Hey Everyone,
One last notice to all my subscribers that this blog has now moved over to http://theborrowedbicycle.ca/. Brand new post up comparing tech entrepreneurship and development here: http://theborrowedbicycle.ca/2010/11/tech-startups-and-human-development-different-worlds/.
Thanks!
Ben
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Ben In Ghana is Now The Borrowed Bicycle
Hey Everyone,
This is a quick note to say that Ben in Ghana is moving onwards and upwards to its own domain! All of my old writing has been moved over to the The Borrowed Bicycle and anything new will be posted there as well.
For anyone who is still hanging around on my blogger feed - please update your feed link to http://theborrowedbicycle.ca/feed/ where I'll be blogging about Human, Personal and Software development. For those that aren't interested in the software side you can use http://theborrowedbicycle.ca/humanpersonal/feed/ to skip out on the software related posts.
Thanks so much for all of the interest and reading and I hope you'll enjoy The Borrowed Bicycle just as much!
Cheers,
Ben
This is a quick note to say that Ben in Ghana is moving onwards and upwards to its own domain! All of my old writing has been moved over to the The Borrowed Bicycle and anything new will be posted there as well.
For anyone who is still hanging around on my blogger feed - please update your feed link to http://theborrowedbicycle.ca/feed/ where I'll be blogging about Human, Personal and Software development. For those that aren't interested in the software side you can use http://theborrowedbicycle.ca/humanpersonal/feed/ to skip out on the software related posts.
Thanks so much for all of the interest and reading and I hope you'll enjoy The Borrowed Bicycle just as much!
Cheers,
Ben
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Positive Results
Last Saturday started in typical fashion. After a 4:30am wake up and quick trip to Wakawaka so Dery could get some local 'performances' done (read: local medicine/magic/whatever) we pulled back into the market square around 9:30am to sit down at the market side. After taking the requisite pot of pito, a couple of health workers pulled up and organized a meeting just beside the road. Dery said we should sit and join, so I downed the last couple of drops out of my calabash. I sat down and the nurse started speaking in Dagarre. I am still nowhere near conversational in Dagarre but the topic of conversation was obvious about two minutes in with the mention of three English letters: HIV.
I tried my best to hear what was being said, lots of references to 'do' and 'po' (man and woman), some questions that various people volunteered to answer, some talk of food for some reason, koko (porridge), fufu (pounded yams), zevarre (soup ingredients) and fairly regular chuckles from the growing crowd. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the talk wrapped up.
Dery asked if I had understood, and I said small small. He explained they were talking about HIV/AIDS (yes, caught that part) and the different ways it is transmitted, from unprotected sex to blood transfusions. Turns out the part about the food was trying to encourage healthier eating so that the risk of needing a blood transfusion is decreased. Last but not least, the most important part of the talk:
“She said they've brought HIV tests and they are giving them free of charge.”
“So will you get tested?”
“Oh yes, I will do.”
Wow. For some reason I wasn't expecting that. I don't know why I expected there to be more resistance to the idea, but from Dery's perspective it was definitely something to get done. I was impressed. Dery is usually ahead of the curve, and I was glad he was leading on this too.
If that impressed me, the next two minutes were almost astounding. Not only was there a significant interest in the tests, there was a rush! I A couple of men fought about who got to go first, with Dery managing to secure second place. Very soon there was a lengthy line up for the test as people registered their names and ages in the log book.
It wasn't long before the inevitable happened:
“Nasado! (White man) (a bunch of Dagarre that I can't remember)?”
“They want to know if you'll also get tested.” Dery chuckled a bit.
I thought about it for a minute, but it was pretty clear I would have to. And why not? I suppose I was taking up some donor's money that wasn't intended for me, and I would be an additional person in the line, but other than that, there wasn't a good reason. I should set a good example too.
I said yes, and signed my name. Despite signing 16th, I got the usual bump to the beginning of the line. The man in front of me finished up and I sat down with the nurse. She asked if I had understood the meeting, I told her not really, so she gave me a quick recap of the general ideas before asking:
“Are you ready to know your status?”
