Damn, where did it go?

Where has my inspiration gone?  I have been trying to write a blog entry for weeks, but I keep losing steam.  Usually, I will get a burst, most likely in the form of a sentence or a congealing idea, but I have felt little these past couple weeks.  In fact, my writing in general has taken a hiatus.  I can’t understand why.  How can lose it only after a couple months at site?  Aren’t I still seeing new things every day?  The answer is yes, but for some reason, I am lacking the creative abilities to spin into something interesting.  I don’t want to just list bland updates, and great epiphanies have abandoned me for the time being.  It is among the many things that are slipping and a constant source of anxiety for me.

It seems whenever I begin another adventure/task/phase in life, I come to a point, a trial I must pass through where I come to grips with the reality that my vision and expectations about what I am undertaking and its actual reality don’t match up.  I am there now.  When I stepped on the plane at JFK I had goals.  Goals to push myself to do more than I had attempted before, to really take charge of my professional development, to take advantage of my academically-prepped mind and be as sharp as ever.  I was really gonna figure out how to be a leader here, how to be a professional anthropologist, and maybe this time, this endeavor, I would find that I could be the best at something instead of just merely “good.”  Maybe I could be the best at learning language, the best at writing, observing, culturally understanding, or critiquing.  Maybe, in my wildest dreams, I could even be the best volunteer.  In some ways all my switching between different endeavors in life are a result of my many interests in the world—dancing when I was a kid, music when I was in high school, culture, archaeology, traveling, and language in college, jobs in (sort of) exotic locales, trying to merge them all in grad school, plus all of the minor interests in between.  And that is definitely true.  I never really possessed the ability to devote myself and my attentions to any one thing.  The world is a big, diverse, and interesting place that everyone should explore to the fullest, but a big part of all that “dabbling” has been about searching for something I was naturally better at than anyone else.  And I thought, this time, with as much work, time, and knowledge I gained in graduate school, I could be a step ahead, but also at the same time be active in gaining so many more insights and skills.  That vision, like so many others, is not being realized.  That doesn’t mean other good things aren’t created in its place, but it is still a struggle to let go of it, to not use the f-word—failure.  But now, as someone recently advised me, it’s time to come down from that.  No matter what I gain, I am still no better at anything than anyone else.  But it is even more splintered than that.  Some things I am still weak in, others I am strong.  I am not strong in all things.  All of the advanced education in the world won’t make me better at gathering people, running meetings and making inspiring speeches, but that’s what I have Kwesi for.  No amount of education can make me a complete master of my space such as he is as we walk around Damanko and I am a bit jealous of that.  I am lucky to have such and able and knowledgeable counterpart—a prime example of what Peace Corps envisioned when they created such a role in their program—so why can’t I just relish this blessing I have instead of being intimidated by it?

In many ways, I have been thrust into a role I have never encountered before.  This was not unexpected.  I wanted that as a part of continually trying to push myself to new insights and growth opportunities.  Never have I been asked or looked to to organize things, to be the source of serious quality of life improvements, the source of new ideas, knowledge and advice.  It’s rather intimidating.  In a place like this, people are hungry for ideas, for knowledge, for opportunities.  Sure there are always those who are looking to improve their lives only through money (or trips to America), because they think that is the only way they can make their lives better, but if you can find those people who aren’t worried with that, you have found the gems.  The people who want only to learn more, to be connected to something different, to be given something they can in turn give to others, are the real movers and shakers of development and the ones who will make the most impact.  So then I find myself thinking—Damn, how do I live up to that?  Kwesi and Joseph talk to me about following Peace Corps because the advice that comes to them through its volunteers suits them well and has really moved them somehow.  How do I live up to that?  People never come to me for advice at home.  Peace Corps training provides me with certain technical knowledge that I am expected to give, but life as a foreign volunteer in an underprivileged community requires a much wider breadth of advice.  Sometimes I look at the two of them and I think:  You can already do so much, what can I possibly give you?

Tis the season--even in 90 degree weather...

A little late on the post, I know, being that Thanksgiving was about a week ago, but some thoughts just struck me.

As has apparently become expected tradition, all the Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana were invited to the Ambassador’s luscious house in Accra to celebrate the most American of holidays.  And so, missing our turkey, mashed potatoes, and pies of the sweet kind (not to mention free booze and the lure of a swimming pool) about 120+ travel raggedy volunteers descended on the carefully guarded premises for an afternoon.  The perpetually warm weather, the enthusiasm for which the swimming pool was sought, the many glasses of wine poured in merriment, and many ladies’ new Ghanaian-made warm weather dresses made the gathering easily mistaken for a beach party.  We swam, drank to our hearts’ content, chatted with new volunteers we hadn’t met, caught up with some we hadn’t seen since training, the Ambassador proudly paraded his new 8 week old son, and we all eagerly awaited the time we could stuff our faces with some old fashioned soul food. 

