Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Number...whatever): Successful Development

So here's a question:  What does successful development look like?  During all of my literature research in graduate school, critiques of current development paradigms brushed a number of different themes such as:  a focus on boosting capitalist economic systems only widens the rich/poor gap, changing agricultural techniques are not congruent with the environment, development aid is another form of colonialism, development programs often marginalize women, the flow of information from North to South is unequal, development isn't a linear experience (i.e. barbarism to modernism), most development is not sustainable, etc, etc...  So, what does one nation/society have to do to develop successfully?  There are some national level success stories, but why isn't Ghana one of them?  It was supposed to be--everyone thought so.  During the wave of Independence in the 50s and 60s  when most African nations gained independence from their colonial masters who were ravaged by WWII, Ghana was christened the "gem of Africa."  I'm not exactly sure why; maybe it's because Ghana is one of only a few countries with no history of civil war since independence, or because Kwame Nkrumah--Ghana's first president--was this Obama-like, messianic leader, or maybe it's gold revenue was supposed to make it prosperous?  Whatever the case, Ghana was supposed to be the big brother that showed the rest of Africa how to do it.  So why, after 50 straight years of Peace Corps (Ghana being the first PC country thanks to good ol' Kwame) are we still here?  In a recent conversation with my district's Coordinating Director, he said there is a goal to make Ghana middle-income and out of "development country" status by 2020.  An ambitious goal by any standard.  These timelines are rarely met (think of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty by half by 2000--didn't even come close), but still, it's exciting to think about.  But why could some countries get there and not others?  Places like Japan, China, Bhutan, Singapore, and South Africa "developed" in the span of a single generation.  It seems that many countries providing the aid in the development of other countries--US, Britain, Germany, China, Japan, and the UN, countries from which the finances and expertise flow from and therefore have all or most of the power--have first tried to direct development by basing it on their own histories and models.  And since these countries have mostly developed via various industrial revolutions, they have tried to replicate it in the rest of the world.

I've been thinking on this linkage I've noticed between accelerated development and rights.  In Europe and America, during our Industrial Revolutions, we were "developing" and we were worshiping at the alter of "progress" without being real sure where we were going.  And we committed a lot of human rights violations on the way.  The large factories and businesses responsible for production worked people for long hours and little pay; they privatized everything making it harder for some to afford necessary services like healthcare; they kidnapped thousands of people, sold them, and kept them in forced labor so we could have cotton, sugar, and tobacco.  And we made other sacrifices:  we scarred the Earth in irreparable ways with our pollutants and digging for riches, gave up living in communities for more private and affluent suburbs, and squeezed out productive family farms for unethical industrialized meat farms and chemicalized plants, and the list goes on.

More recently developed countries--Japan, China, Singapore--have a slightly varying version.  The difference is the rights they take away and the fact that they have a nationalized game-plan.  Their development is all top down, not in the establishment of large-scale private enterprise.  It has an amazingly organized structure and requires total obedience.  Culturally, these societies are already fit for these hierarchical development plans; they don't have the same problem with authority that Western nations do.  In one generation Japan  went from being gutted by the world's first atom bomb to the technological powerhouse it is today.  Granted it was already on it's way there before WWII, but still, that's quite a turnaround.  China had its Cultural Revolution which brought Communism, and Singapore had it's own Cultural Minister.  These countries' governments came up with a plan and demanded complete obedience to them.  Right to free speech or dissent was the first thing to go, next the freedom from Big Government and too many Thou Shalt Not rules, then the right to choose many important things in your life: the number of your children, the career or your choosing, your residence, etc.  Then come the other sacrifices:  traditional customs are devalued and eliminated, rituals are lost, languages go extinct, and lifestyles change.  Japan lost the noble samurai, teahouses and geishas; China lost a lot of music and art.  Grandparents grew up in villages, grandchildren in cities.  It's like countries have growing pains (South African apartheid example?).  The pattern seems to be that in order for desired development to occur, a whole generation has to be sacrificed--have their rights taken away and work doubly hard so their children see the benefit, not them--and be on board with it before their children start squawking about growing up in repressive regimes.  Is that what's happening in Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria right now?  Discuss.

Next on this vein:  Bhutan and the idea of Gross National Happiness as a legitimate measure of development. I also have one about gender (finally).

The biggest water fowl ever

“Kristi, you need to come to the riverside right now.  Hurry.”

“What? Why?”

“There’s something I want you to see.  There’s a…a…a fowl in the water.  Come and see.  Hurry!”

“Okay okay, I’m coming.”

