Happiness is hard work

I love seasons.  I spent 4 years on the equator, and it really reinforced in me that the temperate world is the most climatically variant.  The same place feels like 4 different places in just one year, and there is a constant sense of urgency to get the most out of the limited time you have to enjoy each season.

People behave differently in each season.  Spring is the rebirth -- the party -- when everyone sheds their winter layers, drag their couches downstairs and plop them down in the first sliver of sunshine they can find.  Summer is counter-routine -- school's out, friends are on holidays, you meet a lot of new people, and on a regular Tuesday afternoon, the park is filled with people who are supposed to be at work.  Autumn is the reset button, when everything settles back down, a routine is re-established, and you are reminded of the finite-ness of one's day.  Winter is the time to hibernate, drink hot alcoholic liquids, and enjoy a whole new range of outdoor activities.

This is my first winter in 5 years, and after a heavenly Christmas at home, I returned to Amsterdam smack in the middle of the most depressing time of year in the temperate world: 3rd week of January until 3rd week of February.  Tis the season of whiners, and I couldn't afford to listen.  Our toilet was still broken, the city workers shut off our electricity twice in two weeks due to road maintenance, we had no heat or hot water for 3 days and 3 freezing nights, and I was still waiting for clients to finalise contracts.  I had landed in Amsterdam after a restful Christmas with lots of momentum, and felt like I was facing opposition in all directions.  And everyone seemed to feel the same way.

We have to remember that this isn't Amsterdam's fault.  Everywhere sucks in January.  But suddenly all those Dutch quirks weren't cute any more.  They were painful.  It's like paying first world prices for third world services.  But Canada sucks right now too.  Remember that.  It's just January.  Christmas and New Year are over, and the next national holiday isn't until Easter.  Happiness and healthiness is hard work at this time of year -- eat right, exercise, maintain connections with people, avoid whining and whiners, and get some artificial sunshine if you have to!

And then I remembered another Dutch quirk at this dark time of year: Carneval.  Carneval is like a much more appropriately-placed Hallowe'en, held in the bleak mid-winter rather than in the sea of celebrations that is Thanksgiving-New Year.  A taste of spring indulgence to get you through the worst and final spat of winter bereavement.

Prairie Skies.

I have often said that Dave and I became close friends over a pint of beer, and Nancy and I became close friends over a bottle of rum.

A week or two after I moved to Matsuyama, Ehime on Japan’s Shikoku Island, a strong off-shore earthquake hit halfway between Matsuyama and Hiroshima. After I restored our dishes to their original shelf locations from the floor of our apartment, I went to the liquor store where they were having a sale on all the liquor bottles that were soaked in liquor from neighbouring bottles that had broke during the earthquake. Having not yet acquired a taste for non-girlie drinks yet [I didn’t start drinking beer until I was 23], and not recognising the kanji for vodka, wine coolers, or fruit liqueurs, I picked up a huge bottle Meyers’ Extra Dark Rum, remembering that I had loved the rum balls my sister had made for me the month before when I was in Montreal.

In our building lived the four Canadian English teachers who worked at Aiko Kindergarten: from the mountainous coastal city of Vancouver were me, my brother, and Ando; and from the Prairies in Medicine, Alberta, was Nancy. I was already good friends with Ando and my brother, but hadn’t really had the chance to get to know Nancy yet.

- I have a huge bottle of Meyer’s Dark Rum that I don’t exactly know what to do with.
- I love rum. I spent several years with a Chilean man, and we went to Cuba together one year and spent the whole visit drinking Cuban rum.
- I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, Morocco, and India. Why don’t you swing by the apartment sometime this weekend while everyone’s in Kyoto and we’ll drink rum and you can tell me about Cuba.

By the end of the weekend, my imagination was filled with thoughts of Cuba, stories of growing up in a small town outside of Medicine Hat under the prairie skies, and a headache from all the rum.

