Ghana
February 16th, 2006

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The Arrivals Gate

I didn't realize until I had already landed in Accra how much faith I was putting into people who I had never met before. From the plane's window the city had appeared a loose collection of lights without any seeming center or arrangement. Fluorescent whites and pale yellows strewn around an otherwise dark city. It seemed immense and sprawling, it was unimaginable that I was here. I felt alternating waves of great pleasure for arriving in such a different place and anxiousness about the weeks to come.

This was not eased much when I first met the volunteer program director, Martin, or the younger man who escorted him. Martin hardly even introduced himself, and I had no idea who his companions were. Yet he was the reason that I was here. One of his companions, whom I met briefly that night, was Jacob. Jacob became one of my best friends while I was in Ghana. Another broken expectation: everyone in Ghana would be loud and gregarious and outgoing. Jacob was the complete opposite. Cool, calm, and completely relaxed with himself. We had many interesting conversations over my time there, he was just incredibly quiet at first. Once again the unimportance of first impressions was illustrated to me.

We pushed through a crowding throng of waiting people outside the airport to a taxi that was being driven by Martin's cousin. The air was hot and sticky despite the late hour, which is how it would remain for most of my stay. This can largely be attributed to the capital, Accra, being situated about as close to the origin as any other capital (5'N, 0'W). We finally arrived at my lodging home, which was paved with tile slabs throughout and desolate with only myself staying there.

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Morning Comes

It's difficult to describe the disarray and calamity that existed in many of the public city areas. There were no garbage cans, so the litter from everything was always present. Everywhere was crowded, everywhere was hot: the buses, the taxis, the homes, the streets, the markets, the gutters. I think my mind filtered a lot of things out; it's a struggle to remember a lot of the details. One morning I met a woman whose body was covered in a variety of places with boils on her skin. I tried to pretend they didn't exist, but she was also obviously very self-conscious of them. I have no idea what kind of condition causes such things, other than perhaps the plague which does still exist in parts of Africa.

A Country Myth: Roosters crow at the break of dawn. Roosters do not crow at the break of dawn. They do do that, but they also crow at just about every other hour of the day, or more importantly any hour of the night. It wasn't so bad; it blended well with the wave-like ebb and tide of dog howls, planes flying two-hundred feet overhead, an imminent invading swarm of insects, church choirs singing at 4am, and the myriad of otherwise unidentifiable sounds. Really, I've never heard so much activity in my life as one night in the subburbs of Accra.

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Where The Mosquitoes are Wimpy & The Snails are Huge

At the main downtown market I was completely overwhelmed. There was 'stuff' everywhere. Mostly cheap things, clothes, home goods, cookery, food, but you could easily meet the needs of a small population with everything that was strewn about the place. Surprisingly, there are goods from every part of the world that have been imported. China, Korea, India, SE Asia, Netherlands, England, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, Nigeria, America - Ghana is at a kind of geographical center of the world, and here this centrality shows up in all of the products for sale.

Transportation of nearly all goods is done by carrying baskets or bags on top of your head. It takes some practice, but once you get used to it, it seems like the best way. Your spine takes all the weight, and you can easily have 50 or more pounds perched up top. One lady we saw practically had a whole dinner table on top of her head, support by just a small wrapped rag.
I had never seen snails as large as the ones for sale at the market. Jacob, who was accompanying me that afternoon, said that he used to collect them near the railroad tracks as a kid. And then eat them. Their shells were the size of a coffee mug. I instantly decided that I no longer had anything to prove to anybody food-wise. There was no way I was going to eat one of them, grilled, fried, bar-bee-qued, or otherwise raw. Jacob said that they were pretty good, but I'll just have to take his word for it now.

Mosquitoes on the other hand were the complete opposite, size-wise. As a kid spending summers in Northern Ontario, I was accustomed to parasites of rather large proportion. Mosquitoes that would buzz past your ear with a painful whine, a warning of the intrusions to come. Mosquitoes with the gall to sit twenty-at-a-time on your unfortunately exposed skin, only to receive half a dose of blood before becoming the next victim of my gargantuan hand.

By poor supposition, I had anticipated Ghanaian mosquitoes the size of dragonflies that would descend upon me in Hitchcockian form the moment the sun set. Alas, it was not to be. The mosquitoes of Ghana were quite tame in comparison, and despite the malaria hysteria, I saw perhaps five or ten the whole month I was there. They were small and wimpy and made not a sound. I probably did get bitten once or twice, but remember that we did spend most of our time in the countryside after a fair bit of rain and yet they were hardly noticeable.

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Eric is never going to get married.

Eric was a fairly typical Ghanaian man in many respects. He taught at one of the local schools in the village of his upbringing, he was a good Christian, and had not had many serious relationships with women before. What made him exceptional was that he had given up a large part of his life in dedicating his time to take care of the boys at the football academy. There was really no way around it: somebody had to stay with the boys (all thirty of them) at all times and be available if anything happened. Eric gave up a significant part of his personal space and privacy by living in the boys' hostel in a sectioned-off room that measured maybe ten feet by ten feet. His simple bed reflected his simple means of living without many luxuries. When I first arrived he was complaining (understandably) of not being able to shower for the past six days, and of constantly being hungry. Everything was justified by him through the football kids. "I do it for the boys," he often noted of the sacrifice which he was well aware of making. I bought him a few meals, but it surely wasn't enough to bulk his lean frame up.

Perhaps unintentionally, Eric retained a great sense of humor about his life. His remarks and monologues were unusually honest and practical. "I do not want to get married. I could never get married. How could I ever find a woman to marry? No one would want to stay here with me. I am like a monk." The village we were in was not that big. I'm sure Eric had already met most of the available single girls. Despite his honesty and charm and values, Eric is going to have a hard time getting married.

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Hand Jives

People always told me that California was laid back. California is pretty chill by American standards, however it has absolutely nothing on Ghana. Arriving on 'African time' is more like arriving from a different time zone. For some events we waited three hours for things to actually start. School classes begin when the teacher shows up, sometimes twenty or thirty minutes late. Things just happen when they happen, and when they don't happen that's okay too.

Being in a small town is a different kind of lifestyle than living in a big, anonymous city. In a place where everybody knows you, there are very different kinds of social contracts that exist. You need to greet and say hello to everyone you see since you know everyone you see. You can't walk down the street without running into someone who you know or someone who knows you. As foreigners in the town, our business became town business. When one of us got sick, we were inquired about by everyone.

One of my favorite parts of running into people, and something that I have seriously missed since returning home, is the handiwork that took place upon meeting a new person or greeting an old friend. It's hard to explain in words; I had to be shown many times by my friends before I was able to do it even decently. Basically it involves slapping hands, palms together, sliding off, and then hooking fingers. This move smoothly culminates into a stack of middle fingers and thumbs, built-up together before a quick release. Another slide, apart again, and a snapping sound emanates. Greeting accomplished. Sometimes there were variations, you just had to go with their motions. Literally everyone did this upon greeting, from the school principal to the Mama who was helping to take care of our meals to the boys at the hostel.

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School Discipline

When my parents were kids, they would get strapped in school when they misbehaved. This involved having them lay their hands down on their school desk and then getting smacked on the palms or knuckles. When I was teaching kids in Korea, the kids would get hit by staff or cane in school when they were late or had done something wrong. Some of the girls in junior high-school would show up to class with bruises on their legs and explain that their teacher had done it to them because they had been late or had not done their homework. When I was in Ghana, it was the first time I actually saw kids get caned.

Canings were completely at the teacher's discretion, and even individual teachers would cane inconsistently. The first time I saw it happen was the first day that the kids were back at school after Christmas vacation. The math teacher, Foster, was trying to go through an algebra example in class. He would ask random kids in the class to do some of the steps to solve the question, for example to multiply two numbers together. Most of the kids couldn't do it. He had decided to use the cane today, so whenever one of the kids got the question wrong, he would walk over to them, cane in hand resting close to his leg. Usually he would grab the child by the shoulder or collar and then proceed to whack them firmly a bunch of times on the back or arm. Nearly always, the kid would try to resist and begin trying to squirm away from Foster.

There were exceptions of course. One boy simply stood up straight and proud and got hit a couple of times without showing much emotion or pain. Foster too, made exceptions. He would not cane one of the smaller, cuter girls in the class when she failed to answer the same question that the other kids in the class hadn't answered either. Most other days the cane did not come out in that class, some days it did, perhaps more a reflection of the teacher's daily mood than of good discipline practices.