I responded in the positive and took a deep breath. As most people know, I'm not a big fan of anything medical related. I guess you would call it squeamish. Luckily for me, this test didn't involve a needle and it was over in a minute. The nurse pricked my left ring finger, pipetted up some blood and squirted it onto a piece of plastic with three labels: “HIV 1; HIV 2; CONTROL”.
“Alright, come back in five minutes and I'll tell you the result.”
I stood off to the side, holding the alcohol swab to my slightly sore finger. A couple of women waiting in line looked at me, and giggled a bit. I smiled nervously, pacing a bit. It was a long five minutes. The women laughed some more. Finally the nurse called me back to sit down and receive my result. To my relief only one dark red line cut across the white test material.
Dery and I headed back to the house. We sat down.
“So what did they tell you?” he asked.
We exchanged results, and I asked him if he had ever been tested before. To my surprise, he said yes, this was his third time. He had gone to the clinic himself the past two times. He knows that the nurses recommend getting tested every six months but he says he doesn't always get time, so aims for once a year. I asked him if he thought other people also have been tested before and he said no, this was likely the first time for most.
I don't hear HIV/AIDS talked about much here in Ghana. There are certainly billboards and radio ads, but I've rarely heard anyone talk about it. I have no idea what prevalence rates are in Bole Region, or how many people tested positive that day. For some reason I assumed the relative silence would mean there would be resistance to getting tested, to knowing the the answer to a scary question. But at least on the Dagaarte side of Seripe, I was impressed by the way people reacted. I'm certainly no HIV/AIDS or health expert, and testing is certainly only a small part of effectively managing HIV/AIDS, but to my uneducated eyes it looked like some pretty positive results.
I tried my best to hear what was being said, lots of references to 'do' and 'po' (man and woman), some questions that various people volunteered to answer, some talk of food for some reason, koko (porridge), fufu (pounded yams), zevarre (soup ingredients) and fairly regular chuckles from the growing crowd. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the talk wrapped up.
Dery asked if I had understood, and I said small small. He explained they were talking about HIV/AIDS (yes, caught that part) and the different ways it is transmitted, from unprotected sex to blood transfusions. Turns out the part about the food was trying to encourage healthier eating so that the risk of needing a blood transfusion is decreased. Last but not least, the most important part of the talk:
“She said they've brought HIV tests and they are giving them free of charge.”
“So will you get tested?”
“Oh yes, I will do.”
Wow. For some reason I wasn't expecting that. I don't know why I expected there to be more resistance to the idea, but from Dery's perspective it was definitely something to get done. I was impressed. Dery is usually ahead of the curve, and I was glad he was leading on this too.
If that impressed me, the next two minutes were almost astounding. Not only was there a significant interest in the tests, there was a rush! I A couple of men fought about who got to go first, with Dery managing to secure second place. Very soon there was a lengthy line up for the test as people registered their names and ages in the log book.
It wasn't long before the inevitable happened:
“Nasado! (White man) (a bunch of Dagarre that I can't remember)?”
“They want to know if you'll also get tested.” Dery chuckled a bit.
I thought about it for a minute, but it was pretty clear I would have to. And why not? I suppose I was taking up some donor's money that wasn't intended for me, and I would be an additional person in the line, but other than that, there wasn't a good reason. I should set a good example too.
I said yes, and signed my name. Despite signing 16th, I got the usual bump to the beginning of the line. The man in front of me finished up and I sat down with the nurse. She asked if I had understood the meeting, I told her not really, so she gave me a quick recap of the general ideas before asking:
“Are you ready to know your status?”
I responded in the positive and took a deep breath. As most people know, I'm not a big fan of anything medical related. I guess you would call it squeamish. Luckily for me, this test didn't involve a needle and it was over in a minute. The nurse pricked my left ring finger, pipetted up some blood and squirted it onto a piece of plastic with three labels: “HIV 1; HIV 2; CONTROL”.
“Alright, come back in five minutes and I'll tell you the result.”
I stood off to the side, holding the alcohol swab to my slightly sore finger. A couple of women waiting in line looked at me, and giggled a bit. I smiled nervously, pacing a bit. It was a long five minutes. The women laughed some more. Finally the nurse called me back to sit down and receive my result. To my relief only one dark red line cut across the white test material.
