1 November 2001

Business Name of the Week:
Don't Mind Your Wife Chop Bar

Click the lady with the nice hairdo to see more photos!As they say in Ghana, you are welcome!

Tro-Tro Names of the Week:
No Neon
Magnificat
To be Human is to Err, Trust Me
Clap Nicely for Jesus

This post is devoid of adventure, since last Saturday morning our bus broke down on the road to Kintampo Falls. We waited beside the motorway for three hours while the driver went to see about another vehicle for the trip, but he didn't come back early enough to make it worth our while to continue the journey. If we had, we would have arrived much too late in the afternoon to be able to hike in and out before dark. We slept in the bus or waited outside at the bumper.

A steady stream of people walked by, and some stopped to offer arrangements for our recovery. One man explained that we should let him do this because in Ghana it is peaceful, but in our country people are blowing things up and dying.

We were lucky to find a tro-tro on the other side of the road and went back to Accra. I was disappointed, but since I had come down with a cold, it was just as well.

Auntie Rose believes my cold was caused by drinking too much ice water and by sleeping under a fan. This is the woman who swears by pepe enemas, but I’m not going to experiment with her cures.

By Sunday afternoon, I felt like I had recuperated enough to make a trip to the Accra Zoo. I have mixed feelings about zoos, since it never seems like cages make for content animals, but on the other hand zoos provide havens for endangered species and zoologists.

The Accra Zoo, however, should be demolished or be adopted by an animal welfare group from the fatter nations. It seems to have been built in the sixties, and the grounds, at least, are pleasant. There are winding walkways and little bridges over the mud pits where crocodiles roam. There is a lot of shade and it’s set back from the busy roads, so it’s quiet.

The exhibit cases are cracked, and the glass is taped where there remain pythons and jungle rats. In the monkey cages, scrawny Diana monkeys scuttled nervously from metal shelf to metal shelf, chewing at trash and plastic bags that had blown in to litter the cage bottoms. On concrete slabs with the space of a walk-in closet, emaciated lions sprawled bored with no water, no vegetation. Interestingly, the two huge areas with trees and tall walls where one would expect the lions to be contained are instead filled with duiker, the tiny, deer-like animal that Ghanaians eat regularly in soups and stews. Maybe it makes sense that the animal that could kill villagers is locked in the prison-like cages with rusting bars while the animal you can put on your table gets to munch fresh grass.