Nancy is probably my most free-spirited of free-spirited friends, having her own unique definition of success for herself, who is care-free to societal life checklists. I met Nancy when I had first begun my [apparently ceaseless] world travelling, when I was a soul-searching 21 year-old exploring the world in an effort to understand my most useful role in it. Later on in these formative years, I learned to size people up very quickly, judging whether or not we would have anything in common, and pursuing friendships according to my initial impressions. When you live as a nomad, you have to make meaningful friendships very quickly and not waste too much time with people who you think you won’t have anything in common with, because you are often put into situations where you are forced to be friends with people you wouldn’t normally befriend because of geographical circumstances.

In many ways, Nancy and I have very opposite personalities, and I may have judged our potential to have a friendship differently if I had met her now. Nancy approaches the world as a prairie sky -- a blank canvas where she can trust that everything always works out in the end, and not needing to force time commitments on incremental stages of career-relationship-home ownership-retirement in some overall life plan of 25-30-65 years old. I am much more goal-oriented, climbing peaks to get the best view, organising my time around known boundaries, dividing time into manageable stages towards some imagined goal, only filling the spaces between these planned edges with spontaneity and impulse.

An illustration of Nancy and my calculated boundaries vs. prairie sky approaches:
- I have far too many interests, always wanting to explore every crevasse, every peak. Constantly un-satiated by what I can see, wondering what’s beyond the next corner, around the next mountain, across the sea. I’d hate to put my children through this some day, so I should marry someone who knows exactly what they want all the time, always satisfied that they can already see everything they need to, so that our children end up as normal people.
- I always figured your genes know: if you have good chemistry with someone, you’ll probably produce good babies.

I caught a lift from Vancouver to Calgary last week to catch up with Nancy and her little Zachary en route back home from the Canmore Folk Festival, but we missed each other in Calgary and so I rented a car and drove across the prairies to Medicine Hat instead. On my three hour drive to Medicine Hat, I was annoyed by how boring the road was, by the country music playing on the radio, by the ineptitude of the Canadian Tire staff not being able to find me an iPod converter so that I didn’t have to listen to the country music playing on the radio, and by the fact that Nancy and I hadn't met up in Calgary as planned. I love scenic drives and had just spent 10 hours in the car on the Coquihalla, one of the most beautiful highways in the world that dangerously stretches from BC’s coastal mountains to the Rockies, ooo-ing and awww-ing the whole way at one of nature’s most obvious efforts at sensational beauty. The three hour drive across the prairies was feeling much longer than the ten hour drive through the mountains, mostly because of my perceived monotony of the landscape.

One laugh from my little Zach, and one hug from Nancy, and my annoyance had melted away. I spent the next few days in Medicine Hat with the two of them, peeling off layers of anxiety and stress from my schedule of being in so many cities for the last three months. I was enjoying every minute of my conversion to the prairie lifestyle, however short it was. We accomplished nothing, we never looked at a clock, never had to be anywhere at any time, our day revealing itself as we went along.

Contrary to my journey to Medicine Hat, on the return journey to Calgary I was almost overwhelmed by how beautiful the prairies were. Maybe not beautiful in an exciting and glamorous way, like the Rockies or the Coastal Mountains, but in a more under-stated, subtle but profound way. You could almost see the curve of the globe, the land and sky were so vast, un-interrupted.

Nancy's open-skies attitude and influence have once again defeated my judgmentalism and taught me something about expectations. I rely heavily on my judgments, but sometimes too heavily, and it's always refreshing to be proven wrong and learn something in the process. Thank you Nancy -- you've taught me even more than just an appreciation for rum.

How to keep one’s self entertained while unemployed.

Mastering the art of enjoying being un-employed is an important lesson in life. The most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in life is figure out what to do with my life. We distract ourselves from this Herculean feat by constructing life plans such as university-marriage-work-kids-retirement. We work for retirement, filling our lives with distractions and then reach retirement only to realise we’re running out of time. In fact, many people die within a year of retirement because they’ve lost purpose, forgetting the original point of working in the first place. Retirement is when we can’t avoid it any longer, we’re finally staring in the face of the original question we were trying to avoid in the first place when we first graduated: what do I really want to do with my life?

