June 28, 2010
There are no appointments in the hospital that I’m working in. The closest you can get to an appointment is having a doctor tell you, “come back next Tuesday.” How frustrating. All patients need to block out an entire day to go see the doctor. Hopefully I’ll remember that when I’m annoyed with someone for making me wait. Many more people would come to the hospital, but they can’t pay the 1 Cedi ($0.70) to get to the hospital via taxi or tro-tro. Hospitals that are less than a mile away from Komfo-Anokye are called “district” hospitals because they serve a population of people who can’t get to Komfo-Anokye.
Anyway, the new Obrofuo hangout is the National Culture Center. The prices are super cheap and the quality is fabulous. Initially we made friends with this guy named Hector. He’s absolutely totally sketchy. He wears sunglasses all the time, has 4 gold teeth in the front, and wears suits that are outrageous. He’s a total gangsta, in all the meanings and connotations of that word. Hector makes his living by making friends with painters, buying the painters’ paintings, signing his name at the bottom, and selling them for 2 or 3 times the amount that he paid. He hangs out at the Culture Center and traps Obroni visitors, and then pressures them into buying a painting that he did not paint. We’ve always been wary of him, but when we found out that he was claiming other peoples’ work as his own, we decided not to buy stuff from him. When we walked around the Culture Center, we made friends with most of the owners of the stores, including two painters named Philip and Bernard. It turns out that Philip is the one who paints many of the works that Hector sells. Philip is a soft-spoken, extremely modest guy in his mid-20s. Shy invited him over to his room in the student hostel and he brought all his sister’s jewelry and his laptop with pictures of his work. He sat with us for about an hour as we sifted through everything and marveled at his paintings. Willemein chose 3 paintings that she loved and he encouraged her to give him suggestions about the colors, shapes, size of the canvas, etc. Kjersten decided to buy a huge picture of an elephant (with Lion King colors, not real-life colors, although he does do real-life ones too). A few days later, we came back to the Culture Center and sat and commented on the painting. He tweaked it until Kjersten was satisfied with every little detail and deferred to every comment on his painting. Normally paintings that size would be about 80-100 GHc ($60-70), but he gave it to her for 60 GHc. In response to questions about Hector, he shrugs and brushes off any rude comments that we make about him. I know it’s probably good for Philip to have different people selling his paintings, especially because he sits in the Culture Center every day, but it is so frustrating for me to hear Hector say, “do you like this picture of a lion?? I can make you one. I’ll paint you one and it will be even better than this one. You can personalize it. Do you want different colors? More grass in the background? I will paint this lion for you.” We didn’t want to get Philip in trouble with Hector, but I guess he told Hector that we had been buying things from Philip and Hector became very territorial to Shy.
There are so many beautiful works of art in the Culture Center and they would probably be sold for at least 5 (probably 10) times that amount if they were sold at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. The artists make intricate wood carvings for 10 GhC and beautiful paintings for 15 GhC. Needless to say, I bought a lot of stuff but it is all gorgeous and high quality. I bought 12 paintings from Bernard, who is another incredible artist at the Culture Center. He does a lot of paintings with women carrying baskets on their heads. I went with Shy, Kjersten, and Ueli and hung out at his booth for an hour the first day we met him. After gushing over and buying 5 paintings, we promised to come back soon. The next day we headed over to our hangout spot and visited him again. This time, I bought 2 larger paintings and 5 small ones. I think he thinks that I worship him, but I don’t care. His paintings are absolutely stunning. (NB: If you want to check out his works, go to his website: yessy.com/kwaboama) Later that week, we stopped by his booth, but his apprentice was the only one there. As Willemien bought a wood carving from some other vendor, the apprentice’s phone rang. It was Bernard. They discussed business and everything, and then the student (frustratingly named KOFI, like everyone else here!) handed the phone to me. Bernard said hi and that he was so sorry he couldn’t have been there that day but he was at his studio painting (probably to replace the 40-some paintings that the 4 of us bought from him). He said he would see me soon and apologized again for not being at the Culture Center to talk to us in person. He is in his early/mid-40s and has 3 daughters, a fact you can identify right away in the way he acts to girls. Maybe it’s his humble personality or his discomfort with attention, but he is so accommodating and fabulous to us, especially the girls. Willemien bought two of his paintings at one of the art galleries in the Center, but she had to pay 15 GhC and couldn’t bargain them down. Since we only needed to pay 5 GhC when we bought them from Bernard himself, he approached her the next day and quietly told her to pick out 2 more paintings because he felt bad that she had spent so much money on paintings. I thought that was so incredibly nice and discrete and fair and generous.
I’m in the bus back from Tamale to Accra and I’m falling asleep so I’m going to stop typing. Today I move to the International Student Hostel in Accra at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. I’m excited to start my work in Accra because I have about 55 interviews there (I only had 30 interviews in Kumasi) but I already miss Kumasi. It is such a busy city and I had made friends at the hostel, both Ghanaians and international medical students. I was prepared to be on my own, and Eva’s presence over the past few weeks was just an added bonus, but now I’m a little apprehensive about starting over in a new place. I think I’ll try to visit Kumasi at least once before Eva and Shy leave (August 14). The medical students are organizing a trip to Cape Coast from Kumasi on July 16 and I am definitely going with them. I need to do an interview or two in and around Cape Coast, so that should work out perfectly. All in all, I’m excited for Accra and exploring but I really would like to be in Kumsi, especially since Eva moved back in the hostel today. I will need to travel a significant amount for these Accra interviews, and I’m not looking forward to that. I don’t enjoy traveling very much and I wish I could just have Accra as my permanent home base. Oh well. I guess I’ll seem much more of the country than I would have if I wasn’t forced to travel.
Ghanaian proverb of the day: Two men in a burning house must not stop to argue.
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