The Best Day

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago....

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The end is near.  The end has felt near for some weeks, I have spent much of it anxiously waiting through the days, waiting for one day to cross into another.  Most everything I have done in my adult life has a set time limit—college, graduate school, temporary jobs, Peace Corps Service—and by the end of that set time, I am ready to jump into the next thing.  Ready to not linger, but look forward for the next new “adventure”, the new possibilities.  Instead of having “senioritis” at the end of high school or college, I have pushed through it many times by now and am familiar with the feeling of having one foot in the now and one in the future, not being wholly there, but distracted by the excitement of possibilities that arise after the end of the current journey.

I am looking forward to leaving Ghana and going home.  These two years have been amazing, challenging, and given me a sense of accomplishment, but I'm ready to go home and eat turkey, decorate a Christmas tree, talk to my sister and my best friend every day on the phone, have reliable internet and electricity, and not having to share my toilet with cockroaches or my food with ants.  To be honest, other than some key people, there's not really a whole lot I will miss about Ghana.  At least, I say so now, I am interested to see what I will think in six months.  I haven't felt much trepidation about my impending departure date; I guess I've been subconsciously preparing myself to leave for a while.  The readiness to leave is helped along by some doubts and disappointments that nag at me as I sum up emotionally (and bureaucratically) the course of my experience here.  There is a wide gap between what I expected this time to be and what it ended up being.  Becoming adept at a new language, practicing some real professional anthropologist work, excelling amongst my colleagues, are only a few of the goals I wasn't able to accomplish.  I have succeeded in putting on mass educational events, hoping to reach many people with a variety of ideas, events that look good on a list on a resume, but how effective were they, really?  It is easy to look at my pictures, to read summations of the things I have done, and say I am making a difference, but when you're in it, and you see everything, including your shortcomings, things don't look so rosy.  I try to be objective about my experience and balance out the bad with the good, but it's funny that our worthy accomplishments never seem to shine as brightly as the perceived failures in our mind's eye.

But for one glorious day, that all went away, and I found myself at the end of it, in a tro, on the muddy dirt road, the cool evening air on my face as the bushes and the trees whizzed by, thinking that I was ready to leave this country happy and satisfied after all.

I had traveled the previous day to meet up with Linda and Nathan, the only two volunteers near me, at Linda's house in Jumbo, about an hour's drive from me.  We had plans to hang out and spend the night, then the next morning, catch a car to Nkwanta and find our way to Kyabobo (pronounced Cha-bo-bo) National Park.  The house behind Linda's was in the middle of funeral rites which meant we had to listen to popular Ghanaian hip hop music with the aid of large floor speakers until four in the morning.  Such dance jams are an important part of the celebration part of the funeral process, basically like playing a dance to celebrate someone's life.  The problem is, people like to pay the dj's to play all night, but people usually head home around midnight or one, but for some reason, that doesn't matter.  Needless to say we didn't get much sleep, so hiking the next day was a little sluggish.  Anyway, we caught the not-so-early car and arrived in Nkwanta about 9:30.  Then we had to pay some guys to take us to the park which was easy enough.  The headquarters is only a few kilometers from the town marked by a long wire fence and a big, peach colored gated arch.  Once inside, the road finds the headquarters office and staff areas.  Lots of men are strolling around in what looks like green police uniforms, staff disproportionate to the tourists visits, that's for sure.  The headquarters itself is small, a connection of four or five offices/rooms by a walkway in much better shape than other government buildings I've seen in the country especially in this area.  Since our arrival was a little late in the morning, we decided on one of the shorter hikes, the most popular being the hike up Breast Mountain.  The headquarters is not inside the park, so they dropped us some fifteen minutes up the road at the trail head with our guide, who was guide, ranger, naturalist, and trail crew all in one—and proceeded on what was one of my hardest hikes in a while.  Linda put it in perspective as we were coming down by saying, “you know if this was in an American park, the trail would be weaving up the mountain instead of going straight up”.  That's exactly why it was so hard.  It was little more than a bush trail up a mountain, past some old cassava farms and some very current corn fields.  Once inside the park borders, however, the trail went up a great deal, which of course put me into full tortoise-mode—slow and steady.  After huffing and puffing a good deal and feeling wobbly on my legs, I began to wonder if we'd ever make it to the top.  Eventually we did though and were treated to a great view for miles around.  At Nkwanta the mountains start and continue as one goes south, but everything north is flat as Nevada.  It was different to see this flat, flat land nestled with tin-roofed villages and the Lake Volta in the distance, then --BAM!-- mountains.  We hung out at the top for a while, taking pictures against the pinnacle rock, munching on our plethora of snacks—peanuts, oranges, bread, McVities cookies, waiting for our heart rates to come back down.  They did eventually and we started back down the trail which was almost as much fun as going up and I have the blistered toes to prove it.

