I have been diagnosed with the tropical disease known as Malaria. Which really isn’t as bad of a thing as it sounds. Malaria is almost synonymous with the flu. People just get it and take time off from work and deal with it. Aside from the occasional vomiting and room closing in on itself feel, it’s not so bad. If Rita wouldn’t have insisted rather forcefully in taking me to the hospital, I wouldn’t have ever gone. Turns out that she has quite a few years of experience in dealing with stubborn foreign students. So I’ve spent the last days reading fun novels and chipping away at the complete collection of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, all 45 episodes fitted onto one disk that I had picked up from a guy through the window of a trotro for two cedis.
I went to the doctor the other day. He kept on trying to suck blood from my neck. Don’t go to Dr. Acula.
So when I have decided to leave the comfort of my compound in the last two days, it is both difficult and refreshing to make my daily rounds down Okpunglo junction, greeting those that I see everyday. It’s difficult in my American mentality, in not wanting to talk to anyone, wishing I could just point my eyes to the ground, avoiding eye contact with everyone. But that’s not the way life works here, so when I do see the ever so familiar people in the same places, I stop and talk. “Yaya, come. How is it?” “Oh, I’m ok. I have malaria, so I’m not feeling so well.” “Oh, no. Sorry, ok? You go get some rest. We’ll see you tomorrow.” And such a simple conversation is actually quite nice. (The lady at the corner in the car parts shop calls me Yaya, thanks to Coach, who calls me Yaa, because I was born on a Thursday, making Yaa my day name. People think it’s funny that Westerners don’t know what day of the week they were born on.)
The life down any given street is amazing to me. The way that everyone in a given perimeter is so connected is an amazing thing. What else is there to do than to be outside, conversing with the rest of your neighbors? Just the other day, my roommate Sam and I were outside on the road, playing cards with one of our guards, Uncle Sam, and the next door neighbor guard, Idim. We sat in the shade, backed away behind the fence where we could use natures wonders to our advantage on especially scorching days, while we were huddled over a small table, with our fingers on our cards so that the breeze wouldn’t carry them away. As we were playing, my friend Coach from down the road came around so Sam and I scooched down our bench to give him a spot to sit. He sat with us a while, then left to meet with someone else. Soon after, the woman who sells red red in the morning across the main road came around and chatted with us for a while. I had never actually seen her outside of her red red stand, but naturally, she lived somewhere down this road and, naturally, she was friends with Idim and Uncle Sam. So we played and shared and laughed and had a good ol’ time about it. They had a wild time with Egyptian Rat Screw.
Pretty much what I’m trying to say is that there’s something to be said about community, about having a place in the world, an identity, based on those around you versus chiseling out your own personal niche. You are therefore I am therefore we are. “Where am I?” “You’re with us.” (is what they said). I can’t say anything for internalizing it myself, but I can say that it is something beautiful and worth giving a second thought, or four or eight. thousand.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
In the Absence of Reasonable Blame
There seems to be a cut off point to when doing my laundry in the morning is feasible. The trick is to do all of your manual labor before the sun comes up, in the cool stillness of the morning, while the next door neighbor is cooking a robust breakfast and you can sneak free smells from over the wall and through the barbed wire. Doing your laundry is pretty hard work, for me at least, after being spoiled by the short cuts of normal life back home. Are we really more efficient with the time saved by the machines? Or does it just give us more time to waste idly and a lack of encouragement to be disciplined?
Every once in a while, although it’s probably more frequently than that, there are stark reminders that I am, indeed, in a developing nation. At the outside surrounding entrance to the University of Ghana, there has been a major renovation in the making since we have been here. Slowly but surely, a humongous ditch has been dug out in between the entrance and the road and every week, there poses a new challenge as to how to get around this morphing ditch. Where there once was a wide and easy walk way from the bush canteen, a winding entrance to the side of the campus, through which you walk through an alleyway of merchants selling pawpaw and phone credits, to the edge of the road, where trotro mates are yelling frantically their destination from a perimeter of their trotro which is parked in a nook to the side along with the others, trying to fill up their bus with exiting students so that they can be on their way to make their full potential of sika. Along this wide walk way was enough room for the women to set up their stands of roasted plantains and coolers of pure water, stumps for mtn phone credit guys to sit and plenty of room for the fan milk cart to pass through along with the mobs of students.
