Dirtyfeet

The Index Card Man

2012-01-26T02:46:00.001+07:00

I've been writing my masters thesis on trains, planes, buses, at my old college library and most recently at the main NYC library by Bryant Park. I've been here every day for the past two weeks (except for weekends, girl's gotta have a break) Its a brilliant place to people watch.
I'm at the library right now and it's just past 2:30, which means that the index card man has just walked into the large reading room and taken a seat. He comes at 2:30 every day since I've been here and I like to imagine he's been doing it years. He wears a navy blue vest and matching jacket with khaki pants, a gold pocket watch attached. His white hair lives now only in small patches by his ears and the back of his head.
He slowly sets up his desk space, always picking a table with few others. From his worn leather briefcase emerges a stack of index cards. Then two stacks. Hundreds, probably thousands of index cards in meticulous piles kept together with two rubber bands surround this man. By his appearance I know him to be old, perhaps 85. Against the backdrop of a hundred other people typing away on silver Mac laptops however, the index cards make him look ancient.
He examines one or two books a day, slowly reading through them, making small but beautifully written notes on individual index cards. His handwriting is so neat, it is another signal he is not from my time and reminds me of my grandmothers’ letters we just found in the attic. I wonder what he is researching, if he is writing a book or perhaps a series of short articles. I wonder if all of those index cards are on the same topic, and what that topic could possibly be.

I wonder if he notices me too.

Ko Samui

2011-01-18T20:25:00.000+07:00

We did end up getting to take the overnight train to Ko samui , a island in the middle of Gulf of Thailand, the following Thursday and it was definitely a much better night‘s sleep than our overnight bus to Chaing Mai. We were in 2nd class AC sleepers, which meant we didn’t have our own compartment but we did have a table and two seats that then got tuned into 2 bunk-like beds. With the curtains that are attached to the frames of each bunk it’s a pretty comfortable way to travel. Getting to Ko Samui by train is easy but time consuming. From the train station, which is located one and a half hours from the ferry pier, to the island itself is about 3-4 hours depending on how long you have to wait for the ferry.

We were staying there 2 nights but I had only booked one night at a hotel on the most popular beach on the island, called Chaweng, and then the second night we planned on staying somewhere near Lanna beach, which is smaller, and less populated. Chaweng Beach was indeed super busy and really beautiful. Most of the tourists are from Europe, there is an airport on island and it’s popular with Germans, Russians, other various eastern Europeans and Israelis. The island itself is the second largest behind Pattaya and the interior is still covered in jungle and for those who have a longer stay in mind there are supposed to be really impressive waterfalls all around the eastern forests. The ocean is a wonderful green blue and very clear.

Viv told me I would be crazy not to have seafood when we were basically at the ocean and after the meal Dan and I had our first night I agree. It was some of the best seafood I’ve ever had. The day’s catch is laid out on ice in front of the restaurant (there were about 5 or 6 with this set up on the main street) and you can either pick what you want from there or you can order preset dinners, which is what we ended up doing. Our dinner consisted of a whole red snapper, oysters, calamari, crab and rocket shrimp and it was amazing.

We spent the next day relaxing on the beach and despite our best efforts to stay in the shade we realized as we got into our next hotel on lanna beach we were really really sun burnt. We did get to swim in the ocean which is a rarity for me and I will still maintain that even though it’s technically the Gulf of Thailand, I’m going to count it as my first pacific ocean swim. The ocean there is a lot calmer than in Ghana and there is really very little of an undertow, but as Dan can attest to I’m not sure I’ll ever be too comfortable in the ocean after getting tossed so many times in Ghana. I’ll work on it. The second night Dan was really looking forward to staying in a hut, but by the time we got there they were all filled. So we stayed in a hotel room but it was right on the beach, which was very pretty and much less crowded than the previous day.

After some more beach time (in the shade! We’re not crazy) we packed up and set off for the train station by way of cab-ferry-bus. The train ride back was very nice, we got on earlier than last time so we were able to order dinner on the train and I thought that was pretty cool. Also despite our fears of an uncomfortable sleep and over all ride because of our severe sunburns, the bunks were just as comfy as on the way down and we were able to sleep for a while until the train pulled back into salaya and we hopped a cab back to my apartment.

Sudan Referendum

2011-01-05T13:15:00.001+07:00

note: this post is not about my life here in bangkok but rather some observations on the sudan.

One of the biggest events for southern Sudan is coming up this Sunday. As part of the peace agreement that was signed between the north and south in 2005 to end about 2 decades of war Southern Sudan gets to vote in a referendum whose outcome will decided if Sudan will split into two separate states or stay together as Africa’s largest country. The overwhelming consensus is that the people of the south will choose to separate by a large margin, giving the treatment they’ve received over the last two decades at the hands of largely northern forces. The separation is complicated however. There is still disputed territory on the north south border where oil fields make up a large percentage of the shared land. The north has said they will honor the outcome of the referendum either way but many international actors and observers believe that Sudan is ripe for a large scale armed conflict over the disputed territory, oil, other resources and a general lack of confidence about Sudan’s president Al-Bashir to act honorably should there be a split, regardless of the support he is broadcasting for the referendum.

To see this all unfold over the past 4 years is kind of like hoping you’re not watching a slow motion car wreck. There is a lot of information out there about supporting the south, which I do, for separation and independence. However, as always things are more complicated than they seem. First of all, both the disputed territory on the south-north border and the area of Darfur, which lies in the west, will both be issues/possible ongoing conflict zones that the referendum does not address adequately. Darfur itself was left out of the 2005 peace agreement process and perhaps the conflicts and genocide there was partly due to their isolation from within the north-south dichotomy.

Within the discussion about the 2 new states that will emerge from this referendum there has been little talk about the effect of the southern population on the north. Because the southern presence gave Sudan a much more plural identity the south has kept the north fairly moderate with issues such as enacting harsh elements of sharia law on the state. With the assumed south separating there has been public and more private moves to blanket northern Sudan with a whole slue of new, much more stricter interpretations of what it means to be a Muslim state. Women rights activists are extremely concerned for the lowering of women’s status within northern society if these measures are to be put into place. This is especially problematic after the recent public flogging of a women was recorded and put onto YouTube. Not only were the police taking justice into their own hands, Al-Bashir’s reaction was to express his excitement about the prospect of a better Islamic society once the south was independent.

The realization of an independent southern Sudan is also problematic though few Southern Sudanese will highlight these issues in the upcoming days. Clan or ethnic group ties are very strong in the south and I have witnessed their power within the Diaspora as well. Lots of conflicts were between the north and the south, yes. However there are many small outbreaks of violence within south Sudan on a fairly regular basis. This has subsided some due to the national and unifying rhetoric coming out of the leadership of the SPL, the main southern political party and the general feeling of a common goal among southern Sudanese.

In all three of the situations is it fair to just be waiting for this to all crumble into chaos or is it better to be optimistic about the political processes that are going on in Sudan and hope for the best? No idea. But there does seem to be enough media attention (thanks Clooney and JP) and international political will invested in at least a credible referendum and then after that we will have to see how both new counties are formed and what that looks like in the coming years.

Mr. Eber goes to Thailand

2011-01-03T15:19:00.000+07:00

I picked up Dan from the airport on Christmas Day and we spent a few days in Salaya before heading up to Chiang Mai for the weekend and for NYE. It was nice and much cooler than the ‘winter’ weather we are having in Bangkok. We took the overnight bus up as I had tried but failed to book the night train which would have been much more comfortable but as buses go, the 8 hour journey was not too bad. (Actually Dan would probably tell you otherwise)

Viv and her mom were nice enough to pick us up at 4:30 in the morning from the bus stop. Viv was bundled up in a proper coat and I was soo cold and Dan was…. laughing at both of us…which is understandable as it could not have been less than 65 degrees outside. After dropping our bags off at viv’s house because our hotel room was not available yet we hopped in the car to the foot of the mountain near the Chiang Mai zoo. On the top of this mountain sits doi suthep wat and in the morning the monks come down from the mountain to collect alms (mostly food donations) Some Thai’s get up at this early hour to give alms and Viv’s mom does this quite frequently especially at more holy times, the time near the western new year considered one of these times. After the 4 of us took our shoes off, knelt and placed food into the large gold bowls, the monks blessed us with a prayer. We also went to pray to the famous monk who has a gold statue nearby. After lighting incense we rubbed garlic on the statue and then placed a little bit of gold leaf onto it. Viv’s mom told us the garlic was for a special reason but I think it’s so the gold leaf sticks.

After breakfast back at Viv’s we went to our hotel, which was off to one side of the walled-in old city. The hotel was nice enough and there were lots of shops, restaurants, temples and massage places around. We settled in and went out to explore the area, finding an Israeli restaurant, a post card shop and we also picked up travel shampoo which I had forgot.

Over the next two days we went up to doi suthep wat, walked all over the old city, went to the night market went with Viv to see the fireworks at night. There is a clearing in the doi suthep wat where you can see the whole of Chaing Mai down the mountain and walk around the temple grounds. Up that far and I was in a temperate climate for the first time since October, which was refreshing.

One of the best things about being in the north for New Years is their tradition of setting off floating lanterns into the night sky. The lanterns are a white cloth or plastic tube closed at one end, while at the other there is some type of fire-making contraption suspended in the center. Dan thought it was a carbon ring they were setting on fire. Whatever it is, once it lights on fire it makes a pretty good fireball at the bottom of the lantern. People light it and then hold onto the circular edge until the hot air starts to lift the lantern up and then everyone (evenly) lets go and watches the lantern soar up into the sky. As we watched hundreds of Thai’s setting these off into the sky a group of young teenagers asked us if we wanted to join in releasing theirs. So Dan and I held on to a part of the ring frame and you can really feel the hot air lifting up the lantern. The teenagers were adamant about the right time to let go and (as I’ll explain below) it requires some skill to know how to have a successful lantern lift off.

The streets of Chiang Mai were pretty packed with people and vendors mostly selling food. So for the countdown to new years Dan and I went to the rooftop bar, which is close by the main street and, as its 3 or 4 stories up with no roof gave us a great view of the lanterns. Just before midnight a group of fairly drunk guys attempted to release a lantern from the bar. I say attempted because I guess they didn’t wait long enough since as soon as they let go it rose for about 5 seconds before slowly falling back down. Lucky it has moved over the top of the bar already and presumably fell into a tree as seconds later a whole flock of birds came flying up away from the failed lantern…oops.

It’s a pretty amazing sight to see thousands of lanterns lifting up into the sky. It’s been simply beautiful and gave New Years in Chiang Mai a bit of a magical feeling to it and something we would not have seen if we had stayed in Bangkok.

On Sunday before we left we went to the famous Chiang Mai walking st market, which reminds me of some street markets in NYC in the summer. There is all types of food there and Viv’s mom was always pushing for us to try new things and answered most of our questions about what we didn’t recognize. She and Dan had a quick conversation about what fried bugs to eat and before I get a change to think about eating bugs Dan hands me…I think it was a grasshopper. Obviously I tried it not wanting to be less adventurous than Dan and not wanting to disappoint Viv’s mom. It was crunchy and not terrible but it was also fried and salted…so most things are probably going taste ok like that. I let Dan finish the bag without my help. And with some snack foods from the walking market in hand we said goodbye to Viv and her mom at the bus station and were on our way back to Bangkok.

Christmas Filipino style

2010-12-27T14:23:00.001+07:00

Margie is the Filipino girlfriend of Amit, one of my fellow classmates. She had promised to take me and a couple of other friends to a Christmas Eve mass. Now having been to about a million temples here (which are still beautiful) I was ready for something else and the western style church did the trick. I was struck as well by the familiarity of the hymns and service…I guess between living in Ghana for a year and going to church with my grandparents extremely occasionally has left more of an impression than I knew. The church was a pretty fun picture of the real diversity of Catholicism. The man priest was from Nigeria and most of supporting people were from the Philippines or westerners. The crowd itself was from everywhere. Some were locals who seemed to know other people in the crowd and the priest while others just needed a place to go on Christmas eve.
Christmas in the Philippines is a huge deal. Margie told me there the holiday lasts 2 weeks and Christmas eve is observed a lot more like new years eve in the west, where you count down and stay up celebrating well past midnight. So after the hour-long service we went back to Margie’s to have pizza and more traditional Filipino food: rice, very good baked chicken with some tomato based sauce, a fried chicken dish with some brown sauce and some other veggie dishes as well. We listened to Christmas carols that I was very familiar with and some that were distinctly Filipino. Some of Margie’s friends asked how I knew all of the western Christmas carols if I don’t celebrate the holiday and my explanation quickly turned into a rant about capitalism and I had to backtrack. For anyone who’s caught me listening to my Christmas carol Pandora station knows it’s not quite all about American mall culture. (Also trying to explain that Judaism is like Christianity but without Jesus was meet with blank stares. I’m afraid they were left with the impression that Jews just haven’t got our shit together yet.)

back in bangkok

2010-11-22T22:31:00.001+07:00

Yikes….I’ve seriously neglected this blog. Very preemptive new years resolution: blog more than once a month and definitely not every 2 months!

So to get back into it:

After a very nice break, a taste of the fall, some rest and catching up with lots of friends and family I’m back in Bangkok for about another four months. I am quite excited about this next semester, which will be more focused on the practicalities of human rights and humanitarian work and the current issues in the field and regionally in Asia. I am also starting to make a serious effort into outlining and planning my thesis, which as always is harder and easier than I suspected.

