Two years later, whatever happened? (1/2)
Note: I wrote a lot of things while I was in Ghana, but recently I was going through some of my blog posts on my computer that never became blog posts, and I liked this post to share. Though I wrote this last March, I made minor edits but the message is as I felt in the village. There’s varying degrees of cynicism (or depressing thoughts), but I would never trade my time in Ghana for anything! I really loved my time in Ghana. After all, I learned what it means to just feel free. To feel free is priceless and isn’t something you truly learn or understand unless you live somewhere like the village. That is, I think the notion of feeling free is a central tenet in beginning to describe Ghanaian culture and lifestyle; a sort of authentic hospitality, accepting the present for what it is, and honestly, just stopping to look around and say hi to someone - whether you feel like it or not because that person deserves it.
Due to the longevity of this thought, I’ve divided this into two sections:
Challenges of Peace Corps and village life: “Why we drink”
Working in the village: “Hours go by in peace corpse”
…
Why we drink
(1/2)
March 2016
“I dropped off the money just as per… look, man, I’ve got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I… this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it’s not just, it might not be just such a simple… uh, you know?”
-The Dude in The Big Lebowski
Two years later, and I’m starting to get a handle on what just happened over the past two years. Like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, it’s hard to know where to begin to start explaining the village, or really how to begin to describe any part Ghana and Peace Corps. Perspectives change. I see the village differently than I did when I first moved here, a year ago, and even just a couple months ago. Even last week I felt different than I do now, but that’s just mood swings. One day you leave America and show up in Ghana some few hours later. The environment is new, everyone you meet is new. There’s little reference to what you used to know. Relinquishing responsibilities in the village (checking out) and the thought of leaving for something that I know is really nice, though I’ll miss the villagers and a lot of the PCVs I’ve come to know here.
I’ve found a lot of this Ghana life to be like when you’re digesting food, and you don’t know, or can’t best say, whether it’ll make you run diarrhea or not. Is it possible that the stew has turned? Just like Peace Corps service, I don’t know the outcome, or what really is going on, or have ever had any firm grasp on the surrounding village life. What I mean is that I get why I’m here, and I get what we are supposed to be doing and why from an American context. That’s pretty straight forward. Let’s help people help themselves or whatever. Learning the culture, how things work and why they work that way, is not as straight forward as “let’s help people help themselves,” but culture comes before this.
The village presents a never-ending bombardment of wondering why this is this way, and why that is that way. It’s hard to make that judgment while you’re digesting it all, because you’re always on the learning curve. It’s a fast curve though. Your perception of your role within the village bubble changes quickly, and I think that you consider your role perhaps more so than you would in America. That is, you’re more conscientious of your role in the village than you are just being in America. Not just because you live in something of a fishbowl, but this is an issue of being an outsider in a different culture and all that bundles in a big package. But I’m beginning to piece together a little bit of what has happened here.
[What’s good with life? Just the way it is.] Looking forward to returning to the U.S. in a few months, the thoughts of deep dish pizza cross my mind probably a little more frequently than a sane person would, but this could be due to Mefloquine and Malarone malaria prophylaxis running through my body for the past two years. Of all the foods unavailable in the village, I really don’t know what it is about deep dish pizza that makes me think of it this way. Or, it could be the heat, sweating yourself to sleep every night, crazy loud children, cockroaches and mice scampering through the ceiling, the process of obtaining water or having limited conversations with people who speak English as a first language and understand my background that all build up, and at the end of the day, become one lump of a challenge I can just write off as a fact of life, and then move on to the next one. Day-in and day-out physical and mental challenges become integrated into life, and you’re desensitized to them. But they still take their toll, particularly the mental game.
Perhaps this is why we sometimes drink with breakfast during PCV gatherings. I’ve always found drinking with breakfast so bizarre, a somehow common theme for Peace Corps Ghana, at least for a lot of the northerners that I know. It’s just one of those things that you can do over and over and never gets old. I’m not talking about every day, but market meetings or other social gatherings. Let’s say I’m on my tro leaving the village at either at 6:30 a.m. or around noon, depending on the occasion, and if this is just a day trip, my sole purpose could be to just drink and be with friends. We’re going to get good food that probably couldn’t be found in the village. An hour or so goes by on this tro, and the anxiety builds up. I was in the village for a week, two weeks, or just a few days. It doesn’t really matter. The event is just fun. It’s the camaraderie, sure. A handful of these world-saving volunteers are just going to sit around, drink several beers and eat a ton of food over the course of a few hours. It’s a safe zone, though. We’re not at site, and all the madams serving us at the spots we go to like us, and like it when we force them to order more beer after we leave.
