Photos -- Batik Making

Wooden Stamps

Eunice teaching Sylvie how to apply the wax

Eunice's creations

Dying the material

Letting the dye set

Washing the wax off

Drying

Photos -- Home life in Ghana

Our Home in Hohoe.  Sylvie with her new friends

Doing Laundry

The paper cutting begins

Sleeping nets

Hanging out on the porch

Story time

The tenuous water supply

Liberation Day

May the 5th is Liberation Day in the Netherlands. The mood on the streets is something between Remembrance Day and Canada Day: lots of tributes to soldiers and talk of sacrifices made during the war on the one hand, lots of sunshine and drinking on the other.

To atone for the sin of refusing to wait in line to get into Anne Frank's house, we went yesterday to visit the Resistance Museum. They try give visitors an idea of what the average Dutch citizen endured during the German Occupation leading up to their liberation on May 5th, 1945. It was a complicated time, to say the least. Many went along with the Germans ( and for their part the Germans largely treated the Dutch with respect at the beginning of the occupation, trying to avoid hostilities) and except for a few pockets of resistance, it seemed to take a while for a large movement to get underway and start undermining their overseers. They had quite a good section on the effect the occupation had on the city's Jews. In one corner they had a replica of a door that was used to hide a little room for people to hide in. Particularly effective was the large front door with four doorbells beside it. When you rang each one they all gave excuses as to why they could't take someone in even for one night.

The strangest part of the museum for me, however, was the room devoted to the Dutch colonies of Indonesia and Surinam and their roll during he war. Now to fair I didn't devote my full attention to the room (it came at the end and by that time Sylvie had had her fill of museums and was resisting in her own seven year-old way) but it seemed to focus on resistance activities towards the Germans and the Axis in these places. Now I don't doubt that this is important, but it seems too rich in irony not to at least acknowledge that there was also resistance in these places to the colonial Dutch occupiers!

I felt a twinge of the same conflict this morning at a May 5th breakfast we attended (once we got out days straightened out...). Overall it was a very classy affair: full catered breakfast (and I mean full), a live gospel choir, and what I imagine were interesting speeches that were delivered entirely in Dutch. The reception was in a wing of the Anthropology Museum and is walking distance from the apartment we've rented. But again, standing in this museum that was originally called the Kolonial Museum among a crowd of people that looked a lot more like me than the make up of the neighbourhood even a few blocks away (the neighbourhood is very multicultural with lots of residents, businesses and restaurants reflecting the colonial past as well the global village present). Even the American gospel choir, as great as they were, seemed to be a way of avoiding the diversity all around.

On the way out, though, they gave us free tickets for the museum proper. Never ones to pass up a free pass (the whole breakfast and concert, it should be noted was also gratis) or to avoid inflicting another museum on our daughter we decided to pop in. From the very beginning it was clear that this was a museum that was not going to hide from the complexities of the past and present and instead was going to put them front and centre. The first thing you see getting off the elevator is a statue of a black man from Paupau holding a white baby. The accompanying literature tells you that it is their policy to solicit and display contemporary art from the countries explored in their exhibits. They have a large section on Africa that given our recent experiences there seems to reflect the places pretty accurately (nothing is going to be perfect, and I imagine that non-Ashanti Ghanians would bristle at the attention that that culture is given; but that would be nothing new for them because Ashanti culture is often conflated with Ghanian culture even in Ghana!). They also seemed to do a great job integrating video and computer technology to make the exhibits more relevant and more interesting, but without being intrusive or gimmicky.

The two hours spent the museum seemed to right the imbalance I had been feeling the last couple of days. History is complicated and we're never going to get it all right or be able to tease out every last complexity to everyone's satisfaction, but here was a national museum willing to try and be up-front about its complicated past and welcome dialogue. It created, for me, a new context in which to view the other parts that make up the official narrative of Dutch history.

Lost day

After almost eleven weeks of setting our own schedule, our lacksidasical relationship with calendars finally caught up with us. In our rush to see family and friends we had somehow skipped ahead a day (or perhaps there is some strange time/space continuum in Amsterdam which might also help explain why we've been having such a hard time orienting ourselves and figuring out our way around this confounded city of canals!)

We had arranged to attend a breakfast and gospel concert to mark Liberation Day, which is May 5th in Holland. The directions we had said that we were to go to a side door of the Anthropology Museum. When we got there the doors were locked. We went around to the front to ask if we had got the location wrong. No the May 5th Breakfast was good to go -- on May 5th.

You would think that finding an extra day in a city like Amsterdam would be like finding a twenty dollar bill in a jacket you had not worn in a while. The whole thing was a little disorienting, though. To be completely wrong about the day of the week and the day of the month (especially when you have a trans-Atlantic flight booked for a specific day and time) is unsettling.

We tried to make the best of it. It helped that it was another beautiful day. We took the ferry to North Amsterdam, had a (windy) picnic and then visited the resistance museum before feasting on Surinmese takeout for dinner. All in all not a bad way to spend a "found" day.

And now it is actually May 5th (we think!) and we're off to the gospel breakfast, more or less back on schedule.

Biking

When we arrived in Amsterdam I was thrilled to see the masses and masses of bikes and cyclists making their way through the city. I wanted to be immediately on a bike and using one of the hundreds of dedicated bike lanes. This seemed to be biking nirvana! What also was fantastic was Sylvie sharing my enthusiasm to find some bikes to rent and start exploring the city.

Sylvie is a pretty good cyclist and showed she was up to some longish rides when we had the canal boat and we could bike beside the canal on nice, not to busy, paths and meet up with the boat at a lock. However, after a short period of time just walking in Amsterdam, it was very apparent that biking was not a completely leisurely event, where one could stop when you felt like it and adjust a helmet or just be seven and have a very important question about an imaginary dog be answered immediately while taking up the entire bike path. Nope biking in Amsterdam is about getting places (not fast, ) but definitely biking with a purpose on a three speeder. I was apprehensive about having a seven year old (or our 7 year old) out on her own on Amsterdam streets. Also Scott and I had taken advantage of the Velibe, bike lending program in Paris and toughly enjoyed it, although somewhat dismayed to find ourselves spit out onto the Champs d'Ellysee and all it's traffic at one point (not ready for the Tour de France yet!). With our Paris experiences we thought it was best for Sylvie not to be riding her own bike around Amsterdam.

Initially we thought that this would not be a problem as in Amsterdam kids are transported by bike in a multitude of different fashions (all without bike helmets) and there are many different bike styles modified to moving kids around (even a bike 'bus' that a daycare was using). With all these options visible on the street and a couple of on line leads for bike rental companies that had tandem bikes modified for kids, or buckets in the front of bikes for kids to ride in, we thought this would be easy.

Well not completely so .... It turns out that these tandem or modified bikes are considered 'novelty' bikes and the companies actually have very few in stock. Day one of trying to find a suitable bike was unsuccessful and although I was very enamoured with Sylvie's enthusiasm to bike in Amsterdam I did not think it was going to happen. However, day two was met with success and we got a tandem bike where Sylvie sat in the front and could peddle, but I had control of the steering and brakes in the back. Sylvie loved it and very quickly took to being a 'front' seat driver, where I struggled to maneuver a rather unwieldy bike through Amsterdam streets. It was fun but challenging. I quickly realized that although everyone does seem to bike in Amsterdam, there is a bit more anarchy occurring in the bike lanes and streets than at first appears. For starters, bike lanes seem dedicated to anything with two-ish wheels, this includes scooters and motorbikes and tiny tiny cars that make smart cars look like SUVs. Also traffic signals like red lights, including those specifically for bikes seem to 'suggested' stops for cyclists. So here I am in an oversized bike that has a turning radius of the Titanic and to actually get anywhere I need to throw caution to the wind and put the front of the bike (where Sylvie is sitting) out into traffic and hope for the best. Well it seemed to work okay and Sylvie was very disappointed when we had to return the bike the next day.

