the amazing adventures of puopillion effia and kanyire ajua

it's kind of like the country mouse and the city mouse. only with two different developing nations. and people, not mice. after visiting jenell in ghana for 3 weeks, i don't know how to sum it all up. it's not the storybook, i know i love my world more, moral of the mice friends. but i do know that this mouse might not make it in africa any longer than those three weeks. and that, though i know she'd hate me saying this, i have come to admire jenell even more after seeing her being AMAZING despite heat, sickness, village strife and power outages.






i've wanted to go to africa for as long as i can remember. like india, i had done some serious romanticizing. i hadn't given much thought to ghana's proximity to the equator or people's ranting about heat. and, for someone as heat intolerant as myself, this was a large oversight. the heat shut me down and made me feel like little green aliens disconnected my brain between 1 and 4 every afternoon. i know historians and sociologists typically minimize the impact of heat on development and say that people adjust, etc. but if i lived in ghana, i can tell you one thing. i'd be dead. but lots of things completely surpassed my expectations. the ghanaian people are incredible. barring the scores of marriage proposals i received daily, i loved the genuine warmth of everyone i met. when jenell introduced people to me, the common response was, "you're welcome!" i love that. i love that there was dancing and music everywhere.
jenell and i spent the first week on the most idyllic beach i've probably ever seen. after 2 days in a tro-tro, packed-to-the-brim-minibus, we arrived in jirapa, jenell's hometown. one of the sure highlights of jirapa, aside from sleeping naked outside in jenell's courtyard because of the heat ("tits to the stars"), was spending the afternoon at a school. when the teacher left and the students were supposed to be copying notes, i walked to the front of the 65 student classroom and started in. i told them they could ask me anything they wanted. and that i would ask them questions, too. after telling them about the fake husband who i made up in india and has been growing in my imagination since, they asked me to sing a song. i couldn't think of anything. and i didn't want to sing some pop song. so, i settled on "this land is your land." i don't even know where that came from. but the girls started clapping to the beat (what beat, i am unsure) and booty dancing in the aisles. feel it. feel it. something i didn't plan on at all is the fear some kids have for white people. (as a point of clarification, anyone who is not fully black, including mullatos, is considered white). my first encounter with scaring the shit out of a kid was in an extremely busy bank. i started making faces at the baby and she freaked out. after 5 minutes, and lots of coddling from her mom, she calmed down. only to lose it again when i passed her by. sometimes parents think this game is so funny that they bring their children close to foreigners just, well. i don't know why.


another highlight of the time was hanging out in pete's village. his village is much less developed than jenell's and lacks electricity and running water. the huts are circular mud huts with thatch roofs and a lot of water is gathered from a beautiful (especially because it's full this time of year) dam. the first night of our stay, we followed the drumming to a salah (end of ramadan) celebration. a man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth drummed feverishly for hundreds of dancing women. the women were doing this incredible booty-bump dance with amazing, bull-charging-like footwork. obviously, jenell and i had to join in.










ghana is like no country i've ever seen. the wealth disparity between accra, the capital city, and the rest of the country is striking. in the tro stations in the south, little toys and things are sold. women have more meat on their bones and more junk in the trunk. people in the north, who were the ones sold into slavery hundreds of years ago, are more gaunt and don't enjoy the same infrastructure as most of the towns in the south. more kids have big, worm-filled, malnourished bellies.

from my experience, ghanaians are not businessmen and women. they don't really barter. they're too easy going to drop everytihng for a customer. life moves at a different pace. it's not indian time, elastic due to crowding and a bit of irresponsibility. ghanaian time is such because, well, it just doesn't matter enough to hurry. family is of extreme importance. poverty and begging are different. if you can help a family member who is struggling, you must. so, i guess what i am saying is these places called "developing" countries are way ahead of us in some measures. not really the newest news, but worthy of mention. taking time, loving their communities and families. but, of course, there is the quality of education, the availability of clean water, use of physical punishment at homes and schools and the prevalence of preventable diseases.

i feel kind of like a poser writing about my impressions of a place that is jenell's home. so, for an insider's view... here are the links to two of pete's slideshows from his time in ghana. www.peterdphoto.com/Waiting_for_the_Lights/index.html, www.peterdphoto.com/The_Dry_Season/index.html. the link to jenell's blog is in the right hand side of my blog.

p.s. puopillion means "happiness" and effia is friday born. these things also mean, jenell.
p.p.s. because i also wanted a ghanaian name, and since coco means porridge, we asked jenell's friend, elizabeth (the most incredible woman ever), to name me. "kanyire" means patience. ha! patience. that makes me laugh. and ajua means monday born.