The cleaner, the cakes and the poor black foal

“You train horses, don’t you?” asks Daniel the cleaner as he sashays around, well dressed, with a feather duster. I don’t, I say, but I ride a lot, and if I had my life again I’d be preparing for the Olympics.

He’s talks quickly, so I only get about 10% of the conversation, but he’s charismatically animated. Roughly translated, he says: “My cousin has a horse, you must come and see him. He keeps it near the race track and we go there often. In fact every Saturday. There is also a black horse there and it is…woah! (sucks teeth in delight) it is woah! You must see it. It is a big one. Woah! It is a stallion and so big and when it comes out to race, woah!” At this point words are not enough and Daniel starts to canter camply round the kitchen, dropping his duster and being a racehorse.

We agree that we’ll go and see his cousin’s horse on Saturday and call to see his baby and his mother too, and cross an important boundary on our otherwise non-existent relationship. I panic bake for his family, sifting out weevils from the ingredients as I’ve been taught by caretaker Jonas.

Saturday comes and I show Daniel the cakes I’ve made for his family. They are burnt and the cherries on top have soddenly leaked green onto the icing. He looks at them sadly, then at me, and thinks “she doesn’t train horses, she can’t bake and she clearly can’t clean or I wouldn’t be here.”

We go off in my car to Labadi, a township near the beach hard at work earning a meagre living but living a good life. We go first to visit his aunt, a big woman sitting alone in a small dark room watching a programme about science and algebra on TV. She scrutinises me, asks Daniel why I’m there, then cracks a wide smile and goes back to her programme. Daniel picks up his daughter, Daniella, and we leave the gloomy room and move back into the searing sun.

As we walk around the small courtyard to see the rest of the family, we see kittens, litter after litter, small and thin with big furry paws catching shadows and flies. I turn to Daniel saying: “The guard tells me people in Labadi eat cats,” expecting him to roll eyes and say it’s a myth made for the white man. “We wait ‘til they’re bigger, then we make soup. One of our favourite things. Do you want some to take home?” I dash a glance at Magnus who's thankfully distracted by a football, and say we've enough kittens at home.

Daniel’s mother emerges, tall and toothless, wrapped in mismatching batiks but glamorous and effortless and clearly the matriarch. She comes with a luxuriantly pregnant young woman, smiling and content. We talk over the yapping of a terrier bitch, all teets and complaining face, and her two ugly puppies in a cage. I don’t ask Daniel, but I think dogs fare better than cats in Labadi. I hand over my cakes in an old cereal box with gaffer tape round the sides.

His cousin’s place is a similar set up to his mother’s, but close enough to the beach that you can taste the saltwater spray and watch sparkling sea from the waste-strewn dirt road beside it. Between the small rooms housing adults and countless children are stables and stalls for the horses and ponies they keep.

Daniel’s cousin has saddled up the largest, and wants me to take her for a ride. She’s a former polo pony, seven years old, whose career at the polo club a few miles away ended when she injured her legs. Her refined polo pony head remains, but she is thin now, with swollen forelegs that look like they’d impede anything faster than a slow walk. I decline the ride but say Magnus can get on because he’s less of a burden and I fear she’s about to crumble and break.

We take her down the road for a while, she walks slowly and breaks into a surprising trot now and then, and Magnus asks to take her to the beach and she stumbles across the rocks but plods on. It’s midday and white with heat, and the horse is pulling Magnus who’s had enough. The cousin motions to me. “Take her for a gallop now” he says. “She likes it.” I hide disbelief and wonder if her life giving pony rides on the beach are the cause of the sad face, so decide to give her a go.

She is wearing a plastic saddle and string reins. We clatter over rocks on the beach and I nudge her on, expecting nothing. She collects her hindlegs and starts a slow canter. The ears are happy, so I ask for little bit more and suddenly she’s back on the polo field, Seabiscuit, breaking into a fast gallop that’s hard to contain with the string reins that now burn painfully through my fingers. We run out of beach and are up a bank onto the flat old salt pond they call the racetrack, twice round at top speed then finish. She’s not even out of breath and I am delighted.

The cousin runs up the beach dragging Magnus. “Excellent!” he says. “I want you to train her son.” I ask about him, learning that he is young and unbroken. We walk back to the compound to meet him. The cousin takes me to his small, bare stall between bedrooms. I stare in disbelief.

“He’s a foal,” I say, looking at a black colt barely six months old. “No, he’s two, I ride him,” he says. “He’s for sale.” I decline the offer and tell Daniel we’re going home, dashing the cousin 10 Ghana cedis ($7.50) and wondering how long the baby colt foal will survive.

As we drive home I’m suddenly aware that I’ve given Daniel nothing for his trouble. We pay him over the odds, but he still only earns from us in a month what we would pay a London cleaner in a week. It’s a tough subject to address, but I ask him. “Don’t give me anything” he says. I reflect, thinking he is a decent man. Everyone is friendly, but everyone’s a secret entrepreneur, and few favours are for free, especially for a white person.

