Actively molding young minds: Inspiring world change through Camp GGLOW

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exciting work is coming!

Finally ideas are beginning to gain momentum.  I came away from the All Volunteer Conference earlier this month with lots of ideas and now some of them are starting to happen.  We’ve all but finished the latrine project—all that’s left is the final evaluation for the NGO.  With the help of World Vision (and the District Assembly when they finally release the money), we helped 25 families in Damanko afford latrines for their households.  Now they don’t have to go to the bush to take a dump.  Now it’s time to move on to other things.

Camp GGLOW will be in a couple weeks, and I’m real excited for that.  Some years ago some volunteers in some other country started a camp program for instilling leadership skills and inspiration in young girls (in our case young guys too).  Now, many of them are held in Ghana, and those of us who are in the Nkwanta area are making our own.  I could only take five junior high students, so I went to the two junior high schools in town and asked the teachers to choose a boy and a girl from each.  I also asked the teachers from the smaller English-Arabic (Muslim) school to choose a girl for me.  I am very happy with their choices and look forward to taking these kids to Nkwanta for a week.  I expect it to be as crazy and silly fun as American camp is, which is something these kids will never have even heard of before.  There should be 60 to 70 kids all held in the conference area of Nkwanta’s hospital and we’ll talk to them about life after school, finishing school, boy-girl stuff, health, decision-making, goal setting, etc.  I can’t wait to see how they do.

One of the more popular events the previous volunteers in Damanko planned was a large soccer tournament which Kwesi is eager to replicate.  Football is a big draw around here, so it offers a rich opportunity to educate people about any number of subjects.  Since we have this lucrative pot of gold program called PEPFAR, it will be an HIV/AIDS Football Tournament.  We invite football teams from the surrounding bush villages and provide focused education to the team players, and then to the crowd in between matches.  We’ll even set up free testing at the clinic.  The whole thing should last three days and be a whole lot of fun.  The thing I’m excited about is that we were able to coincide this event with Peace Corps’ training program, so for this event, PC will send us several of the new volunteers who will be arriving in country in about a week.  They won’t come to us until the end of July.

I’ve also organized ten or so kids to participate in a nationwide art contest focused on HIV/AIDS prevention messages.  Plenty of kids like to draw, but don’t often get the chance, so now I’ve got several of them in my house the past few afternoons drawing all kinds of things.

Next week we’ll start my vegetable garden experiment.  I bought seeds for carrots, green peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, and green beans in Tamale so we’ll see if they can grow here.  If they do, it will be a great opportunity for some to farm some extra vegetables for the market.  We’ll transform half of my “yard” into the garden and add tomato and basil plants.  We’ll also start nursing moringa trees.  Any seeds I don’t use, I’ll give to Joseph so he can start his own little garden too, and maybe it will help ease some of the income stress he feels.

Balls are rolling and it's exciting.  Wish you all could see it!

Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Again): Behind Western Eyes

“Women do all the work while men sit under the mango tree.”

I hate this statement.  It took me a while to determine why exactly I felt so uncomfortable whenever I heard it.  This is a well-worn idiom and opinion among volunteers, particularly female ones.  I hear it, its variations, and references to it all the time.  I thought just the fact that it was a broad, generalized, painting-all-with-the-same-brush kind of statement that bothered me, but it wasn’t.  I kept looking for observational evidence to back up this statement in my own community, but I couldn’t—at least enough to participate in its repetition.  I did see evidence to warrant this statement, but I also saw plenty of contradictions, and it’s the second bit that’s absent from this trope and the basis of my insecurity with it.  So here is what I see:

If we do compare “women’s work” to “men’s work,” then the scale is definitely unbalanced.  Women, as everywhere else in the world, have responsibility over the things that keep a household running—cooking, cleaning, childcare, keeping the house stocked, etc.  Things we are all familiar with.  Women also do many things to make their own money.  They have small informal businesses (selling prepared food, pure water, products, etc); formal businesses (sewing, hairdressing, baking, store ownerships); they do trading in the market place on a very large scale, or, if they continue in school, nursing, teaching, and whatever else they dream.  All this they do with childcare seamlessly woven into it.  If women can do any of these things, she has considerable financial autonomy from the men in her life.  They also have farms—groundnuts, okro, peppe, tomatoes, etc.  Men have occupations, trades, or, if they farm, it’s often yams (as they take A LOT more physical labor) or rice.  Men will sell these as cash crops, because it is his responsibility to provide hard cash for his family.  Women’s money, if their husband is able to fill his role, retains her own, but if all is not peach-keen, it could very well fall to her to provide financially as well.  But, just because women are responsible for all this work doesn’t mean she does it everyday or all the time or even alone.  Households consist of many women and daughters to do the housework and childcare.  Women may start and stop their businesses based on time, desire, or income.  Households consist of many men who can bring an income or help on the farm.  Depending on seasons, people may not go to farm everyday.  Their schedules are incredibly flexible.

