T minus 4 months

It's hard to believe that many of my “groupmates” are already home. I'm staying a little later than most, but it still feels so close and so far away at the same time. The first year went fast, the second year has been slower. I guess you can see that I'm excited to go home. It's senioritis all over again. Nevertheless, there are things being crossed off the list, and things poised to be crossed off soon. I have some self-supported girls that I have to set up with small businesses, so they have a means to care for themselves. I have library books to retrieve from two different places as well as the library system to set up and get underway. The organization that helped with our latrine project this year is coming to do some large scale health education with the beneficiaries. Operation Smile comes to Accra at the end of the month and I want to be among the volunteer troops, plus we're sending one child from Damanko to get his cleft lip fixed. And there's still some traveling to do, a handful of places in Ghana I still want to see.  I can feel the winding down happening.

Successes and Shortcomings

Now that the end is near, I begin to reflect more and more on what this experience has been. Lately, I've been wondering with quite disturbing frequency whether anything I have done here has actually done anything. All Peace Corps volunteers know this feeling comes. We all know our expectations can be high, and we all know we have to learn to manage those. We all know we have to look for the small, everyday successes, not wide-sweeping changes. We all know we have to manage the guilt of not being able to right all wrongs and injustices. It's unreasonable and damn near impossible. I have had this picture in my head of the work I do consistently over the past two years, a metaphor for how this “community work” goes. That picture is essentially a handful of carefully selected darts being thrown at a dart board at a long distance. I'm not a stellar dart player so some of the darts hit the wall, most hit the board, and once in a while I hit near the bullseye. I have always felt that the projects I've done, the information I give, the medium in which it is given, are like the darts—some hitting the board, some not. Somehow the ones that look like bullseyes at first drop outside the circle later and become vastly less satisfying. Over the course of service I have lived with this dart-throwing metaphor and been okay with it. I knew I wasn't going to “change the world” when I got into this business. I did wish, however, that, perhaps, I might change someone's world.

I have done a lot of things that will look very satisfying on a resume, things I will be glad to say “I did that,” “I experienced that.” Things that would make very good “successes” especially outside Peace Corps. It's been a busy month as we've been struggling to get started projects that have been in the works for ages, and wrap up others. It's been a bit of a self-confidence roller coaster as well, feeling both successful and dissatisfaction in everything.

First there was our Camp GGLOW, which was a lot the same as last year—30 some junior high school boys and girls, but we PCV organizers did try to tweak the focus of the curriculum a little. This time we decided to talk about gender inequality, reproductive health and sexual decision making. In order to tackle the widespread teen pregnancy problem, we decided to supplement the abstinence only education with lots of information about how to choose good partners and how to protect yourself from the risks of sex when you finally decide to have it or when you have no choice, because girls have a lot less power in the decisions whether or not to have sex than people like to admit. We talked about how pregnancy happens, biologically; what happens at puberty; about family planning; about proper condom use; and about HIV. We had guest speakers come and talk to the kids about gender roles and equalities, human rights, HIV and other things. Serious topics for a camp, right? But we also did fun and sort of frivolous things like watch The Lion King, paint calabash bowls, screen print camp T-shirts, produce a talent show, play Uno and dance the Hokey Pokey (which was a big hit, let me tell you). We PCVs even got a bunch of our pictures together to show them of America. We explained snow, fishing, weddings, Christmas trees and jack-o-lanterns, and Big Ten football games. The kids had a blast as did the staff, and though I always wish our Camp GGLOWs were more “campy”, I was never a sufficient enough camp counselor to make that happen. It's enough, I guess, to get them out of their villages, expose them to topics they often don't get to talk about openly, and meet other kids. It's trite and cliché and a bit of a pity party, to wonder if what we did had any real impact on these kids. Camp GGLOWs all over Peace Corps have proven time and time again to be very successful and impactful projects, but essentially, in the midst of such insurmountable problems, how can even these immensely successful projects have any real impact? How can our teaching and advice to girls about sexual decision making, family planning, avoiding teen pregnancy, building self esteem, creating futures ever have any impact when teachers coercing girls to sleep with them is so wide-spread and so entrenched in Ghanaian schools? And that's only one example.

