Kijiji is a market just beyond the Western bank of Ghana’s Lake Volta, on whose waters thousands of slave children labor. At three or four years old, just weaned from their mothers’ breasts, they come to a lonely life of work and hunger. The fishermen who buy them are often child slaves themselves, grown up on the lake, set free at seventeen or eighteen years old to fend for themselves. At Kijiji, the masters’ wives sell the fish from the children’s nets, and this afternoon we walked in the sun among those market baskets, their mouths full to overflowing.

I am in Ghana on behalf of a U.S.-based non-governmental organization that partners with Ghanaian anti-trafficking leaders to rescue these children. One of my Ghanaian colleagues is sitting at the helm of the red dugout boat, calling to the boatman who guides our craft through the clutter of Kwadjokrom’s shore-docked fishing boats. The boats are shaped like thin moons, each end tipped up, and their wooden flanks are painted with David and Goliath, the Good Shepherd, and the Rainbow and the Dove. We are on our way from Kijiji to a fishing island, where a fisherman has promised to give up a little boy he keeps.

Yet as we push out, my thoughts are of Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, black map dots that rise in my mind with the rhythm of a dull heartbeat. I have no reason to think of those cities while I am here in Ghana, except that they mark for me the trafficking route of a friend, and I have seen Kijiji.

It does not make sense. It did not make sense half an hour ago on the road from Kijiji, when the old man sitting behind me in our rickety trotro asked, through an acquaintance’s translation, why was I so angry?

I did not realize that I was shrieking in the trotro’s cramped cab, holding forth in a language that only three of my traveling companions could fully comprehend.

“Using Craigslist is like buying a coach class ticket on the upper deck of a slave ship,” I think I yelled. The old man was perplexed. “They sell thousands of kids in sex trafficking and prostitution and they could care less!” He did not get that either. “Everyone who buys a used couch knows what’s happening in the “adult services” section and doesn’t care!”

At this point, one of my English-speaking companions yelled back, in near-equal force, that I should zip it. He was right. I turned in my seat to face the front of the bus and the rutted, dusty road leading up to the lake. I was crying now, less from the reprimand and more from the map of the cities I had remembered. I brought my handkerchief up to wipe my forehead and nose and then I held it to my mouth.

It was nearly five years ago that I met the woman whose life is in that map of Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. I was newly married and newly arrived in the third of four cities my husband and I would call home that year. I was teaching literature at a university, but I wanted to keep a hand in the anti-trafficking community, so I signed on for the first meet-up of Polaris Project’s Seattle chapter. When I arrived at the meet-up, she was there, too.

I know what it means to be lonely. I know the delicate aspect it brings to a person’s face and the white cast it brings to the eyes and skin. I know less well how to bear up under my own loneliness, whenever and why-ever it arrives. When I see the kind of fortitude that I lack alive in someone else, I mark it. I know will need that memory.

When she was fourteen, her father left. Her mother followed. Improbably, she was left alone in blue-collar suburban Seattle, where she was found by an older boyfriend-cum-savior-cum-pimp. She was beaten, raped, and sold on the streets and on the Internet. She was cut, branded, and thrown out of moving cars. The West Coast circuit – Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles – was her pimp’s bread-and-butter. When she became pregnant by him with a second child, she took her two-year-old daughter and fled.

It is hard to befriend a woman who grew up in the rigged world of a “stable” – a slang term for the women that a pimp owns, exploits, and uses to exploit each other. A woman who has known this life wants to love and to be loved, but she does not believe that love can be given freely.

When my husband and I moved to Washington, DC, my friend and I kept in touch for a while. Once when I called her apartment, I got a drunken woman who told me that my friend and her daughters had been kicked out. I begged for another number and the woman gave me the line for a motel room, where my friend answered once and a man, whose voice I did not trust, answered a second and final time.

These days, Facebook cuts short the romanticism of myriad lost loves and lost friendships, sometimes for the better. I looked for my friend on Facebook last year, sometime in the wake of the Boston Craigslist murders, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Polaris Project, and several U.S. Attorney Generals rallied – and ultimately lost their battle – to stop human trafficking via the Craigslist erotic services (now “adult services”) section.

In the midst of the bruhaha, I found my friend. Her Facebook profile was meager and her wall was a strange slate of auto-generated messages, but this seemed in some way fitting for all the abuse she had experienced in the world of mid-nineties Internet.