So because of all this flexible time, I see men sitting around playing games under a mango tree, yes, but is it always the same men?  I don’t know.  If a man doesn’t have any work (and if you don’t you could at least farm something—everyone does to supplement income) then you are considered lazy.  Women I see doing the housework, yes, but I also see them napping on benches in the afternoon, sitting in a group yakking and cracking groundnuts, getting their hair braided (which can take two hours or more) at a hairdressing shop, laughing with sisters and girlfriends as they go to fetch water.  I see men hauling water in barrels all day for selling, carpenters working, tailors sewing, men repairing motorcycles and cars, drivers ferrying passengers out of town.  Everyone works hard and everyone sits around.  I don’t know how equal it is unless I actually sit and count up the minutes.

My frustration with this statement comes because I feel like its speaker is dismissing the contradictions in any given place.  Especially if they come from a Western background, this statement shows that they come from a place with very specific feminist sensibilities; in many cases with the expectation of finding “oppressed” women.  They are framing their observations in a purely Western feminist context (with all its unique histories and indicators) which doesn’t belong here.  I have been fortunate that during the development of my feminist theoretical sensibilities (mostly in grad school), I was aware that the paradigms, ideas, and histories, I was encountering were wholly Western and as such, only one of the myriad of ways women struggle for equity.  This awareness, I think, is the main reason for my hindrance at any assumption of women’s inherent disadvantage, my inability to participate in discussions about what a bum rap they get.  Of course there are disadvantages and imbalances of power and so on, just as there are in our own societies, but I think they are missing the power women do have in this structure and I don’t know how to challenge their assumptions.  I guess I feel unable to do that because I haven’t yet found evidence of it, but my feminist anthropologist spidey sense tells me it’s there somewhere.

When the Women’s Movement of the 1970s turned its head to international women’s issues, a woman named Chandra Mohanty wrote a very (academically) famous essay (titled "Under Western Eyes--pun in my subject intended) in which she stood on her soapbox and said: “feminism in the West happened the way it did because of a particular history and culture.  It won’t work the same in the rest of the world, so stop patronizing us “Third World women” by telling us we’re powerless and we need to be rescued by you.”  Of course I am only grossly paraphrasing; she said it much more wisely and professionally than that and in far more dense academic language.  This is why she is right:

Women in the West (let’s say America for example) fought for their equality by not changing the patriarchal system, but by clamoring to be a part of it—by entering male-dominated careers and demanding equal pay, by passing laws in a male dominated government system, by saying no to child bearing and running households and by seeking a sexual freedom—from men, from religion, from convention.  Much of the struggle didn’t seek to change the locus of power, just for women to have more access to it and men to have less.  Many feminist movements outside of the West have been different; they’ve centered on issues such as financial autonomy and more participation in decision-making, and reproductive choice.  Not that these fights haven’t taken place in the West, but the character of the movement that is created is such that the struggle looks more like women clamoring to keep their roles as mother and wives, they just want more power given to those roles.  Whereas, women in West fought for the choice to abandon those roles (example:  look at the value judgments we have about "working moms" and "stay-at-home moms").  In the West, the ultimate feminist fighter was someone who had a powerful career, no children and no husband to chain her to the house.  Third World women’s movements were more about power to wifing and mothering roles, and the freedom to work or earn money outside the home—financial autonomy.  Western feminism has often tried to “liberate” women it feels are “oppressed” and many non-Western women have felt that patronizing because someone outside has told them their lives are unfulfilling, made a judgment about the quality of their lives and situations without asking them.  Western feminism has told women they need to stop having babies, that they need to enter men’s jobs, that their traditional knowledge is ignorance, their commitment to households and domesticity is non-progressive, and that they are sexually constrained.  This is in sharp contrast to the Western woman (read: white) as educated, modern, having control over bodies and sexualities, and decision making freedom.  In essence, all women are oppressed and oppressed in the same way.  (Taken almost straight from Mohanty.)

