On Friends, On Different

Today I said farewell to a friend.  This post is a long time coming as this experience is full of goodbyes.

In the Peace Corps, volunteers go home after two years of service.  In Ghana, Agriculture volunteers swear in in December.  Four months later, the Health volunteers do the same and four months after that, the Education volunteers too, raise their hands in pledge.

This means that every four months, you say goodbye to good friends.  Today, it was Jac Paul.  Jac is quiet but her words are always well chosen. 

Jaclin Paul can prepare a meal like no body’s business.  She taught me just how glorious food here can be, how creative you can be with seemingly limited options.  Birthday after birthday, celebrations and holidays and just-because-it’s-the-weekend, you could be sure Jaclin Paul was involved in it and she was going to plate something fabulous.  Chocolate cake, sweet and salty snacks, carrot tops!  This girl had it all.  She is impressive to say the least. Jac also listened more than she spoke, which is a great characteristic for a PCV because we all want to talk about ourselves all the time.

And today we parted in town and I watched her walk away in her rice straw hat toting probably all the material possessions she owns.  She is done here.  She has served the time and now she is on to the next big, grand, glorious adventure that is America, grad school, a new city, and a new challenge.  I try to imagine what that feels like.  I get jealous, scared and sad.

I think about home, and I think about then and those relationships, and how good it was.  I had this friend named Sarah and this girl she is Rock and Roll.  We worked at a coffee house together where I was pulled into a local music scene hidden away in little house basements and church attics.

Today I bask in memories of porch shows and summer time.  Sarah and this crowd  were unlike people I had ever socialized with.  These girls wore fringe.  They were hipsters but this felt like more than a trend, it was more, this was rock and roll—this was different.  It was some kind of freedom, another world from what was happening next door or across the river.

We would sit in our coffee shop talking about who knows what, boys probably, the future, Friday night.  I would sit in that shop at three in the morning talking to my Botany professor about the genetic mutations in orchids.

I revel in the fact that I got to have these experiences.  That I got to know those people and that place and that I got to take part.

Last Friday night, I found myself at Tacorobama, the best pizza place in Tamale.  And there I sat with my friends:  Beth, the veteran, Fahimeh, my friend and Wade, the boy, engineer and dreamer.

Wade cautiously confides in us a new idea he wants to push and see it become a reality in Ghana.  He talks of 3D printers and a training centers and free ideas and information and sourcing.  We talk through the idea’s strengths and faults leading us to problems and successes in our past projects, problems with the Education systems in Ghana and America, governments, corruptions, failures. 

We talk Peace Corps, Teach for America, AID and home.

We laugh at organizations giving laptops to illiterate farmers in order for them to start keeping records in hopes that they will become better business people, therefore increasing yields, and thus increasing Food Security.

I think of Molly, a friend back home doing that West Lafayette thang.  The girl is not in the Peace Corps, and she isn’t working for AID and she is not getting Feed the Future funding.  But Molly is at the farmers market every Saturday collecting fresh vegetables and taking it to low income housing.  Working, doing and making a difference.

I take pride in those in my generation standing up, being change makers.  People are doing things.  People are doing things differently.  They are dreaming, they are working and they sometimes see things change.

Then think of that past place, the basements, the music, and these guys that just did what they felt like doing, music.  And I look at all these kids that come into Peace Corps and they try and they do, and I look at Wade being passionate about this idea I do not even fully understand.

And I thank God.  I thank God for all of it and all of you.  I thank God for my parents understanding my coming here to do this, and supporting a child that went in a different direction.  And I thank God that my life has been what it has. 

In four months I will be in Jaclin Paul’s shoes, and I will choose to stay, or to go.  My group, The Stonewallers, is 14 left of the 21 that came to Ghana in October of 2012.  We itch to see November.  People talk of spiritual journeys, of sailboats, Europe, of amber waves of grain. 

I don’t know where I am going.  But I hope I never stop.  I love being a part of something, a something, a community, a group of people that believe in an idea enough to sacrifice of themselves.  A people who do to see change for the better.

“Do the job first.  Worry about the clearance later.”

Sgt. Shriver

Fulani

This week I am back in the village for the first time in months.  From All Volunteer Conference to Grassroots Soccer Camp in Bimbilla to Mushroom training in Accra and an all staff conference for my supporting project.

I’m met by everyone with, “I’ve been missing you.”

“Yes I know, I traveled.”

“Are you here?”

“I am here, now.”

Being away makes you appreciate things.  I was happy to throw myself into this life again, knowing in a few short months it’ll all be history.

My site has changed a lot in the last few months, we have lots of new neighbors.  One lady does hair so I go out and sit under the neem tree while she ties up hair do’s.  We sit and talk and remove greens from their stalks.

Yesterday I walked down to the Fulani house to buy milk.  Its rainy season and milk are producing!  This is one of many reasons rainy season makes me so, so, happy.

The Fulani are the nomadic tribe, you can find them all over Africa driving cattle across every landscape.  If they settle, the settle apart from the main village.  At our place, a few Fulani families have built huts across the road from the village of Wuba.

I love the Fulani the most.  The are the ultimate homesteaders.  They hold their own and never ask anybody for anything.

 

They also get hated on a lot, like most traveling tribes of the world.  Aaaand as much as I admire them, they kinda earn it.  They marry young, thirteen and fourteen year olds and they rarely send their kids to school, especially the girls.

I’ve heard things said about the Fulani, like how they belong in the Bush, how they can speak to the plants and animals.  But this is why I adore them, especially when I think how the Fulani, they must know every bush path in our district, every path they’ve ever walked.

Anyway, I went down to buy milk from them.  They make me feel so welcome in their home.  Somehow, I never feel awkward or misunderstood at their compound, they love that I am there but they do not dote either or try to make me feel comfortable by offering me seating or drink or food.  We just sit on the concrete floor of their circle mud huts talking in my broken Dagbani.

Today I took a visitor down there as it was on our way to the dam side.  She was so impressed with my language although I stressed how little I actually know.

It is fun talking to them.  We gave them two bottles and I told them, “Milk, tomorrow.”  And we bargained a little on price, but I didn’t know that’s what we were doing until a few minutes into the conversation.

They are always so happy to see me at their place and its only just occurred to me that it ls probably because no white person has been to their house, ever.

They have come to my house selling a raw cheese product called wagashi.  Maybe they have seen me in their village when I come to teach Numeracy.  And I think white people have walked through Wuba when they come to Kings Village and want to see what a real live African village is like!  But no one visits the Fulani.  Why would they?  The Fulani don’t own land, so its not like they are big farmers.  No aid comes to the Fulani, no whites.

Then I came!  They adore it, I adore it, and I’m going back tomorrow.

On that note, today I made my own butter!  And this week I made English muffins.  Since the cedi is dropping rapidly due to inflation, I can no longer afford brown bread and could never afford butter in the first place.  I feel so pampered.