A week after we concluded the camp, I was back in Damanko doing a similar, truncated version of the program for our girls' football tournament. A few months back a couple of the teams came to Kwesi and asked if we could organize a tournament for them like we did for the boys last year. I gave them an enthusiastic “yes” as long as there was enough interest. Though there are plenty that like to play and play well, girls' football is a whole lot less organized. Still, it was a good opportunity to speak to them about teen pregnancy, about sex and family planning. Many of the schools organized teams and a couple groups from the town organized themselves into a couple of teams, so all in all, we had 8 teams for the tournament. Linda, a new PCV from the next town over, came by to help out and with her and Kwesi's help, we prepared a very successful education day the day before the tournament started. The girls played hard and everyone enjoyed watching them. The winner's bundle was enough sodas for everyone, a couple footballs, knit caps with professional football club patches on them, and a box of condoms. It's great to get so many girls together to talk about topics that are serious problems in their community and in their daily lives, but I still see so many blank faces looking up at me, because no matter how simply I try to explain things, the language barrier is still a problem. Sometimes it's still a problem even with a translator to help. Again, darts on a dart board. Which pieces of advice stick and how many do? I'm not sure we even made a dent in the “teen pregnancy problem,” but the event happened, things were taught, and the girls had fun. That's a success in one way.

I guess part of the problem is that a lot of the countable projects I've done over the past couple years have been big, focused, one-time events like this where we take one opportunity to educate as many people in one place at one time as possible. They require lots of planning, organization, thinking on your feet, money, and are easy to quantify in reports at the end. And when they're done, they're done and you can move on to the next thing. This style of community work is where I get the dartboard visual, because I never really know what impacts come of them. I don't know all the participants personally and I can't follow up on many of them in the future. Conventional Peace Corps wisdom says that our greatest impacts, our greatest work comes from the far smaller scale, one-on-one relationships we form—friendships and mentorships and such like. And to be honest, those are a lot more satisfying in the long run.

After these larger event-projects were finished, I was able to look to those relationships since they have no schedule. Things like one on one computer lessons for one student who has been bugging me for ages and really does deserve them. Or following up on that one seriously malnourished child that I saw at the clinic and taking a personal interest in his and his mother's diet. Or continue planning with a local NGO future meetings for our youth business group made up of girls who, for their own safety, need to learn independent business skills. Or rewarding Kwesi's brothers for helping run the tournament by organizing a match for their teams and giving them one of the prize footballs. These little things make me feel like a real Peace Corps Volunteer and I'm glad I don't have any more big events to do.

A Different Kind of Africa (Part 2)

Chameleon Hostel is definitely one of the best hostels I have ever stayed in—pool, bar, kitchen, tons of info. There is a great atmosphere, a great mix of people and plenty to do. I booked a bed for the night and asked the reception people about tours. The gal said there was a three day camping tour of Etosha leaving the next day, so I got excited. Once she called, however, they said they were full and couldn’t fit anyone else. I took their Master Binder of Tours and Things to Do, and sat down with my cheese and crackers to decide what I was going to do for the next four days. This was a serious low point. By the next morning, I was convinced I wasn’t going to go because a few different scenarios hadn’t worked out. One of the girls in the dorm room with me was living in Etosha and studying giraffes on a Fulbright, but there was no room left in the car she was taking, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get around the park or back to the airport once I got there. A couple other ladies were thinking of renting a car, but nothing seemed to materialize there either. But in the morning, the Safari Lady arrived and seemed to work some magic. A tour guide had come to pick up three guests for an 8 day camping tour of Namibia—Etosha, the Namib Desert, and Soussusvlei (the biggest sand dune in the world). Since there were only three people, the Safari Lady got them to let me jump on for the first four days in which they were going to see Etosha and the town of Swakopmund, and then part from them on Wednesday morning and take a shuttle to the airport in Windhoek. And I can still pay the three day tour price. Oh it was so perfect! So I gathered my stuff, checked out, and hopped on the tour. And thus began my sojourn into the tourism side of Africa. And what a strange beast it can be.

