Note: This post is not as long as it looks Hey Everybody! With only a couple weeks left until I touch down in Toronto, and only one week of work left here, I’ve been pretty strapped for time lately. As a result, I haven’t been able to keep up with my usual pace of writing. Unfortunately, this won’t be a ‘typical’ post either, as I’m far behind in work due to being sick with giardiasis for five days now.
I’ll do my best to summarize the time since my last post. Here are some photo galleries that explain themselves via captions:
Each of these really deserves more than a quick blurb - especially the last one - but in a few weeks you’ll probably hear me rant about each in person anyway (apologies in advance; I’ll try to limit my rants as much as possible), so this will have to due for now.
For the rest of this post, I’ll ease my conscience by posting excerpts from various e-mails that I’ve written. I’ve spent an excessive amount of time giving personal replies to e-mails, and I thought it was a shame that only one person would ever see them, so I’ve put some snippets here. There’s quite a few, but you only have to read the ones that interest you. Consider this a smorgasbord of ideas I couldn’t fit into my blog:
On believing me:
“Just as your response was an opinion based on your knowledge and experience, remember that what I say to you is merely that as well. Though I may be on the ground, this is much bigger than me and I can’t even pretend to have all the answers (if there even are any). The best anybody can really do is try, and so that’s what I do.”
On climate change:
“…while I cannot draw any exact links, just last year in Burkina Faso the waters got so high that they were on the verge of destroying a dam there. As a result, they opened up the dam, and it flooded Ghana (they had no choice really; if the dam broke, it would have resulted in the same disaster). The Oti River raised up high enough to destroy almost all the crops in the area that I’m living in right now. I’ve heard reports of people who were in Ghana, walking among rows of 6 foot stalks of corn one week, then two weeks later they were canoeing over top of the same area, where the corn stalks were 2 feet below the surface.”
On music:
At any public event there will be at least three people drumming, and church seems to double as a dance hall most Sundays, with the band playing an electric bass, a set of drums, a keyboard, and somebody singing. The curious thing is that, in Saboba at least, people have an amazing feel for rhythm, but are utterly tone-deaf. Usually you’ll have the drummer going crazy in the background while the keyboardist just does his own thing, meanwhile the bassist is just rocking out, not really paying attention to anybody else, and two singers just singing whatever they feel like, and not even trying to harmonize. Imagine if five people, each playing a different song, were put together, and that’s what it sounds like. People don’t really care though, and they dance to it anyway.
On class differences:
“This is a tough one, and I don’t have a good answer. There seems to be a difference between those who farm and those who have desk jobs. The latter tend to show off their money in public, but it’s hard to tell how much they really have. You could see them wearing nice clothes and driving a motorcycle, only to go to their home to see that they have no other possessions and live in a single 10 foot by 10 foot room. The few white people that live here make another class I suppose, as they are typically in a high position such as a priest or a doctor. There’s also a nomadic tribe here called the Fulani, which is an extremely mysterious group of people that live by themselves in the deep bush and raise cattle for people, and will often leave an area without telling anybody. I could almost classify them as Ghanaian hillbillies.”
On street vendors:
“The vendors were quite overwhelming for me at first, but I’m slowly getting used to them, and am starting to find them convenient. For example, when I’m on a bus going from Tamale to Saboba, and we make a stop in Yendi, people swarm the bus selling water, fried cheese, bread, crackers, various cooked meats, chicken balls, and just about anything else you can imagine. We don’t even need to leave the bus to buy things. When I start to think about it a bit deeper it kind of bothers me that people have to resort to this sort of thing to make a living, and at some point in the future it needs to stop if they’d like to ‘develop’ (whatever that means…), but for now it’s not really hurting anything. I actually saw an article in the paper here which talked about how there is a movement to beautify Accra, as right now it looks like a disaster zone for the most part, and the first thing they said to do was get rid of the street vendors, so I don’t think it’ll be much longer until something changes.”
On tigers:
“… there are no tigers in Africa (I know, it blew me away too…); they are actually an Asian thing! Crazy eh?”
On conditioning:
“From what I hear, most of the developing world is rather similar in terms of infrastructure, but differ in terms of degree. It worries me how accustomed I am becoming to Ghana, and sometime I have to take a step back and think about the things I am seeing, and try to imagine what I would think if I saw them in Canada. It’s crazy.”
