Thanksgiving

Just sent the email below to all of you who have pledged or donated. Happy Thanksgiving!

Also, Kalila -- and all of us -- are famous! The Indianapolis Recorder wrote about her and our work for their lead article this week.

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Dear friends,

Yesterday, as I held a very rambunctious Kalila in my arms at the counter of the American embassy in Ghana to confirm her visa appointment for next week, I couldn't help but marvel at the network of amazing people around the world who have come together to save her life.

So on this day of all days, let me say: Thank you.

Thanks for being the kind of people who will stand between a mother halfway around the world and her worst fears.

Thanks for being the kind of people who believe that, while we may not be able to right every injustice or save every life, it's well worth making a difference where we can.

And last but certainly not least, thanks for your friendship. I'm truly honored and blessed to have you all in my life.

Nkrumah's dam

A few days ago Uncle Nasir and I went on a day trip to Akosombo, the site of one of the world's largest dams and THE largest artificial lake in the world.

If you compare the picture on Wikipedia to the picture to the right, you wouldn't know it was the same dam -- and the reason is because the huge whitewater shown in my picture is from the spillway gates, which were opened a few months ago for the first time in 19 years. Why? Because massive flooding upriver in Togo and Benin during the rainy season have raised the water levels so much. (I'm just speculating but can we guess that unusual/extreme weather patterns = climate change?)

The dam, on the mighty Volta River, was the signature economic development project of the Kwame Nkrumah government, and currently supplies over 60% of all electricity in Ghana as well as some that is sold to the countries where the river heads are: Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso.

Along with a tour of the dam, I managed to catch a ride around the dock with some local fishermen (second photo).

Kalila visa application

We got the letter from Boston Children's Hospital requesting a visa yesterday, and Genevieve has gone to great lengths through her State Dept contacts to secure a visa appointment for Kalila for next Thursday. So today Kalila and I went to the embassy today to confirm.

I was allowed in because I'm an American citizen, and I took Kalila in with me because really, who was going to stop me? I think that that half hour was the longest I've ever been solely responsible for a child under the age of 8, and I'm very pleased to say that we both came out of not only unscathed but actually quite entertained! The embassy officer I spoke with also seemed quite taken with her, which was really the main point of taking her in with me.

Oh, and I almost forgot the biggest news of the day: Kalila is now saying my full name, "Taren." I'm so proud.

The first photo is Kalila and Uncle Negro, my mom's old friend from graduate school in Australia over 30 years ago and Kalila's grandfather (who she calls "da"). The second (unrotated) is of Kalila and her Uncle Rafiq, who is her fundraising campaign manager here on the Ghanaian side of the ocean (she calls him "Fafiq"). Rafiq, Kalila, Faiza and I have spent a lot of quality time together in the car over the last few days running errands, from going to the embassy to getting passport photos, so we're best buds now :-)

The itinerary

In case you were wondering, especially given the delays around Kalila, my current plan is laid out below. If I have to stay here more than another, say, 5 days for Kalila, then I may need to revise the below fairly substantially.

Ghana

• Stick around Accra for a few days until everything is sorted for Kalila's surgery
• Head north to Wa in the Upper West region of Ghana with Uncle Negro and probably Nasir. That's where their family roots are. Visit the Hippo Sanctuary and take a mini-safari in the famous Mole game reserve, and then get dropped off at the border with Burkina Faso. (Estimated date now Sunday 11/28)

Burkina Faso/Mali

• Bus it through Burkina, probably with a day or two in the capital Ouagadougou, on the way to central Mali
• Do a few days of guided hiking through Mali's famous Dogon Country, a string of very close-together, very traditional villages set on a beautiful escarpment way the heck in the middle of nowhere.
• Try to make it to Djenne's world-renowned Monday market on the way to Bamako (estimated date now Monday 12/6)
• Spend a couple of days in Bamako with former DePauw student and current Fulbright scholar Alys Moore (http://alysinmali.blogspot.com/)

Senegal/the Gambia

• Take some combination of train and bus through Senegal to the Gambia to stay with my friend Ibraheem Ceesay, who I worked with at Copenhagen last year (estimated arrival now Sunday 12/12)

The Holiday Whirlwind

• Fly back to Accra on 12/18
• Fly home to DC on 12/20, get dress tailored for Portia's wedding
• Fly to Greencastle on 12/22 in time for our annual Christmas party the next day
• Fly back to DC on 12/27 for Portia's New Year's wedding!

Email feed set up!

If you're reading this it means that I've successfully set up the ability to post blogs just by sending an email. Pretty cool!

 

The picture is of three schoolkids who I gave 5 Ghana cedis (about $3.50) for their HIV education fundraising drive. Advertising about HIV/AIDS is very prevalent here, and mostly seems to follow the ABC (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms) model. Seemed like a good cause, and the kids were clearly very proud of their boldness to approach me to begin with and thrilled that I was donating.

