Oh Baby!

Whew, it’s been a while! Sorry that I don’t blog with the frequency that I used to-it just seems that every time I’m at a computer I have about 15 other things to do and updating the blog somehow always ends up near the bottom of the list and subsequently forgotten about until I’m back in the village with no internet access… But luckily for you, today I have a few minutes of internet time to share some thoughts on life lately.


Some updates since the last post: we held our quarterly HIV testing and education event at ITFC, in which around 150 workers were tested for HIV. This is always a fun time to catch up with a lot of the company employees and encourage them to keep themselves safe and healthy. I also had the chance to help out at “Health Day” at both the primary school in my village and in another school at a nearby village called Tuniyilli. I was in charge of weighing and measuring all of the kids, which, if you know anything about my love for children, was the perfect job for me . Besides that, I’ve been hanging out in the village, mourning the loss of my broken iPod, and playing with my kittens, who are kind enough to wake me up at 5am every morning by pouncing on head.

After over a year of being in the village (is that possible?!), I finally got a language tutor! Actually, some of the newly sworn-in volunteers who live near me asked if my counterpart (the Ghanaian who Peace Corps recognizes as my liaison in the village) could lead a weekly language tutoring session in which we gathered for an hour or so and learned helpful phrases and improved our language skills. When was first approached to start the weekly meetings, I thought that I might not even participate, since I wasn’t sure if I would gain much useful information studying Dagbani with people who had only lived in their villages for about a month and don’t speak the language nearly as well as I do after one year (well, that’s what I told myself…). Yet after our first meeting, I realized how incredibly helpful and useful the lessons would be for me, maybe even more so than for the new volunteers. After a few weeks of lessons, I’m really amazed at how much my language skills have improved and how much more I comprehend in day-to-day life now that I’m actually dedicating time to “learning” the language in a classroom-type setting again. This has been really refreshing for me, and I know my language skills are only going to continue to improve as we continue our lessons.

As I was thinking about what to write in this post, I realized that there are so many things about Ghana (festivals, customs, cultural practices, etc…) that I haven’t talked about on here. Last week, I attended an “outdooring” (aka: baby naming) ceremony for a family in Gushie. The way they celebrate a newborn baby here puts us Westerners to shame, to say the least. First of all, when a baby is born in my village, they are usually delivered by a traditional birth assistant, who happens to be one of the oldest women in the village in our case. It’s far more preferable (and safer) to have a baby at a clinic or hospital, but since we don’t have either in our village, women usually use the services of the birth assistant. This woman is not medically trained in any way, although the job is usually passed down through families and a girl will “shadow” a birth assistant and become quite familiar with the process before delivering babies. So when a woman goes into labor, the birth assistant is brought into the hut and helps her deliver the baby, which is where the mother and baby stay for seven days afterwards. This is related to a particular local belief that has something to do with the baby’s soul is not necessarily attached to the baby for the first few days of its life, so it remains unnamed and unpresented to the world until it is certain that the baby will survive its first week. On the day of the Outdooring, the mother dresses in a brand new outfit with plenty of sparkling jewelery and the women of the compound start making food first thing in the morning (most families have multiple wives, or at least sisters-in-law, mothers, cousins, etc… to do the work). The mother stays in (or near) her hut with the baby all day to greet visitors, collect gifts, and take care of the newborn, and the father generally stays outside of the compound. Because our village doesn’t have electricity, a family will usually pay for a generator to be brought in and hire a DJ to start playing music early in the morning, as the food is being prepared. Huge pots of TZ (the local starchy substance made from ground millet) and soup are prepared by the women in the hosting compound as villagers slowly trickle in to congratulate the family, meet the new baby, and take home some food. Women in the village bring empty bowls with them to the ceremony, which are then filled with TZ and soup prepared by the hosts and brought back to their own families. Women tend to congregate inside the compound, helping to prepare the food, filling bowls to bring back to their families, chatting with each other, and (of course) dancing. Men, on the other hand, can usually be found just outside of the compound sitting in chairs, listening to the music, chatting, or dancing. Massive speakers blare music throughout the day, and people are welcome to go and come as their daily duties allow. As the day continues, the baby is either circumcised (if it’s a boy) or has its ears pierced (if it’s a girl) and both boys and girls have their heads shaved, which is done by a particular man in the village (I can’t remember what they call him haha) while the baby is being held by the oldest women in the village (kind of a cool tribute to the birth/death cycle). For the rest of the day (and often well into the night), it’s PARTY TIME. Kids usually lead the pack by swarming the dance floor, but adults soon gather around and you can find people of all ages busting a move well into the early hours of the morning. Since the women are usually pretty busy cooking inside the compound, the music is kept loud enough to facilitate all of their dancing needs, which they indulge in quite often while stirring a pot of TZ or ladling soup into a bowl. In my opinion, there are few things more amusing than a bunch of 70 year old village women shaking their booties as they sashay around the compound putting goat meat in people’s bowls.

If this sounds like a fun way to celebrate the birth of a baby, I wholeheartedly agree. I love that this culture values the process of giving birth as a community-wide event worth celebrating with a giant party in which the entire village is invited. Rather than being coddled with great care and protected from danger in a quiet, calm, and serene environment (the way, I would argue, we treat our babies when they first emerge from the womb), newborns here are celebrated with loud music, tons of visitors passing them around, and hardly any acknowledgment of their fragility (a word that has practically become a synonym to “newborn” for us in America… Here in Ghana, you hand over a baby by grabbing it by both arms and letting its neck loll around-none of this “protect the neck!” business we’re so used to in the states…)

So that’s how we welcome our babies into the world over here. It’s one of many opportunities that Ghanaians use as an excuse to throw a party, eat lots of food, and dance. It’s also one of the many cultural traditions that I’ll probably bring back with me to America. Yup, you should fully expect my future children to be introduced to the world with a big potluck and massive dance party, and no matter what people say, I know they’ll all enjoy it 