Meet Me At The Fetish Funeral

– Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Hello All!

Sorry for the delay!  Writing these every week is not so easy with my schedule!  Last week (10/15-10/21) was filled with the typical ups and downs of teaching and another amazing weekend at a beach resort.  It also didn’t rain all week and I found myself more and more tired from the heat and the increasing hours at work.

WEEK AT A GLANCE

My week started with an upswing in the teaching department.  My lesson on Monday went much better than the previous week and gave me some confidence in my ability to hold the classes’ attention.  We read a story about a race between a chameleon, dog, and cock where the chameleon wins and becomes the leader.  When I asked a question about why the chameleon was sad at the beginning of the story (because he knew he was the slowest one there), one of my students replied “because of his wife!”  The class and I needed a good laugh at the time and it made the rest of the lesson easier.  My lesson on Tuesday was a wake-up call for me regarding the abilities of the students in the class.  When I arrived, their teacher told me that he had to go to “the road,” or the main highway that runs along the coast of Ghana.  This is where many of the merchants sell their goods and is about 20 minutes from the school.  In class we read a story and started to answer the related questions.  Throughout the reading, there is constant talking and fighting partly due to the fact that there are only enough books for one-third of the class.  I could tell after the first question that even though I read each sentence out loud twice and they repeated the sentence back to me at least twice, they did not comprehend what they were reading.  In a class of 45, only a handful could eventually find the answer after I gave them hints to what it was.  By the time my lesson was suppose to be over, we had only went through three of the questions and the teacher was not back yet.  The students seemed to slowly understand more of the story which encouraged me to continue working through the questions with them.  It also was a productive way that I could waste time while I waited for the teacher to return.  We worked for another 40 minutes and I finally called it quits.  The teacher still hadn’t returned and I needed to correct some of their assignments and meet up with a group of volunteers who were conducting interviews for the child trafficking project.  About two and a half hours after he left, the teacher finally returned and I felt OK leaving.  A few things from the day ran through my mind as I lay in bed exhausted and without a voice that night.  The first was how not having enough books and materials really prohibited the entire class from progressing.  Like I said, only one third of the class had the textbook and not all the books have all of their pages!  There were also a handful of students without pens, pencils, exercise books, or any other form of paper to write on.  Because of this lack of supplies, students are constantly fighting, yelling, and hitting each other wasting the time of students who are there to learn.  The prevalence of physical abuse is also something I was really thinking about.  As soon as there is a disagreement, the students will automatically slap or hit each other on the head and a lot of the times it escalates to pushing, shoving, and wrestling.  I think a lot of this has to do with the culture of caning at schools and how that translates back to the house which is passed down through the generations.  It has been a challenge to find another way to discipline the students since I refuse to cane them.  Even the students tell me to cane one another because “it is the only way to make them quiet.”  This, like many other things at school, is a work in progress.

Some of the Little Rascals

Also on Tuesday, the child trafficking team and I met with the Chief of Senya Bereku to update him with how we are operating in his community.  CHF’s involvement in Senya began earlier this year with a free health screening for the town.  The Chief is extremely grateful for our presence there and made it clear that he hopes we continue to operate there permanently.  To show his commitment, he told us that he would give us four plots of land for free to build a compound on.  If only we had the money right now!  I could tell the Chief was a really good man.  A former UN Peacekeeper, he came back to Senya in hopes of improving the quality of life in a devastatingly poor town.  After our meeting he was heading to Accra to speak with the women hawkers who sell bread on the street.  Most of these women come from Senya and sleep outside next to the bakery in Accra.  He recently gave a developer free land in Senya to build a bakery so these women would be able to come home every night and sleep in their own homes.  The Chief also suggested that we hold large meeting where we invite the whole town to come hear about our Child Labour & Trafficking program.  It might help us identify families of trafficked children more quickly and prevent us from conducting interviews that don’t provide CHF with much information.  I’m sure we will be speaking with the Chief again sometime soon.

Maia, Freeman, Eric, Chief of Senya, Hayford, and Charlee After our Meeting

On Thursday we were slightly surprised to learn that four of us on the Child Labour & Trafficking team would be hosting a talk at one of the schools our sponsored children attend, DA Primary in Fetteh to be exact.  I have been working on improving the structure and organization on CHF and this showed that we need to have a schedule which everyone can access and see.  A few of us voiced our concerns that we did not feel adequately prepared to host this talk and would rather observe Eric and Freeman because they have experience with these talks.  We also were concerned that the students wouldn’t comprehend our talk as well as someone who could speak Twi and English.  All of us working on this project teach two days a week and our experience with teaching has shown that students have trouble understanding us.  Eric and Freeman agreed that we should observe and the talks went pretty well.  A handful of students had friends or knew children who were working down at the shore which helped us make our case.  Our concerns about the language barrier turned out to be accurate as the students responded to Freeman more when he spoke Twi.

