Yes, she made a difference!

Every time we have come to Africa, and many times when we're at home, we talk about whether or not what we do makes any difference. That's important to us, obviously -- it is the reason we keep coming, and not always under the most perfect of conditions! But it's also an impossibly elusive question. What does it mean to make a difference? How much of a difference? For how many people? How the heck would we even know? And so on. Usually, we just fall back on the mantra we have so often heard from teachers at home: if you can make an impact on one student's life, consider yourself successful.
 Fortunately, over the years we have been doing this, there have been some gratifying bits and pieces of evidence. I thought this moment -- Theresa is in transition, wandering through the Amsterdam airport as I write -- would be a good time to share one of them.
Before her last session with her Writing Club at the Osu library, the head librarian, our friend Joanna, organized the kids to write short "goodbye" notes. Here's one of them:

Dear Aunty Teresa,

Samuel Osei Ababio is my name. I am a pupil of the Osu Salem 1 Primary. I am also a member of the Imagination Famous Writing Club. It is at the Osu Kathy Knowles Community Library. I enjoy writing because it broadens my mind and adds about 50 words every day and it makes me learn how to describe and make a story out of my imagination. The book I like best is Horrid Henry. The game I like best is football and playing Scategories also known as “I know.” [Editor's note, T brought and taught them this game which they absolutely LOVED.] Thank you very much for all that you did for us. We appreciate your coming. Will miss you a lot and hope to hear from you. Yours lovely, Sammy.

 In the "class picture" here, the main members of the club are the little boys in blue shirts clustered in the center behind Theresa, although a lot of the others got involved in one way or another along the way.

Yes, indeed. She did make a difference, and they are right to miss her.

Time flies when you’re having fun …

Rosemary with a smoked grasscutter

Okay, so the blog has languished, but we have excuses. First of all, as I said below, we had company – and lots of it. It started with “the Rosemarys” as we called our first visitors – Rosemary, David (see him heating fufu below), Hawley and an old mutual friend, Jennifer from Uganda. Lots of fun and laughs – until they brought that smoked grasscutter into the compound. I wouldn’t let it in the house, but Kwame cooked it up and we at least got to taste it. (A grasscutter is a rodent-like creature, sort of the size of a groundhog – they raise them here and also capture them wild.) 

Liam and his Dad at Shai Hills Reserve

Then on the heels of the Rosemarys came Kate and Elliot. As you can see below, we wore them out with trips to the markets, seeing monkeys, etc. Then the day they left, Liam arrived. Liam had the quote of the visits – one day Bill asked him what he had seen that he found interesting, and he responded, “I don’t think I saw anything that WASN’T interesting!” 

Kate and Elliot after a day at the market

And since then it’s been work, libraries, more markets and finally, last week, a trip north to Tamale to do some election coverage training. We had planned a trip further north just for fun, but Bill ate something (could it have been that spicy goat???) that caused him to turn the shade of his beige shirt, so we returned to Accra after the training. 

And now, the tears and sadness begin, at least for me. I leave in less than a week. We’ve done this before – you worm your way into people’s lives, and vice versa, and then what happens? You leave. You tell everyone you’ll be back, but will you? It’s a long way away. This morning Gladys dissolved when she realized I wouldn’t be here next Tuesday when she comes. I assured her she is like my daughter, but what does that mean? She stays here, we come and go; she continues to carry used clothes on her head to make a living, we go home to A&J’s and Café Ladro.

On the other hand, maybe the world isn’t so big after all. One of the kids at the library yesterday wanted to know if I was on Facebook. He’s all of 10 years old, but I guess he’s wired.

Funny, we were reluctant about letting Ghana get under our skin. The climate is awful, the bugs as bad. But now we are reminded that it’s not about those things, it’s about the people you meet, the culture you learn about that becomes a part of you. Not seeing Kwame’s dimples again when he laughs, which is always, not seeing Husseina’s lovely little smile when I say something ridiculous, which is always … not looking at each other and saying, “What just happened?” – again, always … well, we’ll miss it all. 

That said, home beckons. Seeing everyone and cooling off in the garden is looking pretty good! Bill is here for two weeks after I leave, so maybe there will be more frequent posts to the blog as he winds down.

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Fufu fun

“I just sink to the bottom,” a young woman learning to swim at the pool where we go complained to her instructor this morning. “Did you eat fufu?” he asked her rather sternly. 

Our guest David Kechley having soup with fufu. He's good at it!