Ghana's Most Beautiful

Faiza (Kalila's mom), Uncle Nasir, and I went on Sunday evening to the season finale of Ghana's Most Beautiful at the National Theatre. It's kind of a beauty pageant reality show with a big dose towards promoting discourse about the intersection of Ghanaian culture and economic development.

(The first picture shows Faiza with me wearing the beautiful African dress she had her seamstress make for me and which I wore to the show. Thanks, Faiza!)

The show started out I guess 4 weeks ago or so with one contestant from each of the country's 10 administrative regions (kind of like states). They lived together in a house and one was voted out by SMS voting each of the last few weeks. With 6 contestants still left, the finale was a ridiculously 3.5 hours long (we didn't get out until 1am, and then the car wouldn't start so it was a very late night...) One of my host family's many cousins was the contestant from the Upper North region, and wound up coming in 4th overall.

A few key observations:

• I very much appreciated the fact that the women did NOT seem to have to fit any particular strict definition of body proportions, height, etc.
• Winner of Most Bizarre award: Ghanaian male models escorting the competitors (exquisitely garbed in traditional-yet-modern dresses) in outfits consisting of cowboy boots, the loudest boxers you've ever seen, and grim-reaper-style hooded cloaks. I kid you not. The photo hardly does the image justice (especially because they don't have their hoods up), but hopefully you get the idea...
• The show's production was not very professional. I was especially unimpressed with the lighting, which was a constantly-shifting kaleidoscope of color. I wish I could have seen what it looked like on TV, but I can't imagine it was very good... The dancing, however, did at least make up in enthusiasm what it lacked in precise choreography!
• The integration of education about economic development (when was the last time you went to a beauty pageant where the contestants had to recite the UN's Millenium Development Goals?) was impressive.
• I also appreciated how very explicit and thoughtful the discourse about preserving Ghanaian culture was -- especially interesting was the clear consensus that some parts of Ghanaian culture should NOT be preserved because they hindered development and kept people in poverty, while other parts certainly should be preserved.
• Winner of the "American Cultural Exports Suck" award: An otherwise quite touching song about baby Jesus in which all the dancers were dressed in Santa outfits. I can't imagine a less climate-appropriate theme.

Anyway, the next time someone refers to "GHB," I expect you all to think of Ghana's Most Beautiful, not the date rape drug!

The Accra routine

Note: I wrote this post a couple of nights ago, and it's actually been much less accurate regarding the last few days, which have been almost entirely consumed with the Kalila Project.

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Some of you may be wondering things like why is Taren spending all her time in Accra
blogging instead of seeing the country? Or, has she gotten sick yet? Exactly how smelly is she at this point?

I'm so glad you asked!

Here's how a typical day in the life of Taren in Accra has gone:

6am - Wake up. Sun is already bright. Bathe with refreshingly cool water poured out of a bucket (the water is usually running in the morning, but the pressure upstairs is too low). Get dressed, probably in the same outfit as the day before -- the skirt you see in all the pictures and my brown button-down shirt.

6:45am - Eat a very Western breakfast of Weetabix (kind of like Shredded Wheat), soymilk & yogurt, and either banana or papaya, along with some juice.

7:15am - Apply sunscreen and bug spray. Perform some kind of morning chore like handwashing laundry or hardboiling some eggs.

7:45am - Perhaps head to the nearby internet cafe to spend some time online before things really open (the cafe is open 7am-11pm); otherwise get an early start on the day's adventures

8:30am-5:45pm-ish - see sights/do interesting things. Most days this is in the company of someone from my extended host family, particularly Abbas (the driver referenced in the "Two Ghanas" blog post) or Nasir (Uncle Negro's cousin on one side and uncle on the other side, if I remember correctly.) Nasir is known within the family as the "prof", and for good reason -- he is a font of useful knowledge, and always wants to learn about America too.

9:30ish - take anti-malarial. Can't eat between breakfast and one hour after taking this pill.

11am-2pm -- browse on some combination of bananas, hardboiled egg, nuts, and crackers/cookies for lunch.

5:45pm - sun sets, and my ability to do interesting things comes largely to a close. Often at this point I time it so that I've just arrived at the internet cafe (I can walk there on my own during daylight, but after dark Uncle Negro says it's not safe). Post blogs, write back to Kalila donors, etc.

7:30pm - call someone from my host family; they come to pick me up and I head home for the evening. Play with Kalila for a half hour or so til her mom returns from work to pick her up and take her home. Tell Uncle Negro about my day.

8:30pm - eat a dinner of rice and canned vegetables/beans. My host family has tried hard to persuade me to eat their absolutely delicious-smelling food, but I am too traumatized from prior bad experiences in developing countries and am having too much fun to contemplate wasting two full days sitting on the toilet.

9pm - get out iPhone and fancy bluetooth keyboard, and type up some blog posts to post the next day!

10pm - head towards the mosquito-proof travel tent I call bed. Lament how hot it is inside the tent, wonder if I'm being ridiculously over-cautious since I haven't seen a single mosquito inside the house yet, and eventually fall asleep.*

Repeat!

