Well, it was a magical week in Alaska, where I went with my two friends Kate and Heidi to run in the Anchorage “Midnight Sun Mayor’s Marathon” in support of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. On the flight to Alaska, I sat next to a big guy who lived with his wife in a heated hangar that he’d built himself on a community airfield about an hour North of Anchorage. Flying seems a pretty popular form of transportation in Alaska; there are airfields everywhere filled with prop-planes and there are always bush planes buzzing in the sky. This guy owned two planes – a Cessna and a Piper Cub – and did all the service on them himself. His eyes gleamed as he described flying into the wilderness and landing in a field or on a dirt road and going hunting or fishing (I guess he wasn’t hunting for moose). Every fall, he would shoot an elk – “It’s the best meat in the world” - and survive on it through most of the winter, making it into sausage and tenderloins and such. I began to get a sense of the self-sufficiency that living in much of Alaska requires and of the satisfaction that can come from it. His wife said that she hoped that he would use some of that self-sufficiency to build the house next to the hangar that he’d been promising for awhile.
Anyway, we landed at 10 pm and the sun was still reflecting off the bay and off the couple skyscrapers of Anchorage. My two friends Kate and Heidi, who work at Project Homecoming with me, had arrived the day before and they picked me up in this crappy, aquamarine Kia rental car that they’d nicknamed Booger. Heidi is a self-sufficient 33-year-old who looks my age, leads a “boot camp” exercise class at 5am every morning before going to a day of construction work, wears funky, teal-colored eyeglasses and has two white pitbulls who she calls her “lady babies.” Heidi’s from Westport, MA. Kate is a year older than I am; is from Saginaw, Michigan; went to Michigan State and is a huge Spartan fan, and is the most enthusiastic karaoke performer I’ve ever met. They were a bit loopy as they hadn’t slept a wink the night before because of the light so we had a couple close calls as they took me to the campsite they’d found. At the tent was Heidi’s talkative friend Tom Tierney from Boston, MA. He was running the half-marathon, works at Fidelity and traveled with Heidi around Ireland a couple years ago. The place we stayed the first “night” wasn’t particularly memorable. There was a popular ATV trail about 100yds through the woods from our tent that people were on all night and the Air Force was conducting some type of training in the sky above so it was kind of like trying to get to sleep during World War III. Not exactly the wilderness experience.
Things picked up the next day, however. We drove out to Chugach National Park, which is a little South of Anchorage. It was our first taste of real Alaska - the road snaked out from the highway up into the mountains, soon revealing a valley below with an impressive green range on the other side. Booger whined and strained. At the Park entrance, there was a sign reading: “Warning: You are entering Bear Country” and, hand-written on the sign, were the most recent sightings of grizzlies and black bears. There had been one two days before. Heidi, whose only fear in life as far as I can tell is bears, gripped her hachet tight, which her boyfriend had given her as a birthday gift for her Alaska trip. We pulled into the camp host station to ask about bears and how to avoid them. An open meadow stretched upwards, turning into a steep, wooded side of a mountain. The sun was out and a nice breeze was blowing and Alaska was starting to seem like a pretty stunning place. The camp host was a thirty-something year-old guy named Erin who was originally from Malibu, California and had moved up here in December. “I’m here to stay, man,” he said. “There is no place like this, everything in Alaska is on a bigger scale. You can’t find this amount of wildlife anywhere else. You got wolves, black bears, grizzles (Heidi’s eyes widened), foxes, eagles, and the fishing, man the fishing’s incredible. And the people here are great; they’re real.” (especially compared to Malibu, I thought). “Most of them moved up here, are a little kooky, but are truly good people once you get to know them.” Kate, Tom and I were all nodding, try to soak up the essence of Alaska, but Heidi had other things on her mind. “So people see bears often then?” “Oh, all the time, you’ll probably see one, they make the rounds from campsite to campsite to see if anyone left food out.” Heidi laughed nervously and looked on the verge of tears. “So what should we do if we see one?” I asked. “Well, make sure to put all your food away in the car, even toothpaste, and then if you see one and you’re near your car, get in and honk the horn.” “The bear would probably just eat Booger whole,” we joked. “If your not near your car, just give them plenty of space and they’ll probably go their own way. Don’t make eye contact with them. If one does attack you, they say not to fight back, to just stay still, unless it keeps attacking you, in which case you should fight back.” I was a little unclear as to what point during a bear attack to decide that the bear had attacked you long enough and to begin fighting back but I decided it wouldn’t do Heidi’s nerves a whole lot of good to ask for clarification. “You guys will be fine,” he said, “Bears are all over, but there hasn’t been a mauling since I’ve been here, I don’t know when the last one was. Travel together and make noise and you’ll be fine. Enjoy this place, go hiking, go fishing, take it all in.”
The campground was near Eklutna Lake. We got out of our car and set up our tents in a little spot shaded by birch trees then strolled through the woods until they opened up to Eklutna Lake, a large, aqua-marine lake bordered by layers of dramatic mountains. The mountains in the background were covered with snow and were bathed in sunlight. A warm breeze fluttered through the tall grass surrounding the lake. We all just giggled out of joy. We were the only people in sight. “I feel like I’m in a dream,” Kate said and that really nailed it; it did feel like an entirely different level of existence, it was so peaceful and grand. We got some Alaskan beers out of Booger and returned to the rocky beach and sat propped up against boulders watching the sprawling peaks in awe. Clouds hovered behind the peaks, unable to get by. “This is the best beer of my life,” Tom said and we all nodded in agreement.
Soon, our serenity was interrupted by honking and whistles; apparently there had been a bear sighting. “Oh, god,” Heidi said, with a frantic laugh. Every hour or we’d hear some distant horn honking or whistle blowing and wonder which poor individual was being mauled by a bear. Nevertheless, we survived the night without getting eaten.
The next day, we hiked up a mountain overlooking the lake. The few other hikers we ran into all had guns; we began to feel like Heidi’s six-inch hatchet might be a bit insufficient. As we got higher up the mountain, we’d periodically come across steaming bear “skat,” or poop, on the trail. We all huddled together and huffed and puffed up the trail, trying to make as much noise as possible to scare off the bears. Soon, the trees thinned and were replaced by shrubs and seemingly hundreds of different types of hardy wildflowers of all different colors and shapes dotting the hillsides. The hike was much longer than anticipated but the nice thing about hiking in Alaska in the summer is that you don’t have to worry about it getting dark. As we got high up, we could see the bay way in the distance, glowing orange from the sunset. On the other side, was the sprawling Eklutna lake, a bright aqua marine in sharp contrast to the forest green hills around it. It was cool; we could see planes flying in the valley below us, little white, fast-moving specks. “We’ve climbed a long, f**king way,” said Tom in an Irish brogue, an accent we all adopted for some reason during the trip, perhaps because whatever you said in it could always be passed off as a joke if it was not well-received.
We lounged on the ridge for awhile, looking in awe at the lake and the valley of the river that fed it, carved out between snow-capped mountains. Thinking about how exhausting the hike up had been, I talked with Tom about how few great things come easy. The mountain kept going upwards and couple hundred feet above us grey clouds slipped over the hillside. We were definitely experiencing the world on a grander scale than we were used to. It was nice to be there together, to share the awe we were all in; it had taken awhile to rally the troops to leave the rocky beach by the lake and take a hike, so we left far later than I would have if it had been by myself, and there had been some complaining on the way up, but having people there to hug and to share the experience with made all the previous inconveniences worthwhile. I thought of that last passage written in Chris McCandless’s journal from Into the Wild: Happiness is only real when shared.
We basically ran the whole way down the mountain, hooting and hollering as we did so to scare off bears. We got back to the campsite around 10 or so and it was still light of course and we started a fire and had s’mores for appetizers as the water boiled for rice, which we mixed with our only other available ingredients: canned tuna and powdered broccoli cheddar soup. It was still the most delicious meal I’d had in awhile given how hungry I was from the hike.
The next day, we departed for the Kenai peninsula which is South of Anchorage and home to many accessible glaciers and fjords, which are bays formed by glaciers. We arrived in Seward, Alaska, a fishing town on Resurrection Bay that is the home of the famous “Mount Marathon” race in July where runners race up and down a 3000 ft mountain. We set up our tents on a windy campground right on the foggy bay and then strolled into what locals call the “Bistro District” which is a single, quaint street that has some surprisingly hip coffee shops and stores. The rest of the town consists of small houses and cottages with rugged looking fishing boats and cabin-cruisers parked in the driveways, It was cold and overcast and we all felt like we were truly in Alaska. Clothing stores sold fur winter wear that was, for the most part, more for warmth than fashion. There was the smell of chimney smoke in the air. The “bistro district” road ended at the bay, from which fog poured in. We slid into the “Yukon Bar” near the end of the street, and played pool and a bear-hunting video game (Heidi loved that one) then to another bar where we did karaoke. Alaskans aren’t particularly friendly or unfriendly, they are for the most part just uninterested; seemingly focused enough on their own lives and those close to them that they don’t see the point in making chit chat with strangers. Several times during the trip, someone – say a waitress – would feel obligated to ask where we were from, and we’d reply “Louisiana” and they’d nod and walk away, worried to be engaged in too long of a conversation. A few, however, did ask if we were from Ireland. Then we had some explaining to do. Anyway, we all got pretty drunk at another bar right next to the Yukon that was packed with locals and where ship steering wheels hung on the wall and where we did karaoke and poor Kate left her bag there at the end of the night and the next morning when we returned to look for it, someone had taken it. So she lost her ID, her credit cards, and her cell phone. Also, in our inebriated state, we forgot to zip close the door to the tent at the end of the night and it rained that night so when we woke up, we were all soaked from the knees down.
That next day, after looking in vain for Kate’s bag, we took a cruise out to see the Holgate glacier. It was cold and foggy and there were huge swells heading out towards the open ocean. Steep cliffs with trees somehow clinging to their sides rose up on both sides of us. There were few boats out except for us, and certainly no pleasure craft; the only boats out with us were fishing boats that looked as if they were going into battle, with steel hulls and thick bridge-house windows and massive antennas. Kate, Heidi and I stood outside the cabin on the bow and hung over the railing watching the racing water as the big ship rolled over the swells. “It’s like an amusement park ride with a view,” I said. We saw otters, paddling on their backs, seemingly quite comfortable in the frigid waters; and puffins, who would frantically flap their wings and skid along on their bellies to escape the oncoming ship.
The glacier itself was stunning. After a brief, bumpy stint in open ocean we went into this fjord and began to see chunks of ice in the water. The chunks of ice gradually got bigger and bigger and the air got colder. Clouds of mist glided over the tops of the cliffs on both sides. The fjord ended at the glacier, which was enormous and was a light shade of blue (because the ice was so densely packed that it only reflected certain spectrums of light). The glacier moved as much as a meter a day! You could hear it creaking and every so often you’d hear an especially loud crack and a big chunk of ice would fall off the glacier and make a big splash.
After staring at the glacier for a long time, we headed out to the ocean again towards the Chiswell Island, which are part of the Kenai Fjords National Park. On the way there, the sun came out and a humpback whale surfaced near us and the mist he sprayed out of his spout glowed from the sunlight. He did a couple jumps out of the water like in the Prudential commercials which was pretty stunning. The Chiswell Islands were absolutely magical. They are uninhabited and are clustered a couple miles out in the ocean. They have dramatic, jagged cliffs with tiny rock beaches and bright green trees bursting from the few flat patches of rock and soil on each island. They drove the boat into a couple little inlets where sea lions flopped up the steep rocks and where puffins and seagulls perched on rocks or floated in the water. The sun was out and hit the high clouds at an angle and made the aquamarine water radiate and the mist from the crashing waves glow. We were mostly speechless. I felt like I’d come across the islands from Jurassic Park or King Kong.
That night we returned to Anchorage and the next day was spent resting up and eating in preparation for the marathon. Also, it was Heidi’s birthday so we went out to dinner for that, but we were all a bit nervous about the marathon so it wasn’t exactly unbridled revelry.
The day of the race, Heidi and I woke up at 5:45 and loaded onto the shuttle which took us out of the city to a high school whose mascot was the Golden Bears. We waited in the gym and, painted on the wall, was “You’re in Bear Country.” It was quite chilly and a bit drizzly which I was pretty happy with since that is good running weather. People stretched and ate lots of energy bars. The Mayor’s Marathon is a big Team in Training event, which is the organization affiliated with the Leukemia and Lymphoma society, so there were lots of purple jerseys around from all over the country. A lot of them pinned pictures of friends or family members with cancer to their jerseys. One woman I was next to had a picture of her son. There were definitely a lot of stories behind the purple jerseys. The race (finally) started in the parking lot. There were about a thousand people running the marathon. There was one very skinny black guy who was standing next to me, perfectly still, looking straight ahead. His legs were the width of my forearms arms. He didn’t have any IPOD holder or “fuel belts” and was only wearing a tank top and running shorts. “There’s our winner,” Heidi said. (He ended up coming in second). The Mayor of Anchorage gave a short speech, the point of which seemed to mostly be to inform us that he, also, ran marathons. He told us to stay in groups (to avoid the bears) and to pace ourselves. Well, when the gun fired, people didn’t seem to take his advice, at least concerning the latter piece. Everyone was off to the races and, as I got passed again and again, I couldn’t tell if there were simply a lot of super runners in the race or if they would burn out at mile 10. As we jogged down a trail along the highway and even old guys passed me and the competitive part of me squirmed, I tried to remind myself that 26 miles is a very long way and that my pace would hopefully improve with the miles as I got stretched out and in a rhythm. Soon, we thankfully left the highway and entered property belong to an Army base. The road became two lanes and hilly, with no traffic, forest on both sides and mountains in the distance. We’d all been pretty scared of the hills before the race, looking at the elevation chart, but the uphills were actually a nice challenge and a time when I began to pass people. It also helped that there were lots of Team in Training supporters along the route, who recognized my purple jersey and would cheer me on, “You’re the first Team in Training person we’ve seen,” they’d yell and they’d rattle noisemakers.
Around mile eight, the course turned from asphalt to dirt and narrowed and passed through more rural territory with few spectators save for aid stations. The miles seemed to go a bit quicker at this point. After a couple killer uphills, the dirt road narrowed at mile 16 to a trail through the woods that was about one person wide. I was feeling pretty good and began to pass people pretty steadily. Around mile 17 was the high point of the course, and from there the dirt path changed back to sealed roads and began a wonderful gentle downhill through birch-trees. By this point the density of runners had thinned out a good deal and I had the road mostly to myself. Around mile 21, my legs started complaining and a mile seemed like a longer and longer distance. A Team in Training coach began jogging alongside me, trying to make conversation. “Where are you from?” He was trying to help but chit chat was about the last thing I felt like. My legs were running out of juice and the course, which was now on the outskirts of Anchorage, had changed into an annoying, winding bike path with lots of ups and downs. Eventually, the poor guy got the hint that I wasn’t too keen on talking and fell back. The last miles were definitely tough, especially the last mile that included a steep uphill to the finish line. But despite the discomfort, I kept thinking to myself, as I looked out on sun-lit meadows of the city park and snow-capped peaks in the distance and huffed and puffed, that this is what I truly enjoy. I felt uncomfortable but healthy and pure, like this is what my body was meant to do.
The course ended at another high school, in Anchorage. At the finish line I saw that my finishing time was 3:13, two minutes shy of qualifying for Boston. It was seventeen minutes faster than my Mardi Gras marathon time and I was pleased with it, though I wished I’d been wearing a watch so I could’ve shaved those last two minutes off. Still, I felt like I pushed myself about as hard as I could’ve. I ended up finishing 4th in my age range and 34th overall They had delicious fresh-baked cinnamon-swirl bread at the finish line which I ate a lot of while I waited for my team mates Kate and Heidi to finish. They both did quite well. Kate finished her half-marathon which was a big accomplishment for her and Heidi finished with a time of 4:20, better than she was expecting. That night, we went out to an Irish pub in Anchorage where a Cajun band was playing (what are the odds?) A bunch of the Lousiana contingent were there and we all danced and did a second-line around the bar to the familiar zydeco tunes like “the Saints” and “Jambalaya.” It was a blast. The next day I returned to New Orleans, which was steamin’.
Overall, the Louisiana chapter of Team in Training raised $120,000 for cancer research. I ended up raising $4300. Thanks so much for your all’s support. It was an incredible week.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
gators
Well, just returned from a "Personal and Professional Development" retreat for all the AmeriCorps peeps in Louisiana. It was held at Lake Fausse Point State Park, which is an hour west of Baton Rouge in the Atchafalaya Delta. This is true swamp / Cajun country, the type I've been wanting to see since I got here. You get off I-10 and you follow "Levee Rd" by trailers, shacks, cottages and houses all set on the shady banks of bayous (small rivers through the swamp). Every yard has a couple olive green, flat-bottom boats parked on the lawn and a home-made sign with names like "Camp Wonder" or "Gator Cove". We stayed in these great cabins on the bayou with screened in porches and at night, when our lectures and team building excercises were over, we built bond fires and went on "Gator Hunts" through the swamp.
