Liz's Adventures Abroad

First London Entry

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:25:38 GMT

Hello all!

Greetings from a grey England. Admittedly the weather has been better than I expected, it has actually been sunny a fair amount since I have been here. This is one of the best times of the year though, and November will bring in the cold. It still wont be as cold as the Midwest winters though, or so I keep telling myself. School has been good so far, just ridiculously hectic and busy. Between trying to keep up with my school work, get to know the people on my program, and spend time with my friends who live here, I have had very little time for things like grocery shopping and laundry. However, I am managing, as they like to say in Ghana.

I am living in East London, oh yeah I am an east ender! I told my Irish friend Niall where I am living, the neighborhood is called Bethnal Green. His response was “how very trendy of me.” :) I am very close to Brick Lane, a place infamous for its delicious Indian and Pakistani food. The neighborhood is very diverse, but does have a really high amount of Bengali people (Bengali is the correct term for someone from Bangladesh I recently learned from a woman in my program). There is a vibrant street market everyday and the place is just 15 minutes on the tube from my school.

The program so far has been good, the strength of it is really the amazing diversity in background and experience of my fellow Masters students. I realized how refreshing it is to finally be with people who have been doing the exact same work I have. It is not that my friends now don’t appreciate what I am doing, because they do. But it is different to be with people who have done similar work and can offer advice about past and future experiences. There are 83 people on my masters program from something like 20+ different countries who have worked in something like 50+ different countries. I would say about 30% of the people in my masters are medical doctors. Everyone has worked in public health in a developing country for at least a year, it is a prerequisite for my program.

Anyway let me give you a layout of my program so yall have an idea of what it is like:

Term 1 is from Sep 25 when I started to Dec 19. Term 1 I think is going to be the hardest since I have to take Statistics and Epidemiology. Since I haven’t taken math or science in 12 years, it has been a challenge to get back into the swing of things. I have 3 other classes besides that with lots of reading. I am class for 30 hours every week and have another 20 hours of work to do on top of that (at least). That is the main difference I see from undergrad, I had less class time and more time to get my work done during the day.

Terms 2 is from January 12th to March 27th and term 3 is April 20th to June 21st or so. For the second and 3rd term, I have 2 classes at a time that run for 5 weeks, then I start the next round. So one class runs from Monday morning to 12:30 on Wednesday and then the second class runs from 2 pm on Wednesday til Friday afternoon. My classes end in the beginning of June sometime, then we have 2 weeks of review before exams.

Exams in England are a bit weird, I have 2 major exams in June for all my classes since September. Then after exams I do my masters project and thesis, which is due on September 4th.

The craziness is really that after you subtract the 6 weeks I get for Christmas and Spring Break essentially my classes are crammed into 7 months. And they are obviously very good at fitting as much material as possible into those 7 months.

OK enough about school. I am going out to a club for the first time since I have got here and get to some much needed dancing tomorrow night yay! I am planning on celebrating Halloween with Americans, the plan is to get all dressed up and wander around Soho on a pub crawl. should be fun. I hope to write more when I can but that is it for now. I would love to hear from everybody, just have a bit of understanding if it takes me a few weeks to respond.

For those from Grinnell and IMSA who have recently contacted me, you can read my blogs from when I was living in Ghana below, since my internet time was few and far between there aren’t that many posts.

Farewell to Ghana

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:21:27 GMT

Hello all, this will be my final blog entry on my adventures in Ghana. I decided to leave the Peace Corps early and am now back in the States. First of all, I wanted to thank everyone again who donated to my project. I promised to put some pictures up on the web of the weavers and others from my project for everyone to see and I was able to do that. I also promised a long time ago to put pictures up from my local festival that happened in October so those are up as well. Check them out at:
http://flickr.com/photos/lmihp
Fyi LMIHP stands for Lawra Methodist Integrated Health Project. I wanted you to look at them so you can see how healthy and strong the women are, and how with your help they are able to stay that way.

It was a tough decision to make to leave early, but I know I made the right choice. Ultimately for me it boiled down to the fact that I went into the Peace Corps to do sustainable development work and the work I was doing was in no way, shape or form sustainable. Most of the work I did for the project was office work—writing their grant applications, writing their quarterly and annual reports, helping them with reporting to the various required agencies. Time and again I tried to figure out ways to impart my skills to the staff, but it was made clear to me by the manager of the project that my role was to do the work and not to train others on it. I was not allowed the staff’s time I needed to train them. Because of this, I realized that rather than helping the project, what I was really doing was creating dependence on a volunteer/foreigner. So I did what I could for them before I left and exercised tough love. With help from you and Ghana AIDS Commission they should have money for the PLWHA’s antiretroviral therapy for the next year and a half. With your help I raised the money for the smock maker to come and teach the members of the PLWHA association how to make their weaving business more profitable. Since I left I know the project will be forced to allow one of their staff to learn computer and proposal writing skills, making the project ultimately as self sufficient as possible.

I am very happy for the lessons I learned about development work from living and working in Ghana. Ghana is oversaturated with foreign aid, and I learned a long list of what not to do in terms of development projects. At the same time, I got to work with Action Aid International Ghana and got to learn lessons about the amazing things that can be accomplished in communities with sustainable, community based projects which are monitored accurately. Okay, that is the last you’ll have to read of my development soap box, but hey it is my career and my passion so I should be excused this once. :)

So what is next for me? Naturally living in rural Ghana I had some time to think and I realized that I do want to continue living and working with HIV/AIDS abroad. But my family and friends are incredibly important as well so I am spending a few months in Central Illinois with my family and a few months in San Francisco this summer before moving to London for graduate school in the fall. I hope to reconnect with many of you as I am once again accessible. Anyway I will definitely miss the women and kids at my project and all the great Ghanaians and fellow volunteers that came to be a part of my life there.

I do have to say a quick “don’t try this at home” about my experience in the Peace Corps. Honestly, I had an incredibly difficult time working with the bureaucracy that is the Peace Corps administration and would not recommend it to anyone. Maybe if you are straight out of college and have no work or travel experience then it would be a good program for you. But I went there to development work, and was treated the entire time like I was on a high school cultural exchange program. If you are in your thirties especially, no way. I know other people have a different experience but I do have to say that was mine. That being said, I would recommend an organization called Volunteer Services Overseas, (VSO) if you are looking to gain a couple of years international experience. VSO is basically Peace Corps for Europeans and the rest of the world without all the bs of working with the American government. VSO requires 2 years of prior experience in your chosen field of volunteering and places you in a professional position. They also do things like furnish your house (concept!) and provide you with transportation so you don’t have to ride the minivan death traps that pass for public transportation in most of rural areas (shocking!) Although it also has its ups and downs, I had a lot of VSO friends and have to say if you or someone you know are thinking about a change and are contemplating international work, go for it! I would be happy to answer any questions for people.

Anyway I look forward to getting to reconnect with people again. I will be attending my 10 year reunion for Grinnell College at the end of May and then I will be coming out to the Bay Area after that in June. In the meantime, I hope things are well for you in your corner of the globe.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:58:01 GMT

I hope everyone is well in their corner of the globe. I wanted to write first of all and send a humongous thank you to everyone who donated to my project. I found out I raised $1655, which was almost $1000 over my goal!! I will be able to make sure that they get the drugs they need until they get their funding from Ghana AIDS commission in May. In May the grant they receive will provide money for care and support for my association of People Living with HIV/AIDS for one full year.

I decided to use the surplus I raised to help them with their income generation activities and become more self sustainable. The women in my group now have 6 looms and are making traditional cloth that gets made into smocks, a typical style of dress for men in the Northern part of the country. So far they have learned how to weave the cloth, but with the additional money I raised we are going to have a smock maker come from the largest city in the North for 3 months to teach the women how to make high quality hand sewn smocks. What this means in the end is that they will be able to make 4 times as much money off the smocks as they can from the cloth itself. So once again, thank you, this will help them out a lot. I want to get pictures of the women weaving the cloth for you all, but will have to wait until I have access to highspeed internet when I go to Accra in February.

So it is a very exciting time to be in Ghana. Ghana is the host for the 2008 African Cup of Nations, which is basically the African equivalent of the world cup. There are soccer games happening in 4 different cities in Ghana and you can hear the sound of people shouting at TVs at night when their team of choice scores a goal. Everyone’s favorite is of course the Black Stars, who are the national team for Ghana. The tournament began on the 20th of January and will continue until February 10th. The country is filled with soccer madness, it is a lot of fun and I enjoyed watching the first two game the Black Stars played in (Ghana beat Guinee 2 to 1 in the first match and beat Namibia 1 to 0 in the second).

Finally, I have some great news. I was accepted into my graduate program at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine! The degree is a Masters in Public Health, and the program is specifically for Public Health in Developing Countries. It is a 12 month Masters and includes one month of research. The program begins in the end of September so I will be moving to London in the fall. I have to go and get back to my town today but I hope all of you are doing well.

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:47:36 GMT

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. I enjoyed mine thanks to the amazing culinary adaptability of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers. Things have been going well at the project. The People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) received a grant to train each other on weaving traditional cloth and are working towards being able to support themselves and their families better. It will take awhile for the women to be trained and begin marketing their cloth, but they are getting there and I am hopeful for them.
In the meantime, I need your help. The NGO that supported us for the first half of this year, Action Aid, has decided not to support us anymore since they have been supporting the project for 4 years already. I have found cross cultures it is typical for and NGO to support any one given project for a 3 to 5 year span. I am applying for funds for the project from the government through Ghana AIDS commission, but their financial support will not begin until May. And unfortunately, we currently have no money to provide our most essential service, the provision of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs to our PLWHA.
So please, if at all possible, give what you can to my project. 100% of the money you donate will be processed into a prepaid account at the local hospital for their ART drugs. We now have 30 clients on ART. Compared to the thousands of dollars ART costs in the States, the drugs are very inexpensive here and are only $5 a month per patient. But beginning in January we do not even have that little needed to help them.

I have waited until I really needed your help and this is the only time I will ask for donations while I am here in Ghana but please, even $10 will give one of our clients 2 months worth of lifesaving drugs. Your money goes a long way here. My goal is to raise $750 from all of you to cover their cost of ART until Ghana AIDS commission grant comes in May. Any extra money raised will be put toward a food box for each of the PLWHA for Christmas. Last year we provided a box with bulk rice, sugar, beans and soap for all of them. Right now we don’t have the money for that but I am hoping to raise it.

So please, there are 3 easy ways you can help, all donations are tax deductible and processed through the Methodist church in the States. Note the Methodist church does NOT take a processing fee and 100% of the money donated goes to my project in Ghana:

On-line at

http://secure.gbgm-umc.org/donations/advance/donate_select_project.cfm

You can locate the project by typing 120001 into the project number contains field or searching for Lawra in the project name contains field. Then click the Lawra Meth.Orphanage & HIV link at the top of the page under the search results heading "Search Results."

By Phone:
Credit card gifts can be accepted by phone. The telephone number is: (888) 252-6174. Tell them it is for the "Lawra Methodist Orphanage & HIV, advance project number 120001."

By Mail:
Make your check payable to ADVANCE GCFA. Write the name of the ministry and the Advance code number on the check, the name of the ministry is the Lawra Methodist Orphanage & HIV and the advance code is 120001. Send your check to:
Advance GCFA
P.O. Box 9068, GPO
New York, NY 10087-9068
If you don’t know what to give someone this Christmas, consider sending a donation in their name to my project.

Kobine festival

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:53:02 GMT

Sorry it has been so long since I have written. Lots of traveling lately has made me busy while at site. So in the beginning of October we had our annual festival in Lawra called Kobine, which is a harvest festival. I found this description of the festival:

Every year around October, the Kobine (pronounced "Kó-bin-ah") festival is celebrated in Lawra, Ghana. It serves as both a harvest celebration and as a homecoming for people who have left Lawra. People come to Lawra from as far away as Accra (capital of Ghana) or Ouagadougou (capital of Burkina Faso) to join in the festival. The Kobine festival lasts four days. The second and third days are the official festival days. The festival begins with the procession of the traditional chiefs. Each festival participant is clothed with their most beautiful smocks while walking under huge parasols. The procession is led to the festival ground by a group of men portraying elephant "hunters". The "hunters" are dressed in traditional hunting atire, including bows and arrows, and "hunt" a small group of "elephants". These "elephants" are another small group of men holding huge, dried elephant ears, which are waved back and forth. These "hunters" and "elephants" are accompanied by a large group of musicians and drummers from the Lawra Chief's (Lawra Naa's) palace. An incredible amount of people watch the performance which starts at the Lawra Naa's palace and continues to the festival grounds. There's lots of dust and excitement in the air and lots of drumming and dancing.

Unfortunately I still don’t have my photos up on the net but you can check out my friends photos who are British volunteers, they got some good pictures:

http://horrocksfamily.net/Kobine%20October%202007/index.htm

There were 7 Peace Corps volunteers in the area who traveled to witness the festival with me, we had a good time enjoying the drumming and dancing and pito (a sour local brew made out of sorghum).

After Kobine I had to travel for a meeting in Kumasi (the second biggest city in Ghana), I am the regional HIV/AIDS representative for the Upper West and we have 3 national meetings a year to discuss all the HIV work going on in Peace Corps, it is inspiring to hear what kinds of work people are doing across the country. A couple weeks later I traveled to the capital for my mid service medical examination and was declared officially healthy.

Now I am in Tamale, the biggest city in the North to join other volunteers for Thanksgiving. I am cooking dinner with 15 other volunteers and we will have some of the standards like mashed potatos and even a turkey!

I have to go for now but will try and write an update of what has been happening at my project soon. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Elephants, Warthogs, and Baboons, Oh my!

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:59:21 GMT

September 22, 2007

So my birthday was on the 8th of September and I got a ride with some European volunteers in my town to Mole National Park. We had a very relaxing weekend and got to see monkeys, warthogs, cob, baboons, impala, antelopes, lots of birds, and my favorite, the elephants. There are lions and hyena in the park, but they are not accessible. I guess they say you don’t get to see as many animals as you would on an Eastern African safari, but you get a lot closer to them in Mole (pronounced like the Spanish chocolate sauce). I was only about 200 meters away from the elephant and the rest of the animals except the antelope hang out right around the lodge. It was one of those “oh yeah, that’s right, I live in Africa” moments for me.

Today is my official one year anniversary in Ghana. It has definitely not been easy, from the extreme heat to the cold rain to the onslaught of bugs in the rainy season. The malaria medication has its drawbacks too. It really does give you some bizarre dreams sometimes. I woke up this morning straight from a very vivid dream about looking for cottage cheese and sour cream in the supermarket today :) Mmmm…I miss non-milk dairy products. Anyway I really give a lot of credit to those who live in Africa long term and work here for many years at a time.

My project work is continuing well. I helped the association to get a grant from the National AIDS STI Control Program in Ghana for the women to learn how to weave traditional cloth. I was happy to help them fill the very basic grant application because the PLWHA have established their own bank account and are managing the money themselves aside from my non-profit organization. It has been empowering for them to be managing their own affairs. I have been trying to encourage them to be as self sufficient as possible. Funding for the NGO is difficult to sustain so I think my sustainable contribution is empowering them to do things for themselves.

