Bantama market and furniture shopping on September 14
BANTAMA
Eric brought the Casa Kumasi brood (Bob, Camille, Jeremy and Justin) to Bantama Market in search of bambara beans. We did not find the elusive beans but did go home with mushrooms, coco yam, peppers, tomatoes and more. Bags and bags of produce for which we paid less than $12! We are always surprised to find yet another sprawling market choked with local produce.
CASSAVA MOUNDS
What a crazy place Bantama is! Everything is incredibly inexpensive. A taxi, overfilled with plantain and groaning from the weight, crept past the thick crowds with an inch or two on either side. We slipped and crunched out way between piles of sweet potatoes taller than we were. We made the vendors smile with our fractured Twi. We narrowly escaped losing toes passing butchers hacking at animal parts on the on the path.
EN ROUTE
We are always on the look out for an elusive resource and still snapping photos of the decorated tros.
KITCHEN REMODEL
Next stop, the furniture mart close to our neighborhood where we bought two large tables (45 cedis or $22.50) and two chairs. Eric strikes a deal with the vendors before they loaded our purchase into a car and sent it to our house. We used the tables to double the counter space in the main kitchen and added the chairs to our office.
JESUS LIVES
Apparently Jesus lives and wild African animals are still hunted for food.
NEIGHBORHOOD BANK AND MARKET
A ten minute walk from our home, here’s where we get cash from an ATM and buy fruit and vegetables for our table.
CLOSE UP
Many of the vendors have braids and some have Rasta Dos.
NEIGHBORHOOD CATERING AND HEALTHCARE
B to D Restaurant is where we often dine on a Sunday night, one of the cook’s two nights off. They also provide take-out which is handy when out of town visitors come to our table. Lapettite Chemists is where we buy antibiotics like cipro – 10 for only $7. Or lonart (used to treat malaria) for $3.50, the same rice as a package of band-aids. No doctor’s diagnosis or prescription necessary.
We decided not to take the costly anti-malarial medication after reading about the negative side-affects. It seemed silly to take a harmful pill daily for a year when you can still get malaria even if you medicate yourself. Plus there are no harmful affects from the cure, even if you take it and don’t have malaria. Some of our Ghanaian co-workers and former American housemates have gone to the local doctor complaining of stomach pains, aches and fatigue and been diagnosed with malaria. The Americans had been faithfully taking anti-malarial medicine. One friend was later diagnosed as NOT having malaria leading us to believe that malaria seems to be the local go-to diagnosis for obroni and obibini alike and it’s hard to know whether you have malaria or not.
We’ve also explored and discussed the pros and cons of taking antibiotics. While we hope our immune systems will adjust to the African bacteria, we have read that it could take seven years for that to happen. On several occasions we’ve fallen ill for more than a couple of days, at which point we take a day or two of cipro and move forward with our lives.
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[Latest] * [Troutsfarm] * [A Two-Birthday Month] * [FS2BD Construction Continues] * [A New Goat] [Around the Yard and Gardens] * [Wetland Walk] * [Bopping Around the Kumasi Markets] * [Ayoum Village]
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