Dery and I headed back to the house. We sat down.
“So what did they tell you?” he asked.
We exchanged results, and I asked him if he had ever been tested before. To my surprise, he said yes, this was his third time. He had gone to the clinic himself the past two times. He knows that the nurses recommend getting tested every six months but he says he doesn't always get time, so aims for once a year. I asked him if he thought other people also have been tested before and he said no, this was likely the first time for most.
I don't hear HIV/AIDS talked about much here in Ghana. There are certainly billboards and radio ads, but I've rarely heard anyone talk about it. I have no idea what prevalence rates are in Bole Region, or how many people tested positive that day. For some reason I assumed the relative silence would mean there would be resistance to getting tested, to knowing the the answer to a scary question. But at least on the Dagaarte side of Seripe, I was impressed by the way people reacted. I'm certainly no HIV/AIDS or health expert, and testing is certainly only a small part of effectively managing HIV/AIDS, but to my uneducated eyes it looked like some pretty positive results.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Good Enough
I would be lying if I didn't say that the past five months have been a struggle for me. In many ways this blog has been a reflection of those challenges. I'm not sure how noticeable it has been for others, but one thing I've struggled with, and struggled to write about is the actual work I'm supposed to be doing here. I have a great family life where I learn something new every day, and I'm having a lot of fun sharing that with people. Work has been a different story.
My commute is almost a passage between worlds. The freedom of the road turns quickly transitions to the stagnation of my seat behind my computer at my desk. I've had a lot of trouble getting out of this mode. Things move pretty slow here in general, but by the end of a day I often feel stuck. Some days I know I'm not bringing what it takes to move things along in a district and I wonder if maybe this isn't the place for me. And most days that all melts away again with those fifteen kilometers of asphalt and wind in my hair that lead back to Seripe.
One of the reasons I've struggled is insisting on perfection before I start implementing. It has been easy for me think of ways things will fail, why they aren't perfect and to delay pushing forward based on that. I'm learning that I won't be able to get very far if I keep up that strategy. Instead of perfection I need to do a better job of recognizing 'good enough', at least for the first implementation of an idea. There are a lot of roadblocks in development, and I need to admit that I'll never be smart enough to think my way through them.
The same goes for my blog. Thank you all so much for the extremely positive feedback you've given me on my first few posts – I really enjoy writing and putting something together that makes people think. That said, I've found myself looking for ways to one-up myself. I want every post to be the new 'best' post. Unfortunately this isn't exactly a sustainable solution, nor does it work well for anyone reading – I'm certainly writing less and posting even less than that!
At the end of the day I still want to create excellent work. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far to the side of poorly thought out ideas that I'm rushing to implement for quantitative numbers of prototypes created, or pieces posted on this blog. I see enough of that here to know it isn't the way forward either.
I hope this post is a start along that path – it certainly isn't my best post, but as I read it over I think it qualifies as 'good enough', something I'm happy with. I'm not sure I'm 100% satisfied with the ending, but that's ok. I've been applying that lens to all of my work over the past week or so and my motivation has been going up, I'm feeling busier, more productive, and happier to be at work. And based on that, expect to see a lot more 'good enough' from me in the future.
Monday, July 26, 2010
This Week on the Farm - Episode 2
Hey Everyone!
Thank you so much for all of the great feedback from last week's video. It was definitely a boost to my week!
And no, I don't just do that Ghanaian accent for fun. I remember giving a fairly good closing remark (I thought at least) to a workshop only to be met by a circle of blank stares and unenthusiastic claps when I finished. I asked my boss why and she told me - "Everyone thinks you're very nice - they just can't understand anything you say!" Dery's a bit deaf in the left ear which only compounds the problem. Hence, the thick (da tick) Ghanaian accent.
Episode 2 is now here - delayed due to very slow Internet on Friday. You can watch it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWSyH1xSoLc or below!
Also, if anyone is interested in sending a video message or asking some questions that I can share with Dery and the rest of the family they would be very appreciative. He's interested in what is going on in Canada as well!
