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| Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005 | | 4:59 pm |
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, or, Where am I?
It's been a while, right? I'm sorry, it's my fault, it has nothing to do with you. I promised I'd write about sustainability, and I didn't. I promised I'd write more about the Ivory Coast, and I didn't. At this point, you're probably thinking, *You know, that Julie, she seems nice enough, but she's not much on following through.* True, true. I'd like to blame it on some tropical disease like typhoid fever, and claim that it debilitated me so much that I was confined to bed, away from a computer for years, but it's not really true. The first part is true - the typhoid - but was it debilitating? Not really. There are a finite number of body parts that can hurt, and typhoid covers a couple of them, but not too many. I did have a lot of spots all over me. But Cote d'Ivoire. The Ivory Coast is, in short, gorgeous - or at least the lower right-hand corner (Elubo to Abidjan) is. Holy smokes, is what I was thinking. Abidjan had electricity, and water, and cleanliness, and no one made me feel like a green alien for being white. There aren't so many white people in Abidjan, but there's still none of the "obruni obruni obruni (white person white person white person)" calls that you get in Ghana, nonstop. There's not so much begging. There's a lot more familiarity for a Westerner there, down to the communication with the locals, which is on a different planet than it is in Ghana. Why? For one, CI is significantly better off, economically, than Ghana. I'm almost totally ignorant of politics, but if I had to guess, I'd think it was largely because of their affiliation with France. Although CI gained independence from France in the 60s, France remained a pervasive influence in the Ivory Coast, and has a presence in the country even today. There are French soldiers stationed all around Abidjan, not favorably regarded by the Ivoirians and questionably regarded by me. I'm not sure why they still need to be there, or what reason they give for being there, but then, as I just said, I don't know a lot about politics. Anyway, the other reason CI is better off, I think, is because Ivoirians seem to have an almost diametrically opposed mentality to the Ghanaians. While Ghanaians don't tend to have much drive for marketing or economically favorable enterprises, Ivoirians appear to have a lot more motivation, business-wise, and a greater drive for a higher quality of life. I doubt that it could be categorically stated that "Ghanaians are this way and Ivoirians are that way" without taking into account the myriad of other factors that must influence this kind of thing - like whose colonies they were originally, religious/ethnic influences on cultural behavior, and other historical details that I can't think of right now - but we can say that these are my observations. Anyway. Suffice it to say that I loved the Ivory Coast, I found the Ivoirians exceptionally warm, friendly people, and it was a nice break from Ghana. The Ivoirians that I met were, for reasons that I can only guess, frantically trying to convince me that there was no war in the Ivory Coast. They kept pointing around the city and exclaiming "Pas de guerre! Pas de guerre, oui?" (No war! No war, yes?). Then we would turn the corner, and they would point to a beautiful park and say, "Vous voyez du guerre?" (Do you see a war? - I might have this wrong, I don't speak French very well). And they would laugh a little, we'd move on, and then they'd point to a cookie kiosk and say "Voyez du guerre?" and laugh a little more, as if the idea that there was a war in the Ivory Coast was so farfetched as to be completely comical. When I asked them about all the reports of war in the Ivory Coast, they protested 'que c'est le presse! Pas du guerre ici!' (It's the media! There's no war here!). They seemed to suggest that the Ivoirian media had some vendetta against the Ivory Coast, and had ganged up to promote negative propaganda about the country. When I pointed out that the media couldn't possibly be making up all the war news and pictures of gun battles and bodies, they admitted reluctantly that yes, there had been a war at some undefined time far in the past (the war began in 2002, according to record), but emphasized there was now *pas du guerre!*, and there was no chance of guerre in the future. Okay. I liked the Ivory Coast, and the Ivoirians enough to discount the following week's report of a shootout that killed 10 policemen in the capital. I did ask them about this, and they laughed it off (C'est le Francais! It's because of the French!). Okay, fine. The Ivoirians blame the entire (nonexistent) war on the French, and for all I know, it's true, or it's not true. I just don't know. I still loved the Ivory Coast, and that's good enough for me. How's that for social irresponsibility? So where is Carmen Sandiego now? Carmen is back in the United States. I came back last Friday night. What have I been doing? Mostly picking blueberries and raspberries in my backyard and eating them until my stomach hurts, jogging around my hometown, privately boycotting refined sugar, and remembering things I missed. I love my hometown in a way I never did before. Before returning home, I spent Saturday in New York City, amazed by the cliches that were coming true in living color now(ie, You Don't Realize How Lucky You Are, Americans Generate A Lot Of Plastic Waste, Everyone In New York Wears Black All The Time, etc.). I fell in love with New York City all over again, captured by the hum of activity and the constant motion of people's minds and feet everywhere, and hating myself for loving New York so much when I know I'll hate it again if I move back there. Well, what's the lesson? You can take the girl out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the girl? You travel all over the world looking for something, only to return home to find it? The pen is mightier than the sword? Actions speak louder than words? I don't know. Let's go with the first one. I still don't know where I'll go next, but I'm hoping it will be somewhere good. Mexico, India, Topeka...I really don't know. Keeping an online journal when I'm not doing anything more interesting than the average bear seems kind of exhibitionistic and maybe a little presumptuous, so probably I'll take a break for awhile. Hopefully I'll end up doing something more interesting than the average bear, maybe even more interesting than the above-average bear. In that case, you can stay tuned. You never know. And thanks for reading....Julie | | Sunday, July 10th, 2005 | | 8:31 am |
Cote d'Ivoire
Hello all, In the Ivory Coast right now, on a keyboard that is completely different than ours. Having trouble typing but stay tuned for stories from the IC, which I will post as soon as I return to Ghana and have a regular keyboard. LOVE the Ivory Coast. I absolutely love it. Can't wait to post photos; it's beautiful here. | | Sunday, July 3rd, 2005 | | 7:34 pm |
| | Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 | | 3:11 pm |
not sustainability, again
I still don't feel like deciphering my notes on sustainability, partly because I'm tired of the topic and partly because I think you are, too. That might be me projecting, but too bad. Instead, I found some interesting notes from June 23rd, so, self-aggrandizingly (is that a word? I have to take the GREs again in October, and I'm hoping it is), I'm writing about that instead. Thursday, June 23 I watched the news this morning. If we're talking about serpents in Eden, nothing looks more serpentine than benign old Chicken Noodle Network. Not having watched television for 4 months now - and especially news - I can't say that I miss it. When I was a girl, I used to watch a soap opera, Days of Our Lives. I watched every day after school and was positively crushed when I missed a single day. After some time, other concerns interfered - sports or piano lessons or something - and I stopped watching, cold turkey. A few months later, I watched an episode again. I can't tell you how ridiculous it seemed, or I felt. Was Johnny the pimp really able to fall in love with Eve, the prostitute? Did Bo really come back from the dead, or was he never dead at all? It seemed like a cruel joke to play on Carly, his wife and/or sister. Anyway. Watching CNN made me feel that ridiculousness all over again. Without being exposed to the rhetoric of Condoleeza Rice, or the pre-fab written-by-someone-else crap coming out of this or that politician's mouth, it now seems canned, silly, inane. I couldn't believe anyone takes American politics, or politicians, seriously (I'm not sure America is unique in this case, but I rarely watch much about the politics of other countries, as we tend to dominate even international news). I had a sudden insight into how pretty much the entire world sees America. How trite and insincere our political blather sounds. It was embarrassing, our obsession with politicspeak. I felt as silly as I had when I watched the soap opera again, as if I'd been under some spell and only now could see things as they really were - silly and fake. There is no right perspective on this, or on politics anywhere: they're a necessary evil, I suppose. By nature politics, and politicians, are dishonest, although some more than others. I felt grateful today to have a glimpse of this, a brief escape from something that I'll surely rejoin when I return to the US: the ridiculousness of our politics, and how much influence media has on the words that escape from people's mouths. | | Monday, June 27th, 2005 | | 9:51 am |
