Location/current state of being: Directly across the street from Fingalix in an internet café that is also a barbershop. True story. Jazz music playing. Pineapple appetizer from the fruit stand has been eaten. Just completed my daily bathroom run diagonally across the street at the gas station (the finest establishments in Ghana, believe me. They sell top dollar items like Obama in Africa wine). Jollof and kelewele and fried chicken dinner from Fingalix has been delivered to my internet cubby. Currently, the barber seat is empty.
Ready to hear about my fully awesome and eventful weekend in Ghana? Ready? Here goes!
I spent approximately five eighths of my weekend in a sorta broken and misshapen bed in my first floor room in the Telecentre Bed and Breakfast. Of those five eighths of my weekend in my bed, approximately three quarters were spent sleeping and the other quarter spent killing How I Met Your Mother episodes on my laptop. I read about 40 pages of Catch-22. I did my laundry yesterday so that I would not have to pack my suitcase for outreach this week with wet clothes that would make the rest of my clothes smell musty… and they’re all dry! I’ve been wearing the same clothes since Friday night because of yesterday’s laundry adventures. I am simply not one to upset a perfectly harmonious balance of yins and yangs. My laundry pile was overworked this weekend, and it would be terribly unfair for me to just dump more on her after all that she’s been through this weekend. I also did some mild exercise yesterday and today and also ate some food and watched several minutes of Ghanaian commercials on the tv in the Telecentre’s lobby. My favorite was the advertisement for the fitness center’s “pilates” classes which was a video clip of a bunch of people sitting on big blue bouncy pilates balls and a series of camera zoom ins and outs of their pelvic regions, which were ever so gracefully thrusting forward and backward. It reminded me of my favorite dance move, the Epic Sax Guy dance.
Exciting? I thought so. This is the kind of thing I’d do on a lazy weekend at home or at school.
Ooooo wait… there is that… one detail I’m leaving out. The one that explains my fortune cookie paper that one time that said that all of my dreams would come true and that I’d be wealthy someday.
Yes. I’m a Ghanaian celebrity! Friday night after returning from a very hectic car ride from a Crystal Eye Clinic outreach near Cape Coast that involved my first experience with motion sickness and an emergency bathroom run at the gas station that was so perfectly timed with the traffic that it wasn’t even necessary to move the car out of the lane of ongoing traffic, there was a mysteriously attractive group of casually dancing people in front of a bunch of lights and cameras plopped on the Telecentre’s driveway’s brick ground. We couldn’t help but to wonder what was going on, and so I asked if they needed an extra actress for whatever they were doing (we had assumed a music video filming) and they said “sure!” despite the fact that I was all sweated up and dressed in a pair of jeans that had ripped on my front thigh that day to reveal a battle scar from a clumsy stumble into a protruding nail from the corner of a wooden plank in the outreach’s church (thank the almighty Buddha for his grace in making me get a tetanus shot, for that darn rusty nail broke my skin!) and a blue Samsung Chelsea football t-shirt that like everyone has because it costs like 10 Ghana cedis (the equivalent of about $6.66). So I joined in and danced next to the guy in the suit, who was apparently the star of the Ghanaian film to be released in July. In English, it’s called “The Woman.” I’m sure it’ll be a soap opera-like film typical of the Ghanaian media industry. If you know me, be prepared for a mandatory viewing party next time you see me. They’ll be sending me a copy of the movie once it comes out.
Long story short, I’m finally agreeing that it pays to be obroni in Ghana. Even if you get overcharged when trying to buy things sometimes, and even if kids chase you around and say “obroni, cash! Obroni, cash!” and don’t let you have your peace when you’re trying to exercise solo outside, and even if taxi drivers honk at every sighting of you because they assume you’re lost and need help finding your way.
Currently, my biggest problem is how I am going to go about watching the next episode of How I Met Your Mother. I had downloaded the entire seven seasons before I left for Ghana, expecting that all of them would function properly. While I was bored on my plane ride, I discovered that season 4 was dysfunctional. I had held off completing season 3 for fear of arriving at season 4 without any episodes to watch besides season 5, and so I began to download a torrent that took me three weeks to complete with my on and off dial-up connections in Ghana. Yesterday I had realized that the first 12 of 24 episodes of season 4 had actually downloaded properly on my laptop with my first torrent! So I was set for the first half. My extremely lazy day made it too easy to complete those twelve episodes, and now I am at an internet café struggling to deal with the fact that the season 4 torrent download I had begun a few weeks ago produced 24 seven seconds of blank MVK videos. Do I move on to season 5 after having completed half of season 4, or do I endure the torturous wait for an uncertain outcome from a third torrent download? And if that doesn’t work out, do I wait to finish the episodes when I return in August? How do I resolve this huge dilemma?
…clearly, my life is in shambles here. I love Ghana.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
These really long blog entries are getting increasingly more difficult to keep up with. Each week I am here presents new information and experiences that I want to document and share with everyone I love, but sometimes when I’m tired I want to just lay in a bed and be a couch potato and serially watch episodes of How I Met Your Mother on my netbook, like I did last night. But now I’m in the UFS van with two and a half hours left to go until I’ve arrived at Jasikan, the town where I’ll be staying until Tuesday for my next outreach with the Crystal Eye Clinic. I’ve been told there is no running water there. Given this, I think that I’m fair game for no internet until I’ve returned to the Telecentre again at the end of this week. So this post is a delayed update of my life thus far in Ghana until Sunday, June 19, 6:03 pm GMT.
So it turns out I am missing another holiday for my dad. Today is Father’s Day! Happy Father’s Day to my dad, my uncles, my friends’ dads, my friends who are dads, Grandpa Joe, and my forefathers. Without your masculine presences, I’m sure I would be among the females who would gravitate towards fulfilling your manly niches. And I’d probably become more manly than I already am. And that’s a rather scary thought. So, thank you for your existences and presences and influences. You are my chains of femininity.
Anyway, last week I was teamed up with the North Western Eye Clinic, which is another among the several UFS partner eye clinics in Accra. Monday through Wednesday I was out in some faraway village whose name I do not know, and each night I was there I stayed in a different hotel/motel/lodge/guest house/a word that probably does not exist in an English dictionary that properly defines these places. Monday night’s lodge had brown water in which I was supposed to bathe. When I first assessed the room, I noticed the toilet water was brownish and had just assumed that the last person to use the toilet had had a very fibrous meal for dinner. Then when my roommate for the week, Sayo, had begun to fill up the bathing bucket from the bath faucet, we discovered that our suspicions about the toilet water were wrong. Whoever ate that dinner must have taken his deuce in the main water supply for the hotel, because that water was brown, too.
Tuesday night, I was confronted by one of my greatest fears: cockroaches. Yep. The big roach I discovered on my shower bucket handle almost makes the lizards and wooly bears (this was what I called these black fluffy caterpillars in my youth) seem okay for a room for which I’m paying. I was absolutely terrified of the roach. Bugs and creatures usually don’t faze me. In my suite this year, I was the designated person for dealing with our surprise mouse guests. For some reason, cockroaches are completely paralyzing to me. They make me squeal like a dying pig and frantically run around in circles like a dog chasing its tail. Is there a term for cockroach phobia? Maybe this condition could get me on the Maury Show!
If it wasn’t the pineapple I had eaten from the street earlier that night, then maybe my cockroach anxiety had caused me to become sick in the middle of the night. I had awoken in the middle of my sleep to an extreme wave of nausea and no subsequent excretions. I haven’t been feeling well ever since. Now, whenever I eat food, I become nauseous. I just tasted one of my fellow volunteer’s boiled yams, which is a very simple dish, and I feel nauseous. My inadequate bacterial flora in my stomach for Africa can go to hell.
Thankfully, Wednesday night’s hotel was actually pleasant. There was hot water and only one or two spiders. I didn’t want to stay out in the rural villages for another two days if I was still feeling sick. Luckily, the UFS van departed to Accra early Thursday morning with the outreach patients who were referred for surgery. Since I was feeling sick, I wanted to tag along the ride, but that would have left the outreach team short of a volunteer. Kind, loving, generous, amazing Page saved my day and offered to stay in outreach and let me replace her in observing surgeries at the clinic. I was so flattered. I had been enjoying the many eccentricities of outreach, including the pink chicks I saw at one of the churches and the donut balls I was eating off the streets and getting to sit next to the optometrist Dr. Kchei (no idea how to spell it) and seeing really interesting cases, such as a displaced lens on a young female with Marfan’s Syndrome.
Taking Page up on her offer ended up being a great decision, because I was able to rest at the comfortable Telecentre and go to the eye clinic and observe surgery! It was amazing to meet the ophthalmic staff at the North Western Eye Clinic. Dr. G was a champ in powering through a straight 22 eye surgeries in about 7 hours. I watched all of them up close! IT WAS SO AWESOME! The reason UFS has its volunteers observe the surgeries is to have a designated witness and sign off that the surgeries are being performed. I was with Sayo. It was so cool to put on scrubs and look over the surgeon’s shoulder the entire time as he was doing his work. It was even cooler to see him work under stressful conditions, with the power coming in and out and the lights and fans going on and off. The surgery he was performing for cataracts is a “SICS” for small incision cataract surgery, which is a much more difficult procedure than what is done in the U.S., but uses much less resources and saves a lot of money. Because there is a large volume of outreach patients and there is only so much financial support available, cheaper and more difficult routes are sometimes taken. But still, quality is not compromised, and the end result is the same. And the surgery is way cooler to watch! It was a party. The next day was a bit of a failure because we were supposed to make it in time to observe the post-op patients. Unfortunately, taxi difficulties got the best of us, and, though we made it to the clinic, we missed the post-op patients and we were just occupying space.
I promise that our lateness had nothing to do with the fact that Sayo and I had gone to the club Aphrodesiac’s reggae night in downtown Accra the night before and returned at 3 am. I promise. I promise that the woman who bit my face in the VIP booth did not prevent me from leaving the premises a sane person. Yep. That happened.
After leaving the North Western Eye Clinic, I was on the prowl for some Coca-Cola light. It is SO hard to find here, and I think it’s because they like their women “jiggly” here, in the words of Dr. Kchei. I miss my coffee and diet Coke so much. Oh god. I found a 12 pack. I felt like an ex-alcoholic after a drink; a serial killer after a long awaited kill; a teenager after his first piece of cake after returning from a few months at fat camp; a person who has found love; an Olympic gold medalist. All those amazing feelings.
I also realize that I’m yearning for something I never could have anticipated missing, and that is fresh air. There are a few smells that I will forever associate with Ghana. Some combination of soot, dirt, car exhaust, fire and burning, body odor, and must will do it. I love the outdoors. I love my home in East Northport that is parked within 2.5 acres of woods and where my dogs can run outside and roam and where I can lay in the grass on my backside and look at the stars and hear nothing but the sounds of the trees swaying and the birds chirping and taste the freshness of the air entering and exiting my system. I love that I can walk and run outside without the worry of feeling as if I’ve smoked cigarettes all the while. In Ghana where the streets are unpaved and there are few car exhaust regulations, it is never pleasant to walk outside, even when the sun is shining and the weather is beautiful. While in taxis or on tro-tros (aka the Ghanaian nickname for buses that drive around and casually pick people up from the sides of streets and are packed to the max with people and are amazingly cheap… I went on one this week and it was so exciting!), oftentimes there is no air conditioning, and the windows are open and I have to cover my face with my shirt because I can hardly breathe in the air from the outside. My clothes are usually filthy with exhaust and dirt that were stirred up from the many vehicles on the roads. I realize that when I decide where I want to live someday, I need to have fresh air. I need to have clean air for me as soon as I step out of my front door of my home. I love unpolluted nature. It is beautiful.
Speaking of nature, I am obsessed with the goats I keep seeing here. I never tire of seeing them. They always make me excited.
I also saw and fed a family of baboons yesterday! And then there was a pack of antelopes! Along the route to walk to see the baboons, I saw a millipede for the first time and some snails that I had also seen in their live form at a street vendor who was selling them as food. Ew. Along the cow tracks to see the antelope pack, I saw a crazy red crab-like beetle and some beautiful dragonflies. As we were about to leave, I noticed a tree above the car that had grape-like fruits on it. I asked our tour guide what the fruits were, and he said the tree was called a nim tree and that the fruits were edible. I was curious, and so I plucked a ripe yellow one off the tree after he showed me that they’re not dangerous to eat. I bit into it and was met by horrid bitterness and crunchiness. Well. Turns out you’re not actually supposed to bite into it. Rather, you suck the fruit until you reach the seed. This is also the case with cocoa fruit! Cocoa is taken from the inner seeds of the fruit that you can suck on. Cocoa fruit actually tastes like sour apple! It’z cray cray.
Lake Volta is the largest artificial lake in the world, and Ghana is its home. I swam in one of its waterfalls yesterday (like a boss). There were two waterfalls adjacent to each other. The right one was the female and the left was the male. The couple was named “Boti.” At first I was grossed out at the thought of swimming because the receiving waters were completely brown and the dude who was leading our group had said that there were tilapia and eels and crabs in the water. I had brought my bathing suit with the expectation that I wouldn’t be the only one who was going to swim. But I was. And I’m so glad I did it, because I discovered that the water was brown not because it was dirty but because of the waterfall splashing up all of the sand at the bottom, which was so comfy and smooth to my gritty feet! And I did not encounter fish. It was actually incredibly refreshing. And I have definitely elevated myself to boss status.
Eh. That’s all for now. Nap time. Ask me about the market and sunburn and Kahuna and corsets becoming illegal in Ghana and my body’s unwillingness to take down food without a grumbly fight sometime, because there were many interesting happenings surrounding such events.
--
TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011
Mood: irritated.
This entry will be choppily schmoppily doowapdiddly fadroppily poppily written, for I am anxious and needing some place to vent and I have no outlets for stress relief here and I’m thinkin bout lots o thangs.
Little kids calling me obroni and suffocating me with their voices and cuteness all the time is fun at first. So are the constant requests for my contact information by, well, everyone. By everyone I mean all the people I’ve encountered in Ghana who fall into one of the following categories: men who want to date me; men who call me their “wife” or who proclaim their love to me or who want a second chance after my first rejection of their marriage proposal; women who want me to be their best friend; school children who want to call me all day long and ask me questions (they’re still doing that, by the way); people who want me to give them my money. A few examples:
The main worker at the “hotel” I stayed at the past two days, after standing beside me as I took a picture of the two toads that I found on the hotel staircase, told me that he would give me his address so that when I go back to the U.S. I could mail him a camera.
The 80 year-old man I was interviewing for my research study had somehow felt more intimate with me than he did with the male ophthalmic nurse Dennis, and he had confessed to me that he had though that his bacterial conjunctivitis (eye infection) was the reason he was having erectile dysfunction, which was why his wife had left him. Unless I was completely mistaken and the translator had been making this entire thing a joke as a means of picking me up (which is very possible because he asked me for my contact information after the interview), I believe this Ewe-speaking elder was begging me to cure him of his condition, because he knows of “so many men who are older than him who do not have this problem!” So I wrote down Viagra and Cialis on a little slip and handed it to him. I desperately tried to drill the fact that I was not a doctor and that I was not adequately versed in the pharmacological literature surrounding erectile dysfunction to give him proper suggestions, and that what I wrote down were some options I had heard of that might be worth looking into. Hah. I guess this isn’t something I’m upset about. I live for instant classic stories like this one. But it is an example of how people here think I have superpowers (and, I’m letting you in on a little secret: I do have superpowers! Puauahahha). Ok, continuing:
There was a man yesterday at our outreach who asked me where I was from and when I was leaving Ghana. When he learned that I am from the US and leaving on July 30, he told me that I will buy a ticket and then bring him with me. Just to clarify, I am not bringing this man home with me.
At one of the North Western outreaches last week, a drunken man stormed into the church in which we were working and slobbered all up in my face and was shouting that I am a princess and that everyone should know that I’m a princess and that anyone who tells me I am not a princess is a liar and a terrible person. When he was too close for comfort, I tried to briskly get out of there, but he followed me. I’m a tough cookie, but I don’t think it would have looked good for my selfless volunteer image if I threw a punch or a swift kick in the tuchus or in the testes. I guess that makes hubris my tragic flaw, because after he had been gone for a while, he returned once again to haunt me.
People see obroni in the UFS van and smile and wave. It’s cute, but would you wave to us if we weren’t white?
I was sitting and eating my waakye breakfast on a stoop with four other volunteers for the North Western outreach last week when a hobo approached me and was all up in mah grill. I don’t even remember what he was saying to me. The only way to get him away was by passing him over to another volunteer, which was not what I had planned to do. Just sort of panned out that way I guess.
Other things I’m think about:
People in the United States will snap at you to get your attention. Here, they’ll hiss to get your attention. I don’t like it. I think it’s rude.
Can I bring home a pet lizard? There are these super awesome green and orange lizards here that roam around everywhere. Is there any rule against packing up a live creature in a suitcase back to the U.S.? Would my pet lizard make it through customs? I’m curious, because I’d tots take on one of these bad boiz.
I tried to pick up a goat today, but it ran away. Wahh.
I have been taking bucket showers and sleeping on sheets that I am provided with and using towels whose origins and the nature of whose washings I am unaware, and I’m really not caring all that much. Whenever I have an overnight outreach, I have no expectations for where I will stay. I don’t wear bug spray or sunscreen. There was no running water where I stayed the past two nights, and I didn’t care one bit. I am not averse to peeing and pooping in open fields. I’m pretty used to these conditions now (though I still use bottled water to brush my teeth and I’m still deathly scared of bugs. I see new ones all over the place, and each time I’ll scream and get jitters and “dance” (if you will) as if I am barefoot on a pile of burning coal.).
