So Sarah and I get a chance almost each night to play a few games of cards with dinner. We decided to keep track of our game of Rummy and plot our service's history of the 2 year long game. We thought it'd be funny to keep you all informed on its progress. Sarah calls me a dork for thinking this is cool, but oh well. You can see that I had a rough week in there but I'm having better luck as of late. My line of best fit analysis, although the r-squared statistic shows only a weak polynomial fit, tells the story well: I'm on the way up, and Sarah's going down. I will soon overtake her!! Stay tuned...

Nummers!

Jordan here: Today I tried lizard with spicy pepper. With a giggle, the men who were serving it in chunks of the animal with skin, scales, claws, and head still intact, they described it to me as nuah ahnee, which translates to crocodiles younger brother. The meat was actually pretty decent, thinking to myself the proverbial “it tastes like chicken”. But I just ate the meat. People here eat everything including the vertebrae and head. They left the jaw bones and teeth, and claws. I asked them if they went hunting for it. They said no they just killed it with a stick. I asked where. They said it just ran across the way over there, pointing about 100 feet behind me. I’m in Africa, I thought. A related story from Sarah. She went to school and was walking from her class just before break and her counterpart yelled from across the way, “Sarah, look!” From his hand he was holding a giant rat. Here we call them grass cutter and they’re actually a bit of a delicacy, hard to believe. She asked what will you do with it, and almost with a skuff, he replied “we’re going to eat it.” So they grilled up the animal, after cleaning it, and Sarah tried a small bite. Not her favorite and probably won’t try again, but was one of those things you can’t say “well I could have tried it, but was scared”. Good for her.

As I was painting the wall for the art spot on our compound, I found a hole in the cement plaster, revealing the orange clay brick underneath. I looked a little closer and saw 8-10 large ants. Well I knew I could paint over them so I tapped the wall near them with the back of my brush. Now provoked, I had woken the whole colony holed up in the wall and sent out a red alert. In seconds, hundreds of large ants were pouring out of the wall. (keep in mind this is not the wall on our house where we live so they’re not pouring out into our domicile) I run to grab my insecticide spray and use up the last bits. It was not enough, the ants kept coming. So I did the noble thing and sat in my screened in porch and watched as, within minutes, the lizards from all directions came scrambling in and made small work of all the ants. Gluttoned and happy, they waddled away and I thanked them for their appetite.

The futbol game!

Jordan here: Today we finally played ball with the boys of the village. I’ll try to paint a picture of what that’s like. Shirts and skins. They of course split Sarah and I up on different teams and its scandalous enough for Sarah to be showing her knees let alone take her shirt off, so I’m on the skins. Now, a lesser person would have been embarrassed, but not me. I grin and bear the villages first glimpse at a farmer’s tan (which, come on, we know with my hair its more like farmer’s burn). The double-take look I got to be sure if I had actually taken my white shirt off, or if that was my skin was as familiar as it was back in the states. This is not mentioning that all of these guys live to farm and labor is their lives…so they’re all ripped. Now I’ve lost 10-15 pounds already here so I’m looking a bit leaner, but as another Volunteer about to head home after his 2 year service said, I’m as “weak as a kitten.” We start playing and since it hasn’t rained in 9 days and each day reaches between 80 and 90 degrees, the field is dust and covers us all. The darker shade now added to my skin will probably be the closest I come to looking Ghanaian. Being a bit out of practice, my way of saying I suck compared to them, they score on me a few times, but are all good sports about it. My Sisaali is not perfect yet, but I think they were trying to trade me to the other team…anyway… As we play, cows and the cowboys (literal cowboys) mosey on through the field. Maybe you’d think they pause with a ‘game-off’ call. Nope, they play over, around, off the hide of them. I think I even saw a cow get ‘megged (this is when an offense player kicks the ball through the legs of the defense). And of course the whole village is in bounds. One guy booted it to kingdom come and 3 guys went chasing after it. A couple minutes later they showed up again and we all continued. Sarah sat out for a few minutes and got all the kids watching to do the slow clap. Not sure what they thought of it. Maybe tomorrow she’ll try ‘the wave’. One time the ball got caught up a bit in the kids watching sitting to the side and a player came and tried to boot it toward the goal and nearly took a kid’s head off. When the light finally faded and the dust literally started to settle, they all shook my hand and said well done just for the effort of coming out to play. It was a fun time and I think we’ll both go back and play again soon.

Jordan here: I write this as I hear a group of something running around above our ceiling. I’m sure it’s something like mice or a bunch of lizards. At first, it bugged me a lot and kept me up, being paranoid that at that very moment vermins were running away with our food. By now, it bothers us less and I can sleep through most of it.