near-death experiences, again! drama and intrigue
Let's talk about the design of a tro-tro. For a country that is wildly non-entrepreneurial, someone had economy in mind when they were doing the 2005 tro-tro design contest. One significant difference between a tro-tro and a bus you know is that a tro-tro has no aisle. Where the aisle would be, the tro-tro has jump seats that fold down all the way up the row. And a tro-tro will only leave the station when all seats have a behind sitting firmly in them. Because tro-tros make several stops along lengthy routes, unless you plan the order of boarding and unboarding carefully (which never, ever happens), people who get out at each stop have to crowd-surf (I'm not joking) over everyone to exit at the one door of the tro-tro, in the front. In an accident, you're dead. There is no exit for you, no aisle to run down. In a contraption with about as much structural integrity as a jelo mold, you're chippety-chop, lickety split. In the past, I've made several references to tro-tros as mechanized deathtraps. The things is, they're CHEAP deathtraps. And I'm not too bright - and cheap to boot - so I keep riding in them. You can't beat forty cents for the 2-hour ride into Accra. The taxi is at least 8 dollars. I think now I'll start being less cheap and more bright. Here's why: I had a great few days in the last week, traveling in the north. After the ferry up Volta, I spent a few days in Tamale with the very nice Dr. Wanye, the only ophthalmologist in the region. He spoiled me rotten and was excellent company. I left for Mole National Park in the northwest of Ghana, on Friday afternoon. I met up wiht a few Brits who I'd taken the ferry north with - Ghana makes a small world smaller. We arrived at Mole (pronounced Mole-ay)on Friday night and went off to the dorms. The morning game walk through the park was disappointing. Sure, we saw elephants bathing, but after the Serengeti, I'm a safari snob. Show me elephants doing pirouettes, you know? And I'll be impressed. I stayed for the afternoon and thought of doing a game walk again, but it turned out there was no need. The game decide to do a tourist walk instead. Apparently frustrated by their inability to impress me with the morning show, they walked right up out of the watering hole and parked themselves in front of the dorms, happily ripping up trees and other vegetation. I was impressed. To demonstrate my gratitude, I approached more closely than the recommended 30 meters. In fact, I approached more closely than the not-recommended 10 meters. To demonstrate his gratitude for that, the elephant charged me. I don't need to tell you that I was terrified. Adrenaline, heart, all organs were go. I dropped my camera (by accident) and ran, vaulting the balcony railing in a high-jump that would have made my high school track coach proud (I think - I fell, but there were extenuating circumstances). Well, Elephant was just playing. He didn't really want to kill me, and in his massive head, I heard him laughing at the silly tourist. The important thing is that I have incredible photos, which I'll post when I return. I know I promised more on sustainability. I have limited time and money for these internet cafes, so keep your pants on. I'll get back to it, if not today, another day. So the tro-tro. I left Mole by hitching a ride with a Dutch group of volunteers and got back to Tamale some hours later. I wanted ot take a regular bus south to Kumasi, but it was sold out by the time I arrived; however a tro-tro was leaving. It was a mega-tro, the kind that holds 38 people. Four seats left. Normally, this is a bingo: if 32 seats are filled, you only have to wait for the other 4 to be full before leaving. This is a matter of minutes. However, is four seats are full, you have to - obviously - wait for the other 34. Hours. Remember, the mega-tro is 2 seats on the left, two on the right, and one in the aisle, the whole way down the tro-tro (7 rows). The front seats 3 on two seats. For obvious reasons, the left and right seats fill up first: the jump seats are ridiculously uncomfortable and generally have no back. So person number 35 gets the middle seat, in the middle of the car. Pole position for death on impact. If the car rolls left down an embankment (somwhat common), dead from squashing from the right . If it rolls right (very common)...you get the picture. Tro-tros have sliding windows. About half slide. Okay, so I'm in the Seat of Extra Death. We're doing the 7-hour route to Kumasi. In this time, we see 9 accidents, 2 of which were probably fatal (one head-on, one flip over down the steep embankment on either side of the narrow road). And you know, I can't help it: after seeing so many, I felt...relieved. That's right, I felt like the day's accident quota was filled up, the same way I feel if I fly the day after a plane crash. I mean, the odds are now with me, right? (yes, I'm aware they're not - play along). And also, I assumed the sobering views on the way were a nice reminder to the tro-tro driver to drive carefully. Which is why I'm completely surprised when, 80 feet away from an oncoming Mack truck, the driver decides to pass the trailer in front of us, on the left. I've been part of some asinine passing before, but never this dumb. It looked like the driver actually was trying to off himself and take us along. Everyone started screaming at the driver. We weren't going fast - 30 or 40 mph, as was the oncoming Mack. Why our driver decided to pass then is anyone's guess - it was a very, very obvious time NOT to pass. Now don't get nervous. I'm here, I'm writing about this. I lived, so did everyone else. The road between Tamale and Kumasi is very narrow. Steep hills into grassy ditches on either side of the road, and beyond the ditches, trees. One of the accidents we passed involved someone who must have fallen asleep at the wheel, and had, incredibly, gone into the embankment and driven UP the tree. So we're approaching the Mack at an almost leisurely speed, but we're squarely in front of him. Our combined speed, of course, was 60 or 80 mph. The Mack can't go right because he'll tip over down the embankment. The trailer we're trying to overtake also can't move right to save us because he'll flip. It was a dilly of a pickle, as Ned Flanders would say. We were next to the trailer, 3 feet - I'm not exaggerating; if anything, I'm under-xaggerating - from the grill of the Mack, and the tro-tro driver, finally seeing impending death and listening to the shrieks from the other 37 people in the car, hauls right on the wheel. The scene in the tro-tro was chaotic, everyone piling on the people in the rightmost seat. I was squished but nothing terrible. I was screaming like a banshee. I never knew what I would do if I truly thought I was going to die before. It turns out I scream. The trailer next to us ran off the road as we veered right. The cab of the Mack hit the front of the tro-tro on the left front corner, smashing the headlight, then taking off the driver-side mirror (a truck-style extended mirror), and scraping down the driver's side, taking our side paneling with him. I felt the car shoved rightwards by the Mack. I almost peed myself. What happened to the trailer? To the Mack driver? I don't know. Why not? Because - get this - NO ONE STOPPED. The tro-tro crowd was up in arms. I want you to imagine being a white person in the middle of loud, aggravated Ghanaians shouting in Twi and flailing around in a panic. There is no air to be had in the tro-tro, and when everyone is breathing so damn much, even less. I was shaking, but after the initial scream, nothing. I just sat in the midst of everyone else, shaking and about to cry. I can't believe no one stopped. I made it to Kumasi by 9:30 pm, starving, and found a cheap guesthouse (5$ per night - my upper limit here), where the proprietor promptly told me he would bring me dinner in the form of chicken and rice in less than an hour . It was to cost about a dollar fifty. An hour later, when I went to track down my food, the same proprietor looked puzzled, telling me the hotel didn't serve food. I questioned why he'd told me they did, and he said, Yes, that's unfortunate. Unfortunate? Jesus. I can't handle the communication problems here. I don't know what was confusing about our first interchange, but this happens on a daily basis. I really don't understand the culture here at all. The nice thing is that I'd bought about fifteen finger-bananas, these wonderful tiny finger-sized bananas, and I ate all of them and finally bathed under the extremely enthusiastic shower at the guesthouse. I was filthy and exhausted, and I cried like a baby. Okay, more to tell, and as usual, I have to get up and look around town instead of spending all day in this cafe. I'll show photos of everything except the tro-tro insanity in about a week. | | Friday, June 24th, 2005 | | 12:01 pm |