I am thinking about this a few days later when Daniel comes to clean. He’s a rare find and I am happy to employ him. He hasn’t been unkind to us, he’s pulled himself together quickly on the occasions he’s cried, and he hasn’t eaten the cats on the compound (while the gardener of the previous tenant did). He’s not on the make, he’s earning his money honestly with a mop and feather duster, and he’ll be promoted soon to market the cleaning business for which he works.

With that, he comes to me, doe eyed, and says he’s sad we’re leaving. I wonder if he’ll cry, because sometimes he does, but he steels himself, looks me straight in the eye and surprises me. “I was thinking” he says, “I want to email you when you go. Best that you leave me your laptops.”

My slightly-less-successful-than-the-last-fishing-trip fishing trip

I gaze at the calendar my mother has given me for Christmas. It has pictures of British beaches, and I know she intends for it to speed my return home from Ghana.

I count the weeks we have left.

"Eight weeks" I tell the others. "We'd better go away for the weekend, to make the most of it." Really it's because I've ridden the local horses to exhaustion, and now I want to go fishing.

To be fair we haven't been roughing it, a solid stream of guests since November requiring trips ranging from super-luxury to gap year in Cape Coast, Akosombo, Big Milly's Backyard, Elmina.

But the renewed pressure of a deadline to leave Ghana brings a fresh excuse, and we decide on a little trip to Ada Foah.

It’s no small undertaking. We know of only one hotel, we've stayed there, and I wrote so many pages in the guest book (a menu that bore no relation to the reality of supplies; two-pin sockets for three-pin appliances; and universally depressed staff) there was a queue of guests lining up behind me to read it.

"How will we explain our return?" I say.

My husband rifles for the tourist book. "There must be somewhere we overlooked".

There is. Tsarley Korpey, a two-storey house with inestimable stone cladding that would leave my (Welsh) compatriots gasping for air.

“Aren’t we lucky?” I say to Magnus as we survey the River Volta while waiting from 12.30 to 2pm GMT (Ghana Maybe Time) for three salads in a national characteristic that makes my husband intolerable very hungry. Magnus eyes a jetski and looks gleeful. “Don’t get too comfortable, all over soon,” I say. He suddenly hates me, but it is early January and I tell him he’s missing the snow and he gets sad.

Our lunch wait time is being underused, so I call a man I've met before to bring his boat at 2pm so we can catch a barracuda, then take Magnus to a jetty to fish.

”You go first” I say, handing him the rod in the hope that he’ll catch something and start liking it. He feigns interest, plops a worm into the drink and hands it over.

But there’s nothing here, it’s like Cowes Week gone south, a persistent hum of speedboats that has sent the fish to the shady banks of the island over the way. I reel in, get stuck on a rock, and am forced to cut the line and lose a South African spinner I’d bought just the day before. As I pull in the rest of the line something hits the water. Plouf. The arm of my finest reel has worked loose and is sinking away from me, through dark water and down into sinking sand, and there are crocodiles, and I'm not going in after it.

"I must have the highest ratio of lost equipment to caught fish in the world," I say to Magnus. "You should give up," he says.

The barracuda boat comes with its owner, whose number's stored on speed dial as Moussa Fish, though only one of those is his real name.

I feel my luck's in. But I’m on form, the parody of a fisherman, losing another reel, another set of tackle, some pride, an afternoon, and several fish. Magnus sleeps through the whole round-trip.

“We’ll try the island tomorrow” says Moussa Fish, apologetically. He has caught nothing either, though unlike me his rod and his pride appears intact. “I’ll pick you up at 8”.

Eight comes and I'm lifeless, pinned to the bed by an interminable pain, a dagger welded in my middle so sharp it’s like Olivia's been with the cowry. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ll cancel the boat” says my husband, and they disappear to breakfast, then return to say goodbye because they are going on a jetski. I drift away, clasped ‘twixt Morpheus and Nauseous, but overhear Magnus from over a mile away screaming delight across the estuary.

When they return, it’s time to go. I uncrumple myself, and my husband shows me to the receptionist. “The latest strain of malaria starts just like this,” she says (not food poisoning from our hotel! Good God no! Malaria, for sure, typhoid maybe. Bilharzia. Bubonic plague but most emphatically not food poisoning, no siree!)

We rush back to Accra for a malaria test at the hospital and by the time we arrive I’m bent double in pain. “I feel very sick" I say "like I have food poisoning, and I need a malaria test."

The receptionist takes down the information, asks if we’re paying cash, then says "you're an emergency, go straight in."

The doctor looks at me gravely and directs me to his ultrasound machine. Strange, I think, I assumed a malaria test would require some blood.

“I feel sick, in my stomach, and I ache, like the ‘flu” I say, “what is it you’re ultrascanning?”

He doesn't answer.

“Almost definitely malaria” he says. He looks at me, concerned, like he’s about to break bad news. “Are you paying cash?” he asks. Yes. “Better stay in.”