When you enter into the world of the tours, you are essentially buying a certain kind of experience. Tourism, at least in Africa, is like a veneer that is hiding the more unsightly things but with a thin shiny gloss. Hence Namibia has good roads, running (hot) water in all the campgrounds, punctual appointments, quality restaurants with non-local imported food. Namibia looks more developed because without these things the hordes of 50-something German couples would not spend their big Euros there. Many people on a shoestring budget don’t go this way. They hole up at backpackers’ hostels, hitchhike to see things, rely on chance relationships and meeting and a flexible schedule to get them around places. There is less security, and more unknowns, but less money and a greater adventure, I guess. I suppose I am somewhere in the middle. Even the “cultural” tours can be a little canned. Let’s make tourists feel good by showing them the “real” Namibia, the people in the slums and opportunities to photograph the oldest traditional and isolated tribe in their bedrooms. Animals, rather than people, are better viewed in this zoo-like way and a better use of my money. Suffice it to say, I am glad and way happy to be on a camping tour with three other people rather than the enormous buses full of wealthy German tourists and all their earthly needs met. Though even the camping tour is quite pampering.

So we were off to Etosha. Me, Karrie—a woman from Texas, her daughter Erin (who seems to run in the same public health circles in DC as I do—small world), and her college friend Lou, an anesthesiologist from Stanford. And of course Millner, our tour guide. The first day was a long drive from Windhoek to the park and we didn’t do or see anything much except drive. I understood why people get such a kick out of traveling on a whim. It was so much more satisfying how this trip worked out than if I had planned it. It made it more exciting. We camped the first night on the border outside the park, welcomed by some springbok and a wildebeest. It was a beautiful day until we go to the campground when Mother Earth decided she needed some water and it poured down on us. It was quite miserable. Here we were, this new group of people (and me with no rain gear either—I was soaked), who didn’t know how to set up these particular tents and not looking world to cooking in the rain and a further wet night. Millner ended up setting up the tents with minimal help from us since we didn’t know how and like a trooper managed a delicious hot meal that made us all feel better.

The next day was our major day in Etosha, our game drive day. Basically, Millner drove us around the third of the park tourists could visit and we would see what we could see. I was hoping for elephants, but it seems it is the time of year that they migrate to the restricted area of the park. Elephants are a nuisance to most people because they see them too much, but I get to leave Namibia without seeing one. Despite the lack of elephants, the multitude of giraffes, zebras, lions, and the rare black rhino sighting tried to make up for it. I always enjoyed seeing giraffes in the zoo and had hoped that seeing them in the wild would be something special. I wasn’t disappointed. Seeing them nibbling from trees right next to your car, then mustering their lankiness into an unnatural looking lope is kind of special. The lions we saw had obviously spent the morning gorging themselves on some animal and were very happy and lazy and the juvenile cubs were lying right next to the road seeming to pose for the safari-ers, crouching and drinking from the puddles in the road. We also saw tons of antlered deer-like animals—springbok, impala, kudu, and a wildebeest or two, even a dik-dik here and there. There were a variety of beautifully colored birds, land birds, ostriches, and road runners. Our hunt for cheetahs, leopards, and rhinos was unsuccessful. We spent the night in a campsite within the park which was a campground in a national park like I’ve never experienced. They had fences and gates which they shut at sundown as well as 5 star lodges and 5 star camping. This camp Okankanejo is popular because they have bungalows right next to a lighted watering hole, which in the dry season is sure to draw all kinds of animals. This time of year though, it is smaller. In the morning we watched a large herd of zebra come for their morning refreshments. This time, the putting up of the tents went much swifter and we were all in a much better mood since we were dry. That night we listened as the jackals called to one another and ran through our campsite scavenging for food. In the morning we packed up early, had some yummy bacon and eggs and headed out to see what other animals we might see before heading for the desert. We were able to see some more wildebeest, oryx, a few hyenas loping through the grasses and the elusive black rhino. Unlike the other animals we saw that were near the road and conditioned show-offs, the rhino remained a tease by keeping his massive head down in the tall grass and partially concealing himself in the stick bushes, never coming completely out in the open, prompting the passengers in the “rhino jam” to go to questionable lengths to get his picture—like climbing on top of the car. We tore ourselves away from the rhino and continued on to the next place—Aba Huab in the desert.

After several hours of driving we were dropped off at a local tourist site the Damara people preserve showcasing rock carvings by nomadic Bushmen 2,000 to 6,000 years ago. In this land of burnt red sandstone are some of the most well-preserved carvings in Southern Africa. Bushmen hunters left tributes, records, and maps of herds of valued animals—lions, antelope, elephants, oryx, rhino, and giraffe. The most famous engraving is of a five-toed lion with an exceptionally long tail and an animal in its mouth. The interpretation is that 5 toes represents a human incarnation and it was believed that shamans could connect with the spirit world through animal spirits, thus the lion is a transformed shaman.