Partially in answer to Sarah’s question about how you eat soup with your hands, I thought we’d better talk a little more about fufu. Oddly enough, like the woman at the pool, the Ghanaians complain about their staple food. Many of them say it is hard to digest (gives you a sinking feeling?) and they can’t eat it very often. They say if you eat fufu in the morning, you’ll still feel it in the evening. We think it's funny that they criticize something that is also almost sacred.

Fufu is usually made by pounding cassava and plantains (the kind I made with Husseina was from huge yams, which is how they make it in the north). They pound it with a mortar and pestle, the pestle being made of (usually) neem tree branches, and the mortar sometimes small (as in Husseina’s case) and sometimes really huge.

Once the mixture is mashed – into a consistency like chewing gum (Husseina kept telling me, “No, it’s not like chewing gum yet!”), they form it into big balls and plop it on the plate next to your soup. You scoop a big fistful of fufu, dip it in the soup until it sort of absorbs it and is dripping, then quickly get the whole mess into your mouth.

Chewing gum!

As in Uganda, where we experienced this same process with matoke and g-nut sauce, we aren’t very good at eating with our hands. You use only your right hand (for somewhat obvious reasons) and to the Ghanaians it’s just fine that your hand is a greasy, reddish, drippy thing when you are eating your fufu and soup. To us, that is not so fine, we like our dainty forks and such – but those do NOT work with fufu. There is always a bowl of water nearby to wash in, so that helps.

What does it taste like? Hmm, well, it doesn’t have a lot of flavor. It’s more like a vehicle for the soup – someone suggested maybe you could form it into a spoon shape, haven’t tried that yet. Banku, a cousin of fufu but fermented, is treated the same. I like fufu fine – no stomach troubles, but we can’t eat the amounts they do here so that might be the difference. And I really liked the yam fufu. Banku must be an acquired taste, it’s too fermented for me. Kenkey, another cousin, is like banku wrapped in leaves and it has a smokey, charcoal taste. I like kenkey with a good spicy tomato sauce. 

To us, one of the nice things about fufu is the sound of the pounding. It’s a backdrop to everything in Ghana – you hear it everywhere you go and it’s nice. Phoomp, phoomp, phoomp – it echoes off the walls. It has to be made fresh, so someone somewhere is always making fufu! 

Cornelius and his wife are a fufu team

Another interesting thing about fufu is that it is HARD to pound, so lots of times it is pounded by a shirtless man in incredible shape for about 30 minutes or more. A woman generally turns the mortar as it's pounded, which can be dangerous unless they have a rhythm. Maybe this is good for marriages, who knows. Anyway, this is Ghana – you sweat when you move your eyebrow, much less lift a huge stick with chewing gum on the end of it over and over. Sooo, sweat is the seasoning for fufu. (Now do you want some???) Seriously, this is what they say.

The neem branch pestle is a lovely thing, and the first time we saw them leaning against a stand where they were for sale, we couldn’t figure out what the heck they were. They are long and pale, and at one end is a sort of flat, round plate that squashes the vegetable. I’m not sure how they carve them, we’ll have to see somewhere.

So that’s the secret: you eat soup by forming fufu into a scoop and then somehow getting that whole thing to your mouth. And then you sink to the bottom of the pool.

We didn't disappear!

Sorry for the scarcity of posts recently. I could say the excuse is the heat - which is oppressive to put it mildly. But really it is that we've been busy. So I'll bring you up to date quickly:

• I learned to make fufu. Well, at least my neighbor Husseina attempted to teach me. It's hard work! This particular fufu is made from huge yams. Husseina is from the north and that's how they make it there. In the south it's made of cassava and plantain. I like Husseina's best! We made it with palm nut soup and ate it with our fingers, yum.
• We went to a bead market in Koforidua a couple of hours from here. The beads were amazing, many of them very old trade beads made of either glass or clay. We bought some, but not too many - we don't really have a talented jewelry maker in our house.
• We had our friends Joanna and Gladys and their kids over for an American meal, complete with US flag placemats that the people at the embassy gave us. 
• We took a trip to Axim, very far to the west of Ghana, almost to the Ivory Coast. We experienced: a) the worst road EVER (but our little car did great), b) a shakedown by a cop at a speed trap (T driving, argh), c) the most beautiful beaches yet. 
• Work: Bill is giving mega-assignments (meaning lots of marking for the prof), the library clubs are growing daily and still tons of fun (e.g., stories called "Time Time I Was Scared), and we did a joint training on management for the US embassy.
• Visitors! More on that later, but suffice it to say four friends are here now, family coming on their heels.

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.