Market day

Market day is always a cause for celebration. The entire city will congregate into a small area of town behind the taxi stand / tro-tro yard, ready to bargain, shop, and trade. People leave work early and forget their farms for one day. People from small neighbouring communities will travel to Savelugu with their produce and grains, walking for sometimes hours with their produce and grains towering on their heads. Children leave school in a rush to help their parents at their booth (if they go to school at all), or travel through the narrow isles with the little plastic sachets that I've become so familiar with calling out, "pure water! pure water!"

The brightest and most colourful materials are displayed, waiting for someone to buy them and bring them to a tailor or seamstress, both of which can be found just outside the market gates. People will call as you walk past with what they're selling, and the phrase, "kami na", or "come" is heard above everything else. I hear the ever present "Salaminga" rise above the children's laughter, and I stop to buy a mango from a small girl who is young enough to be afraid of the white woman's face.

I don't worry about pulling my pocket knife out to peel the mango, I've learned to eat them the same way as the locals. I squish the insides of the mango between my hands for several minutes, being careful not to break the skin. I pour some of my pure water only over the tip of the fruit, bite a small portion of the top off, and spit it aside. When I put my lips back to the opening and squeeze, I'm left with a sugary juice that is (almost) easy to drink. When the juice stops flowing, the skin can be further peeled apart to get at the pit, and you can then further eat the bits of fruit attached to the skin or the large hard seed on the inside. I'm not perfect at it yet, but it's wonderful.

I pull out my camera to capture the chaos, and kids start surrounding me, wanting me to take their picture, and won't leave me until I do. I snap some quick ones and they rejoice, coming to my side of the camera so I can show them what their digital selves look like, and they start to pose again before I say, "chama, chama!", or "go, go!"

I then carry my camera in my hand, winding through the isles, getting even more attention than before. The children are following me and I try to duck between two booths to put it back into my purse, but there's one more person that requests a picture, the lady in the booth that I ducked beside. She's selling beauty products, and proudly asks me to take her picture with her booth using body language and I try to respond in my broken Dagbani... but nothing makes her smile wider than when I start to lift my camera. The smile quickly disappears, though, when I go take the picture. She wants to look dignified with her business. I look for something to buy from her, but I have all the soap I need.

I look around anxiously, wondering how to find what I'm looking for in the disorder. I wanted to see the excitement for the first time, so the mother of the family that I live sent me on a mission. She needed a head of cabbage.

I'm seeing tomatoes, onions, okra leaves and more groundnuts than I would ever be able to eat. Mangos and oranges are plentiful, and the small sweet bananas I love are everywhere. I finally turn to a man that I heard speaking English and asked him to help. He grabbed my hand and pulled me through the crowd, behind booths, and around people until I didn't even know what direction I came from. He then stops quickly in front of me, almost causing me to crash into him, and announces proudly, "cabbage!" He then makes sure I am getting a fair price, shakes my hand, and then disappears back into the crowd.

The market was on Thursday this week, and continues on a six day rotating cycle. It's two days after the Tamale market day, which is on the same six day cycle, and so many of the proprietors travel from district to district hoping to sell to the more rural communities what they could not in the larger city.

The market in Tamale is more permanent. It's not just the small hut like structures that are used to shade the workers from the sun like in Savelugu, they have concrete walls and tin roofs and doors that you can shut and lock overnight. In Tamale, there will always be people open and selling even when it's not market day. In Savelugu, you can find some local fruit and sometimes a butcher, but the real excitement comes once every six days. That's when Ghana comes to shop.