sustainability
I've been meeting a lot of people on the road, most of them volunteers. Many of them are working in sustainable development program with one NGO or the other. Right now I'm about to become pretty unpopular with every NGO that works in a developing country and caters to the current party line of Must Have Sustainability to be Worthwhile. I don't think most sustainable programs really are. The main problem is that we're trying to teach calculus before arithmetic. We're teaching how to fish but skipping the iterations of error/critical thinking that come with experience and experience only. I mentioned before how glad I was to be part of a pilot program. Wihtout going through the pioneer steps, the most heavy-duty error-making time there is, you can learn to do or make something, bu tyou can't troubleshoot it when problems arise. You can learn by rote, but without real comprehension. I'm in no way saying sustainable programs are without value. Some of them work very, very well, and benefit huge numbers of people in exactly the way they're supposed to. What I'm thinking of, however, is that programs need no be wholly sustainable to be maximally beneficial, and a lot of programs jump on the sustainability bandwagon for no other reason than it's in vogue to do so. I can't blame them, either; in theory, it's an attractive idea. But is it really better? Sometimes a band-aid actually does the trick. Is sustainable development a fad diet? Does anyone actually quantify or cost/time-analyze the benefits of programs that are "sustainable" vs those that are "band-aid?" Augh, so much to say on this topic, and I am out of time at this cafe - I'll write more about this later. Off to Mole National Park tonight. | | 11:47 am |
traveling
Traveling always puts me in this very thinky state of mind, partly, I guess, because I'm used to having a lot fo structure to my days. Without filling up empty time with all that activity, all the things that have been waiting at the floodgates come pouring in. I just took the ferry north up Lake Volta from Akosombo, the southern port, to Yeji, the northern port, and then tro'd tro to Tamale. The ferry trip is about 30 hours long, and there are about 300 passengers with two cabins. This means that you only get a cabin if you're very smart and/or very lucky. I'm at least lucky, and was able to nab a cabin with one South African man by showing up 12 hours before the ferry was taking off and insisting that they did, in fact have cabin space, although they insisted that they did not, in fact, have space. The next option is to sleep on the dining-room tables, sticky with dinner and loud with babies. Manna from heaven. I couldn't feel luckier if I'd just won the lottery. The cabin ended up being terrific, if small, and everyone else complained the entire ride about having to sleep in the dining hall. We stowed our bags, relaxed on our air-conditioned bunk beds, and generally had the good life. We were on the top deck with an incredible view of Ghana as it passed us by, showing that Ghana comes in at least 200 shades of green, the best one being a limey sort of neon. The moon was almost full, and lit up the sky even in the afternoon time. The air smelled good. We passed a lot of small lakeside villages - thirty or twenty huts, mud-sided, circular with thatched roofs that probably don't leak when it rains. People in dugout canoes, just offshore, sometimes with their feet dangling over the edges of the canoe and all rowing in sync to push the boat rhythmically forward. Kids running around naked, making up games or doing nothing. Women pounding fufu by the water in large wooden bowls. You look at this an imagine you're back in some primitive place, Eden maybe. You feel like this might be how it's supposed to be - yes, I'm aware this is somewhat hackneyed, but it's my goddamn journal, so can it - and that we're missing something critical by rushing around and working all the time. A writer - I think it was Stegner? - was talking about a proverbial Eden, and pointed out that every Eden has its serpent. If that's true, the serpent seems more ominous, or present, at least, when I think about the West, than it does here. The villages look so innocuous and perfect, with no struggle at all between man and nature. It makes me wonder if God, or whoever it was, ever even counted on evolution. Maybe it was a surprise to everyone involved. Anyway, there are worse things than being on a boat in the middle of West Africa, with a clear, warm night and a full moon and the silhouette of flat-topped trees in the distance. I felt lucky. | | Saturday, June 18th, 2005 | | 3:34 pm |
beautiful
If I ever said that Ghana was not beautiful (and I think I did), I apologize profusely. I plead ignorance. Ghana - parts of it, anyway - are absolutely stunning. I'm on vacation in Ghana right now, so I can't post photos, but I will as soon as I return. I was in Costa Rica a week or so before comiong here, and it resembles the hills near Santa Elena, if you've been there. Think: silence like a vacuum, broken by an occasional bird-whistle or monkey-call, so quiet that the sound echoes. Huge, irregular-shaped hills, covered in lush green trees with flat tops, and tall grasses. The occasional old woman with two dozen four-foot logs balanced on her head, walking on the dirt road and giving a big gap-toothed smile and a wave. The best place so far is between Fume and Vane, for those of you with a map, just north of Biakpa. I had to walk from Vane up the mountain to the lodge (The Mountain Paradise Guesthouse, Biakpa, Ghana), but it was well worth the hike. These are my first real, prolonged interactions with Ghanaians. I'd like to make several non-politically correct gross generalizations about them. Actually, I'm going to retract that near-apology: how does a cliche become a cliche, anyway? These are based on my observations. 1. Ghanaians are, without question, the friendliest people I've ever met. They are super-duper friendly. The kids have no shyness and prance right up to you and say Hello and Whatisyourname. The adults, in some areas - this is really region-specific - will call out to you "You are welcome!" when you pass. As in, welcome to Ghana, not welcome for a thank-you. And you know - it makes you feel really...welcome. Like they've been waiting all day for you to pass by so that they can greet you. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before. The guy with the machete by the side of the road? Welcomes me. The five-year old with the runny nose? Welcomes me. The woman with a baby strapped to her back and twenty pounds of palm nuts on her head? Welcomes me. It is incredible. There is zero malice, zero evil intent, and one million on safety. I always, always feel safe here. People go out of their way to help you, often stopping what they're doing to walk you to wherever you need to go, even if it's not very closeby. 