Recently, this walkway has been reduced to a narrow bumpy path that you have to balance across in a single file line, taking small steps, one foot directly in front of the other, keeping steady so that you don’t fall into the 20 foot deep ditch on either side of you. The path seems to be beaten down every day and the jump from the edge unto the path, and from the path unto the road has become steeper, so that the last time I walked across, an unspoken system had been implemented that the person in front of you, once assisted up the ledge, turned around and held his hand for the next in line, giving you a hoist up. The nook for the trotros had been eradicated in the vast influence the enormous renovated ditch has on the surrounding environment, forcing trotros to try to fit on the side of the road to pick up their customers, causing a major back up of traffic, one that even the most ingenious trotro drivahs have difficulty in finding a way around. The roasted plantain women is forced to back up against the ditch, trusting that those students fanned out along the side won’t back up and push her into the hole. The pure water girls only have enough space to wind back and forth through the thinly layered row of students. And the fan milk guy is forced to find a corner of his own and hope that his horn alone will be enough to attract the customers.
In the dark, this walkway is especially frightening and without a light, you best find someone who does have a light to walk behind because street lights, let alone lights to light the way through this strip are not happening. It would be so easy for someone to lose their footing, or trip over a lump right into the ditch. If this same project were to be undertaken anywhere in the U.S., the safety measures would be immeasurable. And if there were any way around it, someone may just purposefully throw themselves through the measures in hopes of getting rich quick by a nice fat settlement. But no, here, people are reliant upon their own smarts and the assistance of a helping hand that belongs to another prudent mind. If you were to fall, it’s just too bad for you. Better luck next time.
Every once in a while, although it’s probably more frequently than that, there are stark reminders that I am, indeed, in a developing nation. At the outside surrounding entrance to the University of Ghana, there has been a major renovation in the making since we have been here. Slowly but surely, a humongous ditch has been dug out in between the entrance and the road and every week, there poses a new challenge as to how to get around this morphing ditch. Where there once was a wide and easy walk way from the bush canteen, a winding entrance to the side of the campus, through which you walk through an alleyway of merchants selling pawpaw and phone credits, to the edge of the road, where trotro mates are yelling frantically their destination from a perimeter of their trotro which is parked in a nook to the side along with the others, trying to fill up their bus with exiting students so that they can be on their way to make their full potential of sika. Along this wide walk way was enough room for the women to set up their stands of roasted plantains and coolers of pure water, stumps for mtn phone credit guys to sit and plenty of room for the fan milk cart to pass through along with the mobs of students.
Recently, this walkway has been reduced to a narrow bumpy path that you have to balance across in a single file line, taking small steps, one foot directly in front of the other, keeping steady so that you don’t fall into the 20 foot deep ditch on either side of you. The path seems to be beaten down every day and the jump from the edge unto the path, and from the path unto the road has become steeper, so that the last time I walked across, an unspoken system had been implemented that the person in front of you, once assisted up the ledge, turned around and held his hand for the next in line, giving you a hoist up. The nook for the trotros had been eradicated in the vast influence the enormous renovated ditch has on the surrounding environment, forcing trotros to try to fit on the side of the road to pick up their customers, causing a major back up of traffic, one that even the most ingenious trotro drivahs have difficulty in finding a way around. The roasted plantain women is forced to back up against the ditch, trusting that those students fanned out along the side won’t back up and push her into the hole. The pure water girls only have enough space to wind back and forth through the thinly layered row of students. And the fan milk guy is forced to find a corner of his own and hope that his horn alone will be enough to attract the customers.