Thanks!
Thank you so much for all of the great feedback from last week's video. It was definitely a boost to my week!
And no, I don't just do that Ghanaian accent for fun. I remember giving a fairly good closing remark (I thought at least) to a workshop only to be met by a circle of blank stares and unenthusiastic claps when I finished. I asked my boss why and she told me - "Everyone thinks you're very nice - they just can't understand anything you say!" Dery's a bit deaf in the left ear which only compounds the problem. Hence, the thick (da tick) Ghanaian accent.
Episode 2 is now here - delayed due to very slow Internet on Friday. You can watch it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWSyH1xSoLc or below!
Also, if anyone is interested in sending a video message or asking some questions that I can share with Dery and the rest of the family they would be very appreciative. He's interested in what is going on in Canada as well!
Thanks!
Friday, July 16, 2010
This Week on the Farm - Video Blog
Hey Everyone,
After a long hiatus I'm excited to announce a series of videos about life on the farm in Seripe. I'll be filming a few short clips each week and uploading them to youtube (yes it's possible, it just takes about a day).
You'll have to bear with me - the first episode was completely impromptu and my video editing skills are poor, but I hope you enjoy it! Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAr6ZXsoIH0 or below.
Also, if you have any questions or suggestions of things to film for an episode, I'm taking requests! This episode doesn't do a very good job of introducing Dery, the farmer I'm staying with, so I'll work on a quick intro piece so you get to know him and a bit about where he's at.
I also took off to Tamale for a week of team meetings and left the camera with Dery, so expect an episode about ploughing as soon as I can get the editing done.
Thanks for reading/watching!
After a long hiatus I'm excited to announce a series of videos about life on the farm in Seripe. I'll be filming a few short clips each week and uploading them to youtube (yes it's possible, it just takes about a day).
You'll have to bear with me - the first episode was completely impromptu and my video editing skills are poor, but I hope you enjoy it! Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAr6ZXsoIH0 or below.
Also, if you have any questions or suggestions of things to film for an episode, I'm taking requests! This episode doesn't do a very good job of introducing Dery, the farmer I'm staying with, so I'll work on a quick intro piece so you get to know him and a bit about where he's at.
I also took off to Tamale for a week of team meetings and left the camera with Dery, so expect an episode about ploughing as soon as I can get the editing done.
Thanks for reading/watching!
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Seripe
As the rains begin to fall, the area between compounds is growing green. The stars are fantastic. Leo is spread out across the top of the sky; the familiar Big Dipper is in the north and the brilliant Southern Cross opposite it. Women walk gracefully with wood or water on their heads; they laugh at my greetings in Dagarre, the local language, not worrying for a second about spilling a drop. Amelia and her cousins dance and sing in the open space just outside of the compound door. Dery and I have conversations into the darkness about life in Canada and Ghana, often punctuated by his very Ghanaian expression of surprise, “So!” People are constantly dropping in to the compound to say hi and chat, to test my Dagarre and hopefully be the one to teach me a new phrase. In short, the place and the people have been easy to fall in love with.
This illusion has been broken for me several times over the past few weeks in ways that it hadn't been before. The day I arrived in Seripe, a man died in his house two weeks after stomach surgery. After his death I learned I had met him the week before – he was a member of one of the farmer groups and good friends with the Agric Extension Agent. I remember walking down the path to his house, but hard as I try, I can't recall his face. A week after I arrived, Dery fell off the back of a motorbike. Even though it wasn't going fast he dislocated two of his toes and hit his knee. He wasn't able to farm for a month, and the fact that the rains are late so far this year is both a blessing and a curse. He is struggling to find labourers to help clear five acres of land for a maize field in time to plough; gold was recently discovered nearby Seripe and many of the young men who used to be available as labour for hire now mine illegally instead. Philip used to attend school in Seripe but the quality of education is poor and so Dery now pays to send him and Matthew to the Upper West, losing two much needed weekend farm hands.
