Sleeping under the stars next to a mud hut ... hanging out in the shade of a mango tree ... dancing by the light of the full moon in a dusty village square ... chronic water shortages ... searing sunlight ... cloying humidity ... mosquitoes biting your toes to gristle...
So it's been an intense week. Not that we ever thought that volunteering on a guinea worm eradication project would be a cakewalk. But this week's lesson has been drawn from that proverb about being careful what you wish for. Because, of course, what I was wishing for at the start of this week was, y'know, an authentic experience of Ghanaian village life. Which would perhaps (in my imagination) be harder than we were used to, but still bearable over a short period of time. After all, we would be getting a sanitised version of the real thing, with hosts who would cook for us, lodging provided, and no need to go farming in the midday heat.
Now I'm sitting in an aircon Internet cafe in Tamale and I can be more rational about these things. But truth is, by Friday my four days of village life were driving me up the wall. I was feeling hot and bothered and frustrated, and desperate to leave, and trying my best to keep a lid on my emotions for fear of offending my generous hosts. Kate was holding things together a bit better, but was pretty close to the edge too.
It feels unreasonable to complain about such things. After all, we were treated like kings in our time in Dobiso. People who perhaps earn less in a year than the average westerner would earn in a day were looking after us with selfless generosity. To get water in Dobiso involved a one-hour round trip to the lake, and yet people still provided us with a bucket of water - or more - each day for us to wash in. They cooked us three complete meals each day, checking traps, pounding fufu (mashed yam dough, an acquired taste), giving us their houses to sleep in, putting up with our hopeless attempts at their language.
One village chief gave us three bottles of beer which, on local incomes, would have amounted to a truly substantial gift (the whole area was impoverished by an epidemic of guinea worm caused by an infected person returning from a funeral in another town back in 1997; crippled by the disease, people had been unable to work the fields and had missed out on several years of income). All we had to do was wander around fulfilling our few responsibilities and enjoying being looked after: the villagers had to keep the whole thing running.
But it was exhausting and frustrating as well as fascinating and inspiring. One of the main reasons for this is that we found ourselves thrown into the middle of a complex passage of village politics which neither of us knew how to deal with. Our contact in Dobiso was John, the village health coordinator. He was embroiled in a very polite, glacial power-struggle for pre-eminence in town with Dobiso's chief, and we were a major element of his arsenal.
John was an anomaly in Dobiso. Most people in town regarded Dambai - a one-street market town nearly an hour away by car (although there were no cars in Dobiso or any of the neighbouring villages) as a major metropolis to be visited only occasionally, the way Londoners might make a trip to Paris. Dambai had such luxuries as shops, electricity, and piped water, whereas Dobiso didn't even have a proper road connecting it to the outside world, let alone such luxuries as a borehole or even a well.
The regional capital Kete-Krachi seemed impossibly remote from the perspective of Dobiso, and Tamale, the biggest city in the north, might as well have been paved with gold. Few people in Dobiso could dream of saving up the money to manage to even pay for transport to these towns, let alone support themselves once they got there. So John, who had studied in Ghana's 1m-population cultural capital of Kumasi for three years and visited Accra several times - John was seen as being almost impossibly cosmopolitan.
This had an impact on his prestige, and threw him in competition with the less well-travelled chief. John was clearly cultivating his image in the town, and the arrival of a couple of obrunis (white people) from remote corners of the globe provided an opportunity to demonstrate this. Unfortunately for us, this meant being on the receiving end of hospitality that was as much about demonstrating John's status as it was about making us feel comfortable.
Again, it feels inconsiderate to moan about this. I'm quite sure that John was interested in us mainly for his own ends, but it doesn't change the fact that he displayed wonderful generosity. But this carried its own burden of ethical and etiquette dilemmas, of a complexity that would make Jane Austen blanch.
For instance: for the third time today, you are served fufu with meat stew. Meat stew for breakfast is a tough one, even tougher when you get meat stew for lunch and dinner, still tougher when it's 35 in the shade and you're dripping with sweat. But John's made it clear that he'll be sad - for which read offended - if you don't eat up all your meat. This because he's gone to a lot of expense to buy it for you, even though all this meat is as much about showing off his prestige than feeding you with stuff you want. This also because if you don't eat it, it reflects badly on him as a host. (What you actually want is the wonderful sweet mangoes hanging from the trees, but you can't be fed those because they're cheap and therefore not suitable for feeding to Honoured Guests.)
Then again, the women who've actually spent their time making all this food are eating your leftovers, and frankly deserve what they want much better than John does. If you leave the meat, they get it. But then again, if you don't eat the meat John will take it out on the same women and get them to go to even greater lengths to match your exacting diet. And even if you eat all of it, he'll be disappointed if you don't make it through your head-sized swell of fufu.
You can imagine the dilemmas. Add to this the absence of any privacy - when we went to bed outside (it was far too hot to sleep inside) the ceremony attracted an audience who formed a semicircle around us as if they were watching a TV set - and you can imagine there were elements of the week that stretched us a bit.
But as I say, how can we complain about these things? The people who worked all day keeping us in board and lodging, who did that hour-long round trip to get us water to wash in, who smashed giant pestles into giant mortars all day to make our fufu and were up with the dawn to make our breakfast - none of them were complaining about their lot. When I very gently lost it on Friday, sitting in my chair in the town square brooding over our misfortunes, we couldn't but reflect that the conditions that had driven us around the bend in less than a week were the stuff of daily life for people in Dobiso. And they still managed to raise a smile when John brought out his stereo and filled it with batteries to give some music in the evenings, although maybe that was just them laughing at my attempts to dance.
