I recently bought "new" dishtowels. It's hard to know if anything I
buy here is really new. For example, I bought a cell phone several
weeks ago. But when I turned it on there were a few numbers stored in
the phone with Chinese characters. When I went back to the store to
point this out, the owner of the store insisted that the phone was
still new, it's just that someone in China had stored a few numbers on
it to test it at the cell phone factory. He then said something in Twi
to the woman who sold me the phone, and I'm pretty sure it meant
something like "you forgot to delete the phone numbers from the phone
before you sold it to this white man." So they gave me a new phone,
although it still displays the China Mobile logo when I turn it on.

But getting back to the dishtowels...In the Land of Secondhand, it's
important to wash things before using them. And when I washed my new
orange, pink, and red dishtowels by hand in a bucket (that's how it's
done here) I had orange, pink and red water. That's when it hit me -
my dishtowels, along with most everything else here, are slowly
killing me.

There are things here that kill quickly. An example is malaria. But in
order not to die from this disease that kills 3 million people each
year, I take anti-malaria medication daily. Supposedly this isn't
particularly good for my body, but at least I won't die from malaria
in the next two years. Peace Corps certainly does not want me to be
another statistic (note: many volunteers take a weekly medication, but
supposedly it makes people crazy, so i go with the daily anti-biotic).
And I sleep under an insecticide-treated bednet. That can't be healthy
in the long run. Also, I spray Raid everywhere. It certainly does
"kill bugs dead" but it's probably also going to give me some sort of
unhealthy growth at some point in the future.

I use a surprisingly large number of products that are mass-produced.
More than I anticipated when I signed up for Peace Corps (Unilever is
everywhere) These things are cheap. Way cheaper than in the US, and
they allow me to enjoy a better standard of living (depends on the
definition, i guess) here in Ghana. But safety standards in Ghana may
not be quite up to par. So what I'm getting at is I'm using a lot of
cheap products that may contain ingredients that are not quite
rigorously tested for human safety. And, in the long run, these
products will be the end of me.

(Note: I pretty much have the same theory about products in the US,
but somehow the cheapness of everything has to be explained by more
than international monetary policy, the low cost of labor and other
things that I know nothing about. Don't worry, crazy conspiracy guy is
doing just fine. He just wanted something amusing to write about on
his little travel website.)

I thought that the food here in Ghana would be more natural than most
food in the US. But, pesticides abound and MSG is in everything.
Mostly it's in flavor packets that people use in stew and other
things, but they also sell large bags of pure MSG. I just take it
straight (not true)...

Addendum #1: I'd like to upload more photos, specifically of my
village and of me with a beard. Unfortunately, this Internet is slow
slow (and I actually just had to retype some of this because of a
network error). Argh. But rest assured, I look fantastic with facial
hair.

Addendum #2: Happy Jew Year.

¶ 5:58 PM