This was the early morning call I got from Kwesi soon after a phone conversation I had with the Peace Corps doctor about my mind numbingly painful sore throat, which turned out to be strep.  Luckily, my energy wasn’t suffering any ill affects, so I made my way to the river, because Kwesi never calls me with a cryptic message like that telling me to be somewhere without coming to get me himself.  So I shuffle my still sleepy self through a deserted Damanko on a Sunday morning toward the river.  It seems half of Damanko was lined up along the riverside, at the water-fetching area that was functionally created by the last rainy season’s flooding.  Even during the busiest water fetching times there’s not even half that many people standing at the riverbank. 

The spectacle was a hippopotamus.  (“Kwesi, you know fowl means ‘bird’ right?”)  Silly me and my American-ness and my embedded NPS identity had me wondering if they were gazing at a live one, perhaps foraging in the river.  I had memories surfacing of visitors encroaching unwisely into the personal spaces of bears.  I envisioned a similar scenario here since Ghanaians don’t know how to keep a safe distance from ANYthing.  Then I remembered where I am and, of course, the magnificent animal was already dead.  Hippos live in many large rivers and lakes in Ghana, especially in the national parks, and there is even a sanctuary in the Upper West.  But I don’t think anyone in Damanko, even the elders, remember ever having witnessed one, though there are tales and traditional beliefs surrounding them.  The places my Ghana guidebook says hippos can be found are a long way from here, though the River Oti runs right into Lake Volta.

So Kwesi insisted I remove my sandals, and I rolled up my pants and waded into the shallow water.  I let Kwesi elbow his way through the crowd surrounding it and I got my first glimpse of a dead hippopotamus.  She was a magnificent beast, pale gray and pink in color, her elegant eye rolled into the back of her head, her lips surrounding her massive snout peeled back slightly to allow small glimpses of her massive gray and dirty tusks.  Her head was as big as my torso, her body massive, her feet as small as my hands.  Mob mentality was rapidly setting in so there is not much opportunity for contemplation and reverence, but I was able to snap a few pictures (and everyone is extremely happy to let the White Lady do so) and I got out of there quick.  After a lot of gawking, the men assuming responsibility of it towed her back out into deeper water with ropes and anchored her there and covered her with bush branches.  Everyone either dispersed or hung around.

Later the chief will come and see it, and the appropriate traditional belief leader will perform a ritual, then the hunters will do what they will.  Hippos mean lots of money, because they mean lots of meat, and how many people get to say they’ve eaten hippo meat?  Hippos are very dangerous animals—they kill more humans in Africa than any other mammal.  If there is one or two hanging around in the River Oti, how many fisherman or women and children fetching water would be in danger?  They also graze on rice and okro crops.  Konkomba lore says these animals have a bad spirit, that when gazed upon by pregnant women, a child will be born with a deformity of the mouth (“looking like” a hippo—I’m guessing maybe a cleft palette?).  The ritual performed by the elder takes away that bad spirit and makes it safe.  This is yet another brush with African juju that I have yet to untangle—of course anthropologists dedicate whole careers trying to understand such beliefs.

After this I went back to the house, because I needed water for my throat and I needed to rest and cool down lest my fever return.  I went back in the early afternoon, and the crowd of people had doubled.  The proper rites had all been performed and the small group of men were trying to figure out how to move it.  This posed a problem.  She was easy to maneuver in the water like a boat, but even a hundred men pulling on a rope couldn’t budge the great beast.

Chaos was mounting.  More people were coming wanting to get a glimpse, of this thing they had only heard of or seen in pictures.  In Ghana, when an order has not been established by tradition, or something has to be done or grabbed on the fly, its every man, woman, and child for themselves.  This means you have to fight for what you want when you are in a crowd, because chances are, there’s not enough for everyone—special foods, seats on a certain bus, space in the obroni’s pictures, a space from which to see something (like a football game or a hippo).  Personal space looses all meaning.  Crowds begin encroaching to close to breathe.  When this happens, the cultural answer is a stick.  Everyone is afraid of a stick—they’ve all had one used on them throughout every part of their lives.  Even 2 year old Blossom has started practicing his stick swing for self defense.  So when the crowd gets too close—steps over the foul line of the soccer pitch, say—some appointed adult takes a thin, flexible stick and starts whacking a shins and feet.  This is usually enough to send people flying.  The crowd moves surprisingly quick.  Pretty soon I could see the bush branches over the crowd’s heads disappearing as it desperately tried to keep the crowd back.  Because the water covered shins and ankles the branches grabbed the silty mud and was slung at the crowd repeatedly.  Having already seen the hippo that morning, I was perfectly happy to observe from the bank.