In the dark, this walkway is especially frightening and without a light, you best find someone who does have a light to walk behind because street lights, let alone lights to light the way through this strip are not happening. It would be so easy for someone to lose their footing, or trip over a lump right into the ditch. If this same project were to be undertaken anywhere in the U.S., the safety measures would be immeasurable. And if there were any way around it, someone may just purposefully throw themselves through the measures in hopes of getting rich quick by a nice fat settlement. But no, here, people are reliant upon their own smarts and the assistance of a helping hand that belongs to another prudent mind. If you were to fall, it’s just too bad for you. Better luck next time.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
One Man Thousand
I find myself finding comfort in the libraries; I almost forgot the meditative quality they possess. A long hard research session is refreshing and a friendly anthropological reminder from my ever so supportive professors from home gives a nice fuel up for the remainder of my time spent here. It almost seems like a curse sometimes, in counting down the days. Some times, I look at a calendar and I count it down with my fingers, daydreaming about sitting on the plane, sipping from a mini bottle of wine, and watching a classic movie, courtesy of British Airway's impressive service. But then some days, what seemed like so long almost puts me into a panic like trance. Going down is always faster than the up. I know that the full effect has yet to be realized, that it can probably never really be completely realized.
I was sitting in the front on the personal development class, feeling clammy and ill, exhausted from the harsh vomiting outside due to the hundreds of one man thousand fish that I had bought from the woman who makes her daily rounds around firestone to sell the kenkey she balances on her head. I had eaten these eetsy beetsy fish the size of a chewed up and spit out finger nail, proving themselves to be fish only by the tiny black dot of an eye. And although we were having a thoroughly important and interesting discussion about abortion, I couldn’t help to be overcome by an overwhelming sense of…sense… I was listening to one of the students that I’ve gotten to know pretty well talk, and all I could think was about how at the beginning of this, it was hard for me just to follow along when someone spoke with the accent and just the general knowledge of a Ghanaian course of speech. Now, I see her as a real human with a very real past and real feelings and thoughts, and I have a genuine love for her that I couldn’t have predicted to have from the beginning. It was a...moment, infinitely.
She said we were foolish for ever thinking that we don’t find ourselves in a continual loop of energized connectivity.
So as I continue the interviews and really get to know the students, I get a rejuvenated sense of passion for what goes on inside of a human brain, how rationalizations happen, and why. And I think, if I don’t continue to do something like this, I may always regret it. To be one important piece in a larger scheme, contributing to a grander significance in hopes of bettering something or another, if we were to ever be so lucky.
I was sitting in the front on the personal development class, feeling clammy and ill, exhausted from the harsh vomiting outside due to the hundreds of one man thousand fish that I had bought from the woman who makes her daily rounds around firestone to sell the kenkey she balances on her head. I had eaten these eetsy beetsy fish the size of a chewed up and spit out finger nail, proving themselves to be fish only by the tiny black dot of an eye. And although we were having a thoroughly important and interesting discussion about abortion, I couldn’t help to be overcome by an overwhelming sense of…sense… I was listening to one of the students that I’ve gotten to know pretty well talk, and all I could think was about how at the beginning of this, it was hard for me just to follow along when someone spoke with the accent and just the general knowledge of a Ghanaian course of speech. Now, I see her as a real human with a very real past and real feelings and thoughts, and I have a genuine love for her that I couldn’t have predicted to have from the beginning. It was a...moment, infinitely.
She said we were foolish for ever thinking that we don’t find ourselves in a continual loop of energized connectivity.
