Girl Goes Ghana

If you showed up in Ghana with no knowledge of the culture and accidentally walked into a funeral, I imagine you might get the impression you had walked into a particularly raucous party. People drinking, dancing, singing, and hanging out? Seems like a good time. Funerals in Ghana are different than a typical American funeral in many ways. They typically do not take place until several months after the death, in order to give the family time to raise money and get organized. In the meantime, the body sits in the morgue. When the big day arrives, pretty much everyone who has ever known the deceased arrives. The family of the deceased will often post flyers and even billboards around town announcing the death and giving information about the funeral. So when my community has a funeral, our population booms from a couple hundred people to somewhere around a thousand or so. A thousand people I don't know roll into town, dressed in the traditional Ghanaian funeral colors of black a...

One of the things that has been hardest for me to get used to in Ghana is my utter lack of privacy compared to what I was used to at home. One of the weirdest ways that this lack of privacy manifests itself? People dig through my trash. There is no garbage man in Ghana who comes around weekly to collect waste. In my community, there aren't even garbage cans. A few people burn their trash, but most (including me) throw their garbage into a specific spot in the bush which has more or less been designated a community dump. It actually works much better in my community than it does in many others; there is very little trash scattered around the village. This is a little stream in Ho, my market town. It smells about like it looks. Luckily, my community is nothing like this. However. The day after I threw away my first bag of trash, I was stunned to see kids running around town playing with things that I had thrown away. An empty floss dispenser, bits of paper, a piece of a br...

I've been washing my laundry by hand for over a year now, and guess what? I'm not actually terrible at it. My clothes come out unstained, soft, and smelling of detergent. The women in my community cannot be convinced of this. I used to do my laundry sitting outside my house, but I got tired of the way that people would crowd around me and stare at me while I washed, so within a few months of coming to my community, I moved laundry day inside. Sloshing water around on the floor is a small price to pay in order to avoid stares, laughter, and people straight up trying to pull my washing out of my hand. However, although they no longer have the privilege of gawking at me as I clean, most of the women in town remain convinced that I am completely incapable of washing my clothes, and frequently offer to rectify this situation. Several people have come to my house to spontaneously offer me lessons in washing by hand. My friend Davi Aku gets mad every time she sees my washing on...

Sometimes, I am very much taken aback by the difference between how many of my Ghanaian neighbors see me and how I see myself. For example, here is an actual conversation I had the other day: Neighbor: Why don't you have children? Me: I don't want any now. Maybe later. Neighbor: What?? If you wait, you will be too old! You will be an old lady! Me: I don't think so...I would prefer to wait until I am in my thirties or so to have children. Neighbor: What? You mean you aren't thirty already? Me: No... Neighbor: I thought you were at least forty. Me: Not quite. Neighbor: Then how did a young girl like you get to be SOOOOOO fat?? Good question, neighbor. Good question. I have encounters like this fairly regularly. If you pay too much attention to these comments, they can wear away a bit at your self esteem. However, I know that nothing bad is meant by them. I'm pretty confident that I don't look forty, anyway, and no one means to insult me by...

I'm not too proud to admit this, but I'm maybe a little overprotective of my belongings. When I was growing up, if I loaned a book to someone and it came back with some of the pages wrinkled, it would earn my unending wrath. And I have nothing but scorn for those who decide they'd rather pick at my entree than order their own. That doesn't fly so much in Ghana. From the moment I came to my site, I was surrounded by people giving me things. People come to my house with mangoes, coconuts, plantains, buckets of peanuts, more tomatoes than I can reasonably eat. If someone is eating or drinking something and I happen to walk by, they more or less insist that I take some. I visited the Queen Mother a few weeks ago and left with a giant bucket of peanuts. People treat this like no big deal, but it really does improve my quality of life to have random portions of food handed to me every week or so. I think I've mentioned before that the market is not super easy to acce...

So my last version of this post was a huge hit with me, if even with no one else. Clearly a part two was required. So here we go: the toughest job I'll ever love (so they tell me) in the form of Disney songs. 1. Reflection (Mulan) A lot of people who are living in a country that is not their own feel a degree of alienation from their surroundings. Unfortunately, there are definitely days in Ghana when I look in the mirror and wonder who is looking back. Before coming to Ghana, I cut my hair. I wear glasses instead of contacts. I even go by a new name and speak a new language. Some days, I really feel that even my closest friends here won't get to know who I really am. There are no shortage of stories I can't share and values I keep to myself because it might cause people to lose respect for me. Then again, it's not all gloomy. There are plenty of days I'm full of laughter and happiness. And then--there are the Mulan days. 2. A Whole New World (Aladdin)...

So I've been planning this post for a while. I have made a lot of people listen to me ramble on as I planned it. And maybe no one will find it quite as amusing as I do. Nonetheless, without further ado, here are the Disney songs that best encapsulate my life in the Peace Corps. 1. Belle (Beauty and the Beast) Basically everything that Belle says in this song are thoughts that go through my head on...pretty much a daily basis: "Little town, it's a quiet village. Every day like the one before." Maybe that doesn't describe Peace Corps life so much as rural life anywhere in the world, but it's definitely something I've had to get used to as a newly minted citizen of a town of 200. I also am a fan of Belle's favorite method of entertainment: reading. If I am otherwise unoccupied, you can usually find me sitting on my stoop outside of my room with my nose stuck in a book. Finally, and most importantly, much like Belle, the moment I leave my house e...

Before I got to Ghana, I was under the impression that chiefs were a bit of the thing of the past. I knew that Ghana was a democracy--one of the most stable democracies in Africa, with free and fair elections. Just like the United States, it has a President who is elected every four years. Under this system, where is there room for a chief? That's what I thought. But oh, how wrong I was. Every community has a hereditary Chief and Queen Mother. They are not related to each other, and they aren't married; rather, there is generally one family in town that produces Chiefs, and another which produces Queen Mothers. Here is me with the Queen Mother and Chief tying a bracelet to my wrist to welcome me to the community. Next to me is our community nurse, Emelia. The Chief generally controls just about everything in town. When I wanted to start teaching English lessons, I asked the Chief. When I wanted to form a committee to discuss sanitation projects in the community, I ...