Eventually, defeated by simple ways of moving her, a tractor arrived.  They somehow hooked the great hippo to a chain and drug her onto the riverbank a ways.  The crowd, and the branches, moved along with her.  Kwesi was determined how to get me through the crowd again to take more pictures.  Before I could argue, he barged through in typical Ghanaian fashion.  Then we were again at the edge of the crowd where about six men with branches were trying in vain to keep the crowd back.  Several people around me tried to get me to pose with it, or get closer, but I didn’t want to get smacked.  “They won’t hit you” they said, which really I knew to be true (at least intentionally), but how do I explain to them the guilt of taking advantage, big or small, of any white privilege the give me?  It may seem insignificant, but anyone else who approached it would get hit, but I wouldn’t, intentionally, because I am white.  These small instances occur sometimes and hard to explain the complicated web of feeling around equal treatment, hospitality and friendliness, and skin color.  So I let Kwesi lead me around to the head, quickly took a few pictures and got out of there.

All in all, as I watched the whole episode today, it got me thinking about a theme that was often present in grad school—that of culture and environment—and our expectations of its intersections.  After a history of white Europeans dismissing the environmental knowledge (e.g. balance, natural medicines, cultivation, etc) and the destruction of much of that knowledge, in many ways, we have made a complete 180 in our perceptions.  Instead of demonizing (patronizing?) them, we now romanticize them.  Anthropologists are probably guiltier of this than most.  Romanticism is the genesis of our profession.  Thing about Native Americans, how persecuted they were (in many ways still are), but now how romanticized they are in the subject of nature and environment.  Don’t we now expect these cultures to have great spiritual knowledge and wisdom about the Earth that somehow goes beyond science?  How much of a trope is it to have a sweeping camera shot of a vast landscape in the Western U.S. with a voice over of an old Native American man reciting some ancient poem or proverb with drums and singing in the background?  Part of the Green Movement chases this romantic ideal of harmony with nature and tries to recapture this idea that native cultures all over the world have a deeper understanding of the Earth that industrial nations lack/have abandoned/lost.  As Kwesi and I were leaving, some women were discussing the breakdown of tradition—how in “the olden days” women and children were not allowed to set eyes on it until the bad spirit was exorcised.  But now everyone runs to see it regardless.  White missionaries overwhelmingly succeeded in the “dominion over the Earth” lesson, so now everyone’s response to our questions of bush hunting is “God put them here for us” without looking much further.  How much traditional knowledge did that erase?  Christianity, Islam, and juju get all mixed up around here.  Why should I expect them to revere this awesome creature with ceremonies and celebrations and prayers of thanksgiving, or possibly worship that didn’t enlighten my cultural experience?  I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sad that this event was not met with some great unique cultural grandeur, just jumbled chaos and curiosity, but then mad at myself too for expecting them to conform to my idea of how they should behave and regard nature based on my Western ideas of how non-Western people should act.  Isn’t that just as prejudiced?  I’m not saying that what they did was without reason or mistake—there’s definitely some education that could be done here—but it is obvious to me that this experience of contact with a big part of Mother Nature showed some fault lines in the structure of current society.  This interaction between Mother Nature and no longer completely isolated African village manifested in the hippo shows the haphazard dance of community/village/country in development.  Some new ideas get mixed in with old ones, and newer trends of thinking haven’t taken hold so loosely controlled chaos ensues.

Raid Insecticide Presents another episode of: Life in the Bush

3/12/11

So yesterday I was tidying up the house in preparation for a visitor.  This exercise includes the magnificent (but fortunately brief) task of scrubbing the latrine seat.  This unpleasant task done and based on the last few days' observation, I decided to complete the further unpleasant task of Operation: Cockroach Annihilation.  Since few alternative options, few tools (including lack of traps), and little know-how on my part exist here, the roach genocide has taken this form:  either a powder or spray insecticide is put inside the latrine (aka pit hole toilet) in the hopes that it might kill some on contact.  However, rather than suffer and die in the comfort of their favorite hidey-hole (my latrine) they opt for a mass exodus, where instead, they meet a slow death by broom--and possibly ants.  So, on the rarest occasions humanly possible, one can come through the compound door and observe me in a whack-a-mole competition (hand-held Ghanaian broom aloft) with God's most disgusting creatures shouting "Die roach die!"  They are then swept into the garden to be transported to an unknown location by the ever present Ant Army. 