So although, it is is definitely 'the thing' to do in Amsterdam, I think I am going to put my bike rides in the Loire valley and sauntering along the canal trail as more pleasurable than cycling in Amsterdam.

Lining up

It wasn't until we got to Paris that we began to realize the degree to which people willing to line up for attractions, and by contrast how unwilling we were to line up for most of them. There are very few tourist attractions in Ghana and the ones that most people want to see (the slave castles and National Parks, for instance) are big enough to accommodate large crowds (not to mention that Ghana doesn't attract nearly the same number of tourists as the European countries we've visited). Our travels in France prior to Paris we mostly in small places (and in the case of the places we saw while on our canal boat trek, tiny) and still in the shoulder tourist season (it was clear that Saumur was a much bigger tourist draw in July and August and it could very well be that we would have had to line up for attractions had we scheduled our journey a few months later in the year).

But in Paris the crowds were everywhere. Want to go up in the Eiffel Tower? Be prepared to line up, even if it's 10 o'clock at night. The Louvre? Half-hour minimum. Neither of these bothered me particularly because I had little interest in either one. The day we went to the Musee D'Orsay, however, and were confronted with a line up as long as the one at the Louvre was more difficult to accept. What were all these people doing wanting to get into the same place I wanted to go! We dealt with this line by avoiding it and finding something else to do (Paris is great for that -- we rented bikes and made our way up to Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, where we could have visited the Dali Museum if we had felt so inclined, no line up).

It's been in Amsterdam that we've had a much harder time avoiding the lines. It started with the Anne Frank House. I has been there before when I took students on a trip to Europe. My recollection of the visit is just walking in, no waiting (which for the record, is my same recollection of visiting the Louvre on that same trip). What I have come to realize, however, is that tour groups get special privileges and generally don't have to wait in lines with the rest of us ( that realization has made me a little contrite about the many disparaging things I've said about tour groups over the years...). After asking around we were told that the crowds die down after six; we decided to come back then. When we returned at 7 the line up was the same length, if not longer (at which point Alice quipped that it was ironic that there were so many people trying to get into a house whose occupants during WW II would have given anything to get out of...). We cut our loses and went home thinking we might try first thing in the morning.

Today we thought we'd try the Van Gogh Museum. Apparently more people want to see Sunflowers than the house of the Holocaust's most notable diarist. We gave up on that line too (with considerable less guilt, I might add). Sylvie really wanted to see the zoo and when we'd been by the day before, there was no line up at all. It's amazing, though, how much difference it makes being a beautiful Saturday morning, compared to an overcast Friday afternoon. We'd reached a point, though, where we couldn't avoid any more line ups without Sylvie getting frustrated (the zoo, after all had been her choice). So we duly lined up with all the other families (it does seem like you only come to the zoo if you have kids) and the line up moved relatively quickly. We also got a lot more out of this attraction than we probably would have at the others -- Sylvie was still raring to go four hours into the zoo visit, while half an hour to forty five minutes is her maximum at an art gallery (given the heavy nature of the content at the Anne Frank House, I can't even begin to estimate how long we would have been able to spend there).

I am sure that we will have to line up at the KLM desk on Monday to check in for our flight, but hopefully that will be the last one for a while!

Amazing Race

More than once during our ten weeks (it seems hard to believe that it's been ten weeks already) we've compared ourselves to contestants on the Amazing Race. It's one of the few "reality" shows we enjoy and one of the things that keeps us engaged is wondering how you would do in similar situations. In the comfort of your living room is easy to think that you would make better choices than the teams on screen. Having travelled through four countries including one in Africa, I don't think I'm as cocky as before.

(As an aside, it would make a fascinating season of the show if they made parents do the race with their seven year-olds -- it would add a very different dynamic to the show as teams had to stop what they were doing in order to avoid complete meltdown. I can tell you that given the choice between keeping the family peace or winning a million dollars, I would more often than not choose the family peace!)

Although we experienced much that would have made great fodder for Amazing Race situations in Ghana, the truth was that we were much more cautious during our five weeks, and were much less likely to set out to do things without planning them in advance (this, of course, did not mean that we avoided getting scammed by an unscrupulous taxi driver in Tamale -- "when I told you the price to drive you to Mole Park was 250 cedis all inclusive, I though it was clear that that was only one way; it's another 250 cedis to return -- or that Alice didn't get dangerously sick).

Our first 24 hours in Amsterdam I think shine more light on how we might fare on the show. Every time we start to feel that we've got this traveling thing down, something happens to melt a bit of the wax holding the feathers in our wings and we fall back to earth. Sometimes it's adjusting to the rhythm of others and sometimes it's underestimating the differences between countries, even in a place as supposedly unified as Europe.

We took the train yesterday from Paris and arrived in Amsterdam around 4 pm. We had been warned that it was Queen Day, which was particularly significant since Beatrix was abdicating the throne the following day to allow her son to become king (interesting trivia: Beatrix and I were born at the same hospital, though for my birth there was no need to annex my room to the Netherlands so that the future sovereign could be born on Dutch "soil"). We new we going to be entering something akin to Canada festivities, so we weren't surprised to be greeted by mildly drunken groups in the train station or to see young men and women dressed up as foot soldiers, standing on pedestals with giant orange inflatable hands and megaphones they used to yell things in Dutch at passersby (ok, the latter was a little surprising...)

We thought we had written down all the information we needed to get to our rental apartment. It's probably important to point out right about now that although we've managed to divest ourselves of some of the things we brought with us ten weeks ago (either by giving it away in Ghana or by giving it to family who stowed it in their suitcases after their visit with us) we are still a family of three on an extended vacation with clothes for multiple climates and school work for our precious charge. This translates into two large suitcases, two smaller suitcases and a medium size backpack. We don't move anywhere quickly or stealthily, but we generally get where we need to go without losing anyone or anything.

Thinking we need to get to the metro we make our way through the train station (this was after sometime spent looking for a phone -- ha -- public versions of which appear to be completely extinct in Amsterdam) we carry our luggage down stairs, through hallways, down more stairs. We wait in an enormous line to buy metro tickets, we get ourselves through the metro gates (not designed for families with a lot of luggage and a child a bit skittish in large crowds...) only to find that we had misunderstood the directions and we needed to be on a train and not in the metro (isn't the metro a kind of train?!?).

You can picture how this would be shown on the Race. Scott, Alice and Sylvie standing in the metro bewildered and increasingly frustrated surrounded by crowds of orange clad partiers. Sitting on your couch you would be shaking your head -- "they should have been more careful reading the directions. Tsk, Tsk".

So back up the stairs, across the square of partiers (all of whom have special dispensation from the powers that be to drink openly in the streets on Queen Day, and I have to say by this point a can of Heineken is looking really appealing) and into another line to buy another ticket because the trains are not the same company as the bus, tram and metro so the tickets we have won't help us. Get the new tickets and a printout of the next available trains. Run (ok hurry with our bags though the crowds) past the track that our train from Paris came in on three quarters of an hour ago, all the way to the wrong track. "You want 14b, this is 14a". Off the train heading to the airport, to the right train, just as the doors close.

We arrive at the apartment about 45 minutes later than we had said. Cut to Gordon/Hutton family dejectedly figuring out that they will be the sixth team leaving, an hour and a half after the first team gets to go at the crack of dawn. "At least it wasn't a pit stop and we're still in the game," they tell themselves.

I won't bore you with our escapades today, but our ability to figure out the Amsterdam transit system didn't seem to improve with some rest as we tried to rent bikes (we should have chosen the other detour and loaded the gooda truck and made deliveries around town. Is it too late...?) Amazing as it is we managed to fail at renting bikes in the most bike friendly town in the world (I keep telling myself it's because everybody hear already owns their own bikes, but it's somewhat cold comfort!).

What I've realized about the Amazing Race is that not only is there manipulative editing but the teams are constantly kept off balance by being put constantly in new situations; they never have a chance to find any kind of equilibrium because they're always in a rush or being rushed off to another country. Although today didn't go completely as planned, many of the things that I found frustrating yesterday because I was tired, rushed, slightly overwhelmed were a whole lot easier today once I had had a chance to get a better understating of the overall situation and inner workings.

