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. 

Kokum and Cape Coast

As I alluded to in the 40 on 40 posting we spent the weekend in Cape Coast. We had looked into various ways of getting there, but in the end, given our limited time (CCS frowns on missing your placement so we had to leave after lunch Friday and be back by Sunday evening -- not easy when traffic means that the trip could take up to 10 hours either way) we hired a van and a driver for the weekend. It was expensive by Ghana standards but not by Canada's -- it worked out to be about $75 each round trip.

We got to the hotel late on Friday and slept. We opted not to stay at the tourist hotels down by the water and chose instead one with a great name -- Mighty Victory -- and reasonable prices -- about 26 dollars a night for a king size bed, air conditioning and a private bathroom. (As I write for the second time about the cost of something I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's line about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing; I don't think that is case here -- I do think, however, it's interesting to see the relative value placed on things in a given place by how much a particular good or service costs).

We started the day at Kokum National Park. Compared to our visit to Mole National Park in the north 11 years ago, this one had considerable infastructure. The visitor's area before entering the park itself would have been on par with many North American Parks of the same size. The big draw is the Canopy Walk, a series of 7 suspension bridge high up in the trees built close to 20 years ago by some Canadian engineers. They spent a great deal of time reassuring us about its construction, semi-annual maintenance and daily checks. This certainly felt reassuring, but for those of you who suffer from a fear of hieghts, you know that the fear is completely irrational so providing rational explanations of its safety don't add up to much in the end. Still I managed and Sylvie had no problems (as long as there weren't many people on the same bridge in order to limit the swaying). I am proud to say that I did all 7 bridges, despite the out that the engineeers built into the whole contraption by allowing you to only do three bridges if you got freaked out after the first.

The driver suggested a restaurant between the park and town for lunch. We realized that there was a bit of a circuit because after we had been there for a bit others who had been in the park began showing up at the same restaurant. It's a bit of a novelty place with alligators that tourists can pose with. Sylvie enjoyed the alligatiors, but in general the whole place felt too forced. A couple of American from the South discussed hunting and the importance of the NRA. The conversation didn't help make the place any more enjoyable.

After lunch we went to Cape Coast Castle. This is one of 3 UNESCO World Heritage Site Castles on Ghana's coast that played a big role in the slave trade. As people from the northern regions and tribes were captured (often with the help of southern and central tribes and people) they were held in the bowels of these buildings (although they're always refered to as castles, that word feels like it comes with too many positive connotations) before being loaded on ships bound for the US, Caribbean islands and Brazil).

Alice and I had visited another one of these castles further down the coast in El Mina when we were in Ghana the last time and that visit still ranks up there as one of the most disturbing encounters with history. You can read about the horrors of this part of the slave trade, but walking through the buildings that were built to facilitate it makes it hard to look past the most troubling aspects of it (and there are so many troubling aspects that they become impossible to quantify).

It's always hard to compare these things, but I didn't find Cape Coast Castle as jarring as El Mina. Part of it is that Cape Coast Castle is by far more of the tourist mecca (the Obamas visited during their visit to Ghana 4 years ago) and so there are all the things that come with tourist sites -- gift shops, markets, tourist trinkets, etc. The groups on the tours are also a lot larger (there were only 4 at El Mina 11 years ago, compared with about 30 on our tour -- one of dozens of tours going on while we were there). At one point we're standing in the grotto rebellious slaves were put in as punishment for standing up to the captors where they were held before being executed. They closed the door and turned off the light (a 20th century addition, to be sure) so that we could feel the isolation and damp darkness. Once the lights were turned back on people are posing beside the walls with scatches still in the walls from prisoners, smiling as they would if they were standing beside a wax statue of Barack Obama at Mme. Toussaud's. Weird doen't capture it.

