Parenthetical.net

I can’t believe it’s been a week since I’ve been able to communicate with the outside world! I’m definitely getting a sense of the “real Ghana” in Tanyigbe (in the sense that “everyone in the city comes from the village,” as they say), and the size is good in that I can get to know people on a smaller scale. But it is really fucking isolating. Especially since most people can’t understand my accent. I have to speak very slowly, separate my words carefully, make sure not to use slang, and talk with my hands a lot. Sometimes I’ll ask a student what I think is a simple question, and then one of my “keepers” (the guys from the NGO I’m working with; they escort me everywhere and take good care of me, so I’ve started to think of them as my keepers) will “translate” (ie., say exactly the same thing but in a Ghanaian accent) and suddenly she understands perfectly. *sigh*

The school is very much like my school: I’ve done dorm check, study-hall supervision, weekend duty, etc. (They call them different things, of course.) I love that being a high school teacher is enough a part of my identity now that I can be one on any continent. Kids are basically the same anywhere. They had a hip-hop dance contest Friday night, and the senior prefect, Gilbert (who is my friend - one of the first and only kids to reach out to me; he’s taken me on a couple of walks around the village), pulled me up to be a judge. Very silly.

(Heh. The dude next to me is having chat sex while researching rap stars. Ah, internet cafes.)

Yesterday one of my keepers (the other 3 having returned to the city; he’s an agriculture teacher at the school, so he has to stay) and I walked over the mountain to Atidze, a neighboring village. One of our students who lives there showed us around. We saw their water source, a ground-fed river which he said flows strongly even during the dry season, and no one ever gets sick from it even though it’s not purified. (I decided not to test, though so far assorted local fruits and whatnot haven’t made me sick. Whew!) There’s a big white snake that lives there who is supposedly the wife of the river, and if anyone killed her, the river would dry up. The student said he’s a Christian and doesn’t believe that, but a lot of older people in the village do.

Then we hung out under a tree for awhile talking to assorted passersby. I bought “ginger ice cream” (little plastic bags of ice with bright orange ginger syrup) for some kids, at 200 cedis each (about 25 cents). They got rewarded for being a) brave enough to talk to me and b) able to pronounce my name, which is hard for a lot of people for some reason. I also tried cocoa seeds in the cocoa plant - you suck white goo off the seeds, which is tangy-sweet and doesn’t taste the chocolate at all. But I saw cocoa seeds drying before being sent off to be ground up for chocolate, and it is indeed the same stuff. (According to my keeper, it’s all “fair trade” here because the government is the only cocoa buyer, and they always give a fair price, as well as extra bonuses: free tuition for the farmers’ kids, free pesticides. I asked about environmental concerns for burning the bush to plant cocoa trees and then spraying them with pesticides, and he said no one really thinks about that.)

My work: I’m organizing the Tanyigbe Senior Seconday School (high school) library. They have an 8th edition Abridged Dewey (so old it doesn’t really have a section for computers), and I’m teaching the school electrician who volunteered to run the library how to use it. It’s slow going, but he actually seems interested in the problems of classification! Which is kind of a miracle; even among librarians, that’s pretty nerdy. Apparently he wanted to go to a workshop to learn about library work, but the school couldn’t afford to send him. So the workshop came to him!

Unfortunately no one really uses the library except to look at their textbooks (there aren’t enough for every student to have one, of course). Partly this is because there doesn’t seem to be a culture of reading - in Ghana in general, but particularly among villagers. But it’s also partly because the books suck. All those books you give away when you don’t want them anymore…this is the end of the line. Yesterday I saw People of North Carolina, a textbook for (I can only assume) NC elementary school kids from 1973. Oy. So start collecting books that you don’t want that you think some Ghanaian kids might want to read! I’ll say more about what that would be when I get home.

Ok, I have to go in a minute. Back to village life. Hopefully I’ll spend all of next weekend in Ho, so I should be able to check my email again on Sat. But no promises. I miss you all!