This Moment

21 August, 2008
Let me tell you about this moment.

It’s Thursday, mid-afternoon, just past 3 pm. I spent my morning exploring the local “big” town, the district capital about 20 minutes away. The sprawling town is still decidedly smaller than the “big” city of Koforidua that I grew accustomed to living near this summer. I was able to pick up a few necessities during my walkabout, including matches and kitchen knives, but I’m still headed to a nearby market day tomorrow to find other (more edible) goodies. I’m at site for good as of yesterday, which means sitting happily alone in the little blue-painted cube I now call my own. Aside from shopping, the biggest accomplishment of my day was treating a new mosquito net with insect repellent.

In the background of this moment I’m listening to the Olympics in Beijing via BBC World Service, bounced to my corner of Ghana from Ascension Island. I had to look at a map for that one, by the way. My world feels both very small and very big, and I’m not sure where I fall in its Big Picture. The change in routine this past week left me with parting gifts: a stuffy-headed, sore-throated cold, uneven sunburn, mysterious insect bites, and copious amounts of exhaustion… but even so, I’m ok. I find myself breathing deeply, relaxation trickling into my toes. Here, now, I can sit - and simply feel, breathe, hear, be. Tomorrow the frustration can return, next week the exasperation may take hold, and sometime soon I will return to feeling helpless, hopeless, and fed up. So be it; those moments will come on the coattails of their own stories. It is this moment I want to share. In this one, as the second hand ticks slowly around my dusty clock’s face, I am smiling. I am content. I simply… exist.

Life is good.

“If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One obscenely, horrendously, incredibly long update

Super Extreme Update Extraordinaire.
(Which I know is long overdue.)

Where am I? What am I doing? What’s the news? How am I? I’ve done a terrible job answering those questions since June (June??!!), I know. I’m going to try and remedy that a bit now. Grab a sandwich, it’s gonna take a while.

Where am I?
I am at site. I moved here for good (or until my Close of Service, whichever comes first) last Wednesday. The first day of classes for 1st Term isn’t until September 14th…ish… — which means at the very minimum I have three weeks until I start teaching. That’s assuming I actually teach on the first day of class, which won’t be the case if I am assigned a roster full of Form 1 students (which is most likely given the way the ICT curriculum works). Which brings us to the next question.

What am I doing?
Good question. The one everyone is asking, especially after they’ve done the maths and realized I have 20-some days to “sit around and do nothing”. Actually, truth be told, that is what I’ve done for the last 48 hours or so. It’s been blissful. If you kept up with my Asia Travels last year, this weekend has reminded me of the interlude I spent in Hong Kong: a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of mental stretching and deep breathing. Clearing the cobwebs out of my brain’s corners; sweeping the popcorn up between shows. My biggest accomplishment since arrival has been washing a massive pile of laundry, the scale of which put Kilimanjaro to shame (it’s funny to think how I define “massive pile of laundry” now, versus a few months ago.). The high point of today was having my 50gal water barrel delivered, along with the worthier-than-gold water filter (yay, no more subsisting on sachet water! I’ve traded chlorine for chalk as a flavour additive!). I made two trips to the borehole and called it good. If my barrel holds 50 gallons, and I consume 15 gallons a day (stupid flush toilets that suck water, give me a pit latrine anyday), and only have two 5 gallon buckets with which to transport water, and find myself sweaty and muddy after only two borehole trips, and splash a lot while walking slowly and pitifully past at least 6 Smalls on the way… I should have a full barrel before nightfall. Arithmetic is so much easier when one calculates the Small Child Factor.

On a less immediate scale, though, I do have a bit here on campus to keep me busy between now and whenever I start teaching. Regardless of my actual first day of classes, I’ve also been assigned the role of Head of House for a girls’ dormitory, the actual scope of which I’ve yet to ascertain. So as soon as faculty begin to trickle back to campus I will need to corner another Head of House — and figure out exactly what the job description includes. Additionally, I’ve got to find the right person to pass me on the the other right person who knows the school carpenter, so that I can get a bookshelf and clothing shelf built posthaste (or at least within the next two weeks. I’m desperately tired of living out of a suitcase!). Optionally, if the school would just dash* me the lumber, I have a hammer and a lot of motivation.

