Conclusion on Mediums

Not only was the avatar, or perspective I chose to see my experience in, important to my project on the authenticity of experience in Ghana, but the mediums I chose to record it in.  The avatar and the medium were equally responsible for the representation I came up with.  After my experience, I think that there are certain avatars that work better with certain mediums.  If you are someone who relates to one more than another, then considering those recommended mediums could be beneficial.

First, for all students or travelers interested in going out into the field I recommend a jotting notebook and a diary.  A jotting notebook because our memories are just too fragile, and you can lose important information as well as a viable medium, and a diary because there will always be something you want to express that isn't field note appropriate.  

Ava- The Romantic Anthropologist- This avatar was the student avatar.  Having an academic approach with course contracts, books, etc for this experience was great for me, but I realize that might not be for everyone.  I felt like I got more out of it having had that mindset.  To me, it did not feel forced, and it helped me stay positive when dealing with culture shock and some of the other things that come with integrating into a new community.  If you are someone who relates to her, I found that typed field notes were better than handwritten field notes.  I had a lot more notes when I was using a computer. 

Conclusions

This summer I set out to Ghana with an idea.  An experiment.  A crazy out there theory based project that I struggled to describe in one single sentence.  I wanted to know more about the nature of experience and the authenticity of travel documentation.  It was frustrating to see how European explorers like Henry Morton Stanley and Joseph Conrad had contributed to the stereotype of a “dark continent” of Africa based off of their limited interpretations of their experiences.  As a writer myself, I understand the desire to experience and the need to try to express these experiences as a personal kind of truth.  Still, how often do we consider the nature of how we experience a world foreign to ourselves, or the “truthfulness” or consequential effects of these accounts in regards to their cultural authenticity?  Whether these truths are more “truthful” than what really happened, we could find a copious amount of arguments stemming as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics, but truth was not what I was questioning here.  I was more interested in authenticity.   These questions were the fuel of my project proposal.  A lot has happened since I wrote my objectives, but I have been pleased to see that my project was a success.  Our experiences are indeed significantly subjective based on the way we see the world and the mediums we chose to record it in. 

Gipsy- The Postmodern Traveler/Writer Avatar

In order to look at the true nature of experience during my stay in Ghana I decided to look not only at how the medium I recorded in impacted my experience, but also at how the way I saw dictated it.  I divided different aspects of my personality into five avatars to show these differences.  Gipsy was my favorite of my avatars, being something between a postmodern traveler and a writer.  I think like her most of the time, and so it came easy.  Being Gipsy meant that I could be open with my thoughts, liberal in my themes, and creative with my descriptions and comparisons.  As a writer, this avatar could make sense of the experience by reaching into my past. My goal was to have something of a Virginia Woolf style and more stream of conscious.  I think in the field note process it meshed into Ava, but having more of that tone would definitely be something I implement if I were to do this project again.  It allowed me to be more personal and less conscious of some of the taboos you run into with judgment calls in ethnography. 

Pros:

1. Culture Shock- Dealing with jarring situations and encountering the cultural other could be fun with Gipsy.  Her writings are more accessible to someone from my paradigm, and so are probably easier to relate to (FN:7:19, FN:8:13). 
2. Physical Conditions- Being sick was something I pawned off on Gipsy, allowing me to be open and honest that drinking bad water is not fun, and there is little to romanticize like Ava would.  I also fleshed out my Larium dreams (lucid dreams caused by my anti malarial medicine) and talked about some of the other strange side effects that the pills gave me (FN:9:6, FN:18:1, FN:21:1, FN:28:1-5, FN:67:1, FN:78:8).
3. Honesty- Being Gipsy allowed me to be personal and less conscious of some of the taboos you run into with judgment calls in ethnography.  My classic example for this was a poem I wrote in the field that I ended up feeling really bad about.  There are just some things you cannot explain on a surface level when you are being a romantic anthropologist like Ava, so these two avatars would fight from time to time.  However, as a writer I was able to be more honest about my initial impressions without worrying too much.  This could make it more entertaining to read as well (FN:25:1, FN:29:1-2, FN:36:2, FN:40:1, FN:54:1-2, FN:70:1, FN:71:1, FN:78:4, FN:83:3).

