A Short Update
Leave a CommentSo my last update was about two months ago, and that was about something that happened two months prior, so I guess I have a lot to write about. As you may have noticed, the grant application was put on my blog. About a month ago, the entire grant had been filled. I hadn’t planned on receiving the funding in its entirety until the end of August, so I was ecstatic when I saw that my grant had been filled. On behalf of myself and the entire Yefri community, I would like to thank the donors. You really cannot fathom the impact your donations have made and will make on this community. Like unloading a dump truck over a pond, you haven’t just made a splash, you’ve remade the entire geography of the pond itself. Ok, that metaphor was a little forced, but I think you get my point.
This past week, the community has finished installing the new windows and door. In the next week or two, we’ll buy a small air conditioner and paint the interior of the room. Then come the computers. Before the end of September, I’ll have purchased and set up the computers, as well as a modem. I’m going to wait on setting up an actual network (in order to allow the internet connection to be shared among all of the computers) until after I return from travelling to Accra at the end of September.
In case I haven’t told you, I’m running a marathon in Accra on the 26th of September. My training has been going well, I think, but I’ve never run a marathon before so I’m not really inclined to make predictions about my actual performance. Following the race, I have a meeting with Peace Corps volunteer representatives from the other regions of Ghana and the Peace Corps staff about various issues that arise among the volunteer population in each region. I was elected the representative for Brong-Ahafo. I should note that perhaps my use of the word elected is a stretch as no one else from Brong-Ahafo was willing to volunteer.
A week after this I have my mid service medical exam. Technically, the half way point was earlier this summer, but Peace Corps Ghana is undergoing some structural changes due to an increased Peace Corps budget. Given the proximity of this medical examination to my marathon, I’m inclined to think that my weight as recorded in the beginning of July will be the lowest of my adult life. All the more reason to binge on Wawa hoagies this Christmas, right?
Speaking of which, I’ll be home. I’m coming home in the middle of December and I’ll be going back to Ghana after the first week in January. If you’re around then, send me an e-mail. And (as if it wasn’t already a cliché deprived of all meaning) I’ll update again soon.
White People, Give Me Money
Echoing the refrain of every little kid I pass on the way to school, I thought I would let anyone out there reading this that you can now donate money to be used to help build the computer lab at the school where I teach. The link to the website is here: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=641-296
I know this is short, and I haven’t written much recently, but I’ll be sure to update more often now that my grant is online.
Allvol
[On April 25th, I traveled with three other Peace Corps volunteers, friends of mine, to the city of Ho in the Volta Region for the Peace Corps Ghana All Volunteer Conference. Over the course of the week, the four of us, along with 122 other Peace Corps volunteers from Ghana attended HIV/AIDS education workshops, handled various administrative matters, and socialized extensively. The following is my account of the more eventful moments of the week. Sorry it's about 2 months too late]
We got into Ho in the evening. It was still light out but the sun was setting behind clouds and the buildings on the hills around us. There was much traffic in the road, with many old cars and trucks and some new cars, freshly washed, with an ostentatious sheen in the evening sunlight. Except for these few new cars, everything was dirty. Dust and gravel and refuse lined the edge of the street, pushed away from the center like waves in the wake of a boat. The sidewalks were crowded with the electric fans and propane stove tops, cheap televisions and other appliances, all spilling out from inside the one room stores. Plastic chairs were clustered under vinyl canopies outside of what they called spots, which were little more than wooden shacks with electric coolers of alcohol and soda. Each table, plastic like the chairs around it or sometimes metal, tilted back and forth under the beers and elbows and loud vinyl tablecloths. The ground underneath was cracked cement. We sat down and ordered drinks.
From my chair I could look out across the road. There were people in cars and people on bicycles and people walking. The sun looked like it was drowning off in the distance and in its final throes it illuminated the western sky a brilliant, deep orange. A few small clouds were silhouetted, purple against the sky, and the short crumbling buildings with their thousands of electrical wires, sparking, looked colorless by comparison. I was very tired. I sat with my friends and we talked while we drank. Small meat kabobs were delivered to us on tiny saucers. The saucers were chipped along the edges. We drank our beers out of the bottles and sipped soda and terrible liquor out of cheap glasses. The conversation was of people and culture and politics. It was all very smart. We were feeling very smart that night.
The sun had set and now, in the peripheral darkness, the plastic that was everywhere in Ho wasn’t so apparent. In the daylight, there was no chiseled stone, or carved and polished wood, the things I think of when I romanticize Africa. In the daylight, like so many young, poor cities, Ho wore its plastic aesthetic stretched so tightly that its barren concrete bones and tin ligaments showed through. The only lighting now was the soft fluorescence of the bulbs hanging from the ceiling and the strings of Christmas lights wrapped around poles and awnings. Yet for as fake as the lighting was, I felt so real then. Things were happening now, in front of me, with my own people, with whom I had relationships, who knew me and liked me. Life wasn’t some fantasy thousands of miles away anymore, that I lived vicariously through e-mail correspondence and Facebook. The longer we drank and ate kabobs, the more the weirdness of quotidian sobriety faded, and things seemed for the moment like I remember them being in America. The surrealism was a mirage. I was no longer a quasi-celebrity, drawing looks and calls from passers by. The twilight hid the dirt and skin and brand names on clothes. Like back home in America, drinks elucidated the people around me and the things they said. Like back home no one was foreign. That evening the din of a million conversations, ours and so many others, was soothing and so were the drinks.
Eventually, we left the spot with the kabobs. There was a larger gathering of volunteers at a spot not far from where we were. The four of us climbed in a taxi and departed and then the fluorescence of the electric lights and sunless, moonlit sky spun by, seeping in through open windows as we arrived and unloaded ourselves and our bags. We bought more drinks and greeted friends whom we hadn’t seen in months and shared stories with one another and laughed and talked about people and stupid things. The night was reaching its climax, it was so lucid and tranquil, and the air billowed with the warm authenticity of friendship in the midst of these ludicrous circumstances. The cadence of speech and the rhythm of the music in the background made it seem as if poetry floated all around me. I wanted it to stay that way but I stopped drinking and grew tired and sober and after some time we left in another taxi and checked into the hotel with our bags in hand. Spoken words became prose again and eventually I fell asleep.
The next morning at the hotel I was greeted by the unmistakable terror of extroversion. First at breakfast in the dining room and then again afterwards in the conference room as we began our daily group sessions, a strange, disquieting sensation settled inside of me. Although I had never quite acclimated to the cultural norms of village life, I had come to appreciate the bliss that came from making peace with its divinely mysterious quirks. Ironically, it was at the hotel that I found myself unprepared to play a game with rules to which I had an intimate familiarity. There were so many people around me but I felt lost. I stood there, silently, in the long shadow of a looming self-consciousness and I couldn’t escape. Overnight, cool and reserved had become craven and reticent.
How strange, this social anxiety! How did I deal with this before? What were my coping mechanisms? There was idle chatter everywhere around me, closing in. There was a breakfast buffet with a line winding out the door. I could no longer hide in plain sight, behind a veil of mild intoxication, low lights and the cigarette smoke from a dozen of my colleagues. Panic stricken, but showing only a demure look of mild boredom, I sat, and ate, and talked, and got up and sat down again elsewhere once I had finished my meal. I was genuinely happy to see all of my friends and the others too who were only faces and names, but I felt as if when I spoke to them that morning I was only mimicking from observation their inveterate social rituals. Lucky for me, what I thought was a piss poor facsimile proved passable.
