Piggate

Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, I was woken by some strange snuffly snorts from outside my bedroom window a little after 5 am.  It turns out two cute piglets had pushed their way into our compound and were merrily destroying what garden we had.  I shooed them away and pushed the gate closed.   On Tuesday they returned and I quickly discovered this was to be a daily occurrence, developing into not only a morning but an early evening ritual to conquer the gate and destroy the ‘solomeas’ (white peoples) garden.  You would be surprised what damage a bunch of piglets can do.  You see during the week the original two piglets decided to bring all their brothers and sisters too.

You’re probably asking yourselves; ‘why don’t you bolt the gate?’  A fair question… with a very good answer.  Our gate is a huge iron gate with concrete post either side.  As the day get warmer, (it hots up super quickly here) the gate expands and you are unable to open or close the gate.  To the amusement of my neighbours this happened to me and despite 4 Ghanaians pushing and pulling the thing wasn’t going to budge.  Luckily our landlord is fixing the gate this week (only after seeing the wreck of a garden). Kwame, our washerman was actually pleased to see the piglets.  He said because the rains had made the weeds grow in the garden so tall and bushy with lots of foliage (and it shoots up so quickly here) the snakes would come to hide there.  The piglets would eat the snakes (not sure about that; scare the snakes maybe?  Could have been lost in translation), the upshot being, pigs = no snakes, and in my book, even with a pig sty of a garden, that’s a fair swap. 

By Friday the sound of snuffles and snorts was much louder and heavier and I was thinking how many more piglets can there be as I unbolted the front door to enter into the shooing routine I had become accustomed to at an ungodly hour in the morning in the rapidly forming pig sty that was developing outside.  It was at this time, out of the corner of my eye I spotted The Biggest Sow In The World surrounded by her 9 or so piglets.  Mum had arrived.  I imagined briefly being eaten alive by the massive sow in a very Bridget Jones, eaten by Alsatians kind of way…  Remember the quote? ‘And that was it. Right there. Right there, that was the moment. I suddenly realised that unless something changed soon I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine[vodka]... and I'd finally die, fat and alone [in Ghana], and be found three weeks later half-eaten by Alsatians [a massive sow]’.  [Square brackets tell my story].  Anyway, it was at this point I decided knock routines in Ghana on the head… more trouble than they are worth.  Who needs routines when you have a sow who is clearly ready to eat anyone that comes near her and is bigger than a person should they be walking around on all fours.  Please, destroy my garden, ‘you are welcome’ as they say in Ghana.