Archived here….
#2 – 8/16/2005 (Go to Rachel’s first letter)
How Semantics Got His Name and other West African Tales: Adventures in Accra, Pt. II
Hi, all.
Installment #2.
My newspaper, the Vision, has finally come out with the first edition
since I’ve been here, so today I’ve actually got some time to sit down
and write.
I’ve roped one of the other JHR volunteers into helping set up a
website for the paper; for those interested, it will be available at
thevisiononline.net in a couple of days. Ghana time. Meaning give or
take about a third of the time promised. Mostly give. So check in
about a week.
Ghana time: perhaps the most difficult adjustment I’ve had to make
since I’ve been here. During culture classes, it was the first thing
that Tina, our instructor, warned us about:
Given a meeting time, you can almost undoubtedly expect a 45 minute
buffer zone.
Given a date, allow for an extra week.
Punctuality is not exactly my strong point, so I suppose I have no
room to complain, but even I , with my perpetual tardiness, am
consistently kept waiting. What to do? Tina’s solution: just show up
at the time agreed upon and WAIT. Most of the time, the pace of things
is relaxing, grounding, and opens my eyes to the goings-on of Ghana,
and I quite enjoy it. Until I’m trying to be productive.
Given a deadline, allow for a month.
Thus, my bi-weekly publication, which has not published since April,
is coming out this thursday. August 11. Which is an accomplishment in
itself.
As I’m reading this, I’m realizing that my last e-mail left off in the
tro-tro on the way to the camp. So i have a lot of catching up to do.
With all of my work with refugees in Chicago, I just assumed I’d be
working with tents and endless checkpoints. Buduburam, the camp where
I work, is a completely open community — people are free to come and
go as they please, finances allowing, of course, which is more of an
obstacle to leaving the camp than one might expect.
On first glance, the camp is basically like any other village in
Ghana, except perhaps a little poorer and perhaps more densely
populated. Once you spend some time there, however, you notice that
while it is a community, it is a highly specific community that just
landed there all at once, and in the middle of some horrible tragedy.
So there will be little societal mechanisms you just expect to be
present or work a certain way and then it just falls out from under
you in the way that element is absent, like when you expect another
step on a stairway and there isn’t and for a second you completely
lose your bearings…. kinda vague, I know, but bear with me:
The camp itself is divided into 12 zones, connected by one main dust
path that is craggily carved with dingy, foamy water lines and
littered with waste, as there is no official drainage system. As far
as I can tell, all other paths are just coincidentally aligned spaces
between the tightly packed shacks of homes that make up the camp.
On my way to the office, I take this main road to the very end. It is
basically the commercial district, lined with shops and restaurants
and vedor carts. At first you think, “wow! what a bustling economy
buduburam has!” After passing by a few times though, you realize that
the restaurants are always empty — few people actually have the
money to eat in them. Then you realize that the people packing the
street are not shopping, but just hanging around because they have
NOTHING to do. No job to work, no food to cook, and in many cases, no
family to go home to… sounds dramatic, but such is the case.
This whole nothing to do thing is pretty dangerous for the community
itself, because people are just LOOKING for something to outrage them,
for some conflict to occupy them. It’s extra dangerous when mixed with
the fact that almost all news on the camp is transferred via rumor.
This is why I think that the vision, my paper, is so valuable, if we
can straighten a few things out.
Anyway. After a few more passes by this road, you begin to wonder why,
on certain days, everybody is selling the same pair of nike shoes from
four years ago, or why everybody is selling the same poster of Usher
or why everybody is selling down coats or why the man coming towards
you is wearing a portland trailblazers or smith family reunion
t-shirt. And then you realize that most of the stores out there carry
items from aid shipments. Which hits you kinda hard.
