Matt's Missives

Said the gourd. Wrapped in a shaved goat hide, given a neck of something like bamboo and strung twice with sinew the instrument was talking to us through the man playing it.

Life is a market place
and when you have bought and sold
all that you need
it is time to go home.

Or words to that effect, given that it was in Gurune. I freely confess to taking license. The funeral dirge was translated by Emmanuel who led us through the day, from greetings to seeing the body, to drums and dancing, burial and the final respects to the elders.

Akah has gone home. He bought and sold everything he need and has probably gone to a better place. He worked as night watchman for the girls at one of the CUSO houses. Vanessa, Zuzanna, Bailey and a woman named Rosalinde employed him. And after letting the chickens out on thursday morning Akah died. He had been sick for a long time, there is some speculation that it was AIDS, but it’s tough to know. He never went to the hospital, despite entreaties from the girls and his sons. He was supposed to go the day he died.

So last night was his wake, and today was his funeral. When we arrived we heard the funeral dirge, followed by some serious drumming. As the players played people went up and stuck thousand cedi, five thousand cedi notes to their faces. Harvest songs they are called, pulling in funds for the funeral. And as they played people danced. We were escorted inside to see the body, sleeping almost foetus-like on his side he looked peaceful. There was beauty to the pose that is unlike anything you see in a funeral home, with its makeup and glossy attempts to mask death, make it more inviting. It somehow becomes harsher, more threatening.

So we left Akah sleeping and returned to our seats outside, seats that were specially designated for us, the white contingent. It is a funny thing, this, and I don’t know what to say about it yet. Maybe I will never know how to feel about being automatically special because I’m white. I know part of it is honouring guests, but . . . but.

As we sat and watched the drumming, the dancing, we saw a slaughter. First it was a chicken, neck wrung not five feet from me by one of Akah’s brothers. Then the kid. The baby goat’s neck was twisted until broken, and though it may seem cruel to us, was probably as humane a way to go as any being that is take by us for food. It didn’t last as long as a bleeding, and probably hurt only as much as anything that doesn’t cause immediate death. Still, a strange thing to see, this provocative killing at a funeral. Certainly not consistent with the way I feel I’ve been trained to understand death. Celebrating life at a funeral through sacrifice. I don’t know what was done with that meat, but I guess in my outsider’s way understand the show of respect it was.

And then came a procession, of boys, first, dressed only in shorts and carrying bows, then men. Drawing their strings and pretending to fire. I wish I knew what it represented, something to do with hunting or fighting I can only imagine, but I don’t know what. They went inside the compound, and after some time came out with the body. It was wrapped in a mat made of sticks that served as a coffin and a beautiful blanket to wrap the mat. He was paraded around the neighbourhood, with a procession of people and musicians behind him that kicked up enough dust to blind the dead and choke their ghosts.

And then he was put in the ground. Buried in the chieftancy’s graveyard, the royal family of Bolgatanga’s burial ground. He had some connection to them, was of royal blood. And he died alone with his radio in the garage of a CUSO house, isolated from his family in a way that seems so unlike this place, that leads to the speculation about AIDS. They wailed at his death, there was serious mourning happening. But he lived an isolated life that I only saw the very end of, and that raises questions. What was it that led him to the place where he died? Was it self-imposed exile, or stigmatization? These are questions that will never be answered, but should always be asked. And I wonder:

If life is a market place
does that make it a place for bargaining
the chance to see friends
and celebrate the people around you
before you go home?

Posted by matt at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poverty is not simply an issue of material wealth. Nor is it dealt with through opportunities provided, access to resources. I hesitate to say poverty is a mentality; I think that’s a dangerous place to go. But self-determination is powerful tool when it comes to battling poverty. Empowering people makes the difference between effective advocacy and paternalistic development. The mind matters.

I have become, I think, caught in a comfortable cycle of work, food, friends and home. I go to work, I hang out with friends who are more often Canadian than Ghanaian (though I do have Ghanaian friends), eat at places I feel comfortable and hang out at home. This bothers me. I may be comfortable, but there is something missing. I am making inroads into myself, I am doing the work laid out for me, but still. I’m not making the inroads into Bolga’s culture that I want to. Yes, I have some people that are showing me around, and I don’t feel totally outside things. But I have found a comfortable way of doing things, and this is now limiting my ability to stray from pattern, routine. I mean, I haven’t even explored the side roads around my house! I know the way from town to my home, and in my mind it’s one road. Maybe there are a thousand, but I have yet to venture down them. I am lacking initiative.