My friends Kate and Heidi and I all got more of a taste of the bayou than we'd bargained for today. At the conclusion of our retreat, we stayed at the park for the afternoon and rented kayaks to do some exploring. After paddling for about five minutes we saw our first gator sunning himself on an old log. We kept going, passing a couple shacks on the river and watching the knarled root systems along the banks for wildlife. The swamp teems with life; it seems like every square inch is squirming. We saw an enormous striped tan watersnake laying on a tree that had fallen into the bayou. A flat-bottom boat with three old Cajun men with camoflauge hats, tan skin and bright white beards came around a corner and slowed. "They'se gators bigger than those boats y'all are in. They'll eat the whole thing," one of them said. I wondered if this was a routine they pulled with tourists and perhaps it is, but shortly after we did see a gator about as big as our kayak, laying on the banks. Kate paddled close to take a picture and it slipped into the water towards us and disappeared under the murky water. Laughing out of pure terror, we paddled away.
We sat in a small cove for awhile. Kate and Heidi relaxed and I tried to fish. Fish were literally jumping out of the water all around and I didn't get a single bite. It didn't make me feel like the world's most capable outdoorsman. Eventually, we decided to head back. Consulting the fuzzy, xeroxed map we'd picked up at the Ranger station, Heidi suggested that if we went to the right, it would be a loop back to the boathouse. We paddled...and paddled...and paddled. Loops generally involve turns and the bayou we were on was in a straight line in the wrong direction. With no turn offs. The kayaks seemed to have been designed to withstand gator attacks rather than to glide through the water so progress was slow and our arms began hurting and the prospect of turning around was demoralizing that we kept going, hoping that a left turn would appear soon. The farther we got from the boat house, the more wildlife there was and there became more and more semi-jokes about a gator attack, which wasn't good for anyone's nerves. I pictured those three old Cajun guys hiding in the bushes, in absolute hysterics.
Finally the bayou split and we took a left. Soon after, Heidi, checking the map, burst into laughter. And she couldn't stop. Such hysterics from our navigator wasn't particularly reassuring and Kate and I, laughing along nervously, threw in some, "So...Heidi (chuckle, chuckle), where are we?" But she just kept laughing. I was in utter misery.
Eventually, we got hold of the map and saw that we were right at the edge of it and that we were at the farthest possible point. Heading back was probably the shortest, safest option but paddling back all that way didn't seem doable. It looked like there was a shortcut – a very narrow waterway - that cut the loop in half and seemed to me the only way we’d possibly get back to the boathouse while there was still daylight. So, when the shortcut appeared on the left, we took it.
By now it was late afternoon and the weakening light injected some adrenaline into the whole thing. The shortcut immediately became narrower so that low hanging branches were close on both sides. There were constant splashes of some creature or another entering or exiting the water. A bend in the river revealed an old barge with a crane and a trailer parked on top of it. The only signs of life were hundreds of crushed Keystone Light cans. An old skiff with a pilot house with a dusty windshield was moored alongside, resting in the calm water.
All of a sudden, there was a splash very close by and Heidi screamed. I heard a thumping and she screamed, “Jesus Christ! Phil!” I looked back and Heidi was frantically hitting something in her kayak. I turned around and paddled back. A big silver fish flopped up and out of her boat swam off.
The little waterway continued to narrow and we soon had to weave around and under felled trees. Tall, thick marsh grass encroached on both sides further narrowing the channel and we could hear weeds scraping along the bottom of the kayaks. Up ahead the marsh grass closed to the width of a single kayak. We stopped.
“Gators wouldn’t have their nests in this type of area would they?” I asked, hoping for confirmation. There was none. I paddled up to the narrow opening of the marsh grass then imagined a mama gator sitting on her eggs in between the next cluster of the marsh grass and me stumbling across her and promptly being eaten. I backed up.
“Let’s turn around,” Kate said. But at that point I thought I’d rather be eaten by a gator than paddle for another two hours and plus, I was tired of doing the comfortable, smart thing and thought some bad choices might do me good.
So I backed up a bit then built up a head of steam and slid on through the narrow channel. Marsh grass brushed against me on both sides and all types of things - mostly birds – fluttered away through the grass. Every part of me was shakin’. I hummed really loudly, hoping to scare off gators and snakes with my offkey noise. There was this surge of adrenaline that made me ready to beat a gator silly with my paddle. I felt like I was in true nature.
The channel widened a bit and split and both paths were hopelessly shallow. “Well, screw it” I thought, looking down at the muddy bed now visible through the water. There was a fallen tree on the dried up part of the river bed and I thought if I climbed to the top of it, it might afford a view of how close we were to the bigger bayou. “It’s just mud,” I told myself and got out. My leg sank to the knee in mud as I trudged toward the tree. It was freeing to just let go and jump in and realize that nature wasn’t quite as scary or gross as it seems from civilization.
I made it to the tree and, eyeing the branches very closely for snakes, climbed up to the tallest point. There, about a hundred yards away, was the beautiful sight of silver water. It was a larger bayou that we could take back to the boat house.
Heidi and Kate got out of the boats too and we all trudged through the mud, dragging our big ol’ kayaks behind us, watching for snakes and laughing out of terror but also of the satisfaction of overcoming fear. I tell you, when we made it to the bayou and got back into our now muddy boats, it was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, I felt like Lewis and Clark. It’s very easy to be surrounded by nature and still not really be in nature, to still be somewhat insulated from it. But the proximity to it that comes from getting off the path and putting yourself in slight danger is incredibly refreshing.
We stopped at a seafood shack on the way back that was right on a bayou and ate broiled catfish and oysters from the porch and watched fishermen and hunters glide by in flatboats as the sun set. It was a magical end to the day.
Anyways, progress on the house is going well – we are now doing bamboo flooring (the walls are all painted and doors are installed). We have AmeriCorps NCCC’s with us for three weeks. NCCC’s are the national branch of AmeriCorps and they travel around the country doing short-term service projects. We get to be their boss so that’s nice.
Also, the weather down here has been incredible. Last weekend we played beach volleyball on Sunday then my friend Duncan and I just sat out on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain fishing and talking for a good two or three hours as the sun set. We had a bite but my dinky fishing line snapped immediately so that was a bit disappointing but it gave us an excuse to just sit and talk and watch the sky. This week, we did karaoke on Wednesday – one of the AmeriCorps volunteers is a semi-professional singer and she did a duet with a woman she met at the bar who was also an incredible singer and boy, it was like being at a concert - and then 80s night on Thursday at a club called One Eyed Jacks in the Quarter. Friday was not the most productive day at work.
My friends Kate and Heidi and I all got more of a taste of the bayou than we'd bargained for today. At the conclusion of our retreat, we stayed at the park for the afternoon and rented kayaks to do some exploring. After paddling for about five minutes we saw our first gator sunning himself on an old log. We kept going, passing a couple shacks on the river and watching the knarled root systems along the banks for wildlife. The swamp teems with life; it seems like every square inch is squirming. We saw an enormous striped tan watersnake laying on a tree that had fallen into the bayou. A flat-bottom boat with three old Cajun men with camoflauge hats, tan skin and bright white beards came around a corner and slowed. "They'se gators bigger than those boats y'all are in. They'll eat the whole thing," one of them said. I wondered if this was a routine they pulled with tourists and perhaps it is, but shortly after we did see a gator about as big as our kayak, laying on the banks. Kate paddled close to take a picture and it slipped into the water towards us and disappeared under the murky water. Laughing out of pure terror, we paddled away.
We sat in a small cove for awhile. Kate and Heidi relaxed and I tried to fish. Fish were literally jumping out of the water all around and I didn't get a single bite. It didn't make me feel like the world's most capable outdoorsman. Eventually, we decided to head back. Consulting the fuzzy, xeroxed map we'd picked up at the Ranger station, Heidi suggested that if we went to the right, it would be a loop back to the boathouse. We paddled...and paddled...and paddled. Loops generally involve turns and the bayou we were on was in a straight line in the wrong direction. With no turn offs. The kayaks seemed to have been designed to withstand gator attacks rather than to glide through the water so progress was slow and our arms began hurting and the prospect of turning around was demoralizing that we kept going, hoping that a left turn would appear soon. The farther we got from the boat house, the more wildlife there was and there became more and more semi-jokes about a gator attack, which wasn't good for anyone's nerves. I pictured those three old Cajun guys hiding in the bushes, in absolute hysterics.
Finally the bayou split and we took a left. Soon after, Heidi, checking the map, burst into laughter. And she couldn't stop. Such hysterics from our navigator wasn't particularly reassuring and Kate and I, laughing along nervously, threw in some, "So...Heidi (chuckle, chuckle), where are we?" But she just kept laughing. I was in utter misery.
Eventually, we got hold of the map and saw that we were right at the edge of it and that we were at the farthest possible point. Heading back was probably the shortest, safest option but paddling back all that way didn't seem doable. It looked like there was a shortcut – a very narrow waterway - that cut the loop in half and seemed to me the only way we’d possibly get back to the boathouse while there was still daylight. So, when the shortcut appeared on the left, we took it.
By now it was late afternoon and the weakening light injected some adrenaline into the whole thing. The shortcut immediately became narrower so that low hanging branches were close on both sides. There were constant splashes of some creature or another entering or exiting the water. A bend in the river revealed an old barge with a crane and a trailer parked on top of it. The only signs of life were hundreds of crushed Keystone Light cans. An old skiff with a pilot house with a dusty windshield was moored alongside, resting in the calm water.
All of a sudden, there was a splash very close by and Heidi screamed. I heard a thumping and she screamed, “Jesus Christ! Phil!” I looked back and Heidi was frantically hitting something in her kayak. I turned around and paddled back. A big silver fish flopped up and out of her boat swam off.
The little waterway continued to narrow and we soon had to weave around and under felled trees. Tall, thick marsh grass encroached on both sides further narrowing the channel and we could hear weeds scraping along the bottom of the kayaks. Up ahead the marsh grass closed to the width of a single kayak. We stopped.
“Gators wouldn’t have their nests in this type of area would they?” I asked, hoping for confirmation. There was none. I paddled up to the narrow opening of the marsh grass then imagined a mama gator sitting on her eggs in between the next cluster of the marsh grass and me stumbling across her and promptly being eaten. I backed up.
“Let’s turn around,” Kate said. But at that point I thought I’d rather be eaten by a gator than paddle for another two hours and plus, I was tired of doing the comfortable, smart thing and thought some bad choices might do me good.
So I backed up a bit then built up a head of steam and slid on through the narrow channel. Marsh grass brushed against me on both sides and all types of things - mostly birds – fluttered away through the grass. Every part of me was shakin’. I hummed really loudly, hoping to scare off gators and snakes with my offkey noise. There was this surge of adrenaline that made me ready to beat a gator silly with my paddle. I felt like I was in true nature.
The channel widened a bit and split and both paths were hopelessly shallow. “Well, screw it” I thought, looking down at the muddy bed now visible through the water. There was a fallen tree on the dried up part of the river bed and I thought if I climbed to the top of it, it might afford a view of how close we were to the bigger bayou. “It’s just mud,” I told myself and got out. My leg sank to the knee in mud as I trudged toward the tree. It was freeing to just let go and jump in and realize that nature wasn’t quite as scary or gross as it seems from civilization.
I made it to the tree and, eyeing the branches very closely for snakes, climbed up to the tallest point. There, about a hundred yards away, was the beautiful sight of silver water. It was a larger bayou that we could take back to the boat house.
Heidi and Kate got out of the boats too and we all trudged through the mud, dragging our big ol’ kayaks behind us, watching for snakes and laughing out of terror but also of the satisfaction of overcoming fear. I tell you, when we made it to the bayou and got back into our now muddy boats, it was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, I felt like Lewis and Clark. It’s very easy to be surrounded by nature and still not really be in nature, to still be somewhat insulated from it. But the proximity to it that comes from getting off the path and putting yourself in slight danger is incredibly refreshing.
We stopped at a seafood shack on the way back that was right on a bayou and ate broiled catfish and oysters from the porch and watched fishermen and hunters glide by in flatboats as the sun set. It was a magical end to the day.
Anyways, progress on the house is going well – we are now doing bamboo flooring (the walls are all painted and doors are installed). We have AmeriCorps NCCC’s with us for three weeks. NCCC’s are the national branch of AmeriCorps and they travel around the country doing short-term service projects. We get to be their boss so that’s nice.
Also, the weather down here has been incredible. Last weekend we played beach volleyball on Sunday then my friend Duncan and I just sat out on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain fishing and talking for a good two or three hours as the sun set. We had a bite but my dinky fishing line snapped immediately so that was a bit disappointing but it gave us an excuse to just sit and talk and watch the sky. This week, we did karaoke on Wednesday – one of the AmeriCorps volunteers is a semi-professional singer and she did a duet with a woman she met at the bar who was also an incredible singer and boy, it was like being at a concert - and then 80s night on Thursday at a club called One Eyed Jacks in the Quarter. Friday was not the most productive day at work.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Inauguration
Well, the inauguration was the coolest experience of my life most likely. I arrived in D.C. Sunday night and the festivities were already under way. The U St. corridor, a historically black area I used to go to all the time while at GW for its bars and jazz, was filled with black couples in tuxedos and gowns going from one inauguration party to the next. I felt shabby in my jeans and t-shirt. Classically black clubs were all spruced up with red, white and blue ribbons and banners and with tents around the entrances so that the line of gussied up black folks waiting to get in wouldn't have to stand in the cold. Everyone, even younger black couples, was dressed up for the occasion with scarves and petticoats. As exciting as Obama is for all of us, it clearly means something special to black people and the sense I got from walking round U St. was that they finally felt like this was their country. About time.
The next day, I was at Old Ebbitt's Grill, a D.C. institution that's across the street from the White House. The place has got blue blood written all over it (there are mounted boar and deer heads and bronze bannisters) and when Bush was in office, the place would get really busy at happy hour and fill with young, almost entirely white, Republican staffers shooting the breeze over bourbon and cokes and martinis. When I walked in this time, the waiting area was filled with black families. I heard one black woman say, "I don't think they've ever seen so many of us up in here. They're not gonna know what to do."
At the bar, I began talking with a black guy who'd been a strategist with the Bush White House. The last couple inaugurations had been crazy for him; he was looking forward to being able to take it easy, especially since the candidate wasn't too objectionable. "I just feel bad for [Obama]," he said, "People are gonna give him six months then they're gonna turn on him." Anyway, it was fascinating to hear him reflect on the last four years. Red, white and blue banners hung over the bar and the brass lanterns came on as the sky darkened outside and inauguration day approached and hearing this strategist talk about what Air Force one was like (how when they were flying into Baghdad they turned off all the lights on the plane, inside and out, and made a, rapid swirling descent towards the green zone) and his personal opinions of Bush (that Bush, despite his aversion to seeming like an intellectual, was actually a pretty voracious reader of history) seemed a fitting way to experience the inauguration. The guy thought that Bush would go down in history as a much better President than his approval ratings reflected and said that the real reason we invaded Iraq was because, after Afghanistan, Iraq seemed the mostly likely new haven for terrorists; the WMD argument was pushed forward for Blair's benefit, to get his people on board. I wasn't convinced that this made it excusable.
The day of the inauguration, I woke up and walked down towards the mall from my friend's apartment, feeling a bit ridiculous and encumbered from the number of layers I was wearing. Sirens were a constant sound in the distance, as were drums from sidewalk musicians, but overall it was surprisingly quiet; you could hear the wind whipping down the streets. Tents and vending tables crowded several of the main streets near the capitol building, which were all closed off to traffic. They sold every Obama accessory imaginable from Obama-scented incense to Obama pins to gawdy Obama t-shirts with his face in rhinestones. Fried seafood was everywhere, making me feel like I was back in New Orleans.
Barricades were set up along E St. and access to the parade route was only allowed at one or two checkpoints so lines of people several blocks long filled the streets. I waited in one of these for awhile then when we didn't move for a good half hour and it seemed like we'd get to the parade route perhaps in time for Obama's next inauguration in four years, I cut off and went straight to the Washington monument, which is miles from the Capitol but where I figured I'd at least be able to see a jumbo-tron and wouldn't have to hassle with lines quite as much as there were no security checkpoints. As I got a little farther from the Parade route and walked towards the White House along H St., the streets thinned a bit and everyone was in a more relaxed, jovial mood than those struggling to get the best spots. It was a bit surreal: here we were in the midst of this momentous day, for which the streets of D.C. were emptied of traffic, and a lot of people here didn't seem particularly swept up in it; instead they (myself included) wandered around looking for donuts or muffins or coffee.
Eventually I did make it to GW then headed down 18th towards Virginia Ave. and the World War II memorial, joining a thickening stream of people, all walking towards the Washington monument. We got to Constitution Ave, the street bordering the Mall to the North, and real excitement began to set in. Hundreds of clusters of bundled people walked around the frozen Constitution Gardens Lake and across the frost-covered grass separating it and the Reflecting Pool. The jumbo-tron by the WWII monument showed Obama leaving breakfast with the Bushes.
