A wicked long (fence) post....

(Made it home from the bush after a successful stick/tree collection for the garden fence.)

One and a half months at post four months in country (sorry my posts are so far behind! By the time this gets posted I will be rounding 8 months in country!) … time truly is just plugging right along. I think about my time here quite a bit. I have made a calendar for the year (when I say made I mean with a ruler and markers, not just plugging in what I’m doing on a certain day. Calendars are oddly hard to come by). There are different milestones in a person’s service such as completing training (check!), making it through site integration and to Kumasi for Reconnect IST (In Service Training is only a few weeks away… nope, just kidding already done now!), other self selected ISTs (I’m hoping to do a couple within this year… yup did one a few weeks ago!), Midservice IST, and so on. It’s usually at this point when I have the ‘holy smokes’ feeling that my time here is going to be over in two shakes of a lambs tail. This then throws me to the next feeling of needing to stay focused and present as much as possible because when I go down the rabbit hole of thinking in this big picture way I get worried that when its all over it will feel like it never happened. Anyways… I’ve got my mug of instant coffee by my side, sitting in my room, using my airplane neck pillow as a bean bag chair (the only chair I own other than the two planks of wood I stacked together on my veranda… not anymore! my folks sent me a Crazy Creek chair! I’m now sitting in style… although I still use the planks of wood on my veranda) and now its time for a blog post!

My Family

My first full day at site was on my 27th birthday (a detail to help me remember someday when my kids ask or when I ask myself). I celebrated by getting my room organized and sharing cookies that my mentor gave to me with Ma Memuna, Afa Adams, and Mariam after finally informing them that it was my birthday around 8:00pm. Ma Memuna, my landlady, is an incredibly hard working farmer who loves her kids and grandkids. Her hands and feet are callused and splitting like all of the other men and women I have met. She can touch hot coals and move around pots that are sitting on an open flame. She can work a full day on the farm and come home to still more work. I don’t believe she has ever missed a day of prayers, done five times per day, everyday. Her wrinkles and missing teeth help share parts of her life. Her voice is laud and bold most of the time, but especially when she is very happy, mad, or on the phone. She is a respected and proactive woman in the community and is the toughest woman I have ever met with the warmest and most inviting smile. She seems to have different smiles for different things. If I am helping with work and have done an unexpectedly good job or if a friend of hers comes to the house and ask about me while I’m doing work her smile feels warm and proud. If she is joking with friends or watching me happily make a fool of myself dancing around the compound her smile is full and comes with big laughs. And when she looks at little Selma, her granddaughter, her smile is gentle and filled with love. Witnessing this combination of toughness and kindness has proved confusing for me at times. Many of the kids in the community fear her and for good reason. She has a particularly heavy hand when it comes to discipline. Beating kids is the most common and accepted practice of punishment usually accompanied by yelling. This has been the absolute hardest thing that I have had to deal with in Ghana. As it is a culturally accepted practice there is little I can do to stop it other than model other styles of teaching and discipline or abruptly removing myself from the area marking my uncomfort. Since the culture of beating also trickles down to kids hitting other kids I try my best to help them find and use their words as opposed to their hands or sticks or anything else that could be used to hit someone. The kids now know they aren’t allowed to hit in front of me, but truly that doesn’t stop them from knocking or smacking each other. I can now better identify what is just joking around and roughhousing and what is not, but goodness know they fool me all the time. In my compound sound travels and I now know the sound of too many types of hitting, beating, lashing. This is an incredibly heavy way to start a blog post, but here it is. I initially wrote a longer piece about this topic, but I feel this captures enough. The thing I must continue to remind myself and what I would like to remind you is that these practices are culturally acceptable. I have seen kids get hit by their parents, guardians, teachers, extended family and then continue to go about their business like it never happened because in fact it is what they were expecting it is what was supposed to happen. I continue to have an internal struggle with this and I hope that struggle doesn’t go away because this is a part of the culture that I don’t want to ever be normalized for me. At the same time, I don’t want it to affect my relationships with the people I am living with, working with, sharing space with, in fact my entire community and from what I have gathered almost everyone in Ghana. That wouldn’t be fair because again as I said its part of the culture. Ok, lets move on.