Once back in Nkwanta, there were still a few errands to run, since it was Market Day.  Linda needed to go to the bank, and Nathan and I stopped to buy vegetables for dinner later.  Once we collected some coveted carrots and green bell peppers, we followed her to the bank.  Bank on Market Day is a crazy place and it was obvious she'd be waiting a while, so we decided to give it another hour and went to find a spot—a bar.  As we were headed to Hilltop, I heard a familiar voice call out to me and turned around to see Ebenezer with a big grin on his face.  I was happy to see him there since it meant he was signing up for school, something he at one time was worried he wouldn't be able to do.

Ebenezer was one of the junior high school kids I took to Camp GGLOW more than a year ago.  He's a bright and generous kid, his class's Student Prefect, a kid with a bright future, really.  He would stop by my house periodically to chat, to help me with some chore, or whatever.  He applied himself well in school, and genuinely believed that if he worked hard in school, it would get him somewhere.  I knew that if he could get a good start in school, he had the ability to make something of himself.  His mother can barely pay his junior high school fees which are nominal compared to those that would occur in senior high school.  He scored well on his end of junior high state tests, actually the best in his class, but didn't know how he was going to pay for high school, especially with an errant father who sees education as not very important and a stepfather who cares even less.

Some months ago, when I was finishing up our large latrine project, a group from our partnering organization in Ho came to conduct some sanitation and health workshops for various people in various communities.  Vincent Mensah, his university graduated daughter, and couple other staff people, including a PCV, came and stayed about five days.  During their last afternoon, I was in the house making some tortillas and fixing up my hummus-in-a-can, a good import from Lebanon that I can buy in Tamale.  I had planned to share it with Vincent and his crew as a parting gift.  Ebenezer stopped by, interested in my cooking flat bread, and ended up following me down to the guest house with my concoctions.  We all ended up eating the lot and drinking some beer, then as Kwesi invited them to some traditional dancing happening at his house, we all headed there.  To make a long story short, Ebenezer ended hanging out with them that day, helping them buy things at the market, and talking to them quite a bit.  Vincent told him that when he found out his test scores and school placement results, he should call him.  In the end, he ended up offering Ebenezer the possibility of admission in one of the schools in Ho.  After the results came, Ebenezer was placed in Nkwanta's school.  A school in Ho would be of much better quality, but also much more expensive.  Also, time was tight and a transfer now would be impractical, so Ebenezer decided to go ahead to Nkwanta, with the possibility of transferring to a better school in Ho next year if he wants.  After visiting his father, who claimed he had no money for school, he worried about how he was going to pay for it.  I had already determined I was going to give him some, but I wanted to wait to see what his father came up with.  I gave him what I could, but I couldn't pay for all, so I told him to call Vincent who ended up sending him a big chunk of his fees.

On Monday afternoon, as Nathan and I were collecting our things in market, Ebenezer was completing his admission errands for school, which consisted mainly of paying the fees.  He was very excited and looked as though a big weight had been lifted because between the funds Vincent and I gave him he was able to pay everything with no lingering worries, enabling him to start school with the rest of his colleagues.  Even though he normally possesses a happy disposition, it was definitely different that day.  To celebrate, I invited him and the buddy he was with to come to the spot with Nathan and I so I could buy them a Coke.  As we sat with our drinks, he happily showed me all the papers and receipts from the day, his placement papers, and told me about the trials of the day.  Soon though, Ebenezer and his friend had to go to do some final things at the school before they could return home the next day.  As they were leaving, I turned to Nathan and said, “I think that was my two years right there.  I think that just made everything worth it.”

Soon after, we collected Linda and boarded a bus back to Jumbo for another evening at her house.  We had all thoroughly enjoyed our day, experiencing one of those rare coincidences in this place where things just happen to work out exceptionally well.  We had a good, strenuous hike, I had finally gone to a place I've been wanting to visit for two years, and seeing Ebenezer there as he was preparing for school was just icing on the cake.  Such contentedness contributed to a most serene tro ride at the end of the best day.