Family Planning and Cultural Dancing Community Event

I really am not good at improvising. I wasn't good at it in high school (or college) jazz band, and I am not good at it in real life. Working in a developing country requires expert skills in operating on the verge of chaos and trying to make something sensible come out of it. I can be flexible, though. I can change gears when needed, though I sometimes need a few minutes to get my brains and emotions used to the change of pace. However, flexibility doesn't require leadership; improvising does. Improvising requires creativity under pressure and then, most though not all of the time, requires one to make decisions and then somehow implement those decisions with your original plans crumbling around you. This was my day yesterday, and I unequivocally failed at it. The day, the event, was not a total failure, in fact it happened to produce a lot of successes, but my ability to operate productively in a situation that needs complete rejuvenation on the spot, was totally not there.

Yesterday was our big Family Planning and Cultural Dance Event that Kwesi and I have been planning for the last few months. The idea was to disseminate family planning education and mix it with a celebration of cultural dance. We needed a draw, if you will, something fun that would bring many different people from different places. For HIV/AIDS education last July, we used football, but that really only draws the boys and men. We could go to the schools, but then we would only reach the educated, and there are many non-schooled people in these areas. Everybody, though, loves cultural dancing. It would bring the young and old, the men and women, the educated and uneducated. Family planning is not an unknown or new concept here, it is just underused, especially in the smaller villages farther away from the community clinic. It is my impression (purely anecdotal not quantified) that some (men) are still resistant to it, but most people think it's generally a good idea, but other things get in the way of participating in it. Men and women don't talk to each other about it, don't attempt to plan their families and leave it more or less to chance. Some don't want to travel to the clinic or don't take advantage of the community outreach days. Others are turned off by going and then having to pay the small fee. Others (women) are worried about prostitute reputations or the myth that birth control makes you sterile. Given these obstacles, we thought a good start was a community-wide conversation about family planning.

So, I wrote six short dramas about family planning, two of them addressing issues surrounding teenage pregnancy and promoting family planning use among adolescents (my stab at stepping outside abstinence only education). We invited over 15 community groups (many from villages surrounding Damanko) and we enlisted four of those groups to present the written dramas. The two talking about teen pregnancy, we gave to the two junior high schools in town.

So, the day of the event comes. Kwesi and I are very excited. I am excited because I get to see a whole day of cultural dancing—and not just Kinachung, the dance performed by Konkombas at every funeral, but dances by other groups that are only done a certain occasions; one of them so rarely performed that the younger generation has seen it very few times so it can be considered “endangered.” Anyway, on all the of invitations and all the meetings and announcements, we said the event would start at 7:30 in the morning. Even though many Ghanaians arise before 5 am, this is still a ridiculous hour to start something, but in Ghana, nothing EVER starts on time (except football, Kwesi tells me) so we allowed a hour or two leeway. But the upsetting part was that not a soul (aside from the several hundred school children running amok) appeared until ELEVEN O'CLOCK. I was so angry. Here Kwesi and I had worked to get everything in place, written the grant, written the dramas (not to mention all the actors working hard at their parts), visited everyone, set up the stage area that morning; I even traveled to Tamale to borrow special cameras from Peace Corps, and it's perfectly fine to make everyone wait, purely because you don't want to be the first group to arrive. Drives me absolutely bonkers. I could feel the passive-aggressive animal rising in me that says, okay, fine, everything's canceled then, since you all can't show that you care or take this thing seriously. Somehow, no matter how many times Kwesi assured me with “that's how Ghanaians behave; don't worry we will do it, everything will happen” and no matter how much I reminded myself that a year in Ghana has taught me that everything that is supposed to happen will happen, just not as you planned them, 20-some years of deeply ingrained (and possibly genetic?) punctuality is difficult to overcome no matter how many yoga-calming mantras you try to repeat to yourself. Needless to say, the day's schedule (even with an anticipated delay worked into it) was completely moot. Which meant that everything had to be done on the fly as groups showed up, which also meant that everyone was clamoring to know when this group would go and that group, when should we have this person's speech, and so on. Two of the dramas didn't even happen because, well, in one half of the actors decided it would a good day to travel, and the other one, I still didn't know what happened. And those two were my most important. So that's it. No more big, community-wide events for me.

Good things did happen yesterday. Like I said before, everything (or something) will happen, just never as you plan it. The dramas that happened were excellent, a couple even exceeded my expectations, lots of people (and all different kinds of people) eventually showed up, the people who gave speeches spoke very well and gave excellent advice, and those watching seemed to be into it and enjoy it. The biggest disappointment was that I had a very effective event planned, but with such a big delay and the helter-skelter and hurried way we had re-do everything, a lot of the effectiveness was lost.

But enough complaining now, and on to the dancing. Though I unsurprisingly enjoyed this portion, that delay of the morning still lingered as a dark shadow in my mind, so I didn't have the same ebullient feeling I would have had otherwise. Konkomba is the major tribe in this area, so most of the dances belonged to them, but there are large minorities of Ewe and Basare tribes here too, so we asked them to represent themselves as well. After some light pleading, the Basares agreed to perform their Fire Dance, a dance traditionally performed at the funeral of a chief or other important man, and the “endangered” dance I mentioned before. The Traditional Believers (a group of people irrespective of tribe that still adhere to the older, traditional animistic beliefs) begged for a spot too since dancing occupies a large part of their worship, we couldn't turn them down. The Konkombas are widely known for a dance called the Kinachung. It is one of several dances they do, or have done in their history, but this is the one performed most frequently and by the younger generation (so its healthy tradition will continue), and so most favored by the tribe and those outsiders who are familiar with it. This dance is performed by both men and women, though men's is definitely the showier of the two. The Konkomba women have two dances all their own, dances that no man would even think of participating in. They are called Nbanbae and Yechenoi. The latter is set up in a circle with four seated women hitting empty earthenware water jugs over the opening with empty calabash bowls. 

 Traditionally, women didn't touch drums (though no one really cares anymore) and so this was their replacement. The women dance with one arm in the air and stomping their feet in a quick, rhythmic pattern with (if available) rattling shells tied around their ankles for extra percussiveness. Nbanbae is essentially the same, except that in place of the water jug drums, the women use only their hands and voices.

The runaway hit of the show, however, was the Basare Fire Dance. In fact, the crowd kept mistakenly running over the where the fire was set long before they had were to dance, just to ensure they had a good viewing spot, ignoring the other goings-on and further diminishing the effectiveness of the messages we were trying to convey. A major part of funerals in the tribes of northern Ghana is a traditional soothsaying ritual. Through a practiced soothsayer, the deceased can convey any messages to living. These messages, however, usually pertain to the manner and circumstances of death, thereby providing an explanation of a traditionally unexplainable event. The Fire Dance is a spiritual dance performed by the soothsayers to enable them access to the spirit world. How that works is beyond my ken at present. This dance has not been performed by the Basares of Damanko for many years and what was performed yesterday was merely an appetizer portion. I am told that it is rarely performed anymore, mostly due to the fact that to do the dance and the ritual properly, a lot of money needs to be spent. Animals need to be bought for slaughter, drink needs to be brewed and distributed, firewood has to be gathered or bought, and, of course, soothsayers have to make a living. Most of the money goes to animals, though, such as cows which are very costly. And, if it is done properly—for an important man, say—they will invite their relatives and their more expert soothsayers from their original homelands in Togo or the Northern Region. Given the rarity and the spiritual circumstances surrounding the dance, I am impressed, but not surprised, that they chose to air out this old tradition and show it off a little.

So the crowd gathered in a small circle around the fire with three drummers off to the side. There were four men dressed to the “tribal” nines, if you will, men I'm assuming were the soothsayers. Women were performing their own dance in a cluster around the drummer. Logs on the fire were all about the same size and shape and stacked parallel to each other making a small pile with small flames licking the top logs. Dancers cross these logs barefoot, even stomping on them a little, stepping up and over them like a small staircase. Though the flames are licking their toes, it is still a little reminiscent of the walking-over-hot-coals trick.

Everyone had a good time, and I hope they learned something about family planning.  Needless to say, I slept well that night.

Where'd the fire go?

Almost every day comes a minute or two where the increasingly smaller voice in my head asks: Why aren't you writing? When will you start again? Guilt, guilt, guilt. Truth is, I guess, that despite the fact that some projects have been moving along quite nicely; Christmas, New Year's, and my birthday have come and gone; and I'm living in freakin' Africa, I feel conflicted when I sit down to write. I guess that now that I have been here a year, the novelty has kind of worn off. My Holy-Shit-I'm-in-Africa moments are rare and almost non-existent now. The fun with the blog at the beginning was writing about these epiphanies I was having and being able to express them and share them at the same time. Now, I feel rather epiphany-less and that anything I write merely in an attempt to keep up with the blog and not with as a creative expression comes off as dull and stale. Consequently, the lined page remains blank or my computer cursor continues to blink.

I love the work. I love the fact that I've been able to identify community problems, choose which ones I want to address, create a solution or answer to them, find the tools to implement it, and then implement it. I love working for Peace Corps and being a part of the “Peace Corps Machine” if you will. I love several of the individuals I have met in the course of my time here, felt privileged to know them, help them, and witness their lives. I don't love Ghana. I am not summarily taken with or inspired by Ghana, West Africa, or its culture. I guess that that is a foundational reason why the fire has gone and I haven't tackled many of the things that I came here determined to tackle.

At the core of anthropology is tendency to romanticize culture. It is the profession's source of passion and its curse. The passion is what keeps new professionals finding it in university and fighting to study it even though they most likely won't make any money at it. It has what has prompted adventurous individuals to go to far flung places to live with peoples everyone else thought were strange and barbaric. It's what prompts anthropologists everywhere to say of those “strange and barbaric” people and practices, No they're not and I'm going to prove it to you. It's a curse because romanticizing culture can give one rose-colored glasses which can potentially blind you to many things. Romanticizing is not a far step from Exoticizing, something that can be very detrimental and very insulting to people. But, at least for me, it is the dose of romanticism that keeps me curious and motivated and exploratory. I came to the realization a while ago that I feel virtually no passion for Ghana, its culture, or its land. I feel no curiosity (beyond a few certain activities like cultural dancing) about how or why certain cultural quirks exist and have to desire to explore it in a way that I expected to upon touching down in Ghana. It has caused my focus to shift. I have set the anthropology on the back burner and have instead tried to focus my energies and motivation on the projects, the individuals, and Peace Corps rather than community integration, cultural study and professional anthropological methods. It seems I am not really alone in this feeling. Many other volunteers have expressed a very ho-hum attitude towards this country, and a lot of West Africa.

That being said, I am very satisfied at the moment with the pace of my grassroots development work, i.e. my projects. The school library is a long term, ongoing project and I am pleasantly surprised and excited about the way it is snowballing. All our money is in for the renovation stage, there is enormous enthusiasm at home for contributing books, and Damanko is equally as excited to receive it. They have gone even above and beyond in their contributions putting to shame everyone's complaints about their own communities that “just want handouts without contributing anything.”

I was also able to find good match in an organization for our community's household latrine needs. We are in the process of securing materials to build 100 latrines in Damanko and surrounding villages for households who really want one, but can't afford them because the cost of cement has increased more than gasoline. I am really testing the limits of Kwesi's public relations and community organizing abilities with this project and the family planning event we will be kicking off this Friday (I will save a description of that til after we've finished). He will rise and go beyond, I'm sure. I am beginning to think he is indefatigable.

So, life and work saunters on. I am doing enough that my ego is convinced I am appropriately busy, but the pile of finished novels grows exponentially higher.

Okay, so perhaps this is enough to get me started again. Baby steps, right? My computer is also operational again, so that helps immensely. Here's hoping a second chance will be successful!

Been Doin' Stuff

The last couple of weeks have been pretty fruitful.  About a week after I got back to Damanko after returning from America, we had a community meeting about the direction of the library project.  I told the various teachers, headmasters, and PTA people about the library program we had an option of participating in.  Everyone was very excited about the prospect of getting some help furnishing the library.  I told them the biggest obstacle was getting the books from Accra to Damanko.  They took that problem and immediately went to work figuring out how to solve it.  Somehow, they got all the tribal leaders in the town to pledge some money for the transport.  If they can actually collect the money for it, it will be an amazing step of good faith by a community in a country that expects the white world to provide all the funds for everything.  I am very proud of them.  I don't want to say more about the library project at the moment in case I might jinx it.  I'll save it for when it actually happens. 

I also started a Girls' Club to talk about issues teeage girls face around here.  Teenage pregnancy is one of the biggest problems in many communities in this country, so here is my small little stab at it.  The purpose of the club is to be a kind of youth group to talk about those life-things that seem quite abstract here since nobody really talks about them.  Subjects like: goal planning, decision making, self-esteem, relationships, boys, sex, being assertive, gender roles and equality issues, how to spot inequality and fight it, etc.  The hardest part I've found already is how to talk to them about these issues so they understand what I'm saying.  I'm so used to talking to educated people who are familiar with these issues, how do I approach these complex and complicated issues so that young girls with a basic but usable grasp of English can understand me?  I have so much knowledge to give them, how do I keep it from going over their heads? 

So anyway, that's a short update about the most important things I'm doing currently.  One of these days I'll a detailed write up of them.

Introducing the Damanko School Library Project

Damanko School Library Project donations link

Damanko School Library Project Facebook page

One of the biggest obstacles to a well-rounded education in Africa is the lack of access to books. Any kind of books—books full of facts about interesting subjects or just books that are enjoyable to read. Students in school learn to read, but learning anything well takes practice, but there are no books to help them improve their reading. Aside from some well-used minimal textbooks, they have nothing to show them the magic of books and world remains a little bit smaller. Their reading levels remain sub-par and moving through school remains difficult.

This project I am starting will put books in an already-established library space within one of the schools in Damanko.  The room is in this junior high school at the end of the building.  With the money that is donated, I and interested community members will refurbished the unused, slightly deteriorated library room—replace the window shutters for security, build furniture such as extra shelves and chairs, and paint the room to make it a productive and inspiring learning space. The bulk of the money, however, will go to buying books at a heavily discounted rate from the Ghana Book Trust in Accra and transporting them back to Damanko. The school community will provide all the labor, the management, and not to mention the actual building.  Or, instead, we will receive the bulk of the books from state-side book drives assisted by the African Library Project.  I'm waiting to see which one (or bits of both) will work out.

The library room has been acting as a store room for several years, so refurbishment is definitely needed, and, really looked forward to.

We hope to put about 300-500 books in the library.  My plan is to have half of those books be everything from Dr Seuss to Harry Potter; in other words, easy children's books to young adult/teen books. The other half will be interesting encyclopedic textbooks that are very topical and contain extra information about core subjects which currently have a dearth of resources—basic science, geography, geology, natural science, world cultures, and technology.

This small library will also allow the headmaster of the junior high school and I to start and maintain a Reading Club. Many students come into the the first year of junior high school with barely a first grade reading level. Teachers are forced to waste time starting at the ABCs. Having this library resource will give the teachers more teaching materials and will also encourage the students to improve their reading. It is hard to convince students to read and to read well when there is nothing entertaining to read and this skill becomes a utilitarian skill only.

Students like my friend Precious love to read but have nothing to read. Precious is a very bright student with big plans for her future. She is one of the few students who is a very accomplished reader, but her thirst for entertaining and enlightening things to read goes mostly unquenched. She has been working her way through my small personal Peace Corps stash of books. Right now she is tackling all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia books.

Other students like my friend Sudi, a teenager in junior high school, have great potential, but his reading suffers because of inconsistant teaching and no materials to encourage him or help him improve his reading.

Ebenezer is also in junior high and loves stories. He loves to perform and tell stories, and a lot of stories come from other storytellers. He reads moderately well, and tells me he would love more books so he can study them and tell more stories.

There are around 3,000 school children in Damanko, so 250-300 books may seem small and inadequate to you, but the community needs only a small repository that they can manage. And 250 books is more books than any of these students have seen cumulatively in their lives.

Please help these students discover the world in books! The link below will take you to a secure Peace Corps website where you can make your donations. Thank you in advance!

Damanko School Library Project donations link

HIV, gender, and football....and betrayal

Where do I even begin?  What an eventful two weeks.  In fact, there was more “event” and, well, drama than I care for.  It’s funny how there’s months of nothing then all of a sudden BAM! The shit just hits the fan. 

Kwesi and I (well, especially Kwesi) had been looking forward to putting on these football tournaments for weeks.  We gathered soccer teams from smaller villages all around to host a tournament and give education about HIV and gender equality.  Peace Corps staff is busy with training a new group of volunteers and because training was to go an extra two weeks this year they decided to inject a bit of field training into the trainees’ schedules.  They asked us to plan PEPFAR (HIV/AIDS) events for a set of dates and they would send us trainees as minions to help with the projects.  The timing worked out so well that Peace Corps asked us to do two tournaments in two weeks, which we were able to do.  It was very exciting.  We were planning a big event and I was going to be able to be involved in the training aspect of Peace Corps.  I was looking forward to it.  Until our little hiccup.  Our grant was approved and I collected the money and brought it back to my house.  Kwesi and I spent a couple of days buying things mostly for the first tournament—balls, sodas, teaching materials, etc—until that Sunday when I opened my wooden chest in my house and found 500 cedis (400 something dollars) missing.  In the middle of planning for the arrival of 7 new people, the educational planning, and getting all the tournament ducks in a row, I now had to deal with this huge violated feeling.  Someone I trusted had come in and taken the money.  That was the only explanation.  An entire bundle of 5 cedis was missing. 

After a few days it became obvious who the culprit was.  A boy I had trusted and worked with closely for over a year, a boy who through a track record of good behavior had earned my trust enough to be left in my house alone for a few minutes, a boy I had invested many hours into trying to show him he had a future bigger than the village by showing and teaching him things he wouldn't get in the village.  Apparently all that meant nothing.  These are not decisions I make lightly, but nevertheless, it came back to bite me in the ass.  I made the mistake of thinking he was more mature than he actually was.  He began spending the money so it was easy, by then, to involve the chief and Joseph, when confronted, confessed to the act.  The things he bought were able to be returned and we recovered about two-thirds of the money and were able to avoid canceling the second tournament.  The feeling of violation and betrayal is quite overwhelming.  

Once we were able to set—mentally—this event aside, the tournaments went on without a hitch.  I am not really sure how impactful we were with the education, but I know everyone had a good time.  Each tournament was to span 3 days.  The first day was devoted to focused education for the players.  We had 8 teams of 11 twenty-something young men all in a room together.  Since there is a lot of HIV education here and a relatively low prevalence rate (for Africa) it’s common practice to inject other topics into PEPFAR events.  Since I had this specific demographic here, I decided to let them discuss gender topics relevant to their lives—roles, relationships, and sex.  I hope it was as illuminating for them as it was for me. 

It has been obvious to me for a while that I am witnessing a country in transition.  When many go outside the Western world, they are confronted and frustrated by a people rooted in traditions and old, oppressive ideas, especially with respect to gender.  Ghana is right in the middle of that old and new tug-of-war, and the catalyst, very vocally stated, is education.  When one attends school and finishes they enter into this elite rank of Educated which immediately marks you as having certain beliefs and certain behaviors.  To be uneducated means you have no idea how to operate in a modern Ghana.  Educated Ghanaian men have certain beliefs regarding the rigidity of men and women’s roles and expectations in life.  They want to fit in with the modern world.  The “uneducated” ones as you can imagine are less enlightened.  Yet they will still follow their educated brethren up to a point.

After talking about the expectations of men and women in this culture, we read some statements to act as a catalyst for discussion—whether they agreed or disagreed with them.  The one that was most interesting was whether it was easier to be a man than a woman.  One group said that their lives are so different there’s no comparison.  Life is difficult for everyone.  For others it was a little difficult to draw an honest answer.  Most of them see that Ghana is changing; it’s impressing them with the awareness that they are at the forefront of that change and to do that role justice that’s hard.  And that if they choose to keep the same roles they have always kept—men the breadwinners, women the house—then they need to do those jobs with the utmost integrity and respect, and allow people the choice to live outside those roles.

But you can only keep their attentions so long when there’s football to be had.  Everyone played well and magnanimously, except for one team whom I nearly disqualified for threatening the referees.  I had left 99% of the football up to Kwesi to completely organize and run, so I only looked on with a perplexed look when he started officiating one of the matches.  If I had known sooner why he was doing that, I would have disqualified the team, but instead, I laid the smackdown on them before their second match (shaking and squeaking with anger) and they shaped up.

The second tournament went a lot smoother than the first one, yet the first one seemed to have more glory.  The championship game was a real nail-biter too.  Several of the matches (including the final match) went into penalty kicks which really turns into utter chaos.  Even though Kwesi was almost entirely responsible for organizing the football matches, it was incredibly satisfying to see so many turn out for something you had a hand in.  That and the vanity in me is just happy to know I’m capable of organizing such a massive event.  The trainees I had really stepped up too.  During the games we did some impromptu, small group education using pictures about proper sanitation and malaria.  They really jumped in there and were a big help.  I was really impressed with their lack of timidity.  Maybe that’s because some of them are just crazy.