We're in the final let, with only five more days before the final sprint for the finish line. Don't know whether we'll get the million dollars but the trip will have been worth it!

Voluntourism

Came across this article by chance the other day. Given our time in Ghana it raises some interesting points. Still not sure what to think. Cross Cultural Solutions gets held up as an organization that does it right but having spent four weeks volunteering with them I'm not sure I agree with everything the article says about them and what they achieve. I think I still need a bit more time and distance to sort out the complicated nature of volunteering in the developing world...

Here's the link and I'll let people think about the issue for themselves...

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/19/mixing-luxury-vacations-with-charity-work-can-harm-as-much-as-it-helps/

Family traveling

One of the things we haven't talked about explicitly are some of the challenges of traveling as a family unit for eleven weeks. Overall, I think it's gone better than we expected given that tore ourselves away from our routine, our friends and most of our familiar comforts. This is difficult for myself as an adult to do; I can only imagine how infinitely more difficult it is for a seven year-old.

As I write this Sylvie is coloring and cutting things out in the living room of our rented gite here in Saumur. It's quite tranquil and relaxing. It also stands in stark contract to 8 hours ago as we tried to rebraid her hair. Braiding Sylvie's hair is always a challenge (she has a part of her scalp that is very sensitive and at seven is still learning to control her impulses and emotions...) but I think all the anxiety she has been experiencing but not necessarily voicing came out today. We were sure that the police were going to show up and charge us with child abuse -- I was more than a little concerned that my French was not going to be at a sufficient level to defend myself in court!

(As an aside, we couldn't help but think about a story that my uncle told us about washing my cousin's hair in the kitchen sink of a walk up apartment in Mechanicsville. She was screaming blue murder and there was a knock at the door and when my uncle answers it all he sees is the uniform and badge of Ottawa's finest. While trying to figure out how to explain the screaming (hers) and the swearing (his), he doesn't realize that the cop is his friend stopping by after shift for a beer...)

Spending almost all our time together and having to change hats throughout the day (good cop, bad cop, teacher, comforter, taskmaster, etc) all while accepting our all-too-human shortcomings is challenging. Some high (and low) points croons the trip so far:

After all sharing one room with four bunk beds we spent the last 10 days in Ghana all three of us sharing one bed. Sometimes it was a queen, at least one night it was a double and on a few occasions it was two twin beds pushed together with the blanket rolled up to fill in the crack between the two beds. Our family doesn't have a great history sleeping in such close quarters and we were worried we'd end up hating each other every morning, sleep-deprived and delirious. The opposite happened, though. We seemed to get along (perhaps because we had no choice, unlike home when there is always another bed) and found a way to sleep cooperatively.

Besides hair braiding, mornings when we have to adhere to an early start (usually to catch a plane, or some other form of transportation) tend to be a flashpoint for everyone. My favorite moment was 4:45 am in our hotel room in Crawley UK as we are trying to get out to catch the airporter to Gatwick and after I've just tied up Sylvie's shoes, she kicks them off because theyA're too loose. I'd like to say that I was calm and rational and explained about the right tension for shoe laces on size one shoes, but alas that did not come to pass. There were many tears and probably not a few people in neighbouring rooms who were awakened to my poor parenting. Since we have switched to traveling by train we've tried to find schedules that fit us better. We leave on Thursday for Paris at 12:15 and not 8:30 for that reason.

The room we had in Poitier was one of the coziest so far. We had a double bed to ourselves, with just enough room at the end for the door to hallway to open. Had flat screen TVs not been invented there wouldn't have been a TV in the room. There was a little desk and a little bench (overwhelmed with our luggage) and a very cleverly designed bathroom. With all the floor space used they had no choice but to build up: Sylvie's twin bed came out like a bunk above our heads. On our first morning she used it as a launching point to wake us up... After a week of low ceilings and close quarters on the canal boat, we were ready and managed just fine for two days, until trying to fit in a little school work before catching our train...

School work is definitely a challenge for families who are together all the time (I can definitely see why most parents like the system of public education we have: putting some distance between you and your child(ren) while they get educated is good for everyone's mental health!). Although we're nine or so weeks in it doesn't feel like we yet established a routine that works for school work; there is still far too much emphasis on the work part. Perhaps with some time off from each other we might be more patient, but maybe not. We've tried to make used of having two teachers and letting the other take over when she's exhausted the first. It's funny how nothing in my training as a teacher or my 10 years of hands on experience has prepared me for teaching my own kid (who, it must be said, knows how to push my bottoms as well as any 2P class).

I worry a little that along with all the good that's coming from spending this much time as a family, that rer-adjustment to our regular life will be difficult. More and more Sylvie is reluctant to play with kids at the parks we go to (we have to drag her away from the parks in Ottawa) and to even let mom and dad out of sight (I suggested that her and my mother -- her Moma -- could do an activity on their own tomorrow and she insisted it was all four of us or not at all). Her way of coping with all the change that comes with traveling is to nest (hole up in our rented quarters and do arts and crafts) which is ok, I guess (Alice and I were talking about the trips she went on as a kid with her parents to her father's traffic signal conferences and how her fondest memories are of the many hotel pools she swam in -- she's still turned out to be adventuresome in spite of her desire to stay close to those places she finds comfortable when traveling as a kid). I just hope that in the long run she will be more likely to want to spread her wings in the future as a result of what she has experienced during these two and a half months.

My new obsession

I was not sure what to expect from France.  In some ways there have been cultural diffences that I am still trying to get adjusted to.  For example shops closing up for some/most of the afternoon I am having a hard time getting used to, as well I had the misconception that France ( and Europe) in general had great public transit.  Generally the public transit seems ok, but small town are small towns and the dependence on the privately owned vehicle is paramount in most places.  Making getting around the small towns like Saumur and to a lesser degree Agen more difficult then I had imagined.  Even finding car rental has been more challenging than expected.  I am missing the tro tros and taxis in Ghana that made getting around so logistically easy, albeit sometimes very smushed and never sure if the vehicles were running on more scotch tape and a prayer rather than fossil fuel.

However, there are many many things to love about France and one of these things are the marcarrons.   These absolutely delightful two puffs of lightly baked meringue holding a tiny bit of flavoured whipped filling.   I have taken on as a bit of a personal and family mission to find the best of these marcarrons, which means a lot of sampling of different bakeries/boulangeries  One in Agen ranks quite low, while I thought the ones we had tasted on the boat from a small town south of Agen was in the running of the best marcarrons, but alas we made our way on to Saumur, and  there just right around the corner from our apartment, is  a little boulangarie with marcarrons that are so light and delicately flavoured.  What absolute luck!

Cave visits

Although we don't remember all the reasons we chose Saumur to spend time in -- the Loire valley had a great reputation, the town was not too big and not too small -- one of the things that caught Alice's imagination in what we read was the prevelance of caves in the region.

Some of these are troglodyte caves and people lived in them thousands of years ago. More commonly, these caves are the result of quarrying limestone to build towns like Saumur. Outside of town are two museums that involve caves and we took the opportunity to make the 5 km walk this afternoon. They are among the strangest museums I have visited.

The first is called Pierre et Lumierre. Some years ago a couple of guys (neither of them named Pierre -- it's all about the rocks...) decided that it would be a great idea to used an abandoned cave to house cavings of Loire Valley architecture. For three years the artist worked in these caves carving churches, abbeys, castles and townscaapes -- 20 in all. It sounds like a weird passion (I picture a cross between Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams" -- build it and they will come (to our caves!) -- and Richard Dreyfus carving land formations out of mash potatoes in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). Yet somehow it was considerably more impressive than it sounds. For his depiction of Saumur, for instance, he used the water in the cave to represent the Loire. And the level of detail is quite incredible.

They had a little activity for kids in the courtyard that gave them the chance to do some carving for themselves on a little 5x8 piece of limestone. Sylvie chose to do a rabbit. Once she had the relief carved out the arisan who was helping her told her that she could color it with some chalk. "You can use white or brown," he said showing her the chalk, "or combine some to make grey, like this". That wasn't what she had in mind, though. Watching Sylvie, he eventually conceded that her rabbit could be purple if that was what she wanted. And that it could have a medal around its neck.

The museum next door, also in caves, is devoted entirely to mushrooms. The first half is mushroom specimens on display (there are a helluva lot of mushrooms in the world and seeing them all preserved in polyresin cubes in display case after display case is, frankly, a little overwhelming, especially when you're hunched over in a cave examining them...). The back half of the caves are devoted to growing mushrooms. Caves are as good a place as any to grow mushrooms because as long as the moisture and temperature are within the right range, all is good. The other thing you need, of course, is fertilized manure and again Saumur leads other way because besides caves and castles the area is noted for its equestrian excellence and having a lot of horses in one place leads to a lot of horse -- well you get the idea. Most interesting fact learned while bent over looking a mushrooms: most of the white button mushrooms (the most popular variety in the world, by far) have been crossbred from only 6 or 7 parent mushrooms.

In the gift shop I picked up a bottle of of Shitake beer (Belgian and 9 percent alcohol). It's cooling as we speak. I'll keep you posted on whether it is possible to make good beer out of fungus spores or just beer.

Back online!

After a long absence we are back ( though we have probably lost most of our loyal readers during our time in the virtual wilderness...)

One of the most obvious differences between traveling in 2013 as compared to 2001 or during the 1990s is how much the Internet and smart phones have changed the landscape in innumerable ways. I talked briefly before about how easy (and cheap) it was to get a cell phone in Ghana. As handy as it was (it is always hard to know for sure, but I think that parts of our trip there would have been impossible without it; for example because credit card use is so minimal in the country most hotel reservations all require a phone -- if you don't show or are late they call and if they can't get in touch they'll give your room away) it was not a smart phone.

We came to realize that even in the developing world it's a smart phone/tablet landscape that travelers have to navigate. There was Wi-fi almost everywhere we went and stayed. By contrast the number of Internet cafes and other means people used to rely on are falling by the wayside.

We had consciously decided to leave our iPod Touch and iPad in Canada and use our 11 weeks to unplug. During the first month of our trip we coped by borrowing all the other volunteers' devices and making use of the Wi-fi at the house. Later we kept in touch with some with our phone but stopped being able to write easily on the blog or Facebook.

We thought that it would be easier in Europe but that hasn't proven to be the case. The half hours at the library in England weren't enough to write anything meaningful. We had free Internet in Poitiers but again time limits and a crazy keyboard (what could the French have against QWERTY? Maybe it's an EU regulation) made posting difficult.

Apple's value was really made clear to us on our last day in Agen; Alice's brother and his wife both has their phones with them and we used them and the hotel's Wi-fi to plan the next part of our trip. We also used the phone to send an e-mail to my mother who was getting ready to come and meet us: "please bring the iPad!" It has made figuring things out here in Samur so much easier.

It's also made posting the blog a lot easier again. We'll try and be a little more regular, but I must warn you that the weather has been fantastic and given the choice between sitting in the living room of our rented gite and enjoying cafe and a pain au raisin on a sidewalk patio, modern communication and the internet will still finish second... :)

Out of Ghana ...and into the cold!

We're into stage two of our trip. As I write this we're in Crawley England (just outside of London near Gatwick airport). In the strange world that is modern travel, it was less expensive to fly from Amsterdam to London, hang out here for a couple of days and then fly on to southern France for the next leg of our journey.

There is so much that we saw and did and felt in our last ten days in Ghana that we wanted to write about that one blog entry won't do justice to, but I don't know how much time we're going to have to write in the next couple of days (if we were to make one pre-trip change we definitely would have brought an iPod or iPad with us -- everywhere, even in Africa -- has WiFi and it would have made staying in touch a lot easier...); we're going to take the train into London proper tomorrow and then we fly out early on Sunday morning. I'll do my best to capture some of the high (and low) of the week and half we spent travelling around Ghana and then if we have more time and access in the days to come we'll try to expand on some of them in longer entries.

Once we were done our placement in Hohoe (we will definitely have to write about the last day at the school -- we made paper airplanes with the kids and played games with balloons; it felt like we actually added a tiny little bit to the KG class's education, but it also felt like it was time to move on) we travelled back to the capital Accra. We had made arrangements to stay at Hotel Obama (as you might expect, the first black president -- with African roots, even if they are in east Africa -- is very big in Ghana; one of the larger and fancier drinking establishments in Hohoe was called Obama Gardens) but we learned upon arriving at the hotel (after a great deal of difficulty) that they had fudged their location on Google maps and were nowhere near the airport as the map had suggested. One of the other volunteers still had to be dropped off at her hotel so we went with her and got a room there. Coconut Grove was very much the lap of luxury, after a month in Hohoe, but you paid for it. An airport shuttle was inlcuded, and we got up bright and early the next morning to catch a plane to Tamale in northern Ghana.

Tamale is where Alice worked 11 years ago. I will let her write more about the city then and now, but suffice to say it's changed a lot in a decade. It's gone from a somewhat sleepy city of half a million to a booming metropolis of 1.4 million. It was not the city that Alice remembered -- it was considerably larger, busier and nosier. It's hard to put into words what an African city feels like for people who haven't been, but the three of us found Tamale overwhelming, even with our month-long experience in Hohoe (which, for comparison sake, is much smaller at only about 50,000). The traffic feels like it's everywhere, taxis moving all around, honking, brakes squeaking as well as cars and truck pulled up here, there and everywhere on the sides of the roads and on the sidewalks; people are everywhere as well, selling, sitting, bartering, walking.

One of the reasons for the boom in the city, we were told, was the war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire; much of the traffic that travelled through there -- mostly trucks with goods for the contries that lie inland -- now travel through Ghana and specifically through Tamale. Tamale was the only time we were approached by aggressive panhandlers and Alice's friend Coleman told us that most of these people had been displaced from places like Cote d'Ivoire and Mali.

Still, it was very nice to picked up at the airport by someone we knew and ferried into a town that Alice knew (at least a past incarnation of it anyway). Coleman had made arrangements for us to stay at a guest house close to his house.

My time on the library computer is about to run out so I'll sign off for now and try to write more later.

Trying to beat the internet cafe count down to post this

Hi there.   Just a short note to let you know that we are safe and sound in Temale.   The city has grown immensely over the last 10 years, but I am still at the same internet cafe it seems.   It has good airconditioning and working computers. (which has not been the case at the other cafes).   Overall we have found Temale overwhelming as it is much busier than Hohoe.   In addition to this, first I got sick and now Scott is down and out for a bit.   I was pretty bad off on Monday and was fortunately taken to the Cuban doctors who were able to treat me in their house.   They were Carmen and Raul and they did a quick diagnosis that changed rather rapidly as I was making very rapid and frequent visits to their facilities in the 1/2 hour I was there.  Time to bring out the Cipro and a first for me in a developing country -- an injection.   This is one thing I have avoided.   However,   it was felt that without something to calm my insides I would not be able to take the Cipro orally, which would mean an IV.     So there in an old Temale bungalow with the shirtless male Cuban doctor administering a shot to my nether regions on the bed of the female doctor, I was on my road to recovery.   And fortunately,   as soon as Scott started feeling the same symptoms he started the Cipro and is having a much easier time of it.     Sylvie as always is being the trooper and a very considerate nurse through all of this, even though it has not meant much fun for her.

We have so much to say, but not the ability to share it right now maybe we will catch up in a little bit.   We are off to Mole to see the elephants tomorrow.

Farewell to Hohoe

Today is our last day in Hohoe. We were supposed to leave an hour ago but so far the driver and the van have not shown up. When Alice worked here 11 years ago she was told that time was GMT: Ghana Maybe Time...

We didn't get a chance to post about our last day our school placement. The power went out last night and the modem/router didn't come up immediately so we were incomunicado for a bit. Still, I'll leave thoughts on our placement and our last day there for a time when I won't have to shut things down on a moment's notice.

As we head up to Tamale (with a night in Accra at Hotel Obama!) postings on the blog might end up being a little less frequent. We've been lucky to have access to Diana's computer while we've been here and haven't had to go in search of an internet cafe. That won't be the case on the next leg of our journey. On the other hand, Alice has found this laptop to be very frustrating to type on so she might actually post more often once we leave it behind.

It's hard to believe that it's been a month already. Bring on the next seven weeks!

A Few Random Observations on a Thursday

Some things that stood out today (in no particular order):

We had a new driver driving us to and from our placement at Happy Kids. Generally the taxi drivers are polite and most are quiet. What made this one stand out was his obsession with the car's horn. You hear a LOT of car horns here, but most drivers aren't on it all the time. Mostly it's used to let walkers and cyclists know you're coming so they can move off to the side. It's also used to indicate that you want to pass a slower moving vehicle or that you're coming up on the left. This driver though used it almost constantly from school to the house, about a 25 minute journey. We thought of our friends Laura and Sean and a story they told us about driving through some remote part of Australia. To keep themselves amused on some stretch of desolate highway they tapped out songs on their horn. Eventually they managed to wear their horn out. No such luck today, though!

There was another big rain storm today as we move into the rainy season. At one point we were driving on one of the back roads after it had subsided a bit. On this particular road there wasn't much infastructure compared to those around the homebase; just a shalow ditch on either side of the road. Yet, the design was perfect. The water ran off the road and the ditch was a raging stream of run off. When we got closer to home where they've built some "proper" gutters, though, the run off was much more problematic because the sides of the gutters rise up close to two feet at the side of the road. Supposedly, there is to be more fill for the road bring the two things level allowing the water to run off into the gutters. Until that fill comes (if?) little of the water makes it into the gutter and instead most pools in the road because of the two foot concrete barriers on either side of the road...

The teachers are still on strike. The person who's in charge of CCS explained to us the other day that it's not really about problems that indvidual teachers have about their salaries or working conditions, but instead it's the union executive who are doing to this for their own ends and purposes. Big bad unions that stifle the wishes of their members. Very nearly the same things I heard mere months ago in Ontario.

Sylvie's been travelling for almost a month now and I think she's doing remarkably well. It's hard to imagine what goes through the head of a 7 year-old at the best of times, but given all that we're seeing and the very different routine, it must be difficult to know what to think sometimes. We started arguing more about food (for those of you know us, you'll know that's not really anything new) but in the grand scheme of things I think she's adapting very well, learning a ton and having a fair amount of fun. Hopefully we'll segue smoothly into a new phase next week...

Tomorrow is our last day at Happy Kids and we'll probably write more about that when we get back from our placement in the afternoon, but we've all grown close to many of the kids in the KG class over the last month. They wrote their "exam" yesterday and it was nice to see that many of them had made some progress over the last month. Virtually all of them could write their name properly, which is something we worked a lot on in our groups because many of them were still having problems with that when we arrived.

The power was out for close to 24 hours (from about 6 pm Wednesday to 4:30 pm today) which caused many headaches and hiccups. For one thing, the homebase runs a generator when the power goes out; generally we are thankful for this because it means that we can use the fans. Still, the drone is hard to take after a while (I can't imagine what our neighbours think about it when they don't get the benefits that come with the noice). Many in the house have been complaining that they are tired even though they feel they are sleeping well-enough. I think, though, the constant hum and rattle interferes with people sleep so that they don't end up feeling very rested. The generated finally conked out after lunch which was a bit of a relief. The power outage has also meant that the two seamstresses trying to finish work for Alice have been unable to get it done. I can't imagine how frustrating it is trying to run a business that requires power (and how many don't?) and to never know how much you're going to have at any given time.

It occured to me today that I have probably eaten more pineapple during the last month here (at least twice a day, sometimes three times a day) than I have eaten in my whole life. And yet somehow I have managed not to get a single canker. I have no idea how this is possible, save for the possibility that Ghana has developed a special pineapple that they are keeping secret from the rest of the world. (I thank my lucky stars that pineapple is something that Sylvie likes -- dispite our differences over what to eat, she has eaten her body weight in pineapple many times over this past month and has never once complained about it)

I'll end with Nutella. Growing up this was not something I ate and so it's not a craving I have. There's been a jar of it out for about a week though and I'm gaining an appreciation for it. Aside from the pop and occasional (they have become occasional, by the way) Fanice, we don't have much in the way of deserts. A piece of bread with a thick smear of Nutella, though, fills the void nicely. Or at least I tought it did until Alice just made use of the sandwich maker to make a warm Nutella and banana pressed sandwhich. There might not be any going back now...

Groundhog Day(s)

Because new volunteers arrived on Saturday -- the first new ones since we arrived 3 weeks ago -- this week has seen many of the same field trips and outings. Yesterday we went back to see the monkey preserve (with drumming and dancing thrown in afterwards) and today we got to go back to see the waterfalls we visited during our first week (on Alice's birthday).

While it was nice to visit both of these places again, I think we're feeling like we've had enough of Hohoe as we approach the 4 week mark. Like any extended stay anywhere, things like food and routine get repetitive, but unlike being at home (which is nothing if not repetitive and routine) we're not in charge of very much of our lives here. A taxi brings us to our placement everyday and picks us up. While we're there we try to work within the confines of the school's expectations. Our meals are cooked for us and there are housekeepers to change the sheets and tidy up.

For the first couple of weeks, this gave us lots of opportunity to explore the town and experience the culture -- which was great. But we've now done most of the superficial things that tourists can do. I always wonder, too, whether our brain knows that we're done on Saturday so it starts to wrap things up to get ready for the next part of the trip. Either way I think that we'll be ready to see another part of Ghana.

Malaria

So, Tuesday is malaria day for us. We take anti-malarials once a week and we started them on a Tuesday (three weeks before we left to make sure that there were no adverse reactions) and so now every Tuesday at dinner we take our pills.

Malaria -- or more accurately avoiding malaria -- is a big part of any trip to Africa. The British, of course, couldn't colonize half the continent without conquering (or at least controling) the disease. They did it with quinine in their gin and tonics and there are many Tuesdays that I would love to sip that rather than swallow the bitter Mefloquine pill.

In addition to the medication we also sleep under mosquito netting and are advised to douse ourselves in bug spray (30% DEET!) whenever we go out. I have yet to see a mosquito (we're just coming off the dry season, so mosquitos will probable be more prevalent once the rains start -- we'll be gone by then, howevrer) so I've been somewhat lax. I'm not a big fan of bug spray at the best of times so I've managed to avoid that. I do sleep under the mosquito netting, but I'm not the first volunteer to do so and as such there are little rips and tears in it. Most have been fixed with tape, but there is one that I've tried fixing but it's beyone the power of Scotch tape. Seeing even one mosquito might give me more incentive to follow up, but so far the danger feels very remote and so I've been able to sleep easy enough under my flawed protection.

(As a side note, when we travelled to Cape Coast last weekend there was no mosquito netting over our bed at the hotel. I wondered whether they simply had better trained mosquitos that knew not to bother paying guests or whether we practicing risky behaviour...)

What I find most interesting about malaria is how often it is diagnosed. There is a test for the disease, but it's not always performed or trusted, as far as I can tell. One of the volunteers that arrived with us felt faint at her placement last week and thought she was going to pass out. Luckily she's a nursing student and her placement is at the hospital. The first thing they did was administer the malaria test -- and it came back negative -- but they still prescribed her malaria medication which she dutifully took despite not having any of the symptoms of malaria -- notably absent was any kind of fever. Given that she had been eating poorly (she's listening to the book "Skinny Bitch" on her iPod and decided that her two months in Africa was the best time to stop eating meat and change her diet radically) and not sleeping well, the other nurse volunteering here at the time was pretty sure it wasn't malaria, but demured to the "experts".

A few others have been sick while we've been here -- Della, the person in charge of arranging transportation for CCS, missed the last four or so days because of malaria and Sephako, one of the little girls in my reading group at school, had a running fever for about 5 days before she was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with malaria -- but they don't seem to have been tested.

I know at home when we get a cold or the flu we're not always sure exactly what we've got and there's a lot of guessing going on there too. I guess I expected a little more accuracy given the amount of attention and emphasis everyone seems to put on the disease both at the travel clinics before leaving and here in Ghana.

Some Thoughts on Teaching

On our way to the private school we teach at every weekday morning, we pass a large public school at the end of our road. Today all the kids were milling about outside, which seemed strange, but there are often things about school schedules here that are strange so I didn't think much of it. On the way home, when we passed by the school was closed up tight and there were only a few students hanging around. Again this seemed weird, but Sylvie came up with a host of plausible explanatins (e.g. it's parent teacher interviews and the school wanted to make sure the parents didn't get into the school before the scheduled time). When we got back to the homebase we were told that the public school teachers were on strike.

It was like deju vu all over again! I thought I had escaped that by flying halway around the world, but it seems to have followed me.

In thinking about the teachers' strike, I realize that I haven't written very much about teaching and schools here in Ghana, which is a bit strange, obviously, since I'm a teacher in Canada and my volunteer placement is in a school. It's those very reasons, however, that I think make it harder to process some of the things I'm seeing and experiencing.

The protracted labour dispute in Ontario that played such a big role in the semester prior to my leave got me thinking a lot about teaching and teaching, theory and practice. There was (and continues to be, I suspect) a lot of rhetoric from all sides and in trying to figure out where I fit in, I was forced to confront some difficult truths and situations that often didn't square when they were held side by side. Coming here has forced me to re-evaluate things all over again.

The current dispute is apparently over an increase in wages. We were told during the little talk on education that CCS arranged for us that the average teacher in  a public school earns 1200 cedis a month (about $600) but I've also been told it's closer to 800 cedis ($400). Not bad compared to other wages, but not a ransom either. The teachers at our private school, by comparison, are paid 100-200 cedis a month ($50-$100) and most of them are untrained (i.e. have attended the teaching college that public school teachers must graduate from).

Morale is generally low at all the schools, public or private and, although there are many times when good teaching does happen, too often what happens in the classroom is not of much benefit to students. The emphasis here is on rote learning and there are few if any allowances made for any kind of alternative learning (or teaching) styles. If you are are not an auditory learner, you will largely be out of luck.

Most notable is the lack of basic literacy and numeracy building blocks at the school we're teaching at. The nursery and the kindergarten (KG) classes are by far the largest. Most of the students in the KG class (the one we are working with) can rhyme off the alphabet, but few of them can associate any of the specific sounds with each of the letters. Instead, they have memorized a word that starts with the letter. Ask them for another word, though, and they only rarely come up with one. Most of the work we've done is trying to get them saying the sounds of the letters and exposing them as much as possible to print and getting them to hear the rhythm of stories being read to them.

The hardest circle I've had to try and square while here, though, have been the assumptions people make about teachers and teaching. Although there are, from my point of view, definitely questionable teaching practices going on and teachers, by large, do things that make them seem lazy, it's unclear to me whether those things cause people not to have faith in the education system or whether they are the result of a lack of faith. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not.

It's most obvious through our volunteer placements. The vast majority of people at CCS are placed in schools to teach. The vast majority of volunteers, however, are not teachers. Still they are told that they can walk into a classroom and teach classes (with classes, at times, as large as 45). By contrast, the two voluteers at the hospital who are trained nurses, spend their days observing. They do not do any nursing, despite the fact that they are probably better trained than the nurses who are employed there (when you hear people talking about the nurses, they say many of the same things they say about the teachers: lazy, lacking initiative, etc). They don't presume to tell them what to do or do their jobs for them, despite having background in that area. And yet when it comes to teaching, anybody can jump in and take over your class for one, two , six weeks. Sell mortgages in US? Great, you're in. Retired social worker? Perfect.

I'm trying to imagine a volunteer dropping into my class and my principal telling me that they are going to take over for a couple of weeks. "They work for the Ministry of Health in Ghana, but they are here for a couple of weeks and they're going to teach our students..." That sends a pretty clear message that what I'm doing isn't very important or valued. To be a certified teacher here you need to attend teacher's college for 3 years, but an 18 year-old high school graduate can come on a gap year and teacher kindergarten for 3 months...

I realize I'm using broad brush strokes here (I was upfront with the fact that I haven't been able to adequately process all this) but the situation just doesn't sit right. This, in spite of the fact that that volunteer who worked with mortgages came up with fun activities for her students and the retired social worker is working closely with her teacher to deliver the actual curriculum and not leave too much of a mess when she goes hom on Saturday.

But how many different ways are teachers being undermined, if an organization like CCS -- which is incredibly careful to not make cultural faux pas -- puts it right in their handbook that you should plan on taking over the class even if you're not a trained teacher?

I'm not sure I'm any further ahead with any of these ideas than when I started. Such is life I guess.

Reincarnation request

Having lived with mosquito netting in the bottom of the bunk bed I've been sharing with Sylvie for the last three weeks, I would humbly request not to return to this earth as a tent catapilar. Every night I have to carefully fold myself to get under the top bunk and contort further to get inside the netting. This combined with the placement of the three fans in the room can be quite challenging to do without any bumping or tearing!

Although the goats and chickens have free rein of the most places in Ghana, I think I will pass on coming back as either of those, either, given the garbage I see them eating (not to mention the wading they do in the open gutters). Great free range life, terrible diet (hmmm, now that I think about it, not too far removed from the typical North American!)

If I had to choose I'd go with the lizards. They are sleek and have great colours (yellow and green) and are free ranging too. It seems like a tough choice, but a diet of bugs wins out over garbage any day.

:)

A Guide to Ghana's Beer

As I sit here on dad duty while Alice has a drink with some of the other volunteers (three new ones arrived this afternoon) at a local watering hole (Sunset Gardens -- with the choice location beside the car washing station a couple blocks from the homebase) I thought I would write a little about the beer available in Ghana.

(Before you think I'm hard done by having to babysit while the others are out carousing, I enjoyed a cold beer this afternoon and I went out for one last night as well as we bid farewell to Nancy, a volunteer nurse who flew home day, while Alice stayed in...)

For the most part, there are four main choices at many of the drinking establishments (I hesitate to call them bars since, for most of us, that conjures up certain images. Most of them are small patios (a couple of tables, six or eight chairs, with a little structure of some kind -- wooden shed, converted shipping container -- with some shelving, a little bar and a fridge/freezer) although some of the larger establishments -- Obama Gardens and Malaysia being two of the more prominent ones in Hohoe -- can seat many more and have large areas for dancing). There four main choices are (in order from least to most important):

Castle Milk Stout: This one probably doesn't deserve to be on the list. Despite what I said above, you only find this at some of the bars. It's also not west African in origin -- it comes from South Africa. It is, however, my favourite and since this is my guide, it makes the list. It's smooth and rich, very much like the Guinness we're used to drinking in Canada (or, for those lucky ones, in Ireland).

Guinness: This one is misleading, as I learned last weekend during our sojourn to Cape Coast. You see the Guinness logo everywhere. The company is clearly very heavily invested here advertising in many, many places. I probably see at least a dozen signs and logos on my way through town to our school placement every morning. The thing is, when you order Guiness you don't get that smooth and rich brew you get when you order a pint in Canada, but instead a bottle of Guinness Strong which is 7.5% alcohol, considerably stronger than regular Guinness. It tastes a little like drinking a very bitter dark beer with shot or two of vodka. Ironically, one of the reasons you see so much advertising for Guinness is that they are trying to sell their Malta -- a product with no alcohol whatsoever. There are a number of maltas for sale in Ghana, in part because of it's large muslim population. They are an acquired taste -- imagine Coke with molasses as its main ingredient -- that I have yet to acquire. Should you wish to try one without shelling out for airfare to Africa, you can buy it in Canada; I have seen Malta (though not the Guinness brand) at the Carlingwood Lablaws in the miscelaneous ethnic aisle.