“What surprises me the most about being here is how normal it feels. It doesn’t feel like I’m in some sort of exotic land far away from home; it just feels like I just left home and went somewhere else where things are different, and that it takes some time to adjust to them…”
On technological leap-frogging (for example, there are almost no landlines in Ghana as people went straight to cellular phones):
“Most definitely, and the cell-phone example is the first that comes to mind. I find it interesting that you say “I do think that we can save them from all the problems the "West" encountered along the way by sharing "new" technologies,” as I think that this is a major source of problems. The West was able to figure things out slowly, but surely, and the society was able to adapt to the changes as they came. They not only adapted to them at a personal level, but also in terms of infrastructure and our educational facilities. As none of these technologies were developed here, there are huge start-up costs involved with the implementation of most large projects, and the human resources needed to operate them don’t exist as the level of education hasn’t caught up with the technology yet. The result is that all the money from these technologies is essentially flowing out of the country and into the hands of international corporations that do have the means of operating them. OneTouch, the cell phone company owned by the government of Ghana, is about to have 70% of it’s shares sold to an international company because they just can’t keep up with the other international companies like Tigo or MTN. ‘Us’ saving ‘them’ from problems in this case is really more of the same ‘us’ exploiting ‘them.’”
[NOTE: Later the same day as I wrote this, I read the first chapter of Mastering the Machine, which talks about practically the same thing as predicted in the 1970's, only in a much better manner than I have.]
On Ghanaians developing Ghana:
“In Saboba at least, the people here are totally empowered and are dead set on developing Saboba themselves. It’s incredible. Just about every educated person I’ve talk to so far is getting an education for the sole reason that they want to come back home and help develop the area themselves...They understand the situation so much better than us, and many are attempting to attend foreign universities so that they can learn the concepts and way of thinking, so that they can take away what they feel will work for Ghana and apply it there themselves. I’m totally blown away.”
[As a side note, there are also a number of people here who are getting an education in development for the simple reason that it is an almost guaranteed job, and not for such altruistic reasons.]
On watching Band of Brothers with my host-brother:
“It was quite an experience to watch Band of Brothers with my host-brother. For one, as Hollywood-type movies aren’t big here, they aren’t used to seeing very realistic violence, so that seemed to be a huge shock to him. Also, during the scenes where a soldier would get injured and the others would try to save him, he would become extremely frustrated and would say things like ‘Just let him die!” “You’re going to get killed yourself!” or some other comment implying that they are idiots. This is surprising given how collective of a society Ghana has. In the end, he just described the whole set of events as pitiful.”
On civil conflict:
“Saboba was a conflict zone less than a decade ago. Tribal conflicts are vicious; guns and the whole works. Right now, there are two civil conflicts happening in Ghana, though they are with tribes that are not in my region. A little while ago I passed through a conflict zone, however, and we had to go through a number of police roadblocks. The conflict there is quite dormant now, but they police are still needed to check the importation of weapons.”
On roosters:
“…it’s so hard to convey just how much one of them can disrupt your morning unless you’ve experienced it yourself. I always found that there was a very romantic notion that surrounded being woken up by roosters; that romantic notion lasted about two days for me when I came to Ghana.”
On television:
“They only have a couple of channels, and they usually have Ghanaian versions of Western shows. For example, “The Price is Right” is called “Ur Guess is Right.” Imagine if you slashed the budget about 1000 times then replaced the crazed audience with a completely apathetic group of people and you’d basically have it. They also have a learning channel which plays constantly giving lessons on a number of different high school subjects.”
On Canadians:
“…they seem to have the opinion that they understand Canada very well, though most of the time they are totally wrong. They have a very idealistic notion of what it is like in the West. They find it extremely difficult to believe that there is such thing as poverty or homelessness in Canada, or that wealth can bring with it more problems.”
[Note that I would have been just as wrong about anything I thought of Ghana before coming here.]
On Western influence:
“Western culture is definitely much more prevalent in southern Ghana where people are more wealthy and are trying to imitate the Western styles and such, but it influences the north as well, but not as much as one might think. All the television here is Ghanaian based, and the movies that they watch are Nigerian made, so there is little direct influence from the West. The influences that they get are often channelled through things such as the clothes that the actors of the Nigerian films wear, through videos of Celion Dion or Westlife, and through hearsay and stereotypes, so often it is merely the surfaces of Western culture that they see, such as the clothes, and not much more than that. In terms of thinking, many of them want the Western conveniences, but either don’t know how to, or don’t want to, do the things that will get them to that point. Naturally, this causes a lot of problems.”