As part of the Thanksgiving experience, the Ambassador’s people (and Peace Corps’ people too) made it possible for about half of the volunteers expected to be hosted by local ex-pat families (just in case someone doesn’t know what that is: ex-pat refers to families or individuals living in a foreign country for a temporary but extended period of time working for their own government.  Like “immigrant” but richer and not for permanent residence).   My friend Francesca and I were lucky to be housed with a woman named Lisa, who works for USAID in Ghana (and served in Peace Corps in the 80s), and her two teenage sons.  Ex-pat families tend to live pretty high on the hog, especially if they’re working in developing countries, because they earn American salaries and live in countries with lower cost of living.  Often the working for the embassy or foreign service means you are provided with a furnished house and, as part of a larger ex-pat community, able to get American products sent over pretty regularly.  Many employ a local housekeeper.  Some have swimming pools.  There is a water heater, air conditioning, internet, clothes washing machines, and dish washing machines. This allows many people who spend most of their careers abroad to maintain a very American household.  Having spent most of their lives outside of America, Lisa’s two boys are every bit as American in behavior as you’d expect.  They attend school with other ex-pat kids, fight their mom over the amount of time spent on the internet and World of Warcraft, love TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, and they’ve read the entire Harry Potter series.

This lifestyle, of course, does not belong to American ex-pat families alone.  It is very obvious once one has been in Ghana a short while how different life can be between those that live in the northern regions and those that live in the south, particularly Accra.  Like any big city, Accra has is ghettoes, its poorer places, the people without much to their name that come to the city to seek a better life, and it also has those that do live well, those who can afford and strive to live “modern.”  I’m not just talking in material objects, but mindsets, education opportunities, ideas, and exposures are more modern/enlightened/Western (choose your favorite word—of course that’s not to say that these words mean the same thing; what is “enlightened” is not always “modern” or “Western”).  Politics in the last 50 years is mostly responsible for this enormous gap in current development situations.  It also casts a pretty rigid dye for the stereotypes of “village” and “modern” in Ghana.  Anyone from the north, or those living in the north are all villagers and know nothing but farming, or so those in the south are given to thinking.  Their logic goes something like this:  Villagers are mostly farmers, and because they are farmers they don’t value education for themselves or their children.  Because they have no education they are ignorant/stupid.  Also, they don’t know how to spend their money.  They will tell you they can’t afford to send their children to school, but if there’s a funeral to conduct, somehow they find the money for large expensive livestock.  This thinking is a problem in Damanko, and many rural places in Ghana, because the government stations people from the southern provinces in the rural areas to work in civil services.  They are teachers, clinic staff, police officers.  This is part of the government’s plan for development in rural areas.  Theoretically, if people from the more developed areas are brought to the less developed areas, specifically in jobs crucial to development, that will help, right?  Well, to a certain extent, but pretty much all of them buy into this villager = stupid mentality.  Most are not blatant about it and still perform their jobs as expected, but their motivations in performing these services begin to slip.  It’s going to be a challenge teaching or reminding people, that even these uneducated people have some worthy contribution to make and that opportunities offered to people in life are different for everyone.  Not everyone here is uneducated, is a farmer, etc etc.  There is diversity, even here!!

But anyway, my rant over, I’ll return to Accra.  Thanksgiving dinner was great, and I stuffed myself as required by every Thanksgiving—tryptophan effects and all.  The next day, most of us went to The Mall (gasp!) to see Harry Potter 7 P1 and I reminded a few of us that we got to be IN a mall and miss all the Black Friday craziness.  Accra’s mall (complete with Apple Store) has two big stores (plus many others)—a grocery store and a Target-like store.  In the Target-like store, I wandered through and found myself chuckling at the commercialized Christmas decorations, trying to imagine their presence in Damanko: the lights adorning a thatch roof, tinsel and ornaments hanging from Kwesi’s moringa tree, garlands strewn about being nibbled on by goats….  It did offer a pretty unbelievable picture in my mind’s eye.  Looking at them, they just felt so…..pointless.

