Things my parents taught me: Life's not fair!

Sarah here!  Sorry we haven’t been able to blog lately, it’s been a busy final few months at site!  But we enjoyed being able to spend the last amount of time in our service in our village.  We also haven’t written a ‘Things my parents taught me’ blog in awhile; not because they didn’t teach us many things!  But more so that we didn’t have an good examples of where and how we put those pieces of knowledge to use.  Well, unfortunately, we recently had a perfect example to use something my Dad taught me at a very young age: Life’s not fair!  When I was little, and things weren’t going my way, I would constantly complain, “But that’s not fair!”  And my Dad, without fail, would respond, “Life’s not fair!”  If we don’t come to grips with this early on, life can be a pretty tough thing to get through, because obviously the world doesn’t revolve around ME and won’t always be fair to ME specifically, and how could it!  We see plenty examples of unfairness (in our eyes, at least) on a daily basis: woman cooking, bathing their children, fetching firewood and water, etc, all while their husbands drink tea and talk with their friends; kids not really getting a childhood in the sense of playing and learning instead of being shouldered with responsibilities at too young an age; hearing stories of politicians making oodles of money and still “chopping” it from the programs that need it.  So obviously there is unfairness all around us here, but not necessarily relating directly to our lives here.  But....

I recently came home from school on a Monday afternoon, 19 days until we were scheduled to leave our village to travel down to Accra, to find that someone had broken into our house.  They broke open the front door and went through any and all places they thought we would be hiding money...and they found and took all of it.  However, we were VERY lucky that they didn’t just grab our wallets/lock box/backpacks and run, then they would have taken our passports, Peace Corps IDs, Ghana ATM cards, and our American credit cards.  THEN how would we have had our COS trip?  They also bypassed our computer and expensive camera, which would have been way more crushing than losing our money.  This is one of the reasons that we suspect the thief was someone from Tarsor instead of an outsider: the person didn’t want evidence of what he/she had stolen.  We informed our village assemblyman and went about talking to the chief/elders, who then disseminated the information to the community.  As mad as we were at the thief, we were equally as happy in the response from our friends and community members.  Everyone was appalled that this person could do something like this to us, (people coming to live with and help the community, be away from their home/family/friends for two years, and live on a relatively small salary - we make about half the salary a teacher does), and expressed their disgust in the bad name it now gives their community.  The teachers all rode their motos from the school to greet us and offer their support right when they found out, and my headmaster and assistant headmaster joined in the meeting with the chief/elders. 

So while we were right away initially feeling very strongly: “This isn’t fair!”, my Dad’s words echoed in my head: “Life’s not fair.”  Yes, it’s unfair that we came to this community to live and work, didn’t make a salary for two years, left our friends and family and home for two years, etc, and had this happen to us less than three weeks before we were to go home, but hey, Life’s not fair sometimes!  And we figured that we could either react with anger and suspicion towards the community, or accept the fact that sometimes in life, S%^@ happens, we can role with it and show the community members that we can still be positive in the face of adversity.  We were also able to cite the fact that we have had a vehicle broken into back in America and a computer, mp3 and money stolen, to show that in general, groups of PEOPLE are not bad, it’s just individuals that make bad decisions, and that can happen anywhere.  Because....life’s not fair!  And while that still doesn’t make us feel better about having our money stolen and our personal property sifted through, it does give us perspective on the fact that it’s just money, a material thing that we can hopefully replace someday (once we get jobs... :) and our health and personal safety are still intact.  So THANKS Dad for the resounding words!  We’re still following your advice all the way across the ocean, as we finish up this crazy adventure! 

A mosque opening, a wedding, and two baby naming ceremonies!

Over the past few months, we’ve had some fun celebrations!  The first was the completion of a mosque and Islamic school complex (donated from a Saudi Arabian NGO) that is now the nicest building in Tarsor.  Beautiful wooden doors, tiled ceilings with fans, and freshly painted!  They are hoping to have the school (for grades KG – Primary 3) open by the start of the fall term, but we think that will happen on Ghanaian time – so a year or two? :)  They have been working on this since before we left for Christmas, so it was cool to see it be completed while we were here. 