More than ever, life in Seripe has shown me that poverty isn't something you can always see on the surface. I have certainly been one of those guilty of expecting that it should be. Instead it's something much more complex, much more difficult to articulate. The lack of opportunity, the vulnerabilities to shocks and stresses, the lack of access to or trust in basic services like health and education, poorly functioning markets and dependence on the weather. I have seen all of these factors at play in Seripe, but I haven't seen abject misery. The past month has been a sharp reminder that Dery's strong, proud smile as he stands with his family can still be the smile of poverty.
Picture Legend from top (and apologies as I still struggle to get pictures put into exactly the right spot!):
- Anita and Winnie, Dery's two oldest daughters
- Dery's wife carrying pito (the local drink, brewed from sorghum) to the market
- Dery, his sister and two of his sons, Philip and Matthew
- A view over the compound wall
- Amelia, Dery's youngest daughter
- Vitalis, Anita's son
- My usual sleeping place when it isn't raining (plus mosquito net).
- Freshly brewed pito, before heading to the market
- Dery
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Two Days on A Farm (or Why It's Hard to Be an Innovative Farmer)
When you're from the city, two days on a farm can teach you a lot. I'm working in Ghana for the Ministry of Food and Agriculture but man do I have a lot to learn about farming. Two weeks ago I spent two days in Blema, a small village between Sawla and Tuna in the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba district of Northern Ghana. A good friend of mine, Troy Barrie, dropped me off on a Wednesday morning and took off on his moto, promising to return by the same time Friday.
I had the privilege of staying with a farmer named Musah who is doing some pretty incredible things in Blema. Here is a quick run down of the activities he was undertaking during the dry season, when most farmers take a break in preparation for the busy rainy season:
- Palm nut cultivation (harvesting and nursing seedlings)
- Mango grafting and cultivation
- Orange grafting
- Cashew cultivation
- Irrigated tomato and garden egg (eggplant) cultivation
- Animal husbandry (cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, guinea fowl)
- Training bullocks
Needless to say I learned a lot of practicals about farming over the two days. During the rainy season he'll add the traditional staple farming activities and also grow maize, rice, yam and cassava; in two months it will be another whole world of learning for me! What was more important to me about the two days though, was not what it taught me about farming, but rather about farmers.
Besides being an insanely hard worker, Musah is an innovator and an experimenter. Farmers don't have a lot of insulation from risk here, and even common farming activities such as growing maize and yams are highly dependent on external factors, most notably rain. To invest in new, unproven activities when your family's livelihood is at stake takes a lot of foresight and guts.
The most obvious example of Musah's experiments is his palm nut plantation. To the best of Troy's knowledge, Musah is the only farmer growing palm nut in the entire district – it is much more common in the south where the ground is softer allowing the tree's roots to grow strong and deep. Musah has some land around a stream that floods regularly during the rainy season and decided to test out some palm nut trees. Now, five years later, he has a flourishing palm nut plantation. He has continued to experiment in different places and has another plot of land where the test trees he planted three years ago have started bearing fruit. He plans to fill in the area with palm nut seedlings this year.
Another example of Musah's innovation is his grafting. He learned how to graft mangoes, combining local mangoes with varieties of mangoes that produce bigger fruits. Grafted mangoes are common in Ghana and at first this didn't especially set him apart in my mind. Then we came across a mango tree that had several grafts, six in total. Each graft was a different variety, so this tree will grow up to bear six different types of fruits, and Musah will learn which type does best.
All of this without any formal education. Musah doesn't speak a word of English – his son Alhassan translated for me as we went around the farm. Pretty incredible.
Innovation is something we like to talk a lot about in EWB and at Waterloo. When I think of innovation I think of fast-moving exciting projects, pushing the boundaries and learning quickly. I think of shortening feedback cycles, “failing fast” and constant iteration. Two days with Musah taught me that innovation in farming is a bit different. Watching him meticulously check each of his palm nut trees and grafted mangoes showed me another type of innovation. Innovation where you invest in a seedling and wait three years (three years!!!) before you reap any rewards, before you learn if your experiment worked. This innovation requires patience, doing the small things each and every day with the hope that it might pay off in the end.