And I don’t think that it’s really been a big deal until now. I’ve been trying to find a comfortable existence here; now I have it. But that means it’s time to keep pushing. Keep looking for new frontiers. They don’t have to be big ones; something as small as finding a new place to eat, meeting a new friend, going out alone. These are the small challenges that face me, but ones that will probably help me better understand where I am. But it’s an easy thing to want to stay in routine. I have found a certain kind of comfort. It’s a level of living where I know I can survive. And now that I have some of level of comfort it seems easy to slip into a pattern, and repeat it. But this is not really what I want for myself here. I want safe places, certainly, but I also want to be challenged. I want to pushed outside my realm of normal existence, to taste something different, hear a new voice. Ride down one new dirt road every day.

And in my comfort I wonder, what makes poverty such a slippery subject? We have the wealth and resources to deal with, and fifty years of trying to “develop” countries (amidst coups, exploitation, and an incredibly unfair economic format). Is it a culture of wealth and privilege in the global North? A history of exploitation that continues today? Colonized cultures struggling to understand themselves in an internet world that still doesn’t really leave a whole lot of room for them to actually be wealthy? So many things come together create the levels of wealth and poverty we see today I couldn’t explain them in a PhD thesis. And being at the top of metaphorical privilege pile, I feel kind of uncomfortable speculating about what makes poverty, because obviously it’s so different from place to place. But I have some ideas to explore and this is one of my forums for that.

And I think I may have a kind of . . . metaphor . . . to understand what has stopped previous delopment initiatives from dealing effectively with poverty. One of the ideas I keep running up against in my research and writing is the idea of welfare-level development (that is providing pure welfare-level resources to women or underprivileged communities or people with disabilties or whatever). And it just doesn’t work. Providing resources to people, the model of paternalistic “development” that has been in place since this whole crazy post-WWII idea of development replaced colonialism is empty without allowing them to make decisions. Only by making people a part of the process do they have any stake in “development” (such a problematic term, I know, but I use it, for lack of another word, to encompass poverty-reduction, advocacy work, environmental work, etc. and I think it has as much a place at home, in developing better ways of organizing ourselves to deal with problems, as it does anywhere). Otherwise they are stuck in a kind of subsistence living that, if not comfortable, is at least manageable and familiar.

Its an orthodoxy of survival. Obviously my experiences in Bolga are the experiences of a privileged outsider trying to make sense of an experience. But in the culture shock that comes with a new place comes a kind of struggle to survive, mostly in an emotional, but also in a physical-comfort sense. Food, water, company. These are, actually, the things that occupy my mind most of the day. I have the wealth to procure them, but considering how to do it always remains an issue. And so I think I can, from a very outside perspective, try to understand a little bit why poverty is a problem that can’t be dealt with by throwing money at it. Because it’s about having control of your own destiny as much as it is having enough to eat, shelter and water. These are the prerequisites to control, certainly. But poverty does not end there. It ends somewhere else, and I wish I knew where.

Posted by matt at 04:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve been talking about God a lot lately. I’ve learned to pray, on a packed trotro belting down the highway it’s the only sane thing to do. I’ve started to articulate some of my beliefs. I’m learning what’s been culturally drilled into me, what I’ve accepted, haven’t even thought about. Things that are not only foreign to people here, but might actually be foreign to me as well. My assumptions about religion are being called into question and it seems like it’s coming from every direction.

I’ll start with Bailey. She’s the new intern at CENSUDI (yes, there are now five Canadians). She goes to Guelph, does women’s studies and international development and believes in Christ. She’s a waking me up to my own biases about Christianity. I’ve always been an opponent of Christianity, mostly because it’s been such a damaging cultural force in many ways, and the institutions are such a pillar of what I don’t agree with in our culture, but I’m being forced to examine my complete rejection of these institutions. Yes, the evangelical right is vocal and I have serious problems not only with their politics, but the belief structure that underlies their politics. But they’ve appropriated something not entirely theirs to appropriate: they’ve become the voice for Christianity. Like the violent Catholic institutions that have dominated Christianity for the last 1700 years or so, the Christian right is attempting to voice Christianity as the only way. The one path to salvation. And Bailey is reminding me that there’s more to Christianity than the angry Bible thumpers in the south. That, funnily enough, institutions have appropriated a philosophy that is the opposite of what they’re trying to institute. And they have twisted it. I think I knew that once, but it’s an easy thing, most days, to forget.

