Adventures of a Ninja (part 2)

Hunting for a Dinosaur

Tired after climbing coconut trees

Silly ninjas, not the best place to buy your soda

Ninja sleeps it off after a night on the town. Other ninja is not amused

Ninjas go to nursery school

Adventures of a Ninja (Part 1)

I get knocked down and I get up again

The line comes from a song by Chumba wumba called, oddly, thub-thumping. I’ve never understood the title; its airy chorus brags “pissing the night away” and lists beverages more likely to leave me vomiting the night away.

This is not that

This is the memory of a little boy riding on top of bags of charcoal to the hospital with his mother regularly; this is him hugging me; this is him following me down a path, quietly, until I notice and send him home. They’re well-worn memories; I try not to touch them too much for fear the contact will wear them away. This is his mother crying over the photo of him I gave her, how helpless I feel  next to her grief.

And this is the other little boy, running at me down bush paths, on a collision course with my kneecaps. It’s me, stepping aside and him forgiving me every time for not hugging him and holding any part of me-a finger, my purse strap-that he can reach. It’s me spending one night away and coming back to hear he has died. It’s going for a run and being bent in half by my grief, sobbing into a sweaty t-shirt just beyond where anyone can see me. It’s knowing that I never have a chance to love that little boy the way he deserved to be loved. I get knocked down…

…And I get up again. Today I got a ride to the taxi stand in Town and, before I got out, a man handed me 80 Ghana cedis. I don’t know why, I tried to demur but he was insistent. He didn’t ask for anything in return-not even my number. This morning a woman I’ve met twice told me her family would welcome me in to their home when I go to Kumasi later this week, and then sent me phone credit to offset the cost of me texting her.

I am knocked down by these deaths. I am knocked down by the level of grief I feel, the grief that I see. Yet every time I am knocked down I am picked back up again. I can’t take credit for it; it’s the generosity, the kindness, the love that comes from the people around me. This is how Ghana, how peace corps, how reality can knock me down, and this is how Ghana, how peace corps, how love can pick me up again.

Hamidu 2011- Aug 2, 2014

 Ibrahem: 2012-July 20, 2014

Kayayo

Northern Ghana was not developed when slave traders entered the country two centuries ago. By dint of their being on the coast, Accra, Tacoradi, and Cape Coast were points where Europe, and later America, came to build and fill ships with human cargo. According to “History of Africa”, the north was purposefully not developed by the British in order to ensure a constant stream of cheap labor when the farmers of the north suffered their dry season and moved south for work.

It has been over fifty years since Ghana gained her independence. It experienced the typical African growing pains; a harsh dictator, the bloody overthrowing, an economic descent into poverty, and has emerged into the twenty first century as a country that has experienced three elections without upset. The former Gold Coast has become the Gold Standard by which other African countries are weighed; a peaceful, development minded country whose south boasts hotels comfortable by western standards, a Shop Rite shopping center, and that bastion of development; obesity.

Once you pass through Kumasi, known through the country as being a site of robbery and the very worst in third world transportation, the country is unrecognizable. The north that the British are charged with never developing (but which most people have chosen to overlook) has one major paved road that bisects the regional capital, Tamale. The extreme poverty of the north is unique mostly for how widespread it is. It is not a few people in the north who are poor; it is a few people in the north who are not.

Because of this, many people in the north follow their need for income to the south. During dry season, the typical northern village loses a large chunk of their young women to work in the south, and you can hear the regional dialect Dagbani spoken frequently in Accra and Kumasi.

The disparity of wealth coupled with the fluctuations in the value of the cedi note combine to mean that goods are being sold for very low prices, and the relative wealth of the south remains contained. The young porters need housing, and many find it in refuse walled huts in what is known as “Soddom and Gamorah” in Accra. Those who cannot afford those prices can sleep on the street, and those who rightly fear for their safety on the street can find an older man, one with a home nearby, and accept his offer of a room in return for compliant sex. There is no shortage of these individuals.