Buduburam was established in 1990 in response to the flood of refugees
that arrived in Ghana when Charles Taylor took power. The UN High
Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) provided pretty typical aid and
relief stuff to individuals at the camp for a number of years. In
1997, however, Liberia held elections that the UN deemed fair enough
to allow for repatriation efforts, so they stopped all aid to Liberian
refugees in Ghana. But the refugees weren’t so sure. Only 3,000 of
them repatriated during this time. After the UN left, the camp itself
was pretty much on its own, aside from the efforts of a handful of
highly specific, almost ridiculously specialized NGO’s and nonprofits.
The UN even pulled out of the clinic, which left the community pretty
much without healthcare for quite an extended period of time.
In 2002, things in Liberia worsened, and a fresh influx of refugees to
Ghana brought the UNHCR back to Buduburam, although this time the aid
itself goes more to infrastructure work, such as school construction
and such. Which is pretty practical sounding.
So now, the refugees at the camp pretty much have to support
themselves — and why shouldn’t they? most of them have been here for
over a decade! — but it’s pretty difficult in to create employment
in a community with absolutely no resources, and it’s even more
difficult to find employment in a country where people see you as some
sort of parasitic guest and your work experience and education has a
ten year hole blown right through it.
So. In the middle of all of this mess, my reporters work on a
volunteer basis. How they manage, I’m not quite sure. Some of them get
money from relatives lucky enough to be resettled. Some of them have
odd jobs in Accra.
The reporter I work with has a part time job with a paper in Accra. In
Liberia, he was apparently quite the star — he was given his own
radio show right out of high school. Anyway, this man was a born
wordsmith. I’m not kidding: his name is Semantics King Jr.
Curious. The first few weeks I was working with him, I wasn’t sure if
it would be sensitive to ask him about his name, so I didn’t. Then it
was too late. Luckily, the kid doing our website asked the moment they
met.
Liberia has this deal with Firestone dating back generations… way
back when the country’s economy was still yawning, stretching, and
wiping the crumbs out of its newly independent eyes, Firestone bought
something like 99 acres of land for 99 cents an acre for 99 years.
These numbers are accurate; you can check. Anyway. Semantics’
grandfather worked for firestone. He liked to talk, and apparently had
quite the vocabulary. So. One day the overseer at the firestone plant
said “gee, you sure like to talk. I’m going to call you semantics.”
and Semantics’ grandfather liked it so much that not only did he keep
semantics as a nickname, but he passed it on to his son, who, in turn,
passed it on to my journalist.
So. Semantics is quite the journalist. It’s in his blood.
And now That I’ve brought you up through July, I’m going to leave you
hanging. Stay tuned:
Superradical, grassrootsy layout meetings in electricity-less shacks!
Tearing through african bush, dramatically kicking up local footpath
dust in official UNHCR caravans !
I swear I’ll catch up.
Meanwhile, keep me posted. I havent heard from chicago in awhile. What’s new?
I’m so homesick.
Hope all is well.
Love
Rachel
#1 – 7/20/2005 (Go to Rachel’s second letter)
Just call me “Obruni”: Adventures in Accra, Part 1
Hi, all –If you’re getting this, you’ve been placed on my mass e-mail
from Ghana list. If you don’t want to subject yourself to my aimless
musings and sweepingly generalizing cultural observations, you should
let me know and I’ll take you off the list. And you should stop
reading, because this will be the first installment:
So… my trip began with my discovery that Citibank is not present
anywhere in the country. Or Mastercard. And American Express
traveller’s checks are not accepted anywhere. Luckily, remittances
from relatives abroad make up the third largest source of Ghana’s
income, so Western Union is everywhere. Once I took a deep breath and
discovered I wasn’t going to die, the whole situation was actually
pretty hilarious. And this has been the pattern for my summer this
far: things look incredibly intimidating and scary until my fight or
flight animal terror subsides, and then everything is an adventure.
