Hello all! It's been a crazy couple of weeks! Travel time has been really amazing - and also really challenging. I'm really glad I've had a chance to visit more of Ghana and to see some really incredible things. I'm also really grateful that I've had a chance to be a 'tourist' in a more conventional sense for a week, as its given me a new perspective on my village experience and my goals while in Ghana. Let's start at the beginning....or where I left off last time.
Fist stop was Tamale, in the Northern region. We were there to volunteer at an organization called Shekinah, run by a Ghanaian doctor which provides a Christmas dinner to the cities poorest. The Doctor himself is truly amazing (I'm not writing his name because I don't know how to spell it. - even though it makes me picture him as David Tennant). He has such a matter of fact optimism about him, and is incredibly sincere. We had the chance to talk to him about his life and why he started Shekinah, and I guess I was surprised not to feel cynical about it. Basically, he runs a free clinic for the destitute and those abandoned by society. He also runs a food program which brings hot meals to people, including the mentally ill, who live on the streets in Tamale. The Christmas dinner he provides every year is about more than just food though. It's a chance for the poorest of the city to have a day of joy and a day of dignity. We spent the days leading up to Christmas at the Doctor's house, helping prepare for this Christmas dinner and it was really amazing. Granted, I never thought I'd spend Christmas Eve pulling apart 750kg of raw chicken (well, not alone, I had help...at least, I helped). But it was so great to be a part of something so big - and so positive. I'm not sure how to write about Christmas day without sounding cheesy - all I can say is that it was really inspiring. Which is nice, because I feel like I haven't been inspired in a long time. I had the chance to go around in the food program truck and bring food, pop and popcorn to those who were unable or unwilling to come to Doctor's house for the meal. As I was riding in the truck, watching the volunteers pass out food I thought a lot about my degree in 'development' and how Shekinah clinic is antithetical to pretty much everything I've learned about "proper" development work. For one thing, there is no 'goal' other than to love and help the poor. There's no measurement of increased earnings or productivity, no increase in GDP per capita, nothing to contribute to the development index. It's about giving aid to individuals. And for some depressing reason this was kind of shocking to me. Also, there's no plan, no sustainability, no exit strategy. Doctor relies on God; "Divine Intervention". He's very matter of fact about it. He gets his funds from donations, from people who have heard about his work and want to support it. He gets no official funding because it is impossible to keep track of spending in Ghana, and he refuses to keep inaccurate records or use dishonest receipts. Yet he has all these stories of how, just when he needed something it showed up. Which we saw first hand when someone spontaneously donated a huge load of cabbage for Christmas dinner - without even knowing that this was the one ingredient they hadn't produced enough of. Normally I would be so skeptical of this system - and I was. But its worked for years, and the clinic has grown and continues to do amazing work. Again, I don't know how to explain it - because I'd been told about it many times but didn't really get it until I was there, part of it in some small way. In the end though, we fed over 3500 people. Our group was there from 5:30am until 9:00pm and we were neither the first to arrive nor the last to leave. It was exhausting and beautiful and possible one of my best Christmases ever. Which is nice, because I thought I'd be really homesick. Hmmmm, Divine intervention?
From Tamale, the group split up and travel time started in earnest. Michelle, Rachel and I headed down to Nkranza (spl?) to stay with an organization called Hand in Hand. Hand in Hand is a school and home for mentally challenged children and adults who have been abandoned by their families and have no one to care for them. It also runs a hotel. We got there late Sunday and found they'd mixed up our reservation - so we were in this really sweet room that was kinda over budget for us....but really nice to have to be in (all other rooms were booked). Monday's plan was to go see monkeys at the Boabeng Fiema Monkey Sanctuary nearby...which we did...after a morning spent at the hospital due to Michelle's malaria relapse. In the afternoon though, minus Michelle, and in spite of an impeding rain storm Rachel and I set out. Because of the rain, our not very water proof trotrotrotrofriggin amazing! There were two kinds - mona and colobus. The latter are shy and don't eat human food so they "have no use for humans". They're the ones who watched us from the treetops. The Monas, the guide called and they came right up to us - taking food from Rachel's hand. They like human food - a lot. They come into the villages around mealtimes, or when they know no ones around and apparantly steal food.They're tiny, and adorable and just super cute and fascinating. It's very different seeing them in the wild, jumping about from tree to tree and basically acting like you'd expect.Ohhh, monkeys.
