Halas that sh#t.

Ex-pats and people who repeatedly travel to certain places often don't necessarily learn the local language to fluency, but instead slowly incorporate some of the local language into their own vernacular. Some words just don't quite have the same flavour in your mother tongue -- how can you accurately translate "Inshallah" (officially meaning "if God wills it", but often meaning "No."), and "chez" (translates as "at the house of", but is so much more widely applicable and faster than English terms).

Here are some words that I have encountered in the vernacular of ex-pat communities around the world:

Scotland -
"Id-nay" (literally means "isn't it so?")
"Neeps" ("turnips")
"Tatties" ("potatoes")

Japan
"Gambateh!" (three syllables that collectively mean: "work hard"; "nose to the grindstone"; "good luck")
"Dai-jo-bu" (meaning "no problem", but not as casual and much more fun to say)
"Five-man" (a combination of "five" in English, and "man" meaning ten thousand, used constantly when dealing with Japanese currency)

Montreal -
"What day are we?" (Anglo-Montrealers won't actually believe you when you tell them this is not real English)

Turkey -
"Ghetto tea boys" (meaning the young men with brown teeth who spend all day drinking tea and staring at passing women, not to be confused with "tea boys" in the UAE, who are the men who serve tea)
"Brown Cricket Problem" (meaning cockroaches)

Ghana -
"Sista" (literally means "sister", but can be applied to any female, including strangers)
"Cha-lee" (literally means "Charlie", but can be applied to any male who is a friend)
"Bra" (literally means "brother", but can be applied to any male, including strangers)
"You are not a serious man" (widely applicable, used whenever any man is incessantly bothering you)
"Obruni" (means "white person")
"Obibini" (means "black person")

UAE
"Maam-sir" (literally means "madam or sir, whichever you are", and is used by virtually all south and southeast Asian service staff to greet people)
"Same same" (literally means "they are the same", but usually implies "same same, but different", used by virtually all south and southeast Asian service staff)
"Halas that sh_t" (no exact translation possible, western ex-pat expression that combines "halas" [done, stop, enough, cease] with English slang)

Netherlands
"Beer-tche" (spelt "beertje" in Dutch, literally means diminutive beer, or small beer)
"Gezellig" (fantastic Dutch word meaning "good vibes", "friendly atmosphere", "positive ambiance")

Brilliant Quotes of the Noughties [2000-2009].

Sometimes friends bantering can quickly spiral into pure genius. Here are just a few quotes I remembered recently, which may or may not be funny to anyone else:

“But our dwarves have magical powers.”
- Nunoo, on the difference between ‘real dwarves’ in Ghana, and the ‘mythical dwarves’ found in folkloric tales such as The Lord of the Rings. Ghana, 2006.

“Unless that hamburger has alpaca or guinea pig in it, I’m not interested!”
Sarah, responding to the waiter’s dinner suggestion after delaying her much anticipating first Incan meal of either alpaca or guinea pig by 3 days due to altitude sickness. Peru, 2006.

“It’s all in your outlook: sure you’re being cheated, but you’re being cheated in the sun!”
- [Translation] Hostel bartender, on why I should go to Morocco, and to this day the best travel advice I have ever received. France, 2002.

“It gets rid of the goatiness”
- Maura, on using lemon rind to mask the ‘goatie’ flavour of goat’s cheese, coining the term ‘goatiness’ forever. Canada, 2001.

“I was seriously disappointed by the lack of llamas”
Sarah, on her first impressions of Machu Picchu. Peru, 2006.

“And that’s a historical fact.”
- Consultant_Tim, on all of the historical ‘facts’ we fabricated during our car ride across Jordan, collectively falsifying all of Jordanian [and Western Civilisation’s] history. Jordan, 2009.

“Is that funny, or am I just drunk?”
“I don’t know, I’m drunk.”
- Mikey and Me, on a particularly creative Abu Dhabi park job. UAE, 2009.

“I know – let’s make a Junction Triangle interpretive dance!”
- Dougie, on how to effectively present our revitalization plan for Toronto’s Junction Triangle. Canada, 2005.

“It’s irresponsible of you to have a heating bill of less than $600.”
- Toronto Landlord, on why he shouldn’t have to pay to insulate our house in order to reduce energy consumption and our heating bill costs. Canada, 2004.

“Alpacas have cuter faces.”
- Sarah, on her highly scientific method for distinguishing alpacas from llamas. Peru, 2006.

“You promised me Madeleine Albright, elephants, and Livingstone. I’m leaving!”
- Mikey, on his invented expectations of Ethiopia. Ethiopia, 2008.

“It’s f-ing brilliant. Just add water, instant community.”
- Me, on my first week of graduate school. Canada, 2004.

Been there, but have I really "done" that?

-You saw Hadrian’s Arch in Rome?
-Umm…yes. That’s the arch next to the Colloseum right? There are so many…
-Wow – what an incredible experience. I mean, I’ve never been there, but I took a course in Roman History, and wrote a paper about Hadrian. Did you know he built that arch after [blah blah blah]? But, what do I know. I’ve never been there.
-Well I’d “been” to Rome 4 times before this particular trip. I did a degree in Archaeology and didn’t want to go to Rome before I had the chance to really research the place and dedicate a lot of time and effort to do the experience justice. But eventually, I realised I’m never going to have the time to do the experience justice, so on the fifth trip, I finally dove in and saw Rome. But really, there are a lot of places I’ve been where I honestly believe someone who has read a book about the place has “been” there more than I have.

My last trip to Italy was a two-week holiday with my mother as her retirement wish. When she met me in London to depart for Italy, I was in a sorry mental and physical shape – I was recovering from living in Ghana where I was constantly sick, a month in South Africa where I was in chronic pain from some of my medications, and was experiencing quite a bit of culture shock from re-entering the Western World. Despite all of this, our trip was one of the most enriching trips I’d ever had in Italy. Not so much because of places, but more because of the Italian lifestyle, and getting to share the experience with my excellent, and ever-deserving mother.

When travelling, many of our experiences are defined by how hungry/thirsty we are, by the company of people we find ourselves in, by our mental state, and by how friendly people were our first hour in a country. Perspective is important when trying to mitigate these internal and external effects on our travelling experiences, but really, what is travel if not being internally and externally affected by environmental circumstances?

I’ve written before about how travel and living abroad can be vastly different experiences, largely depending on depth of experience [see “Aspiring to be a piece of meat”]. The more places you tackle in a shorter time, the shallower the layers of the experience can be. In one’s lifetime, they can see a thin version of the entire world, a deeper experience of some few key places, or a profound experience of one place. All these experiences are worth having, as long as we keep the objective of our discoveries in mind: vacation, holidays, travels, or cultural immersion?

All inclusive packages. North Americans work very hard, and when we go on vacation, we want a vacation. Travelling means constant decision-making, and it can be far more relaxing to have someone [presumably] in-the-know make all those decisions for you. Plus it’s often cheaper to get the package than the plane tickets alone. While for me a vacation means going “home”, I can entirely appreciate why some people would want to go to Cuba to have the experience of being in a hot Canada, rather than the experience of Cuba. Mingling with locals, gauging expectations, and being a model citizen while travelling is exhausting work, and often requires a recovery period afterwards – a real vacation. Sit, relax, drink daiquiris from filtered water ice cubes, and be served. Just make sure you say “thank you”, try to patronise more sustainable resorts with proper environmental and labour policies, and remember that you are on vacation – you are not travelling Cuba.

Backpacking. Above anything, backpackers are about hanging out with other backpackers, and can be a hugely entertaining way to see the world. Within minutes of meeting these people from all over the world, you will find you have days worth of things to talk about because, regardless of your geographic origins, you all studied social sciences and come from middle-class families in former British or Spanish colonies. You can spot the rookies by conversations about accents or different words we use in Canada vs. the US vs. Australia vs. England. The Aussies will poke fun at the English, the Kiwis at the Aussies, and the Canadians will swear we don’t sound anything like Americans and promise we can tell the difference.

Some of the best laughs I’ve had in my life was with a group of 6 backpackers – 2 from England, 3 from Australia, and me – whom I had the pleasure of spending 24 hours in relentless company with in Lithuania. I had been to Lithuania 3 times before, but as a Lithuanian where my family picked me up from the airport, toured me around, and dropped me off at the airport. I had never experienced Lithuania as a tourist, and wanted to see how my homeland compared with other European cities I had travelled to.

With these backpackers in Vilnius, we cooked a communal feast together for dinner, toured the city together, everyone offering fun anecdotes about how this place reminded them of ____ in ____, and where to go in ____. We drank beer on a creek side terrasse, got shushed by the locals during a Lithuanian poetry reading that none of us could understand, and we will all remember what a good time we had in Lithuania.

This experience can be repeated all over the world, and if stuck to exclusively can become very tiresome. I swore I’d never backpack again after I saw Indian Dreamcatchers being sold in Thailand, China, Vancouver, Venice, and Paris -- all within a 3-month period. But in smaller doses, backpacking is yet another excellent way to enjoy the world.