There is a huge expat presence here, and the community is pretty tight
knit. Apparently, journalists are natural-born networkers, so the
girls from my organization, Journalists for Human Rights, seem to know
everyone. Everyone is doing something to save the world, so as you can
imagine, it’s a pretty dynamic comunity. The organization I’m working
for houses its volunteers in a single building. The house is just down
the road from Duncan’s bar, which is apparently the expat bar,
although a lot of ghanaians drink there too. Duncan’s looks like it is
straight out of the movies. It is marked off my some plywood boards
and fenced in by a little low wall of advertisement plastered boards.
Most of the advertisements are for Guinness, which is apparently the
beer of choice here. The slogan is “brings out the power in you”.
There is even non-alcoholic guinness, which is apparently like an
energy drink, although it tastes something like super sweetened
cornflakes.
The owner of the bar, who insists we call him Captain,
sits outside of the bar (and hence outside of our office) all day and
seems to be the cornerstone of the community. He knows everyone in the
expat crowd and thinks it important that we all know each other. At
any given time, I can walk past and either he or his wife Barbara can
tell me the whereabouts of anyone in the organization, which is
convenient but honestly pretty frightening. However, every time JHR
kids go to Duncan’s, we get to sit with the man who owns the
establishment, and no matter how you slice it, that’s pretty cool.
My internship began with an organized orientation to Ghana:
apparently, JHR decided to hold “culture classes” when a volunteer in
an early batch of JHR kids broke down after someone at her station
offered her the intended compliment that she was growing fat. Culture
classes involve one day of platitudes on interacting with the locals
followed by a weekend when they drop you off in some random village
with a strange family and dont come back until sunday.
My host family is a family of cloth merchants, and they live in a
little corrugated tin-roofed shack the size of a two car garage, but
the shack is part of a larger housing complex with a wide open
community courtyard. The dynamics of the interactions
between families in that community were really interesting
as a result. Basically, the entire housing community raises
everybody’s children. The concept of ownership is strong,
but people walk in and out of each other’s spaces without
even knocking. Everyone knows what is going on with everyone
else, and where everyone else is at any given time, and
nobody seems to mind that their entire life is so open.
The village itself was pretty small, and white people rarely
visit. My presence was known whenever i entered any scene. I
always had a pack of small children running behind me
yelling “eh, obruni” (obruni is the name for a white woman)
and then tearing away at full speed screaming when I turned
around. The smallest children burst into tears when they saw
me. I was also quite a novelty with the adults, and my host
mother, who did not leave my side for the entire visit, took
great pleasure in showing me off to everyone in the
village…we must have gone to the market twice a day for
this purpose alone. This was pretty charming at first — you
know how i like to be the center of attention and all — but
it definitely got old.
My host mother, Eunice, basically took the whole weekend off
to take care of me. She was the sweetest woman, so open and
loving, and the ease with which she took me into her family
was astounding. I had the hardest time understanding her, though:
although she is a grown adult and has raised two children,
there were moments when her innocence or sudden glee with a
situation struck me as childlike. Sometimes I would say
something that would make her giggle and clasp my hand like
a schoolgirl. But then she would talk about something
serious and seem so wise at the same time. It was strange.
Anyway. Eunice and I were inseparable the entire weekend.
When I first arrived we went straight to the market because
I hadn’t brought clothing fancy enough for events she had
planned for the course of my stay. We picked out cloth
together and then she took me to the place of a friend of
hers who is a tailor, and she had me measured. Of course,
the women all cackled over my measurements. I am pretty
skinny by their standards, and my butt is disproportionately
small. Buuuut… my clothes were ready by the evening, and
Eunice had me try them on right away. Despite the fact that
the outfit was tailored to fit me perfectly, as soon as i
put it on it was obvious that the pattern was designed for
someone with more curves than i had… the hips, for
instance, curved out much more quickly than my own. It
looked silly, but eunice was pleased. Compared to the decked
out ghanaian women, I looked a bit like a balloon that has
been sitting around for a few weeks… kind of deflated and
wrinkly where I shouldnt be.
