A New Health PCV Adjusting to Life in Tamaligu, Ghana
So I guess I had too much fun at training to keep this updated. My apologies. On April 16, our group swore in as new volunteers! So I'm back writing again in my bright green room in Tamaligu. No more training. No more schedule. I have the freedom to eat what I want, when I want, and if I want. One thing that I learned in training that a major determinant of one's happiness is what you eat, and you better believe that's real.
After reading through this, it may sound like I'm going crazy, but I assure you that I'm still 100%. Give me a break I've been out of the country for three months today! It happens to all of us. Or maybe it's what I'm doing that sounds crazy. That could be true.
[A new style of life] Well, I'll be honest here. Looking around my room, my compound, going outside and wandering around town, in my first few days here after training I sometimes couldn't help but wonder, “what the hell did I sign up for?” The initial shock is a little, well, shocking – at least for me. It's just the little things that start to add up, like an unprecedented amount of flies. Where did all these flies come from? Animal and human feces, obviously. I'm going to measure my progress in sanitation work on fly reduction.
But I find with a lot of these things, you sort of get desensitized to them after a while, like upper 90s every day. The nights and mornings get into the low to mid 80s, which is a relief. It sucks when the power is out, which means the fan doesn't work. Lights go out daily at any given time, but especially between 6-12pm. Night sweats don't mean that you're sick, but indeed just plain hot. You just start craving rain to come, and I get strangely excited when clouds roll in. “Saha kamna! Tula chama!” I'll say, which translates to “Rain come here! Heat go away!” Or at least I think that's right. This is one of the many reasons why people laugh at me. “Yep, that's our American. He's special.” My language skills don't allow for much more elaboration. All too often, the rain will not come here. But, I'm excited with good reason. In a good rain, the temperature probably dips somewhere into the 70s, which feels cold and absolutely beautiful. We're on the tail end of the hot season and beginning of the rainy season, so it's better than the 100s we had at the time I wrote my last post.
Another little thing is not having running water. Or is that a big thing? I want to get rain gutters installed just so I don't have to go all the way to the borehole to get water. The borehole is only a couple minute bike ride away, but that's really far when all you know is that water normally comes from any old faucet on command. Further, you could assume that the faucet has water that's safe to drink, and you can even change the temperature! Times change. Now, I have these two five gallon, old palm oil jugs that I use to store and get water. I can't complain. Most of the time a small boy will insist on getting water for me, but they take forever. I know it doesn't take an hour to run to the borehole and back, so who knows where they're going. It's my bike that they're using. “What took you so long? Did you go to the river?” I'll ask. “No, masta, bo – hole wata cooooo-ming!”
The strange thing is that ideas continue to run through my mind as to how I can achieve some sort of running water system for a shower or a sink, as if there must be a way to do this. And for the right price, it isn't too hard. It doesn't have to be a complicated system with pressure regulators, temperature regulators and power vented water heaters that meet the 2012 IECC building code like at home. Those things are mythical here, and the building code is a joke. Thanks to Bart Homes for the perspective! In fact, it can't be complicated. I've envisioned building an elevated tank outside and hanging pipes off the walls. There's no such thing as in-wall mechanicals in Tamaligu. I'd hire a small boy to fill it up everyday for a cedi, and even split the cost with the people in my compound if they want to use it. Even if I earned just a third of the minimum wage this would be more than doable, and that's kind of amazing. But I actually make about $4.90 a day depending on the exchange rate, and although that's not a bad wage to live on in northern Ghana, it's unfortunately not enough to allow you to invest in building personal water towers. My family in Maase had a similar water tower thing built and had luxury items like flushing toilets, sinks and a proper drainage system. Getting semi-running water would actually be a good model for people in the community, because I still have faith that people can pull off great things should they want to install one themselves. After all, it's improved sanitation, but just a mental exercise at this point. Training may have slightly spoiled us with showers and automatic wells right outside your door.
[So what do I do all day?] That's a great question. Let's see. I try to do one exciting thing everyday. For example, I've been making a lot of day trips to Tamale to buy stuff for my house. As you can see, I'm naturally trying to make my home as American as possible. Creating something “American” is an uphill struggle, so I may need to continue lowering my expectations. Sure, I applied for it, read about it and signed off on it, but when Peace Corps says, “Lower your expectations,” they mean lower your expectations. Simply put, that's easier said than done. I don't think you ever really know what that means until you experience it.
