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

maelstrom of the Makola Market to the crumbling castle that housed the government offices. In any one of these places, you were as likely to see a man dressed head to toe in full African regalia as you were to see a woman in jeans, tube top, and high-heeled shoes. And the colors! Brilliant shades of orange and red, turquoise and lilac, fuchsia and teal. The African fabrics would make a flamingo look drab. The prohibitions against combining reds and pinks or circles and stripes were absent here. Fabrics of every description lived side by side in delirious dissonance, a dizzying visual feast. The hairstyles too were astonishing. Some adorned the women’s heads like helmets, with sharp spikes sticking out in every direction. Others were elaborate multi-tiered sculptures, their interlacing layers balanced against each other like houses of cards. Still others were interwoven with beads and ribbons, which complemented the colorful outfits with extra splashes of light.
    On top of all this, I’d fallen completely in love with the people. Strangers still waylaid me daily, but what initially felt like aggression I now saw as vitality tinged with humor. I understood that the people on the street didn’t actually expect to go home with me. They enjoyed engaging for its own sake, and while they were at it, they figured they might as well take their shot. This was the quality that struck me the most about the Ghanaians: for better or worse, they
engaged.
Riding across town in a
tro-tro
(Ghanaian for minivan), I often found myself in the midst of a rowdy argument, with people on all sides shouting at each other in the local language. These arguments were almost always good-natured, ending with laughter and backslapping when the participants disembarked. I recalled sadly that in the United States I had once taken a Greyhound halfway across the country without speaking to a single soul.
    There were nights when Hannah, Gorbachev, and I, along with Ayatollah, Momentum, and a shifting group of European volunteers, would smoke bingo (purchased from a mysterious man called Bush Doctor who hovered around the path near the hostel) and tear ravenously through the streets of Accra at midnight, searching for food. Eventually we’d find one of the few stands that hadn’t closed down for the night. The nodding attendant, usually an old woman, would wake with a start and make us egg sandwiches on thick chunks of white bread smeared with Laughing Cow cheese. We’d each down two or three sandwiches and a cup of Milo, a warm chocolaty beverage, before setting off for the hostel, our laughter echoing through the night streets, our running feet keeping pace with the rats that darted in and out of the sewers.

    “A rat stepped on my foot!” Hannah shrieked one night. “I am marked by the King of Rats! Like, do you know, ‘the Nutcracker’? Now you must tell people, I knew a girl who—every night at midnight exactly—she would get down on the ground and squeak like a rat, or no, a girl who had power to change a bad person to a rat.”
    Hannah’s need to mythologize herself touched me. It was what we all yearned for, I thought, to be seen, recognized. We all wanted to be heroes or martyrs, to create lives worthy of legend. She just wore her desire a bit more nakedly than the rest.

    Our volunteer efforts were a mixed bag. While some of the projects ran smoothly, others were woefully ill-conceived. The idea was simple enough: We’d go into a village, start up a project, and leave behind materials so that the villagers could finish the project after we left. The problem was that in many cases no one seemed to have consulted the villagers in advance. Unless there was a committed individual in the village to galvanize the community into action, the hospital or school might easily remain unfinished, while the building materials were slowly spirited away to patch failing roofs or add adjoining rooms to people’s homes. It was also unclear why certain