If those first 24 hours demarcated my emotional bounds, the rest of the week proved to be a reversion to the mean. As I found my footing and I managed to get some sleep and a few good meals I felt the comfort I had grown accustomed to back home come back to me. What helped the most was that the days were all the same. I woke around six or seven for a run and breakfast. After this I spent the remainder of the morning sitting through a morning discussion of grant writing and form filing and other miscellany. Lunch was uneventful. Occasionally there would be a formal discussion of something over the course of lunch between the Peace Corps staff and volunteers, but usually once I finished I headed back to my hotel room to sleep a bit and decompress. The afternoons, like the mornings, were oriented around more HIV training, with the occasional volunteer safety seminar where we reviewed our emergency evacuation protocols and feigned understanding of the inherent risks in riding on the back of motorcycles. Dinner, like breakfast and lunch, was more buffet style all-you-can-eat Afro-American fusion, which means more fried chicken, fried yams, and spaghetti with spicy tomato sauce.
While our days spent in seminars and workshops were all very interesting, helpful, and occasionally useful, they don’t make for a very compelling blog entry. A few of the nights, however, did. The evening started slow on Monday night. Tired, I ate dinner with friends and then returned to my room to relax for a few minutes before heading back out. Each room had a television with several movie channels, CNN International, and BBC. Except for the fact that a crummy, boxy 13 inch CRT with a broken remote is what passes for upscale outside of Accra, it was just like home.
After some time in the dark, alternating between pacing the floor and laying on the bed, I changed into my bathing suit and headed back out to the pool. It was dark outside now, but the bright, plentiful lamps along the gravel driveway and the warm air made me feel like I was indoors, or some other place where I could forget about the time of day. There were low hedges, trimmed neatly, and then a waist high brick wall around the outside of the patio and the pool. Between the pool and the high, white, barbed-wired compound wall there were pool chairs and little tables, and young palm trees all the same height. The pool was crowded, as was the patio around the pool, but I found an empty chair where I could place my sandals, shirt, and phone.
Too crowded to actually swim, I stood in place and talked to some volunteers I hadn’t seen in a while. I tried floating but I couldn’t remember how. I was still overwhelmed, but by this point I had become use to the presence of others and I relished the inclination to talk. Later, we had drinks, splashed around in the pool some more, got out, toweled off on the side near the chairs, drank more and headed back to our rooms. Monday night ended pleasantly enough, with a warm shower and uninterrupted sleep in an air conditioned room.
On Tuesday night, I joined fifteen other volunteers in a poker tournament. We collected bottle caps, rocks, and toothpicks to use as chips for betting and we each paid five Ghana Cedis (about US$3.50). I hadn’t played cards in a year, but I wasn’t concerned as the competition didn’t seem particularly adept. I felt calm. I mixed some of the local liquor distilled from palm wine with Coca-cola and sipped on that for the next few hours. Sixteen became twelve, then eight as we combined the remaining players into one table in the dining room. I played tight, taking advantage of the novice players when they got ahead of themselves, but I finished in an underwhelming fourth.
Like the previous two nights, Wednesday was calm and uneventful. Like the previous two nights, the air was warm and there was a light breeze. Locals milled around the intersection between the gravel driveway and the street leading into Ho. There was social drinking at a spot down the street from the hotel. After dinner and a brief reprieve from human contact in my room with the TV tuned to BBC I headed down to the spot to meet my friends. Looking to alleviate my disappointment from the postponement of what was being billed as “Entertainment Night” (ostensibly a talent show, sans talent), I spent a pittance on cheap liquor and soda and lounged listlessly in a broken, brittle plastic porch chair. Like the previous nights my enjoyment came from social fulfillment and satisfaction, not from spectacle. There was a quietude and calm that evening that I appreciated. It’s difficult for me to assimilate into a large group, to make friends and to be at peace, even in the most convivial of atmospheres, but I had done so. After nearly a year in Ghana, with intermittent and intense immersions into this peculiar mixture of African and American culture, I was comfortable. The calm that evening was an apt, if not entirely ironic, prelude to coming night.
Thursday evening was the “Peace Corps Prom”. Before hand I went with a friend to a restaurant in Ho that served pizza. As this was a nicer restaurant, our waitress made sure to wipe down our vinyl tablecloth before we sat down to eat. It was strange though, sitting at that table. When I looked out down the street, all I could see was a gas station, some nondescript, sparsely lit buildings, and a few recently washed Asian cars parked near the curb. It could have passed for America. Even the pizzas weren’t the culinary aberrations I expected.
With my leftovers boxed up and ready for the fridge, I went back to my room to get dressed. Held on the patio/dance floor adjacent to the swimming pool, prom was anything but the way I remembered it from high school. Instead of formal attire, most of my peers donned loud, eccentric mixtures of African garments and quintessential Americana. I stuck to slacks, a vibrant red and yellow short sleeve shirt with buttons down the front, and cheap African looking sandals shipped over from God knows where. Juxtaposed to the freak-show kitsch festival rising up around me, I was tastefully dressed. Most of us literally wore our snide sarcastic asides and irony on our sleeves. The rest of us were shirtless.
From what I remember, we all danced for a while to a mix of music that matched the incongruity of our clothes. Loud pop beats shook the walls of the hotel while the cute, 80’s rock clichés mobbed the dance floor as waves of water slipped over the sides of the pool, cresting on the concrete. I don’t know who DJ’d, but they knew the mood that evening and faultlessly crafted an atmosphere which melded merry inebriation with an all too apparent awareness of our own little oasis of wealth. But what else could we do at this point, other than smirk and sing along. Too bad Akon had never remixed “Forever Young”, since that’s the only piece missing from a piece perfect lampooning of high school prom.
At some point the music stopped and most of us ended up semi-clothed, in and around the pool. My jug of liquor and fruit juice (courtesy of a woman in a wooden shack on the roadside in Ho, with what may be the only juicer in the country outside of Accra) was empty and sitting on its side with the cap missing, next to a trash can. In what became the evening’s definitive moment, an American Peace Corps employee (not a volunteer), John, staggers over to the edge of the pool to make an announcement to us. His eyes illuminated and his face like a flashlight, he stared at us smiling, with his limbs pivoting loopily at their joints. Drunk didn’t begin to describe him as John crashed about. What he said was ultimately forgettable, but with his conclusion John grabbed a volunteer near by and threw him into the pool. Other volunteers followed, caught by John’s sloppy grin and feisty arms and fingers. Blithely hammered and chain smoking cigarettes by a poolside table covered in beer bottles, Jane, our medical officer was one of the last to fall victim before someone bothered to push John over the side, into the deep end.
