I'm going to look at a place in Vancouver tomorrow; actually, I'm going back to look again. I was there last weekend, but didn't meet all the roommates. It's on Main and 23rd, a big beautiful house, with lots of interesting people in it. I really want to live there, but they're meeting a couple of other people tomorrow, other callbacks. Still, I made the shortlist, so cross your fingers. As much as I want it, I'm really feeling like all things in the universe are working out as they should right now. Everything seems to be . . . coming together. And if this doesn't work out, it just means something else, better will come along.

So that's that really. Summer in Victoria. A tan, a job landscaping, friends to ride bikes and climb trees and drink beer with, a garden that's producing mad tomatoes, and acorn squash, corn and pumpkin, cucumbers and peas. I am pulling food from the earth, and eating with wonderful people. I am drinking coffee, reading books, letting that vitamin D soak right on in, cause there'll come a time, sooner than I want, that I'll miss it.

I left Tamale with my friend Kat at 5am heading to Ouagadougou. We hopped a trotro to Bolga, then a shared taxi from Bolga to the border town of Paga, crossed the border into Burkina Faso, then hopped another shared taxi to just barely make our ten o’clock bus from Po to Ouaga. In Ouaga we got our Malian visas and enjoyed the baguettes, commenting again that the French had managed to do one or two things right by instilling a love of good coffee and bread in their colonies. The British seem to have had remarkably little concern for good food.

The next morning we were up early again, catching a bus from Ougadougou to the northern city of Ouhigouya (wa-yi-gou-ya) where we met a guide, James, who would take us through Dogon country. We crossed the border at Thiou, and enterd Mali at Koro, where we spent the first of many nights sleeping on a mattress outside. The days in Mali are hot right now, but the nights are beautiful and cool. Many Malians asked me if the moon was really as beautiful in other places as there, and some had a hard time believing it was. I met several people who swore Mali was the only country where you could really see the stars. Or maybe it was just the only place they figured people bother looking at them.

The next morning we caught another trotro from Koro to Kanikomboli, on the edge of the Bandiagara escarpment. From the we started our walk, four days, three nights, along the escarpment and up its side onto the spectacular plateau. We stopped in villages at midday, resting three or four hours in the withering heat of noon. The temperatures often climbed above 45 degrees, and there was really nothing to do during the midday heat but eat, drink beer and sleep. The villages along the bottom of the escarpment are mud brick buildings, with wood stuck through near roof level to support the mud that form the roof. The bricks are a sort of sand, clay, straw mix, much like cob (with probably slightly less concern for proportions), formed and dried in the sun. They are then cemented together using a clayish mortar, and plastered over. This area of Mali is renowned for its Sahel mosques, and every village we passed through, despite being a remarkable feat of traditional architecture, had a beautiful, awe-inspiring mosque in it. And these were only the babies of the one we later saw in Djenne.

The best thing about the bottom of the escarpment, though, is the ancient villages. Although the Dogon have now moved onto the plains, their ancient villages are still tucked into grottos on the edge of the escarpment, quite a trek up from the ground (especially when you think of carrying water or grain). When the Dogon arrived at the escarpment, about six hundred years ago, fleeing the rise of Islam in the Manding empire and seeking to retain their traditional animistic practices, they followed the star Sigui (Sirius) along the Niger River, then headed south to the escarpment. When they arrived, the land around was populated by two groups of people, the Tellem and the pygmies. The pygmies inhabited the forest around the escarpment, which was at that time lush and plentiful. The Tellem lived in the cliffs like the Dogon eventually did, only they built their structures higher. Some Dogon believe the Tellem could fly, because even thinking about accessing those places now would require someone with some pretty serious climbing skills. As our guide explained, though, in the days of the Tellem there was enough vegetation around that they would climb vines and trees up the cliff face to store their goods. He also explained that they didn’t actually sleep in the structures, they just stored their food and goods there.

The Tellem structures obviously provided the inspiration for the more complex Dogon buildings: the Tellem built small mud structures around the caves and grottos in the cliff face. While we were wandering in one of the ancient villages I saw dozens of little mud spider homes, all empty, built onto the rock. It struck me as obvious where the Tellem had learned to build their dwellings. They lived as spiders do in the cliff walls. When the Dogon came along, driving the Tellem out and cutting down trees to start agriculture, they still built their dwellings into the cliffs for protection from animals, but they adapted the building idea, using the mud brick technology they had imported from southern Mali.