In many ways all farmers face this challenge of evaluating short-term decisions against long-term outcomes, even with their regular year-to-year crops. Will the rains come early or late? Is it worth it to invest in fertilizer, herbicide or pesticide? At the end of the day, what will all of this work be worth for me? All of these questions are ambiguous in farming. Sometimes it doesn't pay off at all. I recently met a farmer group in Bole trying to do dry season vegetable gardening. They have several gardens of tomatoes that have just started flowering. Unfortunately, the wells they have been using to irrigate are drying up early this year, along with the tomatoes.
All of this adds to my respect and admiration for what Musah is doing is Blema. Being an innovative farmer is hard. Not only do you have to work hard, you need to be willing to experiment, to take risks, and to be patient.
If you've made it this far, you might be wondering, what does all this mean for EWB's work with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and with farmers? In order to keep this from becoming another one of my excessively long posts, I'll defer that question, as it's a big one. Stay tuned, that post is on its way!
PS Below are some more pictures from the two days. Hope you enjoy!
Musah stands proudly in front of his palm nut plantation.
Musah's son Alhassan holds a palm nut seedling in the nursery.
Palm nuts! They become more red as the mature before they're ready to be harvested.
Young cashews before the fruit develops.
Alhassan shows the different types of cashew fruits.
Mature cashews ready to be bagged and sold to a processor.
Taking the bullocks to the dam to fetch water.
Look familiar? A soka (or treadle) pump. One of the technologies EWB used to promote in Southern Africa. They use this for irrigation when they don't have money for fuel for the gas pump.
Alright, fine, a picture of me... if I have to. Alhassan to my right and Musah to my left.
Friday, March 19, 2010
One Thousand Two Hundred Eighty-Eight
One Thousand Two Hundred Eighty-Eight. The number of days between leaving Ghana in 2006 and arriving in 2010. In some ways it feels like I never left. It was almost deja vu, leaving Toronto, boarding the plane to Amsterdam, spending way too much on a croissant on the layover before finally landing in the heat, humidity and darkness of Accra. After making it through customs I took a taxi with the three other EWB staff arriving with me to Madam Adisa's house, the last place I stayed in Accra before leaving last time. Adisa greeted us with her usual openness and hospitality – and a large meal of boiled yams and jollof rice. A welcome back that made it feel like I was returning to a place I knew.
I just looked back on my first month of blog posts from 2006 and it has been an interesting reflection. I managed to write about 5000 words describing my first three days or so. I can't say I'd be able to do the same this time around – the sights and sounds that were so new and exciting three years ago seem almost familiar (although the public toilets are still less than appealing and my first bowl of TZ didn't go down quite as easy as I'd hoped).
At the same time I've had the pleasure of watching Reynaldo, a new friend from my training group, go through all of those new experiences. Sitting in the back of a taxi while the driver and the person in the front seat argue at full volume in another language, learning to eat an orange like a Ghanaian, trying to get red dirt out of a white shirt. Venturing into the market is a great metaphor for the whole experience; it is colourful, dirty, crowded, loud, full of smells (good and bad) and almost certainly overwhelming. How much should things cost? Is that person yelling at me or just yelling? Am I in the way? At some point you learn to accept the chaos as normal and go on about your day as if it is.
The two of us were walking with some of the other EWB staff just by the market when Reynaldo asked a simple question. “What is that???”It was a white vehicle with its doors wide open, full of butchered cows. Halves of cows were strewn about the inside next to two cardboard boxes holding piles of folds that jiggled with the sputtering diesel engine. Upon closer inspection the consensus was that is was beef hide, something I had eaten once before. The smell of the meat made the lack of refrigeration conspicuous, just as the loud buzzing made obvious the abundance of flies. As it pulled away two simple words written in large red block letters gave Reynaldo his answer. Meat Van.
I'm sure if I'd seen such a thing on my third day in Ghana in 2006 I would have written an essay on it, but this time it hardly seemed out of the ordinary, and certainly not a shocking discovery. Later, I was sitting listening to the woman who had just cooked us some fried egg sandwiches talk about how she was expecting it to take her three years to save up the 600 GHC (or $480) to buy a container for her tailoring business when a green SUV pulled up with spotless chrome rims and the logo of an NGO painted on the door. Across the street a monkey is chained to the wall. I start to wonder what out of anything in this city should be normal. It reminds me of a story that Tahidu, my old boss and host father once told me. He spoke of an educated teacher that moved to the remote community he was assigned to, determined to do a better job by being closer, missing less of days of work and spending more time on his community. It didn't help, as the teacher became just like the community and nothing changed.
