The Bonfire

//

 

I think pretty much shortly after that we went to dinner.  It was held outside.  I asked some people for bugspray just in case and they were rude about it.  There was a circle in the middle of all the dinner tables and someone said that we all had to dance and I hoped to god I wasn’t involved.  We sat and talked for a while beforehand, though I largely forget about what.  The dinner was pretty good.  I got a water bottle from the bus and a good amount of rice because it was very well cooked and stuff.

 

After we had dinner for a while, we were allowed to hang out at the tables.  Some kids noticed the stuff in my pocket and wanted me to hand it out.  It was glow sticks.  I hoped they would throw them around and have fun with them, especially when it got dark.  It was dark by now, so I took them out and opened them.  The kids were behind me as I was working on the table and they were basically tackling each other for it.  Maybe I shouldn’t have done it like that.  But I broke the first few for them and then handed them out.  They reached for the ones that I hadn’t handed out yet.  They walked away before I could show them how the connectors worked.  Then I went for the second pack and it was just as bad, but I got a few connectors out this time.  I lost a number of them though.

 

I looked at them a while later and they were just wearing them on their arms and not playing with them at all.  That seemed kinda lame, so I went to one of the kids and took one and waved it around and threw it up in the air and tried to catch it and gave it back to him.  I don’t think they were impressed.  But that’s okay.

This one kid walked around taking them from other kids and then holding them in his hands or under his shirt.  He was a real punk ass.  He collected three or four of them and then I called him over and said, clearly upset, “Give.  Share.”  And he said, “Okay, I will give.”  I watched him to make sure he gave them out, and he did.

 

Fifteen minutes later he had like six in his hand.  I saw them and he saw that I looked.  He put them under his shirt but it was night and they were glowing so it wasn’t hard to see.  I yelled at him again.  This time one of the people from Africa actually went to him and made him give them out.  What a d-bag.  I was really upset with that kid.  Why would he do that?  If he were American I would have thrown him into a pool, or punched him.

 

I had a pretty good conversation with the tour guide.  I asked him about cost of living in Ghana.  He told me that about $10,000 will get you a middle class life mostly because “Ghanaians are magicians” with how they manage their money.  They can live on no money at all and still make it look like they have everything they could ever want.  That seemed pretty respectable.  I asked him how much a car would cost, and he said something like 7,000C ($4500), but that it should only cost like 4000C and that a LOT of money got added on to the price because the corruption and extortion at the ports.

 

The bonfire started and it was HUGE.  The logs were probably like ten feet high and the flames were probably like fifteen feet above that.  I went to go stand near the fire and it was super hot even from like thirty feet away.  Kids kept coming up to me and asking to take my water bottle, but it still had water in it for me to brush my teeth with later, so I had to keep telling them no.  Some tried multiple times.  Some stole water bottles from other people.  Beyond that, people just kept talking to me and I kind of wanted to be alone.  I went to the other side of the fire sat on a log.  I took some pictures and video and sent some to friends on my BlackBerry.  Some kids came over to talk to me, and I wasn’t interested, I just wanted to enjoy the fire.  So after a while I just gave up and walked back into the crowd and disappeared.  I sat at a table with a couple girls until it was time to go.  The smart Ghanaian student girl showed up again.  We talked a bit.  She wanted to be a soldier in the army, and if not that, a nurse or a lawyer.  She said she would go to university.  She seemed very tired and not very interested in being there, and I suggested she go to sleep.  She said it would be over soon and she had to go to school tomorrow so then she would sleep.  She asked me what I was going to give her to remember me by.  I didn’t really have anything except for the guitar picks I had gotten in South Africa.  I gave her the one I was planning to give to Catie, but I forgot to tell her it was from South Africa.  Then we left.

 

It was only like 9:30 by that point.  I wasn’t tired at all.  I went to the bathroom outside the house.  Pius put on some Ghanaian music on the radio and sprayed some insecticide in the air of the place we were sleeping.  Oh, on the way we kept seeing blue lights.  I asked why.  He said some people just feel blue so they use blue lights.  He also said that when you’re getting with someone, it’s harder for people to see their face against blue light than white light, so it helps protect your identity.  I thought that was pretty interesting.

 

I had downloaded some episodes of Radio Times earlier that day knowing I wouldn’t be ready to sleep.  I listened to the one about America in 2050, The Next 100,000,000 people.  It was pretty interesting and I zoned in and out a few times.  The fan was mostly on Andrew.  I slept okay.  He didn’t sleep at all.  So the fan didn’t really make a difference for him.