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* After I wrote this I decided that I was in fact being paranoid, and stopped using the tent. I've had much better nights' sleep since then at the grand cost of a single night-time mosquito bite. Well worth it unless of course I get malaria!

Still here, + guest blogger access re Kalila

We're on the verge (next few days, I hope) of getting Kalila's surgery entirely worked out -- but I feel that my presence here may be essential to some of the details like getting visas, so I've postponed my trip north until it's all settled or very close to it.

Therefore, I am still blogging :-)

Also, FYI, I've given my mother and dear friend Libby Klein access to this blog so that they can keep you all updated about Kalila while I'm out of touch.

How to donate for Kalila

Amazing: With all pledges so far, along with $5K from Rotary, we are almost at $30K for Kalila out of the $36K necessary. Clearly we are going to make it. The time has come to speedily gather all of your generous donations and be poised to write a check to the hospital and bring Kalila here. She is at risk every day -- and the sooner we get the money in the account, the sooner we can bring her here and save her life, so please send checks ASAP.

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HOW TO SEND DONATIONS: My mother set up a special account for Kalila at the Old National Bank in Greencastle, Indiana.*

You can send your pledge in one of two ways:

1) Paypal.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to select "personal" and then "gift", instead of "purchase", when you get to the bottom of the payment screen. Also, please pay with your bank account if you can, in order to avoid the service fee -- but no worries if you need to use credit card:

2) Make a check out to KALILA MAHAMA HEART FUND and mail it to my mother** at

Kelsey Kauffman
609 Ridge Ave.
Greencastle, IN 46135

We want to convey the enormous gratitude of Kalila’s family. They are amazed that so many of our friends (153 at last count!) would care enough about Kalila to try to save her life. Kalila’s mother sent a very touching email to my mother late Friday night sharing her fears and sense of guilt that the problem had not been diagnosed earlier (despite her having taken Kalila to doctors repeatedly over the past 14 months). "I am a basket [case] when I am alone," she wrote. "I have learned not to breakdown in public... but whenever I am alone with Kalila and especially while I watch her sleep, I can't help but cry." Kalila’s grandfather, ever the optimist, has invited all of you to Ghana so he can thank you personally after the surgery!

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*Reverend Bill Wieland (St. Andrews Episcopal Church) and accountant David Bray (Bray and Associates) have kindly agreed to be co-signers on the account with her. All checks written from the account will need to be signed by both Rev. Wieland and my mother.

**She will record it, send you a receipt (in most cases electronically) with a copy to David Bray, and take it to the bank where the bank will stamp it "for deposit only."

Things Ghana does NOT have

(at least, not much/surprisingly little of.)

Note: This post is more informative in conjunction with the "Things Ghana Has" post.

Postcards
Religious strife
Atheists
Jobs
Visible crime/violence
Local premium chocolate brands (despite the massive cocoa farming industry)
Consistent running water in residential areas
Daylight savings
Strong distinctions between nuclear and extended family
Precise usage of the words "cousin", "uncle", etc
Very many purely-European-blood descendants of the first few hundred years worth of colonists
(most of them didn't bring their wives here. The only other white people I've seen while in Ghana have fairly clearly been tourists/expats.)
Rainforest (the wide belt of previous rainforest has been largely deforested)
Beggars
Street dogs (compared to other developing countries I've been in)
Visible drug abuse
Housing (ie, there isn't nearly enough of it)
Recycling
Readily understandable English
Cold
Good public transportation
Good urban planning
Mosquitoes (at least, during the winter/dry season, which is what it is now)
Reliable use of gendered pronouns such as "he", "she", "his", "theirs", etc

This one's for you, Dad...

Two days ago Nasir and I visited the University of Ghana campus just outside Accra. Nasir studied political science there years ago, and much of the family has some kind of undergraduate or graduate degree from the university, which is one of the best in West Africa.

I bought a couple of books at the bookstore and sat in on a geography lecture, but the highlight was definitely non-academic: We were driving past a 2-on-2 pickup basketball game and I joked "maybe I should challenge them" or something like that. Nasir took me more seriously than I was taking myself, and it also turned out that one of the players was a relative (nephew?). So we stopped and, clearly completely bemused, one of the guys gave me his spot. In my skirt and Chaco sandals, and Sarah's nice blouse which I had borrowed to visit the courts, I proceeded to go 2-for-3 from the field (draining and 15- and 10-footer), talked a little trash, and then decided that was as good as it was going to get and I was also in real danger of injuring myself and ruining my trip, and gracefully exited.

(Nasir managed to take that photo of me playing defense. Also, in the interest of fair and balanced journalism, I should probably mention that I did get dunked on, and also that they clearly had mixed feelings about even attempting to put any kind of pressure on me when I was shooting. But still, for someone who hasn't shot a basketball in a couple of months and is playing in sandals, I felt pretty good about the whole thing.)