Popcorn bought off the streets here is absolutely delicious and rather cheap. I buy a huge bag of freshly popped corn for 20 pesewas (about 12 cents). I am on the hunt for it every time I am out and about.
I’m addicted to caffeine. I’ve been carrying around that 14 pack of Diet Coke and drink one every day around 2 pm. It puts me in an amazing mood.
Pineapple is where Spongebob lives and is also very abundant here. From watching so many street vendors cut up pineapple for me, I think I definitely know how to cut a pineapple like a champ.
Lalalalalalalala. Bye bye bwog. Time to bum chill in Wurawura, which sounds like “ra ra” when Ghanaians say it. Ciao.
So it turns out I am missing another holiday for my dad. Today is Father’s Day! Happy Father’s Day to my dad, my uncles, my friends’ dads, my friends who are dads, Grandpa Joe, and my forefathers. Without your masculine presences, I’m sure I would be among the females who would gravitate towards fulfilling your manly niches. And I’d probably become more manly than I already am. And that’s a rather scary thought. So, thank you for your existences and presences and influences. You are my chains of femininity.
Anyway, last week I was teamed up with the North Western Eye Clinic, which is another among the several UFS partner eye clinics in Accra. Monday through Wednesday I was out in some faraway village whose name I do not know, and each night I was there I stayed in a different hotel/motel/lodge/guest house/a word that probably does not exist in an English dictionary that properly defines these places. Monday night’s lodge had brown water in which I was supposed to bathe. When I first assessed the room, I noticed the toilet water was brownish and had just assumed that the last person to use the toilet had had a very fibrous meal for dinner. Then when my roommate for the week, Sayo, had begun to fill up the bathing bucket from the bath faucet, we discovered that our suspicions about the toilet water were wrong. Whoever ate that dinner must have taken his deuce in the main water supply for the hotel, because that water was brown, too.
Tuesday night, I was confronted by one of my greatest fears: cockroaches. Yep. The big roach I discovered on my shower bucket handle almost makes the lizards and wooly bears (this was what I called these black fluffy caterpillars in my youth) seem okay for a room for which I’m paying. I was absolutely terrified of the roach. Bugs and creatures usually don’t faze me. In my suite this year, I was the designated person for dealing with our surprise mouse guests. For some reason, cockroaches are completely paralyzing to me. They make me squeal like a dying pig and frantically run around in circles like a dog chasing its tail. Is there a term for cockroach phobia? Maybe this condition could get me on the Maury Show!
If it wasn’t the pineapple I had eaten from the street earlier that night, then maybe my cockroach anxiety had caused me to become sick in the middle of the night. I had awoken in the middle of my sleep to an extreme wave of nausea and no subsequent excretions. I haven’t been feeling well ever since. Now, whenever I eat food, I become nauseous. I just tasted one of my fellow volunteer’s boiled yams, which is a very simple dish, and I feel nauseous. My inadequate bacterial flora in my stomach for Africa can go to hell.
Thankfully, Wednesday night’s hotel was actually pleasant. There was hot water and only one or two spiders. I didn’t want to stay out in the rural villages for another two days if I was still feeling sick. Luckily, the UFS van departed to Accra early Thursday morning with the outreach patients who were referred for surgery. Since I was feeling sick, I wanted to tag along the ride, but that would have left the outreach team short of a volunteer. Kind, loving, generous, amazing Page saved my day and offered to stay in outreach and let me replace her in observing surgeries at the clinic. I was so flattered. I had been enjoying the many eccentricities of outreach, including the pink chicks I saw at one of the churches and the donut balls I was eating off the streets and getting to sit next to the optometrist Dr. Kchei (no idea how to spell it) and seeing really interesting cases, such as a displaced lens on a young female with Marfan’s Syndrome.
Taking Page up on her offer ended up being a great decision, because I was able to rest at the comfortable Telecentre and go to the eye clinic and observe surgery! It was amazing to meet the ophthalmic staff at the North Western Eye Clinic. Dr. G was a champ in powering through a straight 22 eye surgeries in about 7 hours. I watched all of them up close! IT WAS SO AWESOME! The reason UFS has its volunteers observe the surgeries is to have a designated witness and sign off that the surgeries are being performed. I was with Sayo. It was so cool to put on scrubs and look over the surgeon’s shoulder the entire time as he was doing his work. It was even cooler to see him work under stressful conditions, with the power coming in and out and the lights and fans going on and off. The surgery he was performing for cataracts is a “SICS” for small incision cataract surgery, which is a much more difficult procedure than what is done in the U.S., but uses much less resources and saves a lot of money. Because there is a large volume of outreach patients and there is only so much financial support available, cheaper and more difficult routes are sometimes taken. But still, quality is not compromised, and the end result is the same. And the surgery is way cooler to watch! It was a party. The next day was a bit of a failure because we were supposed to make it in time to observe the post-op patients. Unfortunately, taxi difficulties got the best of us, and, though we made it to the clinic, we missed the post-op patients and we were just occupying space.
I promise that our lateness had nothing to do with the fact that Sayo and I had gone to the club Aphrodesiac’s reggae night in downtown Accra the night before and returned at 3 am. I promise. I promise that the woman who bit my face in the VIP booth did not prevent me from leaving the premises a sane person. Yep. That happened.
After leaving the North Western Eye Clinic, I was on the prowl for some Coca-Cola light. It is SO hard to find here, and I think it’s because they like their women “jiggly” here, in the words of Dr. Kchei. I miss my coffee and diet Coke so much. Oh god. I found a 12 pack. I felt like an ex-alcoholic after a drink; a serial killer after a long awaited kill; a teenager after his first piece of cake after returning from a few months at fat camp; a person who has found love; an Olympic gold medalist. All those amazing feelings.
I also realize that I’m yearning for something I never could have anticipated missing, and that is fresh air. There are a few smells that I will forever associate with Ghana. Some combination of soot, dirt, car exhaust, fire and burning, body odor, and must will do it. I love the outdoors. I love my home in East Northport that is parked within 2.5 acres of woods and where my dogs can run outside and roam and where I can lay in the grass on my backside and look at the stars and hear nothing but the sounds of the trees swaying and the birds chirping and taste the freshness of the air entering and exiting my system. I love that I can walk and run outside without the worry of feeling as if I’ve smoked cigarettes all the while. In Ghana where the streets are unpaved and there are few car exhaust regulations, it is never pleasant to walk outside, even when the sun is shining and the weather is beautiful. While in taxis or on tro-tros (aka the Ghanaian nickname for buses that drive around and casually pick people up from the sides of streets and are packed to the max with people and are amazingly cheap… I went on one this week and it was so exciting!), oftentimes there is no air conditioning, and the windows are open and I have to cover my face with my shirt because I can hardly breathe in the air from the outside. My clothes are usually filthy with exhaust and dirt that were stirred up from the many vehicles on the roads. I realize that when I decide where I want to live someday, I need to have fresh air. I need to have clean air for me as soon as I step out of my front door of my home. I love unpolluted nature. It is beautiful.
Speaking of nature, I am obsessed with the goats I keep seeing here. I never tire of seeing them. They always make me excited.
I also saw and fed a family of baboons yesterday! And then there was a pack of antelopes! Along the route to walk to see the baboons, I saw a millipede for the first time and some snails that I had also seen in their live form at a street vendor who was selling them as food. Ew. Along the cow tracks to see the antelope pack, I saw a crazy red crab-like beetle and some beautiful dragonflies. As we were about to leave, I noticed a tree above the car that had grape-like fruits on it. I asked our tour guide what the fruits were, and he said the tree was called a nim tree and that the fruits were edible. I was curious, and so I plucked a ripe yellow one off the tree after he showed me that they’re not dangerous to eat. I bit into it and was met by horrid bitterness and crunchiness. Well. Turns out you’re not actually supposed to bite into it. Rather, you suck the fruit until you reach the seed. This is also the case with cocoa fruit! Cocoa is taken from the inner seeds of the fruit that you can suck on. Cocoa fruit actually tastes like sour apple! It’z cray cray.
Lake Volta is the largest artificial lake in the world, and Ghana is its home. I swam in one of its waterfalls yesterday (like a boss). There were two waterfalls adjacent to each other. The right one was the female and the left was the male. The couple was named “Boti.” At first I was grossed out at the thought of swimming because the receiving waters were completely brown and the dude who was leading our group had said that there were tilapia and eels and crabs in the water. I had brought my bathing suit with the expectation that I wouldn’t be the only one who was going to swim. But I was. And I’m so glad I did it, because I discovered that the water was brown not because it was dirty but because of the waterfall splashing up all of the sand at the bottom, which was so comfy and smooth to my gritty feet! And I did not encounter fish. It was actually incredibly refreshing. And I have definitely elevated myself to boss status.
Eh. That’s all for now. Nap time. Ask me about the market and sunburn and Kahuna and corsets becoming illegal in Ghana and my body’s unwillingness to take down food without a grumbly fight sometime, because there were many interesting happenings surrounding such events.
--
TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011
Mood: irritated.
This entry will be choppily schmoppily doowapdiddly fadroppily poppily written, for I am anxious and needing some place to vent and I have no outlets for stress relief here and I’m thinkin bout lots o thangs.
Little kids calling me obroni and suffocating me with their voices and cuteness all the time is fun at first. So are the constant requests for my contact information by, well, everyone. By everyone I mean all the people I’ve encountered in Ghana who fall into one of the following categories: men who want to date me; men who call me their “wife” or who proclaim their love to me or who want a second chance after my first rejection of their marriage proposal; women who want me to be their best friend; school children who want to call me all day long and ask me questions (they’re still doing that, by the way); people who want me to give them my money. A few examples:
The main worker at the “hotel” I stayed at the past two days, after standing beside me as I took a picture of the two toads that I found on the hotel staircase, told me that he would give me his address so that when I go back to the U.S. I could mail him a camera.
The 80 year-old man I was interviewing for my research study had somehow felt more intimate with me than he did with the male ophthalmic nurse Dennis, and he had confessed to me that he had though that his bacterial conjunctivitis (eye infection) was the reason he was having erectile dysfunction, which was why his wife had left him. Unless I was completely mistaken and the translator had been making this entire thing a joke as a means of picking me up (which is very possible because he asked me for my contact information after the interview), I believe this Ewe-speaking elder was begging me to cure him of his condition, because he knows of “so many men who are older than him who do not have this problem!” So I wrote down Viagra and Cialis on a little slip and handed it to him. I desperately tried to drill the fact that I was not a doctor and that I was not adequately versed in the pharmacological literature surrounding erectile dysfunction to give him proper suggestions, and that what I wrote down were some options I had heard of that might be worth looking into. Hah. I guess this isn’t something I’m upset about. I live for instant classic stories like this one. But it is an example of how people here think I have superpowers (and, I’m letting you in on a little secret: I do have superpowers! Puauahahha). Ok, continuing:
There was a man yesterday at our outreach who asked me where I was from and when I was leaving Ghana. When he learned that I am from the US and leaving on July 30, he told me that I will buy a ticket and then bring him with me. Just to clarify, I am not bringing this man home with me.
At one of the North Western outreaches last week, a drunken man stormed into the church in which we were working and slobbered all up in my face and was shouting that I am a princess and that everyone should know that I’m a princess and that anyone who tells me I am not a princess is a liar and a terrible person. When he was too close for comfort, I tried to briskly get out of there, but he followed me. I’m a tough cookie, but I don’t think it would have looked good for my selfless volunteer image if I threw a punch or a swift kick in the tuchus or in the testes. I guess that makes hubris my tragic flaw, because after he had been gone for a while, he returned once again to haunt me.
People see obroni in the UFS van and smile and wave. It’s cute, but would you wave to us if we weren’t white?
I was sitting and eating my waakye breakfast on a stoop with four other volunteers for the North Western outreach last week when a hobo approached me and was all up in mah grill. I don’t even remember what he was saying to me. The only way to get him away was by passing him over to another volunteer, which was not what I had planned to do. Just sort of panned out that way I guess.
Other things I’m think about:
People in the United States will snap at you to get your attention. Here, they’ll hiss to get your attention. I don’t like it. I think it’s rude.
Can I bring home a pet lizard? There are these super awesome green and orange lizards here that roam around everywhere. Is there any rule against packing up a live creature in a suitcase back to the U.S.? Would my pet lizard make it through customs? I’m curious, because I’d tots take on one of these bad boiz.
I tried to pick up a goat today, but it ran away. Wahh.
I have been taking bucket showers and sleeping on sheets that I am provided with and using towels whose origins and the nature of whose washings I am unaware, and I’m really not caring all that much. Whenever I have an overnight outreach, I have no expectations for where I will stay. I don’t wear bug spray or sunscreen. There was no running water where I stayed the past two nights, and I didn’t care one bit. I am not averse to peeing and pooping in open fields. I’m pretty used to these conditions now (though I still use bottled water to brush my teeth and I’m still deathly scared of bugs. I see new ones all over the place, and each time I’ll scream and get jitters and “dance” (if you will) as if I am barefoot on a pile of burning coal.).
Popcorn bought off the streets here is absolutely delicious and rather cheap. I buy a huge bag of freshly popped corn for 20 pesewas (about 12 cents). I am on the hunt for it every time I am out and about.
I’m addicted to caffeine. I’ve been carrying around that 14 pack of Diet Coke and drink one every day around 2 pm. It puts me in an amazing mood.
Pineapple is where Spongebob lives and is also very abundant here. From watching so many street vendors cut up pineapple for me, I think I definitely know how to cut a pineapple like a champ.
Lalalalalalalala. Bye bye bwog. Time to bum chill in Wurawura, which sounds like “ra ra” when Ghanaians say it. Ciao.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
The hotel in which I stayed during the Crystal Eye Clinic overnight outreach in Takoradi was called the Super Gardens Hotel. Architecturally speaking, it reminded me of an Embassy Suites, with its guest rooms comprising the outer perimeter of the building and the middle commonly shared area with the real outside fauna and skies chiming in to form a beautiful, not-constructed version of the Embassy Suites's constructed inner tropics. I think I'll take authenticity with bugs and power outages and highly variable shower and toilet water pressure and ear-exploding music through a Sunday night for an extended high school graduation celebration for 40 cedis/night (with the option of no AC and within-room showers for the bargain of 12 cedis/night) in a rural Ghanaian town over a commodified hotel in any given suburb in the United States.
It was really pleasant working with the Crystal Eye Clinic staff. Ernest was the optometrist and John was his side-kick and driver who assisted in the financial management and communicating in the local dialect to the patients prescribed medication or eyeglasses or donned referrals for surgery. They also do fun things with us and share with us a lot about Ghanaian culture, such as introducing us to the local food and bringing us to beaches.
Each day in Takoradi I ate the same breakfast as Ernest, which was waakye. Waakye is a traditional Ghanaian dish that is made from rice, beans, and noodles with a spicy sauce. Atop my rice, beans, and noodles were two sauces: shito and a spicy tomato-based marinara-like sauce. The shito is commonly served with rice dishes to spice them up. I'd love to learn how to make it. It is dark and has a thick and pasty consistency. According to ghanaweb.com, the shito is made from a cooked-down mixture of onions, tomatoes, cayenne pepper, powdered shrimp, powdered herrings, salt, and fish seasoning. As much as I have been craving vegetables, I opted to not have the accompanying coleslaw lettuce and carrots because of my worry of getting sick from food that may have been handled with untreated water. Among the group with whom I was traveling to Elubo, I comprise the minority. I haven't yet been sick or experienced stomach upset since my car ride to JFK, which I still believe was induced by Doxycycline. Diarrhea and general nausea and malady are immediately surrounding me and, for some reason, they have either had a delayed onset in me or they are simply not happening for me. Whatever the case is, I am fully appreciative of my healthy state of being right now!
Back to Ernest and John. They introduced me to the Ghanaian "chop bar," which is a joint for cheap and quick local dishes made by local people. Chop bars often sell a few staple dishes that can be jazzed up or mixed and matched with different sauces and/or meats. As is the case with basically every place that I encounter here, most chop bars are named with some reference to God. The one in Takoradi with the women who wore white and orange aprons and who treated me like a goddess was called "God Is Love Chop Bar."
The old Chelsea would have been irritated by such a restaurant title and such indications of the deeply religious nature of the Ghanaian people as the seemingly ubiquitous presence of this West African gye nyame symbol and people's frequent references to the Bible and Nyame (Ghanaian term for God) in conversations and the all-too-often question of what church I belong to. I took this picture of the gye nyame symbol at one of the outreaches from earlier this week.
Being here, I am learning to come to terms with the fact that, in not believing in God, I am a religious minority all over the world. And that's ok. I'll take your good blessings and just keep my beliefs to myself. :)
The God Is Love Chop Bar presented fufu and banku as the two main dishes with options for choosing either the traditional palm tomato or a groundnut (their term for peanut, which I like because, when I think about it, "peanut" actually sounds like a toilet term) and adding a type of fried meat--chicken, cow skin (I'll get around to trying it, even though it appears disgusting), beef, grasscutter, or tilapia. I think I've mentioned fufu an entry or so back without explaining it. Fufu and banku are Ghanaian staple dishes that are similar because they are both essentially sticky balls of a uniform composition that are eaten with a soup with the hands. Kenkey also falls into this category, but it is not as well known because the dish is more localized to the Akan, Ga, and Ewe inhabited regions of Ghana (and probably because it doesn't taste as good). I like to think of the three dishes in a sort of rainbow spectrum of ingredients, with kenkey being the leftmost dish with (fermented) maize as its sole ingredient, fufu being the rightmost dish with cassava as its main ingredient, and banku in the middle with cassava and cornmeal as its two main ingredients. The spectrum also satisfies my taste preferences, with the rightmost fufu as the most tasty and kenkey as the least soothing to my palate.