I headed straight to the top of the mound that the Washington monument sits on. A migration of people did the same all across that big field. I squeezed to the Capitol-side of the Washington monument. Down below, a sea of people - each with their little American flag - stretched down the Mall towards the Capitol. There was a jumbo-tron every block, receding towards the Capitol. Despite the mass of people, it was quiet. I could hear the flags that surround the monument flapping in the wind.
I didn't see any protesters, nor did anyone seem overcome with excitement. Most everyone I was standing near seemed content and curious to hear what Obama had to say. The only exceptions were those who'd chosen fashion over warmth and were now shivering uncontrollably. The musical performances of Aretha and Yo Yo were incredible: it was so quiet and the music echoed across the mall and the music, combined with the rustling of the flags, sweeping over such a content, calm crowd was an almost Zen-like experience.
When Obama came on and began speaking, there were occasional cheers but for the most part everyone just perpetually nodded. Unlike Bush's inauguration, it seemed that no matter who you were (there were plenty of Repubs in the crowd, including the couple next to me), everyone was at least listening.
I'd been in some big crowds before, but as Obama spoke and articulated such a transcendent vision for the country, I felt a commonality with everyone that I'd never really felt before. Looking over the crowds of people on the Mall, I felt like everyone one of them was fundamentally a good person. I had this intense feeling that everyone had been drawn there for the best of reasons, a deep-rooted hope and belief in a way of life more in tune with our humanity, and that this somehow bound us all together. Obama seemed to recast so much of ordinary political distinctions as petty, it seemed everyone was seeing each other in a way that everyone wants to see other people, with magnanimity. Unless, of course, that person inched in front, trying to get a better view.
When Obama's speech ended, another mass migration filled the big field by the Washington monument, heading towards the Foggy Bottom metro stops. Being part of such a massive group of people, combined with the drums and colorful uniforms of a military marching band playing on the Elipse, made me feel like I was in the movie Brave Heart. Bush's helicopter glided over the crowd and a couple people flipped a middle finger at its green underbelly or yelled "Bye, bye Bush" or something with more profanities but most people seemed more immersed in the future than the past, or were too cold by that point to care. Despite wanting to beat traffic, I couldn't bring myself to leave and so I lingered around by the monument, watching the streams of people fill 17th st. and the avenues by the reflecting pool below and watching the marching bands preparing for the parade on the Ellipse. A Haitian steel-drum band began playing Amazing Grace and a very diverse crowd gathered around. The Haitians went mobile and, as we all stepped to the beat, again I felt like I was back in New Orleans, following a second line parade (which are awesome by the way).
Eventually, I dragged myself away and drove home, ridiculously excited about the potential for the next four years.
Otherwise, life in New Orleans is good. The Sunday before last I ran the Mardi Gras marathon and finished in 3:30, which was my goal. Work on the Paul's house is coming along well - we are nearing the end of drywall and it's finally starting to look like a house! Also, our weekly training runs and meetings for the Anchorage marathon to raise money for LLS are always a highpoint: people of every age are in the group and watching some of the survivors or family members really push themselves for a cause that has touched them so close to home is incredibly inspiring.
Well hope all is well and I look forward to hearing from you all. Love,
Phil
The next day, I was at Old Ebbitt's Grill, a D.C. institution that's across the street from the White House. The place has got blue blood written all over it (there are mounted boar and deer heads and bronze bannisters) and when Bush was in office, the place would get really busy at happy hour and fill with young, almost entirely white, Republican staffers shooting the breeze over bourbon and cokes and martinis. When I walked in this time, the waiting area was filled with black families. I heard one black woman say, "I don't think they've ever seen so many of us up in here. They're not gonna know what to do."
At the bar, I began talking with a black guy who'd been a strategist with the Bush White House. The last couple inaugurations had been crazy for him; he was looking forward to being able to take it easy, especially since the candidate wasn't too objectionable. "I just feel bad for [Obama]," he said, "People are gonna give him six months then they're gonna turn on him." Anyway, it was fascinating to hear him reflect on the last four years. Red, white and blue banners hung over the bar and the brass lanterns came on as the sky darkened outside and inauguration day approached and hearing this strategist talk about what Air Force one was like (how when they were flying into Baghdad they turned off all the lights on the plane, inside and out, and made a, rapid swirling descent towards the green zone) and his personal opinions of Bush (that Bush, despite his aversion to seeming like an intellectual, was actually a pretty voracious reader of history) seemed a fitting way to experience the inauguration. The guy thought that Bush would go down in history as a much better President than his approval ratings reflected and said that the real reason we invaded Iraq was because, after Afghanistan, Iraq seemed the mostly likely new haven for terrorists; the WMD argument was pushed forward for Blair's benefit, to get his people on board. I wasn't convinced that this made it excusable.
The day of the inauguration, I woke up and walked down towards the mall from my friend's apartment, feeling a bit ridiculous and encumbered from the number of layers I was wearing. Sirens were a constant sound in the distance, as were drums from sidewalk musicians, but overall it was surprisingly quiet; you could hear the wind whipping down the streets. Tents and vending tables crowded several of the main streets near the capitol building, which were all closed off to traffic. They sold every Obama accessory imaginable from Obama-scented incense to Obama pins to gawdy Obama t-shirts with his face in rhinestones. Fried seafood was everywhere, making me feel like I was back in New Orleans.
Barricades were set up along E St. and access to the parade route was only allowed at one or two checkpoints so lines of people several blocks long filled the streets. I waited in one of these for awhile then when we didn't move for a good half hour and it seemed like we'd get to the parade route perhaps in time for Obama's next inauguration in four years, I cut off and went straight to the Washington monument, which is miles from the Capitol but where I figured I'd at least be able to see a jumbo-tron and wouldn't have to hassle with lines quite as much as there were no security checkpoints. As I got a little farther from the Parade route and walked towards the White House along H St., the streets thinned a bit and everyone was in a more relaxed, jovial mood than those struggling to get the best spots. It was a bit surreal: here we were in the midst of this momentous day, for which the streets of D.C. were emptied of traffic, and a lot of people here didn't seem particularly swept up in it; instead they (myself included) wandered around looking for donuts or muffins or coffee.
Eventually I did make it to GW then headed down 18th towards Virginia Ave. and the World War II memorial, joining a thickening stream of people, all walking towards the Washington monument. We got to Constitution Ave, the street bordering the Mall to the North, and real excitement began to set in. Hundreds of clusters of bundled people walked around the frozen Constitution Gardens Lake and across the frost-covered grass separating it and the Reflecting Pool. The jumbo-tron by the WWII monument showed Obama leaving breakfast with the Bushes.
I headed straight to the top of the mound that the Washington monument sits on. A migration of people did the same all across that big field. I squeezed to the Capitol-side of the Washington monument. Down below, a sea of people - each with their little American flag - stretched down the Mall towards the Capitol. There was a jumbo-tron every block, receding towards the Capitol. Despite the mass of people, it was quiet. I could hear the flags that surround the monument flapping in the wind.
I didn't see any protesters, nor did anyone seem overcome with excitement. Most everyone I was standing near seemed content and curious to hear what Obama had to say. The only exceptions were those who'd chosen fashion over warmth and were now shivering uncontrollably. The musical performances of Aretha and Yo Yo were incredible: it was so quiet and the music echoed across the mall and the music, combined with the rustling of the flags, sweeping over such a content, calm crowd was an almost Zen-like experience.
When Obama came on and began speaking, there were occasional cheers but for the most part everyone just perpetually nodded. Unlike Bush's inauguration, it seemed that no matter who you were (there were plenty of Repubs in the crowd, including the couple next to me), everyone was at least listening.
I'd been in some big crowds before, but as Obama spoke and articulated such a transcendent vision for the country, I felt a commonality with everyone that I'd never really felt before. Looking over the crowds of people on the Mall, I felt like everyone one of them was fundamentally a good person. I had this intense feeling that everyone had been drawn there for the best of reasons, a deep-rooted hope and belief in a way of life more in tune with our humanity, and that this somehow bound us all together. Obama seemed to recast so much of ordinary political distinctions as petty, it seemed everyone was seeing each other in a way that everyone wants to see other people, with magnanimity. Unless, of course, that person inched in front, trying to get a better view.
When Obama's speech ended, another mass migration filled the big field by the Washington monument, heading towards the Foggy Bottom metro stops. Being part of such a massive group of people, combined with the drums and colorful uniforms of a military marching band playing on the Elipse, made me feel like I was in the movie Brave Heart. Bush's helicopter glided over the crowd and a couple people flipped a middle finger at its green underbelly or yelled "Bye, bye Bush" or something with more profanities but most people seemed more immersed in the future than the past, or were too cold by that point to care. Despite wanting to beat traffic, I couldn't bring myself to leave and so I lingered around by the monument, watching the streams of people fill 17th st. and the avenues by the reflecting pool below and watching the marching bands preparing for the parade on the Ellipse. A Haitian steel-drum band began playing Amazing Grace and a very diverse crowd gathered around. The Haitians went mobile and, as we all stepped to the beat, again I felt like I was back in New Orleans, following a second line parade (which are awesome by the way).
Eventually, I dragged myself away and drove home, ridiculously excited about the potential for the next four years.
Otherwise, life in New Orleans is good. The Sunday before last I ran the Mardi Gras marathon and finished in 3:30, which was my goal. Work on the Paul's house is coming along well - we are nearing the end of drywall and it's finally starting to look like a house! Also, our weekly training runs and meetings for the Anchorage marathon to raise money for LLS are always a highpoint: people of every age are in the group and watching some of the survivors or family members really push themselves for a cause that has touched them so close to home is incredibly inspiring.
Well hope all is well and I look forward to hearing from you all. Love,
Phil
Saturday, September 13, 2008
NOLA (september)
SEPTEMBER
Well, I've now spent a good week and a half in New Orleans. So far, I've seen two hurricanes, have found an apartment, and have learned how to drywall! For Hurricane Gustav, I ended up meeting my organization, Project Homecoming, at a Presbyterian Retreat Center in rural Norwood, Louisiana, next to the town where they filmed Dukes of Hazard. It's about an hour and a half North of N'Orlins, as I've been told to pronounce it. On Tuesday, Gustav snapped lots of pine trees off at the trunk, knocked out power, and turned the retreat center's dirt road into a river, making it impassable for a day, but certainly was not the "storm of the century" that Mayor Ray Nagin had told us over and over to expect. We were holed up for a day after the storm but not once during the storm did I feel anything other than curiosity and excitement.
Before arriving Saturday night (two days before Gustav was set to make landfall), I did drive down to see Lake Pontchartrain, the huge "lake" which connects to the Gulf and borders NOLA to the North. I'd been told to go straight to the center as evacuation routes were already getting clogged, but I wanted to see the Gulf before this massive storm struck. The lanes of Interstate 55 South were largely empty, save for some National Guard convoys, ambulances coming down to help from as far away as Indiana, and lots of buses either donated or contracted to help bus people out of the city. The Northbound lanes were already congested with cars, trucks and RVs stuffed to the gills with people and belongings. On the radio, Gov. Bobby Jindal compared Gustav with Katrina, saying it had the potential to be worse, and hammering over again and again the need to evacuate, now. Every so often, his endless press conference would be interrupted by Emergency Broadcast System announcements that a Hurricane advisory was in effect. Many counties, or "parishes" as they're called down here, were already under mandatory evacuation but I really wanted to see the Gulf, expecting dramatic waves and hoping not to get stopped by a cop and redirected North. Instead, when I arrived at a state park on the North shore of Pontchartain, the lake was as smooth as glass and people were sitting on piling stumps, fishing for catfish, drinking Bud Light, enjoying the warm late afternoon and seemingly unperturbed by the oncoming storm. Seagulls rested on a half submerged steamboat right off shore. There was a little seafood shack nearby doing a brisk business selling clams and crawfish. After four days of driving, I finally felt like I'd arrived at this exotic new region that I'd been picturing for the past two months, with its snaking bayous lined with house boats, its slow pace of life, and its love of frying all types of strange sea creatures like crawfish and catfish. Of course, it was soon time to head North and, after struggling to find a gas station that still had gas (three were out already with plastic bags over the pumps) and trying in vain to find batteries at a mobbed Walmart (they were all sold out of batteries, gas cans and coolers), I with all the traffic, it took me a good three hours to get there.
The evacuation turned out to be the best possible orientation. We were thrown right into helping out with setting up generators for our intimidating Construction Manager Mark, who issued every task, from doing dishes to arranging chairs in the meeting room, in a charged tone that implied that the completion of this task was essential to the survival of everyone at the camp. Anyway, us Construction Assistants got to know each other well pretty quickly through marathon monopoly games and hours of sitting around, munching on prepackaged Smuckers PB&Js. I met my flat-mate, Monica, who is turning 23 and who just completed a year with AmeriCorp's NCCC program, where you spend a year with a service team working in five different locations around the country, spending about two months at each place. Right when she arrived at the retreat center from her long road trip down from her home in New Jersey, she went for a jog and I immediately knew we were going to be compatible as roommates. My roommate at the retreat center was Alex, a big, jolly, smart guy from California who loves history and the comedic tv show Adult Swim and can talk at length and with great conviction about both.
As Project Homecoming is run through the Presbyterian church, there were several pastors and their families at the center as well from random congregations who'd come to evacuate. We had a service early Monday afternoon, as the storm was about to make landfall, and boy did I feel like I was in a movie: a group of people huddled in a room, our pastor and director leading the prayer and giving a sermon about Jesus parting the sea for Peter or something like that, the violently swaying tops of pine trees visible in the window above the altar. Most of the construction assistants do come from a religious upbringing, but for the most part it seems that for them church, and the community that it fosters, is more of a pleasant addition to their lives than a controlling or constraining influence.
Anyway, the night before we left Feliciana, one of the pastors, unfamiliar with Project Homecoming, wanted to hear more about what we did and why we were here and so he organized a meeting, apparently something, along with committees, for which Presbyterians are known, according to Alex. We all grumbled a bit, as it was interrupting a heated Monopoly game where vast sums of paper money were rapidly changing hands, but it actually was fascinating to hear, officially, why everyone in the organization, from the director to the office assistant, were with Project Homecoming. We learned that Mark, the Construction Manager, had come down with his wife for a week of service and, when they returned to their island off the coast of Washington state, they couldn't stop thinking about the city and the people. It only took a couple weeks before they decided to take leaves of absence from their jobs and move, with their two young daughters, to New Orleans to work full time rebuilding houses. Mark, who has got the gruff bearing of a jock turned dad, seemed on the verge of tears when he described how fulfilling life could be when one let oneself be an "instrument of God" and he said how thankful he was that God had blessed him with a purpose.
As people went around the room, what struck me was how many couples had been brought together by Katrina and how many people had found purpose and direction in their lives through the disaster, whether through sweeping them out of 9-5 ruts into more fulfilling assistance positions or through a crash course in what's truly important in life. Multiple couples met because of Katrina: one of the construction managers, Noelle, met her future husband, Nick, who is a New Orleans native, when she came down to do some volunteer construction work. The current office manager, Allie, grew up in New Orleans but was "miserable" in Nashville, Tennessee working as an electrical engineer for a firm for which she says she was both "too creative and too ethical," when Katrina struck. It brought her back to New Orleans to care for her parents. Soon after, she too met her future husband. They now have a baby. The director of Project Homecoming also met her husband, who is a cook for an offshore oil rig, when she came down after the storm to counsel as a Presbyterian pastor. On the eve of returning to NOLA, I stood outside with some other Project Homecoming staff, who were smoking, and for the first time we could see stars. I remarked about how many people had, in the long run, been positively influenced by Katrina. Susan, a short, stocky, spunky 40-something-year-old with a pretty face and a whole string of wild stories bout growing up in Waveland, Mississippi, snapped in a Southern twang, "Not everybody" the stress of Katrina and the subsequent displacement had taken her mother's life and had dissolved her marriage.
But certainly for a whole host of non-natives, Katrina brought them to a city to which they might not otherwise have come, certainly not in an assistance capacity, and with which they immediately fell in love. Christina is a 43-year-old construction assistant (same position as me) who was formerly a Private Investigator in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and now is beginning her second year with Project Homecoming. "New Orleans just feels like home, I can't imagine living anywhere else now. I felt like an alien everywhere else - like what's wrong with me? - and when I moved here, I was like, 'There are people like me.'" The city's slogan - "Laissez les bon temps roulez" - expresses more than passing out on Bourbon St.; it means passing out on a friend's porch, and no one judging you for it.
Anyway, on Wednesday, we returned to New Orleans, a bit before the majority of residents did. There were lots of trees and branches down and there was no power (not even for traffic lights) and there were police cars everywhere to prevent looting of evacuated houses, but overall things were in good shape. Over the next week, Monica and I stayed at the "Blue House" which is a house provided for some of the other volunteers for Project Homecoming while we hunted for an apartment.
