The Unflinching Vivacity of Our Man Ali

He sits at the head of the table, his head laughing, careering on its glabrous swivel. “Ya, masa,” he calls to the waiter of the empty restaurant, “we do not want break-delay...we want breakFAST!” The laughing continues and he gets bigger-eyed than before, his pupils expanding like oi slicks pooling on twin drifts. Suddently, the power goes out and the pulse of the ceiling fan  flattens to nothing. We can hardly breathe, swallowed up in the convection rushing in like a stampede from the outside . Ghana can lay it on thick, hot, and heavy; thankfully, Ali buoys us, the languor-stricken and hard-to-mollify, with his jokes. “So, how much ah we go-een to chahge for dem to look at these ladies?” He fans both arms across the table to encompass the four girls—Lynn, Poy, Ebony, and Laiyin—and tap dances on us all with glistening eyes. “Because dees four gals ah very special, they belongs to me so I will not let dem look at da face free of chahge.” Glowering now, distributing smarting glances among our expatriate family, “I will take no less den 500 tousand for dem to look at deez gals, not even dee docta will look at da face witout paying me for dem!”

Then in an instant, his demeanor turns smoothly on its ever-spinning axis. Delivering a cheek-creasing smile, “I like dis, I am very hahppy.” We laugh. “Ebony, you ah eating so well for me today. You make me so, so happy” he continues, gesticulating his syllables with a conductor’s flare. He swiftly nabs an unbridled bone from my plate, eyes it hastily, and delivers it to his indiscriminate mouth. The girls say ew; the guys leak smiles; Ali says “what is hahppenin?” and follows up with an “offer” to Lynn, our resident ballerina. “Leeen,” he shouts from two feet away, “you ah going to dance wit me please” and offers her his two hands, fresh from clearing the remains of our meal. Lynn shakes her head, but Ali insists, “One dance, Leen, please, why you will do a very much dancing in the State, but when I say ‘you like to dance,’ you will not do it. AH-ah!” This last sound, AH-ah, lies somewhere between a turntable scratch and an animal yell.  

Ali is considered by many, foreign or otherwise, to be a typical Ghanaian. Beside both sides of his nose are vertical tribal scars— pocked, tobacco colored wells no longer or wider than a blade of grass—that he often attributes to a ravaging case of diptheria he endured as a child (never mind that scarring isn’t a symptom associated with diptheria). He lives in a spavined pink flat locked in a horseshoe with five others just like it. The red lawn is covered with black rubbers, thin tufts of saw-grass, and breathtaking children that clean dishes outdoors and assemble in a cluster along the street when cars arrive and depart, as though welcoming a heralded bus at its main terminal. They are all his children, as he says, since in Ghana your neighbors are literally considered an extension of your nuclear family. His clothing is recycled and pregnant with a fowl, but forgivable odor memorializing two or three weeks of unlaundered use. Money is tight, time stops and starts as he pleases, and everything, and I do mean everything, is a worthy subject of his GI tract. Typical Ghanaian, yes; typical human—hardly. Ali is unflinching in his dedication to our cause.  He picks up every volunteer from Accra and lugs them 13 hours to Tamale, where he has already made his or her living arrangements, he coordinates all medical outreaches and outreach living arrangements and culinary accommodations and transportation and sundry requests like laundry and fan repairs and bottled water, and then he has to take the outgoing volunteers all the way back to Accra every ten days, only to turn around on a dime to meet us back in Tamale—not to mention the hundreds of eye exams he conducts on a daily basis and the handfuls of surgeries he books and oversees year round. He is tireless, more so than anyone I have ever seen, and embraces his life with unabridged alacrity.

There are people that sluice our spirits like profligate floods, and there are those that visit and leave us just as naked as we came, and there are those so ostensibly packed with goodness or energy or whatever you would like to call it that they are tacitly obliged to share it with others.  And then there is Ali, a man who urgently, forcedly injects us with his zest and alchemizes from our womb-weary, trembling curiosity in this beautifully abstruse land a harvest of confidence and comfort.

“When we live dis way, it is not that we should be hahppy,” Ali says, “It is dat we MUST be hahppy if we ah to keep living dis way.” Word, Ali.