Knowing what she had overcome, I understood what my friends and colleagues were after in their campaign to clean up Craigslist. I was not sure that attempting to reform an online kingpin, especially one who had no natural impetus to do so, was the best way to do it.

I stumbled on to Kijiji – www.kijiji.com of eBay, rather than Kijiji of the Kwadjokrom overbank, the red dust road, and the market where women sell fish caught by slave children – sometime during those months. I talked to a few colleagues about what it might look like to stage a www.kijiji.com “other-cott” and steer like-minded friends toward an online classifieds site that chooses, of its own accord, to entirely prohibit the “adult services” ads that make Craigslist a haven for human traffickers.

But the www.kijiji.com other-cott did not go anywhere. Or, to re-phrase, I did not take it anywhere. I do not know why.

What I do know is that today on the road from Kijiji, someone mentioned Craigslist. I was thinking of my friend, I remembered how many thousands of boys, girls, women and men like her had been sex trafficked on Craigslist, and without counting the cost, I began shrieking incoherently and obnoxiously about slave ships and sins of omission.

I would like to laugh about the incident, but it occurred while I was on the clock – and besides the inquisitive old man, our trotro ferried half of our Ghanaian partner staff, a former White House economic development expert, and one of Touch A Life Foundation’s most faithful and generous supporters.

It was a bad moment.

I have apologized sincerely to the person at whom I shrieked the loudest. I will apologize tomorrow morning to the other shriek-ee, who was in fearfully close-range. If I can find the old man, I promise that I will apologize to him, too.

I figure that since I have nothing left to lose, I might as well go all out.

I want to you – my colleagues, friends, family, random people I went to high school with – to know that Craigslist’s convenience is not worth its price.

If you want to stop human trafficking, stop using Craigslist and use www.kijiji.com. Tell your friends to do it, too. The more, the merrier, and the better the second-hand shopping selection. ☺

And if you think of it, please pray for my friend and pray for me, that in every way that our lives intersect, I would love her well.

For more information, check out:

Kijiji: www.kijiji.com

Kijiji Rules of Use: http://info.kijiji.com/helpcenter/?article=22

Polaris Project’s Letter to Craigslist CEO: http://bit.ly/9BCF8r

Polaris Project’s Quick stats & Client Service Reflections re: Craigslist: http://www.blog.polarisproject.org/?p=1025

Craiglist complies w/some of critics’ requests, but human trafficking persists: http://bit.ly/Li9eM

0830h: woke up, went back to sleep
0930h: woke up for real, looked outside, saw snow falling on my street
1000h – 1045h: running 6 mile loop around the Vienna old town
1130h: register for free use of rental bikes in Vienna and ride into old town
1200h: Mass at Stephansdom
1300-1400h: Cappuccino, Sachertorte and newspaper at a cafe
1500-1700h: nap

Pretty good so far.

As a nation we are contemplating a major rebuild of our medical system, claiming that it costs too much and that people are getting poor care. Yes, health care in the US is expensive and the current situation can’t be maintained. I’m coming closer to getting a solid stance in the health care reform policy debate, but right now I want to make some observations.

Last week the neurology service was called in to evaluate a patient who had suddenly collapsed. Bystanders gave him 8 minutes of CPR, the ambulance initiated more advanced resuscitation techniques, and the emergency room at an outside hospital “coded” him for 15 minutes before getting a pulse and blood pressure back. He had no brain reflexes after his heart started beating again. He was transferred to my hospital so he could get a balloon to open his arteries in his heart. We were called in the next day to evaluate for brain death. Still no brain reflexes. This man was requiring a cocktail of three different drugs just to keep his blood pressure high enough and his brain showed every sign of death. His other organs also showed the effects of prolonged ischemia. The man was dead and had been since getting to the ED at the other hospital. But we gave him a cardiac cath, an electroencephalogram, a somatosensory evoked potential test, multiple evaluations by squads of doctors, and kept him in the ICU for 48 hours. We spent tens of thousands of dollars on a man who was dead and everybody knew it. But nobody wanted to tell the family that it was hopeless and that they should switch off the ventilator.