Being able to fly home and reflect on my time in Bangkok was extremely useful. I was able to asses how I want to proceed from now on not just in my studies but also my attitude about the environment around me, which I feel can always be improved. Most of this refreshed feeling come from seeing lots of friends and family and having the first real break from academics since last December.

One of the best changes since coming back to Thailand has been the weather. Instead of humid and hot sunny mid 90’s+ weather Bangkok is now in the beginning of its ‘winter’ months, which consist of low to mid 80s in the day with a wonderfully cool breeze and the best part is in the night it drops a good 10 degrees. Basically I found my livable hot weather threshold and it’s the Thai winter.

3 weeks into classes I’ve started to get a good idea about how this semester is shaping up. We have three mandatory classes, human rights in Asia, current issues in human rights as well as a research methods class which is where we’ll really get a good idea about how to get a good thesis topic and how to complete this huge paper. We also have an elective class, which is international relations, independent study or an internship. The internship would be cool but it’s a six-month minimum commitment and our professors often say that it distracts from our class work, and often delays the thesis process. Also the internships they provide are a lot of paperwork and mostly for students who need to get a good idea about how a ngo works, more so than picking up skills and field experiences. The international relations class is an intro class to political theory and the basics and history of IR, which I feel that I’ve covered pretty extensively in undergrad. So I signed up for the independent study which is very useful as I’m going to be able to do my literature review for my thesis, work I’m going to have to do anyway, and get credit for it. It will also push me to do it earlier so that I’m not scrambling at the end of the semester to write my thesis proposal.
Logistics aside we have a new professor or ajian, shes from Philadelphia and its quite interesting to see the differences between her teaching and expectations and that of mike, whose been teaching in Thailand since 1993 and the other thai professors. Her seminars are much more like the classes I took in my last semester at UVM, reading, theory and class discussion intensive. She’s also a anthropologist so I think I also naturally like the way she breaks things down and what she emphasizes more so perhaps than the other professors.

Loy Katong was yesterday. Its one of the major Thai festivals and it’s mostly described as a festival of lights but I knew before hand the main part of the festival is setting little home made (or in more recent years, bought) little boats into rivers, streams, lakes and general waterways. I could not really get a good sense about why or what the festival was about before hand and as I figured, it was much clearer after I had participated in it. Gaby, who was in batch 12 (that’s what they call the classes at the human rights department, I’m in batch 13.) said that while we could go do Loy Kathong in Bangkok, I should try to go someplace ‘Thai’ which meant somewhere that the festival would be more traditional and less filled with farangs, (westerners) I also got the sense that in Bangkok the festival has become overly commercialized which most celebrations are apt to do in larger cities and for some reason especially it seems Bangkok.
So just to explain a bit about the festival ‘Loy’ means to float and ‘Kathong’ is the little boat made from a banana trunk slice, covered in banana leaves and decorated with at least two types of flowers, incense and candles. Since it’s a light festival, it starts at night so that the boats can be set down on the water and its really pretty.
I ended up going Loy Kathong-ing with Viv and we meet up with Niels and Mit, who was kind enough to make viv and me these really pretty Kathong’s. we went to a Klong (canal) close by their house but Mit decided it wasn’t pretty enough so we hopped in a taxi and drove about 15 minutes to taling chan a town close by that is home to a large Klong water system. Because there were lots of Klongs, there were lots of Thai’s there who were celebrating and there was actually what looked to me like a small county fair going on just before the pier. Getting from the edge of the road to the pier proved to be somewhat difficult partly due to the crowds, but also partly due to all of the street food, some of which I haven’t seen before. Viv says that some foods are only sold at temple festival, which this apparently was. That makes sense to me, since it’s pretty hard to find things like candying apples or funnel cake outside amusement parks and fairs back home. We tried sugar cane juice which was very sweet as expected but also really refreshing. I also tried some traditional Thai dessert, which is sweet custard over sticky rice.

We finally made our way to the pier where I promptly burnt my thumb trying to light my Kathong. So much for good luck. We all put a coin near the candle and said a prayer (I was mostly sucking on my thumb and hoping it wound not blister up, so far so good) then we set them off into the water and watched them float away with the hundreds of other Kathongs down the Klong. We took some pictures and then were walking back through the fair to grab a taxi.

It was then that, for the firs time since I’ve been to Thailand I was asked for money by a group of kids. ‘hey you’ I hear them say behind me.. I didn’t turn around until they said it a second time. I said hey you back, winked and walked away thinking they just wanted to see if I understood them which as been the majority of my other interactions with thai children. But they ran up to me after and the tallest boy (maybe he was 9 or 10) said ‘thirty baht, give me thirty baht’ and held out his hand. I was surprised at how fast and automatically I responded to him in a way that had taken me months in Ghana to get to. I had struggled and slowly cultivated a response to all different types of situations when it came to people asking me for money. I asked him why? What for? What will you buy with thirty baht. Blank stares looked back at me. I guess it works better when we speak mostly the same language. The tallest kid said again ‘thirty baht’. I immediate looked at the whole group and said jing jing na? Which kind of translates to ‘honestly’? Or more so in this case ‘really’? They all stood wide-eyed, I have no idea if they were impressed with my small amount of Thai or trying to figure out what in the world I had said. Either way it worked and they ran away laughing and looking back at me, chattering about the silly farang who didn’t give them anything. The best part, beyond knowing that my reaction skills are still intact, was that the littlest boy, who was maybe 3-4 stayed behind for a bit, tugged at my hair and gave me a high five before he half walked/half ran after the rest of them.

good thai days

2010-09-17T23:09:00.000+07:00

Today was a fantastic Thai day…and not just because it was my birthday.
First of all I had another one of those moments here where I think something suspicious is going on and in reality the Thai people I’m suspect of are really trying to help me out. Other examples of this are documented in past entries. This morning however I was woken up by a Thai woman on my cell phone and as I explained to her (in Thai) that I don’t speak Thai she just hung up. Thinking it was a random caller since that has happened on occasion I went back to bed. Half an hour later I woke up to another two calls about five minutes apart. This time it was a man on the phone and I didn’t know what to do so the second time he called I took it out to the security guard and simply handed the phone to him. Which in hindsight was pretty dumb since the security guard now knew what was up, as evident by his nodding at the phone and constant ‘karp’ which is not quite ‘yes’ but more a form of agreement or a signal that you understand, but alas he himself didn’t speak much English. He gave me back the phone and said ‘yes, ok’. I just stared at him and then said thank you and went back to my room, my mind swirling with what could be going on. About five minutes later there was a call to my landline from what the lobby. Again a bit of Thai. Now I was horribly confused. Then a knock on my door and I debated what could possibly be on the other side and if I should open it…especially since this whole time I didn’t even think to get out of my pajamas, which I’m going to take as a bonding experience with my security guard. Anyway behind my door was a rather flustered man who was just trying to deliver flowers from my very resourceful boyfriend. So once again I think the worst when people are just trying to do their jobs or going out of their way to help me out. What does this say about me? I thanked him profusely and bowed a lot to my security guard who really bears the brunt of most of my shenanigans.

I had the most fabulous conversation with a monk who I found sitting across from me in the common room while we were both working. He speaks perfect and distinctly American English and looked maybe 25. He pulled a blackberry out of his burnt orange robes and asked do you know this song? I recognized the opening to empire state of mind in about 3 seconds and said ‘yeah, its pretty big back in the US ’‘Yeah, Alicia Keys man, once I think of her…meditation out the window’ I nodded in understanding. We talked all about NYC and I drew him a map of the five borrows which turned out surprisingly well, I even included NJ and Long Island. He wanted to know where the Upper East Side was because ‘that’s where gossip girl is’ and he asked me if I’d ever seen the show how I meet your mother.
We also talked a bit about religion, him being a monk and all. Though it wasn’t that easy to forget since he’s not to touch women we were having a conversation from a funny distance. He told me all about the Buddha and how there were so many false prophets walking around nowadays thinking that the Buddha said this, the Buddha said that. He talked about the downside of religious fundamentalism but also about how religion can get too watered down and lose its purpose. This seems like a reasonable standpoint to me and balanced which is pretty cool.

I also went to the Friday market on campus which was good, picked up some Sai mai, or semi sweet crepes with cotton candy filling you roll yourself as well as tofu and pork spring rolls and jerk beef and sticky rice.
Then lighting struck and it down poured for almost half an hour and since I didn’t bring any work with me I really wanted to get home. After the thunder and lightning stopped I slowly made my way downstairs since the elevator was turned off because of the flooding on the ground floor. An issue with not having closed ground floors in a lot of the buildings on campus is the flooding in the rainy season. Once downstairs I walked as far as I could go without getting too wet. Why I continue to not carry around an umbrella I’m not so sure.
This pregnant women and her husband were also waiting under the building and finally she smacks him with her newspaper and he goes out to their car and pulls it up to the side of the parking lot. She looks at me and says ‘we go’ and motions for me to come with her. They took me to a little local restaurant and ordered all kinds of food I had never even seen on the street before. Whatever it was it was good, lots of sweet and sour fish, soup with crunchy noodles and thinly sliced beef with some type of green vegetables. We didn’t talk too much since her husband spoke almost no English and she spoke very little but we managed to communicate pretty well. After lunch, which I tried to pay for but was quickly shut down, they drove me back to my apartment.

That evening Brooke, a women in my program took me out for pizza, Laotian beer and we got the most fantastic massages at kao san which was a wonderful break to my paper writing fest.

Wrapping up 1st semester

2010-09-12T12:14:00.001+07:00

I have 3 more weeks of classes and my semester is turning out to be very good, challenging and an interesting mix of my experiences both as an American undergrad and a Ghanaian undergrad. Basically this means that my classes have been mostly challenging along the whole semester (unlike U. Ghana) But I now have an unbalanced amount of work that is due in the next four weeks. (kinda unlike UVM) Our Ajans (professors) keep pushing deadlines back, which most of the class is really happy about but I know how I work and pushing deadlines back is extremely unhelpful. I know it means I have more time to work and polish papers but in reality it’s just going to make my life that much more hectic. There is definitely less directed study, less guidelines for papers and a lot more readings which I was attributing to a non US/Canada more independent teaching set up but now I’m starting to realize it might just be more of a difference between undergrad and grad teaching styles.

In my limited experiences there are difference stages of living in a different country and culture. Its part time, experiences and attitude about both ones living situation presently and the life they temporarily (or not) left, but all of these factors are interconnected. Right now for instance, I’m really loving my time here. This is a combination between: 1. A very limited but expanding understanding of pretty basic Thai (which mostly consists of greetings and other niceties, numbers, basic directions and different types of food) 2. The amount of work I’m facing in the next couple of weeks, which sounds counterintuitive, but productivity is helpful to that living feeling vs. a prolonged visit. 3. The knowledge that I’m going to be going home soon which helps me to remember that I am somewhere special and that should not be taken for granted and 4. General comfortableness with the logistics of living here and small bits and pieces of this world are starting to make more sense.

I’m loving the street I live on more and more. Even though to me it looks like a highway and is bigger than most streets in Burlington Vermont, its slowly becoming smaller as I get to know the vendors, shops and other people who work on it . As I struggle through my broken thai trying to order food at one place or another, I am almost always now meet yes with laughter but also an effort to understand. The couple that runs the Som Tam stand I frequent have been exchanging thai words for their English counterparts. Yesterday was ‘shrimp’ which proved to be very difficult for them to pronounce and ‘peanut’ which was surprisingly easy. From a quick glance at my Thai language books there aren’t a ton of blended consonants which would make the ‘sh’ and ‘mp’ difficult to say. I was pretty hopeless at the thai versions and wont attempt to transliterate them here. The couple and I have been doing this for the past couple of weeks and it’s been pretty what I call culturally satisfying. This might not be the right term exactly but its all about thinking you’re having a moment with people of another culture that’s sincere. Moments of insincerity, which abound a lot more often while traveling, almost always have nothing to do with either party’s intentions or character per say but simply miscommunications and preconceived notions about differences and motives. Both of these types of interactions are important and part of a greater learning process, in the moment and in that country as well as on the whole. But seeing as how those times I’m sitting at the table trading words with the couple and watching as they laugh and smile at each other while trying to pronounce these foreign words feels pretty damn good, I’m going to try for more of these moments.

One of the strangest things I’ve come a cross here is amongst the racks of t-shirts with thai-styled English writing or chang beer logos on them, which proudly proclaims “I am a tourist” there are T-shirts with swastikas printed on them. Now being in a Buddhist country I do see the symbol, if infrequently, on various religious architecture and emblems. However, these T-shirts are black, with a red square, while circle with the black swastika at a 45-degree angle. Add my almost unconscious reaction to spotting it, and there’s really no way it’s not the nazi version. I’ve seen people wearing these shirts three or four times and the same thought are always in my mind. Do they know what they are wearing? Does anyone around them recognize it? Does a symbol have power in all cultures if it has power in one? Drawing way back into AP English I’m pretty sure it was a yes/no answer. Culture gave power to symbols but some symbols seemed to be more prevalent, perhaps universal or at least connected. Throw in some anthropology and globalization I suspect things get a bit more complicated.