We all bobbed in the water, chatting and laughing at John and Jane as they splashed over to the shallow end and smiled, as content as we were, enjoying the merriment. At some point I swam away from the girl I had danced with, having long since grown bored, and collected my clothes. With friends I sat drying off, trying to figure out whether what I just witnessed was an awesome display of relatability and understanding on behalf of the Peace Corps staff, or an irreconcilable exhibition of unprofessionalism. Our opinions were divided. I can’t speak for anyone else there that evening, but I never really made up my mind. Not that night, nor since then. I just walked back to my room and devoured the remaining pizza in the fridge with my roommate and fell asleep.
Pictures
I’m back from my vacation. I’ll try to compose a post in the coming weeks on my trip to Ho for a Peace Corps conference, and then to a beach resort near Takoradi. Meanwhile, I uploaded some new pictures of my recent trip, as well as a day trip I took earlier in April to Kintamp Falls and the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary. I’ve been to the monkey sanctuary many times before (it’s only four miles from my house), but I don’t believe I’ve uploaded any pictures. Enjoy.
African Piety
There is a fatalism here which I’m afraid I’ll never understand. Every outcome and occurrence is resigned to the realm of the divine. Every instance of fortune is determined by the whims of the supreme. Every consequence is singularly the work of God. This belief, not merely in God, but in the absoluteness and immutability of one’s own fate, permeates every aspect of life. Neither effort nor determination can lead to success; only the blessings of God, or the benevolence of a blessed family member or friend bring good fortune. Neither indolence nor profligacy bring about failure; only the loss of God’s favor can do that. It’s disheartening and at the same time maddening.
If you ask a beggar why he squats on the ground, supplicating himself to those who pass by, he will tell you it the will of God. This isn’t surprising. Attitudes like this are found among the impoverished and unfortunate throughout the world. However, if you ask a taxi driver how he obtained the car he drives to make a living and to feed his family and to send his children to school and to allow him a comfortable standard of living, chances are, his reply won’t differ much from that of the beggar. He may have worked hard on his farm and put his money away and lived within his means, but that is of no consequence. It was God who, in his infinite and absolute wisdom, chose him to drive a taxi, sparing him from endless days of toil in on his small plot of farm land.
Instead of saving his money, let’s say the driver had the good fortune of knowing, either as a blood relation or by means of friendship, a much wealthier man who gave him the money for his car. If that is the case, chances are, he believes this rich man was blessed and had chosen, by his own equally mysterious and equally divine whims, to bestow some of his blessing on the driver. It’s everywhere, faith in God is absolute and ultimate. An individual’s actions are arbitrary and meaningless in the greatness of God’s cosmos. Men and women may choose what to wear or what to eat or what to do in their leisure, but at the very instance any of those decisions take on any significant consequence, they become the decisions of God, based not in a rational analysis of cause and effect but in the inexplicability of God’s design.
Perhaps I’m generalizing too much. I don’t suppose all Ghanaians think this way. Many people here do genuinely value education and hard work and ability, but this attitude is nearly universal in the poorer, rural parts of the country. That isn’t surprising. The poor, especially those in less populated areas, tend to be more religious. However, the similarities between Africa and the only other country I’ve ever called home, America, end there.
I grew up with religion in America. My parents raised me as a Catholic. I was baptized, given communion, and confirmed. I’ve moved on since then, I’ve left the church and I no longer consider myself to be religious, but I have a sense of what constitutes piety, at least in America. Rarely, if ever, do even the most devout among us truly resign themselves to the belief that their own misfortune is absolute and brought about by divine subjectivity. Most of us would admit that chance plays a role in every outcome, but sheer determination and willpower, combined with ability and foresight, are invariably the most important factors in one’s own success or failure. We even coin aphorisms and turns of phrase to reconcile our fierce individuality with the terrifying omniscience and interconnectedness of the kingdom of God. Teachers and mentors have told me, in the wake of misfortune, that “when God closes a door, he opens a window”. My own mother has counseled me countless times that “God helps those who help themselves”. People of all sorts, from neighbors to television personalities to strangers, describe strokes of adversity, regardless of the magnitude of their consequence, as “blessings in disguise”. But I never hear this in Ghana.
Maybe I’m being too hard on the Ghanaians. It is easy for me to admonish so many of them for their piety, for their reluctance to take credit for their successes and responsibility for their failures. I’m successful. Sometimes not by my own standards, and rarely by the standards of my colleagues and peers, but almost certainly in the more universal, “global village” sense. I see why they have their religion, why they embrace (God forbid I say “cling to”) their Christianity and Islam so unconditionally. For the people here, belief in the notion of God’s absolute control is a helping hand propping up a broken body politic, bearing the crosses of financial uncertainty, mortal fragility, and social precariousness. I can get by without religion because this isn’t home. I don’t have to live the rest of my life here.
A few months back I was having a conversation with an American friend of mine. We spoke of our frustrations with connecting to the Ghanaians in our communities, to understanding their thought process and the way they rationalize their decisions. Neither of us could understand their insensibility in the face of logic and reason. To us, our arguments were basic and manifestly self evident, whether they were related to why students should study, or why mothers should breastfeed their children, or why fathers should spend their money on school fees instead of alcohol. But when Ghanaians spoke to one another, reasoning was neither a popular nor effective instrument of rhetoric. Ghanaians tortuously wound their speech around the subject at hand, telling stories and advising one another implicitly.
The conversation moved on from there, and then on again and again. Eventually the discussion turned to religion, as we had both moved away from the church during our adolescence. And in this discussion, long after we had left our reasoning and logic scattered in pieces behind us, the solution to our inability to connect with the indigenous society presented itself in what can only be described as an epiphany: Christ spoke in parables. Faith can’t be explained through reason. If there was proof of God no one would need faith. And as much as it frustrates me, Ghanaians need their faith.
The Oven
Looking to expand my culinary horizons, and reaching the limitations of a propane fueled stove top, I decided it was time to build an oven. Working off of the assumption that an oven is essentially just a box that gets hot inside, I started looking around Yefri and Nkoranza for some metal that I could put together into a box shape. Once constructed, the box would then be placed on top of the burners on my stove.
In the computer lab in my school, a veritable voodoo burial mound for desktop computer from the mid 1990s, I found my metal. Way back then, computer manufacturers designed their desktops so that the monitor would sit atop the computer case. Given the considerable heft of computer monitors back then, the cases were constructed out of metal, not plastic like they are now. Since nearly all of the computers in my school are damaged beyond repair, my headmaster gave me permission to take a few of the metal covers caked in cob webs and strewn along the back wall of the room, on top of an old desk.
My original plan was to get some tools and build my metal box by myself. However, I learned from a Ghanaian friend that there was a technical school in Nkoranza with a metal workshop, so a few weeks ago I went with my metal computer covers and my Ghanaian colleague to the workshop and approached the teacher running the classes. I showed him the metal and we talked for a bit about the design of the box. He explained what resources were available to him, such as carbon fiber insulation, and we agreed on a plan. My oven would have a door that swings open on hinges, and a latch to keep it in place when closed. Inside, there would be two brackets on either side to hold baking trays, made from aluminum sheets used for roofing. Each wall, the door, and the top would be about two centimeters thick and stuffed with insulation in order to keep the heat inside the box.