Near travel-tastrophe

This morning, as I was getting ready to leave the house to go to the travel agent and buy my ticket from the Gambia back to Ghana (on Dec 18), I realized that I didn't have my trusty Lonely Planet West Africa guidebook. I sorted and searched all my things several times, scoured the downstairs of the house, involved the whole family... and finally gave up. It was nowhere to be found, even though all agreed that I had been reading it in the living room last night and hadn't left the house since.

Disaster! There is simply no way I can make it, alone on public transportation, through 3 of the poorest countries on earth, where they barely speak a language that I also barely speak, without a good guidebook. And despite having already been to several of the best bookstores in Ghana (listed, ironically, in the guidebook), I hadn't seen hide nor hair of a travel section anywhere.

I decided to go to the travel agent anyway (and hope that he could tell me where to get a guidebook), and luckily Kalila's mother Faiza discovered that the book had somehow made it into her car last night before she went home. Good thing, because the travel agent had never heard of Lonely Planet and didn't even know what a travel guidebook was. His suggestion was to buy a map of Accra...

Now that I've been through that experience once, I'm going to guard that book with my life.

PS - In a quasi-related experience, I had to visit 6 ATMs before I found one that worked in order to withdraw enough cash to pay the travel agent for the ticket. No one here uses or accepts credit cards, and I gather functional ATMs are only going to get fewer and farther between as I head north. Guess I'll be carrying a lot of cash...

We're at $24K for Kalila!

A $5K pledge just came in unexpectedly, putting us over 2/3rds of the way there. Amazing! And the family's fundraising here in Ghana has picked up steam -- they now think that they are over $5K themselves. We now have almost 150 donors -- and we're getting really close!

Later today, my mom will be sending a brief update to my friends who've pledged. Here's the version she sent to her friends and family two days ago (I haven't been online much since then, sorry!)

The picture is from this afternoon -- Kalila was playing with my sunglasses :-) Sorry I can't rotate the picture on this computer...

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My apologies to many of you for my silence over the past two days. Developments are good!

First, the response has been phenomenal. In just three days, 137 of Taren's and my friends responded to our emails with pledges of just under $18,000. That's half the amount we need in only 72 hours!!

Second, I am very hopeful that Rotary International may help. Rotary has a program called the Gift of Life that helps bring children with congenital heart defects from poor countries to the US for surgery--perfect for Kalila. The Rotary people with whom I have been corresponding are very impressed with everyone's generosity and I hope that they will be able to match what we have raised. My thanks to Elaine Peck, director of Putnam County Community Foundation for connecting me with them. (I've also applied to some other organizations/foundations.)

Third, people in Ghana have also been generous. The family's appeals through newspapers and radio have raised more than $2,000 (in a country where the World Bank reports annual per capita income as only $700).

Fourth, I'm still trying to work out where everyone should send checks. I would prefer a foundation (which is why I was talking to Elaine Peck at the local foundation) for greatest accountability, but if not ,I will open a dedicated bank account. Or if Rotary takes Kalila's case, the best method might be to route funds through them. In the meantime, please do NOT send checks directly to me. My house and brain are both too cluttered. Since this is a rather large amount of money to raise from a large number of people, I want to be sure to do this the right way.

Fifth, I responded to the first 70 or 80 of you with personal notes, but have since fallen behind. (Plus, the mold on the dishes was getting out of hand.) Please everyone know how much I appreciate you and I will write to each of you in the next few days.

Meanwhile, I will let everyone know as soon as I know more details.

Kelsey

Unwritten blog posts

I'm still doing way more bloggable things than I have time to blog about. So, here's a partial list of things that I haven't gotten a chance to really tell you about yet!

1) The press conference I stumbled upon by the CPP -- a minor political party that currently only has a single seat in Parliament but was the party of Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana after independence. Also, the old woman who sat down next to me and turned out to be one of Ghana's first female MPs, during the Nkrumah era -- we talked for almost an hour before the press conference actually started.

2) Nkrumah mausoleum -- fascinating memorial to Ghana's first president and one of the most influential Africans of the 20th century.

3) The courts/law firms -- I shadowed Sarah for half a day, through two court cases and at her very prominent law firm. Most surprising: The judges and lawyers still wear white British-style wigs when court is in session. Sarah and I are pictured; I'm holding the wig.

4) The Accra mall -- it's new and shiny and if you squint you'd think you were in Tyson's Corner.

5) The Burkina Faso embassy and visa-acquisition experience -- remarkably smooth and fast.

6) The voluntary service scheme -- I stumbled across the final round of the national selection process for the voluntary service year (kind of like Americorps).

7) Cape Coast and its castle -- 3 hours west of Accra, the Cape Coast castle is one of the dozens of remaining monuments to the horrors of the slave trade. Fewer than 7 in 10 of those held in the castle survived to make it through the door of no return onto a slave ship; even fewer made it to the New World alive. Pictured is the "Door of No Return" -- through which, after an average of 3 months packed like sardines in underground dungeons, you were herded onto a slaver. (Sorry about not being able to rotate the picture...)

