Tuesday, June 12, 2007
I'm home!
Today, though, be thinking about me & my family. I'm going with my dad to visit his cousin in Hospice, who's only expected to live a couple more days, and there have been a lot of recent deaths on that side of the family.
I love you all! I don't have my cell phone just yet, but feel free to call my house, and know that I'll be around online and such asap :)
Thanks for caring!
love,
Rachel Rose
Friday, June 8, 2007
The last post while in Ghana
Hello family and friends!
I’m coming home in only two days! Today is Friday, and I’ll leave
So, now for a cursory overview of landmark encounters and experiences in Ghana: I’ve met the Anglican bishops of Cape Coast, Sunyani, Secundi/Takoradi and maybe Kumasi (I can’t remember), and the former bishop of Los Angeles; I’ve been to nine tenths of Ghana’s regions; I’ve received a marriage proposal (many, in fact); I’ve visited a legitimate shrine; I’ve had tons of conversations about religion in Africa in general; I’ve touched a crocodile and survived; I’ve become adept at hand-washing clothes and washing myself out of a bucket; I’m finally very comfortable with the term “Obruni” – I much prefer it to “white lady”; I’ve pounded something similar to fufu; I can competently eat fufu, and most other Ghanaian foods, in the traditional way. (Note: I know this is not a list of “what I’ve learned in
Things I still want to know/understand: what is Rastafarianism, really? What do people who truly consider themselves Christians and traditionalists think about their own belief systems and practices? What percentage of marriages in the north and south of
Naturally, there’s tons left to learn here. There’s also a lot for me to learn over the next few months and years in the
Also, there are a few topics that I just haven’t felt comfortable writing about here, not because they’re inherently bad or because I can’t explain them, but because I haven’t figured out how to appropriately frame them in this medium. I’m willing to discuss them, but only if I can really talk about them since they’re so complex and my perspectives on them have changed several times. Anyway, they include: being an obruni in
It occurs to me that all these lists might easily be tiring ;) I promise I’m done. They just sort of come about sometimes because I want to talk about a topic, and then realize that I can’t- that there’s simply too much. Isn’t it strange how sometimes things take so much longer to explain than to experience? But how the associated thinking/processing time is usually completely independent of either? I actually appreciate that fact. I like having a fuller set of thoughts on a topic, because then even if I’m called upon to say something small, it will be informed by all of the larger interrelated things that I’ve learned around it.
But anyway, first topic of the day: Profanity. This is a complicated issue for me, and has been ever since I first heard my little sisters here cursing in English. I know that they have no grasp of the gravity of what they say, but the fact remains that they are using the words grammatically correctly, and in situations where they’re frustrated. Chantal, Katie and I had a conversation earlier in which we talked about how children learned about taboo things, and how the forbidden nature of something can make it far more desirable and destructive to people than it would have been as a simple aspect of their lives. For example, tell a child that they can’t say a certain word, go to a certain place, or watch a certain movie, and all the sudden it holds a whole new meaning for them, often inciting them to rebellion. So, Chantal’s argument was that children shouldn’t be forbidden things that are culturally specific taboos – that we should really question our perceptions of what is “bad”. One could further argue that people should not be forbidden that which is taboo in other cultures, and US and British cultures are certainly different from Ghanaian ones, though they’ve also definitely influenced them. Also, I support the validity of changing language, shifting spellings, dialects, accents, and changing word meanings. However, I think there are a couple of counterarguments: these children won’t only interact with Ghanaians during their lifetimes. They’ll be interacting with people who could be offended by such language, and they have plenty of alternative vocabulary they could use. Also, Ghanaians have long referred to the colonizers they interacted with as “the colonial masters”, and in
The English filter is the only reason that Ghanaians are able to say generally profane words, though. There are words for them in Akan, but you can’t say them in public, and especially not in front of an older person. A friend of mine said that a person could easily sing a song about sex in English, but if they had to sing the same song directly translated into Akan, they simply *couldn’t* do it. Now, I know of one particularly profane and also particularly popular Ghanaian rapper who throws this idea out the window (his fans like his music so well that they feel compelled to participate in his call & response, even though they would normally never say such words). But anyway, it’s because of the distance that speaking English provides, making such things not matter because the words are more like sounds than meanings, that Ghanaians can speak profanely in English. They watch American (and maybe some British, Canadian & Australian) movies, and they notice people cursing all the time, and don’t pick up on the full context in which that’s happening. But anyway, doesn’t this also make you wonder about how much churchgoers in
So, speaking of languages and church, we’re going to segway toward francophones in the Anglican church. Now, at first, I was not at all shocked that there were French-speakers (from
I may have also said earlier, once I fully grasped how much people speak Fante here, that I was glad I didn’t go to a French-speaking country in
Another interesting aspect of my language experience here is that even though I only know how to say a few things in Fante, and I know far more in French, whenever someone speaks to me in a foreign language now my first reaction is to respond in Fante. I haven’t forgotten my French at all, but it’s as if the Fante phrases are sitting on top of the French ones in my mind, so I have to use a lot more effort to reach them. However, I’m still fine at explaining things in French (as fine as I’ve ever been ;)). I think it’s merely that my conversational French was never stellar because I rarely practiced with true francophones, so now it’s still there but the Fante comes more quickly.
Big posts I still need to write: transportation in
The last conversation of the day has to do with feeling like my father and mother. I went to the village called Moree the other day to meet some youth that folks around the seminary (and at home! Yay Bethel UMC!) are helping to train for employment. Moree is not to far from
Well, that’s it for today :) I’m coming home soon. I love you all, and thanks for caring!
with very much love,
Rachel Rose