We also had the chance to attend a wedding ceremony in a nearby village called Kuroboi.  We have attended weddings in Tarsor when the bride is marrying to Tarsor, but haven’t attended one where the woman is from a different village and marrying there.  It was interesting to note the similarities and differences between American and Sissala weddings.  The both have a lot of food!  The diversity of food, however, is much greater in America.  In Sissala, any large gathering of people (wedding, funeral, baby naming, etc) entails making a giant vat of T.Z. (a starch the consistency of mashed potatoes made from maize flour) with some kind of soup, and killing a sheep/goat so important people attending get a small piece of meat.  They both also have a doted-on and done-up bride!  At this wedding, the bride changed clothes three different times, and each time the dresses she wore were beautiful, all accompanied by a large diku (pronounced dee-koo) or head covering, with lots of makeup and henna on her hands and feet.  However, for all of this prepping, the poor bride has to sit inside a room and have people take turns to come greet her, while all of the guests are outside talking, eating, dancing and enjoying themselves.  Weddings normally take all day, starting in the wife’s village and ending with the wife being brought to the husbands village.  The husband doesn’t even attend the ceremony in the wife’s village!  As a result, there’s a lot of down time, so...people sleep :)  (I have a picture of Jordan sitting reading a magazine amidst the rest of the male guests, all sleeping in plastic chairs around him!)  We stayed, ate, and danced (only the females do the dancing) until it was time for the bride to get in the lorry (a broken down van, no limo here!)  with all of the Tarsor people and go back to Tarsor.  We then proceeded on to Nwandono to watch our school students take on their school in a football match.  The excitement of the afternoon was watching the girl’s teams crash into each other (they don’t have as much control of their bodies or knowledge of game strategy as the boys) and walking the 45 minutes home from Kuroboi in the dark when Jordan’s bike tire got a flat :)      

The final ceremony we had the chance to witness was a baby naming ceremony.  We’ve been to one before in our village, but this was for one of my best friends in the village, Fozia, and I was anxious that she had the baby before we left!  The morning begins, like a wedding, with a lot of women stirring a cauldron of T.Z. and preparing soup.  I got the chance to have them all laugh at me trying to stir the T.Z. – it’s basically a 4 foot long paddle!  That takes years of practice, not happening successfully for this foli girl!  The oldest woman in the compound is in charge of bathing the baby.  This is also when they can decide to put the facial and belly markings on the baby (using basically a razor blade).  This custom is fading out, as people see that it can lead to infection, and that it marks you as a “village person” if you ever go get a job in a city somewhere.  The woman also basically massages the baby’s body, stretching out the legs and arms, then bathing it again in a herb-infused water mixture, then finally putting on lotion.  The mother than dresses the baby, and lays her out on nice fabric (Fozia even put her in the dress that I had bought for her in Tumu!  Cute!).  The mother herself also dresses in nice clothes, and sits next to the baby, again (similar to the wedding) accepting well wishes (and money) from people coming to greet her.  The proud father sits outside with his male friends, while the women work at distributing the food to the guests.  The elders also go inside the mosque and pray for the baby, and give her her name.  They named the baby Hikima, which means knowledge (and is also the name of our favourite baby here :) , which is written on a piece of paper alongside the Arabic spelling, and her local name: Wuoweribeta (pronounced Woo-worry-bay-tah).  In the local language this basically means that all things you try will be good.   We had fun mingling between the different groups of people, taking photos, and generally feeling a part of our community and friends! 

We also got to go to another naming ceremony in the up-section of our village right after this first one.  This was also interesting to see, because the woman had delivered twins, and one of them died after birth.  To represent the dead child, they placed a piece of wood roughly carved into the shape of a baby next to the living child on the bed.  It was also interesting to see how composed the mother was in telling me this: that one of her children had died.  Naming ceremonies normally take place a week after the birth, and I don’t think it’s our culture in America that the mother would be able to host a whole big ceremony and not really show sadness at the death of one of the babies she just delivered.  It’s interesting to witness the differences in our views of death and grieving between our two cultures.