There's no Mr. Schu, but we had a singin' good time

Dec 13, 2010 11:23

*****

Our boat trip down the White Volta River is finished and only now have I had a moment to recount some of its more memorable adventures. All in all, I think it was a successful trip. We tested several hundred people (I think around 600, with two positive results), did intensive training for about fifty health volunteers from about 15 communities and did general education for about 600 people in 11 villages. Most of the villages we visited were extremely small (less than 100, sometimes less than 50 people) and when we arrived at them earlier on in the trip, I always thought to myself “This is it?”

It’s amazing to me how people can live in such a manner. I don’t mean their style of housing or poverty or what-have-you - I mean the isolation. Some of these communities we went to are only accessible by boat at certain times of the year and then, once you reach the river bank/docking area, you have to hike into the bush about forty-five minutes to an hour before you finally come upon a small gathering of mud and thatch structures. You can get to them by motorcycle from the other direction, but as Volunteers, we’re not allowed to ride and, as members of the communities, most are too poor to afford them. So the water route it is.

We started off in a larger village named ‘God’ in the local language. We were surprised to find that it was an Ewe village because, although we’d anticipated most of the villages having Ewe people (a fishing tribe that is always found around the waters’ edges), we were assured by a local health official that our intended villages were, in fact, Dagbani and Gonja communities. Because of that assurance, we didn’t have an Ewe translator with us. That proved to be very interesting when it came to translating. We had nice housing in this community and ended up staying there for two nights because the next village was within walking distance of the first.

Julie, Kim and I were chomping at the bit to get going because we all wanted to ride on the boat. Lizzy and Liz had ridden up in the boat from a village called Mpaha (where the boat owner lived) two days earlier, so they were sunburned and no longer enthralled by the process of skimming down the water at top speeds of 5K an hour. At this point, two of us (Kim and I) hadn’t even seen the boat. We’d just seen pictures that did it absolutely no justice. Liz kept describing it to us as a ‘really big boat, a giant canoe with motors.’ She said that Ghanaians told her it could transport 300 people, but…well, to be honest, that means nothing here. My tro is meant to hold 28 and we routinely cram 38 inside. Capacity is very relative.

However, she was right. This thing was gigantic.

It was about 48 feet long and 10 feet wide. The navigator had to communicate to the driver at the rear by cell phone because you couldn’t shout that far. We each had our own bench (there were only 15 of us on the boat, sometimes less) - and then several more open benches to hang our wet laundry that never had time to dry at night.

Often, we’d dock in some place that I wouldn’t really consider a dock and was sometimes frightening to enter given that the last boat trip on the Lake Volta had ended when the driver ran over a tree stump and sank the boat. There was severe flooding in this area this rainy season so the safe areas had shifted and our navigator did an amazing job directing us around the danger spots. According to him, we had about a two week window to conduct this 11-day journey because we couldn’t go when the water was too high, but when the rain stopped and the water began to recede, the levels would really drop and we were in danger of running aground in some spots.

So we would get up in the mornings around 5, eat breakfast, then load up our gear and be on the boat around 7:30 (or 8:30 if we had to lug it through the bush) to move to the next village. We’d arrive around 9 or 10, hike into the village, greet the chiefs and elders, then get the community health volunteers mobilized for their training. We’d work with them until lunch, break, then gather the community for general education in the afternoon while half of us continued to work with the health volunteers. We’d finish with everything around 5 or 6, eat dinner, watch an educational film if there was a generator and tv available, then go to sleep and do it all over again. In short, it was exhausting.

I’ve never been so filthy in my life and I’m routinely competing for the Dirtiest Volunteer Award.