When I return, I'll be scoping out all the African markets and definitely bringing fufu home with me. Is there anywhere I can get some cassava in the United States? Actually, I just Wikipediaed it (yes, it's a verb now) and it is apparently the third largest source of carbohydrates in the world. I should be good. It is a woody root of a shrub and, although it is indigenous to South America, it is the most heavily cultivated in Nigeria. The outer encasing of cassava (there are many regional names listed for it, and I am most familiar with "yuca") is rough and brown and long and tubey, and its inside is firm, white, and striated. Yay additional food knowledge! I'm getting excited to read The Curious Cook once I finish Catch-22 so that when I return from Africa with my one month at home I can cook up a storm and then when I re-enter Yale's annual Iron Chef competition I will bring home a trophy for Calhoun. Yay.
Ernest (to the left of me in the picture below) and John (right) also took us to a beach after one of our outreaches. There was a woman who came up to me while piggy-backing her infant daughter who was strapped to her by a cloth wrapped tightly around her bosom. That seems to be the style here. During the visit to the beach I met my daily quota of seeing a naked person (thus far I have seen at least one naked person each day and I plan to keep this up) and the woman came over to me and introduced herself and, to her fortune, asked me if there was anything I could do about her infant's eye problem. I quickly identified the problem as an eye infection because that is what I am researching while I'm here and the green discharge and young age of the child were heavy indicators of such. I got Ernest's attention who was able to better communicate and diagnose the child, and he promptly brought the woman to the Unite For Sight van and gave her eye drops and warned her of the dangers of how she was caring for her child, which was by washing his eyes out with breastmilk.
I'm so happy to be doing research here because I am interacting with the outreach patients on a level that is helping me to gain really valuable insight into the mindsets and lifestyles of rural peoples in developing countries that I'm not sure I would have if not for the extensive questionnaire and patience and elaborate responses of the small pool of eye infections patients at each outreach. This was outside my research setting and was the first time that I would have had to mark down breast milk as the self-treatment practice by the patient.
However, I've been shocked to hear about the beliefs many of the surveyed patients hold regarding healthcare practices that could have been easily rectified with some proper elementary health education. For example, I encountered a nineteen year-old female who washes her face with her underwear. Another example is one of the common replies I have received regarding patients' suspected cause of their eye infections. They will tell me about their "pales," which is a spiritual term for hemorrhoids and which they believe are curses by God that cause other bodily maladies. So, to treat their eye infection, some will seek out a traditional healer and will take supposed pales remedies. Usually, the patients find that there is no improvement in their eye health and attribute this to the curse.
Ernest showed us a video of a "couching" procedure that had the Elubo team and me cringing in horror and disbelief. Couching is apparently still a problem in the world. I am doing some light research right now and learning that couching was the main cataract operating method from the 5th century B.C. until the 19th century A.D. The "technique" (if you can even call it that) involves taking a curved needle (hello non-sterile practices and infections and danger) and pricking the sclera temporal and pushing the lens of the eye down into the vitreous humour, which is the inner gel encapsulated within the eyeball. The cataract is not removed. Instead, along with the lens of the eye, it is relocated within the eye so that it is outside of the line of vision. The procedure is ineffective and dangerous and often results in the patient remaining blind or only with partially restored vision. Sadly, the video he showed us was produced in 2005 in Nigeria.
I am loving the nature of my volunteer trip here. The volunteering I do is no cake walk. Sometimes we station visual acuity 30 feet from an outhouse, and we must endure the strong scent of urine for hours. Sometimes there are flies buzzing around everywhere. Sometimes we don't eat for hours. Sometimes the patients have strong body odor. Sometimes we move really slowly because of communication barriers. Sometimes I simply tire of labor. And then sometimes when the day is over, the conditions in my designated home for that night are not refreshing. Power outages and rain and mosquitoes and stained bed sheets and tough mattresses and poor water pressure for showers and toilets and unfamiliar pubic hair-ridden bars of soap often leave me craving an escape to my comfortable Western world that is hundreds of miles away. But all of this is forcing me to experience a world to which I never would have imagined I could have been accustomed. I thoroughly appreciate the clean home in which I grew up and the opportunities that have been provided for me simply because I was lucky enough to be born to two loving and ambitious parents who lived in the United States and who were educated. Such things I always thought I appreciated, but, assessing where I am now, I realize that I took them for granted. I am in a state of graciousness for the life I have that I could have never conceptualized until I came here. I'm loving the changes in my perspective that I'm sure will inform how I conduct myself and lead my life when I return home this summer.
And now, tuning into the stories of Friday’s and Saturday’s shenanigans!
Friday night was wonderful, as it involved pizza and western civilization and good taxi rides and my first experience club hopping (really wasn’t that pleasant, as there was the annoyance of Ghanaians on the street who kept following our group and of not getting into clubs because of our lack of high-heeled shoes) and a free round of drinks thanks to a rando at the Highway View spot which had begun our night. Funny how “Highway View” is seen in a positive light here. Spot is the term used for bar here. The pizza was absolutely incredible. I haven’t felt so satisfied by any food here as I did that night. And what a feeling that satisfaction is! In the midst of what would turn into an unsuccessful string of club rejections, we stumbled upon a street acrobatics show! Three Ghanaian men were doing some crazy flips and flexibility moves. I wanted to jump in but I knew I’d be shown up. Well that’s just an excuse. I should have joined in. I was wearing pants that were adequately stretchy for some gymnastics maneuvers. I guess I’ll have to make sure I catch the next random street acrobatics performance. But I don’t know if I’ll ever return back to that same corner. It was too sketchy for a second visit.
On Saturday, I rode with a group of 10 UFS volunteers out to Cape Coast. The trip there was four hours long. I felt so sorry for our driver Bismarck who had to schlep us about. Along the way I purchased kenkey from a street vendor for the first time and realized how gross it is. I also saw The really long UFS rides are generally tolerable despite the scarily narrow and bumpy and unpaved and dark and traffic-ridden roads because of our frequent stops at gas stations, which I’ve found are the most evidently wealthy establishments. The gas station marts are always clean and have excellent selections. I am always impressed. We made it to Kakum National Park, where I traversed the canopy walk and guzzled the insides of a macheteed coconut and bought a Ghanaian cookbook from the gift shop. The canopy walk was incredible. I imagined how it could have been if I had been taking strides in nothing but my birthday suit, and I imagined exhilaration. Not that the exhilaration wasn't there. I just see a naked canopy walk as something I absolutely have to do before I die.
Or. Bring my brilliant idea of a naked canopy walk to the United States as a business venture. This is one of my two great ideas for business at home. My other idea is to bring the African people who carry the foodstuffs on their heads in their African garb to New York City. I think there would be huge market for that. I’mma make it happen!
If I had been able to plan the weekend myself, I definitely would have opted to rent out a hotel for a Friday and Saturday night to go on some of the trails. There were many obroni making their ways through the beautiful woods. I wanted to join, but I had to get back in the UFS van to make it in time for our second destination, which was the slave castle at Cape Coast. The tour guide was absolutely fantastic in how he presented to us the gruesome realities of the Triangular Trade. I’ve always felt emotional for slavery, but I can’t say confidently that I ever really thought for a second as much as I did during the tour and during my stay inside the slave dungeons how disgraceful humans could be. The experience was incredibly moving. It’s a new level of understanding I could not have ever fathomed just by reading a textbook. I felt claustrophobic within the sparsely distributed tour group inside the dark dungeons that had been cleared of the pools of blood, vomitus, urine, and feces that had piled up several feet high and had left traces on the concrete walls. I then tried to fathom that claustrophobia times a kagillion. I’m pretty sure I failed. But in the process of trying to understand by exposing myself to that setting, I think I’ve matured. It was truly moving to go there.
Anyway, that was the weekend and the week. I probably won't have internet access again for another week, as I'll be doing another week-long overnight outreach with the Northwestern Eye Clinic this time. I hope I'll get to eat red-red this week, which is a red bean and plantain dish, another staple Ghanaian dish that I have not yet sampled. Much love to all of my family and friends back home. I miss you!
It was really pleasant working with the Crystal Eye Clinic staff. Ernest was the optometrist and John was his side-kick and driver who assisted in the financial management and communicating in the local dialect to the patients prescribed medication or eyeglasses or donned referrals for surgery. They also do fun things with us and share with us a lot about Ghanaian culture, such as introducing us to the local food and bringing us to beaches.
Each day in Takoradi I ate the same breakfast as Ernest, which was waakye. Waakye is a traditional Ghanaian dish that is made from rice, beans, and noodles with a spicy sauce. Atop my rice, beans, and noodles were two sauces: shito and a spicy tomato-based marinara-like sauce. The shito is commonly served with rice dishes to spice them up. I'd love to learn how to make it. It is dark and has a thick and pasty consistency. According to ghanaweb.com, the shito is made from a cooked-down mixture of onions, tomatoes, cayenne pepper, powdered shrimp, powdered herrings, salt, and fish seasoning. As much as I have been craving vegetables, I opted to not have the accompanying coleslaw lettuce and carrots because of my worry of getting sick from food that may have been handled with untreated water. Among the group with whom I was traveling to Elubo, I comprise the minority. I haven't yet been sick or experienced stomach upset since my car ride to JFK, which I still believe was induced by Doxycycline. Diarrhea and general nausea and malady are immediately surrounding me and, for some reason, they have either had a delayed onset in me or they are simply not happening for me. Whatever the case is, I am fully appreciative of my healthy state of being right now!
Back to Ernest and John. They introduced me to the Ghanaian "chop bar," which is a joint for cheap and quick local dishes made by local people. Chop bars often sell a few staple dishes that can be jazzed up or mixed and matched with different sauces and/or meats. As is the case with basically every place that I encounter here, most chop bars are named with some reference to God. The one in Takoradi with the women who wore white and orange aprons and who treated me like a goddess was called "God Is Love Chop Bar."
The old Chelsea would have been irritated by such a restaurant title and such indications of the deeply religious nature of the Ghanaian people as the seemingly ubiquitous presence of this West African gye nyame symbol and people's frequent references to the Bible and Nyame (Ghanaian term for God) in conversations and the all-too-often question of what church I belong to. I took this picture of the gye nyame symbol at one of the outreaches from earlier this week.
Being here, I am learning to come to terms with the fact that, in not believing in God, I am a religious minority all over the world. And that's ok. I'll take your good blessings and just keep my beliefs to myself. :)
The God Is Love Chop Bar presented fufu and banku as the two main dishes with options for choosing either the traditional palm tomato or a groundnut (their term for peanut, which I like because, when I think about it, "peanut" actually sounds like a toilet term) and adding a type of fried meat--chicken, cow skin (I'll get around to trying it, even though it appears disgusting), beef, grasscutter, or tilapia. I think I've mentioned fufu an entry or so back without explaining it. Fufu and banku are Ghanaian staple dishes that are similar because they are both essentially sticky balls of a uniform composition that are eaten with a soup with the hands. Kenkey also falls into this category, but it is not as well known because the dish is more localized to the Akan, Ga, and Ewe inhabited regions of Ghana (and probably because it doesn't taste as good). I like to think of the three dishes in a sort of rainbow spectrum of ingredients, with kenkey being the leftmost dish with (fermented) maize as its sole ingredient, fufu being the rightmost dish with cassava as its main ingredient, and banku in the middle with cassava and cornmeal as its two main ingredients. The spectrum also satisfies my taste preferences, with the rightmost fufu as the most tasty and kenkey as the least soothing to my palate.
When I return, I'll be scoping out all the African markets and definitely bringing fufu home with me. Is there anywhere I can get some cassava in the United States? Actually, I just Wikipediaed it (yes, it's a verb now) and it is apparently the third largest source of carbohydrates in the world. I should be good. It is a woody root of a shrub and, although it is indigenous to South America, it is the most heavily cultivated in Nigeria. The outer encasing of cassava (there are many regional names listed for it, and I am most familiar with "yuca") is rough and brown and long and tubey, and its inside is firm, white, and striated. Yay additional food knowledge! I'm getting excited to read The Curious Cook once I finish Catch-22 so that when I return from Africa with my one month at home I can cook up a storm and then when I re-enter Yale's annual Iron Chef competition I will bring home a trophy for Calhoun. Yay.
Ernest (to the left of me in the picture below) and John (right) also took us to a beach after one of our outreaches. There was a woman who came up to me while piggy-backing her infant daughter who was strapped to her by a cloth wrapped tightly around her bosom. That seems to be the style here. During the visit to the beach I met my daily quota of seeing a naked person (thus far I have seen at least one naked person each day and I plan to keep this up) and the woman came over to me and introduced herself and, to her fortune, asked me if there was anything I could do about her infant's eye problem. I quickly identified the problem as an eye infection because that is what I am researching while I'm here and the green discharge and young age of the child were heavy indicators of such. I got Ernest's attention who was able to better communicate and diagnose the child, and he promptly brought the woman to the Unite For Sight van and gave her eye drops and warned her of the dangers of how she was caring for her child, which was by washing his eyes out with breastmilk.
I'm so happy to be doing research here because I am interacting with the outreach patients on a level that is helping me to gain really valuable insight into the mindsets and lifestyles of rural peoples in developing countries that I'm not sure I would have if not for the extensive questionnaire and patience and elaborate responses of the small pool of eye infections patients at each outreach. This was outside my research setting and was the first time that I would have had to mark down breast milk as the self-treatment practice by the patient.
However, I've been shocked to hear about the beliefs many of the surveyed patients hold regarding healthcare practices that could have been easily rectified with some proper elementary health education. For example, I encountered a nineteen year-old female who washes her face with her underwear. Another example is one of the common replies I have received regarding patients' suspected cause of their eye infections. They will tell me about their "pales," which is a spiritual term for hemorrhoids and which they believe are curses by God that cause other bodily maladies. So, to treat their eye infection, some will seek out a traditional healer and will take supposed pales remedies. Usually, the patients find that there is no improvement in their eye health and attribute this to the curse.
Ernest showed us a video of a "couching" procedure that had the Elubo team and me cringing in horror and disbelief. Couching is apparently still a problem in the world. I am doing some light research right now and learning that couching was the main cataract operating method from the 5th century B.C. until the 19th century A.D. The "technique" (if you can even call it that) involves taking a curved needle (hello non-sterile practices and infections and danger) and pricking the sclera temporal and pushing the lens of the eye down into the vitreous humour, which is the inner gel encapsulated within the eyeball. The cataract is not removed. Instead, along with the lens of the eye, it is relocated within the eye so that it is outside of the line of vision. The procedure is ineffective and dangerous and often results in the patient remaining blind or only with partially restored vision. Sadly, the video he showed us was produced in 2005 in Nigeria.
I am loving the nature of my volunteer trip here. The volunteering I do is no cake walk. Sometimes we station visual acuity 30 feet from an outhouse, and we must endure the strong scent of urine for hours. Sometimes there are flies buzzing around everywhere. Sometimes we don't eat for hours. Sometimes the patients have strong body odor. Sometimes we move really slowly because of communication barriers. Sometimes I simply tire of labor. And then sometimes when the day is over, the conditions in my designated home for that night are not refreshing. Power outages and rain and mosquitoes and stained bed sheets and tough mattresses and poor water pressure for showers and toilets and unfamiliar pubic hair-ridden bars of soap often leave me craving an escape to my comfortable Western world that is hundreds of miles away. But all of this is forcing me to experience a world to which I never would have imagined I could have been accustomed. I thoroughly appreciate the clean home in which I grew up and the opportunities that have been provided for me simply because I was lucky enough to be born to two loving and ambitious parents who lived in the United States and who were educated. Such things I always thought I appreciated, but, assessing where I am now, I realize that I took them for granted. I am in a state of graciousness for the life I have that I could have never conceptualized until I came here. I'm loving the changes in my perspective that I'm sure will inform how I conduct myself and lead my life when I return home this summer.
And now, tuning into the stories of Friday’s and Saturday’s shenanigans!
Friday night was wonderful, as it involved pizza and western civilization and good taxi rides and my first experience club hopping (really wasn’t that pleasant, as there was the annoyance of Ghanaians on the street who kept following our group and of not getting into clubs because of our lack of high-heeled shoes) and a free round of drinks thanks to a rando at the Highway View spot which had begun our night. Funny how “Highway View” is seen in a positive light here. Spot is the term used for bar here. The pizza was absolutely incredible. I haven’t felt so satisfied by any food here as I did that night. And what a feeling that satisfaction is! In the midst of what would turn into an unsuccessful string of club rejections, we stumbled upon a street acrobatics show! Three Ghanaian men were doing some crazy flips and flexibility moves. I wanted to jump in but I knew I’d be shown up. Well that’s just an excuse. I should have joined in. I was wearing pants that were adequately stretchy for some gymnastics maneuvers. I guess I’ll have to make sure I catch the next random street acrobatics performance. But I don’t know if I’ll ever return back to that same corner. It was too sketchy for a second visit.
On Saturday, I rode with a group of 10 UFS volunteers out to Cape Coast. The trip there was four hours long. I felt so sorry for our driver Bismarck who had to schlep us about. Along the way I purchased kenkey from a street vendor for the first time and realized how gross it is. I also saw The really long UFS rides are generally tolerable despite the scarily narrow and bumpy and unpaved and dark and traffic-ridden roads because of our frequent stops at gas stations, which I’ve found are the most evidently wealthy establishments. The gas station marts are always clean and have excellent selections. I am always impressed. We made it to Kakum National Park, where I traversed the canopy walk and guzzled the insides of a macheteed coconut and bought a Ghanaian cookbook from the gift shop. The canopy walk was incredible. I imagined how it could have been if I had been taking strides in nothing but my birthday suit, and I imagined exhilaration. Not that the exhilaration wasn't there. I just see a naked canopy walk as something I absolutely have to do before I die.