Young women stencil their names on their arms with staining black ink so that, if they die in the south, their bodies will be returned to their families. Those that survive wear these marks into their adulthood with something like pride.  Those that survive frequently come home with new babies, with HIV or AIDS, with loss from malaria.

This is important because Ghana also leads the developing world in their low rate of HIV/AIDS, a trend that will not persist should the trend termed Kayayo (a Niger word meaning head porter) persist. What impacts one person has the power to impact us all. The success of Ghana gives hope to many African nations still in the adolescent process of Becoming, and its challenges reach farther than its own borders.

Monkeys

Edmond is small and wrinkled, but I am not fooled; I've seen the strength in wizened African men. Leading me easily through the jungle, I see my gauge of his strength is correct. My breath comes quickly, and I mop my damp brow with my damp handkerchief, while he tells an impeccable remembered history of the sanctuary. In 1827, he says, a fetish was spotted at the river, with four monkeys guarding it; two black and white, and two mona. It was a hunter that happened upon the fetish, and his presence initially scared away the naturally small monkeys. The hunter took the fetish home. Later the monkeys came to his house. They were not disruptive; they simply kept watch over the small, carved fetish. A priest was found, an he explained that the fetish was the child of the monkeys. The villagers could either keep it, and thus adopt the monkeys, or return it to the jungle and not be bothered by them again. They kept the fetish, and with it, made a vow not to kill anything in the jungle they lived in, regardless of whether the creature was monkey or snake, zebra or rat. As he finished the story, the branches began to shake. Water droplets whipped off of leaves and rained onto us. I am nearly certain one threw a stick at me. It was small, so I interpreted the gesture playfully. We bought bananas and fed them. The first few bananas I held too loosely, and rambunctious monkeys pulled them easily from my hand, to eat them a few feet away. Edmond showed me how to hold them tighter, and the next few monkeys carefully peeled back my fingers to get to the sweet fruit. One, distracted, sat holding my finger while he munched on the banana. His hands were leathery-soft. We ended with a visit to the monkey cemetery, where both monkeys and priests were laid to rest. Next to a wooden sign stating “young male Colobo. Buried 14-3-81” was another sign for a woman who had been the monkeys intermediary. The sign says she died at one hundred and twenty years old. Edmond whispers to me that she’d been a virgin, and had brought messages from the monkeys to the community. No one had replaced her since her death, he said. Shaking his head with disappointment, he explained “these days, it is hard to find a grown virgin”

Monastery

I am greeted by Brother Patrick when I enter. He is sitting on a low stool in a room in the shade, surrounded by bottled wines and jams. I ask how the avodado wine is. “I hope it is good” he says “I make it”. He leads me indoors and offers me coffee. I accept, not because I truly even want coffee, but because it is real coffee, not instant. Sitting in a room, generously called the library, I can see out into a garden. Flowering bushes grace the edges, and careful palm fronds betray it as a nursing garden. Somehow, that fits well here.

The brothers are quiet. They aren’t simply not voluble; their very presence draws some quiet within me. Their voices are even, measured. Their footfall is light. The breeze whispers as well, and a lone bee hushes around the edges of the room. The books are not plenty, but they are immediately impressive. Every encyclopedia brittanica is here, and books from “the Vision of God” to “100 Flowers”. Sipping my coffee and listening to the clock pass seconds by, I am aware that, in another life, I could be very happy here.

I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees

I found a beautiful tree in my community. Instead of flowering, it makes these brightly colored puff balls. It's so amazing. It also is more than a little reminiscent of Dr Suess...did he spend time in Ghana? The kids like to eat the puff balls, but I have yet to try it. They just look weird. Behind me in the picture you can see a bunch of them still flowering-with the dry bush as a nice counterpoint.