Outside of my Primary Job Description of “Secondary School ICT Teacher”, Peace Corps requires encourages “Secondary” (or even Tertiary) Projects. The scale and scope of those are up to the individual volunteer, but the idea is to facilitate branching out from the home community (which in my case is the school campus, on which I both work, eat, and sleep.) into the surrounding area (isolated though I feel her at school, there are no less than three seperate communities within walking distance). While I won’t realistically be starting anything secondary for at least a term, there’s still a lot I can do while I wait. The over-cliche, much-derided, somehow-pretentious phrase - community integration - nevertheless makes a good point. This weekend notwithstanding (I needed it, ok?!), a substantial part of my “success” (measure that how you will) here will depend on my connections to, impressions upon, and ultimate integration within the communities around me. As isolated as I feel even when I go to Market Day on my own, it won’t help to give in to the impulse to stay on campus, fetch water, cook supper, and read a book.

So ultimately… all that flowery talk is just a way of saying I’m going to be doing a lot of walking around, waving at kids, greeting people, getting lost with the intention of getting found, saying the same things over and over (”Yen fre me ‘obruni,’ ye fre me Ama Serwaa! Me ye teachani wo AMASS. ‘Peace Corps’? Peace Corps. Peace corpse? Ahaa.” Etc.), and buying two eggs or “2000″ (roughly 1/4 loaf) bread at a time just so I have an excuse to visit more than one market seller. And wait, I’m getting paid (well, somehow) to do this? What’s the catch?!

What’s the news?

        I moved to site!

Really. That’s the news.

Bonus: my clothes are clean. This is GREAT NEWS.

How am I?

You have a lot of good questions. I’m still trying to answer this one myself.

For now, I can tell you that the 10 weeks of Pre-Service Training was . Ultimately, it was a learning experience, which (obviously) was the intent. For better or worse I’ve “passed” with flying colours, successfully sworn my allegiance to the US Government, and made the transition of a single letter, from “PCT” to “PCV”. I conquered a lot of initial fears, made a lot of friends (and maybe a few enemies), tried a hell of a lot of new things — and, I believe, successfully navigated The End Of The Honeymoon’s dark waters. A lot of drama has been inevitable. Stick 35 34 33 32 shellshocked USA natives together with the same in HCN trainers, morph everyone involved into 24/7 cultural lab rats, add copious amounts of stress, miscommunication & frustration, simmer for 10 weeks — “drama” is putting it kindly. I contributed to my share, and if anyone who still hates me is reading this, I apologize. Sincerely.

But aside from all that… I’m still here.

And sometimes that’s enough.

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*Language Lesson of the Week:
    ”Dash. v., see: To Dash. Small gift or favour. Can be lighthearted, e.g., “Your sandals are very beautiful! Dash me your shoes!” (note; may actually be a serious request, obrunis take care) or used in a legitimate sense, e.g., most edible market items are expected to come with a dash. Many things are bought in value and not unit amounts, e.g., “10,000 bread” instead of “1 loaf bread”; it’s common to have the seller “dash” a fractional unit amount over the agreed upon value amount. This is where building relationships within a community comes in handy: there may be 10 women selling tomatoes, and each of them sell the same pile of tomatoes for the same 3000 pesowah - but if you visit Auntie Vic instead of Sister Giftie each time you’re making spaghetti? She’s still going to put just 3000gp tomatoes in a bag, but after a while, she’ll start dashing you a little more on top than her neighbors would. And if she doesn’t then you go back to Sister Giftie very contritely, and maybe dash her some of your American-cooked spaghetti by way of apology. The American in me is flabbergasted by the commonality of “free stuff.” The broke Volunteer in me is very happy.

Also, that reminds me:
“Living in Ghana” Tip of the Week:
If you keep reading this blog, and you try to follow any mentions of prices and currency, I’m probably just going to confuse you. A lot of that will be just because I don’t like numbers, but a lot of it is also due to the recent re-denomination of the Ghana Cedi. Until December 2007, one Cedi was worth 10,000 Pesowahs. 10 Cedis, then, equalled 100,000 Pesowahs, and so on and so forth. After December 2007, however, one Cedi now equals 1,000 Pesowahs. Officially, “everyone” has switched over painlessly to the new system; realistically, though, you’re still going to hear both used interchangeably. The exchange rate, incidentally, is very close to 1GHC = 1USD (thought the USD is actually fractionally weaker at the moment, which I find funny). So when I tell you I’m making 6 dollars/day (or 60,000 Ghana Cedis on the old system, get it?)… I’m dead serious. Perspective-altering, isn’t it?