In general, I don't believe I've seen a better-behaved group of school kids. Sure they messed around every once in a while, and truancy was certainly a problem, but while in class they were attentive, worked hard when asked to, and were pretty easy to calm down. Their behavior was as good or better than any of the classes I taught in Korea. I would say the biggest difference in education was the amount of time that the kids spent in school and doing homework. In Ghana, classes ran for about four hours a day plus some homework time. In Korea, the kids often had three or four hours of extra schooling in addition to their regular public school classes. School ran for six days a week, though this was in the processing of changing to five days a week the year I left. It provided an interesting contrast though there were so many similarities: in both countries there were smart kids and slow kids, happy kids and miserable kids, shy kids and talkative kids. I also felt that in Ghana, people had a lot of respect for a good education, it's just that people weren't always able to get as much access as they would have liked.

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Seth

It wasn't all canings and hard times at the school either. There was plenty of singing, dancing, and general religious fervor (it was a Catholic school after all). The Vice Principal's name was Seth, and he was quite a character from the first time I met him. Seth preferred to work outside under the shade of a large, leafy green tree. He was a short and feisty man, who allowed his religious sensationalism to energize his every action and speech. He was an excellent orator and obviously enjoyed his weekly Wednesday sermons to the children.

As we approached to meet him for the first time, he was sat at his small wooden desk in his plain wooden chair, purusing the Bible with his silver reading glasses knocked nearly to the tip of his nose. His dressy clothing was ironed and well-kept, though his smallish figure made the shirt, tie, and pants look just slightly too large and unfitted. All of this added to his appeal. He rose when he greeted us and sent one of the schoolboys to "fetch a chair" for each of us. He sounded quite glad to meet with us for the first time, and exemplified this by making clicking sounds with his tongue and using appreciative cooing in his speech. I would later come to recognize this as a common and beautiful feature of Ghanaian expression, much like the greeting handshakes.

Our introductions with such town dignitaries always began very formally, with introductions and basic information shared about us volunteers and our situations. Seth then invited us to attend the morning assembly where he would introduce us to the students. The assembly was unsurprising save for the frequent explosions of song from the two-hundred students at Seth's behest. Tambourines would emerge from under tables, palms would wildly slap desk tops with newfound freedom, and nearly everyone sang loud and beautifully. Seth concluded the assembly, as usual, by reminding the young students to not take a boyfriend or girlfriend. And as usual, everyone in the room excitedly laughed and chattered, girls blushed and boys cheered.

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Cash Rules Everything Around Me

When you are getting paid for a position, employers take the attitude of wanting to get as much out of you as they can. The first day I showed up to work at an English school in Korea they asked me to cover a sick teacher's classes. As a volunteer it took me many days of 'observing classes' in Ghana before I had the opportunity to teach a class myself. When people aren't paying you for your time, or worse when you're paying for other people to use your time, there isn't a lot of incentive to get much from you. The seven dollars I spent on chalk for the school was probably of a lot more value than any of my teaching time. It was a good lesson in the value of volunteering.

I realized very early on that the biggest thing that the volunteer program needed from volunteers was money. Schools were available, teachers were available, mentors and coaches were available... food was more scarce. I do not mean this to sound harsh, only honest. I did not feel used (well, once or twice), but it was a slightly different exchange than what I had originally thought when I applied to do the program. Once I accepted that I was most needed for my money, I realized that the whole trip was more for my exposure and enjoyment. Our meals were regular and served three times a day to make sure we were healthy and energized (more food than most local people ate), and we were well taken care of to ensure our visit was positive.

People generally were sincere and honest in wanting to meet you. People, I believe, were also sincere in their pleas for new 'things,' of which I had numerous requests. These ranged from cell phones to carry bags to flights far and abroad. Nearly anything needed was available for sale either in the local town market or in the nearby larger town's market. The issue was with the money to afford these things. Simple things that nearly all of us would take for granted became luxuries. Good soap, food when you are hungry, clean untorn clothes, cutlery, working stationary. I tried to quickly accept the discrepancies between my wealth and the poverty I saw, but this was probably the hardest part of my trip. It certainly caused the most guilt. One of the few ways I could counter this was by assuring myself that I would continue to provide financial support and fundraising to the project in the coming year.

From this experience I would be hesitant to do a long-term volunteer project in the future unless I was certain that I could provide meaningful non-financial assistance to the project. This would include things like detailed, specialized knowledge on an applicable, useful topic (e.g. engineering, project management). To everyone who donated money to the project before I left, your donations were certainly appreciated and well-used on such basics as food and school fees.

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I Want to be a Pirate!

One of the first nights I spent with the boys at the football hostel was on a night when the electricity in the town had been shut off for unknown reasons. The hostel had few windows and it was well before the boys' bed time, so they were all just hanging out and spending time on the grass outside. I ended up talking with one of the older boys, Anouk, for quite a while. We were talking about things that he wanted to do, and in the middle of our conversation he said, "But one day, I want to be a pirate!" Though their numbers have no doubt dwindled in recent years, I am under no illusions that pirates no longer exist. I was saddened to hear that Anouk was interested in pursuing such a dubious career path, so I told him of the dangers I perceived. This continued for a couple of minutes. After a pause, he refrained: "Yes, it is true, but I would still like to be a pirate. Flying is my dream."

Relief and embarrassment settled on my face. "Ahhhhh, a pilot," I said. I had noticed that in Ghana, as in many parts of Asia, a lack of R/L distinction in the people's native tongue had meant a difficulty in properly ennunciating these sounds when speaking English. So then I gratefully recalled many stories taken and learned from my father, who has been a pilot for over thirty years. I had also had the amazing thrill of taking the controls of a light Cessna for a few minutes as well, so I showed Anouk how you use your feet and hands to steer through the air. This was all new information to him, for Anouk's ambitions of flight were entirely in his imagination - he had never been in a plane before. Everybody has dreams but not everyone has the ability to seek them out and follow them through. From a town where many of the people have never seen an airplane before, I wished for Anouk that one day he would be a pilot, if only for a while.

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The Simple Life

The supposed simple life may by simpler in the sense that it's less complicated but it is certainly a lot more work and effort. Laundry is done by hand in a bowl with some soap and water. Restaurants in the sense that we know do not exist, and everything is prepared by hand. Vacuum cleaners don't exist. Cutlery is sparse. Most people don't have cars. Lots of people lie on dirt floors, or on carpets if available. Good beds are hard to find. Industry and machines are sparse.

Farm animals are everywhere, but this is for a reason - they are excellent cleaners. Goats will eat anything, including fallen trees after an errant storm. Chickens will peck for all over - seeds, breadcrumbs, small leftovers. Smoking cigarettes was something that few people were willing to splurge on, and even still, cigarettes were usually sold individually, not in packs. Drinking liquor was usually out of the question. Garbage from home was tossed down a small grade where few people went, and later burned in batches. A great number of people farm as a supplemental job, for either more food or money. For some, this involves walking an hour or two to the field on a weekend, working for eight hours, then walking home carrying the harvest. Simple?

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What Can the Future Hold?

For the boys at the Tintinto project, their prospects are relatively good, and certainly vastly better than before they were accepted to the football academy. Martin, the project director, is very realistic. He knows that as good as most of the boys are at football (soccer), it is unlikely that they will be able to make a career out of it. Perhaps one or two of the 50 kids that regularly play will have a chance to play nationally. For the rest, hopefully they are enjoying themselves, building strong friendships, learning about working on a team, practicing hard, and staying away from adverse influences. Typically, they are also some of the strongest students. They are well-supported by Eric and other adults that work with them, and they are given plenty of time to study and do their homework. I have honestly never seen such a large group of kids who were so eager to learn. At nighttime, when we read stories, I had to do little else than sit them down together in a small group where they could read together and help each other out with the difficult words.

Being in the country itself raised a number of important questions for me, and I realized that my knowledge of even basic economics was limited. How is wealth created? How do countries escape poverty? Can developing countries ever attain the wealth of developed nations or is this discrepancy growing? Does the discrepancy matter? Are people there happy? My observation on that is this: though many people I met were content and friendly and satisfied in many ways, I also felt that there were strong desires for more material goods, and the ability to properly take care of one's self and family. As mentioned above, I was asked numerous times by many different men to buy things for them or send things back to them. Though money certainly can't buy you happiness it can put food in your stomach and keep the roof over your head. I believe there is a happy medium: the endless pursuit of wealth may not be worthwhile but pursuing a meaningful life and living decently definitely is.

I still feel that there is a great deal of value in sharing the wealth we have with the project and with developing countries in general, even though it is a bandaid. The kids really don't need much (they often had just one change of clothing and took one meal a day), but they could certainly do with a bit more than they have. It would also be very difficult to help a large number of the children in Ghana, but helping out even a few other people is far better than helping no one. Finally, despite whatever I gave, I still feel like I took a lot more away from Ghana than what I left. I know it is a place that will stay with me for a very long time.

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Thanks for reading...
-Greg