The teacher worked on the box in between classes and last week he called me to tell me it was completed. I brought it home and washed it out. I didn’t get the baking sheets until this week, so it wasn’t until this past Thursday that I actually got around to testing the oven out on a major baking endeavor. Last week, I did bake a few small peanut butter cookies in a frying pan (I removed the handle) and they turned out well, so I had high hopes.
My recipe of choice was one for oatmeal raisin cookies. There are several reasons why I went with oatmeal raisin cookies. First, I’ve never baked before in any kind of oven, so I wanted to cut my teeth on something simple. Second, this was one of only a handful of recipes for which I had most or all of the ingredients. Third, I love oatmeal raisin cookies. I think I can safely skip over the rather mundane details regarding the mixing and measuring of the ingredients, as I am almost assuredly the only American on the face of the planet over the age of six who has never made cookies. The only ingredient I was actually missing was brown sugar, for which I substituted plain old white sugar. That may have been a culinary faux pas a more veteran chef than myself never would have committed, but sugar is sugar, right?
I scooped the mixture of ingredients (really a soupy batter more than a dough, which, in retrospect, seems to have been a major warn sign that my cookies were headed for disaster) onto one of my aluminum baking sheets. I stupidly opted to cram fifteen scoops onto one sheet instead of spacing them out, despite the fact that I had two sheets. While I was scooping, I had turned on my burners to preheat the oven, which sounded like something the pros would do. When I was finished I put the sheet with my cookies into the oven and went outside to wash some clothes.
Periodically I would come back in to check on the cookies. As time passed, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, the cookies expanded, but the tops still remained gooey. Apparently this is normal, but for some reason I thought the tops of the cookies would be hard when they had finished baking. After twenty minutes, I decided to take the baking sheet out because I was tired of waiting. My cookies, due to their considerable lack of viscosity, had expanded, covering almost the entire surface of the baking sheet. Essentially, I had made brownies, but with oatmeal instead of chocolate. And when, after letting the baking sheet cool down a bit, I went to pry my cookie continuum from its shiny aluminum shell, I found that the bottom sides of most of the cookies were completely black.
I’m guessing if I had taken the cookies out earlier, added some more flour to solidify the mixture, and used brown sugar (which I can only get in the big cities) instead of white sugar, the cookies would have turned out much better. Additionally, in my haste to extract the cookies from the baking sheet, I neglected to take a picture of the baked cookies still on the sheet. Coupled with some technical issues with the internet, I’m unable to show off the finished product. In all honestly, I’ll wait until I get better before I upload any more pictures. Better luck next time I guess.
Nine Months in Ghana
Thursday marked nine full months in Ghana. Every time I sit down to try and figure out what I’ve learned, what mistakes I’ve made and what I’ve done right, I can’t do it. In my mind, the whole process of articulating these things, of formalizing my opinions and my perceptions and synthesizing and inducing, of reaching conclusions involves some kind of termination of the present progressive tense, so to speak. I’m not done here, and I won’t be for some time, but the act of personal reflection feels so much like eating a broken egg with my bare hands. I can pick out pieces of the shell, but the substance keeps slipping through my fingers and I’m left with a mess.
When I got off the plane on June 4th, I was overwhelmed with emotion. At the time, I didn’t really know what I felt, but I knew I was feeling something. I certainly couldn’t articulate it then, and even now, I’m not sure if I can. I guess, for a young person like me, the feeling was similar to the beginning high school or college. I tried to make sense of my surroundings, rationalizing every minute cultural oddity and stretching my very limited understanding of African politics and history beyond its breaking point. I thought that everything I saw had to fit into some sort of literary narrative, that if I looked closely enough and thought hard enough I could find a pattern in the static and come up with a neat little formula explaining Ghana, its culture, its economy, and its people.
Unsurprisingly, such a formula doesn’t exist. But in those first few months here, with the overwhelming emotions and life, in general, being just about as lucid and surreal as it can be for a 22 year old American, I couldn’t help myself from making assumptions and drawing conclusions. There is this onerously omnipresent temptation to use events taken out of context and words and turns of phrase and colors and shapes and images all mangled together to accurately depict the world around me. But that’s not depiction, it’s found art. These fragments of Ghana distort each other, like the way planets and stars warp time and space so that what we see in the night time sky isn’t what’s really there right now, but instead just one unique, fleeting, and ultimately dated perspective on an infinite number of objects in motion in the vast emptiness of outer space. I wanted the traders and the farmers with the things on their heads and their children running around naked and barefooted to each mean something specific and important. And maybe they do, but the only way to figure out the meaning expressed by each passing person in the street is to know them intimately and to become invested in their lives and that’s impossible.
So I guess I was shaken when I first got here. I let my realism slip away from me. I don’t know what replaced it, maybe a sort of idealism, maybe youthful folly. Maybe it was the incubating passions and wishes of my inchoate adulthood. But whatever it was, it’s gone and I’ve got my focus back. My realism has been restored and my optimism hasn’t waned. It’s only been these past few months that I’ve been able to justify filtering out the distractions and diversions, the metaphorical bright lights and sirens found in my literal mud brick village. I’ve become accustomed, even inured in some respects, to the little facets of living in Africa that differ so glaringly from life back home. Waiting and hour by the roadside for a taxi doesn’t bother me. When I wake up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat, I just roll over and go back to sleep. The twice weekly blackouts peeve me a little, but I can’t do much about them. And I haven’t even been sick since October.
What I’ve ultimately found is routine. I wake up before the sun rises every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday to get ready for a run. How far I go and how fast I go varies from day to day, but I go. There is a marathon at the end of September that I would like to run, but even if I didn’t have that motivating me, I would still be out there in the mornings. I love getting up and making myself coffee when it’s still dark outside. I love how cool the air is in the morning. I love the way the sunlight is soft and warm in the moments after the sun rises, lacking the harshness it acquires later in the day.
When I come back, it’s hot. By 8am the sun is high enough in the sky to have eliminated most of the shady reprieves found along the course I take. I stand on the front porch for a few minutes, drinking water, and sometimes pacing around in the barren, dusty front yard. Once my water is finished, I go inside and do some other exercises on the floor and then stretch some more before grabbing my towel and bucket to take a bath. It’s the same routine every time: run, drink, pushups, stretch, bath. And except for Tuesday, when I have a class at quarter after 9, I make myself a big omelet and some spaghetti or rice. Once that’s ready to go, I sit myself down in a chair, with my bowl in my lap and escape into a magazine or a book or a movie on my computer.
I love this time. This morning routine, followed so dogmatically I could easily call it a ritual or some kind of religious rite, makes my whole day. This is my psychological sanctuary. The adrenaline from the exercise, the ecstasy from quenching my thirst when I finish, the shock of the cold water dousing my head and shoulders and the roughness of my soapy sponge all work to fortify my mind, as strange as that sounds. None of these activities are mentally taxing in the way an academic exam can be, none require a keen intellect, perspicacious observation, or astute attention to detail. If anything they work to clear my mind and ready me for the rest of the day. And I love it, I love all of it. What I do from then on out, what happens to me, what I see and hear, matters very little if I follow my morning routine.