In a funk

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately.  Maybe it’s the I’ve-been-here-a-year-already blues, but this “funk” has been pretty hard to shake.  I’ve been A LOT more easily irritated.  Things that I used to be able to roll off my shoulder, now, after a year of build up, make me have a minor stroke.  Things that were soothing balms before are now losing their effectiveness.  I’ve been keeping to the house a lot more lately.  It’s just a lot easier on my nerves.  Just aimlessly walking the paths of the village doesn’t hold the same appeal it once did.  Walking to the river isn’t as interesting.  I’m just tired of people yelling at me every time I go out.  I don’t understand how people can’t see that after a year of being hollered at, and by the same (in my opinion) disrespectful word, it really gets old.  People speaking in a language they know I don’t understand, just so they can laugh at my incomprehension gets old too.  The sense of newness and adventure that just being in and wandering around the village just doesn’t outweigh the irritations anymore.  I really only want to go out if I have some work to do, and even that feels like it occurs less than it should.  These irritations are only the symptoms of a greater disease—the one of self-frustration.  It’s been a year now, and when I think about where I thought I was going to be at this point in my service, and where I actually am, the funk follows.  Graduate school really honed my brain muscle and it was at the peak of its best intellectual shape when I stepped off the plane in Accra.  I could see a clear path of goals, because the path I was embarking on followed quite closely to the intense previous two years.  I had dreams about accomplishing certain things that I knew were a bit of a pipe dream, but there were also things that I didn’t think, given the previous two years, I would fail at.  Language for instance.  I joined Peace Corps to learn another language.  Even at the beginning of training I was determined not be one of those volunteers that didn’t learn the local language.  But, a year in, I’ve given up any hope of even moderate fluency.  As much as I want I just can’t seem to learn it beyond the simplest conversations.  A year in, much of it still sounds like gibberish, I can’t even get the gist of a conversation by two competent speakers.  People can totally talk about me without me knowing it.  I even got a language tutor, and Gideon is great, but it doesn’t seem to be helping beyond the most miniscule of improvements.  

I felt at the beginning of this, I had an advantage being shoved into a great practical professional opportunity in prime intellectually academic shape.  This was my chance to avoid the career crisis trap that most anthropologists and academics face when they decide their degrees were useless.  I was determined not to get to that place, and what better way to do that than to do exactly what anthropologists have always done?  It was my chance to do what my professional forefathers had done, what my own “colleagues” were currently doing.  I was going to develop professionally, do cultural research, find a subject, do all the methods, find something publishable, get some qualitative experience under my belt, so I could walk into a future interview and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that, and this is how it worked.”  I don’t even have a reason why this hasn’t happened.  No reason at all.

Some frustrations are more immediate.  I’ve had a dozen ideas in the last year, that for one reason or another, just haven’t gotten to the Execute stage.  Many of these are probably due to my lack of problem solving abilities.  Motivation has been an issue as well—for me and for others.

I’ve been here a year and what do I have to show for it really?  A few projects have been successful, but I can only ride those so long.  I have a few good acquaintances, but not enough.  I can’t speak the language, no great epiphanies, and haven’t contributed to Peace Corps in any great valuable way.  I have half a dozen things I’ve wanted to start, but can’t seem to start them, and just seem to be doing too much “hanging out” and wasting time, a fat lot of waiting really.

There are some good things on the horizon, but I feel a bit lost.  I guess, even after a year, I haven’t found my niche in this job.  I was certain graduate school was going my allow me to hit the ground running, but it hasn’t turned out that way.  I am supposed to be doing health work in Damanko, but I’ve always thought that job description in Peace Corps was a bunch of rot.  I’m a community development worker—if the community needs health work, then I’ll do that, but they need other things.  In fact, I’ve found that Damanko doesn’t really need my “health work.”  All the technical training I had, the knowledge Peace Corps gave to me based on Ghana’s health goals and national projects, I’ve found is really not needed.  All that knowledge is here.  The people know it, the proper social workers know it, the apparatus is in place for appropriate interventions if only they’d follow through.  None of my ideas are new, they know it all.  Motivating them to do it is the key, and that’s honestly something I can’t do.  They know malaria comes from mosquitoes, HIV from unprotected sex, shitting in the bush spreads disease, etc.  It’s the behavior change that needs to happen.  They know they need to sleep under nets, wear condoms, and build a latrine to shit in, but they don’t for various reasons, but one of those reasons is not ignorance.  Peace Corps is all about creating behavior change, but through education.  How are you supposed to create behavior change using education when they know these things already?

