Intro:
When we were getting ready to head to Ghana, I had every intention of posting updates on our life in the village of Asisiriwa. I wanted our followers and supporters to get a little taste of what it was like for us to live and work in this new culture. Of course, writing about such a thing does not come naturally. I had no intention of writing a travel guide, and my own thoughts were so deeply internalized that I could not write comprehensively or succinctly about the experience for our blog. Kaitlyn, on the other hand, has kept a steady journal about her thoughts and feelings here. She allowed me to read them, and I found them so powerful, honest, and pointed that I knew this was what people needed to read. Where my journal entries are blunt, repetitive, and rambling, Kaitlyn’s are fluid, poetic, and so full of grace that the mere rhythm of them allows you to feel the experience as it happens to her. I requested that she allow me to share these journal entries with you as our updates on what village life is like for us. They are personal and beautiful, and I hope you appreciate them as much as I do.
=Brady=
Asisiriwa Day 4
10 November 2015
I often wish I were home. I wish that, instead of waking up to the chirping of birds and the hum and whirr of cicadas and the impenetrable, cloying heat, I were waking up to a morning pierced with cold, air as fragile and thin as the spidery webs of ice hugging the windows, the clouds that hopeful and dreary color of snow. I wish I were applying lip balm instead of sunscreen and cheerfully popping mints and candy instead of malaria prophylaxis. I dream of boots and sweaters and instead awake to another day of sweat- and sun-drenched linens, testing the limit of my “dri-fit” camisoles and “moisture-wicking” socks. Every day tests my limits, too, asking me to stay on and continue the work I started in a colder place, when Ghana seemed like a dream too far away to threaten my ideals with reality. Now I’m here.
I remind myself it’s a matter of adjusting. That it’s only a matter of months, not years. That I managed six months at my horrid desk job where the lights were all fluorescent, turning everyone’s skin green, making us all into the monsters we had secretly believed we deserved to be. Where I was allegedly auditing oil well files, and where I was too efficient within the first two weeks, which made them look hard at me with their scurvy eyes. I didn’t make friends. I ran away. But I made it six months. So I can do anything for six months.
I know I’ll look back on this first entry and say things like “what self-pity!” and “if only I’d known.” But that’s the beauty and the tragedy of this moment existing the way it does. There isn’t room for too much future self-consciousness and censorship in this present filled to the brim with both itself and this pathetic nostalgia.
“Are you writing a blog?” Brady asks, moving about the room feet first. I feel a small sense of panic. I should be writing a blog–one full of the hopefulness and gratitude I simultaneously feel along with this crushing desire to be somewhere–almost anywhere–else. But I am not.
“No,” I say, smally defiant and searching his face for (dis)approval. He looks at me and asks, “Journaling?” I nod, he nods, he finds his computer and goes out of the room. To write. We are writers, after all.
And that’s a difficult thing here, when we know the stakes are incredibly high with this harebrained nonprofit we started just short of a year ago to build the very literacy center we came to Asisiriwa to build. The selfsame center that is currently being birthed into a cluster of trees just near the road at the edge of town, near the sign that says:
Please come again to
ASISIRIWA
and contribute toward
Prof. Kofi Agyekum
Education Fund
Two days ago they began clearing the trees from the site, and this week (it is Tuesday) they will begin digging the foundation. The project has gotten away from us, the way I think all children eventually do from their parents, and it is becoming something other than what we planned–in small ways, like the addition of a small office and a washroom, and the decision to change the site the day we arrived, and the discussion about whether the roof were designed in the best way.
“They will work,” Prof. Kofi Agyekum, sign bespoke and Providence sent, told us when we arrived and were getting settled, “as long as they have the resources. Day and night they will work.”
So how can I justify sitting here, not writing a blog, when we only have half the money for the building’s construction raised, and an indeterminate amount of time to raise it before the villagers construct themselves entirely through our funds? And yet, I am doing just that, and will continue to do so for the small foreseeable future.