8) WEB DuBois memorial & museum -- The house where DuBois lived out his last few years at Nkrumah's invitation is just a few blocks from my host family's house.

9) The National Theatre -- I stopped by this imposing Chinese-built structure to ask what the performance schedule was, and the guys sitting outside guarding the entrance had the schedule for the next few weeks printed on a single piece of paper in a binder, and didn't even have any way of telling me what the names of the movies coming up were.

10) Parliament House -- I toured Parliament House and observed Parliament in session for about an hour as they were debating a proposal to borrow money from other countries to expand Ghana's ambulance fleet.

11) Kakum rainforest -- one of the small surviving slices of rainforest in Ghana, Kakum is home to hundreds of species and has the sketchiest and most rickety-looking canopy walkway I hope I ever traverse. Pictured...

Things Ghana Has

UPDATE: Compare to this post's sister, Things Ghana does NOT have.

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Cell phones
Advertising for cell phones
Colorful clothing
Children
Mandatory national year of service after graduating from college
Castles/forts (largely used to process and hold literally millions of slaves during the 1700s and 1800s before they were shipped off to the Americas)
Hospitality
Bananas
Plaintains
Fish
Markets
Street vendors
Traffic
Poverty
Illiteracy
Languages (lots of them!)
Litter
Unemployment (though I think this mainly a concept that applies to the middle and upper classes. If you're poor enough, you seem to find *something* to sell on the street...)
Cocoa (Ghana is a huge cocoa exporter)
Christians
Muslims
Peanuts (called groundnuts)
Coconuts
Soap operas (seem to be mainly Mexican and South African from my limited exposure)
Passport photo booths (1/4 the price of CVS Columbia Heights for 4 pictures!)

Are you a Muslim? (Eid, part 1)

This is a long post -- but yesterday was a big day! And it's worth it, I promise.

I was proud to be asked this question several times yesterday. It was the biggest Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, and my host family here is Muslim so I got an amazing close-up view of the festivities. Culturally, Eid al-Adha (called Eid herein but not to be confused with Eid al-Fitr, the feast at the end of Ramadan) is kind of the equivalent of Christmas for Muslims, although with fewer presents. It celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for God.

We got up early, around 6am, and my host sister Sarah dressed me in her smallest African dress, which unfortunately still seemed unlikely to stay up of its own accord so we settled on the solution of wearing my brown button-up shirt over the dress to avoid any embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions. Then she selected a veil to go with the outfit and we discovered that we wear almost the same shoe size -- kind of amazing since she's about 6 inches shorter than me -- so I got a pair of her dress sandals too. [Side note: My college friend Tope who is also of West African descent is also very short and wears almost my same shoe size. Coincidence, or pattern?]

After breakfast we drove about an hour to the other side of town to a large, pretty schoolyard, brimming with Ahmadiyya Muslims. The Ahadmiyya sect is not one I had heard of before, but after reading the Wikipedia article and hearing the family talk about it, I'm going to very roughly equate it to Mormonism within Christianity -- founded fairly recently by a new prophet; not particularly well-liked (and even viewed as heretical) by the mainstream religion it branched off from. (Warning: Don't draw other inferences about Ahmadiyya Islam from that very high-level comparison, though. The Wikipedia article is well worth skimming...)

Sarah and I met up with a cousin and made our way to one of the rows of colorfully-dressed women and children lining their prayer mats up under the rows of young trees, which provided at least a modicum of shade coverage. Before the service, while folks were still milling about and situating themselves, the loudspeakers projected ongoing repetitive Songs of Praise in Arabic, which the women repeated in unison phrase by phrase -- whenever they weren't busy playing with a child or gossiping!

The service proper consisted of two parts: First, about 15 minutes of prayers in Arabic, during which part I went to the back as I wasn't praying. As I left the main group of women, two young women in their twenties who were also visibly not praying beckoned me over and offered me a piece of their prayer mat to sit on. They asked me "Are you a Muslim?" which, as I said at the beginning, was very flattering -- I had managed to fit in! I said no, that I wasn't. They then said, "oh, then you are a Christian." I thought about debating the point but then decided it wasn't worth it -- culturally I am far more Christian than anything else, and it seemed much easier to acquiesce than to explain that I wasn't religious at all.

A note here: I have been extremely impressed by the level of apparent religious harmony in Ghana. Christian-Muslim marriages are fairly common. Radio shows and other pop culture manifestations seem fairly regularly to say things like "All the Abrahamic religions stand for the same things." Not a single person I've met in any context has batted an eyelash at the fact that I'm staying with a Muslim family, that I'm a non-Muslim participating in Muslim events, etc. And even though only a small percentage of the country is Muslim (maybe 15%? Hopefully I'll get around to asking Wikipedia before I post this!), the whole country has a holiday for Eid. I'm sure things are not as rosy for other non-Christian religious minorities, but at the least it's incredibly strong and useful evidence that Christians and Muslims are perfectly capable of living in peace.