Update, Apologies, and my Site

“What day is it?” A friend asked me this yesterday, in complete seriousness. It took me a fraction of a second too long to reply. “Monday!” For those of you not paying attention, that means it’s Tuesday as I write this now. If I’m lucky it will Tuesday when I post this also — 7 days from now.

Time has a weird way of manifesting itself here. On the one hand, a day can drag on to infinity — but on the other, a week will fly by. My apologies for not keeping up my end of communication; part of it is due to losing track of time, a lot of it was because it’s amazingly difficult to find time (and money!) to get myself to a (functioning) internet cafe. Sorry, all. Thanks in advance for the pile of emails I opened my inbox on today — I’ll work on replying to them offline and try to get back online before September.

This past week I’ve been on “site visit”; while the days are pleasantly long, the week has somehow vanished. I still have a few days left before returning to training, and I’m enjoying every moment. Suffice to say I really look forward to moving here in a few weeks. We swear in on the 19th of August, which gives me over a month before classes start for the term. Plenty of time to get to know my new site.

Oh yes. My site. My school is Asin Manso Secondary School, in the Central Region. The local town is - amazingly enough - Asin Manso. Feel free to google it and send me anything you learn; you’ll probably find out more than I already know fairly quickly. The town itself is a 10-15 minute walk from my school gate, which is not bad at all*. The student body is relatively large for a school receiving a volunteer: around 1600. I will be the 76th faculty member… meanwhile, at least one of my fellow trainees will be the 6th teacher at their school. I can’t imagine how different our experiences are going to be! I live on campus, as do another 20 or so other teachers. I don’t actually have a house or flat of my own; I share a compound house with another teacher. “Compound house” means a collection of rooms all open onto a central courtyard. I have one room, plus I share access to a kitchen, bath, and toilet. No running water but I only carry a bucket 55 steps to the water source (I counted). Electricity is present and fairly constant.

Though I only have one room, I plan on visiting Peace Corps-neighbors often for mental breaks and cooking fiascos. My nearest is less than 10 minutes away, and the kitchen there is somehow* awesome. Cape Coast is only 40 minutes away, so I also plan to visit the “Big City” at least once a month (even if only for banking, post office, etc.).

School is closed for now, so I haven’t met many staff or faculty members yet. The ones I have, though, are incredibly kind and welcoming. Before I arrived I was worried about the possible dynamics that might come with being the newest, youngest, whitest, peace corpsest, etc.-est teacher in such a big school. My department counterparts, housemate, headmaster, co-teachers: all that I have met have immediately accepted me as just another teacher, which has been good.

So that’s all I know about my site for now. Once I swear in and move here for good, my schedule should be less Property of the US Government and more my own. With any luck that will mean more frequent blogging and email writing. Until then: Life is good.

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* Note on Ghanaian English: I typed a few Ghana-English terms in this entry, and almost deleted them afterwards — but decided to leave them in, along with a Fun Cultural Tidbit. There are a lot of small words, phrases, sounds, gestures, etc. that contribute to Ghana-English. Two of the most common are use of the words “at ALL” and “somehow”. “Koraaaa” is the Twi equivelent to “at ALL”, and is used often. Stress, volume, and length of the last sylable extend the emphasis. “Me’n pe se di banku koraaaaaaaaaaaa” - I don’t like to eat Banku AT ALL. (Sorry, fellow Ghanians. Banku doesn’t like me; it’s mutual.) The pronounciation is somehow similar to “a TOLL”… which brings me to the other word, “somehow.” The short explanation is to simply replace any American-English instance of “sort of,” “kind of,” and in some instances “maybe” or “so-so”, with the Ghana-English “somehow”. The long explanation is somehow more nuanced, but I have yet to completely grasp it. Now go, speak somehow Ghana-English, and have no trouble at ALL.