Abena

My boss said something the other day that I really liked. He said, “Relationships overpower materials”. You should always care more about other people than your own wealth, because in the end, that’s what will really matter, for both your happiness and your reputation.

I’m just going to jump right in. Welcome to a typical morning for me:

I wake up at 6:30 am. Then I turn on the spigot in the bathroom to fill up the water buckets so that we can have water for our toilet and baths. Then the volunteers eat breakfast together, which consists, without fail, of white bread. And groundnut (peanut) butter, jelly, chocolate spread… sounds Dutch, doesn’t it? Well, the jelly actually is Dutch, but the bread is different, it’s denser and more thickly cut. Well, then I go switch out the water buckets, plug in the iron, wash my face and brush my teeth, iron my clothes, unplug the iron, switch out the water buckets, get dressed, clean my room, turn off the spigot, get my things together, and then just kinda chill until 8:15 when I head to work.

Cleanliness seems to be of the utmost importance here. All clothes have to be clean and ironed. If your cup makes a ring of water on the desk, you better clean it up right away. Try to remember to dust off your chairs and tables frequently, especially before sitting down to work. Put on your shoes before you step out of the house. It’s common for people to shower two, sometimes three times a day, and it’s normal to see people up at 4 in the morning sweeping their floors.

Speaking of floors, a lot of the floors in houses and offices look really nice, like tile or wood or pebbles, but then you realize that they are completely smooth. I have dubbed these “fruit roll up floors”, because you can buy large sheets of rolled up plastic off the street and then unfurl them in your house to make a very nice looking floor for cheap. It’s a pretty neat idea if you ask me, except they can break easily, and they’re slippery if you spill water on them.

I learned that even I can be surprised by people who look different. I thought I had seen it all, but even I did a double take the other day when I saw a little boy sitting on a step with his head in his hands, looking somewhat miserable. He wasn’t an obibini (black person) and he wasn’t an obruni (white prerson)… he was an ofri, an albino person. And I felt bad for looking at him in surprise, because I know how that must feel.

Now, where there might be a sidewalk in the U.S., there are open sewers here in Cape Coast. I know what you’re thinking, and they’re really not that bad, they’re just big trenches with water flowing through sometimes and some garbage thrown in. But in one of the trenches that I walk by on my way to work, there lives a small family of chickens. Two little chicks that are far to small to hop out of the trench, and a mother that lovingly stays in there with them, searching for a spare corn cob or opened package of crackers to eat. They sleep together there, too. Kayla and I call them our trench chickens, since we pass them twice a day. They remind me of the dead duck, which you might remember if you read my Netherlands blog.

So it’s 9:30 pm on Tuesday, and I’m sitting in my room, writing a presentation I have to give at the Day Care proprietor meeting on Wednesday. I was really tired and had just gotten off the phone with my parents and was determined to finish the presentation before I went to bed. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door. Kayla comes in and this is what she says:

“A woman is giving birth, do you want to come?”

Of course there is only one correct answer to this question, so down the road we sprinted, flagged down a taxi, and got to the clinic she works at just in time to send a few text messages.

Wait, what? Yeah. Doctor-patient relationships work differently here, so while this woman was in labor, the nurses were in another room, texting, chatting, waiting. I think they gave her some ibuprofen or something before we got there, but that’s it. She was alone, since her husband was in Accra, and her friend had brought her to the clinic and then left.

Eventually, the woman was told to walk down the hall to another bed, (yeah, she’s in labor and still walking) where she started bleeding. I thought I would be sick for sure. Kayla, a future nurse, was worried about the blood, but the nurse said that this was normal. After that was over, she had to get up and walk again a few steps to the birthing room, where they put an IV in her and told her to stop moaning so much. I would like take this moment to point out that there was no privacy in this situation, seeing as I was allowed to in the same room as her, even though nobody there knew who I was.

Anyway, around 11:00 pm, we saw the head. The birth was surprisingly fast; under 2 minutes. I watched the whole thing, too. The nurse cut the cord, grabbed the baby, and put it on something like a changing table. The baby was there for some time while the nurses were taking care of the placenta and all that, so Kayla and I just stared at her in awe.

Abena. Girl born on Tuesday. Right in front of my eyes.