I think, because of this mental lucidity, I’ve been proactive, productive, and levelheaded in my decision making. I sent off my grant application for the computer lab at the end of February (a synopsis, taken from the application itself, is posted below), and I’ve started planning a few other, smaller projects. I want to start a school wide reading program modeled after the programs run by schools and libraries in the United States. It would be optional, with incentives provided to the students for each book they read (and summarize in at least a one page essay) and rewards at the end of each term for the students who read the most pages. Additionally, I want to provide some sort of transitional math course for the few students who are planning on going to college once they finish their fourth year. In many poorer American schools, and I’m guessing poorer Ghanaian schools as well, there is a significant disparity between the material taught in high school and the material with which colleges expect incoming students to be familiar. My hope is that starting next year (there are no 4th year students right now at my school due to a change in the way Ghanaian secondary schools function) I can teach aspirant university students the material they need to be prepared for college level math, mainly calculus.
I don’t know if all of these projects will work out, but I think they’re all realistic and I think they’ll prove immensely helpful to the community and the students at the school. Right now, I don’t have much else to say. I know some of my earlier blog posts were quite long, which is somewhat ironic considering how insubstantial much of what I had to say was at the time. In the future, although the exceptional and the extraordinary will certainly still get some play, my focus is going to be on the everyday aspects of my life here. I don’t get to see Barack Obama every day. I don’t get to hang out pool side with the American ambassador every day. But I like to think I do make an impact on the community, however small it may be, every day I’m here.
The Grant Application
I submitted my application for a grant to Peace Corps last week. Part of the application involved writing a considerable bit about the project and its aims, the community and their needs, and plans for implementation and sustainability. Below, I’ve posted most of what I wrote for the application to give you all an idea of what my aims were with the computer lab. Basically, the plan is to buy about 15 new computers, renovate the room, get an internet connection, and after school, run the lab as an internet café that the community can use as well as the students and the teachers. Not everything is finalized yet. I only have a verbal promise from the chief of Yefri for the 1500 Ghana Cedis the community is required to put up (the community puts up 25% and the rest comes from donors in the US). I originally planned to run the café as a non-profit, but in the interest of sustainability I’m thinking it would be wiser to use a for-profit model. However, the majority of the planning is done. What’s written below is about as accurate a synopsis of the whole project as you are likely to get from me. Enjoy.
Executive Summary
This grant will be used to rebuild the Yefriman Secondary School computer lab and provide the community of Yefri with local, reasonably priced internet access. Presently, the overall condition of the lab is quite dire. There are gaping holes in the walls and cracks in the ceiling, and the windows and doors need to be replaced. Insects, mice, and lizards have free roam of the lab and frequently use the three working computers as nests. With the money from this grant, we can renovate the lab room, buy newer computers, and even provide internet access to the students and community members. Plans to buy new doors and windows, with stronger locks, are already being funded by the community and the renovations to the room should be completed by summer. Once the room is refurbished and outfitted with the 15 new computers we hope to be able to purchase, the lab will be in use every day by the 300+ students of Yefriman Secondary School. In addition to this, the computer lab will function as an internet café for the people living in and around Yefri. Most of the people in the community are low income farmers with little or no education and limited English language skills. Computer classes will be taught in Twi, the local language, by the best performing students at the school, and students and teachers will help community members search for and translate information related to anything from personal health to agriculture to news and current events.
Background Information
Yefri is a small, rural village and most of the people living hear are low income farmers and traders. Many lack electricity and almost none own motor vehicles. For most people, access to Nkoranza, the nearest town with a large market, is limited. Yefriman Secondary School, which was founded by the chief of Yefri several years back and mainly serves the community of Yefri and several of the surrounding villages, is also quite poor. Most of the students here are struggling to complete the secondary school curriculum and learn all the necessary information required for the West African Secondary School Curriculum Examination (WASSCE), which they will take prior to graduating after their fourth year.
There are a number of very old computers at the school, but most no longer function. Water, dust, insects and mice have all taken their toll on the machines. With class sizes averaging well over 30 students, the three working computers are insufficient. The broken machines do serve as a teaching aid for lessons on computer hardware, but it is nearly impossible to teach software concepts, such as word processing and internet use, with only three computers, all of which lack CD/DVD drives and USB ports.
Community Need
Presently, the students of Yefriman Secondary School are falling behind in their Information and Computer Technology (ICT) classes. The primary reason for this is because the school lacks a proper, functioning computer lab. Within the next few years, an entire section of the WASSCE will be dedicated to ICT. This puts the students of Yefriman Secondary School at a severe disadvantage relative to the students of wealthier, more prestigious secondary schools with proper computer labs, causing the students of Yefri to fall further behind. Ultimately, the lack of a computer lab capable of facilitating proper ICT instruction will make admission into university and access to good jobs much harder to come by for the students of Yefri, leaving them trapped in the cycle of poverty for another generation.
Community Initiation and Direction
The plans for a computer lab had first been proposed to Matthew, the Peace Corps volunteer whom I replaced last August. However, for a number of reasons, namely the recalcitrance and political machinations of the school board, the project was never able to get off the ground due to the lack of community funding. Matthew was able to complete some smaller projects, such as a library, but requested that he be replaced by an ICT teacher so as to facilitating the funding and assembly of a proper computer lab.
When I first met Peter, the headmaster of Yefriman Secondary School, and Frank, another teacher and my counterpart, the computer lab was one of the first topics we discussed. All three of us, as well as several other teachers at the school have been working over the past few months to develop a plan for a new computer lab. We have met with members of the PTA and the local chief, both of whom have expressed wholehearted support for our efforts here and have offered financial assistance.
In the interest of benefiting the community of Yefri, and not just the students at the school, I thought the lab could also function as an internet café after school hours and on the weekends. To gauge the opinions of the community on the issue, advertise the fact that Yefriman Secondary School was considering opening an internet cafe, and ascertain basic demographic information, I composed a short survey. I gave the survey questions to ten students from the school on a Friday and told them to survey their neighbors and report the results to me on Monday. The reason I used students, instead of surveying the communtiy myself was twofold. First, I wanted to emphasize the fact that this was a community initiated project. By sending the students around the town, the community is able to see that this is a project initiated by Ghanaians, not imposed by Americans. Second, my Twi is still limited and I would not have been able to accurately communicate the survey questions written in English to non-English speakers.
Community Contributions
The room currently being used as the computer lab is in a state of utter disrepair. There are holes in the walls and cracks in the ceiling, and the windows and door do not close properly. Before we purchase any expensive electronics, it is essential that we have a room capable of securing whatever we leave inside of it. In order for the room to be ready for the computers that we intend to purchase in August, the school has already begun planning renovations to the room. The chief of Yefri has generously offered to provide 1500 Ghana Cedis (25% of our goal of 6000 Cedis) for the purchase and installation of four new windows and a new door, as well as other minor repairs to the room.
In addition to this, we plan on preparing the room for the installation of a small air conditioning unit, once we receive the partnership contribution. Although an air conditioner is expensive, and seen as a luxury even in the United States, it is essential to keep the room cool and closed off from the outside in order to ensure proper functioning of the computers and to keep them free from dust and other particles that get blown in through open windows and kicked up by ceiling fans.