The two women I sat with were, it turns out, on their menses -- which in Islam gets you off the hook for the prayer section of the service. They were also taking photos, which made me kick myself for assuming that photos during the service wouldn't be allowed and therefore leaving my camera in the car. I traded email addresses with them and hopefully they'll send me some of their pictures, because it was quite a visually stunning experience -- hundreds of people in truly stunning African outfits praying together in a lovely outdoor setting.

After the prayer portion was over, I rejoined Sarah for the sermon. It was read one sentence at a time in English, Akan, and Ga -- the latter two being two native southern Ghanaian languages. I must admit to not paying much attention to the content -- there were too many kids getting lollipop handouts and being generally adorable for me to focus on every third difficult-to-understand sentence emanating from the loudspeakers!

Maybe 25 minutes later the sermon came to an end and everyone began socializing as they moved in the general direction of their cars. I would estimate that we probably ran into about 50 relatives of the family, including Kalila and her mother Faiza. Several men, obviously joking, referred to themselves as Sarah's husband -- turns out if you are a woman's grandfather, great-uncle or male cousin-in-law, you have some subset of traditional husband privileges like getting to engage in lighthearted teasing. And people around here have a LOT of great-uncles and cousins-in-law -- including often a lot of great-uncles who are approximately your own age, due to your great-grandfather taking a much younger second or third wife who bears children around the same time as his grandchild is having you. In fact, Nasir, who you'll see in my pictures from the Cape Coast trip when I get a chance to put them up, is Sarah's cousin on one side and her great-uncle on the other side! (I think I got that right, anyway...)

There was great general amusement when one relative greeted me with "Eid Mubarak" and I, assuming that was her name, replied "Taren" while shaking her hand. Turns out that's the equivalent of "Merry Christmas" for Eid. I think that story got passed around a lot because for the rest of the day various relatives kept coming up to me and saying "Eid Mubarak" and looking disappointed when I replied in kind.

Finally, we made our way back to the car and picked up Uncle Negro, and I finally got to take some photos. (One pictured at the top -- that's Uncle Negro and Sarah in the picture.)

Eid post part 2 (much shorter, I hope!) coming up soon.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

Well, I suppose there is something mildly amusing about: (a) the fact that I spent more than an hour on the phone with AT&T before I left trying to make sure I understood all the possible exorbitant international iPhone fees and how to avoid them, whereas (b) on the main strip in Ghana's largest city, a permanent store advertises in broad daylight that they can just unlock the phone for a few bucks.

But I still don't know about "hilarious."

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As a side, related note: Calling the US from a Ghanaian cell phone costs almost exactly the same amount as calling inside Ghana -- around 10c per minute. I'm sure there's a very good reason AT&T can't just borrow the Ghanaian companies' networks or use whatever technology they're using, right? Surely they're not just using any remotely plausible excuse they can think of to rip us off, right?

How to contact me

UPDATE: Apparently you don't dial the first "0" in my number when you call with the country code from Skype. So instead of the instructions below, dial +233 205369066. I assume it's the same from American cell/landlines but don't know for sure.

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I have a Ghanaian cell phone! It is +233 (that's the country code) 0205369066. I don't recommend calling me from your phone in the regular way, but you can certainly Skype me. You can also download the free international text messaging app to your iPhone, Haywire, and send me texts! Non iPhone-users, sucks to be... I mean, sorry, I don't know how to help you.

This phone number should work til I go to Burkina Faso, in about 9 days. Then I hope I can just swap out SIM cards and tell y'all the new number!

(If you can avoid calling me/sending me texts after about 5pm Eastern time (10pm West Africa time) that would be nice, since I'll hopefully be asleep and may not remember to turn my phone off.)

Kalila pictures/update!

A few more/new pics of Kalila.

We've had over $16K pledged in the last 3 days -- the outpouring of support has been amazing and inspiring. The family is continuing to fundraise locally in Ghana, and we're exploring other avenues of funding (eg Rotary) to help fill in some of the gap. At this point we definitely still need more pledges -- in particular, we'd like to get halfway to the total today if possible, which means another $2K -- but are feeling optimistic that with all your support we will figure out some way to save Kalila's life!

To read more about the lifesaving surgery Kalila needs, click here -- and to donate for it, email me (taren dot sk) and my mother (kelsey dot kauffman), both at gmail, to tell us what you can pledge!

Sunscreen

So many blogs to write, so little time! A quick one -- then I am off to meet with Kalila's mom about fundraising.

I spent part of the day today wandering through Accra's biggest market (pictured). Out of curiousity, I stopped at a booth that had virtually every toiletry product imaginable and asked whether they had sunscreen. The woman was confused and I explained that I wanted something that blocked the sun and pantomimed rubbing it into my skin. She tried selling me tanning lotion, then generic skin moisturizer. I explained again, "I want something that stops the sun." She laughed, almost derisively, and said as if to a child, "Nothing can stop the sun but god." Then she turned to repeat the crazy tale of the white woman who wanted to stop the sun to her next door market neighbors.

