Looking Back: First Months in Ghana

The previous post I wrote looked back, a reflection for me on how I came to be where I am, and an insight for you into why I decided to move from lovely, comfortable Connecticut to Ghana.

This post will continue looking back, but less for my sake as for yours. Writing a blog post has been on my to-do list for a while now, but the post I’ve been intending to write will be the final part in this trilogy. It will look forward to the next year of my life and my ideas for what might be coming after. This post will aim to describe the previous two years of my life and why these two years have produced a third. While it’s probably unrealistic to expect anyone reading this, who hasn’t been to Ghana, to fully grasp the tragedies and the triumphs, the idiosyncrasies and the monotonies, of living in this country, I’m going to write this with a generous expectation of a reader’s empathy.

My extended adventure in Ghana began two years and a couple days ago. I met the rest of my training group in DC a couple days before we flew to Ghana for a few days of training. I arrived last because my flight was delayed. Remembering walking into the conference room in DC seems so unrelated now than before. The people in that room, waiting for me to arrive, are not anyone I know now. They were all remnants of each of our past lives, none of whom I knew or know now. Since then, I’ve had glimpses of these former lives but in most ways they aren’t the lives of the people I know and love.

 It’s strange looking back on those first couple days. I try to put myself in that Joe’s head and I struggle. My first moment of clarity wasn’t until about a week in. The staging, the trip to the airport, the layover in Frankfurt, the arrival in Ghana, the police escort to the university were we stayed our first week, the training we had there, and the trip to homestay. All of these things were a whirlwind of introductions, fascination, and confusion, essentially suffocation of revelation. I wouldn’t say I recovered from it anytime soon, but the moment of clarity, the moment where I first remember my thoughts precisely was the first day at homestay. Homestay was the base for our training: we lived with a Ghanaian family in a village and learned how to live that life. It was crucial for our integration and development as Peace Corps volunteers, but was, almost without exception, the most, or one of the most, difficult parts of every PCV’s service. It started with us being given away, as a bride might feel in a culture of prearranged, traditional marriages. Except we’re being given to these families who we have nothing in common with, who speak only some weird Ghanaian language, and are going to impose their way of life on us. After we were given away to our new families, we were taken back and showed the new homes we’d have for rest of our lives (2 months.) Then they moved me into this tiny room, put up the mosquito net over my bed with a rock as hammer, and left me. Alone. In Ghana. I couldn’t leave because that would initiate another overwhelming interaction with the strange creatures living outside. They certainly weren’t members of the human race I’ve known so happily for the previous 23 years. I had no idea even where or how to go pee, or if anyone was going to feed me at any point, or if I was left to fend for myself. This is when the guided missile of clarity was zeroing in. Impact was as sat down in my chair.

What the fuck had I gotten myself into?

From there, it actually wasn’t so bad. I can say, proudly, that, existentially, that was the lowest moment I had. Sure the next Sunday at homestay, when I pooped my pants right before I had to go to church was pretty bad, and when everything I tried to do at site failed miserably the first year, it didn’t instill hope in me that the Peace Corps would be anything but a ‘learning experience.’ But that moment, the first day at homestay was the bottom. I just wanted to go home to my parents and sit on my couch and have a beer in absolute comfort and security.

But the good thing about hitting bottom, is there is nowhere else to go but up. Up by fits and jerks, but up nonetheless. The rest of training was alright. We fit in 120 hours of language training in the next four weeks. Went north for technical training. Learned that it’s alright to throw plastic out the window of a moving car but not banana peels. Learned all about dwarves and how to feed them. We learned about all sorts of projects we could do: beekeeping, village savings and loan, rabbit rearing, cashew etc. I quickly forgot everything technical, but at the very least it was sensitized us towards the possibilities and the challenges associated with village life.

After technical training in the north we returned to homestay. I went back to Comfort Anim, my homestay mother. She was an imposing figure. Large, loud, illiterate, she spoke a bit of Krobo, the language I was learning, and would try to supplement my daily language classes by yelling at me when I got home in Krobo. When I inevitably didn’t understand her, she would get louder  and angrier until I feigned understanding and went and hid in my room. She also had this lovely habit of waking me up at 4:30am for breakfast. The first time this happened I swore she was an apparition or that I was dreaming and I remember letting her in to bring me my food and then going back to bed after she left intending to wake up from this nightmare.

But on the whole, homestay was a good experience. Living with Comfort Anim was a great introduction to Ghana, to living with a family in a village in Ghana, and the absolute terror and intimidation only big Ghanaian women can instill. Once the end of training was near, my focus was turned towards the great leap: going to our sites. We all visited our sites for a few days earlier in training, but in my case, it did not instill me with overwhelming confidence. The constant presence of massive spiders was worrisome, and the few days we spent there did not give me an accurate understanding of what my daily life would be like. The people there, my counterpart and supervisor, were all nice enough, but the unknown and ambiguous answers to most of my questions about “what do you want me to do here?” left me with a feeling that I was standing on a cliff about to willingly jump into a mass of swirling dark clouds with no real idea of how far below the ground was.

