Culture Shock
It has been just over a week – about 10 days – but in some ways it feels like 10 years.
Sarah left last night and part of me, a large part, wanted to trade places. I feel like this is all well and good for a couple weeks, but the crushing reality that this is going to go on and on and on for several weeks, months even, is really weighing down on me.
We spent the past few days in a village getting a taste of what life is like for most Ghanaians, if not most Africans. We got a little cultural lesson before we took off, how to back out of marriage proposals and not eat so much we wanted to puke, that sort of thing. We also got a quick and dirty language lesson. It was really helpful at the time, but proved to be rather useless on the ground.
We took a tro out to the Swedru town, which is in the Central Region, about an hour outside of Accra. The tro had so many seats crammed into it, even my knees were touching the seat in front of us. It was a long and mostly uninteresting drive out to the town. Things really didn’t start to get interesting until we hit a small market town outside Accra, which was amazingly busy and bustling, with piles of pineapples and oranges, flip-flops and tomatoes and bars upon bars of soap. From there it was straight into the countryside, which these gorgeous, massive trees popping up here and there amongst lush hills and palm trees and wonderful vistas.
Tina, the woman from the cultural office, took us out for lunch, ordering some chicken and rice for those of us with sensitive stomachs and rice balls with chicken for everyone else. She ate grasscutter and fufu, the ultimate Ghanaian meal of rat served with pounded cassava mush. Gross.
Her meal seemed to be some sort of test, as our reactions to it determined where we would be staying. Alex was put in a very posh place with a chief. Anita was put in a hut. I ended up in Afransi with a very wonderful family, Grace and her daughters Jennifer and Prinsla and her son Emmanuel, who disappeared part-way through the visit. Although Grace is married to a chief as well, she lives in a house with no running water and the only electricity she uses is for lights. According to the contract with SYTO group who arranges the homestays, each of the families must be able to provide a double bed in a private room with a door with a lock. They’re paid 60,000 cedis a day to feed us and the expectation is that you will have a bucket shower and use a pit latrine.
My family had dinner waiting for me when I arrived, which I promptly refused much to her dismay. (We had just eaten and my stomach was giving me trouble.) Instead, we wandered outside and helped make bread. I proved to be very useless, a feeling I would have over and over again during the weekend. For a while we watched them mix up some new dough, then Grace took me through town introducing me to people. It was a bit of a whirlwind, but my overwhelming impression was… wow. People are incredibly, incredibly poor. The huts were not hooked up to electricity and the courtyards, where people pee, spit, cook, wash and prepare things like cassava, were mostly flyblown, dusty dirty scratches of red dirt. Kids and babies were scrounging alongside the skinniest fleabag cats and dogs. Chickens and goats roamed around down with abandon, eating garbage. (Makes you consider vegetarianism.)
Anyway, by about 8:30 p.m. it was pitch black and I was ready for bed. The cacophony of noise died down probably around 11:30, so the only sound I could hear was my stomach rumbling as it dealt with the night’s dinner. (Rice and chicken, seemingly harmless.) Nana had told us the towns would be peaceful – she was wrong. Mine was an unending series of noise – whether it was the taxis rolling through with the driver’s hand on the horn, the babies screaming, the goats bleating, the sheep calling to their young, the women and children calling to each other, my host sister doing “air hankies” into her hand, my other host sister coughing up a lung (I swear she had TB) or the sound of the soccer match, the prayer, the whatever. At one point in the wee hours I swear I heard the neighbour moaning during sex, but there were no men around.
To top it off, the town had a large Muslim population, so the call to prayer started at 5 a.m. and continued another five times throughout the day. I don’t know how anyone could possibly learn to sleep through it. It was loud and jarring and completely annoying.
Grace took me to a soccer match, the hospital and to visit her kids in the missionary town where they got to secondary school. I’m not sure what will become of their education, how they will use it as they become little adults.
