I always thought that running a wine bar in Paris for no profit and letting friends use it to play music and sell art was going to be my ‘Breakdown’ job; you know, the job you think you’ll do when all goes belly up and you need to just start again. Well, i now have a new one. I am going to man the land border at Aflao between Ghana and Togo, raising and lowering the rubber rope that constitutes the countries boundaries.
The border was quite simply chaotic, chilled, manic, confusing, logical, noisy and relaxing all at the same time. It seemed almost too cliched to be real. We joked that it was the sort of experience you had on a gap year and would then regale friends on your return for years with ‘this one time, we went through the Togo border and…” So I will spare you this, but you can imagine it was a brilliant experience. The officer even felt obliged to live up to stereotypes and try and bribe us, except he only asked for a bottle coke and he had already issued our visa!
We called our colleague in Lomé who said he would come to meet us but to just relax at the border, so we sat catching the rays on a wooden bench in no-mans land between Ghana and Togo, looking out to the sea, chatting and taking it all in. I then bought us drinks off a passing cart and waited there by the road leaning on a wooden post directing cars and lorries through the border as everyone seemed oblivious to everything going on. It odd to feel so relaxed in such chaos. That was it, that was to be my new breakdown job. If i couldn’t work the rope, then i could always sell bottled drinks from a wooden cart.
So you now know where to find me
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