However, between the insecticide introduction and the mad escapre runs of the cockroaches, some few minutes passes.  As I was occupying myself with another task, I heard a desperate flap of wings and saw the cat run out of the latrine room.  Surprise was my first reaction--Starbucks likes bugs (usually spiders and crickets and dragonflies) and lizards, but never before a cockroach.  Second thought was Damn!  Why didn't didn't you do this the other times cockroaches have appeared?  Maybe you're having some weird cat-pregnancy cravings?  Surprise then led to--Oh shit! That roach probably has insecticide on it!  But by that time, she'd already gobbled it up, cuz, you know, my thoughts are rather slow.  Now I have grown to really like this cat.  She's a lot like my Boo! in affection, temperment, and company, but a vastly more accomplished hunter (not hard to do), and now I was honestly afraid that what she just ate might kill her.  So sat for a moment oscillating between "do something" and "am I overreacting?"  So after a minute or two of this, I called my friend Tricia, a volunteer in the next town, a fellow Ghanaian cat owner and a nurse too.  The Conversation went a little like this:
--Hey, how's it going?
--Good, you?
--Pretty good. Hey, you ready for silly question?
--Sure, shoot.
--How do you induce vomiting in a cat?
--(And without hesitation) Salt.  Or salt water.  Just force it down her throat.
--Great.  Thanks.
--Sure.
Okay, well it went a little longer than that, but you get it.

So I mixed up some salt water and spent the next hour chasing the poor cat around the compound with various combinations of a cup, a spoon, an eye dropper, and a two-yard (a fabric--blanket-like, you know, for wrapping a struggling, panicky cat in) and trying to force-feed her salt water.  And after all that--copious amounts (well it felt like it) of salt water, and undeserved aggravation, I only succeeded in making her very thirsty.  The cat never vomitted and she didn't die.  So I am either the owner of Mutant Super Africa Cat or there was little to no insecticide on the cockroach.  AND dear Starbucks bears no ill will, so either she has a very forgiving nature or just no memory.

A Day in the Life of a Ghanaian Household

Funerals in Ghana are big celebratory affairs when done properly.  There's a procession, a wake, a burial service, a soothsaying ritual and a celebration afterwards--and the whole proess can number in the days rather than hours--and with lots of pito (fermented guinea corn, tasting vaguely like warm, sweet beer) flowing from numerous calabash bowls in between.  Normally, things are going on much of the day, but since everything comes in it's own time in Ghana, most of the day was spent waiting for this particular funeral's activities to start.  Today was the celebration and the soothsaying part (more about that later), which meant that mostly there was going to be lots of drumming and dancing--Kinachung dancing.  Since the funeral was being hosted by Kwesi's household and the dancing didn't get started until late in the afternoon, I spent most of the day hanging out and observing the activity in his house.  Hence you get: A Day in the Life.

Kwesi, his wife and two young boys live in what's called a compound house.  Think of it as a village apartment building.  Three rectangular buildings surround a large cement courtyard with a wall making the fourth side.  These 3 buildings are split equally into separate rooms with one door opening to the courtyard.  Each of these rooms acts as a sleeping room and quasi-, semi-private living room for each occupying family.  Kwesi's family sleeps all in one room as do the other small families in the compound.  A couple empty rooms act as storage spaces.  Cooking areas, washing areas, playing areas, bathing and latrine areas, are all shared in a desgnated place in the courtyard.  In fact, most life happens in the courtyard; most of life is spent outside.  They even set up the tv outside where everyone can sit around and watch it.  Now this compound is owned by Kwesi's father--who also owns/has built two or three other neighboring compounds to accomodate his ever-largening family.  And I mean VERY. LARGE. Family (especially since his grown children are bringing back spouses and children and so on).  Well, those that are still living in Damanko anyway.  Father Taka, like many other obedient Muslims, has four wives (a tradition Kwesi assures me will probably die with his father's generation--"The young ones, we don't make like that") and 22 children between them (it was fun making Kwesi count), among which Kwesi is the 3rd oldest and the first born of his own mother (who is wife #2).  Twenty-two siblings may seem a lot until you realize the extent of the extended family system.  Many of Father Taka's own brothers live nearby or in his other compounds with their own offspring.  These children are not considered cousins, but complete brothers or sisters.  Sometimes, it's hard to discern who's nuclear and who's not.  But that only matters for my own Western-oriented systematic pigeon-holing of everybody.

Anyway, about as far as I can guess, the people living in particular compound besides Kwesi and his family is his elder brother Joseph and his wife and baby, Kwesi's mother and Wife #1, Kwesi's father, another couple of girls/women/sisters I don't know, and another (unmarried?) brother  There ther are several rooms empty or used for storage, endless streams of children running in and out as well as goats, chickens (and their babies), pigeons, dogs, and Father Taka's tom turkey (I think I'll name him Herman).

