DAY NUMBER TWO IN GHANA

My diary starts with this:


"I am sitting on the side of the road fighting back tears"


I had 20 cedi and 70 peswas, that is approximately AU$15, in my pocket left from the US$60 I exchanged at the airport. I walked to nearly twenty ATMs and in to four different banks and not one of them will accept MasterCard or Plus, the only 2 cards I have with me, they all take Visa and Visa only. In short, I am fucked!


I have just enough money to get me a half an hour on the internet and three-quarters of the way back to the airport. I don't know what else to do but leave. I cant even afford a hotel for the night. I can't get cash transferred because it is the middle of the night in Australia and by the time someone is up and able to do it it will be dark here and I will be out on the grotty streets.


I finally walk into a Barclay's Bank and the guy there suggested I try the Stanbic Bank over the other side of town. Another hour's walk in 38 degree heat, sweat trickling down my back and legs, I make it to the bank and guess what... it takes MasterCard! I am so happy I could hug the security-guard standing beside me at the ATM... except that he has an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, and I generally avoid hugging big men with big guns when I can help it. So I ask him how many Stanbic Bank's are in Accra. He asks a lady behind the counter and she writes all six of them out for me. Not six in Accra, but six in the whole of Ghana. In short, I am no longer totally fucked, just semi-fucked. As long as my travel itinerary sticks very close to these ATMs I should be OK. I did not know then what I know now. That ATMs in Ghana are much like lights and running water and people in Ghana: sometimes they work. But sometimes, nay often, they don't work.

But at the time I felt pure, simple relief. So I attempted to eat my first full Ghanaian meal. The day before, my first day in Ghana, I had bought breakfast from a street seller who must have been good cause she had a queue of people wanting breakfast from her. I asked her for what everyone else before me had bought. Though appealing it was not, I figured I would eat what the locals eat. They had all ordered 3 golf-ball sized deep fried balls, a lot like donut holes, squished into a plain white bread roll - all the vitamins and minerals one could ask for.


But the woman said no. She said I should eat porridge. So I said ok, I will eat porridge, it didn't sound like I had a choice. She filled a plastic sandwich bag with warm spiced condensed milk and handed it over. I bit the plastic corner off and drank through the small hole. I had two mouth fulls before I ditched it. My second attempt at eating was bought from a guy pushing a wagon with something bright yellow and pastry looking. I bought one. Had one bite. It had a similar fate to the porridge.


So on the second day I sat at a 'chop bar' named "By God's Grace". I didn't have a clue what anything on the blackboard menu was so I avoided the choice entirely and told the guy to bring me his favourite dish. I had decided that while in Africa I would give up vegetarianism. I was about to eat meat for the first time in years.


I sit and am given a bucket of water and a bottle of dish-washing liquid to wash my hands, in Ghana you eat with your fingers. Then I am served two plastic sandwich bags with a warm white, starchy, sticky mass I later find out is either fufu or banku. It doesn't taste like much, but sure is hard to swallow. It comes with a dollop of very hot red chili oil and a chicken leg that had to have been deep-fried several times cause I have no idea how you get skin that think. Then I wonder to myself if this leg once belonged to one of the millions of chickens hobbling around the streets and in the open sewers. I sit and ponder how long I can survive in Ghana if I don't eat another meal the whole time I am here.


There was a cardboard box on the counter that said 'suggestions please' and I wondered where I would begin.