Ahaa! I have successfully returned from my site visit! The counterpart teacher I will be working with while in Ghana is fairly young (23), my headmaster seems like a responsible and supportive person, and my town (village, rather) is amazing. At 400 people strong, its pretty tiny - we have one lady that runs a store in a closet-esque space, and one other lady that sells Waakye (pronounced wah-chee). Thats it. Everyone in my town farms for a living and goes into Ho, our regional capital, for market days and to purchase anything required. A few notes about Saviefe-Gbogame:
There are two forms of transportation to my site on a dirt road; one is by motorcycle and the other is a large Metrobus (think charter bus). However PC will not let me ride a moto, and the bus makes one pass in the morning heading into town and one pass in the afternoon coming back to town. Thats about it for getting in and out. So sunday, the bus didnt run and I needed to leave. So I walked an hour to our nearest paved road, waited another 45 minutes for a taxi to come by and take me to Ho. Overall, 20 kilometers took nearly 2 and a half hours to accomplish.
My living arrangement is two rooms in a compound in the village, so I live with a few other people there, but furniture is quite nice.
My school is exactly what I expected - no electricity, no running water, and built by local villagers 25 years ago.
But, Good News! I have electricity in my house! Now I can read at night
So I'm back at training right now, and I'm about ready for it to be over. I just want to go to my site and begin what I set out to do - teach, learn, and integrate into the local culture of Ghana.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Not too much has happened since my last post. This week was intense language training, and while I am not fluent yet, the basics of Ewe are coming together. Speaking of which I will talk a bit about the language.
Ewe is the anglicized version, because the 'w' in Ewe is actually more like a V. The alphabet has 30 letters (same letters as English minus C and Q) including a bilabial unvoiced F that looks like a normal f but a longer tail at the bottom and bilabial voiced V with swooshes at the top of the V. The F is like you are blowing out a candle and the V is simply how an f and v are similar - with one you have a soft sound and the other is hard. Also in this new alphabet is a new G, an X that makes a different sound (like a hebrew H), a backwards vowel C (like the a in alms), a lowercase n with a tail (no English equivalent), a d that sounds like you are saying "dir" as in dirty fast. Also a good thing about learning that language - each letter except for E makes the exact same noise everytime. One letter, one sound. There are diagraphs in Ewe that make similar sounds to those found in English (ch=ts). So, cheese is pronounced the exact same way, but spelled completely different.
Cheese = Tsyise
I will try and see about getting the actual letter characters so you all can see what they look like.
This upcoming week I will be meeting my teacher counterpart at my site and conducting my site visit the second half of the week in Volta! Finally I can really practice my Ewe greetings outside of the classroom and the scattered Ewe I meet on the streets.
Facts:
I had some pants tailor made for about 12 dollar including fabric and sewing.
Its been cool that past couple nights - Ive needed my sheets.
Ewe is the anglicized version, because the 'w' in Ewe is actually more like a V. The alphabet has 30 letters (same letters as English minus C and Q) including a bilabial unvoiced F that looks like a normal f but a longer tail at the bottom and bilabial voiced V with swooshes at the top of the V. The F is like you are blowing out a candle and the V is simply how an f and v are similar - with one you have a soft sound and the other is hard. Also in this new alphabet is a new G, an X that makes a different sound (like a hebrew H), a backwards vowel C (like the a in alms), a lowercase n with a tail (no English equivalent), a d that sounds like you are saying "dir" as in dirty fast. Also a good thing about learning that language - each letter except for E makes the exact same noise everytime. One letter, one sound. There are diagraphs in Ewe that make similar sounds to those found in English (ch=ts). So, cheese is pronounced the exact same way, but spelled completely different.
Cheese = Tsyise
I will try and see about getting the actual letter characters so you all can see what they look like.
This upcoming week I will be meeting my teacher counterpart at my site and conducting my site visit the second half of the week in Volta! Finally I can really practice my Ewe greetings outside of the classroom and the scattered Ewe I meet on the streets.
Facts:
I had some pants tailor made for about 12 dollar including fabric and sewing.
Its been cool that past couple nights - Ive needed my sheets.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Hard Work in Ghana
So this is actually a serious post. In many places around the country one sees people doing all sorts of manual labor that in the US we would have machines do or otherwise find a simpler way to do it. Example - Construction materials seem to generally be carried atop someone's head to the destination. Granted, this is Africa and materials are scare, but to me it seems like it would be easier to create a solution that involved putting a lot of materials onto a cart and pushing/pulling that cart to its destination. A more relevant example of what I want to convey is the process of 'weeding'. Weeding is young men (and boys) taking a machete (called a cutlass or matchet here) and manually cutting grass with the blade. They hunch over, swing, and can clear a little bit of area with one stroke - overall an inefficient way to clear a large area, unless you have an army of students. The question I posed to my host brother was why no one used either a lawn mower, create an old push-mower, or even develop a scythe type tool that could cut grass more effectively. His answer was simple - in Ghanaian society, you are considered lazy if you don't do a given amount of manual labor. Even a metal grass mower that could be fairly easily made would cut down on weeding time, but the impression I got was that some type of machine doing the work for you is equated with you being lazy.
This is a huge difference than the US where efficiency has driven most inventions to be better and better, but here in Ghana you need to do a certain amount on labor, spend a certain amount of time proving you are able-bodied enough to possess a family. Playing games such as chess or scrabble more than once or twice a week is frowned upon because it means you dont have enough time to do your other activities.