Chiang Mai, and other random thoughts

2010-08-16T20:48:00.001+07:00

Not 3 months in and I’ve already begun to neglect my blog. Well done me.

Chiang Mai
Very cool northern city, with a much more laid back vibe than Bangkok, which probably has something to do with the much smaller size and less humid and muggy weather. It’s about an 8-10 hour drive from Bangkok and up in the mountains which gives it almost a seasonal like ‘winter’ (i.e. gets below 75 sometimes) Vivien, who is in my program is from Chaing Mai, her mom lives up there. Well two weekends ago viv’s mom was down visiting her and she let Abhay (another masters student from India) Viv and myself hitch a ride up. The trip took the better part of the day but Viv’s mom is great and she knew where to stop along the way. The best part of the car ride was seeing a large amount of Thailand because the route is basically up through the middle of the country and up through a couple of mountains. We stopped at Suphan Buri, to walk along the streets of the hundred-year market, which is a destination in its own right. The market itself might not be a hundred years old but the old thai style houses that make up the streets of the market were probably built sometime in the late 19th century. There was very intricate woodwork and lots of narrow stairs and curved rooftops.
We finally got into Chiang Mai late and stopped right away at ‘the best pad thai’ in the city, and it was really really good. The best part of traveling with people who live in the area is that you get to see and experience places and things you might discover on your own but the risk you’ll miss the little shops along a narrow alleyway is high unless you know what you are looking for. Highlights of our 3 day stay there was the temple Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep which is just known at Doi Suthep to the many thai and international tourists who visit the mountain temple every year. Just past the chiang mai zoo there are lots of taxi’s who are willing to drive you up the winding and steep mountain road. It takes about 15-20 minutes depending on how fast the driver is willing to take the turns and it really did give me flashbacks to some of the corkscrew highways in Israel. After you break through the tree line and get out of the taxi there is about a 10-minute walk up this dragon railed golden staircase to reach the temple. It’s well worth the climb because the view is pretty amazing. From Doi Suthep you can see almost all of Chiang Mai on a day with good visibility. Of course it’ s the rainy season here so there were a lot of clouds but I was still able to see quite a bit.

On Sundays there is the famous Chiang Mai walking market, which is a huge outdoor market that takes over much of the downtown area. There are vendors from all over Thailand but there are a lot of hilltribe and northern arts, crafts and other goods being sold. I really wanted to get a northern quilt but because of how famous the walking street market has become, it would be better to buy it from a local vendor up father north, I’ll get a better price and know that the person who made the quilt will probably get most of the money. We also checked out the night market that runs every day and Viv and I had the most glorious hour long foot massages for 120 baht apiece (that’s about $4) at a temple nearby.

If/when I go back again I’ll take the train there and back. It’s a sleeper train which is pretty cool and it costs only about 700 baht one way which is dirt cheap compared to the steep prices of sleeper trains in the US, Europe etc. I’d love to get up there during December or January because I’ve been told it gets ‘cold’. Now that’s probably in the 70’s but that’s good enough for me as exploring the city further would be a lot more fun if I was sweat-free.

I am forever comparing Thailand to Ghana and I feel pretty bad about it, or rather conflicted about it but I suspect that’s how humans just think, process and learn (or at least that’s the excuse I’m giving myself) westerners, other travelers and international students in my program that I’ve meet along the way always comment about how slow life is here and I’m pretty surprised. If someone thinks life here is slow, Ghana has all the spend of a glacier. I don’t like to always bring up the experiences I’ve had in west and east Africa because it feels like a bit of a trump card. Its like ‘you are having a hard time living here? Try Ghana, try togo’. And there is really is so much more to it, besides that making me sound like a bitch. But to me life here is easy for someone coming from the US or Europe, I have what I need, and if I don’t I can get it very easily. Here are the two things I think make the biggest impact in comparison: I get to walk down the street unnoticed and there is air conditioning. These might sound weird or unimportant but they are both about comfort in my own space. Now traveling is all about getting uncomfortable and learning from that but living someplace new is the process of going from being uneasy to relaxed. As you can read below I’m still somewhere at the beginning of that process.

Another “is something bizarre going on here or am I immersed in a completely different culture with different social norms and expectations” moment brought to you by Emma: I go to this food stall down the street from me about four times a week, and as a farang I stick out so I’m not surprised the locals have noticed the new addition to the faces crowded around the young women who makes the best sum tom this side of chiang mai (no, really CM is where this dish, a papaya salad mixed with all kinds of good and mysterious ingredients, was invented) Usually I will sit down at the little tables and eat with friends but lately its been raining so hard and unpredictably that we’ve been getting food separately and eating at someone’s apartment to avoid getting soaked for the 15th time that week. So I go, order my som tum (still sans chilies…I’m working on it) and the women kindly wraps it up for me and I go on my way. The past four times I’ve been there however, this is always a guy who I’m pretty sure is in his mid thirties but who really knows sitting down at a table across the way. Every time I see him he looks up, and waves, which I’ve come to learn is a dead give away for I didn’t grow up in Asia. The first time he did this I waved back because I thought I might be forgetting him from one of the international graduate programs or something. He then called out something in Thai to me and lifted up his plate of rice and pork, I smiled back, having no clue what he said, took my sum tom from the lady and left. The next time we had the same exact interaction except this time after lifting up his plate he motioning for me to come sit with him…at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant. I was meeting friends however and not sure if he wanted to talk to me or share his food with me I smiled back and waved goodbye. The third time I actually went and sat down at his table where he tried to spoon feed me all of the rice on his plate and talked in thai the whole time. All I could get out was a very broken ‘I don’t speak thai’ and ‘no thanks’ to the spoonful of rice he was holding at my mouth. Quite confused and unclear about what I should do next, I was glad when my name was called out to let me know my food was ready. I got up from his table, smiled and left.
The fourth time, yesterday, even I knew he would be there, I still was unsure how to react when I spotted him at the same table in the corner. He smiled. I smiled back. He picked up his plate of food and looked at me. I pointed to my own food being prepared and smiled again. He motioned for me to sit. I employed the thai phrase ‘mai pen rai’ which actually means something like no big deal in English but I was hoping he would take it more for ‘I’m good’. He raised his plate again. I smiled and shook my head, paid for my som tum and went to the 7-11 to buy this green tea drink I’m obsessed with and try to sort out what was going on. When I walked back by the food stall, the guy was gone. So that’s a nice situation of a little bit of unclear mixed with some more totally unclear! From experience there’s about a 50/50 chance that perhaps in a couple of months this will all make sense OR this one particular guy is just leaning too far over on the weirdo scale…for me. I’m sure there are some girls out there who like to be spoon-fed rice by someone they have no means of communicating with. If this appeals to any of you girls out there, I’ve got just the guy for you. I’m sure I will continue to see this guy around and I’ll keep you posted if I have any epiphanies…or if things take a turn for the more bizarre.

October October October. Since my semester started in early June my ‘winter break’ is in October and ive been thinking about what to do for it for the past couple of weeks. My initial plans of traveling to Cambodia and Viet Nam were curtailed by lack of traveling partners (without exception everyone in my program is going home for the break) and my greater understanding of how significant the rainy season really is on the best laid plans of mice to explore places like Angor Wat and villages along the Mekong River. So I’ve moved those plans to the beginning of march which should be a bit celebratory travel respite between finishing my coursework and starting on my thesis (yikes, that’s far too soon)
I briefly considered volunteering for a month at a refugee camp on the brumese-thai border but I’ve learned enough to muster the self-control to not do that. Even though it would make me feel better, that’s probably all it would do. I promised myself I would never volunteer somewhere for such a short period as I’ve seen the lasting effects on the community as a slew of never ending fresh faced international volunteers makes the same mistakes over and over. A lot of people in my profession (do I have one…can I even say that?) think that something is better than nothing. Actually for the most part we all do otherwise we would not be in the saving the world business. However, I think there is a subtlety to that thought and I’m not totally sure but it goes something like ‘if its just going to make you feel better about the world around you, it might not be worth it to the people you are trying to ‘save’.

So option 3 and the one I am very excited about is going home for a month long visit. I’m going to be able to see friends and family, collect resources for my thesis that are hard to obtain here and replenish my shoe collection. (Thai’s have tiny feet) plus not only do I get to celebrate my second favorite holiday I also get to vote. So….if you want to see me before June 2011 I’ll be in Burlington for October and should have my regular phone up and working…if I can find it in this mess that is my apartment and remember not to check it in my luggage this time.

Korean fan death meet Thai elevator death and I have to say I have empirical evidence of the latter. The elevators in Thailand, which I do really appreciate and are fast, have no sensor attached to their door-closing mechanism. Therefore it’s a bit perilous to get in unless you run in right away. Of course if there is someone in the way the elevator doors open up again, and by someone I mean a foot, head or elbow that’s being crushed for a hot second. Danger.

Ayutthaya

2010-07-19T22:17:00.003+07:00

The international college at Mahidol organizes a cultural trip once a semester and its open to all students at Mahidol. This semester the trip was to Ayutthaya, which is a very old capital of the Siam kingdom, founded around 1300. It was once one of the biggest cities in Southeast Asia and had about a million people around 1700, which I thought was pretty impressive. The Burmese army attacked and subsequently burnt the whole city sometime after 1750, which caused the collapse of the Siam kingdom. What this history translates into is some really amazing ruins, mostly temples that are styled in the Khmer tradition since Ayutthaya was heavily influenced by the Cambodian kingdoms.

Because of the nature of our trip (group traveling has its major downfalls) we didn’t get to actually walk around the ruins which is one of the major draws of Ayutthaya since you have pretty much unrestricted access to most of the temple ruins. We also didn’t get to see Wat Mahathat, which is home to one of the most famous Buddha statues in all of Southeast Asia

We went or rather passed by a large amount of these wat ruins, and they are really impressive, part because they are not isolated outside of the modern day city but rather the city has woven itself around the old crumbling buildings. Well they were crumbling but Ayutthaya has been designated a UNESCO world heritage site since the 70s. After that we took a boat tour and had lunch on the boat. 3 rivers intersect making the ancient Ayutthaya somewhat like an island, which is why it was picked as the new capital as it could be well fortified. The rivers are filled with lots of fish which means a lot of house boats, one of my all time favorite structures since visiting Amsterdam a couple of years ago and the Thai houseboats did not disappoint.

Then it was on to the elephants. And this is where I get equally excited and disillusioned, those two go hand in hand a lot more than I would like, but I don’t necessarily think that a totally bad thing. I think it means I’m slowly developing a discerning eye. Or I’m overly cynical. Toss-up really. Anyway Asian elephants. So much smaller than the few African ones I have seen but that did not stop me from getting pretty excited to take a trip on one. Quite bumpy and you really move a lot in that metal chair. We had elegant red umbrellas that were attached to the back of the chairs with gold fringe swinging about with every elephant step. And from the umbrellas my mind went off, I couldn’t help it. For the rest of the trip it was racing through images of colonialism, white women perched atop elephants roaming around East Africa, Tarzan, how this place was really a elephant farm and I couldn’t help but stare at the metal hooks used to direct them into place. Further on at the floating market that was conveniently in the same area as the elephant rides I had the distinct feeling I was at Epcot. Men and women were paddling through the market in full ‘traditional’ dress, loincloths, war paint and all. In anthropology that’s kind of a big glaring issue of forced cultural stagnation, often seen as keeping the developing nations undeveloped for the sake of diversity. The whole floating market itself was either set up for tourist or saved and perpetuated for them. Does it make one a snob for wanting to go to a ‘real’ floating market and is that person any better than the one who enjoys this one? I didn’t feel cheated out of a ‘cultural experience’ because I can’t even begin to describe what that actually means.

What was most peculiar about the whole thing however, was that out of the hundreds of people that I saw there I could count on my hands the number of recognizable non-Asians and im betting most of the Asians were Thai. The question is does that make a difference or is perpetuating cultural primitiveness always damaging? More importantly does getting dressed up in war paint pay well and I should just shut up?

Its all about a balance between convenience and independence. For my first day trip it was nice a. not to be alone b. with thai-speakers and c. I did get to meet a lot of new people and while, most of them were international students all of the organizers were Thai and overall its nice to be able to see a couple more familiar faces on campus. And the trip certainly left me with some thinking to do.

brushing up with some culture and classes

2010-07-19T14:41:00.000+07:00

Having traveled and lived in some rough parts of Ghana, I have become natural suspicious of strangers when traveling. However, taking my West Africa mentality to Thailand might turn out to be totally unnecessary. Ex. 1. I got a phone call from some Thai guy on my room phone. Only people who are in the building can call it as I don’t even know the extension to dial from outside of the apartments. I started thinking about who was trying to reach me, why, and if I should even go out and check. Then there was a knock at my door. To get into my hall you need a card pass so I was pretty spooked but opened the door anyway. Of course it was just the very nice security guard letting me know that my keys were in my door. This episode just lets me know I need to lighten up, not take myself so seriously and stop thinking about being ‘abroad’ as the same. Although there are some funny similarities between Ghana and Thailand there are also a ton of differences.

