Ghana: Day 3

I’m not sure that I can put days 3 and 4 of Ghana into the right words. There’s a reason I’m not a fiction writer, and that’s because the long, elaborate paragraphs on scenery, people, and emotional upheavals are pretty tough for me. But I’m gonna do my best, because my overnight to the Tagorme village was possibly the most memorable experience of my life so far.

On day 3 we started our journey into the Tagorme lands. We drove and drove. Slowly we stopped seeing cities, shops, and stands as the scene changed to lush greenery. We had officially left the hub of Ghana and had moved into the rural wilderness. As we approached the village, the streets turned into dirt roads. We bounced up and down and down and up so much that I was happy I hadn’t had breakfast that morning. Finally we began to see crudely constructed wooden buildings and mud huts. But, before we could even take in the traditional architecture of this place, we were all distracted by the mob of children. At least 100 little boys and girls clad in their green school uniforms were running towards our bus, yelling and screaming and smiling and waving. They ran after our bus until we came to a stop near the village center, upon which they mobbed us so completely that I was sure I might be pulled to pieces by all the little hands tugging at my arms. Considering that there was only one tiny little school house in the village, I couldn’t help but wonder how all these kids could fit into the place at one time.

The kids led us further into their village, where we were greeted by a sight straight out of a documentary. There were mean clad in traditional Ghanaian cloths wrapped around them like togas, little boys covered in paint and wearing white skirts, and even a village chief sitting in a sort of throne carrying a large bronze staff. Drums were playing, people were singing, chickens and goats were running in and out of the party circle…it was trippy, so very trippy. My immediate thoughts were, as you might expect, “is this for real?”

We were escorted into our seats, which were pretty much front and center and directly across from the stern gazes of the village elders. The next two hours were filled with some of the kids performing traditional African dances and chants for us, heavy on the Ghanaian drums. Interspersed between performances were the naming ceremonies. I was called up in front of the entire Tagorme village, where I was given two African names. The first was…well, I don’t really remember what it was, but it was the name all Ghanaians give to girls who were born on a Thursday. (Incidentally, Kofi is the name of a boy born on a Friday, so I guess I learned something about our WWE superstar that day.) The second name was my new, official African name: Sitsofe (pronounced something like sitchopay). It means “shelter”. Upon naming me, I was given a handmade pot and bracelet. At the very end of the ceremony, we were introduced to our official hosts. I was greeted by Ben, a man clad in red and blue Ghanaian cloth, and then pounced upon by his enthusiastic mother. The girls were not particularly comfortable with the idea that we would be isolated from each other in the village, half of us with a male host. But before we could speak our concerns to the trip leaders, we were whisked away to lunch.

Compared to what had just occurred, lunch was pretty uneventful. We were brought to some ritzy hotel and given traditional Ghanaian food. It seemed dumb to have left the village to eat what the villagers pretty much ate every day, but I assumed that SAS was trying to ensure that our lunch was as hygienic as possible. I ate a lot more pepe. There was a lizard on the ground. That’s about it.

After lunch we returned to the village, where we were once again promptly mobbed by the kids. The adults tried to get the kids to leave us alone, but that  just straight wasn’t going to happen. We got a brief tour of the village, where we were introduced to the women’s main profession of pottery-making and the men’s professions of weaving cloth and fishing in Lake Volta. It was an incredibly interesting presentation, but I have to admit that I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. The kids were pretty persistent, and I ended up holding hands with them, giving them piggy-back rides, and stopping them breaking my friends’ cameras for the entirety of the tour. The kids were just. Too. Cute. Keep in mind, I don’t really care for kids. But when you’re surrounded by children who think you’re the coolest thing since sliced fufu, it’s pretty hard not to fall in love. They gave hugs for EVERYTHING. Did they want us to give them presents because we clearly had more money than them? Well, yeah. But what kid doesn’t? I’m pretty sure that the one who was most attached to me only knew three English phrases: “yes”, “let’s go”, and “fish”. It was pretty fun to mess with that.

After the tour we were sent to our respective hosts. I went with Ben and was officially introduced to my new living arrangements. We walked into a small collection of little huts, the likes of which people tend to imagine when they think of peasants in Medieval Europe. I’m talking one room, thatched roof, mud walls…seriously, primitive as primitive gets. The ground around the huts was nothing but dust and trash. In Ghana, it’s very, very dirty because the concept of a trash can doesn’t seem to have reached most of the general public. So, in my new Tagorme home, I was surrounded by orange peels, candy wrappers, broken sandals…and I heck of a lot of poop. Yes, you heard me, poop. Or did I not mention? The place was literally crawling with chickens and goats. Everywhere you looked, another one was wandering by. I’m actually not sure if I was ever more than three feet from an animal during my entire stay in Tagorme. There were more goats than people. (Kristin Wirtz, you’d be in heaven.) In actuality, I did like this quite a bit. It’s refreshing to see a community that lives as one with animals, allowing them to live full lives before finally using them to make fufu. Sure as heck beats locking the poor things up in a cage and pumping them full of pesticides. However, in terms of the villagers’ personal hygiene, I’ll admit that the horde of goats didn’t seem like the best decision. 

Ben introduced me to his family…or who I thought were his family. It’s pretty hard to tell, because in Tagorme everyone is “my brother” or “my sister”. The only ones whose identities I was sure of were his mom and wife. I gave his kids (maybe his kids) the gift I’d been saving for them: an Iowa Hawkeyes football. They went craaaaazy. I’m not sure they knew what it was at first, maybe a broken soccer ball. I had to teach them about American football and how to throw the ball, but before I could even think of playing with them, they were already wrestling each other to get to the ball. Ben had to take it away from them.

I was shown into my room, which amounted to my own personal hut. It was reasonably sized, with a large painting of Jesus on the thin wooden door to remind me which room was mine. There were protective coverings over every piece of furniture in the room, which led me to believe that either they were afraid of contaminating me, or they thought I might contaminate them. My mattress was firm and made from locally-grown straw. I’m not sure what the floor was made of, but my guess is that it was some form of solidified clay. It’s important to establish that I did indeed have electricity…in the form of one really creepy light bulb in the back corner of the hut that glowed a sickly shade of green reminiscent of a nuclear power plant. Ben had placed two fans in front of my bed to counteract the sweltering heat. There wasn’t really a window. In short, the place was pretty much the exact vision you have when you imagine those guys in the Peace Corps who live in the depths of Africa living amongst the locals, and everyone else rolls their eyes and says you’re just ignorant and stereotyping a country. Nope. Still happens.

Ben showed me around the village for the next three hours. Yes, three hours. Of course, half the time was spent getting to his canoe a mile and a half away on the lake. He was very proud of that canoe. He was a fisherman. At one point he introduced me to another one of his “brothers”. The man seemed very skeptical of me, and didn’t believe me when I told him just how much a liked Ghana. He pointed to a girl across the way about my age. “You see her?” I nodded. “She finished school here, but now can’t afford to move on. She wants to go to school. We have no money. You can help us.” I looked at my host, who didn’t seem to have a problem with this statement. Eventually, we moved on.

It was about dinnertime when Ben asked me if I’d like to bathe. I was a little hesitant, knowing full well that the lack of flushing toilets and running water in this village did not leave much chance of me getting what I defined as a bath today. But he and his wife grew more and more persistent, and I was already caked in sweat from the heat and humidity of the day, so I finally gave in. They took me behind a wall and showed me to my bath: a wire sponge, soap, and a bucket of water. It did the job washing off the sweat, but I’m pretty sure the river water I’d just threw all over myself had probably made me dirtier. Luckily, they gave me about a gallon of perfume to coat on my skin afterwards, which succeeded in making my skin nice-smelling and incredibly sticky. It was an odd experience, but I’m glad to say that I did it.

Dinner was pretty much hotel food again. Nothing to discuss.

After dinner the village held a bonfire, which pretty much amounted to an all-out dance party for me and the village children. I taught them the Macarena and they taught me they’re local dances. Whatever sweat I’d just washed off of me came back ten-fold by the end of the night, due to the combination of hard-core dancing, fire, and children on all sides of me. When I finally sat down to take a break, the village children took pictures of each other with my camera. They gave it back, and were utterly entranced when I showed them photos of Morocco. I think the food photos were they’re favorites. They kept making slurping and munching sounds when they saw them.

Finally it was time for bed. I went behind my Jesus-door and collapses onto my straw mattress.