On photography:
“It’s so difficult to do. I was only able to capture Mariana[, the woman in front of the material,] because I snapped the shot as quickly as I could after asking her permission, when she was still kind of giddy about the idea of having her photo taken. As soon as she realized I was taking the photo she got really serious and so the second photo of her didn’t turn out nearly as well.”
On children:
“…it’s quite complicated, and is very hard to generalize. It differs from child to child and is also based on gender. As far as I can tell, young boys have absolutely no responsibility, and simply exist to shout things at me. The young girls, however, tend to do the cooking, water/firewood fetching, chores, and anything else that needs to be done. The place that I go to buy my Fan products actually has a little girl working there, who can’t be more than 10 years old, and I’ve seen her there days when she should be in school, which is a real shame. Gender roles here are shameful, and for that reason they are often major priorities for programs that get implemented by NGOs and other organizations. Most of the children [in Saboba] go to school, but I’m not sure how many actually stick with it. Those who live closer to the school, or who have more money, definitely have an easier time than those who don’t. Like I said, it’s complicated…”
On the appetite of Ghanaians:
“In response to your surprise about the portion sizes here, the appetite of the people is quite a curious thing, and I’m thinking it has to do with their way of life. My host-father, Samuel, is about 50-years-old, and is one of the most muscular people I have ever seen; there is hardly a bit of fat on his entire body. Given that, he needs to take in an extremely high amount of calories per day in order to sustain him during 12 hours of farming (not the kind of farming done with a tractor either; everything is done by hand). If his appetite is limited, he simply wouldn’t get through a day, and so I think his body has adjusted (that, or it is hereditary, which would explain how the children can eat so much as well). That being said, I don’t eat an extreme amount as it is, and so I think that the type of people who do indulge in the super-sized amounts of food could probably eat an equal amount as him, but it’d hardly be for the same reasons.”
On Gender:
“I find men and women rarely communicate or show any sort of affection, though on occasion I’ll see one of my host-brothers teasing my host-mother. The women tend to ‘bond’ together, though it is hard to define bond in this sense. They perform the same tasks together, at the very least. For traditional families, such as my own, the gender disparity isn’t so bad. My host-father farms manually six days a week, and it is damn hard, so I’d say the male/female roles are just about equal. Where the trouble lies is when a man from a traditional family gets a desk job, and still expects the woman to do the same traditional tasks; life becomes totally unfair for the woman.”
[In Zamsheigu, an NGO called ActionAID has succeeded in significantly changing the gender roles, so all men now help with cooking supper and doing chores. Mind you, the women still cook the first two meals of the day and still do the bulk of chores, but they are making progress. In addition, no women there attend school, and no child below the age of seven attends either, as the journey is too far to make each morning. Those who do attend, often attend sporadically.]
On sleeping:
“Sleeping is pretty rough, and for the first little while I was pretty much a pissed off zombie most mornings. I’m actually adjusting quite fast though, and am able to tune out most of the noise in the morning. This makes me think that the people that live here have simply become accustomed to it, or at the very least, that they wake up earlier and simply contribute to the noise.”
On insects:
“I was held hostage in my room last night by the biggest grasshopper on the face of the planet. The thing had a cross-section about the size of a nickel, and it wouldn’t stop jumping around my room. It ultimately rested on the curtain in front of my door, trapping me inside. Eventually I got past him and asked my host-brother for a net with which to capture him. Not understanding what I meant by net (I don’t think), Gideon came in my room, grabbed the closest thing to him – a towel – and just went crazy swinging at the creature. He managed to stun him, then picked him up with his bare hands!”
On the snack food and ‘convenience’ stores:
“The snacks are all made by the same company actually, Fan, so if a store sells Fan products, then they have a good variety. The store is more like a house, and confused the heck out of me when I first got here. You walk up to a desk that is about 20 feet in front of the house, tell them what you want (which means you have to already know what they have in stock) then they run inside, leaving their jars of money at the desk, and get you what you ask for. The process usually takes about 10 minutes and sometimes they’ll just come back out and tell you that they are out of whatever you asked for. It’s terribly inefficient.”
On aid:
“…I certainly feel your pain when it comes to almost resorting to giving personal aid just to stop the suffering you see right in front of you. It’s such a hard decision to make, but I try to see the big picture and realize that I couldn’t possibly help everybody that I come across, and that I’m here to help thing at a higher level that will allow these people to help themselves. But my god it’s a hard thing to look past…”
On goats:
“There will be more goats in the future, I promise.’
-Ryan
