Final Days of Training

What is there to say? I passed my Language Proficiency Interview with an Intermediate Plus rating, which is very good. My sign language group was way ahead of the other language classes, partly because some of us had previous experience in ASL, and partly because sign language is simply an easier language for a novice compared to Dagbani or Twi or Ewe, which are tonal languages with sounds and structure completely foreign to English. While my language group was conversing in sign about gender equality in the workplace and other complicated topics, the other groups were memorizing a rigid, rote introduction about themselves and their family, and were virtually unable to deviate from their script to answer questions or engage in actual conversation. So, being ahead of the curve, my group took our language test a few days early, and then had the rest of the week to prepare our “Heal the World” song, and waste time in Kukurantumi.

We had a formal going away/thank you ceremony for our homestay families yesterday, which was basically a dry run for swearing-in on Tuesday. We danced the Ghanaian dances we had all been practicing, and my sign language group performed our song. Sitting around after the ceremony, I had my first actual conversation with my homestay mother. She seems to be a very busy woman (I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt here); she runs a catering school in Kukurantumi for at-risk women. It seems like a worthwhile endeavor, and one that I would like to have heard more about earlier, but I’ve never been invited into my homestay mother’s home (I’m in the outhouse) or felt like I am part of the family. On the bright side, I’ve had all the freedom I could ever want, whereas many homestay families treat their PC trainees like children, wanting to know their whereabouts at all times, doing their laundry, etc. I think I must have set some unspoken precedent early on that I am not a child; I can do my own laundry, and I will come and go without being unreasonably questioned. Kate will not be coddled. However, I remember I was told by my homestay aunt on the first day that I met her that she would prepare me for marriage…and I can’t say I feel any more equipped by my experience here. Although I was taught how to make groundnut soup and rice balls in my language class, which I hear is the key to a man’s heart. It’s certainly the key to my own heart.

As is standard, my homestay mother had a dress made for me, which she presented to me just before the ceremony. It’s a very pretty fabric, but the entire chest area is adorned with tiered ruffles that act to completely obliterate any curves/figure I may have naturally. I’ll let you judge for yourselves, but I felt like a Spanish birthday cake in the dress.

So, tomorrow morning we actually, really, finally leave our homestay behind, bright and early, and head back to Valley View University near Accra to await our official Swearing-In on Tuesday at the American Embassy. I hope it’s a big party—I’m really excited.

beautiful evening in New Tafo

puppy bath (the cutest puppy in Ghana, now owned by a trainee)

This is right outside my door in Kukurantumi

cooking lessons--sorting the beans (because there are a lot of rocks: reconstructive dentistry is a big part of the PC experience)

cooking lessons--bubbling beans

cooking lessons--Lauren grinding the peppers

cooking lessons (we had to make guacamole)

cooking lessons--groundnut soup and chicken

no pastoral afternoon cooking session is complete without a dead dog

making rice balls (basically just cooking rice to the point when it falls apart, and then making balls out of it)

post-language test festivities

rainy day soccer match

wet and muddy players

post-game photo (I was merely a spectator in this game)

me trying to make something happen on the soccer field

making a new friend

Ghanaian Dance (video to come soon)

Sign Language girls signing "Heal the World"

Ghanaian Bacteria, Latrines, Etc.

I'm back in Kukurantumi enduring my final weeks of training before swearing-in on August 30th. There's not too much to say about attending sign language lessons for 6 hours a day, except that my group is learning a signed version of Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" that will be broadcast on Ghanaian National television during swearing-in. We spent quite a while simply translating Jackson's lyrics into the grammar of sign language, rendering the original song almost unrecognizable. For example, one signed line goes, "know heart love process," which is nonsensical to a hearing person, but evidently the signs will mean something to the deaf. We hope.

I mentioned before that I had been sick while traveling in Damanko. I'm happy to report that following some strong antibiotics, I'm 100% well again. It only took 6 days of painful diarrhea for Peace Corps to finally give me the meds. Bacterial infections are really awful.

A funny anecdote:

During my illness, my homestay mother saw me walking urgently back and forth across the courtyard to the nasty latrine, and she yelled over to me in front of the entire family, “Kate, are you running?”

“Yes,” I said.

I hope her use of the word ‘running’ is not lost on you folks back home.

During another recent trip to the shit hole, I came across the elderly man in my compound sitting in the latrine with the door wide open (all the men in the compound poop with the door open). Generally, in these instances, I make my way back to my room for a few minutes until he calls across the courtyard to tell me he is finished. But in this case, my homestay mother was sitting outside, and she witnessed one of these bathroom encounters. She called to me, asking if I wanted to use her bathroom. “Okay,” I said. Well…I thought in the past I had heard the distinctive sound of a flushing toilet from the courtyard, but I assumed it was just my wishful imagination. But today, with Maame Doris’ blessing, I opened the (normally locked) door just to the right of my own dingy, dark bathing room to find (queue the choir)…an incredible tiled bathroom complete with a glorious flushing toilet, shower, and porcelain sink. What?!!? I am your guest, and you have me using the outhouse, a cockroach infested, raised cement hole, shared with 7 other people? ...when there is a beautiful first-world bathroom right here? Maybe she’s taking the ‘living at the local level’ Peace Corps directive too much to heart.

About toilets/bathrooms in general:

They come in various models in Ghana, if you will.

--Just above squatting on the side of the road or behind a building, you have the Cement Slab style bathroom, which features 3 cement walls enclosing a concrete ground onto which you pee. The backspray on this model is particularly intense, generally bathing you in your own urine.