The day we returned, we went with construction managers to check on some of the houses that they'd been working on before the storm. This took us into the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards as well as into St. Bernard Parish (called "the Parish") which lies to the East of New Orleans and was heavily flooded during Katrina by Lake Borgne. The Parish was first: driving along Chef Menteur, the main drag through, I assumed that the strip malls full of boarded up Family Dollars and Winn Dixies were closed because of Gustav but Noelle, our construction manager, said they hadn't reopened since Katrina. Some residential streets - long, straight, surburban - intersected off Chef Menteur and looking down them, you couldn't see a single car or any sign of life, just overgrown sidewalks and lawns. This wasn't Gustav - people hadn't come back from Katrina.
There are many reasons why areas like St. Bernard have been so slow to crawl back. The way one homeowner described it to Noelle was to imagine that your house was destroyed, say in a fire. There are people that you'd turn to for help, from friends you could stay with to that whole slew of professionals - plumbers, electricians, general contractors, etc. - that it would take to rebuild. Now imagine that every single one of those people's houses had also been destroyed, along with the houses of the community's police officers, fire fighters, and teachers. You have no place to stay and no place, any longer, to work, as the company you worked for was also heavily damaged by the storm. Your insurance company says it will not cover damage due to flooding - only wind damage - so they pay you 30 percent of the value of your house. Stuck in a hotel miles away, your savings dwindling daily, you are not in a position to contest the settlement in court. Perhaps you have some savings, but now many of the general contractors who are in the city have no shortage of business and are charging exorbitant rates. Building supply prices have skyrocketed. Every single other person in your community is in the same situation so there is no guarantee that anyone is going to return to your neighborhood, which is now abandoned. The first family back on the block faces the risk of looters who have largely free reign over the city thanks to a police department who is handcuffed by flooded headquarters and officers abandoning their posts or evacuating. This would be a formidable challenge for anyone; now imagine that you were just scraping by before the storm.
As for government programs like Road Home, applications have been processed at a snails pace and promised financial assistance has yet to materialize. One woman in the office is a social worker from New Orleans, used to dealing with the maze of bureaucracy surrounding government assistance programs. In our orientation meeting about Katrina, she described trying to get money from Road Home after her insurance company paid a meager settlement. She applied, and then heard nothing for months and months. She called and called and was put on hold again and again, or they said they'd yet to process her application. After a year of living with her parents, with no sign or assurance that money was on its way, she was driven to tears, pleading with the Road Home operator, "Just please help me." This was a college educated social worker and an ordained minister.
So, outside the Quarter and CBD (Central Business District), New Orleans is eerily quiet. In the Lower Ninth Ward, along the Industrial Canal where an unfastened barge punched a hole in the levy during the storm, there is an expansive field, broken only by the occasional house every couple hundred yards. Driving into the Lower Ninth over the canal on North Robertson St., you can make out concrete slabs in the field, their edges overgrown, spaced close apart like the other shotgun-house neighborhoods of New Orleans. The flood of water from the levy breach simply washed the houses right off their slabs. It's a formidable challenge, but the Lower Ninth, where many of the area's jazz musicians grew up, is an essential part of New Orleans and the city won't be near complete without its revitalization.
As for our living arrangements, we finally did find a place - kind of a converted attic - that's located on Esplanade Ave. in Mid-City, a neighborhood about a 15 minute bike ride northeast of the "Quarter." We're a block away from Bayou St. John, a river that comes in from Lake Pontchartain and close to City Park, which is a huge, slightly overgrown park with lots of twisting Bayous and old trees where the fishing is apparently really good, according to construction manager who knows about such things. We're also quite close to where Jazz Fest is held every year so it will be great fun to be able to walk back and forth to the fairgrounds to watch that this spring.
Our landlords, a spunky, middle-aged couple, live downstairs with their son and two pugs. They own a small dive bar nearby where we've watched a couple Saints games with local fans. Going means being ready to accept a formidable number of free drinks - either from Gary and Laura (our landlords) or from the other patrons, who are thankful for what we're doing...or who think Monica's cute and feel obligated to buy me a drink as well. So we always bike there.
Overall, NOLA's been swell; it's a genuinely comfortable place to live, especially now that I'm getting my bearings. People say hi from their porches and touch your arm gently and say " 'scuse me, babe," if they need to get by you at the supermarket. I'm quite glad I moved here with something (AmeriCorps) already in place; I was immediately tied in with a group of people. This would be a lot harder if I'd just come planning to start from scratch. The first weeks at a new place are always rocky - it's no fun feeling like people don't really know you - but it's gone about as well as it can - I think I'm getting to the age where befriending new people is a bit easier; we've finally gotten a well of experience that we can draw from in regards to people and making friends. It's not exactly a piece of cake though.
Well, I hope you all are well and I'd love to hear updates about what everyone is up to, if you can find the time. Love,
Phil
Well, I've now spent a good week and a half in New Orleans. So far, I've seen two hurricanes, have found an apartment, and have learned how to drywall! For Hurricane Gustav, I ended up meeting my organization, Project Homecoming, at a Presbyterian Retreat Center in rural Norwood, Louisiana, next to the town where they filmed Dukes of Hazard. It's about an hour and a half North of N'Orlins, as I've been told to pronounce it. On Tuesday, Gustav snapped lots of pine trees off at the trunk, knocked out power, and turned the retreat center's dirt road into a river, making it impassable for a day, but certainly was not the "storm of the century" that Mayor Ray Nagin had told us over and over to expect. We were holed up for a day after the storm but not once during the storm did I feel anything other than curiosity and excitement.
Before arriving Saturday night (two days before Gustav was set to make landfall), I did drive down to see Lake Pontchartrain, the huge "lake" which connects to the Gulf and borders NOLA to the North. I'd been told to go straight to the center as evacuation routes were already getting clogged, but I wanted to see the Gulf before this massive storm struck. The lanes of Interstate 55 South were largely empty, save for some National Guard convoys, ambulances coming down to help from as far away as Indiana, and lots of buses either donated or contracted to help bus people out of the city. The Northbound lanes were already congested with cars, trucks and RVs stuffed to the gills with people and belongings. On the radio, Gov. Bobby Jindal compared Gustav with Katrina, saying it had the potential to be worse, and hammering over again and again the need to evacuate, now. Every so often, his endless press conference would be interrupted by Emergency Broadcast System announcements that a Hurricane advisory was in effect. Many counties, or "parishes" as they're called down here, were already under mandatory evacuation but I really wanted to see the Gulf, expecting dramatic waves and hoping not to get stopped by a cop and redirected North. Instead, when I arrived at a state park on the North shore of Pontchartain, the lake was as smooth as glass and people were sitting on piling stumps, fishing for catfish, drinking Bud Light, enjoying the warm late afternoon and seemingly unperturbed by the oncoming storm. Seagulls rested on a half submerged steamboat right off shore. There was a little seafood shack nearby doing a brisk business selling clams and crawfish. After four days of driving, I finally felt like I'd arrived at this exotic new region that I'd been picturing for the past two months, with its snaking bayous lined with house boats, its slow pace of life, and its love of frying all types of strange sea creatures like crawfish and catfish. Of course, it was soon time to head North and, after struggling to find a gas station that still had gas (three were out already with plastic bags over the pumps) and trying in vain to find batteries at a mobbed Walmart (they were all sold out of batteries, gas cans and coolers), I with all the traffic, it took me a good three hours to get there.
The evacuation turned out to be the best possible orientation. We were thrown right into helping out with setting up generators for our intimidating Construction Manager Mark, who issued every task, from doing dishes to arranging chairs in the meeting room, in a charged tone that implied that the completion of this task was essential to the survival of everyone at the camp. Anyway, us Construction Assistants got to know each other well pretty quickly through marathon monopoly games and hours of sitting around, munching on prepackaged Smuckers PB&Js. I met my flat-mate, Monica, who is turning 23 and who just completed a year with AmeriCorp's NCCC program, where you spend a year with a service team working in five different locations around the country, spending about two months at each place. Right when she arrived at the retreat center from her long road trip down from her home in New Jersey, she went for a jog and I immediately knew we were going to be compatible as roommates. My roommate at the retreat center was Alex, a big, jolly, smart guy from California who loves history and the comedic tv show Adult Swim and can talk at length and with great conviction about both.
As Project Homecoming is run through the Presbyterian church, there were several pastors and their families at the center as well from random congregations who'd come to evacuate. We had a service early Monday afternoon, as the storm was about to make landfall, and boy did I feel like I was in a movie: a group of people huddled in a room, our pastor and director leading the prayer and giving a sermon about Jesus parting the sea for Peter or something like that, the violently swaying tops of pine trees visible in the window above the altar. Most of the construction assistants do come from a religious upbringing, but for the most part it seems that for them church, and the community that it fosters, is more of a pleasant addition to their lives than a controlling or constraining influence.
Anyway, the night before we left Feliciana, one of the pastors, unfamiliar with Project Homecoming, wanted to hear more about what we did and why we were here and so he organized a meeting, apparently something, along with committees, for which Presbyterians are known, according to Alex. We all grumbled a bit, as it was interrupting a heated Monopoly game where vast sums of paper money were rapidly changing hands, but it actually was fascinating to hear, officially, why everyone in the organization, from the director to the office assistant, were with Project Homecoming. We learned that Mark, the Construction Manager, had come down with his wife for a week of service and, when they returned to their island off the coast of Washington state, they couldn't stop thinking about the city and the people. It only took a couple weeks before they decided to take leaves of absence from their jobs and move, with their two young daughters, to New Orleans to work full time rebuilding houses. Mark, who has got the gruff bearing of a jock turned dad, seemed on the verge of tears when he described how fulfilling life could be when one let oneself be an "instrument of God" and he said how thankful he was that God had blessed him with a purpose.
As people went around the room, what struck me was how many couples had been brought together by Katrina and how many people had found purpose and direction in their lives through the disaster, whether through sweeping them out of 9-5 ruts into more fulfilling assistance positions or through a crash course in what's truly important in life. Multiple couples met because of Katrina: one of the construction managers, Noelle, met her future husband, Nick, who is a New Orleans native, when she came down to do some volunteer construction work. The current office manager, Allie, grew up in New Orleans but was "miserable" in Nashville, Tennessee working as an electrical engineer for a firm for which she says she was both "too creative and too ethical," when Katrina struck. It brought her back to New Orleans to care for her parents. Soon after, she too met her future husband. They now have a baby. The director of Project Homecoming also met her husband, who is a cook for an offshore oil rig, when she came down after the storm to counsel as a Presbyterian pastor. On the eve of returning to NOLA, I stood outside with some other Project Homecoming staff, who were smoking, and for the first time we could see stars. I remarked about how many people had, in the long run, been positively influenced by Katrina. Susan, a short, stocky, spunky 40-something-year-old with a pretty face and a whole string of wild stories bout growing up in Waveland, Mississippi, snapped in a Southern twang, "Not everybody" the stress of Katrina and the subsequent displacement had taken her mother's life and had dissolved her marriage.
But certainly for a whole host of non-natives, Katrina brought them to a city to which they might not otherwise have come, certainly not in an assistance capacity, and with which they immediately fell in love. Christina is a 43-year-old construction assistant (same position as me) who was formerly a Private Investigator in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and now is beginning her second year with Project Homecoming. "New Orleans just feels like home, I can't imagine living anywhere else now. I felt like an alien everywhere else - like what's wrong with me? - and when I moved here, I was like, 'There are people like me.'" The city's slogan - "Laissez les bon temps roulez" - expresses more than passing out on Bourbon St.; it means passing out on a friend's porch, and no one judging you for it.
Anyway, on Wednesday, we returned to New Orleans, a bit before the majority of residents did. There were lots of trees and branches down and there was no power (not even for traffic lights) and there were police cars everywhere to prevent looting of evacuated houses, but overall things were in good shape. Over the next week, Monica and I stayed at the "Blue House" which is a house provided for some of the other volunteers for Project Homecoming while we hunted for an apartment.
The day we returned, we went with construction managers to check on some of the houses that they'd been working on before the storm. This took us into the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards as well as into St. Bernard Parish (called "the Parish") which lies to the East of New Orleans and was heavily flooded during Katrina by Lake Borgne. The Parish was first: driving along Chef Menteur, the main drag through, I assumed that the strip malls full of boarded up Family Dollars and Winn Dixies were closed because of Gustav but Noelle, our construction manager, said they hadn't reopened since Katrina. Some residential streets - long, straight, surburban - intersected off Chef Menteur and looking down them, you couldn't see a single car or any sign of life, just overgrown sidewalks and lawns. This wasn't Gustav - people hadn't come back from Katrina.
There are many reasons why areas like St. Bernard have been so slow to crawl back. The way one homeowner described it to Noelle was to imagine that your house was destroyed, say in a fire. There are people that you'd turn to for help, from friends you could stay with to that whole slew of professionals - plumbers, electricians, general contractors, etc. - that it would take to rebuild. Now imagine that every single one of those people's houses had also been destroyed, along with the houses of the community's police officers, fire fighters, and teachers. You have no place to stay and no place, any longer, to work, as the company you worked for was also heavily damaged by the storm. Your insurance company says it will not cover damage due to flooding - only wind damage - so they pay you 30 percent of the value of your house. Stuck in a hotel miles away, your savings dwindling daily, you are not in a position to contest the settlement in court. Perhaps you have some savings, but now many of the general contractors who are in the city have no shortage of business and are charging exorbitant rates. Building supply prices have skyrocketed. Every single other person in your community is in the same situation so there is no guarantee that anyone is going to return to your neighborhood, which is now abandoned. The first family back on the block faces the risk of looters who have largely free reign over the city thanks to a police department who is handcuffed by flooded headquarters and officers abandoning their posts or evacuating. This would be a formidable challenge for anyone; now imagine that you were just scraping by before the storm.
As for government programs like Road Home, applications have been processed at a snails pace and promised financial assistance has yet to materialize. One woman in the office is a social worker from New Orleans, used to dealing with the maze of bureaucracy surrounding government assistance programs. In our orientation meeting about Katrina, she described trying to get money from Road Home after her insurance company paid a meager settlement. She applied, and then heard nothing for months and months. She called and called and was put on hold again and again, or they said they'd yet to process her application. After a year of living with her parents, with no sign or assurance that money was on its way, she was driven to tears, pleading with the Road Home operator, "Just please help me." This was a college educated social worker and an ordained minister.
So, outside the Quarter and CBD (Central Business District), New Orleans is eerily quiet. In the Lower Ninth Ward, along the Industrial Canal where an unfastened barge punched a hole in the levy during the storm, there is an expansive field, broken only by the occasional house every couple hundred yards. Driving into the Lower Ninth over the canal on North Robertson St., you can make out concrete slabs in the field, their edges overgrown, spaced close apart like the other shotgun-house neighborhoods of New Orleans. The flood of water from the levy breach simply washed the houses right off their slabs. It's a formidable challenge, but the Lower Ninth, where many of the area's jazz musicians grew up, is an essential part of New Orleans and the city won't be near complete without its revitalization.
As for our living arrangements, we finally did find a place - kind of a converted attic - that's located on Esplanade Ave. in Mid-City, a neighborhood about a 15 minute bike ride northeast of the "Quarter." We're a block away from Bayou St. John, a river that comes in from Lake Pontchartain and close to City Park, which is a huge, slightly overgrown park with lots of twisting Bayous and old trees where the fishing is apparently really good, according to construction manager who knows about such things. We're also quite close to where Jazz Fest is held every year so it will be great fun to be able to walk back and forth to the fairgrounds to watch that this spring.
Our landlords, a spunky, middle-aged couple, live downstairs with their son and two pugs. They own a small dive bar nearby where we've watched a couple Saints games with local fans. Going means being ready to accept a formidable number of free drinks - either from Gary and Laura (our landlords) or from the other patrons, who are thankful for what we're doing...or who think Monica's cute and feel obligated to buy me a drink as well. So we always bike there.
Overall, NOLA's been swell; it's a genuinely comfortable place to live, especially now that I'm getting my bearings. People say hi from their porches and touch your arm gently and say " 'scuse me, babe," if they need to get by you at the supermarket. I'm quite glad I moved here with something (AmeriCorps) already in place; I was immediately tied in with a group of people. This would be a lot harder if I'd just come planning to start from scratch. The first weeks at a new place are always rocky - it's no fun feeling like people don't really know you - but it's gone about as well as it can - I think I'm getting to the age where befriending new people is a bit easier; we've finally gotten a well of experience that we can draw from in regards to people and making friends. It's not exactly a piece of cake though.