So as I continue the interviews and really get to know the students, I get a rejuvenated sense of passion for what goes on inside of a human brain, how rationalizations happen, and why. And I think, if I don’t continue to do something like this, I may always regret it. To be one important piece in a larger scheme, contributing to a grander significance in hopes of bettering something or another, if we were to ever be so lucky.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Get The Cool Shoe Shine
Yesterday at work, I was eagerly waiting for it to be lunch time so that I could take a break from powerpointing to go indulge in some delicious fried yams and the best shito sauce in town with an included bonus of green onions. So about three steps down the street, my nice tan and black flip flops broke! So I stood for awhile with my broken shoe, trying to figure out what I was going to do and how I was going to get home with one shoe, as people passed and offered their dismay at the situation, as all Ghanaians do at any instance of an unfortunate event. “Sorry, Sorry. Are you fine?” I hobbled down the rest of the road until I got to my yam woman and I showed her my broken shoe. “Oh Sorry, Sorry.” She said I needed to wait for a drummer shoe shine boy, you know, the one that hits the box at his side while he walks down the road. I thought, well I’ll be darned, so THAT’S what that guy does. 50 pesewas of fried yam pulled out of a silver bowl filled with boiling oil suspended over a small fire on the ground later, and lo and behold! The sound of the steady beat of a stick against a box was off in the distance. We called him over and he sat right down on a rock, took my shoe, opened his box and began threading the thong right back inside of the sandal. Even better than before, my newly mended sandal cost me 20 pesewas, though I only had 10 in my hand. My yam woman wanted to pay for it, she said “This is Ghana. Relax.” She paid for it and refused to take my 10 pesewas. Just like that. My shoe is fixed, no big deal, and just in time for an unexpectedly busy day.
There are so many new things here that it’s hard to decipher all of them. Everyday I see something new hidden somewhere down my own street. Just today, I discovered the lady selling red red right across the road. There are so many things crammed in so little space.
My internship is going well. I have officially begun teaching the classes that I have been dreading and struggling with. It’s a lot better than I thought it was going to be. The students are warm and welcoming and the fact that they are at SISS to begin with proves that they are willing and eager to learn. Sister Krysta is what they call me. The African mediator is what really really helps the whole situation. After I give my little schpeel about whatever it is, yesterday being personal hygiene, Naa jumps in and almost translates it for them, into an African framework. Which I am so so so very grateful about. I was so afraid of teaching something that was relevant to me to my life in the United States, but not so much to life in Africa. I came here to learn about life in Africa, not to impose my own norms on them. Which is why I was so bent out of shape about the whole project. So good old Naa went through it and I learned a wealth of information about African hygiene techniques, like the chewing sticks (an alternative to our toothbrushes) and lime wash.
It’s hard to be doing what I really want to be doing here. I can’t decide how cold of a person that makes me. There’s a certain degree of detachment you need to have to be an anthropologist. And I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or how selfish it really is. I knew all along that I wanted to be here and for selfish reasons, really, for my own curiosity. People have posed arguments of relative selfishness, which I think make the most sense to me. Rumble, Jumble, Mummmbleeee.
It’s good to know that I’m not the only person who has days that simply walking down the street is exhausting. Sometimes I wish I could transform into a chicken and walk down the street that way. through the gutters.
There are so many new things here that it’s hard to decipher all of them. Everyday I see something new hidden somewhere down my own street. Just today, I discovered the lady selling red red right across the road. There are so many things crammed in so little space.
My internship is going well. I have officially begun teaching the classes that I have been dreading and struggling with. It’s a lot better than I thought it was going to be. The students are warm and welcoming and the fact that they are at SISS to begin with proves that they are willing and eager to learn. Sister Krysta is what they call me. The African mediator is what really really helps the whole situation. After I give my little schpeel about whatever it is, yesterday being personal hygiene, Naa jumps in and almost translates it for them, into an African framework. Which I am so so so very grateful about. I was so afraid of teaching something that was relevant to me to my life in the United States, but not so much to life in Africa. I came here to learn about life in Africa, not to impose my own norms on them. Which is why I was so bent out of shape about the whole project. So good old Naa went through it and I learned a wealth of information about African hygiene techniques, like the chewing sticks (an alternative to our toothbrushes) and lime wash.
It’s hard to be doing what I really want to be doing here. I can’t decide how cold of a person that makes me. There’s a certain degree of detachment you need to have to be an anthropologist. And I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or how selfish it really is. I knew all along that I wanted to be here and for selfish reasons, really, for my own curiosity. People have posed arguments of relative selfishness, which I think make the most sense to me. Rumble, Jumble, Mummmbleeee.