On our second day we climbed up the escarpment through an anachronistically green and cool canyon. We got the top of escarpment and stayed the night at a village calleed Begnemoto. Looking out over the plains below, from the top of the escarpment, probably about 200 metres up, it’s difficult to understand how anyone can live there. The soil is quickly turning to sand as it is used intensively, and though animals are kept and their waste carefully returned to the soil, it is not enough. Every year there is less soil, more desert. Although I have read that colonial practices, the emphasis of cash crops over subsistence agriculture, had a serious impact on desertification, destroying traditional checks and balances that kept the Sahara at bay, I have no idea whether this holds true for the Dogon people. This is a group of people, after all, that cut down all the trees to make way for agriculture. The rising population here means that this land can’t not be farmed. People need every ounce of food they get from this place, even if that means destroying it in the process. It’s a funny, fucked up cycle.

The houses on top of the escarpment are stone, adapting tradition to available material, and equally beautiful. We spent two nights on the plateau, and eventually descended back to the plains through a village called Dorou, where we left our guide, who was great, if a little too into partying (but then his job is to walk around a beautiful place and spend the nights with friends, so who wouldn’t be party-focused?) and caught a ride down to Bandiagara.

From there we went to Mopti, where, finding our intended hotel full, were led by a guide to a god-awful little Fisheries Ministry guest house. We were too tired to argue and the room had a fan so we shrugged and paid the $10 for it (Mali is not as cheap as Ghana). It was a concrete box so ridiculous after the beautiful stone and mud structures of Dogon Country, that just cooked when the fan wasn’t on. Of course there were much better places in town, but we were too tired to go looking. We wandered around Mopti a bit sat and had a beer that afternoon in a little restaurant and planned our trip to Djenne. Mopti is at the confluence of the Beni and Niger rivers, and although the town itself isn’t much, is full of trade from Bamako to Tombouktou.

The next day we headed to Djenne, down the Beni river (which was basically dry near Djenne) to see the famous mud mosque. This mosque is the largest mud-constructed building in the world, and is a truly remarkable building in a truly remarkable city. Djenne itself is ancient, founded by the same group of people who founded Tombouktou, and populated by families who have been there since the dawn of time. As one American guy we met said, if your family hasn’t been in Djenne for two thousand years, you’re not really from there. The whole city is constructed with mud, beautiful architecture that doesn’t rival the mosque, but complements it. We wandered around tiny alleys, and little courtyards, really feeling like we’d stepped back about a thousand years. While the tourist strip down the middle of Djenne is a little obnoxious, since everyone’s asking you for something, we found that stepping out of that people were incredibly friendly and interested in us.

We stayed in Djenne two nights and returned to Mopti to do a trip on a riverboat up the Niger river for a night. We visited the ancient village of Mopti, on the opposite bank of the Beni as the city, and then spent a night on the bank of the Niger, sleeping in the sand. We ate Capitaine (also known as Nile perch) from the river and drank wine and stared at the stars. It was only waking up the next morning, looking around, that I realized what I was looking at.

Humans have been in West Africa for such a long time it’s impossible to imagine it without them. But that night on the river we didn’t have to hide our food, because no animal was coming to take it. We didn’t have no clear a space to sleep, because it was sand as far as the eye can see. The human footprint on this area, that we call the Sahel, is so heavy that there is nothing, except maybe fish and mosquitos, not there by human design. All over Mali, Burkina, even northern Ghana, people are adapting the landscape so completely to their uses that nothing that doesn’t fit into this scheme remains. Seems like we might have a parallel for . . . almost everywhere else in the world. But we can see the results here, the increased desertification, decreased soil productivity. By making the land what we think we need, we kill it. Another paradox of progress: the more we take for ourselves the less we have.

The Burkinabe, as citizens of Burkina Faso are known, are reputed to be a very easygoing people, relaxed and open. While this was the case with some that we met, the vendors (definitely the most predominant aspect of the city for us white folks) were super-aggressive. Not that we had any bad experiences; often I found the people to be fun and friendly, just very forward. Still, they made Ghanaians look like quiet introspective people, who don’t often approach strangers, which is not something I would have ever thought to say.

Outside of Ouaga (as it’s commonly called) the poverty is intense. I have heard that the north is worse, that Sahel landscape, dotted with trees and the creeping sand of the Sahara. You can’t farm sand, and it reaches its fingers further south every year. The reality of desertification is apparent enough in parts of northern Ghana, so the situation is far more desperate in Burkina. I am curious about Mali, where I will be headed in April. I am bracing for the kind of poverty that comes when farming is impossible.