I have concluded after being here for a year that that is the best development all around—responsible, non-corrupt Africans designing projects for themselves with technical and financial assistance from the government and NGOs with proper monitoring systems to periodically make sure the project is on track. I have seen many donor programs fail because the people involved in the program are corrupt or unmotivated because they did not have a voice in the design of the program and therefore have no stake in it. I have seen other programs fail because no one is there to monitor the project, a problem arises that the community cannot solve, and they don’t tell anyone for fear they will lose their funding or are too embarrassed to admit they can’t fix the problem themselves and the project fails. But if the proper elements are in place, I have seen a definite improvement in people’s lives from the development work here.

Sorry I will get off my development soap box now, it is just hard when you see so many preventable mistakes around you all the time. Two weeks from now we are having our big annual festival called Kobine in the town of Lawra. Supposedly it is the one time every year when this place is hopping, we will see what that means for this sleepy town. There will be 2 days of drumming and dancing, I am getting excited. I hope all is well for you all in your corner of the globe.

The Tolerance of Islam

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:55:39 GMT

To celebrate Ramadan, I have done some reading on Islam in a book called The History of God by Karen Armstrong. The book is often tediously academic but has a lot of good information. I wanted to share a bit of what I learned since I think like many Americans I don’t really understand anything at all about Islam. I understand a little now, but it is still not enough. I think what differentiates the teachings of Muhammad from the teachings from other religions is that he did not think or insist that Islam was the one truth faith for everyone. Armstrong points out at the time of Muhammad people believed “Because there was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from him alone. Belief in the supreme and sole Reality would be culturally conditioned and would be expressed by different societies in different ways, but the focus of all true worship must have been inspired by and directed toward the being whom the Arabs had always called al-Lah.” Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to convert to his religion unless they wanted to, since they had received their own teachings. I was surprised because of the reputation of fundamentalist Muslims today being intolerant and not accepting of people from other faiths.

One of the most famous masters of the Sufi tradition named Rumi made it explicitly clear that everyone has their own path to the divine. The Sufis believed everyone’s experience of God was personal and different and, therefore, everyone had their own path. Rumi speaks through God in the following passage:
“Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It’s all praise, and it’s all right.

It’s not I that’s glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshippers! I don’t hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be Friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression.”

So out of respect for this extremely important and sacred month for so many Ghanaians in the North I have taken the time to learn about Islam and was surprised by what I found. I think sadly the sometimes impression of Islam is fanatical, intolerant, and dangerous is from men who are committing terrible acts in the name of al-Lah and his prophet Muhammed, while simultaneously directly contracting their teachings. Of course the same thing is happening in Christianity through preachers in the West using Jesus’ words to preach hate and intolerance. The problem is the fanaticism itself. That is one reason why I think it is so, so important to travel in your life and learn first hand about other people’s beliefs and world views. It increases your tolerance and decreases the egotistical assertion that we are taught in America that “our way is the best and only way,” which is dangerous and destructive regardless of whether you are talking about a religion like Christianity or Islam or a political system like capitalistic democracy.

Thanks and Project Update

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:33:22 GMT

It has been good to be back. I noticed I have been very grateful since I got back from the UK, especially to many of you. I was reading Paul Farmer’s biography called Mountains Beyond Mountains. There was a line in there about the different people who have supported him throughout his career, about lives of service being based on lives of support. I was just thinking about how my life is better because of the support of so many of you on this list. I recently got new music from my friend Jeremy in England and David in Brazil and have been getting lots of work done with the inspiration of new tunes. I thought about how happy I am that I have the camera that Sara gave to me, or how my meals are so much tastier because Julie shared her spices with me before I left. About how I am so much more comfortable because Anthony helped me to get comfortable clothes that I wear all the time. About how I had one of my favorite meals I made in Ghana so far (mmm chicken n black bean soft tacos) I made with the taco sauce Sharif and Catherine sent me and the beans and tortillas that my mama and grandma sent me. I am just very thankful because on a daily basis these are the little things that offset the discomforts of living in West Africa and keep me connected to all of you. I know I am digressing but I did want to say thanks not only to those mentioned but everybody who helped me out before I left and since I have been here.

The project has been doing well since I got back. We finally heard from Ghana AIDS commission and we did get a grant, but it was 30% of what we asked for. The program is “managing” as they like to say in Ghana. When you ask how people they are, they always say “oh, we are managing.” Which usually means persevering with very little resources. That is a good way to describe our project. We are ambitious in the range of services we would like to provide. We have 2 new clinic attendants who were trained as nurses and have begun working in our new functioning out-patient clinic. We are providing services not only for our HIV+ clients, but to people in the community who don’t have money to go to the hospital. Our services for our HIV+ clients are expanding as well, we now have 25 people, over half of our association, on antiretroviral drugs. We are supporting the HIV affected orphans with education and healthcare. And also we are still supporting mothers with malnourished babies and children.

Our self support projects have been expanding as well, which has helped us to sustain our growing services. We grow this plant called Moringa Oleifera, which seems to be sort of a growing craze in Africa now. It is really good for people who are malnourished and have little money to have a varied and balanced diet. We have been giving it to our PLWHAs and it helps to keep them healthy. It supposedly has all kinds of medicinal uses and certainly helps people out a lot, but there haven’t been enough scientific studies done on it to see what it most effectively used for treating. Anyway, we have been growing and processing Moringa to sell and this part of our project has taken off due to the popularity of Moringa now. Also we have a soya milk processing machine so we have been making soya milk for sale as well.

So that is all for now, I hope things are going well for you in your corner of the globe.

The Daily Grind

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:29:07 GMT

One of my friends in the UK said he found the daily details of my life interesting, so in the tradition of Seinfeld, I have decided to describe a bit about my daily life in hopes it will be interesting to you. I wanted to describe a somehow typical day. So when I get up, usually the first thing I do is check to see if the water is on. I have a tap outside and the water flows through it 2-3 times a week. So when it comes I fill up my bucket in my concrete outdoor sink and transfer it to the 2 barrels in my kitchen. I go back and forth with the bucket for as many trips as it takes to fill my barrels. Once the water is sorted, I take water from my water filter and make coffee and start my breakfast. My friend Jenell recently remarked that when she returns to the States she will miss “every morning being a Sunday morning.” My mornings are the most relaxed part of the day. When I finish my breakfast I do my dishes using 2 plastic basins outside near my sink, one for washing and one for rinsing.

After the dishes, I bathe using the “bucket bath” method. I have a large bucket with clean water and then a smaller plastic bucket that I use to dip into the clean water and pour over myself. I stand in a large plastic bin to catch the soapy water. When I finish I pour the water into my toilet. So the actual amount of I use each week is not so much, since much of it is recycled.

After my morning routine I go to the clinic and see what there is to do. I spend time on the computer working usually and help with whatever is happening at the project that day. I usually at some point take my bike and go into town. I check my mail and get fresh bread and stock up on items at the store. I try to go after the heat of the day. If it is market day I will go to the market to get whatever food is in season (now it is tomatoes, yams, okra, and onions). I will often stop by the hospital and greet my friends there. Greeting is a really important part of daily life here. Taking time to say hello to people and inquire about their work, their family, and their health is important, even if you just saw them the day before.