The end of training was somewhat anticlimactic. We had our final weeks at homestay, swore in with the US ambassador, and then we were free to go. Most of us went to the beach for a couple days before going off to site as a last hurrah but the next step we had to take was in the back of all of our minds.

Anniversary Post

Today is the two year anniversary of the day after we arrived in Ghana. Two years ago I woke up in Africa. This morning I woke up, still in Africa. 

These two years have contained some of the best days and some of the worst of my life. The emotional ups and downs I rode were far more dramatic than anything I’ve previously experienced. I’ve always considered myself a typically even-keeled, calm person. Not prone to undue stress or bursts of emotion. But Africa brought something new out of me. Anger, euphoria, sadness, hopelessness, defiance. These begin a list of emotions I newly became aware of feeling. Not that I didn’t experience any of these before, but the situation I found myself in, day after day, imposed a need for reflection and introspection. Also, the shifts were so sudden and seemingly spontaneous that I couldn’t help but think ‘what the hell is going on with me?’ It took me to realize, not much. I like to think of it as my emotions catching up to my experiences.

These experiences started two years ago today. The most important thing I was told in the beginning, in Pre-Service Training was ‘you are here for you.’ It’s true, I was and I am here for me. Altruism and compassion, sure, I’ll admit to being overwhelmingly full of both, but I came here, stayed here and will come back to Ghana for me. 

Let’s rewind a bit, back before I came to Ghana, back before I even really knew where Ghana was, back when the first inspiration to apply to the Peace Corps rocked my brain. I’m sure you’re thinking that it must have been a memorable moment that was looked back upon often as various trials (uncontrollable diarrhea) and tribulations (children screaming at 5:30am as their mother beats them) caused me to question the obviously delusional motivations that led me to this godforsaken country. But I never once thought about it in those times. Nor when I was feeling content enough to be sure I would marry and settle down in the village. This seeming ingratitude for divine inspiration is not due to any flaw of my person as one would suppose. The truth is I just don’t remember. Seriously. I can provide the context but I have no idea what the thought process was of the main character. Me.

I’ll give you what I can. 

I was in the second floor of the library at UConn. Next to the computers, at the tables opposite the tutoring area. I remember pulling up the page and opening up the application. This was in the beginning of my final semester at UConn. I had just ended a longterm relationship over the winter break. I was graduating in just a few months with a History degree and sub 3.0 gpa. It’s a bit of an understatement to say that I wouldn’t be scaring away other prospective applicants to jobs and graduate schools. On top of that, I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, so even if I did get an interview, my conviction and enthusiasm for whatever the work  was going to be in whatever job I was applying to was not going to be an asset.

Peace Corps is a refuge for the uncertain. And it attracts many who are filled with uncertainty. But it is also far more than just a refuge. Some of the people I’ve met here are more uncertain but with more conviction than anyone I’ve met before. They need a refuge like I need to go to a sweat lodge. I was and am still uncertain. I didn’t necessarily have a disproportionate amount of conviction, and if I did, it was favoring a dearth of conviction. That hasn’t changed drastically, but after two years, I more excited to hear an argument of conviction, and be potentially swayed by it, or experience something that could lead to it’s formation, than ever before.

However, none of these really explain why I started applying to and ultimately joined the Peace Corps. I have thought about this a lot over the last couple of years and none of these explanations felt convincing to me(the last, while true now, didn’t hold much over me at the start.) The strongest reason for joining the Peace Corps, I’ve decided, is getting out. This might not be the obvious reason for anyone who has known me, and it certainly wasn’t obvious to me, as it took over year of being in Ghana to realize. But coming here, was as much about getting out of Connecticut and the world I had lived in for the previous 23 years, as anything else, and more.

Up to this point in my life, I have lived a charmed life.  I don’t say this because everything was easy for me. Some things weren’t. But nothing was particularly difficult. I had a very happy childhood and adolescence, a wonderful family, an abbey, good friends, and a strongly principled but loosely structured upbringing that allowed me to develop naturally as an individual but inside boundaries that directed that development in a good way. All these things were perpetual, and they remain today despite communications difficulties. However, the fact remains that I grew in a small conservative farming town on the border of Litchfield (old, wealthy, and waspy,) went to Holy Cross High School, and then went to UConn. The transition from Holy Cross (a Catholic school) to UConn was impressive because not only did close to half of my class also end up at UConn by the end of my four years, but a large number of the remainder of the twenty thousand students could have also gone to Holy Cross if I hadn’t known better. 

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at both, and wouldn’t do them over any differently if I had a choice (try harder at Stat 101 maybe, I could have gotten better than a C.) I met some really amazing people and still have friends that I value over anyone else, but I still imagine, ‘what else?’ What if I had done anything else? Done something a little more atypical of a middle-upper middle class white kid from Bethlehem who went to Catholic school? I had never felt quite content at any stage of the process because of these unanswered, and unknown, questions.

I can’t express how relieved I am that I didn’t leave that question unanswered for long. The answer, Peace Corps, has thus far proved entirely satisfactory. 

Continued next......time...