Back

Sometimes I wake up surprised that I am in this room.  The chipped blue walls I painted in high school.  A bed so enormous I can turn sideways and my feet will not dangle when I can’t sleep.  The box in the top of my closet with pictures of once living realities and fading memories.  A mirror on the dresser to remind me that I forgot to plaster on my makeup.  Carpet—warn fuzzy carpet, AC and a computer with unlimited Facebook access in the corner.  But there is something new.  Something that changed.

Me.

You know, I can still hear their voices.  The blaring radio with the blown speakers wakes me up.  Then come the children’s laughter echoing as they run up the hill to school singing the wrong words to Celin Deon.  I should run, but not after that Larium dream, and my mosquito net fell in on me again.

A Ghanaian Funeral: Part 2

Seventh Day Celebration:

It was too hot to go to another funeral. Jones had invited us the other day, and we agreed for the sake of being polite. Hadn’t I already been to a funeral? I crawled out of the comfort of my mosquito net, pushed my sweaty hair back from my forehead, dropped my book and followed my friends to the taxi station. Turns out that this was nothing like the funeral I first experienced.

An hour later we arrived in Mampong. Jones was there waiting for us with a friend he called his brother. He told us that this was the Seventh Day Celebration part of the funeral rites. It is held a week after the death to raise money for the funeral expenses and to begin the celebrations surrounding the life of the individual. You can wear anything but white, but most people were wearing your typical red and black attire. Anyone and everyone should come. These Ghanaian funerals are not cheap.

I took a deep breath and plunged into the crowd, going through the clumsy routine I was only half sure of, trying to maintain an impossibly low profile being white and all. I greeted the elders, vacillated between good eye contact, bowing, and offered my condolences for the death through an abysmal greeting in clobbered Twi. I was so engrossed in keeping up the routine that I didn’t notice that Jones’ “brother” was holding my hand. When he got an inch away from my lips I clued in, pulled away, and then got kissed on the ear.

Recovering from the shock of it we went out back where the family was serving Fanta and Coke products, much like a regular funeral. Brother sat right beside me. I leaned towards Maggie.

“Is this a kissing culture?”
“Definitely not.”
“Oh.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“I hardly know…”

We sat there for a half an hour. I could only use my language barrier as a shield for so long before Brother’s proposals drifted to the other white girls in the group. After hanging around for the polite thirty minutes we decided it was time to make our donation and catch the fastest tro-tro back to Wiamoase.

We ended up having the whole car to ourselves and laughed the entire way home. If that was not a cultural experience, or even a funeral experience, tell me then, where is a story like this supposed to go?

Gipsy

To Market to Market to Buy... a What?

If you are expecting to hear about a wide variety of exotic fruit that you have never heard of or imagined before you are going to be disappointed. Are they the same? Absolutely not, but it is a subtle, almost tricky the way fruit in Ghana tried to be like everything I already knew about—but not.

Let me walk you through the bargaining process of the market. You either go on Thursday’s to the Wiamoase market, or you hold out and go with Christiana on Tuesdays. Having a native with you makes bargaining a lot easier. You get fair prices on cabs as well as your supplies. Each week we would go to the market with a list of items we needed to find. On most trips Christiana would disappear for about twenty minutes doing who knows what, and during that time we were most likely to explore different fruit options.

First we come to “anka,” the oranges, or what you would think of as an orange. The main difference is that these oranges have green skin. I think I actually said “Oh brave new world” when I first saw one. Just when you thought you had a grip on that, turns out there are two different types of oranges with green skin. There are some with red fruit on the inside, which are called white oranges (yeah, I know), and the orange colored fruit ones are called red oranges. It took me awhile before I learned how to properly eat the Ghanaian oranges. You shave off the outside with a machete, careful not to pierce the inside layers, cut off the top, and then squeeze out the juice. They are too fibrous to eat. If you try to bite into them you will have a half an hours worth of flossing that night and juice dripping down your elbows. I also learned that the locals do not “take,” or eat oranges for breakfast because they believe it gives people stomach ulcers.

Map of Wiamoase, Ghana

There was a point, and I could not tell you the exact moment, but gradually this village of Wiamoase became so familiar that we started referring to it as home. From the open sewers to the potholes to the mannerisms of the neighbors, by the end of my stay I knew them personally. Google maps might not know them, but I do.