The grocery store was fun too.  It offered many imports and included a deli, fish counter, and lots of cheese.  It was a scene familiar to me, but I did entertain myself by imagining Joseph, my 15 year old friend who’s rarely been out of Damanko, in a store such as this.  It’s common in Ghana for people to ask for small gifts when friends or family are traveling.  If I got something for everyone who asked, I’d use up my paycheck every month, so most people don’t take it seriously, yet I always take a few special people some gifts.  Since I was in this very American-like grocery store, I looked for something I knew would probably not reach outside of Accra.  Several people received pears when I got back.  I was happy to find them, to eat one for myself, and to present even a couple of my more educated and worldly friends with something they hadn’t seen or tried before.  “It is sweet, oh.  I like it.”  Maybe someday I’ll do a post just on the Ghanaian use of the word “sweet.”

So all in all, Thanksgiving was a blast, and it gave me a chance to ruminate on some things, like my fluctuating definition of “luxury.”  If you ever want to enjoy something 100 times more than you do currently, just deprive yourself of it for a while.  I have become used to bucket baths and don’t mind them so much.  Of course that doesn’t mean I didn’t nearly weep for joy during the first hot shower I took at Lisa’s.  Yes, they feel good when you have one everyday, but they feel 100 TIMES BETTER when you haven’t had one for six months.  Francesca and I slept in an air conditioned room on beds with sheets and duvets, we ate homemade pizza and pancakes (not at the same time), washed our clothes in a washing machine, and stretched out on real sofas.  Life feels so much more satisfying when even the little things become so pleasurable you can’t stand it.  I don’t feel deprived when I’m at site.  I don’t sit around and think “Damn, I’d do anything for a _____ right now.”  Well, at least not always.  Having some of those things just wouldn’t feel right out here.   They just don’t fit in with life as it’s lived here.  That said, when I get back, I’m going to get a whole lot more out of that hot shower than you will.  I am thankful for the chance to rediscover how wonderful even some minor things can be.  

Whirlwind Schedule

The holidays are upon us, and it seems I cannot get away from it's vamping in schedule even in Ghana!  Next week a bunch (like, over a hundred) volunteers will descend on the ambassador's (posh) house in Accra to gorge themselves on turkey, vegetables, and pumpkin pie.  Then (hopefully) we will be able to catch the new Harry Potter movie in the only theatre in Ghana.  (I'm really logging in the Harry Potter-viewing countries.  I saw the 2nd one in Scotland.)  I will travel back to Damanko, stay for a few days, then head out again to the first of my In-Service Trainings in Kumasi.  There is talk about travel to a happy place for Christmas, but thinking I might stay at site and brew pito in celebration with my Muslim counterpart and his family and make paper snowflakes with the zillions of kids running around here.  I even found glitter from somewhere!  I think this will be my first snow-less Christmas.  Wish I had some lights to decorate a moringa tree, but maybe the snowflakes will have to do.

Rollercoasters

One thing about Peace Corps you know going in is that it is going to a rollercoaster ride of emotions.  Being here is amazing, and most days I can log at least one Holy-Shit-I’m-in-Africa moment, but some days are just the pits.  How do I describe the bad days?  Well, it usually consists of me not having anything constructive to do, which leads me to hanging out in the house and thinking too much.  It’s left over from graduate school where time is of the essence, and so, if I had nothing to do there must be something wrong with my time management or I was forgetting something, or whatever.  Just this basic feeling that if I had done everything right, I wouldn’t have time to waste.  So some days, I am in the house with nothing to do.  Okay, I was prepared for this.  Life in a developing country—or any country not America for that matter—means lots of waiting time, down time, things not happening fast-fast, as my counterpart likes to say.  But still, down time = thinking time and sometimes that’s not always good.  I start to question my situation.  Am I integrating well enough?  Shouldn’t I be using this time to study language?  Why don’t I have any one to hang out with?  There must some cultural thing I should be observing.  And speaking of which, how am I meeting my anthropologist goals?  Why am I not out there perfecting my methods skills?  Shouldn’t I have more notes about observations?  Shouldn’t I be doing more needs assessments?  Aren’t there more people to meet?  Why am I not better at this?  Shouldn’t anthropology and graduate work have made me more able and adept at this?  Why am I not on the fast track?  Why am I not fulfilling the vision I had for myself and my experience in this space?  Ugh!  It’s so frustrating to have these thoughts cycle through my head over and over like a broken record.  I’ve always been one to be moderately patient and wait for the right opportunity to present itself in its own good time, and making sure I was available to pluck it.  Forcing things to work has never worked for me.  That’s being tested here.  Then there’s the whole comparison game:  this volunteer’s doing this, and this volunteer’s doing that, and I’m not doing either.  Should I be?  Am I behind?  Such thoughts are ludicrous, because everyone’s sites, environment, abilities, situations, colleagues are all drastically different.  But still, what have I done that’s equal to it--different but equal?  It’s aggravating.  The funny thing is that such moods are easily evaporated by simple things: a conversation with a needed person, a chance to get out of town, one child calling me Madam Kristi instead of “fada,” a visit to the guys at the police station, or even just a walk to the river.