The other big difference between the two castles is that at Cape Coast they bricked up the tunnel that the male slaves were forced to walk to get to the Door of No Return. At El Mina the tunnel remains open and you walk down as it gets narrower and narrower as you approach the door, to the point where the slaves would have had to crouch down or crawl to get through to the waiting boat. In Cape Coast, the guide explained that they only opened the bottom third of the door, which accomplishes the same thing. Somehow, though, it didn't have the same visceral impact. I can still vividly remember realizing that there was no way that the Europeans viewed the slaves as animals. If they had they would have build a much more efficient method of getting them on the boat. The construction of the Door of No Return made it clear that they knew these fellow humans had be broken down psychologically to be sold into slavery.

The other big difference, of course, was visiting this time with Sylvie, who's not just 7 but of African descent. We thought long and hard about whether to make the visit and talked with some black friends in Canada who had been to Cape Coast. In the end we decided that Sylvie would probably wonder when she's older why if we were in Ghana we didn't visit one of the castles. It's hard to know how she interpreted the visit. She definitely took it seriously and she held my hand tight throughout the visit to the dungeons (letting it go when we were in the airier Governor's Residence). Sylvie tends to take time to process and I know that she will think about aspects of it and will ask questions when she feels the time is right. By the end, it was like any other boring museum tour for a 7 year old and she was eager to get onto something else.

As white parents of a black child we're constantly second-guessing ourselves and wondering whether we're doing the right thing when it comes to black history and culture. As contradictory as this might seem: I think it was good to visit, but I'm not still sure whether it was the exact right thing to do. Maybe all parenting -- black or white -- is thus, I don't know.

40 0n 40

Forty thoughts and observations about our travels on the occasion of my 40^th birthday:

1. Ghana is a country of speed bumps. We traveled to Cape Coast this weekend (about 8 hours each way) and it became clear that any town, toll or police checkpoint worth its salt announced itself with a series of speed bumps (on average it felt like about 8). As the driver got more impatient to get to our destination, the faster we would hit the bumps. When you then combined speed bumps with potholes (more numerous the further north you go from Accra), it made for a very bumpy ride!

2. Ghana is also a country of receipts. We went to a national park this weekend. Our receipts were checked no less than three times (by three different people) despite the fact that we were wearing badges indicating that we had paid.

3. The little boy next door wears a Habs t-shirt. I’m going to write a sequel to The Hockey Sweater set in HoHoe (hint: there is going to be a lot more sweating in this sequel)

4. I’ve realized how much I like plantains. I’ve also realized how little I eat them in Canada. My two favourite Ghanaian dishes have fried plantain: Kili Willi (plaintains fried in spices) and Red Red (spicy  beans and fried plantains). Mmmmm.

5. One of many things I still am still not sure what to make of from yesterday: the fact that Sylvie used the flower boarder setting on all the photos she took at the Cape Coast slave castle yesterday. Her way of processing? Just her being seven? Completely random?

6. Walking and driving in Ghana you see all sorts of things being done by the sides of the roads: peeing, bathing, hair braiding, eating, etc. Two things you can never do in public: hold hands/kiss and smoke.

7. I’m not sure how we lived without Apple products. Sylvie entertained herself most of the car ride this weekend with audio books on the iPod. When that was boring we played Angry Birds on another volunteer’s iPad mini. A number of people in the house rely on Facetime to stay in touch with friends and family back home. Interestingly, none of the Ghanaian staff have any Apple products.

8. Instead of technical sounding terms like humidex (or wind chill – not that there would be any reason to use that here) the weather forecasters use the term “Real Feel”. It’s a nice pithy term that sums it up perfectly.

9. I miss water pressure more than hot water.

10. Every 20-something Caucasian blond female was hanging out at Oasis Beach Resort in Cape Coast last night. They just kept coming; we eventually had to go back to our hotel just to make room for them.

11. When mangos are selling 4 for 5 Cedis (about 60 cents each) you can’t have too many. We bought 16 of them on the way home. They’re good counterpoint to all the great pineapple we eat at every meal.