Freeman Speaking with Classes 4 & 5

Freeman with Some Participants

Lil’ Boogers Taking Notes

Last week we also received five new volunteers.  Four of them are from the US and one from Canada.  It is amazing to see how many volunteers CHF recruits and I told Eric that whatever he is doing to recruit them is working really well!  Most of them are only staying for a few weeks but one, Abby, will be here till April with CHF.  I am glad that I am living with a host family for many reasons but now I can add the fact that the intern house is packed with 10 people (8 girls, 2 guys)!

Over the weekend eight of us went away to Meet Me There, another beach resort, which is located between the villages of Dzita and Dzita-Abledomi of the Eastern coast of Ghana.  Between the guest house and the ocean is a lagoon where you can fish and swim.  The awesome part about the lagoon is that at night, the plankton light up when you are swimming around in it.  When you watch someone else jump in and swim, it I like their feet and hands are just balls of light.  If you lift your arm out of the water, it looks like illuminated grains of sand falling off of your body.  Grace and Laura (fellow interns) had visited this resort already and because it was such a fun place they wanted to come back.  During their first trip here, they made friends with a young boy named Bright.  Bright is the coolest 14 year old you could ever meet.  Climb a coconut tree? No problem! Catch any animal/rodent/sea creature with your hands? Childs play!  On top of that, he has a pet monkey named Joe.  Basically I became friends with Bright immediately after I won the championship in table tennis against him (apparently there are a lot of Ghanaians who are really good at ping-pong).  We also let Bright play with Kati’s camera so he became our personal photographer throughout the weekend.  After relaxing the first night when we arrived, we planned to attend a Fetish (Voodoo) funeral the next day.  In Ghana, funerals are a big deal, and big party, where most of the village attends.  I have to say, in the three weeks that I have been here, this was the best experience I have had.  It was a very intense ceremony which included drumming, dancing, chanting, and the sacrificing of animals.  Of course they made all of the obronis dance which was a lot of fun and was very entertaining for those in attendance.  I never liked open-casket funerals in the US and this took it a step further.  The deceased was “sitting” in a chair with a cigarette in his hand.  After people came into the tent where the body was to pay their respects, they close the curtain and put the body in a casket.  Then they bring the casket out and perform some rituals around it which includes sacrificing two chickens and a sheep.  As with most activities in Ghana, we felt very welcome and people went out of their way to explain things and make sure we were enjoying our time. (Link to a video on the bottom of this post)  On the way back to the resort, Laura and I crossed off one of our “Ghana To Do List” items by riding on the back of a motorbike.  Riding at sunset along the coast is one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done.  That night (Saturday) Meet Me There hosted a party which was a fun time for all the interns.  On Sunday I paid 30 Cedis to take a boat trip up the Volta River with lunch included.  It was a really nice trip despite the blazing sun.  All along the banks of the river are mangrove trees which hold a lot of cranes.  We stopped for lunch at a spot where the river and ocean meet.  After some swimming, eating, and talking we headed back to Dzita to say goodbye and made it back to Kasoa relatively quickly. (I slacked on taking pictures during this weekend trip, sorry!  I will update with photos from other interns.)

Meet Me There

The Lagoon at Meet Me There – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Joe the Monkey – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Croc – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Bright, Our Photographer for the Weekend – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Bright & I – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Intern Group with Bright – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Fresh Coconut (Check out Laura’s Face) – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Kati, Lena, and I Dancing at the Funeral – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

GHANA

I still, and always will, love the small, everyday acts of kindness that I receive from Ghanaians.  I’ve had a stranger who I met in a taxi use her own time and money to help me get to the right place and a stranger walking up to me on the street asking to be my good friend because he knows why I am here (just to name two instances).  Granted, in the US we have many different faces, ethnicities, and cultures that we are used to seeing, I don’t think as many people go out of their way to make someone not from the area feel welcomed and wanted.  Children here show their respect for elders by saluting them on the street.  Most strangers you pass will say good morning, afternoon, evening even while they are talking on the phone.  Where most people in the US would look down or the other way while passing in the street, Ghanaians are always looking at you and smiling after you greet them.  It is nice to be surrounded by people who want to interact instead of staying in their own little world while listening to their iPods.