Anyway, I was in this funk a few days ago, and then I got an interesting, out-of-the-blue call.  This guy introduced himself as Kyle, said he was a friend of one of my PC buddies, and working in Accra in a company working in sanitation, and he wanted a rural perspective, so could he come visit me?  Uh, sure, why not?  So after a quick phone call to said buddy, Kyle arrived a couple days later on an early bus to spend the day seeing a different part of Ghana.  This is important because the South (especially Accra) and the North are very different in terms of development.  Not to mention traveling this road is a travel adventure in itself.  So a couple hours of visiting and a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, we started out to see the sights.  Kyle was lucky because that day happened to be Market Day so there was LOTS of activity.  We headed to the river first so we could discuss the water situation in Damanko and watch the fishing boats for a while.  Then we got one of the fishermen to paddle us out into the river a ways, much to the amusement of the spectators on shore.  Kwesi (this is my counterpart, who, up until now I’ve been calling Kofi in this blog, but have gotten tired of the pseudonyms) and my other buddy, Addai, were at the bridge in uniform pulling over unregistered motorcycles, so we greeted them and went on our way.  We walked back down to the other side of town to the clinic then back to the house.  Kwesi was off his shift by then, so he came back to the house with a watermelon (reason #87 he’s the best counterpart EVER!) then I made him play tour guide and we went “roaming” around town.  Kyle wanted to know about the sanitation situation in Damanko so we told him about the things we were planning to do and so on.  We walked to a couple of the smaller villages just outside of Damanko whose situations can be quite different.  We sat with a group in Baduli for a while talking about our upcoming latrine project.  We walked past the other side of Baduli and stopped to sample some pito, the local brew, and then had some fun with a group of girls carrying things back from market by trying to balance things on our heads.  After our afternoon walk, we headed back to the house.  I made some market soup while Kwesi and Kyle chatted and were eventually joined by Joseph, my inherited “small boy”.  Joseph, being my cultural events alarm bell, told us there was a funeral service that night, and would we like to go?  Duh.  So later that night we went to the first of many funeral events.  Ghanaian funerals are very long, elaborate, celebratory affairs which I will write about at a different time.  This was the religious service, so there was a hefty mixture of African gospel evangelism with traditional beats and dancing.  It was amazing to watch (though not as amazing as the Kinachung event I witnessed a week later).  Kyle left the next morning.

His visit actually did a lot for my morale.  He’s the first visitor I’ve had to host since I’ve been here, and it was very helpful to have him.  Having somebody to show things to helped me to take ownership of this space and my experience.  This is MY site, MY house, MY counterpart, MY work, MY experience, MY village.  It’s always nice to pass that imaginary border where, at least for a time, one stops being the perpetual newcomer and begins to be the local.  And we just did a lot that day.  It was nice to have plenty of things going on, to see a bunch of things, even if I’d seen some of them before.  And it’s nice just to have another white person around just to diffuse some of the looks, to encourage me to react to things differently.  I was reminded, watching this new person jump right in to everything, how scared I am to just jump into things with both feet.  I feel at the center of attention all the time, so I try to hide as much as I can.  I hate taking attention away from whatever they’re doing at the time, being the perpetual distraction.  I feel like an intruder always.  So I refrain from just jumping into things, going up to people uninvited, etc unless I have another person, a doorway, something.  Kyle needed no such things, and I wish I were more like that.  I remember my Uncle Mark, ruminating on the old "sink or swim" metaphor a long time ago: “Your aunt can’t just dive into anything.  She has to check the water, find a life jacket, take swimming lessons to make sure she can swim first.  Me, I jump in, find out I can’t swim, then ask for the life jacket and swimming lessons.”  Guess I’m just like my Aunt Lori (insert snide comment from my mother HERE).  I’ve gotta have all my ducks in a row first; or at least grouped together in a queue-like fashion.