When you’re unemployed, you’re facing this same dilemma on a basic, daily, unavoidable level: what do I really want to do with my life – TODAY?

-It’s so great to have you in town to go on bike rides with. I can’t remember the last time I had the time to do something like this.
-Well, I have all the time in the world.
-If I had all the time in the world, there are so many things I’d like to work on for my portfolio. So many creative projects I wish I had the time to flesh out.
-I know. I have so much material to write about – like when that Spanish boy climbed into bed with Taser while we were asleep in Latvia. But I feel like I’ve been too busy to write. But really, what the hell do I do with my time?
-When we have the time, we don’t know what to do with it.
-And when we don't have the time, we're inspired to dream of what we'd do with it. I think I’d rather have the inspiration, and feel I don’t have time to fully realise my creativity than lose my inspiration. I’d rather be inspired than have a lot of time.

I’m used to being very very busy, and get annoyed when people claim they don’t know what to do with their free time. If I had free time I’d: learn Spanish; cook more; take an art class, probably pottery or glass blowing; sign up for a dance class; practice more piano; garden; cycle downtown every day, organise all my old photos; do my taxes; the list goes on…

Lists are good. They help us break up our days into manageable pieces. Just before I graduated from my first degree when I was 2o years old, I had such a heavy course load yet I could barely force myself to concentrate on my studies because I was too busy planning what I wanted to do with my life once I was "free". I made a list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime -- a list of over 8o adventures -- and I still have the list, somewhere. Maybe that's one to add to my list: amalgamate all my existing lists.

Fast forward a few months and I was facing graduation. I’ve often said that the most paralysed I’ve ever felt in my life was when I graduated from SFU in December 2ooo. I had a degree, I sold all my possessions so I had money, and I had the whole world available to me to start my adventures. Yet I was paralysed as to where I should start. I knew how to push boundaries, but without any boundaries to push, I was lost. I felt the same about being creative – in high school when we had creative writing classes, sometime Ms. Morgan would put a blank sheet in front of us, give us a pencil, and say: “write!” I never knew where to start. Other times she would say “write about this ball of paper, in the style of James Joyce”, and I could be the most creative person ever.

As with anything in life, it’s all about perspective, and having a tentative plan to move to the United Arab Emirates has certainly helped me keep a healthy perspective on my employment situation. Travelling around the world also helps.

I’ve been very quiet and mysterious since I got back to Canada, not purposefully, but mostly because I am just as in the dark about my immediate future as everyone else is.

I’m someone who likes to think I’m very consistent with what I say I’m going to do. For the last two months, I’ve had vague plans to accept a job in the United Arab Emirates, but until I have a plane ticket in my hand, I’ve been reluctant to make some bold announcement detailing my imminent move.

Where will you live?
For how long will you be in the UAE?
When do you leave?
What will you be doing?

All I know is that I have been offered the position of “Planning Analyst” with the Planning Department of the government of Abu Dhabi, that I’ve accepted my terms of employment for an initial contract of 3 months, and that I’ve requested to leave on 17 August 2007. I hope to stay at least 9 months to 1 year, but we’ll see how/if it goes. I promise – that’s all I know.