What is wrong with the mango tree statement is that it is said in the spirit of Western feminism; that the fact that women do all the men do nothing is not only true, but that it is unfulfilling for the woman, that she has no other options, no power to change it, and so we have to do it for them.  And that men are somehow complicit in all this.

This isn’t to say that all is hunky-dorey and that everything is equal.  Of course it isn’t.  Women and girls are at a severe disadvantage in many ways, are victimized in many ways, and there are men who are scoundrels and no friend to women or their rights.  They are at a disadvantage based on traditional beliefs about education, opportunity, and gender roles which are only now beginning to change.  Women are forced into powerless situations, girls are preyed upon, but show me a society where that isn’t the case.  It doesn’t mean our Western ideas are better at fixing the problem or all-knowing of it.  My struggle is to decide whether the situations I witness are isolated incidents, the blame resting on the individuals involved or whether the situation is indicative of a larger cultural problem that needs to be addressed.

I guess the key is fulfillment.  To make sure every girl has the opportunity to fulfill her own life whether that’s through school, marriage, motherhood, becoming the president of Ghana, or whatever she chooses.  Really, I think this culture tells girls that they can be and do anything, just not that it will happen for every girl. 

So, that said, it is my intention to organize a Women’s Empowerment workshop in Damanko where we discuss mostly rights and health; where women and their daughters can learn about opportunities and support systems available for their needs.  I think many women think they have less power than they actually do.  I’ll keep you posted.

"Successful Development" follow-up

How much does the lack of natural resources and/or cash crops for export affect this equation?

Wow.  Point to my mom for shooting out the highly loaded question.  So loaded, I couldn’t answer it in the “comment” section.  It needed a whole other blog post.  Not that I’m the reigning expert, but here’s what comes to mind.

So when international development first started receiving focus in the aftermath of WWII, there was a huge meeting in a place called Bretton Woods of all the rich, “developed” nations of the world to answer the question: how do we best eliminate poverty (with all these newly independent nations) so as to ensure greater global security (so nothing like the path from German poverty to fascism ever happened again)?  Their solution was to set up massive international lending bodies to (theoretically) develop the business and industry in these new countries.  Sounds great right?  Give some assistance, advice, hard cash to impoverished (and brand new) country governments to build up economies, markets, private businesses.  Poor people get jobs, global poverty is alleviated and people (poor and rich) make money.  It sounds great until you look at it more closely and see that it is “trickle-down economics” heart and soul.  If the business sector—the sector with cash got better, then so would everything else.  If people just had more money….  It’s a very Western—very American—way of looking at solutions to poverty and, hence, development.  The institutions created—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—existed to lend money to developing countries.  In order to receive their monies, like any lending institution, you had to play by their rules and the reigning belief in these large, international institutions, created and run by the rich, powerful nations of the world, was on expanding international markets and greater inclusion in them.  In order to get IMF money, developing nations had to enter the global market, whether they were ready for it or not.  This meant growing more cash crops for sale in international markets rather than for feeding their own people, selling their natural resources to the rich countries who consumed 25% of the world’s resources rather than selling them to their own people.  That was supposed to give them enough money to then buy the things they needed, including food and resources they had traditionally gotten for themselves.  This is unsustainable development at its finest, and only in the last 20 years have we really seen the problem.  Countries like Jamaica have been in debt to the IMF for so many years, they can’t climb out of it.  They used to be able to grow enough of their own food to feed their population, but now it can’t even compete in the global markets it was supposed to.  Now it’s sold its soul to the tourism industry.  All the money the IMF said it was supposed to make is not there, so what little money they do make has to go back to the IMF to pay for the loan rather than paying for stabilizing an education systems, a health care system, job creation, etc—all those things that contribute to building a structure in a country.  Now they’re one of the many countries clamoring for “debt forgiveness.”  For more, I encourage you to watch the VERY GOOD documentary Life and Debt.  The IMF and the World Bank forced countries to export their goods as the driver of development rather than “keeping it local”.  Which is really totally backwards, I think, from the rich countries.  When I think about the “successfully” developed countries I mentioned in the last post, I realize that these are all countries that import more than they export.  Have you ever heard that statistic—the richest countries in the world have 10% of the people and consume 25% of its resources?  It’s kind of old hat now.  If you (a country) don’t have natural resources to export, you don’t get any of the rich countries’ money, but then you’re not their slave either.  The institutions that were created to help countries help their people climb out of poverty, only succeeded in making them poorer.  These “successful” countries never had substantial help from them.  

Well, I hope that answers at least part of the question.

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.