Apateshi at 8am

This past weekend, I went to the village of Dzodze, the town where my drum master grew up. We went to record some traditional music and in the meantime, I learned so much about village living and how they make it work. Its just so amazing how the standards for living can be so different, but their standard for living well is just the same. You don’t need a running toilet in order to be happy.

So in this picture, you can see some of the houses that are made out of concrete. And in the forefront here is the grave of my drum master’s grandfather. Under normal circumstances, staying right in the middle of a graveyard would be ridiculously creepy, but it actually felt really neutral. Borderline comforting to have the ancestors so close. Haha. But yea, their graveyards are completely intermingled with the housing and community facilities.

Among the notable ‘community facilities’ would be the bathroom situation. For as taboo as it is in America, I feel like I talk about bathroom issues constantly. But it’s just that bathroom issues in Ghana are so goddamned hysterical! I mean the bathroom is constantly and issue, so I guess you have to make it hysterical. So you pee in a concrete room/stall that stands just outside the house. The floor of the room has a small hole that works for drainage. The thing that I found the most surprising was that I found myself taking a bucket shower in the same concrete room/stall that I had peed in the night before… Not so sanitary…and yet! If it works for them its as good as gold for me. The craziest bathroom issue in Dzodze was the ‘other bathroom’. The house of dump. The shack of shit! If you will. So it is a little bamboo house that looks similar to the one in the picture above that is built around a large pit dug in the ground. Bamboo shoots are laid over the pit in order for you to balance your self. Interesting….

The food we ate here was incredible! Shockingly, it was some of the first food I’ve eaten in Ghana that didn’t make me sick. The meals are all basic. Rice balls that expand to fill your stomach, fresh tilapia, fried fish. You can always measure hospitality by the presentation of meals and I was really touched by how well they took care of us. You figure that these people have so little by Western standards of living, and yet, their generosity is so incredibly sincere. I have so much to learn.

So Saturday we got to hang out with the priestess of the local shrine and danced agbaja for hours. Here is a picture of the priestess in all her diva glory. This is just one of many traditional drum rhythms that include not only the various drum parts, but a story and dance. When white people do agbaja, it sort of looks like a hilarious chicken dance. Haha. The priestess was a completely magnetic woman. Every time she would get up to dance, the other woman would kneel to their knees and raise their hands to her. With her were women that were in spiritual training. They are the ladies wearing white cloth and white powder on their skin. After an hour of listening to this intense drumming, you start to feel a little bit possessed. Especially after a few shots of apateshi, the local grain alcohol, which you certainly can’t refuse when offered!

After the dancing and drumming, we went to greet the village chief and pay our respects. It’s all formalities, really. But it seems natural that if you are a visitor, you should let the village’s caretaker know that you’ve come and thank him for having you. So next time I have visitors in New York, we’ll go to town hall and pay Bloomberg some respects. Haha!

One of the funniest things I saw in Dzodze was this kid wearing an Osama Bin Laden shirt. How bizarre is that? I can’t even fathom the journey that shirt must have taken to even get to this tiny village in the middle of Africa and into this boy’s hands. We all started taking pictures of him, and I don’t think that he had any idea why. One of the villagers saw us laughing about this shirt and started commenting “yes, yes, Bin Laden”. But it was all in jokes. In retrospect, it’s really weird that we would be laughing about something that would cause hysterical protest in the US. We should have asked the kid to trade him for this shirt!