The next day we drove to the city of Swakopmund, another German city on the coast, but bigger than Luderitz. We passed from the beautiful red, rocky mountains to the desert plains near the coast. In the afternoon we were free to walk around and visit the markets and craft shops. The next day was a “free day” to spend as we liked, but it was my day to go to the airport. We walked around that afternoon trying to not be bothered by the somewhat desperate craft sellers, stopped at a café, and walked through a couple stores. That night we cleaned ourselves up and went to the nice seafood restaurant on the water. I had a wonderful seafood kebab with several different kinds of seafood and tasty Chardonnay to go with it. Afterwards we headed to a local bar where I enjoyed a yummy Savannah Dry cider. It was the perfect way to spend my last night in Namibia.

A Different Kind of Africa (Part 1)

I decided about a month ago to take a spontaneous holiday and have spent the last couple of weeks in Namibia. My cousin Leslie has been there for the last eight months and plane tickets were suddenly rather cheap so I took off from West Africa to see a bit of the Africa everyone dreams about. I wanted to see big animals, meet other Peace Corps Volunteers, and spend some time with a relative I never see. As far as those three things, the trip was a complete success.

I arrived at the Windhoek airport early on Thursday morning sleep deprived and curious. I got from the airport to the bus station via a connection of Leslie’s and settled in to wait for the next several hours until there were enough customers to leave. Windhoek kind of shocked me. I didn’t see much of it the whole trip, but it’s a very clean and modern city, full of new buildings, new cars, painted houses with high walls, interesting looking restaurants—a city like anyone would find in America and better than most. The car that was to take me to Keetmanshoop was new, operational, clean and spacious, quite dissimilar to my normal travel experiences in Ghana. As customers filled the car, I began to get a feel for the people in this new place—the sound of Afrikaans, the enormous diversity in skin color, and the sound of one of Southern Africa’s many “clicking” languages. Very musical and fun to listen to.

Eventually we left for Keetmans and as I watched (and we flew down a very smooth and well-maintained road, might I add) the land changed from mountainous to mid-western flat with fields and great herds of goats and cows. We arrived too late in Keetmans to get a car to Aus, so I stayed with a couple PCVs in that town. Two volunteers were living in a flat at the hospital’s quarters with two other Czech volunteers. Electricity, running water, apartment style housing, fridge, oven, etc. Is this Peace Corps? One of the PCVs, Will, was heading to Luderitz in the morning and Aus was on the way, so we headed out the next morning to find a car.

Namibia is very sparsely populated—especially in the south. There are only two million people in the whole country. Towns in the south are few and far between, so at every town almost every car has to stop and refuel. People looking for rides and drivers looking for customers often find each other at gas stations. So Will and I hunkered down at a gas station for a couple of hours until a “combi” (large van) going to Luderitz picked us up. It was a couple hours to Aus and the land changed again from Missouri to Utah. As the grasslands transitioned to the Namib Desert, mountains made of sandstone blocks erupted out of the ground. Sand, shrubbery, cacti, strange looking trees, and empty riverbeds were all that could be seen in the mountain beneath the cloudless blue sky. Aside from the lack of sage brush, it looked so very similar to the land that was Leanna’s and mine playground for so many years. In here was Aus and the Klein Aus Vista lodge that was Leslie’s workplace. We sat and had lunch in the lodge dining room (you have no idea how excited I was about that ham sandwich) on the balcony overlooking the desert and began our three or four days of nonstop talking. After collecting some fruits and veggies from the bosses for dinner that night, we walked to Leslie’s house in Aus and then took the five minute walk around Aus. You’d think (or at least I did) this would be a village, but it’s not. Aus is like a little resort town at low season—there’s nobody in it. But, like Windhoek, its clean, modern, and with nobody walking around. And the local people are in a lower income neighborhood across the street away from the town. Of course the best part was the short nightly ritual we set up having good German beer (dear God it was so good) outside on the Bahnhof Hotel deck where a couple nights later I enjoyed a dinner of kudu and ostrich kebabs.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to do in Aus except hike, or maybe visit the nearby wild horses from which the lodge earns its living. Hence the Texas-Cowboy-in-Africa feel that the lodge exudes. So we hiked to The Lookout—the sort hike over the rocks between the peaks of the mountains that are the barrier between the mountain desert and the moonscape into nothingness on the other side. 

