Nothing and Everything

About Nothing Of Importance (written 11/09)

I just felt like writing about my lunch today and wasn’t going to put it online, but I thought why not. I promised a few of you no effusive poetry about Africa and the world, but I never said I wouldn’t put up mundane descriptions of nothing in particular, so bare with me…

I exited the Immigration Office through a small parking lot and into a courtyard of gravel and unkempt grass. An array of cement-block government buildings, like the one I had just left, sat around the perimeter in no particular order, each 3-4 stories high with the typical cross-iron windows. They reminded me of cheap motels in Florida, but here they are the preeminent, modern buildings that house the district capitol offices for the Volta Region.

Like any open space in Ghana that has even the most minute chance of snaring a passer-by, several vendors had set up shop in the shade of the trees selling various snacks and trinkets. At one stand, a woman stood inside something reminiscent of a ticket booth serving food through a square opening. I decided I was hungry enough for lunch, and so I went to scout it out. I found her dishing beans and fried plantains out of a set of large pots and pans. There were a few benches set out in front to allow customers to dine in. I ordered the food in Ewe to practice/show off (Ewe is the language they speak in the Volta Region and I’m trying to, at least, get down the basics), and she laughed unashamedly out loud.

“Peppe?” She asked as she began scooping out a large helping. Her benign tone masked the grave danger of the word. Too much peppe sauce can disintegrate your insides before you can mouth the word “W-A-T-E-R.”

“Small, small.” I switched to English, given the importance of the question. Well, their English. I have quickly adapted their version. In their version, important words are often repeated twice.

“Gari?” She continued. (Ground cassava.)

“Plenty!” It really mixes well with the beans, adding a starch to offset the mush.

I sat down on a nearby bench with my bowl and a coke and took out a book. The attendant in the Immigration Office said the paperwork for my Visa extension would take 2-3 hours, so I anticipated 4-6. In any case, I certainly had time for a leisurely lunch.

After an hour of reading and intermittent chatting with the woman (we established we were both born on Monday, a very relevant fact given that friends and family here use nicknames for each other based on the day of the week they’re born), I paid my fee and even left a tip. Tips aren’t heard of around here, but, then again, I’m rich (comparatively), and the bill was roughly 70 cents. And, plus, it was a very pleasant lunch.

 About Everything of Importance (written 11/16)

Now for the real update...

I have just returned from the house of the chief, or “Na-Na.” His house is made of cement and modest in size but towers over the mud huts and thatched roofs one passes to reach it. It is my third visit in a week—there is something of a crisis looming at the school in his village. The school director has made official, through a letter to my NGO director which he read to me as courtesy before sending it, that he refuses to effectively all the terms that were asked of him in return for our support (terms which he previously agreed to). He refuses to limit class size or prohibit corporal punishment. He cites as his reasons a long history of failed partnerships between foreign and African entities, but I know that his main reason is desire for all the money he has seen flow into the school now that we are here (As an aside, because I have studied the history of abusive Western organizations in Africa, I find it particularly offensive when he willfully misuses it to justify his own greed).  Of course, in concluding, he wrote that he encourages us to continue helping his school, so long as we can “compromise” with him.

My NGO director, Ellen, received the letter, and she, Myles (the other volunteer), and I talked things over. Understandably, Ellen doesn’t want to work with an obstinate partner when there are so many other schools in need. On the other hand, leaving aside the sentimental stuff, Myles and I don’t want to give up on this community. We have seen the warm welcome we have received here, the great need, and the potential for a prosperous partnership with the school. In fact, I did some calculations and, even with no financial support from the NGO, the school fees we are bringing in now would cover the all the necessary expenditures, including paying teachers and the headmaster higher wages than what they are taking now (this is big because the school has operated at a loss throughout most of its ten years in existence). The hitch is that the finances are only stable if the NGO maintains some type of presence to entice the parents to continue to enroll their children and if there is no director siphoning off money. The problem is that with the current director, neither condition can be met. The only way would be to buy him out.