Travelling alone. The loneliest birthday of my life was spent in the French Alps in 2002. I was an archaeologist in central France, but took the afternoon off of work to spend the weekend in Annecy – a picturesque ski village about 45 minutes south of Geneva, complete with medieval canals and stone buildings. When I arrived, it was already dark, the hostel staff wasn’t answering their phone, and I didn’t have the address of the hostel. I hitch hiked into town and found a cheap hotel room in an empty building in an empty neighbourhood, and didn’t see another soul for the rest of the evening. Sometimes you just need bodies around you, even if they’re unfamiliar.

The next day, the hostel staff managed to answer their phone, and after a long day of walking around town, I spent the afternoon chatting with the hostel bartender. He and some of the hostel staff were going out that night to celebrate a friend’s birthday that lived on the other side of Lac Annecy, and there was an extra seat in the car. This ended up being one of my most enjoyable evenings while travelling, and would have never been possible if I weren’t travelling alone. I have similar stories about walking from Greece to Macedonia alone, travelling to the Sahara desert alone, and a fun coach to Istanbul alone.

Travelling with friends. I have lot of friends who I don’t think would be very fun to travel with, but I have also had company who have made the best of some pretty dodgy situations. Despite constant obstacles and sickness in Peru, I most remember all the clever banter with Sarah. In Latvia, poor hostel organisation and roommates with grossly different personal boundaries turned out to be a platform for Anastasia’s excellently delivered comedic reactions, even after having to share a bed with a drunk Spanish boy who climbed in with her for 3 hours.

Friends who you meet while travelling alone are great because you instantly have something in common, but equally important are friends with whom you have history. While I have bonded with all sorts of people all over the world, often very quickly because of obvious common interests and personality traits, but there is no substitution time-tested friendships, regardless of how irrelevant you are to each other in contemporary contexts. Human relations are about filling roles, and when we travel we meet people who mutually need someone to fill those familiar roles for the duration of that particular, however temporary, context. Having a lot in common with someone is also really important in friendships and has an important role in terms of familiarity and feeling understood, but old friends have the familiarity of resilience and the comfort of knowing that they can overcome obstacles.

Travelling as a couple. It can be exhausting trying to maintain emotional health by keeping in touch with familiar people back home while building new communities of people along the way. Bringing a partner with you really helps with emotional issues, allows you to share something profound with your partner, and, as a woman, travelling with a man can really help with some of the daily discomforts of being approached by opportunistic men. It’s like you can have your life and travel too. However, travelling with your partner can easily limit how deep your experience is locally, because you don’t need to seek comfort from your environment, and so it’s easier to turn to each other instead. Plus, the only people who want to talk to you are other travelling couples.

Particular knowledge. I live around the world and have friends who live around the world, and visiting them is my favourite introduction to a new place. They understand local customs and some language, can hold your hand through the initial discomforts, tell you the good places to go, and are often excited to use you as a partner in adventure for things they can’t do with their local friends. The benefit of growing up in Canada is that many of my friends are first-generation and have family to visit in other parts of the world. I also enjoy theme travelling -- microbrewery road trips around Cascadia, wine tasting in South Africa, archaeology in the former Roman empire, wildlife viewing – these are activities enriched by developing a particular expertise about one common layer. Or by travelling with someone who holds that particular knowledge.

Expats. There are technical differences between expats and sojourners, but I will combine the two here. Expats are like backpackers who graduated to the next level. Expats vary greatly – in most ex-pat communities, people are some combination of: (1) the expats who only hang out with other expats, whose definition of a good place is based on having cool expats there, who transport their world to different geographical locations around the world; (2) the expats who will have nothing to do with other expats. They do not greet the only other white person in town, they can’t remember the last time they spoke English, they write in their day planners in the local language and only eat non-Western foods; and (3) the expats who have local and expat friends, but whose expat friends are actually enriching their local experience rather than solely being a source of escaping it [also necessary at times].

When I lived in Ghana, there were only really 2 white people who lived in town: Kathryn and me. Kathryn and I didn’t meet until she had been there 4 months, and I had been there 2 months. Kathryn lived with a family, had to learn Twi to get by, worked in a small office where no one drank alcohol, and was living on a much tighter budget than me and therefore ate a lot of street food. I lived with a young Ghanaian woman, my friends were constantly speaking in really fast Twi, I worked in a huge office with all sorts of politicians, private consultants, technocrats, bureaucrats, Community-NGOs, and general members of the public, where the big men would scoff at the idea of street food, but I could cook vegetables at home. I learned more Twi from Kathryn than from any of my Ghanaian friends, learned about taboo subjects like family life and the treatment of children, and ate street food all over Ghana because of her. Kathryn learned about young Ghanaian social life, how Ghanaians drink, how Ghanaians settle a bill, the politics of Ghanaian marriages, and how to tell stories in colourful English to a Ghanaian audience. Our friendship was a necessary escape, but also an enrichment of the Ghanaian experience.

Nomads. I’ve written about nomads a lot. Nomads are everywhere, and yet nowhere, can feel at home anywhere, yet nowhere. Nomads don’t compare how many countries they’ve been to or how long they’ve been on the road. They do normal things in extraordinary settings, have a wide range of insatiable interests, and have gotten really good at letting themselves be in the hands of others. They like to have guest rooms whenever they are temporarily settled, and they know another nomad when they see them.

There are limitless ways of experiencing the world, and while some classify them as being a greyscale of shallow to deep, I think of them more as different axes across a landscape. Depending on an individual’s interests and objectives, they are all experiences worth having, none being necessarily more important than another. While my journey seems to be profoundly geographic, others chose to understand a variety of contexts in one place, or concentrate on their relationships with their partners, or study something like meditation, or yoga. If I didn’t travel so much, I think I’d be a much deeper person.

Revisiting Ghana...via YouTube.

As I prepare to depart for the Persian Gulf, my thoughts are of...Africa? Visiting colleagues from Ghana in Canada, retrieving my Ghanaian music collection, and watching 'Blood Diamonds' has set a tone, I think. Blood Diamonds had some insightful one-liners and introduced the audience to a lot of issues about white people in Africa. But it is still a film intended for a Hollywood audience, and many sacrifices had to me made to cater to the objective of making the film accessible.

My experience in Ghana was nothing like the film's depiction of Sierre Leone -- even when under military dictatorship, Ghana was quite peaceful, and Ghana has been a model democracy for the last 8 years. Though tribalism occurs in Ghana just like everywhere else in Africa, the dominance of the Ashanti, the limited role of colonialism in Ghana at playing tribes against each other [that statement is very debateable], and the cultural priority of having a good time first [though this seems to be a pan-West African cultural trait], seems to have kept Ghanaians loving each other over the last 50 years of independence, unlike most of their neighbours.

Some clips I found on YouTube that help illustrate some of my experiences in Ghana...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st13lz8EmAUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_sxqlwRNY
Kumasi's Kejetia station/market. Kumasi's the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom, and Ghana's second largest city, but much older than Accra and therefore actual feels like a city rather than an extended village.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FZj2hoI1f4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyRumEg2_og
These clips belong in my "Cultural Lesson: Taking public transit" post. The first is a shot of being on a tro-tro stuck in traffic, I'm assuming as a result of a car accident. Hawkers quickly fill every crevasse with goods to be sold -- their entrepreneurial spirit never fails to amaze me. Very similar to the experience of waiting for the tro-tro to fill, or of any tro-tro station in Ghana for that matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bCeBCy0Bm4
A typical Sunday at church. Sometimes these events would go until 4am -- piercing voices over amplifiers and speakers set 5 notches louder than they [or my ears] could stand. Outfits 5 notches too bright for my eyes, and food 5 times too spicy to be enjoyable. But GOD DO I MISS IT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s07oBh007Jw
Very typical of streets in Accra. The kiosks on the side of the road selling phone units, the concrete 'drinking spots', the drains/open sewers lining the roads, about one third of the buildings being under construction [it seems to take at least 10 years to finish a building] and dust, dust, dust. Though there's a serious lack of laughing in this video -- a key feature of Ghanaian life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgQO5-VN6Q
Aaah, Accra's busy Kaneshie Market, right next to Accra's largest tro-tro station, Circle. This place was Cheryl [a fellow CIDA intern in Accra]'s idea of hell. Very lively, very claustrophobic.
http://www.ghana50.gov.gh/
The official website of Ghana@50 - the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence. Includes a video of Kwame Nkrumah's famous speech "The battle has ended. And Ghana, your beloved country is free forever". Still looking for the Ghana@50 theme song though...

"Landed"

I was in the car with Stefan on the way to London Heathrow. I hate London Heathrow. This must have been the 5th or 6th time I was in the car with Stefan on my way to or from a London airport. Thank GOD for Stefy!