This might sound fake, but the very first thing I thought while I was taking a look at her was, “She’s perfect”. She really was, too. 4.6 pounds, pink, lots of hair, long fingers and toes… she even opened her eyes a little and started sucking her fingers and cried a bit. The most amazing thing to me was that she could breath. Might sound obvious but think about it – she’s 4 pounds! I’m 30 times that big and I can breath, which makes sense, but she’s not even as long as my calf and she has lungs that work, can you believe that? All those little tiny organs in this little tiny girl. She was so beautiful, and so helpless. I’ve never seen anything so helpless in my life.

The nurses tied the cord, and believe me, she’ll have an outie belly button, like everybody does here. Then they cleaned the baby with baby oil and what was essentially a maxi pad. With one hand she grabbed the baby’s wrists and held her up for the mother to see. The woman didn’t even know it was a girl until 15 minutes after she’d given birth. Kayla congratulated her and showed her some pictures she had taken. She told me that the woman was gone by the time she got to work the next morning.

Well, now that that awesome story is over, I’ll try to speed through some random observations:

Posters and guidelines are really to the point and intense here. In my office, there are posters describing the HIV chain, domestic violence, etc. with very graphic and clear pictures that anybody could understand. Also, in one of the day care attendant guidebooks, they describe strangulation as being hanged by the neck with a noose. While I agree that is one definition, I’m not sure that’s something that is a real concern for a day care attendant. Another section in the guidebook was about fair discipline. It said things like, you know, time outs are okay, or taking away a privilege… and then it said, but do not “place ginger or hot peppers in a child’s private parts. Do not place a child’s hands in boiling water, hot oil, or fire”.

DID THIS REALLY HAVE TO BE SPELLED OUT? I’m not trying to sound offensive here, I realize that different people have different cultures and all that but in my opinion, this is going a little far. (But all that happened in the past, you know? Even caning in the schools is being looked upon negatively in modern times.)

So some girls came to visit us on Wednesday at the house and they asked us to tell them what was different between the U.S. and Ghana. We literally spent 2 hours on the subject, it was incredible. Here are two of the funniest ones:

“Nobody can carry things on their heads in the U.S.; nobody even knows how. When we buy food, we put it in a shopping cart. It’s basically like a big box on wheels and we put the food in it and then push it along.”

“One of our holidays is called Halloween. There are haunted houses where you go in and it’s dark and scary and people chase you with knives. And you pay like, 20 to 40 cedis to get in. Just to be scared.”

I have never laughed so hard at American culture. Some things just sound so ridiculous when you put them into a different context. I can’t even imagine a shopping cart in Cape Coast. And really, why pay people to chase you? I also think it’s funny that one of my favorite words in Dutch is “winklewagon” which means shopping cart, so for some reason, I always find a way to laugh about that object.

Speaking of culture differences, I was watching TV with my host sister once, and a woman appeared on the screen while the narrator introduced her and said, “She has the body every African woman wants”. This woman was huge. I mean, yes, she was very beautiful, I’m not making fun of her at all. It’s just that in the states, all the “beautiful” women that you see in magazines are barely even there. The media between African and the U.S. portray the exact opposite standards of beauty. It’s intriguing.

Okay, almost done. I’ll mention just four short things before I go.

I wanted to clarify that at my internship, we aren’t actually creating a new law, per say. I was confused about that, but really we’re making a bylaw, so it will only affect the Cape Coast Metropolis and the hope is that other regions will adopt our model to eventually revise the national law. But for now, we’re starting small.

Also, there’s another Ghanaian girl living in our house now. She’s very sweet and a bit shy and I’m not entirely sure about what her situation is, but I get the feeling that our Auntie is taking better care of her now than she was getting before.

I have a rash on my face, on my jaw line. I’ll be fine, it’s just itchy, so I should stop touching it. But it’s itchy. So that’s hard.

Lastly, on Wednesday we had one of my favorite dinners, groundnut soup with rice balls and chicken.

Oh and I almost forgot, my presentation went fine.

P.S. please remind me to take pictures, as I have only taken one so far, and that was of a funny sticker on my desk. I’ll get pictures from my friends, but I should really start taking my own I just always forget to.

P.P.S. I already know someone who has gotten malaria last week, and one of my friends at work kept saying she wasn’t feeling too well, until she tested positive for typhoid. A lot of computers keep breaking, too, probably because of the higher electric voltage from the outlets here. Well, here’s hoping that my computer and I stay healthy for the next 6 weeks!

P.P.P.S. the only side effect of my malaria medication is that it gives me really fun dreams.

P.P.P.P.S. I met a woman who works for AFS at the Coast to Coast restaurant. Small world, huh?

Yoh, yen koh!

Ekuwa