It becomes immediately apparent as a challenge when all your house has is a mattress and Target isn't 10 minutes away. Our communities are supposed to provide basic furniture, but like most policies in Peace Corps, they're just guidelines that look nice on paper. When I called the guy that's in charge of housing, he said, “Sorry-o, but your village spent all their money on building your house, and they still owe some of the laborers too.” With that, he's having Peace Corps pay to have my front porch screened in, and I believe that they've packaged a desk, bed frame and other basics into the bid. This proposal, which can't be more than $200, is in a long multi-step bureaucratic approval process in Washington at the moment. Governments and accountability standards. But you see, in Ghana, whenever it comes, it will come. It's like trying to figure out a tro tro schedule.
Tamale is about an hour and a half from here, and the day trips are more like morning trips since I only have about three hours between tros, but that could mean up to six hours. The driver of the Tamaligu-based tro says that he leaves Tamale at “11:00-going.” So what time is it going to leave? Definitely not 11:00. It means 11:30, 12:30, 1:17, 2:08 or anytime in between. The latest has been around 2:30. If I miss all the tros, I have to hitchhike home, which I haven't done yet but it sounds like an exciting day in itself. Compared to other volunteers, I'm really close to the amenities of Tamale, or that of an obroni store-grade city. And Tamale is big. There's at least 4 obroni stores, a huge market and nice spots that sell overpriced beer. Another volunteer in my group lives nearby, so we try to coordinate when we go. We dedicate an hour to have a beer and talk about life, like what I'm writing about here. It's worth a beer in the morning to talk to another American about adjusting to life in Ghana. Physical adjustments, I'm told, are the easy part. Fortunately, I think it's safe to say we're new enough to where we can just laugh at it. It's still funny. But in this town, activities are pretty basic.
I can watch what we call “Goat TV” (GTV), which is observing goats headbutt each other to claim a higher ground, such as a stack of logs or a mound of dirt. Or sometimes they'll fight just to impress the ladies. A cock fight is really exciting, but rare. Roosters usually just mind their own. Hawks actually swoop down and pick up the little chicks, so people make this noise and then the chickens know to scatter. Sometimes the donkeys seem to just get really pissed off at something and go on tantrums. With all of the animals, I guess the whole town is kind of like a big farm, and yet people can still keep track of their chickens and lambs and whatnot. Kids are pretty mean to the animals, which is unfortunate when it comes to raising mean dogs. They also try to kill birds with slingshots, but they're pretty bad at it. I will be impressed when I see a kid with the skills to kill a bird. That's identifying motivated individuals, or potential change agents.
My neighbor can make really good egg sandwiches, so I think of it as sort of like a McDonalds breakfast. She can even make you tea! Somehow, she gets it into a little plastic bag, so it's a little hot to touch. I'm learning to drink lots of different things from plastic bags. She also has a TV, so you can watch a football match for 1 cedi, at least until the lights go out.
I can go to the borehole and have the women make fun of me for not having my wife get water, because why would a grown man fetch water, let alone a grown American man who's supposed to have money? Because I don't have a wife? What the hell is my problem? And I cook too? On a $15 gas stove?! Woah now, that's proof of money. Now they want to marry me or introduce me to their friend or sister and cook me endless meals of yams and tizet. I'm both desirable and incredibly strange at the same time. “What am I doing in Tamaligu?” they'll ask. But by now my Dagbani vocabulary has been far depleted and I can't explain myself. “Alafee...bomma...bangsim,” (health work, but again, who knows if that's right). Embracing being an idiot, I have to try to speak. They find it hilarious. Peace Corps is all about brightening peoples' days, and I'm the one that took 300-level classes on “gender equity”. Purdue has prepared me well for the real world.
The men are starting to work on replacing the straw roofs for rainy season and are heading back out to farm, but still don't seem to do as much as women. So I'll walk back over to where the men are sitting under a tree playing games, and the brief entertainment of a tro tro with 50 people will drive by, completely loaded down with rice bags, jugs of stuff, logs and whatever else to the point where I wonder how the roof isn't collapsing. There's at least three daily tros that pass through town making trips to and from Tamale. These are the only transportation options aside from a taxi, which is too expensive or moto, which Peace Corps frowns upon our use of. For the north, these options are considered pretty good. One tro driver has a brake that's stuck, so he stops in Tamaligu every day to buy water sachets to cool off the wheel. Tros passing through town are quite the event for sellers. It's an interesting process to watch people buy things from the roof of a tro that involves a lot of yelling and throwing money.
Buying things is fun. There's definitely no such thing as sales tax, unless you're in a legitimate obroni store in the city that goes through the trouble of ringing items up. I'll usually buy at least one meal from the chop bars everyday. You can get a meal of rice and beans or fried yams and beans for 50 pesewas (20 cents), or just a snack size for 20 pesewas. A lot of times they run out of beans. If you're lucky, they'll have bush meat, which could be rat, rabbit, or whatever else they find in the bush. Bush meat is a novelty worth an extra cedi, and you don't really get too much either, but I think it's usually worth the protein and experience. I've had rat and rabbit so far. The rabbit leg was pretty good. I'm not always up for bush meat, or really any meat if it looks mysterious. It's better to just say “no” if the cut is unidentifiable. Chop food isn't bad, but sometimes I think about food at home, like pretzels, Jimmy Johns and Giordano's.
Another eventful thing is a couple times every day, I'll walk over to the edge of town where there's good cell service and check out Facebook or WhatsApp on 1G-equivelant data speed, better known as Vodafone's finest “Edge” network. The service works most of the time at this one spot where there's a clear view of the bush, so I'll count how many times kids open defecate in front of me.
As far as the kids go, they can be really annoying sometimes. School is on break now, and I can't wait for sessions to start again. Both because then the kids will be there, and I might even start to teaching some classes. I understand that I'm the white guy in town, which is really exciting for them and they're just curious about me, but you really have to stand your ground with them and establish boundaries. They follow you around town, they yell “siliminga!” at you (the Dagbani equivalent of “obroni”), and some of them are just plain annoying. Now that they've seen me around, they're getting better, but I'm also getting better at yelling at them. I like the kids that live in my compound and some of the neighbors to hang out and talk to. They're pretty awesome. A couple of them want to learn more English. They sweep, offer to fetch water and even wash dishes for me. It's the random ones that follow you around and demand pictures or whatever from you that are just annoying. Especially when they're filthy and want to hug you. I tell them to take a baf. That's just part of health work. Neighbors and the kids that live here act as security guards, and it didn't take long for me to encourage them to cane the intruders. Tell me that just sounds horrible in the US. Nobody gets hurt unless they deserve it. We all come here with great intentions, but I'm not here to change that culture. “Caning” involves a good kid that asks me if a bad kid should “go back”, and I say yes, and then they handle it. Fighting is usually a last resort. They just yell at them. When they don't understand what “please stop” or “please go away” means in their own language, what else do they get? If they don't take the siliminga seriously and they know that they're being annoying, then it requires a peer. It's the adults or teachers that will beat them pretty hard, which I haven't seen too much of yet.
But seriously, I can write my blog and other letters home, which I'll consider “work” in the Peace Corps (please refer to our third goal). So I do try to accurate stuff that you may be interested in. Just let me know what you want to know. I read too. The work that I'm doing for the first three months at site, or until sometime in July mostly involves wandering around the community and greeting people. I tell people I don't start work until July, because that's probably the best, honest answer. Officially, it's called integration: becoming a member of the community. But doing nothing isn't as easy as it sounds – it can be a challenge when you're an American that speaks English living in Dagbani-speaking Tamaligu, Ghana.
I can sit under a tree for hours with absolutely no agenda, and trust me, that's not exactly easy. But I've done it. Later, after I get the feel for things, I'll try to set up some more formal meetings and identify what people want to do to improve Tamaligu. I'll need to do the same at the other communities that are around me too, but I'll get there later. Right now I'm trying to find other English speakers that I can potentially work with, and others who could sit down and tutor me in Dagbani. At some point, hopefully I'll be able to narrow down who's motivated to lead projects and continue them when I go home. The way I see myself here is that I'm not leading anything, I'm just here to find individuals that want to improve the health standards of the town, help to instill some sort of motivation to be health leaders and role models and assist them however I can along the way. Sure, they'll need me to find grants and provide technical assistance, but I'm really just here to stir the pot and to help get things organized. It's not me who has lived here, knows the culture and how people think. If I could get the chop bars to serve vegetables, I would feel like I've done something. So, as of now, I try to get out at least a few hours every day and talk to people, and if I can't talk to them, simply greet them and tell them about myself, that is, give them something like my introduction speech that we learned in training.
[Training] The downside of training being over is not seeing the 19 others in my group. After being together for three months, our group grew close together, and sometimes that meant too close. Now, I'm only close-ish to a few of them and there's only one that I can see easy-o in a day. There's a few other volunteers in the area that have been here for about a year, so it will be nice getting to know them. When I say I can't work until July, that also means that I can't leave my site until then. I can go to Tamale, but I can't stay at the office there overnight. Again, that's by the “rules”, but this one we follow. This is supposed to force us to integrate into our communities in our first three months.
My counterpart, Lawyer, left town and is currently in the Western Region for an indefinite amount of time. I've heard he's coming back in one month and others say five months. The most accurate answer that I got from him is “I'll be back as soon as I can.” Why? The matter has been chalked up to personal business. He did say he'll try to come back for my naming ceremony, which is also scheduled sometime in the near future. So like I said, it'll happen when it happens.