Though breakfast brews are done in an upbeat fashion, there is more to where they come from, beyond “just because we can – we’re not at site today.” Day drinking here carries a functional element in addition to gathering with friends and having fun. I sometimes wonder if I drink more or less here or when I was in America, and I honestly don’t know the answer. I feel like I do here. I mean, I have mead fermenting in a Frytol (what was a 6-gallon cooking oil) container two feet in front of me between my bed and my baf. I told my (village) mom that it’s “American pito” (a locally made alcoholic drink that isn’t drunk in this household). She thought it was funny, but mostly a little bizarre that I’m fermenting honey water in a perfectly fine water (Frytol) container. I can get away with it. My mom doesn’t know what to expect from me, and life goes on as usual. So, why do PCVs seem to day drink so often?
There are couple reasons to highlight why we drink so much. One is strictly functional. For example, a couple street shots of Alomo bitters right before your 12-hour overnight bus ride from Accra to Tamale makes the trip more bearable and easier to sleep. That’s why there’s so many street shot vendors right by bus stations, right? Alcohol is functional to sometimes help ease “dreaded” regular tasks, such as challenging transit, or, admittedly, going to market. Going to market is indeed stressful when you don’t want to talk to anyone but need to buy food.
Another purpose of drinking Club beer and sachet alcohol is to escape. Not like unwinding after a long day, I mean really escape and remove yourself from everything Ghana. I want to have a beer and relate to another American – that’s all. I just want to speak normal English and talk about how ridiculous something in the village is that nobody except us understands. I find my neighboring PCVs to be from all over the U.S., with different backgrounds from what I have, and with different beliefs and interests. But these people are the luck of Peace Corps’ lottery – they’re my neighbors and against all odds are my friends. Really good friends. People that probably never would have crossed paths suddenly have a distinct common interest in these scenarios: just being American. Obviously, like any mix of people coming together, some have more in common than others. But it’s our common Americanness and frustrations that bring just about anyone together over sub-par beer and strange alcoholic liquid substance in sachet form.
Though I say this lightly, the booze can turn into a real problem for PCVs that wouldn’t normally have an alcohol problem in the U.S, when abnormal is living in a hot, dusty mud-built home with mice in the ceiling. Abnormal meaning living in the village – regardless of what your village scenario is like – precisely what we signed up for.
[What’s cray] Like I was saying earlier, it’s hard to pinpoint just what is making you crazy when you know it’s just the sum of everything – life – coming together. When you live and work in the village, you don’t get to clock out at five and head home. There are no hours; just life. During your adjustment phase early in your service, or really whenever you don’t want to be in the village, where do you go? You’re in the village all the time, most of the time – it’s just life. I’ve found this to feel like more time than I’ve ever had. Every day is basically the same. I look forward to the village’s next market, the next town’s market, my next travel plans – any change to the uneventful village monotony. These events feel far away if they aren’t tomorrow. Otherwise, tomorrow is just another day that’s almost exactly the same as today. It’ll be hot. I’ll do the same routine. The lights will go out. It’s not that I don’t like my village. I love my village. I feel at home in my home, it’s like I’m part of the family.
I can stay here for long periods of time, but the big thing that’s missing are relatable connections, especially when there seems to be so much to say and listen to. I always seem to be in a different state of mind from my Peace Corps friends. It changes so fast that by the next time I see them, we go from loving about how cool, fun or moving some experience was, to hating something that happened, or something that didn’t happen.
Sometimes people go from week-to-week attitude and perspective changes to deep ruts where they seriously consider whether they should go home – America home. I don’t ever know with certainty the right answer or what to tell them. It’s not easy to live here, especially if you think you should go home, or should’ve gone home, that Peace Corps was never for you in the first place, whatever it may be. Fortunately for me, going home was never something seriously on my mind. For me, staying is based on a hunch, and I think it’s the same for most others.