So anyway, the Day in the Life started as I started walking towards the house.  Almost as soon as I got out of my house I nearly stumbled upon Mpwon, Kwesi's four-year-old son following Aku, one of the girls in the neighboring house.  Kwesi doesn't like his young son to "roam" far from the house and I knew that he was much further out of bounds than he should have been and I knew they'd be missing him.  Luckily, the little tyke adores me, so I had no problem convincing him to go with me.  Halfway there, he wanted to get on my back, so I obliged and he got a few precious minutes of undivided attention from his neighbors as they stared at little Mpwon on the obroni's back.  As we walked into the house, there was no alarm, just the requisite finger-shaking.  Though he'd been MIA most of the morning, no one was really alarmed because they knew he'd eventually come back and he's in no danger, because, well, it's a village--and a village of which Mpwon is related to half the residents.

So, anyway, after walking in and the greetings finished, I sat down next to Lingamwe, Kwesi's wife, who was in the middle of unraveling hair pieces.  I had just sat down to help her with it, when there was Kwesi's mom with a mug of pito in her hands, insisting that I take some.  Now, I like the stuff, but it gets old on the tongue after a short while, and it would taste much better cold.  So, anyway, I took some, and set to the hair pieces.  The compound looked like it did on any other day, save for the headless goat meat hanging from the rafters in the kitchen area--the morning's wash, including Mpwon's school uniform, hanging from the overhang beams; the roosting hens in the corner of the compound; random make-shift children's toys in the courtyard; the water barrel propped up on an old tire; drying bits of yam, cassava and whatnot drying on the roof; a small girl sweeping out a room; a group of boys sitting around a pot of groundnuts and cracking them; Mpwon playing his favorite motorcycle game where he says "bye-bye", then revs up and runs out of the compound and back again and says "Ayikoooo". 

After a short time, Blossom, Kwesi's two year old son, woke up from his nap and peeked out of the room door at me.  This, of course, prompted an immediately fun game of "peekaboo" of which Blossom never tires.  After a while of this, Lingamwe got up and fetched a bucket of water and set it down in the middle of the compound.  Before I knew it, both boys were naked and ready for their bath (not before Blossom peed on the side of the bucket, however).  I watched as she soaped them both up real good--teeth and all--with the omnipresent Ghanaian scrubby bathing cloth (takes the dirt and, if you scrub hard enough, the top layer of skin right off) and rinsed them off.  Whodda thunk one bucket of water could make two little boys clean?  Afterwards, Mpwon came out of the room with his everyday blue shorts and his favorite pink parka.  Yeah, that's what I said.  I think it was probably 100 degrees that day.  Doesn't faze him though.  After I snapped it up for him, he picked up an old bike tire and rolled it out of the compound (a favorite game for children around here--the rolling tire with the stick thing; it involves lots of running).

Since Blossom was all clean, he wanted to sit on my lap.  I can't resist, so we sat there with the other girls still unraveling hair and talking.  The open fires in the kitchen area were going as women were cooking the mid-day meal and pounding fufu.  I saw Kwesi's mother head out with an empty silver basin and plastic meaning she was headed out to fetch some water.  Lingamwe and another small girl were washing some pile of dishes.  One of brothers came in to collect some eggs from the chickens who made quite a retaliating racket.  All in all, it was a day of some lazy chores, just doing the things that keep a household running.  People (most of them women) work hard, yes, but it's punctuated with breaks of pito-drinking (especially on funeral days), sitting and shelling something, or what have you.  Most of the work takes place in the cool hours of the early morning, and, if they're not at farm, by the time the heat of the day comes around 11 am or so, people are more sluggish and doing less activity until it's time for the Water March at around 4 pm.  Then it cools down some and all the women migrate to the river to fetch water.

So anyway, a Day in the Life.  It wasn't a very active day this one, but maybe now you have a little better idea what one looks like.

Initiation of the Discovery Club

I've become frustrated at my other projects, having found out too late that the monies for this year have finished already.  So the latrine project and the computer lab project are on a hiatus right now until we can think of another strategy.  I've scaled back to doing things that require little to no reliance on outside resources and coordination of motivation and deadlines.  I've refocused myself, for the time being, to Peace Corps' basic ideological core--presence, exposure, and inspiration.  Rather than trying to "fix" all the problems--or at least finding solutions for them--I've just jumped in with the students and trying to find ways to show them things that they don't normally have access to, but I do.  So, hopefully, if I can get all the right tools, it will be successful.