When I come back the kids (from the orphanage) are out of school and will often come over to my house to play. If I have a lot of work to do I will tell them to go away, but if I don’t I take time to play with them. Sometimes I put on music and we have a dance party, other times we just run around and laugh. I finish work around 5 and start dinner. After cooking and cleaning up, I either do 3 things: read by myself and listen to music, go have a beer at the outdoor bar behind my house with my friend Helen who is an English volunteer and play scrabble or card games, or go see my friend Val at the hospital and hang out with his friends and chat or watch DVDs. I have electricity most of the time but they do rolling blackouts every 4 nights and every 4 days for 12 hours. So basically every 2 days the lights (and fan) get shut off for 12 hours during the day or night, depending on the schedule. So that is a snapshot of my daily life, it may not be too glamorous, but I really am lucky. A lot of volunteers don’t have electricity or cell phone service, or have to get in a crowded tro tro and travel to a town where there is a decent market. I may not be as hard core as them, but I am okay with that :)

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 17:42:00 GMT

So I know it has been way way too long since I have posted any entries. The reason is that I spent the last month in the UK. I just arrived on Wednesday and I will return to my site in Lawra tomorrow. I thoroughly enjoyed the month I spent abroad. It was nice to enjoy the amenities of the first world including good food and wine, the theatre, hot water, and electricity all day, every day. I got to visit the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where I will be applying for my Masters of Science in Public Health, specifically the Public Health in Developing countries program for the fall of 2008. I really liked the sound of the program and hope I will be accepted into it when I apply in September. After being scheduled to return to Ghana on July 3rd I ended up being delayed an extra 8 days in the UK due to a suspicious package at Heathrow airport. It was nice to have the extra time and even nicer because by the end of that last week I was really ready to come back to Ghana. After 12 hours of craziness at Heathrow I also realized that transportation can be a nightmare in the first world as well (no one knows what really happened except that 9000 people got their flights delayed).

During my time in London I stayed with friends of mine who were incredibly generous with their hospitality. Inevitably in listening to the stories of my life here, both the good and the bad, they asked if I really wanted to be here for another year. The realization that I came to at the end of my time there and since I have been back is that despite the challenges, of which there are many, I really love it here. Life is not easy here at all. For example, when I got back into the country late at night even though I had called that day for a reservation the room wasn’t available. It seems like no amount of advanced planning helps here sometimes. But moving around Accra and taking care of my business before coming back North made me realize all of the things I love about living here. The people in this country are AMAZING. I continue to be inspired by their strength and resilience and seemingly bottomless capacity for humor in the face of adversity. Ghanaians know they have it hard here. One of the favorite lines I hear all the time from people is “you see how we suffer.” Sometimes it is serious, sometimes it is a said as a joke with a glint in their eye. There are bad people here as there are everywhere, but the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians are friendly, open people who love to laugh. I love the fact that when you get on public transportation you greet the person next to you and ask them how they are. I can see why this country has the reputation as being the friendliest country in West Africa.

Another conclusion that I came to is humans can adapt to any environment and I also am adapting. I am in Tamale at the moment, writing this at the Peace Corps sub office which has been newly connected to the internet (thanks to our new Country Director Bob, he does seem to be willing to make changes sometimes when we ask for them which is awesome.) I went this morning to get my bus ticket to the Upper West tomorrow and to the market to buy some veggies for dinner. The station and market are seriously hectic places which would have once been intimidating to me but are now routine. I discovered the secret that if I moved through society like I used to in Jamaica, I have a lot less people calling me “obruni,” their name for white person, just like less and less people called me “whitey” the longer I lived in Jamaica. Basically I just act like I know what I am doing and where I am going and use hand signals to respond to people rather than always verbally responding to every person trying to get my attention. I remain detached (not to be confused with aloof which I know comes off as snobby) and act like even the strange or confusing is routine and have fewer problems with harassment for money. Also speaking to people in Ghanainglish (Ghanaian English) really helps just like speaking to people in Patwa in Jamaica helped.

The final conclusion that I came to is that I like my life here. I had a great time being in London, but after just seeing friends and grad school and not even doing much site seeing I was exhausted after 3 weeks and felt like I had been running the whole time. I have often enjoyed the fast pace of cities and thrive on the diversity of people and things to do. But right now at this point in my life I have enjoyed slowing down and simplifying. I like having time to read and to cook and time to interact with people on more than a superficial, “I have somewhere to get to after this” level. I have had time to work on personal development, as I always do when I travel. I know I will go back to the urban pace of life next year, but in the meantime I am enjoying what I am doing now. I am really looking forward to going back and seeing where the project is at. I am eager to see if we have heard anything about our grant application from Ghana AIDS Commission and see how the PLWHAs are doing. I am also looking forward to seeing the orphans again, somehow I managed to actually miss their screaming “Nansaal pog! Nansaal pog!” translation: “White lady! White lady!” Besides, after about 50 attempts I think they are finally learning my name. “N youri ba Nansaal pog. N youri la Shista Liz.” Translation: “My name is not white lady, my name is Sister Liz.” :)

So anyway I will let yall get back to your respective days. I know that I will have a lot of ups and downs the next 13 months, but I am feeling reenergized for my work and ready to face things as they come. I will try to send an update of how the project is doing in a few weeks after I get back into the swing of things. In the meantime I hope all is well in your corner of the world. By the way, as you may have guessed my friends were unable to hold the benefit that they wanted to in San Francisco in mid June. The reason is that they could not find an outdoor venue like they wanted. If you know of a good outdoor venue, please contact my friend Freida at freida2020@yahoo.com. They are looking to reschedule toward the end of the summer.

In service training, slave castles, and cultural differences

Fri, 18 May 2007 10:28:19 GMT

I hope all is well in your corner of the world. Things have been good here in Lawra. I recently returned from being in the south of the country for two and a half weeks. I went to the town of Takoradi on the coast for "in service training" for the Peace Corps. Once you have been at your site for a few months, they bring everyone in your sector back together and give you additional training (in my case my sector is Health and Water/Sanitation). It was a chance to learn some new skills and reconnect with volunteers who are in parts of the country so far from me that I never see them. After the training I had a few days of rest n relaxation on the first clean beach I had seen in Ghana. Being a Peace Corps volunteer often feels like you are working 24/7, even when you have a day off. Those few days were the first days I felt like I had off since I came here. I am now feeling re-energized and ready to continue he work I have been doing.

After the few days on the beach I went to visit the old slave castle at Cape Coast where they held the slaves they were importing and exporting, which was naturally a sobering experience. One of the craziest things I learned there was that the English had an Anglican chapel as part of the castle that was directly on top of the slave chambers. It is hard to imagine people worshipping God with 150 people packed into a small room suffering below. If you were a seditious slave they packed you with 60 other people into a one-room confinement with no windows. They would leave them there to starve until they die. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t remove a person if he or she died and would wait until all 60 had died before coming in to remove the bodies and fill the room with the next crew of “troublemakers.” Bizarrely there is now a Ghanaian Anglican church directly across from the slave castle. It was strange to see people filing into the church knowing the church was started in the slave castle across the street.

After the slave castle I went to Kumasi for 2 days for another training. This training was to be a part of the Peer Support and Diversity network that essentially provides peer counseling for volunteers. I learned some good counseling skills and once again got to reconnect with some volunteers I had not seen in some time. Once the weekend was finished I returned to Lawra ready to get back to work.

