Observations.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been avoiding the blog lately. I guess it’s the feeling that I haven’t been keeping up well with the blog since I came back from my visit to America, so it seems daunting to get back on here and share stories when I don’t even know where to begin. But here I am, with a little time on my hands and a few thoughts that you might enjoy…
This post will probably seem more like an exercise in stream of consciousness rather than an update with a coherent theme, but instead of giving information on what has been happening in my life and work, I thought I’d share some observations instead- observations about the culture here, my friends, and my life in general. That’s more interesting anyway, right?

First of all, after having once again spent a couple of days in the capitol of Ghana (Accra) enjoying my Thanksgiving in the sweet excess of the American-esque lifestyles that Embassy workers enjoy, I realized just how lacking the food is up here where I live. Even as I type these words, I understand that the when I start talking about food shortages or a lack of nutritional variety, I’m jumping into a hot topic that could be discussed, debated, and defended endlessly. I’m going to go ahead and avoid a lecture on food security and instead talk about the basic fact that there just isn’t a lot of variety when it comes to food around here. When I say “around here,” I mean my village, and more broadly, the northern region of Ghana in which I live. The main crops in my village are maize (corn), rice, millet, soybeans, groundnuts (peanuts), and yams. Although this leaves us with a lot of starch to consume, we’re lacking in the area of fruits and vegetables, which doesn’t provide us with a lot of nutritional variety in our everyday diet.

To give you an idea of just how difficult it is to find fresh fruits and vegetables where I live, let me take a moment to talk about markets. My village, being less than 1,000 people, has no market. This means that any food that we want to buy must either come from our farms directly or from another local market. This also means that it is nearly impossible to buy ANY food in my village, besides some packaged spaghetti, tomato paste, a few loaves of bread (if you can make it to the bread maker’s house before 7:30am, at which time she runs out of bread), local rice and stew (watch out for stones!), and fried yams. The variety in my village changes slightly at the onset of mango season, in which we forgo the yams and bread for piles and piles of fresh mangoes (thank God!). Take a minute and think about the food that I just mentioned. Tomatoes in a can. Spaghetti noodles. Rice. Bread. Not a lot of variety there to work with, eh? Notice that I mentioned virtually NO PRODUCE? That was not a mistake, we simply don’t have it. Well, if you leave my village and go about 15 miles down the road, you come to a significantly larger village that has a market every 6 days, in which you can get all of the aforementioned food plus tomatoes, onions, oranges, cabbage, bananas, and a few other treats like fried wagashi (a locally produced cheese) and “Soya,” which is basically fried tofu. Yup, that’s as far as the variety goes within about 35 miles, and we’re still in a harvest season. Once you get to Tamale, the regional capitol and one of the largest cities in Ghana, your produce choices expand to include peppers, pineapple, apples, potatoes, and beyond… which is why my cravings often send me 50 kilometers down the road for special treats that I just couldn’t get otherwise. We Peace Corps Volunteers often joke around about the need for a cookbook with recipes that utilize only rice, tomato paste, and onions as ingredients, because those are the foods that we’re most often left with, particularly those of us without a refrigerator to even keep other foods if we could buy them. Do me a huge favor and eat a big head of broccoli or reach into your cupboard for some canned fruit in my honor. Those are luxuries I dream about…

The next observation that I’ll share with you is the ability of Ghanaians to act surprised and horrified by situations that, in my opinion, are downright predictable in their frequency. Let me explain by offering a recent example. The other day I was preparing to come home from the market in a local town (the one I mentioned before that’s about 15 miles away), and there was a large bus waiting for those of us who were going back to my village and the village beyond mine, since there were a lot of us shopping/selling at the market. As most of us know, the sooner a bus can fill with people, the sooner it can leave, or at least that’s what logic would tell us. In my area, the idea is a bit more complicated than that. Being the Siliminga (white person) that I am, I hop on the bus, take a seat, and wait for the bus to fill with people so that we can leave. Being the northern Ghanaian women that they are, me fellow bus mates also hop on the bus, throw their things in a seat near the back of the bus, and walk off the bus, waiting for it to fill. The only problem is, it’s nearly impossible to tell when a bus is full when it’s passengers are waiting outside of the bus rather than taking their seats. This also inevitably creates a problem when people finally do decide the bus is full, only to then create a huge traffic jam of people cramming into the bus in no particular order, leaving some people having to get in and out of their seats several times while others step over them or loudly complain because “their seat” has been taken by another passenger who actually sat down instead of throwing their scarf on a seat and hoping it would be enough to save the place. This would be interesting enough to watch, except that it happens every single time a bus tries to leave anywhere, which just makes it habit. The thing that’s really interesting to watch is the reaction of Ghanaian women to the amount of time that it takes for a bus to fill up, or the fact that their seat has been taken by somebody else. It’s as though this is the first time something like this has ever happened, although I’ve personally never seen a transportation situation that DIDN’T play out exactly this way in Northern Ghana. There is loud complaining and often yelling (“Why didn’t the driver tell us this bus was full?!” “Why is this bus taking so long to leave?!” “Why did Rafia set down her bags and walk off the bus when it was about to leave the station?!”), there is finger pointing (“I saw Sanatu looking at fabric over there! This is why the bus hasn’t left yet! ”), and there is my favourite reaction, which is the utter shock and horror on the looks of the women’s faces when they realize that the bus is about to leave and they need to get on it if they want to go. You’d think that after literally years of the exact same scenario playing out at every single station on every single market day that maybe, once in a while, my fellow villagers would lose their ability to be surprised, but so far, I haven’t seen it happen. 