The "June 2nd" date that had been scheduled since last July as my return to Vancouver had finally arrived. I had had that date imprinted in my brain for nearly a year. When I booked my plane ticket last summer, the travel agent needed to know two things: when did I need to arrive? And when did I need to return? Clueless as to what my needs would be an entire year away, I calculated my answers based on what I knew:

I finish work in Ghana at the end of February.
I don't want to go all the way to Africa without seeing some of the continent, but judgeing from my experience in Turkey, I'll probably be really ready to leave after 6 months.
Ando's in Morocco, but it's probably cheaper for me to fly there from London than from Accra.
Leanne may be in South Africa, but she's about as easy to keep track of as I am.
My mum wants to go to Italy.
Mary and Adam are getting married in Ireland at the end of May.
Paul's at Cambridge, Sandy's in Wales, Stefan and Amy are in Watford.
Anastasia's going to be in Sweden March-June.
It might be easier for me to find summer work in the UK than in Canada.

With all of this, I took my first step back into the unknown and booked a return from Heathrow to Vancouver for 2 June 2007, completely unsure as to how my year would transpire, not knowing where I'd actually be, who I'd be with, or even if I could afford any of this.

Plans started revealing themselves easily, and with little effort on my behalf, I accidently stumbled upon the best way ever to travel: all the comforts and stability of having the familiarity of close friends and family, with all the excitement of having new experiences and seeing new places.

In Ghana, I was constantly surrounded by the love and affection of my Ghanaian friends. Over the three months of travel since I left, I think I was away from old friends and family for only maybe 2 weeks in total, and even then, I usually met fantastic people along the way to enjoy some laughs [and beer!] with. I cannot imagine a better way to see the world -- innaugurating friends' guest bedrooms from South Africa to Morocco to Barcelona to London, with more friends and family flying across the world to join in the adventure.

But this wasn't just any plane today -- this was the plane. The plane that was going to take me "home". The plane that I didn't have another plane to connect with afterwards. The plane that would put all my suitcases and most of my possessions into one common city -- except a few items I have scattered around Toronto.

London Heathrow is a huge airport, and Terminal 4, where all the cross-Atlantic flights depart from and arrive to, is very far from all the other terminals. As we approached T4, Stefan saw a sign on the highway reading "As of June 1st, 2007, all British Airways Flights to Vancouver Leave from Terminal 1". What were the chances? There are two daily flights to Vancouver on British Airways. If they really wanted to make a dent in air traffic at Terminal 4, why not re-route all flights to...say...New York? Or Chicago? Why go to all this effort to re-route 2 bleeding flights per day???

But there it was, the writing was on the wall:
"Flights to Vancouver"
And it finally started to sink in: I'm going "home"!

What I completely forgot to factor in though, is that without a clear idea of exactly what I'm doing in Vancouver, not having any imminent employment opportunities there, plus a pending trip I'm making back east to de-brief with my boss and visit my TO and MTL crews, there will definitely be more flights and more packing. Etching return dates into my brain, breaking up my life into beginning-of-the-trip, and end-of-the-trip travel dates, is all just a game I'm playing with my head.

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE FLIGHTS AND MORE PACKING.

[De]Evolution of a Tan.

I associate excessive doses of sun and perpetual summer with having a tan. I have been in summer since I went to Peru in February 2006, after all. I think sun=tan is a reasonable association, and yet contrary to popular belief, I am not very tanned. Every time I see someone I know I seem to get the same reaction.

-Wow. You really aren’t very tanned. Haven't you been in Africa the last 7 months?

1. GHANA. I worked as a Community Development Planner for 6 months in Ghana. Half of my time at work was spent in my office, a quarter of my time was spent at workshops, in meetings, or at public sensitization events, and the last quarter of my time was spent in the field monitoring and evaluating projects. Ghana is extremely hot, and Koforidua is the capital of the most humid part of the country. And no swimming pools to quell the heat. I'd manage to get most of my desk work done in the mornings, when my office was cool enough to think. After lunch, it was too hot to sit at a desk, and I'd usually retire to one of the two air conditioned offices in my building and socialise for the rest of the day. In the late evenings, hours after the 6pm sunset, it’s hot enough that basic un-animated conversation provides enough activity to sweat profusely. Fanning oneself produces more exercise and heat than the cooling effects of the mild breeze your producing. When on site visits, I wore a hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, and covered my skin with something to protect it from the burning sun, and still never lasted more than a few minutes before having to head for the shade. It’s HOT. Not in a nice warm blanketing way, but in a painful, retina-burning, planning-what-to-wear-such-that-you-don’t-sweat-through-your-outfit, hammering down on you, kind of way. I always wore a hat outside and drank copious amounts of [yuk!] water, and still had heat stroke twice. In fact, the darkest my hair has ever been in my life as a blonde was at the tail end of my time in Ghana.

2. SOUTH AFRICA. My Ghanaian friends had told me that the reason there are so many whites in SA was because the climate was just like in Europe. I arrived in Jo’burg in late summer with very high expectations, and was very very excited to wear long trousers for the first time in 7 months. My friends in Ghana had never seen me wear trousers before. I spent a whole day at the poolside – not just 10 minutes of sun before having to retire to the shade – and then off to Cape Town. The Cape Peninsula had some of the most beautiful and inviting beaches I’d seen before, and the strong breezes made even the hottest of days feel very mild.

Inland in the wine country, the air was dry and the heat soothing, and it was finally possible to hit a terrasse in the sun. Finally I was going to get the tan I needed before my return to the temperate world. I didn’t have any freckles, but my cheeks were pink...then darker pink...then red. Was I burning? Should I put on my hat? No, it’s just the South African red wine we were enjoying -- enjoying enough that you could read it on our cheeks.

SA’s most famous beaches surround Durban, but floods in Mozambique and along SA’s east coast pre-empted any beach ambitions we may have had. Instead, we headed for the hills – the Drakensburg, to be exact, where we climbed up to 3200 metres. This was the closest I’d been to the sun in a long time – although I lived in the “mountainous” region of Ghana, none of those “mountains” even compared to Burnaby Mountain, which we Simon Fraser alumni always referred to as “the hill”. SA’s mountains, on the other hand, were very impressive, and we returned from our expedition up the Drakensburg with a respectable shade of skin for someone who claimed to have been living in Africa for 7 months. After spending 4 hours out to sea great white shark cage diving, parasailing on the Garden Route, climbing the Drakensburg, and going on a 5-day camping safari in Kruger National Park, I was finally exhibiting the 7 months I had spent in Africa.

3. ENGLAND. When I left Canada in August, I packed for 7 months in Africa. I knew I’d be in Europe too, but figured I’d cross that bridge when I got there. And besides, how cold could it be? It was April.

-If you need to borrow any of my coats, help yourself. Oh. And I have an extra pair of gloves for you too.

Gloves? I had bought no less than FOUR scarves/shawls in Ethiopia, anticipating the European cold. I had lost my hat somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a sacrifice to the Gods of shark cage diving, and all I had was a thin safari jacket and four scarves/shawls. I had entirely forgotten about gloves. And I suffered for my thoughtlessness.

4. ITALY. I used to have freckles when I was a kid, but hadn’t had freckles since 2003 when I lived in Turkey, a summer where I spent 16 weeks in persistent, unyielding sunshine. I assumed I had outgrown freckles and was old. It was just another reminder that life peaks at 27, wasn’t it?

-Actually, freckles represent damage from the sun, so it’s probably a good sign that you haven’t had any freckles since 2003.

The temperature in Italy was excellent – it was the perfect temperature to walk around all day without needing to bring an extra bag just to put all your excess clothes into. Montreal springs are always like that – you need to pack for everything between +28 and -15, sweating underneath your spring jacket while the sun is up, and then catching the flu in the evening as the temperature drops by 5 degrees per hour, every hour after sunset. The same day I remarked about my lack of freckles since 2003, I came back to the hotel after a long day of siteseeing and noticed the appearance of freckles on my nose and cheeks! It was a lose-lose battle – sun-damaged skin, or feeling past my prime?

Italy was perfect – cool enough to be comfortable wearing proper walking shoes, but warm enough to eat gelato every evening for dinner. The sun was soft and embracing, not stinging and hammering, and just the right temperature to enjoy my daily half litre of wine on a sunny terrasse in the late afternoons.

5. MOROCCO. I arrived in Morocco dawning blonde hair, freckles, and a respectable tan – or as respectable a tan my Northern European self can get. I couldn’t pass as a local, but I clearly wasn’t some fresh-off-the-boat European tourist, inexperienced in the ways of Africa. Or maybe it was my permanent aura of un-approachability I exude when travelling in pushy countries. I spent 3 days in the Sahara desert and in the Atlas mountains, under patchy clouds perfect for photography. I thought I was going to the big sand dunes, but was instead at Zagora where the dunes were barely high enough to act as toilet camouflage.

I arrived at Ando’s apartment in Casablanca exhausted and lethargic. In fact, I think Ando’s quite disgusted by just how little I can manage to do in a day, but still feel good about myself. In 4 days in Casa, I hadn’t left more than a 3 block radius from Ando’s pad, and my bronze was fading.