Well, I hope you all are well and I'd love to hear updates about what everyone is up to, if you can find the time. Love,
Phil
Thursday, April 5, 2007
the Month of March
Hey sorry I've been seriously slacking on the blog front. I'll begin with the Indepedence celebrations of early March. On the night before Independence Day (March 5th) we went to another concert and fireworks show, essentially a countdown to Independence. For the concert, they'd blocked off one of the main streets of Accra and set a stage up at one end, a massive glowing set behind a quarter mile of people filling the road. Zach and I arrived at 10 pm or so and, unable to see much, we bypassed the crowd using a dirt path that ran parallel to the road and was less crowded. We ended up about 20 ft. from the stage, on the side. President Kufour was holding a private reception in the Nkrumah Mausoleum, a building behind the stage, and from our viewpoint we could see various motorcades of diplomats and dignitaries entering the compound's gates. There was an almost palpable excitement in the air, fueled by the sleek black and flashing lights slipping behind the stage and the massive crowd. The entire crowd were waiting to be galvanized; there was so much potential energy. Everything seemed to be building to midnight. Eventually, a bit bored with the concert, we snuck backstage and made our way to the gate of the compound, where armed soldiers held the crowd back. We could see the building behind the gates, where Kufour was giving his speech. We tried to convince the guards to let us in but by the time we did, the speech was over. We were standing just inside the wall when midnight struck. Fireworks launched from within the compound into the night sky as motorcades began leaving, passing within feet of us. Even the soldiers turned around and watched the fireworks show; it was pretty spectacular. As everyone gazed skyward at the fireworks, I could really sense the pride that they all felt in their country. It was a time to forget their problems and just celebrate Indepedence, a time for everyone to be part of something bigger, to be a part of the liberation. It was really nice to be a part of it.
The next morning, Independence Day, we woke up at 5 am in the morning and made our way in the early morning light towards Independence Square, a flat concrete expanse bordered by bleachers and with the ocean as a backdrop. Indepedence Square was where the official indepedence celebrations were to take place. Driving through Accra on a tro-tro, all the storefronts had Ghanaian flags hanging from the windows. As we neared Independence Square, even in the early morning hours, the sidewalks became filled with Ghanaians draped in flags walking briskly towards the Square, clapping, chanting and waving flags. We got out and joined the crowd. Soon the street widened and there was Independence Square. The crowd broke into a run and photographers and video crews huddled on the periphery, capturing the scene. Running for our lives and getting a tad bit nervous, we climbed over the Square's fence with the rest of the mob and sprinted towards the bleachers to get a seat. The Square itself was where the parade was going to occur, so it was blocked off and the crowd gathered around the outside. In the square was a formation of Ghanaian tanks so sneaking onto the square was thrown out as an option. The next hour was spent walking around the massive circumfrence of the Square trying to find a seat. But even early in the morning, the big concrete grandstands were completely filled. So we eventually stood on a slight hill near the back of the Square, unable to see much except the tops of the tanks and the rising bleachers filled with people, feverishly waving the paper flags they were distributing. We stayed for about two hours, waiting for the festivities to begin as the viewing areas became more and more packed. There was a row of large trees along the back of the square and they became so filled with people that the entire tree began swaying. By nine the celebration still had not begun and we were already exhausted, since we'd gotten about two hours of sleep the night before. Since we couldn't see anything anyway and had already accumulated a thin film of dust, we decided to head back and watch it on TV. Walking toward the tro-tro station, against the procession of people heading towards the square, taxi's and other cars screeched by dangerously, passengers hanging out the windows waving flags. Back at home, I watched the parade on TV, which was an endless procession of military personnel and equipment followed by a long, somewhat uninspiring speech by President Kufour. Soon after, I fell asleep. So the Independence Day itself was a bit anticlimactic, though the morning was intense.
Gwen visited later in the month and it was an awesome, packed four days. The house received her very warmly, considerably more warmly in fact than they received Zach and I. Zach and I were amazed at how much some of the female members of the house like Ablanyo and Mama opened up to Gwen, actually engaging her in conversation, asking her questions, and expressing general interest in her, attention that we are utterly deprived of. We like to think that, rather than us being uninteresting, their reserved manner is culturally dictated. But who knows. At any rate it was really fun to see that side of them and to have them be so welcoming to Gwen.
Gwen and I spent some time in the batik, where we stamped and dyed t-shirts and skirts (hers came out much better than mine). Then we left with some friends to Senya Beraku, a coastal town about an hour west of Accra. We arrived at dusk, turning off the main road onto a red dirt road that wound through the coastal plain. It was dark by the time we reached the outskirts of town and soon the road ahead was filled with figures, eerily gray from the harsh headlights. The little wooden shacks along the road all had candles or lanterns hanging out front. We arrived where we'd be staying; an old slave fort on the beach converted (by Ghanaians) into a hotel of sorts. We soon went in search of food, up the main street. As we neared the town's center, the road became filled with people mingling. The candles on the vendors' tables lining the street made up for the lack of street lights. Little children were everywhere, darting in and out of the dark alleys between shacks. Soon we were surrounded by probably fourty kids screaming, "How are you? How are you?" It was fun but made being inconspicuous difficult. Perhaps I've mentioned this in the blog before, but the community feel of these towns is really impressive. Because people often don't have electricity, much less televisions, people mingle and interact with their neighbors instead of being holed up in their house. One of the effects of this is how socially at ease Ghanaians are; they can really talk with anybody. I'm always amazed when I with a Ghanaian friend and he or she meets another Ghanaian and before you know it, they're talking and joking like old pals. Anyway the next day we went to a beach and relaxed then headed home. That night Gwen and I went out to dinner and had a great time then returned so Gwen could pick out some fabrics from Grace's shop then off she went to the airport.
That week I got quite sick and went to the hospital to get checked out. To my dismay, soon I was admitted and hooked up to an IV. By that point I was feeling better and did not like the prospect of spending the night in the hospital. My discontent and boredom grew until around 9 pm when, after careful planning and consideration, made a somewhat feeble escape attempt. I unhooked the IV and stood, finding myself not quite as strong as I thought I was. I got as far as the hallway when a nurse yelled and asked what I was doing. Mumbling excuses, I hobbled back to bed. As I told Gwen later, I felt like an old man who was trying to escape the nursing home.
I still wasn't feeling 100 percent when Zach, Arielle and myself traveled up north to Mole National Park. The bus ride up to Tamale was about 14 hours in extremely cramped, smelly nearly suffocating quarters. We spent a day in Tamale, a predominantly Muslim, courteous and dusty city. A plump, jovial teenager named Mohammed took us around Tamale, first into a large, covered market. The beautiful, wrinkled faces of the old women vendors glowed from the light filtering through holes in the roof. After that we walked outside under the burning sun and walked in an outdoor network of alleys and huts. As we got farther from the road, I felt more and more like I'd stepped back in time. Goats wandered around the rough dirt paths past huts with thatched roofs and cookfires. It was quite odd to be in a place where everything was made from natural components; from the houses to the benches to the tools, I didn't see plastic once. Unfortunately, my ailment resurfaced and I became increasingly overheated and light-headed. Then Mohammed, whose idea of cultural sensitivity was different from ours, took us to the city's mosque to pray. Zach, with his dark skin, black hair and beard, was an infinitely more convincing Muslim than myself and I was dubious that they were going to believe Mohammed's story that I was a visiting Muslim also named Mohammed. We did the ritual bathing across the street from the three story, pink mosque, washing each limb three times as well as our face and head. Especially in my overheated state, the bathing was a very pleasant ritual. Then Mohammed led us into the first floor of the mosque, a quiet open space with prayer mats arranged in rows on the concrete floor. Lounging Muslims in the back eyed us with curiosity. We knelt on prayer mats and began the praying, me watching frantically out of the corner of my eye for the next move. I then realized that I was wearing the Christmas boxer shorts my mom had bought me and that they were exposed every time I knelt towards Mecca. I tucked my shirt in but Mohammed hissed at me to untuck it. Luckily the praying was soon finished and, after touring the roof, we departed for Mole National Park. As our bus bounced through the increasingly barren and dry savannah I began to feel sicker and hotter. The complete lack of infrastructure would've been interesting under normal circumstances, but as I was feeling sicker and sicker it was the last thing I wanted to see. By the time we got to Mole I couldn't stand for more than thirty seconds or so at a time and couldn't let any body part touch another because they were so hot. Being a good ten hours from the nearest decent hospital, I was terrified. I've never had such a bad fever in all my life and it just kept getting worse. All types of worst-case scenarios were running through my head. It was one of the first times in my life when I actually thought I could die. It was a very long night of dousing myself with water and wrapping towels around my head but by morning I really felt a great deal better and that day went on a game walk into the savannah with a small group and a guide. We stood on the banks of a watering hole where elephants bathed then saw antelope hiding in the brush and warthogs fearlessly grazing. At one point, while walking on a path through some brush, we stumbled across some more elephants and one of the elephants raised its ears and made all types of grunting sounds. The guide looked nervous and shouldered his rifle and told us to get back. Many, seeking a good photo, were reluctant. I think if the elephant had charged, half the group would've kept filming and snapping photos right up to the bitter end. Things just look like a movie through the viewfinder of a camera. Anyway we returned to the motel and took a nap. We were awoken by a somewhat frantic housekeeper who explained that the oranges we'd left outside had been shredded. "The baboons! The baboons!" she yelled at a bleary-eyed Zach who could only reply, "OK." We were dubious but as we stepped outside to head to the pool, a monkey dashed around the corner. We pursued it around the building onto the porch on the other side, which overlooked miles and miles of flat, green savannah. At the edge of the drop down to the savannah, more monkeys, were perched on branches and fallen logs, including a mother and baby monkey. We watched them intently and were thrilled initially when two drew closer. They spread out and walked towards the porch, where we were standing. Suddenly two very small hands grabbed onto a board of the porch's fence and a small, angry monkey's face appeared shortly thereafter, staring right up at us with beady, angry eyes. We all shrieked and turned to the right, but another monkey blocked our path. We sprinted towards our room as the monkeys pursued, me grabbing a large, unwieldly branch for self-defense. We got into the room and slammed the door. One monkey jumped up on the screen window. We stayed in the room for a good hour or so until finally leaving, armed with sticks. We didn't see any monkeys on the way to the pool but there were plenty of baboons strolling around, with their pretty, black, solemn faces and weird butts. The next morning we headed back to Tamale, where we had dinner on the roof of a large building, watching the tro-tro station gradually settle as the sun set. Then we counted down to my birthday with two Germans we'd met by drinking and playing cards at a table outside of our hostel. While they had few card games to teach us, they had plenty of drinking games with great names, including "carten-blasten" where you lay a deck of cards on top of a full glass of beer and try not to blow the last card off. The next morning we boarded a bus back to Accra.
The next morning Mom arrived and we had a really nice week. She brought a tape of various friends and family saying happy birthday. It was a lot of fun to listen to, thank you all for your contributions to that. It was excellent to see her and to catch up; we had some really nice talks. We walked around Jamestown (the colonial center of Accra) taking in the sights and smells of the fishing port and went to Ada Foah, the place at the mouth of the Volta River mentioned earlier. She also spent some quality time with the family, who, like with Gwen, took an instant liking to her. One night we went took Alex (my host brother) out to dinner and had an awesome time; Alex seemed to really enjoy himself. The last night she was here we went to dinner at Ama's sister's house (Ama and Kwaku are our Ghanaian friends from home). It was a very pleasant dinner, we sat outside as chicken grilled on the barbeque and the late-afternoon light filtered through the leaves and chatted with them for a good two or three hours. Ghanaians are so sociable they can really talk to anybody and make anybody feel at home. One thing I noticed about when my Mom visited was how much more respectful people were. There were fewer shouts of "obruni" and people were much more courteous in general. Age is really much more respected here than in the States; it must be nice to live in a culture where respect and societal recognition are something that's ahead of you and are accessible to virtually all instead of something that is fleeting and rare. Another thing that's much more common here is three-generation households, where the grandparents, children and grandchildren all live together or in close proximity. The grandparents thus play an important role in raising the kids and their acquired experience and wisdom are more accessible to the kids. It certainly seems to me like a model to emulate.
The day Mom left the CIEE group departed for the neighboring country of Togo. We stayed in the capital of Lome, which had been described somewhat generously as the Paris of Africa. It had the odd feel of a European city left to decay. Crumbling colonial mansions and buildings faced the palm tree-lined beaches and well-planned boulevards had developed massive cracks and potholes. The French influence was unmistakeable, baguettes replaced sugar and tea bread and motorbikes were all over. It was very fun to practice my French in a setting where it only had to be good enough for people to understand. Also, since French is also the second language for the Togolese, they speak it slower and are more understanding of mistakes than I hear the French are. Anyway, some highlights were going to a fetish (voodoo) market where tables around a dusty square were covered with chimpanzee and dog heads, horse skulls, dead, enormous snakes, and elephant feet. All the various body parts, if crushed to a powder and ingested, supposedly cure ailments. Some of the claims were dubious, such as crushing and ingesting an elephant's foot to cure elephantiasis, but who knows, perhaps it does work. After that we toured the Grand Marche then Molly, Dan I strolled around the streets for a bit, eventually finding a very tall hotel and taking an elevator to the 37th floor where there was an incredible view. Lome, squeezed onto a strip of land between the ocean and the marshy Lake Togo, stretched ahead for miles, and plumes of smoke rose from a large fire to the North. Quite a sight. Then we rode motorbike taxis around for a bit which was a blast.
OK that's all the trips undertaken as far as I can think of. Some other developments... Maownefea, another of our host brothers, recently got a harmonica so we've had a couple jam sessions which have been fun, me playing chords and him soloing on top. Also, I've been actually doing work at the Dodowa Health Center which has been satisfying. Perhaps I've already mentioned this but I've been working primarily in the lab. One day, after just sitting there for two hours, I went up to the head of the lab and demanded to be given something to do. He responded really well and now I actually feel like I'm making a contribution. Directness is really important here; sublety doesn't get you too far. While it can be exhausting and frustrating to have to lay everything out perfectly clearly, there are benefits. For example, transgressions at the house at dealt with immediately with clear, verbal confrontation. A short argument ensues then the matter is finished. Such a communication system, which doesn't ask one person to try to read the mind and body language of another, prevents small disagreements from building into impasses.
Recently at Dodowa, I did some home visits with Pascal, a lab tech. We went to a village to check up on a patient. The village was only accessible by a series of increasingly narrow and rough dirt roads. By the end the Toyota 4Runner was bouncing over ditchs and rocks with branches scraping the side. The path eventually opened to a small clearing with three or four huts. The patient was a teenage, single mother who was quite sick with what appeared to be malaria combined with something else. The thing that really struck me was how concerned her parents were; they could've easily been parents at an Emergency Room in the States. For some reason, I'd callously assumed that people here were more desensitized to death because of its increased frequency. But finding that this was not case made the poor state of the healthcare system even more disturbing. I really wanted to be able to help more but like I've done most of my life, I just observed, unable to assist.
Life at the house has been about the same. I set up a basketball hoop using a cardboard box and rope and me and the two young girls Abigail and Stephanie and their friend played a very fun though highly dramatic game of basketball. While I may be technically part of the house, I still feel and am treated as a guest and outsider and sometimes get the impression they're thinking, "Don't you have your own family?" It will nice to return to a family that actually cares about me. I'm close with Alex and we often go across to the bar across the street to have deep, philosophical conversations, yelling over the blasting Celine Dion music.
OK that's it for now, I try to fill in some of the holes and add reflections one exams are finished. All's good though I'm starting to itch for the comfort and familiarity of home! Hope all's well!
The next morning, Independence Day, we woke up at 5 am in the morning and made our way in the early morning light towards Independence Square, a flat concrete expanse bordered by bleachers and with the ocean as a backdrop. Indepedence Square was where the official indepedence celebrations were to take place. Driving through Accra on a tro-tro, all the storefronts had Ghanaian flags hanging from the windows. As we neared Independence Square, even in the early morning hours, the sidewalks became filled with Ghanaians draped in flags walking briskly towards the Square, clapping, chanting and waving flags. We got out and joined the crowd. Soon the street widened and there was Independence Square. The crowd broke into a run and photographers and video crews huddled on the periphery, capturing the scene. Running for our lives and getting a tad bit nervous, we climbed over the Square's fence with the rest of the mob and sprinted towards the bleachers to get a seat. The Square itself was where the parade was going to occur, so it was blocked off and the crowd gathered around the outside. In the square was a formation of Ghanaian tanks so sneaking onto the square was thrown out as an option. The next hour was spent walking around the massive circumfrence of the Square trying to find a seat. But even early in the morning, the big concrete grandstands were completely filled. So we eventually stood on a slight hill near the back of the Square, unable to see much except the tops of the tanks and the rising bleachers filled with people, feverishly waving the paper flags they were distributing. We stayed for about two hours, waiting for the festivities to begin as the viewing areas became more and more packed. There was a row of large trees along the back of the square and they became so filled with people that the entire tree began swaying. By nine the celebration still had not begun and we were already exhausted, since we'd gotten about two hours of sleep the night before. Since we couldn't see anything anyway and had already accumulated a thin film of dust, we decided to head back and watch it on TV. Walking toward the tro-tro station, against the procession of people heading towards the square, taxi's and other cars screeched by dangerously, passengers hanging out the windows waving flags. Back at home, I watched the parade on TV, which was an endless procession of military personnel and equipment followed by a long, somewhat uninspiring speech by President Kufour. Soon after, I fell asleep. So the Independence Day itself was a bit anticlimactic, though the morning was intense.
