Ahem.

I've been trying to think of a good way to write a "development" post for days.  But, instead, I'm going to link you to one of my PCV trainee buddies who is far more articulate about it than I.  I will try to continue the discussion in a later post.

http://little-emmaline.blogspot.com/2010/08/slippery-slope-you-can-chew-on.html#comment-form

Channeling Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmerman---No Reservations for Bizarre Foods?

There is a certain, probably scientifically predictable, time that every Peace Corps group will experience.  There is a threshold which we all cross, somewhat unobtrusively, into the time when half of all our conversations revolve around food.  Usually they take the form of our current cravings—ranch dressing, Dairy Queen blizzards, red wine, pretzels, sushi, BLTs, guacamole, tortilla chips, CHEESE—but they all inevitably end up there.  “God, what I wouldn’t give for a (insert random grocery store item here) with some (add appropriate condiment),” or “I used to cook (blank) with (blank blank).  Man I would kill to have that now.” “Dude, I really want a burrito!”  Etc etc.  One of the institutionalized systems of culture shock, I can assure you.  As most of my friends will tell you, I quite enjoy my cross-cultural culinary excursions.  I kind of made it a hobby.  I looked forward to Friday nights the last couple years as they eventually became our ritual Ethnic Food Night.  After a week of sitting through classes, working on projects, reading articles that just went on for pages, my roommate and my friend down the hall and I would head out to one of our favorite non-American restaurants in the greater DC area.  Our favorites were the ones where we were the only white people in the place.  DC is a Mecca for every immigrant group in America, which essentially means you can find food from anywhere in the world—I mean literally.  I’m sure if you searched, you could find food from Greenland.  If someone immigrated to America from another country, there is probably a restaurant in DC that serves food from there.  The three of us would make the rounds between our Japanese, Vietnamese pho, Thai, Korean, Ethiopian, Caribbean, Lebanese, or Indian.  I’ve also had Moroccan, El Salvadorian, and Peruvian chicken.  Allison and I would sometimes head to Silver Spring for Ethiopian food and a film at the cultural center across the street.  I love DC for its variety.  You can find any kind of food from anywhere in the world—even Ghanaian.  There is a Ghanaian restaurant in DC.  I am no stranger to trying, adventuring, acclimating, and desiring food / meals / eating from cultures that exist in the world.  As feminist bell hooks has said, I quite enjoy “eating the Other.”  But it is the access to this constant variety that I became used to that is stressing me now, and the source, I think, of our expressions of the foods we miss.  It’s very difficult for many of us having a large menu of things we can cook, to having stewed vegetables and yams always.  I always thought I had a small menu to cook, because I can’t cook any of the ethnic dishes I named above, but at least one dish was vastly different from the other.  At its most basic level, 90% of Ghanaian food is oriented like this:  stewed vegetables in a sauce (usually tomato-based with lots of “peppe”) with meat + something starchy—yams, rice, noodles.  OR, one can make soup (palm nut or groundnut, for a couple of examples) with a chunk of meat and poured over something starchy that has been molded into a dough-like thing—fufu, riceballs, banku, kenkey, or T-Zet.  Fufu and banku function as unofficial (or maybe official—fact check, please) national dishes.  Fufu, as I described in a previous post, is made with cassava and plantains, or, if you’re in the North, yams and plantains pounded into a dough-like element.  Banku is essentially pounded or ground up fermented corn.  It may sound unpleasant but it tastes better than it sounds—much like boiled custard in Appalachian Virginia that actually tastes like non alcoholic eggnog.   Banku actually tastes a lot like sourdough bread.  Both fufu and banku are eaten in a bowl with the soup + meat (which for me is usually fish, but most often its beef and taken from just about any part of the cow) mixture poured over them.  As in most places in Africa, you eat with your hands, so you tear off a piece of fufu or banku, dip it in the soup and voila!—oh yeah, and, for some reason, you swallow it whole.  There is also jollof rice and fried chicken, waakye (rice and beans + pepper sauce + noodles + boiled egg), but these are really the bulk of the meal choices.  Other food exists—chop (or street food, “fast food”) other food made by women and sold from trays on their heads or from their stands such as boiled eggs, fried fish, coconuts, fried donuts, etc. 

So again, the hardest adjustment is the lack of variety.  There’s essentially no dairy and without cheese, that cuts out a significant amount of dishes we can create here that resembles American food.  Laughing Cow has the market, evidently.  I like the taste of all the Ghanaian dishes alright (though I’ve learned the hard way that my body outright rejects a certain kind of yam—at least that’s the working theory from that one night at Bunso….), it’s just hard to have stew or soup every night—even if the ingredients are different.  I guess that is why I look forward to my everyday lunch of cheese-less omelet sandwich.  It’s just something sooooo familiar.  Eggs, with onion, pepper, tomatoes, and even some lettuce, then put on some bread.  Plus it caters to my well honed daily habit since childhood of having a sandwich every single day for lunch.  Who would have thought an egg sandwich would be so comforting?