A Weird Success

A huge part of being in Ghana has been learning lessons about myself and working to improve the way I work in the world. A big part of that is how I develop and maintain relationships, and what I expect to receive as return in my relationships.
Recently, a good friend of mine, Zeinab, came to me crying. She said that the headmistress at her school wouldn't let her take her BECE. I asked her why, but Zeinab said that the head just didn't like her. She said that it was possible for her to take the test at another school, but she didn't know how to get signed up. "Please come with me" she said, and because she's my closest friend in the village, I said yes.
We first went to the closest JHS to our village. We begged a ride on the main road, and alighted in Diare, at JHS A. It's at the southern tip of the town. We walked towards the school for only a minute before a young man, a teacher, joined us. He said we would have better luck at JHS B. We thanked him, and turned our feet that direction.
JHS B is at the northern tip of Diare. We tried to beg a ride, but the street was oddly empty at that time of morning, so we walked all the way through the village to the very northern point.
Waiting for the head there was easy, and we enjoyed a ball of banku. Or rather, I did. Poor Zeinab refused to even sit down. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick and one foot tapped a rhythm on the ground. She was a bundle of nerves. When the head arrived, I met with him in his office and explained the predicament. I was absolutely confident that he would sign up Zeinab for the test. Why not? She is a very smart girl.
But he told me he'd already sent in the list of students taking the test to GES. He thanked me for my time. He indicated the room full of students at old computers and told me he needed to start his lesson. I understood Zeinab's nervous tics.
She and I entered a truck heading south, and she ignored my attempts at conversation. They were very weak attempts. We sat and listened to the driver and mate speak rapid French and I wondered what it would be like to fail Zeinab. I wondered if she would cry.
We alighted in Pong Tamale, a town a bit south from our town, Tunayili. The first JHS was set back from the road only about half a mile, and we walked it with purpose. The round of greeting seemed to take forever, but finally we were able to talk to the headmaster. Sorry, he said almost immediately, I have already turned in my student list to GES. But try the other JHS, maybe they haven't.
At this point I couldn't even make eye contact with Zeinab. It didn't change my life if she didn't take this test, but it changed hers. She is seventeen and form three, and so, if everything went perfectly, she would take the test, score well, be accepted into an SHS, graduate from that, take the next important test, score well, and become...I don't know. A teacher? Sometimes she said she wanted to be a nurse. If she didn't take the test, she could anticipate getting married, probably to a local farmer, having children (lots and lots of children, the village women generally want ten) and then living the rest of her life walking the long hot stretch of land between her house and her farm. So even though this is where I would have given up if it was any other day, she and I walked to the other school.
It was much further from the road than the first had been, and it was forty sweaty and tired minutes before we reached it. A pleasant man named Alex-from-Accra invited us to sit in his chair under his tree while he tried phoning the head.
Unfortunately, the head was away. Alex-from-Accra told me we could either come back the next day (my shirt was stuck to my body, my legs jellied from walking) or we could try another school. Both options seemed bleak. But Alex-from-Accra informed me that he was good friends with the Nabogu head, and that if we went there and dropped his name, we would certainly be allowed to take the test. Pretending hope I didn't feel, Zeinab and I started back down the road.
We caught a ride in the back of a taxi to Nabogu, which is actually closer to my village than Pong Tamale is. From the boot, I jokingly asked a woman if I was invited to her take away containers. I must have looked pathetic, because she handed me a container over my protests and insisted we eat it.
In Nabogu, the head was away. His assistant was called from his home, though, and Elvis and I had a long conversation about Zeinab and what was best for her. Finally, wonderfully, Elvis agreed to sign Zeinab up to take the test with the Nabogu school. Elated and exhausted, she and I sat outside the school and ate rice from the take away container while the students stared.
Days went by, and one morning I was out talking with Amina, one of Zeinab's close friends. Amina told me that Zeinab had been heartbroken when she failed the test. What test, I asked. The pre-BECE test that the headmistress at her school had given her. She'd refused to sign up anyone who didn't pass the pre test, saying it was just a waste of their money.
So Zeinab had lied to me.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this. What I kept coming back to was that day that we spent around five hours walking and greeting and asking for favors from people we didn't know. I didn't just help Zeinab because I care about Zeinab, or even because I think she'd be a great teacher (nurse...?). I did it because I have the power to help people here, and when I use it, when I do things that wouldn't get accomplished without my presence, I feel really good. So that, to me, is a success. No matter what Zeinab scores on her test (or whether she never tells me she failed the pre-BECE exam).