Thursday May 9, 2013

By Stephanie Fox -

Awkaba!  Welcome back!
I am taking a moment to put my feet up, relaxing on the porch of the guesthouse. My thermometer reads 32C in the shade.  I am watching a group of mona monkeys who have claimed the guesthouse yard (and roof) as their home territory. All of the individuals in this group seem to have limbs missing or paralyzed. Perhaps in poor taste, we call this group the war amps. One mona is dangling from the branches of a mango tree. One mona is sitting grooming itself on the walls of our summer hut. Another mona is playing with a dish towel that it has probably stolen. A few juveniles are wrestling amongst the tallgrass (the mower has broken), and all I can see is their long tails bouncing up and down, occasional heads popping out, and the grass waving around. Recently these monas pulled apart the straw roof of our summer hut to forage for insects. Now we have a skylight, wanted or not.  A few hens cluck about noisily and one rooster struts. Three species of ants march around on the porch: big black ones, small black ones, and red ones. They are all fierce. One got inside my sleeve on my first night and gave me 6 bites on my arm. The folic acid from her jaw felt like pulsing electric shocks in my skin. I felt like a whimp.  There is Ghanaian music playing on the radio coming from Joyce’s house. Joyce is our cook and caretaker, and otherwise generally the woman to go to when in need of anything. She is my age. Her sister helps her who is 19, and Joyce also is raising a little girl whose mom died from a snake bite when I was hear two years ago.  Today her dad and two other siblings are visiting. Joyce’s house is always bustling. There are men on tractors and trucks driving back and forth and back and forth from the farms, and they wave and call to Joyce. The crickets and cicadas make so much noise, and I can hear a small commotion in the village down the road.

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