Club: You see this almost everywhere. Unlike Guinness, their prefered method of advertising is the plastic cases the bottles are shipped in. You don't see people buying cases of beer here the way we do in Canada (though I'm sure that some people do); mostly drinks (beer and pop) are distributed to the various establishments around town in reusable cases and bottles. The club cases are a distictive green with a simple club symbol (like you find on playing cards). There is a distribution centre on our way to our placement and the cases form a wall piled 15 or 20 cases high along the fence facing the road. As for taste, I can't tell you because I haven't tried it. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it is probably  very similar to the generic lagers, like Canadian, the big brewers in Canada force us to settle for.

Star: This one is the most important -- Ghana's national beer. The Black Star is Ghana's symbol, adopted following its independence from England in 1957 (the first African country to achieve autonomy from its colonial rulers). The main square in Accra is Black Star Sqaure and there is a black star at the centre of the country's flag. I have tasted this one and there is nothing exciting about it, outside of its symbolic weight -- I would hard pressed to tell the difference between it and Blue or Budweiser. For all I know, it comes from the same vat as Club does (one of my all-time favourite Simpson moments comes during Homer's visit to Duff Brewery; there is a shot of one giant vat of beer with six or eight taps all with different labels...). On a hot, humid day, though, a cold Star tastes good and you can justify the bland taste by telling yourself that you are doing your civic duty and upholding the country's long tradition of fierce indepenence -- quench your thirst and stick it to the man!

As a side note, someone told us that Star stands for "Sit, talk and relax" which I thought was very clever, though I've yet to see that written anywhere or included in any advertising. I imagined a group sitting around an advertising firm in dashikis circa-1967 trying to come up with clever slogans, in the wake of the founding President -- Kwame Nkrumah -- being deposed by the military the previous year. "We need something that isn't tied to independence; another reason to drink Star besides patriostism.  Who wants to drink beer associated with military dictators? What have people got? We need something simple, easy to digest and clever." Too many hours spent watching Mad Men? Perhaps.

Surreal Day 2

Before coming to Hohoe we had a seen a video of some African-American CCS volunteers being welcomed back to Africa through a ceremony with a local chief and some elders. Although coming to Africa was a deliberate choice -- have Sylvie experience a culture in which people who look like her are the majority -- we weren't sure what to make of the ceremony and whether it was something we should persue or let it go and let Sylvie decide it was something she would like to do when she's old enough to make the choice. One of our reservations is that they match you up with an "African Mother" (land of your ancestors' birth and all that) and at the moment Sylvie has enough mothers and we didn't want to add any more (symbolic or not) into the mix.

As it turned out they performed the ceremony for the African-American volunteer who left last week. We found out yesterday that Sylvie was supposed to be part of it, but the early departure for our trip to Cape Coast last Friday meant that we missed it. We were asked whether we wanted to have Sylvie participate in a follow-up ceremony. Once we established some ground rules -- no new mothers, no huge entourage of elders -- we decided that it would be a nice gesture. The ceremony would involve the presentation of some beads as a welcome back gesture.

The ceremony last week was done outside but because of the torential rain storm that passed through in the late afternoon, the chief decided to have the ceremony in his living room. I think this indoor venue, more than anything else, contributed to the strangeness of the event. It was not a very big space and most of the room was taken up with puffy leather couches and chairs and a very large flat screen television. It's a point of pride to have a large television (with satellite) and so the tv was left on for the ceremony, rather than being turned off as a similar occasion might require at home.

During the first part of the ceremony BBC news was on -- a technology report, if memory serves. Alcohol is big part of traditional Ghanaian ceremony and so everyone was given the opportunity to sip from a glass of schnapps. The difficult with having the ceremony indoors, however, is that you are supposed to provide some to the ancestors by spilling it on the ground (or spitting it) once you have imbibed. The chief accomplished this by spilling and spitting on a little rug made out of goat's hide at his feet. The rest of us just had to pretend to spit once we had tried the schnapps. I can tell you it's an awkward process to be sitting in a stranger's home, drinking sipping cough-syrup-like alcohol from a communal glass and then pretending to spit on his living room carpet. We did our best.

We then presented the chief with our own offering -- two bottles of gin. This part was also a little more confusing than it probably would have been otherwise because of the chief's assistant. We had asked that the ceremony be kept to only a few people but it's tradition that the Chief needs an assistant. The regular assistant, however, had been late so a younger man was filling it, but wasn't familiar with all the processes and procedures and so the chief was trying to help him understand what he should be doing, while explaining to us what was happening in each step. I thought that this assistant-in-training was very nervous and unsure of himself. It turned out that he was very drunk (a condition that preceded the schnapps drinking, but probably wasn't helped by the fact that it seemed to be his responsibility to drain the glass of whatever couldn't be inconspicuously spilled on the living room carpet...).

The gin we brought was tied up in a plastic shopping bag (like everything you buy here) because one of the staff had carried to the ceremony on the back of his motorcycle. Handed this to the assistant without undoing the knot in the bag. The assistant was instructed to hand the bag back so that we could open the bag. By way of explanation, the chielf gave a long speech about how his is a very coveted position and he must always be careful about assassination attempts, including possible bombs in bags. By this time the channel had been changed on the TV to Tele Afriq which shows Nigerian soap operas. The particular scene that accompanied the always-be-wary-of-potential-assassins speech was a long extended shot of man sitting in his bathroom enjoying the pleasures of a very large joint. I'm sure to Sylvie it just looked like a man enjoying a poorly rolled cigarette but most everyone else in the room had to suppress a smile.

The chief talked a lot about the important of ceremonies like these and the challenges of combining tradition with the demands of modern life. There was no mention of the television accompanying our meeting (nor the cell phones that were going off periodically and being answered), but the clash of the traditional and the modern was definitely something front and centre for everyone in the room.

By the time we got to the acutal welcoming part of the ceremony the channel had changed again, this time to hip hop videos. We started off with some Drake (appropriate Can-con, I suppose). As he talked about black and white coming together ("whites adopting blacks, blacks adopting blacks" and the gradual disappearance of racism in the world...) the video changed to one filmed in Paris and South Central LA. The Eiffle Tower was appropriate given that France is the next leg of our tour. The gratuitous ass-shaking and other hip-hop tropes from LA, however, were less appropriate (even Sylvie tweaked to this, as she told us afterwards). By the time the chief was winding up and had presented the bead bracelet and necklace, "Don't You Worry Child" by Sweedish House Mafia had come on -- one of Sylvie's favourites (and appropriate in terms of both lyrics and visual content).

At the end, they asked if there were any questions. The Chief had mentioned that he became chief by being "captured"; Alice asked what that meant. The answer was long, but interesting. I probably should have mentioned, in case you were picturing some grizzled old man, that this chief is only 31 and by day is a psychiatric nurse at the Hohoe hospital. When the last chief died he was in his last year of his studies at Cape Coast university. The community's elders got together to choose a successor. When they decided on him, some in the community travelled to Cape Coast and "captured" him as chief and brought him bask. He was then ensconced in a house for 8 days and educated into the ways of being cheif (one of his responsibilities is to settle disputes and so there was some conflict resolution training, among other things). Then on the 9th day, he was let out of the house and installed as chief (and warlord, he confided to us proudly) for life.

In the end, I think Sylvie liked the sentiment and the beads. It was a nice counterpoint to the slave castle visit last weekend and the brutality that befell her ancestors. I think Sylvie knows she is welcome many places in the world and that must feel good (though I suspect if you ask her, she'll tell you that she still feels most at home in Ottawa -- which is just fine with us!)

Surreal day part 1

Today was surreal.

When we arrived at school today the teachers either had not shown up or were refusing to teach.  I am not exactly sure why but it seemed to be a mixture of: people being sick; testing for the students starting Monday; teachers needing additional time to write tests; it being Friday and a focus on physical education and/or  frustration being expressed by the teachers?  We tried to follow some routine and we were able to get four reading groups together before things fell more or less apart in terms of structure.  The flipside was that the kids got to play a lot and Sylvie has now mastered the clapping/jumping game – ampe – that most girls play.   Even though we have not been here that long, I have to admit that I have grown very fond of many of the children at the school.   I am excited to see Bless more or less write her own name, and to take on the sassy Selena, who stares defiantly at me when I tell her it is time to stop colouring and hides a pencil crayon in her dress to finish her drawing of an egg, and to encourage Cynthia’s imagination as she tells us the outrageous story of her mother who keeps an elephant at her house, which travels with her mother to the fields to help with farming.  When challenged by Dzidom regarding the truth of the story she very accurately states “Now Dzidom, have you been to my house?  No.  So how would you know what is true?”, and for Rosemary who finally wrote her ‘e’ right side up and did not look completely lost when I was speaking to her.  As you might have figured out, we were working on the letter Ee this week.  

After school we walked to town.  Many afternoons there are rumblings in the sky and it very often looks like rain will come.  Most often it does not.  Today when we started it the sky was rumbling and it looked like rain.   By  the time we got to town and the bank it was just starting to rain, but the sky was very dark.  We decided to take a taxi back to “1^st wash basin” (the closest communal taxi stop to our house) and by the time we got out of the taxi the sky had opened up.   We were completely soaked by the time we got back to the house and the wind was fierce.  However, walking by the Kente weavers, with their open air workspace, you could still hear the clickity clack of their looms as they weaved through the rain.

But the most surreal part I will save for another post, as the computer is driving me crazy.

Tea Parties in Ghana

Yesterday when I was walking through town I saw a woman wearing a t-shirt that read "Taxation without Representation." At first I wondered how this shirt made from an American Tea Party rally to Hohoe Ghana. You see a lot of North American t-shirts here (the little boy next door wears a Montreal Canadians t-shirt and one of the first days we were here there was someone wearing a Saunders farm t-shirt -- a long way to go for a haunted maze!) and I know that at least part of the reason that shirts like this are for sale here is that many of those clothes that we donate to various charities are then sold by the pound to buyers in the developing world. They then take the best, press them and sell them in little stalls all around the country.

The more I thought about this Tea Party message though, the more I wondered about larger economic questions. A lot of the time, walking around Ghana feels like the Tea Party theory put into practice. They want to reduce the taxes paid to the state and let capitalism thrive. Ghana, if nothing else, is unfettered capitalism with very little government regulation or interference. You can sell things virtually anywhere. There are little store fronts along most road-sides. If you can afford to buy or rent one of these you can roll out your blanket and hawk your watches and phones on the corner in the shade of a tree. If you can't find even a sliver of space you can put your goods in a basin on your head and walk through town selling to whoever is buying. Water, batik fabric, plantain chips, among many other things are all sold in this fashion.

And there is no tax charged on any of these transactions. The country has something called a VAT (value added tax) but you only pay this at the upscale shops (where the vast majority of people never shop). Of all the things I've purchased here (a lot of Coke and Fanice, but also tailored clothing, jewlery and various and sundty nick nacks, I have paid exactly no tax).

This is obviously a problem for the government. As the Tea Party points out: it's hard for them to interfere in your affairs if they do not have a suffient source of revenue. And you see this lack of interference everywhere you turn. The roads are lousy with potholes and there appears to be no planning in towns like Hohoe -- build what you want wherever you want. There is also no system of government public transportation: instead of a municipal bus system you get private taxis that run up and down the streets that you can jump into and get wherever you want to for 70 peswas and trotros if you want to get from town to town. They are relatively inexpensive -- imagine bus fare that is 35 cents in town or 5 bucks from Ottawa to Montreal -- but you also have to wonder about how safe any of these vehicles are. A trotro can seat 12-15 and taxis can fit as many as you can jam in (a friend here in town was telling us about a trip she took on the weekend; they started off with four in the sedan and before long they 9, including a mother and baby in the front seat and a man riding in the trunk). But it is all ok because someone is providing a service and you are paying for said service.

The road to the house we're staying in is probably the best example. Any vehicle trying to get to the homebase has to drive a fair ways out of the way on bumpy roads to get here. There is a more direct road, but it is only accessible right now by foot. Before we got here the bridge had been washed out. The bridge has since been replaced but not the fill that connects the road on either side. I was asking one of the staff here about that. He told me that people in the community didn't want to wait for the government to come and fix the bridge so they pooled their resources and got the bridge built. Now they are raising more money, but they don't yet have enough to finish the road. That might come next month or later. In the end, it will probably be faster than waiting for the government.

I am reminded of an episode of This American Life we listened to a while back. They talked about some town in the States that had pretty much done away with property taxes (or at least any increases in property taxes). They started turning out all the street lights, because they no longer had the funds to pay for it. If you wanted the streetlights on your block to be turned on, you could go down to city hall and pay something like $250 and they would turn them back on. One city counsellor (who was opposed to this new system) talked to one man and said, "You know, if you just paid an extra $100 on your property taxes we could turn the lights on all around the city and you would still be $150 ahead." The individual felt this was better, even if he was paying more.

I don't know whether it's ideology that drives thinking like that or something else, but I wouuld very much like to see the Tea Partier whose t-shirt migrated to Ghana spend a month here and tell me that a policy of no taxes leads to better society because I just don't see it.

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” -- Oliver Wenell Holmes Jr.

It is fun over here

I have been doing lots of stuff outside and it is hot.  Right now I am playing checkers with my dad.  Today we went to the weaving place.  We did fun stuff.  I had to knit and it was hard. 

We went to Cape Coast.  We went to the war castle and it was scary.   I don't want to talk about it.  People were not very nice in the slave castle.  

Daddy's birthday was a good day.   We see lots of roosters.   Daddy has a lot of my red checker pieces.   In the book we are reading.  I like the Hobbit.  Gollum had a lot of riddles.   "what's in my pocket, what's in my pocket?".   I liked the riddles.

International Women's Day

International Women’s Day was on Friday.  On our drive to Cape Coast it was a pleasure to hear the Accra radio station devote their evening show to women in Ghana while we were stuck in some never ending traffic.   It made me think about so many  people I admire and respect and reflect on our roles as women in different parts of the world.  

One of the things I have noticed while in Ghana is that Sylvie always has a group of boys to play with around the house.   There is Essum, Junior and Gabrielle who are the most regular.   At first I thought it might be that the boys were more bold and willing to play with a new person in the neighbourhood.   However, there are several young girls around and sometimes Camilla and a couple others come over to play, but they are much less frequent in their visits.   I have come to realize that while the boys play in the afternoon the girls Sylvie’s age are fetching water, cooking or doing cleaning.   In between their chores they might come and join in with the fun or some reading for  10 minutes or so, but then they are off to their next task.    I also see this pattern at school.   Some of the girls I am working with often are very tired and more interested in putting their heads down, then focusing on reading.   Today, we had them draw pictures of themselves.   In the most ambitious group, Cynthia did a great drawing of her cooking, pounding foufou and smiling with a flower in her hair.  Meanwhile the boys did drawings of themselves playing football and blowing trumpets.    

This afternoon we went to the Hohoe Public Library, so that Sylvie could have some quiet time to do some school work.   It was a lovely quiet cool building.  Built in such a way that the breezes came through the building and there was no need for fans or air conditioning.  There were quite a few teenagers studying and doing homework.  But again all of them were boys, with one lone girl in the corner.   We gave her a nice smile when we went out.  

So I guess this post is too all the girls and women out there.   Hugs to all.