I’ve run into this guy maybe 5 or 6 times in the past couple of weeks, he’s from Arkansas and is teaching English as a school nearby salaya. Always loud, always obnoxious and every time I see him all I can think about is how fast I can get away without being unnecessarily rude. He has some traveler’s tendencies, some of which I’ve run into before, that are majorly off putting. He always calls me ‘farang’ like its supposed to be endearing or something (it’s a Thai word for westerner, and while doesn’t quite have the same connotations as obruni or khawaja, my general feelings about it are the same) and he’s so far into what I can only describe as travelers isolation. He came up to me initially and started talking on the street because I was white, something he would never do back home. Now one can make an argument that I’m being too harsh and he could be lonely and people who are traveling/living in foreign countries can employ different social rules.

Most recent conversation:

Him: ‘Sawadekap farang….that means hi whitey’

You’re gonna eat here? You know that will make you sick?

“you’re eating squid? I’m so proud of you”

hmm, I wanna punch you in the face. Me: “yeah I have to go”

On to the substantive stuff:

A good six weeks into classes I’ve gotten a pretty good idea about the kind of work I’ll be doing for the next year, which is good because no one really tells you the difference between undergrad and graduate work except perhaps that’s there is a lot more reading, which I’ve certainly found is true. Other differences are less emphasis on tests, and something I really like, my classes place a high value on the lived experiences of the students and the professors or ajans as they are called here.

Douglas is my very passionate, very gay professor and he often comes off as if this class is his own personal soapbox. However, having the smallest insight into this area (gender studies), the man knows what he’s talking about. He causally drops the fact that hes been to a couple of the UN world conferences like its no big deal and not what we are studying this whole semester. His section on gender rights in my selected topics class just finished and this week we start with migrant issues with a new professor Sriprapha Petcharamesree , who heads the PhD program and works on citizenship rights and migrant worker issues. I’m thinking about asking her to be my main thesis advisor so im looking forward to her classes for the next 6 weeks. Douglas is coming back after that to finish out the semester in September with indigenous rights.

We had a guest speaker in HR theory class last week. He teaches at the International College where all of the classes are in English and about 30% of their students are non-thai’s. Im pretty sure he was English but he has a kind of accent where you can tell he’s been overseas for a while so while its not American its pretty ambiguous. His lecture was on the European enlightenment and it was yet another instance where I feel like I’m glad to have majored in political science. Some choice quotes from his lecture:

‘Heads on spikes type of event’

‘You’ll all drug addicts too’

‘Instead of getting executed she just died in childbirth…kinda the same thing really'

'After your head has been cut off from your body, you're usually dead'

Bit funny but he knew what he was talking about, makes me wanna brush up on my political theory.

We also had a guest speaker this week in theory class as well, Eugene Jones . He was giving us a lecture on Marxist thought and Lenin’s attempts at implementing his theory into policies. He lectures full time at the International college here at Mahidol and teaches “all things radical” and “likes to kept it as leftist as possible”. It was a very bizarre experience. What should have been an academic discussion about a historical school of economic and social thought turned into much less of a discussion and more of a fight between those in class who thought learning about communism was worthless and anti-democratic and has no place in a human rights course and the professor who told us he was presenting a bias view as he was a neo-Marxist and thought that the USSR was the best nation to exist. I was more curious about the strong reaction to communism from the other students in my class than what Jones was saying. Yeah he was a leftist who was saying that there were no true democracies in the 21^st century, but I think that it was quite bizarre for some people to not see the value in at least understanding the historical background of communist ideals and socialism, especially since I do see a connection between human rights agenda’s today and the aims of pure Marxists theory.

The other two classes I’m taken, HR standards and HR mechanisms are kind of a pair of classes. In standards we are looking at what is considered a human right and what is not, and then going through each UN convention to see how it was constructed, what was left out and why and what it represents. In mechanisms we look at how these rights are being protected and what systems the UN and regional bodies have in place to protect the rights granted by the UN conventions.

One of the more interesting things that I’m seeing around me is the stark difference between the students who study at Mahidol and the people who live in Salaya. I suspect its not that much different from American university towns where the tuition is higher than the average income of those who live in the town. But for reasons I am still working out the differences are much more pronounced here. I’m not sure if that says more about the concept of the invisible poor in the US or the fact that I’m only observing material differences here in Thailand.

There’s corn in my ice cream

2010-06-25T14:16:00.000+07:00

I’ve been abroad a month already. How the hell did that happen? Don’t ask me, I’m just as surprised. This sudden realization about time has caused me to think about a couple of considerations. 1. My life here moves a lot faster than it did in Ghana, which I think is a mixture of having a similar standard of living here as back home, which means I always seem to be running around doing something, as apposed to Ghana everyone moves at a glacial Ghanaian pace. 2. I might be a little better at this whole living abroad thing and perhaps have struck a good balance of experiencing my new home as well as staying connected to my people back home. This is much easier and much less stressful thanks to the relatively reliable internet access I get here and makes me worry much less about feelings of disconnect back home which in turn lets me dive into life here a little more confidently. 3. 1 month over means I have 11 months in the countdown to thesis completion…yikes! Best get on that. I’m thinking ‘stateless people and the systems gap” sounds nice…we’ll see, IDP issues are always at the back of my head and I have a head start with a term paper and lots of research but is it a human rights issue/can I tweak it into one? I’m definitely doing a structural issue rather than a case study because I think that access is a big issue and I think structural issues are huge in the mess that is international laws, humanitarian missions, weak mandates, sovereignty, the UN, you know…all that good stuff.

Now that I’ve been here a month here you get to hear my broad generalizations of living in Bangkok that by about month 4-5 I’ll report are all bunk, incomplete or just plan offensive…nevertheless, go with it. it’s a process:

Couples walking on the street don’t seem to hold hands; something I’ve read is taboo but slowly showing up more and more with the younger generations. Still the couple who walked in front of me for about ten minutes yesterday seemed to always be precariously close to each other and would sometimes knock into or brush up against each other which was my only clue that they might be dating.

The shaving cream situation in Bangkok….so unclear. To wax or not to wax…exciting and important updates coming soon.

Also just because I’ve been here for a month does not mean I have even begun to decipher any of the foods I see around me. Such is the case that I’ve nicknamed a lot of food to what I think it might be. Just because I’ve eaten it doesn’t mean I know what it is. And sometimes when I think I’ve figured it out, I am surprised; such is the case of the stealthy corndogs I ran into a couple days ago.

Quick reminder I am still in Southeast Asia when I’m at the mega mall named tesco lotus: to the left of dunking donuts… people sitting in the mall with their feet stuck in water...thousands of small fishes eating the dead skin off. Now on my list of things to try

Kids….what can I say about them. Universally cute and Thai toddlers wobbling around ‘wai’ing each other is no exception. Every time I see little kids they pull out their best English, which is usually a ‘hello’ ‘good morning’ or like yesterday my presence was graced with ‘chicken nugget’ from this little guy on the front of a motorbike. Maybe he was pushing five but he clearly posses more motorbike skills than I do, which really is not that hard to do.

Old couple selling mangos- by far my favorite people in all of salaya There is something about old people. I adore them and am very happy that I, might one day, be able to be a fantastic old person…you know…years from now. I was obsessing about finding mango & sticky rice, which is a thai dish that often pops up in on the dessert menu at US Thai restaurants. (I know you might say all food here are thai dishes but that’s simply factually inaccurate, due to the large Indian and Chinese populations. I even found an Ethiopian restaurant…but back to my affinity for the elderly) needless to say on my own very street about 2 weeks ago I spotted a table full of mangos and a big bowl of rice. Crossing my fingers that I had found what I was searching for, I cautiously walked up and announced both my presence and intent to buy something with the every useful ‘sawadeeka’. I’ve yet to know the direct translation of this phrase but from my limited knowledge it’s an all purpose greeting, with the ‘ka’ at the end represented respect for the person receiving the greeting at the same time it specifies the gender of the speaker. I do my best thai smile and then start gesturing towards the big white bowl of sticky rice and the rows of mangos that are lined up by it. The man hobbles off his stool, pulls back the wrapping on the rice bowl and begins to scope it up into a container. His wife, nudges him and takes the bowl from his hand. He goes to sit back down. Sensing this is something they have been doing for the last fifty years I do my best Thai giggle and the wife smiles back and me. She hands me over a flat container filled with sticky rice, half a mango cut into chunks and a little bag of coconut milk I’ll pour over the whole thing. As I say “krab kun ka” (but pronounced more like kira kuun ka) in thanks the old man winks at me. I’ve since found other sticky rice and mango sellers but I can’t go to them. I’m totally in love with this couple and I stop by their stall most days.

Follow up post on classes and living in salaya coming soon to a computer near you.

Week 1: Bangkok 1, Emma 0

2010-06-03T20:33:00.000+07:00

As to be expected really

Besides the fainting, food poisoning, being unable to register for my classes on my mac and not getting to move into my apartment (well room with a bathroom…and a balcony!) for five days ----Bangkok and I are getting along great. Well I should say salaya instead of Bangkok, im really about 35 kms from anything recognizable as the capital but technically I’m only about 5 km from the city limits.

I experienced my first rainy season storm yesterday. I was actually out exploring the area around my apartment building and all of a sudden there was what looked like a sandstorm coming up the street. People were walking faster and taking down the umbrellas that were attached to their food stalls. To me that means only one thing. Rain. Sure enough I looked up and saw one of the huge apocalyptic clouds that’s surely far too big and too dark to be allowed. Anyway if you were wondering yes, the Thais I saw were acting much in the same way that the women at the night market in Ghana did when it rained… which is to run for cover. You would too if it poured like this back home. Thai rain also brings thunder, lightning and yes a lot of wind.

The Tesco’s by my apartment sells some pretty bizarre things that I don’t think I would find at the ones Jae frequented in Canterbury. Sometime I would identify as liver was labeled blood cake and next to that was “paw” which I’m pretty sure were individual chicken toes... or I guess fingers…hard to tell.

I didn’t realize that the mangos I had picked up at the local 7-11 were actually pickled mangos. Not wanting to fail already on my mantra of try everything at least once I opened the package and bit away. And yeah they were ok but mostly the whole time I was just wishing they weren’t picked. Other than that...as ive suspected for some time Southeast Asia has some of the best junk food ive ever come in contact with. Besides all of the usual suspects of “things-i-cant-find-in-the-US-but-can-expect-to-see-in-almost-everyother-country” such as obscure nestle products and discontinued mars bar products there are also new products such a seaweed flavored Pringles, some type of twinkle looking product that is labeled pizza-ketchup flavored….questionable…..green tea Smarties (the Canadian kind) and rose and lavender flavored mentoes which only from previous encounters with aussies do I know are imports from New Zealand.

I had udon for the first time today from the street and I thought I died because it was soo spicy. Next time instead of saying (well motioning) for a little im just gonna say no spice…until I know where to get some rice to stuff into my face as a precaution. I was wondering if I was going to be eating out of bags again and so far the answer is sometimes yes sometimes no. Mostly street food is on sticks and really life is that much better when you can eat food on a stick.

Bangkok is famed for its terrible and somewhat dangerous traffic and while I’ve only ventured into the capital twice I got a first hand experience while walking back to my apartment from campus. My street has divided two-way traffic up until a specific point when driving away from the direction of campus, and then the divider fades away which is actually very convenient for me to access all of the shops and shacks on the other side of the road, plus it makes me feel less like I’m living on the side of a highway...which could probably be argued. Anyway I was walking to my apartment and a car passed me and then for some unexplainable reason swerved into the lane closest to me and banched up and over the sidewalk hitting a newly built fence. It then proceeded to spin its wheels on the sidewalk in the place I had just previously been about half a minute before. The taxi driver, 3 motorbikes and a bicycle, which were in this lane somehow managed to stop in time, were all starting at the car. Of course this whole thing had caused a lot of squealing breaks, crashing sounds and other exciting noises so naturally there was a large audience by the time the car dislodged itself from the raised sidewalk and sped away.

Also….Hi. My name is emma vick and im a pandora addict…but don’t worry…the cold turkey method always works right?

It does when its enforced by international copyright law but now im just bingeing on citizen cope and alice smith---win some lose some…

How do I feel about being in school instead of being under the delusion that I'm helping people in Thailand? about as selfish as I thought I would...it will pass I'm sure. After all I'm getting a masters degree in Human Rights...more knowledge will mean I'll think even more so that I actually have the ability to do something even though that assumption will probably be just as false as it is today...too soon to be this cynical? definitely.

I know that’s all kind of miscellaneous information but that’s how it goes sometimes.

So here’s some concrete information for those type a’s out there. I have orientation on the 14^th of june and then my classes start on the 15^th . I’m taking Human rights theory, which is taught in conjunction with the PHD students so that should be good. Im also taking International Human Rights Standards and Human Rights Protection Mechanisms and I signed up for selected topics in HR as my elective, which turned out to be a good gamble on my part since the topics will be indigenous rights and gay rights. I have these classes once a week for 3 hours each, and I don’t have classes on Mondays or Fridays. I am looking to take a thai language class but you know…that might be a fruitless endeavor on my part.

There are 13 confirmed students for the masters program including me and that number could rise up to 19. Most of the other students are from around southeast Asia but there are a couple from Europe as well. There are more men in the program than women, something I find fascinating giving my experiences both abroad and in classes at UVM.

Next weeks plans include a proper tour of Bangkok, a continuation of my favorite pastime abroad--befriending old ladies on the street, and general wandering around. Still on a quest for hangers and a microwave and probably for sometime to do with these white walls…the less prison feel the better I always say.

ps remember dont fret over grammar issues, spelling mistakes or words you may not have encountered yet...jae's got that covered.