I hope they got a good laugh :-)

Update on Kalila: Over $10K raised!

Wow, we've gotten over $10K in pledges already for Kalila! Keep it coming -- just email kelsey dot kauffman and taren dot sk, both at gmail, with how much you can pledge and we'll send you bank account details once we have them.

Thanks so much
Taren and Kelsey

PS - Read more here: http://tarenwanderer.blogspot.com/2010/11/urgent-birthday-plea-save-kalilas-life.html.

An urgent birthday plea: Save Kalila's life

FOURTH UPDATE (Nov 20) -- We are over $30K! And, we have Paypal set up -- you can donate now by following the instructions here!

THIRD UPDATE (Nov 18) -- Wow, a 5K pledge just came in getting us two-thirds of the way there! More info here.

SECOND UPDATE (Nov 16): Almost halfway there! See new pics and an update on fundraising here.

UPDATE: Over $10K raised so far! Keep it coming!

***************

In my first post after I landed, I mentioned my host's granddaughter Kalila, and said you'd be hearing more about her soon. The time has come -- please see why in the email below that I'm sending to many of you today, and then help grant my birthday wish (I turn 29 today!) to save Kalila's life by emailing me and my mother (taren dot sk and kelsey dot kauffman, both at gmail) if you can pledge any money.

Many thanks,
Taren

********************

Dear friends,

I'm in Ghana staying with an old friend of my mother's -- Abdulai
Iddrisu, who went to graduate school with my mom in Sydney more than
30 years ago -- and his welcoming family.

Today is my birthday, and I have a special birthday request for all of you.

When I arrived a few days ago, I met Abdulai’s entire family,

including his only granddaughter, two-year-old super-cute Kalila.

Kalila's mother Faiza is Abdulai's youngest daughter, and she is
almost exactly my age. Sadly, three weeks ago, a Harvard team of

cardiologists visiting Accra diagnosed Kalila with Tetralogy of Fallot
(TOF), a usually fatal heart problem. With immediate surgery she can
live a normal life. (Shaun White, the winner of the 2006 and 2010
snowboarding Olympic gold medals, was a TOF baby.) Without it, Kalila

will die, possibly as soon as in the next few weeks.

Only a few hospitals are well-suited to do TOF surgery. The Harvard
surgeons offered to operate free-of-charge at Boston Children’s
Hospital and tentatively scheduled surgery for the end of this month.
However, *before* Kalila can obtain a visa, the family must provide
the hospital with a check for $36,000 to cover pre- and post-operative

care. Kalila’s family has launched a fund-raising effort in Ghana and
are making some progress, but given the exchange rate they have little
prospect of raising the whole sum, especially not in a few weeks.

So, as my special birthday request, I am writing to everyone I know in the hope that you (or your church, synagogue, company, etc.) would be willing to help. If people
contributed an average of $100, we could meet the goal (but, of
course, please give more if you can, or less if that is all you can

afford). You don't need to send me money immediately -- we are moving quickly on this and haven't yet determined how we're going to handle the money. Instead, just reply to
this email and cc my mother at kelsey dot kauffman at gmail dot com to let us know what you would be willing to pledge. The
instant we know that we and the family will have enough funds, my mother
will contact the Children’s Hospital and get started on visas and
transportation.

Like you, I receive pleas for money all the time for worthy causes (in
fact, I write a lot of them...), and I realize that $36,000 can buy a
lot of important things. But I spend much of my life working towards
large-scale change, and this is different. This is the fate of an
individual child who I have held in my own arms, and who I know whould
have the opportunity to lead a full and productive life if only she
had been born to one of us instead of to my Ghanaian friend. I don't
want to think about how I will feel if she dies next month or next
year and I could have prevented it.

Attached you can find a photo of me and Kalila from my first day here
-- I can proudly report that though she looks a little overwhelmed in
that picture (white people are scary!), since then she has warmed to
me considerably thanks to my lame Peekaboo routine. In fact, she likes
it so much that she has started performing it herself and fully
expects me to be as delighted and surprised when her face appears from
behind her hands as she is when mine does :-) I've also attached a

letter from the surgeon at Harvard/Children’s Hospital. [NOTE: If you're reading this on the blog and want to read the letter, send me an email and I'll forward it.]

Thank you,

Taren

PS - My family knows something personally of the urgency of Kalila's cause.
Almost twenty-five years ago, my parents were offered the chance to

adopt a little Korean girl with TOF. Because the surgery could not be
done in Korea and our insurance would not cover the then-more than

$100,000 cost of the surgery, we delayed eight weeks while my mother

searched for and found outside funding and the least expensive

hospital. By then she was too weak to travel and died. My parents and
I will do what we can, but Kalila needs help, and needs it quickly.

Two Ghanas?