So I’ve decided to change tracks—focus on gender and environment issues (though not necessarily together but not opposed to it either).  The conversations that aren’t being had here are about the environment—depletion of forests for firewood, over hunting and over fishing, degradation of farm land, etc.  Problem is, since Peace Corps’ cross-sector training is scarce, I don’t have the training to handle these problems, but maybe I can at least get them started.

Actively molding young minds: Inspiring world change through Camp GGLOW

Last week, we Nkwanta Peace Corps volunteers participated in one of the most rewarding events of Peace Corps—Camp GGLOW. Each of us chose five junior high school students from our villages and met in Nkwanta for a 4-day workshop/camp event. It was an incredible week.


For most kids in this area, finishing school is a doable, if difficult task. For some it is nearly impossible, and for most it’s incredibly more difficult than it should be. Education is not free. The Ghana Education Service may say it is, but fees trip up families at every turn. There are uniform fees, test fees, extra class fees, supply fees, even end-of-term exam fees. Many attitudes toward education are reminiscent of America fifty years ago—children’s labor is needed for the farm; there are no opportunities so education is irrelevant; or just basic devaluing of education. Yet the biggest obstacle remains to be the money. Even if they can afford the fees, it is a struggle from term to term, and sacrifices are made by everyone as financial support may not come only from the parents. Money concerns keep the parents from enrolling their children, but the students’ attitude obstacles are many more, especially when they hit the junior high age. Many don’t see school as beneficial to them or just want to spend their time helping their households generate income. Or they just plain aren’t responsible kids and neglect their school work. Many don’t make goals for their lives, or at least have no idea how to achieve them. Girls are coerced into sex too early and get pregnant—all too often by their own teachers. Girls’ education is passed over in favor of their brothers’ education because they can only afford to send one. The pitfalls are many, but so are the inspirations. Camp GGLOW is an opportunity to take 5 serious and high-performing students and show them that succeeding is possible and to not give up. I don’t know whether the five students I took were at risk for not moving on to senior high school, but I hope now they realize that any of the sacrifices they make will be worth it. I also found 5 new friends.

I thought it would be best if I had the teachers choose which students they thought deserved to go to such an extracurricular event. In many cases they chose high performing students who were already in leadership positions chosen by their fellow students. I told the two bigger junior high schools to recommend a boy and a girl and I told the smaller one to choose one girl.

Mark is one of those tall giants who doesn’t live up to his size. He is a reserved and quiet boy of about 16 and unfailingly polite. He doesn’t offer long explanations easily when directly asked, but participates well in class discussions. His family lives in Pibilla, a super tiny village about 7 miles from Damanko. There is a primary school there, but if kids want to continue with school, they must traverse those seven miles by foot or by bike to school everyday. Mark is lucky that he is able to stay with his brother in Damanko for many of the school days.

Enam is the daughter of the head nurse in Damanko. In fact, she says that she wants to become a nurse when she is finished with school—a popular profession with many kids. She enjoys sports too. She is on her school’s girls’ football team, and while at camp, took any opportunity to play volleyball or frisbee or even Capture the Flag.

Ama is still a bit of a mystery. She is very quiet and tends to blend into a crowd very well—so well that I had to search many faces closely before I could find her. She is a very serious student; her teachers tell me she never misses school, a quite rare ability.

Ebenezer is my performer of the group. He is a powerfully-built kid with broad shoulders, a short stature, a sharp mind and affable personality with a knack for telling stories. His lack of shyness makes him a defacto leader of any group, something he handles easily.

