An obruni turns to an obibini in the men’s room and says, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…”

No, wait! Wrong joke.

Okay. So the Kumasi airport was shut down with no warning on Saturday and after six days officials cannot say when it will reopen. The sound bytes in the news stories these past six day are a bit amusing to those of us not trying to get out of town. Not so funny to people traveling, trying to do business between Accra and Kumasi or those in the tourism industry. Not to mention the airlines.

Welcome to Kumasi. Only you can’t actually fly into Kumasi these days. Have a nice day!

Asuma Banda, the Chief Executive Officer of Antrak Air is particualry unhappy, having lost an estimated $300,000 since the closure. According to a news article, Banda blames the Ghana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA.) The official word from GCAA include lame assertions that they’ve closed the airport for our safety and that the “gaping potholes” were caused by rain. Nothing about when the airport will open. No word about what airport officials intend to do to prevent closures like this, this one being the third closure in the past year.

Granted, this is Africa so I shouldn’t be surprised. But seriously!

The opening story on September 29 is a gem:

Kumasi Airport Closed
The Kumasi Airport has been shut down temporarily for repair works to be undertaken on the runway.
Airport officials have confirmed to XYZ News that gaping potholes on the runway will be sealed during the repair works.
It is unclear how long the temporary closure will take.

In subsequent stories, routine checks were mentioned and a picture of the one of the gaping holes was released. Bob and I shook our heads. If these checks were being done on a daily basis (or at least weekly) it’s hard to imagine how a  hole like this could have developed. And if inspections weren’t occurring at least weekly, how can they call them routine?

Meanwhile, our house mates are planning trips abroad. Even if the airport is open in a couple of weeks, they are wondering if it might be prudent to take the six-hour bus trip than risk the plane flipping over after catching its wheels in a pothole.

In the absence of hard data, it’s easy to let our imaginations run away. But hard data is not to be had. We don’t know how big the holes are, for example. Although I gather the holes were not insignificant. When the Minister of Transport, Collins Dauda, looked at the damage he was shocked, saying “it is not a small hole, it is very deep and wide and I think this demands a lot of work at the place to fix the problem.”

Nor do we know how much weight the runways can handle. Or when they’ll let us know more…

Oh wait! This just in:

Kumasi Airport re-opens at 2PM today

RadioXYZonline.com can confirm that the contractor working on the runway at the Kumasi Airport has completed work on the potholes that caused the airport to be closed down temporarily.

XYZ News’ Ashanti Regional Correspondent, Isaac Justice Bediako, reports that the construction firm has completed work on the runway and handed over the airport to the management.

The airport is expected to be opened at 2:00PM this afternoon to commence operations.

This will come as a welcome news for Airlines plying that route as the closure affected their operations.

The Minister for Transport had earlier indicated that the airport will be opened last Monday but the date had to be postponed as the repair works were more than expected.

Industry players have asked the Ghana Civil Aviation Authority and the Airport authorities to run regular checks on the runways to prevent such future closures.

They have also called for a restriction on the sizes of planes that ply the airport in order to ensure that runway does not develop potholes in the future.

Well, okay then. I certainly do hope regular runway checks and weight restrictions are implemented. You know, for our safety.

Oh, and about that joke. Click on “continue reading” below if you must. : )

A young man named Jack, hopelessly in love with his girlfriend Wendy, decided to have her name tattooed on his love muscle. For obvious reasons, the tattoo was done while his member was erect, therefore most of the time all you could see were the letters W and Y. Shortly after the couple was married and were honeymooning in Jamaica, Jack found himself standing in a bathroom next to a Jamaican man. Jack accidentally looked down at the guy and could not help but notice that he ALSO had the letters W and Y tattooed.

Unable to contain himself, Jack says, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice your tattoo which matches mine. What a coincidence! Do you also have a girlfriend named Wendy?”

“No, mon,” the Jamaican replies, laughing, “my tattoo says: Welcome To Jamaica Have a Nice Day”

Also, here is the text of the most comprehensive story to date from yesterday.

Asuma Banda Disputes GCAA’s Claims

Asuma Banda, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Antrak Air, has disputed claims by the Ghana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) that the Kumasi Airport runway was damaged by recent downpour.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, he disclosed that the runway got damaged as a result of the landing of heavy aircraft and dared GCAA to challenge him if they think his assertions were untrue.