-You’re moving to the UAE? That’s so exciting.
-Honestly, I have the most boring life ever.
-Don’t you dare say that. We all live vicariously through you.
-No, I’m the one who literally lives through you. What have I been doing the last 4 months? Basically, I don’t have a life of my own, and so I fly to other parts of the world and live the lives of my friends for a week at a time. I need to get my own bloody life.
-But your life’s so interesting.
-Really. Honestly. It’s so boring. You have a life, and in your life you look forward to things like travel. So travel for you is exciting. It’s you at your best, and it’s something you can always look forward to, something to aspire to. I travel all the time, everyday I’m doing what most people aspire to do. And it becomes a chore. So everyday I’m faced with the philosophical dilemma of having to re-establish what inspires me, what I look forward to. Because I don’t have a trip on the horizon, my life is a trip. While everyone has this easy answer of what they would do with their vacation time, I’m actually having to live that day, every day, and try to find new ways of making it fresh.
-But that’s so depressing.
-Exactly. It’s much easier to be distracted from thinking about your own purposelessness when you have a trip to look forward to. Or maybe granite counter tops, or renovations on your house. Those activities which deviate from the norm of what we do. So I have to listen to everyone tell me how exciting my life is when really I just wish I had granite counter tops to distract myself from thinking about life. I really can’t complain – I have a super awesome life, with super awesome people in it, and I wouldn’t change it for a second – but it’s not as easy as everyone thinks.

The hardest thing in my life is saying goodbye to a community of friends. The second hardest thing in my life is grappling with constant philosophical dilemmas around meaning, purpose, inspiration, and life in general. I once got in an argument with a friend of mine in Africa about it:

-You white people have everything, and yet you’re always complaining.
-No, you people in Africa always have purpose, and yet you’re always complaining about not having enough stuff! Japanese people have one of the highest standards of living in the world, and they live longer than people in any other country. Yet they have the highest suicide rate in the world. Africans aren’t killing themselves!

So I continue to do exactly as I please, everyday waking up, choosing to just go with the flow, or attempting to tackle one of my lists: my list of things to do; my list of activities I love doing; my list of foods I want to learn to cook; my list of microbrewed beers I want to taste; my list of places I can cycle to from my house; my playlists of songs I like to rollerblade to; songs I want to download; things I want to write; great literature I want to read; films I want to see; friends I want to visit; organisations I want to research; etc. As with life in general, once time starts to become scarce, I’ll realise I don’t have enough of it to accomplish all that I need to do before my departure [or in my immediate case, my departure for the UAE]. This exercise of the last few months of being un-employed and relatively un-distracted may prove to be a prism through which to examine the larger task of constructing one’s life. If I can master this on a daily level now, maybe I’ll avoid a mid-life crisis in the future?

Am I actually complaining about this?
If this is my biggest worry, than my life must be pretty good...

Needing a vacation from being on holidays.

I've been in Morocco, Spain, England, and Latvia in the last week, and am off to Lithuania tomorrow.

Caught some Italian opera...in Latvia...where I've met up with a friend whom I met in France 6 years ago...who's from Oregon...while trying to coordinate my next means of employment with people in Canada and the Middle East...while I'm in Africa and Europe.

It was so difficult trying to explain to the expats in Morocco that tourism was #4 on my list of things to do in Morocco. #1 - look for gainful employment; #2 - re-connect with my friends and family in preparation for landing; #3 - relax and enjoy some sort of lifestyle while my bags were firmly in one place; and #4 - see some of Morocco.

Unfortunately, Morocco is a tourist's heaven with its rich culture, starkly varying landscapes, history, and cuisine. But I just wanted a vacation from being a tourist. I wanted to sit at a desk, do mundane tasks, not go outside and enjoy the sun, and not see anything new and exciting.

Luckily here in Latvia, Anastasia and I seem to be on the same page and have spent most of our time here passively soaking in Latvian culture via meals, drinks, strolls through medieval city centres, and bathing on beautiful Baltic beaches.

And while I feel like I could stay in the Baltics forever, I'm also looking forward to an extended vacation from being on holidays when I land back in Canada in a few weeks. Excitement is always what deviates from the norm of one's usual existence.

Easy isn’t a place on this Earth.

This is something un-intelligent that I wrote in a moment of frustration, which embellishes a little. It's more of a letter to all people who approach me on the street as if I can just hand out visas to whatever country they assume I come from. I have much more interesting things to say on this subject, especially after reading about the recent conference on migration and the Lybian president's comments on migration being a natural right of humans. Once I've settled into a new home, I'll hopefully have the opportunity to write about it. In the meantime...