In contrast, on one of my last afternoons in Ghana, I was seeing patients in “my” office when there was a pound at the door. The Cuban doctor called me, saying, “Doctor Ben, emergency case! Please come!” I grabbed gloves and trotted outside to find a 40ish woman lying on a stretcher somewhere between home and the hospital she had stopped breathing, but nobody could tell us how long it had been because she had gotten to the hospital on a motorcycle sitting between two men. I listened to her chest for breath sounds or a heart beat. I felt for a carotid pulse. I checked her pupils. And then I said that she was dead because I knew that even if I started CPR I had no defibrillator to shock her heart, no ventilator to breathe for her and no advanced recussitation drugs. In other words, I had no tools to reverse the process that led to this woman’s heart stopping.

There MUST be some middle ground between the no-holds-barred approach utilized in my hospital in DC and the lack of care I provided in Kete Krachi. I think that the right balance is closer to the American style than the medicine practiced on the shores of Lake Volta. Interestingly, I’ll be on the front line of “heroic” resuscitation of patients like my guy here in DC. So I need to start thinking about how far I should go.

I’m about to take a policy stance on an issue here…so if you don’t like it, fine, but don’t be rude in the comments you choose to leave. With almost every patient I saw over the past four weeks decisions were made on the basis of medicolegal risk assessment rather than clinical judgement. Some of hese decisions were small while others will very expensive, like keeping a patient an extra two or three days in the hospital for an MRI just to have photographic proof that there was no stroke in the brain in case the patient decided to lawyer up and sue. Talking about reforming the health care system and controlling costs without including tort reform is foolish…sort of like puting a lot of fancy paint and sweet rims on a car with a blown engine.

So this morning I’m thinking of the two times I have personally performed CPR. One guy, a 60 year old man, collapsed while riding his bike in the park. I started chest compressions within one minute. He’s back to teaching middle school these days and continues to ride well over 1000 miles each year. Between good CPR, very skilled paramedics, and the best, most expensive medical care money can buy, he beat the odds. The other time I gave somebody CPR was in Ghana when a 4 year old boy’s heart stopped while I was trying to get an IV going for him. I literally felt his heart stop beating. I gave that little kid 45 seconds of CPR before recognizing that there was nothing I could do to reverse the process that led to his cardiac arrest. I wanted to do so much more but couldn’t.

So maybe it all boils down to balance. Doesn’t it always come down to that?

I leave Sunday for Vienna and four weeks of experience in the Austrian health care system (it’s a tough job but somebody must do it). I’ll see if they have it right and I’ll report back.

The most beautiful things in Ghana are green oranges. If you’re a close friend or family member of mine, you’ve probably already read my post this week at IMAGE Journal’s “Good Letters” blog.

Tonight, while riding home from a spontaneous Girls’ Night w/the six Tema Home girl smalls, plus Pam, Martha, and Susan, I was thinking again about how grief can make our minds crystallize pedestrian moments and see in them many things of beauty.

One of tonight’s beautiful things was 6-year-old Miss D. curled up in my lap on the bus, nearly falling asleep several times, but then sitting up again to insist that we pray for her friends at the Tema House, Mama Pam, or me and my husband. She loves to be loved. Her little shorn head is soft and nubbly; if you even accidentally touch her shoulder, she draws your arm around her places your hand against her temple, guiding your fingers to stroke her cheek. It’s hard to think of her mother or father selling her, sending her away, letting her go to work at the lakeside. It makes me wonder what kind of pain each of them harbored.

In the month’s blank space of non-blogging, Ben returned to the States, I headed back to the Tema children’s home, and the TAL Executive leadership touched down in Accra. Shortly thereafter, Malaak Compton-Rock and her assistant, Lea Cohen, arrived, and Raymond Stephens (the aforementioned US Embassy Political Officer) joined all of us for a fact-finding trip to Kete Krachi.

Malaak Rock (yes, indeed: wife of comedian Chris Rock) heads up Journey for Change, an NGO that coordinates reciprocal service-learning trips for African-American kids from Brooklyn, NY, and African kids around the continent. The sweet catch: the African-American kids serve in countries to which they have traced their ancestry, allowing them to get a glimpse into their native culture and language, and life in the country from which their forebears came.

Malaak read and loved Pam’s book, Jantsen’s Gift, so this March, five Journey for Change kids, accompanied by Soledad O’Brien and a CNN crew, will arrive for a week-long service-learning adventure with the Touch A Life kids. And in April, the Journey For Change and Touch A Life kids will head to Washington, DC to headline a joint Congressional briefing on child labor trafficking in Ghana’s Lake Volta fishing industry. I am really excited for all of them – I think the US and Ghanaian kids will do a great job, and both trips will be once-in-a-lifetime thrills.

