Ramadan, mosque, and Maria

Mosque in Tamale
“Remove your pants,” Maria tells me. Maria is the woman I’m going to sleep with tonight. I want to protest that I’m not wearing any pants, but then I remember that in Ghanaian English, pants means underwear. We are crouching in a dark urinal down a dark alley in downtown Tamale. We’re in there with a young girl neither of us has ever seen before. I’m confused. I’ve been confused more or less continuously since coming to Ghana over a year ago, so at least that part of the situation feels familiar.
“Wash,” Maria says as she hands me a bhuta. A bhuta is a plastic container shaped like a tea kettle. It is used for performing ablution, the ritual washing that Muslims make before entering mosque or praying. We’re in this urinal together to perform ablution, which apparently includes washing your private parts. No one in my village mentioned this part to me, but that might be because of the language barrier. The woman who taught me how to do it did make a hand motion that I thought meant “do you need to pee?” Now I know what she was trying to get across all those months ago.
Maria and I step back outside, wash our left and right hands and feet and our faces. Each part is washed three times. She helps me get into a sariga, a piece of cloth that women cover their heads and upper bodies with when they pray. We make our way back up the dark alley toward Tamale Central Mosque. The alley and the streets around the mosque are full of beggars of all ages, a few who are missing limbs or sitting in make shift wheelchairs. Maria gives some coins to some of them.
Tamale Central Mosque is big- it has three stories and it is wide. I can’t get a good sense of how wide because the men and women’s sections are separate. The women’s section is smaller, but I’m not sure how much smaller. Women are packed together, looking beautiful in their nice cloth and bright sarigas. Shoes litter the entryway, because you can’t wear your shoes in mosque. Small boys roam around the floor, pedaling prayer beads and dvd’s. I want to ask Maria if she finds this disrespectful, but she turns to ask me what color of prayer beads I want first. I select the green ones and assume that if she found the peddling of goods in mosque disrespectful, she wouldn’t buy them. The boy doesn’t come back with her change very quickly, so she leaves for a while to go and collect it.
Maria tells me the service is about the importance of going to Mecca if you can. She starts to explain how to use the prayer beads, but then decides to wait until after the service. For the prayer, everyone moves in unison. This is cool to watch at my village mosque, but it’s really cool in the gigantic Tamale Central Mosque. Hands up to your face, look left and right, touch your forehead to the ground. It feels good to move, and I’m more or less familiar with the motions by now. This is my first time at the Tamale mosque, but it’s definitely not my first time at mosque.
The service ends, and Maria grabs my hand. We hold hands back to the cab station where we pick a cab back to her house. It’s very normal for women to hold hands or for men to hold hands, but it’s pretty rare to see a man and a woman holding hands. Rare and slightly inappropriate.

Maria
Maria is a teacher in a nearby village. We met once on the lorry, and so naturally we’re best friends now. This is one of my favorite things about Ghana. I was travelling and had no place to stay, so she offered her brother’s house. It’s nicer than my place. When we come back from mosque, Maria introduces a group of women at the house. She calls them all “wife.” One of the women is her sister in law. Wife’s husband is living and working in America. She’s the one who is allowing me to stay. They are fasting, but the fast is broken after dark, and I am invited. Wife and Maria make food I’ve never had before- a dish that tastes like hominy and beans, and salad. Maria tells me that sometimes she will drink a Smirnoff and eat biscuits for dinner. In Ghanaian English, biscuits are cookies. I thought Smirnoff contained alcohol and Maria is a strong Muslim, so I ask her about it. She tells me why drinking alcohol and making “unnecessary sex” is very, very bad. I listen attentively, still not convinced that Smirnoff does not contain alcohol. I’m glad that wasn’t the dinner she chose for me.
She won’t stop asking me about the boyfriend I don’t have. “You must be hiding one,” she said. “Won’t you take a husband?” Later, my mom calls me. When I hang up, Maria is grinning. “Your boyfriend. I heard you saying I love you here and there. I knew you had a boyfriend!” I laughed, and then I called my mom back so Maria could greet her and find that my mother is not in fact my boyfriend.
The next day we wake up at 4 a.m. Since Maria is fasting, she has to drink and eat before the morning prayer call. It costs less to make phone calls at that time, and someone calls. 4 a.m. is a normal and acceptable time to make phone calls in Ghana.
When she hangs up, she explains that this man tried to date her but already had another wife. “I won’t be the second wife!” she said. She then explained all the research she did to find this out, which included talking to a lot of people. “You have to be careful, or you won’t have anything.” He wants to borrow money for his school fees, and she thinks it’s ridiculous. She starts talking about the evils of unnecessary sex again, and finishes with “it’s all finished for him. He can find somebody else.”
I’m trying to pay full attention, but I’m still having a hard time dealing with the fact it’s 4 a.m. Maria has already recovered from both the time and the conversation with the want to be lover and is happily devouring a giant bowl of rice. “Are you sure you won’t eat?” she asks me. “It’s very good for human beings to fast during Ramadan.” I try to fall back to sleep without success.
Much later that day, I lose my phone in a taxi. Some of my friends tried to call it, but whoever picked it up turned it off. I mentally noted that my chances of getting the phone back were really, really low, so I bought a new one.
Later that evening, when I got back to Maria’s house, she greeted me “Where is your phone?” I told her I wasn’t sure. “I called you and a man answered! I thought he was your boyfriend. I was greeting him and I was very confused. Let’s go to collect the phone.” She grabbed my hand and we left. Two men met us with the phone. Then we came home. Wife made a nice salad (I wasn’t aware before this that Ghanaians ate salad) and tezed for dinner, and we ate. The next morning I left to continue my travels. I definitely want to stay with Maria at again.

Ramadan and Sala:
We recently finished the Sala celebration in my village. Sala is the big festival that marks the end of Ramadan. The festival is formally called Eid el Fitr, and also has a Dagboni name that I can’t spell or pronounce.
The festival starts with about 30 days of fasting. During the fasting period, Muslims don’t touch food or water while the sun is up. Children and elderly people are excluded, but children who are old enough fast for two days and teenagers sometimes fast for 15 days.
A drummer goes around the village to wake people up early in the morning during the fasting period, because everyone has to eat and drink before the day starts. People have told me that not drinking water is the most difficult part and that not eating is relatively easy. I didn’t try, so I’m not sure. Muslims are always encouraged to be generous, but this is particularly true during Ramadan.
Sala starts the day after the moon is seen, and it marks the end of fasting. Gunshots and drumming announce the end of Ramadan, and everyone comes to the lorry station to pray together. There is a type of uniform for children who have memorized the Koran, and they are all there. It’s really pretty to watch everyone praying together.
Then people slaughter goats. Many, many goats. Everyone eats rice for lunch. People go from house to house greeting their friends and bringing meat. This continues for dinner, which can be any food. I had both tezed and fufu and maybe an entire goat- at any rate a lot of goat meat.