Now, We Play Serious

Ping-Pong is big at Big Milly's Backyard in beautiful Kokrobite, Ghana. I like to think I know my way around a ping-pong table. Not this ping-pong table. I was doing just fine until I played the girl in the pictures who beat me handily despite what I deemed as my respectable performance. Kevin had winner. When I went to get drinks, and she started volleying with Kevin, our opponent says to KB, "I can see you are a good player. I was just joking around with your friend. Now we play serious." Just for the record, she beat up on Kevin as well.

Color Consultation

A Bad Joke?

Why on earth would the Libertarians nominate Bob Barr as the their presidential candidate??!!??!! Barr voted for the Patriot Act, against Medical Marijuana, and for authorization of Bush's unconstitutional Iraq War. He led the charge to impeach President Clinton. He drafted the Defense of Marriage Act. In Congress, Barr proposed that the Pentagon ban the practice of Wicca in the military. I can't think of anyone I'm less likely to vote for. I just don't understand. Can someone explain this to me?

Columbia Heights: Where Nobody's Special!

Leading The News

Who’s that man?: Obama asked for ID at gym
By Kris Kitto
Posted: 06/27/08 02:13 PM [ET]

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may have one of the best-known faces in the world, but that doesn’t mean he is recognized everywhere, even in Washington.

Washington Sports Club employee Takehia Wheeler was manning the front desk to scan members’ identification cards Friday morning when the presidential candidate walked in with his entourage. The gym opened a month ago in the Columbia Heights district.

“He came in and walked past me,” Wheeler told In The Know. “I was like, ‘Sir, you need to come back.’ ”

Wheeler said Obama looked familiar, but she didn’t recognize him. So she asked for his ID card.

“I said, ‘What’s your last name?’ He said ‘Obama,’ ” Wheeler explained. “I said, ‘So what’s your first name?”

Then she laughed because it was at that point that Wheeler realized who she was talking to. How did she make amends? By saying, “Sorry, Mr. Future President!”

She wasn’t alone in not recognizing Obama. Trainer Drew McNeil wasn’t sure either.

“I was training right next to him, and I was like, ‘That looks like Obama,’ ” he said.

Obama brought his security detail along. Gym staff said Obama stayed for 20 minutes.

They said he has a membership to the citywide gym network, with his home gym at the Gallery Place/Chinatown location.

The Mad Dog of the Middle East & The Shapeshifting Bar Maiden

The Libyan flags looked out the box new but the giant posters of Muammar al-Gaddafi showed the colonel looking just as I remember him on the news 25 years ago. We were headed north destined we thought for the mountains of Badou. The military police blocking the roads and manning the crowds weren't so sure. And at our third road block when a cop smacked our cab driver he bid us adieu and headed back south without us. We strapped on our packs and started walking the parade route where the crowds cheered us and the soldiers ignored us. Before long a dude approached us offering the front seats on a bus to badou for pennies as soon as traffic started moving again. We mingled in the beerless town until the band struck up and Reagan's Mad Dog of the Middle East came by in his presidential motorcade. The thirty second anticlimax ended with us on the bush taxi and back on the road north to Badou. It was a long slow ride and we passed the time singing dancing and entertaining the young Tuareg lady behind us. We were all but home free when some dude hogties six goats and loads them on to the bus. The ones inside are OK but the ones tied to the roof are screaming like nothing I've ever heard before. They sound very human. We then proceeded to stop at every single town until Badou and each time another woman hopped on the bus with multiple live chickens stuffed in bags. Needless to say the last twenty miles seemed like hundreds.


When we arrived in Badou the town was far bigger than we had anticipated and we had no idea where our friend lived. We found a bar sat outside and refueled with Awooyo and the most delicious boiled eggs I've ever had. The proprietor of the bar was the friendliest little elderly lady who plugged Kevin's phone in for him and actually let him use hers when he had battery juice but no signal. We couldn't have gotten in touch with Carolyn without her help. We expressed our gratitude with plans to return as we headed down the road to the filling station to meet Carolyn. Carolyn took us to her friend Papa V's bar for peanuts and Awooyo. Papa V asked me if I had an iPod he could plug into his system. I did and Vampire Weekend joined the spirits in the mountain air.

