going. That was half the battle. The other half was waged upon arrival. In our big empty house without toys, we had to get her settled in and keep her busy. So we decorated her "princess room" with anything pink that we could bring to get her excited about her new digs, which worked well. And the DVDs we brought from home (thanks grandma) has kept her from peeling the paint off the walls.

Still, the process has been challenging. Without the usual routine (walks to the park, trips to the grocery store, playgroups), she got bored very quickly. And so did we. So the first few days felt like they would never end.

Children are creatures of habit and disrupting their schedules can send them for a loop. Little Miss' sleeping patterns started to get quite erratic - for a while she was waking up regularly between 2 and 5AM and no amount of milk would get her back down.

Enjoying a little watermelon.

For the first week, she was regularly asking "Where is home?" and insisting that she was ready to go home now. We knew this would happen, but it did not make us feel any less horrible.

But soon enough, the questions got less frequent, the sleeping pattern more predictable and the general spirits heightened. We started learning how to keep her occupied. Mrs. O brought arts and crafts, stimulating her artistic side. Her imagination can be stimulated simply by putting a towel over two chairs ("Dada want to go camping with me?") or by hiding under a blanket and telling stories.

Filthy creature.

We have a network of colleagues with children, so she is starting to make friends, including with our next door neighbour, where they run back and forth - so much so, the guards and househelp are starting to refer to the pair as "the mosquitoes".

And while she has not been eating a very Ghanaian diet, she is enjoying the local flavours, including the fruits (bananas, oranges, mangoes and watermelon) and is crazy for FanIce, the local ice cream in a bag that costs less than 50 cents.

She is also embracing the outdoors, spending much of her day running around the yard and covering herself in dust and dirt. Hopefully, she is absorbing enough bacteria to develop some serious antibodies and slowly become impervious to local diseases. At least that's what we keep telling ourselves.

Sunday in Jamestown

Jamestown Lighthouse

Among the many changes in Accra, the art scene seems to have evolved significantly over the last few years. Back in the day, "art" usually meant local Rastas playing drums by the beach. If you went to an "art show", it would be an underwhelming affair, featuring a few local artists and a whole bunch of curious expats who got the same e-mail you did. Then you'd leave after about half an hour.

That seems to have changed. Case in point: the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Jamestown.

Jamestown is a strange place - it is very old (including a lighthouse, forts and other colonial buildings over a hundred years old), tightly-knit and has a strong local flavour, but it's also underdeveloped, decrepit and fairly challenging for tourists, with the sheer number of street kids and the community's love-hate relationship with foreigners taking photos. It is so strange that in the entirety of his previous stay, Mr. O did not once visit the town proper.

EVERYBODY AZONTO!

Taking a drive on a Sunday with the neighbours, they got lost, wandered down some dodgy sidestreets and were about to return when they made contact with an old friend of Mr. O's who has been living in Ghana for several years. They then found the street festival. And it did not disappoint: vendors were selling interesting wares, from the usual beads and carvings to fine pottery and high-concept art t-shirts; local foods were available like bissap (sorrel in the Caribbean) and honey from the Volta Region; there were galleries, stencil art and chalk displays; and what seemed to be an all-day azonto dance party.

The mob descends upon sleeping Little Miss.

The crowd was a mix of young, hip Ghanaians and various expats (more the former than the latter). Little Miss fell asleep in the car on the way there, so she was put in a stroller, which immediately attracted the attention of a mob of local children, who crowded around, gawked and poked at the little princess being wheeled around in her own vehicle by adults. Thankfully, she slept the entire time, or else she would have been terrified. The kids were eventually shooed away by their elders, who have fewer qualms about telling them to stop being pesky gadflies.

The goal was to stay for an hour, tops. Yet they ended up staying for most of the afternoon hanging out, dancing, exploring the area and catching up with their old friend. It was a great way to get to know the city a bit more and experience local culture in a relaxed way, without it feeling sanitized or staged for the benefit of tourists. It feels like Accra (or at least its art community) is becoming more confident and assertive in its identity, which is exciting.

Creepin' & Crawlin'

There are dozens of topics we could be writing about that are more relevant to our day-to-day lives, yet we could not resist this one.

We have fancied our new place as being fairly impenetrable. It is clean, modern and all windows have screens and tight glass seals (plus iron bars). Our army of air conditioners ensure that we can keep the entire place climate controlled (we don't). Unlike 99% of buildings in Ghana, there are no ants, mosquitoes or other creepy-crawlies about.

At least that is what you tell yourself. Curiously, Mrs. O noticed an enormous squashed African cockroach today. In addition to not knowing where it came from (a hopeless mental exercise), we do not know who or what squashed it. On the upside, all food is kept sealed, so we are not worried about our supply. But it is clear that we are not alone.

On a lighter note, there are several geckos who like to hang out on our screened porch. They are pretty cool. Plus they eat bugs.

On Reverse Culture Shock

You can't go home again.

This is the first thing they tell you when you return from a long journey abroad. When you arrive at a new destination, there is a culture shock as you adjust to the new environment. However, when you leave home, it changes. You change as well. Meanwhile, you form a mental image of what ''home'' is and project this as a constant. Upon your return, reality hits, anxiety increases and frustration sets in. This is known as reverse culture shock.

For Mr. Obruni, this happened not in Canada, but in Accra. Over the last seven years, he maintained an image of Accra - the roads, the buildings, the billboards, the traffic, the prices, etc. In reality, all of these things have changed as Accra has undergone its economic and demographic boom. The city that Mr. O knew no longer exists in the present day.

(Curiously, some things have not changed, including rickety tro-tros, air pollution, open sewers and burning garbage.)

Mr. O has changed as well. He has a day job and dependents. As much as he would like to hop a tro-tro, his family would prefer a taxi - and a good one, if he has any sense. His colleagues drive nice cars, eat well and stay at upscale hotels.

This is all part of the adjustment. In returning as an 'adult', he has responsibilities and priorities that differ from those of his youth. His life has progressed and he has advanced in his life's goals.

And that's why you can't go home again.

A Sunday Drive

Living in Accra is somewhat like living in Quebec in winter: you need to get out of the comfort of your house and embrace the ridiculousness around you.

Normally full of cars moving slowly and honking at each other.

And so it was that we found ourselves borrowing a friend's giant SUV on a Sunday morning.

For a bustling city choked with traffic, Accra on a Sunday morning is completely dead, as everyone is at church or nursing a hangover. This makes it the perfect time to get to know the streets. Being in a massive Toyota helps too.

Adenta: Ga for 'Just Park Wherever'

This was Mr. O's first time driving in Ghana. Previously, he took cabs, tro-tros and hitched on his friends' scooters ("motos"), but never dared drive himself. So this was a big step.

The family got in and first started heading North to his old stomping grounds of East Legon and the University of Ghana. It was completely unrecognizable. The two-lane "Old Road" to Adenta has been turned into six lanes to service the growing traffic. The University too has exploded with development. But Mr. O couldn't even find the entrance, such was the level of change.

Independence Arch - very French

After some further confusion and a u-turn in a crowded intersection, they went through East Legon to find still standing the place where they would rent private rooms to watch pirated Hollywood films. (Note: sources have alleged that this place was actually a brothel. Which explains why we always seemed to be the only ones there.)

Independence Square. (not a McDonald's)

The family drove back into the city towards the old expat neighbourhood of Osu. Oxford Street used to be obruni central - it was where restaurants and boutiques glittered next to open sewers, hawkers and beggars. These are all still there, but it definitely feels scrubbier next to the glittering towers of Airport Residential. We stopped in at the Koala Mart, once the go-to place for western goods and a cup of real coffee overlooking the town. The place looks tired and the café was done away with, perhaps to fill more goods. We picked up some essentials and continued our sojourn.

Makola Market (closed, thankfully)

We followed the main street down to the end, which led into the older Osu/Cantonments neighbourhood, far removed from the expats and their offices. We slowly snaked our way West along the High Street that hugs the coast (don't be fooled: the waterfront was never developed). We passed the Independence Arch, the golden arch of Independence Square, the Supreme Court and stickhandled our way through the dormant Makola Market (which is barely navigable any other day).

This has what condo developers call 'long-term potential'.

We eventually found ourselves on the West end of Accra's Ring Road. From the comfort of our locked air-conditioned fortress, we drove past shantytowns, smouldering garbage heaps, grazing farm animals (all in the same spot, mind you) and finally hit traffic as we approached the vendor-filled Kwame Nkrumah Circle (just "Circle" for the tro-tros). We also pissed off a car full of angry local men with an ill-advised lane change. The trick was simply to stare straight ahead, ignore them, and remember that your tank of a vehicle could clear any curb in case of emergency.

After negotiating the massive traffic circle (again, by sheer size), we progressed back into town and ended up back home safe and sound. It was hard to imagine that Mr. O used to find his way through all of these places by public transportation and foot on any given day. Just another reminder of how much he has changed over the years.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Operation Accra Revisited was a success. We celebrated with an obligatory FanIce from a street vendor (ice cream, at least in the technical sense), which Little Miss enjoyed immensely. This is life in Accra and the family is slowly embracing it.