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!
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