[Tree time] So, you have more than enough time to literally sit and think about what is making you crazy, or maybe why you want to go home. Most of the times that I sit and think, I sit on my log bench under the tree behind the house. I have a few trees, but my main one is right behind my house. It’s generally in a few particular periods of the day that I visit there: mid-day in the shade, after running during the sunset, or later at night that I sit there, especially if it’s lights out and too hot to be inside without a fan. Regardless, it’s rare a day goes by that I don’t visit my tree. It’s a place that’s particularly welcoming after a long day, or right after I’ve come back to the village from traveling. Or any day. How nice! It’s not the most comfortable setup, I guess, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a series of 6” wide logs lined up that provide a bench seat. Occasionally, kids come by and chill out with me. During a day I might read a book there. People walk by and greet me. At night, it’s nice just to feel the cooler breeze and listen to the leaves rustle above. Above them the stars sometimes come out. For some reason, the ants also come out at night and you can feel them run across your feet, but they’re harmless.
My tree happens to be a neem tree, which is a wood that is desirable for building material. Every now and then you’ll find a neem tree around the village completely trimmed to the point where it literally has no more leaves on it, to be used for whatever it’s going to be used for; a fence, a roof, a disting. As you’ve guessed, this happened to my tree once, but it fortunately wasn’t trimmed bare. I had left the village for some reason, probably (definitely) for a reason described above, and came back to discover my tree being significantly smaller and no longer producing the same shade as it used to. I have a feeling that it happened while I was gone for a reason, which amounts to another reason why you should try to never leave your village. Your tree might get trimmed. Then you just have to wait for it to grow back. This is when the bros say “sucks to suck” when your tree has no shade. Or it’s like the lyrics of a blues song when it’s lights out and your tree’s got no shade, ah, damn.
At night, my tree logs are situated in such a way that I sit across from an old man, my neighbor. You see, his logs aren’t under a tree, so it’s only practical to sit on his bench configuration at night. They’re maybe 30 feet away from my tree outside of his crumbling house that maybe once had a family living in it. Now it’s just him and this other guy who always wears a worn out Donovan McNabb Eagles jersey, but he never sits with the old man and isn’t around as much.
My small girl tells me that this old man is a strange one to watch out for. He’s a bit crusty, and I can see how an 11 year-old would be intimidated by her old man neighbor that really isn’t so nice to all those damned kids in the neighborhood. But I like him. I’d probably be the same way. In fact, by His grace, I might be one day. What’s truly incredible is that of all the countries Peace Corps could have placed me in, of all the villages I could have been assigned to, of all the houses I could have potentially lived in, of the few trees in the village and all the old men, this old man is my neighbor who sits on the bench yonder across from me almost every night. This is what I think of, among other things, under my tree. We don’t say much. When we’re sitting there, we don’t have to say much anything at all – not that I could say much anyway – or that anything should be said. I say “good evening”, he says “naaa naa, good evening,” or something about how the day was fine, as it always is. What’s a day if it isn’t fine? No good day. Maybe we say something about how hot it was today, if it’ll rain tonight, I don’t know. Except in Dagbanli, of course.
Occasionally our silence is interrupted when people walk by and greet us. Sometimes he tries telling me something and I only get about half of it, unfortunately. There’s not much between, but I think we get each other. Honestly, I don’t think I spend as much time with anyone else other than my family, or even my counterpart, as I do sitting across from this old man at night.
I asked him about why my tree got trimmed that one time, and he said something about how someone came and trimmed it. But “Alhassan” “who lives in that direction” is one of five names, so who knows who did it. It was some Alhassan who lives in that one house over there. After all, it’s really not that big of a deal that the tree got trimmed. The tree still works just fine at night. I told my counterpart, Jacob, about my tree incident, but Jacob lives on the other side of the road, not even in my neighborhood/cluster of mud houses. I’ll never know who trimmed my tree while I was gone. I didn’t plant it, but whoever trimmed it most likely planted it, or their family did, so it’s justified. It’s not my tree. I’m just using it during my temporary-elongated stay here.