I'm drugged, dripped and left. Then there follows an incredible crescendo of antipathy. Drips fail to drip, and two big nurses come to tell me off; they storm in at 4am and turn lights full-on, then ask why I'm not resting. They try to take a blood sample and say my veins are wrong, and they tell me off. And so on.

My son meanwhile is delighted because it occasions a meeting with Dr Boy, who saw him when he was admitted with (vile) dysentery, and who said to him "My name is Dr Boy. I am not a girl, I am a boy". My son repeats it regularly as part of his "I'm a Ghanaian" line up that also includes, in strong local accent, "Your buttoss is itchy!" (you've ants in your pants) and "Jolloff rice is tooooo nice!" (but your buttoss will get fat).

I hold Doctor Boy in slightly lower esteem. He comes into my room, spies my son, whom he talks to adoringly, then my husband, to whom he is reverent (Ah! The BBC man! Great to have you here. How was Kenya? East coast suit you well? Been travelling much? You look on fine form!) and leaves. He has ignored me, on the bed, drips not dripping and wrong veins. He pops back in, as if he's forgotten himself, gives me a cursory "you OK?" and leaves before I answer.

Twenty-four hours, five non-dripping drips and nurses who sing sweet church songs while violently flushing a vein later I am allowed to go. We go to pay the bill. It's almost one thousand dollars, with a premium on everything because the man with the ultrasound machine was the country's top gynaecologist. We didn't know.

"We thought he was the doctor on duty, we told you I wanted a malaria test" we say.

The woman, who's behind a thick pane of glass and talking deliberately quietly, says "You saw the gynaecologist, do you know how good he is? So you have to pay what it says on the bill."

The credit controller comes, and we explain. She sucks her teeth and says "pay it". There follows a loud row. Not between her and me, because I'm being puny and still ill, but between her and my husband, who has become excellently terrifying.

The medical director spies that we're being manhandled by the credit controller, a woman who raises aggressive a few notches and turns it into fanged loonyism. She ushers us into her office, apologises, and we emerge triumphant, sensing the credit controller will be the next person in.

We pay the right amount and walk out past an audience we've entertained for the past half hour.

As we reach the door my husband, a reasonable, cerebral, (usually) conflict-averse man, turns on his heels. "I'm going back to the credit controller," he says, "to tell her she's toast."

Georgina Pipson with three boys and two girls

In the past weeks as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's fortnight in Ghana gave its place in the news to Togo under siege in Cabinda, another story was quietly playing out in the local press. It divided people sharply, turning its culprit into a victim while speaking volumes about a society out of touch with its own reality.

The story broke on January 5, with the discovery of five dead children, aged 11, 9, 6, 4 and 1, lined up like dolls on a bed in order of age.

Their mother, Georgina Pipson, (pictured, holding the youngest, Esi) is thought to have poisoned their food, then called her ex-husband, told him he should get the children, and fled.

Initially she was labelled a monster. But days later she was found lying semi-conscious in a vehicle in Accra. She was admitted to hospital and died the following day. Nobody spoke of the cause.

When she was found, she was carrying a purse containing a small diary in which she had chronicled her life.

“I was born in December 1977...I am alone in this world, God why, God why..Georgina with three boys and two girls...I don’t have a mother or father, who am I? My People deserted me...God give me hope...forgive me and my children, Nana, Kwaku, Angel, Kofi, Esi...What a painful world; God have mercy on me and my children...Why, Kojo my husband? Kojo, I do love you and will never forget you."

While reports suggest that Georgina was mentally ill, her former husband had said that this wasn't the case. “Georgina was not mad. She was quite normal but occasionally at some point, she starts behaving abnormal. She would go out and sit somewhere and cry.”

She'd been visited by a domestic violence unit of the police after reporting her husband for abuse, but there the help stopped.

In this newspaper column written "just to interrogate the system", Vicky Wirecko suggests that Ghana has yet to get to grips with the disintegration of communal living, which was equipped to support single mothers. Its place has not been filled by adequate state support, leaving single mothers, dirt-poor, struggling to bring up big broods they can't afford. The mental wounds (one study found 50% of women surveyed in a marketplace showed signs of mental degradation) can obviously be devastating.

Wirecko says the family’s tragedy "speaks loads about our failed society, our dysfunctional child welfare and protection institutions, and a pathetic diagnosis of the social welfare and medical support systems that exist in our country today."

Georgina still lies in the mortuary with the youngest of her children. The four others were buried last week by their father, absent for the latter part of their lives but keen last week to talk to the newspapers to present a picture of the wronged father burying his children in the copper soil.

The remaining child, one year old Esi, remains unclaimed. She cannot be laid to rest with her siblings because the father says she's not biologically his.

He also can't bury Georgina, so she will not share her children's grave. He says his culture can't allow him to bury the family together without the consent of Georgina's family, but they have not kept contact, save for the presentation of a bottle of Schnapps when they heard the news that the children had died.