Mariam, the other person living in my compound, is a young preteen/teen (I’m not quite sure) who is from a neighboring community. I believe she is what is referred to as a working girl. She is not part of Ma Memuna’s family, but there is some kind of agreement with Mariam’s family that she will live with and work for Ma Memuna. To give you a little idea of that relationship, I was sure that Mariam was Ma Memuna’s granddaughter for the longest time as Mariam worked side by side with her, was disciplined by her, and did chores with and/or for her. Mariam is one heck of a hard worker. She is on from dawn ‘til dusk doing any work or chore that needs doing. Farming, sweeping, cooking, washing, gathering water, you name it she does it. She also seems to understand my broken dagbani and English medley of a language and I understand her dagbani, hand gestures, and facial expressions enough for us to communicate fairly well. We are able to have little secrets and jokes and moments together especially during evening prayer when all adults go to the mosque. During this hour or so we have groundnut cracking races (she always wins), we are goofy, we sing, we dance, we do exercises and it gives her one kind of platform or safe space to be a kid for a little while. Sure we have our tough moments when kids will be kids and she tries to find out how far she can push me, but all in all she’s a good egg. It feels like she’s my younger sister, especially knowing that we have both been essentially adopted into a family that isn’t quite our own, but here we are.

As for Afa Adams, he doesn’t live in Ma Memuna’s compound, but I keep calling him my family. The other day I told him that he was my brother from another mother. He got a kick out of that. He has been my guiding star when it comes to learning about culture and he is the guy I will call if I have a problem that needs solving. His moral compass seems pretty darn spot on and goodness knows he lives everyday as best he can in the moment. I am still getting used to this as I try scheduling meetings with him and he will say that he can’t very well tell what tomorrow or even later in the day will bring. These meetings in some capacity always seem to happen, maybe not when I thought they would, but life goes on and we keep rolling with what it brings. Most of the time for Adams life brings humor and music. He loves laughing and it seems like he even enjoys and understands my odd humor. We have a joke that he snores like a small cat and for some reason it still makes us laugh. Adams can often be found walking around listening to music. He loves it. In fact he loves music more than most people I’ve met in my life. Celine Dion, country, Ghanaian hip hop, Beyonce, John Legend, you name it… although he didn’t quite love my folk music… maybe someday. To sum up, Adams is honest, reliable, humble, music loving, funny, and wonderfully kind. How lucky I am to have family like that.

Most of my time during the first days and really couple of weeks at site were spent in the library that the previous volunteer helped to build. Mohammed, one of my counterparts, and I would talk about the town and what kind of projects had been finished, had been started, had been thought about, etc. This man, Mohammed, he is young, smart, unbelievably generous with his time and knowledge, and has one heck of a laugh. Volunteerism is not something that is typically practiced in this area. The community does indeed come together to support one another, but more in a sense of using it as collateral instead of out of the goodness of their hearts (a true community in so many ways… give a little get a little and keep things moving forward). Volunteering, for Mohammed, is part of life. Before farming season, it seems the men in town will collect dust on their clothes only from the breeze blowing by as motos (motorcycles) and motokings (motorcycle front with a mini truck bed in the back) pass as they sit on the side of the road that goes right through town. They talk, play games (it looks like moncala, but way more complex… lots of math), de-shell groundnuts from time to time, and sleep in the shade. This is what they’ve been taught to do, how they’ve been raised. Then there are those who have broken that mold. Mohammed is not the only one; Afa Adams has also spent endless hours, days, time to support his community. He is respected by everyone I have met in the village (youth, elders, men, women). This respect seems to stem from the respect and kindness he shares with others and how he moves about the village doing whatever he can to help lift the community up. There are a few others in town who volunteer to help clean up the village (I’m told every other month or so, but haven’t seen it yet) or support the CHPS compound (Community Health Planning Service) for their bi-weekly clinics, but I have come across very few who embody selfless support as much as these two men. Counterpart extraordinaires indeed.