It was not always like that though. It was scary to go outside alone and overwhelming to even buy a loaf of bread. About a week into my stay Rachel Morse and I decided to go about a mapping project to met friends and get more settled. We met up with Kye Bafour (Kwasi) and his friend George at the Cocoa House and asked if they would show us the important places to know. They agreed without hesitation and walked us through Wiamoase with a local perspective.

The first map I threw together in the field had about half of the buildings now listed. On it was were the buildings Kwasi and George showed us, but now there are a few more personal additions. My first map was beneficial for a few reasons, but the main one being the gray areas—what was not mapped. When I could see what I did not know, it was then that I knew what areas I needed to explore.



1. My House- This is the compound I stayed in with the Baffour family with Maggie, Chase, Ava, Myra, Shelley, Akua Obruni, and Nate.

How to Cook a Ghanaian Meal 101

Let me introduce myself. I am the kind of girl who cannot wait fifteen minutes for the oven to both preheat and cook a frozen pizza. I am the girl who’s most complex meal is Macaroni and Cheese (with shapes), and I am certainly the last person in the world who I thought could ever appreciate the time and effort it takes to pull of a well cooked meal. I finally caved though. I was done with weekly hamburger dreams, and sick of eating nothing but plain rice and bread on the weekend, and so I actually learned to cook.

Starting with the basics, this is what I mean by rice.

Ghanaian Rice

2 liters of rain water
Rice, preferably not local because it has rocks in it.
4 generous handfuls of salt
Oil. A lot of it.

Tomato Stew (Foundation for everything)

It is Emmanuel that I owe for helping me learn this dish. He taught me the proper way to use the pestle and mortar (crossing over the middle rather than using the edges), and instructed me that by mashing up one vegetable at a time the process goes quicker. To mash at home, just use your blender.

1. Cut up a small onion and fry it in some hot oil.
2. Mix up 7 peppers and 1 large onion. Then add it to your pot with some water. Boil it and stir until the water evaporates. You remember those times they used to tell you that oil and water do not go together? Well, that rule does not apply here.
3. Add the tomato paste and about 1 cup full of water,and then let it boil. You wait till it is thick consistency before moving on.
4. Add the corned beef, Maggi (about 1 cube, taste to decide, and yes, it does have MSG), and add the curry powder. Stir it until the corned beef is cooked.
5. Eggs fried on the side make a great protein to add to this dish.

I have made this dish once since I have been home, and it was a hit with my family.

Da Na Se: A Night of Hymns

I do not sing.

I did not want to sing. But I needed a local friend and hope that I could string a single sentence together in Twi, the local language, without slaughtering it. I reluctantly followed my group members over to the other house where Akua and Gina were gathering to teach us hymns. Hymns make up a huge part of Ghanaian music called high life. They also tend to be universal to all of the different Christian denominations in the area. Akua, the landlord of the other house, I thought was a good example of that. Even though she was a Catholic, the ten-minute walk up the dirt hill to the Catholic Church in heals did not seem as sensible as attending the Presbyterian Church right next to her house. As long as you attend church and believe in God, these hymns apply.

Even to me, the kid sitting on the cement bench trying to stun an oncoming spider with my Wal-Mart flashlight, this was a special experience. I could not help but feel that God really does love all of his children, and that it does not matter where we are in the world, he knows us personally. It was a testimony I was trying to learn at the Branch, but it seems these lessons always come quicker with music.

We learned three different hymns, but “Da Na Se” was my favorite. Here are the lyrics and the translation:

Cape Coast Slave Castle

I have gone to museums before. Some more memorable than others, but this, this was an overwhelming monument—evidence of the atrocities that humanity is capable of slipping into throughout history. What does it feel like to visit a slave castle? A feeling of suffocation, helplessness, and humiliation for mankind. A haunting sensation-like walking among the shadows of ghosts. I have asked Myra to help me with some pictures. In some ways I feel like we had two completely different experiences, each viable in their own right.

Allow me to share what I learned by going on the museum portion of the site, now situated in the British quarters offering a history of slave trade and the Cape Coast Slave Castle in context.