I come from North America, a continent whose current shape was built on immigration. When my family arrived in America from a refugee camp in Eastern Europe, the “American Dream” of coming to a young country, working hard, and making a good life for one’s self was still viable within a generation.

The world is a very different place now. The middle class has been filled and the only vacancies left are at the foot of the social ladder. People who were doctors and university professors in their home countries come to North America and are the lucky ones if they find work as taxi drivers or janitors. For people who come from situations where their basic security as human beings was being comprised – coming from war-torn countries, desperate poverty, political prisoners – immigration may be a necessary transition for them. But for people who live a secure, safe, and relatively comfortable life in their home countries, who hope to immigrate for an imagined “better” life abroad, I hope to un-veil some of the realities you should expect if you were to go to the North American countries of the United States of America or Canada.

Every country seems to suffer from youth unemployment these days, and North Americans seem to be dealing with this problem by spending their 20s in universities rather than learning a trade and being almost immediately employable. People who are competing for white collar jobs are extremely educated in North America, and you will find that many North Americans who sell shoes and serve food have Bachelor degrees and even Master’s degrees sometimes. Arriving immigrants have to compete for good jobs with people who: (1) are experts at local social and cultural norms; (2) have an average of 2 years more education than their job requires; (3) speak the local language with perfect clarity; and (4) have more connections to the higher rungs of the social ladder. Many immigrants feel they need to lower their salary demands just to compete in the North American job market, adding to the existing financial obstacles that they had not anticipated, but that come with life in highly developed countries.

The cost of living. Highly developed countries are nice places to live because people spend most of their money on them. In Ghana, most people’s income goes towards food. In North America, someone who earns a decent wage of $40 000 per year will pay roughly half of that to taxes. Rent in major cities usually costs another half of your monthly income. In the winter, your heating bill can cost as much as half of your rent. That leaves about $80/week for food, entertainment, clothes, and lifestyle. That’s $11/day. A coffee costs $2, a very cheap lunch is $5, and a Guinness is about $8, not including taxes and tipping your waiter. When you add all the costs of living, at the end of the month you won’t have enough money to access the lifestyle you came to North America for. The lifestyle you seek will still be some distance away.

It’s not an easy life. I have a friend who is a European-Canadian with an English name who has a Master’s degree in the fastest growing field in the UK. He went to London equipped with all of these assets and, after struggling for 8 months, has decided to go back to Canada so that he can enjoy a proper meal and have enough money to have some sort of lifestyle.

The social ladder. A person’s lifestyle largely depends on the context they live in. In peaceful countries like Ghana, where the most basic human needs are generally provided for, the bulk of society has a relatively comfortable lifestyle. The lifestyles of my work colleagues here in Ghana are roughly comparable to the lifestyles of my work colleagues in North America. They live in houses, some of them have cars, they can feed their families and take care of some desperate relatives, but can’t afford too much travel. How we judge ourselves is always relative to where we place this bar of what we consider to be “normal”.

My mother once said that when she was growing up in America in the 1950s, they had nothing compared to what children in America have today. But since everyone was under these same circumstances, they didn’t feel like they had anything less than what was needed, and everyone was happy. A child today with the same standard of living as my mother in the 1950s would be considered deprived and would feel ashamed of their few possessions, being aware of the many possessions their classmates have. The norm of what we “need” is now higher, but we certainly don’t consider ourselves as being any happier. After providing for basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, and security, possessing a higher standard of living has no ceiling – both the developed and the developing world keeps “needing” more things, and I hate to think how much plastic will be wasted just so that children in 20 years can keep pace with their friends.

When immigrants come from a comfortable lifestyle in their home country to a new life in North America, they loose their standing as being in the same financial condition as everyone else. Immigrants often work more hours, do much more labour-intensive work than they are accustomed to, and at the end of the day all their struggles still result in a lower than “normal” standing on the social ladder. Immigrants may need to struggle like this for an entire generation before attaining “normal” standing in their new country. The only respite from this cycle is when they can send their surplus $50 per month (about 500 000 cedis) back home so that somewhere, someone can benefit from their labours. Many Ghanaians who live abroad don’t come back because they can’t afford the plane ticket.

