Ghana, Farming, Spirit Possessions

I have quite a few updates to make since my last blog article...two months ago! I did go to Ghana and sipped cold beverages by the water. It would have been much more ideal if the water wasn't full of discarded black bags that lapped the shore. Two of us walked into the water in Cape Coast but did not go farther than ankle-deep because a pair of shorts tangled around my foot and a wooden board hit my friend in the shin. Ghana is a surreal place for someone who just spent six months in the poorest country in the world. There is a tropical divide somewhere in the north of Benin/Togo/Ghana that separates "developed West Africa" from the rest. In the bus to Cotonou, Benin, I was shocked to see the forests of palm trees. Mango trees were everywhere, ripe with huge pink mangos. People didn't seem to know what to do with all their fruit. In Ghana, the highways were lined with stands selling huge watermelons every few meters. Another thing, Nigeriens love to point out to me (as a white person) that I'm an "anasara." The Ghanaian word for white person is "obruni" but I don't remember being called that once. Instead, street vendors will rip you off mercilessly and Rasta bros offer drum lessons and treat you as objects that they can handle without asking. I loved the weather in Ghana, the marked infrastructure (electricity, garbage collection, running water, and, evidently, functioning schools), seeing the ocean—no matter how dirty—and eating all kinds of new food. However, I also felt relieved that I would go back to Niger where I can speak a local language, where people respect me, and where strange men can't touch me.

Little did I know that Niger was falling apart in my absence. When I turned on my phone upon crossing the border from Benin, I received all kinds of frantic texts about the president dissolving the Parliament and several that just said "The Grand Marche is on fire." That is the shopping area in the center of town where thousands of established and shanty stores sell goods. With all the insanity, we were asked to leave Niamey and return to our villages; ideally the very night we had finished our 31 hour trip. I opted to leave the next day, you know, to save my sanity and all. I then visited several friends' villages and participated in a radio show about the difference between love relationships in Niger and the US. Finally, I returned to my village and almost immediately got the field that I had worked almost two months to get. For a week, I uprooted bushes and painstakingly weeded the plot. Then with incredible timing, right after I bought peanut seeds, the heavy rains came and a villager offered to plow my field for me with an ox plow. The next morning two women came to my field to help me plant the peanuts, plus hibiscus and sorghum that my village friends gave me. For about four hours we planted by digging holes in the loose ground with our feet, dropping in a pinch of seeds (only one peanut per peanut hole though), and covering the hole with the same foot. My two friends did a fast and flawless job. I was all over the place, zigzagging my lines. I'm self conscious that when the plants start to significantly grow, my lines will be incredibly crooked. But that doesn't matter now. The point is that I'm a farmer! What an incredible new chapter in my Peace Corps service. The political instability in the cities makes me nervous. I just hope that, like any other political problem in the history of Niger, it will blow over soon.

Then last week, I took a quick trip to the Konni region, the closest Hausa-phone area. One volunteer was hosting a possession ceremony in his dominantly animist village just outside of Konni ville. I was incredibly impressed by the start of the festivities. Two men played a calabash drum with claw-like drum sticks (drum claws?) and a fiddle made out of a gourd. The violin (called a "gourge") had a thick bow, like a bass bow, and the man played it in the crook of his arm. I hope to go to another one of the ceremonies soon and next time, I will try to buy one of these fiddles to take home. The musicians played for hours and only stopped once, ironically, to pray. Then the animist hosts brought out a big bag of clothes and asked three of the Peace Corps volunteers to dress up. There were cowry-shell vests and crowns and all kinds of beautiful skirts made of cloth and leather. During the actual possession, the possessed ones wore fabric that they held over their heads that I recognized as traditional Nigerien weaved cloth. In the Balleyara market, a fabric seller showed me this hand-woven fabric and explained that most households in the olden days only had one stretch of fabric. Everyone was naked until they needed to go out somewhere and would actually take the clothes from the current owners back. I asked the price of this fabric and the vendor just laughed and said there was no way that I could afford it. Imagine my surprise seeing the animists with several pieces of this fabric. I wonder how long they had owned this fabric. The actual possessions disappointed me. It felt staged for the benefit of the white tourists. In my own region and in smaller villages of Konni, there are daily animist events. I want to show up at a whim to one of these and see what the people do when no one's watching. It is still intriguing. But as of yet I'm not impressed.

Soon I'll head back to the bush to work on my small farm. Expect some tamed blog entries in the future. I plan to keep a low profile for a while.