Learning to Live

Well, after over a month of battling the ants and multiple rounds of pest guys coming to the house, they finally brought the right magic dust to obliterate the colonies…we are ant free!! However, whilst we were still in the throes of our ant war, one of our neighbors texted me a picture of a SCORPION in her kitchen. After that, I prayed, “Thank you Lord for the ants. Really, they are quite lovely. Please feel free to give me more ants. Please…just don’t give me scorpions.”

Other household things are looking up too. I borrowed a screwdriver from the scorpion neighbor and removed all the doors to all the little cabinets on the wall. No more 24 locks and keys to drive me crazy! And our character of a shower is getting a talking to as well. The plumbers put in an order for a real live regular shower head like the other showers have!

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. Then we noticed a patch of mold growing ever larger on the kitchen ceiling, directly below the master bathroom. The carpenters cut a huge hole in the ceiling, the plumbers inspected, and literally as I sit down to type this, they came and told me that the plan is to tear out the tile in the master bathroom to address a leak that is causing the mold. Meanwhile, Don and I have been showering in the guest bedroom shower in order to not exacerbate the leak situation. Just this morning, as I was showering in that one, the drain apparently clogged and, you guessed it, water just flowed out of the shower all over the bathroom floor (This shower is a stand alone shower, not tub style). Now I know why there are 5 bathrooms in this house. It’s so you have a backup bathroom to your backup bathroom to your backup bathroom. Stay tuned to see if we manage to flood all 5 over the next 2 years. Seeing as how we’ve flooded 2 in 2 months, my money is on YES WE CAN!

Housing situations aside, the transition to Africa has been challenging. I feel like I am learning a deluge of new things and battling a plethora of new problems every day. For the first 6 weeks here we did not have a car, so I had to Uber everywhere, even to do grocery shopping. One day I stood outside the compound for several long minutes, but my wifi never could connect well enough to actually call an Uber. What to do now? Sighing, I walked back into the compound. Luckily, a neighbor had said we could borrow their driver/car if we needed to while they were at work. “Seidu, could you please give me a ride to the grocery store?” Everyone on the compound loves the kind and gentle Seidu, who has 6 children himself. Whenever a car enters the compound, Seidu jumps up to protect all our kids who are running, biking, and scootering all over the place. He had to rescue the mom instead of the kids that day!

Without a car, the kids would get antsy in the compound, so I tried to take them out whenever I could. There is a place called the American Embassy Association within walking distance from our house where social events like taco Tuesday, kids movie night, and trivia night are held. The walk there is always…interesting. The Africans at their roadside stands watching me with my 4 little obronis, following me in a line like ducklings. During one stretch, you must walk single file, scrunched between a fence on one side and a lane of very busy traffic whizzing by on the other. Cars, motorcycles, and the most dangerous beast of them all…the tro tro. These are the Ghanaian version of public buses, and they take the form of large vans that must be at least 20 years old, held together with spare parts, duct tape, prayers, and sometimes even the occupants inside, who seem to be holding the side doors on/shut in some cases. These contraptions on wheels come barreling down the roads at the highest speed their rickety frames will allow, and you had best make sure you are out of their way at all times! Doing that walk during the day is slightly nerve-wracking, but doable. Doing it at night is a different story. Street lights are scant and criminal activity picks up in the night hours. (Just a couple weeks ago in that exact area, a few men cut the electric wire on top of the wall in the middle of the night and stole items from a residence when the family was out of town).

But the kids and I were desperate to get out! So I walked all of us to the American Embassy Association one evening, worrying about how to get back the whole time we were there. Don was stuck at work, so I was alone with the kids. Night comes quickly here, even in summer, as sunset is at 6:30 year round. I knew I could call an Uber…but could I? What if my signal didn’t work like that time I tried to go to the grocery store? That and my phone battery was almost dead. Make the kids shove down their tacos in 5 minutes and try to hustle them back before dark? Beg another American family that I had just met for a ride back? We did manage to get an Uber and it all worked out fine. But there is a constant mental strain that really wears you down. How do I do this? What’s the best decision? What if I can’t keep my kids safe?

I’ve been grocery shopping a billion times now and still don’t feel like I have that down either. You can almost guarantee that you won’t be able to find everything you need at 1 store. As I’m typing this, I’ve been grocery shopping the last 3 days in a row, at 3 different stores, and still haven’t been able to get everything on my list. When I had to Uber, I couldn’t drag my bags full of groceries in and out of Ubers between stores, so I had to just Uber to the store I thought had MOST of what I needed and deal with making meals with whatever I could find that day. The other day, the store I went to was out of the brand of coffee I’d been buying, so I bought basically the only other brand that was there at the time. This new brand of coffee was called “Wild Ghana Coffee.” Now, it’s coffee. I didn’t think I had to check the ingredient list for coffee. Welp, after brewing a pot, Don and I quickly realized, YOU DO. This coffee had ingredients like nutmeg, tiger nut, and Ashanti pepper in it! Let’s just say, we’ve discovered that we don’t like our coffee spicy.