The coast is all sand beaches and palm trees. The forest is thick and greener than anything I remember after having been in the north for two months (how quickly we forget!). It looks almost impassable from the roadside. Gold, rubber, cacao are the main resources you find down here, but my favourites are still coconut and fish. A little boy taught me to crack coconuts against the base of a tree to get them open. If I’m ever stuck on a desert island with coconuts, I am now armed with an important survival skill. Climbing the tree and getting them down not yet my forte. The cool 33 degrees was a welcome relief. True it’s more humid, sticky, down there, but the breeze of the water makes it really pleasant. And now I have returned to the searing 44 degrees of the north, where water evaporates so quickly that there’s no point in cleaning up a spill of water unless your toilet is overflowing. A kind of heat that makes your body think the low thirties is cool, and if it drops below 30 you think about a sweater.

The coast, at least from Cape Coast to Accra, is Fante land. They are coastal people, so they fish, but also controlled trade with the British when their ships arrived. The gold fields, further north, are in Ashante land, a powerful, though relatively recent, empire that had immense power over the trade route, since they had gold, and were able to resist the British for a long time.

As we roll through towns and cities, passing taxis, trotros, private cars and donkey carts, it’s easy to imagine that all this movement is new. And to some extent it is: paved roads and fossil fuel, larger populations and a wider range of goods, this is new. But the idea is not. The goods and people that rolled back and forth over the Sahara, from the Mediterranean to the southern coast of the West African bulge may have changed, but the traffic is something as old as anything else we’ve bothered to remember. It may not be written down, but it’s in the actions and ideas of everything happening here, written into the culture of visiting, trade and gift-giving, in the way that the rooftops of trotros are piled as high as the vehicles themselves with food and gifts travelling with people as they return home or leave it. You can tell the distance a trotro travels by the height of the goods on its roof.

And it’s this traffic itself, the application of new technology to old traditions, that makes me think back on some of the things I’ve seen in my short time here in Africa. I have this vision from Tanzania, passing through a town just east of the Great Rift Escarpment, of a woman walking down the street in the evening, baby tied to her back, with a hoe in her right hand and a cell phone in her left. Though this might seem incongruous in Europe or North America, somehow it fits here, doesn’t seem at odds with anything else. I think for too long I’ve held on to this idea of culture as static, set in stone or lost in time. Ahistorical. But it’s not like that, is it? It’s okay to ride a camel and talk on a cell phone, or email from the middle of nowhere. Or ride an age-old trade route in a Ford Truck. Or a donkey cart.

I met this Austrian fellow last week who was so much more impressed with Bolgatanga than the south of Ghana because it’s “more like the picture” of Africa he had. Not to say that I don’t love Bolga and Frafra people but the poverty here makes certain things more difficult, and it’s those things I like about the south. It fucks with my ideas of what Africa “should” be. It’s sophisticated and traditional at the same time, steeped in something old but doing its best to change.

And while life here is cool, and wonderful, and mostly new, well it's probably also a lot more average in many ways than I'm making it out to be. I do work in an office, I work at a computer. My days are as filled with computer chess as they are with work (I have a relatively reasonable timetable for project completion). But still, the basics always apply. My days involve work, forming and maintaining meaningful relationships, eating, partying, reading. A thousand tiny and novel ways of entertaining myself in the hours of waiting that are Ghana. I think they have developed waiting into an art form here. Time is . . . relative.

My days may be hot and dusty but I find them endlessly fascinating, or something to just pull on through. Much like my days at home, only in a different setting, with a different language and a little more imperative on staying healthy, staying safe, staying cool.

Is it romantic to travel? Of course. Am I indulging certain romantic tendencies when describing this place? For sure, they're what makes good stories, after all. And in all reality, these events I write about really are the most tangible, if perhaps not the most frequent, events that occur. They're what gives me insight into this place, and hopefully a little more into myself. But still, they are not an accurate account of my daily life, and I just need to make that clear. The question is: is life a series of mundane moments punctuated by exciting moments? I tend to think not. Like any good adventure, with life you just have to learn to be patient between key moments.

Toilet functions are a pretty big topic of conversation here among expats. Comparing notes, diseases. Making sure that sickness isn't too out of hand, learning what to expect. Ah yes, sharp stabbing pains. That means diarrhea, maybe punctuated with vomiting, maybe not. The sharper the stabbing the less . . . control you'll have. Always carry toilet paper. Always. Oh how we poor privileged suffer.