So, here I am now, taking it day by day, knowing that this experience would be a hundred times harder if it weren’t for some key people, but they can’t make all the bad days go away.  Some days I want to hug and play with all the children, and some days I want to punt all the ones that shout “Fada!”  Some days I look at goats and think “Cute!”  Other days I look at them and think “at least those annoying pests taste good.”  Some days people smile and greet me and are genuinely happy to see me; other days all I get is harassment from the men.  Some days I feel happy to see the same people all the time; other days I feel like I’m not doing my job right because I don't know enough people.  Some days it’s just too hot to do anything; other days walking to the river at sunset is an amazing spiritual uplift.  Being here is wonderful, but I guess my fundamental fear is I won’t actually be able to do the work I need to do with the skill I envisioned myself doing it with.  There are so many people who are happy to have me here and so many people that don’t deserve to be let down.

Part 3 of Kristi’s Ongoing Conversations with Herself: Race

10-23-10

Growing up, I never gave much thought on the expressions or impacts of race on my immediate environment or my person.  At least not past that which the learning of history required or the ability to think through TV talk shows.  Racial experience was always something that happened outside of my limited scope of the world—on TV or in books or something.  Being white and growing up in a predominantly white area made my experience, my lens, essentially race-less.  There were small groups of non-white people around me—first the children of Native American heritage that went to my high school and a large Hispanic minority in my second high school—and while their presence wasn’t invisible to me, it wasn’t highly visible either.  They moved around me more or less indifferently and I indifferent to them, not realizing that our fundamental cultural differences were not allowing me to connect with them and to unconsciously seek the friendships of those with whom I was similar.  Thus I never really thought my race meant anything, I being the same as all those around me.  I never really saw racial difference, but cultural difference.  Only in my adult life have I realized that the two main environments of my childhood—Vernal, UT and Wenatchee, WA—were and are not homogenously white, and that any sense of non-whiteness exists there.  In my racial naivete, I associated “race” and “non-Whiteness” with “black” and since there were no, or very few black people any of the places I lived, I perceived no experience of “race” or even, racial privilege.  I knew that a history of racism gave me opportunities that I could be born into, opportunities that previous white generations would bestow upon me as a result of racial discriminations written into laws and cultural consciousness; but I didn’t feel race operating on me everyday.

If my entrance into anthropology changes the angle of the race lens for me, Women’s Studies exploded it with vibrant color.  Anthropology attuned my eyes more critically to diversity, but Women’s Studies made me see and understand new depths of race—how I exist in this world, my place given to me and how the world reacts to me based on race.  My entry into anthropology was facilitated by a deep, unexplainable interest in people’s lives—not their personal ones, per say, but their collective ones.  I was fascinated by the different way we found to live with few important similarities.  With this budding interest and an increasingly honed eye on “diversity,” I realized my life and the people around me were not all that diverse in lifestyle or origin.  My anthropological knowledge was coming from books and texts and professors, not experiences and people.  Even the practitioners of anthropology often comment about how anthropology is still a white man’s endeavor and are always critical about how few diverse viewpoints and backgrounds there are.  So it was with anthropology that I realized my lack of racial diversity in my life—how “white” my life truly was.  In Women’s Studies I came to know what that meant.

For those unfamiliar with something like Women’s Studies or feminist theory, you may be surprised to learn that it is not all about women or women’s rights.  Properly defined (I think, anyway; there’s a TON of literature on the proper definition of feminism), feminism is the attempt to challenge, understand, and confront unequal power relationships between groups—to think through why certain groups are oppressed and why others are privileged.  This includes not only gender relationships, but those of race, class, disability, socioeconomic, nationality, any identity that renders one person or group of persons less than another.  And so, race is a big part of Women’s Studies and feminist theory.

I realize now that the ability to go through any part of life without a thought to race is an expression of white privilege.  Power and privilege may not be immediately invisible to those who have it, but its affect on those who DON’T have it, is.  Marginalized groups often have a less distorted view of power because it is being exercised on them.  I also believe the perception of the power of race experience is diluted when one is enmeshed with those of her own race.  Hence, without the experience of diversity and exposure to a variety of different viewpoints and experiences, one risks a seriously truncated and distorted view of world and their existence in it.  It is when one comes into contact with those of another race—either physically, or over media, even—that race becomes more vibrantly salient.  I learned that many who are non-White, who are not of the privileged dominant social group (whether white, rich, Christian, heterosexual, but for the purposes of this post, mainly white) think on their race all the time, judging whether it has any bearing on their present situation or interactions with others.  I began to see what had been hitherto hegemonic and to understand how, and what bearing the history of race relations had on current cultural and socioeconomic conditions and the complex nuances within.  From anthropology I understood the important debunking of biological race and the power of socially constructed race, but Women’s Studies illuminated its complex existence in this world.