The problem with not having Lawyer is he left the job up to his little brother, Jacob. It will be more difficult since Lawyer played a major role in bringing me to this community, he understands what Peace Corps is and went through counterpart training with us. I don't expect Jacob to fulfill his job. He doesn't speak English as well, at least to a practical level that I can work with. There are at least a few other fluent English speakers that I'll get to know and try to get them to work with me. So it sucks that I have to seek out another counterpart-like figure, but at least it'll help to get me out and into the community. But no problem. We don't worry in Ghana.
I wrote my last post at site visit, which was about a month ago now. After the visit, we went into technical training, which was in a town called Dalun, which is a small town not too far from here. We probably spent half the time making trips to other volunteers' sites and to Tamale and the other half in the classroom. We stayed at this place that was something like a satellite campus of a technical university based in Tamale, so we had an air-conditioned classroom where we learned all about health stuff, from nutrition to different kinds of VIP latrines to the life cycle of the malaria parasite.
Technical training was about two weeks long. One day, on our “day off”, we took a day trip up to this crocodile pond. But these are no ordinary crocs. The attraction is that these are nice crocodiles. I would like to know how many people have died at this place, but you could hold their tails and squat on them and pose with them. There will be pictures sometime soon. This particular community worships the crocodiles because they don't attack people. They lure them out with a chicken, and out a couple of them come until they find one particular crocodile that they like. The chicken is alive at this point, but they sort of kill it when a good, big crocodile comes out, and they throw the dead chicken a few feet in front of the crocodile. You can then take pictures with it, and it opens its mouth and all for you. I wouldn't be surprised if that means it's about to attack you. When you're finished, they somehow let the crocodile know it can eat the chicken and go back in the water. So a chicken was sacrificed for our crocodile-viewing pleasures, and I feel just fine about that. Most animals live better lives here. There's some story about the history of how nice crocodiles came to be. I don't know it and it should be easy to judge how accurate it is, but you can look up if you're interested. It was someplace in the Upper East Region. Whatever. For example, in Tamaligu, they “worship” cobras, which really worried me at first, but there's no cobras around because people kill all the snakes because unlike the nice crocodiles, they actually attack you. Every community has their own special, “spirit” animal, if you will. I guess it's a hit or miss tradition. But it was interesting because my only experience with crocodiles prior to this was watching Steve Irwin piss them off on TV. It was a good time for 10 cedis/person (~$4).
[Swearing In] Technical training finished with a really long test and a 15 hour drive from Dalun back to Maase, where we spent about a week back at home stay and getting more generalized sessions on PCV life. I made my family macaroni and cheese, which I probably I enjoyed more than them. This is the one meal that I cooked there, or that I was allowed to cook. Even though I enjoy having the freedom to eat what I want, I'll miss my sister's cooking.
The swearing in ceremony was pretty cool. The US Ambassador came. Ambassador Kretz was actually a PCV some time ago. His deputy tells us that we're ambassadors with big a “A”, and he just gets a small “a”. Sure. I make just under $5 a day, take bucket baths and ride tro tros around. The embassy in Accra is actually outlandishly huge. The word on the street is they have real burritos and a store that sells imported American stuff! These are the things we fantasize. But I really can't imagine what sort of business the US has in Ghana, so don't come to me when you're complaining about government spending. And really, eat your whole burrito. There are starving PCVs in Africa.
I got to humiliate myself at the ceremony by singing a song in Dagbani with the other girl in my language group. The meaning of the song doesn't translate into English very well, at least by what our teacher told us. It's something about a womanizer and a girl whose mother bought her new waist beads, which are sex symbols here, so she goes around town and shakes her new beads. Our instructor told us that it's a kids' song, but I'm not so sure. He probably just thought it would be hilarious. I'll ask what it means someday. Nobody speaks Dagbani in Maase, so that's fine. Each language group had to do a performance of some sort, and everyone had to do a dance too. This was mainly just to prove our language proficiency and cultural tact.
So that's just about it! The latest from Ghana. As days go on, the more and more I'm starting to like it here. Even though that takes a bit of adjustment and culture shock – it's not even that bad. Just little things. How can you pass it up? The opportunities out there are thoroughly exciting; to make this town and the other communities healthier, to connect with other organizations that want to make good use of their resources, and of course, to have fun along the way. And I'm saying that without having running water. Living in poverty to contribute to ending it can be fun.
I'll be continuing my “work” and am happy to say I'll be running the Accra Marathon this September, so you're invited to visit then! Or really anytime. I have a new address in Tamale which is under the “contact” tab here. Coffee is much appreciated. The first coffee I've seen here was in one store in Tamale that sells real, Lavazza coffee, but the packages were small and more expensive than the big ones at home. I think if every package has coffee, there should be enough to last! Check soon for a wish list if you're motivated enough to send a package here.