2010-04-10T01:42:00.001+07:00

Thailand!

2010-02-22T00:33:00.000+07:00

ok next adventure......drumroll....

Yes once again my crazy plans have actually panned out. I will be starting a human rights masters program at the end of May at the University of Mahidol right outside of Bangkok . Of course only a week after I graduate from UVM, such is my life. Bangkok should be amazing and wonderful and oh yeah...HOT...yet again...what am I thinking....oh well.

Dont know where I'm living yet but am in the process of learning as much as I can about thailand. A bit more low key than accra....no shots needed! and only a hint of malaria...which means I'm expecting visitors...

keep yah posted when I know more.

Isreal

2010-02-11T00:41:00.000+07:00

Dirtyfeet back in action for a moment....Israel for winter break? yes why not. pic from red sea beach.

DirtyFeet Out.

2009-05-15T23:19:00.000+07:00

This will be my last post from Ghana. It’s quite bizarre to think that I might never be in this country again and that I am leaving in just a couple of days. Things here have been very good and not only have I discovered a lot about me, other people and the way the world really works but also a little about where I might fit into that whole thang. Logistically I leave Ghana on the 21st of may, fly to Amsterdam and then to NYC where I will be staying with my aunt and uncle for a couple of days and then road tripping home with a good friend. I think driving into Burlington and Vermont in general will help me to not go into shock. I’m having a lot of anxiety about flying right now but I know its only a manifestation of my fears which is both that I am leaving Ghana and that I really want to be home. I’m hoping that once I am actually on the plane I will be fine and getting home will not be so abstract and me leaving here will feel more peaceful and timely.

obruni sick?

2009-04-24T20:17:00.000+07:00

With less than 4 weeks to go my mind is torn in a million different directions. I feel the need to mentally prepare myself to leave here without taking away from the time I have left. I keep reminding myself that a month is sometimes the only amount of time people have here. I truly cannot imagine that. I also feel the need to see that I leave Ghana as gracefully as possible. This means having a good idea of what I am throwing out, donating, to who and what I am taking back with me. In classic procrastination style I have left a lot of things here to what feels like the last minute. I’m about to go on a picture taking frenzy for instance. On top of this I have 5 exams to study for. Yikes! Because we don’t really do any work over the semester it does feel like a lot of work over this 3-week period.
In some exciting news I stupidly got sun stroke (I think) and fainted in the middle of the night market, which is basically a food market right by my hostel. We went to the pool the other day and for whatever reason I didn’t drink any water the whole day. Well after 6 hours in the sun and a bad sunburn I walked to the night market with some friends and then fainted by a fruit stand. Kayla half caught me which was really good but I still managed to whack my head against the cement floor of the market and an now nursing a golf ball size bump on the back of my head. I woke up to about 12 children starting down at me. Then the fruit stand lady asked me “obruni sick?” and I said “yes obruni fainted” and then she thought I said plantain which was confusing so then I just put my hand up and then let it fall. “ooooh” she said. I got up, go a soda for the sugar and some chicken for the protein, stayed up for 2 hours incase I had a concussion and took my sunburned fainting self to bed. The next day as I was walking by the same fruit vendor, I bought some pineapple from her and she asked me if I was feeling better. The kids who saw me had better reactions. They all yelled obruni and then dramatically collapsed in a heap at my feet.

11 months-passover

2009-04-10T20:11:00.000+07:00

As today marks 11 months since I left Burlington I thought I would give an update.

Lets see, I have one more week of classes left but in reality I really just have 2 more classes since most classes stop before the official end of classes. Most of my professors have told us what to except for our exams and some have even gone to far as to give us the questions we will be seeing on our exams. There is a lot of studying to be done and my exams are spaced pretty far apart from each other, about 3 to 4 days in between each one.

Celebrating Passover in Ghana turned out to be relatively easy and I was able to go to two different Seders. One was held in ISH and was planned by two of the people on kayla’s program. They did a pretty good job and even got some matzah from these chabad rabbi’s who flew in just to help jews celebrate Passover. Our group for the ISH night was a nice mix of non-jews and jews and jews who’d never been to seder before. Ben, one of the uys running the Seder had 3 Nathan Goldberg haggadah books with him and I brought out the children one and the ten plagues of Egypt book. Everyone was quickly enamored of the children’s book and they ended up using that for the main portion of the Seder. We had sweet South African wine, and we made a really good charoset from apples, pears, cashews, wine, cinnamon and sugar and yes I had to cut the cashews with a knife as we were lacking in some kitchen supplies. For dinner, we had a very traditional Ghanaian meal of boiled yam and stew. The stew is usually some type of tomato based soup-like creation with any kind of meat in it.

Last night I went to the chabad house for Seder. It was a truly unique experience and it was also the smallest Seder I have ever been to. There were the 2 very orthodox rabbis but they were 22 and 23, four of us Jewish American university students and this Israeli who was 25 and working in security. The rabbi’s were very cool and were really into us asking questions and had all of these little explanations for why we do this and that. The seder was in half Hebrew and half English which was good since we were reading round robin style. I was surprised how easy I could follow the Hebrew but Moshe, the Israeli had the most intense accent and I was sitting right next to him so that was a bit difficult. (NOTE: they served us beets and not eating veggies for so long I forgot that beets turn your pee pink. Well by the time I remembered that I had gone thought my lonely planet guide to Africa heath book twice. No mention of pink pee)

Toady my back has really been bothering me and I think its from the bed but its been pretty bad. We’ll see how things are and if I’m feeling up for it we’ll go to medina market tomorrow but we might not anyway because its Easter weekend here and everything is closed! There are no government buildings open from Friday to Monday. The Ghanaians here really do take the holiday seriously. I was going to go home with my roommate this weekend for Easter and to meet her family but she has come down with malaria so she’s staying in Accra this weekend to go to the hospital and get better. I’m still hoping that she’ll be able to bring me home later this semester.

Indian food, theater, and good ghana days

2009-03-24T15:18:00.001+07:00

The girls just left for Togo and Benin last Wednesday very early and I’m getting ready for my friend Janelle to come with her American university semester class. Their class topic is international environment and development and they are coming to Ghana for 3 weeks. I’m going to show them around the University here. I was trying to get a lecture planned for them but there is so much bureaucracy here that I just hit to many walls.
The Internet has been really spotty lately and that’s pretty frustrating but there is really no that much I can do about it. I’m working on picking out my classes for next semester, we have to register on the 13th of April and I feel like it’s going to be an adventure trying to do it here.

Forgot to mention this earlier. 2 weeks ago I got to see the university of Ghana production of the Vagina Monologues. I’ve seen this production many times back at home and my sister was in them once so being familiar with the play I was really curious about how they were going to adapt it. It was better than I expected. It was a shorter version but they had all of the essential monologues that for the most part are in all versions of play. The audience however was terrible, which I was expecting but it didn’t make it any less painful or irritating to sit though. Ghanaian audiences in general don’t mind interrupting any public type of performance to say what’s on their mind b that church, a political speech or even theatre performances and they certainty are not bashful about saying negative things. Well of course there were a ton of boys in the audience and they were really vocal but from what they were saying their understanding of the play and its meaning was very shallow and I just don’t think they understood what the plays message was supposed to be. They did the rape monologue and the men were just whistling and laughing the whole time. It was totally bizarre and I’m not sure if it was because they were uncomfortable, or if there brains just registered that someone was talking about sex so they should whistle. Do I think it was a cultural miscommunication?

I have no idea, after 10 months here I still have a lot to learn, there are still a lot of things that Ghanaians do that I don’t understand. Students here get up at 4 in the morning to study and take naps during the day. Some don’t go to any classes but study a lot. A lot of them read their notes from class over and over every day and their notes, which has been dictated to them by their professor acts like a textbook. The other day a Ghanaian called me obruni. Now he was in my class and it’s a small class so I deiced to put some effort into it, which I hardly ever do now and said, “I have a name”. He asked why I said that I told him that being called obruni really pissed me off and he was so surprised. He says that Ghanaian think its funny. I told him it made me want to punch someone. They are just as confused about us as we are about them.

It was Libby’s birthday last Saturday and so I took her out to our Indian restaurant. We love it there, it’s cheap for Indian food here and the waters are really nice. The only bad part is that the walk there is in a real sketchy place and at first we were walking but now when it’s just us we talk taxis back to circle and get tro-tros back to campus. They have really great rotti, dosa and the pickled mango chutney spread stuff that I really love. Allegra and Jeanine who was in India last semester came with and Jeanine told us that this food was mostly southern Indian. Its different from most American Indian restaurants that have nan and samosas.

We tired to make microwave popcorn in the microwave a couple of days ago. This was surprisingly difficult because of the shady quality of my roommates microwave and a lot of it ended up burnt…but it was still good and oily and salty. It did make my room smell for the whole night however….

I had a really good Ghana day the other day. Joey, Jenny and I went to the cultural center, which really should be called “Ghana’s biggest art and crafts market that only tourists go to”. Usually it’s a really big hassle and headache because the market is dependent only on tourists all of the vendors are really pushy. They yell at you and grab you and pull you into their stalls and its really difficult because they are chaotically organized into sections depending on what they sell and so everyone around you has the same wears to sell. This is difficult but also good because if the price one place is too high its often really easy to go right next door and get it for cheaper. Its really overwhelming the first time you go but it was so nice this time. We spoke enough twi between the 3 of us that it was better and we charmed a lot of salespeople so they gave us good deals on much of what we bought. Of course we spent a lot of money on the whole but we got a lot of things and I’m beginning to like bargaining again. I’ve always liked it but I grew tired of it a while ago mostly due to taxi’s. Those I wish were metered and standardized but bargaining with the vendors at the art market is fun. They know the prices they are giving you are soo high and they like to see how low you are willing to tell them. I have a pretty standard bargaining strategy. If its jewelry or trinkets I say 1 cedi first no matter what they ask for it unless its over 20 cedi. When its something that I like I’ll say 5 cedi unless its something big like a mask, painting or a table and then I cut the price in half. Sometimes I throw out numbers that I know they wont go for just to see their reaction. Sometimes that’s because I don’t have any more money than that.

It is really nice to go to the market and be able to converse with Ghanaians in their own language. It makes me feel at peace here and part of this place in a way that I don’t often feel being at the university surrounded by other international students. But I think that’s the environment that this experience has to be in. Do I wish that the international students were more integrate in the general university and do I wish that I had more Ghanaian friends? Of course. But do I also recognize that I feel better back at ISH when I don’t always have to have my social guard up and I can talk openly to other international students about how I feel about Ghana, the great and the bad? Yes. I think this is probably the way it is allover where there are a large group of temporary international students and I am curious about the way this dynamic manifests itself in European countries and North America.

Today was one of those days when you say, “really, you really believe that?” and you question if there is any critical thinking going on at this university. Now that statement might be harsh but its not directed to the students. As someone whose spent over 3 months on the inside of an elementary school in West Africa is it clearly the system and the teachers that are failing their students. My economic anthropology professor today was the perfect example of don’t believe everything you hear just because someone older and supposedly wiser than you said it. In his lecture today on globalization he managed to do 3 things. One, he talked about how globalization has a lot of negative effects but one big great effect is that soon we’ll all just be one big uni-culture and that will be good because then we can stop killing each other over our differences. Two, when talking about cloning in reference to genetically modified engineering he stated that the US is making a clone army and because they are just copies of humans they don’t have any emotions at all. He wasn’t sure if Obama was continuing in this plan or not but he would “check up on it for us”. And three he introduces us to the word deskilling. Which he said like “des-killing” and that it was an anthropology word and you would not fine it in the dictionary. Well I’m pretty sure that world is actually de-skilling and I’m pretty sure you can find it in the dictionary. Anyway it was a bizarre lecture to say the least. It was also very weird to see this professor who obviously is very much pro American espousing all of these ideas about global warming and talking about the evils of too much modernization upon the middle and lower industrialized countries. It was in totally conflict with what he had been partially preaching to us since the first day.

Cake, rain and the AC man…

2009-03-11T00:03:00.000+07:00

So its my roommates best friend’s birthday today and that means cake! Great chocolate cake with chocolate icing and swirly letters spelling out “happy 22nd birthday afuia!” my roommate bought it today and it was hiding in our room for the afternoon. After everyone was back from class they had a big party in the kitchen and Afuia was all dressed up and I got to help hold the cake (no candles for Ghanaian cakes I learn) Anyway I haven’t had cake in ages and I thought it would be really dry but it was really good and we have a lot left over. Strangely because my roommate got it she gets to keep the leftovers! So that just means we’ll be living off of cake for the next couple of days. I’m psyched about it.

Also yesterday was the best day ever because it rained, that’s right, rained here for 5 hours!! It was amazing and wonderful and I wish it would rain like that everyday here. it was soo cold sleeping that night and I even got out my fleece blanket and long sleeves and the fan was even off, which is never is. It was magical and funny because I knew it was only 73 degrees which is not cold at all! Yet I was soo freezing that I had to get a sweatshirt halfway though the night. That does not bode well with me living in Vermont and all, I’m going to be cold just walking down church st. in the middle of July! Because it was “cold” last night it was cold this morning too. Yet at around 12 I still managed to be sweating so the cooler weather is really only a day thing and in reality when the dry season fully stops, which should be in April, the rains will be cold but them it will get much hotter just after it has rained here. I am happy that I get to experience all of the months in Ghana because I get to know the weather but I’m not looking forward to may. Last June was sooo hot and humid and I’m told that may is far worse.