This week in Kete Krachi, Malaak and Lea got a feel for the Lake, the Village of Life (where many of the rescued kids live), and the Achibra family’s mission and work. And Raymond Stephens received the US Embassy’s first in-person introduction to Touch A Life’s work with the Achibras. The kids performed their gome, a drumming and dancing performance about their lives on the Lake (makes me cry every time I see it); we went on an early morning Lake Volta outreach/victim identification trip, toured the Thursday market, and enjoyed an 11 a.m. round of Guiness with Nana, the Krachi District paramount chief.

This week was also the first time that the Achibras regarded me less as a guest and more as one of the family. The role-swap meant that I got a better glimpse of the awesome (emphasis on the awe) household mechanics behind the Achibras’ unstoppable hospitality. I’ve come to believe even more firmly that the family’s generosity of spirit, food, drink, and accommodation pivots on a steady supply of young, unemployed female family members and friends who can be tapped for service at a moment’s notice.

I don’t know if this is bad or good. On one hand, I wouldn’t trade the opportunities of Western womanhood for a life of hand-washing laundry, pounding fufu, and tending stew pots in the front yard, while a phalanx of able-bodied adults (male and female) stand around and watch me work.

On the other hand, my sojourns in Bolivia and Nepal taught me that when moms, grandmas, and sister-in-laws are constantly at home, there is always someone ready to offer guests the tea-and-conversation that Americans are too busy to bother with. And there is something about that steady, gentle, bodily acknowledgement that instills a great sense of dignity – in the guest, I guess, but not always in the woman.

I don’t know. I’m sure things don’t have to be either/or, but I don’t know how to do it well – “it” being hospitality, sanity, and a career. And once again, I’m closing a blog post in the wee hours of 9 o’clock p.m., when my brain is doing a quick nose-dive.

[Imagine pithy concluding statement here] and sleep well. I’ll see you back in Accra after tomorrow’s long drive.

Everybody in Krachi, from our Yam Boat auntie to George Sr.’s tiny, toddling granddaughter, Deborah, has Christmas hair: intricate braids and curly weaves that each required at least two-to-twelve hours at the salon. I, on the other hand, decided to spice up my style by simply washing my hair. It has now gone from greasy to large-and-in-charge. For Bus 32 alums in our readership, I’m sporting a helmet worthy of Mrs. Dothage, circa 1989.

I let hygiene (like communication – so sorry) wane over the past few weeks as I wrestled the thing that wouldn’t die, otherwise known as the prototype victim database. I’ve seen a million different victim-tracking systems, so you would think it would be relatively painless for me to create one for the Lake Volta kids. But since I am only detail-oriented in a reactive (rather than pro-active) sense, I’ve had to do about a billion re-toolings. This morning, I finally “finished” a bona fide Working Draft and, by mid-afternoon, I had entered into it all the historic victim data that we have on-hand.

It’s strange to think that tomorrow is Christmas. Besides the weather, I think one reason I feel seasonally out-of-kilter is because, sadly, I’ve squandered Advent in over-work. But it also feels un-Christmas-y because, apart from the Christmas goat tied up in the front yard and last week’s Twi/English sermon on The Annunciation, we’ve had a thoroughly non-liturgical Advent season. There has been no Russian Orthodox fasting, no Advent wreaths, no readings of Jesus’ genealogy, and certainly no 6-foot-tall spruce tree leaning in the living room. OH – but there has been an awesome Ghanaian country-western Christmas album on rotation (think Barbara Mandrell affecting a Nigerian-British accent, and you’re not far off).

Regardless, tomorrow is Christmas, and I am thankful. We’ll go to church for a “hanging of the green”-type Christmas worship service, in which we’ll deck the open-air sanctuary with palm fronds. George, Sr. will have the Christmas cow and the Christmas goat slaughtered; the butcher will bring the fresh meat to the house and we’ll roast it on spits under the shea tree, in the grassy, gravelly front yard that serves as an all-purpose summer kitchen, parlor, and dining room.