That nothingness we crossed a couple days later on the way to Luderitz, an oddly placed, old German colony on the west coast of Namibia. Originally settled by German colonists in the 1800s(?) mostly because of the nearby rich diamond deposit, it is an odd mixture of beach and desert. Ocean on one side, flowing sand dunes on the other three sides. We walked around Shark Island; a place once used by the Germans in an early genocide of Africans, but today is a very windy camping park, the history invisible to its modern uses. And we went to Kolmanskuppe, a town built a few miles out of Luderitz purely to house the workers of the diamond “mine.” In fact most of the diamonds they found were lying on the surface. For 20 some years in the early 1900s, Kolmanskuppe was a thriving little town complete with theater hall, gymnastics equipment, a school, an ice factory, and a hospital with one of the earliest working x-ray machines, then it was abandoned abruptly and the surrounding desert is slowly burying it. Now it’s a destination for history buffs and, oddly enough, photographers of all abilities wanting to play with the site’s light and shadow abnormalities. We spent the morning playing and experimenting with our cameras, or, at least, I did.

While in Luderitz we stayed with a couple PCVs who were living in a flat in town. Will, my hitch hiking buddy from earlier was there and we all had a great time swapping our Peace Corps experiences over a wonderful dinner of rice and rogan josh curry with chicken. Mmmmm. As Thursday faded and with it my first week in Namibia, I was trying to find a way to see Etosha National Park, a long way to the north. It was becoming more and more apparent to me that I would feel incredibly stupid and regretful if I left Namibia without seeing the best wildlife viewing it had to offer. None of the tours seemed to be working out with my schedule, since it is the low season so less tours are booked. Since Leslie had to go back to Aus anyway to work, I decided to just travel to Windhoek the next day, and hole up at the popular Chameleon Backpacker’s Hostel and see if something would “work out.”

I think I Created a Monster

Precious is a very precocious (no pun intended) 15 year old girl who is in her second class in junior high school. She is one of the top performing students so the teachers pick her for just about anything that needs school representation outside the school. And the best part? She LOVES books. Precious doesn't originally come from Damanko, but her family came from somewhere around Kumasi. She said when she was younger her grandmother used to make her spend the hours after school in the library there, and she developed a love for books. In Damanko, however, there is not much to read. The headmaster at the junior high school quickly found that Precious could not only read at a higher level than most of his students but was equally impressed by the level with which she could recite (not word for word of course) the stories she read. But he soon ran out of novels to give her. (I think the school has scavenged maybe a total of five books one of them being Huck Finn.) So he started sending her to my house. At first I gave her easy-to-read abridged classics I found for sale in Hohoe. She got through those in a couple of hours. Then I started giving her books from our informal Peace-Corps-pass-around library and at first I didn't have much that was suitable for a teenaged African girl, so I gave her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She was excited that it looked like a grown-up book. Surprisingly, she had few problems reading or understanding it. Because of the rote memorization technique the schools employ here, students can usually read the words, but their comprehension is very low. After a couple easier children's novels, I gave her the big volume of the Chronicles of Narnia. I knew I had a winner there, because she devoured that book rapidly and her eyes lit up when she talked to me about it. She even kept it for a long time and read it through a second time. During all that time, I was collecting the Harry Potter books for her because various copies are in various Peace Corps offices and I even had to get the first book sent from home.

After about a month and a half, she is starting on the sixth book. One indicator of JK Rowling's genius is the ability of the books to evoke the same emotion in all its readers. Precious had never heard of Harry Potter before I gave her the books, never met anyone who had read them, and is totally isolated and ignorant about the Potter-mania that has sprung up and the cultural icon that is Harry Potter. Yet she acts like every other 15-year-old I ever saw that absolutely loves the books. Her mother tells her not to come and collect anymore, she is totally addicted. (I'm sure this makes me a bad influence.) I have all except the very last movie on my computer, so I've started letting her watch the movies and we only finished watching the first one today. Because many of the lines follow very closely with the book, she was predicting the actors' lines before they said them. And, no, of course she had never seen the movie before. She remembers nearly every little detail from any of the books she read; details such as that Filch is a squib, and she knows what that means. I had to convince her not to skip ahead in the movie because she was so curious to see what Quidditch looked like. She loves all the good characters and hates the bad ones with a vengeance. She is vehemently convinced of Snape's duplicity. Anytime the movie showed a panoramic view of the castle or flying on brooms, Precious would lament: “I wish I were a wizard!” She is certain all other books will be boring compared to the bright shiny world of Harry Potter. She would fit right in any of the Harry Potter fandom and there isn't much of that in Africa. Is the mark of a truly good story that it provokes similar behavior and emotions in all different people?