2. Ghanaians are, without question, often exceedingly annoying. Partly in the Ned Flanders kind of way, and partly in a way that I can't otherwise describe. Let me go through the conversation I have at least five times a day, with both males and females alike (the difference is that the females don't ask me to marry them). I should stress this is not everyone - it's maybe half to 3/4 of the people who approach you. G(hanaian): Hello! J(ulie): Hi. (*I used to say this more enthusiastically. Keep reading to find out why I don't anymore). G: You are my friend. What is your name? J: Julie. G: Julie, you are my friend. This is Kojo. J: Hi, Kojo. How are you? G: Julie, I would please like your phone number. J: Uh...no, thank you. G: Julie, you are my friend. I would like your phone number please. J: No. G: Why don't you want to give me your phone number? *(He or she is smiling broadly through this whole encounter. There are no feelings of maliciousness, and s/he never realizes that I find the encounter kind of odd). J: Because I'd rather not. G: But you are my friend! I want your phone number. (smile) J: I just met you. G: Do you not want me to call you? (smile) J: That's right. I do not want you to call me. (frown) G: I love you! Will you marry me? You will give me your pen. (smile) J: No. (frown) G: But then please to give me your email address. I love you. Give me your pen. (smile) J: I don't email. G: But please how will I get in touch with you? I will come to visit you! Please your pen. J: No. G: Yes! Where are you living? J: Over there (hand-waving). G: Where? J: There (vague motions, to a place far away). G: Where do you live? J: I don't want to give you my address. G: But you are my friend! Why do you not want me to come visit you? And on, and on, and on. It's relentless. And it's astounding - how rude do I have to be? You could replace pen with money, food, watch, whatever. For reference, I'm no supermodel. I have two long braids and zero makeup. I look about twelve years old here. I wear smelly clothes. I am dirty all the time (in the bad way, not the good way). I have scabby legs from the mosquitoes. I know the other travelers I meet tell me the exact same things happen to them. Let me repeat: there is no maliciousness in any of this. People are so, so, so nice, but I find the iterations of the conversation above so, so, so grating. 3. Humor is not the same here as it is at home. Specifically, I mean sarcasm. Same scene as (2), different day: I'm sitting in a tro-tro with Sally, another international volunteer (Malaysian, but everyone shouts "Chinese White Woman!" at her, which we all find hilarious). A guy comes up to the car and goes through the same iterations with Sally: you are my friend, I like you so much, give me your address and phone number, but how will I get in touch with you then. She tries all the usual refusals, but he won't leave the window (we're sitting in front, and he's practically leaning in on her lap). She eventually says she'll give him her address. She starts, "PO Box 9..9...9..9..9..9..9..9.." and I'm finding it hard not to laugh, and I'm waiting for him to laugh, too - it seems the easiest way to nicely deny him at this point. But while she's counting off nines, he says, "Wait! I have to get a pen!" He ran off and came back with a pen, at which point we felt pretty bad. Sarcasm is not understood at all here, which just makes it cruel. 4. Ghanaians have no sense of direction or space-time. None. Everything is "very far!" even if it's just around the block. They hate to walk, oddly enough (they have to do it all the time). They don't think in kilometers or miles or any measure of distance that we know, and if they don't walk you directly somewhere, when you ask directions, they say "Go straight!" I don't think go straight means here what it means in the US. I think it means I don't know so ask someone else. They also confuse right and left, and he and she. I think the latter must be because their native language has no gender distinction, and I can't fault them for that: I have trouble with the nouns' genders in Spanish for sure. The Spaniards must find it ridiculous that I keep calling a table (una mesa) a boy table (un mesa). I don't have a good explanation for the right and left except that direction-giving is not a priority. I'll make more non-politically correct gross generalizations when I have a little more travel time, I'm sure. In the meantime, stay tuned. I'll post some photos when I get back to the camp, in about a week and half or so. Julie | | Friday, June 10th, 2005 | | 7:13 am |
thought processes, by taking notes
At the end of each class, I ask my students “What have you learned?” I used to wonder if it was condescending, but they love telling me what they’ve learned, so I kept the question in. It was more for me than for them, really: I liked to hear that something stayed. At any rate, this is a class for me as well. It isn’t the end of the class yet: I am here for another 7 weeks or so. I would imagine that everyone who works in development or in a developing country goes through the same set of questions in his or her mind. Am I really making a difference? If so, is it more on the side of good or bad? What, if any, are the lasting effects of what I’m doing here? Am I trying to push too much on too fast? Am I not doing it fast enough? How surmountable were the cultural differences, and did I approach them in the right way (this is a big one – much bigger than I would have thought)? A few typically non-politically correct points that I think are important, now that I’ve had some time to think them over. 1. No one really wants charity. Not poor people, not homeless people, not rich people, not sick people. No one wants pity, vis a vis charity. That’s not to say that people won’t accept charity or even ask for it, but every time someone offers it (viewed as pity), it’s a little bit dehumanizing for them. For example, in the context of giving away our glasses. In the clinic, glasses are free. Sunglasses, distance glasses, reading glasses. And so we’ve been discussing whether or not we should charge a small amount for glasses. The two sides: a. These are refugees! How can you charge for glasses? They don’t even have enough to eat! They are scrounging to buy fresh water! They can’t buy medicine for their children! I can’t believe you’re even thinking about this. For God’s sake. My first reaction, and the one I sometimes still have. b. If we don’t show value of the glasses to US, how can we expect people to treat them as though they’re valuable? If we don’t charge for them, then clearly they’re easily dispensable to us. And if they didn’t have any value to us, why should anyone else put value on the glasses themselves? We have a lot of people coming back saying their sunglasses were broken/stolen/lost/whatever, and sometimes they really are, because people may be careless with the sunglasses (and why not? They’re not that valuable to us, right?), and sometimes they are being sold on the camp to make money. i. Is that (selling them) really such a problem? Well - yes and no. 1. No, because theoretically someone is going to wear the sunglasses. And the someone who received them will benefit from them, health-wise, in the way we were trying to accomplish. The someone who sold them will get something to help them, maybe in another way. 2. Yes, because that wasn’t the point. We aren’t trying to create a market: we’re trying to create healthy eyes and dispense glasses with the explanation of why it’s important to wear the sunshades. If people are selling them, I doubt they’re going through patient education about how sunglasses prevent cataracts and pterygium when they do. 2. HOWEVER, begging in Africa is not a shameful thing in the same way that it is in the United States. How do I reconcile this with the last statement? Not too well, probably. All I know is that both people with a bit of money and people without a bit of money ask me for money all the time. And they do it without embarrassment, without apparent discomfort. I’m the one who’s uncomfortable. How is this different from the charity described above? There are differences between solicited and unsolicited charity. I haven’t volunteered my pity; they’ve coaxed it. I haven’t pre-devalued anything for them; they are asking for what they need. a. Let me make this clearer. i. Scenario 1: You need a shirt, but you have no money to buy one. You hear that there’s a place that is giving poor people free shirts, but you have to stand in line and meet the people who are giving the free shirts. You go, meet the people, find some shirts to choose from, and take one home. It’s free, after all. ii. Scenario 2: You need a shirt, but you have no money to buy one. You have a friend (or an acquaintance) who is rich beyond his needs (or at least your perception of his needs). You pull him aside and ask him if you could have money for a shirt. He gives it to you, and you go to the store and buy a shirt. iii. No matter how great those shirts are in the first scenario, you want the second one. Even if the shirts in the first scenario are super-stylish, awesome, rock-on shirts, you want the second one. Both are charity, but one has more dignity, at least here. iv. This doesn’t discount the work done in developing countries, which frequently includes Scenario 1. It’s just commentary. There are few ways to make volunteered charity dignified for the recipients. 