Eunice was also pleased that I was interested in learning to
cook ghanaian food. So we went to the market again, stopping
at every stall so she could show me to her friends. There
was one larger woman sitting outside of her shop, rolls of
flesh enveloping the top of the stool where she rested, who
looked me up and down, stuck out her lower lip poutily, and
asked me very directly, hands on hips, ” do you have a
boyfriend? are you a virrrrrgin? have you ever carried a
baby on your back??” in such an accusing manner that she
didn’t even give me the chance to answer. I wish you could
have heard the way that she popped the B’s in “baby”
and “back” off of her lips…it was great.
I complimented her lipsick in a weak attempt to change the subject, and it
worked … she whipped it out of her bag and began applying
it to my face without even asking permission. Quite a crowd
had gathered at this point, and she sent someone in it off
to find a mirror. Her lipstick WAS beautiful… it was a
shimmery golden with black lipliner that just looked
stunning on her….it looked deathly gothic on me, though.
Everyone laughed. Hah, hah. silly obruni. Let’s all laugh at
her.
Given this rate, it took us about an hour to buy the
plaintains, yams, and dried fish she wanted to use for
dinner. A little word about the dried fish..Tilapia, it is
called. Tilapia is on every street corner, stiff, flaky
brown and salted, sticking rigor mortis straight tail first
out of bundles in baskets. You see it, and every common
sense grain in your traveller’s body, every scrap of will to
stay alive, tells you it is a bad idea. I have been avoiding
it all week even though the other JHR volunteers say it is
great. Well. Eunice puts it in every meal she makes. You
know how fishing villages smell? That is how every meal I
ate this weekend tasted. I didn’t die.
Anyway. so we brought everything from the market back to
Eunice’s place, and she showed me the kitchen, which is
basically a closet sized section of the living room cordoned
off by a few boards. We chopped the yams and peeled the
plantains. On the floor. In bare feet. We put everything
else in a pot with gallons of cooking oil and boiled it.I
can now cook ghanaian. I helped with dishes. Outside.
Squatting. The tone of this e-mail is getting a little
whiny. Dont get me wrong — even though i was kinda sqeamish
inside for most of the trip, i really enjoyed every moment
of it.
During my culture classes, the woman teaching me warned that
it is a very loud culture. she pointed to how women just
strap babies to their backs and make their way through loud
markets and daily tasks and the baby just sleeps… no
tiptoeing around or shushing. Ghanaians are bred into noise,
she said. My host mother woke up at 5 saturday morning and
had the TV and the radio playing at the same time at full
blast. everyone else was sleeping.
Saturday I got to wear my new ghanaian gear to two funerals.
funerals here are quite the event… nothing like in the
states. They are kind of like parties in the states where
you can show up and leave whenever, and everyone in the
neighborhod is invited. The first part is held outside under
tents. The coffin is in the middle of everyone, and a
preacher yells at everyone for awhile. Nothing somber
sounding. Then, there is a band, and everyone makes a
donation to the family of the deceased.(an interesting note:
the names of people who donate the larger amounts, and the
amounts themselves, are read over loudspeaker later that
day) Afterwards, there is a procession to the house of this
family, where there is another band and more food than can
possibly be eaten. And ghanaians can pack it in — portions
here are enormous.. i have learned to order half sized
meals. Anyway. Food and music and dancing. A funeral here is
essentially one big party, a celebration of those still
living. Of life itself. Which I think is a good idea.
Families will spend small fortunes on these events. One of
the girls in JHR told me that sometimes the body will sit in
the morgue for up to three months while the family saves up
and prepares for hte funeral. Apparently the government has
even asked the civilian population to stop hving such lavish
funerals. INteresting. We went to two of these.
Eunice and I spent most evenings wandering around the city
meeting people, followed by an hour or two of tv watching.