Project Implementation
We have already secured guarantees of funding from donors in the United States, and the community of Yefri. After sending off this grant application, the headmaster and I will be contacting retailers and construction workers in the area in order to buy and install the new windows and doors by summer time. Our hope is that through networking with influential Ghanaians in the area, such as the chief of Yefri, we can secure a good deal on the hardware and installation. In addition to this, we will have the students at the school clean the room before and after the installation of the windows and doors.
Over the summer, any other minor repairs needed will be taken care of and the room will be prepared for the installation of an air conditioner. Meanwhile, the headmaster and several of the ICT teachers at the school will be in contact with computer retailers in Techiman, Kumasi, and possibly Accra. Instead of purchasing brand new computers, we are looking for slightly used models which can be bought for about 200 Cedis each. Presently, our goal is to make our purchase in the beginning of August and spend the next month setting the computers, as well as purchasing other pieces of hardware, such as networking equipment and a modem through one of the mobile phone operators in the area (there are no telephone land lines in the area).
Hopefully, the lab will be functioning by the beginning of the school year at which point the students can begin to take advantage of its facilities. In addition to this, we will open the lab in the late afternoons and evenings, as well as on Saturdays, for use by the community members. There will be a rotating schedule of ICT teachers covering shifts in the lab. This will also be when students in their third and fourth year of secondary school, who have done well in ICT, will be encouraged to teach basic computer classes to the community members in Twi (some form of compensation will be provided as an incentive to the students, in order to make the classes worth their while).
If all goes according to plan, the lab will be functioning smoothly and the community members will take advantage of the resources available to them. I have already begun compiling a list of websites with information pertinent to rural Africans. While the internet café may be run at cost in the beginning, while other technical issues are being sorted out, our long term plan is to operate the internet café as a small business and invest some of the profits back into the lab and the school.
Project Sustainability
One of the most exigent concerns pertaining to the construction of a computer lab is the safety and maintenance of its facilities and hardware. Stories abound in the developing world of teachers and administrators who sell pieces of hardware or even entire computers belonging to schools for their own personal profit. Regardless of whether they act out of avarice or the unfortunate constraints of the circumstances of their impoverishment, it is always the students who suffer. To prevent the theft and deterioration of the lab, both while I’m here and after I have returned to America, I have proposed that the PTA create within itself an “ICT Council” which, once or twice a semester, coinciding with PTA meetings, will take inventory of the lab, find out what computers are not working and why, and determine what is being done to resolve the problems. And while the teachers and administrators of the school will, hopefully, be doing their best to spot any problems and prevent theft before it occurs, a second set of eyes on the lab will further disincentivize any prospective malfeasance.
Additionally, we believe that by eventually running the internet café as a for-profit business, with the school and perhaps other community organizations, such as the PTA, functioning as stake holders, the project will be sustainable and even turn a profit which can be reinvested or paid out to stakeholders in the form of a dividend. However, one of the biggest challenges we will face will be finding qualified teachers to run the lab. I will be at my site until August 2011 and my top priority, once the lab is up and running, will be to train the other teachers at the school in how to properly administrate and maintain the computers, as well as troubleshoot issues with the networking hardware and the internet connection. I plan on leaving behind as extensive a collection as possible of technical manuals and reference materials, both in terms of books and online documentation, of which future administrators can take advantage.
Ultimately, our hope is that by the time I leave, the community will have enough of a vested interest in the maintenance and upkeep of the lab that the school and the community members will be able to keep the lab running smoothly. Despite the relative impoverishment of the community, these people are not technophobes. Mobile phone use is almost universal, even among people who lack electricity in their own homes. According to the feedback from the survey I administered, enthusiasm for the internet café is exceptionally high. Despite the fact that many of the people in this community have never used the internet, or even a computer (other than their mobile phone), I suspect they will take to the technology very quickly and use it to radically improve the quality of their own lives.
Christmas and In Service Training
For the last month or so, with a few brief exceptions, I’ve been very busy. The end of the Fall term was a little hectic, as I didn’t really know what the hell I was suppose to be doing. Not long after that I my site to travel up north for Christmas and the New Year. For Christmas, I stayed at the Peace Corps sub office in Tamale with about ten other volunteers. The day after, I left with a friend for his village near Bolgatanga, in the Upper East. You could say we were without electricity, but that’s not an entirely honest statement. We both had laptops and iPods that were charged up, as well as headlamps and flashlights, so neither of us really missed the single, naked compact fluorescent bulb dangling from my ceiling that is, arguably, the biggest different between the interiors our two sites.
But unlike the insides of our homes, with the concrete walls painted in pastels and adorned with calendars, photos, and ornaments from the states, the surrounding landscapes could not have been more different. Up in the north of Ghana the climate is hotter and drier. There are no clouds in the sky and there are no rolling hills cloaked in jungle. The land is covered in loose dirt and dead, dry grass. In the middle of my friend’s compound, which he shares with several other families, there is a raised platform made of mud brick, with steep, narrow stairs climbing up to the top. I believe it’s used for drying foods and, during the unbearable heat of springtime in Ghana, sleeping. The view, when perched atop the platform as the sun sets in the evening, is surreal. You can stand in place and turn slowly, seeing a panoramic of the dry, grassy savannah stretching for miles and, as your eyes strain to make out the trees and mud brick houses the size of pin points on the horizon, the sun slips away leaving behind a fast fading trail of deep purples oranges and yellows.
Without divulging any potentially incriminated details, we had fun that week in the village, and in Bolgatanga on New Year’s Eve. I left on the morning of the second day of January for my home in Yefri and made it back by the evening. That week, most of my neighbors and nearly all of the other teachers at the school had traveled and were still away. I relaxed, watched movies on my computer, and read some books. That weekend, I had to leave once again, this time for Kukurantumi. Beginning on the following Monday, Peace Corps had scheduled an in service training seminar for all the education volunteers who had arrived last June.
Our Ghanaian counterparts attended the seminar with us and together we participated in teaching workshops and lectures on, among other things, Ghana’s educational system and the various fundraising opportunities available to us. By the end of the week I felt very satisfied with the information we had been given and the workshops Peace Corps had held for us. Obviously not all of what we were told was of particular relevance to me, and there were a few dry spots during the lectures, but I left that week impressed by the facilities Peace Corps made available to us and reenergized, ready to get back to work. And of course it was also very nice to spend time with many friends from training whom I had not seen since last August.
Since classes began a few weeks ago, I’ve been focusing on getting my plans for a new computer lab off the ground. My course load was severely cut back this term due to the fact that computer skills will not be tested on the WASSCE (the exam all graduating students take in the spring of their final year). I’m not at all disappointed by this. Teaching was perhaps the least interesting part of my job. My headmaster has been very cooperative with me thus far this term, as he was last term, and now I have more time to work on my grant application for the computer lab, as well as a few other secondary projects, all of which I’ll write about in another post in the near future.
I hope all of my friends and family had a great holiday season. And out of curiosity, are there are any Peace Corps invitees preparing to come in June 2010 that read this blog? I was thinking about trying to put together a post on advice that I wish I had heard before I came here. In the mean time, feel free to e-mail me with any questions.