Which is exactly what we are trying now, through some delicate politicking. Alas, this is the final attempt to salvage the situation and, if it fails (which is likely), I will most likely have to volunteer at a different school after Christmas break. Here is the basic premise: The chief and community fully support our NGO and don’t want us to leave. The teachers are unhappy with their very low wages and are threatening to quit if the director does not provide them their promised raises at the end of the month. Most parents will withdraw their children if we leave, and the director will go back to operating at a loss. Finally, the director has made clear in the past his interest in selling the school to save his pocket book.

 In other words, we have a lot of bargaining power. The basic idea would be to have some sort of board of directors, made up of village elders and in collaboration with myself and Ellen, buy the school back and run it as a community school with our support. There are a lot of details that I have been considering that would have to be worked out for proper accountability, but the basic principles we are banking on are (1) the school director recognizes his own desperate circumstances and is willing to sell at a reasonable price and (2) that the village elders would see the benefits to the community to having a well-run school amongst an otherwise completely failing local education system and therefore would willingly and honestly collaborate with us to get there. Over time, this relationship between our NGO and the community would bring more possibilities to help them prosper in a more organic and complete way than even the most successful partnerships the NGO has had at other schools.

But I am getting ahead myself. As I said, I just returned from meeting the chief. I found him sitting idly on a lawn chair in his portico dressed in a (disappointingly) unceremonious, checkered, button-down shirt. He greeted me warmly, and we went through the perfunctory introductions I have learned are not only customary, but necessary. Then, I told the chief that Ellen, my director, had sent the school director the letter refusing his “revised” conditions and informing him of our imminent departure (a bluff that may, unfortunately, become true). This is part of the plan, one which the chief and I devised in our last meeting (I find him to be remarkably cunning and understanding of NGO partnership intricacies). In the letter, Ellen would be mentioning that, in the interest of the community, she had given me the go ahead to inform the chief that our partnership would be ending. This was a calculated move so that, when the chief “invites”—commands—the director to come meet him to discuss why the NGO is leaving his community, the director wouldn’t feel it is a surprise attack, a coup d’état contrived by his foreign partners (which is partially what it is, although the chief and elders do genuinely want to find a way to keep us here… so it’s only that we have to present the initiative as led by them with our assistance, rather than the other way around).  I will be absent from their meeting so that the chief and the director can discuss more openly the opportunities to salvage the situation, and the hope would be that the director will raise the option of selling himself. Afterward, the chief will call on me and we will meet.  If he does show interest in selling, the chief and I would subsequently have to convince the community leaders to raise some money themselves for the purchase, since my NGO wants to assist them to do it rather than simply buy it for them.

It’s a bold move, but we are all out of options. At least, I hope I can sleep well knowing that I have done all I could. I am very tired of this saga. Whatever happens, whether I stay here or go to another school, I hope I can just focus on teaching next term. I didn’t think I would get so caught up in politics here, but I must say it has truly been an extraordinary experience: maneuvering through this system—one governed by traditional age-grade politics, a confusing spoils system that at once seems hopelessly  corrupt yet efficient and even acceptable, and a strong sense of propriety that often means what is said is not what is meant to be heard—is  a challenge, to say the least.

 Alright, that’s enough for now. Thank you for the encouraging words you have sent. I’m sure that the next time I write, I will know which way the wind is blowing, and whether I’ll be sailing or not. I’m not sure what I personally want anymore, although I do know I am very tired and this instant coffee is just not cutting it…

Two Months in Africa--What Have I Actually Been Doing??

I can’t report any huge developments on the school since I have last written, so I’d like to use this entry to talk about some other things about which I have yet to write. However, first, I think I ought to give those of you who care a coherent summary (something I realized I have yet to do) of what I actually do here, what my organization is trying to accomplish at the school, and where we stand now. This is coming mostly in response to a couple of friends who wrote me recently and said they still have no idea what I’ve been doing for two months in Africa! For the rest of you, feel free to skip the next seven paragraphs….

