Wilderness

Well, as the last week has shown, the Volta region is pretty spotty when it comes to internet access. Today we finally managed to get online from an internet cafe at an incredibly beautiful beach basically at the Togolese border, but we've obviously been out of access for a while. That's because, despite the "urban" in our program's name, we've been in the tiny town of Klikor, in what amounts to our private compound. The purpose of that is pretty clear - we've basically been spending day and night learning music intensively. Every day has been including four solid hours of drumming (or dancing, but given the choice I'm always going to choose to drum), on two Ewe rhythms called Gahu and Atsiagbekor. They're both played on a wide ensemble of drums, most of which are played with sticks, and both include several simultaneous supporting parts. It's very intensive, and very rewarding - I can feel my technique improving enormously, and I now now 6 supporting parts and how they all fit together, not to mention the bell and rattle parts which form the base of the rhythm. Tomorrow we start learning lead parts, which excites me rather a lot. The lead drum is both beautiful and interesting - it's very long, and tapers from a very wide middle to a crazily small head. The beats are played half on the head and half on the side. Should be great. I'm also getting Jordan to teach me some guitar basics in our considerable amount of downtime (in exchange for some drum technique pointers), which opens up a whole new dimension.

The other aspect of our relative isolation is lots of bonding time. And by "lots of bonding time", I mean ridiculous amounts of time with nothing to do but sit around, talk, and play music. So the thirteen of us are getting to know each other rather well, I'd say. I'm not spilling any gory details here, but it's been interesting, to say the least. We have a great group; I'm planning to write a whole entry about this crowd sooner or later. Safe to say, this is one of the best unaffiliated sets of 13 people one could put in this small of a proximity for this period. I'm enjoying it greatly.

I've also gotten a good deal of reading done; I just read a local book by the name of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which is absolutely amazing - seriously one of the top two or three African books I've ever read. The blurb on it compared it to Sartre, and I wouldn't say it's wrong. Highly recommended. Also, I've somehow managed to read a sizable chunk of the Hardt and Negri tome Empire, which is incredibly frustrating yet rather rewarding. Not for the faint of heart, but if Neo-Marxist global vision interests you and you have serious time to kill, check it out.

Gotta go; will write again when possible.