By Leah Bevis
Imagine, if you can, a rust-red road, cutting like a river through a world of Green beneath a sky of Blue. The road is no more than a dusty, uneven, gravelly path with shallow trenches on either side. The green sliced by the road is not a Forest Green nor a clear, Sunlit Green, but a dusty, deep, Enduring green. It is a green splashed with brown and dirt and dry and death, but it is these patches of faded ills, woven into the vines and the fruit, the flowering shrubs and the tall, tall trees, that make the landscape beautiful; make it real.
Imagine village houses of brick or mud or concrete, with thatch roofs, tin roofs, or occasionally shingle. Outside the houses children gather in groups, old men and women sit in the shade munching sugarcane; mothers and daughters pound maize or millet, or dry the grain on wide-open sheets in the sun. As you drive by, children shout and towards your car. Adults wave or simply watch you go by, and their eyes are some friendly and curious, some guarded and cold. The houses and the people are interspersed with the landscape so organically, so gently, that they seem to be part of the green and the brown and the sky and the bush and the road, rather than set against it.
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By Katie Weindler
He sits next to his mother with cow manure smeared across his forehead. Looking down at the ground, he hunches his shoulders when he hears one of us ask what is on his face.
“It’s for the fever,” Emmanuel translates from Dagbani. Emmanuel brings tourists to the widows’ village to help them raise money. We are college students from America, donating gifts to the widows and buying their hand-woven baskets. We bring things like water, pencils and toothbrushes, all of which we buy in a gas station on the way to their village. I buy a basket for my mom to stack her magazines.
I squat down in front of the boy. “Yefre wo sen?” I ask.
The boy looks up at me, but quickly looks down when I meet his gaze. He swings his legs back and forth, under the bench and straight in front of him. I look up at Emmanuel, confused. “He doesn’t speak Twi,” he says.
I feel stupid. After three months of living in Accra, I am eager to practice my Twi, but I am twelve hours from the capital and I know not everyone in Ghana speaks the same language.
“Can you ask him what his name is?” I ask Emmanuel.
He translates and the boy answers, still looking at the ground and swinging his legs, “James.” I can barely hear him.
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by Kristen Kehoe
I took a photograph of a 3 a.m. still life, unarranged. The borders
suggested the entire space outside it as well as every Roman
breakfast, from the misplaced chairs to the scattered silverware. Our
landlady shared her home with us, and with it, her neglect of order
and line. She was an architect. She was also a mess.
But everything in her kitchen soothed me—things that never would at
home. Her table amassed layers of pasta bowls, crumbs, wine corks,
rum cake, and dirty dishes from previous days. These things tiptoed
their way around me, and each day I would find a new element of the
architecture of her character in that room. It is not the paintings
that I remember now, nor the colors of the walls, nor the size of the
room. Rather, the sense of place was in the smallest details, the
things unseen by those merely passing through, the details that
became a mosaic of my three-month life in Rome.
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