Staying Centered

Everybody in West Africa knows that the best way to carry a load is by balancing it on top of your head. Acknowledge me that, now, imagine. You’re reborn a Ghanaian.

As a newborn, it’s just something funny you do to imitate everyone else. You place whatever you can on your head to catch a glimpse of the feeling but quickly lose it not knowing that keeping it up there requires real skill. You begin to find your center on the walk to and from school. Whether you think your hands are equally if not more suited for the task, you’ve inferred that you’re expected to, so you balance your books, bags, and math sets on top of your head. You start to appreciate the usefulness of the practice when you are first able to simultaneously peel an orange and balance your school supplies.

But it’s not for another few years, having spent about ten on the planet, that you begin to notice the necessity. You spend hours out of school fetching water from the nearest source-well, river, lake, or ocean-to keep the barrel at home full. Early mornings, you follow your family members to the farm making several round trips to bring home the harvest. You spend years honing the skill by supplying your family two of life’s basic essentials. With enough prayer and good fortune, you may have even brought home a surplus.

Fortunately, your talent has you well-prepared to enter the local job market. You realize there’s profit to be had at the nearest market, tro station or roadside. You bring your surplus harvest or other goods there the best way you know how. Whether you intend to set up a stand or keep on the move, you add a jar that will serve as your till to the basket, box, or bin overhead. A customer on foot calls at you as you reach your destination, and on either end of their transaction, helps you dismount and mount your load. This is good warm-up for completing sales requiring more agility. You are circling the vehicles in the station repetitively calling out the name of your product. You begin a transaction through the window of a tro and, the vehicle starts to move as you are changing the payment of your customer. By this point, you’ve had enough practice to balance your product on your head while you chase down the customer and complete the sale. Over the years, balancing becomes so second-nature that you find yourself doing more complex tasks at the point of sale including de-shelling hard-boiled eggs, chopping coconuts open, or fixing sandwiches. These are your hay days. You feel you can do anything with something on your head.

Your healthy physique, due in part to your proficiency as a head-porter, is among the reasons you’ve attracted a mate and are expecting a child. If you’re a woman, this doesn’t slow you down. In fact, your enlarged torso before birth and your newborn, which you fasten to the small of your back with a piece of fabric, after birth both serve to lower your center of balance. You’re able to carry heavier loads precisely because there are more mouths to feed.

As a veteran, there are specialized tasks requiring your expertise. You carry home a piece of bamboo several stories long with which you’ll extend the antenna of your radio or TV. You carry an assortment of dishes to serve during lunch break at the school canteen. At your age, you notice your child rediscovering the method. In a few years, the bulk of the burden will be handed down a generation. Your loads become much less than you can manage and you forget them as quickly as a royalty forgets their crown.

I've kept long

I would guess every PCV-authored blog features at one point or another an apology for their delay between posts. Let this be my first of hopefully not many. It's been almost two months since my last post and not for any legitimate reason that other PCVs might claim, such as lack of access to internet. We have internet, albeit slower than 56K, in our own home. So with that said, let me provide an update on my life as a PCV with responsibilities, as a stranger experiencing culture shock, and as a person with hobbies.

First, PCV. So the third term of the academic year is underway and it stands true with exceptions that kids have little affinity for math. I like to believe however that my students do enjoy coming to class and that they all learn at least something each class. At times it's hard to say, but I really do enjoy teaching them. We're going to paint. I've started registering interested students to enter their paintings in a contest meant to raise HIV/AIDS awareness. The contest is sponsored by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR, yes, there's an acronym in that acronym). The Plan supplies students with painting materials in exchange for their finished works all of which should depict a certain HIV/AIDS-related theme. This years theme is "Protect Your Dream." In our meeting, we've discussed how contracting the virus can interfere with accomplishing your dreams and, subsequently, ways to avoid contracting the virus. The twelve best paintings from children throughout Ghana are selected by a panel of judges and featured in a published calendar. We want a library and computer lab at the school. We have loose plans to construct a building at the school that will serve as a library and computer lab. The aim of the project would obviously be to raise proficiency in English and computer use for those with access to the school. Stay tuned on that one. You will most likely have the opportunity to contribute. Ghanaian languages are interesting, so interesting to some of us PCVs, that at least one of us has spearheaded a project to document a lot of them in the form of language-learning audio. I've joined the Celebrate Language Project (CLaP) to help with the editing. Here's an example of what we're working on(coming)

Now, as a stranger experiencing culture shock. This is more of an I.O.U. than an update. I have a number of fascinations with Ghanaian culture that I've started to put into words. I plan to post them as I see fit in stand-alone posts. So, expect to see more of those.

Now, as a person with hobbies. My name appeared again in the Problems section of Mathematics Magazine, here's the full article and my solution. During last school break, I spent a good number of hours writing a java applet that animates a four-dimensional cube. The applet is more or less proof that I learned something during the research project I did senior year at St. Mary's College. Partly in preparation for getting myself together to apply to grad school, I've gathered these things and more into a personal website.

By posting shortly after Hallie, I've stolen the space at the top of this page. If you haven't read it already, scroll down to read about Hallie's work with Ghanaian female youth.