Anyways, if I’ve figured anything out here, I’ve seen the world differently sitting under that tree across from that old man. I learned patience that later turned into feeling free. But despite the peacefulness under the tree, I sit on the logs under my tree and it’s easy to see that Peace Corps isn’t the quaint image that everything is fine and awesome: full of adventurous tro rides, digging wells and teaching little African kids, or whatever you find on the Peace Corps Facebook page. There’s really nothing quaint about a 10 year old that doesn’t know how to wash his or her hands, or an “adventurous” broken down tro ride when all you wanted to do was day drink, or even do real business. When your tro breaks down, you can derive almost all of this country’s problems from this unfortunate scenario. Imagine your car was 40 years older, made loud noises as if it’s going to break, and people touched you while you’re driving.
While my tree is my sanctuary, it’s easy to sit there, frustrated, and see that there’s little that is romantic about this whole story. Part of this experience is seeing and witnessing statistics through real stories. That is, living among “some African problem” and being able to empathize with it. In the villages, we witness the stories of malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, arranged marriages, etc., and how serious these are and how they set us back. That girl was just married off. That guy just died, maybe from malaria, maybe from something else, we’ll never know. Some girl just dropped out of school and ran away to the city to try and make some money.
[Stats in action] Funding and stats in America are to support some issue here, say malaria, from really nice NGO offices. Malaria may cause x amount of children under 5 to die every year, or some stat like this. But very few people who fund initiatives that try and solve malaria ever see it, and even less live among it. But malaria is still very real, and the statistics make such educated, informed people feel bad, especially since there’s seemingly clear-cut solutions to the problem. The real victims with real families don’t even know that they’re victims to malaria. Rather, life just happened. And this is only malaria. Not open defecation, not primitive farming, it’s just one item on the long list. But every case has its own narrative. And we live among many of them.
I find it disconcerting when people like PCVs live among the problem, but most of the time can do very little about it, unless considerable effort is put forth and community motivation is present. The reality is that other than PCVs and a handful of other similar international grassroots service organizations, very, very few expats working in Ghana have any idea of the country they work in or serve (and we struggle to grasp these things too); the priorities of the people, the way of life and the working culture on the lower levels – the villages – even though these people very well may be working to prevent malaria and all the other problems. All too often, perhaps over beers, I hear my colleagues (my friends) say, “x NGO is ‘working’ in my district, but what has x NGO ever done?” What makes Peace Corps special is precisely this, and if anything else is what motivates us the most. If not me, then who really cares about my village? This is what we came here for – it’s what we signed up for. Nobody, except for the victims obviously, truly cares about that malaria death except for us. It’s hard not to when you see it firsthand.
This is the paradox of success in Peace Corps: you can dedicate your service to one problem, and chances are very high that you’ll fail, at least in one way or another. You will feel as if you’ve done next to nothing to combat this monstrosity of a problem. Emptiness sucks, especially when it’s true. But what are you going to do? You are just one person or one group standing in front of a rolling snowball of cultural clout. You can’t stop it, and are incredibly naïve if you think you can yourself, or with a billion dollars. You go crazy once you’re consumed by the cultural snowball – being integrated in your community – but this is the only way to get anything done. Being in the snowball keeps things real. It keeps you in bounds when working in the village. You realize that large sums of money don’t necessarily work, and can make some problems worse. Integration means you see how things work and how people think. It means you have an idea of the realistic extent of which people are capable of developing themselves.
What I know is that PCVs are in positions that most clearly understand local conditions, regardless of whether you have a good volunteer or a bad one. Compared to other aid or embassy workers, how well do they understand the culture they are supposed to be helping? The understanding is not met living in the city implementing programs in rural communities, or at the beach or the smoothie store, or at the ambassador’s house over cocktails. So, staring into the dry, dead savanna bush from the edge of my village in 100 degree heat trying to get phone service, I daydream, “In small time I will be having deep dish pizza,” (quoted just like that) or so I would think, because at this moment deep dish pizza is actually very important to me. I know that when I’m consuming disgusting amounts of deep dish pizza, I’ll never feel like I’m combatting malaria. Or even in the general vicinity of such ridiculous foods. Nope. But I still encourage you to support Peace Corps projects, especially in Ghana, with your tax-deductible donation to the Peace Corps Partnership Program.
But seriously, we can always use the money. donate.peacecorps.gov. Money is always needed for various projects. I was just giving my perspective.