One of the differences I have found between the culture here in Ghana and back home is the difference in the emphasis on convenience. Because we are so focused in the West on things being convenient, this translates into our interpersonal relations. I was very conscious of not doing things in the States to inconvenience people. This is one of the ways I have seen myself change over the course of my time here. People in Ghana are incredibly friendly and helpful. It is particularly acceptable when asking someone for directions to say, “I don’t know this place very well, can you show me?” For example, when I arrived into Kumasi for the Peer Support and Diversity training I needed to get to the suboffice, which is inconveniently located a 10 –15 min drive outside of town. I knew I had to get to a place called Roman Hill to get public transportation there, but had no idea where it was. Kumasi is the second biggest city in Ghana and is a big place. I asked a man how to get there who was in the middle of a conversation and he said, “one moment I will show you.” I apologized for interrupting his conversation and he quickly finished talking with the other man. He then walked 20 minutes with me snaking through the city to my destination. Once we got there, he asked someone for the appropriate minibus and got me exactly where I needed to be. At that moment I was struck in the difference in African and Western culture. Could you imagine interrupting a conversation on a sidewalk and saying, “I need to get to this place but I don’t know the city. Will you drive 20 minutes out of your way so I can follow you to where I need to go?”

That is one thing about Ghanaian culture that I really admire. People are constantly helping each other out. At first I had a hard time finding certain things in the market. Then I realized I just ask a young boy or girl (referred to as small boy or small girl) to show me. Small boys and girls, referred together as “smalls” do a lot of chores around the house and are often sent to run errands for the household. I think it is the fact that smalls are raised to always be helping out around the house that translates later in life to always helping out other people.

I am back at work in Lawra now. I hope everyone is enjoying spring over there, the rains have started to come occasionally to alleviate the heat. Thanks to everybody who sent packages, you are my heroes and sheroes!

My Perceptions on Western Perceptions of Africa

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:53:20 GMT

Hello all i hope all is well for you. Things have been good here at the project, busy as always. This week we had a quarterly partners meeting with our sole donor, Action Aid. When they came to visit us last month we learned that they were withdrawing two thirds of their funding from the project. We were not surprised because we have been working with them for about 4 years now and NGOs (non-profits) typically like to support any one given project for an average of 3-5 years. I have found it to be the nature of funding from NGOs worldwide. So the last few months we have scaled back our activities while we wait to see if we are going to be funded by Ghana AIDS commission. The partners meeting was informative. I always enjoy hearing about all the great programs that local NGOs come up with. There was recently a new Domestic Violence bill passed in Ghana so there are a lot of activities going on right now about educating women on their rights. Women's rights is really starting to take off in this country, it is encouraging how many activities and how much dialogue is happening around the issue.

Anyway, I wanted to address some of the perceptions that I have found to be common in the Western world about Africa. Africa is hardly mentioned in the "world news" of major American networks at all, and when it is, it is almost always negative. There are a lot of misperceptions about Africa and as an American living here, I though I would address them in an effort to dispel some myths.

Perception #1 : People are starving everywhere
Okay I work with a malnutrition centre so I can say there are many malnourished people here. But actually Ghanaians eat a lot, the portions are huge in this country. It is just that the diet is so high in carbohydrates that sometimes people are full, but not getting enough protien and vegetables that they need. But I think it is more accurate to say "people are overeating everywhere."

Perception #2: Africans are lazy
This is perhaps the most laughable misperception of all. Ghanaians typically work 6 days a week for an average of $2 US a day. I would like to meet the American who would work so hard for so little money, because I don't think he or she exists. Our clinic attendant/malnutrition centre employee/orphan take care of-er/cleaning woman/general saint Madam Gyovaa comes to work at 6 or 7 am and is supposed to go home around 2 but usually stays until at least 5 pm and makes less than $.75 a day. That is of course when we are paying her, which we haven't for the last 2 months because of our loss of funding. Ghanaians are seriously hard and dedicated workers.

Perception #3: Corruption is rampant in Africa
This is the one negative perception that seems to ring very true. Corruption is rampant in all levfels of government and society as far as I can tell. It is not that every politician is corrupt, but enough of them are that it seriously affects the quality of life of people in society. Just being here a short time I think there are 2 main reasons that I can see why Africa's development has not been as effective as it could be: 1. is corruption. I am sure so much of the debt money that countries now owe is sitting in the foreign bank accounts of its leaders. 2. is lack of production facilities. If Ghana could produce certain products instead of raw materials, then they would pofit much more from their natural resources. A perfect example is shea butter. They have a lot of shea here, especially in the North, which is the poorest part of the country. If they had a processing plant here they could make mass quantities of high quality butter for export. As it is, they just have a local market for the butter which doesn't produce high profits and export the rest of the shea raw which is worth a lot less. Sorry I am digressing. Anyway, corruption seems to me a major problem from the local the national level.

Perception #4: Everyone is poor
This is just as ridiculous as the peception in Ghana that all Americans are rich. Poverty is a huge problem here, especially in the North. But as it every society, there are the haves and the have-nots. Your middle class Ghanaian man is probably relatively better off than your middle class American man in terms of providing for their family by the standards of their society. I am talking relative here, don't think I mean most middle class Ghanaians have washing machines, computers, and ipods :)

Perception #5 Africa is dangerous
This one is not so easily agreed or disagreed with. I think it is a lot less dangerous than people think. Ghana in particular is not plagued by the tribal conflict and coups that other countries experience. One viewpoint I have heard is that Ghana doesn't have problems with tribal conflict because of its high school system. High schools, or secondary schools as they are called here, are boarding schools. So because at a very young age Ghanaians have to live with and tolerate people from different tribes, they don't have major tribal conflict. I know my own experience of living with people from different backgrounds in high school made me tolerant and influenced my interest in other cultures at a young age so I can relate.
However, I don't go out alone at night in Africa, this is because of the misperception by Ghanaians that all Westerners have a lot of money and walk around with fists full of dollars all the time. So in that sense I felt safer living in San Francisco.

Anyway my time on the internet is almost up, I am leaving and going back to Lawra this morning. Thanks to Freida for organizing a benefit, the help is definitely appreciated. Saturday, June 16th is the date of the event. I will send out details beforehand of how people can support us that are unable to attend the benefit. Take care all and have a good weekend.

Celebration of Ghana’s 50th Anniversary of Independence

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:07:45 GMT

So a friend of mine here wrote to me, “The interesting thing about being here is that every image I’ve ever seen of Africa-the babies starving, the vast savannah, the great, the beautiful, the putrid, and the horrible-it’s all true, just all at once.” It seems an apropos theme for this entry, which is really about triumph and tragedy both. A month ago I left for Accra and went down there for two reasons, to submit our proposal to Ghana AIDS commission, and to celebrate the 6th of March, which marked the 50th year anniversary of independence from England. It was the first country that was under colonial rule to achieve independence, and thus it was also a kick off celebration for all of the other African countries achieving independence as well. Many of the other heads of state in Africa were in Ghana to celebrate. The celebration itself was impressive and inspiring. There was a Carnaval type atmosphere in the streets with celebrations all over the capital. There were many brass bands marching the streets with dancers following. There were mobile parties with sound systems on flat beds. And of course there were street parties in many neighborhoods. I went to Independence Square to witness the mayhem but didn’t actually get to see the parade. I would have had to get up at 5 am to get a seat and wasn’t willing to make that commitment. But I had a good time getting there on African time and being on the periphery and people watching. There were people in red, gold and green everywhere. Ladies with their hair dyed 3 colors, babies with doorags of the flag on their head, and lots of people with traditional outfits made out of local cloth emblazoned with the 50th anniversary logo. There was African pride everywhere, and I was proud to be in Ghana that day. It was good to realize despite the challenges that Ghana has faced making its own way apart from colonial rule, they have managed to survive and thrive. It made me realize how misunderstood Africa is, especially in America. People are constantly fed negative images and only the problems are reported on, none of the positive. I doubt the celebration here was even covered in the American media, despite its importance to the 50+ countries of Africa.