Finally, she managed to drag me out for a day on the town – we went to the medina, I bought two tapis, and we went to the market and bought camel meat from a meat store that had a freshly slaughtered camel head hanging from it [yes, of course we took shameless pictures of ourselves standing behind the camel head, which conveniently hung at my shoulder length]. We found someone to grill our kilo of camel meat for us on the side of the road, went to the beach, and then we finally went to the hammam.

At the hammam, you sit in the steam room for an hour painting yourself with a seed ingested and defecated by a goat, and then a woman comes and scrapes all your dead skin cells off. She actually stopped halfway and showed me just how much grime was peeling off me. All I could do was shrug, conveying the international sentiment of "what are you gonna do?" -- passive acceptance of one's own disgustingness.

I emerged from the hammam satisfied that I had finally managed to get myself clean since taking that 6 hour tro-tro to Bui National Park last January [see blog entry “Ando can officially sleep anywhere”], realizing that maybe I had had a tan underneath all the layers of dust afterall. If only I could get my clothes as clean! [I really just want a box of chemicals and a machine to wash my clothes at this point]

In any case, along with the layers of dust, she had certainly managed to scrape off whatever progress I had made in my plight to actually look like I had been in Africa for 8 months now. I didn’t see any women at the beach wearing swimsuits, and I’ve been pretty careful about not exposing myself too much while I’m in Morocco, so I don't know how much sun my skin will actually see while I'm here. I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get to Spain and Latvia before I can have my African tan!

[In Casablanca on 1 May, post-camel lunch, but pre-hammam]

Ando can officially sleep anywhere.

Africa is either really cheap or really expensive to visit because it takes a month to be able to interpret your environment enough that you can get around on your own. If you don’t have a month, you need an expensive guide to interpret your environment for you. One Ghanaian friend who had lived in Germany for several years said it very simply – your world is user-friendly, while mine is friendly.

Safety – above anything, safety is expensive. It often feels like life here in Ghana is considered less valuable than the cost of installing seatbelts or paying police officers properly so that they stop accepting bribes from commercial vehicles that overload their trucks and kill 170 people in the month of November in my region alone when their brakes fail or when they overtake weaker vehicles.

Comfort – when you take the entire cost of running a vehicle from point A to point B, and divide it between the maximum allowed occupancy of the vehicle, the cost would be too high for most Ghanaians to afford. In order to make travel more cost-effective, tro-tros – often Chinese-made vehicles that seem to have a per person space allowance based on the average size of people in China, rather than a more realistic Ghanaian allowance – often even add another 1-2 people per row beyond capacity. Our 5 hour tro from Wenchi to Bui National Park had a 28 person capacity, though we counted 40 people inside the tro, plus another dozen or so on the roof. Plus the 3-bag per person minimum that seems to accompany Ghanaian travellers.

Signage – being a local really means something in Africa, and travellers find this most frustrating in terms of the total lack of signage and consistencies such as street names or addresses. Even when road names do exist, locals never know them and have instead their own names, such as “the junction” [which one?], “next to the orange tree”, or simply “not far”. Above and beyond anywhere I’ve ever travelled, Ghanaians have the least consistent sense of direction, always making ambiguous and general statements about everything. Add to this the fact that nothing is ever written down, it’s sometimes a miracle that travellers can ever reach their destination [though the journey is more than half the fun]. It can be extremely intimidating to recent arrivals to be constantly at the mercy of people who are friendly, but in the Ghanaian-style of [aggressively] bellowing things in your general direction, sometimes even grabbing you. It can take weeks to be able to tell the difference between the hollering Ghanaian who’s genuinely going out of his/her way to ensure you safely make it to your destination, and the barking Ghanaian who’s lying to you so that you’ll patronise someone who will give him/her a kick-back fee.

After an entire month of trying to understand how to feed myself and get places without an escort, I spoke to one of my work colleagues about my frustrations.

-Budget, do you generally feel like you understand your world?
-In what sense? Do I think I’m going to heaven when I die?
-No. Like if you’re walking down the street, and a crowd of people suddenly burst into the streets screaming and dancing, do you feel like you know why? When cars are driving in either direction on either side of a divided highway, and then there are other cars driving in either direction on the unpaved shoulder of the highway, do you understand where your car must go? Do you understand what all those hand gestures coming from taxi drivers mean?
-Yah. I’d say I generally understand what’s happening in each of those situations.
-Okay. So I shouldn’t just give up trying to understand your world?

Somewhere along the way, I either stopped trying to understand my surroundings, or I actually did start to understand my surroundings, at least enough to be able to feed myself and see most of the country. Let Ando – a dear old friend who came to spend her Christmas holidays with me in Ghana while she’s living in Morocco for 2 years – be the judge.

Ando's photos [I'm still waiting for Pat's] are at: www.photobox.co.uk/lgudaiti@alumni.sfu.ca
Chronology:

1. Accra – The capital, though almost entirely lacking in anything of tourist or urban-planner interest, though enormously interesting to sociology types. Ando’s arrival, my malaria hospital recovery, Ando’s first of many bucket showers, Ghanaian-Chinese food.
2. Krokrobite – a beach town just outside of the capital. Disappointing drum lessons, but the first peace I've had in at least 3 months.
3. Cape Coast – The Boston of Ghana, hosting the highest university per capita rate in the country, a colonial-era urban fabric, winding roads and old buildings, and another visit to the hospital for me.
4. Kakum National Park – Ghana’s most touristique national park, with a Star Wars-inspired canopy walkway.
5. Elmina Slave Castle – One of the most impressive of the dozen or so slave forts dotted along the Ghanaian coast, this Dutch-built slave “castle” was the last stop for hundreds of thousands slaves who survived the journey to the coast and then either made it onto ships for the New World or died at the fort.
6. Kumasi – the Capital of the Ashanti kingdom, considered to be one the most resistant of the African tribes to colonisation. Kumasi, according to my urban-planning ass, is one of the few Cities of West Africa, named the Garden City of West Africa by the Queen when she visited in the 1990s.
7. Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary – a delightful monkey sanctuary situated between two villages that consider the monkeys as being sacred, even burying expired monkeys in their own cemetery.
8. Bui National Park – When the government built the Volta Dam in the 1960s, the hippopotami living in Lake Volta had to go up the Volta river to the Black Volta where 200 of them currently stay about 20 km from the Cote D’Ivoire border. Their new home is slated for its own dam though, construction reportedly beginning in June 2007, at which time the hippos are expected to pack up and move again, though this time to Cote D’Ivoire or Burkina Faso, both of which the Black Volta crosses. We were fortunate to see 25 of them panic and run into the river as they heard us approach. Hippos are so high-strung.
9. Koforidua – My [current] hometown, situated in the mountainous jungle and isolated from the main Accra-Kumasi corridor. Ando pounded her first fufu and enjoyed the lovely company of my Ghanaian friends here.

Ando did a super job. It took the rest of us at least a month to stop complaining about all the waiting, the heat, the humidity, the dryness of the Hamatan, the constant noise, suffocating pollution, being covered in dust all the time, swarms of blood-sucking insects, exhaustion from relentless attention, persistent barking of children, total lack of toilet and washing facilities, lumpy beds, dirty sheets, waking up to roosters at 4am, sheep at 5am, goats at 6am, Ghanaian house calls at 7am, and constant leg/neck/ass cramping from sitting in overloaded vehicles lacking adequate shocks for the dilapidated road conditions. Ando didn’t complain. Partly because Ando managed to sleep through much of it.

I’ve seen Ando fall asleep in the middle of a rambunctious and lively jazz concert. I’ve seen Ando fall asleep in mid-sentence while sitting upright in a wooden chair, only to wake 15 minutes later to finish her sentence. But, most impressively, Ando managed catch up on sleep while sandwiched between 6 people in a row meant for 4, inhaling exhaust fumes from the floor and dust from the window, while our decaying vehicle precariously stormed down a road fit only for a tank.

Absolutes, ambiguity, and being a real Canadian.