(Afa Adams above repping the Chicago beanie, gifted to him by the last volunteer. Mohammed and me below at a friend’s wedding)

When I arrived I inherited a bi-weekly math club. I had never taught math in my life… scratch that… I had never taught a core subject in a classroom setting in my life. I have spoken to graduate students in packed lecture halls about adaptive sports. I have run trainings on bike fittings. I have coached sled hockey and wheelchair tennis. I have talked to middle schoolers about kinesthetic learning and played in their gym, but I can’t recall a time that I have stood at a whiteboard and was expected to teach in a true classroom setting. The show must go on though and so I made a lesson plan for two groups of students, one older and one younger. Memories of algebra and PEMDAS came racing back into my brain and finally it was time… nobody showed up for the first class… instead I had about twelve students age 5-14 in the second class… Alright, make it work. I can’t say it went great, but I can say that I’m fairly certain that nobody lost any knowledge after attending and I definitely gained a lot, so I will give it a minor success rating. In Ghana students are prepared to shame others for getting questions incorrect (something I tell them is not acceptable in my class) and are taught to praise others for their success. The praise usually comes in the form of a specific clap… Teacher: “Let us clap for him/her”… clap clap clap-clap-clap clap… In Peace Corps through Grassroots Soccer there have been many more claps or “kilos” that have been introduced. These claps made my first attempt at teaching more fun for everybody. The student gets to choose which clap they would like and the class will serve it right up. Rain claps/Sa claps (Dagbani: sa = rain) are VERY popular. I personally like the champion kilo… clap-clap-clap clap-clap-clap “CHAMPION!” At the start of each class we begin with an energizer. Something goofy, something fun, something to get the body moving. I introduced them to the hokey pokey and they think it’s hilarious… As do I… Since that first class, things got a bit smoother, but fizzled out when Ramadan came around. We’ll see what happens with the math class soon. Mohammed and I have also started planning for a reading club. The process of planning for this new club has been a bit interesting. I find myself thinking about what I wrote in the last blog post, the idea of being forgotten. Through the process of starting the club and picking out books and being asked to develop material I have realized that when I leave it will not last. The one thing that will last is the struggle with decreased literacy in the community. I need to go back to the drawing board with my counterparts and the teachers. The problem is real, the solution will take time, the method needs work, getting it wrong on the first try (second try/third try/etc.) is common, keeping momentum and persevering is challenging. Time to try again!

Inch by Inch Row by Row

(Garden fence finally complete! It’s right outside of the compound where I live.)

One thing that I got going right away upon arrival at site was a garden. I learnt about permagardening during training and was excited to give it a whirl. First step… Get the compost going… I purchased a big green container and rolled into town excited to start gathering my brown, green, and manure material to mix together in this beautiful container that I just had to put some holes in for aeration. The only thing was it took me a long time to build up the guts to actually put holes into the container. Water security is the main challenge in town and here I was ready to poke holes in what the community saw as a water catchment container not as a home for making dirt. I kept putting off poking holes in the container and instead focused on gathering the materials I would need. Trying to explain composting in a language that I know very little of proved quite challenging. The best thing I came up with was saying that I was mixing these different materials to make nice soil for my garden, but even that is more eloquently put than how I was saying it. Rough translation “collecting green leaves, brown leaves, cow poop, and food yuck…… nice soil. Nice vegetables” Some of the kids caught on and would explain to others and then finally I knew it was time to make the holes in the container when one of the adults explained to another adult what I was doing and that I would be putting holes in the bin. Great! All I needed now was a hammer and a nail to make the holes… wrong again… always listen to the locals! They quickly took me aside after hearing me make a racket and seeing me struggle with one hole and taught me the ease of burning a hole in the plastic with a heated piece of metal. Alright the compost is now on its way! At this point I have my garden mapped out and the bulk of my work now is building a fence. I head out into the bush, machete/cutlass in hand, and duct tape on my blisters from digging the elbow deep postholes.

I cut down a few small trees to act as the bones of my fence and branches for the walls. This has been one heck of a process! I’m still plugging away at it and enjoying the manual work quite a bit. I like that my hands are getting tougher and hopefully muscles getting stronger, but I’m not gonna lie I was very happy when a boy, Hafiz, brought a gift of branches for the wall to me the other day. I will consider it a trade (although that was not his intention). He attended a Peace Corps camp recently called the GLOW BRO Camp (Girls Leading Our World and Boys Respecting Others Camp) where he learnt how to make popcorn. On our way back after I picked him up from camp (3 hours from our community… His farthest adventure at age 12) he was able to find some popcorn kernels in the market. His plan was to save some kernels to grow and harvest to start a business and cook the rest for his friends. Well we all know how tasty popcorn is… Now there are no kernels left for the start of his business. Or at least no kernels he is aware of… I too was planning on growing corn for popping. Lets see if he can get that little business going and still learn the importance of not eating all of your start up investment.