While we were at technical training, a couple of our trainers who are current volunteers and had been here at least a year, made a couple of American meals.  One night was spaghetti and garlic bread, which can be made from stuff that’s really easy to get here (well, minus the cheese).  It was probably the best spaghetti I ever had.  The last night we actually devised a way to make cheeseburgers.  The key is the meat grinder, well, and the cheese.  We were in a place near Tamale which is a big city in the Northern Region and very cosmopolitan, and a place where one can find an “obroni” store (a store where they sell things white people like—catch the reference?) and the Peace Corps sub office there has a meat grinder.  So we ground up the beef, bought some cheese and ketchup, and threw the meat on the grill.  We had vegetable and fruit salad (FRESH veggies, with the exception of corn, are eaten rarely here and must be washed really really well).  We even bought bagged and frozen French fries!   You would have thought the 15 of us would have died and gone to heaven.  Shawn even cooked brownies.

So I challenge you, Anthony or Andrew, to come here and pound some fufu, stew some groundnut soup, and swallow all of it.  Every last bit.  Because it is huge.

Note about my new feature

So you may have noticed the new list to the right of this blog (or you may not).  I have created a list of things that would just blow my mind to see in a package.  But, I must explain about the food items.  You see, after about two months in country, it's amazing how half of our conversations revolve around food.  Ghanaian food is good, but it's biggest problem (for me) is it provides a lack of variety.  I miss not just American food, but ethnic food like crazy.  So, I know many prepackaged or otherwise vacuum sealed foods exist in America (even tuna and chicken from Chicken of the Sea--yes, volunteers do get them shipped over), so if any of you feel compelled to send me some fake cheese (like Velveeta or something) or Taste of Thai Peanut Sauce, you will get many good thoughts sent your way from Ghana.  Just PLEASE! don't send things that will go bad.  The other non-food items on the list are excellent for working with the kids and giving out as small gifts or prizes.

Another note on pricing.  If you use the cheapest USPS flat-rate box, it will cost $56 for up to 20 lbs.  If, however, you don't want to send enough to fill up a box, my dad sent a bubble envelope with light things for $12.

So that was my shameless plug.  But also, none of these packages would complete without a note or pictures from you!  I miss your personal connections more than the stuff!

Kristi

Some small life details:

This morning I woke up to a crowing rooster and a neighbor blasting Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”  Old 90’s pop music is very popular here.

Cars run on duct tape and miracles.

This is where Good Will clothes come for their last rites.  All those clothes you throw in a donation pile?  Yeah, they end up here.  That’s how you get five-year-olds with shirts that say “Fuck the Clock” and Mitt Romney for President.  It provides endless entertainment.

I picked up a worm yesterday and chased my sisters out of the compound with it.  That was fun.

The head is your basic carry-all.  Yesterday, my host mother needed both her hands to hang the laundry, so she put the wet clothes she was hanging on her head to hold them.  

All the dogs look the same, but I don't really want to touch them.

I have inherited a cat with my house in Damanko.  I decided that her name will be Starbucks.

Pictures!

I have loaded a bunch of pics onto facebook, because the picture loader for this blog site is a lot slower than fb. So here is the link for any of you who are interested.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113472&id=39201087&l=850327280d

Sh*t

No, you didn’t read that wrong; I actually intend to write a whole blog post dedicated to shit.  And I don’t mean the derogatory reference to random things, but the actual fecal matter itself.  Let me explain.

As any Peace Corps-experienced person will tell you, once you enter this exclusive club, you get used really quickly to talking matter-of-factly about shit.  Yours, your friends’, your community’s, the cow’s, the goat’s…anybody’s really.  We all get sick at some point and the most common bodily reaction to anything here is the runs.  You must realize that sterile, clean, healthy, and private places in which to conduct this business is not really normal outside of the Western world.  Somehow, the West has come to a place where it is unthinkable to build any kind of public or private structure without some kind of bathroom.  In most of the developing world, including Ghana, this is not the case.  Running water is still a rare commodity in Ghana, but as I’ve learned, one doesn’t need running, chlorinated water such as we have in the US in order to be clean and sanitary and healthy.  Flush toilets are not really an accessible goal here, though they are in many places, but that does not mean that pit latrines (yes, for the less technical—big hole potties) cannot be bug-free, odor-free, and just as comfortable (the one at my house definitely will be).  NGOs for decades have built public latrines, but without the infrastructure to maintain and care for them, they quickly deteriorate into I’d-rather-shit-my-pants status (such as the one in Techiman that I walked into and immediately out of).  For the Health, Water and Sanitation field of the Ghanaian Government itself, the promotion of latrine use and the elimination of open defecation and hence, childhood diarrhea, is priority one.  Many communities in the Northern Regions are significantly poorer than the south and have not historically been able to afford latrines, especially when there is an endless supply of “bush” in which to shit and when you’ve always done it that way.