All my life I have had the ability to hide, to blend into the group or the background.  Nothing I do or am makes me stand out.  I am what everyone expects me to be.  One reason I wanted Peace Corps to send me to Africa was because I wanted to change that.  I wanted to have the situation flipped, to experience what it is to be in the minority, the inability to hide, to know what it is to have race in my face—everyday.  It is wearing, exhausting, trying, and I know, completely different from any other non-White experience.  I can’t compare it to being a minority in the US, because, even here, I am a privileged minority.  Even in a place where I am an intruding foreigner, identifiable to the racial category of those that are historically responsible for Africa’s current situations, I am privileged based on my skin (and to some degree my nationality, but mostly my skin).  It is like a bright neon banner flashing in a dark field.  To have it this way when I am marked with privilege, I can’t imagine the horror to be gazed upon with racial hatred.

But still, being American, and having been ingrained with a 20^th century American history of racial injustice, tension, and the radical correction of it, to be called out to or sought because of my skin color makes me very uncomfortable.  To have this quasi-celebrity status is very unsettling and, I think, very undeserving of such behavior on both sides.

There is a lot to tell you, blog-s-sphere, about my experience of whiteness in Africa and how people react to me based on this very obvious marker.  This subject shall continue.  

Thou Shalt Not Covet My Pawpaw!!

10-21-10

There’s no real beating around the bush about it.  Damanko has given me a nice house.  Three or four generations of volunteers have added their own touches to it, making it that much more….well, better.  Sometimes I feel guilty about this.  I feel guilty that because of who I am, and where I’m from, I get a place to live that is still at better standards than most of the people here.  Of course there are perks here that Americans prefer to have that most Ghanaians really could care less for, but still, I am a participant in what Peace Corps lingo is known as “Posh Corps.”  My counterpart, Kofi, assuages some of this guilt by not begrudging me anything, even though I know my house is in much better shape than his, and by personifying good Ghanaian hospitality for its guests, especially ones that have proved themselves in the past, such as American Peace Corps Volunteers.  I really consider this house almost as much his as mine, since he has poured much of his blood, sweat, and, well, not tears, but energy anyway, into its maintenance and upkeep.  He’s planted trees, painted walls, fed the cat, organized many of the landscaping tasks, helped furnish it, and basically guarded it like a police dog both when volunteers occupied it, and the year its stood vacant.  So, I allow him his indulgence in his very overt protectiveness over the house (and to some extent its occupant).  He is as territorial as a peacock.  The pawpaw has brought this out bright and clear.

I have three papaya trees in this yard (that is enclosed by a gate I can lock, but it’s a hassle to do so), and a fourth one that is not bearing fruit.  Known as pawpaw in many parts of the world, they are apparently very coveted items—as one of my friends said “Because it is Obruni’s (the local word for White Person) pawpaw”.  The fruit is beginning to ripen, and people’s mouths are beginning to water, so to speak.  Each tree can bear as many as 20 great big pawpaws and they must be plucked when ripe.  This means one must either climb the tree (good 10 to 20 or so feet in the air) or get a long stick (of which there are plenty in front of my house) to push one off.  If you don’t “drop” them, they don’t fall, they will just rot on the tree.  Most of them are still green, but edible, and now everyone wants one. 