It’s good to know that I’m not the only person who has days that simply walking down the street is exhausting. Sometimes I wish I could transform into a chicken and walk down the street that way. through the gutters.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
AFROBEAT RULES
Seun Kuti!! Fela Kuti’s son who is keeping his father’s afrobeat legacy alive played a wonderful fantastic awesome show where I danced harder and longer than ever before. I think the key word for Afrobeat is STAMINA. Man, these songs are like 20 minutes of the same rhythm. And some of these guys have been playing the same beat for the last three 20 minute songs and they still go strong. Every one of them is so necessary for the whole togetherness of the song-two trumpets, two saxophones, two guitars, a bass, one large drum, one wooden beat keeper, one shaking gourd, two incredible back up singers/dancers, and Seun himself in his appropriate matching white striped black suit and shoes just like his dad. You just keep in the music, one stray thought can alter the vibe, and ohhh their stamina inspired mine and when the people in the stands could hardly contain themselves anymore and their energy spilled out into the dance floor, it was all out from there. Front and center dancing hard, everyone grinning from ear to ear, or maybe it was just me…
And in the revolutionary spirit of Fela’s afrobeat, issues were addressed. People are dying in Africa, there is no money. Rich people start going broke, they give them money. If they don’t, the rest of the world will go broke. But wait man, Africa’s been broke for some time now. A speculation of course, but some raw truth nonetheless.
And at the end of the night, I was so content and Bunmi and I caught a cab right out of there for a decent price thanks to my Twi vocabulary and my STAMINA, only to be woken up a couple of hours later by my other roommate Sam who couldn’t wait till morning to tell us about how they were invited back stage to chill hard with Seun and the rest of the band. Unbelievable.
Last weekend Sam and I and three other lovely people we have met here traveled to Togo, where the main mode of transportation is by jumping on the back of a motorcycle, and everyone speaks French. We stayed at an atrociously disgusting hotel which was only fair as the amount we paid for it couldn’t have gotten us much better. We weaved through the Lome market and found ourselves at the ocean. Once the water finally came back on in the hotel and we were able to take a shower for the first time in a couple of days, we gussied up, went out, especially looking forward to the place with the description in the travel book as having multilingual prostitutes. Afterwards paying some money for a motorcycle tour around Lome just for the sheer thrill of it. It was funny really. These guys do this all day everyday and next thing you know they’ve got a couple of white kids on the back of their bikes paying them a decent amount of money just to ride in a circle, all the while they laugh their heads off.
The next day we caught a bus up north to a little mountain village called Kpalime whose winding dirt roads were centered around the looming red and white church. We took a very scenic ride indeed on the backs of motorcycles up to the mountains where we were welcomed by drumming and dancing in the rain and then were accompanied by the wonderful Coolio Ga Ga to the waterfalls. There was a very pleasant café that served couscous and café au lait, but the best au lait in the entire world, and we were all ecstatic to drink coffee, even if it was Nescafe. We met MoMo there, who invited us to a traditional African drum and dance show, where we were joined with what seemed to be peace corps volunteers. Before this, we went out to dinner with Momo and his Moroccan and Algerian friends, where I could only say so much considering the conversation was in French through and through. Je ne parle pas francais. Weird vibes were thrown all over the room, but I suppose when the electricity is out for a whole city and the only light to be seen for miles and miles is candlelight, and you are in a cold stone fortress with people you can’t communicate with, anyone can seem shady. We did make it to la spectacular! Where beats were hard to contain and dancing games were played afterwards, of which I was one of the first to be booed of the stage, until drum circles commenced and everyone danced in a circle together.
The next day Momo found us a hidden bus stop full of charcoal eyed Muslims napping on benches where we waited patiently for the bus to fill up. But that’s the thing, the bus won’t leave until it is completely full, and at the rate this station was going, it probably could have taken another 6 hours to get 7 more people to need a ride across the border. So we all threw in a couple cedi and got to stretch out in a half full tro tro. The bumpy and winding roads through the limbo of Togo and Ghana in a decrepit tro tro whose roof could only take one large bump to have a head bust straight through the rust was a bit much for my stomach to handle so I was sick all the way back from Kpalime to Accra and at every stop we made, at the Immigration offices and bus stops. That was rough. But all is well now.
