Day 4

Tuesday, January 12, 2010
By John Wark

Ghanian proverb #1: Instead of doing the wrong thing, then pacifying people with money, do the right thing and save your money to look after your children.

Ghanian proverb #2: When the old woman is hungry, she says, “Cook something for the children to eat.”

One of the most prominent facets of life in Ghana became apparent on the overnight flight from New York to the capital city of Accra. One row in front of me sat a father and his son. The boy was only about two or three years old and did not have a seat of his own. So his father, dressed in a blue blazer and dress slacks, held him on his lap the entire duration of the transAtlantic flight without so much as a hint of personal discomfort or complaint.

I watched him closely and his face remained serenely composed the entire flight. I recognized him as Ghanian because as we passed through customs he queued up in the line for Ghanian nationals. I felt the urge to go over to tell him how moved I was by his selfless act and what an inspiring example of fatherhood he presented. But I held back, slightly concerned I might somehow offend him. After being in the county a few days I realized I had nothing to fear. Ghanians accept compliments with the utmost grace. I also realized that I don’t need to see such a man step into a Ghanian customs line to identify him as a Ghanian – seeing him with his son was enough to identify him.

Since arriving in Senchie Ferry with the rest of the Global Volunteers team three days ago we have seen day by day just how deeply this sense of devotion to children reaches into the entire community. It is a devotion enthusiastically inspired by Global Volunteers, which has invited us each here to participate in helping the Senchie community grow stronger in its self reliance and confidence in pursuit of the priorities it has set.

The priorities set by the community and adopted by Global Volunteers largely revolve around the children, from the current library project to the assistant school teaching we will do here.

This trip to Ghana is for me occurring under a double sign of the child. That I am here at all is the work of a child. I flown from Florida to Africa to support my beautiful 13-year-old daughter Haley’s personal effort to become more self reliant, much as Global Volunteers is supporting the children of the Senchie community.

Here, in today’s group journal, I want to publicly thank my daughter for being brave enough to dream boldly and be daring and self-reliant enough to advance her dream of visiting Africa as far as she did. It was Haley who contacted Global Volunteers and found this program only five weeks ago and who, when I and her mother first suggested it may take a little time, effort and planning to make a trip to Africa, answered use with: “Don’t say it’s not possible. You have to believe that it is.” She said coming here would fulfill a desire held since she was much younger. Thank you, Haley, for this remarkable trip.

What I have discovered in the short time we have been here is that while your mother may be in Florida, awaiting our return, Haley, our motherland is here. Where human life first took hold millions of years ago.

The importance of children to our collective reason for being here emerged again on Tuesday, the day of this journal entry, as the children of the village dressed in their cleaned and pressed uniforms returned to the village’s schools for the first time since their Christmas break began and the members of our group who volunteered as teachers – Ellie, Jane and Kathleen -- joined in classroom activities.

The schools are simple concrete block affairs with shutters and doors that open to allow the air to cool their poorly lit classrooms. But the children are incredibly happy and well looked after. They go to school only through the sixth grade in the three schools Global Volunteers is sponsoring.

The rest of us – Haley, Sandy, Pam, her irrepressible husband Ed and I – joined the workers for day two of construction work on the library Global Volunteers is building. The library will be a first for the entire region and serve communities for miles around when complete. When we arrive there is already a shell and a roof. Our morning was spent moving more than a hundred cinder blocks, wheeling barrows of mud to mix with sand, arranging scaffolding, mixing cement by hand, passing blocks to the masons up on the scaffold, offloading a truckload of wood for the framing and continuing to ready conduit for the electrical work. We also completed the upper courses of stone work at he east and west ends of the hallway. This work was all completed by noon, Ghanians and Obronies (whites) working side by side, but the Ghanians directing and guiding the Obronies every step of the way.

My daughter Haley learned how to use a trowel to throw “mud” into the channels carved into the cinder stone for the electrical conduits and then to pack it in and smooth it over, She also helped pitch sand into the wheelbarrow and mixed cement. Needless to say, I am very proud of her.

By 12:30 we were tiredly picking our way back along the network of red dirt roads and paths that thread through schoolyards, backyards and front yards to the St, James House hotel where we are all staying and where lunch would be waiting. Earlier in the day, as we walked to the schools and the library we saw the scores of village children in their fresh uniforms assembling outdoors near their schools and heard them sing their national anthem.