I've just finished with the second meeting of my junior high school club, which I'm unofficially referring to as the Discovery Club.  It's got no real form yet, or real agenda.  I just wanted something really informal and fluid; a venue or somewhat organized time that I could use to expose them to some new things when I get them, a time to relax and get to know them, help them with whatever they need--school or otherwise, and when the mood is right, talk to them about bigger things--help them learn what they want to learn.  I want it to be a place and time of discovery--especially at this time in their lives when they're on the verge of adulthood.  Many of them, in fact, will be adults in the next few years, such is the rate of growing up around here.  I have art supplies they aren't familiar with.  I can show them Planet Earth, so they have some idea of the world outside of Damanko or Ghana.  I have seeds for plants they don't normally see.  I can introduce new sports games (like Dodgeball or Capure the Flag).  Maybe we can do some simple science experiments.  We can read books and magazines; do roleplays or some dramas or watch movies or do crafts.  We can make pen pal opportunities, learn about constellations, or just do riddles and puzzles.  Anything really, once I have the materials.  If you have an idea, don't hesitate to tell me or help me!  The people that fascinated me the most when I was a kid were the ones who could bring the world to me--exchange students, groups from foreign places, etc.  And that's the kind of volunteer I want to be.

From here I can also start my girls' club.  When I know a few of the well enough, it can be made of girls who want to be a part of it and show promise, but have a tougher time succeeding because of other obstacles.  We can talk and learn about other important "girl stuff"--role models, gender roles, how our bodies work, life skills like decision making and goal setting, watch sappy romantic movies, and so on.

Oddly enough, I'm beginning to find it easier to work with the school kids than the adults, and kids used to scare me.  Young children do still to some extent, but I'm learning to enjoy them in packs of only 2 or 3.

The Case of the Exploding Birthday Cake

My birthdays usually pass without much of a hullaballoo, and this one was really not much different.  It was pretty much just a regular day, so I decided to try an experiment.  I wanted to see if I could manage to bake a birthday cake, or at least something like it.  How about some birthday brownies?

In suit with every other part of the government I’m familiar with, the Peace Corps doesn’t skimp on published material for its volunteers.  Among the pile of reading material they gave us on the way to site, one was a book of recipes helpful when trying to learn how to cook familiar dishes with local ingredients.  It has everything from Ghanaian Red Red to bread pudding and chicken enchiladas.  I picked out an easy brownie recipe and thought I’d make some chocolate frosting as well.  Ovens are hard to come by in this country, and that makes it hard to bake anything (and I’m too lazy at the moment to build the “Peace Corps Dutch Oven”).  However, those that choose to go into business baking bread, build themselves an oven, so some exist in this town.

My friend Rebecca is one such baker.  She’s around 23 years old and already has her own thriving business.  After finishing junior high school, she went to Accra to live with an aunt because her mother could not afford, at the time, to send her to high school.  (Here, as in most developing countries, high school is not free; students must pay tuition, book fees, and because there is no high school in Damanko, boarding fees as well since they have to live there while they’re in school.)  Rather than be idle, she went to a vocational school that taught how bake bread (among other things), run a small business, and build an oven.  After finishing that, she saved for a year before coming back to Damanko and starting her own business.  She’s been baking for three years or so now, and since she’s the only one who bakes tea bread (most bakers make sugar bread as it seems to be the local favorite) she does very well.  She now makes enough money to send herself to high school, and, she hopes, after that, nursing school.  Since Damanko has no high school, all students wanting to go (and that’s a lot) get farmed out to high schools in other villages and often only come home for breaks.  It’s almost like college, really.  For much of the year Rebecca is away, so who bakes?  As with many things in this way of life, you turn to the free labor of your family.  In order for Rebecca to go to school, her mother and three younger sisters (plus one or two apprentices) must keep the bread business going.  Rebecca’s mother, Hannah, is a very jolly sort of woman and I am happy to be friends with her as well.  Hannah has her own business—she is a seamstress, so every morning she gets up at about 5 am, mixes the bread dough, and with the help of her daughters molds the loaves into the several dozen bread pans.  At about 8 am or so, she goes to her own shop to do any sewing she needs to do that day.  Some time in the afternoon, she goes back to the house to set the fire in the oven and around 5 pm, the fire is ready to put in the bread.  The oven is pretty big.  It’s made from cement and plaster in the shape of an igloo with a small hole just above the ground on one side.  In order to heat it, you put a bunch of firewood in it and burn it until they are all ash and coals.  After that about an hour, Hannah takes a long metal stick with large hook and rakes all of the coals out of the igloo, leaving all the heat inside.  Then she takes a big flat shovel at the end of a long stick to put the bread (each in their own separate pans) inside.  In about half an hour they’ve finished baking, she takes them out and puts in the next batch.  As she pulls out the bread, her daughters take it into a room in the compound, let it cool, take it out of the pans and package it up for selling.  When the baking is done, Rebecca’s sister Naomi takes the bread in the blue box to market to sell it in the evening.  Depending on the amount of bread baked and sold and whether it’s market day, the baking will take place every day or perhaps, every other day.