Okay. So halfway through my senior year at Penn last year, I decided I want to volunteer as a teacher in Africa. I found Pagus, this small NGO that effectively consists of one woman, named Ellen,  in Philadelphia, and a small, intermittent supply of volunteers. Ellen has spent the last four years supporting the development of a boarding school in rural Ghana through a scholarship for the impoverished students, infrastructure development, and short-term volunteer trips (Having visited the school, I must say she and the school director have done a fantastic job). Now that this partnership has matured and the school is, more or less, independent, Ellen decided to launch another effort with a new school. The director of a dying school in a very poor village, called Likpe Bakua, had been courting her for years to help, and she recently agreed. Around the same time, she accepted me as her first long-term volunteer, and I agreed to go to this village as a volunteer teacher and a sort of Pagus representative.

The school was created ten years ago to provide a better alternative to the government schools in this deprived region of Ghana, and it runs from daycare to 6^th grade. From what I can gather, the founder managed to maintain some stability in the school but eventually gave it up and sold it to the current director, Francis. Francis, who is a regional pastor and “big-man” of the area (he owns a car, goats, second house in Accra) decided to buy it up  because he either saw it as a business opportunity or because he has a big heart and wanted to save the children (I am now putting it at about a 70/30 mixture of the two, respectively). Francis enjoyed a brief period of seeming success (up to 180 students in his first year) and then suffered an abrupt dive into depopulation, bankruptcy, and disarray. In actuality, he operated at a loss for all the three years he has owned the place, and no more than half the student population was ever really paying. The abrupt collapse came when the school bus driver quit because he wasn’t receiving his money, and, without him, the greater part of the student population which was attending from outside villages suddenly had no way of getting to school. The rest of the school floundered, the headmaster and several teachers quit, and many parents withdrew their children because they thought the remaining teachers to be irresponsible or incompetent (I know this doesn’t paint the current management we are dealing with in a positive light, but in all fairness, I must say this community is also extremely difficult when it comes to education of their children. Many don't see the point and refuse to pay promptly or fully. As a result, the school can’t afford quality teachers and so the education became as worthless as they already felt it was. Classic chicken and egg).

I don’t believe Ellen had any idea the extent to which this school was rotting when she decided to sign on, and I obviously had no clue. I thought I would be spending my time adapting to the culture, trying my hand at teaching for the first time (to which I felt very unqualified but very excited), and just learning from the kids. I thought that to be plenty for the year. But when I arrived, I saw a school that lacked toilets or drinking water, textbooks or qualified teachers. Its roof leaked and the window panes were spoiled. There was no semblance of class structure, no clear authority figure, and no committed leadership. Most of all, there were almost no kids. Needless to say, I didn’t really think I had time to just focus on adapting to the culture.

I dove in from day one, organizing a sign-in rotation system for the oldest students to fetch river water for the school, buying clocks and pencil sharpeners, re-testing some of the children who were clearly above or below their assigned grade, revamping the class schedule, and so on. I was emboldened because the headmaster and teachers were very receptive and welcomed all the new ideas; I tried to make it a collaborative process but the state of the school was so dire that, when they seemed unwilling or unable to actually contribute, I temporarily accepted promoting dependency for the sake of salvaging the school. All the while, I was teaching approximately four hours of class a day, primarily Math and English for the 3^rd-5^th graders, along with shorter classes in Information and Communication Technology and Creative Art (I hope Mrs. Mattingly, my elementary school art teacher, is not reading this). In the evenings, I would meet with the school owner/director to hammer out the details of our NGO-school partnership or even the chief of the village to find out about how the community viewed the school. (I need to mention, at this point, that a couple weeks in, another volunteer named Myles arrived to stay for three months with me in the village. Fresh out of high school, I was skeptical about having him around, but Myles has turned out to be extremely effective, mature, and a fine partner.)