The greatest danger to safety in this country doesn’t come from disease or politics, weather or crime. It’s all about the roads. And as I pulled out of Bolga on the trotro this morning I said a little prayer to arrive safely. I don’t think I’ve prayed since I was about ten, but the beginning of a trip is definitely an appropriate time to pray. The road to Tamale is pretty good; it’s paved, there are no major curves or huge hills. It’s about the safest place to drive, I suppose. But with the trucks bombing back and forth from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Accra in the south, with the trotro roofs sometimes stacked as high as the vehicles themselves, crammed full of people, animals, luggage, the roads are something to reckon with. There was only one overturned truck on the road out this morning, and the usual dozen or so broken down on the 2 hour trip. It’s the charred skeletons of buses and trotros that really freak me out. I have seen them before, being worked over for scrap hopefully long enough after the incident not to upset any ghosts.

He had a face I trusted. And I arrived safe.

These hills aren’t big, and they’re only 15 or 20 km away, but they have started to mean something to me. I think there are two reasons. The first is that they’re landscape. I mean, rolling hills and trees are great, but in a flat savannah drama is important. Actually, I think almost anywhere drama is cool. It’s what makes for powerful landscape; it’s what makes for power centres. Hard and jagged, particularly when living in the soft and rolling, means power. The second reason is more personal. Every day, as I ride to work, I imagine, for one single moment, I am riding heading from the ferry back to Victoria, with the Olympics as my backdrop. Now, this is a personal fantasy, I will admit. But it’s a nice feeling, to see everything totally unfamiliar around you, and yet to find something that reminds you of home. It makes me feel a little more at home.

We went to the Tongo hills today. Vanessa, Bailey, Gideon and I hopped on bikes and rode out of town, towards these dust-shrouded hills, deciding that the best course of action would be to ride in the hottest, dirtiest, directest-sunlight time of day.

Gideon took us by his family home, in a village that only vaguely sounds like the English pronunciation Winkongo. In fact there are some crazy guttural/glottal sounds that I can’t even try to replicate speaking, let alone on paper. That’s the job of a linguist. We met his father, and his father’s wife, the senior brother of the family, Gideon’s half-brother (ie brother) and his half-dozen young cousins.

We then rode into the hills, towards a town called Tinzugu. There is a small tourist business in these hills, set up around the chief’s house and a shrine. Standing on a rock that once provided the overhang for Tinzugu’s school, we looked down on the maze that was the chief’s house. John told me a few weeks ago about this place (and exagerrated a little). This is the legendary 500-family house. Actually, it’s about 300 people, built around the chief’s eighteen wives and their children. It’s a twisting, turning knot of a compound that was quite an impressive feat of navigation for anyone passing through.

We continued on to the shrine, a small cave set into the rock hillside of one of the peaks. There are rules to entering the shrine. Clothing, above the waist and below the knee, is not allowed. Because of Tinzugu’s small but important tourist industry the shrine has allowed white women to enter the shrine wearing their bras, if they pay to sacrifice a guinea fowl. So both Bailey and Vanessa did. Originally the shrine played a role in bringing rain to this area, as the nearest water, the White Volta, is probably somewhere between five and ten kilometers away, over rocky harsh landscape. There is a borehole in town, now, so this is less of a concern. These days the shrine is used to solve problems. A big problem takes a donkey, a small one a goat or a fowl. The shrine itself was a circle of oil painted on the wall of the cave, a huge pile of guinea fowl feathers, and offerings left by visitors, some so old no one remembers who brought them, or what their significance might be.

And we climbed back down, and biked back out of the hills. Biking back I started to realize that although I was getting sunburned pretty badly, I wasn’t actually hot. One more moment of appreciating sweat. I’ve never noticed, before being here, how well it really does regulate body temperature. A thin film of water on the outside of the body and even the slightest breeze will keep you feeling cool and comfortable. The key is just keeping enough liquid in the body to sustain that constant output of water. So I drink about 4 litres of water a day.

I just barely made it back to town before a flat tire got me. I got it patched and went to get some sausages and beer (a 35km bike ride definitely made me feel like I deserved it) at a spot near my house, where I bumped into some other Canadians I know, and my friend Alex. I sat for a while, and after dark got on my bike back to Zaare, my other favourite part of the day. Coming down the hill off the main road into the village the air starts to cool, and as soon as I leave the pavement it’s drops significantly. The air in the village is noticeably cooler, and the stars more visible for the lack of streetlights. So under a skyful of stars and a slight breeze I return home.

