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.
