Somebody's Heart Is Burning (4 page)

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 villages were chosen for projects several years in a row, while others nearby remained unvisited. Since the presence of so many foreigners brought a lot of energy to the local economies, I suspected personal connections might be involved.

One of the more disheartening stories I heard involved a camp in which the volunteers dug a foundation for a schoolhouse right next to an identical foundation that another group had dug and abandoned. When the volunteers asked why they couldn’t simply build on the existing foundation, they were told that it was forbidden to interfere with the work of another group. Another tale involved a village to which a group had returned several years in a row and done nothing but make bricks. As the story went, the village was so overrun with bricks that the local people were using them as tables, chairs, even bassinets.

Most of the foreign volunteers I worked with in Ghana fell into one of two groups: those who came with an already ingrained sense that the work we were doing here was futile (but doing it was marginally better than doing nothing at all), and those who arrived filled with hopeful romanticism about their own ability to “help.” Members of the second category were often terribly disillusioned when their projects hit a snag, and tended to resemble the members of the first category by the time they left. Members of the first group, on the other hand, were occasionally jolted back to the second by the sheer exuberance of Ghanaian life.

Outwardly, I allied myself with the jaded camp—I’d done enough volunteering in the past to know that it often benefited the supposed help-
ers
more than the help-
ees,
but my cynical veneer was ridiculously thin. Beneath my world-weary affectation, I longed with my entire being to be knocked over the head by a driving sense of purpose. I approached each new project harboring a shameful secret: a vast, uncool reservoir of hope. In the guise of offering service, I came to the construction site seeking nothing less than redemption. Perhaps we all did.

Whenever I returned to Accra, I looked for Hannah. She alone seemed peculiarly free of either grudge or expectation concerning our role here. She soaked up everything with unbiased delight. I envied her capacity for simple enjoyment and secretly hoped that if I spent enough time with her, some of it might rub off.

A few months after our initial meeting, I came back from a project on the northern coast to find that Hannah had gotten romantically involved with a Ghanaian volunteer who went by the camp name of Rambo. Rambo was devilishly handsome, with silky skin the color of polished walnut, pronounced cheekbones, and striking gray-green eyes. He dressed to fit his nickname, in Western tank tops that exposed his enormous biceps, camouflage pants, and heavy-soled boots. He was studying mathematics at Legon University and was rumored to be a brilliant student. He came from that minuscule portion of the Ghanaian population that could be called middle class, meaning he had been raised in a home with both a television and a phone. His father had some mysterious government post, which Rambo cryptically described as “near the top.” He spoke flawless English in a deep, purring voice, and was famous for his ability to drink any European under the table when it came to
apeteshi
, the strong home-brewed liquor that was popular in the Ghanaian countryside.

Throughout the steamy afternoons and into the balmy evenings, Hannah sat beside Rambo on the steps of the hostel. She listened intently as he talked to the other African volunteers in Fanti, Ga, or Twi, his arm slung heavily across her shoulders or hooked around her neck like a boa constrictor. Often she leaned over to kiss his cheek or nibble at his ear. He allowed this briefly before pushing her away with a murmured reprimand.

She began to wash his laundry on a regular basis. As I sat in the dirt courtyard behind the hostel with my plastic bucket, wringing the dust from my own grungy socks and shirts, I’d see her laboring over the heavy camouflage pants or scrubbing away at a spot of dirt on a white tank top. When I suggested to her that Rambo could just as easily do his own laundry, she shrugged.

“How do you say, when you are with the Romans . . . ?” She giggled nervously.

Hannah had little time for her old friends.

“I have known this man,” Gorbachev grumbled to me privately, “and I have not liked him. I am very sure that he seeks only to marry a white sistah so that he may leave this country. He wants to be a doctor in Europe or America, where he can make a lot of money and own many cars. Our Sistah Abena, she is so innocent. She trusts every person.”

A week later I returned to the empty hostel from the Makola Market in the middle of the day. The Makola Market was the largest in Accra, and its endless rows of outdoor stalls provided the ideal place to revel in the beauty of African fabrics. I was laying out my purchases—three exquisite batiks dyed in richly saturated blues, purples, and greens—draping them across my bed to admire, when I heard a strange, stifled sound, like someone choking. Looking around, I saw, through the gauzy veil of a mosquito net, a huddled lump on Hannah’s bed, covered by a sleeping bag. Alarmed, I rushed over.

“Hannah? Is that you? What’s going on?”

In one violent motion the sleeping bag flopped flat on the bed and there she sat, shaking and red-faced.

“He will marry her!” she screamed. “He is all made of lies! He will marry
her!
”

“Who? Who will marry who?”

“Rambo,” she sobbed, throwing herself at me through the mosquito net. I ducked beneath the netted shroud and wrapped my arms around her. She heaved and wailed against my shoulder.

“I’ll kill him!” she cried. “I will give him petrol to drink. I will turn him into a rat. Then I will make him marry only me, after he is
dead.
”

“Hannah, Hannah, sweetheart . . .” I murmured. She sobbed in my arms for close to an hour, occasionally breaking away to hurl accusations at Rambo and his unnamed bride.

Eventually, the story came out. That morning, while Hannah was still in bed, a former volunteer named Isabella had arrived from Spain. Rambo had introduced her to the omnipresent crowd on the steps as his fiancée. He’d been anxiously awaiting her return, he said; they would be married at the end of the month. Hannah heard the commotion and wandered out in her oversized T-shirt to find Rambo lip-locked in the sort of public display of affection he was never willing to engage in with her. When he came up for air, Rambo met her eyes for a long, cool moment, then looked away. She ran and threw her arms around him, shouting that he was hers. He pushed her away, and told the astonished Isabella—whom Hannah alternately described as ugly as a rhinoceros and beautiful as Sophia Loren—that this crazy girl had been hanging around the hostel bothering the volunteers and would soon be shipped back to Sweden or Germany, wherever she came from.

“But that’s ridiculous!” I sputtered. “She’ll hear the truth before the day is out. She’ll know he can’t be trusted.”

But Rambo and Isabella had taken Isabella’s things and left the hostel. Hannah had run after them, trying to grab the luggage out of Rambo’s hands. Several of the assembled men held her back, chuckling and clucking, trying to soothe her. Now she no longer wanted to live in the hostel, no longer wanted to see the faces of those men.

Hannah had long ago befriended Sistah Essi, the feisty, sparkly-eyed young proprietress of a tiny beachside restaurant called The Last Stop. Located about a quarter mile from the hostel, The Last Stop was a favorite volunteer hangout, a breezy open-air shack with sand underfoot, located a short sprint from the ocean. Essi lived with her two daughters, ages one and three, in a room adjoining the restaurant. She assured Hannah it would be no problem for her to pitch her tent on the beach, and offered Hannah meals in exchange for helping out in the café.

Hannah’s good nature returned after a week or so, but her eager-to-please, puppy-dog energy had been replaced by something calmer and more distant. That was when she began her walking. At any time of the day or night you might see her, striding through the streets or along a red dirt path above the beach, chin and chest thrust forward like a woman on a mission. She walked that way for hours, unafraid and unapproachable, perfectly poised on the crust of Africa, perfectly alone.