You have to adapt and learn to survive and be happy in another culture, but how far do you go? What do you stay grounded in when so many of your assumptions about what is right are challenged? I've been struggling with this question and wondering if I have too easily accepted the realities of Ghana as normal. What values do I hold on to in order to be an effective catalyst of change? It is hard enough to make change and push boundaries in your own culture, never mind the complications of being a Canadian in Ghana.
Although this question has been especially apparent to me over the past couple of weeks it is not new; it's certainly one I thought about in 2006 and since then. These are the challenges I have been looking forward to coming back to and tackling again, with a little more time and a little more depth. It's a reminder that after one thousand two hundred and eighty-eight days I'm not just coming back to familiar people, places and sensations, but familiar challenges and unanswered questions as well.
I just looked back on my first month of blog posts from 2006 and it has been an interesting reflection. I managed to write about 5000 words describing my first three days or so. I can't say I'd be able to do the same this time around – the sights and sounds that were so new and exciting three years ago seem almost familiar (although the public toilets are still less than appealing and my first bowl of TZ didn't go down quite as easy as I'd hoped).
At the same time I've had the pleasure of watching Reynaldo, a new friend from my training group, go through all of those new experiences. Sitting in the back of a taxi while the driver and the person in the front seat argue at full volume in another language, learning to eat an orange like a Ghanaian, trying to get red dirt out of a white shirt. Venturing into the market is a great metaphor for the whole experience; it is colourful, dirty, crowded, loud, full of smells (good and bad) and almost certainly overwhelming. How much should things cost? Is that person yelling at me or just yelling? Am I in the way? At some point you learn to accept the chaos as normal and go on about your day as if it is.
The two of us were walking with some of the other EWB staff just by the market when Reynaldo asked a simple question. “What is that???”It was a white vehicle with its doors wide open, full of butchered cows. Halves of cows were strewn about the inside next to two cardboard boxes holding piles of folds that jiggled with the sputtering diesel engine. Upon closer inspection the consensus was that is was beef hide, something I had eaten once before. The smell of the meat made the lack of refrigeration conspicuous, just as the loud buzzing made obvious the abundance of flies. As it pulled away two simple words written in large red block letters gave Reynaldo his answer. Meat Van.
I'm sure if I'd seen such a thing on my third day in Ghana in 2006 I would have written an essay on it, but this time it hardly seemed out of the ordinary, and certainly not a shocking discovery. Later, I was sitting listening to the woman who had just cooked us some fried egg sandwiches talk about how she was expecting it to take her three years to save up the 600 GHC (or $480) to buy a container for her tailoring business when a green SUV pulled up with spotless chrome rims and the logo of an NGO painted on the door. Across the street a monkey is chained to the wall. I start to wonder what out of anything in this city should be normal. It reminds me of a story that Tahidu, my old boss and host father once told me. He spoke of an educated teacher that moved to the remote community he was assigned to, determined to do a better job by being closer, missing less of days of work and spending more time on his community. It didn't help, as the teacher became just like the community and nothing changed.
You have to adapt and learn to survive and be happy in another culture, but how far do you go? What do you stay grounded in when so many of your assumptions about what is right are challenged? I've been struggling with this question and wondering if I have too easily accepted the realities of Ghana as normal. What values do I hold on to in order to be an effective catalyst of change? It is hard enough to make change and push boundaries in your own culture, never mind the complications of being a Canadian in Ghana.
Although this question has been especially apparent to me over the past couple of weeks it is not new; it's certainly one I thought about in 2006 and since then. These are the challenges I have been looking forward to coming back to and tackling again, with a little more time and a little more depth. It's a reminder that after one thousand two hundred and eighty-eight days I'm not just coming back to familiar people, places and sensations, but familiar challenges and unanswered questions as well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)