He explained that “a number of reasons have been given for the deterioration of the Kumasi runway. But all airlines including the GCAA and the Ghana Airports Company Limited (GACL) are aware the primary reason is caused by heavier aircraft.”

He added that “landing heavy jets in Kumasi is like landing the A380 in Accra.”

He pledged to hold a demonstration if management of the GCAA does not take steps to prevent the damage of the Takoradi Airport runway in the Western region.

The maximum landing weight of the Saab 340A that CiTylink operated to Kumasi from 2003 to 2011 was 12925kg.

During the same period, Antrak operated the ATR 42-300 that has a maximum landing weight of 18300kg.

The ATR 72-500 that Antrak and Fly540 are currently operating has a maximum landing weight of 21850kg.

However,the BAe 146-300 has a maximum landing weight of 35153kg and also lands at higher speed than the turboprops.

Asuma Banda explained that the Kumasi Airport had been closed on three occasions for repair on the runway since September 2011.

Antrak, which is currently flying passengers to Sunyani in the Brong-Ahafo region before transporting them by bus to Kumasi, has lost about $300,000 since the closure the Kumasi Airport.

He said if GCAA dared him he would employ independent experts to access the situation, stressing that he would claim damages if experts confirm that the runway was damaged by heavy jets.

He expressed regret that the GCAA declined to attend the press conference, stressing that it knew it lied to the public.

All airlines operating in the country should have their representatives on the board of GCAA to ensure that the interests of all stakeholders are taken into account, Asuma Banda indicated.

“What message are you therefore sending to the public,” he quizzed.

He disclosed that though Alhaji Collins Dauda, the sector minister, was in the process of accessing the extent of damage, he was not a technocrat.

He called on government to employ technical persons to assist him in ascertaining the facts.

The Deputy Director of Ghana Airports Company Limited, John Q Amedior, said the government had released an amount of GH¢10 million for the rehabilitation works.

Mr. Amedior noted that his outfit had adopted measures to mitigate the repercussions

He was unsure when the Kumasi airport would be reopened for business but stated that the company was working around the clock to reopen the airport.

Sometimes reality hits you in the face whether you’re ready for it or not.

I didn’t take a picture and that’s probably a good thing. I’ll cut to the chase and then flesh out the detail. People eat animals. Sometimes those animals might be what we would consider to be pets.

Here’s what happened. I was walking to the Chinese store for tofu, coming up on the house where the rust-colored dogs hang out, when I noticed two men doing something in the grass between the ditch and the compound wall. One of the men was picking up an animal. He held both front feet in his left hand and the hind feet in his right. The second man was holding a big woven plastic bag just like the one we bought a load of charcoal in.

I immediately identified the animal as a dog and because it was the same color as the dogs who habitually sleep outside that same wall, a scenario developed in my brain. A cherished pet had been struck by a car and was being rescued. Or it was dead and the body was being removed by city employees to wherever road kill dogs go.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the men look my way so I turned and getting a better look, there seemed to be some life in the unfortunate animal. Maybe there was hope for the dog after all. My face reflected my internal narrative with a mixture of sorrow and hope. As I met his gaze, the man swung the dog into the bag and reached down for something else.

I think my look of concern made him smile. Picking up a second dog, this one a black one, he asked in English in a slightly teasing voice, “You like this?”  He held up the dog and its head swung back to reveal a gaping gash where the throat once was. Obviously, the dog’s throat had been cut. Cut the way I’ve seen deer hunters bleed out an animal before butchering. Probably hacked with a machete or “chopped” as they say here.

Confused, I answered “No,” and kept walking, stepping aside to miss a small puddle of drying blood. It was unclear whether he was asking if I liked dogs in general or as pets or did I like dog meat. It was pretty clear these two dogs were headed to someone’s kitchen and it was best that I continue on my way.

A couple of weeks ago our housemate, Jeremy, told me he saw our next door neighbors handling a dead cat in the same way one handles a piece of meat. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dead pet?” I had asked. “No” Jeremy shook his head, “They were treating it like food.” The next week both Bob and Jeremy saw them handling a chicken in the same manner.

To be fair, I’ve often joked that I’d eat roadkill if I were hungry enough and feel better about it than eating factory-farmed meat. I’ve never been squeamish about meat. The neighbors raise chickens for food and the goats in our yard are being raised for breeding with the intention of eating the kids. After we leave Kumasi, Jeremy intends to sell his Nigerian Dwarf goats, Go-At, Aponche and Nwansane, for meat.