Where we’d dock, we’d have to jump down into the mud, then scramble up steep hills/riverbanks to get to the grassy areas. Mind you, we had to carry all of our gear with us, too because we didn’t know what the communities could provide us with. We brought enough food to last us the entire trip and the communities always gladly provided women to cook meals for us. A lot of them even prepared their own food for us to eat, which was extremely nice of them, but a couple of them just couldn’t put together the supplies. In villages where there are only 45 people, 15 strangers showing up and wanting food could put a real strain on their stock. They also gave us rooms to sleep in, but we eventually moved to sleeping outside because it was so hot. A few of us brought hammocks and others had prayer mats and mosquito nets they’d hang and sleep on the ground. It wasn’t the most comfortable of arrangements, but I don’t think anyone had comfort in mind when we set off on this journey.

Another thing that was a test of strength was the bathing situation. In most of West Africa, breasts aren’t sexualized so there is no reason to hide them. The bathing areas were all outdoors in the open. There was sometimes a wall that went to about waist height made of either thatch or a concrete and mud mixture. We bathed at night, but…well, the skies are very clear and we white people? We glow in the dark. None of the villagers actually cared but it was a real struggle at first.

One night in particular, there was no wall at all. I had my bathing bucket of river water and a young girl directed me toward a thatch hut (the fufu hut I would find out very soon) and set the bucket down in a grassy area behind it and said “Here. Bath.”

I looked around, seeing only a wood plank on top of some rocks I assumed I should stand on. About twenty feet away, there was this ramshackle thatch enclosure that would’ve given me coverage up to about my thighs. It was a little more in the open (both of these places were about thirty feet from the mango tree, the community gathering point where a particularly heated game of Spades was going on at the moment) and I decided that my wooden plank behind the soon-to-be main eating place in town empty grass shack was a little more private. So, against every inclination I had in my body, I stripped down and lathered up - only to find about five minutes later that the bathing area I’d been placed in was also the main highway to the bush where people go to the bathroom at night.

I had people walking by me the entire time, greeting me, telling me thanks for doing the education, inviting me to eat dinner with them when I finished and they got back from defecating in the bush. Oh, and not to mention people would come around the back of the hut to wash their hands before eating fufu.

All of this was happening, let me remind you, while I was completely naked.

I seemed to be the only one fazed by it, but that wasn’t exactly a comfort at the time. I’m glad I can look back on it and laugh. It was one of the fastest bucket baths I’ve ever taken.

In our hammocks, I was routinely woken up in the middle of the night by featureless faces staring at me in the moonlight. They were trying to peek into my hammock (which was covered by a black mesh mosquito net) not to see me, but to try to figure out what it was, I’m sure. I woke up with a start several times, only to scare the person half to death (because I don’t think they really thought anyone was inside - hammocks look kind of flimsy to them, I’m sure) and send them sprinting into the bush to get away. It was kind of funny, but also freaky at the same time - waking up to some shadowy figure whispering to a friend a few feet away from your face in a language you can’t understand it slightly unsettling.

Oh, it should also be said that I was afflicted with giardia (look it up) the entire time and not one of these villages had a latrine available. Lizzy was also sick and we were incredibly happy to find that her counterpart, Old Boy, had brought his hoe with him. We both made several emergency trips to the bush throughout the excursion.

There’s so much more that could be said, but I’d go on for pages, so I’ll stop. In the end, I’m happy we did it and I think everyone else was too. The communities were grateful (we heard so many times “We know there’s something called AIDS, we hear about it on the radio, but we don’t know what it is - please tell us about it”) and the trip itself stretched us all beyond our means and comforts and strengths in very positive ways. It was good to work with our counterparts so closely (three of them went) and amazing to see how things just…came together. At one time, I was doing education in English and a Mamprusi speaker was translating into a Dagbani, for a Gonja speaker to hear and translate into Gonja, so that a girl from the village itself could take the Gonja and put it into Ewe so the rest of her people could understand what we were saying.

We kind of have a saying that we’ve adopted over here and it’s “It’ll all work out.” No matter how bad things look at the outset, no matter how disorganized and mixed up it all is, somehow, some way, it all works out. It's a struggle to accept that on some days, but I'm learning. And, in the words of Hannibal Smith from The A-Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

boat trip, cultural observations, projects

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