At the same time when I got back to Lawra I had a reminder that even though Ghana has come a long way, it still has a ways to go. We had our monthly meeting of our PLWHA meeting, which they recently renamed “Lantaa Songtaa Association” which in my local language Dagaare means “come together and help one another” on the third Saturday in March. I entered the meeting and they were just starting, conducting a special prayer for Parmanance, our 5 year old in the group. He looked terrible, like the images you have seen of the children with AIDS in the hospitals who have wasted away to almost nothing. I had not seen him since December, when they took a trip 5 hours away to Bolgatanga for antiretroviral therapy (ART). I had heard he was in the hospital at one point, but had no idea his condition had become so dire. I learned that day from his Aunt who is his caretaker that when he went to start the drug in Bolga they informed him that since the town closer to us Wa was beginning to offer ART that he should start on the drug there since they would monitor his condition. This was despite the fact that they did a CD4 count test in Bolga and found out that is CD4 count was 5, which basically means it was as low as it gets. But when I saw him in December he was still healthy, though a bit thin. I knew that we had sent him for ART in Wa, but what I didn’t realize is that they couldn’t give him ART because they didn’t yet have the children’s formulation. We took him every week but they kept saying next week, next week it is coming. So unfortunately Parmanance passed away 2 days later. I don’t know if they have received the children’s formulation yet in Wa. These are the times when it is hardest to work here. It is fine to be on GMT (Ghana Maybe Time as a British volunteer I know dubbed it) when I realize I am going to have to wait 2 or 3 hours for my van to leave. I always carry a book with me because I know that may be the case. It is harder to deal with GMT when it comes to people’s lives. I was inspired at the meeting though of how positive people were. We all knew the inevitable would happen and I am sure it made more than one PLWHA at the meeting aware of their own mortality, but they carried on with dignity and even joy, singing songs and keeping the meeting positive as always.

Despite the sadness at his passing, we are continuing to carry on doing our work. Things have been busy as usual at work, unfortunately things don’t slow down just because we are in the heart of the hot season. I am doing my best with the heat, it is only trying to get a good night’s sleep that is challenging when it is in the 90s at night. I don’t actually know what the temperature has been, nor do I really want to know. It has been so hot that I have started putting my bath water in the refrigerator so I can take a cold bath. My water heats to luke warm temperature sitting inside my kitchen in my barrels. On nights where it is lights out and there is no electricity (and therefore no fans) I have been wetting my sarong and putting it over myself so I can sleep. I wake up later when it dries completely and then wet it again and go back to sleep. Many, many thanks to those who have sent packages. It has been good not to have to cook as much, I appreciate it. I hope all is well for each and all of you and spring is treating you well in the States.

sorry it has been so long...

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 16:44:38 GMT

...since I posted. The internet cafe was shut down for a few weeks by the IRS of Ghana because they owed them a bunch of taxes. Anyway, I wrote this entry on Valentine's Day, I hope all is well in your corner of the world.

14 February 2007

I have to apologize for not posting for so long. The only accessible internet went down for a few weeks so unfortunately I was out of luck for awhile. So things are good in Lawra, we have been really busy at our NGO (non profit organization). The Harmattan, or the windy season, has gone and the hot season has come. They say it has come early this year and it promises to be one of the hottest years on record. We have already had a couple days where it was 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Thankfully I have a fan in my bedroom and one in my kitchen, it makes the heat much more tolerable. But every 5 days they turn off the electricity from 6 pm to 6 am to conserve energy, and that is when the heat is the hardest. They say they have a lot of funerals in the host season, because it is too hot to sleep at night anyway. I guess I should explain that statement since it wouldn't make sense from an American context.

So people in Ghana often have 2 funerals, one when they first die and then a second sometimes a year or more later. The reason why the second one happens so long after they die is that it is a big party and often the family has to save for a very long time to be able to afford it. Many of the funerals I saw, especially in the South, have sound systems and often t-shirts made for them and everything. Funerals are community events and important social functions. You may not know someone very well but you would still be expected to go to his or her funeral. Not going would be an insult to his or her family. The funerals here in the North are a bit different. The first and sometimes only one (if the person is wealthy enough and doesn't need to raise money they only have one) has xylophones and drums that play and the corpse is suspended in a chair above the crowd. It is covered on 3 sides with cloth and open in the front. People throw coins at the base of the platform that holds the chair and also at the xylophone player and drummers. The funerals last for 3 days, the first day is a lot of moaning and wailing and usually what you would see at American funerals. Then the second day is the big party day and the drumming and dancing goes on all night long. I was telling my mother how strange it is to tell someone "oh enjoy yourself!" when they are going to a funeral, but it is a big celebration and one of the main sources of entertainment here. So during the hot season people hold their second funerals because people have a hard time sleeping because of the heat so they might as well party. :)

So my work has been going well, we have been very busy. I have finished all the end of year reporting and we had our quarterly planning meeting with Action Aid International, the NGO that supports all our activities. We submitted our budget for the first quarter and are anxiously waiting to find out which programs they will continue to fund. In the meantime, it has been a challenge to maintain our activities with no money. It is almost half way through the first quarter and we didn't have any funding left over from last year to carry us through. So unfortunately we haven't been able to sponsor our regular trips for our clients to go for antiretroviral therapy. We also have a couple of new clients who desperately need to go on ART so we are in the process of trying to secure some emergency funding from our NGO so that they can go. Right now we are currently providing care and support for 35 HIV + Ghanaians. I have been discovering the rewards of direct service and the challenges of working in a developing country. It has been much busier than I expected, I have just now finally caught up from the gap when the last volunteer left and I came. It has dawned on me over the weeks that unlike most Peace Corps Volunteers who do general and varied work with a community, I have an actual jobby job with deadlines and everything. I had 12 things on my to do list last week. Even though I had that many things on my list in one day of previous jobs it is a whole new ballgame working within "Africa time." Incidentally another consequence of the importance of funerals is a lack of control over my workflow. If something needs to get done right now, or now now as they say here, a funeral may come along and delay it for a few days anyway. And since they happen quite often, it can be problematic.

Now I am on my way to Tamale where I will participate in the quarterly meeting for the Methodist church and meet the Bishop of the Northern Diocese. Since we are a Methodist project, we need to participate in the meeting. When I return from the meeting I will be working on a proposal to the Ghana AIDS commission, the government agency that funds most of the People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) associations in the country. When I am finished with the proposal I will go to Accra in the beginning of March to present it to them. I will also be there to celebrate a huge event in Ghana the celebration on March 6 of the 50th year anniversary of Ghana's independence from Britain. Ghana was the first country to gain independence and this celebration will be the kick off one for all the independence celebrations on the continent. It will also be good to get out of the Upper West region where I live for part of the hot season. Evidently in March and April it gets up to 120 degrees. I am still trying to mentally prepare for it, it will take some time for me to adjust.

Speaking of which, it is going to be really difficult to cook over a stove when it is that hot and Ghanaian food takes a long time to cook. So if you have been contemplating sending me a care package at any point, now would be a great time J Below are some suggestions of mostly lightweight and quick things to prepare. Don't feel like you have o send me a big box of stuff. Even if you just got a few things and threw them in a bubble wrap padded envelope and sent them to me I would be really, really happy. In fact I have heard from other volunteers if you send under 4 lbs you can send it USPS Express Air Mail for slightly more than USPS regular Air Mail and it will get here in 2.5 - 3 weeks instead of the 4 - 5 weeks it takes for my family's packages to get here. They say it takes something like 6 - 8 days for the regular mail to get here but they lie J. It may take 6 - 8 days to get to Accra, but it may still take another month for the Ghana mail service to finally get it to my post office. Anyway, if you feel like sending me something you can send it to my address in Lawra. It is:
P O Box 44
Lawra, Upper West Region
Ghana, West Africa
I hope all is well for each and all of you in your corner of the world and you had a wonderful Valentines Day. My love to you from across the ocean!