--The Aluminum Roofing model features 4 aluminum walls, about chest high, including a swinging door, but no roof, and a gravel ground upon which to pee. If you are exceptionally lucky, you will find two aptly placed rocks upon which you can stand so as to avoid peeing on your feet.

--The Cement Hole with Standing Pad style is frequently found in bus stations; it features as many as 10 stalls in varying degrees of total filth, ranging (in a best case scenario) from simply being wet...to having piles of poop around the cement hole. Most likely, there will also be baskets for toilet paper, or whatever other paper-like material you can find to wipe yourself with. Add in a few hundred flies and mosquitoes, and a smell that engages the gag reflex of the most seasoned traveler, and that about sums it up.

--From there, it gets significantly better: there are several different manifestations of the traditional porcelain and/or plastic sit toilet, one with running water, and one in which you have to add water to the back of the tank and then flush. Most of the time, you can’t put your toilet paper down these toilets, so you use an appropriately placed trash basket instead.

Our SCOP group (another PC acronym that doesn't warrant explanation); essentially we played football and performed a malaria skit

kids lined up for water at our SCOP event

someone's poor pet

name this bird? It was flitting around a urinal with it's mate.

More images from Damanko, Wli Waterfall, etc.

on the way to Wli

So, now you know who to contact...

Yes, that does say 'California Video Game', and they have a Playstation

the town of Wli heading to the falls

me on the Wli trail in my awesome new batik knickers

there are nine stream crossings on the trail

the falls!! Quite possibly the highest or longest waterfall in West Africa, although this is debatable.

ants on a mission

Kate in her natural habitat

one of the prizes for winning the tournament

the game ball, post-game

fufu ladies in Damanko

fufu, fresh fish, and light soup (this is not my meal; I eat it without the fish); looks pretty gross, but if you live in Damanko, this is what you get for a least one meal a day

fresh fish from the Oti River (see above for cooked product)

another nice image of the spectators at the football match

longboats ready at the edge of Oti River in Damanko

beautiful image at dusk of the Oti River

another image of the tro from hell; notice how the engine cover is permanently bent open; it IS a Mercedes, though!

Damanko

On Sunday morning, Carol, Mark, and I woke up at 3:30 am and were taken to the Tamale station to find a bus leaving for Yendi. When we arrived at the station at 4:30 am, we were directed toward the wrong line of people, and nearly an hour later we found the correct queue, where dozens of people were pushing and yelling, trying to form some semblance of a line so that the tickets could begin to be sold. Standing among this mess, we missed out on the first bus of the morning, but managed to be positioned correctly for the second bus. Before 10 am, we arrived in Yendi and met up with Brenden who was in our PEPFAR group and headed to Damanko with us. We waited for an hour while our tro filled—this bus was the worst bus I have ever ridden in, with the seats caving in and dislodged; I rode the entire journey with my hand on the seatback in front of me, holding it upright.

Oh, and the road! (Jeez, I was thanking my luck for having placed my site on a paved, main road, close to a big city.) We endured 3.5 hours of rutted, dirt road, going 5 miles an hour in and out of pot holes, with two goats up-top sliding and banging their hooves loudly across the metal roof with every sharp turn and bump. I arrived in Bimbila looking like an extra from a disaster movie, with dirt caked on the half of my face that was closest to the bus window. In fact, my backpack and my entire body were covered in dust to the point of earning a hearty laugh from my travel mates upon arrival. And we weren’t finished. We got in the back of a truck with two more goats on top and headed the final hour on another dirt road into Damanko. The last ride wasn’t so bad, except I was both peed and pooped on by a goat, dribbling down from above. Good times. My bucket bath that afternoon was well deserved.

Damanko is an utterly unexceptional town, with virtually no services, food, or goods. The PC volunteer here has lost 30 lbs in a year, mostly because there is no variety of food whatsoever. Damanko is the site for our HIV education field activities (PEPFAR). We are staying with a volunteer, Kristi, who is coordinating soccer matches in conjunction with an HIV awareness campaign. We are educating the soccer players to be leaders in their communities, who will spread knowledge to others about how to protect oneself against HIV, and distinguishing fact from myth about the disease. The first day’s events were fairly successful—we played several games with the Ghanaians, one of which helped them to visualize how easily HIV can spread when people are having unprotected sex. The men were only partially interested in these activities, and they mostly stuck around because we are white people, and that, evidently, is a pretty good spectacle to witness first-hand.

The remaining two days of PEPFAR were spent watching the soccer matches (boring), and giving small presentations on preventing malaria. On the day before we were to leave Damanko, I became sick with a high temperature and diarrhea. This sort of virus is incredibly common among the PC trainees and volunteers, and it’s really awful when it happens when you are traveling. That’s why they say that 99% of volunteers ‘join the club’ during their time in Ghana, which is another way of saying that they poop their pants. Thankfully, I did not join the club on our journey out of Damanko to Hohoe, but there were a few close calls along the way.

one of three cars/tros to take us from Damanko to Hohoe

evening market in Damanko---mostly fish from the river

waiting out the rain under a pavilion near the soccer field

bread-making oven

mid-game malaria education presentation

spectators gathered round the goal at the soccer game

our PEPFAR group

soccer tournament

HIV video presentation drawing a big crowd

Kristi's courtyard in Damanko--I'm painting the inside of my house this color

HIV and gender presentations in the local church

our accomodations in Damanko--not so great

Damanko in the evening at the market

goat up top

baby gripping Brendan's leg during the tro ride

people up top

worst tro ever to Bimbila

tro station activity in Yendi

animals up top

goat up top

my PEPFAR group waiting for a tro in Yendi

normal bathroom while traveling

Bread lady at the bus station