Back "home" in Accra!

As I told Uncle Negro and Sarah, when I got off the plane yesterday in Accra I felt like I was coming home! Of course Faiza and Kalila aren't here, but I'll see them soon enough in Indiana.

My last few days in the Gambia were packed with excitement, including a few more kora lessons, a fascinating school theater performance that Ibraheem was judging, and the opening ceremony of a national youth conference that Ibraheem was running, complete with the Vice President of the Gambia.

The first photo is of one of the acts in the school theater performance -- a traditional Indian dance, performed by a couple of students of Indian descent and a couple native Gambians. I hope I have time to write a whole blog post on the entire event, as it certainly deserves it, but this act in particular stuck out in my mind. The girl on the left in the picture was the leader of the group, and while the other dancers sometimes stumbled through the choreography, she had a look of intense focus the whole time (and it was long -- like maybe 4-5 min). The audience of middle and high school students, who you can see a few of at the bottom the picture, were going absolutely wild the whole time, screaming and dancing and clapping along. And I just had this sense that for this young girl, living in a country and going to a school where she's in a tiny minority ethnically and culturally (and probably religiously, though she could be Muslim), this was a pivotal moment in her adolescent years, the kind of moment of feeling accepted and even celebrated that problably doesn't come along very often. I felt a real sense of vicarious pride and joy in her accomplishment!

The second picture is from the opening ceremonies of the youth conference -- part of a procession of youth groups, musicians, traditional dancers, and more passing by a dais with several ministers and the Vice President. The brown hairy guy dancers you can see in this picture are monsters who carry machetes, and they're acting out some sort of attack scene. It's supposed to be very bad luck if they touch you with their machetes, and Sirah tells me that Rugi used to be very frightened of them as a child.

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.

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!