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 Cape Coast on Sunday afternoon, leave Ghana around 10pm that night (local time), arrive in Washington DC mid-afternoon on Monday, and make it home by Monday evening. To tell the truth, I’m really looking forward to coming back and seeing everyone, but as for saying goodbye to people (and life) here, sometimes I feel the depth of it and sometimes I don’t. The seminarians have had their graduation, final church services & a dinner, and all that helped me feel and understand things drawing to a close. It felt a bit like the end of a summer at CCC, like leaving NCSSM, or Guilford, or the Yachting Club (which, though part of my Guilford experience, deserves its own recognition as something difficult to part with ;)). But still so many things feel normal here. My schedule even today is much the same as usual… perhaps the biggest transition will come tonight, when we have our “farewell dinner”, and tomorrow when I finish packing.

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 Ghana”- we’ve got 5 months worth of blog posts for that, & maybe more to come ;)).

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 Ghana are polygamous? Why do Ghanaians use non-inclusive language in English when the equivalents in their own language don’t have a gender? How many people that have asked for my email address will end up emailing me? What is it about the way I dance that Ghanaians like, since in general I dance so differently from them? Did the cultures of Ghana always treat their children the way they do now, or was it traditionally different? How long will the power and water shortages last? What’s the cross-regional representation like at most senior secondary schools in Ghana? Has my experience at UCC been an unfair representation of Ghana’s tertiary education options, positively or negatively? What would have happened if Kwame Nkrumah had ruled for a few more years? What would Ghana be like if it had lower tariffs for imports and more readily let people leave the country? Will Ghanaians ever embrace washing machines, or is the saved effort not worth it to them? How much reverse culture shock will I go through when I get home?

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 United States. I’ll never run out of things to ponder, so long as I can continue to notice topics and information. But anyway, in light of all this that I’ve gone through and attempted to gather & reflect upon, I’m having a mid-year review :) That is to say, I know that some people read what I’ve written, and since (thanks to my sister) I’ve decided to continue posting, I’m soliciting feedback. You’re all my friends and/or family in some manner or another, so what do you think? How am I doing? Have you witnessed change in me over this time period? Are there some things you think I should have noticed or considered, but didn’t? Let me know ;).

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 Ghana, relating to other foreigners in Ghana, relating to men in Ghana, begging in Ghana, having privilege in Ghana, attitudes about “success” in Ghana, and probably some others I can’t remember ;)

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 Ghana, “master” is used much the way that “sir” is used to get someone’s attention in the US. However, people are starting to see how even with this different definition of the word, a) “master” still has another, harsher meaning, and b) Ghanaians are still putting their true oppressors in a place of respect above them by using that term. Words have power, by their every inflection & connotation, and I think it’s important to pay attention to that.

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 Ghana can connect to English liturgies and English hymns? In truth, though, most churches seem to use local languages primarily.

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 Guinea, Cote D’Iviore, and Togo) at the seminary. I don’t know why, I just wasn’t. And then I thought about how strange it was that a church which had started as the Church of England was having French-speaking priests (and congregations). Then I shifted again, and decided that if they have Fante speaking folk, then having French speakers is not weird. And then finally I wondered why they had to learn English, and decided it was so that they could connect to the whole hierarchy. So, there we go ;)

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 Africa, because I would have had two languages to learn, and if people there spoke French as haltingly as people here often speak English, I’d be in trouble. However, for complicated reasons, this seems not to be true. The francophones I’ve met here (in Ghana and just over the border with Burkina Faso) seem to be quite fluent in French, and I don’t think all of them come from backgrounds with lots of education. I think it’s because, as Chinua Achebe suggested in his novel Arrow of God, the French might have taken a more strict, enforcement-based view of colonizing than the British. I’m not sure if this is true, and I really need to spend some time in some francophone countries, but I do suspect that French is more widely spoken within them than English is here.

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 Ghana, Food in Ghana, and “things-to-know as a traveler in Ghana”.

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 Cape Coast, but my seminarian friend Ocansey and I had to take a tro-tro (read: rickety crowded mini-bus) to get there. They were very nice, and it was an interesting conversation to watch, as Ocansey is also in the process of learning Fante, though much farther along, and so he’s easy for me to understand. Anyway, as we were coursing down rough roads, leaving clouds of dust behind us, dropping people off at different points and going past bits of countryside I’d never seen, I knew quite well that this was something I could imagine my father doing. Simultaneously, though, sitting there with my hands in my lap, looking curiously but calmly out the tro-tro window, I felt like my mother- as if she were put in that situation, that’s how she would look out at the world. Isn’t that interesting?

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