I let the girls from the sewing school next door drop 6 or 7, some of which I kept, but if I didn’t stop them, they would drop them all.  When I offered Kofi one, his guard flipped up and told me he told them not to do that without him there, otherwise they would drop them all.  At the time I thought, “Goodness it’s just pawpaw, and besides, me and the school’s master were there to make sure they didn’t take them all.”  I asked him what has been done with all the pawpaw in the past, and since the Chief is the landlord, some of it goes to him, which is perfectly suitable.  Several days ago, a couple boys came from the Chief’s wife’s house to ask for a pawpaw or two, and Kofi was here and told them no because there weren’t any ripe ones yet (we dropped some this morning for the Chief’s wife when they had ripened).  Even the Chief’s son has come by to ask for one.  I heard voices and noises in my yard one time, and rushed out to find Kofi’s own wife with a stick in the tree (okay, well, she’s entitled.)  Two days ago I was talking to my sister when I heard some noise in my yard and caught a boy red-handed with a stick in his hand trying to drop a pawpaw.  He promptly ran off.  Even just now, as Kofi and I rounded a corner, we saw a posse of young boys around my gate and a stick behind the wall sticking up into the pawpaw tree.  “See,” Kofi told me, “this is why you need to start locking the gate when you leave.”  (I always lock the house but get lazy with the gate except when I travel.  I was only gone a couple hours.)    Then he donned his police persona, took off at a dead run and scattered the boys.  He puffed up (which always brings to mind an cat on the offense all arched and hair standing on end) in the very particular way Ghanaians do when they get angry at someone in order to tear them a new one, so to speak; and had some choice words for the boy (yes, the very same boy I previously caught—most unlucky at thieving, poor kid) he caught with the stick.  Kofi is not a big guy, but when he summons the authority he has as an older youth exercising power over a younger one, I’m sure he looked humongous and scary. 

Watching Ghanaian anger is very fascinating and quite entertaining as well.  Most of it is display.  It reminds me of when I worked at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at my university.  Whenever we went into the viewing area of the chimps’ enclosure, they would “display” to us, claiming the small space they inhabited as their home, and communicating to us that we were intruding upon it.  We were there on their terms.  The displays asserted their dominance over us by puffing themselves up to make themselves look bigger, quick and determined pacing, and displays of strength and vocal volume.  It could go from calm to full display in 0 to 5 seconds, and be over just as quick.  The chimps weren’t really angry or upset, they were showing us their power.  If they can display enough of that power to scare you away, then they win.  Ghanaian anger is much the same.  It can puff up quickly, and be gone just as fast.  There is yelling, furrowed brows, fast words, intense eye contact, and broad gestures.  Same ingredients of the chimps’ displays, but expressed incredibly differently.  Ghanaians don’t use politeness as a mode of interacting and resolving conflicts that Americans do until there the anger shows itself for real.  There is rarely any real rage, whoever has the strongest presence of anger and argument wins.  Yelling and broad gesticulating (minus the presence of any real anger) is also an indicator of seriousness.  If one party is quietly listening, displaying nothing, then the other party feels he is not being taken seriously.  This is especially evident in Kofi because he doesn’t see a lot of gray, and when he makes an opinion about something, he will defend it tooth and nail.  Any admonitions against it strikes him personally and against his rigid sense of what is right, honorable and the proper course of things.  And so leads him to his intense protectiveness.  “This is your first warning” he was saying as I got there, “I catch you again, I will punish you thoroughly” (which could mean he could haul him home for a beating or even off to the police station).  Stealing is a grave offense in Ghana.  Stealing even small things is not a misdemeanor.  For many transgressions, one can go to the police, but the Chief or any official elder can withdraw the case and settle it in the community.  For certain offenses—homicides, rapes, and stealing—they go immediately to court, and more often than not, there is jail time involved.  That probably would not happen to this boy, but the important thing I am noting is the rank that stealing has with other grave offenses.  These are the things I learn while hanging out at the “police station”.  J

Still, I can’t help but wonder if there is something more complicated behind this boy trying to get at my pawpaw.  Things are usually more complicated than they appear on the surface.  But even so, be careful who you mess with.  I might have to sick my Kofi on you.

Second Edition of Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself: Am I "Rich"?

Before reading ask yourself the following:

Are you rich? 

Is Africa poor? 

What characteristics determine whether one (individual or country) is rich or poor?

Really think about it.

I am white.  Most of you already know that.  My body is like a flashing neon sign in a dark field in Africa.  But I will save a discussion on race until the next Kristi’s Ongoing Conversations with Herself.  For right now I will say that here, for most people here, White = Rich, unequivocally.  So, I ask, what does “rich” mean?

My current hypothesis is that most Americans, and indeed the rest of the West, determines wealth solely based on material possessions—the accumulation of Stuff.  If you have a large bank account, you are obviously rich.  Okay, but bank accounts are not overly visible displays of wealth, so wealth really is determined by what one can purchase with that large bank account.  As a result we have established culturally certain kinds of possessions that immediately display wealth and, therefore, success.  They are things such as: electronic gadgets (trendy ones such as Apple products and entertainment technologies), clothes (including shoes), vehicles, and living structures, just to name a few.  These key things have been established as markers of wealth, however, just because one has them doesn’t mean they are wealthy.  Americans have mastered the art of looking rich without being so.  We have milked the practice of borrowing unnecessary amounts of money to its utmost.  Our inability to manage debt has allowed us to indulge in this image without the meat to back it up.  So, how does this translate to Ghana and my experience in it?