People work hard all over the world. Immigrants who have been very successful in their new countries worked very hard to get there – they were innovative, smart, entrepreneurial types who probably struggled for years before reaching any success. Easy is not a place on this Earth. You can’t get a visa there and making friends with foreigners won’t buy it for you either. Foreigners may seem rich to you while in Ghana, but most of us have a comparable life in our home countries to yours here in Ghana. It’s only when we take our currency across the border into countries with weaker currencies that we can feel big about ourselves.

That’s something that’s very un-fair. Currencies and passports from the “developed” world can get you into most countries in the world while currencies and passports from the “developing” world cannot. When one country’s economy is stronger than another, the stronger economy country does not want everyone to flood into the country and burst their economy, so they limit the access of people from poorer economies to come to their country. People from the world’s strongest economies pose little threat because they are un-likely to want to work in a country with a weaker economy than their home country. We are welcomed with open arms into most countries because we come to spend our money, not to earn money that would otherwise be earned by a local national. But currencies fluctuate, economies grow, and new resources can suddenly become extremely valuable on world markets, changing people’s access to the rest of the world.

You may still want to experience all of this yourself, and maybe your immigrant experience would be different than what I have just described, but I think it’s important to leave with appropriate expectations. Ghana is a peaceful, friendly country, where people enjoy more personal security than many cities in the developed world. A “better life” is not necessarily geographic or across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Bigger Picture

My sister and brother in law have a parrot. When I’m in Vancouver visiting, I often baby-sit their parrot. The parrot wakes, squawks until someone lets him out of his cage, squawks to be fed, cleans his feathers, sharpens his beak, and then squawks to be put to bed. By my second day babysitting the parrot, I start to think about what kind of a life a caged animal has, and by the third day…well…it doesn’t take much imagination to draw parallels with one’s own life.

Here in Ghana, much of the work conducted at my office involves socializing, interrupted by mundane work tasks. Even in my department, one of the most important and active departments in the Municipality, I often feel like I’m meant to fit a circle into a square, then into a triangle, then into a rectangle, only to find out all three files were replaced by an older version of the file by one of my work colleagues who’s still learning how to use flash drives. One hour meetings are spent waiting for 2 hours for people to come, another hour re-capping what was missed by participants who were 3 hours late, and most of the presentation is spent reading out loud what’s already been provided for us in written form, which we’ve already read while waiting for participants to arrive. Despite constant emphasis on presenter’s need to summarise their points, the narrative word-for-word reading of the document being presented continues.

When I ask what people do on weekends, it usually involves going to a funeral on Saturdays and church on Sundays, preferring to socialize en masse instead of the dinner party or going out for beer style of socializing I’m accustomed to in Canada. Ghanaians don’t really have vacation time, so they also don’t spend much time traveling. In fact, with the exception of Accra, there really isn’t anywhere to spend your money – there’s no infrastructure for Western conceptions of leisure, and Ghanaian leisure costs only membership into their social units.

My first reaction to all this was to constantly emphasize the end goal – what is the objective of what you’re doing, and is your method of achieving that objective actually effective? Common examples are presentations that use too many slides or speeches that lack a hierarchy of information so that an audience can extract the message from the words. A specific example was the Public Hearing I attended last week, where opening speeches and Department Head presentations were so long that by the time the public had the opportunity for discussion, they were worn out. That meeting lasted 7 hours in a room without air conditioning – you can hardly blame the public for their lack of enthusiasm when their time to speak had come.

My leisure time follows a plan I drew with some fellow sojourners here, a plan whose objective is to allow us to see as much of Ghana as possible on weekends and National Holidays while we’re here. I have only stayed at home three weekends since I’ve been here, and that was only because I was sick with “malaria”.

I find it difficult to complete tasks which I can’t determine the larger reason for, and have been much happier at work and in my leisure time here since drawing a new work plan and settling on a rough travel schedule.