Most of the TV shows here seem to be lengthy commercials…
many are for churches, (there were music videos in which the
only lyrics were “abstain from sex” and “say no to casual
sex” )but western union has sponsored an entire game show in
which the entire audience is wearing western union apparel
and taking part in western union brand games. The companies
that actually choose to come out here have a heartbreaking
amount of power and sway over the public, and the way that
Eunice obliviously drank it all in kind of bothered me. You
could just see the influence of capitalism creeping into the
household. She was so innocent and pure and
wholesome in some ways that i’ve never seen before and I
just didn’t want that to be wrecked. There was one evening
that she told me that she wanted to be skinny like me, and
her friend, who was also there, agreed, and asked if in the
states there exists a cream that you can rub on your stomach
to make it flat. It kind of hurt me that I was playing a
part in that process. I dunno.
THe following week, my internship began. I have been assigned to work
with the Vision, a brand new paper that refugees in the buduburam
refugee camp publish. Buduburam itself is mostly liberian refugees,
and with a population of 42,000 people and no clearly established
method information dissemination other than one billboard at the front
of the camp, a paper is desperately needed.
It sounds, however, like my paper is a bit at odds with the UNHCR,
which is pretty bad if you’re a refugee, so my job at this point is to
figure out what’s going on and sort things out. Then i think i want to
find the paper funding — the vision is in a pretty tight spot, in
that refugees can afford neither a newspaper nor advertising, so I’m
thinking a little grant writing is in order. So. Funding and mediating
for the Vision. All the while writing for it. And about it. Basically
I get to explore a place that interests me through a lens that Im
passionate
about and then tell people about it….Im so psyched right now it’s
kinda silly.
My first morning of work, I got up super early (to a breakfast of
mango!) to make the commute out to the camp . Buduburam is about 2
hours by mass transit outside of accra. This hour isn’t your average
trip on the el, though — it was quite an adventure in itself. Mass
transit here consists of a system of abitrarily routed minivans, caled
tro-tros. Imagine your everyday minvan, maybe with an extra row of
seats. But imagine five people — grown adults— in each
row. In the place where there should be an aisle, there is a little
makeshift fold-down seat welded to either side, so they can pack even
more people into the masses they’re already carting around. The seats
themselves are a later
addition to the vehicle, I think — they are basically upholstered
particle board, and they sway around when the driver takes turns or
hits bumps. Amazing.
The system itself isn’t written down anywhere, as far as I can tell.
There are a few muddy lots where the tro tros hang out if you’re lucky
enough to be at the beginning or ending of a route, otherwise a guy
leans out the window and yells
where he’s going and you have to flag the thing down right out of traffic.
One thing that the tro tros apparently do have in common with the CTA,
however, is evangelists. Yes, evanglists. So my first morning, not
five minutes into our
drive, some passenger got up in his front row seat and turned around,
knees on his seat to face everyone, and perched his bible and his
elbows against the seat back as the passengers in the next row
actually had to lean to one side to avoid his head. An evangelist
seems much more invasive when one’s space is already so constricted.
He preached the entire trip, too — mostly in twee but with
spells of english and outbursts of “HALLELUJAH!” as well. From what I
could tell, his sermon didn’t make much sense… it seemed to be about
prosperity, but it wasn’t arranged well, and you could tell by the
volume and intensity of his
voice — rather than gradual swelling, every so often he would just
yell a word or two. It was loud.I specifically remember him saying
“ladies and gentlemen, I am not a beggar. I guarantee you I am not a
beggar. Do you know why I am not a beggar? Because I saw Jesus
Christ.”
Ato, the country director here, does not have a church even though an
overwhelming majority of ghanaians do (Buduburam, population 42,000,
has 50 churches!) because he believes that the churches here are just
“fleecing” the ghanaian people. HE says they preach mostly of poverty
and how an individual can
gain riches, then pass the plate, then keep the money for the pastors
rather than use it for good. In big front page scandal news out here,
there is a minister out here who has started his own church, which has
a membership in the hundreds of thousands, and has declared himself
archbishop. This would be fine, except that he owns 10 nice nice nice
cars and wears only designer clothes. He has actually been quoted as
saying that Jesus himself wore the same. Imagine! this is not even the
scandal part — he is pretty well accepted. The scandal is that his
wife has run off with some american soldier for the second time and
this conservative
pastor will have to file for divorce. ATo, under a pen name, wrote a
fiery column discussing this, and the minister himself called the
paper to complain. Ato was
pretty pleased with himself.