When she finishes the series, I'll tell her to take a break from books for a while (she may also need to catch up on her math practices), then I'll throw The Lord of the Rings at her and see what happens.

Kristi's Ongoing Conversations with Herself (Yes! It's back!): Images and Perceptions of Poverty--a year in

2-15-12

What do you think poverty look like? When I was home visiting, I talked to several high school classes about Peace Corps and the kind of work I was doing in Ghana. I showed them pictures of the projects I had finished, pictures of people, and pictures of life in the village. Not just once, but several times, a different student would reflect and comment on the feeling of thankfulness my presentation evoked, gratitude over the comforts they enjoy and the lives they lead and the things they take for granted. I was a little thrown by such statements because, while I don't want to discourage a feeling of thankfulness for blessings, that sentiment was not what I was trying to evoke at all. First, I was trying to show them another, equally rich world, a different way of life, a challenge, an adventure. Second, behind this statement is a feeling of pity--”Oh those poor Africans. They don't even have running water and the women have to work so hard (by pounding) to make food everyday.” Pity is one of the motivations that is at the root of Africa's troubles. Out of feelings of guilt and charity, the West is mostly responsible for the continued poverty of Africa. For so long, the aid that came to Africa was about trying to fix Africa's problems without teaching or helping Africa fix its problems itself.

This, of course, is the lens of a high school student, who can't imagine life without a hot shower everyday and easy access to computerized entertainment. I remember what those feelings felt like. But it's funny. As I sit on my perch and watch people walk to and from the market, I have to actually remind myself that what I am seeing is what the rest of the world (including the same people I am watching) considers poor. I am so used to these scenes now, I forget that what I look at is supposed to be “poor” and instead, it just looks like regular old life. The fact that things are always carried on heads rather than vehicles and people walk long distances—life. The fact that everyone's feet are covered in dust and many are barefoot—life. The fact that people are not invisible in their houses watching TV—life. The fact that people have to carry and keep water in bowls and barrels—life. Even naked children seem a highly practical part of life and not as evidence that their parents are too poor to afford clothes. (How many clothes do your babies go through? Who wants to keep buying clothes when kids continually get dirty and tear holes in them? It's quite economical, really. Plus, it's hot here.) It's funny how in America, running water is such an intrinsic part of life, that we think people must really suffer without it. But it is so not true. The suffering comes when people have no access to clean water, not that it doesn't come at a moment's notice with the turn of the faucet or the flush of the toilet. In a place where no one has it, you don't miss it. And you don't miss it because no one expects you to live like you have it. I can actually count on one hand the number of times I've said to myself “I wish I had running water.” So what are the indicators of poverty if it is not these saturating images of dirty children and overworked women? Of course the governmental organizations and NGOs working to alleviate poverty have all kind of measurements like life span, child mortality rates, income levels, accesses to opportunity, etc and I cannot argue much with those. It is the judgments made by the heartstrings of laymen and potential donors that are hard to swallow.

Ghanaians have an unhealthy sense of their own poverty which frustrates me and makes me sad. Because they see themselves as poor, they don't value a lot about their everyday lives. Everything about wealthy countries and cultures is better than what they have, to their mind. If we're looking on a national scale, meaning wealth country by country, to me real poverty is starving people, no access to medicines for preventable or curable diseases, no protection for women's rights, no freedom to advance your status. These are problems faced by many countries on the verge of or recovering from civil war. Ghana has these problems, but on a much much smaller scale. It is hard for me to think about what is happening in Somalia and think that Ghana is poor. To me, the citizens of Somalia, the Sudan, the eastern Congo, and Haiti are truly poor. Conversely, it is hard for Ghanaians to see images of Europe and America and NOT think they are poor. 

Family Planning and Cultural Dancing Community Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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