I'm sitting in an internet cafe as sleek as any you'd find in the US, with faster broadband than Rev House has. I'm staying an 8-min walk away at a large, well-kept house owned by a family of lawyers and other white-collar professionals, which has regular blackouts and running water for only a few hours a day. And in between, I walked through an area very comparable to the poorest DC slums (pictured) -- though my impression is safer, at least during the day!

That's Ghana for you.

Unemployment is high here -- much like many of my friends in DC, it's common to be overeducated and jobless. For instance, the driver my host family procured for me during my stay has a master's in finance from a university in China. His course was in English but he obviously speaks Chinese now as well from living there for two years. So, he is proficient in the two most important languages in the world and has a master's degree in a practical field that is generally in demand, and he still can't find a job.

But, somewhat paradoxically to American ears, crime is very low -- and Ghanaians seem extremely proud of that fact, several having mentioned it to me independently. It seems at first blush to me that family ties are a big part of that. You may not be able to find a traditional job, but while you are looking, you are living with your parents or brothers and caretaking or running errands for your cousins/nieces/nephews/uncles/aunts -- and generally making yourself useful.

Gotta run -- off to meet the former VP of Ghana :-)

A rose by any other name...

I've arrived!

It's amazing to me how much my emotional state -- my aura, perhaps -- changes valence almost as soon as I land overseas in ways that I can't predict (though generally in a positive direction). It's partly based on actual events and observation, and partly simply on shedding the professional/busy/competent DC Taren and taking up the mantle of the curious/open/relaxed-but-alert backpacking Taren.

In this case, I stepped off the plane into 90-degree weather not dissimilar from a normal DC summer day, and was greeted almost immediately by an airport employee in uniform holding a sign with my name on it (spelled correctly!) Courtesy of my host family, who are well-connected, he escorted me briskly through security and the visa processing area and introduced me to my host's nephew Nasir. Outside we met with my host (I'll come back to his name) and his daughter Sarah, who is approximately my age and is a lawyer at a big Accra law firm.

My host, Abdulai Iddrisu, went to graduate school with my mother in Australia before I was born. She and my father helped him financially with his treatment after a bad car crash several years later. He has walked with a cane ever since, but raised his family of three daughters and continued a successful career in livestock consulting.

On his name: I asked Sarah what to call him and she repeated what he had told me in an email, which is that all of his children, nieces, nephews, etc, call him "Uncle Negro". I of course felt a little bit uncomfortable with using this phrase as a white American, but apparently I'm not the first to have reservations so after they laid out their usual points about why it was silly to feel uncomfortable using a name that isn't remotely offensive here, I decided to go with the flow. As Shakespeare might say, "What's in a name? A Negro by any other name..." OK, see, that still sounds really bad to me -- this is going to be hard :-)

Sarah and I drove back to the house and I put my bags upstairs in the room we'll be sharing for the next two weeks. Then over the course of the afternoon met many other members of the extended family, including Sarah's sister Faiza and her daughter Kalila, who you'll hear a lot about later.

Right now I'm struggling to stay awake (8pm Ghana time -- just need to stay awake for another hour and then get a good night's sleep, and jetlag begone!) but am so pleased to be here. Tomorrow, I'll be off exploring the city of Accra!

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow!

That's when I finally leave the US for the trip I've been talking your ear off about for months now (you know who "you" are). I started taking my malaria meds today, which made it all a little more real...

I started writing this sitting out on the porch of the stunningly beautiful Mohonk Mountain Retreat -- picture of the view included -- during a "free time" period of the 1Sky climate strategy retreat. I'm flying out tomorrow from LaGuardia to Accra, via Dulles (ironically), for a 6 week backpacking trip through West Africa.

I'll begin the trip in Ghana, staying for 10-14 days in Accra with family friends whose patriarch went to graduate school with my mother in Australia some thirty-odd years ago. Then I plan to head overland through Burkina Faso to Mali, where I want to go trekking as well as explore the capital city for a few days. That should bring me up to the beginning of December, when I'll head west to Senegal and the Gambia -- where I'll stay with the family of a fellow climate activist I met through the Copenhagen negotiations last year.

It's my first time to Africa -- and the longest continuous amount of time I'll have spent in the developing world since I was 8 when we lived in Argentina for 6 months. I'm a little anxious, a lot excited, and hopefully as open as I can possibly be to growing and learning and experiencing more of this complicated, beautiful, scary world!

Despite careful list-making and packing and ticking off all the boxes of things to take, I realized today that did forget something: My rain jacket/windbreaker. Forgetting something is inevitable in my experience, and I always feel better knowing what it is -- especially since in this case it seems like a fairly replaceable item that I wasn't even sure was necessary.

Oh, and thanks to everyone for a very enjoyable last few days in DC -- everyone who came to my birthday party on Saturday night, and of course my amazing housemates Ben, Paul, Michelle, and Seth, not to mention my might-as-well-be-housemates Libby and Babbott, for wonderful company on Sunday. See you all next year!

Thanks for reading my first blog post (f1rst!), and keep in touch (more soon on how to do that...) :-)