Somebody's Heart Is Burning Read Online Free PDF Page A

nets to the metal lattice of the bed above. The overhead fan worked sporadically, and the rough wooden floor bestowed many splinters on tender pink soles. Sunlight filtered in through small, screened windows. In midsummer, when the hostel was packed with volunteers, the bunks were supplemented by mattresses on the floor.
    The hostel was for foreigners only. Ghanaian volunteers were expected to live at home when not participating in camps, although they were welcome to visit during the day. Ghanaians who complied with certain criteria could participate in the camps free of charge. No one seemed to know exactly what those criteria were, but all the Ghanaian volunteers were literate, spoke good English, and had families that were financially able to spare them. With a few exceptions, they were city youth, getting a taste of the countryside. Some of them seemed as alien to the lives and customs of the villagers as we foreigners were.
    A few local young men who were not volunteers hung around the hostel during the day, practicing their English and hoping to develop friendships with foreigners that would lead to marriage, employment, or at the very least sponsorship for a journey abroad. These men were clean-cut and solicitous, and many of the foreign women were all too eager to take advantage of the opportunity for roadside romance (and if that’s all it turned out to be, the men didn’t seem to mind too much either). As a brunette, I didn’t get quite the attention the blondes did, but I got enough. Too much, even. I was still far too confused about the relationship I’d left behind to think about flirting. Michael’s and my letters had slipped back into a tone of such intimacy it was as if we were still together. On my stronger days, this felt like a burden—I worried that my homesick heart was writing checks my itinerant body wouldn’t keep. But on days when I felt most unrooted, it was a tremendous comfort to know that he was there.
    Periodically throughout the day, Mr. Awitor, the head of the organization, emerged from an inner office to chase away nonvolunteers with harsh words in one of the local languages. He often added in English—presumably for our benefit— “If I see your face here again, I will surely telephone the police.”
    “We don’t mind them,” the foreign volunteers insisted, but he simply shook his head and walked back inside, murmuring under his breath that we would surely mind when our costly cameras and sunglasses went missing. The young men always reappeared an hour or two later anyway. Though Mr. Awitor’s tone was menacing, they’d learned by now that the threatened phone call was never made.
    Some foreigners participated in one camp and simply stayed on at the hostel for the rest of the year, bumming around Accra and smoking potent local marijuana, called “bingo” or “wee.” Hannah, however, had been in Ghana for three months and already participated in four camps.
    “We must choose your name!” Hannah clapped her hands with delight. “What shall we call her, Gorby?”
    “We must call her Korkor,” he said, “like my baby sistah.”
    “Korkor,” I said. It sounded like kaw-KAW. “What does it mean?”
    “It means second-born, in Ga,” said Gorby.
    “Are you second-born?” asked Hannah.
    “To my mother I am.” I was about to explain that my father had older children from a previous marriage, but Hannah interrupted.
    “Perfect! Gorby is . . . how do you call it . . . Soo-kick?”
    “Psychic,” I said.
    “Psychic! Gorby is psychic!”
    “What’s your camp name?” I asked Hannah.
    “Mine is Abena,” she said, “Tuesday-born in Fanti. Everyone here has a day name. But then there are also nicknames and family names and Christian names. Africans have so many names, it is very confusing.”
    “Not to us,” said the man called Momentum.
    “Only to girls from Holland,” added Gorbachev. He flashed her an adoring grin.
    Later Hannah confided in me that back home