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!
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