12. I can’t figure out how people pick stores to shop at. We drive past tiny little shop after tiny little shop that all seem to be selling the same thing. At home we have to decide between three or 4 grocery stores; here you’re deciding between dozens upon dozens of provision stores. Does it come down to the personalities and personal relationships people have with the proprietors?

13. I am not a fan of Jack Reacher. I gave it my best, but Killing Floor did nothing for me.

14. On the tour of the slave castle they mentioned that some of the dungeons (that held up to 150 slaves at a time – and that felt crowed with the 25 people on the tour) were turned into cisterns to hold water after the slave trade was abolished. Europeans bathing in (drinking?) water stored where millions of men and women were held against their will for up to 3 months and denied any kind of toilet facilities. There is a poem in there somewhere…

15. Ghana is very much a cash-based society (you have to carry wads of it around everywhere). I am having trouble adjusting from the put-it-on-plastic society I have grown accustomed to in Canada.

16. It is intimidating to get so many positive responses to the blog. Now there’s pressure!

17. In spite of all the frustrations we might have with the school system in Canada, I’m increasingly glad that we have that system. I’m not sure what would become of a student like Sylvie in a school system like Ghana’s. The attention she’s got and the interventions put in place for her do not really exist here.

 

18. It must take a certain kind of personality to make home schooling work. We’re muddling through, but I don’t think that Sylvie and I have the requisite personalities.

19. I’m not a big fan of hot chocolate, but Milo (the equivalent in Ghana) is great (though I often drink it warm rather than hot to limit the sweats that come after).

20. I am proud to say that we have climbed the highest peak in Ghana. At 885 feet above sea level, it’s no Everest, but we did it (and I’m sure we sweated a whole lot more than those wusses on Everest – that’s got to count for something, no?)

21. Here’s a word problem for all my math colleagues out there: When a 7 year-old spends 7 hours in a van (and 2.5 of those hours sleeping) how much unspent energy is there at bedtime?

22. I once heard that the Elizabeth Smart novel  By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept was named after a friend told her the original title was no good and opened her manuscript at random and pointed to the first sentence he saw. I think most of the stores, taxis and tro-tros in Ghana were named by taking the above approach with the Bible. His Divine Mercy Enterprises, Blood of Jesus Bicycles, etc.

 
23. It never ceases to amaze me what people (though it’s most women) carry on their heads. A lot of water (try walking with a huge basin of water on your head and see how far you get; now try doing it for a mile; now keep the empty basin on your head, wade into the water and use a smaller bucket to scoop the water up into the basin before setting off to carry it that aforementioned mile). Besides water though, I’ve seen sewing machines and chainsaws, any and all kinds of snacks and dozens of neatly pressed and folded men’s trousers tied together in a tight bundle.

 24. The organization we’re volunteering with is called Cross Cultural Solutions – CCS for short. I am beginning to wonder about other possible meanings of the acronym. Given the amount of chicken we’ve eaten at the homebase (lunch and dinner almost every single day), I think Chicken Cooking Society might be more fitting. I should say at this point, that although the menu is somewhat repetitive, the food here is good and they are making an attempt to please everyone from those who really like local dishes to those who can’t stomach anything too different.

 25. Don’t take your washing machines for granted. Hand washing is tedious and time consuming.

 26. Despite my fear of heights, I spent the weekend of my 40^th birthday do the canopy walk in Kokum National Park: a series of 7 suspension bridges well above the rainforest floor, among the trees’ canopy. I can’t say I did a whole lot looking down, but I did all seven bridges and didn’t have to resort to the shortcut that you could use if you were too scared once you got up there.

 27. West Africa does not have the safari scene that East and parts of Southern Africa have, but today on the way home we saw a huge baboon just hanging out by the side of the road.