Thanksgiving
The air was cold outside when I left my house in the morning the day before Thanksgiving. It was still dark out, but in the moon light I could see my breath. I was freezing. I had on shorts and a t-shirt and I jumped in place and shifted my weight from side to side to keep warm, but I was dressed for the mid day sun and the searing heat of the afternoon. I waited for Steven, a colleague of mine from the school, and his girlfriend, Gladys, by the front porch of the compound house we live in. When they came out, we walked out to the dirt road and then down to the intersection. In the darkness, with the street lit dimly and warped by the strange shadows cast from electric lamps and a full moon, I stumbled in my flip-flops over the ruts and loose dirt. Steven and Gladys, both Ghanaians, navigated the path adroitly. Gladys was heading to Nkoranza as well, although her ultimate destination was different from mine. When we got to the intersection, we stood underneath a dim orange street light, one of a few scattered along the side of the road leading to Yefri, attached to the wooden poles holding up the electrical lines. The sun had not yet risen. I couldn’t see the trees, with their faint powdering of red dust from the road, and the mud brick abodes were mere outlines, points of discontinuity in the gradient shadows off from the road. Here we made some small talk. As we talked dawn broke behind us, raising the morning mists and huddled creatures in mud brick huts, and we stood at the corner waiting for the first taxis to come.
In my small green backpack, along with my laptop, a book, money, a bank card, identification, and a few changes of clothing, I had stuffed two energy bars to eat for breakfast. I ate one while we waited, for something to do with my hands, and because I thought it would warm me up. I was anxious and bored in the cool, rising dawn sunlight. I hadn’t spent much time in Accra and the last time I had been to the city was July. Accra had a mystique about it and existed in my memory as only a blurred collage of still frames from my first days in Ghana, overexposed and washed out. It was anything but lucid, starkly antithetical to the moving pictures in my mind of Yefri, Nkoranza, and Kumasi. Accra was mythical. And standing at the corner of the two dirt roads that intersect near my home in Yefri, with the street light still lit above me despite the rising sun, I appreciated the myth and mystique that the city offered me. It would give me something to think about in the taxis and trotros, as the rides themselves had long since lost their novelty. After six months in Ghana I could find my way around well enough and the idiosyncrasies of travel were nuisances and minor amusements, not challenges anymore. Travel, by itself, was mired in routine and ritual.
As I finished eating, Gladys waved down a passing taxi and we got in, bidding Steven a casual farewell. We left Yefri, and I put on my headphones in the backseat and I leaned my head against the window. I was wedged in between the other passengers, the side door, and my backpack. Here was satisfaction, here was heedless happiness. I had lost track of time, not in terms of hours but in months and seasons and I was savoring the novelty of seemingly celebrating Thanksgiving in the summer time. In the car, the air was warmer and the cool breeze rushing through the open windows of the taxi was calming. Now the sun was rising quickly, an austere orange globe climbing up past long, thin gray clouds on the horizon. Warm air and exhaust blew in through the window and the taxi rolled and rattled on over the dirt road.
A half hour passed and we ended up in Nkoranza. I found my trotro to Kumasi waiting, almost full, ready to depart. There is no time table for departures. Cars only leave when they are full and it was merely fortuitous, a stroke of dumb luck, not deftness, that I arrived in time to buy the final ticket. We left once I boarded, not more than an hour after sun rise. I wanted to get to Kumasi early on that Wednesday. I wanted the whole day to relax and I wanted to get myself a bed before they were all taken. The following day, Thanksgiving, there was to be a dinner at the ambassador’s residence in Accra. To get there by early afternoon I had to wake up in Kumasi around dawn and I wanted to be well rested for the ride down to Accra. I suspect that trying to sleep on a trotro would, at best, go down as a gross misadventure. The drivers regularly pack twenty or more people into the vans, replete with the extra rows of seats welded to the floor and the walls, and I usually end up stuck in a corner with my neck crooked and my head slamming against the sheet metal roof after every bump we go over. And even if that weren’t the case, I just don’t like travelling tired.
In the trotro down to Kumasi, wide awake, with my knees and my back pack in my lap and my headphones on, looking out the window and moving my ankles around the cargo underneath the seats to keep them cool, I had some time to think. This would be my first time away from home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the longest time I had ever been away from my home, my family, and my friends. In college, I had spent four months in Spain but I had left a week after New Year’s, with the tastes and sensations of the holidays, the splendor and revelry, fresh in my mind. It’s not easy being away from home as the year draws to a close, but the uniqueness of the experience at the time, that is, the opportunity to travel down to Accra and eat and drink and sleep for free in the capital, blunted the creeping homesickness.
Reflecting on all of this, I realized that I had never thought of Thanksgiving as a holiday in and of itself. For me, it was always the beginning of a season of celebrations, a prelude to festivities around Christmas and New Year’s Day. It was as if, up until that point, the end of the year was a day dream, some fantasy place far off in the future. Like the way young children think of college, or twenty somethings think of retirement or death, it wasn’t fiction, but up until Thanksgiving the year’s end and the jubilation and warm, romantic feelings that accompanied it were far from the point of realization. Thanksgiving used to be the end of the fall semester. Thanksgiving used to be the day I got to see all the family I hadn’t seen since Labor Day. Thanksgiving used to be the point at which the temperature, after meandering downwards as we trudged through the cold rains and icy mud of autumn, fell precipitately, down below freezing. And I wasn’t sad about this. I just missed the comfort and the feeling of home.
We rolled on, continuing south through Ghana. Kumasi is only about three hours from Nkoranza, but the last hour of the trip is usually spent sitting in traffic on the narrow roads outside of Kumasi. On the ride down, with the windows open, the trotro stays cool. But once we come to the inexorable stand still in the midst of Kumasi’s arterial roadway blockage, the trotro quickly heats up. The roof, walls and floor, all metal, all conduct heat from the sun, the road, and the engine. Exhaust and a faint fog of dust billow in through the windows and the back door, which usually isn’t closed completely, but only tied in place with a rope. This is where my legs begin to hurt and I try, in vain, to reposition myself in my cage of stuffed vinyl seats and metal. There is no solace to be found in the scenery either. The shops and homes are all concrete and mud brick still. Some are painted with advertisements in solid, severely radiant purples or yellows or reds, but most sink back from the road into the jungle beyond with austere, sun baked shades of tan and brown. There isn’t any sort of skyline to see, even if I could peer out through the windows and above the traffic. While we sit there, waiting, women come up besides the cars lined along the road selling bananas, water, groundnuts, and other small snacks. If I make eye contact with them, they won’t leave me alone. If I go to buy something and the car starts moving again, they’ll run along side the windows, their food tray balanced precariously on their heads, handing the food to me through the window as I fish change out of my pocket.
