Posted tagged ‘training in Ghana’

“Food is our common ground, a universal experience.”

October 21, 2022

Today is perfection, the sort of fall day people sing about. It is warm and sunny. A slight breeze stirs only the leaves at the ends of the branches. Today is a day to be enjoyed.

When I was a kid, the first subject in school every morning was religion. I remember in a few grades we used the Baltimore Catechism as our text. We also read stories from the Bible. Religion was always my least favorite class, and, of course, of all subjects, religion was destined to follow me through grammar school into high school and even into college, into my first year of college when religion was disguised as theology, same subject, different name, and still my least favorite class. The only thing I remember from theology was learning Christ was probably born in 2 BC. That shattered what I had been taught. It all went downhill from there.

It has been four weeks since surgery on my finger. It will be one more week before I see the surgeon. My finger is better during the day but not so good at night because I have been using my right hand more. When I changed the wrap yesterday, I noticed the swelling is going down in the middle of the finger close to the fracture.

When I was growing up, we ate simple foods, nothing exotic except Chinese but that was rare. Every supper during the week was usually mashed potatoes, some sort of vegetable and meat, heavy on the hamburger and chicken. It was in Ghana where I first tasted a variety of foods.

Before I left for Ghana, I didn’t think much about the food. I gave bugs and diseases my attention. I can still remember our first night in Ghana and our welcome meal. It was outside near the dorm. It was food I recognized, rice and some sort of kebob meat, so I still wasn’t anxious about food; however, that changed the next night. For supper, we had food that looked like leaves, maybe a bit like spinach. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it all my time in Ghana, kontomire. I didn’t like the cocoyam leaves.

To say my palate expanded when I was in Ghana is an understatement. I tried all the food: Ghanaian, Lebanese, Indian, street food and food in other countries where I traveled. Half the time I had no idea what I eating. I think in some cases I was glad not to know. I became an adventuress eater.

Tonight I am having plantain for dinner.

“It is a rare and beautiful moment when you find love among people and in places that are so completely different from anything you’ve ever known.”

October 25, 2014

We have sun for the first time in days. The morning is chilly the way fall mornings are. The rain and the wind blew pine needles and leaves off the trees so the lawn, the driveway and the deck are covered. The leaves are yellow.

I hope my memories of Ghana and the Peace Corps don’t make you yawn. They appear here often because they are still so much a part of me, even after all these years, and much of what I think, love and respect came from those years. Living for a little more than two years in Africa is mind and soul expanding and that never disappears.

I think I was destined to be a Peace Corps volunteer. When I was eleven, I made a vow to travel. When I was in high school, I joined groups like SNCC believing we all had social responsibilities. In college, among other things, I picketed for the grape workers, marched against the war and tutored Spanish-speaking kids in English. The Peace Corps seemed a perfect fit.

I applied in the fall of my senior year in college. The application was multi-paged and took what seemed forever to finish. When it was sent to Washington, all my hopes and dreams were in many ways attached. The answer didn’t take long. In January the all important letter came inviting me to train to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, in Ghana. I sent my acceptance the very same day even though I had no idea where Ghana was. The worst part in the process would be next, telling my parents.

I called home.

My mother said little. My father said it all: no more money for school if I choose to go, Africans stink, and he forbade it. Okay, that last one gave me a chuckle. The phone call ended when I hung up on my father because of his anger. It would take a while but he did finally accept my choice.

I remember how nervous I was leaving home on the flight to Philadelphia to staging and then on to Ghana. I was twenty-one.

Training wasn’t easy. Coupled with homesickness, eating strange foods and suffering from a variety of ailments I sometimes had the urge to leave, but I didn’t. I chose to stay. During training, after our live-in, we had to make our way to the next training site by ourselves. That was when I started feeling like a Peace Corps volunteer. I was on a bus with mostly Ghanaians and traveling for hours to go south, and I got there with no problems. I ate food sold alongside the road, drank water from dubious sources and peed in a hole.

I thrived in Ghana. I came to love Ghanaians, sweet, warm people always willing to help. Teaching was difficult at first but then got easier as I learned to teach. If I needed to, I could travel anywhere by myself and often did to get to Accra, 16 hours from where I lived, to Togo, the country to the east of Ghana, and to what was then Upper Volta.

I was at ease in Ghana, confident in myself, and loved being there. My homesickness disappeared. I felt at home.