Ghanaian life is such an outdoor life. The houses are either one-room mud huts or low, cement-block Os with a long wall outside the doors to designate a porch. Each room is just a bedroom with an outside door. The kitchen and bathrooms are just plain outdoors, the former designated by three scorched rocks and the latter by a bamboo screen. So unless you're in bed, you're outside. The AAMCT Guest House has a nice living room in each half, but it is deliberately westernized.

Since everything is crammed in together in town, and foot is the main way folks get around, traveling from one section of town to another will often involve trips through kitchens and living rooms. The concept of privacy is just not there. If someone wants to get ahold of me, they know they can always find me in bed, at 7 AM. So they just come to my window and start talking to me, and eventually I wake up.

They believe that Akwasibruni are blessed by God, so the most common response to the sudden appearance of this ghostly fellow in one's kitchen is "Akwasibruni! Give me a job/Marry me/take me to aburochile! <-(some fabulous land of milk and honey that could be anywhere but Africa) Nobody but the rare beggar asks me for money. Everybody wants a job instead. There's always work weeding somebody's farm, but not much other work. You can always find chop (food) because everybody's got four or five younger-moms in town. So nobody's hungry, and everybody's broke.

Of course, the women all say marry me and take me to chicago, I'll leave my husband, he has other wives. I hear sentences with only three english words, 'johnny' and 'discover card'. I suggest to the kids that I zip them in my suitcase, and they always agree. Only the most serious about coming to America ask me for the coveted visa reference.

But this is a gift-giving society, so these requests are always fulfilled by first giving me bananas or dinner or carvings or weavings or articles of clothing. When I am not actually offered a sister or daughter (oish!) then grandmaw is joking about it while poking the young woman playfully, or offering simply to have one of her offspring bear me a child that I will take to Chicago. It seems enough that the genes make it there.

At the same time as I am a blessed savior, I'm also expected to make a complete oaf out of myself at all times. My General Foreigner Exemption gets me out of most social awkwardness, but my ignorance of social class causes drama- just like at home. Unfortunately, everybody views me as God's problem-solver. They want *me* to fix their bike, not the mechanics at the center. Strangers say buy my gold nugget (what would I do with gold?), give me a job, all I want is a wind-up radio, give me a bike. And friends try to suck me into local drama. I rely heavily on the General Foreigner Exemption to get me out of drama, but it also allows me to disregard the stress that usually comes from worrying about behaving the 'right' way. Such as when I stop in at a friend's house to wash my hands, and immediately stick my grubby paws in somebody's near-boiling cooking water.

So I was walking through town today with Lovalova when a man called out from inside a small bamboo-and-thatch porch that served as a restaurant, "Hey, does that Obruni know how to eat bush meat?" We went inside and he had three fat bush rats that he had shot this morning. I picked one up, and gave it a heft. This thing was the size of a fat ferret. Its tan fur was soft and silky like a domestic animal, and in fact, it reminded me of holding my cats when they were adolescent. It was a grass-and-bug-fed bush rat, not one of the big-eared little mice that you see indoors, or the blunt-nosed grasscutter that is also hunted for its 'sweet' meat.

He gutted the rats and chopped them up into chunks, like eigths, and threw them into a cauldron boiling on his three rocks. Bush meat always has to be eaten with lots of pepper, so they pounded up a sauce with a fat wooden pestle and tossed it in the pot. Our serving ended up with a hindquarter and the tail section. I ate the meat off of the leg, but left the leg bone complete with little curled paw. Same with the tail- I snacked on the long thin muscles at the base of it but left the actual skinned tail. Eric looked at me like I was crazy and, after I repeatedly denied them, chewed them both up.

The meat was delicious. It tasted so clean. Yeah, it was a little like chicken, but with a nutty flavor that reminded me more of venison or maybe even a pork chop. They're onto something with this 'sweet' description. I shall pursue further this excursion into Order rodentia and see what delicacies await.