My attitude had always been: animal protein is animal protein, no matter how you slice it and I’ve chosen not to partake.

Our vegan diet has taken a hit since moving to Africa. We can’t get Veganaise so we use the mayonnaise made with eggs on sandwiches and in slaw. We eat a lot of beans to make up for the absence of processed garden burgers, soy chick’n nuggets and home made tempeh, and seitan.

Fortunately beans are abundant, soy milk readily available and fresh tofu is delivered daily to the Chinese shop just a few blocks up the street. Peanuts, soy protein nuggets and nutritional yeast (brought in suitcases by visitors to Kumasi) round out the vegan menu. Bean fritters, Kentucky fried tofu, chili, falafel, hummus and fried soy protein figure heavily in our menu.

We all voted against the local margarine “Blue Band” which refused to melt and so I’ve begun buying real butter. Tonight’s meal for example, the Kentucky Fried Tofu meal, will depend heavily on butter for the gravy, mashed potatoes, candied carrots and sauteed mushrooms.

The guys supplement their diet with eggs, tuna and cheese. When we go out to eat, they sometimes order chicken or tilapia. The addition of tuna to the Casa Kumasi pantry created a dilemma for me. I didn’t feel right about buying fish even if I didn’t intend on eating it myself. But it was my job to stock the house and this had become an item to be stocked. In the end, I agreed to add tuna to the list of things I buy and pack home from the store.

Last Saturday Bob and I discovered a new shop in the neighborhood that stocks good cheese, delicious beans, bread, spices, dried fruit and our favorite mayonnaise. We had heard about this unmarked shop on the other side of Melcom Road and Andreas, a German ex-pat who has been living in our neighborhood for over a year knew where it was. He generously invited us to join him while he ran his shopping errands and we happily hopped in.

Andreas’ errands took us out past the abattoir for a case of beer. “Here is the slaughter house,” he said, “I’ve been inside this. It is horrible.” I asked him what was so horrible and he replied, “The attitude. They slaughter animals and how they treat it.” Two stops later we were back at Atinga Junction. “I know you don’t eat meat, but this butcher is very good.” Andreas said, pulling into a tiny shop for a package of ground beef.

We returned home with 101 cedis ($50) worth of food, including three packages of cheese. So now grilled cheese sandwiches are the latest culinary craze around here. I tasted the Swiss and one of the cheddars and was reminded how much I once loved cheese. I have yet to eat a grilled cheese sandwich but I have to admit that today Bob’s sandwiches smelled mighty inviting, even after the trauma of seeing what I saw a couple of hours earlier.

I realize there’s a lot of wiggle room between grilled cheese and dog meat. But my nonchalant attitude towards meat has been shaken by the haunting image of a black dog with a hacked throat. When I arrived home, the goats gathered around like pets and I felt a pang of sorrow knowing that they may one day end up on someone’s dinner plate.

All of this comes down to one realization – we all have to make our own decisions about what’s right for us. Some of us eat fish but not meat. Meat but not beef. Beef but only grass-fed beef. Eggs in mayonnaise but not fried in a pan. Butter but not cheese. Cheese but not a whole sandwich of melted cheese, bread grilled in butter (horrors!)

Only I can decide where to draw the line.

Yesterday Bob, Jeremy and  I explored the territory behind our neighborhood in what is left of the Kumasi Forest Preserve. The area is divided by a concrete ditch flowing with dirty water. The ditch is at least 30 feet across and probably 15 to 20 feet deep. The sides are steep concrete inlaid with large rocks.

Both sides of the ditch are lined with piles of glass bottles, dump truck loads from the nearby Guinness bottling plant. As well as corn patches, banana groves, cocoa trees, cassava, market gardens, foraging hump-backed cattle, rice fields and subsistence farmers living in shacks with their families.

We walked for an hour, due east from our neighborhood, turning north to walk along the ditch, then east across the ditch over a concrete walk way, then south to another concrete ditch crossing and north again back to our neighborhood. Along the way we encountered and chatted with people we met. Bob spoke with a man gleaning corn from a harvested stand of corn. He told Bob he was hungry. We stopped to exchange pleasantries with a man shoveling smoking charcoal while his wife and baby entertained themselves on the ground nearby.