Package possibilities:
Trader Joe's trail mix with m&ms
TJ's fruit leather
dried peaches, apricots, apples
dried black beans
Annie Chun's Udon microwavable bowl
Good ramen
Instant Pad Thai (Thai Kitchen is good I think)
dried soups
Fantastic Foods Creamy Potato Soup dried
other dried Fantastic Foods stuff
pasta sauce packets like alfredo, pesto, etc
Velveeta cheese
Peets or other vacuum sealed coffee
Reisen chocolate candy
flour tortillas (preferably resealable ones and with preservatives like El Paso brand)
salsa seasoning packet (Concord Foods hot salsa is good)
Chicken of the Sea brand pink salmon in a pouch
basically anything dried and asian or mexican flavored
DVDs of movies or TV shows
MP3 CDs (new music please!)

p.s. I think I gave some people the wrong impression in my last post. I do have limited internet access but feel free to email me anyway. Just please don't be offended if it takes me weeks to respond. I know it is considered rude in our culture if you take 2 months to respond to an email so I just wanted to make sure you all were aware of why it takes me so long. But please, by all means, keep writing me I love to get news from home.

happy new year

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 14:02:36 GMT

Happy holidays and a happy new year all! I hope you all had wonderful holidays. Many people have expressed curiosity about what I eat here, so I wanted to write part of this journal entry on the food. I have started cooking for myself nowthat I no longer have my homestay mother to cook for me. I get most of the good from the weekly market, which fortunately there is one in my town of Lawra so I don't have to travel to get to it. A lot of the Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) are in small villages with a limited local market and end up having to take public transportation back and forth to a market where they can get a variety of foods. Mostly in Ghana public transportation means these minivans they stuff a lot of people into, and many things on top of, including baggage, bicycles, and livestock, called tro tros. For longer distance trips they have buses, some of which even have a radio and/or TV that plays low budget Nigerian films.

The items in the market are seasonal, but right now I can get tomatoes, onions, green peppers, yams (not sweet potatoes the bigger tropical variety that taste more like potatoes), supposedly fresh pineapple although it is expensive, garlic, watermelon, sweet potatoes, these vegetables that taste like eggplant but are smaller called garden eggs, oranges, this leafy vegetable called kontomire that is like spinach, okra, bread, peanut butter, black eyed peas...that is all I can think of for now. The vegetables available in the North are fewer than in the South because the North is drier and only has one rainy season, and thus, one growing season. There are 2 rainy/growing seasons in the South. However, I will go to a bigger town called Wa twice a month to use the internet and I can pick up more things there like apples, carrots, cucumber, cabbage, plantains, kidney beans, potatoes, bananas, and cheese, among others. You can find more things because Wa is a decent sized town (100,000 people maybe??) and they import food from the South.

So as far as what I actually eat, I can get rice and pasta so I eat a lot of both. I can also get canned tuna so I eat a lot of tuna sandwiches for lunch. Breakfast I have an egg sandwich or pancakes, sometimes oatmeal. For dinner some of the Ghanaian dishes I have made so far are rice with peanut soup and goat meat and this rice dish called Jollaf rice, which reminds me a lot of Spanish rice. I also made a black eyed peas and tomato dish called Red Red that is served with fried sweet plaintains and is a local favorite. I have also of course made spaghetti in all its versatile forms :)

I eat out too, especially when I am traveling. Most anywhere you can get rice and sauce with some form of meat, usually goat or beef. I can also get goat or beef to cook with, you can get chicken too but they only sell it to you live so I would have to kill it and clean it myself, and I am not ready for that yet. (give me a year :) The staple in the South is called fufu, and it is my favorite Ghanaian dish. It, like so much in this country, somehow defies explanation. But it is chewy and filling and made out of yams, plantains, and cassava in the South and just plain yams in the North. You eat a ball of it with either peanut soup or a stew they call light soup and meat, usually chicken, beef, or goat. Also when I am traveling I have had Kenke, which kind of reminds me of polenta, but it tastes more sour than that.

Even though everything is on Africa time here, it is possible to get fast food. It is either in the form of kebab (meat on a stick), which is not my favorite, or chicken with fried rice and ketchup and mayonnaise. Admittedly it sounds gross, but is actually really tasty. They have stands in the bigger towns where you can go and get your chicken and rice to go and the chicken is usually really good. They call eating out here "chopping" and places where you can get local food "chop bars" or "chop stands." You can also get rice and beans, called Waachi, Red Red, and fried or boiled plantains with a spicy sauce at chop stands everywhere.

So I have been at my site a couple of weeks now and have started to get a sense of what my work here will look like. The overall gist of it is that it is going to be a challenge. Not an overwhelming one, but a challenge none the less. Basically there are 3 parts to the project--the malnutrition center, the small orphanage, and a small outpatient clinic for PLWHAs (People Living with HIV/AIDS) which holds the monthly meetings for the PLWHAs association. The malnutrition center includes a dormitory for malnourished women and thier children and also feeds people in their homes and in the hospital. The whole project is called the Methodist Health Integrated Project and is affiliated with the Methodist Church in Ghana. My house is on the edge of the project. Since I live there my commute is nonexistent, which I love. We also do a lot of work at the hospital, going to the antenatal and child welfare clinics to identify and treat malnourished women. At first I was kind of disappointed that my work didn't have to do more with HIV/AIDS until I sat down with my boss Marjorie and found out that most of the malnourshment cases are caused by, or go hand and hand with, HIV. The connection is that when their income level goes down because of the disease, they don't have enough money for food and they get malnourished. Also when we had the monthly PLWHAs meeting I noticed that most of the women living at the malnutrition center are HIV +.

We also do home based care for our malnourished and HIV+ clients. So essentially what we do is support and care for PLWHAs and secondarily some malnutrition work. Every week I will be doing growth monitoring for the children at the malnutrition center. I will also be going into the hospital to identify new HIV and malnourished cases at the weekly clinics they hold. I will be doing some home visitation to meet with clients in the surrounding communities. The other big part of my job is going to be finding funding. We have a little funding now. The Methodist Church kicks some money in but they don't bring in enough contributions from the congregation to do much. We get food for the malnutrition center from Catholic Relief Services. Then the funding from the monthly meetings and transportation and travel expenses for our clients to receive antiretroviral therapy comes from an NGO called Action Aid. The health project takes clients to the Upper East region for antiretroviral therapy. They have to drive 5 hours to a town where they can get a CD4 count test and start on the drug if the disease has progressed far enough. The problem is we don't have enough funding to cover our current expenses.

So that is going to be my own personal challenge to myself, to help them find funding. There are a few other NGOs (nonprofits) that work in the Upper West so I am going to start there. There is a national office that funds HIV/AIDS activities, called Ghana AIDS commission. I will be putting together a big grant proposal for them in February. I would like to help them not only get into the black, but to expand their activities. I have not really done too much grant work myself, but have always been interested in it so this is going to be good experience for me. Well that is it in terms of my work, I just wanted to give all of you an idea of what I am actually doing for work over the next couple of years.

I hope all is well for everyone in their corner of the world. By the way, please have patience with me in emailing you back if you write to me. I only have a couple of hours on the internet a month, and it usually takes at least an hour to update my blog. So please be patient if it takes me awhile to get back to you. Anyway, I wish you all a happy and properous New Year.