3. Educational discrepancies can be a large gap to overcome, but people also can surprise you. I find that knowledge about things can be spotty, but the spots can be deep. In the reverse roles, I have some serious gaps in my knowledge as well. For example, can you believe that I knew almost nothing about the Liberian war before coming here? I definitely don’t know about the history of Cote D’Ivoire and France, even though I know Cote D’Ivoire hates France. It’s all contextual, I think. 4. It’s all about communication. Which can be much, much trickier than it has to be. If you’re smart, you figure it out or you find ways around it. a. Sometimes the communication difficulties here floor me. Apple to you means orange to someone else. Orange to you means scuba diving to them. Conversation and communication are only distant cousins. I don’t know if people here are as frustrated by their communication issues as I am. I guess not, because then they would change them, which actually makes them my issues, not theirs. I’m envisioning a Ghana where Kwame calls his friend George, and says, “George? I was wondering if it would be possible for us to have a meeting this week sometime. Is there a time that works well for you?” And George says, “Kwame, good to hear from you. How about Friday, at 3 pm?” And Kwame says, “Great, I’ll meet you at your office then.” And at 3 pm on Friday, George and Kwame meet, discuss what they need to, and enjoy their respective weekends. Maybe I just need a new magic decoder ring, because often I feel like I’ve missed the communication boat. This is probably my number-one frustration here, and I wish I were better at dealing with it. The difficulties in communicating with people who have a completely different idea of what interaction is, of what respect is, of what words and actions mean can be overwhelming. | | Thursday, May 19th, 2005 | | 2:07 pm |
mother's day update
More on the Mother’s Day story, and then a little non-Mother’s Day stuff below. I did get some facts wrong in the first version – so please reread here. I am trying to make this as factual and non-sensationalistic as possible while keeping it moderately interesting. Abraham is one of our clinic volunteers, and about 2 weeks ago (?) I posted a story about how he found his mother, a few days before Mother’s Day, after being separated from her for 15 years. Abraham was born in Monrovia, Liberia, the child of a school principal and a military woman. His mother, Sarah, was working in the military for the president, and was separated from Abraham’s father early on, although Abraham maintained frequent contact with him. Even before the war officially began in 1989, Liberia was a dangerous place to live, with frequent political clashes. Because Sarah worked in a politically sensitive position, she sent Abraham and his brother, Larry, to live with their grandmother, about an hour away in a village called Touzon. Although Abraham remained close to his mother, for most of his life, Abraham’s grandmother has raised him. In 1990, Abraham, Larry, and their grandmother Sally were at home when rebels stormed their village. Larry tried to defend Sally as the men burst into the house and began to rape her; the men hacked Larry to pieces with a machete in front of Abraham and Sally, sliced 6-year old Abraham in the thigh with a penknife, and beat Sally with the butt of a gun. Abraham and Sally fled their village the same day, and ran into the bush with about 100 other villagers. Together, they walked east for 2 weeks straight until they reached the Ivory Coast, eating raw cassava leaves and grass, and sleeping outside in the rain. One child and several older people died along the way: the survivors buried them, and left. Abraham developed skin rashes all over his body on the journey, and his grandmother made folk medicine to heal him. They stayed in the Ivory Coast until 1992, when they came to Buduburam. Shortly afterward, Sarah also fled Liberia with her co-worker Mohammed, heading for Nigeria. She did not know the whereabouts of Abraham, Larry, or Sally. Most Liberian refugees have scattered, and now live in either Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Ghana, or Nigeria: she did not know where to begin to look. Sarah and Mohammed had a child in Nigeria and she began working in a restaurant to support the child. In the meantime, Sally and Abraham were in Buduburam, and Sally was selling palm nuts to pay for Abraham’s schooling on the camp. ***I can’t even emphasize how much this touched me. Abraham had mentioned this once before to me, and I had forgotten. There is only only school on the camp that is recognized by the Ghanaian government, Budu Sec (Buduburam Secondary School). It’s extremely expensive by camp standards: about 25$ per semester, not including extra fees like uniforms and books. Palm nuts cost almost nothing, and the amount that she had to sell, and the amount of time that she had to work to send him to school must have been excessive.*** Abraham has been living with his grandmother since 1992, at Buduburam. In April, Sarah started looking for them in Abuja, Nigeria, where another Liberian refugee camp exists. While she did not find her family in Abuja, she did meet another Krahn man (her tribe) who knew her family before the war, and knew that Abraham and Sally were at Buduburam. On April 28th, she received information of their whereabouts; on May 1st, she arrived at Buduburam and found them. When I asked Abraham what he remembered about the experience fleeing Liberia, he said “I was very scared. At that moment when we fled away, I was too tired and too scared. I had never seen heavy blood before, and when I saw them cutting my brother to pieces, I felt heavy, I mean I went crazy. When we fled, almost every day I was hungry and I saw children dying and I thought I would die too. “Here, most of my friends here have their moms or dads around them, but I never did, and I felt uncomfortable (not having my mom around). But now I have my mom around and I feel fine. I feel fine!” (***this is a pretty normal way to speak here – the English is pretty different from ours, but saying you feel uncomfortable is saying you feel bad, and saying you feel fine is saying you feel great). Abraham still does not know where his father is, or if he is alive – they lost contact when he fled Liberia, and he has not heard from him since. He has dreams of becoming a civil engineer, but he can’t go to college – he can barely get money to eat every day. If anyone is interested in donating to this particular cause, either in helping his mother get a house or helping out in any other way, I will put you in touch with him, send you videos, photos, whatever you want. He works for us – for free – 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and offers to work on weekends, too. I never thought I would actually meet people who had been through the things that I’ve only seen in movies: even seeing it in movies isn’t enough, you can’t convey what it really must be like to go through something like this. Somehow, I think I wouldn’t make it. Okay, that’s it for today. If and when I find out more from Sarah, I’ll post it. Thanks for reading. | | 2:06 pm |
updates
Hi there, It’s difficult for me to believe I’ve been here for close to 3 months. Another week and a half makes 3, I think. This entry is not meant to be offensive: it's blunt and honest, and it’s the way life is here, and I hate bowing to political correctness to cover up reality. There’s been a lot going on here. The camp is starting to feel very much like the place I expect to find when I open my door in the morning, although not exactly like home. I have more volunteers here now, and I think that’s going to really make life a little easier in the coming months…I hope, anyway. We’re still running the clinic, and we see about 60-70 people per day now. It’s a hectic day, and I teach two days per week after clinic, which is always really fun. The students ask good questions, and it forces me to learn as well. I’m much better than I was before, too, at prescribing eyeglasses and finding cataracts, predicting glaucoma, looking at the retina, diagnosing chalazion and corneal problems, using an ophthalmoscope, using a slit lamp…actually, I still suck at using the slit lamp. But I’m better at the other things. I am still kind of blown away by the number of eye problems I see here on a daily basis. The hardest part for me still is, and probably always will be, the way other people look at me here. Someone else on camp wrote in her journal: I don’t like the God role. I couldn’t agree more. I feel very uncomfortable being served by black people all the time: in our American history, that’s no longer an acceptable position to be in. I don’t feel right when black people ask to do my laundry, refuse to let me help with the serving, the cooking, the cleaning, the carrying. I don’t feel right when they treat me differently than everyone else because I am white. To me, it brings up feelings of past colonialism that I am just not comfortable with, that I’ve been programmed against for my whole life. And the idea that white people are omnipotent - and omniscient - is pervasive here. They want me to be more comfortable than they are, to eat more than they do, to sit when they stand. And they want me to be paternalistic, to tell them what to do, or they’re paralyzed – it’s a learned helplessness that I find extremely frustrating to deal with. In speaking with a woman last night who is Liberian, but who lived in the US for 20 years and now works for the UNHCR, she says the whole system has moved 50 years backwards since the time of leaving Liberia, and that she feels that the people have acquired a ‘mental laziness.’ She talked about having electricity and a telephone in Liberia in the 1970s, and how on her last visit to Monrovia, 2 weeks ago, she felt overwhelmed by all the work that would have to be done to just bring it back to something that approximated level, and her general feeling of unpreparedness of the people here to rebuild a country. I can’t say I disagree. Even if I tell the volunteers 15 times about a certain rule or regulation, they will still check every single move with me first – and I mean everything. I try to encourage them to make decisions on their own, but it’s not really a part of society here to do that, and they just will not do it. This does not make me positive about creating a sustainable program here: I don’t know how to re-program people’s expectations of themselves. I can’t even be judgmental about it, because that implies that if I had been raised the same way, had been through the same things these people had been through, that I might somehow be a different person than they are through some personal, intrinsic advantage. And I just don’t believe that. It’s sort of the way I feel when foreigners criticize Americans for their “Americanism” – as if they’d been raised in the States and had gone through the same kind of life we had, that they would somehow have escaped all the little stereotypes that we are always accused of, because they’re intrinsically better human beings. I mean, it just isn’t true. Related to the way other people see me, I still hate when people – particularly total strangers - beg me for money, more than anything. It makes me feel fatigued now, rather than compassionate, when people constantly pull at my sleeve for money or medicine or sunglasses (I am begged for more sunglasses 4 or 5 times a day – the sun is absolutely blinding and it’s not even a frivolous thing). If this is what it’s like to be super-rich, I’d rather not – although I’ve never really been poor, and I doubt I would want to be as poor as they are. I hate saying no and I can’t say yes all the time. The things I still like here are the easygoingness of the people, the persistent politeness, and the giving nature of people who have little to give. I can’t ever get over how people DON’T nitpick over giving someone else their last 1000 cedis (11 cents) to buy bread and fruit, or just sharing whatever they have. You would think they might be grabby about things, try to be as frugal as possible, but they’re beyond that: they have less than enough to be frugal about and they have a strong belief that God will fulfill their needs. Maybe you need something to save in order to feel like you CAN save, and they’re below even that point. I like the gratefulness of most of the people for our work here, and how they know me on the camp and always say hello to me. I like that they’re open with their feelings and tell you about how they like you. I like how women carry babies in sarongs wrapped around their backs and the babies lie squashed on their backs, dozing the day away. Speaking of babies, a woman brought a baby into Daniel’s office the other day, while I was waiting for him after work. The baby was 8 months old but looked about 3 months – he was probably 12 pounds or so. One quality of these underfed babies is that they are rather listless. You pick them up and they don’t protest, they don’t push with their arms or kick with their feet. They sort of flop against you, and make no noise. It would be kind of cute, the way they snuggle up to you, but it has a malignant undercurrent – they do it because they don’t have any energy to do anything else. I went to the feeding program yesterday afternoon after clinic, and there were fifty babies in there, just like that one. Skinny little legs, big heads, all floppy and sleepy. And there are hundreds more. It just seems like such a waste; they’re accumulating damage now, and I’m watching damage accumulate that could be prevented. These children could still grow up normally but they won’t. I don’t really have anything else to say about this except that this is another one of those things you miss if you just come here and spend a week, or even a month here. The “two-camps” thing seems more obvious to me now than ever – the camp that’s doing okay, and the camp that’s not. I am trying to start a cane program on the camp for the blind people here. This is probably my favorite project so far, and I’m really looking forward to getting it underway. There are 37 blind people on camp; at this point, we’re still at the stages of carrying out a survey to see who does and who doesn’t know about cane use, and what the interest level would be in learning to use a cane. There’s one blind man on the camp, George, who has volunteered to teach me, and then together we’ll teach the classes. I have enough trouble getting around on the camp with my own two working eyes; I’m both nervous and excited about learning to use a cane (although I think I’ll still prefer my eyes). I finished 100 Years of Solitude, a beautiful book by Marquez, in which he tells the story of a fictional town of Macondo through the life of a family that establishes the town as well as dies there. The book has a postscript that describes how Marquez’s grandparents used to tell him stories that were absolutely fantastical, but with straight faces, and how that was one of his favorite things about them. If you’ve ever read Marquez, his stories are very similar to that style: he tells these amazing, winding stories that are that are just shy of reality, but with no apology for the purely fantastical parts – he treats them as though they’re reality. Sometimes when I tell stories from here, I think about that, about how the things I hear and then re-tell are so unbelievable that they probably seem somewhat fantastical. Like Abraham finding his mother after 15 years, like the mother who did not have 5$ to save her child from strep infection, or my patient who did not have $2 for typhoid medicine, and like my patient who was a village chief and whose hands were cut off and eye poked out by rebels at age 70. Who does this shit? And to a 70 year old man? The guy is tiny, I could knock him over with both hands tied behind my back (and for reference, I’m pretty tiny myself now – I was kind of small before, and I’m now about 15 pounds lighter). WHO DOES THIS SHIT? It makes me so angry. Okay, 5:30 am. Rooster. Going to café to send. | | Sunday, May 15th, 2005 | | 4:37 pm |
Pics From Julie (5/13/05)
From Brian...These are pictures sent from Julie on 5/13/05. "Hi all, It takes so long to send these photos that I just put them all together and am sending them to all of you at once. Daniel, the photos of you and Ma Fatu and Asha are here. Jennifer, you might want to use the sunglass photo at the bottom." ( Follow this link for pictures from 5/13/05... ) | | Monday, May 9th, 2005 | | 9:48 am |
the biggest shortage in Ghana