-It’s past the junction.
-Which junction?
-The junction. On the road to Accra.
-How far?
-Not far. You’ll see it.
-Is there a sign? What colour is it?
-There are flowers. But not the first house with flowers. The other one. With oranges.
-And which junction?
-Near the French lady’s house.
-The French lady?
-Well, she left about 6 years ago, but near the junction where she was staying.
I come from a culture that worships absolutes. We like specific names for things, and clear, quantifiable, measurable directions. African culture is a culture of ambiguity, where nothing is explicitly stated, but everyone seems to get it. It can make life really easy for a recent arrival, because even those who don’t speak English never panic about trying to understand you. They use their common sense and assume that you’re approaching them for the same reason everyone else is approaching them – you want water, plantains, or a coconut like anyone else, and any sounds coming from your mouth will either ask how much they cost, or dictate what quantity you would like. This is best summarized in how to catch a taxi.
-How do you know if you’re taking a shared taxi or a single-dropping taxi?
-Uh, I can’t explain. You just kind of get in and pay shared taxi fare, and that’s how you know.
-But how do you know where it’s taking you?
-Often I don’t know where it’s taking me. But there are only so many places a taxi can go. So, if you get into a taxi and don’t say anything, then they’ll know that it’s a shared taxi.
-What if you get into a taxi along the main road. How do you know which direction it will turn when it reaches a junction?
-When you’re standing on the road, you sort of wave the generally direction you’re going. When the tros drive by, that’s what they’re doing.
-Those ambiguous signals are supposed to indicate direction?
-Yah. They don’t point like we do, they kind of make this general wave in the air. If the wave is up, they’re going straight. If the wave is up, but to the left a bit, they’re going left. When they shake in a circle-like, they’re going to Circle.
-But where are they going left?
-At the junction.
-Which junction?
-Whichever one is the usual one.
Sometimes assuming people will always make the same request as everyone else can really backfire though, and many of my battles with bureaucracy would have easily been avoided if my colleagues would just listen to what I’m saying rather than assume they know what I’m going to say:
-Nunoo. I have no lights, but the rest of the building has lights.
-You’re having light off.
-NO! Mine is the only apartment of the 9 blocks of flats that doesn’t have lights. When I came to inspect the place yesterday, I had lights, but today I don’t. So it’s not an electrical problem. The electric company has cut my electricity and someone must go to the electric company to pay the bill.
-I’ll send the electrician.
-DON’T SEND THE ELECTRICIAN. Please, listen to my words. You must send someone to the electric company to pay the bill. I don’t have the bill, because I just moved in today, but last time this happened, I didn’t have the bill either, and we managed to sort it out by going to the electric company.
-Do you have the bill?
-I don’t have the bill. I just moved in today. I’m standing here looking at the box, and there is no bill.
-It’s there. Slotted into the box.
-There’s no bill in the box. I’m standing in front of the box right now. There’s no bill. Just like last time.
-You stay there. I’m sending the electrician.
Last time this happened, it took 3 days for me to have electricity because no one would listen to me and go pay the electric company. This time, I didn’t just stay at home and wait. I got in a cab, went to work, found a driver, found an electrician, went to the electric company together, and sorted out the problem before nightfall. It took 3 trips to the electricity company, and 3 trips back and forth to my house, but we did it in 5 hours, not 3 days like last time. [There’s also a huge water bill that hasn’t been paid yet though, so I’m just waiting to see when they cut my water.]
-So, did they sort out your electricity problem?
-Kathryn, I’ve decided that it’s best not to try to save people time and effort by skipping them through 5 steps in the process. They’re just not prepared for that. They can’t even hear it, and meanwhile I’m left exhausted. They have to follow the usual sequence of activities, involving the usual people who do those things. They’re not prepared for a white planner knowing when her electricity’s been cut in Africa. That’s an African electrician’s job to determine.
Westerners, especially North Americans, tend to favour specifics like using people’s given names, instead of labeling them as the property of some familial line, and you can be fired for generalizing people into labels like "the dark man", "the fat woman", "the fair girl", and "the crippled man". Ambiguity and generalization manifests in so many facets of Ghanaian culture. Every Ghanaian has several names – a Christian name, a name that indicates the day you were born, and a surname. In general public life, most people go by their day-they-were-born name, making it much easier for people to remember everyone’s names, because there are only 14 of them [7 days of the week for men, 7 days of the week for women]. Where this generalization becomes most dangerous though is in tribalism, and sexism.
-George: Women in Ghana are their own worst enemies.
-Me: Yes, I’ve attended sessions on gender equality in Africa at International Conferences, and all the African men complained that women in power were always striking each other down. But that hasn’t been my experience at all – all my girlfriends here are super supportive allies.
-Evelyn: I will never vote a woman into power. I will die before I’d elect a woman into power.
-George: See?
-Me: How can you mean that Evelyn? Women are just as capable as men, and recent studies are suggesting we make superior managers. Besides, men seem to be especially fumbling up the world in the last few decades.
-Evelyn: Look at the character of women in power. Look at your housemate.
-Me: Actually, yes. That was something that was very disappointing. The only woman with any administrative role of the entire Assembly’s staff, and she fulfills all the stereotypes associated with catty women. She doesn’t get along with a single female staff member and has even let her dislike of other women escalate to the point where there have been several management meetings just to discuss the "female problem" in the office. When she was being hostile and bullying me at home, management kept saying things like ‘women can’t share a kitchen’ and ‘the blacks can’t live with the whites’. Meanwhile, I have shared a dozen kitchens with a dozen women from countries and in countries all over the world. My inability to live comfortably with this woman was due to the particular character of a particular woman, not black-white, woman-woman issues.
-George: But women in Africa always see other women as a threat.
[Constantly being pinned against each other by men doesn’t exactly help, though. I’ve had men try to manipulate me into distrusting my girlfriends here, trying to plant the seed of distrust so that if the women happened to reveal the fact that these men were all married and deceiving me into believing they weren’t married, I’d distrust the women instead of distrusting the men. I’ve also listened to George rank the women in the office according to his tastes in a room full of these women he is ranking – practically mapping out which women are threats and which women are not.]
-Me: Women and men are not all that different, and I find many of my male friends struggle with the same things my female friends struggle with. In many circumstances I find I can relate to men more than women, just because of the roles I have had during the course of my life, and the independence I’ve been fortunate enough to exercise. Being a woman is just one component of what makes me the person I am. And I definitely think a confident woman is still more likely to be ‘successful’ than an unconfident man.
-Evelyn: I will never vote a woman into power. I almost didn’t vote in the last district election, because there were so many women on the ballot.
-Me: You need to get past the label. I’ve never experienced labels like I have here. GET OVER IT. Not all Ewes like the colour red, not all Gas have a specific shape of forehead, being a ‘northerner’ is not an insult. See through the fact that she’s a woman, a Voltarian, or a Ga and listen to her words. If you like someone’s ideas, at least vote for those.
The label is what allows a culture of ambiguity to function. We need to form generalizations in order to make sense of our world and compartmentalize it into bite-sized boxes. The paradox of how rigid those boxes are is what makes for an interesting debate though. The ambiguous Africans have strict and absolute judgments about the contents of those boxes. The absolute Americans are careful not to restrict our judgments to the boxes, and are very ambiguous about how we self-identify.
-This is my friend Andrea from Canada. She stays in Morocco and is visiting for X-mas.
-Welcome! [to me]: Your friend doesn’t look like a Moroccan. She looks like a Chinese.
-She’s a Canadian, like me. She’s staying in Morocco for 2 years like I’m staying in Ghana for 6 months.
-Does she eat with chopsticks?
-Stop it. Did you know that I eat with chopsticks?
-But you’re a white lady. White ladies eat with a knife and fork. The Chinese eat with chopsticks.
-Well, I don’t have a knife and fork. I have chopsticks. Deal with it.
My colleague Patrick is the third Canadian to intern at the District Assembly where he works. Patrick is a mix of different European heritages, while the other interns were a Chinese-Canadian and a Nigerian-Canadian. When Patrick first arrived, he was introduced to the Assembly’s staff:
-This is Patrick. A real Canadian.
Walking down the street in Ghana, one is constantly called over to converse with people. Normally these conversations are limited to Country? Name? Marriage? Where are you going? Sometimes the conversation can be more elaborate though.
-HEY! HEY! WHITE. WHITE LADY. COME, COME, WHITE. WHITE LADY, COME. WHEN BLACK PEOPLE AND WHITE PEOPLE COME TOGETHER, THEY ARE A PIANO.
-How long did you practice that line? I realise that you’re just trying to be friendly and welcoming, but can I offer some advice about approaching white women?
-Why don’t you white ladies like talking to Ghanaian people?
-I spend most of my time talking to Ghanaians. Maybe I just don’t want to talk to you because you grabbed my arm, wouldn’t let go, and shouted in my ear. I felt like I was under attack, because in my country when someone grabs your arm and shouts in your ear, it is an attack. White women will interpret your behaviour as aggressive, even if you’re just trying to be friendly.
-Why should I have to change my behaviour when you come to my country?
-You’re absolutely right. And I do change my behaviour in your country. But I can’t change my instinctive reaction to what I’m interpreting as aggressive behaviour. I just want you to know that when white ladies don’t come talk to you, it’s usually because they have misinterpreted you.
[his friend realises that he doesn’t like what I’m saying and decides to intervene in our conversation]
-You know, I went to your country and you people look down on my people.
-What country is this?
-Germany.
-Ghana is closer to Germany than the country I come from! I come from North America. People from North America can look like people from Africa.
-But those aren’t real Americans. They’re Africans.
-Well, they’re both.
-No, they’re Africans. Someone may be born in America, but they’re not Americans. They are African, or maybe Chinese, but they are not American.
-But white people aren’t from America either.
[silence]
-White people came from Europe to America, much like they came from Europe to Africa. The difference is that their diseases killed most of the people who were already in America, whereas in Africa, African diseases killed the Europeans.
[silence]
-I doubt you have ever seen one of the original people of the Americas in Ghana. So, an African-American has just as much claim to the word "American" as a European-American.
-They are Africans.
-Why do you get to decide how they should self-identify. What if someone was half white, half black, and born in Canada?
-They’re a mulatto. They are no one.
-Excuse me?
-If your parents come from different tribes or different countries, you are nothing.
-But their parents often both come from America – the same country. Besides, my parents come from different countries. So I am nothing?
-Exactly. You are nothing.
-What happened to the piano? I think pianos make beautiful music!
Isolating one’s gene pool can be a very dangerous thing, just look at monarchs. Genetic disorders can be avoided by mixing as many gene pools as possible. When I was a very young child, I observed that my sister and my brother were very close and I asked my mother if they would get married. She said that they couldn’t get married. When I asked why, she said "Well, their children would have back problems"
[My mother always had clever ways to explain things to me as a child. In the 1980s, when American popularity was at its height and Reagan was in power, I asked my mother, who’s American, why we don’t live in America if it’s the greatest country in the world. She said "Well my dear, in America, actors can become presidents!"]
-Evelyn, why don’t you marry Edom?
-He’s from the Volta Region. Ashantis don’t marry Voltarians. My father would never allow it.
-But you would marry a white person, right?
-You don’t understand. My tribe, and his tribe, we don’t marry.
-But when you start dividing people, there’s no end to it! If Ashantis took over all of West Africa, you’re father would say ‘now you can only marry Ashantis with thick eyebrows’.
With post-natal plastic surgeries, and pre-natal eradication of genetic imperfections, pre-selection of the physical characteristics of one’s offspring is just around the corner. In some cultures, the practice of getting an ultrasound to determine the sex of a child has already resulted in the abortion of a high number of female foetuses. In a few decades, the rich and the poor will be distinguishable by their genetic and environmental flaws. But, if I were born with a cleft lip or a birth mark across my face, I’d probably prefer surgery so that I could enjoy the same opportunities in life as everyone else too. If we’re a world of not getting past the physical attributes of the label, then equality would mean that everyone must look the exact same, wouldn’t it? We can’t discriminate against each other if we are all in-discriminable.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope countries like Canada prove that we can get past the label, that there isn’t one marketable thing with which to define/judge us. That we not only defy the label, but that we challenge its existence in a modernising world.
Who is a real Canadian? Our culture of absolutes seems to thrive best under a magically ambiguous self-identity.

