Sunday Church

The internet was totally down for a solid six days this week, so I had to hear from a Peace Corps volunteer in the market  about Roy Halladay’s no-hitter, and I certainly could not blog. Good news is I found out there’s a guy in the nearest town who has a satellite and can get any channel for a proper monetary token. If Phillies go World Series, I know where to go.

I think I will be posting something else shortly for this past week, but here is what I meant to post last Sunday:

“Mr. NE-TAN?”

It was Francis’s son, timidly standing outside my door. I opened my cell phone to look at the time. It was 8:27 a.m. No way, a Ghanaian arriving early. Albeit 3 minutes, but still early. Not in my entire month here had any Ghanaian done anything on time, much less early.

Ahhh, but it’s Sunday, and we’re going to church. If they do anything on time here, it would be Sunday church, I thought….

Ghanaians are extremely religious. There are a multitude of Christian sects, along with significant minorities of Catholics and Muslims. Nothing seems to happen here that can’t explicitly be related to God or demon spirits, whether it be crop output or a student’s behavior. Every meal begins and each meeting ends with prayer. Most shops lack formal names; instead, they paint slogans on their front rafters like “Our Savior Always,” “Christ’s Blood Cures,” or, the oldie but goodie, “Oh, Jesus.” Here, Sunday is a true day of rest—the only day this farming community stays home from their farms.

This particular Sunday, our school director, Francis, was taking me to his church where he serves as pastor. They dress very well on this day, and so I had found my nicest slacks and collar shirt to put on. As I rushed to put on my dress shoes, the boy asked me if he could polish them down with a rag. Slightly embarrassed, I accepted—they were pretty muddy.

We loaded into Francis’s ancient German Volkswagen. I think it was from WWI, and it had been stripped of everything not necessary to make it go forward. We travelled an undulating dirt road from our small village to a smaller village, where we parked under a tree in no particular direction. We got out and walked past a few small shelters and made a sudden turn toward a modestly-sized mud hut that appeared out of nowhere. I ducked my head under the low-hanging corrugated roof as we entered and, about to ask what we were stopping here for, I realized I had entered the church. The aluminum roof, dirt floor, and wooden housing were all barren, but there were a few rows of wooden benches and, at the front, a small table draped in a brightly-colored African cloth with a slender blue vase and four pink lilacs neatly poking out. Despite the faded chalk of addition problems  scratched onto every inch of the wooden support beams and a worn chalkboard in the corner, it felt very becoming as a sanctuary. It was as if it were constructed just to prove that that any room in the world could be sanctified through the conviction of the congregation, and it reminded me of the stories my grandparents told me of praying in a barnyard at one of the member’s farms before our synagogue in Carbondale was constructed.

I won’t take you through the whole service, but between an old man in traditional garb doing some spiritual boogie that resembled the chicken dance and Francis’s sermon that likened the race of the sperm cells to the egg to God’s love, let’s just say it was sufficiently unusual. I did enjoy the hymns.

Afterward, we visited a sick man who had gone blind in a nearby house and prayed with him (I was told I was teaching some of his grandkids, but he couldn’t remember which ones).  Whatever my skepticism about religion—and especially the intense brand of Christianity practiced here—one can’t argue with the solace it brings a sick, lonely man to be visited and prayed for on a Sunday afternoon.