(Garden beds complete! I double dug each bed about two feet deep… exhausting, but it felt so good!)

Typical Day

As I start settling in to my life here I have found that I am holding a loose schedule. Tuesday and Thursday mornings CHPS Compound; Tuesday, Thursday, Friday afternoons math class; Saturday or Sunday games at the library; other times during the day work on the garden, go to the library, crack groundnut shells (aka de-shell peanuts), drink ataya with the men, sit and listen to conversations, have conversations, go to market, exercise, watch episodes of Planet Earth/Human Planet/Life, walk around greeting people, read, think about food, etc. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I like to help out at the CHPS compound in the morning. Tuesdays are the baby weighing days and Thursdays are the Antenatal Clinics. The CHPS compound in my village serves, I believe, 7 villages. Women and babies come from all over the surrounding towns for care. During baby weighing I’m usually the one at the scale doing the weighing (which I love) while there is paperwork being done and vaccinations (when available) being given by the staff (1 community health nurse, 2 RNs, 1 helper, and 1 volunteer… usually it’s a mix and match of who is actually there). For the babies the scale that is used is not one you step on, sit on, or lay on (unless you are only a couple of weeks old). You know those swings for babies at the playground? The little ones that surround their bodies and have holes for their legs to hang through?… Well each baby is put in their own cloth version of that and hung on a scale that is attached to the beam of the roof.

Some babies don’t mind and just sit there looking adorable as they look up at you or mom from their cloth swing. Others are terrified and I’ll tell you what, its not easy getting the accurate weight of a baby flailing and thrashing about. Sometimes its not the fact that they are hanging in mid air that makes them scared, but instead it’s me. For many of these kiddos I’m the first white person they’ve ever seen and although I like to think that I’m a gentle person who shouldn’t provoke fear in anyone (unless in sporting competition… watch out dodgeballers! I’m comin back for you!) I look different and that gets them wailing. For some it’s like an on-off switch. Mom turns them towards me and they start crying, mom turns them away and they stop. Sometimes the moms will try a ‘flooding technique’ and try to hand me the crying child, but that never seems to help. The moms get a bit of a kick out of it though. I do indeed really enjoy going to the baby weighing days. It’s been fun starting to get to know the moms and the little ones even through their tears. The Antenatal Clinic on the other hand has fewer tears. In fact no tears would be more accurate. The women come for pregnancy tests, vitamins, Malaria and HIV testing, malaria medication, and a general checkup (weight, height, BP, Hb, physical exam, etc.). My typical job is to do paperwork or make pill packets. Counting out the pills makes me feel like I’m preparing for a career as a pharmacist. Recently I have also been given the job of doing the rapid malaria and HIV tests and the Hb analysis. This includes pricking the woman’s finger and getting a tiny bit of blood to run each test. When I was given this task, I asked for gloves. This seemed to be second nature for me as a past EMT and WFR. If it’s warm, liquid, or sticky and not yours, don’t touch it. One of the staff went into a room to grab me some gloves. Wearing gloves for such a minor encounter with blood doesn’t seem to be something that is practiced at our CHPS compound and granted when doing these tests you probably wont touch the person’s blood, but there’s always a chance. Now I’m curious what it’s like in other areas, villages, regions. What does it take for someone to put the gloves on? I should ask our nurses. Anyways I feel like this is a good time to mention the setup of the clinic.

The CHPS compound is pretty darn small. It’s a cement structure that has cracks in the walls and chunks starting to fall off. There are three rooms on the left for staff to live in and three rooms on the right for patients and paperwork. The roof comes over part of the courtyard on both sides and there is a strip down the middle that is not covered. The doors into the courtyard stay open all day and welcome in not only the patients, but also some of the goats and chickens who need shade or a drink of water. The animals are welcome here. The baby weighing and antenatal clinics happen on the right side of the courtyard underneath the roof. There are benches for the women to sit on and a table where people come when it is their turn for services. The only time during the antenatal clinic when women go into a private room is during their physical exam when their belly is measured and the nurse listens to their baby’s heartbeat. With this said everything else is done in the open for all other women to hear. HIPPA is essentially non-existent. If a baby is underweight, everyone will know. If a pregnant woman has lost weight, everyone will know. If someone has malaria, everyone will know. It goes against everything I’ve been taught as a health provider, but it is how things are done here. I briefly mentioned community and shaming earlier in this post and this essentially falls under those categories. Although the information is personal it is the friends who will check in on the mother and although shaming is harsh it is the tactic that the community has been taught to respond to. One of the main diagnosis that is in fact kept private is HIV. If someone is diagnosed they will be told and counseled in private because of the very real stigma that is attached to the virus. HIV education is lacking throughout Ghana, which causes a decreased understanding of the virus, how it is and is not transmitted, and what life is like or can be like for someone living with HIV. Although there is not a lot of education on the subject there is still more here than in other countries. In fact the number of people living with HIV in my district is very low. It seems like the job of education now is to keep these numbers low, learn how to protect yourself from transmitting the virus, decrease stigma, and learn how to positively support those living with HIV.