In other news, I am in love with the “AC man”. The AC man is about my height, has a good potbelly, he must be at least 65 years old and has a significant number of teeth missing. He always wears the same clothes and has cheery eyes. I have class in the archaeology building twice a week for my anthro classes and twice a week whenever I stroll in he gets up from his desk in the back and closes the doors and switches the 2 heavenly white boxes that are fixed to the wall on. He guards the little AC remote, it’s always covered in bubble rap in his hand or in his pocket, never letting it out of his possession. As the cool air comes into the classroom I smile at him and he gives me a wink. We haven’t spoken a single word but he might be my favorite person in Ghana.

It was Ghana’s independence day on march 6th, last Friday. There was a huge parade and small air show at independence square. The new president spoke and there were many other members of the government present. Everyone was dressed up in the country colors, red, yellow and green and the traffic into Accra was mind-boggling. The campus here is about a 10-minute drive from Accra but it always takes about half an hour to get into the city. Well, last Friday it was a whopping 2 and half hours to move maybe 10 km. last Saturday a couple of international students went to the 13th annual Ghana international trade fair. It’s basically a whole lot of buildings with a ton of crafts, jewelry, art, fabrics and anything else you can think of to sell that’s from west African. They had drums and carvings too. It was all up for bargaining but I could see how one could spend hundreds of cedi there. Speaking of cedi, in a kind of bad for them good for us thing, there are now only 71 cents to the cedi, which means for me talking out 100 cedi means only $71, which is great! The market here response quickly however and I think we should start to see prices that I pay for food and such rise slightly at the end of April or beginning of May to match the lowered buying power.

For something totally and completely different I actually have a bit of work ahead of me for March. I have my first solo paper due in 3 weeks. I haven’t written a paper by myself since May! It is for my archeology class, which is economic anthropology. The paper is only 6 pages but its worth 30% of my grade. That might sound crazy but it we didn’t have it my exam would be 100%, as it stand its just 70% no big deal. I’m also organizing a lecture for the beginning of April. One of my friends from home is coming to Ghana on a class trip with American University and I’m helping them with itinerary and things like that. The lecture is going to be about development in Ghana and it was going smoothly but of course I’ve run to all kinds of bureaucratic crap and things are going downhill, I’m not sure if it will all work out but hey I’m trying and all. I have a quiz on Thursday too! It’s almost like regular uni!

Also I finally brought all of my fabric that I’ve accumulated over the year to a seamstress. Last semester I got 2 skirts made but since then I have bought maybe 15 yards of different batiks, fake kente and the more traditional African pattern fabrics which I like less and are mostly now made in either in the UK or China as bizarre as that is. With Batik I know it was made in Ghana or at least West Africa as I’ve seen the dye pits up north. Fake kente is not as nice as the real deal but its way too expensive and actually a terribly heavy fabric to begin with. That’s not to say its not beautiful and I might come home with a small small piece. Anyway, I’ve got 4 skirts and a dress on the way and I finally picked up the dress I got made last semester. I’m very excited and its really cool to design your own cloths and then get them custom made just for you. These seamstresses really know their trade too. It’s a huge business in Ghana and some women walk around with their sewing machines on their heads in small villages to repair clothes on the spot.

The half way point for this semester is this upcoming Friday (the 14th) and I’m pretty surprised that its already March and today (the 10th) is officially 10 months since I left Burlington. The time as a whole has gone by much faster than I anticipated (per usual) but I am also looking forward to going home as much as I think I’m really very much going to miss Ghana and all of the things that I have experienced here. 9 weeks feels like a pretty short time to have left and I want to make the most of it but I am also conscious of trying to prepare myself for leaving and know that when I get home I’ll hit the ground running. It’s a funny balance to keep but I think that its important to keep perspective on the remaining time I have, my expectations about what I can get done in that time, how much I’ve gotten used to being here and my expectations about going home.

We've made it to March

2009-03-01T19:31:00.000+07:00

Making it to March at home is a feat. Making it to March means that there maybe an end to the snow, the cold, the wind. Its that little moment that says things are not always like this...sometimes the sun even comes out and stays for days at a time here. This year though, March means that the dry season in ghana has ended. That the weather is going to get even hotter, more humid and the rains don't really start going until May. Welcome to my kind of hell. No matter how much I have "acclimated" to the weather and environment i'm ruined really. This body of mine has spend 20 winters in Vermont, 20 falls and 20 mud seasons. i slightly remember some hot weather in there but its a distant kind of feeling. most importantly i'm a 4 seasons kind of girl. Now i didn't know this until i spent 10 months in Ghana.
I've just also spent some time reading all of the entries on this blog and it really seems to be a feat that its march already. March also means that I have little over 10 weeks left in Ghana. While most of that will be busy with classes and exams, there are some things i still need to do. I'm going back to the refugee camp at least one more time before i leave to check up on the people who are still there. I'm going back to ada foah for a weekend because its one of my favorite beach places here. I still need to get cloths made even tho i cant stop buying fabrics. I'm sure i'll hit up all of the markets before i leave to pick up the things i have been putting off to buy and i'm going to the cultural center in accra to bargain my american sheets, pillow,the electric kettle that i bought and cloths that i'm leaving behind for paintings, jewelry and other traditional crafts. Should be interesting.
I'm going to lebanese food tonight and we went to a new Ethiopian restaurant last sunday which was really good. however, we ended up getting into a huge fight about the bill, which they said was 142 cedi, when we were expecting to pay about 70. In the end it worked out but i've never had to bargain at a restaurant before and now we don't know if we want to go back even thought the food was really good. I've been to the Lebanese restaurant before and it was really good. there is a ton of lebanese all around west africa. I'm not really sure why but when the wars happened, the affluent lebanese who could escape came here. So now there is this huge network of lebanese all around west africa which means a ton of lebanese food which is a real treat after so much fufu and jollof rice.
Anyway heres to March, 10 months in ghana and still no malaria!

voting and development...beta

2009-02-19T02:56:00.000+07:00

I have two things to address here.
One is the fact that I have barely mentioned the elections that took place in Ghana while I was here last semester. They finished up in when I was in London because there was a run off vote. The elections were very close but in the end Atta mills a professor won by small small percentage
Two is the fact that my economic anthropology professor told us today that the reason Africa is undeveloped is because of its culture. I’ve never heard a Ghanaian say that. Anyone I talk to about development in Ghana or Africa in general sites colonialism, failed US aid or simply racism. I have this frustration with Ghanaians who I feel think that because of what happened to their families and counties in the past everything should be giving to them rather than earned and I know it’s a bizarre feeling and it was even weirder to have it in the refugee camp. However, still think that many people here in Ghana think that one day they will just find someone to pay for them the rest of their lives, give them a job and house etc. I think its one of the reasons that this country is not progressing as much as it could, and that’s with my full admiration of how things could be and how far Ghana actually is. Having my professor tell his own students that its their culture that is keeping them behind is so strange to hear now since any ill feeling towards another peoples culture is surely to be stricken from the mind while traveling. No one in class opposed the professors statement and that was also surprising.

choices

2009-02-19T02:52:00.000+07:00

When Rachel started at me and asked “what do I do” I automatically said, “don’t give it to him”, trying not to look too much at the elderly man begging for her food in the middle of crowded market in downtown Accra. I had taken Rachel and Mary around Accra for a couple of hours to help them situates themselves to what will be their homes for the next semester and what I called home for the last nine months. After which we had found refuge from the market chaos in a open air restaurant I’d been to once before. As the old man stared at Rachel I looked at her. The automatic-ness of my answer had surprised me for this had been a subject of much discussion this summer when I volunteered and lived at the burduburam refugee camp. I was uncomfortable with the fact that I had made a choice along the way not to give to people begging and I didn’t remember when it was. I think these discussiosn were intense in the refugee camp because it was a constant in all of the volunteers lives. I encountered little begging in helping to open a high school for girls in south Sudan in may and since moving from the refugee camp onto the university of Ghana campus begging has been very limited.

2009-02-09T20:49:00.000+07:00

second semester

2009-02-08T22:35:00.000+07:00

so i thought that i would talk a little bit about second semester here in ghana. i've moved from ISH 2 into ISH 1, there is no big difference except for the fact that i now eat breakfast every morning at this great store/restaurant in my building that serves up semi-real pancakes and omelets. the pancakes are kind of more like think crepes than anything else but they do the trick. i have a new roommate, her name is Debbie and she's from the accra region in ghana so thats a little different than last semester too. she keeps very different hours than I going to bed and waking up much earlier than i but its not so bad. her side of the room is very clean, very spars and very orderly. mine is well....not. i'm pretty much a general dirt ball here. i've completely giving up on my feet and i think thats ok. or its gonna have to be. in terms of classes i'm taking 6, 3 poly sci, 2 anthro and arabic. The 3 poly sci are Ghana's foreign policy, human rights in africa and regionalism and ethnicity in Ghanian politics. the anthro classes are economic anthro and human diversity and conflict management. so far i've only had 2 classes of each and none of my economic anthropology even though we are into our 4th week of classes. thats how some things go here. So far my human diversity class has been the only one that seems interesting in class but the human rights class has the best readings and thats the main thing here because most of the exams are on the reading and not what was taught in class. I do have to write an essay for the human diversity class and i'm actually excited about it. climate wise it is dry and hot instead of wet and hot but there are nice cool winds at night.

F-F-Frustrationish

2009-02-03T17:13:00.000+07:00

Being here in Ghana has been a great experience, that’s a given. Having the opportunity to spend a year in another country under the context of being a student is not to be taken for granted. However, I think I have more questions and I am more confused about the world around me than ever before. Learning in the higher levels or being a lifelong learner is not a straight line of deeper understanding. A lot of times one must unlearn or relearn the “true history” or the “real way” to think about something as much as one is simply gaining new information. When you are in elementary school you are certain that the civil war was fought over the clear injustices of slavery. In high school you learn that it was really about states rights and the growing role of the federal government. Now in college they introduce economics, which apparently (and I agree) accounts for 90% of all government actions. Now I’m left with this terrible feeling that the answer to some things I’ll never truly figure out until I’m too old to comprehend them. Learning about the way to think about anthropology, Africa, development, and the way to feel about international relations and how to personally connect or not with a foreign culture feels very much like relearning and unlearning about the civil war. Except, and that’s a big except, that this learning is in the present. New theories on development and the older ones that get scraped directly affect people around the world. Everyone working in the grand (read big, not glamorous) field of international relations, weather it be journalists, professors, diplomats, aid workers, or top CEO’s at development agencies and busses have had to make choices about their IR ideology. Do we say south and north or rightly point out that Australia is indeed in the south? Do we wonder what was wrong with developed an developing or do we wonder that the majority of the people we are passionate about helping don’t care what we call their country compared to ours in academic journals?
Its like this with the classic anthropologist case of FGM used in countless freshmen classes to befuddle young minds. Is it a cultural thing? Are western ideas (read the evils of colonialism and imperialism) crushing the fiber of communities around the world? Or is this truly a female rights issue that needs to be campaigned and legislated for? Which is the more correct stance? Which one holds more academic weight, and which one holds the most understanding of the relationship the west would like to have/should have with other nations? In an ideology does it matter to be more correct or does you gut feeling have anything to say that is valuable?

Also don’t even get me started on “It’s a cultural thing” which translates into 2 things. a. I have no idea what’s going on or b. his behavior is appalling to me but that’s is what "they" do.

a little catch up

2009-01-13T17:11:00.000+07:00

Hi everyone
Because I can only get to the internet so much here I’m going to make long entries covering multiple days, I think it will give a better picture of the day to day here and my ever changing thoughts about Ghana, studying aboard and anything else I’m feeling is especially important.
Jan 10th
This update is long overdue
It is now the evening of jan 10th. This means a couple of things.
1. I have been away from Burlington for 9 months which just sounds so crazy to me.
2. My sister and my best friend are as I’m typing this up flying home to the states.
3. I am flying back to Ghana tomorrow and will arrive on the 12th.
My sister has been away for 4 months in Canterbury, which is where I spent the better part of my month here in the UK. I had a great time in the UK and so happy that I got to see my parents, my brother, my cousin and I’m excited to go back to Ghana which is good because I am there for another 4 months.

Jan 12th
Am feeling quite homesick right now. I know this will pass but seeing everyone was fantastic and being back here is just a bit hard at this moment. I’m excited for classes to start. I think. Cried a bit just now but I’m not really sure about what.