While we were at the soccer match, I caught sight of Prue and Jon coming across the field and I swear I have never had a more elated reaction to the sight of people I know. I literally grabbed onto my host mum’s arm and shouted, “Look! There’s Jon and Prue!” That really got me thinking, about ex-pats, about my expectations for Ghana, about how I’m going to last here when I’m so glad to see other white people. I talked about it last night with the other volunteers and they were quite reassuring, but I’m a bit nervous that I’m deluding myself a bit about the experience of living in Africa. On the one hand, I want to get to know Ghanaians and appreciate Ghanaian culture, not just transplant my easy Canadian life to a rich suburb of Accra. But at the same time, I was really craving a like-minded person while I was in the village, someone who could view the experience in the same way, who would know what to say about the food and the way people looked at you and the requests or demands for things like phones, cameras or T-shirts.
Like I said earlier, the full weight of six months is really coming crushing down and I found myself really questioning whether I could really last through six months of not connecting with people, of feeling different or isolated or misunderstood. The entire thing was incredibly exhausting.
At points I was counting down the hours, the days, the meals until I could leave the village. I would lie in bed and think about how much more time would elapse until I could go to bed and just get away from the family, who spoke a lot about me, but rarely to me. (Even the kids just stared and spoke to each other in Fanti.)
It wasn’t until the night before I was set to leave that I finally broke through and scored some points with the people and my family. As we were getting ready for bed, I stepped outside to use the toilet, then back in to get a flashlight and by the time I was done using the toilet, a crowd of kids had gathered. I sat on a bench with them and they taught me some church songs, then I taught them “This little light of mine,” the only church song I could remember. (Pathetic, I know. I even made up some story about how at my church only the choir sings – lying about going to church isn’t a sin, is it?) Anyway, the kids and the adults and I really connected – finally!!
The next morning, Grace loaned me an orange and white dress, along with a scarf, to go to church. She also gave me money to give as an offering, which they did three times. The service was long and complicated and involved a lot of singing and dancing and loud, individual prayer, which was really deafening at times.
Needless to say, we were all very relieved to see one another by the time we met up to catch a tro back to Accra. Each of us had trouble with food and relating to our families and things like that. It felt like coming back to paradise to arrive in a city with electricity and running water, where we could go for a drink and have a shower. (Both of which each of us did rather promptly.) In fact, we all got slightly buzzed at the bar, then went for a shot of Akpeteshi with the bar owner, then came home and drunkenly cooked up some pasta, which is sure to become our staple, now that we’re living like poor students.
Sarah left last night and part of me, a large part, wanted to trade places. I feel like this is all well and good for a couple weeks, but the crushing reality that this is going to go on and on and on for several weeks, months even, is really weighing down on me.
We spent the past few days in a village getting a taste of what life is like for most Ghanaians, if not most Africans. We got a little cultural lesson before we took off, how to back out of marriage proposals and not eat so much we wanted to puke, that sort of thing. We also got a quick and dirty language lesson. It was really helpful at the time, but proved to be rather useless on the ground.
We took a tro out to the Swedru town, which is in the Central Region, about an hour outside of Accra. The tro had so many seats crammed into it, even my knees were touching the seat in front of us. It was a long and mostly uninteresting drive out to the town. Things really didn’t start to get interesting until we hit a small market town outside Accra, which was amazingly busy and bustling, with piles of pineapples and oranges, flip-flops and tomatoes and bars upon bars of soap. From there it was straight into the countryside, which these gorgeous, massive trees popping up here and there amongst lush hills and palm trees and wonderful vistas.
Tina, the woman from the cultural office, took us out for lunch, ordering some chicken and rice for those of us with sensitive stomachs and rice balls with chicken for everyone else. She ate grasscutter and fufu, the ultimate Ghanaian meal of rat served with pounded cassava mush. Gross.
Her meal seemed to be some sort of test, as our reactions to it determined where we would be staying. Alex was put in a very posh place with a chief. Anita was put in a hut. I ended up in Afransi with a very wonderful family, Grace and her daughters Jennifer and Prinsla and her son Emmanuel, who disappeared part-way through the visit. Although Grace is married to a chief as well, she lives in a house with no running water and the only electricity she uses is for lights. According to the contract with SYTO group who arranges the homestays, each of the families must be able to provide a double bed in a private room with a door with a lock. They’re paid 60,000 cedis a day to feed us and the expectation is that you will have a bucket shower and use a pit latrine.