Sa Kana

The dry season/hot season is HOT. I know this is spelt out in the name of the season, but it’s a bit different knowing the name and actually being engulfed in it. In the last blog post I wrote a little bit about what it was like coming into site for the first time and experiencing the heat and the dryness that captures the land in the North of Ghana for a few months out of the year. With that said I wont go into too much detail about it all. I will remind you though of the red dust and the hot wind, of the emaciated cows and barren landscape, of the occupied spaces under the shade of trees when the sun is high and resting is all your body wants to do, and finally of the importance of water and the lack of life without it. This lack of life is seen both in the speed of human action and movement and the lack of green everywhere you look. There are some green leaves that hold strong on a couple of plants, which pleasantly break up the landscape of dust, rock, scrub brush, and heat hibernating trees, but still me oh my is it a challenging time of year. The earth is parched and the people are running on the bare minimum when it comes to hydration. There is a borehole in the community, which has four collection points scattered throughout town and serves the full 1,600ish population. There are some parts of the dry season when compounds must take turns accessing water. One day on, one day off… so when the first big rain comes to break the drought I’m sure you can start to imagine what that’s like, but I will help with some details… It was nighttime. Asleep under my bed net on my cot in the corner of my room I woke from the winds rattling my rooftop. These winds have scared me in the past. Well terrified me would be more accurate, to the point of hugging my knees in and rocking myself back and forth trying to find some comfort in uncomfortably unfamiliar times (that only happened once, but that’s one more time then I ever expected I would feel so fearful from wind). There have been moments that I felt like the roof might just fly away, which during a particularly harsh wind actually happened. A piece of the grass roof on one of our rooms got ripped right off and down the road the wind, working a bit harder, stole part of a zinc roof. With all of this said, this night wasn’t that kind of windy night, something was different, it wasn’t just wind that was waking me it was pip pip pip of raindrops on the metal above my head. Quickly that pip pip turned into a noise to drown out all other noises. Sa kana. The rains had come. Tank top and athletic short pajamas on I dashed for the door and popped out onto my veranda. The wind hit me and brought along the spray of cool rain coming down around the compound. I stopped and watched. Just for a moment trying to take everything in. The spray in the breeze, the fat drops pelting down outside, the darkness, and the urgency. I was the last one out. Ma Memuna and Mariam were already frantically gathering every vessel and big bowl that water could be collected in, lining them up under the concentrated rain runoff from the roof. Although I say frantically it looked like their arms, bodies, feet, hands, and beings knew exactly where to go, working around each other in silence, a choreographed dance of collection. After I took this short pause, absorbing this moment, I joined in. I zipped back into my room, grabbed my bathing bucket and water basin, and ran back outside. One step past the cover of my veranda and I was soaked. Bucket and basin now in place I helped as best I could with lining up the other water catchment containers that were put out. The energy was exciting and it became clearer than ever before how important water is. I know this sounds silly because of course I know how important water is. We need it to live. Heck we are made up of about 60% water, but it is one thing to think of water in the sense of ‘I know my body needs this and gosh I should really be drinking more’ and then experiencing the urgency behind ‘there is not enough water in town for everyone to be able to have access to safe water everyday for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, clothes, yourself, and certainly none to be wasted on hand washing’. Knowing the importance of water based on need as opposed to based on knowledge is very different. After months of feeling the pangs of the importance of water, the moment when it finally arrives brings an energy that is electrifying, palpable, intense, exciting, like when you’ve been underwater long enough that you have run out of air and you still stay down for an extra second and then come up for a breath. Your heart beats faster and the feeling of breathing is overwhelmingly good. This rain, this sa, this was overwhelmingly good. In the days following, the color green skipped back into my pupils and as the rainy season carried on I watched it bring life right along with it.

