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.

Update

Spent the last 5 days on a wonderful whirlwind tour of Ghana's Upper West region, with Uncles Negro and Nasir. Back in Accra today for Kalila's visa appointment (2 hours from now!) If all goes well with the appointment, planning to fly out tonight to Dakar, Senegal, spend a few days there, and then make my way overland to Banjul, the capitol of the Gambia, to visit Ceesay of EU Action Factory 2009 fame.

Then on the 18th back to Accra as originally described here.

Update coming soon on Kalila's surgery - finances, date, etc.

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 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!

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!