On the morning of my birthday, the power had gone out early in the morning, so Hannah didn’t get the bread mixed early.  The day before I had asked if I could slip my own brownies in the oven with the bread, to which she eagerly agreed.  The power outage, however, set the baking time back a bit.  The fire wasn’t ready for the bread until about 8pm, so I had a late birthday cake.  I mixed up some brownie batter before going over there and had to use some of her pans.  The ones she offered me looked like very large cupcake papers, only made from aluminum.  I filled three of them half way because I knew they would rise.  We put them on a large flat sheet and put them in the igloo-oven.  After the first batch of bread was finished we checked the brownies (which had risen considerably) and only the tops were done, so we put them back in.  This time, Hannah shoved them to the back of the oven and when we looked again, a chocolate lava flow was brewing.  There wasn’t much we could do until the rest of the bread was done since the brownies were at the back of the oven, so we just left them.  Left them spilling over into one of the other bread pans.  When we took them out, I was absolutely flabbergasted.  They had no insides.  ???????  They looked like chocolate brownie pot pies with no filling.  The tops were there, the sides stuck to the pans, but the insides were spilled all over the pans.  What the hell?  And, then for surprise #2, as soon as they cooled, they became crispy, like cookies.  So, while the third batch of bread baked, we all sat there in the dark, next to the oven, under the watchful eye of Orion, eating ruined brownie and sugar bread.  The taste of the brownies was perfectly normal, but the presentation was seriously lacking.  Everyone in the house enjoyed them, anyway.  We even chipped the biscuit-like brownie off the pan and ate the crumbs.  I took the bigger pan home for the next day, but I just decided to shrug my shoulders and then took it to Kwesi’s house and gave it to the kids there, who did an excellent job of picking it clean.  It was no Safeway cake (or Vinman’s cake—OMG my sister’s bachelorette cake was the best EVER—for more than one reason) but definitely the most laborious and disastrous cake that ever existed on my birthday.

Books, Bathrooms, and Buildings

So projects are beginning to take shape.  Our first endeavor was to organize a latrine building project.  After talking to many groups in the community and asking them what they wanted me to accomplish for them in my two years here, nine times out of ten the first and almost immediate response has been: “We want toilets.”  Well, okay then.  Throughout Peace Corps training we talked about the various situations that latrine projects have encountered.  For some reason I haven’t gained an insight into, when people build their houses, they don’t incorporate or plan toilets—or latrines, into them.  Perhaps it’s the cost of the cement needed.  Most houses are built with mud, sand, and water.  Granted, you could build a latrine with that too, but good solid latrines are built of cement, which can be pretty expensive.  Pretty much every latrine here is reminiscent of the outhouse.  It’s a little shack with a vent pipe that covers a deep hole in the ground over which you squat.  I know that right now you’re thinking of your white (clean?) porcelain commode with running water in your own sanitary and tiled bathroom at home and thinking “ewwww, they poop in that?”  It’s really not as bad as you think.  If can keep the odor down and the bugs away, it works just fine.  And anyway, it’s loads better than having to find a place in the bush or your rubbish pile.  Anyway, of all the situations we talked about in training, I have found very little to no evidence of those same obstacles here.  Perhaps the most important indicator of all is that people are asking for them.  Organizations that have traditionally helped communities build toilets have found their efforts and monies go to waste because they didn’t do the groundwork beforehand to make sure the people were ready to use them and just went ahead and built them.  As a result, these same organizations now make the communities do a considerable amount of the work beforehand to facilitate a sense of ownership and make sure a lot of education about the connections between defecation and disease take place first.  But the fact that people are explicitly asking for help with toilet acquisition means they are already a great deal past that.  At least, that’s what I think.  Time will tell if I’m right.