Zuha

There are a few new activities taking place in town now that the rains have come. One of these activities is called zuha, which is the process of re-flooring a compound. This is a job done by women in the community. It starts early in the morning with a woman going around with a bell similar to a cowbell that she strikes in a melodic way informing women that there will be a zuha that day. The first round of woman create a concoction of water, dirt, cow manure, and maybe other things, which turns into a wet clay-like substance. This is laid down on the broken up dirt compound floor. Once this goes down a group of women use a wooden floor beater called a sampani, made from a strong tree at the junction where the trunk meets a branch. The whole piece is whittled down. The trunk side stays cylindrical for holding and the branch side about as long as my forearm is flat on the bottom and rounded on top. The flat side of the sampani is used to smack the ground to flatten the surface.

Once the cow manure mixture is sufficiently spread out and smacked down a small bit of powdered cement gets dusted onto the surface. Alrighty, here’s where it gets fun! Women from all over the community start flooding in, sampanis in hand, and prepared to get messy. Accompanying the women is one man and one boy. The man has a drum that he sets up out of the way and the boy has the same kind of bell that the woman had been hitting to inform the community of the zuha that morning. When the drumming begins all women raise their sampanis and crack them down against the ground in unison with the flat surface of the sampani making a loud slapping noise as it meets the wet floor.

Again and again the sampanis come crashing down with the unified strength of the strongest women I know. The noise creates the steady bass tone for the drum and bell. We move as a group slowly inching our way from one side of the compound to the other. The women sing, yip, call out with guttural cheers, and dance along to the music of our work. Our bare feet, shins, capris, skirts, shirts, faces, arms, everywhere quickly become drenched in sweat and splattered with cement and the cow manure concoction. For me, well, the dirtier the better. I was having a blast! If you know me, you know I like teamwork; this was just that, teamwork surrounded by strong women. Such incredibly strong women.

The Ataya Base Men

There is a group of men that I typically sit with at a place called “the station” or “ataya base”. This spot is on the side of the road in town right next to our one container store that has some cooking oil, crackers, cookies, candies, light bulbs, sodas, batteries, tomato paste, cold water, cigarettes, and soap. The store is run by Afa Abukari who is the president of the disability commission for our district. He always finds time to push my dagbani practice to the next level. If I enter or sometimes even pass by his shop I better be prepared for a lesson. I’d say that’s a good friend. The group of men and I sit out on benches and the men patiently help me with my dagbani and have conversations about current events, farming, rain, and flocks of birds that might disturb their crops. If someone can afford the ingredients, then we take ataya (Ghanaian English: take = eat or drink). Ataya is green tea made with a lot of sugar in a tiny teapot, heated on a tiny coal pot, and taken with tiny vigorous sips, from tiny cups the size of shot glasses. I’m not sure why they sip so intensely only to take in tiny amounts of tea at a time. Maybe these loud slurps help cool it down because man does it get served hot! I love this ataya tradition mainly because I think its kind of funny seeing so many big strong men dealing with so many small things, but in all seriousness I enjoy that it is communal and brings people together to share a drink and conversation and the fact that it only happens when someone can afford it. With money so tight it makes it quite special knowing that someone chooses to use the small bit of extra they have to share with friends.