Then last night I was talking to my neighbour Alex about Pentacostalism. Alex told me about speaking in tongues. It was 1996 and he was a strong part of his church. He was at a Pentecostal gathering where the minister told that those who couldn’t speak in tongues they should come up to the front. He did. He was told to pray in his first language, and as he did so he lost track. Of words. He lost track of language. He spoke in tongues, and he explained it to me this way: it was like English was coming out, only it was too fast, and held more meaning. He felt like he was going to vomit, and when he held his head over to do so his ‘words’ only came out faster. And he knew he was saying something. Nobody had to understand it, noone had to know his words, but he knew meant something. And he reminded me that religion is more than just a sermon and hellfire. Religion is about magic. It’s about believing in something that moves beyond the eye, in the realm of the heart and the earth. It’s about placing ourselves, in whatever way best works, in a vast, sometimes indifferent, universe.

Today, at the office, Happy (the receptionist) asked me if I was Christian. I said I was baptized, but that I don’t go to church. She was completely dismayed, and asked me why. I told her that I worship in my own way, that I find community outside church. I don’t think my explanation held a lot of water for her. But every time I talk to a Catholic, every time I say I was baptized there is this look of relief in their eyes, and they say something like “Well your faith is still there.”

And maybe they’re right, though not in the way they think. But Happy reminded me that religion’s about community, too. It’s about coming together with people, to tell stories together. To bond over faith and love and pain. The formulate a cultural narrative that helps not only the individual make sense of the world, but society at large. For all its divisiveness, religion is ultimately supposed to bring us together. It’s an easy thing, most days, to forget.

Many of us are trained, in my part of the world, not to believe in things that can’t be explained. We are trained from childhood to abhor ritual, superstition, belief. We are taught not to believe. I mean, I’m conditioned into not believing in Christianity, Islam, anything that could be construed as dogmatic. Buddhism and Hinduism are okay, cause they’re hip. Or at least polytheistic, but only from a distance. Only casually. But sometimes life just doesn’t make sense, no matter how much you apply your powers of reasoning to it. And sometimes you need to worship to feel like you’re making sense of it.

I’m starting to remember how people, individuals and cultures function (how’s that for a generalization?): if something doesn’t make sense, an explanation is created with the best available information and some imagination. Telling stories makes sense to me, explaining things with the mind, if not always with empirical evidence. Stories become belief, and sometimes belief becomes reality, a worldview. Traditions are born, and traditions change, and traditions die. And yes, the Catholic Church is still implicated in huge historical bloodsheds. But there’s also a history of Catholic social justice workers. And yes, fundamentalists don’t believe in abortion, but that’s a matter of ignorance veiled in religion, not necessarily the core of the religion itself. As Brother Fowles says in the Poisonwood Bible: “There are Christians and then there are Christians.” And I’m not going to be a regular church attendee ever in my life (though I will probably go to a couple of services while I’m here), but I remember why people do attend church. And most importantly, I am starting to give voice to the personal framework I’ve been developing for most of my life. A framework that draws on many spiritual traditions, but conforms to none. A personal mythos.

I have experienced change. I know that its constancy is real. I have felt, at times in my life, the path I am walking on spiritually more surely than the ground beneath my feet. And from what I have seen and felt I have come to understand what I believe. I believe we all walk a path, across many lives, and as we walk, we learn many lessons. I believe that we stand in a universe that looks chaotic and place our sense of order upon it. And we do it through bifurcation. I believe that our first act of consciousness was, like Genesis tells us, the recognition of good and evil. I believe in the constant, dynamic play of two sometimes complementary, sometimes oppositional forces. Sometimes that’s called heaven and hell, sometimes male and female, sometimes black and white, sometimes self, sometimes other. I like to think of it as heaven and earth, deified through a god and goddess. Principles that infuse everything. These are things that make sense to me, intellectually. I see them, when blessed, in the world around me. Sometimes I forget. And I know that this is story I tell myself, intellectually, to make sense of things beyond the intellect. It is the believing that makes it real. I think that, like many people I know, part of me believes and part of me struggles with faith. And it’s that struggle that lets me accept the beliefs of others, that keeps me from the rigid certainty of zealotry, and it’s that struggle that keeps my own framework changing. So this much lets me know that all I know is wrong. Or at least up for criticism.

Posted by matt at 04:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah yes, the requisite bad poetry. Every once in a while I have this urge to embarass myself publicly. Sometimes it's a specific desire to put poems on the internet where everyone can see them. Such is my curse.