 28. I think there are three types of people in this world: those who like fantasy books, those who do not and those who manage to put aside their dislike because reading fantasy books out loud brings a great deal of pleasure to those in the first group. Sylvie is loving The Hobbit; I am enjoying Sylvie’s enjoyment.

29. I wish I had turned 30 this weekend, not because I’m finding 40 hard to deal with (it just feels like another birthday) but 30 on 30 would have been much easier to write. I feel like I’m running out of steam a bit here.

30. Just down the road from our home base are Kente cloth weavers. Apparently there is some debate as to whether the Ewe (the cultural group in Volta region) or the Ashanti developed this type of weaving. We’ll have to do a little comparison when we travel through Kumasi on our way back from Tamale.

31. It was interesting driving through Accra and seeing how cosmopolitan much of it is. It’s entirely possible that depending on where you live in the city, you could suffer as much culture shock traveling to a place like HoHoe as someone coming from San Antonio, Texas. I guess it would be similar to the disorientation we’ve felt that past couple of years at the Danford Lake Canada Day BBQ up by our cottage. Why don’t we call that culture shock; just because it’s occurring in the same country?

32. The smallest member of your family can take up more than her share of a king-sized bed in your hotel room when the whole family is forced to share one bed for the weekend.

33. It’s a good idea to put your sandals far enough up on the beach when you’re playing in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. We would have had to go home barefoot had it not been for some quick boys who grabbed our footwear before it was washed out to sea.

34. I am writing this on another volunteer’s laptop that she has graciously offered to let us use whenever she is not using it for her on-line course work. I am reminded of one of my roommates in first year – Wendy in Townhouse 17 – who was one of the only to have her own computer (Laura’s Commodore 64 didn’t  count). She was equally generous and there were a number of us that spent many a night typing away on Wendy’s computer while she slept soundly no more than a foot away.

35. I continue to find the idea of “authenticity” a fascinating concept (it’s probably my cultural studies brainwashing at Trent; the legacy of Sean Kane, Alan O’Connor and Jonathan Bordo). As we sat in the Oasis Beach Resort last night – a tourist trap if ever there was one – we listened to Hurricane by Bob Dylan, Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door by Eric Clapton and Another One Bites the Dust by Queen. The drums that seemed to be on hand for a performance never really got played while we were there and even when the music made it past 1978, it jumped right to contemporary house and hip-hop beats. No African music all night. Was this any less an authentic African experience?

36. Cape Coast has a much wider range of animals wandering. In addition to the goats and chickens you see everywhere  in HoHoe, we saw pigs, cattle and cats.

37. We are halfway though our month-long placement here. Less than two weeks before we set off to visit other parts of the country and see how much has changed in the last 11 years up north.

38. We had lunch at a Botel on Saturday (apparently a Botel is a hotel on water). Its main attraction was that there were alligators (crocodiles? I’m forty and I still don’t know what the difference is) in the water around the eating area. At one point, one of the staff came out with some raw chicken and the reptile bellied up for photos. Some people posed with one hand on the animal’s back. For the record, no one in the Gordon-Hutton family was terribly keen on this so there is will be no photos in this year’s calendar with Sylvie hugging the alligator.

39. The hotel had pancakes on the menu and this morning being Sunday (the day we traditionally feast on pancakes in our house) we ordered them. They were good, but definitely more of a folded crepe than pancake.

40. I can get anywhere in HoHoe in a taxi for 70 Peswas (about 35 cents). I’m not even sure I can think about ordering a cab in Ottawa for that price, let alone actually go anywhere.

Shortages

I had started another entry but then we lost power (without which the router can't work) and so I thought I shoulld talk about electricity and water and leave the other entry for later.

We lose power a lot. Alice thinks that the power outages are longer and more frequent than when she was here 11 years ago. It's hard to know, though, whether that is a sign of anything. We're in a very different region (Volta as opposed to the North where Alice was in 2001-2). There is a big hydro-electric damn on the Volta River south of here and one of the volunteers here says that he's been told because we're right at the end of the dry season the water levels in Lake Volta are low and that affects electricity production. Whether that's the reason or not, it does seem to be a big concern for the country as a whole. John Mahama was just elected President in December and reading some of the analysis of the election, frequent power outages and the instablity they cause in the economy is an issue that came up during the election and something that the government is trying to focus on.

We generally lose power once a day, sometimes more. In practical terms this means that we lose lights and the aforementioned access to the internet. The bigger issue are the fans. There is no air conditioning here and the fans (in addition to cold Coke and Fan Ice) keep us somewhat cool. The power went out one night and it was almost intollerable that night without any air circulation. The house has a generator but it is very loud, so with the light and fan action comes a lot of noise.

The dry season also means that water isn't as plentiful. There is lots at the house to drink but yesterday we ran out of water in the resevoir that we use for showering, dishes and flushing the toilet. The staff had to scramble a bit to find more water. In the intrim they got water from the water hole that most everyone else in this part of town uses. It was interesting because we were told this was strictly for flushing the toilets and not even to wash with (and especially not to brush our teeth with). The basins sat outside the bathroom and were a bit yellowish and cloudy. It reinforced both how important water is to our daily lives and what kind of water the majority of people here have to make do with on a daily basis. We are definitely not in the majority here (something that I am reminded about at almost every turn) and so CCS arranged to have the fire department deliver water and fill the resevoir back up. This raises some awkward questions (are we taking water away from a potential emergency so that we can shower?) but these decisions are made by the staff here and not by me.

While on the subject of water, I wouldn't want to mislead anyone when it comes to showers. The house does have running water, but since being here I've only once had water pressure that would be considered acceptable by Canadian standards. Generally it's a trickle from the shower head and people often have to resort to bucket showers. Given how hot and sweaty we usually are by the time we're showering, none of this seems to matter very much because any water washing over your body (no matter how it got there) feels good!

From Sylvie:

Ghana is fun. I like to play with Elvis. I miss my friends a lot. I made a new friend; her name is Alexandra. We like going for walks in the rain.

I am very hot. I've been eating a lot of rice, chicken and pineapple. I like getting Fan Ice Cream from the men on bicycles.

We've started reading The Hobbit. I hope he survives!

I love going for walks. We see goats and chickens everywhere. People in the town look at me but are very friendly. Some even hug me! 

Relief from the heat

The heat (and humidity) is unavoidable in the Volta Region. There are times of brief respite that usually come in the early morning. Now is another one of those times: right after a thunder storm. It's still not quite clear to me how close we are to the rainy season (depending on who I talk to it's either the beginning of the rainy season which starts in earnest in April or it's the beginning of the short rainy season, but the real rainy season doesn't begin until June -- like most things here (and probably everywhere) the truth probably lies somewhere in between) but it's rained about half the days we've been here. This cools things down for a bit before the humidity sets back in. we have no control over the rain, so we're forced to find other ways to cool down.

The homebase has a water cooler and a fridge, both of which make things here much easier. The water provided is guaranteed clean (I guess that's part of what our fees pay for) and we can leave our water bottles in the fridge overnight to cool down (while I was diligent about this at first, I've realized that most of the time the water has warmed up considerably by the time I want to drink it). No matter the temperature, a regular supply of clean water goes a long way to cooling us down and keeping us hydrated. If we need to buy water in town, we're told to be vigilant about buying bottled water that we can guarantee the seal has not been broken. Most Ghanians drink water out of little plastic bags (the size of beanbags). While it's clean, it's not guaranteed purified so short term tourists like us are advised to avoid them and we do. (As a side note, it is interesting to see the variety of things that people here will drink out of bagies. This morning at breakfast, those people who got their egg sandwhiches to go also got their tea to go -- the hot liquid diligently poured into a thin platic bag and tied at the top.)

When we want something a bit more exiting than water, we have a number of options open to us -- most of which Sylvie has embraced whole-heartedly. Some of the CCS staff intoduced her to Fan Ice on the first Monday we were here. This is ice cream in a plastic pouch that the seller puts in aother plastic bag (plastic will be a constant refrain in almost all of these postings because it is used for EVERYTHING in Ghana). You then bite off the corner and suck the ice cream through the hole. Because it's so hot (did I mention that?) it turns into a bit of a milkshake as you eat it/suck it.  They are sold by guys on bikes with coolers on the front. Sylvie's favourite is strawberry, while I've partial to chocolate. At 80 peswas (40 Canadian cents...) they are a good deal! The taxis cost 70 peswas so yesterday on our way back from town I told Sylvie that we could walk and buy a Fan Ice to eat along the way or take the car ride. She chose the ice cream.

Pop is also another safe beverage. Eleven years ago, you could only get it in reusuable glass bottles that you had to drink at the store (or else pay a crazy deposit). Now you see plastic bottle and cans in most stores, but those glass bottle are still around. There is a little store right next to the house we're in and he will sell us 300 ml bottle of Coke and Sprite without the deposit and we can enjoy them at the house. We've been to a couple of different places, but so far we haven't found any sufficiently cold enough (I'm going to sound like I'm shilling for Coke here, but an ice cold coke is great on a hot day; a mildly cold or warm one is not so great -- the syrup coats your teeth and it does nothing to quench your thirst). The nice thing about having it next door is that we can bring it home and put it in the freezer and get it to the right temperature. Doing this doesn't get us out into the community and experiencing the culture, however.

Drinking beer does, though. CCS has strict rules about alcohol. I suspect the rules are aimed more at the 20-something volunteers rather than the almost 40 parents here with their kids, but we have to abide by them nonetheless. We can't drink in the house and we can only drink on  the weekends. Today we went for a walk in the afternoon (in seach of the river that runs nearby). We did not find the river, but we worked up a thirst in the futile quest. We stopped by a little place on the way back for a Star -- Ghana's national beer. The beer was nice and cold and we enjoyed it in the courtyard amongst the chickens and goats that wandered in and out (but not amonst any locals because they all got up to move and make room for us when we entered -- so much for culture and community!). The bottles of beer are very big (about twice what they are in Canada) but we managed to finish it. Although I'm told that there is no drinking age, we decided that Sylvie should have a pop and can wait until our next visit to Ghana to try the beer...

A week in

It's been a full week since we landed in Ghana and overall it hasn't been as jarring as I expected. I'm not sure whether it's because I'm older and wiser (ha!) or whether the distance between countries like Ghana and Canada is diminishing. Whatever the reason, the week has gone smoothly and we've found something approaching a routine.

We leave every morning around 8:15 for the school where we're volunteering (Happy Kids -- don't know whether it's the power of suggestion or not, but with one notable exception (a little boy who I've never seen do anything but cry) the kids at the school are very happy, and always happy to see us!). We spend about 3 hours there working with the kindergarten kids (KG, as it's called here). Rather than take over and teach a class, we've set up literacy circles and we work with groups of 3 or 4 students and help them work on the skills they need to move to the next level (for instance, some are still at letter recognition and acquiring English vocabulary (they all speak Ewe as their first language) whereas others are emerging readers and still others are already reading). We just put it into practice Friday and it seemed to work pretty well. The many conversations I've had with WHS's ELD teachers over the years have certainly helped us structure the activities for the kids.

We're back at homebase for lunch and then during the first week the afternoons were generally pre-planned for us (I think Alice has posted about some of those activities). Friday afternoon was the first afternoon that there wasn't anything specific for us to do. Trying not to lose sight of the fact that this is a holiday, we opted to take it easy and hang around the house (and the fans) while others went into town (Mondays and Fridays are market days, so there is a little more variety in what you can purchase on those days.