Ramadan... Maybe Next Year

Eyes to the evening sky and the small fingernail sliver of a moon marked the start of Ramadan. Living in a Muslim community means that everyone except for a few exempt groups (young children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, elderly folks, and a few others) take part in a month of fasting during the day. This means morning meals must be completed by 4am, no food or drink during the day, then around 6:15ish depending on the sunset fast is broken. The first day, I woke up, took my morning coco (corn porridge) at 4am with Ma Memuna, Mariam, and Ma Memuna’s daughter Barkisu, and promptly went back to sleep. Around 6:30 or 7:00 I woke back up and went about my daily business already feeling a bit hungry. Mind you, water is also included in the fast. I went to farm that day to survey Mohammed’s groundnut fields. As we were coming back I started feeling a bit light headed. I took some water… safety first. I made it back home around noon and decided the best thing to do to pass some time was to take a nap. A couple hours went by. I woke up and was so hungry! I watched a movie. 4pm rolled around and I took a few steps out of my room. I felt awful, hungry, a bit out of it, yet still determined. I must have looked terrible. Ma Memuna took one look at me and questioned me about eating lunch. I tried telling her I was fasting. Well… I’ll tell you what… She was not pleased. She walked over with fast heavy steps to a corner of the compound where she grabbed the container I ate my breakfast from. The container is about the size of a tall, plastic, cylindrical takeout container, the kind that you get soup in. She then started talking loudly in dagbani to the people around me as she pointed to the coco that remained in the container. I am almost never able to finish all of the food she gives me and that morning was no exception. There was about 1/3rd of the coco remaining, which the kids usually eat. Ma Memuna, after yelling a bunch and throwing her hands in the air sporadically trying to get me to eat the rest of the coco, finally wore me down. I gave up trying to explain myself and took the cold coco and started drinking. She not only wanted me to finish that, she had Mariam quickly make a whole other batch of a different kind of corn coco for me to eat. As much as I felt defeated with only two hours left until day one of Ramadan was to wrap up my body said ‘thank you for feeding me’ and more than appreciated each bite… well, that is, until I was full, which didn’t take long, but Ma Memuna had more in store for me. I was then given rice balls and groundnut soup and a couple hours later was given TZ and more soup. There was to be no more fasting for me this Ramadan. Maybe next year I’ll get a full day in. As for everyone else, it seems like the community had a good Ramadan indeed. Every day when my group of men broke fast they each ate a dried date, which is the traditional food to brake fast with. A little later on Afa Mutaru (Ma Memuna’s son-in-law, a big man with a deep wholesome laugh who reminds me of a dad, not really my dad or my step dad, but just a dad) would share maha drizzled with honey (maha is essentially a deep fried corn flower ball, which is a bit crispy on the outside when served fresh and with the honey on top it becomes dangerously tasty). So, for me, Ramadan became the time of year of delicious evening snacks and pleasant times with friends. Sometimes I would buy the dried dates to give to my group of men and to Ma Memuna, Mariam, Barkisu, and Ma Memuna’s other daughter Sanatu. On the final day of Ramadan, as the sun went down, there were two appointed men making their way throughout the community firing traditional celebratory muskets. Each time one was fired it came as a surprise. The men were traveling separately and covering a lot of ground in short spurts of time. It almost seemed like they were sprinting from place to place as the loud bangs and clouds of smoke were scattered about town. The next day was a celebration of the new year called Eid al-Fitr. Lots of rice was cooked and shared, children roamed saying “Barka da sallah” which is a greeting on the Sallah day and a time when children will get small change from neighbors, and the whole community went to the central mosque for prayers. What a month! I’m already looking forward to next year.

Acceptance

There have been a few instances since I arrived that have stood out as moments of acceptance, integration, and relationship development. One in particular involves the smell of a warm bakery. One night Ma Memuna was heading out late at night to go to the mill and I asked her if I could come. At first she said no and then after I persisted with a few more asks she finally told me to come. I felt like a puppy right at her heels as we walked the fifty feet or so to the mill. The mill is small, loud, and hot. There is a man who operates the machine and women working to collect the ground cornflower. In big metal bowls the flower is taken outside to a large 10x10ish smooth slab. We take our shoes off, step onto the slab, and by the light of the moon we get to work. The flower is dumped out and we start running our hands through it, spreading the piping hot cornflower over the cool slab. I have to move quickly because the flower is so incredibly hot that my hands can’t touch it for long. I am working side by side with Ma Memuna and three of her friends. They are speaking dagbani and I am listening while intently moving the flower around to help it cool off. My nose was filled with the smell of a warm bakery. The smell seemed to over take my body and it sent me day dreaming of sitting in a bakery surrounded by fresh scones and pastries, bagels right out of the oven, and warm sweet bread. Oh how I wanted to be there. I put my dreams on hold when I heard my name. Laamihi. We had been working for a little while and I like to think I might have been doing something right because Ma Memuna decided to officially introduce me to her friends. I had been living with Ma Memuna for over two month and she hadn’t truly introduced me to anyone until now. It felt like she was proud of me and finally felt good about having us connected in the community. I felt accepted by her in that moment and boy did it feel nice. As we continued to move piles of cornflower around I felt happy and a part of Ma Memuna’s team of women and although I was dreaming of bakeries at home there is truly no place I would have rather been.