California Poppy

She wanders highways
fixing flats
and stopping cars, explaining
that the seasons still change;

that there is more to summer
than this black band of asphalt
and its rolling, roaring herds.

She talks about eating dirt
and drinking sunlight
and always wonders how it must feel,
always daydreams, about how we, too,
could drink sunlight--

if we only had the imagination.

Autumn Song

There was a song playing when we met,
a banjo twang of scrapes
and bruises
with the insistent chorus:
nothing is happening here.

But its fall melody
showered us with
burnt umber leaves
and questions of friends,

so we fell a descending scale.
Music of rain and late mornings
punctuated by laughter and sex
and honesty.

Before I realized it,
the leaves underfoot
and your voice in the morning air
were gone.

But I’m still pulling
notes from my head
and your red hair
from my clothes.

December, 2005

Posted by matt at 05:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by matt at 03:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 14, 2006

It’s funny how much little things can affect you in a foreign environment. Moods swing randomly and sporadically from feeling comfortable to feeling totally out of place. Most of the time I’m pretty happy being here, doing my thing. Once in a while though the foreignness of everything overwhelms me and I just want to curl up. Which I usually do, for a little while. Then it passes, and I do something that makes me incredibly excited about being here, and this experience, and all the things I’m seeing. Finally, equilibrium sets in again and I feel, for the most part, comfortable in my environment.

My weekend has been packed, and I think keeping busy keeps me on the excited side of the emotional spectrum, allowing just enough downtime to recharge and fully engage with this place. Yesterday I got up early, showered, dressed and headed into town for a church picnic. A couple of people in my office are in the choir at the local Catholic Church (the Frafra in Bolga are Catholic) and invited some of us interns along. The other obroni (ie white people, in Tre, the Ashanti language), or solmena (ie white people in Gurundi, the Frafra language), in the office are all women, Vanessa, Zuzanna and Stefani. Vanessa and Zuzanna are CUSO cooperants, over on an exchange that is a requisite part of the international development program at U of T. Stefani is interning for six months here on a CIDA internship. We are all at CENSUDI, and, funnily enough, will be joined by another Canadian intern this week.

So we all arrived, on time (which in Ghana means about a half hour late) at the Catholic Service Centre, awaiting the arrival of Mabel (pronounced Maybelle) and Peter, who had invited us. Peter arrived at 9am, about a half hour after us. Mabel probably rolled up around 9:30 or 10am. Despite all the groaning about how we could have slept in (I had stayed in the night before, so wasn’t too unhappy about getting going early), sitting around until a trotro (picture a miniature bread van, jam-packed full of people) came to pick us up gave us the opportunity to learn some hymns.

While I am an avid cynic of organized religion at home, there is something about Ghanaian religion that makes it . . . different. People believe, not only in God, but in signs, speaking in tongues, and magic. Magic is real here. So religion, while distinctly Christian or Muslim, is different from what we would consider religion at home. And everything is spiritual. As we were loaded onto the trotro at 11:00am a prayer was said, asking for our safe journey. Every meeting, workshop, initiative or journey starts and ends with a prayer. Then people started singing. And I’m not talking about the staid, stiff hymns of euroamerican worship. These were real West African vocal jams. Lead singers, harmonies, and a celebratory sense of purpose. Mabel had prepared us with a couple of hymns (which she kindly wrote the words to) so we were able to join in a little. I never thought I’d have fun singing about serving the lord. I think the act of singing, as much as the words, is what people appreciate. It provides, even for an outsider, some sense of unity. Like we’re all in this together. Which I guess is the point of religion, really.

So we arrived (and prayed before getting out) at the dam, a beautiful body of water that irrigates many of the fields in this area, and, I think, provides water for Bolga. We spent the day eating, dancing (even more important, here, than singing for people, and something kids do almost before they walk), playing football and volleyball. It was probably the hippest church picnic I can imagine, as many people there were drunk by the end.

We hitched a ride back home on the back of a big old flatbed lorry, and headed home to change. Then last night dinner was sausages and chips (I miss potatoes constantly, I hadn’t realized how much I depend on them for my starch needs, I really think I’m addicted) at my local pub, New Lifeline, with Mabel, Vanessa, Zuzanna and Stephanie and their friends Aziz and Amy, and off to the Black Star Hotel, which runs a nightclub on Saturdays. A little dancing, a little dodging the overly-friendly police officer who wanted to find out where I live so he can come visit, and the night was over. All in all a good day.