Just Another Agent of Neo-Imperialism

Every head has its tail, and it would be naïve to suggest that those in development work are just good. I wouldn’t be doing what I do if I didn’t believe in it, but I think it’s important to exercise a critical eye – especially when the intention of your work is to effect change in people’s lives. Many aid/development/workers/volunteers go to the developing world because they want to “make a difference” and instigate positive change in the world. From an ethnographic point of view, change means a deviation from the normal trajectory of natural development of a society. From a social-anthropologist perspective, changes instigated from an outsider would have some obvious biases that would lean towards the values and structures [and benefit] of one’s own culture. Though I stand to be corrected on that interpretation/wording. Likely by Paul.

Any “difference” that I “make” cannot happen independently of the white-democratic-individualistic-North American perspective that I come from. I may not be of Anglo-Saxon descent or even be a Christian, but having grown up in Canada, there are also some clear WASP values that I have been raised to appreciate – things like subtlety and not discussing inappropriate things that will make people uncomfortable [and not blatantly cheating on your wife and having your girlfriends hanging around the office all day].

A large component of my internship in Ghana is knowledge exchange, specifically with concern to public participation in local governance and planning. If individualism and democracy are indeed post-Enlightenment Euro-Christian constructs, then what is the difference between me being here to cast the net of democratic participation to a wider audience, and early Christian missionaries coming to Ghana to cast the net of Christianity? Both parties think they are somehow “saving” people.

Good intentions can be a very dangerous thing, and sticking to one’s principles can be even worse if people are not critically examining what they are doing. I have spent much of my adult life resisting North American complaisance to commercial culture – a culture that dictates that people with a lot more money than me expect me to pay offensive prices for goods that were produced in some poor nation too desperate for employment to negotiate a proper salary for its workers. Shopping malls, expensive cars, [blood] diamond rings, and the right labels to advertise that I’m working more hours and having less fun? Meanwhile we’re all sedated from participating in our own governance, because we feel like the lucky [rich] ones?

That said, I remember reading some story about the latest suicide bomber in Iraq last year and it dawned on me: suburbanite Paris Hilton wanabees will never blow themselves up while killing a dozen or so others in the name of anything. They’ll never believe in something enough to do that. And while I loath their disinterest in collective welfare, at least their youthful emptiness needs only material goods to satisfy its cravings, and will never be manipulated into someone convincing them to fly a plane into a building, killing mostly people who are basically as powerless [and arguably more repressed] as they are against the global distribution of power.

Being a Canadian in Africa promoting public participation in local governance vs. White lady persuading Black people to do things the way we do things back home [or at least how things are supposed to be done in Canada]. As with everything, the “truth” lies somewhere on the greyscale between these two [and many other] extremes. Regardless of good intentions, we are best equipped to mitigate the potentially destructive aspects of the differences that we make by critically examining our own perspectives and biases. It’s important to stop and smell the WASPs.

Visiting a Slave Fort. Ghana’s coast is dotted with the most impressive monuments of West Africa’s slave history [see my photobox album]. While visiting slave “castles” in Ghana, there’s a general sense that you, white people, did great harm to us, black people. As a human being, I have a lot to learn about what happened to Africa and to Africans because of slavery. It’s impossible for me to imagine how people could do such tortuous things to fellow people. But a black man trying to use white-man’s-guilt so that I’ll buy his postcards does not exactly plant us on the road to recovering from the largest displacement of people in the history of mankind [though perfectly forgivable, however ignorant].

Could this man come to grips with the fact that my ancestors had less to do with the slave trade than his? All he sees me as – along with most of the people I encounter daily on the streets of Ghana – is just another white person like all the other white people who have come to the country. I expressed my frustrations to my friend Robin one afternoon in an email:

“I tire enough of people making presumptions about me in Canada, but here, it's just too much. I went to the coast, and everyone's all "Look what your people did to the African slaves" -- a first generation Canadian-Lithuanian had less to do with the slave trade than most of the tribes that currently compose Ghana! I'd much rather have an interesting conversation about neo-colonialism than simplistically blaming me for the slave trade. Even if I was Danish, Dutch, or English, do you think my ancestors were rich enough to participate in any international trade??? My ancestors were fucking shoemakers in Lithuania! And besides, as a WOMAN, I never would have been allowed the right to exercise my will over myself let alone over another continent of people.” And even if my ancestors were among those responsible, what does that have to do with all of us now? Don’t we all have something to learn from this, regardless of how directly or indirectly involved our distant ancestors were?

Another classic example of false assumptions based on geographically- and culturally-determined power distributions, rather than recognising the much more relevant sub-level power struggles that exist in everyone’s daily lives. I try to evoke an alternative perspective, whenever I have the opportunity.

-Obaa yaa. Why do I have to wear your European clothing? It’s too hot for trousers and a tie.
-Ghanaians are always wearing traditional clothing. I’ve never seen an Assembly member come to a meeting wearing anything but traditional cloth, and it seems like people only wear t-shirts and the like when they don’t want to soil their nice Ghanaian clothes.
-Yes, we do wear traditional clothes on weekends and at public gatherings. But to work, we always wear a suit and tie because your people tell us to. You know, we ended imperialism almost 50 years ago, yet were more like the whites than we’ve ever been.
-Know thine enemy, Personnel. It’s not just white people who are telling you to wear a suit and tie. It’s people who own companies that sell you things who tell you to wear the suit and tie they’re selling you, and it’s your complaisance to their lies that makes you wear their suit and tie. We have to accept our own responsibility in that, even when there’s such a consorted effort against us, involving most of the people who control what images we are meant to see. “My people” suffer far more than Ghanaians when it comes to complaisance to that lie.
-What do you mean?
-You can walk down the street and buy a coconut from a small boy. That small boy climbed the mountain this morning, picked the wild coconuts on the mountain, brought them down the mountain into town, carved the coconut for you and collected your money. If I were in Canada and I wanted an orange, I would likely go to a giant chain supermarket owned by some American corporate giant, and buy a Pfizzer patented genetically modified orange from Florida, which is owned by Sunkist, which is owned by coca cola, flown on a plane owned by the Star Alliance, using petrol from a Texan tycoon who had to invade Iraq just to keep pace with American oil-demand, and marketed by AOL-Time-Warner-Disney. If I’m thirsty, it’s almost impossible to avoid coca-cola, because they own minute maid, dasani, etc. Why should I have to pay to all these people who already have more money than me?
-That’s serious-oh.
-Like the t-shirt Gladys is wearing right now. Gladys, is Nike paying you for this prime real estate across your breasts? That’s some seriously persuasive advertising you’re giving Nike for free. I try to participate in all of that as little as possible. But it’s not easy-oh.
-Uh-huh. Like all those Malaysian textiles you see in the market these days. Nobody used to be able to afford them, but now that people are having some small money, the local textiles are having trouble competing because people want to be seen wearing finer, imported cloth.
-Oooh. Which stores in the market have Malaysian cloth?