These last two weeks have been reserved for technical training.  This is where they have split us trainees into our “sectors.”  I am with the other 12 Health/WATSAN volunteers in a village called Gushie, learning about Peace Corps Ghana’s sanitation goals, how to educate about a variety of different health issues (shit-related and not shit-related), and different borehole (water pump) mechanisms.  We joke that as WATSAN volunteers we will be spending our two years talking about shit, but we really have a wide variety of issues to tackle and tasks to be involved in.  These last two weeks I have:  educated 5th graders about the causes of diarrhea (shit yet again), 8^th graders about HIV/AIDS, and farmers about malaria.  I have dug a latrine pit, tossed rocks into a soak away pit, weighed the cutest newborn babies, and learned how to teach treatment for malnourished children.  (I also sat on a live crocodile and got kicked out of a national park, but those are stories of minor importance.)  All of these things, I know I will do at some point in my service while living in Damanko.  But still, shit reigns supreme.  There’s just no getting away from it.  Especially when there are some cases when it is not taboo.  Many cultures throughout the world, especially those in which cattle play a major part of daily life, use shit for many purposes—though it’s normally cattle and not human.  Other UN projects have found a way to make biostoves that use human excrement for fuel which cuts down substantially on the collection of firewood and the work load of women.  While in Gushie, we witnessed such a task.

Every several years, any normal household needs to redo its compound's floor.  It is a large task--too big for one person or household to do alone--and so it is done through an event called the zuha.  The old floor is torn up, and lots of dirt is gathered.  Then, the women gather their female neighbors together for the floor pounding exercise.  Each woman has a stick with one flat side and they spread the dirt and water mixture (read: water and cow shit) over the floor, then a specially chosen singer leads the group in song and all the women beat the floor together in rhythm until it is smooth, compact, and hard.  There are dozens of songs, all proverbial prayers for the house, and all in sing and response style.  Drums, and singing and dancing are a way of life and entertainment here in Ghana, especially in the rural regions, and one can rarely find a collective activity where not one of things is present.  As the women pound away at the mud on the floor, it is a beautiful sight to see--all the women coming together as one, making the mundanest of tasks a celebration of community life and sisterhood.  When the floor is pounded, it undoubtedly splatters everywhere.  By the time we were done participating, we were covered in shit.  But the most beautifully-gotten, hard-earned shit possible.

Who needs rollercoasters when one can take a tro?

“I am at peace.  All is well in my world.”

This was a mantra that one of the volunteers I met often consoled herself with when overwhelmed by the rigors of traveling.  I don’t know how to describe the state one must be in to travel in Ghana, but one definitely has to put on a game face.

Three days ago, we left our homestays for a workshop at one of the local agricultural colleges.  This was the event where we were to meet our counterparts and then proceed with them to our site for a short visit and introduction to our next two years.  This is a very important, yet unheralded occasion as our counterparts are the people we will be working with for the next two years.  Let me give you a brief description of the process for achieving development in Peace Corps Ghana:

We have now passed the time when the West gives development to Africa—at least, they are trying desperately to leave that.  Instead, Peace Corps is doing its darndest to be a part of Ghana developing itself.  Our training staff is run by an all Ghanaian team (with assistance of current volunteers given the title “trainer”) and they are working within the system(s) Ghana has set up for development.  These sectors we are split into—Health/Water and Sanitation, Environment, Small Enterprise Development, and Education—are all sectors within which we work with the Ghanaian government.  Our trainers are all products of these divisions are trained phenomenally well and their capacity for creating sustainable development is well established.  (One could argue about who is really pulling the strings in development if all the staff is educated in a Western tradition and influenced by tropes of quality of life outside of Africa, but that’s my development research talking.  To be expounded upon later.)  In addition to a Ghanaian training staff, Peace Corps Ghana (as well as many other PC countries) has set up a system whereby they pair the volunteers with people in the community who are working for that community’s development.  These people can be people working for an NGO or people with other occupations that volunteer their time to making their community better.  These are our counterparts—our Ghanaian partners who are not paid by Peace Corps but who volunteer their own time to work with us.  Each volunteer has a supervisor and a counterpart.  The supervisor has the general roles you would expect—he acts as my boss more or less, keeps me on track and guides project design and implementation.  The counterpart is more an equal, a person assigned to work with you in the same way as the supervisor, but to act more as a cultural guide and a ready-made friend, helping to integrate and make sure you don’t do anything in ignorance that will get you immediately kicked out of the community.  Three days ago I met mine—Alfred, my supervisor and Kofi, my counterpart (and because this is the internet, names have been changed).  Neither one of them work for an NGO as many of my other volunteer colleagues’ counterparts, they have other day jobs.  Alfred is in his forties and works as a farmer and mechanic, and Kofi is probably not more than 25 and on the Ghanaian police force. 