January 15, 2006

Tap. Tap. Knock. Knock. Bang. Bang. “Uncle Mattew, Uncle Mattew!!” Please let them go away. “Uncle Mattew!!” Giggle. Knock. Bang. “Uncle Mattew!” Giggle. Tap. Quiet. They’re gone. Knock. Bang. . .

“Emmy, Uncle Mattew likes to go out drinking on weekends, stay out too late and sleep in. That means he doesn’t come answer your knocking at 7am on Sunday morning.”

I was polite and the girls received it well, and we actually hung out for about an hour before I got tired again and passed out again. It’s all about setting boundaries, I suppose, even when they’re six (or three). Today I went to Zuarungu, a village just outside Bolga, to see some natural building. Actually, we got there when they’d finished for the day, but saw some foundation work they’d done. Basically the same principle as cob, only no straw. And really far less necessity given that the structures are far smaller, and less permanent. There does not seem to be a philosophy of permanence here.

I was given a tour by John, who works next to me (and above me) in the office. He showed me the foundation, and described the building process. Basically, they make balls of clay/sand and slap them on the wall. Pretty simple, really, and they build 1.5 -2 feet a day. John then took me to his home, which is almost complete, and he’s sprayed with cement (it really does last longer that way, as the summer rains are heave and there’s no limestone here for a decent plaster). I met his uncles, who are the patriarchs of the compound. Apparently they’d done a ceremony the night before involving pito (the locally brewed millet beer, which is actually pretty good) to check in with the ancestors. All the uncles were doing the rounds today to insure that all was well, that the ancestors were appeased. They invited me back, and were all very sweet men, and I think I’d like to take them up on it.

So I saw the buildings, and John explained to me bricks (shaped in boxes, dried in the sun and then mortared together with mud) vs. hand building (much more like cob), showed me how layers are added, what the timeline is. It was all very interesting, but I’m starting to sense that mud building is less about knowledge of materials and more about cultural design. John explained to me how compounds work. Traditionally based upon a polygamous Ghanaian family structure, each wife is given a house (with a male house upon which it’s centred). The sons are then allowed to build off their mother’s house, while the daughters go where they’re married). Compounds are thus patriarchal in descent, and familial in terms of connection. John’s compound is 4 families (including his brother and two distant cousins, all descended from the same great grandfather). He then told me that there is a compound in Tongo (a village not too far from Bolga) that is 500 families!!! I’m amazed by this number, and at this point really excited to see a house, a building, a living structure that houses 500 families. Incredible. It has become my next Ghanaian goal (just wait till Dogon country!).

So John showed me around, and meeting his family was a special privilege. I then headed back into town, remarking on how Ghana really is a motorcycle country (Mike assured me of this before I left, and I believed him then, but moreso now that I’ve toured around on a bike). We went back to the office, and I bumped into Stef, who was waiting for John (who was stuck in the village as he had funeral arrangements to make, which is a really big deal here) to do some work. We had lunch and chatted, and I headed home.

Dinner this evening was with Tony Allthorp, who’s on a district capacity building project (DISCAP), and a very interesting guy. I met him in Accra when I first arrived, and spent my first day in Bolga with him. He wasn’t feeling too well, but we had palm nut soup with grasscutter, the local rodent (something like a cross between a large rat and a bunny). It was tasty. A surprising amount of meat on them. Tony keeps his fridge well-stocked with beer, which is always nice, but an evening with him always makes for a long next day, which is, I suppose, what tomorrow will be.

Posted by matt at 03:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by matt at 03:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have just finished King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, and I am appalled, but not surprised. During Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, during the late 19th and early 20th century, approximately 10 million people, about 50% of the population died. And we have forgotten it. We are taught about the Holocaust, and often Soviet Russia, but we have forgotten the horrors of rubber and ivory imposed not just by the Belgians but by the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Portuguese. We may have washed the blood from our hands, and hidden the bodies, let us only hope that some part of our conscience still whispers “Out, out damn spot.”

Posted by matt at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The following is a summary of journal entries and thoughts accrued over the last nearly two weeks, as I left Tamale and went, via Accra and Nairobi, to Tanzania with my mother and brother. It’s divided, more or less chronologically, into sections that for the most part deal with different aspects of the trip so that they can be read seperately, since this is a fairly long entry.