Religion out here is pretty interesting: I think there is something
like a 65-75 percent christianity statistic. ALthough I don’t attend
church here myself (except during my homestay), there are churches all
over, and they were celebrating and yelling (much like our friend in
the tro tro) and singing from before I got out of bed until after
dark. Everyone in the street was standing around in their sunday
bests, too…
The cars and shops all show marks of the influence of christianity,
too. I actually saw “our savior fast food” restaurant today. And the
cars all have little religious
slogans pasted to their back windows. Taken out of context and
allowing for errors in spelling and translation, some of these slogans
that i’ve seen are pretty funny, such as “except god” and “pray for
hustlers.” The intensity of christianity also has deeper, more serious
implications, such as a widespread intolerance of homosexuality (it’s
against the law, under penalty of fines or imprisonment) and
such, but silly things are a lot more fun to write home about.
Anyway…Lately I’ve finding myself getting violently angry at the
form of Christianity I see out here. Like I can feel the anger in my
chest. you know what I mean? Last week on the tro tro out back from
work work there was another evangelist, and he yelled at us for about
ten minutes about Jesus being god and then he spent the rest of the
ride asking this work-weary collection of strangers for money in
exchange for blessings. Almost everyone in the car gave him at least
5,000 cedis, which is more than the cost of the trip itself, and
although it only works out to about 50 cents, it is probably pretty
important to most of the people on that trip. Who knows if the
evangelist actually believed he was blessing people (he
called himself a prophet).
The same thing happened when I went to church with my host family.
They have so little money and the minister was so well dressed, and
the entire service centered around offering. The minister got everyone
in the congregation all worked up emotionally, dancing and
hallelujahing and clapping and such. And then he literally danced them
the entire congregation in a line dance up to the front to give money.
Who knows where that money goes? My family definitely could have used
it for something else. But going ot church was the highlight of their
week. It hurts so much to see these people I care about give such
needed money to someone like that… I dunno.
And the religion here is so divided along class lines. The poorer
people are, the more dedicated they seem to be to the tradition. I
guess it’s a little like that in the states, but here it really feels
like people are being intentionally
manipulated, and in a way that hinders their ability to help
themselves. In the states, I may not attend chuurch regularly, but I
always had respect for people did… the element of faith seems so
romantic and miraculous. But it’s dangerous here. Maybe both parties
involved here actually believe they’re getting something holy out of
it, but I have never been to a country where the religion felt so
abused and devoid of the sacred. So.
Last week, I had some pretty interesting interviews for an article I
am writing for the paper. Liberia has elections october 11th, which
gives me just enough time to throw something together that may be
timely enough to publish or whatever when I get back if i get my act
together and figure out this freelancing thing (im terrified of even
trying it). More than half of liberia’s population has been displaced
in the past 15 years, and it seems like the refugee community would be
a pretty significant point of interest because of this, right? The
elections are going to change so much. It feels like the whole camp is
just holding its breath… nobody is really taking steps toward
developing the community further, in case the elections actually do
work, but there is enough suspicion that nobody is exactly packing
bags to go home.
Another point of interest that i learnedd: ghana actually made it
illegal for liberian refugees in the camp to hold elections because
the first few times around, the
elections caused so much chaos and violence. Wow.
Anyway… this is long enough, I think… SO much more has happened,
but it’s so difficult to take note of it all while it’s happening, you
know?
Please write me back and let me know what’s going on back home — I
miss everyone terribly.
Love
Rachel