This is my bigger picture.

Since a great deal of my time at work is spent socializing, I spend a lot of time talking with Ghanaians. I have mostly found that there are two main themes of conversation: gossiping and flirting; and society and beliefs. Contrary to what you’d expect though, the gossiping and flirting seems largely instigated by the married men in my office.

The society and beliefs conversations are usually instigated by someone discovering that I’m not Christian or Muslim.

-I’m agnostic. It means I sit on the beliefs fence, not even committing to an answer regarding if God does or does not exist.
-But what do you believe then?

But what do you believe then? Are people allowed to just ask you that? How are you…fine…what’s the purpose of you being on this Earth? These are questions I have spent the last decade trying to escape/answer by fleeing to different parts of the world. Beliefs are not a place on this planet.

The Personnel Officer has particularly taken an interest in discussing this topic with me.

-Obaa Ya, how do you manage to wake up everyday and carry about your life if you don’t have beliefs about what happens to you when you die?
-But what difference does it make – I’ll be dead. I demand satisfaction and justice in life rather than trusting it in someone else’s hands at death.
-Do you see justice occurring in life?
-No, but that doesn’t mean we should be complaisant to injustice. Powerful people are benefiting from your acceptance that their wrongs will be righted after they die. Meanwhile, people continue to suffer while living. No, you’re absolutely correct that we can’t expect justice in our lifetime, but we can still demand improvements for the living.

Our conversation continued along the usual trajectory of evolution vs. creationism. By the time it was 5 o’clock and time to go home, he brilliantly summarized his view as follows:

-Obaa Ya, you are clearly knowledgeable about the physical world, and I appreciate your sharing with me what you know about it, but you fail to recognize that your arguments are limited to the physical world. I’m talking about something outside of the physical world. You’re assuming explanations from the physical world can be applied to the non-physical world.
-But then you’re assuming that there is a non-physical world.
-Of course there’s a non-physical world. Otherwise, what is there to think about?
-Well, I like thinking about the physical world. Maybe that’s why I travel so much. Maybe when I’m satisfied with what I know about the physical world, I’ll start considering this spiritual one you like so much.

And there it was – I assumed Ghanaians lead mundane lives because I don’t see them constructing a bigger picture for their lives in the physical worlds. But, what I entirely failed to appreciate was that Ghanaians think I lead a mundane life because I haven’t constructed a plan for my life in the spiritual world.

On turning 27.

13 September 2006
Rather anti-climactic really.I’m sitting here, Kenny G does “What a Wonderful World” playing in the background, remembering what I thought 27 would be.
When I was 15 years old, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. He was 27. I realised then that all the greats seemed to have not made it to their 28th – Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and now my dear Kurt! Clearly, life peaks at 27. In the words of Neil Young “it’s better to burn out, then to fade away.”
I’ve since decided that, at least in my case, life only gets better. I love knowing myself one more year, I love every year of experiences, every year of discoveries, and every year of learning something I didn’t think before.
Sitting alone in the restaurant of the hotel, where I presume I am the only guest, in a town where I am essentially a zoo animal, I certainly hope my life hasn’t peaked on this day.
If anything, I feel much younger than I did last year on my birthday. Here in Koforidua, I am entirely dependent on other people. I literally can’t eat, pee, drink water, go home after work, get to work in the morning, or do anything except sit in my room alone writing blog entries which I will still need someone’s assistance in order to find an internet café to post them onto my blog.
I have been super laid back about it all. It’s no secret that I am definitely someone who enjoys my independence, especially in terms of being given the flexibility to manage my own time, and having the freedom to explore the world that surrounds me. So far, I have been given a total of 15 minutes of my own time and the comfort [ie. daylight] to explore my world. It only took about a minute for me to be surrounded by children screaming.
“Obruny! Obruny! Can I have your number?”
“You can’t even reach my elbow.”
“But I will grow!”
“Are you even old enough to operate a phone without parental supervision?”