The biggest shortage in Ghana is, without question, pens. The commodification of pens here approaches that of MP3 players in New York City. And the saying here is that the pens have legs: I don't doubt it . I covet pens here like nothing else. I know you're thinking, what the F? Pens? Give me a break. But anything can be commodified if the demand is high enough and the supply low enough. That's how it is here with pens. If you've ever been to Mardi Gras, you know what I mean. Beads, right? Before you go, you're thinking, I am NOT going to get sucked into that stupid, STUPID obsession everyone else has with those stupid, STUPID plastic beads. No way am I flashing my breasts/lifting my skirt/copping a feel/letting some skeezy guy on the street cop a feel for those stupid, STUPID beads. Other people are stupid enough to do it, but not me. And of course, you're right: the beads are stupid. The desire for them is stupid. But then you arrive in New Orleans. You walk out onto the street. And there are a lot of people around, and they all want beads - beads of every color, plastic, long chains of beads. Suddenly, you forget your earlier promises - you want those beads. You MUST have those beads! You will do anything for more, bigger, brighter plastic beads. And in a bizarre out-of-body experience that you'll recount wildly to your friends later (but out-and-out deny to your parents), you find yourself doing things that the Real You would Never Do to get your hands on as many beads as possible . The beads become the utmost status symbol, the Ipod mini of your world. You start to anthropomorphize your beads, to name them, and to strut about so other people can see them. Because you have beads, you are someone. Look, I've never actually been to Mardi Gras - these are just the stories I hear. And this is how I feel about pens here - I want pens all the time. I must have pens, and when I lose pens, I am crushed. I want to cry, I wonder how I can get another pen, what can I trade to get more, bigger, brighter pens, that write nicely and last a long time. I covet other people's pens. And that's sad. | | Sunday, May 8th, 2005 | | 2:22 pm |
MOTHER’S DAY
One of my volunteers (I’m calling him Abraham, a common name here) called me last week to tell me he wouldn’t be in to the clinic for the week, because his mother (who I’m calling Sarah) had come for a visit. This would be unremarkable, except that he hasn’t seen his mother in 15 years, since he was 6, and didn’t know, up until last Sunday, where she was, or if she was still alive. He told me so casually that I assumed I must have misheard him (“Yeeeahh, Julie, I’m not going to be coming to work this week, because my mother has come for a visit. So I’ll see you next week, okay?”). I don’t think reunions of this type are extremely common. It’s true that lots and lots of people – the vast majority – are displaced from their families here, and most have no idea where their children, siblings, or parents are. Given the number of people here raising strangers’ children, we can guess that their parents, children, or siblings might be somewhere, alive, but where? How do you find out where your family is? As far as I know, there’s isn’t a “Connect Liberians” NGO or anything that looks for your family for you. Another, smaller, refugee camp exists in Ghana, Sanzule, but I don’t know if people go there to find lost relatives. It’s really quite remarkable that Sarah found him. Political tensions can still run high on the camp, and people are still targeted for their past lives and past actions in Liberia. While I think the chances are pretty small that Liberian rebels are reading my Live Journal, I'm not giving real names or telling too much about the past lives of these people. Sarah was in the Liberian military, working close to the top in the 1980s. She sent Abraham and his brother to live with his grandmother because her military position put her in a particularly sensitive spot for attacks by the rebels. Despite this, rebels found Abraham and his family, shot and killed his brother, raped the grandmother, and Abraham and his grandmother fled to Ghana in a tro-tro, losing all contact with Sarah. Sarah worked with a Nigerian man in Liberia, and when the war started, he took her with him and they fled to Nigeria. In Nigeria, she started a life of sorts and had another child with this man. They lived there for almost 15 years before someone alerted her to the fact that her other child and mother were still alive, at the refugee camp in Ghana. Her husband refused to let her go, so she took their child and fled here last week, on a 3-day bus that took her from Lagos to Buduburam. She moved in with her family and now they are looking for another place for her to live. She is quite beautiful, and very young. The resemblance between her and Abraham is remarkable – both have wide faces, square jaws, very smooth, black skin. I wish I could post a photo. I am dying to ask Sarah all kinds of questions – I mean, in the US, this story in itself would be a talk show – but she doesn’t understand my speech yet. She’s agreed to talk to me, but we have to get to know each other first. I’d like to try and make visits to her with some frequency so we can get used to each other’s speech – she speaks English, but the pidgin English that is spoken on camp. I can understand her (it took me a long time to understand pidgin English) but she can’t understand me yet. Anyway, I speak very quickly, and half the people in the US can’t understand me, so no surprise there. I read through the Lonely Planet West Africa last night, which lists Liberia as the worst place in the world to live, currently. It describes it as a war zone, and the capital city as being in ruins. There hasn’t been electricity there in over a decade. There are so many other situations like this, families that are separated but still alive, that cannot reconnect. Ma Fatu, who is one of my favorite human beings in the world, lost her husband and 4 children in the war: her husband was killed and she has no idea what’s happened to her children. Here on the camp, everyone is her child: she cooks for practically the entire camp. For Mother’s Day, she’s the one I got a card for here. Like everyone else, she never, ever talks about Poor Me, I Lost All My Children, but you can guess why she is the way she is, feeding and taking care of the whole camp. I would love for her to be able to find her children. Everything is possible, so how could it be done? I am looking for ideas, so please post comments!!! Are there organizations that do this for refugees? And Happy Mother’s Day to everyone. | | Thursday, May 5th, 2005 | | 7:51 pm |
| | 4:55 pm |
I will descend upon you! Ghanaian movies
Realizing that we needed to be doing/thinking about something else besides cataracts and health, Aliya (the new volunteer) and I went to Accra and saw a movie last night. There are no cinemas as such in Accra, not like the ones we’re used to in the States, but there are locations that show movies. TV3 is one of them – the TV station – and it shows Ghanaian films. The Alliance Francaise is another – I saw a film there last week about the life cycle of a flip-flop. It was more interesting than it sounds – some flip-flops get completely recycled into children’s bath toys and mobiles for babies in certain areas of eastern Africa. Last night, we went to TV3. The TV3 building is not a TV station like ABC or NBC in New York City, but it does approximate what I might expect from a TV station here. Large, sort of modern, with satellites, a “courtyard,” and a “cafeteria.” [We ate red red in the cafeteria, my absolute all-time favorite Ghanaian food - and I have to learn how to cook it, because I will not survive without it anymore. Red red is cooked beans and fried plantains in red palm oil. It’s like eating candy for dinner. Absolutely delicious.] I put courtyard and cafeteria in quotes because they are probably not what you are thinking when you think courtyard and cafeteria. Nonetheless, they’re not bad. We watched TV for the first time here (they had taped MTV from a few years back playing in the cafeteria) and were mesmerized. The cinema is in a building that is attached to the TV3 building. When we first entered, they were showing some kind of soap-opera style show about a couple that was trying to save their foundering church by saving the pastor and his wife’s marriage. The pastor did not pay attention to his wife, and so she had become a lesbian (there is nothing that approximates subtlety here in media of any sort). Mistakenly, the pastor thought his wife was having affairs with several men, and was a very talky kind of guy, so the whole community knew about his suspicions. When the other guy, who was genuinely a good guy, tried to convince the wife to stay with her husband, he did so in her bedroom (her “matrimonial bedroom” as they kept calling it) and the pastor walked in and accused the other guy of being the one his wife was cheating with….he told the other guy he would “descend upon you with my anger." Even I was biting my nails. I was very curious to find out what happened next, except they cut it off and started showing the movie we were there for. I assume the pastor and his wife got back together and she realized the sins of her lesbian