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 4^th 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.

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