April 27, 2011
Long time since the last post, I know. I’ve been really busy in the village, Katie Mae and Sheldon visited and I just haven’t been in the mood to write. Sooooo…
The batik group is in full swing. We’ve stamped about 60 yards of fabric and I went and picked up supplies for 48 more yards last week. Making batik is expensive; it is not very profitable if you can’t buy in large bulk, but we’re working on it and we’re all learning so… This group is full of young women and there’s only 1 or 2 than are actually serious about the batik, the rest just use it for a social gathering, but that’s ok…it’s a break in their day to day of hauling water, hunting firewood, cooking, and taking care of the children. So if it allows the women to get away from the kids and husbands for a day, it’s serving its purpose all the same.
There is a young man in the village (Peter) who has recently graduated from batik and tailoring school. I gave him one of my hobo bags to copy and he’s using our batik and lining it with flour sacks. He should have these done for me this week. My hope is that he will be able to produce these since you can make more money selling products that just cloth. So if I pay him 1 cedi 50 pesawa a bag, and my 1 yard of fabric costs 4 cedi 50 pesawa and the flour sack costs 50 pesawa, I can sell the bag for 10 cedis and make 3 cedi 50 pesawa off that one yard instead of 30 pesawa, then I’ll be able to generate more money for the batik group. I’ll have to find places to sell them in HoHoe since the lady a Wli makes her own batik and bags….so we’ll see. I’m trying to link the different groups in the village so they can support each other’s small businesses and really take advantage of our tourism (batik group sells batik to women’s group and Peter uses our batik to make purses….everyone is making small money off it). I have put “Likpe Todome Products" flyers in the visitor’s center so that we are advertised to the tourists...we’ve already made a couple sales from it.
I’m currently getting prices to have new brochures printed for the TMT. Since I got my new SLR camera, I want to take some professional pics and redesign our brochures so I can distribute them around the tourist sites in Ghana. I’m still trying to get a TMT meeting to discuss the missing 500 cedis…hopefully tonight. Today I’m gonna write some proposals requesting funds (500 cedis) for brochures and 2 signboards (800 cedis) to advertise our site. I’ll send the proposals to Ghana Tourism Board, the District Assembly, and the communication companies: Vodafone, Tigo, and MTN. We’ll see if anything comes of it. We wouldn’t have to request the funds if 500 cedis hadn’t been stolen from the TMT…but this is Ghana and chopping of money is done at all levels here…which is why millions of dollars of foreign aid never make to villages like mine…ministers need new Mercedes for God’s sake!!
The women’s group is chugging along. I need to come up with some new product ideas that they can make. I really wanna try to get a soap workshop together…I think that would be an awesome project for us…especially for the ones who are shitty sewers.
Next subject…Katie Mae and Sheldon were here for 2 weeks: we traveled to the coast and went to the Cape Coast Castle where millions of Africans were shipped to the new world in the slave trade. We’ve all read about it, seen movies about it, but to actually see the tiny rooms that hundreds of stolen humans were stored in until they could be shipped…shocking and disheartening. Humans…we suck! How can people treat other people this way? How can a king sell his people to other people for tobacco and fire arms? How can anyone feel that they can buy and sell other humans for a personal gain? It’s disgusting…and yet we still do it. Sex trafficking and forced labor are alive and well all over the world. There is still genocide and mass raping all over the world. These great injustices are happening right now, and most of us have no idea about it or just shut our eyes and ears to it. What else can we do? I don’t have the answer…and being here has made realize just how naïve my thoughts of development and change really are…yes one person can make a difference, but human beings are just shitty creatures that will continue to be shitty until the end of time…
Sorry for the diatribe, back to the fun stuff. We traveled around and then came back to the village. The chief and elders poured libations and gave a brief history of our community to KM and Sheldon. The school kids put on cultural drumming and dancing for us and we danced for them (we had this whole plan of playing a bunch of American music and doing a bunch of different dances, but my ipod speakers wouldn’t play the music loud enough, so we ended up doing the electric slide to the beat of the drums…the villagers enjoyed it, but it would have been so much better if we could have busted out some Michael Franti to shake it to!) It was nice to have “my people” see my life here. It was a brief glimpse of just the surface stuff, but it was special all the same. It made me miss my life in America even more. It made me realize how I’ve changed in the last 11 months; both good and bad. It was enlightening to see Ghana through the eyes of visitors…for I’m not a visitor…I’m not a native, I’m somewhere in between. I’ve been here long enough that life is mundane and Ghana has lost its mystic charm; like when you go to visit a friend and see the beautiful ocean out their window and think how that if you lived there you’d go swimming in the sea everyday and just take long walks on the beach to bring you peace…but your friend who lives there spends their time doing laundry and grocery shopping just like you do at home. I’ve been here long enough that it’s lost its exoticness, its simple charm…now I just get pissed off at people yevuing me all the time. It was hard to see; hard to see that I don’t greet people with smiles anymore because if I appear too friendly I will be promptly fucked with and I don’t have patience for it anymore. It was hard to see. It was even harder to see the look of disgust? surprise? disappointment? in my friends’ eyes when they saw me act like this. I had that same look when I first came to country and saw the interactions between Ghanaians and current PCV’s. It’s left me in a funk that I’m still trying to sort myself out of.