All the kids from the Village of Life will be there, of course, wearing the matching Christmas clothes that the seamstress and her assistants have been sewing on the old-fashioned foot-pedal sewing machines set-up in her front yard. The cloth for their new clothes is glossy white, coral, and gold. George, Jr. told me that all the kids will get shiny new Christmas shoes, too.

I’m looking forward seeing the kids. But I feel sad, too, knowing that because I’ve spent the last day wading through their historic files, I will remember the hard things that each one has endured even as I greet them and celebrate with them. One of the littlest ones, Bakpa, usually spends every church service staring unblinkingly at me, as if I am the only obruni he has ever laid eyes on. I am almost dreading seeing him tomorrow because I know I will think of his story as he stares at me.

Since I was finally able to come out of the work cave this afternoon, I spent the early evening in the front yard with the family, where they usually spend the sunset hours cooking, talking, and receiving visitors. George, Sr., who is still recovering from his car accident, was holding court in a long blue dressing gown, green cast, and crutches.

I sat with George, Sr., for a long while tonight, asking him questions about his work on the lake, his childhood, and his relationship with his father, James – a brusque, Russia-educated medical doctor, a man who lived in Europe for nearly 30 years, married and divorced a Dutch woman, and finally retired to a small medical practice on the outskirts of Kete Krachi. James is known throughout the community as much for his thorough medical manner as for his brusque diatribes against Africans, even though he himself is Ghanaian.

I met James only once, as he was leaving the house after a brief, perfunctory visit to inquire about George, Sr.’s post-hospital health. Sporting mirrored Aviators, a taupe silk turtleneck, and barely grizzled black hair, he looked decidedly non-Krachi. I had no idea who he was.

“I don’t believe in your God,” he said, cornering me in the front yard. “Your God made the enmity between the white man and the black man, so I don’t believe in him. He put the devil in the black man’s blood.”

“Oh, you mean sickle cell anemia,” I said dumbly, completely confused and trying to be polite.

“No, I mean the devil,” he said; “it has been scientifically proven.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “that is just your perception!”

Ever since this strange exchange, I have been even more intrigued by George, Sr.’s warmth, openness, kindness, patience … all of it. Tonight, sitting with him in the front yard, I asked him: “Who taught you how to love?”

And he told me about Akua, his maternal grandmother, who raised him in old Krachi before the Lake Volta flooding. She loved him very much. She made room in their home for every friend of George, Sr.’s who needed a place to sleep or something to eat. She believed in him; she had dignity, joy, and generosity of heart, and she imparted these things to him. He told me, “Someday, I will build a guesthouse and it will be named in her honor.”

I have forgotten to tell you that one of the most revered members of the Achibra household is George, Sr.’s mother, who is also Akua (that being the name given to women who are born on a Wednesday).

As George, Sr., says, “She gave birth to me at a very tender age” – so she can’t be that much older than him. But her body is wracked with arthritis and the chronic pains of injuries sustained in more than seven trotro accidents. She walks with a walker, sings to herself, and grabs Ben every time he walks by, insisting that he inspect her ear, listen to her cough, etc.

She is gentle-spirited and kind. She gave her apple-cheeked smile to George, Sr., and she spends most of the day lounging topless in the front yard while her great-granddaughters play at her feet – which, if you ask me, is a pretty great way to grow old. And even she has Christmas hair: one of her grandnieces uncoiled her cornrows and fluffed her meager hair into a sweet pageboy. It is romantic and airy around her face; I think she is pleased to be pretty.

Watching George, Sr., and the way that he cares for her and enjoys his mother, I would never guess that she had not raised him. I would never guess that there was a long swath of history in which they were, for all intents and purposes, separated. It reminds me of how, when George, Sr., talks about his father, I don’t hear him express anything other than love, respect, and, very gently, the sadness of loving someone who does not know how to love in return.

All of this is for me the mark of something very beautiful. I feel that at its root, anti-trafficking work is work of reconciliation: reconciling a child with his parents, a woman with her body, a man with his dignity.

To learn that I am supporting the vision of a man who has learned how to reconcile in even the most intimate, personal, and painful relationships of his own life gives me greater confidence that the investment is worth the victim database spreadsheet insanity, as well as the literal sweat and sleeplessness.

It is almost midnight here. I was going to try to tie all this up with some semi-incoherent thoughts on incarnation, the body, lounging topless in the front yard, etc. But I am really sleepy, so I’ll spare you the rambling and let you guess it all out for yourself.