The next morning we got moving early; Coca cola and spaghetti and hot sauce with a spoon out of a black plastic bag for breakfast. We hiked to the falls at the top of the mountain with giant flesh eating black ants drawing minimal blood leaving their disembodied heads wriggling in the rubber of my flip-flops.













After hiking back down the mountain the mountain we couldn't think of a better treat than Awooyos and boiled eggs from our gracious hostess of the night before. When we got to the bar we went inside for the first time to escape the late afternoon heat. The woman in charge this afternoon looked a bit like our friend from the night before but roughly thirty-five years younger. When she returned with our order Kevin asked her in Ewe "Where is your mom...or your grandmother?..She really helped us out last night." The young woman gave Kevin a look of confusion and amusement.

She replied "That was me. I am your friend from last night." She left to continue shelling eggs. Kevin and I looked at one another in bewilderment. I surveyed the bar for the first time. We had only been out front the night before. The beer and eggs had come out of a French Red Cross cooler. There were stretchers hanging on all the walls. Booze was locked in a giant old medicine cabinet. Carolyn observed that it was no ordinary table our beers and eggs were resting on but a rustic operating table.

Girl Talk - Feed The Animals, Album Of The Year?

Just as soon as you tired of hearing me talk about Vampire Weekend, and the time I got them on the sound system at a Rasta watering hole in the north of Togo, Pittsburgh's Girl Talk releases my new album of the year. I am halfway through, and the chills won't stop. Name you price and download Feed The Animals here now.

Take Me Away Fast

I rode on the back of many Zemidjahns last week. I even met a dog named Zemidjahn. A Zemidjahn is a motorcycle taxi. They must outnumber the car variety by about 20 to 1 in West Africa. Zemidjahn translated from the Beninois Fon means "take me away fast." Frank is a German DJ who has spent the last two years in West Africa on the ultimate record collecting adventure. He documents his intercontinental crate digging at Voodoo Funk. Below is a trailer that will hopefully lead to funds to support a feature length documentary of Frank's journey entitled "Take Me Away Fast.":

These Are the Roots of Rhythm & the Roots of Rhythm Remain

Paul Simon's Graceland rang into the wee hours of a rainy Friday morning. My romance with Lome had to come to a perfectly soggy end. Sun replaced the rain as we headed north into the Plateaux Region to Notse', the centuries old, original walled village of the Ewe people. Our hostess was a friend of Notse's chief, who agreed to take us to the small village where his father in law was the chief. We rode motos through the bush with a gift of Sodobe that would be the centerpiece in an elaborate ceremony of we guests pouring out for ancestors, then drinking first to prove poisoning the chief was not in our intentions. The Sodobe, a palm wine moonshine was actually quite good, tasting a bit like grappa. It was observed by the chief and his confidants that I clearly had the force, as was evident in the ease with which I took my Sodobe. We were given a gift of roasted corn and an extensive tour of the village, where we met, salued, and played games with the children.

The tour featured the beautiful mud brick thatched roof homes of the villagers, an abandoned looking infirmary, an impressive soccer pitch, a new school, an old school, and that which the town seemed most proud of, a well and pump, built in the early nineties by the USDA. Several well and pump demonstrations were given.

A naive cultural sensitivity kept me from taking many photos on the trip but here in this village they begged me to take more and more photos, so that they might be able to see copies one day but more importantly so that "America can see how we struggle in Africa."