Gwen visited later in the month and it was an awesome, packed four days. The house received her very warmly, considerably more warmly in fact than they received Zach and I. Zach and I were amazed at how much some of the female members of the house like Ablanyo and Mama opened up to Gwen, actually engaging her in conversation, asking her questions, and expressing general interest in her, attention that we are utterly deprived of. We like to think that, rather than us being uninteresting, their reserved manner is culturally dictated. But who knows. At any rate it was really fun to see that side of them and to have them be so welcoming to Gwen.
Gwen and I spent some time in the batik, where we stamped and dyed t-shirts and skirts (hers came out much better than mine). Then we left with some friends to Senya Beraku, a coastal town about an hour west of Accra. We arrived at dusk, turning off the main road onto a red dirt road that wound through the coastal plain. It was dark by the time we reached the outskirts of town and soon the road ahead was filled with figures, eerily gray from the harsh headlights. The little wooden shacks along the road all had candles or lanterns hanging out front. We arrived where we'd be staying; an old slave fort on the beach converted (by Ghanaians) into a hotel of sorts. We soon went in search of food, up the main street. As we neared the town's center, the road became filled with people mingling. The candles on the vendors' tables lining the street made up for the lack of street lights. Little children were everywhere, darting in and out of the dark alleys between shacks. Soon we were surrounded by probably fourty kids screaming, "How are you? How are you?" It was fun but made being inconspicuous difficult. Perhaps I've mentioned this in the blog before, but the community feel of these towns is really impressive. Because people often don't have electricity, much less televisions, people mingle and interact with their neighbors instead of being holed up in their house. One of the effects of this is how socially at ease Ghanaians are; they can really talk with anybody. I'm always amazed when I with a Ghanaian friend and he or she meets another Ghanaian and before you know it, they're talking and joking like old pals. Anyway the next day we went to a beach and relaxed then headed home. That night Gwen and I went out to dinner and had a great time then returned so Gwen could pick out some fabrics from Grace's shop then off she went to the airport.
That week I got quite sick and went to the hospital to get checked out. To my dismay, soon I was admitted and hooked up to an IV. By that point I was feeling better and did not like the prospect of spending the night in the hospital. My discontent and boredom grew until around 9 pm when, after careful planning and consideration, made a somewhat feeble escape attempt. I unhooked the IV and stood, finding myself not quite as strong as I thought I was. I got as far as the hallway when a nurse yelled and asked what I was doing. Mumbling excuses, I hobbled back to bed. As I told Gwen later, I felt like an old man who was trying to escape the nursing home.
I still wasn't feeling 100 percent when Zach, Arielle and myself traveled up north to Mole National Park. The bus ride up to Tamale was about 14 hours in extremely cramped, smelly nearly suffocating quarters. We spent a day in Tamale, a predominantly Muslim, courteous and dusty city. A plump, jovial teenager named Mohammed took us around Tamale, first into a large, covered market. The beautiful, wrinkled faces of the old women vendors glowed from the light filtering through holes in the roof. After that we walked outside under the burning sun and walked in an outdoor network of alleys and huts. As we got farther from the road, I felt more and more like I'd stepped back in time. Goats wandered around the rough dirt paths past huts with thatched roofs and cookfires. It was quite odd to be in a place where everything was made from natural components; from the houses to the benches to the tools, I didn't see plastic once. Unfortunately, my ailment resurfaced and I became increasingly overheated and light-headed. Then Mohammed, whose idea of cultural sensitivity was different from ours, took us to the city's mosque to pray. Zach, with his dark skin, black hair and beard, was an infinitely more convincing Muslim than myself and I was dubious that they were going to believe Mohammed's story that I was a visiting Muslim also named Mohammed. We did the ritual bathing across the street from the three story, pink mosque, washing each limb three times as well as our face and head. Especially in my overheated state, the bathing was a very pleasant ritual. Then Mohammed led us into the first floor of the mosque, a quiet open space with prayer mats arranged in rows on the concrete floor. Lounging Muslims in the back eyed us with curiosity. We knelt on prayer mats and began the praying, me watching frantically out of the corner of my eye for the next move. I then realized that I was wearing the Christmas boxer shorts my mom had bought me and that they were exposed every time I knelt towards Mecca. I tucked my shirt in but Mohammed hissed at me to untuck it. Luckily the praying was soon finished and, after touring the roof, we departed for Mole National Park. As our bus bounced through the increasingly barren and dry savannah I began to feel sicker and hotter. The complete lack of infrastructure would've been interesting under normal circumstances, but as I was feeling sicker and sicker it was the last thing I wanted to see. By the time we got to Mole I couldn't stand for more than thirty seconds or so at a time and couldn't let any body part touch another because they were so hot. Being a good ten hours from the nearest decent hospital, I was terrified. I've never had such a bad fever in all my life and it just kept getting worse. All types of worst-case scenarios were running through my head. It was one of the first times in my life when I actually thought I could die. It was a very long night of dousing myself with water and wrapping towels around my head but by morning I really felt a great deal better and that day went on a game walk into the savannah with a small group and a guide. We stood on the banks of a watering hole where elephants bathed then saw antelope hiding in the brush and warthogs fearlessly grazing. At one point, while walking on a path through some brush, we stumbled across some more elephants and one of the elephants raised its ears and made all types of grunting sounds. The guide looked nervous and shouldered his rifle and told us to get back. Many, seeking a good photo, were reluctant. I think if the elephant had charged, half the group would've kept filming and snapping photos right up to the bitter end. Things just look like a movie through the viewfinder of a camera. Anyway we returned to the motel and took a nap. We were awoken by a somewhat frantic housekeeper who explained that the oranges we'd left outside had been shredded. "The baboons! The baboons!" she yelled at a bleary-eyed Zach who could only reply, "OK." We were dubious but as we stepped outside to head to the pool, a monkey dashed around the corner. We pursued it around the building onto the porch on the other side, which overlooked miles and miles of flat, green savannah. At the edge of the drop down to the savannah, more monkeys, were perched on branches and fallen logs, including a mother and baby monkey. We watched them intently and were thrilled initially when two drew closer. They spread out and walked towards the porch, where we were standing. Suddenly two very small hands grabbed onto a board of the porch's fence and a small, angry monkey's face appeared shortly thereafter, staring right up at us with beady, angry eyes. We all shrieked and turned to the right, but another monkey blocked our path. We sprinted towards our room as the monkeys pursued, me grabbing a large, unwieldly branch for self-defense. We got into the room and slammed the door. One monkey jumped up on the screen window. We stayed in the room for a good hour or so until finally leaving, armed with sticks. We didn't see any monkeys on the way to the pool but there were plenty of baboons strolling around, with their pretty, black, solemn faces and weird butts. The next morning we headed back to Tamale, where we had dinner on the roof of a large building, watching the tro-tro station gradually settle as the sun set. Then we counted down to my birthday with two Germans we'd met by drinking and playing cards at a table outside of our hostel. While they had few card games to teach us, they had plenty of drinking games with great names, including "carten-blasten" where you lay a deck of cards on top of a full glass of beer and try not to blow the last card off. The next morning we boarded a bus back to Accra.
The next morning Mom arrived and we had a really nice week. She brought a tape of various friends and family saying happy birthday. It was a lot of fun to listen to, thank you all for your contributions to that. It was excellent to see her and to catch up; we had some really nice talks. We walked around Jamestown (the colonial center of Accra) taking in the sights and smells of the fishing port and went to Ada Foah, the place at the mouth of the Volta River mentioned earlier. She also spent some quality time with the family, who, like with Gwen, took an instant liking to her. One night we went took Alex (my host brother) out to dinner and had an awesome time; Alex seemed to really enjoy himself. The last night she was here we went to dinner at Ama's sister's house (Ama and Kwaku are our Ghanaian friends from home). It was a very pleasant dinner, we sat outside as chicken grilled on the barbeque and the late-afternoon light filtered through the leaves and chatted with them for a good two or three hours. Ghanaians are so sociable they can really talk to anybody and make anybody feel at home. One thing I noticed about when my Mom visited was how much more respectful people were. There were fewer shouts of "obruni" and people were much more courteous in general. Age is really much more respected here than in the States; it must be nice to live in a culture where respect and societal recognition are something that's ahead of you and are accessible to virtually all instead of something that is fleeting and rare. Another thing that's much more common here is three-generation households, where the grandparents, children and grandchildren all live together or in close proximity. The grandparents thus play an important role in raising the kids and their acquired experience and wisdom are more accessible to the kids. It certainly seems to me like a model to emulate.
The day Mom left the CIEE group departed for the neighboring country of Togo. We stayed in the capital of Lome, which had been described somewhat generously as the Paris of Africa. It had the odd feel of a European city left to decay. Crumbling colonial mansions and buildings faced the palm tree-lined beaches and well-planned boulevards had developed massive cracks and potholes. The French influence was unmistakeable, baguettes replaced sugar and tea bread and motorbikes were all over. It was very fun to practice my French in a setting where it only had to be good enough for people to understand. Also, since French is also the second language for the Togolese, they speak it slower and are more understanding of mistakes than I hear the French are. Anyway, some highlights were going to a fetish (voodoo) market where tables around a dusty square were covered with chimpanzee and dog heads, horse skulls, dead, enormous snakes, and elephant feet. All the various body parts, if crushed to a powder and ingested, supposedly cure ailments. Some of the claims were dubious, such as crushing and ingesting an elephant's foot to cure elephantiasis, but who knows, perhaps it does work. After that we toured the Grand Marche then Molly, Dan I strolled around the streets for a bit, eventually finding a very tall hotel and taking an elevator to the 37th floor where there was an incredible view. Lome, squeezed onto a strip of land between the ocean and the marshy Lake Togo, stretched ahead for miles, and plumes of smoke rose from a large fire to the North. Quite a sight. Then we rode motorbike taxis around for a bit which was a blast.
OK that's all the trips undertaken as far as I can think of. Some other developments... Maownefea, another of our host brothers, recently got a harmonica so we've had a couple jam sessions which have been fun, me playing chords and him soloing on top. Also, I've been actually doing work at the Dodowa Health Center which has been satisfying. Perhaps I've already mentioned this but I've been working primarily in the lab. One day, after just sitting there for two hours, I went up to the head of the lab and demanded to be given something to do. He responded really well and now I actually feel like I'm making a contribution. Directness is really important here; sublety doesn't get you too far. While it can be exhausting and frustrating to have to lay everything out perfectly clearly, there are benefits. For example, transgressions at the house at dealt with immediately with clear, verbal confrontation. A short argument ensues then the matter is finished. Such a communication system, which doesn't ask one person to try to read the mind and body language of another, prevents small disagreements from building into impasses.
Recently at Dodowa, I did some home visits with Pascal, a lab tech. We went to a village to check up on a patient. The village was only accessible by a series of increasingly narrow and rough dirt roads. By the end the Toyota 4Runner was bouncing over ditchs and rocks with branches scraping the side. The path eventually opened to a small clearing with three or four huts. The patient was a teenage, single mother who was quite sick with what appeared to be malaria combined with something else. The thing that really struck me was how concerned her parents were; they could've easily been parents at an Emergency Room in the States. For some reason, I'd callously assumed that people here were more desensitized to death because of its increased frequency. But finding that this was not case made the poor state of the healthcare system even more disturbing. I really wanted to be able to help more but like I've done most of my life, I just observed, unable to assist.
Life at the house has been about the same. I set up a basketball hoop using a cardboard box and rope and me and the two young girls Abigail and Stephanie and their friend played a very fun though highly dramatic game of basketball. While I may be technically part of the house, I still feel and am treated as a guest and outsider and sometimes get the impression they're thinking, "Don't you have your own family?" It will nice to return to a family that actually cares about me. I'm close with Alex and we often go across to the bar across the street to have deep, philosophical conversations, yelling over the blasting Celine Dion music.
OK that's it for now, I try to fill in some of the holes and add reflections one exams are finished. All's good though I'm starting to itch for the comfort and familiarity of home! Hope all's well!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
ada foah, etc.
hi everyone. well a magical time to recount. this past weekend our travel group of 6 friends headed off to ada foah, a town near the mouth of the volta river, the largest river in ghana. To get to Ada Foah, it's necessary to take a boat from Ada (on the river) downstream towards the coast. We ate in Ada then boarded a long, thin wooden boat and headed for the coast. As we chugged down the wide river, hugging one bank, the sights on land were incredible. large, colorful fishing vessels were beached on the sand, and behind them a lazy forest of palm trees in which were small, grey huts with palm leaf roofs. Kids played in the water and often the bank would open to a shaded cove with more activity. in the soft afternoon light, it almost seemed unreal, as if this place should only exist in movies. we were all giddy, laughing, breathing in the air, our eyes wide. eventually we reached the strip of beach that separated the river from the ocean and pulled into a cove with the strip of beach on one side and a shaded fishing village wrapping around the rest of it. we passed the inland point of the cove and on it there were villagers lying in hammocks tied between palm trees and chopping up coconuts. the place we were staying was a series of rustic beach huts right on the beach ($3 p/night). when we pulled up to shore, we could hear the ocean crashing but couldn't see it over the rise in the sand. we eagerly hopped off the boat and dug out feet into the sand. we'd landed in paradise. after dropping off our stuff we climbed up over the hump in the beach and ran down to the ocean. the beach stretched as far as i could see in either direction, the beach framed by palm trees and the ocean. the undertow was actually pretty vicious and two of our group were nearly sucked out to sea so we didnt go back in but opted instead to swim in the cove. afterwards, i sat in a chair facing the cove and river beyond and read for awhile, often glancing out at the various watercraft that passed by, from dinghy's with bed-sheets as sails to large rowboats with eight or so rowers. as the sun slowly set, a thin mist settled over the volta river and soon i could only see the dark outlines of these boats. after reading about three pages in my book, i went down the beach with arielle and mollie to a cluster of palm trees to buy some coconuts then we headed back and we all had dinner under a thatched roof. after dinner zach arielle and i ran out into the dusk and onto the eerie beach and just jogged down the beach awhile. when we returned we met some brits on their gap year and hung out with them for awhile then the owner of the huts built a bonfire on the beach and some teenagers from the village came over and did this great dance performance. after we sat on the sand near the flickering light of the bonfire and looked up at the sky. i eventually took a short walk on the beach and it was incredible. it was very dark so i could only see the outline of the huts, the bonfire in the distance and the gray sand immediately surrounding me. i could see the full expanse of the sky, from one horizon to another and as the wind whipped down the beach i felt like i was in some desert.
anyway the next morning we woke up very early to see the sunrise so we walked out onto the beach and stared at the grey sky, waiting for about an hour. some fisherman walked by and stared at this dumb group of white kids waiting for the sun rise. soon one of us spotted the sun, but it was already a good ways up in the sky and had just poked through a gap in the clouds. a little disappointing. that day we took a boat to a rum village where they make rum from smushing sugarcane. it was a very fun trip and i really began to feel comfortable with the group. i had a good talk with zach about how i didnt feel comfortable or natural with other members of the group and his idea was that if you dont feel comfortable with new people, instead of avoiding contact with them, spend more time with them. sounds incredibly simple and obvious but i needed it. also, spending excessive time alone can sometimes cause me to obsess over my faults and magnify them out of proportion until i feel that i cant relate to other people, when in fact i can. so ive found all this quite helpful and have really been trying harder to bounce ideas and feelings off people to get fresh perspectives, cause i can work myself into a mental frenzy if i dont.
anyway, in other news, ghana (finally) passed a bill outlawing domestic violence against spouse and kids, though there is still some confusion here whether it's still legal to rape your wife. also, everyone here is very excited about the upcoming 50th anniversary of ghana's independence from britain. it is this tuesday, march 6th and celebrations are already beginning. last night (saturday) me and three friends went to a "highlife to hiplife" concert on the parking lot in front of the national parliament building. hiplife is a combination of the more traditional highlife music and hip hop. an artist called abrafuor (probably butchered the spelling) performed and was really good and got the crowd really going.
in the papers, there have been a lot of editorials questioning the fervor with which people are celebrating ghana's independence. one editorial worried that people are focused too much on the independence while losing sight of how far ghana still has to go. another said that ghana should have made more progress in the last fifty years towards true autonomy. for example, according to one of our lectures, much of the independence celebrations themselves are being funded by the united states and over 50% of the national budget comes from foreign aid (uganda's is over 90% from foreign aid). additionally, ghana has to import nearly everything. virtually nothing, even stuff that could be produced here, is made in ghana. even a lot of the cocoa beans are sold out then bought back as chocolate, though there is some domestically produced chocolate. but its quite disheartening how manipulated a lot of these countries are by large companies and even by our own government. the first leader of ghana, nkrumah, was overthrown by the cia-funded coup when he tried to make ghana more self-sufficient. for example, nkrumah built a tire factory so ghana wouldn't have to buy tires from outside. after the coup, the factory was turned over to firestone. also a lot of the multinational corporations operating here (like the gold industry) reap nearly all the profits of natural resources that are in ghana, simply because ghana doesnt (yet) have the technology to build its own mines. and the money that the ghanaian government does get from the industry doesnt seem to go to the average joe. the sad thing is im sure its far, far worse in a lot of the other countries in africa, as ghana is one of the most developed and democratic countries here.