Preliminary Predictions and Where I'm Going From Here...

Well, I am back. Not all the way, but I need to start somewhere. It is time to reel in my five avatars and speak as a slightly less skitso, multiple personality disorder victim, and be just Rachel—a name that started to collect a little bit of dust.

Here is an overview of what I am hoping to do for the rest of my time on this blog and a prediction of what I think I captured before I dive into my notes. Time to decode, interpret, and assign the meaning to a polished, tweaked experience. Ghana in retrospect.

I think that my project was a great success in ways I never anticipated, and the way I see it, I can look at this through two different frames. First, how did my avatar—the way I chose to look at my day—affect my experience, and second, how did the medium I chose to record the experience alter what I captured? Here are my preliminary predictions.

Stars

Hello everyone!

The power has been going out a lot lately, but it brought about a really cool experience. When it is that dark you would not believe the night sky. Our group sprawled out on the concrete one night after dinner and just stared up at the spectacle, mostly silent, just taking in the feelings that come with the closure of an experience abroad. Gipsy and Danielle only gave it a 2 on a scale of ten for spectacular stargazing on account of a few wispy clouds, but Chase and I were convinced it was one of the most beautiful things we have ever beheld. Akua came out to offer us a lantern, unable to see why we were so boggle eyed about the whole thing, and went inside laughing at us. Shelley was—I don’t know, she didn’t say. Just, there.

Love,
Ava

My Itinerary

This is a poem I wrote based off of the form of "My Paris" by Ted Hughes.

My itinerary
Is printed out and ready.
My plane is waiting on the runway, restless and roaring,
Impatient for departure. It obeys a schedule.
One I must return to. And I will.
It sounds heartless, but I will.
Am I so unhappy here? The red roads, linking my worlds,
Meandering, running nameless like soft rivers under my feet
(The ones so very tired of concrete,
Asphalt freeways and paved sideways)
That rusty path. It has
No set “this way,” and won’t tell if you step off
Every so often.

Besides, the people, places and the sea of faces are
Waiting. The ones who will save me from
My poisonous laurel wanderings.
My lotus eaters- My sirens
That threaten to steal me away for good. My envisioned life
Is not so plotted as my to-do lists,
My class and bus schedules. Those have to be that way,
They do not know the difference.
And if they could fly away to strange and distant lands
Maybe they too would not march to the mechanical clock.

I can run and run. I have not yet discovered
That calendar branded to my nomadic
Feet. Never tried
To look down or learn to dance with that beast
My ball and chain!
I never knew how complicated home could be.
Never knew it could be an in-between.
A state of mind. A no place.
So of course I ran
As if training for some eternal marathon
In someone else’s schedule—one I have tried to swallow.
I’ve been there, putting on the same coat
And hat, shutting out winter
Only to trap in my chronic cold condition
That sleeps beneath my weathered date book
Rooting itself, like a cork screw,
Collecting the weight of 9-5
Piercing the subconscious of my life.

So do not suppose that I care that the roads are a little bumpy here,
That the crinkled tin shacks are displeasing to me
Lining dusty hungry roads, red rivulets, untamed in their riverbeds-
Their rocky ways that taxi’s and buses could never make way,
Railed on their schedules, to-do lists,
And the road will laugh, make them abandon

Their cozy lightless spaces, make them saunter along the path,
Teach them to trust their feet by making them trip
On their expectations and concrete plans
As if we could make plans-
To endure life, (until retirement) or live forever.
To establish trust funds that we’ll never spend.
Do good for the sake of a grad school resume,
And die hunting for something that rhymes
With our social security numbers.

Yes I will board that eager plane
And transition in the turbulence, into my other life
My self the sea of faces knows me as,
A girl too young to settle down,
Too old for these dangerous dreams
That lure me away across black seas, shivering
When life threatens to turn into another winter
Where it stings to be outside and my feet grow stiff,
Frozen in the freshly plowed roads.

But my feet won’t forget. Wherever they go
These meandering roads, invisible on Google maps,
Winter by winter
They’ll wait for my next plane ticket,
So tired of living
Like a social security number.

Gipsy

Ghana is one of the few places on earth where you can’t find a McDonalds, or so I thought.

