The Bolga Twist
Big Trouble in Little Bolga. Actually, it’s not really in Bolgatanga, but just outside, in a town that sounds something like Suween, but I’m not really sure how to spell. It goes a little something like this (at least according to the rumours about town):
Before Christmas some time rather large bets were being taken during a card game between two villages, Suween and its smaller neighbour, a village starting with B (which is what I’ll call it). Of course, these villages have a history of conflict with eachother. Things got heated as one side, B, accused the other, Suween, of cheating. Tensions were allayed, and apparently died out over Christmas, but were revived again the other night, Sunday. Somehow B decided it would be a good idea to mount an attack on S. This, in northern Ghana, generally involves sticks and stones (stones being the popular way of killing witches in the area as well). Some houses got burned, and a local cop, who actually works in Accra, but was home for a holiday, took it upon himself to do something. So he put on his uniform, climbed to the top of a tree and started shooting. Caught in the crossfire (though a lot of sources claim she was involved in stoning and perhaps even the torching of a house) was a 15 year-old girl. She’s dead now, shot by our friend the tree cop, and three men are in hospital. The real kicker is that now the army and cops have taken sides, against eachother. You’ve really got to wonder sometimes.
What pisses me off the most (other than yet another indiscriminate killing of a little girl by a cop) is that conflict like this affects people who want nothing to do with it. CENSUDI runs a program called EIP (education improvement project) which organizes scholarships for intelligent, underprivileged girls (25% of their scholarships go to boys). There’s a woman who has come into the office a couple of times since I started last week to do paperwork, talk to the CEO and Executive Director about funding for her daughter. She was assured some time ago that part of her daughter’s educational funding could be secured through EIP, but part would have to come from another source. Being a dutiful mother, and obviously desperate to get her daughter out of the poverty trap she herself is in, this mother has been saving desperately for some time. She managed to save 500000 Cedis (which is a fortune if you live in a village, and about $70 Canadian) to donate to her daughter’s education. That, coupled with the scholarship, would have seen her daughter through secondary education, which would secure her at least a low-level office job, if not some prospect of tertiary education (given continued saving and perhaps another scholarship from CENSUDI or elsewhere). Their house was burned in the conflict, and with it all her savings.
And what can you do? A common reaction here is “life is hard” a shrug of the shoulders and a continued struggle to eke out some kind of existence amongst the poverty. And you never, really, get used to it. Not without going blind, or shutting down, which, I guess, we all do at some point or another. But when you even try to look with your heart, just a little, God it makes you hurt.
And then there’s the anger. I just finished Graceland, by a Nigerian-American named Chris Abani, about a 16 year-old boy in a Lagos slum who rails against that shrug of the shoulders, that acceptance of life being naturally difficult, and searches for some way out, some response that makes sense. But how do you dispute it? Life is hard. And how do you fight it? When the governments and police are corrupt, when people elsewhere really don’t care. How?
And at these moments when I feel so disgusted by the situation here, elsewhere, in our own country, something clicks. There’s a flipside to the shrug of the shoulders. Life is hard, so you might as well enjoy what you can. That’s what music is for. That’s why every person here starts dancing at birth. There is something to measure against the violence. I’ve started volunteering at an orphanage, run by a small NGO called Afrikids. There are two boys there who impress me.
The first, whose name I can’t remember (I just met him last night), is deeply learning disabled. He’s about 8 and can’t grasp the alphabet, can’t pay attention in class, causes trouble in the house, bugs other kids. And yet. He knows every truck driver in town, and they’ll take him anywhere. He’s wholly self-sufficient, and used to bring in wages to feed his entire family, from a hard day’s work. He knows every individual tree, literally, by its name, and directs you where you want to go according to these names. When he goes to market and makes a little coin, through trade or begging, he, unlike the other kids, brings it straight home to Mama Ladi (who runs the place and is the definition of a saint). That he has the capability to survive, and even show kindness, in a hostile world amazes me.
The other’s name is E. A year ago E, probably about 9 or 10, was on the verge of suicide. Right now he’s the top student at the orphanage, doing very well in his class, helpful with the little ones, friendly and always has the biggest smile on his face. He is going somewhere, that much is apparent.
It astounds me, this strange blend violence and hope. I mean, how can grown men, with homes and some food and families wage war over cards, while an amazing woman grows hope from concrete and dust for the two-dozen kids she lives with? It just doesn’t make any sense. I am so completely baffled by this place I think I just need to stop trying to understand it. Maybe it’s only when you stop trying making sense of this place that it starts making any sense. That’s about the only approach that makes any sense right now.