well, what could be more amazing than squatting in a momentarily abandoned guesthouse with a dozen african drummers and dancers on the coast of ghana? nothing, i tell you. nothing. i am here with them, and i can hear the ocean through my left ear and the whispering graveyard through my right, the constant drums through my feet and all the nights of gospel music echoing from the sketches of churches scattered amongst the fetish forests.
there is no running water at the house, and so i spend a happy portion of the morning lugging buckets up the path from the nearby pump. i would carry them on my head, like a genuine ghanain mama, but then i could only carry one bucket and not two. and there is no electricty either, and so when the sun goes down we sit by the kerosene lantern and eat globs of fufu or banku and we talk about all the difficulties of life in ghana and how terrible it is to see small children selling sunglasses in the winding walls of traffic that fill the streets; or we talk about religion and they preach to me about how everything belongs to god, and then i have to answer their peculiar questions about meditation. they want to know if i am chanelling evil spirits or communicating with the devil, when i am sitting on the porch with my legs crossed and my eyes closed for long periods of time. really, i think they rumor me to be a witch...but they're curious and terrified to admit it..
someone is always sweeping the dancefloor at sunrise, and shortly after that i am on it..stomping like the earth will not turn unless i push it with my feet. by 10:00am the day is too hot- and then, i am sitting in the palm-thatched shade amongs the potentially percussive logs, working on carving a soon-to-be-beautiful djembe. wow. now i have blisters on my hands from chipping away at this musical wood and they match the blisters on my feet from jumping jumping jumping and it is all amazing, my last two weeks here resonating with the tribal lives of this afrikin family.