So, yesterday morning, we prepared ourselves for the long day of traveling ahead of us.  Four of us volunteers and our counterparts climbed into a tro (small bus type ride) for the first leg to Hohoe.  This was uneventful, except for the minor chaos in the morning trying to figure out who was going in which tro, how many there were, making sure all the drivers had passengers, etc.  At Hohoe we changed tros, this time for one to Nkwanta in the northern Volta.  On the way to Nkwanta we dropped off a few people at their sites until it was just me and Tricia at Nkwanta with our counterparts, and that’s where the real fun began.

The road from Nkwanta to Damanko is not good.  It’s actually kind of comical how bad the road is.  There are great gaping holes with lakes in the middle of it in places.  Kofi was stressing out about this the whole trip.  Such a bad road makes the going very very slow and he was all day trying to get everybody moving so that we could get to Damanko before dark.  It was all mostly in vain.  As always, the tro was packed full, with little individual space and we were all bouncing along like an old Disney cartoon.  At Kpassa, we left Tricia and her counterpart and then had to get off ourselves and charter a taxi the rest of the way to Damanko.  Oi vey. 

One of my trainee colleagues once said, “I think Africa is where cars go to die” and I think that statement is rather true.  These roads are hard on vehicles, but the fact that some of them can still run in their condition is really a minor miracle.  I can’t describe the dilapidated state of cars who have long lost any interior they once had short of the seats.  Really, they are metal boxes with an engine.  Six people plus two children crammed into our little taxi and then the driver’s friends gave us a push as he tried to spark the car from the wires beneath the steering wheel.  Alfred was not in the car with us, he had run off to somewhere, and I asked Kofi, “Is Alfred coming in a later car?”  “No,” Kofi replied, “He will ride on top.”  Well, okay then.  And sure enough, as we drove up the road a piece, Alfred came out and climbed onto the top of the taxi.  You can bet Peace Corps will not be allowing me to do that.  If I can’t ride on a motorbike under threat of being sent home, you can bet I can’t ride on top of a taxi. 

We went down the road like this and about halfway to Damanko, the car quit.  The hood was smoking and so water was poured into the engine.  But try as they might, the guys couldn’t get it going.  We pushed it multiple times but it never sparked again.  In Kofi’s words: “That car is disqualified.”  After about 45 minutes, a couple of guys in a small Toyota truck came by and were able to tie the dead taxi to it and tow it along.  Everybody climbed into the back (except me and Kofi because Peace Corps also forbids me to ride in the back of a pickup truck and since the Country Director claims that he reads our blogs, I must prove that I can follow the rules) and continued on our journey. 

Everyone has stories of traveling in Ghana in various sorts of vehicles that encounter an equally various range of problems, and I think I got them all in the next two hours.  After about a mile, the Toyota quit after apparently hitting the end of its petrol tank.  After the guys managed to siphon the gas from the taxi into the truck we climbed in and took off again.  After another mile the driver stopped since now the front tire was flat.  After changing the tire, we tried to continue again and were good for another mile until the tow rope broke.  They retied it, but it proceeded to break 7 or 8 more times, due mostly to the condition of the road.  At one small village we dropped the car and picked up about five more people and a truck bed’s worth of more stuff.  Once we abandoned the taxi, we could make it the rest of the way to Damanko with no trouble.  A one hour trip turned into three and patience was wearing thin, mostly for Kofi and Alfred.  I couldn’t help but laugh, really, as all the typical car troubles seemed to happen in the span of ten miles.  I was anxious to be done with the journey, but not really stressed since I wasn’t by myself and I knew they were more upset not having things go right on my first trip to Damanko.  It was also becoming dark and Peace Corps also does not like us traveling after dark.  This was also not the most convenient way to travel.  They would have much preferred to just hop on a motorbike as those are more reliable and the choice mode of travel, so we had to suffer through this.  Though I’m not too sure I want to ride a motorbike in Africa…. 

Anyway, we finally got to the house and I have to say, I hit the Peace Corps jackpot.  But seeing as this entry is long enough, I will describe it another time.  But anyway, we did some cursory sweeping, as there was a layer of dirt over everything, including myself.  After a bath, I was presented with an egg sandwich and some hot cocoa, cementing Kofi’s status as the best counterpart ever.  There will be bragging to the others.

After a couple days here, I will leave to meet the others in my sector in Gushie—another whole day trip—for two weeks of technical training before going back to our homestay families in Anyinasin.