Giving Thanks

I have been in Ghana for almost four months now. And every week seems to go by faster than the one before. I recently pulled out my paper journal and re-read an entry I made waiting in the Frankfurt airport for the final flight that would bring me to Africa, this place I had studied and dreamed about but could not really truly imagine. And reading my words, feeling the same excitement tinged with uncertainty and notquitefear, made me realize how far I have come in the last four months, how much I have grown up, grown into myself, and how much I have learned. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I have almost eight more months to go here, and they will be full of as much adventure, as much learning and growing and discovering as these four months have been. There are days that I wake up and it takes me a moment to realize that I am in Ghana, and there are days that make me feel like I have been here forever. This trip, the slight terror and immense joy I felt waiting for it to begin, the sum total of all that has happened and is happening and will happen to me here, might just be the best thing I have ever done. When I go home and people ask how Ghana was, how will I answer? Ghana was like a second home, another garden to put down roots in, another place to fold into my heart and treasure and hold. What am I giving thanks for? The chance to be here, and whatever told me that I needed to come. Because I am more now, in an incomprehensible way. Thank you.

As Beginnings Go

The airport is clean and almost hospital sterile, which is not unusual (in her past experience, at least. In a few hours all of that will change forever). She makes her way through crowds of people who mostly don't speak her language, letting them drift past her and their words flow through her. She hitches her red backpack higher on her shoulder and follows signs to her destination, all alone on the middle leg of her journey, in the middle of a continent she has visited before, on her way to something she knows she can not even imagine, which has never stopped her from trying.

Finally she reaches her gate, and is brought up short: there are two lines (queues, she reminds herself, they are queues now) and no indication of what people are standing waiting for. And she is, for the first time on her adventures, different, in that way that only your skin color can make you. Never in her life has this girl, this on-the-verge-of-woman, felt her skin as a thing with a life separate from herself. Never has she seen herself as an outsider, an other, a someone-not-like-us. And that, more than tearful goodbyes in the airport, going through security, or any of the other busywork business of travel, brings it home: she is not in Kansas anymore, Toto, not surrounded by anything close to familiar, and she has only just begun this trip, this year-long journey to find herself or follow her dream or just get the hell out of town. Whatever the reason du jour, she needed to leave, could not understand why, but could feel that need slipping and burning under her skin, an emotional growing pain. And now that her skin is burning again, she asks herself why she had to leave, and realizes that it doesn't matter. She is here. She has performed the act of leaving, that single step that begins any journey, that first long, hard fall. And as she watches (observes, putting long-practiced skills to use), finds the right queue, enters the waiting area, and finds a seat, she knows. This will not kill her. Yes, she is uncomfortable, really and truly uncomfortable, for the first time in her life. But that discomfort will not kill her, and it will pass. Yes, she is alien or different or one of those words, but that life experience is not unique to her, and it will be a valuable feeling to pull out and remember in six months, when she is comfortable, though the thought of being comfortable seems about six thousand months away at the moment. So she takes a breath, puts down her bag, and looks around.

Most of the seats in the waiting area are full, and more people are handing their passports over to the guard, awaiting permission to enter. There is more foreignness in this small space than she felt the first time she saw Paris or Amsterdam or any other place she has been, and maybe that has something to do with the deep, quiet voices rumbling in languages she can not even begin to identify, or maybe it has something to do with the riot of color and pattern and cut of clothing that covers all of the people packed in around her. A group of nuns in full habit, right out of The Sound of Music, shuffles past in ugly utilitarian shoes and thick support hose, clutching giant handbags and whispering to each other. A family, small son and required infrastructure secured to a stroller, lounges against the wall, father peeking at his large gold watch and adjusting the belt around his waist that exactly matches his tan leather shoes. Old men and young men, children and mothers and grandparents, single travelers and whole tribes, all gather around and wait for the signal to board the plane. As beginnings go, it is a good one.

Down Home on the Farm, or My Ghanaian Family

The sky is pregnant with impending storm, hanging like a damp, grey wool blanket above campus, smothering the usual Sunday sounds of church music and celebration, and stifling any cool breeze. It is a strange experience after my sunny smiling adventure of yesterday.

In my Arabic class there are several people who are my friends, and a few people who study with me. Of those, Fareed is by far the closest. He came by to visit me when I missed class because of Malaria, copies my notes, and generally is a very good person. When we were talking once about favorite foods, or maybe what I love about Ghana, I mentioned that I have fallen in love with pineapples since I have been here, and Fareed invited me to visit his father’s pineapple farm one day. It turns out that that day was Saturday. And it was amazing.

[side note on trotro etiquette: (reminder: a trotro is pretty much a van with four benches in it, some working windows, stickers and sayings everywhere, no seatbelts, a very shaky chassis, and a general air of exhaustion and imminent collapse. The driver sits on one side of the front seat, which usually also holds two or three passengers, and the mate rides in the body of the vehicle with the bulk of the passengers, opening the sliding door (and sometimes holding it closed), calling out stops and destination, taking money, arguing fares, and loading and unloading the various passengers’ cargo of pieces of beds, animals, bags of produce and charcoal and anything else imaginable) When boarding a trotro, it is polite to move to the back, taking the furthest seat possible. Once a bench is filled with people (anywhere from two to five, depending on size, personal space bubble, amount of luggage, and general orneriness of the mate, who will sometimes pack people in mercilessly), the little bucket seat in the aisle is folded down and filled, completely blocking the bench behind it. If someone from the rear bench needs to get out, then, it follows that all of the aisle-seated passengers will need to get up, and out of the car, for that person to exit the vehicle. So at pretty much every stop people pile out of the trotro to let someone off and pile back in, filling in the empty space. Over the course of a ride, it is possible to go from sitting directly behind the mate in an aisle seat closest to the door to sitting in the very back corner. This, the screaming goats, the fretful small children, and the truly giant unwashed masses are all part of the charm of this form of transportation, and only add to the sense of adventure. I promise.]

It was a four-tro journey, as it turns out. We were planning on leaving at about 8:30 in the morning on the ’45-minute’ trotro ride and I thought we would return by 1:30 or so. Mikaela was going to join us but opted instead for a beach getaway vacation with Steve instead, so it was just Fareed and I walking down the main road of campus to the taxi and trotro station across the street at 8:30 on Saturday morning, discussing the myth of America and the American Dream. At the tro station we found a car to Achimota (which is apparently the bastardization of the Ga word achimotaabe, which means a sacred place in which you are not allowed to use people’s names) and another tro to his parents’ house in Ofankor on the outskirts of Accra. On the way, we talked about culture and tradition (and how America ‘doesn’t have one’), development in Africa, and my sadly lacking but humorous Twi skills, which I employed on the woman pressed very very tightly up against me, who was wearing a gorgeous dress. At one of the numerous stops and consequent reshufflings, when I was pretty much sitting on her, I told her I loved her dress, that “eye fe paa,” which means ‘it is very beautiful’ in Twi. Fareed and the woman both laughed, and proceeded to test my Twi knowledge, starting with easy questions and jumping straight from What is your name? to things that were spoken so quickly and so full of words I didn’t understand that they were pretty much gibberish. It was really fun, and probably a good thing that I got some practice in, because I needed it later.

The trotro stopped at Second Power, which was the stop for his parents’ house (though it looked to me like just another stretch of dirt road lined with cement walls, iron gates, lean-to stores and ditches). I spilled out of the trotro with my usual grace(lessness) to stand on the side of the road just at a footpath leading through a cornfield to another red dirt road. Waiting on a stool in the shade of an empty store was a dignified old man in a white polo shirt and a grey checked cap. He reached out to take my hand and I asked, “Ete sen?” which got a laugh and broke the ice a little. Fareed’s father (as the gentleman turned out to be), led us through the corn to his family house on the other road, behind the cement walls and a red-painted iron gate. Inside this enclosure was a paradise of tropical trees and flowers cuddled up to a blue-green house looking out on a yard with the usual dog, cats, goats, etc. Fareed’s mother came out to greet us, a beautiful matriarch wrapped in colorful fabric and carrying a little boy. She also laughed at my attempts at Twi, and the boy in her arms, Fareed’s nephew, hid his face because he had never seen a white person before and was scared of me. Soon after we arrived Fareed’s twin sister Faridah came out to say hello, and introduced me to her son (the baby), correcting me when I told her he was beautiful, because in Ghana only girls are allowed to be beautiful. We chatted while Fareed took out the exercise books, calculator, shirt, and various other presents he had brought for his family and got them caught up on school news. And, since I had brought my camera, we took pictures, of me and his family, of him and his family, of everything. Then it was time to set out for the farm, in a village two trotros away.

We walked back through the cornfield, caught a trotro to the main road passing the town, from there caught a trotro to a filling station in the village of Nswame, and from there caught another trotro heading out to the farmlands outlying the village. The roads are all dirt, and when it rains (right now about three times per week) they turn into rivers, eroding and evolving into slippery red mudslides that destroy any road-like features before hardening into clay again, leaving ruts, holes, little valleys, and dry washes inscribed permanently on the face and lying in wait for over-full trotros, taxis, big trucks, and any vehicle foolish enough or desperate enough to attempt a traversal. So the final trotro ride resembled less a ride and more a mountaineering expedition engaged on a micro level. At one point I looked out the window (with one hand on the metal side of the car so that I did not get a concussion from an unexpected rut) and took a look at the road, and just laughed, because there was a four-foot gulch in front of us with no trotro-sized path that I could find, and yet the driver dropped from first gear into some lower gear (that must only be available in rural Africa) and lay on the horn before inventing a new dimension and somehow not folding his vehicle in half. And the next thing I know? We are back to very bouncy ruts in the road, no one is blinking in surprise at the miracle we just witnessed, and Fareed is telling me that the most valuable investment someone could make in Ghana might just be improvement for rural roads. No kidding. Maybe this is why God is real here…because he is desperately needed on a daily basis.

The trotro dropped us at a dirt crossroads marked by a giant tree in the middle of cornfields, orchards of pawpaw trees (skinny little anorexic palm-looking trees with clusters of papayas sitting smug and green at the top, ten feet off the ground), and general explosions of green growing things lining a round bowl of a valley cupped in the hands of beautiful grey-green mountains. Hidden behind trees was a house belonging to Fareed’s uncle, and I followed him and his father up the steps to the porch, where a be-spectacled little grey haired man was enjoying his lunch. I was introduced and he exclaimed over Fareed, who, I had figured out by this time, was a bit of a prodigal son, since he had not been to see his family since he went to secondary school at cape coast four years ago. More pictures were taken, especially of the HUGE tree and the mountains, and we proceeded up the road towards the farmhouse.

In a lot of ways being there reminded me of visits to Uncle Steve and Aunt Connie when they were living up Monticello Road, when everyone would sit on the porch and just relax and talk for hours when visitors came, but you could still feel the tasks and trials waiting for attention because it was a working ranch. This place, for all that it was in tropical West Africa and the conversation was about pineapples and plantains instead of cows and all talk was in a mixture of Twi and Ga, had exactly the same feeling of being a working farm taking time out to entertain in its own modest way. Only about one vehicle per hour passed on the road (making it very different from the Connie and Steve’s house, I know), so it was the quietest place I have been in Ghana. It smelled like growing things and dirt (and, yes, chickens and goats, which were EVERYWHERE underfoot), and it was infinitely relaxing. In addition, his uncle, his aunt, his cousin, and another guy (I think the foreman), were overjoyed to see us and welcome us and make us at home. I got a tour of cornfields, one of the pawpaw orchards, and a low field sprouting a carpet of spiny-looking bushes, each one protecting a scaly little grey-green egg, a baby pineapple. Apparently the variety of pineapple cultivated on the farm is originally from Cuba, but it seems to be flourishing in Nswame, alongside plantain trees (Uncle Simon gave me a pop quiz, and one of the questions was whether I could tell the difference between banana trees and plantain trees. The only difference, by the way, is that plantain fruit is bigger, which doesn’t help me any because they are the size of the steroidful bananas back home), the pawpaws, and various other products.

After the tour we sat in the yard and ate fresh-picked fruit still warm from the sun and sinfully sweet and juicy, and looked out over the fields and watched the skinny farm cats chase baby chickens until the mamma hen got mad. Fareed’s cousin Becky came out to sit with us for a while and teased Fareed for not having visited at all in the last millenium, then disappoeared to teh kitchen adn kept plyuing us with fresh fruit, folowed by kenkey with fish (all the cats came out of the woodwork for that, and were rewarded for their grumbling, mewling efforts with the skeletons from the fish, and bits that dropped from my inexperienced fingers) Fareed taught me the proper way to eat kenkey, rolling the fermented corn dough between fingers and thumb of my right hand before delicatly dipping it in the tomatoe sauce and popping it into my mouth. It is harder than it sounds and much harder than it looks, especially with the buildup of sticky kenkey dough on fingers, my tendency to take either far too much or not close to enough dough at any given time, and the bits of fish bones that the cats keep crying for. Not to mention the gorgeous view i have of mountians over the tops of corn every time i look up. Fareed suffers from the same affliction that many of my Ghanaian guy friends suffer from: they keep telling me I need to eat more. Which is wonderful, but it goes against all of my early conditioning, and also? Kenkey is really filling. Becky brought us more fruit, and I chatted with Uncle Simon about agriculture in California and growing up without plantains as a staple while Fareed and Becky took a twelve-foot-long bamboo pole and ventured into the nearest pawpaw orchard to harvest a blue plastic feed-sack full of pawpaws and plantains.

The sun was getting lower, and the temperature dropped a bit as we hitched a ride back to Nswame on a giant truck, bed empty except for the three guys standing in it, clinging to the bar behind the cab. Fareed and the bags of produce went in the back, and I hoisted myself into the cab, squeezing over to leave enough room for Fareed's father. The truck made its leisurely way down the rutted road, stopping several times to take on a piece of cargo, take orders for an errand, or greet someone walking along the shoulder. We hopped another trotro, dropped his father off and said goodbye to sister and mother, and were finally, at long last, on our way back home, a sack of pawpaws, pineapples, and plantains at my feet and the sun painting orangepink pictures in the grey cloud sky.

It was wonderful to get away from campus for a day, to escape to and explore somewhere so different and yet so welcoming and familiar. And, fresh fruit? Never a bad plan. But maybe the miracle of the day was how open everyone I met was. Fareed's mother wanted to know when I was coming back so that she could cook a meal for me, and invited me to stay at their house if I ever need it. His father was laughing at my jokes and observations by the time we said goodbye, and I honestly love his twin sister. The pace of life in this country is sometimes difficult to deal with, but the things I rely on in America to keep me grounded (family, friends) exist here too, and that erases or makes up for all the challenges I face. I have a Ghanaian family, and I have reached another level of comfort and connection with this country and these people. The roots I feel developing are stronger than ever now, just of a different tree than I had before. Maybe I am a different kind of person here, but I don't think so. I feel like more of myself here than I have before, like I am growing into who I want to be.

Things that (shouldn't) go unnoticed

an orange-brown soy milk box, kindergarten size, cradled delicately in the roots of tree, held by corners only, floating above the ground

two dragonflies, exhibitionists, clinging to a florescent light and locked in shimmering gossamer love.

black sequins in a matte black sea carefully sheltering a pure mind opening devoutly to Friday morning prayers

the slicing blade of a machete in black hands bent low, sending the sharp sweet scent of cut grass as an offering to the morning breeze

fluttering butterfly with yellow rose petal wings dancing accidentally through the classroom

sun-warmed lizard scurrying on splayed-toothpick legs, long tail trailing dutifully

flashing ten-year-old grins and bumping shoulders as blue-checked shirts make their way to school and another day of adventure

the stillness of exhaustion written in every line of her body as she bends over another boiling kettle, tending the never-ending needs of a canteen full of mouths

muted murmured greetings and secret handshake as old friends good friends true friends meet again

night-shadowed true love sworn in hushed voices on the steps of home as the specter of curfew creeps ever closer

ghostly remains of lessons past traced in spidery shadows over each other and the ancient black board, reduced in a moment to drifts of dust

You Look Happy. What's Your Secret?

I was walking past the Balme library trying not to die on the roundabout (amazing for cars, kinda like death in a circle for pedestrians), and a Ghanaian guy and his friend, total strangers, stop me and say, "You look so happy! What's your secret?" I grin even wider than I was, turn to them and reply, "I'm in Ghana. That's my secret." And today at that moment, it was true. I have moments here that are isolated, moments that are lonely or scary or painful or boring, but most of the time I really enjoy myself trying to find new ways to fit an obruni peg into obibini life. And there are moments that are just there, where I am totally at peace and in the perfect place at the perfect time and able to take a moment to enjoy it.

Last night I went with Mikaela, Steve, John and Sirena to Desperado's, which is a restaurant/bar up at the Vandal City of Commonwealth. The only food they serve there is banku, but it is delicious. The girl behind the counter remembered me, so she brought our food out to us specially, setting out plates of spicy pepper sauce, shito, and chopped onions, pieces of grilled fish (that would be pretty much the WHOLE fish, no head but everything else including bones, fins, skin, etc), and fist-sized balls of banku, a thick paste made from fermented corn. It tastes like sourdough bread a little. We washed our right hands, holding them over a bowl in the center of the table and pouring water from a pitcher provided for the purpose. Eating hand appropriately clean, we unwrapped the banku and I set about de-boning my fish, first taking off the fins, then peeling off the top half of the flesh and pulling out the bones. Everything ready, I dug in, pinching of pieces of banku and dipping them in pepper sauce, alternating the sour-spicy with rich grilled fish and sips of bitter Star beer. We ate slowly, chatting about nonsense and looking out to see the glittering lights of Accra and the campus visible between the trees and spread out beneath us. I felt like royalty.

No wonder the commonwealth boys feel like they are the colonial masters of the school: they look down every day from their palace or temple on the hill and survey their underlings or something. Seriously, they have the most incredible view. It is second only to the view from the very top of Volta hall, where I found myself with Mikaela and Steve and another girl from our program named Elliot. None of the Volta girls go on the roof, so its kind of become the unofficial obruni hangout place, where everyone goes to smoke cigarettes and relax and just look out. From the top (its four or five stories) you can see even further than you can from Desperado's, almost to the mountains to the east, and down the coast to the west. And last night the weather was perfect. It was only a little cloudy, and five stories up you get a nice breeze. You can only ever see a few stars with the heavy orange-gold glow of urbanization, but the clock tower above Balme Library lights up, and the carpet of lights, with an old-fashioned clock ace floating in a purple-black haze, is like a museum diorama of the moon in a sea of adoring stars. I go up on the roof to think, to cool down, to call my family and friends (it is the only place in Volta with more than ten to fifteen seconds of reliable reception), to cry, to just be. In the dark you cant see how dirty the corrugated tin roof is, nor all the trash accumulated in the corners, or the puddles of stagnant water. At night it is a magic carpet, a paradise, an island. And when several of us are there together it feels like a tired, overworked secret clubhouse, reached up an extra flight of stairs and through a peeling blue door with a very high step. An empty desk sits at the top of the stairs, an abandoned sentry's post. The lock on the door doesn't work anymore. The walls are high enough that you would have to jump to fall off. Even thinking about it brings me peace.

There are times during the day that I really need that peace, someplace in my mind that is in Ghana but not really part of this world, something that doesn't remind me of the color of my skin and the cadence of my speech and the entire cultural package I carry around with me like an invisible hermit-crab's shell. Today I was walking back to Volta from Arabic class, which is held at a new but drafty lecture hall next to Tingi-Tingi, about a ten-minute walk from my residence hall. I was walking with the TA, the class captain, and another student named Abdul Bassit, who was my first friend in the class. They all started chatting in a polyglot of Arabic (both of the students have a background in it, being Muslim, and Saleh studied it for years), Twi, and pidgin English. I had just finished lecture feeling good about being on top of my reading, and had a little chat with my study-buddy Fareed, and I was definitely feeling a part of the group. Then they all started talking and joking in this language I couldn't follow, and all of a sudden I missed home, where I would be able to understand any joking, where I would not be instantly and accidentally excluded so completely. And it really got me thinking.

Saleh had said something in class about needing exchange students (directed toward Quentin the Belgian from Canada and myself, seated in the front row) because we foster cross-cultural understanding, yes, but also because Ghana specifically and Africa in general have many problems, and having people who have been here and seen them provides a greater chance of them being solved. I jokingly said that I would love to help, that I had five Ghana cedis in my bag and if he would tell me how to spend them I would gladly put them to the best use. Some students laughed and two boys asked if I could just give it to them, but most of the murmurings were of lack of comprehension at my joke, or just plain not understanding. And Saleh told the class that even if most of them couldn't understand me, that was exactly what he was talking about.

Walking through the grass, with stormclouds hovering tentatively on the horizon and bright sun on my shoulders, I realized something that really should have occured to me much sooner. As much trouble as I have trying to understand people here, THEY HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM WITH ME. I felt like a little bit of an idiot, and a little bit selfish. I must really be the center of my own world for it to take three months to realize that. Like I said a couple of paragraphs ago, I have good days and I have bad days, fun days and days I want to cry. But, as frustrating as it can sometimes be to stand out, to have no one get my jokes, to have to sit in the front and in order to get half the sense out of some lectures, to have to memorize and regurgitate instead of studying and analyzing, it never crossed my mind that when I ask a question in class the professor might have to listen as hard to me as I do to them, or that maybe when I get excited about something I talk maybe way too fast for Ghanaians to understand. Yeah I have to repete myself to be heard, but I didnt realize until I was floating over the green grass and the red dust in a little bubble of not-home after Saleh's words that this is just as hard for the people who see me as so exotic, different, foreign. And yet I still manage to have amazing Ghanaian friends, people I will remember my whole life, people I will miss as much as I miss my 'family' from Santa Cruz right now. Because however shallow they are, however alien, I am putting down roots here. This is becoming my home in a way that America will never be because I will never have to work for that home. It comes naturally to me after twenty-two years. But Ghana, and whatever place I have here on any given day, I earned through my own sweat and tears, to be cliche. But it is true. I have found and continue to find new depths of my own personality, new ways to react to strange situations both horrible and wonderful. And when I leave here, I will leave a part of my soul here waiting for the next time I come back. And come back I will. So what is the secret to today's happiness? Even though I dont always fit into this place, even when I feel isolated or lonely, I do have a place here, and maybe I always will. I am happy because I am in Ghana, which may just be the most rewarding thing I have ever done. It is certainly the most challenging.

the best-laid plans of mice and men

[warning: potty talk at the bottom. if this offends you, rinse and repeat]

i was going to embark today on a grand adventure to Akropong, this town on the Akwapim ridge mountain range, which is the site of the first mission to be set up in Ghana. On the way i was going to stop at a woodcarving village and this huge bead market, then do some archive
research at this institute there and go to crazy church on Sunday and talk to people about the role of Christianity and witchcraft in their lives. the tro tro ride would have been gorgeous, especially on an overcast day (not too hot, rain forest in its natural lighting and moisture level). it was going to be amazing. however, Ghana has, as usual, caused me to completely reevaluate everything about anything. Exhibit A: access to cash. The atms are not working today. Mine because they decided that today would be a good day for the whole bank (Standard chartered) to SHUT DOWN COMPLETELY so that they can go through the computer system and somethingsomethingsomething. And everyone who has an international visa card has no access to their money at all for some reason (the main rumor i have been hearing is a world bank strike that has blocked international banking transactions, but that may or may not be true). so no one i was going to travel with has any money at all. none. and we are going next weekend instead. which will be fine. oh, and there has been no water at volta hall for two days now. This means several things. 1) bucket showers wooot! where you just soap up and dump cold water on yourself. effective for things like skin and NOT for things like hair. ps getting ready for a
date and not even being able to wash your face is fun. 2) no flushing for the toilets. this is pretty much the most lovely consequence of having no water. just let your imagination deal with it. one result is that people pee in the shower stalls (which have drains) because the toilets are gross, but there is no water to wash it down, which means that when someone comes in to do the bucket shower thing, well... 3) the stairs, covered in slippery tile, get REALLY WET because people haul buckets of water up the stairs. do you know how hard it is to NOT spill a bucket of water walking up three flights of stairs? pretty much impossible. so i always almost die trying to go to class, etc, and that just makes every day i am not dead that much brighter.