Jan 13th
I am meeting a lot of new people and seeing some old familiar faces. My new room takes some getting used to and is unfortunately infested with ants right now. I put on my towel to take a shower and instantly threw it off as tiny red ants crawled up my neck, onto my face and down my legs. Needless to say I ran to the shower sans towel and my next trip into Accra will involve a hunt for Raid. Being at the Uni of Ghana for a year I’ve realized there are lots of ways to kill small animals for sale here.
My parents got me, among a lot of things, 5 books about humanitarian intervention, AIDS, and other topics, things I should be thinking about while here. Strangely enough it seems that one cannot live here and always think about these things because one has to well, live. I am happy to have the chance to think about these things further because 1st semester it was all about learning and making mistakes. Now I think I might be able to reflect some things and begin to work out a. if I want to do a thesis on anything here and start to do some research and b. reflect on my time here and how it applies to the work I might want to do later in life. I am feeling very inspired and grateful to have the time again to be here (might not graduate in 4 years but hey, could be worse, I hear its -15 Fahrenheit at home, which must be a German word now that I think about it)

I’ve decided to stick with NESEI this summer. I think my trip to Sudan has made me connected with the organization on another level than just being an intern a development NGO. Opening up the school in Yei and seeing all of the girls makes me want to go back and see how they are, are they getting by there? They seemed so shy to all of the western women on the trip but inside the dorm, away from the strangers they came alive, yelling and screaming and laughing, just like any other girls in dorms around the world.

Speaking of plans I am still very excited that I have deiced to peruse a masters in human rights. For now at least it seems the best way to go. Being in Thailand while completing it also helps me with my ever and always internal conflict of being in school and the feeling that it’s a huge waste of time when I could be out there doing something with my life. Of course I firmly believe in the fact that smart people who actually know what the hell they are doing is very important. But I just think that maybe I could be that person in 50 years. So with that in mind I think Thailand will be great and I keep hearing more and more good things about Mahidol.
Today was much better than yesterday. I feel happy here and I think yesterday was just emotional because I think I can do anything and sometimes I cant and I have to realize that and accept it (but mostly I think I can)

CanterBury

2008-12-18T19:04:00.000+07:00

After a very long month of doing very little but waiting for exams to be over I am finally sitting in my sisters dorm room in Canterbury, England. I arrived here on Sunday after a 3-hour detour in Dubai. I know it seems bizarre that I would have to go to Dubai to get to London but it was the cheapest way to get there. It was also very cool to be in Dubai even though I was only in the airport. They have white Christmas trees all around the airport and that was quite confusing. Jae met me at Heathrow and we took the train out to Canterbury. So far its been fairly foggy and cold which is such a nice change of pace from the hot and deathly humid weather I’ve been living in the past 8 months. So far ive eating a lot of different things including mozzarella, baguette, hot dogs, chips or crisps as they are called here, a panini with cheddar and bacon and shredded wheat. So far all have been really good and I’m glad to have veggies back in my life. My parents get here on Friday which is very exciting for me and them but also its my brothers 1st time in Europe which while he is going his best to seem like he doesn’t care, I know is very excited for. I’m so excited to be here and it’s a very nice break from Ghana but I am glad I am looking forward to going back for second semester.

I think I’ve just started to learn some things about the Ghanaians I live around. I don’t say live with because I don’t really live with any. Part of that is because I’ve gotten tired. Living with a different culture of people is tiring and especially a culture that is very invasive like Ghana. Here in the UK I have been here for over 3 days and not one single person has talked to me beyond what is required for their job. My arrival in the country has been completely ignored by everyone except the customs agent at Heathrow. Maybe that’s because I look like everyone else here and the only distinguishing factor between the natives and me is my apparently blaring American accent. But I have a feeling that if a Ghanaian came here they would not get any different response expect maybe a closer inspection of their choice of dress. Anyway what I am trying to say is that I don’t live with Ghanaians because a. the international office groups all of the orbuni together in the international hostels and b. my interactions with Ghanaians on campus come in limited forms. The men either want to get my number, cell or room, or sometimes just want to be observed talking to a obruni girl and the women don’t seem to notice much about us nor talk to us at all except to note that we are usually much more poorly dressed than them. Some people tell us that the Ghanaian female students are intimidated by the obruni girls but I think its also frustration as well. I have heard multiple times that they think that we think we are better than them because obruni girls dismiss the men they think are the best of the best without even considering these men.
I am also always confused at the double standards that are both Liberian and Ghanaian attitudes towards western experiences. Many times in my 8 months of being in Ghana I have been pressured into trying different types of foods, and to act and talk as a local, which includes things like hand washing, using a broom made of sticks and getting ones hair plaited. However, when in exchange, an obruni has offered to share some of their culture there is usually a negative reaction on part of the local. I’m not sure if it’s because locals don’t think obruni have culture to share, or if it’s worth learning or perhaps extreme some type of backlash of colonialism. We are expected to try a lot of different foods and looked down upon if we don’t but when my friend made her Ghanaian roommate pizza she was practically fearful of the food and made her friend taste it first before taking the most minuscule bite and that was it. This seems strange for Ghana since refusing the offer of food is about as rude as you can get. Ghanaians also tell us they are mad at the obruni women for buying African fabric and then making western clothing out of it. This seems bizarre as I think of all of inflexibility they seem to posses. I’m not sure if this is because the western world is actually quite multicultural when it comes to food, dress and attitudes. We have so many options in life while most of Africa eats the same meals every day and do the same job 7 days a week. I don’t really know what I am trying to say here but something is off. There is a lot of misconceptions about “obruni” in Ghana and I guess that is to be expected. It’s a constant fight that is very tiring and I am grateful to have some respite but it also is very concerning because I’ve just recently made this terrible (for a traveler/anthro major) revelation that I could live some place for 5 years and be no where close to understanding the people or places I am. This is a terrifying thought but I know its true. It makes me want to sit on the streets of Burlington in the hopes that that I know something of where I have spend my life so far. I know I cannot say the same about any other parts of the US having meet people from all over the states and found out that we live in very different countries. So I’ve come along way and I end up, suspiciously nowhere, which at sometimes feels depressing and other times feels necessary and perhaps important. I cant help but feel this has all been written before, by someone else and these revelations so personal but also maybe universal to a traveler. “time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students” I don’t know whose words those are but truth needs little citation.

working on it

2008-11-22T19:47:00.000+07:00

My Africa is beautiful sunsets, purple and pink skies and the smell of burning trash. Of snazzy dressed university students and children covered in iodine, turning their skin purple. It’s of happy old women and grumpy old men. Of women whose bodies have become permanently hunched over from sweeping and pounding fufu and small children who sit ever so bored on backs for hours at a time. Of amazing natural parks and streets filled with discarded water bags, wrappers and black trash bags.

thoughts at 3 am

2008-11-22T19:43:00.000+07:00

If the world is pessimistic enough to be prepared for the worst of things then there should be the assumptions that refugee camps with continue to be needed and will continue to be formed organically. But why, if we know that they are inevitable to a certain point why is there no Sears refugee camp box that anyone with enough money could buy and build. There could be different models depending upon the size and climate of the area but that is also predictable. For example there is little evidence of Canada and western Europe needed refugee camps in the next 50 years. There is much evidence in places like Pakistan, Palestine, and current or just cooled hotspots in sub-Saharan Africa. with the tragic patterns of warehousing these days as well what is wrong in thinking about the long term needs of a refugee camp. Obviously the locate cant really be pre-determined but there must be ways with gps and other methods to find water sources and other resources.

To the north and BeYond!

2008-11-22T19:38:00.001+07:00

This past week I went up to the north with some friends and my roommate Karen. We took the grueling 13-hour bus from Accra straight up to Tamale, the sudo-capital of northern Ghana and also the most rapidly growing city in Ghana. As we drove farther and farther up the scenery subtlety changed at first and then dramatically with the land leveling off, becoming a flat plan of sand. The people look different too. The north is mostly Muslim, so the men dress in long traditional dresses, and caps and people bike everywhere. The women all cover their heads in some way or another but its not evident that its for religious purposes as there coverings look very African and more an extension of what the women are wearing rather than the more traditional coverings of the Middle East.
The second we got off the bus we were surrounded by a range of men from about 12-25 years old asking us everything, did we want a taxi, did we know where we were going, where were we staying. Some guy was trying to convince us that we had called him to pick us up. In the end and after much shenanigans we slowly made our way to our hotel, which wasn’t in the best of areas simply because it wasn’t on any main road so we went down some dark alleyways but it all turned out fine until the hotel reception told us that the rate was actually 15 cedi per night and not the 10 we had been told on numerous occasions. So as things went we didn’t get a great introduction to Tamale but it was kind of what we were expecting. The next day we had until 3 before our 4-hour bus to Larabanga and Mole took off so we explored as much of the city as we could. We went to the market, which wasn’t that big so it was calm for a change. We visited the cultural centre, which was much nicer than the one in Accra where the hassle is like no other. We also got to see and go inside the biggest mosque in Tamale for a small donation. We were able to go up on the roof and take pictures of the whole of Tamale, which was very cool, as the people of Tamale don’t like cameras very much and this way we were neither offending them nor losing out.
Our bus to Larabanga was late as expected and we left around 4:30. We were staying in Larabanga instead of Mole because the motel there was filled and we had heard of a great place to stay in Larabanga called the Salia Brothers guesthouse. They were really great because Larabanga has what I consider an unwarranted reputation as being a very hassle filled city best avoided, someone met us on the bus, knew my name and took us to the guesthouse. I could see the potential for hassle as we got off the bus in Larabanga as there were many, again 12-25 year olds vying for our attention. We slipped right past them and in the guesthouse with is very close to the bus stop. There we meet al Hessian, one half of the identical twin pair that makes up the Salia brothers. His brother Hussein runs and lives at their other guesthouse, Savannah lodge, just a 5-minute walk down the road where they provide free elementary schooling for the surrounding villages and Larabanga’s children and host volunteer teachers from around the world. That night we slept out on the roof of the hotel something that was very surreal. Staring up at the moon and the stars on this roof of a hotel in a small village in northern Ghana was one of those times you say to yourself “this is pretty damn cool” and really mean it. We woke early the next morning and took taxi’s to Mole national park where along with about 50 other obruni we were separated into 4 groups and then each lead by an armed guide into the park. The walk itself was very beautiful and although we didn’t get to see any elephants (the main reason for our trip) we did get to see about 4 species of antelope and boks as they are known in SA, a whole family of baboons, crocs, and warthogs. We also saw a ton of different types of birds and bizarre flowers and insects. We also got to see an antelope fight. Two males with huge antlers were fighting over a heard of females. They were very violent and they were very close to us. The sounds of the antlers cracking and banging against each other were very very loud. After the walking safari we chilled out by the pool in the Mole Motel. The set up there is very nice and the pool looks out on this cliff that goes straight down into 2 waterholes so there are many times that one can see elephants from the pool. Unfortunately this did not happen to us but it was still a good time. We went back to Larabanga around 4 and went to the oldest mosque in Ghana (built around 1300) and supposedly the oldest structure in Ghana but that was less clear. The mosque itself is very old and made entirely out of mud and sticks. It still functions to this day as the mosque of the town even though there has been 3 others constructed to help reduce the crowding in this one. We were not allowed inside it because we were not Muslims but we were allowed to take pictures of it.
The next day our traveling group split up, and half of us headed out on the bus to Wa to see the hippo sanctuary. Since all of us had exams this week Jen, Karen and myself stayed in Larabanga for the day and we got to teach at the elementary school for the better part of the afternoon. The kids were great and I had major flashbacks to my not so distant days at Buduburam. The schools have the same problems, they are all memorization and no learning or critical thinking skills are being developed. But it was a good time and we slept on the roof for a third time and it was cold, but that was a nice change from the steamy south.
We woke very early to take the 4:30 bus to Tamale but instead of going back there for the day and leaving on the direct bus to Accra the next morning we decided to go to Kumasi for the day and shorted our trip in half the next day as Kumasi is about half way between Tamale and Accra. We took 2 tro-tros to get there, one from Damango junction to Kintampo and then from Kintampo to Kumasi. The trip was ok, kind of cramped but that expected. We stayed at this great hostel in Kumasi right near the Bus station and got to see a bit of the city that day but we got up early the next, bought tickets for the 1:30 bus and walked over to the famous Kejetia market, which is the largest open air market in West Africa as there are over 10,000 sellers in the market itself and about another 3,000 outside the market, crowding the streets. It was the perfect place to buy fabrics because the prices here are much lower than they are in Accra because of all of the competition between sellers. So in no time we had all stocked up in fabric and made our way back to the bus station. We took showers at the hostel before we left and then checked out and hoped onto the bus. The bus was supposed to take about 5 hours but we didn’t get back onto campus until about 10 and went straight to bed, as we were exhausted. This being the 1st time I’ve traveled in a long time it went really well and I think we got the connect with a rural village very well and it was nice just to spend some time out of Accra. I’ll be leaving in about 3 weeks for London and all of a sudden I have a lot of things to do, like study for exams, figure out what I’m bringing with me, what’s staying here and all of that. Keep yah posted!

And it was good

2008-11-06T01:00:00.000+07:00

I cant begin to explain last night. And by last night i really mean very early this morning because thanks to daylight savings time I am now 5 hours forward from the east coast. But its no matter i would have stayed up for days I think. I've never had this feeling before and its not really going away.

NYU in Ghana organized a election party at a small hotel. the group I was with got there around 1 in the morning even though most people showed up around 10. We were really just on time as they announced Kentucky for McCain and yes, MY fab home State, Vermont for Obams just as we were walking into what looked like a beer garden with a huge projected screen and the biggest Cooper Anderson i've ever seen. there were many chairs filled with students, american and not. they were filled with Ghanians and not. they were even filled with Obama supports and not. everyone was concentrating on the huge screen, surrounded by tables filled with beer and pizza and in our case a big bottle of champagne that we were covering with my bag just in case (and then everyone would knock on wood).