Life is good here. The weather is getting warmer and the rains are fewer and farther apart every week. It is just a bit of foreshadowing of the dryness that is to come. Soon the winds will bring dust and a nightly chill to the air. Sarah is hard at work trying to get some drapes put up so we don’t have a house full of dust. Funny that part of the delay is making sure we get cool Ghanaian cloth for our place J Sarah continues to teach math every day except Friday. Right now she’s teaching about sets of numbers in her Form 1 students and linear inequalities in her Form 2. Her frustrations and triumphs continue to make her question and confirm her purpose here in Ghana. I try to help remind her that the things she is frustrated with is why she is here. You can already tell the students respect her and take her seriously. She has found that if the class is misbehaving, their biggest punishment is for her not to teach.

I have started to show up nearly every day to teach at least PE. Our first game is Frisbee. They’ve never had a PE teacher before, especially one that tries to have some fun with it. Hence I enjoy hearing the students excited for me to show up. I’ve also taken on the Form 2 ICT students. They technically have a teacher, who has not taught an ICT lesson yet. So I basically stepped in and took his place. What a challenge it is to teach technology class without any technology. However, it must be done since at the end of Form 3, they take their BECE test to determine if they’re allowed to graduate on to high school. ICT is part of that test.

Our favorite part of the day continues to be the evenings when the weather is cooler, the skies are amazing, and we go greet the community. It usually starts the second we leave the door with kids yelling “Madame Sarah!” at the top of their lungs. There are a few Master Jordan calls too, but not as many. Then we stop at nearly every group of adults we see sitting around and give the same greetings as the day before and the day before that. But just to see the genuine interest people have for us trying their language and showing a desire to share in their food and culture etc. puts a smile on their face that is contagious. Tonight 2 of our favorite little kids followed us around and are just a riot to play with and watch interact with each other. Their names are Bahadjiah and Abi (short for Abiba). They could perhaps be the 2 cutest Ghanaian kids we’ve seen.

Now it’s the next morning: We wake up about 5:30am since this week Sarah is the teacher on duty which means she must be at the school when the students are showing up to clean the grounds. This includes sweeping inside and out, fetching water for the students to drink throughout the day, and cleaning all the blackboards. She is just there to supervise. She is typically the only teacher arriving on time every day. We admire the sunrise as we walk to our favorite darow (it is like porridge but smoother texture; we like to add roasted groundnuts and a little sugar) lady. She just starts selling about 6 and since few people here actually make their own breakfasts, her supply runs out fast. A 8-gallon barrel will sell in about an hour before she has to refill around 7am. That sells out by about 8am and then she will call it quits and then continue to the rest of her motherly/womanly duties. These include: fetching LOTS of water for the family, feeding and bathing children, cooking something small in the afternoon, cooking a large meal for the whole family by the evening time. Usually any child in the family old enough to go to school helps out in some way to do the chores. Not to mention they go to farm as well or at least work on the farm produce once the men have brought it back from the farm. Each morning this week Sarah and I have walked past the same compound where all the women and children of that compound come to pluck groundnuts from head-high piles of ground nut roots. When they finish, the livestock come in to clean up the grounds by eating any dropped nuts and eating much of the foliage that is still green.

While we sit and eat darow, we practice some Sisaali. When Sarah finishes, she bids farewell and bikes to school. After I joke a bit with those sitting round I walk home and greet along the way. Everyone that sees you wants to know the basics: Ng hara seeay? Neeay kumu? I si mu skuu? That translates: is your wife well, where are you going, will you go to school? Mix in some other odd questions and that is the jist of how we communicate. I make it back to our compound and do my daily admiration of the garden I’ve worked so hard on. Nothing has fruited yet, and its been a week since the last rain. If it doesn’t come today, I will have to haul water in to keep it going. My newest project is taking a wall leftover from the circular houses that used to stand in this place on our compound and turn it into and art spot/amphitheater/kids play area. I need to pick up some more white paint. A few nights ago, Sarah brought out the coloring books and crayons and invited in the 15 or so little kids that usually just sit by our fence and stare at us throughout the afternoon. Our code word is “the zoo is open” meaning we feel on display on how the exotic folis live. The kids absolutely loved coloring. They would show us every 30 seconds how their scribbles were coming along just like any other kid in America. Now they come by every night and ask to “panty” which translates to “color”. When the wall is clean white, we can give them chalk and then be able to clean and start all over every day.

The regular reality check of “I’m/we’re in Africa” hits us every day when we watch the daily lives of our community. But when we come home, and settle in for the evening, we are happy and privileged to be right here, right now.