In summary, the culture I have experienced is one that emphasizes hard work over efficiency, washing your own clothes by hand over spending that time reading a book, and more emphasis on working hard than thinking hard. Perhaps that last part is a bit unfair, so hard work is preferred more than finding an easier way to solve the problem. As a consequence (this is just a conjecture), people seem to waste a lot of time weeding (a simple mower could be better), washing clothes (a child could wash the same clothes and not use the adult's time), walking (perhaps a money constraint to take a taxi), or fixing things (time and money costs to repair a bucket as to buy a new one). I realize that there are a lot of people here with excess time on their hands, especially children, so labor is not a problem, but I'm just surprised that efficiency, at least in areas I pointed out, has not taken hold.
FACTS -
If its raining, every shop shuts down.
A training session was delayed because we had a rooster in the church we were meeting in.
People try and talk to me while I run, so I just have to ignore them and run at 530 when people aren't on the streets.
This is a huge difference than the US where efficiency has driven most inventions to be better and better, but here in Ghana you need to do a certain amount on labor, spend a certain amount of time proving you are able-bodied enough to possess a family. Playing games such as chess or scrabble more than once or twice a week is frowned upon because it means you dont have enough time to do your other activities.
In summary, the culture I have experienced is one that emphasizes hard work over efficiency, washing your own clothes by hand over spending that time reading a book, and more emphasis on working hard than thinking hard. Perhaps that last part is a bit unfair, so hard work is preferred more than finding an easier way to solve the problem. As a consequence (this is just a conjecture), people seem to waste a lot of time weeding (a simple mower could be better), washing clothes (a child could wash the same clothes and not use the adult's time), walking (perhaps a money constraint to take a taxi), or fixing things (time and money costs to repair a bucket as to buy a new one). I realize that there are a lot of people here with excess time on their hands, especially children, so labor is not a problem, but I'm just surprised that efficiency, at least in areas I pointed out, has not taken hold.
FACTS -
If its raining, every shop shuts down.
A training session was delayed because we had a rooster in the church we were meeting in.
People try and talk to me while I run, so I just have to ignore them and run at 530 when people aren't on the streets.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Vision Quest
This past weekend I went on a vision quest of sorts to visit a current volunteer's site and see how they live day to day. Dispatched to the Central region (which is actually on the beach) I had a blast. Went to a secluded beach for a day trip, watched my host teach a class, and ate some bushmeat (antelope) and rice. The trip to my host's site interesting because we passed a road that warned drivers...
"WARNING: 32 people killed here"
but the drivers still absolutely fly on that baby. Also the road divider is more of a guideline than a rule, so hurtling 70 miles an hour in the wrong lane when another tro is coming 70 miles an hour head-on... wow, its best just to ignore the obvious danger and put on a tune.
I went to Cape Coast for a day, and was extremely surprised to see other white people there that were not with Peace Corps. I said hello to one person, and after that person didn't even look at me I realized it was a futile effort.
During my ride back to Kukurantumi I was waiting for a tro to leave (tro-tros are the dominant form of transportation here, see earlier posts) a preacher came onto our tro and everyone in the tro stopped whatever else they were doing and we listened to a good 20 minutes of prayer and praising Jesus. All in a language I didn't understand, so I pretended not to speak any Twi and ate Mystery Meat Pie from some street vendor. Going to see another volunteer at their site was a great experience: I could see how he interacted with the local population and daily life. I cannot wait to go to my site in Volta.
Onto to other good news, I am not always called obroni when I walk past people. Most people who I talk to call me 'Kofi Mike'; Kofi is my name day because I was born on Friday.
Finally, I describe myself as very adventurous recently (the past year or two), and traveling around Ghana alone was exhilarating - until I found myself crammed in the back of a tro where in order to not receive a concussion you must hunch over your seat and lost nearly all feeling in your lower extremities while riding along on the most pot-holed dirt road you can think of. At that point I realized I don't like traveling in a tro.
Last part of the post will be dedicated to random facts and information:
The Ghana-Uruguay match was insane. Never seen people so happy after we scored the first goal.
Electricity is only sometimes an option.
Running water is almost never an option.
Local women have mastered urinating while standing...
"WARNING: 32 people killed here"
but the drivers still absolutely fly on that baby. Also the road divider is more of a guideline than a rule, so hurtling 70 miles an hour in the wrong lane when another tro is coming 70 miles an hour head-on... wow, its best just to ignore the obvious danger and put on a tune.
I went to Cape Coast for a day, and was extremely surprised to see other white people there that were not with Peace Corps. I said hello to one person, and after that person didn't even look at me I realized it was a futile effort.
During my ride back to Kukurantumi I was waiting for a tro to leave (tro-tros are the dominant form of transportation here, see earlier posts) a preacher came onto our tro and everyone in the tro stopped whatever else they were doing and we listened to a good 20 minutes of prayer and praising Jesus. All in a language I didn't understand, so I pretended not to speak any Twi and ate Mystery Meat Pie from some street vendor. Going to see another volunteer at their site was a great experience: I could see how he interacted with the local population and daily life. I cannot wait to go to my site in Volta.
Onto to other good news, I am not always called obroni when I walk past people. Most people who I talk to call me 'Kofi Mike'; Kofi is my name day because I was born on Friday.
Finally, I describe myself as very adventurous recently (the past year or two), and traveling around Ghana alone was exhilarating - until I found myself crammed in the back of a tro where in order to not receive a concussion you must hunch over your seat and lost nearly all feeling in your lower extremities while riding along on the most pot-holed dirt road you can think of. At that point I realized I don't like traveling in a tro.
Last part of the post will be dedicated to random facts and information:
The Ghana-Uruguay match was insane. Never seen people so happy after we scored the first goal.
Electricity is only sometimes an option.
Running water is almost never an option.
Local women have mastered urinating while standing...
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