Until the next time,
Liz

Welcome to Liz's Adventures in the Peace Corps

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:27:58 GMT

I arrived in Ghana on September 23 with all of the other 47 trainees in my group. There are 3 different sectors of people who trained together: Environment, Small Enterprise Development, and Water and Sanitation/Health Education (Watsan for short). Even though I have a specialty in HIV/AIDS, it falls under the category of Watsan so in the last 10 weeks I have been learning a variety of different skills related to Water and Sanitation work, as well as skills relating to health education. I know more about how to get a community a borehole for safe water access and how to get a latrine project going than I ever thought I would. When I envisioned what I would be doing, it was different than what I am actually doing. But that is not a bad thing at all, I have always enjoyed learning random useful skills.

The last 10 weeks have been intense, we have had 50 – 60 hour work weeks and only 1 day off every 14 days. A typical day has been like this:
-get up at 6:30, greet my homestay parents, eat breakfast, get ready for school. We stayed with a homestay family for the 10 weeks we were in the Techiman area.
-7:30 walk across town, greeting 10 – 20 people as I go, saying “good morning, how are you, I am going to school, where are you going”, etc
-8:00 start language for 4 hours. I learned Dagaare, which is what they speak in the Upper West where I am going
-12:00 go back and review the language lesson and eat lunch
-1:30 to 5:00 technical training. Each week was a different theme like basic sanitation, HIV/AIDS, women’s health, or school health education. Our technical training including visiting NGOs on field trips, visiting local clinics, practicing taking a census and other techniques they teach us to integrate into our community, and teaching lessons on basic sanitation and HIV/AIDS in the local schools.
-5:00 come home and eat dinner and hang out with my homestay family
-6:30 practice language or work on projects for an hour and a half.
-8:00 relax a little bit before going to sleep, sometimes meet up with the other volunteers and hang out

We had three main projects during the 10 weeks. One was to plan 2 health education lessons to teach in the local Junior Secondary School (the Ghanaian equivalent of Junior High). The second project was a cultural one, we had to pick an aspect of Ghanaian culture that interested us and report to all the trainees. I did my project on the Black Stars, which is the Ghanaian World Cup team. The Africa Cup is happening in 2008 in Ghana which the Black Stars will be playing in. The final project we had to do is called SCOP, or the small community outreach project. By the way both the Peace Corps and Ghana in general are addicted to acronyms, I will try not to expose you to too many of them. For our project, we produced an education flyer for the community clinic on basic concepts on HIV/AIDS prevention and transmission.

For 3 days out of the week we had training within our sector with other Watsan volunteers only. There were about 15 Watsan volunteers total. Then for Thursday and Friday every week we had general training sessions with the other 47 volunteers on a wide variety of topics. We had a medical session every week, since they could talk to us for hours about the various fungi, diseases, water borne bacteria, and generally scary things we could contract during our 2 years here. Then we had more uplifting sessions on different aspects of Ghanaian culture and societal structure, which is complex, diverse, and fascinating. For example, something which is fairly standardized in the West like how 2 people go about getting married varies from village to village, tribe to tribe, and region to region. Finally we had a lot of general sessions on how to run groups, do interviews, and adapt to another culture. These last type of sessions were very tedious for me as I have a lot of work experience and have been traveling for years and know how to integrate into another culture. Overall, I am grateful that the Peace Corps taught me a lot about the language and culture, these are the things I most took away from training.

We also had 3 trips during our 10 week training period. The first was the second week we were in the country we had what the Peace Corps called a “vision quest” and shadowed a volunteer in the Volta region. The volunteer I was with did Guinea Worm eradication work and lived in a tiny village of a few hundred people. We split into groups with 2 or 3 people staying with each volunteer. This was good as it gave us a glimpse early on of what we were getting ourselves into. The second trip was a field trip to the Northern region to a volunteer who was also doing Guinea Worm eradication work. We had thus far been in the southern half of the country and it was good to get a perspective of what life is like in the North. The Southern half and the Northern half of the country are pretty distinctly different. The South is the more touristy and developed area and has a hotter and more humid climate. Therefore, it is has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that you get a better variety of food because there are 2 growing seasons a year and the roads are better. You can also find some things more easily since it is more developed. The disadvantage is that most foreigners around are tourists who are coming on vacation and have money, so they equate white people with being rich and expect you have money. The South is also predominantly Christian. The North is drier but hotter, so even though the temperature is higher, especially during the 2 months a year where it can get up to 120 degrees every day, it doesn’t feel as hot to me because it is not a wet heat. The food variety is less there, but the people are more calm in the North. And the traditional drumming and dancing culture is more preserved in the North because it has been less developed and, therefore, less modernized. The North is predominantly Muslim, although in both regions there are pockets of the opposite religion.

The final trip we took was to our site where we will be staying for the next 2 years. I will be working in Lawra in the Upper West region. Lawra is a large spread out village of 50,000 people. It is the district capital and the hospital and the local government offices, which is called the District Assembly, are located there. There are a lot of educated people in my village and many people in the town speak English. The other language spoken there is Dagaare, which I now have a basic understanding of. Unlike most of the Northern half of the country, Lawra is predominantly Christian. My assignment is with the Methodist Integrated Health Project, located in Lawra and affiliated with the Methodist Church. The project I am working with has 3 main components: there is a small orphanage, a live-in malnutrition center for severely malnourished children and their mothers, and a group of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). My job will be to assist the project with whatever they need. I will also be doing computer trainings for the hospital staff and other community members. I would like to do HIV/AIDS education in the schools whenever I can as well. I know about the different aspects of the project, but I won’t know until I get there what the specific type of work they want me to do. Also I will be spending the majority of my first few months just hanging out with different people and trying to get to know my community.

My house is nice. Sorry to disappoint those of you who envisioned me living in a mud hut, but I have a 2 bedroom self contained house with electricity. I do have running water that is piped into my house, but they only open up the pipes once a week, so I have 2 large water barrels that I will fill up once a week. I will take bucket baths and have a toilet that I will bucket flush. I have a small refrigerator and propane stove that I will cook on. I am very happy with my house, it is basic but nice and I think I will be comfortable there.

Overall, I have been really enjoying my time in Ghana and the time I have gotten to spend with the Ghanaian people. I have heard many people say it is the friendliest country in West Africa and I understand why. People on the whole are willing to help you out if you ask them. Also, Ghanaians love to laugh and have a great sense of humor. I have met many Ghanaians who are really focused on getting to the US and I consider it part of my work to help them understand what is wonderful about their country and why they should be happy to live here. Especially since the States doesn’t grant many visas to people from Ghana. Even though I have spent the majority of the last 10 weeks with mostly Americans, I have still picked up on some of the great things about Ghanaian people. One is definitely their extended family structure. Even though people have little money compared to the West, everyone is taken care of more or less under the extended family structure. After spending day after day seeing the mass of homeless people on the streets of San Francisco, this has been a welcome change. Also the world could learn a lot from Ghana about the coexistence of Islam and Christianity. There are some interfaith networks in the North, and some of the people who are involved are both Priests and Imams and are recognized as leaders in both the church and the mosque. There is not such a sharp divide between the 2 religions and intermarriage between Muslims and Christians is common.

Well I suppose I should close for now. Sorry this is so long, but it really is several entries compacted into one. I have finally got some extended time on the internet today. Thanks again to all of you who supported me in my quest to get here and through training. It is an interesting time for me, I am excited to get to site and started on my work. If you would like to write me a letter, here is my new address in Lawra:

Liz Gharst PCV
P.O. Box 44
Lawra, Upper West
Ghana
West Africa