Lucky to be me

After that last post, the flowers immediately shriveled up and in swept the Harmattan. I have been thinking about inventing windshield wipers for my eyes (sandshield wipers?) with Visine as wiper fluid. Everything is filtered in a layer of fine dust so that you keep blinking to try to get Ghana back in focus. Someone described it as Accra being a “smudge” and that seems accurate. It’s a bit cooler because the sun is also a smudge, though today is like a thick sauna out there. But some people are wearing sweaters, which we can’t even imagine.

Madina library writers pretending to be "detectives."

I have promised a description of what I am doing at the libraries. First of all, I am one lucky woman. Kathy Knowles of the Osu Children’s Library Fund is allowing me to create little Writing Clubs, and I feel like falling to my knees next time I see her, I am so grateful.  

At Madina, the library closest to us, I go every Monday and Tuesday afternoons. The kids come rushing up to me shouting, “Madame Theresa, Madame Theresa!” and their little fuzzy heads are suddenly in a big crush around me. (A student volunteer from Canada, Dominique, also gets mobbed.) At Osu (Wednesdays), there are more boys than girls and they are a little more reserved, but equally as excited. 

Prosper putting the finishing touches on his book cover.

What do we do? The idea is to generate creative thinking, as well as writing skills. Kids here learn mainly by rote. There are few, if any, textbooks, so most of the learning in classes of 80-plus kids comes from a teacher writing on a blackboard, and then students copy it in their exercise books. There is not a culture of reading or writing for pleasure.

So, lucky me, I get to jumpstart their imaginations, and throw in a few writing skills at the same time.  

The “Writing Club” kids have written stories about random animals in weird settings (e.g., goat driving a trotro, leopard scoring goals for the Ghana Black Stars ), they have learned how to create characters and settings, and then come up with problems and solve them without making the solution too easy. They have written about their earliest memories, and last week in Osu they made “Menus for your worst enemy.” (Thank you to Teri Hein of 826 in Seattle for that huge hit!) Things like that.

One challenge is cultural differences. So, for example, one day we played Scattergories while waiting for all the kids to arrive. A card says “In the Garden,” and the other card says the letter “C.” A kid yells, “cassava!” while I was thinking “carrot.” And “A Girl’s Name” brings yells of “Persephone,” and “Patience.” We were writing about the library yesterday, and some began the story, “One Harmattan day … .” 

Earliest memories had a lot of “and then I was beaten” in them, as well as many pots of hot soup spilling on them. But also lots of “my brother pinched me,” a universal early memory!

Culture aside, I figure kids are just kids. Those menus? How little-boy is this: “Toasted penis soup.” Or “scorpion brains with rice.” “Snake teeth with mud.” (The little girls had a bit more trouble, they are too nice to their enemies.) 

Now we are embarking on creating some actual books. This week, we made an “About the Author” page complete with photo (thanks to our chugging-along portable Canon printer) – huge excitement! 

One lucky woman at Kathy Knowles Community Library in Osu.
Photo by Deborah Cowley

As I say, I am soooo lucky!

Just add water!

“It’s like a little miracle,” said Carl, our friend from Canada who has been teaching in the Philosophy department for the past year. Just watch, he said: When you get a rain after one of the prolonged parched spells like we’ve been having, the fields will explode in flowers.

That was hard to imagine. As Theresa mentioned in an earlier post, the most notable thing about the fields and trees when we returned after Christmas was how reddish brown everything is, covered with a thick level of bone-dry dust.

But then the other day it did rain, not for long but very hard. The car was suddenly clean; the air was refreshed; the sun was a more normal color at sunset, and you could actually see things in the distance that had previously been lost in a deep haze.

And two days later, the miracle happened. Everywhere we looked – out our kitchen window, on the walk to the pool, up the hill toward the administration building – there were patches of gorgeously delicate little white flowers, sticking their heads up, pointing toward the sky, waving in the breezes. Where could they have been hiding? What did they think as they emerged from the rock-hard soil into the blazing sun?

That’s not all, either: along with the clumps of flowers came an explosion of fat moths. Where had THEY been gestating, and in what form? There are hundreds and hundreds of them, under trees and clustered in corners of the building and flying madly all around. At least there were hundreds – the snowy white egrets think the moths are a good development, and they’ve been wandering around the yard, their long necks darting forward occasionally as they snag another one. Crunch.

Our friend and sometimes driver Gabriel tells us that egrets aren’t the only ones: people capture the moths in buckets (not very smart moths, but then, they haven’t been alive long enough to learn anything), remove their wings and eat them – just like with grasshoppers in Uganda, but not in such large quantities (we haven’t seen them for sale on the street, for example), and I think I’ll pass on this delicacy.

The flowers in the fields…the moths in the air: it’s one more reminder that although we don’t have the same sharply defined, months-long seasons here that we do at home, there are seasons nonetheless. They are just short, and – no surprise! – very, very intense. Blink, and you miss them.