Greetings from the gold capital of Ghana, Obuasi town, where $8 US can buy you a night’s sleep with spit-stained floorboards, shared and faucetless showers, and sheets decorated with the chest hairs and crumbs of innumerous prior visitors. “Silence Hotel” wasn’t named for the quietude of the place – it’s in the center of town, backing up to a shanty village armed with a battalion of screaming children. Instead, the name seems cautionary to anyone who would share all the secrets going on behind these creaky, paint-flaking doors. So many men here chatting me up! So many accompanied by “a friend of my wife – I’m just taking her home.”

Obuasi really is the center of the Gold Coast’s mining scene. AngloGold Ashanti (multinational mining company) is visible in all the wrong ways: mountains are lopped off at the top, descending into pits a mile deep; giant machinery surrounds the community; sad-looking miners sit at bars but order little (one 51-year-old told me he worked his way up to a $3-a-day salary in his 32 years of service, but he says it’s not enough to educate his 5 children). AGA transports workers to the mine in school buses and cage-like gondolas, and executives live in huge houses scattered in the hills skirting town. The town itself is a string of dusty, unpaved, car-less side streets dangling off the main drag. I’ve met mine workers, mine experts, and their families, and I’ve yet to hear a good word about the operation that has fuelled this so-called economy for generations.

BUT, the town itself is tiny, disgusting though it may be. And the outskirts are peppered with housing projects – with lawns, running water, electricity and sewage lines – constructed by AGA and filled with workers and their families. There’s a large, pretty primary and secondary school that looks like it could hold every student in Obuasi.

So why the complaints? Compared to the villages around SRL, these people have ‘everything’. Fear not, I’ll ponder this and write an essay on it, but I’ll spare you the details here.

So no paved roads, no happy locals, no burgeoning middle class. You know what IS here, though? ‘Medicine’ salesmen, and itinerant preachers. They hop on buses selling their various promises, and people buy. That this is where salaries are sometimes spent suggests that the formalized systems established by government and company aren’t fulfilling certain needs or expectations. What illnesses are better treated by medicine men than doctors? I haven’t sorted this yet.

Store names, toothpaste, everything seems to have Christian overtones: “‘Only God Can Do’ Mobile Phone Repairs” is my favorite. There’s a sign en route to the mine that reads: “No blood will touch the ground / do you believe it?” Not sure what to make of that.

Had fufu (pounded cassava paste) with mudfish soup at my new best friend Lily’s house yesterday. Being a dinner guest in Ghana is not a time-oriented experience. There are no mealtimes, people eat when they’re hungry. The family was confused that I thought I should wait til everyone was served.

Off to the processing plant!

Hastings Airport is a hangar flanked by wingless, motorless crashed airplanes. To pay airport tax, you have to actively seek out an airport authority. My plane, a LET140 had 14 seats and could go no higher than 14,000 feet (legally). It had 2 propellers and, in my case, three pilots. Ray, James and Neil thought I looked like James’ daughter, so they gave me daughter-of-pilot treatment and let me flick switches, twist steering wheels and gaze out the windshield as we approached the landing strip, a dirt field flanking the town market. A Sierra Rutile (SRL) guard was driving a truck around the “strip” just before we landed, chasing goats off, I later learned.

That guard, a Rhodesian (no, not Zimbabwean) military man who hopped over to south Africa’s defense force when Mugabe took power, has a glass eye, a severe dent on his forehead and a rugged, tough-guy disdain for the project manager. As we drove through villages to the mine headquarters, he pointed out which communities had held him hostage and which dredge sites were underperforming while observing that Sisay knows none of this because he can’t seem to stay away from Freetown for more than a couple of days (“there are no discotheques down here”). I had been trying to figure out how the project manager scored himself such a high powered job… turns out the company’s owner adopted him as a kid, funding his education and employing him at nearly every job he’s ever had.

The roads are substantially better than any around Freetown (graded constantly by SRL), but few people have cars, and there’s not a petrol station for miiiiiiiiiiiiiiles  (so theft from company vehicles and machines is substantial). Half of the villages between the landing strip and the mine are mud-stick-thatch huts. The other half are cinderblock and tin roof houses, and everyone who’s not a miner is a farmer. Many people are both.

I spent most of the day with a mine planner who stayed here during most of the war but fled to Freetown when the RUF raided the mine, sprinting to the port under grenade fire and bullets, where SRL’s rutile barges piled employees on and headed to Freetown. The RUF followed them north less than 2 weeks later, using SRL vehicles to travel from the mine to the capital. The real looting didn’t happen till ECOMOG (west African troops, mostly from Nigeria) came in. They loaded up trucks with washing machines, televisions, and whole silos worth of food (RUF just took walkie talkies and stuff they could carry in pockets). Then kamajors (usually described as “tribal” fighters who thought joined them, committing at least as many atrocities as the RUF did) came in, and national military, and…

People around rutile said they preferred the RUF to those who came after. At least, that’s what the mine planner tells me. He was one of the first to come back in 2000. Housing and office buildings were bombed out. Everything was overrun by jungle. Much of the mining camp is still that way – we drove down ‘roads’ that only remain as small chunks of pavement every few meters, visiting houses that have no roofs and vines growing through windows. Also, strangers around the community were wearing his shirts. Locals, too, joined in the looting (anarchy + extreme poverty = …)

Today a tour of the mines. This afternoon, a conversation with SRL’s former employee and harshest critic, a guy named Leslie.