anyway ive also begun work at a rural health clinic about 40 minutes away. the clinic, situated near the town of dodowa (a town known for its mangos), specializes in childrens health and nutrition. the first day i was there (monday) i went with several nurses on an outreach program into the village of dodowa to check on the young kids in the village. the nurses did physical exams and made sure all the kids had a full set of vaccinations, which, surprisingly, they all did. with the national health insurance plan here, adults pay $12 dollars a year ($2 for children) for health insurance. the outreach program was really interesting and the nurses were extremely helpful and talkative and translated a lot of the conversations, since my Twi language skills are still pretty primitive. they said the primary health concerns here for children are malnutrition and malaria. anyway it was very interesting walking through the scattered village and sitting outside mudhuts hearing mothers talk about their children. the nurses told the mom's how to realistically give their kids nutritional meals (like adding fish powder to pourridge) and i was really impressed. we also visited some more isolated huts and it was fun walking on these narrow paths lined with mango and banana trees.
on friday i returned and worked in the clinic's pharmacy. the pharmacist was not loving life. he had come here three years ago to do his year of compulsory national service but because of some glitch or mistake, he still had not been released or assigned elsewhere. all i could think of was milton from office space. but he was actually a very nice guy and was very interested to hear about the american health care system and was astounded that there are poor people in america.
ok well that's all for now, sorry it took me so long to write this, hopefully i will update again soon. gwen arrives in 9 days cant wait! the family is excited to meet her.
anyway the next morning we woke up very early to see the sunrise so we walked out onto the beach and stared at the grey sky, waiting for about an hour. some fisherman walked by and stared at this dumb group of white kids waiting for the sun rise. soon one of us spotted the sun, but it was already a good ways up in the sky and had just poked through a gap in the clouds. a little disappointing. that day we took a boat to a rum village where they make rum from smushing sugarcane. it was a very fun trip and i really began to feel comfortable with the group. i had a good talk with zach about how i didnt feel comfortable or natural with other members of the group and his idea was that if you dont feel comfortable with new people, instead of avoiding contact with them, spend more time with them. sounds incredibly simple and obvious but i needed it. also, spending excessive time alone can sometimes cause me to obsess over my faults and magnify them out of proportion until i feel that i cant relate to other people, when in fact i can. so ive found all this quite helpful and have really been trying harder to bounce ideas and feelings off people to get fresh perspectives, cause i can work myself into a mental frenzy if i dont.
anyway, in other news, ghana (finally) passed a bill outlawing domestic violence against spouse and kids, though there is still some confusion here whether it's still legal to rape your wife. also, everyone here is very excited about the upcoming 50th anniversary of ghana's independence from britain. it is this tuesday, march 6th and celebrations are already beginning. last night (saturday) me and three friends went to a "highlife to hiplife" concert on the parking lot in front of the national parliament building. hiplife is a combination of the more traditional highlife music and hip hop. an artist called abrafuor (probably butchered the spelling) performed and was really good and got the crowd really going.
in the papers, there have been a lot of editorials questioning the fervor with which people are celebrating ghana's independence. one editorial worried that people are focused too much on the independence while losing sight of how far ghana still has to go. another said that ghana should have made more progress in the last fifty years towards true autonomy. for example, according to one of our lectures, much of the independence celebrations themselves are being funded by the united states and over 50% of the national budget comes from foreign aid (uganda's is over 90% from foreign aid). additionally, ghana has to import nearly everything. virtually nothing, even stuff that could be produced here, is made in ghana. even a lot of the cocoa beans are sold out then bought back as chocolate, though there is some domestically produced chocolate. but its quite disheartening how manipulated a lot of these countries are by large companies and even by our own government. the first leader of ghana, nkrumah, was overthrown by the cia-funded coup when he tried to make ghana more self-sufficient. for example, nkrumah built a tire factory so ghana wouldn't have to buy tires from outside. after the coup, the factory was turned over to firestone. also a lot of the multinational corporations operating here (like the gold industry) reap nearly all the profits of natural resources that are in ghana, simply because ghana doesnt (yet) have the technology to build its own mines. and the money that the ghanaian government does get from the industry doesnt seem to go to the average joe. the sad thing is im sure its far, far worse in a lot of the other countries in africa, as ghana is one of the most developed and democratic countries here.
anyway ive also begun work at a rural health clinic about 40 minutes away. the clinic, situated near the town of dodowa (a town known for its mangos), specializes in childrens health and nutrition. the first day i was there (monday) i went with several nurses on an outreach program into the village of dodowa to check on the young kids in the village. the nurses did physical exams and made sure all the kids had a full set of vaccinations, which, surprisingly, they all did. with the national health insurance plan here, adults pay $12 dollars a year ($2 for children) for health insurance. the outreach program was really interesting and the nurses were extremely helpful and talkative and translated a lot of the conversations, since my Twi language skills are still pretty primitive. they said the primary health concerns here for children are malnutrition and malaria. anyway it was very interesting walking through the scattered village and sitting outside mudhuts hearing mothers talk about their children. the nurses told the mom's how to realistically give their kids nutritional meals (like adding fish powder to pourridge) and i was really impressed. we also visited some more isolated huts and it was fun walking on these narrow paths lined with mango and banana trees.
on friday i returned and worked in the clinic's pharmacy. the pharmacist was not loving life. he had come here three years ago to do his year of compulsory national service but because of some glitch or mistake, he still had not been released or assigned elsewhere. all i could think of was milton from office space. but he was actually a very nice guy and was very interested to hear about the american health care system and was astounded that there are poor people in america.
ok well that's all for now, sorry it took me so long to write this, hopefully i will update again soon. gwen arrives in 9 days cant wait! the family is excited to meet her.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
koforidua trip, osu visit
hi, lots to report. the internet cafe has been off and on and when it's been on it's not fast enough to access the blogger site. but they say they've fixed the problem so....
just to warn you, it's going to be a very long entry as a lot has happened.
last friday night several of us went to a club in downtown accra. The city streets were deserted on the cab ride there, an interesting contrast to the bustle during the day. but the club itself was a happening place, even if there wasnt much going on around it. there were sleek cars out front and enormous bouncers at the entrance. before getting there, we were planning to try to bargain down the cover charge but when one of the bouncers, who ressembled the incredible hulk, demanded $10 USD there was complete and immediate compliance. inside, the club was very bizarre, it was slightly reminiscent of a laser tag arena, but with worse music. it was an odd crowd, mostly aging expats though some ghanaians showed up later. i really was curious what they're stories were, how they ended up in accra, ghana. i can't say the club was really enjoyable, i don't think clubs are really my thing, it's kind of difficult to have a conversation with anybody when shakira is busting your eardrums, so people seem to just either dance or sit around trying to look suave. im bad at both.
last week four of us visited osu, a neighborhood in accra that catering to oburoni's (foreigners). there are still open gutters and trash strewn everywhere but the main street is lined with two story, air-conditioned "western" hangouts and food spots with clean tiled floors. we went at night and found an outdoor bar to sit at and watched these three incredible gymnasts, not older than 14 years old, performing on the street, dodging taxis and traffic while doing back flips and forming these human pyramids. when we sat down we were swarmed by very desperate-looking kids, dressed in rags, asking for money. here we were enjoying a beer and kids didn't even have enough to eat. it's strange, but it was really here, in the most Westernized and "developed" part of the city where i was first struck by the poverty here. everyday on my walk to school i pass shacks and huts but i dont get a sense of desperation, there appears to be some type of communal safety net. it's so cheap to live in that neighborhood that most people seem to at least have enough to eat. shop owners regularly give food away free, making us feel stingy for not indulging everyone person who asks for money. the generosity here is impressive, our house is an example, our host parents have taken in at least twenty people and are supporting them. but in a more western environment like osu, the poor seem much more vulnerable. i dont know whether it was simply the contrast of their situation to the relative affluence of osu (which would make them more aware of their own poverty) or if, in an environment where people are urged to strive to improve their material situation, they're less likely to give as generously. but anyway, we were all quite uneasy and headed back.
also this week we attended a cultural dance night at the university performed by a ghanaian dance troupe. it was held in this outdoor amphitheater surrounded by palm trees and looking up at the night sky through the palm leaves as the african drums beat, i really felt as if i was in africa! the dance groupe were all from northern ghana, which the exception of a 7 foot tall danish white guy who had joined the group a year ago. as you can imagine, he kinda stuck out and it was hard to watch anybody else. during one intermission, the m.c., a ghanaian student, called the danish dude to come to the stage and the m.c. interviewed him, asking him what country he was from, what he'd learned. the m.c. concluded by saying how this showed that oburonis could do african dances as well. it was quite awkward, as it seemed to unnecessarily mark this danish guy, and all of us in fact, as different and as outsiders. but zach pointed out that in the u.s. we do the same to african-americans, interviewing african american corporate execs or minority scholarship students. while it is done with usually the best of intentions, perhaps we are really only highlighting their outsider status.
also, we went to this place nearby called the living room, which is a really cool idea for a movie theater that i'm surprised hasn't caught on in the u.s. anyway it consists of a lot of smaller viewing rooms which fit maybe ten to twenty people so you go with a group and rent a room and pick from a list of movies. on the walk back, it was late and it was a full moon and the streets were empty save for feral dogs skulking around. these two guys emerged from a dark gap between two shops and started following us speaking in hushed voices and walking quickly and nervously, with straightened legs as if to conceal that they were trying to catch up with us. all our hearts started pounding as we were pretty sure we were going to get mugged. as i was looking at the road in front of me, i swear i could see every single pebble and grain of sand. all i could think of was how well my sympathetic nervous system was kicking in. but i didnt need it as i guess they decided against the mugging as there were four of us. or maybe they were just trying to scare us.
on a more upbeat note, im starting to get to know to know the neighborhood better. there's an elementary school around the corner with a dirt soccer field and apparently on monday afternoons a group of retired and current professional soccer players play on this school field just for fun. unfortunately ive got twi language class during that block but im definitely going to skip the class at least once to check it out. a lot of professional footballers live in east legon, including Pele, whose name sounds familiar. he actually lives two houses down from ours and our host father is good friends with him. i'll have to google him.
on the subject of football, the whole country got all geared up for an international friendly match between ghana's national team, the black stars, and their archrival nigeria, who ghana has not beat in 14 years. we went to jerry's (the outdoor patio bar across the street) and watched the game. since this was the only place nearby with power, the whole neighborhood crowded onto the patio and crowded at the gaps of the lattice partitions which seperate the patio from the street. a vendor cooked kabobs on the street and everyone passed around star beers. people came wearing the green, yellow and red Ghanaian flag draped over their shoulders. ghana scored 4 goals in the second half and after each goal people got up and danced ecstatically and uncontrollably, just out of pure joy. it was almost like being at an evangelical church service, everyone was being touched by the football gods and practically speaking tongues. ghana ended up winning and afterwards cars sped down lagos avenue honking their horns and holding the flags out the window.
also this week, i was eating lunch at the night market, (an outdoor collection of vendors situated on the edge of campus, overlooking an expanse of dry, shrubby land) and all of a sudden a woman started screaming and ran out of one of the cooking tents about twenty feet away. a crowd gathered and two guys holding clubs ran into the cooking tent. a very long, skinny green snake promptly slithered out and started booking it for the brush. they caught up to it and killed it then held it up, it was probably around 4 or 5 feet long but quite thin, certainly the biggest snake ive ever seen. from then on i've stuck to the paths.
this past saturday, zach, myself and five other CIEE kids (mollie, dan, ariel, lauren and sabrina) headed off to Kofidura, a city about two hours inland from Accra. We'd heard that there was a very nice waterfall near the city and we were all itching to get away from the chaos of Accra. We took a tro-tro (van) there and soon we left the mutilated, chaotic landscape of the metropolitan area and after about forty minutes reached some large hills which just seem to spring up suddenly from the flat coastal plain. the ride up these hills was great, passing herds of cattle and overlooking the dotted plain below. as we got further inland, the landscape became more lush, hilly and rural. we passed by several villages with mud huts, shaded by palm trees. the scenery was incredible, distant green hills formed the backdrop to closer plains with the occasional, enormous, top-heavy tree. african xylaphone music played on the radio and as we bumped along in the crowded van, I felt quite exhilirated by the complete newness of the experience. at one point, we heard sirens around a bend in the road and a second later a police motorcycle flew around the corner, nearly clipping our trotro. the trotro driver swerved off the road just as a police suv came around as well. the police cars kept coming, all going ridiculously fast then came some luxury suvs with small ghanaian flags flapping from the hood, tinted windows and tires screeching. according to the tro tro driver, it was the president of ghana, kufour. i hope he was wearing his seatbelt.
eventually we rolled into kofidura, a city surrounded by hills. we pulled into the busy trotro station and after walking through some narrow streets packed with wooden shacks selling things, we got some lunch. after lunch we decided to try to get to the waterfall, where there was supposed to be a hotel. the city and surrounding hills were sunny but behind the hills the sky was black. i almost felt like i was in some holy city or something. as we hunted for a tro tro that would take us to this obscure waterfall, the clouds moved in and the wind picked up. all the vendors' wares which were hanging from the trees began to blow off so soccer jerseys and wind pants were flying everywhere as the vendors tried to grab them. we approached an empty tro tro and asked if they were headed towards the fall and they initially said no. but as we walked away the driver and his friend exchanged some words then said, "get in." usually trotros have designated routes and you just hop on, they dont usually do charters so we were a little suspicious but since it began to pour we started to pile in. two more guys arrived, who appeared to be friends of the driver. they talked in twi for a bit. we were all in the trotro, feeling a bit uneasy and vulnerable. then they told the biggest guy in our group, dan, that he had to sit in the back of the trotro, which also seemed odd. the driver and his friend got in front, then the two large friends got in with us, sitting in a backward facing seat at the front, which most trotros dont have. at this point i had a really uneasy feeling, a kind of charged restlessness, as did everyone else in the group. they closed the sliding door and we realized all the windows were latched shut. before we got going one kid in our group said, "we forgot something at the restaurant, we need to go get it. can you let us out?" a couple people outside were looking at us so after some more unintelligible conversation, they let us out. who knows what they were up to but we'd been warned of robbings of oburonis.
we eventually bit the bullet and took a taxi, which are more expensive, to the waterfall, which was a half hour out of town on a windy, remote road through a misty valley. it was late afternoon by the time we arrived, at which point we were informed that there was a funeral in the village and so all the rooms of the hostel were taken. just wanting a place to crash we inquired further and they said there was a large utility closet where the seven of us could stay. we checked it out, it was a concrete floor with stacks of plastic chairs, a bicycle and a few bags of concrete but we said we'd take. the rate was reasonable, $5 USD total for the seven of us. after dropping our stuff off, a tour guide took us from the campsite down a couple hundred stone stairs through the jungle to the swimming hole at the base of the waterfall. since the waterfall wasn't actually running since it's the dry season, the swimming hole was actually a stagnant, shallow pool. but zach and dan were determined to make the most of the experience and so we climbed up underneath the massive ledge where the water would fall if there was water. the waterfall must be a couple hundred feet up and really must be really impressive during the rainy season. standing well below the ledge, if you looked straight up at the overhang there was a real sense of vertigo. looking out from our perch we could see the thick canopy off the distance. it was a really beautiful and almost mystical area, but i was too tired and thirsty to really appreciate it. on the way down we saw a snakeskin. good lord, the thing was at least six feet long! one of the girls in our group, lauren, who is from the mountains of colorado, said that the skin probably belonged to a rock python. i asked how she knew this. "because i have one," she replied. so we learned a little about lauren on this trip. anyway, after returning from the falls i took a nap and when i awoke it was time for dinner. it was dark and we brought our lantern to this tin-roofed lean-too with a picnic table and a women from the small village across the street from the campgrounds brought us rice and stew. huddled around the picnic table in our lantern-lit leantoo (the park didnt have power), outside was pitch black, I felt as if I was in the middle of nowhere. the campgrounds were deserted save for the campground manager and the campgrounds were surrounded by wilderness except for the small village across the street. we began to hear the beats of music coming from the darkness in the direction of the village. we asked the park manager, a recent graduate from the university of ghana who was doing his year of civil service, if the music was from the funeral and he said yes. dan asked if we could go to the funeral and the manager initially said that it wasn't safe as a lot of random and questionable people showed up to these funeral parties but then said that he and the tour guide would accompany us there but that we shouldn't stay for long. the park manager grabbed a flashlight and our waterfall tourguide brought up the rear with the lantern and we left the park grounds into the steamy darkness. the tourguide, who was in his sixties, stopped at a makeshift bar across the street to take a couple shots then we proceeeded down the country road. i could barely make out the silver of the pavement, everything else was pitch black. lauren, mollie, sabrina and ariel all held hands and all talked in nervous whispers but i honestly wasn't that nervous, just excited and alive. every so often a dark silhouette would emerge immediately in front of us on the road (we couldnt see very far) and it would startle us. as we neared the music, there were more and more people standing on the road, all staring at us for even in the dark they could tell there was something different about us. we turned off the road onto a narrow path through some vegetation towards the music. the music was quite loud now and we could hear shouts and laughs. i caught glimpses of light and fires through gaps in the trees and almost felt like i was on treasure island or something. we passed more people on the path, solemnly staring at us, and i certainly felt a bit out of place. i was also a bit worried that we were going to be intruding on something and taking the focus away from the deceased. the path opened to a clearing, revealing a dirt dance floor packed with kids and old women. lamps, powered by a generator, hung from the thatched roof above the dance floor and provided light, as did a couple fires at the edges of the clearing. there were a lot of plastic chairs set up going up the hill to the right and probably about twenty men sat in them, facing the dance floor. the camp manager had us greet some of them though the loud, upbeat pop music made introductions difficult. we were then pulled onto the dance floor and started dancing with the women and kids. the beat of the music was incredibly fast and i pretty much was just flailing about awkwardly but it was still fun and the little kids were great dancers and everyone made us feel quite at ease. after awhile, we left and headed back. by now the moon had risen above the ridge to the left (east?) and was a very dark orange. it was quite a sight, as were the clear stars above and we got all felt pretty fine.