My family had dinner waiting for me when I arrived, which I promptly refused much to her dismay. (We had just eaten and my stomach was giving me trouble.) Instead, we wandered outside and helped make bread. I proved to be very useless, a feeling I would have over and over again during the weekend. For a while we watched them mix up some new dough, then Grace took me through town introducing me to people. It was a bit of a whirlwind, but my overwhelming impression was… wow. People are incredibly, incredibly poor. The huts were not hooked up to electricity and the courtyards, where people pee, spit, cook, wash and prepare things like cassava, were mostly flyblown, dusty dirty scratches of red dirt. Kids and babies were scrounging alongside the skinniest fleabag cats and dogs. Chickens and goats roamed around down with abandon, eating garbage. (Makes you consider vegetarianism.)
Anyway, by about 8:30 p.m. it was pitch black and I was ready for bed. The cacophony of noise died down probably around 11:30, so the only sound I could hear was my stomach rumbling as it dealt with the night’s dinner. (Rice and chicken, seemingly harmless.) Nana had told us the towns would be peaceful – she was wrong. Mine was an unending series of noise – whether it was the taxis rolling through with the driver’s hand on the horn, the babies screaming, the goats bleating, the sheep calling to their young, the women and children calling to each other, my host sister doing “air hankies” into her hand, my other host sister coughing up a lung (I swear she had TB) or the sound of the soccer match, the prayer, the whatever. At one point in the wee hours I swear I heard the neighbour moaning during sex, but there were no men around.
To top it off, the town had a large Muslim population, so the call to prayer started at 5 a.m. and continued another five times throughout the day. I don’t know how anyone could possibly learn to sleep through it. It was loud and jarring and completely annoying.
Grace took me to a soccer match, the hospital and to visit her kids in the missionary town where they got to secondary school. I’m not sure what will become of their education, how they will use it as they become little adults.
While we were at the soccer match, I caught sight of Prue and Jon coming across the field and I swear I have never had a more elated reaction to the sight of people I know. I literally grabbed onto my host mum’s arm and shouted, “Look! There’s Jon and Prue!” That really got me thinking, about ex-pats, about my expectations for Ghana, about how I’m going to last here when I’m so glad to see other white people. I talked about it last night with the other volunteers and they were quite reassuring, but I’m a bit nervous that I’m deluding myself a bit about the experience of living in Africa. On the one hand, I want to get to know Ghanaians and appreciate Ghanaian culture, not just transplant my easy Canadian life to a rich suburb of Accra. But at the same time, I was really craving a like-minded person while I was in the village, someone who could view the experience in the same way, who would know what to say about the food and the way people looked at you and the requests or demands for things like phones, cameras or T-shirts.
Like I said earlier, the full weight of six months is really coming crushing down and I found myself really questioning whether I could really last through six months of not connecting with people, of feeling different or isolated or misunderstood. The entire thing was incredibly exhausting.
At points I was counting down the hours, the days, the meals until I could leave the village. I would lie in bed and think about how much more time would elapse until I could go to bed and just get away from the family, who spoke a lot about me, but rarely to me. (Even the kids just stared and spoke to each other in Fanti.)
It wasn’t until the night before I was set to leave that I finally broke through and scored some points with the people and my family. As we were getting ready for bed, I stepped outside to use the toilet, then back in to get a flashlight and by the time I was done using the toilet, a crowd of kids had gathered. I sat on a bench with them and they taught me some church songs, then I taught them “This little light of mine,” the only church song I could remember. (Pathetic, I know. I even made up some story about how at my church only the choir sings – lying about going to church isn’t a sin, is it?) Anyway, the kids and the adults and I really connected – finally!!
The next morning, Grace loaned me an orange and white dress, along with a scarf, to go to church. She also gave me money to give as an offering, which they did three times. The service was long and complicated and involved a lot of singing and dancing and loud, individual prayer, which was really deafening at times.
Needless to say, we were all very relieved to see one another by the time we met up to catch a tro back to Accra. Each of us had trouble with food and relating to our families and things like that. It felt like coming back to paradise to arrive in a city with electricity and running water, where we could go for a drink and have a shower. (Both of which each of us did rather promptly.) In fact, we all got slightly buzzed at the bar, then went for a shot of Akpeteshi with the bar owner, then came home and drunkenly cooked up some pasta, which is sure to become our staple, now that we’re living like poor students.
posted by Palmer in Africa at 6:12 AM
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