People have also got to calling me Krystabell. See, the first couple of weeks here, every once in a while someone would call me Krystabell and I would think, NO WAY! only mi madre calls me that. but then I figured out it is a sort of common name around here and i've discovered that it's hard for people to understand Krysta right away, so I say Krystabell and they get it instantly. So people call me that here, and I walk down the road and kids scream Krystabell. I can't say I don't love it. It feels like home. Where else???
And in the revolutionary spirit of Fela’s afrobeat, issues were addressed. People are dying in Africa, there is no money. Rich people start going broke, they give them money. If they don’t, the rest of the world will go broke. But wait man, Africa’s been broke for some time now. A speculation of course, but some raw truth nonetheless.
And at the end of the night, I was so content and Bunmi and I caught a cab right out of there for a decent price thanks to my Twi vocabulary and my STAMINA, only to be woken up a couple of hours later by my other roommate Sam who couldn’t wait till morning to tell us about how they were invited back stage to chill hard with Seun and the rest of the band. Unbelievable.
Last weekend Sam and I and three other lovely people we have met here traveled to Togo, where the main mode of transportation is by jumping on the back of a motorcycle, and everyone speaks French. We stayed at an atrociously disgusting hotel which was only fair as the amount we paid for it couldn’t have gotten us much better. We weaved through the Lome market and found ourselves at the ocean. Once the water finally came back on in the hotel and we were able to take a shower for the first time in a couple of days, we gussied up, went out, especially looking forward to the place with the description in the travel book as having multilingual prostitutes. Afterwards paying some money for a motorcycle tour around Lome just for the sheer thrill of it. It was funny really. These guys do this all day everyday and next thing you know they’ve got a couple of white kids on the back of their bikes paying them a decent amount of money just to ride in a circle, all the while they laugh their heads off.
The next day we caught a bus up north to a little mountain village called Kpalime whose winding dirt roads were centered around the looming red and white church. We took a very scenic ride indeed on the backs of motorcycles up to the mountains where we were welcomed by drumming and dancing in the rain and then were accompanied by the wonderful Coolio Ga Ga to the waterfalls. There was a very pleasant café that served couscous and café au lait, but the best au lait in the entire world, and we were all ecstatic to drink coffee, even if it was Nescafe. We met MoMo there, who invited us to a traditional African drum and dance show, where we were joined with what seemed to be peace corps volunteers. Before this, we went out to dinner with Momo and his Moroccan and Algerian friends, where I could only say so much considering the conversation was in French through and through. Je ne parle pas francais. Weird vibes were thrown all over the room, but I suppose when the electricity is out for a whole city and the only light to be seen for miles and miles is candlelight, and you are in a cold stone fortress with people you can’t communicate with, anyone can seem shady. We did make it to la spectacular! Where beats were hard to contain and dancing games were played afterwards, of which I was one of the first to be booed of the stage, until drum circles commenced and everyone danced in a circle together.
The next day Momo found us a hidden bus stop full of charcoal eyed Muslims napping on benches where we waited patiently for the bus to fill up. But that’s the thing, the bus won’t leave until it is completely full, and at the rate this station was going, it probably could have taken another 6 hours to get 7 more people to need a ride across the border. So we all threw in a couple cedi and got to stretch out in a half full tro tro. The bumpy and winding roads through the limbo of Togo and Ghana in a decrepit tro tro whose roof could only take one large bump to have a head bust straight through the rust was a bit much for my stomach to handle so I was sick all the way back from Kpalime to Accra and at every stop we made, at the Immigration offices and bus stops. That was rough. But all is well now.
People have also got to calling me Krystabell. See, the first couple of weeks here, every once in a while someone would call me Krystabell and I would think, NO WAY! only mi madre calls me that. but then I figured out it is a sort of common name around here and i've discovered that it's hard for people to understand Krysta right away, so I say Krystabell and they get it instantly. So people call me that here, and I walk down the road and kids scream Krystabell. I can't say I don't love it. It feels like home. Where else???
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