the next morning around seven we awoke and the village spokesmen came to greet us. he took us through the bright morning to the clearing again to meet the elders of the village, a customary practice for visitors to a funeral. he took us through the village, past the mudpacked huts, to meet the elders and the village chief. the village chief was dressed in a traditional robe but the other elders were in t-shirts and shorts. we thanked them then the village chief wanted us to have our picture taken with him then we had breakfast back at the campground. after breakfast our tourguide took us through the jungle, past a cave filled with massive spider skeletons, then up a steep hill to "umbrella rock,"which is a massive, flat rock perched on a smaller rock situated at the peak of a grassy hill. from the top we had a nice view of the hills and valleys around. in the valley to the west we could see a couple red roofs in the midst of the dense vegetation and could hear music coming from here. apparently it was a church service. dan wanted to see the church service, which again i thought was a little intrusive, but the tour guide said no problem so off we went to this new village. we got to the village, which was dug out of a hill, and we were ushered into the church which was packed, the women in colorful dresses and head wraps and the men in shirts and ties. the sermon was in twi but it was interspersed with songs, which were led by a band with an electric guitar, a drum set and a bass. we made a donation to the church then they warmed up to us quite a bit and wanted us to dance in the aisle and the band stared playing and there we were dancing in the aisle surrounded by smiling faces and clapping hands. we eventually danced on out of the church. i felt very bad about intruding on their church thing but they really didnt seem to mind. after that we took a trotro back to accra.
ok that's all for now, i'll try to post some reflections on my trip so far and fill in some of the gaps with another blog entry soon but right now im kind of tired of writing. hope alls well, i miss you all!
just to warn you, it's going to be a very long entry as a lot has happened.
last friday night several of us went to a club in downtown accra. The city streets were deserted on the cab ride there, an interesting contrast to the bustle during the day. but the club itself was a happening place, even if there wasnt much going on around it. there were sleek cars out front and enormous bouncers at the entrance. before getting there, we were planning to try to bargain down the cover charge but when one of the bouncers, who ressembled the incredible hulk, demanded $10 USD there was complete and immediate compliance. inside, the club was very bizarre, it was slightly reminiscent of a laser tag arena, but with worse music. it was an odd crowd, mostly aging expats though some ghanaians showed up later. i really was curious what they're stories were, how they ended up in accra, ghana. i can't say the club was really enjoyable, i don't think clubs are really my thing, it's kind of difficult to have a conversation with anybody when shakira is busting your eardrums, so people seem to just either dance or sit around trying to look suave. im bad at both.
last week four of us visited osu, a neighborhood in accra that catering to oburoni's (foreigners). there are still open gutters and trash strewn everywhere but the main street is lined with two story, air-conditioned "western" hangouts and food spots with clean tiled floors. we went at night and found an outdoor bar to sit at and watched these three incredible gymnasts, not older than 14 years old, performing on the street, dodging taxis and traffic while doing back flips and forming these human pyramids. when we sat down we were swarmed by very desperate-looking kids, dressed in rags, asking for money. here we were enjoying a beer and kids didn't even have enough to eat. it's strange, but it was really here, in the most Westernized and "developed" part of the city where i was first struck by the poverty here. everyday on my walk to school i pass shacks and huts but i dont get a sense of desperation, there appears to be some type of communal safety net. it's so cheap to live in that neighborhood that most people seem to at least have enough to eat. shop owners regularly give food away free, making us feel stingy for not indulging everyone person who asks for money. the generosity here is impressive, our house is an example, our host parents have taken in at least twenty people and are supporting them. but in a more western environment like osu, the poor seem much more vulnerable. i dont know whether it was simply the contrast of their situation to the relative affluence of osu (which would make them more aware of their own poverty) or if, in an environment where people are urged to strive to improve their material situation, they're less likely to give as generously. but anyway, we were all quite uneasy and headed back.
also this week we attended a cultural dance night at the university performed by a ghanaian dance troupe. it was held in this outdoor amphitheater surrounded by palm trees and looking up at the night sky through the palm leaves as the african drums beat, i really felt as if i was in africa! the dance groupe were all from northern ghana, which the exception of a 7 foot tall danish white guy who had joined the group a year ago. as you can imagine, he kinda stuck out and it was hard to watch anybody else. during one intermission, the m.c., a ghanaian student, called the danish dude to come to the stage and the m.c. interviewed him, asking him what country he was from, what he'd learned. the m.c. concluded by saying how this showed that oburonis could do african dances as well. it was quite awkward, as it seemed to unnecessarily mark this danish guy, and all of us in fact, as different and as outsiders. but zach pointed out that in the u.s. we do the same to african-americans, interviewing african american corporate execs or minority scholarship students. while it is done with usually the best of intentions, perhaps we are really only highlighting their outsider status.
also, we went to this place nearby called the living room, which is a really cool idea for a movie theater that i'm surprised hasn't caught on in the u.s. anyway it consists of a lot of smaller viewing rooms which fit maybe ten to twenty people so you go with a group and rent a room and pick from a list of movies. on the walk back, it was late and it was a full moon and the streets were empty save for feral dogs skulking around. these two guys emerged from a dark gap between two shops and started following us speaking in hushed voices and walking quickly and nervously, with straightened legs as if to conceal that they were trying to catch up with us. all our hearts started pounding as we were pretty sure we were going to get mugged. as i was looking at the road in front of me, i swear i could see every single pebble and grain of sand. all i could think of was how well my sympathetic nervous system was kicking in. but i didnt need it as i guess they decided against the mugging as there were four of us. or maybe they were just trying to scare us.
on a more upbeat note, im starting to get to know to know the neighborhood better. there's an elementary school around the corner with a dirt soccer field and apparently on monday afternoons a group of retired and current professional soccer players play on this school field just for fun. unfortunately ive got twi language class during that block but im definitely going to skip the class at least once to check it out. a lot of professional footballers live in east legon, including Pele, whose name sounds familiar. he actually lives two houses down from ours and our host father is good friends with him. i'll have to google him.
on the subject of football, the whole country got all geared up for an international friendly match between ghana's national team, the black stars, and their archrival nigeria, who ghana has not beat in 14 years. we went to jerry's (the outdoor patio bar across the street) and watched the game. since this was the only place nearby with power, the whole neighborhood crowded onto the patio and crowded at the gaps of the lattice partitions which seperate the patio from the street. a vendor cooked kabobs on the street and everyone passed around star beers. people came wearing the green, yellow and red Ghanaian flag draped over their shoulders. ghana scored 4 goals in the second half and after each goal people got up and danced ecstatically and uncontrollably, just out of pure joy. it was almost like being at an evangelical church service, everyone was being touched by the football gods and practically speaking tongues. ghana ended up winning and afterwards cars sped down lagos avenue honking their horns and holding the flags out the window.
also this week, i was eating lunch at the night market, (an outdoor collection of vendors situated on the edge of campus, overlooking an expanse of dry, shrubby land) and all of a sudden a woman started screaming and ran out of one of the cooking tents about twenty feet away. a crowd gathered and two guys holding clubs ran into the cooking tent. a very long, skinny green snake promptly slithered out and started booking it for the brush. they caught up to it and killed it then held it up, it was probably around 4 or 5 feet long but quite thin, certainly the biggest snake ive ever seen. from then on i've stuck to the paths.
this past saturday, zach, myself and five other CIEE kids (mollie, dan, ariel, lauren and sabrina) headed off to Kofidura, a city about two hours inland from Accra. We'd heard that there was a very nice waterfall near the city and we were all itching to get away from the chaos of Accra. We took a tro-tro (van) there and soon we left the mutilated, chaotic landscape of the metropolitan area and after about forty minutes reached some large hills which just seem to spring up suddenly from the flat coastal plain. the ride up these hills was great, passing herds of cattle and overlooking the dotted plain below. as we got further inland, the landscape became more lush, hilly and rural. we passed by several villages with mud huts, shaded by palm trees. the scenery was incredible, distant green hills formed the backdrop to closer plains with the occasional, enormous, top-heavy tree. african xylaphone music played on the radio and as we bumped along in the crowded van, I felt quite exhilirated by the complete newness of the experience. at one point, we heard sirens around a bend in the road and a second later a police motorcycle flew around the corner, nearly clipping our trotro. the trotro driver swerved off the road just as a police suv came around as well. the police cars kept coming, all going ridiculously fast then came some luxury suvs with small ghanaian flags flapping from the hood, tinted windows and tires screeching. according to the tro tro driver, it was the president of ghana, kufour. i hope he was wearing his seatbelt.
eventually we rolled into kofidura, a city surrounded by hills. we pulled into the busy trotro station and after walking through some narrow streets packed with wooden shacks selling things, we got some lunch. after lunch we decided to try to get to the waterfall, where there was supposed to be a hotel. the city and surrounding hills were sunny but behind the hills the sky was black. i almost felt like i was in some holy city or something. as we hunted for a tro tro that would take us to this obscure waterfall, the clouds moved in and the wind picked up. all the vendors' wares which were hanging from the trees began to blow off so soccer jerseys and wind pants were flying everywhere as the vendors tried to grab them. we approached an empty tro tro and asked if they were headed towards the fall and they initially said no. but as we walked away the driver and his friend exchanged some words then said, "get in." usually trotros have designated routes and you just hop on, they dont usually do charters so we were a little suspicious but since it began to pour we started to pile in. two more guys arrived, who appeared to be friends of the driver. they talked in twi for a bit. we were all in the trotro, feeling a bit uneasy and vulnerable. then they told the biggest guy in our group, dan, that he had to sit in the back of the trotro, which also seemed odd. the driver and his friend got in front, then the two large friends got in with us, sitting in a backward facing seat at the front, which most trotros dont have. at this point i had a really uneasy feeling, a kind of charged restlessness, as did everyone else in the group. they closed the sliding door and we realized all the windows were latched shut. before we got going one kid in our group said, "we forgot something at the restaurant, we need to go get it. can you let us out?" a couple people outside were looking at us so after some more unintelligible conversation, they let us out. who knows what they were up to but we'd been warned of robbings of oburonis.
we eventually bit the bullet and took a taxi, which are more expensive, to the waterfall, which was a half hour out of town on a windy, remote road through a misty valley. it was late afternoon by the time we arrived, at which point we were informed that there was a funeral in the village and so all the rooms of the hostel were taken. just wanting a place to crash we inquired further and they said there was a large utility closet where the seven of us could stay. we checked it out, it was a concrete floor with stacks of plastic chairs, a bicycle and a few bags of concrete but we said we'd take. the rate was reasonable, $5 USD total for the seven of us. after dropping our stuff off, a tour guide took us from the campsite down a couple hundred stone stairs through the jungle to the swimming hole at the base of the waterfall. since the waterfall wasn't actually running since it's the dry season, the swimming hole was actually a stagnant, shallow pool. but zach and dan were determined to make the most of the experience and so we climbed up underneath the massive ledge where the water would fall if there was water. the waterfall must be a couple hundred feet up and really must be really impressive during the rainy season. standing well below the ledge, if you looked straight up at the overhang there was a real sense of vertigo. looking out from our perch we could see the thick canopy off the distance. it was a really beautiful and almost mystical area, but i was too tired and thirsty to really appreciate it. on the way down we saw a snakeskin. good lord, the thing was at least six feet long! one of the girls in our group, lauren, who is from the mountains of colorado, said that the skin probably belonged to a rock python. i asked how she knew this. "because i have one," she replied. so we learned a little about lauren on this trip. anyway, after returning from the falls i took a nap and when i awoke it was time for dinner. it was dark and we brought our lantern to this tin-roofed lean-too with a picnic table and a women from the small village across the street from the campgrounds brought us rice and stew. huddled around the picnic table in our lantern-lit leantoo (the park didnt have power), outside was pitch black, I felt as if I was in the middle of nowhere. the campgrounds were deserted save for the campground manager and the campgrounds were surrounded by wilderness except for the small village across the street. we began to hear the beats of music coming from the darkness in the direction of the village. we asked the park manager, a recent graduate from the university of ghana who was doing his year of civil service, if the music was from the funeral and he said yes. dan asked if we could go to the funeral and the manager initially said that it wasn't safe as a lot of random and questionable people showed up to these funeral parties but then said that he and the tour guide would accompany us there but that we shouldn't stay for long. the park manager grabbed a flashlight and our waterfall tourguide brought up the rear with the lantern and we left the park grounds into the steamy darkness. the tourguide, who was in his sixties, stopped at a makeshift bar across the street to take a couple shots then we proceeeded down the country road. i could barely make out the silver of the pavement, everything else was pitch black. lauren, mollie, sabrina and ariel all held hands and all talked in nervous whispers but i honestly wasn't that nervous, just excited and alive. every so often a dark silhouette would emerge immediately in front of us on the road (we couldnt see very far) and it would startle us. as we neared the music, there were more and more people standing on the road, all staring at us for even in the dark they could tell there was something different about us. we turned off the road onto a narrow path through some vegetation towards the music. the music was quite loud now and we could hear shouts and laughs. i caught glimpses of light and fires through gaps in the trees and almost felt like i was on treasure island or something. we passed more people on the path, solemnly staring at us, and i certainly felt a bit out of place. i was also a bit worried that we were going to be intruding on something and taking the focus away from the deceased. the path opened to a clearing, revealing a dirt dance floor packed with kids and old women. lamps, powered by a generator, hung from the thatched roof above the dance floor and provided light, as did a couple fires at the edges of the clearing. there were a lot of plastic chairs set up going up the hill to the right and probably about twenty men sat in them, facing the dance floor. the camp manager had us greet some of them though the loud, upbeat pop music made introductions difficult. we were then pulled onto the dance floor and started dancing with the women and kids. the beat of the music was incredibly fast and i pretty much was just flailing about awkwardly but it was still fun and the little kids were great dancers and everyone made us feel quite at ease. after awhile, we left and headed back. by now the moon had risen above the ridge to the left (east?) and was a very dark orange. it was quite a sight, as were the clear stars above and we got all felt pretty fine.
the next morning around seven we awoke and the village spokesmen came to greet us. he took us through the bright morning to the clearing again to meet the elders of the village, a customary practice for visitors to a funeral. he took us through the village, past the mudpacked huts, to meet the elders and the village chief. the village chief was dressed in a traditional robe but the other elders were in t-shirts and shorts. we thanked them then the village chief wanted us to have our picture taken with him then we had breakfast back at the campground. after breakfast our tourguide took us through the jungle, past a cave filled with massive spider skeletons, then up a steep hill to "umbrella rock,"which is a massive, flat rock perched on a smaller rock situated at the peak of a grassy hill. from the top we had a nice view of the hills and valleys around. in the valley to the west we could see a couple red roofs in the midst of the dense vegetation and could hear music coming from here. apparently it was a church service. dan wanted to see the church service, which again i thought was a little intrusive, but the tour guide said no problem so off we went to this new village. we got to the village, which was dug out of a hill, and we were ushered into the church which was packed, the women in colorful dresses and head wraps and the men in shirts and ties. the sermon was in twi but it was interspersed with songs, which were led by a band with an electric guitar, a drum set and a bass. we made a donation to the church then they warmed up to us quite a bit and wanted us to dance in the aisle and the band stared playing and there we were dancing in the aisle surrounded by smiling faces and clapping hands. we eventually danced on out of the church. i felt very bad about intruding on their church thing but they really didnt seem to mind. after that we took a trotro back to accra.
ok that's all for now, i'll try to post some reflections on my trip so far and fill in some of the gaps with another blog entry soon but right now im kind of tired of writing. hope alls well, i miss you all!
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