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.