A Family Dinner

I went to Gideon’s house for dinner tonight with Bailey. He introduced us to his mother, Rita, and his brother Calvin. We sat down and had amazing chicken, yam fries (real yams, not sweet potatoes called yams), rice, salad and Ghanaian tomato sauce. Gideon works with me at CENSUDI on the Education Improvement Project and is the first person I go to when I have questions about culture. How does a funeral work? What are the belief systems around this, why do people say that?

He’s an extremely bright guy, and always has a well-though out answer. We sat, after dinner, and discussed American foreign policy, African and international literature (Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare), and the revolutionary philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah (and in fact the pan-African movement). He and his brother have obviously both read extensively, and both write: journals, poetry, plays. When Bailey asked if Ghana needed a visionary leader or someone capable of restructuring the system the brothers answered differently. Calvin thinks Ghana needs a visionary, someone who can put them on a new path that will reshape the nature of their developmental direction, while Gideon sees a visionary as someone malleable to the whims of a party, and argued that restructuring the system will really be the only way to allow for positive change. When I asked them if there could be another Nkrumah they both said no. Too far ahead of his time, too willing to sacrifice for the good of his people and uncompromising in his politics, they said, how can Ghana produce another Kwame Nkrumah when the education system downplays the importance of his philosophies, his attitude towards politics and culture. How, indeed, can the world produce revolutionaries in a climate that breeds conformity? And yet it does, as the very conformity enforced upon breeds dissent. And so it is. So it goes.

February 4, 2006

I had another Nkrumah conversation last night. Actually, it was more of a lecture. I was out with the girls and my flatmates Gborzor (pronounced, roughly, Gozo, emphasis on the second syllabel) and Samuel. After the girls left I started probing Gborzor on Ghanaian politics; Kufuor (the current president) and his stance on issues. The conversation quickly turned towards the iconic Nkrumah (I probed that way, curious to see if Gideon’s ideas hold true across a wider range of people).

Nkrumah was a visionary. Not a flawless one, but a visionary nonetheless, said Gborzor. This is not what Ghanaians have been taught, though. Gborzor grew up, in the seventies and eighties, learning that Nkrumah was a bad leader. That he squandered wealth. And in many circles this holds true.

But he had a vision; one that I can’t speak to fully, but can hopefully paraphrase. Nkrumah, as Ghanaians are so good at doing, played host. To the leaders of anti-colonial Africa, to the desire for change, to the notion of pan-Africanism. I don’t pretend to know the philosophies, or problems, associated with pan-Africanism. All I know is that Gborzor said Nkrumah saw the future of Ghana intrinsically linked with the future of Africa. So he invested in the future of Africa. Sometimes poorly, sometimes well.

But for his own country, he built three universities (when the nation was no more than seven million people); one for teachers, one to cover everything else and one for science and technology. The latter two are still the most reputable universities in the country; the former, unfortunately only hosts teachers, who lack the respect due to them, as they do in most parts of the world.

He built a dam and a nuclear reactor (environmentally problematic, yes, but an investment in the future of Ghana from where he was standing in the 1950s) and started down the road that led to the coup against him. Nkrumah’s problem was that he was anti-US. Funnily enough, this seems to have been a problem for many countries historically, and Ghana was no exception. There was an effort to take his life (failed, killing a schoolgirl) that led him institute a pre-emptive arrests act here in Ghana. He was, as a visionary morphed into a dictator. And he was overthrown (in a CIA sponsored coup by Kotoka, who the airport in Accra is now named after) and Ghana continued down the path of dictatorship.

And it was this shift that makes me wonder some things. Gideon confided in me the other day that he doesn’t believe democracy will change Ghana. Only benevolent dictatorship by someone like Nkrumah. But he also said, at one time, there can be no one like Nkrumah. And, I asked him when he told me this, would Nkrumah’s philosophies have been compromised because of his power? Were, perhaps, they already being compromised?

What, indeed, is the role of a leader? To spark revolution, and lay foundations for the future? To spark revolution and stand back? Or is leadership necessarily corrupt? Are the ideas of leadership and corruption necessarily conflated? I think not, but I am having a harder and harder time coming up with justification for this argument, other than obscure Taoist philosophy.

Economically, the situation that Nkrumah inherited with the country is one of its best. And then it nosedived. But it’s making a comeback now. Accra is on the way up. Kumasi is a hip town. The south is making huge progress, and the north will eventually follow. Everyone’s just wondering if there’s a leader fit for the challenge. I’m wondering if there’s a need for one.

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?

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.