Or. Bring my brilliant idea of a naked canopy walk to the United States as a business venture. This is one of my two great ideas for business at home. My other idea is to bring the African people who carry the foodstuffs on their heads in their African garb to New York City. I think there would be huge market for that. I’mma make it happen!
If I had been able to plan the weekend myself, I definitely would have opted to rent out a hotel for a Friday and Saturday night to go on some of the trails. There were many obroni making their ways through the beautiful woods. I wanted to join, but I had to get back in the UFS van to make it in time for our second destination, which was the slave castle at Cape Coast. The tour guide was absolutely fantastic in how he presented to us the gruesome realities of the Triangular Trade. I’ve always felt emotional for slavery, but I can’t say confidently that I ever really thought for a second as much as I did during the tour and during my stay inside the slave dungeons how disgraceful humans could be. The experience was incredibly moving. It’s a new level of understanding I could not have ever fathomed just by reading a textbook. I felt claustrophobic within the sparsely distributed tour group inside the dark dungeons that had been cleared of the pools of blood, vomitus, urine, and feces that had piled up several feet high and had left traces on the concrete walls. I then tried to fathom that claustrophobia times a kagillion. I’m pretty sure I failed. But in the process of trying to understand by exposing myself to that setting, I think I’ve matured. It was truly moving to go there.
Anyway, that was the weekend and the week. I probably won't have internet access again for another week, as I'll be doing another week-long overnight outreach with the Northwestern Eye Clinic this time. I hope I'll get to eat red-red this week, which is a red bean and plantain dish, another staple Ghanaian dish that I have not yet sampled. Much love to all of my family and friends back home. I miss you!
Saturday, June 11, 2011
This week’s Elubo overnight outreach with Crystal Eye Clinic in Takoradi was rather eventful.
Have you ever heard of grasscutter? I just looked it up on Wikipedia because this is the first time I’ve had internet access this week. I knew it was a rodent that looked like a rat. I knew it wasn’t anything that anyone in the United States eats. I knew it’s considered to be a delicacy in Ghana and Western Africa. I knew I wouldn’t be pleased when I looked up what this animal is.
I was still surprised. I ate this thing???
It tasted sort of like chicken. It was fried and in someone else’s fufu dish. I only had a bite. It’s formal name is the "greater cane rat." Now that I've seen this photo I don't think I'll ever try grasscuttahhh (spelled with the correct Ghanaian pronunciation) again... even though it was tasty.
I'm going to Cape Coast today to hopefully do a canopy walk. Maybe I'll see a grasscuttahhh there.
The entire week I had the impression that Takoradi was a much nicer city than Accra, until I saw the downtown Osu district last night. Takoradi's markets were much more abundant and fertile, and the streets were mostly paved and less congested with traffic. Many palm trees were seen along our routes. People here cook with palm oil, which is a derivative of palm trees, which are part of the natural fauna here. Palm oil isn't harvested or sold in the U.S. because of its high saturated fat content. But it's here. Everywhere. The locals also drink "palm wine," which I tried last night, and which I found to be appalling.
The UFS van took us to some nice markets where I had some yummy fruit, including an African "apple," which is not the type of apple that I have grown to love. You eat it by ripping it apart with your hands. The fruit's inner heavens are white and soft and have the natural flavor of sour apple. Be careful to not let the fruit sit at the bottom of your bag with your belongings when it has been ripe for at least one day, for it will rip itself apart and open up its inner nectars to the loins of your bag, which becomes sticky and a haven for mosquitoes.
Noms!
--
Things I'll share once I've returned from Cape Coast:
- armadillos and leprosy
- power outages
- "couching"
- how outreaches work, and Crystal Eye Clinic's staff
- pales, breastmilk, etc. research.
- ghana church sign thing
- events of last night: frankie's pizza, clubbing, street circus performers, better taxi experiences.
Have you ever heard of grasscutter? I just looked it up on Wikipedia because this is the first time I’ve had internet access this week. I knew it was a rodent that looked like a rat. I knew it wasn’t anything that anyone in the United States eats. I knew it’s considered to be a delicacy in Ghana and Western Africa. I knew I wouldn’t be pleased when I looked up what this animal is.
I was still surprised. I ate this thing???
It tasted sort of like chicken. It was fried and in someone else’s fufu dish. I only had a bite. It’s formal name is the "greater cane rat." Now that I've seen this photo I don't think I'll ever try grasscuttahhh (spelled with the correct Ghanaian pronunciation) again... even though it was tasty.
I'm going to Cape Coast today to hopefully do a canopy walk. Maybe I'll see a grasscuttahhh there.
The entire week I had the impression that Takoradi was a much nicer city than Accra, until I saw the downtown Osu district last night. Takoradi's markets were much more abundant and fertile, and the streets were mostly paved and less congested with traffic. Many palm trees were seen along our routes. People here cook with palm oil, which is a derivative of palm trees, which are part of the natural fauna here. Palm oil isn't harvested or sold in the U.S. because of its high saturated fat content. But it's here. Everywhere. The locals also drink "palm wine," which I tried last night, and which I found to be appalling.
The UFS van took us to some nice markets where I had some yummy fruit, including an African "apple," which is not the type of apple that I have grown to love. You eat it by ripping it apart with your hands. The fruit's inner heavens are white and soft and have the natural flavor of sour apple. Be careful to not let the fruit sit at the bottom of your bag with your belongings when it has been ripe for at least one day, for it will rip itself apart and open up its inner nectars to the loins of your bag, which becomes sticky and a haven for mosquitoes.
Noms!
--
Things I'll share once I've returned from Cape Coast:
- armadillos and leprosy
- power outages
- "couching"
- how outreaches work, and Crystal Eye Clinic's staff
- pales, breastmilk, etc. research.
- ghana church sign thing
- events of last night: frankie's pizza, clubbing, street circus performers, better taxi experiences.
[wrote this for] Tuesday, June 7, 2011
HAPPY 50th BIRTHDAY, DADDY! I LOVE YOU!!
Location: Super Garden Hotel room NN3 in Takoradi, Ghana. NN3 should ordinarily indicate air conditioning, but there is a power outage due to the thunderstorm, and so I sit here with my battery-operated Netbook trying to stave off heat rash and sweat and the imminent mosquitoes. Local time: 6:36 pm, Tuesday, June 7, 2011. State of mind: agitated, yet mellow. I don’t know why I’m agitated.
First and foremost: Happy 50th birthday, Daddy! I love you. And this was for Monday. I regret that I am not present to share in celebrating your milestone of living for half a century! Here’s to another half. I hope that my lack of presence does not keep you from celebrating. I am not dead, I am not miserable, I am not unsafe. There is no need to worry about me. Please don’t feel as though you can’t go on with your daily life simply because I am in Africa. If I had known that my trip would keep you from carrying on with your celebrating and regular activities, I probably would have reconsidered my travels. In fact, there was a graduation celebration going on through the night in the hotel our first night here. Obviously this means that your celebration is ubiquitous! So, please, celebrate! I am there in spirit!
I miss my spinach smoothies. Before I had left I thought it would be a good idea to invest in huge quantities of foods I knew wouldn’t be accessible to me or safe to eat in Ghana, like green vegetables and many of the fruits I like to eat. I’m not so sure it was the greatest idea to indulge in my spinach and mango and spinach and strawberry smoothies, for I crave them so terribly and I cannot have them here. There is no spinach to be found, and, if I were to find it, I’d probably not eat it because I’d worry about the contaminated water in which it was washed or contained. My current roommate Jen just ate three corns that she bought from a street vendor, and she worries that the water wasn’t adequately boiled so that the bacteria wasn’t killed. I’m doing my best to ease myself into the Ghanaian lifestyle little by little so my mind and body are able to handle it.
For example: the maggots. Knowing that the hotel I would be staying at this week did not have the same breakfast accommodations as the Telecentre, I had thought it would be wise to come prepared with instant oatmeal to save a few dollars. On Sunday before we left I had gone out to the supermarket and I had bought 31 500 mL bags of water for only 1 cedis and 50 pesewas and a bag of what I thought was a trustable name brand of instant oatmeal for just 2 cedis. Monday morning while my fellow Elubo outreach volunteers were waiting around for their breakfast to be served, I had been bum chillin’ with my oatmeal and the bowl and hot water that with which the hotel had provided me. Little did I know that I would be the laughing stock of the crew when I looked a little bit closer into that bowl of hot and fresh oatmeal to discover that what had appeared to be less grounded oats were actually… dead maggots. I WAS SO GROSSED OUT! Then I looked into the instant oatmeal bag and there were plump flour beetles alive and crawling about. I was absolutely horrified. I spit out my food and promptly evacuated the scene.
After two good meals later that day and a hearty breakfast on Tuesday, I had thought my time with maggots would be over. Somehow two live crawlers made their way into my netbook case during outreach today. I am 2 for 2 with maggots on this outreach thus far.
Perhaps it’s just another effect of the Doxycycline? Apparently Doxycycline’s most well-known side effect is very vivid dreams. Last night I dreamt two unpleasantly vivid dreams, and I’d have to say since Friday I’ve been consistently feeling the need to record what I’ve been dreaming about. This does not help my sleeping that is already compromised by uncomfortable beds and pillows and mosquito nets and having to wake up super early every morning. Then today while admiring the light show that is the thunderstorm outside that has caused this city-wide power outage (and Ghanaian cities seem to be terribly inefficient at dealing with power outages, which occur frequently during the raining season. It has been hours since it began, and still no change), I told Jen why my sleep lately has been terrible and she told me that this is a common side effect for most anti-malarial pills. Boo.
Yesterday’s outreach was rather interesting. We were at the Shamam district of Emmanuel Methodist JHS. When the kids had gotten out of school, they spotted me and swarmed around me once I responded to their beckoning over to me. They all wanted to know my name and they all wanted me to know theirs. It was impossible to know all of their names because there were at least 50 of them, and some were more pushy than others. They sang their national anthem to me and then they made me sing the American national anthem, which was incredibly embarrassing as the other volunteers stood to the side and laughed at me. It was chaos when one touched my hair, because then all the others wanted to touch my hair and followed suit. I guess they have never seen blonde hair before? They, as all other Ghanaians do, loved my name and kept repeating it. Then they insisted that I come back to visit them. I told them I couldn’t make any promises, but that they could have my Ghanaian phone number. I figured that I’d only have that number for two months and once I’ve left from here they wouldn’t be able to bother me. So I gave out my cell phone number. THAT was a terrible decision. I’ve had callers all night yesterday and all day long today. There is actually a side of me that thinks it could be a great idea to establish some form of real contact with these children to mentor them as they grow older. I wonder how it would be if I gave them my e-mail address and remained in e-mail contact for years from now. Would I be able to change their lives? Would I be able to provide them with some form of adequate mentoring so they could live better lives and change the community they come from for the better? How much effort on my part would that really take? I am really giving this one a good thought. I have seven weeks now to settle this internal debate I’m having.
Sightings and experiences from the past two days that merit mentioning but that will not win my elaboration in blog writing: white breasted crows, boat-carving Ghanaians, falcon, pigs, fufu and eating with my hands, two “Chelsea Football” shopping bags, waakye and rice, Reggiecoco and Enoch and my champion volunteer translators, the sick vocalization from the bird just outside my bathroom window this morning, soccer game with my Manchester ball, learning how to take one’s visual acuity, second chop shop stop and the workers asking about me and remembering my name, learning that living with someone I don’t know very well is different because they don’t expect me to hang around without my clothes, the fruit juice, and, the “apple”.
Things I’ve realized I’ve forgotten to pack: flashlight, toothpaste, extra batteries, Miralax, knife and/or pocket knife, hand sanitizer, Ziploc bags, duct tape, athlete’s foot cream. How. Did. I. Forget. These. Essential. Things. Whoosh. I’m in for quite the ride.
HAPPY 50th BIRTHDAY, DADDY! I LOVE YOU!!
Location: Super Garden Hotel room NN3 in Takoradi, Ghana. NN3 should ordinarily indicate air conditioning, but there is a power outage due to the thunderstorm, and so I sit here with my battery-operated Netbook trying to stave off heat rash and sweat and the imminent mosquitoes. Local time: 6:36 pm, Tuesday, June 7, 2011. State of mind: agitated, yet mellow. I don’t know why I’m agitated.
First and foremost: Happy 50th birthday, Daddy! I love you. And this was for Monday. I regret that I am not present to share in celebrating your milestone of living for half a century! Here’s to another half. I hope that my lack of presence does not keep you from celebrating. I am not dead, I am not miserable, I am not unsafe. There is no need to worry about me. Please don’t feel as though you can’t go on with your daily life simply because I am in Africa. If I had known that my trip would keep you from carrying on with your celebrating and regular activities, I probably would have reconsidered my travels. In fact, there was a graduation celebration going on through the night in the hotel our first night here. Obviously this means that your celebration is ubiquitous! So, please, celebrate! I am there in spirit!
I miss my spinach smoothies. Before I had left I thought it would be a good idea to invest in huge quantities of foods I knew wouldn’t be accessible to me or safe to eat in Ghana, like green vegetables and many of the fruits I like to eat. I’m not so sure it was the greatest idea to indulge in my spinach and mango and spinach and strawberry smoothies, for I crave them so terribly and I cannot have them here. There is no spinach to be found, and, if I were to find it, I’d probably not eat it because I’d worry about the contaminated water in which it was washed or contained. My current roommate Jen just ate three corns that she bought from a street vendor, and she worries that the water wasn’t adequately boiled so that the bacteria wasn’t killed. I’m doing my best to ease myself into the Ghanaian lifestyle little by little so my mind and body are able to handle it.
For example: the maggots. Knowing that the hotel I would be staying at this week did not have the same breakfast accommodations as the Telecentre, I had thought it would be wise to come prepared with instant oatmeal to save a few dollars. On Sunday before we left I had gone out to the supermarket and I had bought 31 500 mL bags of water for only 1 cedis and 50 pesewas and a bag of what I thought was a trustable name brand of instant oatmeal for just 2 cedis. Monday morning while my fellow Elubo outreach volunteers were waiting around for their breakfast to be served, I had been bum chillin’ with my oatmeal and the bowl and hot water that with which the hotel had provided me. Little did I know that I would be the laughing stock of the crew when I looked a little bit closer into that bowl of hot and fresh oatmeal to discover that what had appeared to be less grounded oats were actually… dead maggots. I WAS SO GROSSED OUT! Then I looked into the instant oatmeal bag and there were plump flour beetles alive and crawling about. I was absolutely horrified. I spit out my food and promptly evacuated the scene.
After two good meals later that day and a hearty breakfast on Tuesday, I had thought my time with maggots would be over. Somehow two live crawlers made their way into my netbook case during outreach today. I am 2 for 2 with maggots on this outreach thus far.
Perhaps it’s just another effect of the Doxycycline? Apparently Doxycycline’s most well-known side effect is very vivid dreams. Last night I dreamt two unpleasantly vivid dreams, and I’d have to say since Friday I’ve been consistently feeling the need to record what I’ve been dreaming about. This does not help my sleeping that is already compromised by uncomfortable beds and pillows and mosquito nets and having to wake up super early every morning. Then today while admiring the light show that is the thunderstorm outside that has caused this city-wide power outage (and Ghanaian cities seem to be terribly inefficient at dealing with power outages, which occur frequently during the raining season. It has been hours since it began, and still no change), I told Jen why my sleep lately has been terrible and she told me that this is a common side effect for most anti-malarial pills. Boo.
Yesterday’s outreach was rather interesting. We were at the Shamam district of Emmanuel Methodist JHS. When the kids had gotten out of school, they spotted me and swarmed around me once I responded to their beckoning over to me. They all wanted to know my name and they all wanted me to know theirs. It was impossible to know all of their names because there were at least 50 of them, and some were more pushy than others. They sang their national anthem to me and then they made me sing the American national anthem, which was incredibly embarrassing as the other volunteers stood to the side and laughed at me. It was chaos when one touched my hair, because then all the others wanted to touch my hair and followed suit. I guess they have never seen blonde hair before? They, as all other Ghanaians do, loved my name and kept repeating it. Then they insisted that I come back to visit them. I told them I couldn’t make any promises, but that they could have my Ghanaian phone number. I figured that I’d only have that number for two months and once I’ve left from here they wouldn’t be able to bother me. So I gave out my cell phone number. THAT was a terrible decision. I’ve had callers all night yesterday and all day long today. There is actually a side of me that thinks it could be a great idea to establish some form of real contact with these children to mentor them as they grow older. I wonder how it would be if I gave them my e-mail address and remained in e-mail contact for years from now. Would I be able to change their lives? Would I be able to provide them with some form of adequate mentoring so they could live better lives and change the community they come from for the better? How much effort on my part would that really take? I am really giving this one a good thought. I have seven weeks now to settle this internal debate I’m having.
Sightings and experiences from the past two days that merit mentioning but that will not win my elaboration in blog writing: white breasted crows, boat-carving Ghanaians, falcon, pigs, fufu and eating with my hands, two “Chelsea Football” shopping bags, waakye and rice, Reggiecoco and Enoch and my champion volunteer translators, the sick vocalization from the bird just outside my bathroom window this morning, soccer game with my Manchester ball, learning how to take one’s visual acuity, second chop shop stop and the workers asking about me and remembering my name, learning that living with someone I don’t know very well is different because they don’t expect me to hang around without my clothes, the fruit juice, and, the “apple”.