Tuesday morning it was off to Ejisu, just outside of Kumasi. After finally finding our guest house and dropping off our stuff, we went to a Kente weaving village called Aboamase. Kente is the traditional cloth of the Ashante peoples of Ghana, and is really beautiful. The village we went to provides tours, run by a community project that reinvests in community development. They've already built a library with the proceeds and are hoping to build a hospital next. Though much of the cloth now is made with synthetic, imported fibers, we did see how local cotton - traditionally used - is spun and prepared. The weavers themselves were amazing - they worked really fast on complex patterns, using both hands and both feet to operate the looms. It was interesting though to be in a village setting, as a tourist, rather than as an adopted family member. It was interesting too that kente cloth, available at a number of shops is cheaper for tourists than for Ghanaians. The guide explained that this is because if locals buy it cheap, they can then sell it for a profit so the sellers charge them more to ensure this doesn't happen. Not only is there less fear of tourists doing this, but the sellers want western tourists in particular to buy the kente so as to increase its popularity and therefore increase demand for the products. Economically, this kind of makes sense to me...but it still seems not quite right. It brings up the question of culturally appropriation - of westerners buying these cultural products without understanding their meaning or significance. Yet it's also difficult to say that the villagers shouldn't sell their Kente to tourists - as a means of making money and as a means of sharing their culture - shouldn't that be their choice? BUT is it a choice if its driven by economic need? The guide really wanted us to dress up in kente and have our picture taken, as the last part of the tour. We said we didn't have time, but really it was because it made us really uncomfortable. It's especially difficult as a westerner, knowing that western culture has spread around the world - including to Ghana - and not really feeling I have the right to decide what parts of culture should be sold, or protected, or changed. Culture and economics have always been tied together, but the power dynamic makes it a really complicated issue when it comes to wealthy tourists buying from a developing country. Anyway...
Next stop was an Ashanti Shrine, which was really, really cool. It had been restored, yet still is one of the only remaining examples of pre-colonial Ashanti architecture and had a lot of interesting information on Ashanti culture, religion and history. We spent the night in Ejisu, then spent Wednesday traveling down to Cape Coast. By this time, I was getting a little tired of the Trotro system. On the way to Ejisu, our trotro driver had been a maniac - driving too fast on pretty curvy sometimes mountainous roads. This time, to Cape Coast, our Trotro could barely start without help and we had to keep stopping to check the engine - once to do some sort of repairs. We made it to Cape Coast though, where things got very touristy. Our guest house is a popular one for westerners and it was weird to be surrounded by white people all of a sudden. It was also frustrating because around the guest house food was expensive - which is understandable, but made it hard to stick to our strict budget. The next morning we took some time off, just to relax and not be in a trotro and chill. In the afternoon, we went to Cape Coast Castle - an old British fort which had been used to contain slaves before shipping them to the Americas. Obviously, it was pretty intense and kind of difficult. It was weird too because the fort itself reminded me of Fort Henry, in Kingston....yet it was so, so different. It made me realize how lightly I take British colonialism in Kingston - how sanitized it is at Murney Tower - focusing on the suffering of the soldiers having to share a room with 12 others (oh no!) - no wars, just little Timmy who was killed when the roof fell off. Yet here, it really hit home -standing in the dungeons where people literally suffocated to death, piled in by the hundreds -feeling the energy of a place where so many had not only died, but who had been made to suffer horrendously. Over top of the male dungeon there was an Anglican Church - which just seems so obscene. It added to the feelings of white guilt with which I've already been struggling. It also made me realize for the billionth time how lucky I am...to live when and where and under what economic circumstance I live. And yet, its not just luck. I'm also part of a system where I benefit from economic exploitation - from the suffering of others. Its not an easy thing to come face to face with. It would be so much nicer to say that slavery is over with, in the past, and isn't it horrible what my forefathers did and isn't it great we've moved past such injustice. It would be really, really nice. Maybe one day. But part of this experience is realizing that just because some forms of slavery, or economic exploitation, or social injustice have ended doesn't mean that they all have. And its one thing to shake our head at the past, its another to actually learn from it.
