The morning is wet with spitting rain. I can feel the dampness, the thick humidity, in the air and in the house. Showers are predicted. It is in the low 70’s and will stay there all day. I have errands, four of them.

I was going to skip today’s Coffee as I have a lot to do; instead, you’re getting a mishmash.

Sometimes I write a thought or an experience I delete mainly because it doesn’t fit, doesn’t take me anywhere. Some of those I save. Today I am going to post them. They have no connection to one another other than I chose to save them. They are in no specific order. Here they are.

By the time I left Ghana, I had replaced my entire wardrobe. I’d buy cloth in the market and have my seamstress make a dress. I especially loved tie-dye cloth. Some dresses had embroidery on the front. They were my favorites. The only thing I still wore from home were my sandals. They had tire soles put on in the market so they’d last forever.

I have the most annoying neighbor in the house behind me. He plays his music so loud I can’t sit on the deck. Worst of all, it is country music of which I am not a fan. I do like rockabilly and way back classic country music like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and The Stanley Brothers, but I don’t like contemporary country. When I used to call for Gracie, he would yell and tell me to quiet down. He is the one who thought Gracie was a wolf when she climbed the six foot fence into his yard. That should tell you all you need to know about him.

I have told this story before, but it is one of my favorites if not the favorite story of my day to day life as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. I had taken the magic pills and traveled to Old Tafo to visit my friends Bill and Peg. They lived on the second floor in a house with no plumbing. Bill hauled water in buckets for the house. Down the stairs were the necessities, a row of single seat outhouses. No longer taking the magic pills meant running down the stairs and staying awhile in one of the outhouses, my own single seater. Now that you have the background, here is my story. I was sitting there in my little house biding my time when I heard a sound behind and underneath me. I stood up and a head appeared below the hole. It was the night soil man whose job it was to empty the buckets. He saw me, gave a little wave and said, “Hello, madam,” as he emptied the bucket. When he was finished, I sat down again.

This one I posted, but it is also one of my favorites. I thought I’d end with it:

It didn’t take long after training to realize the best part of Peace Corps isn’t Peace Corps. It is just living every day because that’s what Peace Corps comes down to, just living your best life in a place you couldn’t imagine. It is living on your own in a village or at a school. It is teaching every day. It is shopping in the market every three days. It is taking joy in speaking the language you learned in training. It is wearing Ghanaian cloth dresses and relegating the clothes you brought with you to the moldy suitcases. It is loving people and a country with all of your heart from breakfast to bed and forever after. Peace Corps doesn’t tell you that part, the loving part, but I expect they know it will be there.

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This entry was posted on August 29, 2023 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Ghana, Peace Corps Ghana, rain

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