24.12.05

Arriving in Accra two days ago I was impressed, after my brief stay in Tamale, over the sophistication of the city. There really is a marked difference in how people dress and act in the more cosmopolitan south. But Nairobi . . . that’s a real city. Tall buildings, green lawn, and a bunch of swank hotels, one of which we’re in.
After meeting Tony at the hotel last night we drove south through Kenya, and eventually crossed the border into Tanzania, stopping in Arusha and then continuing on to the first of several national parks we’ll be visiting, Tarangire. The land we came through, I’m told by our guide, Paul, belongs to a people called the MoArusha, ethnically and linguistically similar to the Maasai. In fact, we were all under the impression that this actually is Maasai territory, given what little I know about them. These people dress the same (the red and blue robes, which have in the last century replaced leather clothing), emphasize herding heavily, carry the trademark Maasai staffs, and have the same lanky figures that fit this landscape, which makes you feel you can walk forever. However, while they herd (sheep, goats, cattle and donkeys), they are primarily dependent upon agriculture, particularly corn and beans, for food. This is heavily resisted by Maasai culture.
Another major difference between this group and the Maasai are their structures. I have observed two types of structures, apparently adapted to different village types. In the larger, more commercially based villages structures are rectangular. Posts of wood (probably as thick as my calf around), probably acacia of some kind, are woven with smaller horizontal beams throughout to form the frame. This frame is then often stuffed with stones, which are abundant, and daubed over with mud. The rooves are thatch from the abundant grasslands around.
The second type of structure seems to dominate the more agriculturally-based villages employ round huts. The vertical posts are smaller, though probably also acacia (it being the only wood of any abundance other than baobobs in this area), and closely spaced (probably less than 6 inches), then daubed over. It seems to me these structures are somehow attached to agricultural practice itself (even as the structure becomes rectilinear in commercial areas); that lifestyle and economics inform design. I am curious to see the Maasai houses.
The agricultural villages themselves really differentiate from the dry grassland around us, they are green and lush. Although it’s easy to wonder whether these villages should really be green, given that it’s now the dry season, from what I can see they’re making maximum use of plants and shade. Palms and succulents are what really stand out in this place--plants that can make use of a heavy rainy season to survive a long dry season. It makes many of these towns little oases in what is currently a very dry place.
We pass Mt. Meru, Tanzania’s second tallest mountain (after the continent’s largest Kilimanjaro) outside of Arusha. Clouds trail off the mountain, offering a little respite from the heat, and up the slope the land greens, growing more emerald than yellow as it climbs into a highland forest. We arrive in Arusha at midday, when the sun is absolutely overhead. Just below the equator here the sun cuts a clear line east to west all year long, casting no shadows north or south.
Arusha is a small town well-placed as a base for the many nearby national parks; it’s a nice town, for a dusty dry place. But it’s more than just a tourist hub. I didn’t spend long here, but something struck me about Arusha as important. There is a heavy expatriate influence here, and a large Indian-Tanzanian population. The Maasai, the Chagas, the coastal traders, all meet here. The British used to use this as a base on their way from the Serengeti to Nairobi. It’s also a geographical midpoint: a stone in the centre of the city marks the halfway point from Cairo to Capetown. The heart of East Africa. Perhaps most striking, though, is it’s important role in East African politics. Originally playing host to an East African political alliance between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (doomed because of the complex and corrupt politics of the 70s and 80s), it now provides the meeting place for the new economic alliance being forged between those countries. More interesting to me, though, is that it’s also hosting the U.N. Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity in Rwanda. The trials, more than ten years after the genocide, are ongoing. Funny that the U.N., an organization responsible for abandoning the people of Rwanda, is now responsible for administering justice there. But, I suppose, what choice is there?

25.12.05

We entered Tarangire yesterday, a park famed for its baobab landscape and elephants. And elephants we have seen in droves. More than this, though, baboons, vultures, a thousand small, bright, beautiful birds that Paul names and I promptly forget, hyrax (the closest genetic relative to elephants that actually resembles a marmot), many antelope varieties from dik diks to gazelles to elands to waterbuck, zebras, giraffes, jackals, ostrich, warthogs, wildebeest, and lions. One young male and a four females, panting under a few trees, bellies full, the eyes of a thousand zebras and it seemed as many tourists on them. Birds of prey, Bataleur Eagles, African Fishing Eagles, Maribou storks with their strange backward knee joints, and many more. There is too much here to process. This is only the beginning.