A history of unregulated giving and limited interactions with people from the outside, many people in Africa associate white people with lots of possessions, which must mean they are rich.  This leads to regular experience of children (and even old men) chanting “Give me small money, give me small money” as I pass.  Many even assume that because I am there, Peace Corps will bring them money (and maybe jobs?) which is the antithesis of PC.  This image extends to a blanket stereotype of America in general.  Several people I have talked to have been generally shocked to learn there are “poor” people in the US.  That there are homeless people, and people who can’t afford to eat.  To them, America is a land of milk and honey.  If they can only get there, their problems will go away.  I try to tell them that No, they don’t go away, they only change.  I also try to tell them that even though Americans (even low-income Americans) make more money than the average Ghanaian, but we incur many more expenses than they do.  There are so many more bills to pay!

The West possesses most of the imaging and idea-generating power in this globalized world.  For generations, Africa has been told by White travelers, development workers and missionaries that they are poor and need to be saved.  This same Western voice has said so because its sole marker of wealth has been cash flow.  If you can’t make or spend money, you are poor.  So Africans must be poor, and we must find ways to increase their cash flow so they can be rich, and their problems will go away.  It’s become a part of the cultural consciousness in many places.  So let’s mess this straight and narrow line up a little.

What is poverty?  Ghana, like any nation on earth, has its problems, but starvation isn’t one of them.  People don’t make a lot of money, but they can afford to feed themselves and their children, buy cloth to make beautiful clothes, afford electricity when the infrastructure permits its existence, travel small when they need to, etc.  Everyone has a cell phone (and some of them are really nice too).  Some own motorbikes.  But their houses are falling apart.  They can’t always afford school fees.  Children may go around in tattered clothes, but that does not mean they don’t bath or have nice clothes for church.  I have met many Ghanaians who are well educated and working hard to improve the quality of life in Ghana.  Opportunities and capacity are existent here, maybe just not as abundantly as in America.  But then, America isn’t always the Land of Equal Opportunity it strives to be.  Gross inequities exist everywhere in the world, they just manifest differently in different places.

So I wonder if the real discussion about causes of wealth and poverty, and their definitions, don’t exist so much at the relative individual scale, but perhaps through governments.  I am not rich in my country, and I’m not really any richer here.  I don’t have an income, my bank account is miniscule, but my safety nets are richer.  My government will pay for my healthcare for the next two years (though not when I actually go home) and I have a safe home to go to should something unspeakable happen here.  Even the poorest Americans have access to certain amenities (like running water) because the infrastructure has been established to facilitate and support that.  Does that make me richer than Ghanaians?  Sure Ghanaians may not have as much stuff, and the children may not have toys, but don’t we complain that too many Things have corrupted our youth?  Don’t we complain about the hours young Americans spend in front of the TV, Playstation, computer, etc?  Children here possess a freedom American children don’t.  They can roam safely.  They are able to socialize well with their peers.  They contribute to the maintenance of the household (by sweeping, fetching water, running errands, etc).  They have time to be children, to do leisure activities of their choice without being overscheduled with a hundred extracurricular activities.  So, in this light, the children don’t seem so “poor” do they?

Ghanaians are rich in time.  They have the time for leisure, the time to do nothing, the time to wait, the time to sit and chat with their neighbors, their friends, their sisters.  They have the time to properly greet everyone they pass.  They are not running from appointment to appointment, never claim to be too busy to do something, not too busy ferrying their kids to different activities that they can’t cook a proper meal.  In Time, I’d say Americans are very poor.

Many volunteers, upon leaving for their service, are bombarded with well wishers complimenting them on the unselfish decision and an admiration of a perceived dedication to “helping those poor people.”  This makes my skin crawl, because it implies to me that the person believes people here don’t have the power, the ability, or the capacity to help themselves, that they are powerless, which is not true.  Service in Peace Corps is every bit as selfish as it is unselfish.  We often get more than we give. 

My argument is not that there is no such thing as a rich person or a poor person, or that it only exists in relativity.  My argument is that when you look on someone as a rich person or a poor person (or a group of people) you should ask yourself what is contributing to that judgment.  What visual (or other) indicators is making you judge this way?  And what is your reaction to it?  Maybe wealth and poverty exist in other realms of life besides just monetarily and materially.  If that is so, there are many cases, I’m sure where Ghana is richer than the US.