Things I’ve realized I’ve forgotten to pack: flashlight, toothpaste, extra batteries, Miralax, knife and/or pocket knife, hand sanitizer, Ziploc bags, duct tape, athlete’s foot cream. How. Did. I. Forget. These. Essential. Things. Whoosh. I’m in for quite the ride.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
When in Rome...
When I finally decide it’s time for me to crack down and learn a few phrases in Twi, I will of course make sure I’ve ascertained eye clinic outreach competency, with familiarity in basic ophthalmologic terminology and abilities to direct money exchanges and visual acuity screenings. I will also make sure I know how to ask the following questions and comprehend all of their possible responses as if they were tattooed on the back of my hand. Is there adequate oil? Is there an adequate supply of petroleum? Why is the windshield cracked? Does the car’s transmission, eh, work? How about the windshield wipers and defrost? Could you describe in full detail the route you will be taking to bring us to our destination?
If these questions had been addressed and responded to appropriately, we may have had a different and more pleasant turn of events yesterday.
All we wanted to do was go to the beach. A nice beach. Not one that has trash all over it, or one where I will be attacked by people who want me to buy their things. We made it to that beach. It was called Bojo Beach. It should have been a forty-five minute ride both ways. In total I think we were on the road for five and a half hours. The six of us didn't think our taxi experience could have been worse than the ride there, during which we squeezed six passengers into a car that could only fit four passengers (I sat in the trunk) and kept the windows open for some ventilation and breeze in exchange for exhaust and soot from the filthy roads infiltrating and polluting our lungs; the driver refused to admit to not knowing that Bojo beach was actually a place or where it was located, and so he spent at least a half hour circling back and forth on the same highway until he stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant and insisted that this was, in fact, Bojo Beach; and then, since we refused to leave the car, the cab driver had a conversation in Twi with at least five people he found on the side of the road to help him navigate his way to Bojo Beach.
We eventually got there, and, thankfully, the sun was still shining and the people were still inflowing. The beach was great! It was a private beach at a resort. To get to the beach area we rode on a steamboat to the sandbar, which had clear sand and beautiful ocean water. It wasn’t crowded. We wanted to play volleyball but the workers there told us we would have had to pay 10 Ghana cedis. I was skeptical of their intentions because a few hours later we saw a group of obibini (black people) who tried to start up a game but were quick to give up their volleyball because they had few participants. 10 Ghana cedis is about the American equivalent of 6.66 dollars at an exchange rate of 1.5 Ghana cedis to the 1.0 dollar. I would never throw away 6.66 dollars in an instant like that! So we figured they tried to get money from us because we are obroni (white people). It’s really funny when people see us and they shout “obroni!” They do it all the time. We are also stared at a lot. I never feel unsafe, though. People who look at us aren’t looking to hurt us. They are just curious and have a different concept of personal space. They touch a lot, and I’m not really used to that, but I kind of like how trust is the standard here.
I made some friends with the locals! I did a flip on the beach just to see if I still could. A few minutes later I saw a group of Ghanaian children who were flipping as well! I think they were doing so to invite me over or to show me up. They were good! So I went over to them and spotted a few for some backflips. I was able to teach the most talented one how to do a backflip sans hands. J Then we flipped together! Then a police officer made his way over, and the kids scattered. They weren’t doing anything wrong! I also felt one of the side effects of the Doxycycline malaria prophylaxis pill… again. This time it was sensitive skin. Apparently it is common for anyone on the Doxycycline medication to burn easily. I think the combination of my paleness and falling asleep in the sun while reading The Man Who Lives With Wolves and the African sun and the Doxycycline was a deadly one, for I am burnt. I was wearing a bathing suit with metal ringlets in it, and today I have spots of burns in the formation of my bathing suit. Pleasant.
There were also naked people getting into boats. I was entertained. And I saw this as a photo opportunity.
INSERT NAKED PERSON IN A BOAT PHOTO HERE!
We left the beach to meet what we never would have imagined to be our worst nightmare: our taxi and its driver. We squeezed 6 into a 4-person car, but this time no one in the trunk because the trunk was dirty and rusted. I was one of two people in the front passenger seat. It was terribly uncomfortable. I was on the left side (Ghanaian cars are American-style: they drive on the right side of the road), so half of my back was pushed up against a seat and half was in the air space above the gear shift. The cab driver said he knew where our destination was, and we were inclined to believe him because the ABC junction in New Achimota is supposedly a well-known spot, but we really should have been prepared to give him directions after what we had experience during the ride there. For that mistake I cannot forgive myself. I can, however, forgive myself for not expecting a car that had no oil, no petroleum and a popped tire, and for not beating the thunderstorm. It’s raining here season in southern Ghana, and it often results in cars breaking down, as was the case during our outreach trip on Friday. We had to push the car (like they do in Little Miss Sunshine!) to get it going.
The roads were full of traffic and they are hardly lit, and I was terrified for my life because the driver was visibly anxious and agitated. He continually expressed his worry that he’d be caught with a car of too many people by the police and he kept pointing over to where New Achimota was. We had assumed that he had meant that he knew he’d get us to that destination. We had assumed incorrectly.
--
OK, I’m cutting this short because I’m getting in my car to go to Takoradi for this week! I will get back to this entry as soon as I can. The place where I’ll be staying does not have wifi all over the place. I’d have to hit up an internet café to get back here. We’ll see what happens.
--
Arrived in Takoradi. No internet access here. This post is being written on Sunday night, but will probably not be posted until Friday or so. Sharing an air conditioned room in a remote area for 45 cedis/night, which ends up being $15/night for me, which is stellar. This is an upgrade from the other rooms with fans only. I am enjoying the comfort of this room. Though there are lots of bugs to keep on the lookout for. Mosquito net is up and bug spray is applied. I’m ready for the wild.
--
…Continuing from before. When we had reinformed the driver that we needed to get to New Achimota again, he said “no no I drop you off here.” It was the middle of a highway. It was pouring. During the ride he kept turning the ignition on and off, used a towel to wipe off the defrost, continually articulated his worry about the no oil and no petroleum, and all the while was blasting music from his cell phone. Like the driver who took us to the beach, he kept insisting that he drop us off where he felt like it because he wouldn’t make it to New Achimota. He kept stopping and saying “ok, you go here.” Eventually he stopped completely because his car broke down. Yes. The tire popped. We stayed in the car as he replaced the tire and we called our Ghanaian reference person Jerome who works for the Crystal Eye Clinic and is in charge of all of the Unite For Sight programs in Ghana. We had hoped that he would come and pick us up. But he didn’t. :( He instead spoke to the driver in Twi, who had told him he’d be able to take us back, apparently. Seeing that the driver was feeding our reference poor information, we got out of the car and were hitchhiking two taxis to bring us to the ABC junction in New Achimota in the torrential rain. Sadly, I saw this as a photo opportunity, and I snagged a few shots. We took two cars back and made it safely to the Telecentre. Hoorah.
I was exhausted and burnt. It was wonderful to return to the Telecentre, which has started to feel like a home. The ladies who work here know all of our names and are so and sincere. I am so humbled by their kindness and willingness to make our stay in Ghana as smooth and pleasant as possible. When we tell them we’re hungry, they’ll ask us what we’re interested in eating and they’ll suggest a place, give us the directions, and offer to call someone at the restaurant to meet us halfway. They help us find taxis and talk to the drivers in Twi for us so we are not ripped off. They do our laundry! They feed us breakfast. They gossip with us when we are watching television in the guest room. They are great people. Magdalena did my laundry and listened to our rants when we came back from the beach. I guess this is what we dub “southern hospitality” in the States, except I don’t feel as though the women at the Telecentre are living a slow-paced life. I like their balance of pace and willingness to pause. It’s a great harmony.
I made it to bed at 9:45 pm that night. I was incredibly exhausted.
Friday was an outreach day. It was my first day of research, and it was well played because Sophia and I are the two team members collecting data and we are splitting up from now on as of this week to maximize our data. We needed a day to figure out a spreadsheet for data collection and to figure out how to optimize our survey questions so that they only take long when we need them to. She is staying at the Telecentre this week and I am at a different about five hours away from her. I’ll see her again this weekend.
I ate at a Chinese restaurant on Friday night! It was deelish. I had leftovers for Saturday night. During dinner I had announced four of my minor goals for my trip here. They are 1) pick a coconut from a coconut tree (DONE! Thanks to the beach. Yay. But apparently the coconut I picked was the wrong color. You are supposed to pick the green ones, not the brown ones); 2) have a person on the street teach me how to carry buckets and stuff on my head; 3) buy something while in my car from a street person; and, 4) pet a stray dog or goat (because I got my rabies shots and I feel that they should go to good use).
Goal #3 was accomplished while on my trip to Takoradi today! And it was a great achievement, for I purchased a Manchester soccer ball for 12 cedis. Apparently the person who was trying to sell me the ball was talking to my driver in Twi and saying to him “man why are you helping out the white girl, you know she can afford more than that!” And puahaha. The Unite For Sight guy said he would have paid the same as I had. The seller wanted 25 cedis for it. The Manchester soccer ball is pretty cool to me because apparently the team name is Chelsea. On the Chelsea team is a Ghanaian player, and people in Ghana are obsessed with that team because of him. So people here don’t forget my name when I tell them what it is! Their eyes light up and they ask me if I know about the soccer player. I might just start following ‘football’ this summer once I get home. It’s the only sport I see on tv here, and people gather round in ‘spots,’ which are sort of like bars except outside and less belligerent, to watch the games.
We had some interesting conversations in the car about spiritual upbringings. God and Jesus are very ubiquitous here. On the road you see Jesus and God bumper stickers, on storefronts you’ll see phrases like “He is all mighty!” and in conversations you,b’ll hear “God bless you” and on Sundays you’ll see people dressed up and ready to go to church, storefronts closed, and the sounds of big church pastors from miles away. One of the volunteers was talking about his Mormon upbringing and how much it has brought to his life. As a non-spiritual person brought up in a non-believing household, I wonder if I’m missing something that I can’t even conceptualize. I don’t desire it. It’s just interesting to wonder about how things might be different for me if I had a higher belief system to which I subscribed my heart and soul. Am I less whole because I am missing a certain non-tangible thought process? Am I capable of as much happiness as someone who is spiritual? I’ll never be spiritual because I simply don’t desire it. But it doesn’t keep me from wondering.
If these questions had been addressed and responded to appropriately, we may have had a different and more pleasant turn of events yesterday.
All we wanted to do was go to the beach. A nice beach. Not one that has trash all over it, or one where I will be attacked by people who want me to buy their things. We made it to that beach. It was called Bojo Beach. It should have been a forty-five minute ride both ways. In total I think we were on the road for five and a half hours. The six of us didn't think our taxi experience could have been worse than the ride there, during which we squeezed six passengers into a car that could only fit four passengers (I sat in the trunk) and kept the windows open for some ventilation and breeze in exchange for exhaust and soot from the filthy roads infiltrating and polluting our lungs; the driver refused to admit to not knowing that Bojo beach was actually a place or where it was located, and so he spent at least a half hour circling back and forth on the same highway until he stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant and insisted that this was, in fact, Bojo Beach; and then, since we refused to leave the car, the cab driver had a conversation in Twi with at least five people he found on the side of the road to help him navigate his way to Bojo Beach.
We eventually got there, and, thankfully, the sun was still shining and the people were still inflowing. The beach was great! It was a private beach at a resort. To get to the beach area we rode on a steamboat to the sandbar, which had clear sand and beautiful ocean water. It wasn’t crowded. We wanted to play volleyball but the workers there told us we would have had to pay 10 Ghana cedis. I was skeptical of their intentions because a few hours later we saw a group of obibini (black people) who tried to start up a game but were quick to give up their volleyball because they had few participants. 10 Ghana cedis is about the American equivalent of 6.66 dollars at an exchange rate of 1.5 Ghana cedis to the 1.0 dollar. I would never throw away 6.66 dollars in an instant like that! So we figured they tried to get money from us because we are obroni (white people). It’s really funny when people see us and they shout “obroni!” They do it all the time. We are also stared at a lot. I never feel unsafe, though. People who look at us aren’t looking to hurt us. They are just curious and have a different concept of personal space. They touch a lot, and I’m not really used to that, but I kind of like how trust is the standard here.
I made some friends with the locals! I did a flip on the beach just to see if I still could. A few minutes later I saw a group of Ghanaian children who were flipping as well! I think they were doing so to invite me over or to show me up. They were good! So I went over to them and spotted a few for some backflips. I was able to teach the most talented one how to do a backflip sans hands. J Then we flipped together! Then a police officer made his way over, and the kids scattered. They weren’t doing anything wrong! I also felt one of the side effects of the Doxycycline malaria prophylaxis pill… again. This time it was sensitive skin. Apparently it is common for anyone on the Doxycycline medication to burn easily. I think the combination of my paleness and falling asleep in the sun while reading The Man Who Lives With Wolves and the African sun and the Doxycycline was a deadly one, for I am burnt. I was wearing a bathing suit with metal ringlets in it, and today I have spots of burns in the formation of my bathing suit. Pleasant.
There were also naked people getting into boats. I was entertained. And I saw this as a photo opportunity.
INSERT NAKED PERSON IN A BOAT PHOTO HERE!
We left the beach to meet what we never would have imagined to be our worst nightmare: our taxi and its driver. We squeezed 6 into a 4-person car, but this time no one in the trunk because the trunk was dirty and rusted. I was one of two people in the front passenger seat. It was terribly uncomfortable. I was on the left side (Ghanaian cars are American-style: they drive on the right side of the road), so half of my back was pushed up against a seat and half was in the air space above the gear shift. The cab driver said he knew where our destination was, and we were inclined to believe him because the ABC junction in New Achimota is supposedly a well-known spot, but we really should have been prepared to give him directions after what we had experience during the ride there. For that mistake I cannot forgive myself. I can, however, forgive myself for not expecting a car that had no oil, no petroleum and a popped tire, and for not beating the thunderstorm. It’s raining here season in southern Ghana, and it often results in cars breaking down, as was the case during our outreach trip on Friday. We had to push the car (like they do in Little Miss Sunshine!) to get it going.
The roads were full of traffic and they are hardly lit, and I was terrified for my life because the driver was visibly anxious and agitated. He continually expressed his worry that he’d be caught with a car of too many people by the police and he kept pointing over to where New Achimota was. We had assumed that he had meant that he knew he’d get us to that destination. We had assumed incorrectly.
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OK, I’m cutting this short because I’m getting in my car to go to Takoradi for this week! I will get back to this entry as soon as I can. The place where I’ll be staying does not have wifi all over the place. I’d have to hit up an internet café to get back here. We’ll see what happens.
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Arrived in Takoradi. No internet access here. This post is being written on Sunday night, but will probably not be posted until Friday or so. Sharing an air conditioned room in a remote area for 45 cedis/night, which ends up being $15/night for me, which is stellar. This is an upgrade from the other rooms with fans only. I am enjoying the comfort of this room. Though there are lots of bugs to keep on the lookout for. Mosquito net is up and bug spray is applied. I’m ready for the wild.
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…Continuing from before. When we had reinformed the driver that we needed to get to New Achimota again, he said “no no I drop you off here.” It was the middle of a highway. It was pouring. During the ride he kept turning the ignition on and off, used a towel to wipe off the defrost, continually articulated his worry about the no oil and no petroleum, and all the while was blasting music from his cell phone. Like the driver who took us to the beach, he kept insisting that he drop us off where he felt like it because he wouldn’t make it to New Achimota. He kept stopping and saying “ok, you go here.” Eventually he stopped completely because his car broke down. Yes. The tire popped. We stayed in the car as he replaced the tire and we called our Ghanaian reference person Jerome who works for the Crystal Eye Clinic and is in charge of all of the Unite For Sight programs in Ghana. We had hoped that he would come and pick us up. But he didn’t. :( He instead spoke to the driver in Twi, who had told him he’d be able to take us back, apparently. Seeing that the driver was feeding our reference poor information, we got out of the car and were hitchhiking two taxis to bring us to the ABC junction in New Achimota in the torrential rain. Sadly, I saw this as a photo opportunity, and I snagged a few shots. We took two cars back and made it safely to the Telecentre. Hoorah.
I was exhausted and burnt. It was wonderful to return to the Telecentre, which has started to feel like a home. The ladies who work here know all of our names and are so and sincere. I am so humbled by their kindness and willingness to make our stay in Ghana as smooth and pleasant as possible. When we tell them we’re hungry, they’ll ask us what we’re interested in eating and they’ll suggest a place, give us the directions, and offer to call someone at the restaurant to meet us halfway. They help us find taxis and talk to the drivers in Twi for us so we are not ripped off. They do our laundry! They feed us breakfast. They gossip with us when we are watching television in the guest room. They are great people. Magdalena did my laundry and listened to our rants when we came back from the beach. I guess this is what we dub “southern hospitality” in the States, except I don’t feel as though the women at the Telecentre are living a slow-paced life. I like their balance of pace and willingness to pause. It’s a great harmony.
I made it to bed at 9:45 pm that night. I was incredibly exhausted.
Friday was an outreach day. It was my first day of research, and it was well played because Sophia and I are the two team members collecting data and we are splitting up from now on as of this week to maximize our data. We needed a day to figure out a spreadsheet for data collection and to figure out how to optimize our survey questions so that they only take long when we need them to. She is staying at the Telecentre this week and I am at a different about five hours away from her. I’ll see her again this weekend.
