Last days of research

After ages, I thought I let you know where I am.

After sick, ill, asthma attacks and sick again, I finished my research around Tamale. They showed me the gods that allow or demand burning bushes. Without wanting to show disrespect - it looked to me an eggshaped form plastered with feathers on a stick. They told me all about their fire-and-hunting feast after harvest and I could see their eyes glimmer. They explained me how the gods are actually quite flexible and comprehensive towards a change in customs - like stopping the burning of the bush - as long as you sacrifice enough guinea fowls. But as a smiling chairman explains: ¨It is not the gods but the people that will not allow it!¨
Well anyhow it is a long story and I will tell it to you when back home (which as you might have heard is 29 th of july)... Sure thing is that I hugely enjoyed my last days in the field, when finally not trying anymore to understand their behaviour in terms of a rationality that I could not grasp. Is it more rational to be smoking our lungs away; stressing up to the point of heart attacks etc. than burning the bush?

Time had come to say good bye and we even organised a dinner party for our electricity friends. They are some guys in our street who work on a Worldbank project of putting street lights on both side of one street, where other parts of town have none - strangely coinciding with upcoming elections. Thing is, the Ghanaian are deemed too stupid for doing the project themselves - so our friends are driver or watchmen only - and therefore some Egyptians who could hardly speak English were flown in. They stay in their airco building almost all day. Ibrahim, Abdullah and our other friends are therefore teaching us the art of boredom; where unemployment seems the norm, a useful skill to master. They know exactly who of all our neigbhours have passed at what time of the day and are happy for any chat and offer their help to the tiniest problems we have (like where to find yam for dinner.
After eating their pasta and finishing their drinks - no alcohol, thanks to Allah - they ask permission to go home; a Ghanaian party finishes whith the food it seems...

Holidays start with travelling up to Bolgatanga to see the others and have two field trips: