One stop shopping!!

Boy it’s hard to write about something interesting about your day when you feel like there’s nothing really grand to it, just a sequence of small, mind-occupying events.  I try to invoke the spirit of Bill Bryson and channel his style of taking the mundane quirkiness of experiencing the everyday in your travels and turning it into a quippy and witty satire that elicits a lot of low chuckles, but some things you just can’t force no matter how much you try.  I walk around slightly frustrated that almost everything I see would not be mundane to those who don’t see this every day, and yet somehow I’m missing the spark to describe it—the wacky connections I could make of something unfamiliar to something familiar, finding something seemingly unrelated that somehow ties a whole string of interesting ideas together, the event or idea that serves as a catalyst for striking understanding into a previously only theoretically understood idea (I’ve been trying to write a post about gender for weeks), or even just the self-deprecatingly hilarious cultural misstep.  Have I just not been putting myself out there enough?  Taking enough risks?  It’s very tiring to endlessly contemplate whether you’re doing as well as you absolutely possibly could (a rather unsavory left-over from graduate school—I have so much to do, am I using every minute to its utmost capacity?), and yet somehow compelled to wallow there in that land of endless self-evaluation. 

Anyway, so here’s my self-assigned writing exercise for the day.  Since today was Market Day, I will attempt to describe the market.  Market happens every six days.  People (mostly women) come from all around to sell their goods here and in other towns on their market days, but today they will arrive with their goods in enormous burlap sacks which they’ve stacked on cargo trucks and which they will sit on top of in order to get here.  Once here, everyone has their place, or at least, their section.  At first glance, like much of what you see in Ghana, you wouldn’t think there’s a system or any order, but as you get used to it, a pattern begins to emerge.  Humans can’t do anything with any kind of regularity or organization if there is no pattern; nothing is repeated if chaos reigns.  It looks like chaos to the untrained observer because we lived in a very obsessive compulsive and organized world in the States.  All vendors have their special means of transport, the areas they’re assigned to set up in, equipment in which to do so, and finally, the most taken for granted of all, a prescribed or designed way by the organizers of how the consuming/buying/browsing crowd is supposed to wander easily among the vendors.  That last bit is what is really missing from this situation and what, I think, gives the illusion of chaos at first glance.  So what does one see “at first glance”?  Well, if you walk out of my front door, you are standing in the middle of the “clothing market”.  There are piles of clothing laying on burlap mats with small children sitting in the middle of them calling out prices, shirts and trousers on hangers hanging from strings strung up around my wall, and people wandering out between all of them.  Then you come to the three thatched shelters that hold the “livestock market” where one can buy everything from kittens to fowl to goats.  Right next to that are the gari women—the women who sell gari which is dried and powdered cassava, sorta.  Okay, now you’re barely 50 feet from my door and you can walk into the market/lorry station proper.  This is where it gets really hairy, because now we’re in the space where vehicles park, but see, market tends to take place anywhere there’s space, so cars full of people end up driving through crowds of people and bread sellers have to move their tables to allow more cars to park.  Anyway, once you walk past the gari women, there is the yam market on your right, which today is weird because the yam market is usually across the street.  Not sure why they moved it.  Anyway, if once continues to the right up the wide path between buildings you’ll hit what I call “Ghana Costco.”  I call it that because here you can buy many things in bulk—maize, groundnuts, 5 or 6 different kinds of beans, peppers, this nut thing that looks like a seed, more gari, etc.—and for cheap Costco prices!  These women bring their product in large burlap sacks that they probably sat on on their trip into town and pour it out into big piles on their mats, or in big basins.  They then sell it by the bowlful—which, if you’re buying for one, is a freakin’ ton.  Then they’ll “dash” you, just to make sure you get your money’s worth.  However, if you don’t go up the Costco aisle, and you continue straight, you’ll walk into the massive produce market (after passing by the guys selling belts and boxers, feminine smelly things, and the occasional aphrodisiac).  Okay, well, the produce is on the left.  There are mounds of bananas and plaintains, like, 30,000 pounds of them, probably (Harry Chapin [sp?] reference just for you, Mom).  There used to be loads of oranges too, but not so much anymore.  There can be watermelons sometimes, the occasional pineapple, etc.  Keep going straight and you’ll get to the vegetables, continue to the left and you’ll get to the wares—containers, pots, buckets, fans, brooms, baskets.  If you’re looking for vegetables, you find the ladies with the freakin’ enormous woven straw hats selling onions, tomatoes, garden eggs (like miniature yellow eggplants), okro, peppe.  On the right are the women selling printed cloth behind a big bus and behind them men selling bikes and tools and various odds and ends.  Going down the path between the buildings past the men selling women and children’s underwear will lead us to another section of the market that has tables that small log and thatch shelters.  See, everything up to this point has been out in the open.  People come and set up their things in an otherwise wide open space.  They are open to the sun, the rain, the wayward vehicle, everything.  When they are gone, the place is empty.  Here, these structures stay even if they do stand empty a good part of the week.  Anyway, this place is the “cloth and soap market”.  Most of the cloth sellers set up here, as do many of the soap sellers, shoe sellers, and those selling jewelry and knickknacks.  At the very end are people selling dried fish, just for a bit of randomness.  Oh did I mention there are also people wandering about trying to sell things from the tops of their heads too?  Yeah, can’t forget the pure water girls.

So once you see that people set up in the same space every time, and get used to the day-after-Thanksgiving crowds that wander to and fro and anywhere there is space, it doesn’t look so much like chaos.  And wander a few paths away from the market, you’d think you found yourself in a ghost town, cuz nobody’s around.