I ate at a Chinese restaurant on Friday night! It was deelish. I had leftovers for Saturday night. During dinner I had announced four of my minor goals for my trip here. They are 1) pick a coconut from a coconut tree (DONE! Thanks to the beach. Yay. But apparently the coconut I picked was the wrong color. You are supposed to pick the green ones, not the brown ones); 2) have a person on the street teach me how to carry buckets and stuff on my head; 3) buy something while in my car from a street person; and, 4) pet a stray dog or goat (because I got my rabies shots and I feel that they should go to good use).
Goal #3 was accomplished while on my trip to Takoradi today! And it was a great achievement, for I purchased a Manchester soccer ball for 12 cedis. Apparently the person who was trying to sell me the ball was talking to my driver in Twi and saying to him “man why are you helping out the white girl, you know she can afford more than that!” And puahaha. The Unite For Sight guy said he would have paid the same as I had. The seller wanted 25 cedis for it. The Manchester soccer ball is pretty cool to me because apparently the team name is Chelsea. On the Chelsea team is a Ghanaian player, and people in Ghana are obsessed with that team because of him. So people here don’t forget my name when I tell them what it is! Their eyes light up and they ask me if I know about the soccer player. I might just start following ‘football’ this summer once I get home. It’s the only sport I see on tv here, and people gather round in ‘spots,’ which are sort of like bars except outside and less belligerent, to watch the games.
We had some interesting conversations in the car about spiritual upbringings. God and Jesus are very ubiquitous here. On the road you see Jesus and God bumper stickers, on storefronts you’ll see phrases like “He is all mighty!” and in conversations you,b’ll hear “God bless you” and on Sundays you’ll see people dressed up and ready to go to church, storefronts closed, and the sounds of big church pastors from miles away. One of the volunteers was talking about his Mormon upbringing and how much it has brought to his life. As a non-spiritual person brought up in a non-believing household, I wonder if I’m missing something that I can’t even conceptualize. I don’t desire it. It’s just interesting to wonder about how things might be different for me if I had a higher belief system to which I subscribed my heart and soul. Am I less whole because I am missing a certain non-tangible thought process? Am I capable of as much happiness as someone who is spiritual? I’ll never be spiritual because I simply don’t desire it. But it doesn’t keep me from wondering.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
My first day in outreach
Ghana time: 6:35 pm. Location: leftmost window seat of the fourteen-seater white Toyota Unite For Sight van. Sitting here because I am looking to buy a soccer ball from one of the Ghanaian street people and the greatest chance for me to do so will be if I’m seated next to a window.
The outreach camp workers made individually packed hot lunches for each UFS volunteer! I was so impressed. People are so friendly, generous, hospitable, and gentle here. I could learn a few things from their ways here. Our lunches were fried rice and fried chicken with the same hot sauce I had eaten at Fingalix the day before. My fellow UFS volunteers couldn't take the heat, so they did not apply the sauce. I happen to be accustomed to hot foods because of my lovely neighbor Susan who cooks spicy Indian food all the time and who has inspired me to integrate spice into my cuisine. Chelsea loooooove spices. Also, considering the fact that I've eaten fried chicken and rice twice in the two days I've been here, I think this (the fried chicken and fried rice, obvi. not the spice) is something I'll have to get used to.
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Ok, now it's 11:01 pm here. I fell asleep in the car. Then I did 50 push-ups and a stomach workout on the floor of my bedroom in the Telecentre. Then I showered. Then I kind of sort of put all of my stuff away because my two roommates are much cleaner than I. For the past two days I've had all of my three suitcases and backpack sprawled out and unzipped on the floor. Now I'm pushing off sleep until I finish this post because I jotted down a few interesting parts of my day before I fell asleep that I'd love to share with the world. I have to make sure I sleep enough for a 7 am outreach departure tomorrow morning. :( So I'll try to make this quick!
The sound of Epic Sax Guy was heard around the world at 6:46 am Ghana time this morning. Yes, he is my alarm. He is also the story of my sophomore year. Sets me off on the right foot every day.
What also sets me off on the right foot in the morning is an unexpectedly delicious breakfast! It's even better when I have unforeseen ample time to eat it because my driver is late to pick me up! I was incredibly impressed by the Telecentre's continental breakfast. They had a seemingly self-replenishing supply of hot oatmeal (made in a pot! not even the instant kind!), corn flakes cereal, fresh toast, and hard boiled eggs. This would have been easily been enough to satisfy me. But then there was the most exotic jam selection I've ever encountered! I tried my toast with both mango and pineapple jams. The strawberry was just too old school for me this morning. There was mango juice and pineapple coconut juice. I didn't get to sample the pineapple coconut juice, but I am sure it is as delicious as the smooth and silky and tangy mango juice. I will report on my pineapple coconut juice experience tomorrow.
Today was my first outreach experience. I probably should have begun this blog writing about why I am doing this trip and some of the expectations I have for the volunteer work I'd be doing. Unite For Sight is essentially the reason I am here in Ghana. The NGO sponsors free eye treatment in a number of target clinics for outreach patients who are restricted in their access to health care by poverty, which encompasses more than just insufficient funds for health care expenditures. Poverty restricts one's access to health care for other correlative reasons such as lack of transportation and lack of education surrounding medicine and, consequently, knowledge that help is available, of common risk factors and and general ways to conduct oneself healthfully. Unite For Sight cites that there are at least 40 million cases of preventable blindness in the world. Eye health is so important where there is poverty because, with simple solutions such as eyeglasses or ten-minute surgical cataract procedures, people's lives are drastically improved and they instantly become productive members of society again. This helps more than just the person who needed eye treatment, as those who were previously caring for the patient are relieved of such obligation and can once again channel their energies towards production and, hence, the economy.
The outreach efforts of the eye clinics sponsored by Unite For Sight involve teams of ophthalmic nurses and volunteers who traverse the borders of the cities to access the rural villagers. We conduct patient screenings, which include visual acuity tests and eye health diagnoses by the ophthalmic nurses. The ophthalmic nurse prescribes the outreach patient with either a medication, a set of eyeglasses, or a referral for further assessment by an ophthalmologist. We are in charge of visual acuity screenings and the process that follows the prescription, i.e., distributing the eyeglasses and/or medication, informing the patient of his/her referral, and the medical documentation. I will be conducting a research project alongside Sophia and Jonathan, so my volunteer role is a little different. My work will combine the typical volunteer agenda with the work for my research project. I will be collecting my data from the same places where I will be going for outreach, so there wouldn't be any conflicts of interest here. I will begin my data collection once my surveys have been translated into the most common local dialect, Twi, so that we will have fewer language barriers and, hence, more opportunities for viable survey data.
Anywayzzzz. So this all started today. We were picked up from the Telecentre by Dennis and John and driven to today's outreach camp with the Crystal Eye Clinic. During our bumpy car ride, I began to read Shaun Ellis's The Man Who Lives With Wolves. This will definitely be my favorite book once I've read it. I read through the first three pages of the prefix and I melted. Shaun Ellis is such a bizarre man who knows how to love in a way that is so strange yet so pure, and he does a beautiful job conveying his true feelings. I want to meet him someday.
A lesser pleasant experience I had during the bumpy car ride was the shocking sight of a guy in the street who was ever so casually flailing his jean pants in the air to conceal and reveal his underwear-less self to the traffic onlookers. He was actually 20 feet away from two police officers who were definitely turning a blind eye, for he made his presence known. When he finally settled to tie his jeans around his waist, he covered his rear, which was previously exposed to the police officers, but, from the front side his schlong was still peeking visibly from the inner seam. Sneaky, sneaky.
Another thing I noticed: school children walk (edit: RUN) to school together, and girls here don’t let their hair grow until a certain age. While at the outreach I was able to take a minute to attend to the noisy commotion coming from the adjacent building. There was a high school graduation! This was the second time today I was faced with the image of schoolchildren dressed in uniform and having to slap myself because I was quick to assume that boys here just wore dresses. To my dismay, this was not true. It is a cultural expectation for girls to keep their hair short until a certain age, which I surmise is just before they graduate high school because the female high school graduates had stylized their hair. Another interesting thing about this graduation was that it lasted the ENTIRE day. I would say the ratio of ceremony to mingling was about the same as that of, oh, say, my high school, but since the ceremony was going on from before the time of our arrival at 10:00 am and until around 4:00 pm and the people were still mingling when we left at 7-ish, I concluded that the proportion of business to socializing remains consistent from across the Pacific. Well. This generalization holds for at least high school graduation ceremonies... I think.
There were also boys who had completed their military cadet training and had put on a performance at the ceremony. They also had those funky ropes around their left shoulders that were adorned on the security guards at the airport. If I had a photo editing program on my netbook, you might be able to see what I'm talking about here:
The outreach camp workers made individually packed hot lunches for each UFS volunteer! I was so impressed. People are so friendly, generous, hospitable, and gentle here. I could learn a few things from their ways here. Our lunches were fried rice and fried chicken with the same hot sauce I had eaten at Fingalix the day before. My fellow UFS volunteers couldn't take the heat, so they did not apply the sauce. I happen to be accustomed to hot foods because of my lovely neighbor Susan who cooks spicy Indian food all the time and who has inspired me to integrate spice into my cuisine. Chelsea loooooove spices. Also, considering the fact that I've eaten fried chicken and rice twice in the two days I've been here, I think this (the fried chicken and fried rice, obvi. not the spice) is something I'll have to get used to.
Other interesting food I ate today? Mini bananas from the basket on a woman's head! It cost me 1 cedi for a half batch, which was eight mini bananas. I think I ate four of them. They were so yummy.
I also made another friend who was carrying stuff on his head. He was a young boy. He had some funky fruit. I would have bought it but I didn't have small enough Ghanaian currency to buy a small quantity. His name was Simon, and I wanted a picture with him because he was so adorable, and he agreed so long as I give him what I initially thought was a copy of the picture, but no: his hand was pointing to the camera because he wanted my camera. I engaged him in conversation and realized that there was a chance that I'd come back to the same place again because Unite For Sight conducts an outreach at the same place (I wish I knew the name) on the first Thursday of every month. I think I will request to conduct outreach with the Crystal Eye Clinic for July 7th, because I kind of sort of promised Simon that I would have a copy of the picture for him on that date. I gave him my phone number and name and told him to call that number if I wasn't there on July 7th. He told me that one day he would teach me 'his language' Ga, which is another local Ghanaian dialect.
I know I've mentioned the chickens everywhere. There were chickens at the camp. There were also stray dogs. Cute dogs, too! They looked friendly and harmless, and, from my conversations with other volunteers, I seem to be one of the few (cough: the only) who was vaccinated against rabies, so it is naturally my duty to seek out these stray animals and see how they respond to a human's advance. The dog seemed scared of me. :( A Ghanaian lady walked by and said to me, "he's probably scared because of your color." And I was like... hmmm? That might actually be a possibility!
Tejas is a fellow volunteer with whom I am developing an interesting relationship. It's been a while since I've had people obsess over my buffness and physical strength... since high school I think? Yeah, when people would ask me all the time how much I can bench, etc. Tejas first wanted to know if I was a swimmer because I have broad shoulders. That was yesterday. He asked me again today. Then he asked me if he could arm wrestle me. I told him after a month of me doing push-ups every day (hence my 50 push-ups from before). He agreed to the challenge. Then he proceeded to ask me if I ever flexed so hard that I ripped through a shirt. He was serious! Then I thought about it, and Sophia interjected to recount the story of the Unite For Sight concert last winter during which I ripped my pants while MCing. I had jumped onto the stage and my entire pants split from the middle seam. I thought the noise was really loud because the audience was silent. So I kind of made a joke about it and proceeded off the stage and deferred MCing to another UFS member. Tejas must have some kind of special mind-reading powers to have gotten that one out of me.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
My first day in Ghana
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011, 8:52 pm Ghana time (which I've learned is GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time. There is no adjustment in time for an offset longitude. Ghana is located within the same time zone as London).
Margaret, upon my questioning, proudly announced "I run this place." Not that I was questioning her authority. I was simply wondering if I would get to see her again because I was taken aback by her kindness and willingness to make our experiences here more wholesome. Naima, Sophia, and I awoke from our naps and proceeded downstairs to the guest room to chill on the tan colored leather couches in front of the tv, which is currently playing some movie that sports the characters Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, and the manly man who stars in Iron Man (does anyone know the name of this movie)? A Ghanaian woman laden in a green, white, and black dress arose from the corners of neverland and asked us our names and began to teach us Twi, which is the language in Ghana that Ghanaians hold to their identity and culture, and, in the same way that Yiddish sometimes works for me, there are some Ghanaian words for which there are no adequate English equivalents. Even with English as the primarily spoken language, Twi is still relevant to me because I may encounter rural Ghanaians who only speak Twi. The first word Margaret taught us was "Akwaba," which means "welcome." When one welcomes us, we are supposed to respond with "Iao sohn," which means "thank you," but not the same thank you that we use to express our gratitude for a gift or a favor. When you wish to say that, you say "medasi." Iao sohn is used in response to greetings, such as "good morning."
Akwaba was a familiar term to me because it appeared on many signs at the Accra airport, including one that I encountered just after handing in my I-94 form (which had both English and French instructions! That made me excited), providing my fingerprint, and pulling out a smirk for a Logitech camera so the Ghanaian government could lock me up if I'm up to no good. Read that sign carefully. You might laugh.
There were two customs lines for "Other Nationals" that were reserved for non-Ghanaian travelers. Interestingly, all of the white "other nationals" merged to the leftmost "other nationals" queue, even though the right queue was designated for the same purpose and was much shorter. As a Caucasian, these two months are really the first time I will ever be an ethnic minority. Growing up as a Jew in a white Catholic suburban Levittown should not have been much different, but, without first having a conversation with me or my family, one would not have assumed that I was an ethnic minority. This is different. And it seemed as if the white "other nationals" were gravitating inwards towards each other into their comfort zones. I, for one, prioritize timeliness over assembling with people of my same race. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish. Who knows. I went to the right line. And then by some twist of fate I was the only one in my group to not be stopped when the customs security inspected our bags. My cart of luggage was glanced at and signed off by the person directing the customs security traffic. I was so confused. Two of the Unite For Sight volunteers I was traveling with had to leave their eyeglasses behind at the airport because of customs difficulties. They didn't even care to look inside a single one of my bags. I was at once flattered and confused.
In the United States, I am used to navy blue as the default color for security guards and policemen. At the Accra airport, security guards were dressed in green, and each had a woven rope that extended over the left shoulder and into the front left pocket. No idea what was at the end of each small chain, but I thought the concept was nifty.
There were six Unite For Sight volunteers on my flight, and all of us were greeted by Jerome, an ophthalmic nurse, and John, our driver. John drove us and our luggage from the airport to the Telecentre Bed and Breakfast, which is my primary lodging destination. The van ride here was quite the trip, what with the many unpaved roads and street vendors all over the place and people casually walking between cars in the middle of the traffic in the main roads who were carrying all sorts of things on their heads that they wanted you to buy (like ACTUALLY the stereotypical image of African people carrying huge amounts of stuff on their heads, sans hands... and some women had their babies strapped to their backs all the while. so impressive), the red dust all over the place, and the CHICKENS EVERYWHERE! This is for real. There are stray chickens and roosters literally everywhere. I don't get it.
We checked in at the Telecentre and were given cell phones and our room keys and assignments. The lady who works at the front desk is Daksa, and she has been so kind and welcoming and seems to be genuinely looking out for us. Ghana's country code is 011233, which you dial before you dial the number for my cell phone. My cell phone number here is 0207058112. If you're looking to call me from any other country besides Ghana, you'll have to dial 011233-207058112. I called my mom this afternoon and the reception was fantastic, as if I was having a conversation between two land line phones at home. So, call me if you'd like! Or e-mail me. The Telecentre has free wifi everywhere. It's a little slow but it definitely does the job and I am so grateful for it. I will not be in the Telecentre at all times, however. During the month of June, I will be residing at the Telecentre when I am working in the eye clinics in Accra, and I will be elsewhere when I am doing the outreach camps. I will be working the eye clinics on June 2-4, June 12-18, and June 26-30. I will be doing overnight outreaches on June 5-11 and June 19-25. I will likely not be the most accessible during those times.
The Telecentre Bed and Breakfast is a wholesome setting, but is a tad on the shabby side. A definite upgrade from typical Ghanaian lifestyle from what I have seen and read. Accra on the whole is a bit on the shabby side. It is a very poor city. Powder me up and call me a Westerner, I don't care, I'll say it anyway: I can't say I'd like to live here. I growing to appreciate my lifestyle in the United States in which I vacillate between my home in a highly developed suburban neighborhood in Long Island, NY and my college dormitory in the, although ridden with crime, mostly functional city of New Have'n, CT. As much as I talk it down, I think I actually like to be clean. The shower kind of scares me, as does the toilet that tests my patience because I need to leave several minutes for it to rest to build up adequate water pressure for use. I was a bit turned off by the new patch of ants that appeared on our floor to eat up a crumb of food that had been left behind by the previous inhabitant of my room. The dust all over the place outside kind of makes me feel dirty overall, and I miss being clean. I also have to worry about mosquitoes all over the place, and so my bedspread consists of a sheet that I brought from home for my backside, a pillow case cover atop the provided pillows for my head's backside, and my mosquito net that I failed to properly install that will serve as my blanket. It works.