The missionaries at the bus station clued us in, and Maggie’s dad, being the mission president of Cape Coast, helped make it happen. Here is how it works. You call up Kwame, tell him how many people are coming and about when you’ll be there, and he will go open up shop. This Kwame McDonalds had a lopsided pool table, orange soda, and pile of excessive napkins with every plate of fries and a burger, both as appealing as the model food they use in commercials. I bit and chewed it slowly, allowing the ketchup to run freely down my wrist, and if I closed my eyes tight enough, the blinking Christmas lights changed to the Wendy’s pick up sign, where a chunky, chocolate chip cookie dough vanilla frosty would be waiting for me, so sweet and grainy and cold.

After such a nice stay at the mission home, coming back to Wiamoase was a bit of a shock. Not just because of the 100 plus ant corpses that decided to take their last breath in my bed (7 dustpans full just on the floor), or the 4 AM’s free of disoriented rooster squawks, but I have come to find that I miss my hot showers. And yes. Hamburgers. Thick, cheesy, juicy hamburgers, soaked in a generous saturation of mustard and grease to compliment a pound of salty, value meal French fries (total 4.39 after tax). But for now I can content myself with bread. Yes. Bread with a healthy layer of off brand nutella or some derivative of peanut butter.

(Does anyone know if there is a Wendy’s in London?)

Gipsy

For Danielle’s birthday, Gina decided to prepare us all groundnut stew and banku. The soup had a healthy layer of oil on top, and a generous helping of fish below it. It might have gone purposely unnoticed except for the eyeballs, with their stoic glazed gaze, and the bones poking up through the orange redness. The banku itself (I noticed upon closer look) was abominable without the soup. Banku has the constancy of play dough; and the taste, sadly, is not much better. The very look of it was unsettling. It was solid but slimy. Soft but grainy. It had a flavor of rotten milk. It had a color like puke. I hated the way I had to fondle it before shoving it down my throat, taking care not to chew before swallowing. It looked like my death certificate, and perhaps it was a divine revelation that I could never serve a mission.

But alas, providence was not so cruel, and since it was during the Ghana match of the World Cup, Rachel Morris, the saint she is, took a few of our bowls, ran out back, and chucked the meal over the fence without detection.

Needless to say, I assured all of my group members that if anyone breathes a word about my birthday next month, there would be serious consequences.

Gipsy

The Detour

"Don't look at them"
Was the tro tro driver's advice to us
As we drove to Kejatia.

"They are just beggars"
He reminded,
So jarringly nonchalant.

Then he took a sharp turn-
A sudden abrupt detour
off the paved road.

You get sick if you
Don't look out the window,
And more sick when you do.

With your eyes glued to the plastic window
To watch the passing shacks,
Their walls, crimped rusted metal slabs.

The rivulets of green and red sewage
That pass and pass. I had to look
At the barefooted woman hawking,

The cobweb infested barbwires,
The relic of a shirt
Clinging to the bowing back

Of a man balancing a mountain of bags
Still raining concrete dust,
Mixing with his sweat.

His eyes looked the color iodine
Behind him stood a once white wall
With a faded inscription about the evils of men

That I could not quite make out.
There was a certain look
That could pierce from a distance.

I found one smile in the face of a toothless woman
That looked more like a grimace,
So I politely looked away,

Trying not to cringe
From a whiff of the open sewer,
Or betray disgust

When hit by a cloud
Of black, thick diesel
Feasting on my lungs.

I saw a dead body on the side of the road.
The naked babies hiding in the shadows,
Their skin coming off in flakes.

No one brushes the flies from their face,
And looking up they hesitate,
With tired eyes that radiate

To collide with mine,
Sheltered and sick for it.
Driving past, unable to take a second glance.

"Don't look" is their advice.
What is there to romanticize? Synthesize,
About raw human suffering?

Stay at home. Watch the news.
Half promise to write a check,
Then continue on with your dinner.

Gipsy

Kejatia Market

We weaved through the crack in the mud wall like ants. The narrow walkway of churned up rail roads, conglomerates of cement, and rust colored mud caked our dry sandals, following each other in a straight lines like ducks. To the left, a baby girl pissed in the open sewer gutter. A toothless vender selling second hand socks. A man grabs my wrist, touches my hair. I am real. I found a grocery store. Approached the cashier.

