15 days left in Ghana!

It seems like these posts keep getting fewer and further between. The time is drawing nigh, though, and soon I will be at home, enjoying Christmas in Virginia. That seems strange… that Christmas is almost here. I am used to cold and late-fall frosts as precursors to Christmas. Instead, I have soft red dust underneath my feet and tropical heat at the end of November.
Things are happening so fast here that it’s hard to keep up. My parents came to visit me last week, and we had an amazing time. We went to Kakum National Forest and walked on a tree-to-tree rope bridge across the rainforest canopy, we stayed at a hotel that had crocodiles in a pond underneath the restaurant, we went to Green Turtle Lodge and basked on the sunny beach, and we saw a rural school, where the kids were practicing balancing sand on their heads for gym class! I think that they enjoyed themselves and got to see a lot of the reasons why I love Ghana.
Today is my last day of class, and then tomorrow I embark on my next journey. Many of you know that I have a strange and remarkable interest in social science research (surveys and statistics and the like), and that I have been going to the Liberian refugee camp while I’ve been in Ghana. For my one week travel break, I am going to stay at Buduburam (the camp) and conduct a research study about child sexual abuse. Apparently, incidence of children being raped is on the rise, and there is very little empirical information about how the community responds to it, other than the obvious horror-struck reaction. I want to find out about the community’s attitudes and beliefs about child sexual abuse, and then investigate some of the community’s responses, and the resources that they have to deal with it as a social phenomenon. I will be conducting focus groups with citizens and doing interviews with community leaders for 7 days.
I am going to stay at the camp with one of the women who works at Center for Youth Empowerment (the organization through which I’m doing this study), but coming back to campus for a few days in the middle for personal debrief and a rest period for myself. Please pray that things go smoothly and that I would have access to all of the resources that I need. I think that this will be hard and somewhat stressful, but important. Very little research exists about cross-cultural community beliefs about child sexual abuse, and this is a new and important area of study. It would be a perfect master’s thesis topic, too.
So anyway, please keep me in your prayers. I’ll let you know how it’s going.

15 days left in Ghana!

It seems like these posts keep getting fewer and further between. The time is drawing nigh, though, and soon I will be at home, enjoying Christmas in Virginia. That seems strange… that Christmas is almost here. I am used to cold and late-fall frosts as precursors to Christmas. Instead, I have soft red dust underneath my feet and tropical heat at the end of November.
Things are happening so fast here that it’s hard to keep up. My parents came to visit me last week, and we had an amazing time. We went to Kakum National Forest and walked on a tree-to-tree rope bridge across the rainforest canopy, we stayed at a hotel that had crocodiles in a pond underneath the restaurant, we went to Green Turtle Lodge and basked on the sunny beach, and we saw a rural school, where the kids were practicing balancing sand on their heads for gym class! I think that they enjoyed themselves and got to see a lot of the reasons why I love Ghana.
Today is my last day of class, and then tomorrow I embark on my next journey. Many of you know that I have a strange and remarkable interest in social science research (surveys and statistics and the like), and that I have been going to the Liberian refugee camp while I’ve been in Ghana. For my one week travel break, I am going to stay at Buduburam (the camp) and conduct a research study about child sexual abuse. Apparently, incidence of children being raped is on the rise, and there is very little empirical information about how the community responds to it, other than the obvious horror-struck reaction. I want to find out about the community’s attitudes and beliefs about child sexual abuse, and then investigate some of the community’s responses, and the resources that they have to deal with it as a social phenomenon. I will be conducting focus groups with citizens and doing interviews with community leaders for 7 days.
I am going to stay at the camp with one of the women who works at Center for Youth Empowerment (the organization through which I’m doing this study), but coming back to campus for a few days in the middle for personal debrief and a rest period for myself. Please pray that things go smoothly and that I would have access to all of the resources that I need. I think that this will be hard and somewhat stressful, but important. Very little research exists about cross-cultural community beliefs about child sexual abuse, and this is a new and important area of study. It would be a perfect master’s thesis topic, too.
So anyway, please keep me in your prayers. I’ll let you know how it’s going.