I could try a lot harder I guess.

Being served. I’ve never been served like I am in Ghana. It used to make me very un-comfortable being fussed over all the time and being in the top half of some hidden hierarchy that everyone except me seems to know about. Not just because I’m white, but mostly because I’m a guest [and my skin colour screams “GUEST! GUEST! GUEST!”]. Anytime I go to the market with a Ghanaian, the shopkeepers always hand my bags to be carried by my Ghanaian friends for me, who are part of the conspiracy and never let me carry anything for myself either. How many times have I walked down the street empty handed while a Ghanaian followed me carrying my groceries and heavy bags of water on their heads from the store to my kitchen so that I don’t have to lift a finger. I don’t even resist it or get embarrassed anymore. Whenever I arrive anywhere there’s a scramble to address the arrivees in the proper order of top to bottom, and I’m never allowed to stand for more than 10 seconds upon entering a room [usually the first 5 seconds are spent kicking someone else out of their chair to offer it to me]. All you can do about it is sit and be served, otherwise you will make your hosts [and everyone else] very un-comfortable.

Such a culture of selected servitude – Ghanaians will eagerly serve the people within their hierarchy of relations, but it’s impossible to galvanise support for serving collective public works such as boreholes and hand dug wells – the means for providing basic water to households – and public indiscipline regarding where to dump wastes [solid and liquid] is a major issue in Ghana. Yet you can make anyone younger than you fetch anything for you at any time, and no one would ever question some of the irrational decisions made by their bosses. [Maybe waste disposal is one of the few areas of one’s life where Ghanaians feel especially empowered to do exactly as they please?]

Anyone who has ever spent any time in Africa will experience at least one man who’s going to tell you how he thinks it is. I don’t know how to describe these men except as pompous, misinformed, anything-to-be-able-to-make-themselves-feel-like-big-men, misogynistic shits. The other Canadian in Kof, Kathryn, had one of these men come into her house, get right into her face while she was eating, and start his monologue rant against her and everything else her skin colour and gender represent to him.

-You can eat with your hands? You don’t need a fork? You don’t think it’s beneath you to eat with your hands? All you white people do is come here, devastate our economy, and tell us what to do. If you really gave a damn about Ghana, you’d send our students to your country to learn your technological expertise so that they could come back and train the new work force. You’d fund technological studies and fund local artisans to build things, rather than always sending us your own people for big contracts. We don’t need any white people in Ghana, we just need your technological expertise to train our own people.

This is an abridged version of the “conversation”. The actual “conversation” – which was in reality a forceful monologue intended to intimidate Kathryn out of a retort, and then actually talking over her when she did offer constructive responses – lasted about 25 minutes. Most regrettably though is that this man actually made a lot of really good points. With some major adjustments in delivery, it could have been an enlightening conversation for both of them, where they mutually learned from each other and maybe even discussed potential solutions in a non-threatening environment. Instead, Kathryn and I bonded over the shared experience of having to deal with some really hostile assholes amidst the generally welcoming and almost overly hospitable warmth of Ghanaian people.

The next day I sat at my desk at work and thought about what I actually do at the office. I spend a lot of time showing my bosses different commands on the computer, I re-write and edit documents for print, I redesign their PowerPoints so that they conform to a single stylistic format that’s easy for an audience to follow and is highly visible in an inadequately lit room, I convince them to let me reorganise presentations such that there’s a stronger hierarchy of information that fits into fewer than 20 slides and contains 3 clear messages for the audience to leave with. I lobby to include things like disability rights into the development plan, I constantly query them on their opinions of various donor agency project implementation models, and I tag along to help with monitoring and evaluation. I try to influence them to do things like they’re done in my world, I learn from their experiences, and I leave.

-Abu, am I just an agent of neo-imperialism?
-No! Of course not.
-But mostly I just consult on issues regarding conforming deliverables of the Planning Unit into a format that would be used in my home country.
-You are teaching us a great many things. Everyone thinks you are jovial.
-You don’t think foreigners cause more harm in Ghana than good?
-We love white people. You all look the same – like movie stars.

People ask me why I don’t take pictures in Ghana. Try walking through an African slum where you represent all that these residents don’t have. A walking slap-in-the-face of the haves vs. the have-nots reality. While you get to pass through their lives, smiling and waving, they stay and are rarely offered the opportunity to pass through yours. Pull out a camera and what you’re doing is trying to document their misery. What’s worse is that they understand that, but are so hospitable that they’ll even smile for your pictures [even if you just wanted a natural shot]. You are an observer, un-involved in what’s being captured, and they are your subject. Maybe that’s not what’s actually happening, but that is certainly how it can feel sometimes.

Even if I don’t make a difference in Ghana, Ghana has certainly made a difference in me. Being a visible foreigner represents so many different things to different people here, and most of those things are starkly different than your reality as an individual. Just by walking down the street you may represent a history of slavery and colonialism, and the present reality of a globalised world who decided who all the big players were going to be without inviting Africa to the table.

So many clichés. I must have read 100s of feel-guilty-cause-you’re-comfortable blogs/emails/letters. And then following guilt, we are expected to have a realisation of what’s really important. Meanwhile, being distracted by the superficial is not something that’s restricted to the developed world – I’ve encountered just as much materialism and vanity in the developing world as I have in the developed. I think it’s mostly the act of mentally removing yourself from your normal condition that makes you realise what’s important, and that’s something that’s universal.

I was back in Vancouver this summer, and every morning and every evening I would change trolleys at Main and Hastings, Vancouver’s famous Downtown Eastside. There are so many development issues there – it’s probably one of the few places in Canada where marginalised poverty actually holds a majority. There are some fantastic things about that, and some important perspectives and alternative voices have been brought to mainstream attention via the safety in numbers found in the Downtown Eastside. As the condos are increasingly encircling the community, many lobbyists have argued that marginalised culture itself is being attacked as residents are forced to move into less expensive suburban communities where they will be swallowed up and assimilated into the norm. The approaching condos represent a cultural genocide, where those whose views vary from the accepted centre are weeded out like cancer cells from the Vancouver social fabric.

That said, the community is also experiencing a devastating drug problem, and many residents find their addiction even harder to kick because of the sense of inclusion one can feel when suffering from drug abuse. Ask these people if they want their drug culture to be assimilated, and they might actually agree.

Summary and Conclusions. So I’ve covered imperialism, blame, guilt, and assimilation, but mostly I hate to dwell and rather concentrate on potential solutions – what is working, what is not working, how can it be adapted to work, and how can we make the whole thing effective and meaningful? But if any outside attempt to drive change is considered as a vehicle for assimilation, then what must I do? Even trying to empower others to determine their own means of escaping some assumed disadvantageous circumstance could be considered to be driven by Euro-Christian-individualism!

So the cycle of drive, doubt, critical re-examination, and getting back on one’s feet perpetuates. Accept that we are all biased creatures, remember that there isn’t one answer, that everything is a negotiation between different interests, and that by pleasing everyone you’re pleasing no one. You can justify anything as “good intentions” and so you need to work hard to do what actually feels right, while acknowledging that other people are also doing what they think is right, and neither is better or worse. We’re just trying our best.

As Dr. Walter Perchal – the professor I had the great fortune of working with while TA'ing Education and Social Change at York University for two years – would always say “Mental conflict is good. It keeps you on your toes and reminds you that doing the right thing is – and should be – difficult work”.

A Day in the Life.

Some people have asked me what exactly I do in Ghana. Sometimes I’m not sure myself. So I thought I’d describe a typical day for me and you can draw your own conclusions.

Get up. I distinguish here between "getting up" and "waking up", because by the time I get up between 5.30 and 6.30 ["lazy" by Ghanaian standards] I’ve already woken up several times to roosters, drums, singing, dogs, neighbours, goats, and sheep. I turn on the telee and catch as much Aljazeera as I can before CNN comes on at 6.30am – it’s always entertaining to witness the chasm separating how these two news agencies can tell the "same" story. If it’s Friday, I wear one of my Ghanaian skirts. We’re supposed to wear head-to-toe traditional cloth on Fridays, but I think there are some things that white people shouldn’t attempt to pull off.

7.45am. I start walking – very slowly – to work. I always walk slowly in Ghana otherwise I quickly overheat. The slower you walk, the more comfortable you are in temperature and the better you can handle the relentless advances of your environment. I’m much more at ease and friendly when I walk slowly.