THOUGHTS

As I become more comfortable in Ghana, I start to realize more characteristics of the culture and the people.  This is not limited to the beautiful things I see here, but also the problems and ugly things as well.  Education has always been an important issue to my family and I (How’s my grammar, Uncle Rich?).  While I have always said that education is the most important thing one can do to help themselves, I only saw the effects of no education from other Americans and some Hispanics living in the US.  It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I saw the truly debilitating effects it has on whole communities that are uneducated.  The village of Senya Bereku, where I teach, has a 70% illiteracy rate.  70%!!!  You can actually see the cycle of poverty in front of your eyes when you witness a family, three generations, living together and barely scraping by.  Don’t get me wrong, the challenges to educate children are real.  It is not cheap and even when you can afford to send a child to school, you might only be sending one of your four children.  We interview mothers who see no other option than to sell their child or put them to work, just so there can be rice on the table for dinner.  When an individual barely makes one or two Cedis a day, spending 400 Cedis a year to send a child to public school is not an option.  In my organization, we try to locate trafficked children who have returned home for one reason or another.  We then seek donations to sponsor these children for a basic education.  The challenging part, in my mind, is that we are only scraping the surface of the underlying problem.  Poverty is the root cause for this labour and trafficking situation.  Poverty that cannot easily be cured by micro-loans, donations, or volunteers like myself.  It is something I think about and battle everyday in my mind.  I have to keep reminding myself that sending children to school, sometimes the first in their family to receive an education, is a wonderful and powerful act.  Education is still the answer to this puzzle.  Although it seems like an impossible task, Ghana, and the rest of the world has to start somewhere.  I found this great quote today that gave me the little boost I need after witnessing these struggles:

“Start by doing what is necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible” – Francis of Assisi

Senya Bereku DA Primary, Class 4A Stars

Senya Bereku DA Primary, Class 4A Star

I mentioned earlier that over the weekend I attended a Fetish (Voodoo) funeral.  In regards to culture and the overall experience, this has been my favorite thing in Ghana thus far.  When I say that the whole village was there, I mean it!  We saw tro-tro after tro-tro filled with people coming from all over to attend this funeral.  It was so different than anything we are used to in Western culture.  While Western funerals are typically somber affairs, this was, from my perspective, more of a celebratory farewell.  There were still plenty of upset family and friends, but it was displayed in a different way.  The men drumming were going for hours fueled by pure passion for the ceremony and hopefully out of respect for the life of the deceased.  The dancing felt very deep and you could tell that people were mourning through their dance.  They made sure that all of us visitors got up and danced with them.  Even though we couldn’t perfect the moves they were showing us, we all had a great time and the audience appreciated our effort.  We even got one of the most serious participants, who kind of scared me, to smile and laugh at our dance moves.  While this was going on, you still had a whole other section of drummers and dancers which were on the other side of a building but still part of the funeral.  I tried to communicate with some of the elders who were in the crowd and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves and wanted to make sure I was comfortable as well.  There were even hawkers and others, selling their food and goods to attendees.  After the initial drumming and dancing, they brought the coffin to the middle of the ceremony area.  A few of the main individuals danced some more and then brought over a sheep and two chickens to sacrifice.  I asked about the significance of this and was told that it is meant to rid the body of any bad spirits so they can rest in peace.  I never thought I would watch a sacrifice but it was not as gruesome as I would think.   The sheep was rather calm (maybe because of the gaping wound in its neck and the immense blood loss) but the chickens were what you would expect from a chicken with its head cut off!  After the sacrifice, they take the coffin out and the party moves over for some more drumming and dancing.  It was such an intense, new, and moving experience that I cannot help but love it!  When we returned back to Kasoa, my Christian family and colleagues were (seriously) concerned if they had cast a spell on me.  I know if they started to, my dance moves broke their concentration and they would think I was cursed already!  I would like to request that at my funeral, hopefully a long time from now, that there be African drumming and a lot of dancing 🙂

Dancing at the Fetish Funeral – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Serious Participant Who We got to Laugh at Us – – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Sacrificed Animals – Photo Courtesy of Katharina Von Eitzen

Video of the Fetish (Voodoo) Funeral: http://youtu.be/pnB5eUTta-Q

I miss and love you all,

John