The heat has probably been the most difficult to adjust to. It feels like those two or three weeks of Ottawa summer where the temperature reaches the mid-30s and the humidity is crazy. To my winter-synched body it feels relentless. There is some reprieve early in the morning and in the late evening, but there is a whole lot of sweating going on in between. Last night the power went out (not an uncommon occurance) but there was no generator as back up so we were without our precious fans. It was uncomfortable and sticky and at about 2 a.m. I wasn't sure whether we were all going to make it through (Sylvie was particularly uncomfortable -- or at least she was more vocal about voicing her discomfort) but we did, though we might all need a nap this afternoon.

This morning we went down to the tro-tro station (tro-tros are the vans that people pile into in order to get from town to town -- sort of a half-way point between a taxi and a bus) and had a breakfast sandwhich and Milo. There is a woman from California -- Brittany -- working at Happy Kids and this is favourite Saturday morning routine and invited us to join her. We sat at a rough-hewn table on stools while they fried up the egg (with cabbage and peppers -- apparantly vegetables are scarce at other stalls, which is why Brittany prefers this particular stand) and add the bread (huge slices of white fluffy bread) and toast/fry it all together in the frying pan). By about 8:30 or 9:00 the sun is high enough in the sky so that there is no more shade and the first round of tros have left for there destinations (Ho, Accra, etc). The husband and wife pack up the stand and store it away in a locked wooden storage container, making way for someone new to come and set up to sell something else later in the day. It was the closest thing that we'll get to a greasy spoon breakfast and it was perfect.

So much more that I want to talk about (Kente cloth weavers, Fan Ice, the elusive seach for a really cold pop, Sylvie's new friends next door and her reading buddies at school) but I will have to leave it there and come back to those topics later (we're fortunate to be using one of the other volunteer's lap tops while she is away this weekend visiting Lake Volta, so I might try to squeeze out another entry this evening).

We're are enjoying seeing all the pictures of winter, but it's so far from our experience right now that it's almost impossible to make sense of it (is that what they call cognitive dissonance?).

Some photos Take ####????????

 
Now this just might work.  Small poor resolution but still an image.  



Waterfalls on my birthday.  

Some photos?

I am going to see if we can upload some photos today.   I am at an internet cafe in town and I have forgotten what slow internet connections are like.  It is interesting what you take for granted.   Let's see if this will work.  

Hot in Hohoe

Internet has been shoody the last few days.  I  tried three times to post some photos with no luck.   This morning I think I saw the best way to sum up Ghana 11 years later.   I was walking in the neighbourhood and past a very typical Ghananian house: mud/cement walls metal roof,  Wash area outside with kids and chickens all about, very neat and tidy.   All looks the same.  However, Dad is in the courtyard with baby tied to his back on his cell phone.   And there is was -- Dad looking after baby, and the influx of mobile communications.  Neither I would have likely seen ten years ago.

Scott and Sylvie are off to town right now to buy one of these mobile phones.  It seems as if absolutely everyone has one and compared to Canada they are rather cheap.  (I think Scott has already written about this).   So we might be trying to give a call to Moma and Mom and Dad this weekend. 

The teaching is going well.   Yesterday we did some planning and have organized a class into literacy circles where we will work with group of 4-5 kids indiviudally depending on where they are with their reading.   We tried this today and it went well.   We have some kids who are still not able to form letters and others that are starting to read.   Being able to work with them in small groups makes them able to practice where they need practice.  The only challenge is space.  It looks like we will be doing the circles on the ground in the 'office/internet cafe (with no internet)/library/storage area as there are not enough chairs.  This seems pretty good as the room has an overhead fan and the kids get to come in from their 'outside' classroom (Their class room is just a structure with a roof in the yard).  Sylvie was amazed to see the chickens wander among the kids and the lizards hanging out.  

Well I just lost two paragraphs I had typed up.  So I am going to sign off now.   More to come later.