ways, but who really knows? The church is incorporated into absolutely everything here, and I was surprised to see homosexuality in such a public venue. The movie we saw was called “Super Hero,” but they only showed half of it. I don’t know when the other half shows, but it seems to be a common theme here: show a little bit, then cut off. Super Hero was about two neighboring native tribes who both, oddly, spoke the Queen’s English. The main character was a champion wrestler and every female in the village was enamored of him. He was in love with one woman who hated him, and told him that she would only believe he was in love with her if he lost a wrestling match to his opponent. He did, and she fell in love with him instantly (see what I mean? No subtlety at all. Although I have to admit it's pretty hot if a guy loses a wrestling match for you). But that was just the first 15 minutes! Other stories in the same movie: the prince of one of the villages, who had very black, very pointy, high eyebrows, went around raping maidens from the other village (maidens is their word, not mine) and mistreating his subjects, and the chief of the other village was demanding justice. The king was embarrassed about his son’s behavior, but kept giving him more and more chances after threatening to disown him five times. No one seemed too concerned about the women; it was more of a slap-on-the-hand crime. The son, however, did not pick up on this threatened disinheritance (despite its being said over and over again by the king), and only started to be concerned about his loss of inheritance of the throne when one of the guys on his father’s advisory board told him as a “favor.” In fact, the guy on the advisory board was having an affair with someone else’s wife and the king had scolded him publicly for it, and so he wanted the king dead… so he decided to tell the prince what was appallingly obvious to the rest of us. While I know you’re all engrossed with the storyline, I can’t give you any more of it - the movie stopped there. You have to wait until I see part two. The best part of the movie was the line: “Give me my wife back or I will descend upon you with my anger!” (said by the guy whose wife was cheating with the king’s advisor – as a retort, the advisor calmly said “No,” and carried the other guy’s wife off to a hammock where they started getting busy). It seems they’re big on descending upon someone else with anger here, at least in the cinema. Anyway, that’s the movie scene here. A little different from Hollywood. I’m going home to descend upon my dinner with hunger right now…I am starving. | | Sunday, May 1st, 2005 | | 3:05 pm |
| | 10:18 am |
I Heart USA
It’s been awhile since I’ve written, I know. I haven’t felt inspired and truthfully, I’ve been quite homesick – the former a direct result of the latter. In some ways, I’m just bored with the same old same old. I both like and hate feeling needed all the time, and I am learning about patience. What I wanted to write about was the obsession that people have here with the US. I know I’ve mentioned this before. In a world full of USA-haters, it’s awfully nice to be around people who love the US. But it goes beyond that: there is an obsession with resettlement in the United States, so strong that it can be dangerous. There is this idea that the US is the panacea to all problems, and “if I could just be resettled in the US, everything would be perfect in my life.” I mean, I don’t know – maybe this is true, maybe their lives do improve so significantly when they are resettled that they seem perfect – but it represents a deeper problem with Liberians and rebuilding of Liberia, should the time come around when there’s an opening for this. In the past few days, there have been rumors swirling around the camp that the camp management was involved in resettling people in the USA who were actually Ghanaians, using Liberian names. The two people responsible for this, if it in fact occurred, have been whisked away to a secret safe haven in another city: the people on camp will kill them if they believe it’s true (whether or not it actually is) - that’s the level of obsession that exists. When I take patients to the doctor, many of them beg for notes explaining that they have this condition or the other so that they can be candidates for medical resettlement. And although we pay for medical procedures like corneal transplants, some of the candidates do not want to be considered for it because it would mean they were not medical resettlement candidates (much easier to get corneal transplant surgery in the US than here). They’d rather take the chance on being blind in the USA next year than seeing in Ghana next month. Other things regarding the obsession with the West: the people on camp always try to speak like they think we speak. And the results are often funny, not because they’re doing too badly but because I realize how we sound to other people when I hear them talk. The guys will say Heybabyheywassup? And the girls with say, Heyhowareyouiseverythingcool? That’s not how they normally talk here: they’re trying to talk like they think I talk. And the clothes: if you dress ‘western,’ you have money: if you dress African, you don’t. Western clothing – flared jeans, tank tops, sneakers – is at a premium. There is also a general feeling that westerners – and particularly American white people – are able to deliver babies, repair electronics, and give scholarly speeches on any topic imaginable, all at the same time. A heady feeling to be regarded this way, but, sadly, inaccurate. I can’t repair electronics at all. And I don’t feel compelled to pretend that I can. Being a white person on the camp must approximate what it’s like to be a B-grade famous. Everyone knows you, even if you don’t know them: you’re the only white person around, so you’re easy to remember and easier to spot. People treat you as though you have a magic aura around you and everyone wants to talk with you and get to know you. People are excessively friendly, even when you’re somewhat rude (and I am sometimes, because I get really aggravated with people constantly coming up to me to “talk to me small” – it always ends with them asking for money, which I can’t give to everyone). People call me doctor, even though I say I am not one (well, not the kind that they think). They expect that I have vast stores of knowledge and vaster stores of cash. Why am I talking – immodestly – about the obsession with the US, and/or white people, including myself? I keep wondering whether or not many of the refugees really want to go home. For some – maybe many? – their lives here are better than they were in Liberia. And they definitely won’t get resettled when they’re no longer refugees. I can’t judge them for the obsession with the west: in the same situation, I might feel the same. But on some level, they have to stop seeing the United States as the cure-all to everything, pull themselves together and start planning for a return to their country. For me, I would see this as a huge challenge, an amazing project to undertake, and I would like to work towards it. And yes, that’s easy for me to say, because I have resources, I have education, I have options. But I have started thinking about the refugees, and their real motivations to return home. Do they want to? I don’t know. I’ve asked some, and I’ve had mixed responses. Some do, some don’t. Some freely admit their lives here are better than in Liberia, or no worse, and after 15 years on the camp, they have lives here of a sort. And what is there for them to return to, anyway? In my mind, it’s like coming home from a long trip to find your house completely burned down. You used to have a home, you’ve been away for awhile, and you have nothing to go back to – so where do you go? I can’t even imagine it, not really, having nothing to go home to. Most of my patients tell me their houses have been destroyed in the war, and they don’t know where their friends and family from Liberia are. So why would they return? But then, what does this mean for the refugees? What the heck are they going to DO? What will it take for them to activate, and pull together? What could be provided that would make them feel capable of rebuilding Liberia? The answer is skills, training, education, I think – now we’re back to my first journal entry. It must seem absolutely abhorrent to them that people have the chance for education in the United States, and some OPT not to take advantage of it. Seriously – it must seem crazy. | | Thursday, April 28th, 2005 | | 7:46 pm |
| | Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 | | 5:05 pm |
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