The usual smells of open sewers and exhaust fumes are partially masked by the smells of people cooking and brushing their teeth along the streets where the open gutters/sewers are. Unlike my inconsistent return journey, my morning journey to work follows a predictable schedule that the neighbourhood children can easily anticipate, ensuring that they will be in position and ready to start hollering by the time I pass. They never tire of it.

-SISTER OBAA YAA!!! SISTER OBAA YAA!!! SISTER OBAA YAA!!!!!
-Good morning. How are you?"
-SISTER OBAA YAA!!! SISTER OBAA YAA!!! SISTER OBAA YAA!!!!

I have to say good morning to virtually everyone I pass on my morning route, otherwise I’ll have to hear about it on my return journey. I stop to pick up some Ghanaian breakfast – usually a deep fried biscuit of cassava with bread, or beans with deep fried plantains – and head to work. Work is from 8-5, though I am usually one of only a handful of people who arrive at 8am, and many people often work well past 5pm.

As I sit in my office eating my Ghanaian breakfast, one-by-one my fellow colleagues will arrive, carefully stopping by every office on my floor to say good morning.

-Obaa yaa. Good morning.
-Good morning. How?
-Fine. How?
-Fine.
-Obaa yaa! I’m coming…[always said while leaving]

Eventually my two bosses arrive with the keys to the office that has coffee. Up to this point, I’ve managed to be very productive – editing development plans, writing proposals, reading reports, drafting ideas, writing reports, finding out from everyone [except my bosses] what meetings and site visits I’ll be participating in for the week. I spend my time at work trying to absorb everything I can – keenly listening to conversations, reading anything I find in the piles around the office, asking questions – then piecing together what I am learning into some sort of improved understanding. I feel like I’m at a rare vantage point – I’m familiar with the conference- and report-style of dialogue used by top-down decision-makers, but get to enjoy direct and un-filtered access to the opinions and experiences of technocrats in a developing country, people who have a totally different understanding of the implementation of these programmes and policies. I capitalise on this rare vantage point as much as I possibly can.

Once everyone arrives at the office, the flirting begins. The office that I share with my planning colleague and our national service person is located in what is considered by African standards as the prime office real estate of the Assembly – the busiest, loudest part of the office with the most traffic [and interruptions]. Once the first un-scheduled power outage of the day begins and I’m paralysed from being able to get any work done, I usually take my coffee and sit in the office adjacent to mine where all the women congregate. Though only one staff member per day is allocated to the radio transmission office in Room 20, you can never find fewer than 3 people there. Sometimes we can spend 3-5 hours a day socialising at the office, an activity considered far more important in the workplace than accomplishing work tasks. When I’m socialising, people comment on how hard working I am, because they can see me. When I’m at my computer working, they assume I haven’t come to work yet or that I snubbed them by not visiting them. Your relationships with others determines how successful you are in your work environment in Ghana.

Once I can no longer stand my hunger, I start walking towards reception to see if anyone else seems to be hungry. If I’ve had a meeting or a site visits, lunch is usually provided and always consists of fried rice with fried chicken. I will never eat fried rice and fried chicken again after I leave Ghana. If I’m going out for lunch, it usually entails 2-3 people sitting around a common bowl eating fufu or banku in goat soup with our hands.

-It’s nice to see you finally eating your share of fufu. You’re looking beautiful.

"Beautiful" can mean only mean two things: you’re getting fat, or you’re at least getting an ass [though I’ve also been told that if you’re thin but have reproductive hips you might also be considered acceptable]. After lunch, I’ve still forgotten to take my malaria pill and am too full to get any work done.

-Obaa yaa. How is it?
-I’m feeling lazy.
-Sometimes it’s like that.
-It’s not easy-oh.

This is when I have my religious debates with Personnel, socialism vs. capitalism debates with Budget, science vs. superstition debates with Engineer, and stout vs. lager debates with Protocol. Sometimes we continue the debate over a fresh coconut down the street.

Evenings. By 5pm, I’m ready to go to the market with Evelyn, go for beer with Engineer or Protocol, or eat yet another meal of ripe plantains with Kathryn.

-Sister Obaa Yaa. I saw you this morning but you didn’t greet me. You are not friendly.
-Sister! I’m sorry. I didn’t see you. How are you?
-Normal.

Walking down the street usually involves literally hundreds of calls from virtually every single person who sees me, each of them screaming "OBRUNI! OBRUNI!" [white lady/man] in sharp piercing voices as they run from their homes and line the streets to greet me [though most people in my neighbourhood call me by my name, Obaa Yaa]. I generally reply by mimicking their exact same tone of voice and saying "OBIBINI! OBIBINI!" [black lady/man]. Then everyone laughs and temporarily gets over it that I’m a white lady and we can have an actual conversation for a few minutes about such riveting topics such as "how is back?" [how are you since you’ve gone and come back], "how is it?", and "where are you going?" only to repeat the same process the following day. Men will occasionally grab my arm and refuse to let go, but I generally get the sense from people that they’re just genuinely curious and want to seize the opportunity to speak to me. I figure it’s about the equivalent of children seeing Volkswagen beetles in Canada and screaming "PUNCH BUGGY, NO RETURN", except that there is always a return [and a return, and a return, and a return].

-OBRUNI.
-OBIBINI. How are you?
-Fine. Where are you going?

Where are you going??? Let’s see…how many other places does the "Road to Kes Hotel" go? It’s not like street names in Ghana leave much to the imagination. "Where are you going" seems to be the equivalent of how Canadians will talk about the weather. A conversation about the weather would be very short in Ghana. I can only imagine the possibilities:

-How about this invariable heat, eh? I haven’t experienced a fluctuation of more than 8 degrees in my entire life-oh.
-Yes. It got down to 24 degrees last night. I thought I would freeze-oh.
-That Hamatan. It’s not an easy life-oh.

At home, I spend my evenings doing sudoku puzzles, reading, watching soap operas, designing clothes for the fabrics I’ve bought and creatively trying to simplify the designs to give to my non-English-speaking seamstress. Despite the fact that people speak English here, communication – especially over the phone – can be cumbersome at times.

-Evelyn, I went to your house but you weren’t there.
-I’m having lights off. I’m at my sister’s salon.
-I bought some cloths and want your opinion about what I should do with them.
-Where are you now?
-Walking to Kes Hotel.
-Go back-oh.
-What?
-Go back to my house and put them in water.
-No, it’s okay. I’ll just bring them to work tomorrow.
-No. Go back to my house, put them in water, and cover them or they’ll run away and die-oh.
-Evelyn. CLOTH.
-Yes. C-R-A-B-S.
-No. Cloth. C-L-O-T-H-S!

I catch some "The Gardiner’s Daughter", "My Big Fat Valentina", "Footballer’s Wives" or some "Extravagant Anastasia", and eventually get some actual work done on my computer once the Latin American, Philippino, and Korean soap operas dry-up on TV. I take this opportunity away from the public eye to do things like eat vegetables, avoid copious amounts of unrefined oils, and use utensils like spoons and chopsticks [I am expected to eat everything with my hands when I’m around Ghanaians, and there would be a riot if they saw me eating with chopsticks]. I spend at least an hour washing my clothes with the limited supply of water remaining after I’ve had my shower and flushed the toilet once. Every five days there is a scheduled power outage from 6pm until 6am, and before I was homeless and staying at a hotel, I only had running water for about 1 hour a week [I read the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2006 and realized that I live just above what they consider as the minimum basic requirement of water per person needed for a comfortable, sanitary life – 5 litres per day].

Go to sleep. Any time between 7pm and 3am, depending on how much I have on my mind [usually not much] or how interesting the latest book I’ve traded with another ex-pat is. I’ve never been much of a sleeper, typically averaging 5-6 hours per night in Canada. But sleeping in Ghana is such a necessary and enjoyable experience. Ando couldn’t believe how much sleep she needed while she was here. Partly because of the general exhaustion one feels when the entire world is conspiring against you [or at least that’s how you feel when in Africa], and partly because of the psychotic dreams one can experience while on anti-malarials. For my first month here, I barely experienced homesickness because my dreams were so vivid that I felt like I was back "home" for 8-9 hours a day.

Conclusions. Sometimes I cannot believe that my neighbours still haven’t tired of the same conversation with me everyday. Sometimes I can’t decide if I’m filling time, or if I’m really filling my life with excitement and challenge. Certainly challenge [have you ever tried to instigate a project within a Ghanaian bureaucracy?]. The routine of daily life here certainly helps distract me from the general sense of instability I experience, never knowing where I’m going to be every 2-8 months. I have to take these rare moments of familiarity – at least in terms of being able to walk home, seeing familiar faces, and having a community of friends and colleagues – breathing the familiar in and letting it consume me enough to carry me through the next period of uncertainty where I build my life all over again.

But what do I do in Ghana? This day-to-day narrative may leave some readers still wondering. In one word or less, the best conclusion I can come up with is that I’m, well, absorbing things. Another great pro-active verb to use on my CV? I think not.