26.12.05

We left Tarangire and head towards the Great Rift Escarpment. We arrive at a wall, I think more than two thousand feet high, created when Europe and Africa collided millions of years ago. This stretches from Ethiopia to Mozambique, and boasts the birthplace of proto-humans. We climb quickly up the escarpment, and arrive the top, looking out over a plateau, the rises slightly on its western and eastern sides, with farmlands stretching the dozens of kilometers between us and that western half. We drive across the land of maize and herds and reach the western escarpment, which rises to 7600 feet in the Ngorongoro highlands that look out over the Serengeti Plains. The land becomes a tropical rainforest as we climb above the dry lands that stretch below us to the east. We reach the top and pass the lip of the Ngorongoro crater, where we will go in a few days.
To our west the lands stretches off in to what seems like forever. I feel like I am standing on the edge of the world, at its top, staring into eternity when I see this place. It seems like everything, everywhere, ever, is stretched below me on this plain, or above me in this sky. And I wonder, what it must have been like, looking out over this world, from up here, for the first time, with human eyes. This was the beginning
We begin the descent into the Serengeti and past true Maasai villages and we glimpse them, their herds, here and there along the road. And everywhere are the wild herds: gazelle, zebra, wildebeest. Thousands upon thousand upon thousands dotting the landscape we can see. There is game everywhere. We drive through this endless grassland and I am overwhelmed by a kind of anxiety. All around me lies a place I do not understand. I mean, I can name some animals, a few plants, make a few guesses about what this place might look like across the seasons, but I think I am struck by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about this place. In fact, not just the Serengeti, but Africa itself. Maybe everywhere. I realize that maybe I have this feeling all the time, that it’s easy to ignore when I’m surrounded by people. When I’m in a new landscape, where people are culturally quite different the easiest thing to do is focus on bridging the culture gap. And whatever those gaps might be, there is still the knowledge that we share a basic mode of being. We perceive, process and communicate in what are basically the same ways, on an animal level (is that going to get me in trouble with the postmodernists?). But this . . . this is so radically different, so open that I am struck by my inability to create a narrative. I have no story for this place. I mean, how much do I even know about my own home?
Overwhelmed by this sensation of complete and utter alienation from the landscape surrounding me I start to wonder about the first people. The Oldupai Gorge is near here, this cradle of humanity, where proto-human fossils date back 3.6 million years. And I wonder what stories they told of this place. Were they born into it knowing it? Did they, by evolving here, simply develop a culture completely at ease with the dangers and beauty of this place? Or did they enter it, as I do, an alien? Did they wander it together, following the herds, which they say were then as they are today, naming, describing and creating the myths of land? And if they did, could this be considered an act of creation? Did they call on ancestors, and gods? Did they sit on the escarpment for weeks and study the land? Did they walk behind the herd and tell of the animals that shaped the land, of wildebeest and lion, of the ghost leopard that hunts from the trees? Did they keep walking into this eternal landscape, until it changed and became a new land? And when it changed, did they continue onward and so become a new people, telling a new story, and creating a new world with their words? I am simply left wondering.

28.12.05

Another Serengeti day, this time based around the giant rocks called kopjes that dot the landscape, apparently spewed from the Ngorongoro crater when it erupted 3.6 million years ago. It blew these rocks over 150km, these giant rocks that give us vantage over this flat land. God, when that volcano blew it must have seemed like the world was ending.
Paul takes us to caves where the Maasai used to live, before their land was appropriated for a park. He wonders what the cost has been of our gains this last century. I think we all do.
Paul intrigues me. He’s one hell of a naturalist. He’s got a name for every bird we see (and that’s a pretty huge feat given the sheer number of birds that inhabit this place) and most of the plants, understands the body language of the huge beasts we see roaming this place, determines what is happening out there simply by listening to the noises, watching the signs. He can see more while driving at 50km/hour than I can staring out the window when we’re stopped. He knows the weather, and is concerned about how dry it is at this time of year. There should be small rains. He knows this place. He has a story.
He’s got strong opionions too, but he’s helpful to people. He knows this is a harsh place, and so does what he can to make sure people are okay when they break down, that no one who needs help is ignored. It’s good to see. He jokes about kids being leopard BBQ, which shouldn’t be funny (but somehow is) for its truth. A boy was killed by a leopard last year at one of the lodges in Tarangire.

29.12.05

I am sitting on the edge of what I’m told is the world’s largest uncollapsed crater, the Ngorongoro. From here to the other side is 21km, and it’s nearly a thousand meters high. Up here all is green, this tropical rainforest. There is yellow grass and green at the bottom of the crater, swamp and scattered trees. Small rises down there, and some lakes. But mostly it looks flat.
Again I feel like I’m looking down at a whole world. A whole world contained in a bowl. Maybe it’s like being in a fish bowl. I can’t really explain my feeling, but there is a gravity to this place. Like I’m compelled towards the centre. Compelled to roll all the way down this hill. Drawn down like water to a drain.
Saw a Maasai village today. The houses were made of dung, in a sort of kidney bean shape. They were cool and comfortable, but do all their cooking on open fires with no ventilation. This is affecting their health. They are in a fishbowl. Just one more set of animals for the tourists to gawk at.