Peace and joy to you! Merry, merry Christmas! We hope you have a wonderful holiday with your families and friends.

Love,

Laura and Ben

The man drops his drawers when asked and there on the outside of his thigh is a huge growth. It was the size of the guy’s head. And it had grown that big in one year. It was soft and jiggly, much like Santa’s belly this time of year.

To borrow a line from a German-speaking surgeon who worked with a friend, well, we had to schwack that thing off.

It was a monster lipoma, a benign tumor of fat cells gone wild. When chuncks of tissue that size are cut off a person I think they should be named. Got any good ideas?

I think that Decenber 26 will be my last day at the hospital. On the 28th Laura and I journey to Accra. We’re going to spend the nights of the 30th and 31st at a hotel on the beach and I’ll catch the morning flight to the US of A on the 1st. Laura, of course, is staying on to pad her resume’s “Saving the World” section.

We got our Ghanaian clothes this week. They look pretty good. The fabric is a large pattern with geometric designs and some big hibiscus flowers, I think. Laura’s dress is a two-piece deal. My shirt is like a polo. They seem very well made but, seriously, how do people wear heavy cotton fabric with inner linings here? My shirt is hot.

But everything in Africa now seems hot. Tonight we borrowed an extra fan for the room, only to have the electricity go out. I am tired of being hot. It’s hard to imagine how Laura feels knowing that she has at least one additional month here. But I’m just HOT. I am insanely jealous of the snowfall in DC.

It’s the beginning of the dry season here and the snakes are coming out. I’ve seen one at night that my host swerved to run over with the car. We’ve seen at least 7 snakebites in the hospital over the past two weeks and their frequency is increasing. To date there has been one fatality. The bites look REALLY painful. One 12 year old came in yesterday showing signs of clotting trouble that kills snake bite victims so I made sure that he got a big dose of vitamin K (it helps the liver make the stuff our blood needs to clot) and a transfusion of whole blood because it will give him some more clotting factors until his liver started to be able to make some more of its own.

In the meantime, Doctor Hilarius and the two Ghanaian medical students are off to Accra. I’m here with Dr. Alberto, the Cuban doc who only sees outpatients. The Cuban OB/GYN has returned to Cuba. On Saturday or Sunday the senior doctor in the district will come to cover for Dr. Hilarius but until then I’m at the top of the medical food chain. I’m praying that nobody requires surgery. I am unable to operate, of course. There would be nothing I could do.

Between Sri Lanka and Ghana I’ve spend a total of 8 weeks so far in a developing country environment. Sooner or later I’d get a gut bug and it happened…on the day I had to run the hospital alone and our anniversary. We had to skip our anticipated Prison Canteen date. But I went to work and made it through. I’m feeling a little better already but still don’t have much of an appetite. I know it’s probably not good infectious disease management, but at the first sign of a gut rumble I started popping Cipro and Flagyl.

Most interesting case of the day yesterday was not the cobra bite victim but instead the last patient of the day, a 30 year old complaining of recurrent ulcers on his hands and a strange feeling on the skin on his arms. The guy was a poor farmer and had a dime-sized ulcer on the middle finger of his left hand. He was also missing the tips of his index and ring fingers on his left hand. The skin was a little thickened and scaly over his elbows and he had several light-colored areas on the skin of his trunk. My medical friends have by now made their diagnosis, I hope: Hansen’s Disease. For the non-medical folks, it’s leprosy. I had not even thought about leprosy as a disease I would ever encounter, but here it was. I was really amazed to be sitting there with a man with such a historic condition. I felt this weird connection to the Bible stories of people being shunned and leper colonies. The good news today is the leprosy is easily treated. It’s harder to overcome the stigma of the disease which persists to this day. But within 72 hours my patient will no longer be contagious and after treatment only about 0.1% of patients will relapse.

Food update: The only food I ate yesterday was part of my anniversary present from Laura: an honest-to-God real Snickers bar. I popped it into the freezer section of the mini-fridge in my office and at it for lunch. I though of eating frozen Snickers bars on the mountain while elk hunting with my grandfather and savored every chunk of the chocolatenuttycaramel goodness. I bet that there is not a gourmet chef in the world who can rival the Snickers bar. I’m also really wishing for a Wendy’s chocolate Frosty and hot, salty fries to dip into the Frosty. Or a medium chocolate-dipped cone from DQ. Maybe my appetite is coming back, after all.