Rafia was my pleasant surprise. My only student from the English-Arabic Muslim school, she was my dark horse. When I first met her, I could barely hear her speak and she seemed bewildered easily. Over the weeks before camp she visited me often, but still did not speak much or loudly. Often in school, unless the girl is exceptionally bold, we have to encourage them specifically to speak, because the boys like to take over and the girls tend to let them. I watched Rafia a lot, trying to find what piqued her interest. She was very attentive during all our sessions, but seemed on the edge of her seat during the ICT lessons and during PCV Raj’s impromptu one during free time, she was there in small group surrounding his screen. She even knew many of the answers to the ICT questions, though I’m sure she had never handled a computer until camp. Rafia’s got a voice too. During Thursday night’s talent show where we let the kids showcase whatever they could do, Rafia got up and sang a song in Arabic all on her own. She did it again the next night when we did cultural dancing. She sings very very well. At camp I saw a whole new side, and she blew my mind more than a little when she announced she dreamt of becoming a pilot. I think I found my girl.

The camp is a weird mix between a semi-professional workshop and American campy-ness. We tried to keep it from being too much like a workshop by inserting activities like tie-dying t-shirts and playing Capture the Flag. We had sessions about “Life Skills” which is a major point of emphasis for Peace Corps—teaching kids how to make good decisions and stay out of trouble and to keep their eyes on their goals. We brought in a lot of professional people to talk about a variety of subjects—gender equality, health, HIV/AIDS, wildlife conservation, etc—not only to expose them to issues not talked about in school, but also to show them the variety of professions people have even in their own backyards.

We held the camp in the “medical village” which is basically a campus for the hospital in Nkwanta. It has a large space, a conference room, some dorm space for the kids to sleep in, and bungalows for us. Dr Tony, the director of the hospital, led a session on HIV/AIDS. HIV is surprisingly not a big issue in Ghana, with a prevalence rate of only 2%, and most kids get plenty of HIV education in school. Because we were able to supply computers and a projector for this event, plus a highly educated doctor, Dr Tony was able to show them clinical pictures of many of the opportunistic infections that affect AIDS patients which the kids have never seen before.

Selorm came from one of the NGOs in town to talk about gender equality, something the kids intuitively understand, but rarely see. Fuseini from nearby Kyabobo National Park was invited to talk about his work and the kids’ reaction was very interesting. The idea of conservation and protected animal species flies a good six feet over their heads. Cultural mentality is that animals are here for us to use or eat, because surely they would do the same to us, and setting up a system that protects the natural processes and lifestyles of animals seems odd and useless. All week they had been absorbing really well all of the things we were giving them, but this concept eluded them.

The highlight of our guest speakers was Grace, one of our Ghanaian Peace Corps staff. She may be responsible for only the training of new PCVs, but her passion is really working with youth, especially young girls. She has one of those truly rags-to-riches stories that makes everyone sit up and take notice. She runs all of the training for Peace Corps Ghana, has a master’s degree, and is highly respected by everyone, but like some of the students, she came from a rural village, was told not to go to school because educating girls was a waste of time and money, and struggled to make ends meet the whole time.

We had a theme for our camp—Leadership Around the World. As Peace Corps volunteers we know that one of the best things we can do in these communities is just to show the world outside of their villages, outside of Ghana, so that’s what we tried to do. We showed Planet Earth during lunch breaks, did small presentations on countries or regions of the world. We had a globe and a world map and hammered some geography into them because maps are something they rarely see and most cannot do more than point out Ghana on the map. We made sure they knew the continents and even went as far as naming the planets.

The evenings were the most entertaining. The first night, since we had the benefit of our computers, a projector, and the vast PCV digital library (that is spread among everyone’s hard-drives) we showed a couple animated movies. The first night was Megamind, the second, How to Train Your Dragon. Both went over really well because they’re full of action and funny mannerisms. Ghana has its own movie industry and a lot of influx from Nigeria, but they rarely, if ever, see American animated films. On Thursday, we had a talent show which most kids used as a platform for singing or dancing or telling stories. Little Bernard shocked everyone with his animal noises, and another boy with his break-dancing.

It seemed like the event was a success; everyone bonded well, was active, and seemed to have a good time. I sincerely hope, though, that at least a couple of my kids feel better and more hopeful about their future, because really, they have their whole lives ahead of them and they can become and do anything. I hope to use these five kids and Camp GGLOW as a spring board for some other things. I’m sure they’ll want to start an ICT club, knowing now that I have a computer. I want to try and start a girls’ club with Ama, Rafia, and Enam and ask them to invite the friends they know are having trouble, so we can use the Camp GGLOW tools to help them. It’s all about paying it forward.