The doves are cooing all around me! what more lovely symbol of Valentine's Day can there be?
It is very breezy and cool this morning.. i am sitting out under the mango trees having just finished my breakfast of omlette, toast and nescafe coffee... i added my own mango as well!!
I am feeling a bit sluggish because last night my cold had reached a bit of a crescendo... it is hard to dramatize a cold, i mean, get over it right? But that awful feeling of your head full of cotton batting and that there is this mean Genie in your throat tickling you with a feather .... and you have left the cough mixture and tylanol you had brought all the way from Canada back in Ho ....
and you are far from home ....trust me.. you are feeling pretty miserable!!
But with the light of day and the front desk waking you up at the crack of dawn to come and eat your breakfast everything rights itself again!!
Yesterday Dela and i checked out the bus situation to Ho... it leaves at this seeming random spot by the road at 5 am in the morning ... so we will need to be there around 4am !!! Wow! worse than an airplane... this will not be a greyhound bus but something in between...
Then we set off to investigate the Bead Market... We got lost a bit but slowly we were getting orientated ... Amazingly enough the whole market is on a grid with main lanes running parallel to the big roads and then tiny alleys running perpendicular to the main lanes.... so if you kept straight either way you would end up eventually coming out onto a main road....
We arrived at the Bead area only to find that there were not many more vendors than yesterday ... My 'friend' Abraham was there to greet me ...
It was nice in that even though he had a lot of beautiful beads all the pressure to buy was gone ...
I had already managed to purchase a beautiful assortment of the most exciting beads ... It was an assortment that would be a very good start to my small online business.
Also of course was the restriction of weight ... i was right on the cusp and so this curbed a lot of enthusiasm.
Nevertheless i sat in Abraham's small Ali Baba's cave and drank in all he could tell me about the beads... He obviously loves the beads and knows a lot about them....
I had met Abraham at the other market... i had bought some strands of really nice brass beads and in exchange he let me choose a brass symbol ... i chose ' love and relationships' ... it seems fitting to wear it today on Valentine's Day in celebration of young love!!!
Abraham is a very good salesman with no oiliness or pressure ... He told me he would like to see me come back for beads again and again...
And that is what it felt like ... that he was establishing a business relationship...
He brought out some strands of small beads that i knew were the ones that are broken up and restrung with filler, cheaper beads ... i don't know i thought that was a good move .... :)
Finally i had a small pile of interesting beads ... we negotiated, i sitting on my small bench and him sitting easily on his heels...
i reflected how far i had come... there i was negotiating calmly with a good certainty of what the beads were worth ... feeling quite at home.
... a far cry from that red faced person whose heart pounded and who was so clumsy and humiliated by the whole ordeal!!!
I went off feeling like i had passed an exam or something...
In one way Kumasi was extremely disappointing bead-wise... Abraham's stall turned out to be the only one that was interesting...
Later Dela left me on my own to wander around... and i crisscrossed that market ... wandering for hours ... and didn't find any other beads...
I was not disappointed however, in that, it meant that if there were future Bead Hunts, i now knew the area to concentrate on...
I still had the Accra markets to check out, of course ...
I feel my trip to Kumasi has been good for reasons that i had not expected. I found out that i can be sick and feeling sorry for myself far, far away from home But still be allright!! I found out that i can find my way around and look after myself ...
And that i had a much more in depth and real understanding of Ghana because of this .....
As much as i have felt like people treat me as an 'Idea' (rich, white person) rather than a person in her own right so have i fallen into this same trap...
Yesterday afternoon, when i left Dela and wandered I 'went into' myself and tried to be a part of what was going on... instead of seeing people with all sorts of impossible things on their heads ... i realized that young girls earn their living transporting goods from point a to point b using their big silver trays they can balance so expertly on their heads... The weight creates permanent wrinkles in their young foreheads so they look worried and anxious but you can see a patience and resilience that i now recognize.
All around me were people living a life as complete with troubles, accomplishments, excitements, expectations as mine!
I think my honeymoon with Ghana is over and the real work on the relationship must now start ....
and i made a start when i walked into the neighbourhood near my hotel and bought some mangos and a pineapple a woman running a small stand just sitting on the side of the road... she treated me like a person buying mangos and a pineapple and i had the right change....