"Do you have an ATM."

Then a silent stare. Uncomprehendable chattering between the workers. Now I am the idiot in the store. Completely handicap to all social etiquette. I left. Who needs water. The sun so hot. My blood flowing like hot tar.

Then I got back. Asked Maggie for the phone, and stared at it for an hour or so. Calling. Hanging up. I left something back there. I'm not sure what. But I think I lost my voice. I don't know how I feel about Kejatia market.

Gipsy

Atlanta, Georgia

Hi guys,

I’m still trying to figure out the correct formality and medium of blogging, so give me feedback if you notice I’m going diary or if you see room for improvement.

Just for a kind of general synopsis before I get full blown with this Ghana blog—I am doing a creative field studies project in Wiamoase, Ghana this summer where I will be working in the secondary school system looking at attitudes towards English and written expression in general. Simultaneously, I will be writing my own sort of travel narrative that invites us to reconcile with the difficult nature of qualifying an experience because of the way we must mediate it. I am doing this through a few different avatars of myself where the different characters and mediums will show the difficult, complex nature of experience and the way we attempt to preserve and document it. The goal is to hopefully invite a little more skepticism about travel writing and creative nonfiction as a genre to try and combat the deep, “Dark African” stereotype that has been cultivated since early travel writers like Henry Morton Stanley and Joseph Conrad.

So, if someone is not signing the blog posts “Rachel,” do not be alarmed. It’s still me. One aspect of me.

I wish that I could be Ava today. 1 flight down, 3 more to go before I touch the Ghana soil 45 hours later. As much as I love the adventure, those cute little delta inscribed biscoff cookies and half audible pilots don’t do much for me. Or airports for that matter, but perhaps that is because my overpriced fake Chinese food was only “sweet and sour” once I dipped the fried chicken in the packet of sauce. I have no appetite anymore, but when will I see an attempt at Chinese food for the next four months?

Oh, and my travel itinerary has my name wrong. I thought I was pretty sneaky getting past security on that one. An “E” snuck into my middle name, so once I sat down in the plane I had to use a nice mans phone to call Todd from the travel office to tell me I won’t get stuck in Dubai when they hunt me down. Well, maybe that is not all true. I got my phone call after asking three people and passing a background check and the lie detection test.

Now I wait. Wish I wouldn’t keep checking my pocket for my cell phone. Wonder if London has free Internet. Hope Delta comes through with my disposable blanket, and that when I land in Accra I will not have a Hawaii-homeless-on-arrival repeat.

Gipsy

What's in a Name?

"Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception." ~David S. Slawson

I found a baby names book on the bottom of my parent’s bookshelf. After silently thanking them for naming me the sixth most popular girls name of the eighties (there are 2 other Rachels in my group of 7), I went through and picked out the names of my avatars.

Romantic Traveler: Ava (birdlike) or Chloe (young grass). Which do you like?
Postmodern Traveler: Gipsy (wanderer)
Photographer: Myra (quiet song)
Experiencer: Shelley (“from the meadow on the edge,” a spin off of my own name, and I like that it reminds me of Percy Shelley)
Native: Akau, my name in Twi

And Alma (learned soul)… I am considering a poet. Before I was thinking I would squish my poetry into the romantic and the postmodern, but I don’t know that it is the same. If I decide to do this, it means less show time for the other ones.

So lets iron this out. I am doing research approximately 90 days. But this whole thing could start as soon as I leave, ending when I return from England, maybe even a little bit after with a reflection piece from one of them. Still, I figure my travel time will be about 100 days, about 14 weeks.

If we do a day breakdown on a 100-day assignment… 85 with Shelley taking every Sunday… it is 17 days for 5 characters.

I think I will have Alma. With her, each character will have a run for 4 days, five if I really like a particular one that week, and that way I will be each character 4 times in the field with a little room to grow if I want. Plus Akua probably will just be a voice here and there and not a full-blown character experiment depending on how well that goes.

Also, I have decided it might be cool to add some of the kids writing. Obviously I would claim it to be theirs, but that might be an interesting authentic piece to a totally anti authentic themed narrative that will serve as voices like Akua.

This is exciting!