In the past three days I have seen no fewer than three patients wearing the uniform of the Krachi High School for relatively minor physical complaints. They admitted to having seen me dance. They admitted that it was bad dancing.

One even went so far as wondering if my super sweet boogie moves were the source of her nausea and vomiting.

You can’t touch this.

—–

Greetings from Sunyani, the cool and verdant capital of Ghana’s western Bron Ahafo region (over by Cote d’Ivoire). After a quick trip to Kete Krachi to see Ben and meet up with Nic, an Italian businessman-turned-charity-mastermind who set his sights on Touch A Life fundraising, Amanda and I set out for this city, her Ghanaian hometown.

My main tasks were to renew my visa (surprisingly easy!) and meet with George Insiful, fisheries professor at Sunyani’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). George is one of Amanda’s colleagues in her CIDA-funded natural resources work, and I talked with him about TAL’s proposed sustainable aquaculture project, which hopes to combat child labor trafficking and, at the same time, address Lake Volta over-fishing issues.

Here’s the idea: Lake Volta is a very young man-made lake, created in 1964 through the damming of the White, Black and Red Volta rivers. At its inception, the lake was teeming with tilapia and other fish. Over the last 10 years or so, the thriving fishing industry has declined due to over-fishing. Various NGO and media reports suggest that child labor trafficking has increased as fishermen compete for diminishing harvests.

TAL’s hope is to enter into micro-credit partnerships with fishermen who agree to stop trafficking children and stop using child labor. The micro-credit partnership will allow the fishermen to buy stakes in a cage-fishing enterprise, whereby small groups of fishermen will manage very large Lake Volta-located cage fishing hatcheries of 25,000 fingerlings. TAL will assist in streamlining some of the lake-to-market processes and, dreaming big, perhaps one day establish a tilapia export business.

George Insiful (not to be confused with any of many other Georges connected to TAL) was fascinated with the idea of a project addressing both child labor and over-fishing. His teaching/research commitments won’t allow him to participate, but he promised to get in touch with a couple of colleagues to gauge their interest. Just this morning, I got a text message from one of George’s cohorts, an Accra-based professor and sustainable aquaculture specialist, who is interested in meeting up to talk more about the TAL project. I’m hoping to meet with him sometime this week.

What’s crazy about Ghana is how quickly things can move, if people want to move. I get the sense that under-employment allows for a certain degree of flexibility: if people believe in your project and they think there’s a serious possibility that they’ll get paid for participating, they’ll shuffle everything to make it work.

On the personal front, I came to Sunyani and basically lost it – in that I slept for hours upon hours and woke up jittery, slightly feverish and still deeply fatigued. Between the intensity of work, the strain of overland trotro or van travel (usually 9-12 hours at a stretch), and the physical stress of being extremely hot all of the time, I think that when I arrived in Sunyani’s relatively cool clime, my body just gave up.

So after I finished designing the TAL client database in the wee hours of Friday morning, I just stopped working. I slept, read one of Amanda’s Donald Miller books, watched The Interpreter and X-Men, and finished most of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s African travel memoir, The Shadow of the Sun. I went to the market with Amanda and bought my mom some beautiful Ghanaian batik cloth, and on Saturday night, we had dinner (a home-made pizza!) at the home of Amanda’s German friend, Thekla. And then I slept some more.

The sleeping has been more of a feat than you might think. As part of the University’s in-kind contribution to the CIDA-funded project, Amanda lives in KNUST’s dorm, along with 400 Ghanaian university students. Between the courtyard’s non-stop soccer pick-up games, blaring high-life music, and all-night prayer vigils, it’s a lively place.

I’m somewhat dreading tomorrow’s 12-hour trotro trip back to Kete Krachi. One good thing is that I’ve enlisted Amanda’s friend Aaron to travel with me – call me a coward, but I’m done traveling as a lone white woman in a country I don’t know well, and in a region where I don’t speak any of the dialects. We’ll probably start out around 6 a.m. and make it to Lake Volta around 6 or 7 p.m., where I’ll call George, Jr., and he’ll motor across the bay in TAL’s red wooden boat to come get me. Just thinking about it makes me sleepy … and happy at the thought of seeing Ben again.