Well, due to some problems in the field that required “modern” facility (electricity to charge laptop battery, first and foremost), I had to come to Wa, the capital of the Upper West region of Ghana from my survey community (just over an hour’s drive south from Wa on local transport). While at Wa, the best place to recharge the battery is obviously the internet cafe, and I’m making full use of this opportunity by posting this “update”. Well, I’m alive and well and enjoying the “village life” for the past week or so. We (my survey enumerator and I) have a room at a fairly decent house in the village, and the land-lady cooks pretty decent meals with the ingredients that we give her every day. Work is hard, especially counting trees on a hot day, but very enjoyable due to the hospitality of the villagers. Fried or boiled yam to eat in most of the farms where the farmers and busy harvesting maize or rice! I just wanted to mention two strange/funny things that happened today.
1. When I was at the internet cafe checking my email and charging my laptop battery, one man came in holding the base unit of a desktop computer. He came in to use internet with it, which I wouldn’t have imagined until he started arguing with the girl at the front desk because he wasn’t getting served while I was surfing the net with my nice white laptop. He asked if he was being punished because he came with that big thing while people with small laptops were being served well.
Continue reading ‘quick update from the field…’
I don’t get email from my younger sister too often, so when I do, I have a habit of replying instantly. In fact that’s how I treat most of the personal email I receive, which obviously aren’t that many, providing me sufficient incentives to reply to those who do write me on occasions. Anyway, I got an email from my sister and replied just a few minutes ago. As I pressed “send”, a spelling-error dialogue popped up suggesting me to replace the ‘mistakenly’ spelt word “dashain” to its correct spelling “brainwash”. I just couldn’t help laughing out loud in the cafe attracting attention of all other net users. Nobody asked why I was laughing, which was quite a relief, as I don’t think they would have been amused at my sense of humour.
Anyway, now that “dashain” has been mentioned, let me start by wishing all my readers who are dashain-celebrating-type a very happy festive season, starting with dashain and then tihar and chhad for some, and so on.
On this festive season all around, I should also wish all those who are observing the month-long fasting for Ramadan and also those who are not - Eid Mubarak! I am already getting too many end-of-Ramadan party invites to celebrate Eid, so was looking forward to it very much…The only problem is I start my survey and field data collection early next week so I’ll head for the villages later this week, and miss all the parties that I have been invited to 
The price that I am having to pay for not being able to carry out my field work as planned. Hopefully I get to celebrate Christmas properly…of course that too is contingent on me finishing my surveys before December 25th!
Well, I wanted to do a last update before I headed for the field, and I guess this is it. I am really looking forward to going back to those villages (I was there a couple of months ago for meeting and greeting!) and get some things done this time…
Hope you all have a great festive season!!!
PS. For those who would like to (or need to) stay in touch with me during these next couple of months, it’ll have to be via SMS on my Ghana number which works most of the time - unless of course if I am out of coverage area! Like below a mobile phone mast as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts 
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It had been a while since I last wrote an entry (and I mean write proper here with a pen on a paper!) and typed later on. This is one of those entries (at least partly anyway), borne out of situation than from choice - the area that I live in was without power from Saturday night to Tuesday morning. The battery on my laptop was virtually exhausted and the emergency lamp was slowly fading. So, I mused these on a candlelight on Sunday night, with BBC World Service on radio on the background!
Sunday, 23 September 2007, 18:30 GMT (BBC World Service Time)
Real doctor in the house
A dreamnightmare scenario is unfolding at my residence - they are re-opening the maternity home/clinic! Only last week, I wrote about the weird but largely comfortable place that I currently reside in. When I decided to take the place, I thought the maternity home was closed for good. However, over the months I have been here, what I found rather surprising was that most of the peoples who were supposed to know about the closure of the clinic turned out to be completely unaware. It even made me suspicious as to the reason for closure in the first place. Now I am hearing that they are reopening the clinic, and that too all of a sudden and with immediate effect - the watchman has already cleaned up the main check-up room and put in place the necessary equipment. He tells me the clinic will start receiving patients from Tuesday - that’s only two days away! Considering how things usually work here in Ghana, this is extraordinarily efficient!! Once its open, I’ll have to seriously consider using the big gate at the side for coming in and going out from my house. I wouldn’t want to be walking in and out through the corridor full of women waiting to see a doctor, nurse or a midwife.
Continue reading ‘Reality and nightmares…’
I am a huge fan of BBC comedy series “Doctor in the House” and “Doctor at Large”. Used to listen to them (repeats of course) over the internet. I never wanted to be a doctor, ever - if hell exists then hospital is that for me. Never liked the sound, smell, anything to do with hospitals. Anyway, the reason I bring this issue of doctors and hospitals here (actually when I think of it there might be reasons and not just one reason) is that my current residence in Ghana is just behind this clinic, which is closed now (otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the place!). To be more precise it used to be a Maternity Home/Clinic and you can see the services that it provides used to provide from a snapshot of the signboard below. Yup the signboard is still outside, and the walls are painted hospital-yellow, and there are posters encouraging women to “say no to sex”, “use female condom”, and “breast-feed your babies” all over the walls (of the clinic, not my house!). So you can just imagine how I feel as I come home after long-day’s work and walk through the corridor with all these posters on both sides! And the reason I use the clinic entrance to get to my house is that clinic forms the front of the property and the side gate is just too big (built for vehicles) to open and close everyday.
Continue reading ‘doctor in the house…’
I must have mentioned previously that here in Ghana, rationing of water and electricity (load shedding) on most areas are a normal occurrence. Just by good luck, the area of Tamale that I live in doesn’t have scheduled load-shedding nor it has the rationing of tap-water. But this luxury comes at a very heavy price, as I have recently found out - you never know when the electricity supply is cut (and usually the availability of tap-water follows the pattern of electricity supply). Since there is no scheduled load-shedding in the area I live in, when the lights go off, its the “general lights off” as is known here, and it means the whole town is without electricity!
Anyway, coming back to the “heavy price” of this uncertain supply (or more appropriately, the uncertain cut-off) of electricity, I found out what happens to a laptop battery when you have all sorts of power-hungry devices (mostly the USB plug-and-play devices such as external hard drives) are plugged in and the mains power is suddenly cut off - my laptop battery just went dead! It actually happened a couple of weeks ago. I was burning some pictures from my external HD that requires mains power to a CD on my laptop, and suddenly the mains power was off. As soon as the external HD shut off, my computer went dead. Nothing I did to make it come back worked. The power indicator on the battery showed that it was fully charged, but none was getting through to the computer. I thought my laptop HD was gone, which meant a disaster, for I hadn’t backed-up my system (which I do at least once every couple of months normally) since I came to Ghana. I do update the copy of “Documents” on external HD every week or so, so I wasn’t too worried about losing much of my recent work.
Continue reading ‘lights off…lights on…’
copylefT 2008
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