There’s a host of other grocery shopping situations that require a new kind of brain power here, like ordering all your meat and cheeses from the counter using kilograms. For awhile there, I didn’t know if I was the only person ordering cheese by saying “THIS much please” while holding my index finger and thumb a certain amount apart. I was oddly comforted when I noticed other patrons doing the same, and realized that no, there was not a fancier/more right way to order cheese! Then there’s figuring out the VAT paperwork. Tax here is high, around 20%, and as diplomats we are able to get reimbursed for that cost…if we are willing to jump through all the hoops. Each store has a different office area/desk that I have to take my receipt to after purchasing my spicy coffee and “this much” cheese where they fill out a form for me and attach it to my receipt. I then have to take THAT form to the embassy to have another form filled out to get reimbursed for my tax. And finally, frequently, when I exit a store with my cart full of groceries for a family of 6, the locals jump up to help me push the cart and load the car (or even the Uber) with the groceries, expecting a small tip for their efforts, of course. I wonder if they know that in America, I NEVER have help loading groceries in my car, and that I AM fully capable of doing so? Sometimes I feel like a toddler, just wanting to scream “I do it myself!!!” Anyway, that’s grocery shopping. Exhausted yet?

Speaking of grocery shopping, I finally started driving on my own here, and let me tell you, that’s another source of mental strain/anxiety! A couple weeks ago I drove to the grocery store and to the kids’ school (about a 20 minute drive away) for the first time. Was super proud of myself for not dying and for not killing any of the motorcyclists or street hawkers. But of course, the car was almost out of gas, and I did NOT want to run the risk of running out of gas in the middle of Accra, so I committed to the adventure of getting gas for the first time. After patting myself on the back for finding a gas station AND knowing what side of our new car the gas tank was on, I purposefully pulled up next to a pump with no one near it. I didn’t want anyone watching me fumble through my first time putting gas in this particular car in a new country. But the Ghanaians quickly waved me over to a pump with people standing by it, and I realized that Ghana is like Oregon…other people pump your gas for you. Fine, maybe its better that way anyway. Until the Ghanaian attendant asked me how much gas to put in it. And the gas is measured in liters, not gallons. And the price is in cedis, not dollars. I just kinda stared blankly at him while I tried to do conversion rates in my head. How many liters are even in a gallon anyway? How many gallons does this car even hold? Do I have to pay cash? If so, do I have enough cash for whatever number of liters/gallons I randomly pull out of my ass to tell him to put in it? After fumbling through an awkward conversation with the attendant (some speak English better than others and sometimes we can’t understand each other’s accents) where I was basically trying to tell him “I have no idea, YOU tell ME how much gas to put in this thing”, he finally said “should I just fill it up?” Kicking myself for not just jumping right to that in the beginning, I said “Yes! Yes, just fill it up.” Guess I don’t care how much it costs anyway, as gas is kinda essential. (860 cedis is what it cost by the way, about the equivalent of $86. Ouch).

For those first few weeks, I just felt mentally and emotionally exhausted by the end of the day. I’ve heard other new families say the same. Taking a shower, getting groceries, getting back home from somewhere, putting gas in the car…things that used to be simple and require little thought in the States, now require a whole critical thinking process along with the anxiety that things won’t work out the way you need them to at that moment. I will say, 2 months into our adventures here, it does get a little easier every day. Next time, I’ll already know not to get that kind of coffee and how to get gas into the car. It takes a LOT of trial and error, but we’re getting there. We’re still in that rocky transition phase, which I keep having to remind myself. Sometimes I think “We’ve been here for 2 months, why don’t I feel settled or comfortable yet??” But a few weeks is nowhere near enough time when the countries you are moving between are so vastly different. Also, we still do not have the majority of our stuff from the States, only about 800 lbs worth of stuff that was flown here about a month after we arrived. Hard to feel settled when you’re just living on the bare essentials!

There are SO many positives too (which I will post about soon), and many more funny stories to come. The kids started school a couple weeks ago, and I am using some of my new quiet time to delve deeper into my prayer life. Like I’ve written about before, all struggles seem small in the light of our faith. These quiet moments have helped me recover from the barrage of new sights, sounds, people, and things and re-center on what is most important. Leading our family and others to Christ and continuing to find and follow His purpose for my life.

Thank you for your prayers for our family and “Ma nya da pa” (“have a good day” in Twi). Little phrase my kids taught me that they picked up at school!