As we approached the wide highway traffic bridge to the north, we noticed small shacks on either side of the ditch and what appeared to be a community living underneath the wide bridge. Surely, these folks were squatters, the poorest of the poor. Yet all greeted us with polite smiles and took time to converse with us.

On the other side of the ditch, we couldn’t help but notice with a mix of horror and fascination, the piles of human excrement clinging to the top few feet of the steep ditch wall. This is real poverty, when you have to hang your ass off a ledge to relieve yourself. And yet, what amazingly strong leg muscles these people must have! Surely, there must have mishaps. The image of such an accident was sobering. Tumbling down fifteen or twenty feet of shit encrusted rock into the nasty water below would be a terrible start to any day. We tore our eyes and imaginations from this subject and pressed on.

We had an interesting conversation with Prince, a Nigerian in a colorful suit who was overseeing the bagging of glass for shipment to the coast and ultimately by barge for processing. He was tall and sure of himself, spoke frankly about his reasons for doing business here rather than Nigeria and had tribal scars on his face, a short horizontal scar on the top of each cheek.

We, or rather Bob spoke with a market garden farmer working with his son. He was growing cabbage, peppers and eggplant, working with his son while his wife and smaller children did chores around their small wooden shed of a home. In another conversation with a man named Peter, Bob got the lowdown on a fairly large rice operation. We learned that Peter harvests his labor intensive crop three months after transplanting seedlings, then threshes it and takes it to market to sell to the rice polishers.

Back on the dirt roads in our neighborhood, we walked the street that parallels Dr. J. G. Wood to the east for the first time. Outside the home behind our kitchen window, the one with the angels on it, we met an older man. He invited us to come visit him in his home. “We see your house from our kitchen window,” Bob said, pointing up at our house, “Does your house have angels on it?” The man said it did. His name is Samuel, he is a doctor with a practice near the airport and offered to make a house call any time one of us fell ill.

At home, we shared our stories with housemates Justin and Joanne. Joanne remembered something Mother Teresa had said regarding poverty in the United States. So, I looked it up. “Mother felt the need to serve the poorest of the poor in this rich country,” said Sister Dorothy, “because she thought poverty in this country was quite different from poverty in India.” The worst poverty in the United States, she explained, is “loneliness, unwantedness, not being loved.”

The quote rings true based on what we had seen that morning. Although the people we met during our morning walk were mostly dirt poor, they seemed content and connected to one another with enough social energy to extend warm welcomes and take the time to share a little about themselves. It is easy to contrast this observation with the isolation we have experienced in the comfortable and affluent United States. Perhaps the knowledge that you have everything you want and need makes it easy to build a wall. Surely, air conditioning helps keep people sectioned off behind the walls of their choosing. All the comforts of home serve to keep one at home. Without those comforts, people tend to socialize more.

I like to think one can have it both ways, have their basic needs met without sacrificing community. Back in Moncure, this is exactly what our neighbors are trying to achieve – a happy balance between self-sufficiency and inter-dependence. Kudos to our good friends back home. We look forward to resuming our well-balanced life at the bend next year.

So many questions and a few answers!

Who put the ho in Ahodwo? – No Idea
Why do I hear chain saws at night?
How come the Muslims broadcast their prayers at random times of the day and night?
Answer from Todd Miller in Cairo:
Broadcasting is the call to prayer, sermons are usually only broadcast at the Friday noon prayer (at least in Cairo). It seems random, but it most assuredly is not; God ordains it all.  Alhamdilullah.  (or as the Ewe say, Mawu E Lolo). There are five prayers (Salah) a day:

• one before dawn (Fajr)
• one after dusk (Isha)
• and three in between:
• noon (Zuhur)
• mid-afternoon (Asr)
• sunset (Maghrib)

Who are the rich folk across the street with their servants and cars?
Are our neighbors really living in that shanty ruin next door?
What do they eat?
Where can I get sesame oil?
How many gallons of reserve water does our roof tank hold? – About 250
How many bubbles do I need to see float to the top of our 5-gallon drinking water jub before my glass is full? – Three
Why does the drinking water we bought last week taste salty? – Because it came from Accra where they desalinate salt water
Why don’t our shower tubs have anything to hang a shower curtain on?
What will I use to clean up the puddle around the tub?
Why does our house echo like a dungeon?  – It’s made of concrete
How fast will this coming year pass? – In the blink of an eye…

As an addendum, here’s an example of the Muslim prayer schedule which I found online here: