Matt's Missives

Or so it was explained to me by Kofi Nyame, one of the guys I live with. This is how you celebrate holidays (and, for that matter, days off) in Ghana. It was Salah today, one of the Muslim holidays, Eid al Fata (?). This involves slaughtering a goat and eating it, as far as I can tell.
Edward Said talked about how euroamerican culture has this tendency to shove everyone else into a box called other. It seems I am proving this true by constantly comparing my experiences in Asia (there you go, bulk categorizing again), with what I’m coming across here. But it seems inevitable when we experience what’s different to want to compare experiences, and note how they differ from what we do at home. And perhaps this leads to some vast generalizations in culture, which I think probably everyone in the world is guilty of, but it also leads to us somehow making sense of what we see when we go away from home.
On that note: I have these memories, from when I was fourteen in Bangladesh and this holiday was being celebrated. I remember leaving my house and smelling iron in the air, seeing blood in the gutters that run by the roadside. The streets were full of blood, as every household (at least most of them in the 90% Muslim country) slaughtered a goat or sheep in the gateway of the their house. The situation was imbued with the kind of seriousness that seemed to be the norm in a country that was, in most senses, desperately poor. The parallel here, with the holiday, was that it was an excuse to take a day off, see some friends, and go out. At least that was how we celebrated it. And seeing friends, family and kin seems to be about the most important activity in this country.
There is (or perhaps was, and is being adapted), a pretty rigid system of hierarchy, greeting, gifting, and often just simple hanging out that often takes hours to really get through. As my boss put it, it sometimes takes an hour to explain why you’re cancelling a meeting. While I can understand the local and foreign frustration with this system, I also appreciate the fact that you can’t go anywhere without saying “Hello. How are you?” A basic greeting, response and acknowledgement is the norm in any interaction you’re faced with. And while it may be time-consuming, I think it’s valuable. We have this tendency to steamroll people in our economic interactions. Our culture doesn’t value greeting as highly, so it’s easy to lose people in the rush of daily life.
I’m currently installed in a kind of row house, a series of self-contained rooms all in a row, lined up next to eachother. For the most part it’s full of what I’m starting to think of as the Telecom boys. Actually only three of them work for Ghana Telecom, doing IT and network stuff, but two more guys here do mobile phone repair, so they kind of fit into my category. They’re all educated and interesting, and like to party. Hence the holiday celebration today. I got up at 7am, and showered, read, ate some cereal. At around 8:30am, I left my room and hung out with Alex, Kofi and Gozo (the actual Telecom guys), who were getting ready to pound fufu, kill a guinea fowl and cook some goat. I hung out while this took place, watching Alex kill and gut the guinea fowl while Gozo and Kofi went to town to get booze (yes it was still morning). When they got back some other guys showed up, including the two mobile phone guys who live here, Bright and Samuel. We all hung out and drank the godawful strawberry stuff I’ve mentioned before, some Sangria, gin, and something that tasted vaguely like tequila. The worst thing was how everything just got mixed. Gin and sangria do not make a good mix. Trust me.
So we drank, and they started pounding fufu, which is boiled cassava (or yam, real yam, not orange sweet potato, which is what we call yam at home) and plantain. They’re put in a huge pestle, on the ground, and the mortar is about five feet tall, lifted overhead and smashed down into the bowl on the ground. Hard work. So we chopped. This is both a verb and a noun--to chop is to eat, and food. Then we slept all afternoon.
Throughout all this I also became a set of monkey bars, mostly for Emmy, but a little for Mavis. These are two girls who I think have adopted me. Their family also lives here in the complex, three or four doors down from me. Their father is in the hospital right now, since he got hit by a motorcycle last week. He is, apparently, responding to treatment, but will be a while in healing up. These are two younger sisters of what I think is a sibling group of five (but it’s hard to tell, the older girls are too shy to talk to me). They are both adorable, and enjoy hanging out in my room chatting at me. I understand about 40% of what they’re saying, but I’m learning lots from them. Apparently ‘obroni’ (the Frafra word for white man) like to cut the heads off little girls, and, in fact, black people in general. Sadly, it seems easy to laugh at this now, but it’s only a recent development. What seems like a funny urban legend is probably the truth about the majority of the contact that’s taken place between Africa and Europe.
But to end on a slightly more positive note: things are good. Bolga is an interesting town, quiet enough that it's not overwhelming, and totally bikeable. But still, there are nightclubs, and I think it'll be easy to find a good balance between Ghanaian friends, and other interns. Speaking of: I’ve met some Canadians in Bolga, three girls who work at CENSUDI, and a couple of Brits. My life is simple, since my room doesn't have a kitchen I eat out a lot, sometimes with pleasure, other times with a certain amount of trepidation. I have been taken under the wing of many different people here and my work looks interesting. Plus it’s not too damn hot yet. Rumour has it it’ll be 45 in March. Yikes.