We spent Thursday night in Cape Coast, leaving early Friday morning for the Hideout Lodge, in a village called Butre. It was New Years Eve and was supposed to be our chance to relax, at a budget hotel, by the beach, and to chill and recover from so much traveling. And I'll add that the Hideout is not some huge resort - its very low key, and reasonably priced, and the people there seemed cool. And yet.....this was when tourist mode really hit. The beach was really gorgeous - Ghana has beautiful coastline, where pollution and urbanization haven't taken their toll. It's just that it was really weird to be surrounded by white people who were basically on vacation, right next door to a village so much like my own, where locals lived in what we would call poverty. The three of us talked a lot, and struggled a lot, and experienced a lot of discomfort at being there, especially that first day. For me, the biggest struggle was feeling like I didn't belong there - I couldn't spend the money on the insanely overpriced western food, I couldn't just order cocktail after cocktail, and I couldn't just lay on the beach and forget everything I'd been through and seen the past two and a half months - even though I really just wanted to. Yet in a way, I did belong there. I'm a Canadian, not a Ghanaian. I am white. I am wealthy. And when, after hours - literally hours of debating whether or not to order a meal at the resort, to give ourselves a break from the past couple of months, we decided to walk into the village and get local street food I also felt I didn't belong there. I guess I expected some good Karma to come out of that decision, but instead we had trouble finding food within our budget- because of course, prices are raised for rich Obrunis staying a the beach. And of course they are! Its not like I blame the locals for trying to charge me 30 peswas more than usual for rice and stew - or an extra 50 peswas for a big bag of water. Because really, I can afford it, and its still cheap by my standards and the west screws them over enough as it is, why shouldn't they charge us a little bit more? And I guess that's where I started to get really disillusioned with the program. It really hit home how artificial "immersion living" is. And in retrospect I know I've changed and grown and learned a lot, simply because I was even having these thoughts, and debating so hard about a 5$ plate of pasta. At the time though it felt like nothing had changed. And if I was going to be here, in this country, why shouldn't I just embrace my privilege, and spend money and enjoy it. After all, the very fact that we traveled so much in the past few days seemed to negate the idea of living in solidarity with the poor. So I ended up feeling like I didn't belong at the lodge, and I didn't belong in the village. It was difficult too that people at the lodge didn't really understand what we were doing. Not really. And the people who thought we were craziest were a Ghanaian and a Gambian. But anyway. I may have strayed away from simple living that night - actually, I did. But it was a good experience because it made me realize that I can't just change to being a tourist - it doesn't feel right and if nothing else, now, within this program is not the time for it. I realized that I'll have a lot of struggling to do once I return home. But now, I'm here, and I've made a commitment to live a certain way regardless of what I can afford, or justify, or feel I deserve. And, again, it sounds cheesy, but here in 2011 I'm really recommitted to living simply, and to giving up as much of my privilege as is possible and reasonable while I'm here. I know it will never be complete, it will always be artificial in some sense. But that doesn't mean its not worthwhile to try. And as I mentioned, the fact that I grapple with these issues, and that I'm really thinking about them and feeling them so deeply shows me how much I've changed. My perspective has changed. My ideas of what I want, need, deserve have all changed. I've come to terms with my lapse, and with my frustration and in a ways I'm glad it all happened - because I was beginning to resent being here and being confined by the program. Now though, I'm really choosing to be here and to be trying my hardest to live simply and to live in solidarity with my Ghanaian family, even though I've left them until March.
Anyway, January 1st was actually an amazing day. We found amazing cheap food in the village, and it was super satisfying. We also kind of segregated ourselves on the beach - lounged around, talked, napped, and frolicked in the waves and I felt super good and genuinely relaxed. Now we're in Kumasi for our retreat - and its been nice to meet up with the other half of the group, and to debrief a lot of what happened on travel time, as well as in the villages. I'm nervous to set off for Accra on Sunday, and to start work placement Monday. It'll be hard to start the transition all over again and try to get my bearings .But I'm also super excited to take control of my experience. There's a lot a want to learn about, especially around gender issues - things which came up in the village and which I'm in the right head space and environment to explore further.
So that's travel time! Big week, long blog. Hope everyone had any amazing Christmas and New Year! Happy 2011 - I think it's gonna be a good one.
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