This trip was no different from any of the others and so the ride continued like this, like it always does, until we reached Kejetia station. The trotro from Nkoranza to Kumasi always stops at Kejetia station, in the center of Kumasi, nestled in a valley between two steep hills lined with multistory buildings and banks with glossy windows. Around the station are shops and vendors crowded in front, next to, and on top of one another for blocks and blocks. The more expensive wares, such as electronics and appliances, are sold out of the rented spaces in the concrete buildings with the big, heavy iron doors along the sides of the roads, but the lower cost, higher volume goods, such as fruits and vegetables, wooden stools and shovels, trowels and machetes, clothing and footwear are sold off of blankets spread out on the sidewalk. Milling around between the street vendors and the shop keepers are a few men and many women selling small baked snacks and water sachets from bowls and boxes on top of their heads. Overlooking the station, perhaps half a mile up the hill to the east, is a towering cathedral, one of the few distinctive edifices breaking up the horizon. I don’t know it’s history, who built it or when, but alongside the hodgepodge of brown, slanted roofs, scattered radio antennae, and the grayish tint of the exhaust fumes hanging in the air like a thick wool blanket, the cathedral stands out like a beacon, like a lighthouse of sorts for travelers.
Per its usual routine, the trotro breaks creak and we stop at the entrance to the station. There are many cars in front of us and next to us, and after a few moments, behind us as well. I, like most of the passengers, didn’t wait for the trotro to park itself. I jumped off and side stepped my way through the congestion of cars and filthy air. From here I moved through the station to the corner farthest away. The sun was very high now and I could feel it on my neck. There was no order, just a teeming crowd. I wasn’t feeling contemplative any more and I was tired and I wanted to rest. The trotros going to places within and around Kumasi are all lined up along long, narrow pavilions. Underneath are men selling tickets and women selling bread and other food and benches where the passengers sit and wait. I found my car and paid, and waited to board in the shade of the narrow overhang. I had made good time up to this point and I was not in a hurry. I looked around the station to see if I could pick out any of my Peace Corps colleagues, but I saw no one I recognized.
The trotro pulled up, the other passengers boarded, I boarded, and we left. After half an hour, on a road leading out of Kumasi to a city called Oduom, I told the driver to stop and I dropped off on the edge of the highway, near the narrow street leading to the sub office. No one was inside the office when I arrived. The back bedroom was empty and Mike was out running errands. In the back bedroom, I put my bag down on a bed, laying claim to it for the coming night, and took my computer out onto the porch. I spent the day reading e-mail, writing e-mail, and reading the news, a love I had left behind when I came here to Ghana. It was hard, at first, finding ways to waste time on the internet. Very little happens in terms of current events during the week of Thanksgiving. But the miraculous thing about the internet is that it allows for an almost infinite amount of opinion and analysis to be generated by only a handful of items meriting news coverage. Over the remainder of the day only two other volunteers, friends of mine, came by the sub office. The two young women spent most of the day, like me, doing nothing of merit. For dinner, we walked down the street and bought fried rice, chicken, and beer and brought it all back to the sub office.
The next morning, we woke up early. My bag was light, I was leaving my laptop and some other items behind in storage, to pick up on my way back home on Friday. Breakfast was light and we soon left the sub office. Cars heading towards Ejisu, a town in the direction of Accra, will stop and pick up passengers along the side of the road. We stood out there on the side of the street, down the hill a little ways, as the sun rose up above once again. Although it was bright out, the air was still cool and the breeze from the cars rushing by felt good as we stood waiting. I had my sun glasses on and in my backpack I had a camera, an early Christmas present from my parents, ready to chronicle the journey south of Kumasi. I thought I remembered much of what the south was like. I had spent ten weeks there over the summer, and even though Accra was still a mystery to me, I didn’t understand how inured I had become to the labors of rural life in Yefri. In the trotro, the closer we got to the capital, the nicer the road became. The houses and offices and gas stations and shops along the sides of the roads all looked bigger and better built. When we passed through towns, the people dressed better. The fruits and vegetables they sold were bigger and the baskets they sold them in were thicker and more neatly woven. Even the cars themselves seemed to be newer and glistened more in the morning sunlight.
As the car moved down the road, I watched the country develop. As we approached Accra, we approached civilization. It was shocking. As tempting as it was to label the people, their homes, their places of work, their cars and trucks as ostentatious, I couldn’t. They were simply modern, clean, and new. Things were painted white and made of plastic. No one was in rags, only ripped jeans and faded t-shirts. I felt like I was returning to America, or at least that’s how I imagined I would feel when returning home. I had been away from this developed world for almost six months and the sudden transition back into it was unsettling. I wanted to live like this again. Returning to Accra was like watching a period drama depicting my past, seeing the actors in the garb and get-up that cling best to the era, with the body language and behavior perfected, with perfect verisimilitude.
Accra has its slums too, but on this excursion into the mythical capital city, they were no where to be seen. My two friends and I made our way to the diplomatic district of the capital. We were all staying with American employees of the embassy. We wandered through the labyrinth of paved streets and sidewalks, in awe and struck by novelty from what we had known so intimately only six months prior. One of the girls I was with had directions to the home of her host family for the evening so we accompanied her there. When we found the house we were looking for, the front gate to the property was closed. Here, they still have property. People’s lawns are their own, and no one else’s. A groundskeeper opened the gate for us and led us in. In the drive way, there was a basketball hoop and bicycles. There were cars in the driveway and a swing hung down from a big leafy green tree in the front yard. The house was enormous. At the door I felt a breeze blow by me and I realized the woman who answered it, a middle aged American woman, had the air conditioning on and wanted us to come inside.
Inside, her house was indistinguishable from any American home, except for the fact that it was bigger and nicer than most. By the door inside she had a small collection of wooden warthogs, bought from places all over Africa. She served us cranberry juice and we sat in her living room and drank it while she told us about her job and all the places she had travelled to. After about twenty minutes, once we had finished our drinks and used her bathroom, she offered to drive us to the ambassador’s residence, which was not far.
In the car, there was also air conditioning. There were CDs and seat belts and spaces for me to move my legs around. Back outside the confines of her property, but still in the semi-opaque bubble of her SUV, we merged onto the highway and fought traffic for a few minutes. We missed the turn the first time drove by the ambassador’s house. Cars honked their horns and cut others off. On our second pass, we pulled into the right lane and slowly headed towards the gate. Guards, tall African men, waved us through and then we got out of the car. The ambassador lives in a mansion. He has a driveway in a semicircle, a swimming pool, landscaping and real flowers, a big outdoor patio with a roof over it and a dozen ceiling fans hanging down, and a yard with cut grass. Big glass doors from the patio open up into the living room. Inside, his walls and shelves are lined with books and knickknacks from around the world. In the corner is a grand piano. He has real carpets and real flush toilets and real running water, hot and cold.
I mingled with my friends from Peace Corps. I had not seen many of them since we had finished training in August. We caught up each other on what we had been doing at our sites, who had quit and gone home, and what there was to do in Accra that evening. Not long after I arrived, the ambassador, as always without a tie (certainly excusable in this case considering I was in flipflops), got up to announce that dinner was to be served soon. On a long, clothed table up near the house on the patio, servers brought out food in dishes of silver, ceramic and glass. There were bowls of cranberries, carrots, peppers and green beans. There were basins of stuffing and mashed potatoes, with gravy in a dish to the side and a silver ladle poking up out through the surface. There were plates with cauliflower and broccoli, seasoned and warm. And there were twelve cooked turkeys. So I filled my plate with as much food as I could fit and sat down at a table, eating and drinking glass after glass of sangria and smirking insouciantly, drunk off of the atmosphere and food more than the drink itself and from knowing that one day when I return home I have all of this waiting for me.