After obtaining some Ghanaian currency, my Unite For Sight group and I ate at a local place called Fingalix, where I ordered joloff and kelewele, which was described as "savory rice & savory fried plantains." The dish was rieally yummy. Hot and spicy the way I like it. For Jonathan it was apparently hotter than he had expected. But thanks to my lovely neighbor at home Susan who makes spicy rice all of the time, my palate was prepared for anything. And this I would have described as mild. The servers brought out our food as they were cooked, which took quite a bit of time. Jonathan and I were the last served, and we insisted that the others eat because there were flies all over the place. This is the kind of dirty I'm talking about. :(
Anyway, time to close up. It is 10:17 pm here. Apparently I have to be dressed and ready to go for my first day at the Crystal Eye Clinic at 7:30 am in the lobby. I feel really safe here and, although my living conditions are not what I'm used to, I think it will be a smooth adjustment for me and a stellar experience. I really think this will shape who I am in years to come, and I'm so glad I've been given the opportunity to embark on such a journey. I'm excited to start helping people tomorrow!
Oh oh oh! Last thing. Favorite picture taken today definitely goes to this gem. STAR beer is the Ghanaian preference. It is actually an acronym that stands for "Sit Together And Relax," which is a testament to the peaceful, social, and chill Ghanaian way of life. Plus, there's sax. And, I think we all know very well that everything is better when there is sax.
Sky Mall Escapades
Oh, Sky Mall Magazine… You slay me (and my white girl problems)! I am always begging to be kissed, but my lips's natural flaccidity would never resonate with my buxom feelings if it weren’t for your AminoGenesis Lip Plumper found on page 13. I am an honest woman, but sometimes my hips give off lies. Where would I be if not for your “celebrity style body shapers” found on page 12 that effectively standardize my womanly physique to that of the one and only Shakira, whose hips never lie? I declare victory: Chelsea: 1, cognitive dissonance: 0.
Sky Mall Magazine, you complete me. Sometimes you give me purpose in life when I accompany my well-to-do I-banker Ivy League businessman husband from a political family who usually only lets me tag along as he golfs with his equally powerful and intimidating co-workers when I keep quiet and primp myself up with said materials from Sky Mall pages twelve and thirteen. Thanks to your “detachable golf bag cover that instantly converts into a fairway cooler,” when my husband and his colleagues demand that I make them sandwiches (a practice to which any and every housewife woman is accustomed), I am able to provide them with temporarily satisfying chilled beverages, which may not equal sandwiches in both their taste and splendor, but do achieve success in simulating the process of instant food delivery from unappreciated slave housewives. And, with said transpiration of events, my existence is validated (and so are my and my daughter’s fake boobs).
Thank you, Sky Mall Magazine, for never letting me down when my stereotypical white vacuous hole of loneliness is remedied by such products as “the Slanket siamese for two,” which is your Snuggie blanket that has two head holes for two individuals! You never fail to be the only reason my husband sits next to me as he watches The Game every night on television.
And of course, sometimes I feel trapped within the holed pocket that is my mid-life existential crisis, and I like to pretend that I am Hermione Granger attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a moment, and so I lift up my wand that I ordered from one Sky Mall magazine that I encountered while on a flight to my two-week stay in the Bahamas, and, with a twist and a flick say “Wingardium Leviosa,” and, in that moment I am caught in a trance of vicariousness in which all of my fantasies are realized.
HAH, Sky Mall. You slay me and my drifting mind. Back to the real Chelsea. Where we at.
Meters above the ground: 20,000? Kilometers from Atlanta, Georgia airport terminal E12: 10330. Kilometers to Accra International Airport, my destination: 6860. Time to my destination: 7 hours and 48 minutes. Current date and time in New York: 11:13 pm, Tuesday, May 31st, 2011. Current date and time in Accra, Ghana: 3:13 am, Wednesday, June 1st, 2011. Time until my Netbook computer battery dies: 7 hours and 25 minutes. Minutes until I’ve lost all ambition to complete this well thought-out first travel blog entry: negative 22. Minutes until my neck muscles have lost their voluntariness and I will have been overcome by the pull into the lair of my subconscious: 13 (projected). Alas, I chug (chug, chug, chug, CHUG! CHUG!! CHUUUUGGGG1!!11!! ok done) along.
So, if you’ve made it this far (which is an accomplishment, because I am terribly verbose when I'm pensive), I think you might have already arrived at the conclusion that, yes: I am on a plane. I am seated in my “comfort economy” seat in 11D, which I was happy to re-select as I was printing my boarding pass for my first flight, which was from JFK to ATL. My current flight is from ALT to ACC. The way the configuration appeared on the touchscreen in the Delta check-in at JFK, it seemed as if selecting seat 11D would have resulted in me having unlimited leg room and the circulated air not from the rear of a passenger in front of me. Instead, I am squished by the confines of two seats to the left and right of me, the left one with a passenger in it and the right one with my stuff. My life is truly a tragedy, especially because I ended up sitting next to a really kind gentleman named Bill from Liberia who was troubled by his nomadic lifestyle between California and Texas and Liberia which is what apparently happens when you’re an altruistic guy who works on development projects for communities that are weighed down by the hopelessness experienced after war crises. I was engaged in conversation with him, and I think I’d like to have his e-mail address before I step off of this plane, for his work has been trending towards the directions of farming and planting, which are inherent to community development processes. That is quite interesting to me, and, who knows, maybe I’ll end up despising my medical mission in Ghana and want to find myself in some other discipline. If that’s the case I’d love to have someone like him to call up to talk about such options. But I’m not all about networking. I’m really enjoying the warmth I’m receiving from his arm that is pouring over into my chair space. He is sleeping right now, but I am still thinking about his recommendation to see the Ghanaian beaches and to eat the “red-red,” which is apparently a plantain and bean mixture soup type thing. I’ll definitely seek it out.
Well anyway. Thus far my trip is not proving to be as ominous as perhaps what could have been predicted by the bad omen that occurred while on the car ride to JFK airport in my family’s black Toyota Prius (the only exception being the presence of biohazards for syringes in the airplane’s restrooms… what). Doxycycline is a version of the highly recommended and Malarone malaria prophylaxis medication, which is a level of expensive that gives even the most grizzliest of men the goosebumps. Unlike Malarone, Doxycycline is known to have its unfortunate baggage of side effects, including an upset stomach. I took a Doxycycline pill on my way to the airport and was lucky to have found a sturdy enough bag that would capture a more liquidy and visibly unappealing and less tasty version of my lunch. Yeah. I booted. In the car. On the way to the airport. I hoped this would not mean doom forever. Ew ew ew!
Things started to turn around with my first flight to Atlanta. I had packed three suitcases and one backpack (one of the suitcases was a carry on). One of the bags I was checking was twenty pounds overweight, and to leave it as such would have cost me (ahem, my parents) $150. But, THANK YOU BEAUTIFUL WOMAN BEHIND THE TICKET COUNTER! You were ever too [ok, sufficiently] generous with your allowance of about nine pounds in excess and ever too [adequately] patient in waiting as my parents and I scrambled to shuffle about my heavy items in my suitcases. Needless to say, I will not be accompanied by an extra shampoo bottle and a handle of laundry detergent. But I think I will make it.
Then came the boarding onto my Atlanta flight. I had a super maximally stuffed backpack and a super maximally packed rollie luggage. Thanks to my laziness and crappy seat, I was at the end of the line to board the plane. Mid-step onto the plane I was confronted by a flight attendant who had informed me that there was no more room for rollie luggage in carry on, and that my luggage would be put with the rest of the checked luggage free of cost. So, laziness and crappy seat equaled me having one less bag to worry about when I was making my connecting flight from Atlanta to Accra. Sounds like a win to me!
Then came the discovery of two unexpected Unite For Sight volunteers who were also on my flight to Accra and who were also connected to me in some way. I am traveling on the same flight as four other volunteers: Sophia, a fellow Yale sophomore on my research team who has been my rock and traveling buddy since we were planning our trip together in March; Jonathan, a Yale Masters in Public Health student also on my research team; and Naima, a fellow Yale sophomore and Tagious (no idea how to spell his name; he said it’s pronounced as the “tagious” in the word “contagious”), who just finished his sophomore year at Duke and who apparently lives about 5 minutes away from Naima in Saint Louis, Missouri. Cool. Very cool. They seem like splendid people.
And of course, the six chicken McNuggets with barbeque sauce and the medium-sized fries and diet Coke and Oreo McFlurry I had to calm the storms of my every last craving before I departed from the United States for two months. Still haven’t taken care of that White Castle craving that is hanging around inside me. Ahhh. I can’t complain. Life is good. But there is simply another dimension to my life since I know what it means to indulge in White Castle when you have The Craving. I must embrace my level of understanding that is apparently much less encountered than I would have ever expected. White Castle is really only a prominent force in a few states in the United States. I am blessed to come from a place where White Castle abounds. Ok, major tangent. I’ll stop. Actually. No. I won’t stop until I get my White Castle. Which I will. I am determined.
Ok, update. Time in Ghana: 4:03 am. Oy. I am totally awake. How will I ever adjust to this time difference? Do I stay up until my flight is over at 11 am-ish, or do I sleep now and wake then? But then I won’t finish this! Ahh!! Cognitive dissonance, shoo yourself!
I thought it would be interesting to make note of some of the key items I packed for this trip, and why. Everyone loves bullet points for their conciseness, ease on the eyes, and indentations (and hence less text)! So I’ll use bullet points to introduce them.
I have been trying to sleep on this flight for the past hour. I am NEVER not able to fall asleep. But I’m antsy and I feel so so itchy. I think I have mosquito bites on my legs from home that are for some reason starting to really bother me. I’m feeling really uncomfortable. I’m feeling as if I need to break out and scratch my whole body. WHY AM I SO ITCHY?????? Does this happen to people on really long flights? Do they become hypersensitive to even the most nominal of feelings and sensations they have? What is my deal? I want to take my pants off to scratch but that would obviously be completely inappropriate. Five hours and thirty six minutes until my battery on this thing dies. The bigger question is: how many more hours will I be able to handle on this flight? What am I going to do to stop feeling so uncomfortable and making time on this plane pass by so slowly? What am I doing wrong? I don’t hate flying or anything. I was actually thinking about when the last time I flew was, and I actually couldn’t remember. I’m thinking it was to Washington, D.C. during Thanksgiving break, but I actually don’t remember how I got there. If I didn’t fly then, then this right now might be the first time I’m traveling by plane in years. I used to travel so much in high school for gymnastics. When I went to college there was no such traveling. No money and no reason to do so. Until now. AND I’M SO ITCHY AND UNCOMFORTABLE!!!
I really want to be able to exercise while I’m in Ghana. That’s what I do over summers. Every summer over the past four years or so I’ve whipped myself into shape. I love doing that because of the beautiful weather and the time I’m able to devote to being fit and healthy. However, this summer my schedule might be messed up because I doubt that I’ll feel safe to go out for casual jogs on a regular basis. I’m probably antsy for that reason as well. Oh and maybe that coffee from an hour or so ago is not helping either. Crap. Ahhhhhh.
Back to actual blogging and not ranting about my current unpleasant state of being. I finished reading my Culture Smart! Travel Guide to Ghana during the span of my two flights with plenty of time to share what I’ve learned and many of the things I underlined that I found to be unique to Ghana and aspects of the culture that I hoped I would get the chance to fully experience. I am literally going to spit out the most important information surrounding Ghana and its culture that I underlined in those 150 pages. Here they are. Commence bullet form.
• “The most mountainous area is in the east along the Togo border, where several green peaks rise over 2,438 feet (800 m) to give an impressive view of Lake Volta. This is the largest artificial lake in the world, at 2,100,400 acres (850,000 hectares), fed by the White Volta, Black Volta, and Red Volta rivers and serving the Akosombo hydroelectric dam, which is 1,214 feet (370 m) wide and 400 ft (124 m) tall.”
• Ghanaian flag “consists of red, gold, and green horizontal stripes with a black star in the middle. Red signifies the blood of those who died in the country’s struggle for independence. Gold represents Ghana’s mineral wealth, and green denotes its lush forests and farmland. The black, five-pointed lodestar is the symbol of African emancipation and unity in the struggle against colonialism.”
• “Older people are accorded massive respect in Ghana. It is believed that they have reached old age through living in harmony both with the ancestral spirits and with natural forces.”
• “Ghana’s many French-speaking immigrants, especially from the poorer countries of Togo, Mali, and Niger, tend to be viewed as second-class citizens.”
• “Bakatue (July, Elmina): A regatta to usher in the beginning of the fishing season.” I will try my very best to make it to see this extravagant festival in northern Ghana.
• “The outdooring, as its name suggests, is the occasion when a new baby is taken outdoors for the first time to be shown to the community, traditionally on the eighth day.”
• Apparently my Ghanaian name is “Amma” because I am a female and I was born on a Saturday.
• “It is believed that after death the soul of a person enters a spirit world, from where it maintains contact with the living and can protect or punish its descendants depending upon their behavior on earth. ‘Real fun’ is a fitting anagram for ‘funeral’ in Ghana.”
• “Do not smell food brought to you… If accepting a drink of alcohol, pour a little on the ground as a libation for the ancestors before drinking… Don’t sing in the shower… Don’t whistle at night.”
• “If you are the one to invite someone out, you will be expected to pay.”
• “People love it if you greet them by name. A ubiquitous one is ‘Charlie,’ meaning ‘my friend.’”
• Homosexuality “is taboo and illegal in Ghana.”
• “A wife’s major role in a marriage is to bring forth children. Childless marriages can be seen as a curse, and a childless marriage is seen as the joining of two incompatible souls, and is not recognized as a ‘real’ marriage.”
• “Popular foods among tourists include red-red (fried plantain with bean stew),jollof rice (rice cooked in a meat and vegetable stew), waakye (spiced rice and beans), rice balls with groundnut (peanut), borfrot (doughnut), mpotompoto (mashed yam with palm oil and fish), kelewele (spiced fried plantain), and the fresh fish, shrimps, and “one-man-thousand” (tiny fried baby fish—one man can eat a thousand of them) straight from the Volta around Akosombo.”
• “The nation’s favorite beer, Star, is used as an acronym for ‘Sit Together And Relax.’”
• “Among women, cigarettes are reserved for prostitutes.”
• “When buying foodstuffs, you can try your luck by asking for a reduction in price (te so) or for the addition of some extras (to so). Ask them if they are charging you obroni (foreigner) or obibini (Black man) price.”
• Kumasi is home to the “biggest market in West Africa.”
• Hiking – “Ghanaians do not understand the idea of walking for pleasure.”
• “Too many cars and not enough roads, unintelligent traffic light systems, police barriers, accidents, street parades, construction, and herds of animals can all contribute to some critically bad congestion in the cities. Traffic is a common excuse for Ghanaians’ lateness, and is usually a justifiable one.”
• “A common Ghanaian practice that foreigners usually do not like to adopt is the storage of used toilet paper in a box in the bathroom, burning it rather than flushing it away.”
• “One Ghana cedi is currently just less than one US dollar.”
• “Expect meetings to be late, cancelled, or forgotten. Ghanaians themselves bemoan their own unpunctuality and jokingly refer to their own version of GMT: “Ghana Man” or “Ghana Maybe” Time.”
• “Pointing at somebody with the thumb, or biting the thumb and then flicking it toward the person, is the equivalent of raising the middle finger in the US… It is most often seen between irate taxi drivers, and can be accompanied by the very rude “Wo maame!” (Your mother)!”
This is a sign that I am tiring of writing. I would ordinarily comment on the aforementioned butt ton of material copied straight from the book, but I am exhausted, and I have reached my seventh non-doubled spaced page and 3,895th word in Microsoft Word. This might be considered to be too much for any blog entry. All I could say is that I wish it were this easy to write a paper for a college class. Wow. I actually have so much more to say. But I’ll stop because this is pathetic.
This entry was highly important to me because it marks the last piece of writing I will have down before I have experienced a new continent, which I am sure will probably change me in some way. This is the last piece of writing that reflects the pre-Ghana Chelsea, which, who knows, may be a completely different person than the post-Ghana Chelsea. Only regular and detailed written documentation of her journey and an in-depth analysis of her post-Ghana visit cognitive self will tell. Stay tuned! And thanks for reading. I love you all.
New York time: 3:02 am. Ghana time: 7:02 am. Kilometers to destination: 3135. Kilometers traveled: 13933.
Sky Mall Magazine, you complete me. Sometimes you give me purpose in life when I accompany my well-to-do I-banker Ivy League businessman husband from a political family who usually only lets me tag along as he golfs with his equally powerful and intimidating co-workers when I keep quiet and primp myself up with said materials from Sky Mall pages twelve and thirteen. Thanks to your “detachable golf bag cover that instantly converts into a fairway cooler,” when my husband and his colleagues demand that I make them sandwiches (a practice to which any and every housewife woman is accustomed), I am able to provide them with temporarily satisfying chilled beverages, which may not equal sandwiches in both their taste and splendor, but do achieve success in simulating the process of instant food delivery from unappreciated slave housewives. And, with said transpiration of events, my existence is validated (and so are my and my daughter’s fake boobs).
Thank you, Sky Mall Magazine, for never letting me down when my stereotypical white vacuous hole of loneliness is remedied by such products as “the Slanket siamese for two,” which is your Snuggie blanket that has two head holes for two individuals! You never fail to be the only reason my husband sits next to me as he watches The Game every night on television.
And of course, sometimes I feel trapped within the holed pocket that is my mid-life existential crisis, and I like to pretend that I am Hermione Granger attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a moment, and so I lift up my wand that I ordered from one Sky Mall magazine that I encountered while on a flight to my two-week stay in the Bahamas, and, with a twist and a flick say “Wingardium Leviosa,” and, in that moment I am caught in a trance of vicariousness in which all of my fantasies are realized.