30.12.05

Death at the bottom of the crater. We saw a buffalo killed today, huge beast, by lions. There were, at one point, eight lions on top of him. They would take him down, hanging off him, and he would keep rising. He must have fallen and stood at least four times before falling for good. I don’t think I have ever seen an animal fight so hard to live. Eight lions. It was interesting watching them work, slowly, so as to insure none of them were hurt by this driven buffalo and his massive horns. First they took down his back legs, then one went for this throat, slowly. Like a house cat batting a mouse. Then slowly more piled on his flanks. Then it was just a matter of time.
While this was sad to see, I didn’t feel disturbed by the death itself. What disturbed me was the 50 land rovers lined up to see it. Obviously I can’t blame people for wanting to see this, since I was there watching as well. Nor can I really blame the Tanzanian government for making the most of their tourist industry (though I think that there was a little too much traffic in the crater, for the most part all the parks seemed well managed, and the safaris minimally intrusive to the life of the animals and plants here). What disturbed me was the attitude of the tourists (I can feel a rant coming on).
While we stood there watching a buffalo die, and I think feeling lucky to witness this event (as such trying to be respectful), two carloads of tourists next to us shouted back and forth to eachother jokes about being lion meat, shrieking with laughter as an animal did battle with eight lions. This attitude seemed prevalent in many of the people we ran across during our trip. A comment in one of the guest books I flipped through in Serengeti summed up how most people felt about this place: “It’s like a giant zoo!” And so they act as if they’re at home, wandering around a zoo. Talking and shouting while animals hunt, showing little to no interest in any kind of Tanzanian culture or people, it quickly became apparent that, as my mother put it, this is the European equivalent of the Caribbean package tour for families.

01.01.06

New Year’s Day. We are back east of the Great Rift Escarpment. Yesterday we arrived at our hotel for lunch. It is a hotel run (though not owned) by the Maasai people here. I spent the afternoon walking to a waterfall with a guide and one of the guys who works at the hotel named Fadhil. He is about my age. Being out of the Land Rover for an afternoon was awesome, walking and talking to this guy, I finally felt like I was actually learning something about the country I was in. Fadhil is from Arusha and has been working at the hotel. He is one of the few non-Maasai employees and is saving for college. He wants to go into tourism, which seems to be the only sure thing around here these days, and has already taught himself both English and Spanish (French is next, on top of Maa, the Maasai language and Swahili). He told me about banana beer and African football teams, and some medicinal plants we saw around.
After dinner I stayed up talking (and drinking beer) with him and one of the Maasai guys who worked there named Moses, who was also in his twenties. Fadhil told me how when this area was created God made three people, and gave one a stick, one a hoe, and one a spear, to herd, to farm to hunt. These are the main lifestyles still practised here, though agriculture seems to be colonising the other modes of life. It has a way of doing that. The Maasai we’ve seen so far have not been particularly well off, their way of life being eroded by modernisation, economics and an increasingly agricultural economy. They are fighting hard to maintain their traditions, but I think it’s fair to say they’re probably not the culture they once were. Talking to Moses was inspiring in many ways. He told me how ridiculous he thought white people were for tourism. Despite (or perhaps because he’s) working in the hotel, he didn’t have many good things to say about tourism or tourists. I can’t say I blame him. Still, he was eager to share about the Maasai culture, the different stages of life and initiation rituals, their beliefs. He was open about many things, some fascinating, some repellent. The Maasai still practice female circumcision/genital mutilation. He was very straightforward about it being a necessary measure to insure women didn’t cheat when the men were away. I didn’t even know how to approach that one, how to begin crossing that gap, so I just nodded, not really able to express what I was thinking.
Despite the problems of the Maasai culture, though, I have a lot of respect for them. It’s increasingly difficult in our world to live a non-sedentary life. Pastoralism is dying everywhere, and the Maasai are fighting hard to keep their traditions alive. To see someone see the lifestyle we the privileged have, and decide they don’t want it, and fight to keep what they have inspires me. It gives me hope.

04.01.06

I am in Tamale, and the sky is hazy with dust. I begin work on Monday.

Posted by matt at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)