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I'm done.
I've been volunteering at Kwahu Tafo, in the eastern region of Ghana, for four weeks, and now I am finished. It was challenging. That's euphemistic. It was hard. And not the work itself: that was negligible. It was hard because it was, for me, the intersection of tedium and culture shock, plus plenty of tension from putting a group of strong-minded young westerners in a pressure cooker. Which isn't to say I regret it. But I'm travelling now, and glad of it, though today I suspect I might have giardia or something similar, which is sucky.
In the mornings I taught (in theory) English (in theory) at the Presbyterian Junior Secondary School. In the afternoons I led sessions on drama at the cultural center (read: the Catholic kindergarten). Both of these were fairly superficial exercises owing to the fact that the primary language spoken here is Twi, and my Twi is about as good as yours (unless you happen to be Akan; in which case mine is worse). Complications also arose from the fact that the kids I'd been given had been discouraged from thinking and forbidden from holding any opinion about any subject whatsoever. These things
Sunset in Tafo
Behind the compound where I stayed make creating art or even having a dialogue difficult. I taught school four hours a week, plus an extra hour tutoring sometimes in the evenings. I worked at the cultural center four hours a week. That's twelve hours a week. Do the math and you see that this left lots of spare time. And so there was tedium.
The culture shock is maybe more self-explanatory. Maybe not. I still find it very hard to articulate - or actually I find it very very easy to articulate, but not in a way suitable for mass consumption or that is particularly polite. Basically I've found my moral thermomater (or baromater or enema or whatever) to be useless here. My class was interrupted the other day so that a couple teachers could casually beat the latecomers among the children. Another boy was apparently (it happened in front of one of the other volunteers) pulled into the bushes and kicked around by a strange man the other day; the boy was supposedly a thief. He was a thief because he was hungry. Many people here are hungry, or else they are enterprising; often they are both: I get several requests for money and
food every day, often creative, always troubling, and not from the people you'd think of generally as "beggars". Part of my experience of culture shock has been that I've found it very difficult to trust people. Usually I think (I hope) I assume the best about people, assume that most people are basically good and honest, but here that conviction has been challenged by the staggering proportion of "friends" I've made who have ulterior motives. I can count the people I've met whom I consider "real friends" - people who want to spend time together for reasons other than material gain - on one hand. Which isn't to say I haven't met good people, or great people, whether briefly or among those I lived with; I have. But it does something funny to you when you begin reflexively expecting a request - for school fee money, for your shirt, your watch - from every new acquaintance. I'm trying to shake this way of thinking. I don't think it's healthy, but it's a product of my experiences here.
I've been reading Anna Karenina while volunteering in Tafo. It's fantastically relevant in some ways. There's talk in it of the idea
that education isn't a solution to poverty - e.g. educate the rural poor and they will develop intellectually and morally, and so economically - but instead a result of wealth and luxury. If you have wealth, you have leisure time, so you can educate yourself; and so the cycle continues. To say "take control of your life; educate yourself" to people who are, some, illiterate, and many without opportunity, without inheritance, without income, is both absurd and a bit offensive. These are the kinds of things I've been spending my time obsessing over.
I'm in Kumasi now, a big, noisy, dirty, raw, wild, busy city. It's like nowhere else I've ever been. The sheer congestion of people and cars is hard to believe. Yesterday I went with my friend Allison and her Ghanaian friend Frank (one of the most generous and decent people I've met since I left home) to Lake Botsumtwi, near Frank's childhood home. Botsumtwi is a warm fresh-water lake supposedly free from bilhazia (a nasty freshwater disease prevalent elsewhere here), and so we swam. It was a really nice afternoon.
It's exhilerating and bewildering here. Danny: "awash" is not just a good word, it is
the word. Hope Toronto (and everywhere else) is good. Boo Conservatives. Half-hooray minority government. Canadians: howl at the moon.
Love,
Daniel
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Judy A.
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I just...wow
Wow. Really. I look at the picture with you and the kids...you're really there and I'm really here and I want to go - It's interesting how we can never anticipate the culture shock. We think we're diversified Canadians and then some kid asks us for our shirt, tells us something in Twi and we're speechless, it seems. Totally worth it, though. When you get back, I want to know all the details of your trip. ...Can't wait till your next play! Cheers.