So, Kwesi and I, through various community leaders, collected the names of households requesting toilets.  So far there are 76 of them.  An organization in the district capital, Nkwanta, called World Vision has a program to help communities with the purchase of the cement and the vent pipe.  Their budget can only cover about 25 toilets, so that’s where we’ll start.  I’ve asked the local government to cover the cost of the skilled labor—the cement layer.  Surprisingly, the District Chief Executive said the amount “was too moderate.”  I think he expected me to ask for more money.  I’ll keep that in mind for next time.  The 25 households have to do most of the work, though.  They have to dig the hole, build the structure (with local materials that don’t much or anything at all), and pay 10 cedis to help with other expenses.  Imagine…a whole, new, sanitary outhouse for the cost of 10 cedis and a whole lotta work.  If they want to put metal sheets on the roof instead of thatch, then they have to figure that out for themselves.  Although, if the District Assembly really wants to give me more money, they can fund that or more than 25 toilets.  We’ll see what happens.

Project #2.  The government junior high school is one building with three classrooms, a teachers’ office, and a big empty which is labeled “Library.”  Inside this room is a small blackboard, crumbling tables, a large pile of sand and fishing nets (*shrug*), four bookshelves, and lots of bats and guano in the ceiling.  Not a single book.  Other than school books and the novels I have that float among PCVs between sites, there is not really anything for anybody to read in this village.  This means children and adults can read, but without anything to practice with, their abilities are minimal.  How simple, I thought.  There is already a structure and even book shelves that only need a little TLC.  There are also many organizations that organize book donations to Africa.  This is also a project common in the PCV world.  This I’m sure we could do lickity-split, granted I can find the right organization.  Once we get some books, then I can make a reading club.  Voila!  Then this monster came along….

I had a meeting with the school teachers a few days ago.  They want me to help them build a computer lab.  Oy.  Alright, I told them, let’s think this through.

ICT (or information computer technology) is a relatively new subject in the Ghana school curriculum.  Unfortunately, the government doesn’t really have enough money to pay for the introduction of a new subject (the new teachers, their trainings, the materials, test materials, etc.) AND the cost of building and furnishing computer labs to all of its schools.  So what happens?  Teachers in (most likely) rural villages must teach ICT to students who have either never seen a computer, or never touched one, by using the old methods—lecturing and writing descriptions on the blackboard (what’s lovingly referred to as “chalk and talk”).  Imagine trying to teach the parts of a computer (the screen, the mouse, the keyboard, etc) with no actual computer.  Imagine trying to learn it, then writing an exam on it.   Very few students pass their exams in ICT.  There is no doubt as to the need of computer labs for students to gain experience on.   Perhaps, they thought, we could take over the long pavilion that’s not being used, build a structure with two or three rooms and put the library inside there too.

The biggest problem with computer labs in, well, Ghana, is that of sustainability.  Communities want them, but the problem is they’re not always aware of what it takes to keep them.  Many labs here have many computers that don’t work.  You can’t really just call the office IT guy that knows how to magically fix everything to make sure the computers keep running.  Or, for that matter, call the nice people in India.  But also:  Who will pay the electric bill?  Who will keep the computers updated and virus free?  Whose job is it to monitor the students while they’re using the computers to make sure they’re not looking at porn (that’s IF we put internet in there)?  What about a printer?  Is the money the district gives you for ICT stuff enough to cover these recurring expenses?  Can we replace the computers in five years when they’re (reeeeeeaaallly) out of date?  We need fans to keep them cool, a locked door, and a massive voltage regulator to keep the electricity from frying the computers from the inside out.  And somehow, we have to find a way to keep the dust out.

These teachers would not be detracted.  They came up with a solution to every obstacle I threw at them.  I still possess a healthy dose of cautious skepticism, but it is my job to help them do what THEY want, not what I want.  But we can’t very well not try since we all know that to give these students a leg up in the world, to get outside this farming community, they need to know something about the world of technology and have some access to it.  Even if the harried pace of the technological world doesn’t fit the slower pace of a traditional African village. 

So here I am, fast becoming the “volunteer who builds stuff.”  There was a lot of discussion about this during training.  There wasn’t a discouragement from “building stuff”, but just a cautionary note about staking your success on how many tangible things, or buildings, you bring to your community.  Peace Corps is about “behavior change” something my culturally relative theoretical self struggles with, but nonetheless, I see the great value of it.  We are here to educate, influence, lead by example, not just come in and give “stuff” away.  There are plenty of organizations for that, so Peace Corps is supposed to do the harder of those development methods.  Still, all of this bows in deferment to what the community wants.  I am but an aid and an advisor in their own development visions.  If they want a computer lab, then, dammit, I’m going to do my best to help them get it.  There is no ignoring the great need for it.  Besides, with adequate preparation before hand, I can inject the behavior change after we get the proper tools.  Wish me luck!