For once, I am choosing to be a writer. A seemingly selfish act in the midst of what seems, arguably, a grand gesture of selflessness. Giving of oneself in time, in money, in presence, in skill, to a community of people who are, by all conventional standards of measurement, underprivileged–that is a fine act of selflessness, and one commendable by one’s parents back in the States. It’s true that it gives me great pride to hear them tell me how proud they are of me, and the work I’m doing, and the person I’m becoming. Especially because, in many ways, when I first informed them of my going to Ghana with this harebrained nonprofit I started with my boyfriend, I think they looked at each other (with divorced-parent-eyes) and said in the language of parents that requires no voices (which they learned while still married, but have still practiced enough to maintain it, which is difficult with language), “This child has gotten away from us.” It’s nice to know that a thing that gets away can still make one proud, you know?
To be completely honest, though, the whole ten or eleven days that I’ve been in Ghana (most of which was spent in Accra, at this point) has been riddled with moments of pure selfishness. And I am finally learning to distinguish the selfish from the self-(what would you call it?)-loving. Selfishness, it seems, is making a decision with the full awareness that someone else is probably suffering because of it. For example, choosing to allow Brady’s friend Kyidom’s comment about me looking “bigger” and having gotten “quite fat” yesterday on our day trip to Kumasi to ruin the rest of my day was pretty selfish of me. Self-love is something different, but I don’t know what an example would be yet. But they say learning is a process, and I am also learning to be patient. So I am willing to wait at least another day before I have a revelation about self-love.
I say that with some level of sarcasm and self-ironizing disdain, but my impatience for epiphanies is difficult to overstate. I feel that I am on a grand adventure–a once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity (God willing)–and as such, I feel somehow cheated when all my experiences don’t swell with the swooping strings of Howard Shore, ushering in new wisdom to my young, supple brain. As a millennial, I don’t understand why wisdom must be a benefit reserved for the old. So I try to experience as much as possible as fast as possible, packing my life full to bursting with experience in the search of wisdom, and trying to avoid its cousin cynicism, and trying not to seem pig-headed when I am really just being honest.
I wonder if sarcasm can be a means to wisdom?
I wonder if a selfish, self-serving wisdom quest is the main reason I’m here, in Ghana, sponsoring a literacy center (because let’s be honest, I am not doing any of the building). Is that enough?
Remember when Brady asked me if I was writing a blog or journaling and I said journaling? Is that what I’m doing? Is this a journal?
Whatever I’m doing, and whatever the reason, the fact is that I live here now and I haven’t showered in four days. My skin sticks to itself whenever it can find a spare bit of me to stick to, and peels away with a feeling of being very slightly stretched. I never knew that this was what it feels like to be dirty until I arrived in Ghana. I had never been dirty like this before. So here it is, a new experience. But I don’t feel revelation or wonder. I feel gross. I wonder if retrospect is the key to wisdom. But with retrospect, doesn’t romanticization inevitably come? I remember my time in Europe with a rosy tint, but I also know, somewhere in the hard, fact-keeping part of my brain, that it was not always sunny when I wanted sun and cloudy when I wanted clouds. I missed certain foods. My feet got sore. My back and shoulders ached. I know these things, but I don’t remember them. Will that happen to Ghana eventually? Will the heat seem like a kiss of sun on a fun, rainforesty vacation? Will the outhouse bathed in mosquitoes seem simply provincial? Will the spice of the food be cut by months of remembering?
Yesterday I informed my sister, a baker, of my desire for the chill she was beginning to feel in Colorado, and she said, “You say that, but pretty soon I’ll have to start scraping off my car before work at 3:30 in the morning.” But alas, even that shot of reality was no match for the strength and conviction of my nostalgia.
I wonder if, in the harsh dregs of winter in some northeastern European country, when the world seems dark and cold and dead, I will look back on Ghana with nostalgia, allowing myself the indulgence of forgetting the bad to remember the good, that insidious romanticism that clouds the thing that was until in its blurred outline you see the thing you wanted it to be. Chiseled by your frozen mind into the likeness of simple sunshine, vibrant green, cool tiled floors, it will begin to become that cheery zombie that you intended. You will remember through the lens of your anticipation–the ideal you sought–the thing that got away from you.
Well, and is that so bad?