HAH, Sky Mall. You slay me and my drifting mind. Back to the real Chelsea. Where we at.
Meters above the ground: 20,000? Kilometers from Atlanta, Georgia airport terminal E12: 10330. Kilometers to Accra International Airport, my destination: 6860. Time to my destination: 7 hours and 48 minutes. Current date and time in New York: 11:13 pm, Tuesday, May 31st, 2011. Current date and time in Accra, Ghana: 3:13 am, Wednesday, June 1st, 2011. Time until my Netbook computer battery dies: 7 hours and 25 minutes. Minutes until I’ve lost all ambition to complete this well thought-out first travel blog entry: negative 22. Minutes until my neck muscles have lost their voluntariness and I will have been overcome by the pull into the lair of my subconscious: 13 (projected). Alas, I chug (chug, chug, chug, CHUG! CHUG!! CHUUUUGGGG1!!11!! ok done) along.
So, if you’ve made it this far (which is an accomplishment, because I am terribly verbose when I'm pensive), I think you might have already arrived at the conclusion that, yes: I am on a plane. I am seated in my “comfort economy” seat in 11D, which I was happy to re-select as I was printing my boarding pass for my first flight, which was from JFK to ATL. My current flight is from ALT to ACC. The way the configuration appeared on the touchscreen in the Delta check-in at JFK, it seemed as if selecting seat 11D would have resulted in me having unlimited leg room and the circulated air not from the rear of a passenger in front of me. Instead, I am squished by the confines of two seats to the left and right of me, the left one with a passenger in it and the right one with my stuff. My life is truly a tragedy, especially because I ended up sitting next to a really kind gentleman named Bill from Liberia who was troubled by his nomadic lifestyle between California and Texas and Liberia which is what apparently happens when you’re an altruistic guy who works on development projects for communities that are weighed down by the hopelessness experienced after war crises. I was engaged in conversation with him, and I think I’d like to have his e-mail address before I step off of this plane, for his work has been trending towards the directions of farming and planting, which are inherent to community development processes. That is quite interesting to me, and, who knows, maybe I’ll end up despising my medical mission in Ghana and want to find myself in some other discipline. If that’s the case I’d love to have someone like him to call up to talk about such options. But I’m not all about networking. I’m really enjoying the warmth I’m receiving from his arm that is pouring over into my chair space. He is sleeping right now, but I am still thinking about his recommendation to see the Ghanaian beaches and to eat the “red-red,” which is apparently a plantain and bean mixture soup type thing. I’ll definitely seek it out.
Well anyway. Thus far my trip is not proving to be as ominous as perhaps what could have been predicted by the bad omen that occurred while on the car ride to JFK airport in my family’s black Toyota Prius (the only exception being the presence of biohazards for syringes in the airplane’s restrooms… what). Doxycycline is a version of the highly recommended and Malarone malaria prophylaxis medication, which is a level of expensive that gives even the most grizzliest of men the goosebumps. Unlike Malarone, Doxycycline is known to have its unfortunate baggage of side effects, including an upset stomach. I took a Doxycycline pill on my way to the airport and was lucky to have found a sturdy enough bag that would capture a more liquidy and visibly unappealing and less tasty version of my lunch. Yeah. I booted. In the car. On the way to the airport. I hoped this would not mean doom forever. Ew ew ew!
Things started to turn around with my first flight to Atlanta. I had packed three suitcases and one backpack (one of the suitcases was a carry on). One of the bags I was checking was twenty pounds overweight, and to leave it as such would have cost me (ahem, my parents) $150. But, THANK YOU BEAUTIFUL WOMAN BEHIND THE TICKET COUNTER! You were ever too [ok, sufficiently] generous with your allowance of about nine pounds in excess and ever too [adequately] patient in waiting as my parents and I scrambled to shuffle about my heavy items in my suitcases. Needless to say, I will not be accompanied by an extra shampoo bottle and a handle of laundry detergent. But I think I will make it.
Then came the boarding onto my Atlanta flight. I had a super maximally stuffed backpack and a super maximally packed rollie luggage. Thanks to my laziness and crappy seat, I was at the end of the line to board the plane. Mid-step onto the plane I was confronted by a flight attendant who had informed me that there was no more room for rollie luggage in carry on, and that my luggage would be put with the rest of the checked luggage free of cost. So, laziness and crappy seat equaled me having one less bag to worry about when I was making my connecting flight from Atlanta to Accra. Sounds like a win to me!
Then came the discovery of two unexpected Unite For Sight volunteers who were also on my flight to Accra and who were also connected to me in some way. I am traveling on the same flight as four other volunteers: Sophia, a fellow Yale sophomore on my research team who has been my rock and traveling buddy since we were planning our trip together in March; Jonathan, a Yale Masters in Public Health student also on my research team; and Naima, a fellow Yale sophomore and Tagious (no idea how to spell his name; he said it’s pronounced as the “tagious” in the word “contagious”), who just finished his sophomore year at Duke and who apparently lives about 5 minutes away from Naima in Saint Louis, Missouri. Cool. Very cool. They seem like splendid people.
And of course, the six chicken McNuggets with barbeque sauce and the medium-sized fries and diet Coke and Oreo McFlurry I had to calm the storms of my every last craving before I departed from the United States for two months. Still haven’t taken care of that White Castle craving that is hanging around inside me. Ahhh. I can’t complain. Life is good. But there is simply another dimension to my life since I know what it means to indulge in White Castle when you have The Craving. I must embrace my level of understanding that is apparently much less encountered than I would have ever expected. White Castle is really only a prominent force in a few states in the United States. I am blessed to come from a place where White Castle abounds. Ok, major tangent. I’ll stop. Actually. No. I won’t stop until I get my White Castle. Which I will. I am determined.
Ok, update. Time in Ghana: 4:03 am. Oy. I am totally awake. How will I ever adjust to this time difference? Do I stay up until my flight is over at 11 am-ish, or do I sleep now and wake then? But then I won’t finish this! Ahh!! Cognitive dissonance, shoo yourself!
I thought it would be interesting to make note of some of the key items I packed for this trip, and why. Everyone loves bullet points for their conciseness, ease on the eyes, and indentations (and hence less text)! So I’ll use bullet points to introduce them.
- Medications and vaccinations were perhaps my most expensive necessities for this trip. My doctor at the Yale Travel Health Clinic wanted to take every precaution with my trip, and I ended up having to charge almost a thousand dollars to my student account for all of the shots and consultations I needed. This is only further encouragement for me to travel to Africa again, because I will have had all of these expenses covered. Anyway. In my yellow slip that is taped to my passport for immediate indication of my yellow fever vaccination [required if you’re traveling to Ghana], my doctor at the Yale clinic took the liberty of noting all of the other vaccinations I had received as follows: “Tdap” (tuberculosis), “HepA #1” (Hepatitis A, “#1” because I will need to follow-up with a booster shot in six months), Typhoid, Rabies – Pre #1, #2, and #3 (series of three shots over the course of 21 days [though 28 is more desirable]), IPV (I think this is tetanus), and influenza (for this year’s flu virus). She also prescribed to me a buttload of medications, including a malaria prophylaxis (the Doxycycline), an anti-diarrheal (Ciproflaxin), a skin infection ointment (Mupirocin), and a yeast infection medication (Fluconazole). In addition to the prescribed medications I made sure I was adequately supplied with my seasonal allergy saver, Claritin D and Benadryl allergy, and pain medication Tylenol for your everyday headaches.
- Books for pleasure and summer studying. I’ve been telling myself for the longest time that I would pick up some books just to read them for the pure enjoyment of reading, and, since I never let myself do anything for pure enjoyment, I had to pack them away with me to Africa to force myself to read them so I would justify the space they are occupying in my already stuffed up suitcases and as rite of passage for me to begin to pick up my MCAT books and EMT textbook that I also brought along with me. That means I won’t allow myself to begin studying for the MCAT until I’ve read these books. I’ve made them a prerequisite. Sad that I have to do this to myself. Anyway. They are books that I genuinely want to read. They are The Man Who Lives With Wolves, by Shaun Ellis, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, The People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species, and The Curious Cook, which I found during Spring Salvage hunting activities and is supposedly about the science of cooking. These are a nice balance. I think I’ll be content with the fact that I found a way to guilt trip myself into devoting the time to reading things I actually want to read. Yay.
- UV light water purifier. Gotta watch out for those tap water bacteria. Mmmm.
- Voltage adapter and outlet converter contraption (so gnarly). Ghana’s outlets are apparently the same as Europe’s, with 220V and 50Hz as the standard output and a funky three pronged input that does not typically house U.S. electronic plugs.
- Netbook in protective Hello Kitty sleeve. I didn’t really feel comfortable bringing my laptop abroad with me for the slightest chance of theft and losing all of my valuable files, so I thought it was a worthy investment to buy the cheapest netbook I could find. I’m using it right now, and it’s a definite strong choice if you’re a traveler and looking to have the basic functions of a computer at your fingertips while also feeling comfortable with losing it if ever it were to happen. The Hello Kitty sleeve was the cheapest of all of the netbook sleeves by far (and also the cutest), so it was a win-win purchase for me. Best Buy. Toshiba netbook. $279.99. Hello Kitty sleeve. $12.99. Go. Get it. Words. Getting. Choppy. Because. I. Am. Sleepy. Zzzzzz……
- Eyeglasses – 500 of them, ready for use, packed into one suitcase. Needed them as a requirement for Unite For Sight. These eyeglasses I obtained essentially for free from the Lion’s Club of New Jersey, which is an organization that recycles eyeglasses and distributes them for free for such purposes as Unite For Sight’s missions. But I had to pay shipping. And I had to commit an entire suitcase to transporting the glasses over to Ghana myself. And that’s a lot of space. And that’s not really OK.
- Passport with Visa. Yes, I am talking about the same passport and visa that arrived to my house on Thursday, aka 6 days ago. Thank you, sudden wave of anxiety that drove me to fret about my visa and call up VisaHQ in a panic, and for hitting me at just the right moment so that I wouldn’t be completely screwed with my flight. Next time, I will NOT send my passport to the wrong place. Never putting myself through that stress again. Sum of the story: if you use VisaHQ.com to process your visa [which is a totally legitimate and recommended service], make sure you mail your passport and other offline materials TO VISAHQ, NOT TO YOUR DESTINATION COUNTRY’S EMBASSY!!! Because you might not know where your passport is for a while. And your required documents for your visa might be found in two separate places that are out of your immediate reach so you cannot mediate the situation. And you might have to spend hours waiting on your destination country’s embassy phone queues just to be redirected to people who can help you who are only available by voicemail message. Here’s a hint for you. Just send your damn stuff to the right place and you’ll damn well have a lot less stress than I did.
I have been trying to sleep on this flight for the past hour. I am NEVER not able to fall asleep. But I’m antsy and I feel so so itchy. I think I have mosquito bites on my legs from home that are for some reason starting to really bother me. I’m feeling really uncomfortable. I’m feeling as if I need to break out and scratch my whole body. WHY AM I SO ITCHY?????? Does this happen to people on really long flights? Do they become hypersensitive to even the most nominal of feelings and sensations they have? What is my deal? I want to take my pants off to scratch but that would obviously be completely inappropriate. Five hours and thirty six minutes until my battery on this thing dies. The bigger question is: how many more hours will I be able to handle on this flight? What am I going to do to stop feeling so uncomfortable and making time on this plane pass by so slowly? What am I doing wrong? I don’t hate flying or anything. I was actually thinking about when the last time I flew was, and I actually couldn’t remember. I’m thinking it was to Washington, D.C. during Thanksgiving break, but I actually don’t remember how I got there. If I didn’t fly then, then this right now might be the first time I’m traveling by plane in years. I used to travel so much in high school for gymnastics. When I went to college there was no such traveling. No money and no reason to do so. Until now. AND I’M SO ITCHY AND UNCOMFORTABLE!!!
I really want to be able to exercise while I’m in Ghana. That’s what I do over summers. Every summer over the past four years or so I’ve whipped myself into shape. I love doing that because of the beautiful weather and the time I’m able to devote to being fit and healthy. However, this summer my schedule might be messed up because I doubt that I’ll feel safe to go out for casual jogs on a regular basis. I’m probably antsy for that reason as well. Oh and maybe that coffee from an hour or so ago is not helping either. Crap. Ahhhhhh.
Back to actual blogging and not ranting about my current unpleasant state of being. I finished reading my Culture Smart! Travel Guide to Ghana during the span of my two flights with plenty of time to share what I’ve learned and many of the things I underlined that I found to be unique to Ghana and aspects of the culture that I hoped I would get the chance to fully experience. I am literally going to spit out the most important information surrounding Ghana and its culture that I underlined in those 150 pages. Here they are. Commence bullet form.
• “The most mountainous area is in the east along the Togo border, where several green peaks rise over 2,438 feet (800 m) to give an impressive view of Lake Volta. This is the largest artificial lake in the world, at 2,100,400 acres (850,000 hectares), fed by the White Volta, Black Volta, and Red Volta rivers and serving the Akosombo hydroelectric dam, which is 1,214 feet (370 m) wide and 400 ft (124 m) tall.”
• Ghanaian flag “consists of red, gold, and green horizontal stripes with a black star in the middle. Red signifies the blood of those who died in the country’s struggle for independence. Gold represents Ghana’s mineral wealth, and green denotes its lush forests and farmland. The black, five-pointed lodestar is the symbol of African emancipation and unity in the struggle against colonialism.”
• “Older people are accorded massive respect in Ghana. It is believed that they have reached old age through living in harmony both with the ancestral spirits and with natural forces.”
• “Ghana’s many French-speaking immigrants, especially from the poorer countries of Togo, Mali, and Niger, tend to be viewed as second-class citizens.”
• “Bakatue (July, Elmina): A regatta to usher in the beginning of the fishing season.” I will try my very best to make it to see this extravagant festival in northern Ghana.
• “The outdooring, as its name suggests, is the occasion when a new baby is taken outdoors for the first time to be shown to the community, traditionally on the eighth day.”
• Apparently my Ghanaian name is “Amma” because I am a female and I was born on a Saturday.
• “It is believed that after death the soul of a person enters a spirit world, from where it maintains contact with the living and can protect or punish its descendants depending upon their behavior on earth. ‘Real fun’ is a fitting anagram for ‘funeral’ in Ghana.”
• “Do not smell food brought to you… If accepting a drink of alcohol, pour a little on the ground as a libation for the ancestors before drinking… Don’t sing in the shower… Don’t whistle at night.”
• “If you are the one to invite someone out, you will be expected to pay.”
• “People love it if you greet them by name. A ubiquitous one is ‘Charlie,’ meaning ‘my friend.’”
• Homosexuality “is taboo and illegal in Ghana.”
• “A wife’s major role in a marriage is to bring forth children. Childless marriages can be seen as a curse, and a childless marriage is seen as the joining of two incompatible souls, and is not recognized as a ‘real’ marriage.”
• “Popular foods among tourists include red-red (fried plantain with bean stew),jollof rice (rice cooked in a meat and vegetable stew), waakye (spiced rice and beans), rice balls with groundnut (peanut), borfrot (doughnut), mpotompoto (mashed yam with palm oil and fish), kelewele (spiced fried plantain), and the fresh fish, shrimps, and “one-man-thousand” (tiny fried baby fish—one man can eat a thousand of them) straight from the Volta around Akosombo.”
• “The nation’s favorite beer, Star, is used as an acronym for ‘Sit Together And Relax.’”
• “Among women, cigarettes are reserved for prostitutes.”
• “When buying foodstuffs, you can try your luck by asking for a reduction in price (te so) or for the addition of some extras (to so). Ask them if they are charging you obroni (foreigner) or obibini (Black man) price.”
• Kumasi is home to the “biggest market in West Africa.”
• Hiking – “Ghanaians do not understand the idea of walking for pleasure.”
• “Too many cars and not enough roads, unintelligent traffic light systems, police barriers, accidents, street parades, construction, and herds of animals can all contribute to some critically bad congestion in the cities. Traffic is a common excuse for Ghanaians’ lateness, and is usually a justifiable one.”
• “A common Ghanaian practice that foreigners usually do not like to adopt is the storage of used toilet paper in a box in the bathroom, burning it rather than flushing it away.”
• “One Ghana cedi is currently just less than one US dollar.”
• “Expect meetings to be late, cancelled, or forgotten. Ghanaians themselves bemoan their own unpunctuality and jokingly refer to their own version of GMT: “Ghana Man” or “Ghana Maybe” Time.”
• “Pointing at somebody with the thumb, or biting the thumb and then flicking it toward the person, is the equivalent of raising the middle finger in the US… It is most often seen between irate taxi drivers, and can be accompanied by the very rude “Wo maame!” (Your mother)!”
This is a sign that I am tiring of writing. I would ordinarily comment on the aforementioned butt ton of material copied straight from the book, but I am exhausted, and I have reached my seventh non-doubled spaced page and 3,895th word in Microsoft Word. This might be considered to be too much for any blog entry. All I could say is that I wish it were this easy to write a paper for a college class. Wow. I actually have so much more to say. But I’ll stop because this is pathetic.
This entry was highly important to me because it marks the last piece of writing I will have down before I have experienced a new continent, which I am sure will probably change me in some way. This is the last piece of writing that reflects the pre-Ghana Chelsea, which, who knows, may be a completely different person than the post-Ghana Chelsea. Only regular and detailed written documentation of her journey and an in-depth analysis of her post-Ghana visit cognitive self will tell. Stay tuned! And thanks for reading. I love you all.
New York time: 3:02 am. Ghana time: 7:02 am. Kilometers to destination: 3135. Kilometers traveled: 13933.
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