Many of the children we saw in the morning now roamed the pathways or milled about near the schools. I noticed that the village women set up tables near the schools and handed the children fruit freshly peeled with a machete, and such things as bags of nuts and also bags of water. Children of all ages approached us as always with open faces, hands out, touching us, holding us, hugging us, sometimes begging for soccer balls for their pictures to be taken.

Often it seems to me many of the children are simply using these encounters to practice their English and I have begin to notice for fewer requests for soccer balls, at least today. They seem to want merely to practice saying, “Hello!” and “How are you?” and “Good afternoon, sir.”

I’ve also noticed that these children often speak better English and understand more than do many of the young men working the library construction site. Although another group of teenagers who lingered in the shade of an awning near the work site demonstrated good enough skill. “Mister,” they shouted as we walked past them, give us your daughter.”

After lunch today we had been told we would begin a regular mid-afternoon routine of tutoring the children from the schools. But the teachers asked us to hold off a day so that they could complete some of their own back-to-school business. So we found ourselves with the unexpected boon of a cleared afternoon.

Esther & Bonnie headed out to find yet another internet cafe. Meeting with the home office...

For the rest of us, out came the guidebooks. The list of potential free-time activities posted near the list of must-learn Twi phrases was consulted. Was there sufficient time to leap aboard a tro tro and run into Accra to visit the Arts Center? What about a visit to a place within walking distance that apparently had kayaks for rent and a pool to swim in? Or, how about that place 10 minutes away where we could buy amazing hand woven pieces of khente cloth?

We ended up taking the advice of a veteran, Kathleen, who sagely suggested we go to the Continental Hotel where we could rent a boat to tour the Volta River, see the exotic animals they kept on the grounds, and have a drink on the veranda poolside.

The boat ride was a treat, and cooling respite from the day’s heat and hard work, as we slipped through green water below green hills. We motored around for an hour, passing by fancy resorts and pretty riverside estate houses, banana plantations, tilapia farms, what is purported to be the world’s second largest suspension bridge, and an impoverished riverside section of Akasombo.

The sharp contrast between wealth and subsistence living in this country is staggering.

At the Continental Hotel we saw monkeys and crocodiles, exotic birds including parrots, and a strange animal that looked like a big cat with a raccoon face and both stripes and spots along its body. Haley fell in love with the monkeys and now wants one as a pet. (If you’re wondering where the impetus to buy or adopt the horses, chickens, cats, dogs and goats we have, you may use the aforementioned as your clue.)

When I paused to reflect on where we are and what we have been doing I was struck by how far and yet how near everything feels. For instance, was New Years really only 12 days ago? Have we really only been here three days? It feels like weeks. It is hard to believe this is only Tuesday and also a little bit beyond imagining that I am really in Africa, that this is Ghana, and these Twi-speaking Akans are our hosts for the coming weeks here in Senchi, beautiful Senchi, emerging from the fragrant smoke of cooking fires that have been burning since the dawn of time in this part of the world; Senchie lying indolently under the hot sun in the shade of an ancient mythically large mango tree not from from the Volta river; Senchi awakening in the quiet, gentle eyes of its children, Senchie drumming the names of its children through hundreds of years, their names ringing with the passage of daily life itself: the people of Senchie and the place making the familiar as unfamiliar, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Kwadwo, Kwabena, Kwaku, Yaw, Kofi, Kwame, Kwasi, Adwoa, Abena, Akua, Yaa, Alfia, Amma, Akosua; Senchie, maze of timeless red dust paths along which appear and disappear, children, old blind women past the age of 100, chickens, goats, dogs, women and men carrying a vast indescribable array of goods on the their heads, families huddled around outdoor coal fires, women pounding fuffu, driving banku.

Moment to moment life in Africa shape shifts. Almost instantly the days in Ghana take on the quality of a waking dream filled with sounds and sights and smells in which one feels one’s self suddenly becoming more African, less white European. This is liberating, is it not?

The shade from the tree with the root that reaches to the instant mankind was born spreads out its leafy African limbs, shading the white brother and the black sister indiscriminately. One feels the stirrings underfoot, knows the substance of life, the ancestors felt. The same earth. The same stirrings. The same aliveness at one’s core.

Africa is less a place to know that a place that presents one with a new way of knowing.

Me da ase, Senchie.

Me da ase, Global Volunteers.

Me da ase, Ed, Pam, Sarah, Bobby Jo, Ellie, Deb, Kathleen, Jane, Bonnie, Sandy, Haley.

Me da ase, my Akan sister Ester.

Me da ase my African ancestors with whom I stand eyebrow to eyebrow.