Le Femme Epanouie

Thursday morning I met a friend at the outstanding French Cultural Center in Lome'. We drank espresso and listened to musicians rehearsing behind the stage before viewing the center's exhibits and climbing aboard northbound motos. We stopped just below the circle before the University and hopped off. We would spend the morning wandering. Studying the informal economy and interacting with dynamic people and the pieces that make the neighborhood go. We stopped dead in our tracks when we passed the stall of Assamagon muralist and screenprinter. It was the stall cum studio cum gallery's adornments that sucked us in and we were welcome. Beautiful business is everywhere in Lome' with the hustle and the bustle and the can't wait to go back.

The Assamagon piece that you see was his first to catch my eye and is on exhibit at Chimka's Tavern indefinitely. It has been said to translate as "Woman at Ease" "Opened Up Woman" and "...and Now We Pray." Insight is welcome.

In the afternoon we participated in Kevin's excellent discussion group at the University where a significant conversation about addiction evolved into a revolutionary discussion on the oppressive politics of poorly distributed wealth.

The evening proceeded with bats an impromptu fed show love and congregation with spirits.

Diversifying Classroom Instruction and Structures to Enliven Content, and Increase Levels of Student Engagement and Empowerment

University of Lome, Togo
West Africa





I spent Wednesday morning at the embassy in Lome preparing for my PM workshop which couldn't have gone any better. The teachers Kevin works with at the University are so intelligent, reflective, and ready to innovate. I can't wait to go back and work with them again.

Back in the U.S.A.

I am finally back home as of last night. The trip was life changing. I wrote much the last few days and hope to transfer my day to day adventures in Togo & Ghana to this space in the coming week. That and try to find a new job.

Lome' is amazing. The streets are filled with an angry swarm of killer motos. Hop on the back of one. It's your taxicab. Get across town for 300FCFA.

I don't sleep much here, because in this, the worldwide capital of voodoo, the night is filled with...well...the night is full.

I participated in an amazing university film & discussion group with KB at the helm of a brilliant crew of thoughtful young people ready to take on the world. I am about to head to the US Embassy to prepare the materials for my afternoon faculty workshop. Bonsoir.

Greetings from West Africa

Here I am. It's been a wild and wonderful ride so far. The flight to Germany was just fine, and I finally crashed in the airport in Frankfurt, which made the layover less of an ordeal. On the second leg of my journey I sat next to a cool Ghanaian banker making his annual journey back to his homeland from Switzerland. He gave me the lowdown of what to see in and around Accra, and even knew a great deal about the sights to see in Togo. Almost to my destination, I got to check out Lagos, Nigeria from the window of the plane as we dropped off about a quarter of our passengers. Kevin met me at the airport in Accra, Ghana, and thank God because things can be a bit overwhelming for a Yovo visiting West Africa for his first time, but Kevin negotiates things in the region like he's lived here forever. We spent the night in Accra eating, drinking, dancing. On Saturday morning we took a taxi to the coast to spend the night in the Rastafarian fishing village of Kokrobrite. More drinking, reasoning, playing on the beach. At one point Megan and I noticed a crowd of about one hundred people about two hundred yards down the beach. As we got closer we could see that the crowd was all men, and that they were taking turns jumping over a rope held by two Lebanese cats. When they started playing "Steal the Bacon," I had to ask around. Turns out, the story I got was that the two Lebanese men were Olympic Scouts testing the athletic prowess in the village, seeking prospective members for the Ghanaian Olympic Track & Field team. Whether that was B.S. or honest to God truth, everyone was having a blast. The food in the village was fantastic, with ample vegetarian options thanks to the ital diet of many of the village's fishermen. The beach was as beautiful at nighttime as it was in the day, so we spent a fair portion of the evening in the sand. In the morning we bathed in the Bight of Benin before hopping on a very crowded bus back to Accra where we caught a taxi to Aflao, Ghana for a smooth border crossing into Lome, Togo. We had a lovely dinner at Kevin's doubly lovely apartment with three triply lovely Peace Corps Volunteers. Then the fun really began. Kevin threw the greatest party I have ever been to, where one of many highlights was dusting off the fed catalog with a combo of crack Togolese musicians.

Rest in Peace

Rumours Afoot

via ProjectKB: