Part 3 of Kristi’s Ongoing Conversations with Herself: Race

10-23-10

Growing up, I never gave much thought on the expressions or impacts of race on my immediate environment or my person.  At least not past that which the learning of history required or the ability to think through TV talk shows.  Racial experience was always something that happened outside of my limited scope of the world—on TV or in books or something.  Being white and growing up in a predominantly white area made my experience, my lens, essentially race-less.  There were small groups of non-white people around me—first the children of Native American heritage that went to my high school and a large Hispanic minority in my second high school—and while their presence wasn’t invisible to me, it wasn’t highly visible either.  They moved around me more or less indifferently and I indifferent to them, not realizing that our fundamental cultural differences were not allowing me to connect with them and to unconsciously seek the friendships of those with whom I was similar.  Thus I never really thought my race meant anything, I being the same as all those around me.  I never really saw racial difference, but cultural difference.  Only in my adult life have I realized that the two main environments of my childhood—Vernal, UT and Wenatchee, WA—were and are not homogenously white, and that any sense of non-whiteness exists there.  In my racial naivete, I associated “race” and “non-Whiteness” with “black” and since there were no, or very few black people any of the places I lived, I perceived no experience of “race” or even, racial privilege.  I knew that a history of racism gave me opportunities that I could be born into, opportunities that previous white generations would bestow upon me as a result of racial discriminations written into laws and cultural consciousness; but I didn’t feel race operating on me everyday.

If my entrance into anthropology changes the angle of the race lens for me, Women’s Studies exploded it with vibrant color.  Anthropology attuned my eyes more critically to diversity, but Women’s Studies made me see and understand new depths of race—how I exist in this world, my place given to me and how the world reacts to me based on race.  My entry into anthropology was facilitated by a deep, unexplainable interest in people’s lives—not their personal ones, per say, but their collective ones.  I was fascinated by the different way we found to live with few important similarities.  With this budding interest and an increasingly honed eye on “diversity,” I realized my life and the people around me were not all that diverse in lifestyle or origin.  My anthropological knowledge was coming from books and texts and professors, not experiences and people.  Even the practitioners of anthropology often comment about how anthropology is still a white man’s endeavor and are always critical about how few diverse viewpoints and backgrounds there are.  So it was with anthropology that I realized my lack of racial diversity in my life—how “white” my life truly was.  In Women’s Studies I came to know what that meant.

For those unfamiliar with something like Women’s Studies or feminist theory, you may be surprised to learn that it is not all about women or women’s rights.  Properly defined (I think, anyway; there’s a TON of literature on the proper definition of feminism), feminism is the attempt to challenge, understand, and confront unequal power relationships between groups—to think through why certain groups are oppressed and why others are privileged.  This includes not only gender relationships, but those of race, class, disability, socioeconomic, nationality, any identity that renders one person or group of persons less than another.  And so, race is a big part of Women’s Studies and feminist theory.

I realize now that the ability to go through any part of life without a thought to race is an expression of white privilege.  Power and privilege may not be immediately invisible to those who have it, but its affect on those who DON’T have it, is.  Marginalized groups often have a less distorted view of power because it is being exercised on them.  I also believe the perception of the power of race experience is diluted when one is enmeshed with those of her own race.  Hence, without the experience of diversity and exposure to a variety of different viewpoints and experiences, one risks a seriously truncated and distorted view of world and their existence in it.  It is when one comes into contact with those of another race—either physically, or over media, even—that race becomes more vibrantly salient.  I learned that many who are non-White, who are not of the privileged dominant social group (whether white, rich, Christian, heterosexual, but for the purposes of this post, mainly white) think on their race all the time, judging whether it has any bearing on their present situation or interactions with others.  I began to see what had been hitherto hegemonic and to understand how, and what bearing the history of race relations had on current cultural and socioeconomic conditions and the complex nuances within.  From anthropology I understood the important debunking of biological race and the power of socially constructed race, but Women’s Studies illuminated its complex existence in this world.

All my life I have had the ability to hide, to blend into the group or the background.  Nothing I do or am makes me stand out.  I am what everyone expects me to be.  One reason I wanted Peace Corps to send me to Africa was because I wanted to change that.  I wanted to have the situation flipped, to experience what it is to be in the minority, the inability to hide, to know what it is to have race in my face—everyday.  It is wearing, exhausting, trying, and I know, completely different from any other non-White experience.  I can’t compare it to being a minority in the US, because, even here, I am a privileged minority.  Even in a place where I am an intruding foreigner, identifiable to the racial category of those that are historically responsible for Africa’s current situations, I am privileged based on my skin (and to some degree my nationality, but mostly my skin).  It is like a bright neon banner flashing in a dark field.  To have it this way when I am marked with privilege, I can’t imagine the horror to be gazed upon with racial hatred.

But still, being American, and having been ingrained with a 20^th century American history of racial injustice, tension, and the radical correction of it, to be called out to or sought because of my skin color makes me very uncomfortable.  To have this quasi-celebrity status is very unsettling and, I think, very undeserving of such behavior on both sides.

There is a lot to tell you, blog-s-sphere, about my experience of whiteness in Africa and how people react to me based on this very obvious marker.  This subject shall continue.  

Thou Shalt Not Covet My Pawpaw!!

10-21-10

There’s no real beating around the bush about it.  Damanko has given me a nice house.  Three or four generations of volunteers have added their own touches to it, making it that much more….well, better.  Sometimes I feel guilty about this.  I feel guilty that because of who I am, and where I’m from, I get a place to live that is still at better standards than most of the people here.  Of course there are perks here that Americans prefer to have that most Ghanaians really could care less for, but still, I am a participant in what Peace Corps lingo is known as “Posh Corps.”  My counterpart, Kofi, assuages some of this guilt by not begrudging me anything, even though I know my house is in much better shape than his, and by personifying good Ghanaian hospitality for its guests, especially ones that have proved themselves in the past, such as American Peace Corps Volunteers.  I really consider this house almost as much his as mine, since he has poured much of his blood, sweat, and, well, not tears, but energy anyway, into its maintenance and upkeep.  He’s planted trees, painted walls, fed the cat, organized many of the landscaping tasks, helped furnish it, and basically guarded it like a police dog both when volunteers occupied it, and the year its stood vacant.  So, I allow him his indulgence in his very overt protectiveness over the house (and to some extent its occupant).  He is as territorial as a peacock.  The pawpaw has brought this out bright and clear.

I have three papaya trees in this yard (that is enclosed by a gate I can lock, but it’s a hassle to do so), and a fourth one that is not bearing fruit.  Known as pawpaw in many parts of the world, they are apparently very coveted items—as one of my friends said “Because it is Obruni’s (the local word for White Person) pawpaw”.  The fruit is beginning to ripen, and people’s mouths are beginning to water, so to speak.  Each tree can bear as many as 20 great big pawpaws and they must be plucked when ripe.  This means one must either climb the tree (good 10 to 20 or so feet in the air) or get a long stick (of which there are plenty in front of my house) to push one off.  If you don’t “drop” them, they don’t fall, they will just rot on the tree.  Most of them are still green, but edible, and now everyone wants one. 

I let the girls from the sewing school next door drop 6 or 7, some of which I kept, but if I didn’t stop them, they would drop them all.  When I offered Kofi one, his guard flipped up and told me he told them not to do that without him there, otherwise they would drop them all.  At the time I thought, “Goodness it’s just pawpaw, and besides, me and the school’s master were there to make sure they didn’t take them all.”  I asked him what has been done with all the pawpaw in the past, and since the Chief is the landlord, some of it goes to him, which is perfectly suitable.  Several days ago, a couple boys came from the Chief’s wife’s house to ask for a pawpaw or two, and Kofi was here and told them no because there weren’t any ripe ones yet (we dropped some this morning for the Chief’s wife when they had ripened).  Even the Chief’s son has come by to ask for one.  I heard voices and noises in my yard one time, and rushed out to find Kofi’s own wife with a stick in the tree (okay, well, she’s entitled.)  Two days ago I was talking to my sister when I heard some noise in my yard and caught a boy red-handed with a stick in his hand trying to drop a pawpaw.  He promptly ran off.  Even just now, as Kofi and I rounded a corner, we saw a posse of young boys around my gate and a stick behind the wall sticking up into the pawpaw tree.  “See,” Kofi told me, “this is why you need to start locking the gate when you leave.”  (I always lock the house but get lazy with the gate except when I travel.  I was only gone a couple hours.)    Then he donned his police persona, took off at a dead run and scattered the boys.  He puffed up (which always brings to mind an cat on the offense all arched and hair standing on end) in the very particular way Ghanaians do when they get angry at someone in order to tear them a new one, so to speak; and had some choice words for the boy (yes, the very same boy I previously caught—most unlucky at thieving, poor kid) he caught with the stick.  Kofi is not a big guy, but when he summons the authority he has as an older youth exercising power over a younger one, I’m sure he looked humongous and scary. 

Watching Ghanaian anger is very fascinating and quite entertaining as well.  Most of it is display.  It reminds me of when I worked at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at my university.  Whenever we went into the viewing area of the chimps’ enclosure, they would “display” to us, claiming the small space they inhabited as their home, and communicating to us that we were intruding upon it.  We were there on their terms.  The displays asserted their dominance over us by puffing themselves up to make themselves look bigger, quick and determined pacing, and displays of strength and vocal volume.  It could go from calm to full display in 0 to 5 seconds, and be over just as quick.  The chimps weren’t really angry or upset, they were showing us their power.  If they can display enough of that power to scare you away, then they win.  Ghanaian anger is much the same.  It can puff up quickly, and be gone just as fast.  There is yelling, furrowed brows, fast words, intense eye contact, and broad gestures.  Same ingredients of the chimps’ displays, but expressed incredibly differently.  Ghanaians don’t use politeness as a mode of interacting and resolving conflicts that Americans do until there the anger shows itself for real.  There is rarely any real rage, whoever has the strongest presence of anger and argument wins.  Yelling and broad gesticulating (minus the presence of any real anger) is also an indicator of seriousness.  If one party is quietly listening, displaying nothing, then the other party feels he is not being taken seriously.  This is especially evident in Kofi because he doesn’t see a lot of gray, and when he makes an opinion about something, he will defend it tooth and nail.  Any admonitions against it strikes him personally and against his rigid sense of what is right, honorable and the proper course of things.  And so leads him to his intense protectiveness.  “This is your first warning” he was saying as I got there, “I catch you again, I will punish you thoroughly” (which could mean he could haul him home for a beating or even off to the police station).  Stealing is a grave offense in Ghana.  Stealing even small things is not a misdemeanor.  For many transgressions, one can go to the police, but the Chief or any official elder can withdraw the case and settle it in the community.  For certain offenses—homicides, rapes, and stealing—they go immediately to court, and more often than not, there is jail time involved.  That probably would not happen to this boy, but the important thing I am noting is the rank that stealing has with other grave offenses.  These are the things I learn while hanging out at the “police station”.  J

Still, I can’t help but wonder if there is something more complicated behind this boy trying to get at my pawpaw.  Things are usually more complicated than they appear on the surface.  But even so, be careful who you mess with.  I might have to sick my Kofi on you.

Second Edition of Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself: Am I "Rich"?

Before reading ask yourself the following:

Are you rich? 

Is Africa poor? 

What characteristics determine whether one (individual or country) is rich or poor?

Really think about it.

I am white.  Most of you already know that.  My body is like a flashing neon sign in a dark field in Africa.  But I will save a discussion on race until the next Kristi’s Ongoing Conversations with Herself.  For right now I will say that here, for most people here, White = Rich, unequivocally.  So, I ask, what does “rich” mean?

My current hypothesis is that most Americans, and indeed the rest of the West, determines wealth solely based on material possessions—the accumulation of Stuff.  If you have a large bank account, you are obviously rich.  Okay, but bank accounts are not overly visible displays of wealth, so wealth really is determined by what one can purchase with that large bank account.  As a result we have established culturally certain kinds of possessions that immediately display wealth and, therefore, success.  They are things such as: electronic gadgets (trendy ones such as Apple products and entertainment technologies), clothes (including shoes), vehicles, and living structures, just to name a few.  These key things have been established as markers of wealth, however, just because one has them doesn’t mean they are wealthy.  Americans have mastered the art of looking rich without being so.  We have milked the practice of borrowing unnecessary amounts of money to its utmost.  Our inability to manage debt has allowed us to indulge in this image without the meat to back it up.  So, how does this translate to Ghana and my experience in it?

A history of unregulated giving and limited interactions with people from the outside, many people in Africa associate white people with lots of possessions, which must mean they are rich.  This leads to regular experience of children (and even old men) chanting “Give me small money, give me small money” as I pass.  Many even assume that because I am there, Peace Corps will bring them money (and maybe jobs?) which is the antithesis of PC.  This image extends to a blanket stereotype of America in general.  Several people I have talked to have been generally shocked to learn there are “poor” people in the US.  That there are homeless people, and people who can’t afford to eat.  To them, America is a land of milk and honey.  If they can only get there, their problems will go away.  I try to tell them that No, they don’t go away, they only change.  I also try to tell them that even though Americans (even low-income Americans) make more money than the average Ghanaian, but we incur many more expenses than they do.  There are so many more bills to pay!

The West possesses most of the imaging and idea-generating power in this globalized world.  For generations, Africa has been told by White travelers, development workers and missionaries that they are poor and need to be saved.  This same Western voice has said so because its sole marker of wealth has been cash flow.  If you can’t make or spend money, you are poor.  So Africans must be poor, and we must find ways to increase their cash flow so they can be rich, and their problems will go away.  It’s become a part of the cultural consciousness in many places.  So let’s mess this straight and narrow line up a little.

What is poverty?  Ghana, like any nation on earth, has its problems, but starvation isn’t one of them.  People don’t make a lot of money, but they can afford to feed themselves and their children, buy cloth to make beautiful clothes, afford electricity when the infrastructure permits its existence, travel small when they need to, etc.  Everyone has a cell phone (and some of them are really nice too).  Some own motorbikes.  But their houses are falling apart.  They can’t always afford school fees.  Children may go around in tattered clothes, but that does not mean they don’t bath or have nice clothes for church.  I have met many Ghanaians who are well educated and working hard to improve the quality of life in Ghana.  Opportunities and capacity are existent here, maybe just not as abundantly as in America.  But then, America isn’t always the Land of Equal Opportunity it strives to be.  Gross inequities exist everywhere in the world, they just manifest differently in different places.

So I wonder if the real discussion about causes of wealth and poverty, and their definitions, don’t exist so much at the relative individual scale, but perhaps through governments.  I am not rich in my country, and I’m not really any richer here.  I don’t have an income, my bank account is miniscule, but my safety nets are richer.  My government will pay for my healthcare for the next two years (though not when I actually go home) and I have a safe home to go to should something unspeakable happen here.  Even the poorest Americans have access to certain amenities (like running water) because the infrastructure has been established to facilitate and support that.  Does that make me richer than Ghanaians?  Sure Ghanaians may not have as much stuff, and the children may not have toys, but don’t we complain that too many Things have corrupted our youth?  Don’t we complain about the hours young Americans spend in front of the TV, Playstation, computer, etc?  Children here possess a freedom American children don’t.  They can roam safely.  They are able to socialize well with their peers.  They contribute to the maintenance of the household (by sweeping, fetching water, running errands, etc).  They have time to be children, to do leisure activities of their choice without being overscheduled with a hundred extracurricular activities.  So, in this light, the children don’t seem so “poor” do they?

Ghanaians are rich in time.  They have the time for leisure, the time to do nothing, the time to wait, the time to sit and chat with their neighbors, their friends, their sisters.  They have the time to properly greet everyone they pass.  They are not running from appointment to appointment, never claim to be too busy to do something, not too busy ferrying their kids to different activities that they can’t cook a proper meal.  In Time, I’d say Americans are very poor.

Many volunteers, upon leaving for their service, are bombarded with well wishers complimenting them on the unselfish decision and an admiration of a perceived dedication to “helping those poor people.”  This makes my skin crawl, because it implies to me that the person believes people here don’t have the power, the ability, or the capacity to help themselves, that they are powerless, which is not true.  Service in Peace Corps is every bit as selfish as it is unselfish.  We often get more than we give. 

My argument is not that there is no such thing as a rich person or a poor person, or that it only exists in relativity.  My argument is that when you look on someone as a rich person or a poor person (or a group of people) you should ask yourself what is contributing to that judgment.  What visual (or other) indicators is making you judge this way?  And what is your reaction to it?  Maybe wealth and poverty exist in other realms of life besides just monetarily and materially.  If that is so, there are many cases, I’m sure where Ghana is richer than the US.

Thus Far

So what have I done for the last month in Damanko?  To recall it, it feels like “not much” though I suppose that’s not really true.  In a nutshell, I’ve really just been trying to feel at home in the place, make myself a presence in the town, and observe alllllllll I can.  My days are not really filled with tasks, yet somehow the days pass.  In the mornings, I like to walk to the bridge over the river and watch the fishermen go out in their boats.  It is the end of the rainy season, so the river has swollen to twice its normal size.  Its flood plains have increased more than anyone can remember; it’s taking farm crops and submerging the water intake (which has been waiting to work, but that’s another story).  For all its destructiveness, it’s still beautiful.  On Wednesdays I go to the town’s clinic to help with the baby weighings.  In order to monitor malnutrition, the government of Ghana instituted Child Welfare Days throughout the country.  Once a month mothers take their children from newborns to four years old on a designated day to have them weighed, registered with the state for birth certificates, and given childhood immunizations.  All these things are recorded and kept in every child’s individual health book.  If a child is underweight, the nurse counsels the mother or refers her to a bigger clinic. This is a chance for me to get to know the staff at the clinic (all 5 of them!) and to see and be a presence to the women in the community.  Other times, I may walk down to the police barrier at the end of town to get to know the other police people since I have an in there with my counterpart anyway.  I might sit with the apprentices at the sewing school next door to my house and try to learn Likpakpaln from them or just chat with Simon, the teacher.  Other days I might travel a short distance to Kpassa or Nkwanta—bigger towns with local government people who have an affect in Damanko without being there.  Or I might devour half a book, or watch the kittens romp in the garden, or take a nap, or do a crossword puzzle.  Who knows?  

Zen Buddhism and Ghana?

9/31/10

In order to retain one’s sanity here, one must have an interesting mix of Buddhist outlook and an incredibly fine tuned attitude of flexibility.  From my very meager understanding and brushes with Buddhism, its main appeals to me have been the lifelong dedication to total enlightenment and a near constant analysis to all earthly impacts on the purity of a person’s soul or existence.  This often leads to a vow of poverty, a disavowal of attachment to all earthly things, a removal of the temptation of material possessions and desires, because to focus your life on the accumulation of Things and a selfish attachment to objects hinders your enlightenment and your ability to be your best self. (did I just throw in a dash of Oprah?)  Oddly enough, Ghana is testing my Buddhist abilities, and creating some where I had none.  Nothing is sacred, safe, or reliable here (okay well sometimes it is, the trick is, you just don’t know when it is or will be reliable—the reliability is unreliable, weird).  Ghana, the Peace Corps, is hard on stuff, hard on desires.  One must not rely heavily on one object, one course of action, because it will inevitably collapse—or change.  One must have an arsenal of paths, possibilities, plans, and back up plans that can be inserted at the drop of a hat, or, three days before.  Everything I have been attached to has been mangled in some way (and I’ve only been here 4 months!).  Every eagerly awaited visit, meeting, or promise that “I will definitely be there” has faltered in some way and come about by a different route.  Clothes you love will eventually become rags from the sweating and washing (or otherwise asked for by a random person).  Electronics will be fried by the voltage.  That bottle of wine you can’t wait to drink will break during rough transit.  The packages you eagerly await sit idly waiting to be delivered.  The boy whose visit you’ve been eagerly awaiting and expected on this day can’t get there for three or four more days.  Ghana tests my unhealthy attachment to anything.  When first I got to site, I was giddy to find an electric tea kettle left for me by previous volunteers.  In the last couple years, tea has been my comfort and indulgence through long papers and dry textbooks.  I had tea a whole three weeks before the kettle died.  All through training I looked forward to breaking out of my host family and cooking for myself once again.  Most PCVs cook with a pair of burners hooked up to a propane tank.  When I got to site, I found mine empty and a propane shortage throughout Ghana.  I still don’t have gas (although I sent off this week to be filled; there’s finally gas in Accra).  After a couple weeks at site, I finally cleaned the store room and found, quite unexpectedly, a rice cooker!  That made my day, and I could use it make several things other than rice!  Alas, I used it a whole three times before the voltage melted it.  (Luckily, however, when I thought all hope was lost, the local appliance guy was able to resurrect it by replacing a wire—even the death of appliances is unreliable; but I had to give the tea kettle a burial.)  Even the presence of a voltage regulator doesn’t guarantee anything.  I forgot my computer’s power cord at the PC office, and the arduousness of Ghanaian traveling doesn’t allow me to return easily to retrieve it.  After years of using the computer everyday (or even every few days since coming to Ghana), I haven’t turned on the computer in a month.  Also the battery has died and can’t seem to charge itself when plugged in.  The precious moringa trees that provide medicine and shade in my yard get eaten by goats because the lock on the gate doesn’t work.  The garden I’ve been excited to plant for a month still lies empty because the seeds are in a package that sits in the Tamale PC office waiting to be retrieved (along with the power cord).  The project I was really excited to start work on might not happen, or at least wasn’t as I imagined it.  Ghana tests to the limit my unhealthy attachment to Things and makes sure I don’t want anything too much.  Truthfully, though, the problem isn’t that things don’t happen at all or that this single treasured item breaks and isn’t replaceable (I left all the irreplaceables in boxes at my Grandpa’s house).  Things get done.  Things will happen.  Other objects will function to fill a desired role (tea water prepared in the rice cooker!), just not on your schedule or at least how you plan, thought, or unconsciously assumed it would happen.  There just might be an incredible (and previously believed insurmountable) amount of waiting involved.  Waiting requires (hopefully breeds?) patience.  Flexibility is Patience’s kissing cousin.  It’s also a survival mechanism.  If you can’t “roll with the punches” you will surely dies—death by implosion of undirected frustration.  Patience, Flexibility, and Letting Things Go—the tenets of Peace Corps Buddhism.