Anyway, over these past two months, I’ve learned that running a mile a minute can’t take you backwards in time. It is easy to forget the bounds of your role when you see obvious problems that can so easily be fixed, and no one else seems to be trying to fix them. But I really should have known better than to think we could turn the school around on a dime. After all, you are tampering with issues that transcend the school; they run deep into the culture, community, and history. Nonetheless, I can’t say we didn’t make progress. With the subsidized fees and the presence of foreigners, the student population ballooned. With the improvements in structure and infrastructure, it began to function like a proper school. We were even able to hire two new teachers—both infinitely more qualified than the previous staff.

But it is this rapid progress that allowed my delusion to carry on for so long and made the realization that I wrote about in my last entry that much harder to bare (For those of you who don’t want to read back, I reached a breaking point in the “negotiations” with the school director because he didn’t want to agree to the terms of the agreement my NGO director had made with him via phone/email prior to my arrival—there were some serious misunderstandings about what those terms were, of course). Just as I magnified, in my own mind, the significance of the immediate progress of the school, I magnified this failure into a true crisis: I questioned the whole experience here, my purpose, blah, blah, blah. I was spreading myself so thin I couldn’t see the intrinsic value of the experience or the real impact on some of the kids.

But, as I wrote before, ultimately this event served to temper my expectations, my demands, and my disappointments. I have now decided that, if the partnership fails, I’ll stay on as a teacher for the year (after all, that’s all I wanted to be in the first place). Of course, it won’t be easy for me if the school reverts back to its former state, but I think I now have the experience in hand that I’ll avoid another existential crisis and accept the impact I can make in the realm I can make it. Before, I hadn’t truly convinced myself (even if I told myself I had) that no matter what happens, it’s not a waste. I’m 80% sure I’ve convinced myself now. If I can get the other 20% there, I’m invincible.

Okay, summary finished. Sorry that took so long. What about the rest of my experience here? Let’s see….I love the village I am living in. It is nestled in the foothills of the mountains that separate Ghana from Togo. It is very, very green. It has a few shops in the town center and vans that pass through that stuff people like sardines for the 30 minute trip to the nearby town of Hohoe where the market is. I would guess the village consists of one to two thousand people, comprised of seven clans (which are indistinguishable to an outsider) led by seven family heads who report to the chief. The people are very kind and, after two months, some of them have even begun to stop gawking at me! Only a few of them have passable English. I have begun to learn their language, but it’s slow coming.

I stay at an informal guesthouse here run by one of the wealthier townsmen and his wife. They rent out six rooms that extend from their own house, each furnished with an uncomfortable bed and a ceiling fan (yes, there’s electricity, although frequent blackouts). The bathroom is communal, but the toilet flushes and there’s a real shower (I was almost disappointed when I saw the shower head; I had been mentally preparing myself to shower with a bucket for a year). Needles to say, no hot water, but I rarely miss it. Besides a “guard” dog, a puppy, a cat, and two kittens, the couple lives alone with their 11-year-old grandson, Denis. I love having Denis around, who is also one of my students, and he is finally getting over his shyness toward me—he even followed me (barefoot) on my evening jog tonight.

As far as food and water go, I have a gas cooker and a refrigerator, so I make a lot of my own food and boil my own water. Tonight, I tried to recreate my Mom’s tuna casserole (it was more like milk-pasta pudding, but it was tolerable). The madam of the house has adopted Myles and me as her own and sometimes makes us very tasty local dishes for dinner as well. The variety of food here is extremely lacking, but I’m making due. On the whole, I’m pretty comfortable with life here. If nothing else, there are so much fewer distractions here than back home that, for the first time in my life, I feel like I have time to actually read!

And, because I am trying to make this entry a catch-all, and it is already interminably long, let me conclude with a bullet point list of things I miss about home (besides my family and friends):

·         Whole wheat bread

·         Gym

·         Meritocracy

·         Salads

·         Muffins

·         Real Coffee

·         Unbelievable efficiency

·         Complete disinterest in your existence when walking down a street