Ghana notes continued

Wednesday

“There has been a change of plan,” Erika told us this morning as we finished up a breakfast of flabby white toast and red jam.

“The chief of the village where we were going to stay, who also owns the hotel where we were going to sleep, is celebrating his fifth year as chief today. He rang me to say he needs all the rooms in his hotel for the celebration. The only other hotel in the village has an outside toilet. So we can not stay there.”

The prospect of a latrine did not bother me so much. This afternoon, in another latrine in another village, I had to move slowly so as not to disturb the swarms of mosquitoes that lurked on the cool damp walls waiting for the heat to pass, and for a bare bottom to arrive. They were as heavy as flies, and longer, their fine syringes heaving up and down, waiting for a skin feast. I tried to pee harder to be out of there quicker.

Erika, from the cocoa co-operative, took us to another village instead. Through selling Fairtrade cocoa and establishing the Divine Chocolate company, half of which is owned by the co-op and the farmers themselves, they have been paid cash dividends and built a school.

Cecilia, a soft-skinned woman with thick plaits and the sort of friendliness which in Senegal I would just wait to turn into demanding cash, showed us around her village. I told her one of my best friends was called Cecilia. She told me that I reminded her of her sister and promptly gave me her sister’s name, Esswe. On a wooden bench near the co-op weighing scales, Cecilia split open a golden yellow cocoa pod and we shared the fruit inside, a slimy translucent white flesh covering the bitter brown cocoa seed. She could not believe I had never seen cocoa before. Neither could I. What a wonderful, wonderful thing.