I’ve been here for almost one year…I can’t believe it! We are getting ready for the new group of volunteers to come. They ask us to write a welcome letter to them; they also spell out that we need to keep it upbeat and not write our letter on a day that’s been particularly hard…proof in the pudding that being a PCV has just as many downs as ups. And as I sat and wrote my letter last night, I realize how much I love this place…this crazy, exhausting, infuriating, yet kind, interesting, heart-warming place. When you talk to PCV’s we sound crazy. WE HATE IT, WE LOVE IT, WE HATE IT, WE LOVE IT…all in one day. I was talking with a friend last week about serving here and how I’m really disappointed in my lack of language skills and therefore my lack of communication and deep relationships with the villagers. I wanted to make Ghana my home and have a patchwork family just like I’ve developed in the different places that I’ve lived before. He started laughing and said he treats his time here as a job. He is here to work for 2 years to better the lives of his villagers…he’s not here to make friends and this is definitely not his home. We all have different goals and desires for our PC experience; none are right and none are wrong. It’s just funny. My friend Amy gave me a small piece of advice that I go back to a lot here, “Be kind to yourself.” It’s not easy to do here as a volunteer.
Next….ITALY. After some humongous bullshit and an extra $1000 I officially have my new ticket to Italy and will be leaving May 20th for 2 weeks with my good buddy Leila…and wine and cheese!! I’m hoping a 2 week leave from Ghana will help me get my head back in the game and come back rejuvenated and inspired for the last year (last year…crazy!!!) of my service. I’ve also started on this idea of when I close my service I will housesit for a friend in England for a week and then we will all go to Ireland for my 30th birthday…I’m thinking that sounds fantastic. We’ll see how everything plays out.
Easter is a big deal here in Ghana. So my friend Chris came to stay with me because my village hikes to our mountain on Easter Monday and we play games and have a picnic and stuff. There was also a tourist who came Saturday, but all the guest rooms were full because of a wedding in the next village, so she stayed with us. I had a full house on Easter Morning…it was nice! We went to church for 3 hours on Sunday, did our dancing with the villagers and ate fufu with my supervisor’s family. Monday morning we cooked spaghetti for the family (including the jankity local beef that stunk so bad we didn’t eat it, but cooked it for them…it made my pot stink!!!) and the youth were supposed to have a program at 8:30 am, and then we all would climb that mountain around 11. Well the youth program didn’t start until 11:30 and lasted until 3. No one went to the mountain. The Togolese were on the mountain waiting for us and no one went…I was really disappointed. I stayed in the village for Easter because Easter Monday was supposed to be so much fun and I wanted to share that with the village…but no go. I could have been paragliding off a mountain in the Eastern region…which I will be doing next year…which means I will never get to spend Easter Monday on the mountain with the villagers…I was less than happy.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon playing jacks with Rose using rocks…these are the things that make me love Ghana…well that and the fufu and the palm wine :)
So here’s my post. I apologize for the long absence, but I’ve been in funk and don’t want to write and sound all depressed…I’m still very happy here and wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else right now (except maybe Italy for an extra week or so :) ). Hope you guys are doing well. Happy Easter!
Love,
j