Thoughts on Ghana in 2007

Yesterday was the four weeks mark until we leave Ghana, and it passed without much fanfare. We are all ending this semester with mixed feelings- towards Ghana, towards Calvin College, towards development, and especially towards living as part of a group. I came into this semester with a fairly idealistic picture of what life in community with 16 other people would be like. I’m leaving with the consensus that I cannot and should not expect to thrive within randomly delegated community, and especially that I cannot and should not expect that all of my opportunities will fall into my lap. I have had meaningful and valuable experiences here, but they are in no way automatically afforded to me. I had some strange notion that my life in Ghana would be profoundly different from my life in America, but it has been profoundly similar. I spend time watching movies with my friends, listening to music, talking with people, and reading. I have electricity and running water, access to the internet, clothes, food, and even a laundry service one floor down from my room.

This is not to say that Ghana is exactly like America. There are girls who work at the market right outside of my hostel who do not know how to read, who sleep at their market stall at night. There are people all over who live in abject poverty and who have access to minimal resources. My roommate’s parents completed only elementary and some junior high school education, and yet they have an upper-middle class standard of living. I encounter people every day who do not speak the national language of their country. All the while, my own life is not intrinsically affected by this disparity. Instead, I go out at night and eat good food, travel all over the country with ease, and get to observe Ghana’s neat little cultural quirks.

This may have been a pointless rambling, but it says some important things. I am learning that people in the developing world can and do do things for themselves, that they desire more for their lives, and that they recognize the disparities that exist in the world. They also have hope. All of the migrants from the Northern region come to Accra for the same reason that actors go to New York- they want to make it big. That might mean that they end up selling water by the side of the road, that they become street kids or that they do not get a formal education, but they are active in their pursuit of something better and bigger than life in a rural village. It is important that we recognize this distinction of choice and agency when we do development work, because often it gets neglected. Africa is not, nor has it ever been static. In ten years, Accra will have a totally different look, just as it looks completely different now than it did ten years ago. It is both exciting and terrifying to be in a place that is changing so rapidly.

My perceptions of Africa have changed so much during this trip. No longer is it a place waiting for me to save it and all its people, or a wild bushland waiting for cultural observation. It is new and growing and ready to do for itself what it wants. After 50 years of independence, I think it's time.

Update during the rainstorm

Some wonderful things are happening in my life:

• I just got stuck in the most amazing rainstorm. It started with purple clouds rolling in and wind tossing leaves up and down gutters. All of a sudden, drops of rain splattered to the earth, jumping up to bite my legs. It reminded me of the second day I was in Ghana, when I got caught in the rain and was soaking wet. A man called across the road (in a Ghanaian accent, which I did not yet fully understand): “Africa has blessed you!” I am updating my blog while I wait out the storm.
  

• When my parents come, we are going to stay at the Green Turtle Lodge, an Eco-Tourism project about 3-4 hours away from Accra. 17 days until they come!

• I am helping to facilitate a workshop concerning gender-based and sexual violence among Liberian women living at the Buduburam Refugee Camp. THis will be a two-day affair with thirty women. I am working with Center for Youth Empowerment, a grassroots NGO that is run entirely by Liberians. They are doing some neat things in their community. The workshop will take place in two weeks. I need to do some serious research about the specific ways that GBV comes up in that particular community. I'm used to thinking about it from an American perspective, but the norms will be completely different, and ways of addressing topics will be challenging. I think that I will learn a LOT from the women.

• I'm going to a bead-making village this weekend! Jemima, the receptionist at the Center for African Studies, is going to bring me, Sarah, and Pearl.

• My dresses are ready! I have two "traditional" African dresses (long skirts and fancy shirts) and one wrap-dress made from batik fabric. I am extremely happy with the results.
  

• I dressed up as a snail for halloween yesterday. I made the shell from my laundry bag- I sewed it into a shell shape, stuffed it with my pillow, and then sewed circles on the sides. I was pretty proud of it. I'll never get too old to dress up.

Some sad things are happening in my life:

• Lydia Brown, one of the girls who came on this trip from Calvin, has been sick for 5 weeks with a debilitating stomach cramping and nausea. The doctors have no idea what it is, and condescend to her (the nursing major) as though she doesn't know her body. She hasn't been able to go to classes or travel, and she's pretty miserable, so she is going home early next week. I am going to miss her so much. Hopefully she will get well soon.

• I think that's pretty much the only thing.