When I finally shook off the first round of kids, I noticed a football field where spectators were sitting along the edge watching. As I approached the game to join the spectators, the whole game stopped, and everyone turned and stared at me. I decided, in the interest of the sport, to continue walking instead, where I was shortly met by the next pack of roaming children.
I realised then that the closest thing I have to autonomy is my peanut butter. The one meal of the day that I chose when and where is breakfast – I pull out my Swiss army knife, my jar of peanut butter, and the loaf of bread that I was able to ask my driver to find for me because I didn’t know where to find bread. I don’t even have a napkin or a plate to eat from, and when I offered my driver some bread with peanut butter so that he could taste Canadian food, I had to present it on a sudoku puzzle. I think he enjoyed the sudoku puzzle more than the PB.
NB. For anyone who ever goes to a developing country, I cannot stress the importance of a Swiss army knife, a jar of peanut butter, and, most crucially, a couple roles of toilet paper. I’m not going to elaborate on this note in too much detail, but please, for the love of God, bring a role of toilet paper and a couple of ziplock bags. TRUST ME.
So my Ghanaian name is “Yaa”. I can also go by “Yaayaa” and “Obayaa”. In Ghana, your name is the day you were born. I may as well confess now that I have been lying to everyone for the last 27 years, telling them that I was born on Friday the 13th. I was actually born on Thursday, September 13th, which gives me the lamest of all the days-of-the-week-female-Ghanaian-names. Other days of the week include: Akosua, Asi, or Ese (Sunday); Adwoa, or Ajao (Monday); Abena, or Araba (Tuesday); Akua (Wednesday); Afua, Afia, or Efua (Friday); and, Ama (Saturday). Despite this repertoire of beautiful Ghanaian names, my name is Yaa.
My most common activity at work is to respond to enquiries at the door of the Municipal Planning Office.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Yah?”
[since it’s a female voice, and I am the only female on my floor, they instantly know it must be…]
“Yaa!”
“Yah.”
Even the boy names for Thursday birthdays are better: Yao or Ekow. Considering that my world is 100% male right now – I haven’t even really spoken to a woman in almost two weeks, and there’s no rubbish bin in any of the toilets on my floor – I should at least get to choose between Yaa, Yao, and Ekow.
But there’s no choice here in Ghana, social rules dictate that my name is Yaa. This relates to how I’ve been explaining Canada to my colleagues here in Ghana.
In Canada, you’re generally free to do whatever you please, as long as it does not infringe on someone else’s freedom. You can eat dinner alone, you can go to the bar alone, you can explore the streets alone. But, the other side of the coin is that you always feel alone.
In Ghana, everyone’s your sister, everyone’s your brother, and you are always loved and cared for. But you cannot do exactly as you please, and, as I learned this afternoon when I went for lunch alone, you’re never to do things alone. As no one was in the office and I was hungry [never stand between a skinny person and their lunch!], I was too hungry to care and decided to fetch my own lunch in the form of crossing the street and buying a minced meat pocket. My office colleagues were dumbfounded by my behaviour, and I remembered similar reactions from people when I lived in Italy, France, Japan, and Turkey.
Mostly, I was just surprised I was able to find a place to buy a small quantity of food. Not only is it difficult to distinguish between…say…a hair salon, a CD shop, and a restaurant [it’s not like they have neon signs here, when you’re used to commercial establishments fighting for your attention, it’s hard to recognise those that don’t leap out of the landscape at you. How to make a distinction between rows of undistinguishable shacks? In Japan, it was rows of undistinguishable shacks that had red lanterns out front, and you needed to find someone who read kanji to know if it was a restaurant]….it’s also impossible to find anything less than a huge meal in Ghana. So far, I’ve not been able to finish more than half of a meal, and there’s no such thing as doggy bags.
I just can’t wait to have my own space…where I can cook for myself…live without burdening my colleagues and driver…maybe even exercise a small degree of independence….remembering that I am indeed 27, not 7.