We waited, sometimes talking, sometime standing, some people dancing to the music being played simultaneously, because of course this is Ghana and you can never just be doing one thing at a time. there must always be music.

As they announced state after state, and hey we're a pretty politically aware group of people so yeah we cheered wen new york went to Obama but we knew that when we saw Penn go there was something. Its 3 o'clock by now and no one is tired. We are all silent in our heads, doing frantic math, and trying not to jinx anything but its hard when the crowd is filled with Ghanaians wearing obama everything like they just went to Obama world and bought up everything at the gift shop on the way out. Then ohio gets called and we know. we really know or at least we hope we know. people get more excited and by now i've called my parents about 3 times. We spend the next half an hour laughing at how the pundits talk about ohio and why the math has suddenly gotten very hard for the red states. very hard indeed.

Then Virginia get called and anyone who knows it knows it. its done its over, we won.

People around me start asking frantically how many votes California has and all i can say is enough, they have enough.

CNN calls it, OBAMA wins.

the whole crowd goes crazy in a fantastic energy/sleeplessness kind of way that only comes from acing a final after an all nighter except with about 60 million other people. Some people left, we didnt. Julia popped open that champagne and the 6 of us who came together hugged each other and some people were crying.

I was not, that is, until his speech. I cried when he got on stage, i cried when he said his wife was the love of his life, I cried when he said he was getting his kids a puppy and then i just cried. And it was the best feeling in the world. And to be here, in ghana of all places, i would not want to be any where else right now. This is so important and really beyond what I was ever expecting here.

And its the energy, that vibrating, breathtaking, brand new and exciting energy that i can feel all the way across the world. I've talked about going back to a different country then when i left it and its really true. And the fact that a bunch of cynical people today woke up and felt better for the 1st time in 8 or even 16 years is pretty damn good. I was 12 when Bush was elected, but i remember staring at the white state down in the corner willing it to change blue, make it blue. But it stayed white, the whole night, and we went to bed and woke up the next day in democracy hell. And it kinda all went down hill from there, didn't it. i dont know what it feels like to be proud, well overtly proud to be american. i do know what it feels like to get spit on in Denmark for being American but I think i always knew that the US was a good place and now i really know. and the fact that i can be that optimistic and not be somewhat ashamed of my country (though sorry mum and dad, this wont stop me from traveling) is pretty fabulous and maybe even a little bit revolutionary.

so i cried. and it was good.

preachers, london and the ghanian mail system

2008-10-28T20:05:00.000+07:00

1.ok so i was in my conflict class today and besides the fact that the professor did not show up at all, which i wasnt surprised about because hey we only have one more week of classes and why not, but we had to listen to a preacher/student for about the half an hour its required that we sit in class until we can go when a prof doesnt show up. Ans look, i'm all about "rising above" as i like to call it and just ignoring the man whose telling me that i'm going to hell because jesus is not in my heart. However i tend to get a little ansy when he stops condemning regular people and starts attacking groups. now these groups are other Christan groups so it really doesnt make that much sense but i still have a harder time "rising above".
2. Since we only have 1 more week of classes now because of the Ghanaian elections that are taking place about a month from our own, i now have 5 weeks of review and exams. needless to say i dont think that i will need 5 weeks to study for my exams since i feel that they are reall easy, but one never knows, i could say that and fail them. (however i would bet my left leg that thats prob. not going to happen) SO this means that my count down to london is officially starting. its in 6 weeks from friday and i'm very excited and i get to see dubai, at least on the way back and try out some of my mangeled arabic on them. i'm excited to see my family, and quite a few friends who will be coming over to see me, and start/leave their own study abroad programs, including my sister. yay. it will be good to come back to ghana refreshed, maybe a hot shower or two, fix my hair cause lets not talk about that and stock up on things i should not care about but will make my life easier, (like instant oatmeal) and then i can feel just as guilty about my life when i get back to Ghana as i did when i got here. super.
3. So for over 4 weeks now i have been checking my mail box every day for letters people have sent (correction, only 1 person has sent me letters, i am waiting on the rest of mine but i'm sure they are just lost in the mail voil that i'm about to describe to you) there is a mail void or what i like to call "African mail limbo jimbo" which sounds like a terrible disease sometimes. anyway i have a package from my dad, books that he sent to me, a month ago. now they are most definitely in African mail limbo jimbo and i know, i know that they will arrive here when i am in London because well, that the way the world works today for me.

lots of love
Emma

A splattering of thoughts for you

2008-10-24T21:13:00.000+07:00

hello everyone, i hope things at home are good and that the early winter weather hasent got too many people down. i'm going to backtrack quite a bit because i keep writing these blog posts but I cant post them because the blogger cut and paste function is very messed up.

anyway I have 3 more weeks of class here and then a month of study/exams. For the better part of that however, i've decided to travel up north to see Mole national park, thats where they keep the elephants in ghana. it takes 12 hours to get there by bus and should be a bit of an adventure. I'm going with my roommate who I just realized i haven't talked about at all. Her name is Karen, she lives in Missouri and goes to Truman state. Shes pretty laid back like me and we like to sleep in alot and watch movies and lament about how we are in africa doing lazy things when we should be "out there". I've been here for 5 months now and I think that if your hear a month it would be a shame to not be "out there" the whole time but there has to be a balance between seeing africa and living in it. and by africa i mean ghana. even here most people just say africa tho so its hard to get out of that habit.

Its getting hotter here by the day though i keep getting told that the dry season is coming and it will be cooler soon. i don't believe them that much but i guess i don't live here. My feet are always covered in the red dirt that makes up alot of the scenery in my mind when i think of the places ive been. At first i thought ghana dirt wasnt that special because the dirt in Uganda and Sudan is sooo red but now i realize that ghana dirt is pretty red too. not a bit of the brown i grew up with. this is important because its all over my clothes all of the time, my feet all of the time, my shoes all of the time. my shoes are constantly orange.

i havent really talked about the food here at all so here we go: starch, its all starch. well, is starch carbs? yeah i think so. so its starch and fruit. thats basically it. i eat rice everyday sometimes twice a day. it comes in 4 forms. jollof, which is a tomato paste stewed type of rice with bits of fish in it, wachie, which is rice with black-eyed peas mixed in, fried rice, which is a distant cousin but still recognizable form of transplanted chinese food, and then plan rice. you go to these stand outside of my dorm called the night market, which is amazing as you can get almost everything you need there (everything that you can get in ghana at least) You can get food, and packaged food and soap and buckets and kebabs and bootlegged movies. for 20 cedi you can get the whole series of sex and the city plus the 7th season (which does not exist but is actually the movie) its pretty cool. Anyway at these stands there are fried plantains, spaghetti which is called macaroni, something that looks like couscous but is not, fried whole fish, sausages which are actually hot dogs, fried chicken, cabbage which is called salad and all kinds of bottles of soda. Sometimes there is a ghanian salad which is real lettuce, cabbage, baked beans, eggs, mayonnaise and ketchup. its pretty bizarre but i get it sometimes.

Ghana is great but I am looking forward to flying to london to see my family. And coffee, i want need and otherwise really really really crave coffee here. i know its hot and everything but i want it. I miss the cold and time passes differently which there is little change in weather from may to October. I am constantly reminding myself it is almost november.

difficulties of technology in Ghana

2008-10-02T19:48:00.000+07:00

So i realized that i haven't posted in a month. this is not part of my plan to keep everyone informed about what i am up to. it has to do with the fact that the internet has been down for at least a week and a half and this is the 1st time i've been on in quite a while. so as i sit here and read all about our stumbling economy and the presidential and vp debates to take place in the up coming weeks i wonder how different the US I left will be from the US i come back to. I guess i've never thought about being away from my country for a year,i've always thought about it as being away from people, places and family but not my country. I hope some things will have changed and others stay the same...but as i sit very far away from it all, i can't help but wonder what will the U.S. look like in may 2009 and will things be better or worse?

I miss and love everyone and as my time here seems to be vanishing away at least until I go to london in Dec. I am thinking about everyone at home alot but also feeling very settled here in legon.

Love,

Emma

The last one….and the influence of Ghanaian voters on the US elections.

2008-09-21T18:45:00.000+07:00

I waited until Deidre had walked far enough away until I burst into tears. Picture me standing in the middle of the airport parking lot with my drum over my shoulder and 2 bags in my hand, getting yelled at by taxi drivers about where I was going and balling. It was for many reasons, I didn’t wan to say goodbye, I was happy they were going to be able to see their families, sad I’m not going to see mine for a while. I know I’m going to miss her and Rita a lot and saying goodbye to both of them Thursday was really hard. I know I’ll see them but I just know it could be in a long time and that makes me really sad. I’ve gone to the airport 3 times now to see people off. It’s exciting because they are going home. They are sad about it, and happy and it’s the same way I feel. But every time I go it makes me a little homesick, I have to stop myself from wishing that I could go home. I don’t want to be wishing the time away, and I’m trying not to. Its really amazing here and I’m having a great time and time does seem to be speeding up so fast. It was just September 1st!
Anyway everyone at the camp took me out for dinner at this really great Italian place in Osu, a more affluent section of Accra. Then yesterday my friends at campus took me out to Lebanese food and some karaoke near the center of Accra. Its been really good but everyone is away this weekend, some to Togo, some to Kumasi. I still havent got my passport back from the immigration offices (they’ve had it for a month to give me my residency permit) and it makes me anxious that I don’t have it and more immediate prohibits me from going to Togo. Eh such is life. I only have 6 more weeks of classes and then 2 weeks off and then exams. Its very bizarre because we only meet once a week so its like I have 6 more classes, which back in the us could be just 2 weeks of classes. Here its six. In total we only meet 11 times. I can’t help but wonder if the Ghanaian students who are here for 4 years really do have a grasp on their subjects because its been very difficult here to get an in depth concepts or explanations from the professors.
Also everyone here is soo obsessed with Obama, which I can understand. However, this means that I get into fights with random Ghanaian men over nothing at all. Men of course because women here don’t talk to me unless they are trying to sell me something, and apparently “women don’t know anything about politics”. Super. This one guy on a tro talked to me for over half an hour about how Obama was very popular in Ghana and therefore I should vote for him and that he was going to win because he was popular in Ghana. Then we got into a flight because I said “you know, that’s all very well but Ghana can’t vote in the elections and it’s a pretty tight race, they both have good chances of winning” well that went over awful and there was very little I could do to convince him that no matter how many rallies he and his friends went to about Obama and how many Obama biographies they bought on the street (they think the money goes to his campaign) that it was the American citizens who would chose the president so I just gave up.
Happy 21st anniversary mum and padre. Much love.

2008-09-20T22:56:00.000+07:00

My Birthday

2008-08-31T19:26:00.000+07:00

My 20th birthday is coming up in a little more than 2 weeks. this means 2 things. 1, ahh I'm not going to be a teenager anymore and that really scares/..scares me. 2 I've decided that instead of having all of my friends and family expensively fed ex me birthday presents here to ghana as I know you all where planning to, that instead I think the more fitting thing for me to do here for my birthday would be to ask for donations so that i can help some of the people i have meet at the refugee camp over the summer. If this is interesting you at all, please send any donations to my parents and the will see it gets to me. I'll put up a list of where/who/why/what the donations went for/to after i figure out how much i've got and what I do with it. Things I'm thinking about- helping single moms repatriate to liberia, donate to an orphanage on the refugee camp, buy medical supplies for the under-stocked maternity ward at the camp's clinic. If you want an amount scale, it takes 20 cents to buy one rehydration packet, $50 to feed the orphanage per week and its $20 for 2 months supply of baby formula.

other than that, classes are going well, still haven't had one of them, but i'll cross my fingers and hope that my prof shows up on tuesday.

missing everyone at home and will write soon-

Emma

Weekly Schedule

2008-08-29T23:38:00.000+07:00

Mondays I go all the way across the campus to my soc class which is gender studies around 9:30 and it gets over around 11:30. So far it’s a traditional gender studies class with about 85% females and about 15% males. Typical anywhere in the world I suppose. The professor is my only female one as well. It’s quite bizarre going to university where there are 3 guys for every 2 girls. Tuesdays I have 2 poly sci classes from 11:30 to 5:30. If anyone wanted to skype between these classes I’m online every Tuesday from 1:30 to 3:30. Wednesdays I have my Arabic classes, at 11:30, which surprisingly have been very fun and help in continuing the trend of my spastic study of the world’s languages, which has already been mentioned So naturally the next thing is Arabic, I could have taken Swahili but as Arabic is much more wildly used in places I will defiantly go, there it is. I say this is all so that I can be a world traveler and get by anywhere I go, but in truth I think its because I’m completely insane. I’m thinking about taking a math class because I’m going to have to sometime but I think I might take it as a summer class when I get back. Sounds like a good plan, especially because I’m not sure it will transfer back as the class I need.
Being a international student in Ghana is very different from say Paris or London. From the moment you get off the plane to the moment you are back on western soil, you are ever so aware as never before that you are white. You are aware at every second while in Ghana of your position, of what you were born into and what those that were not think about you. Its hard to explain the ever present feeling that one gets walking around Accra, and even on campus. Its kind of like you know a lot of eyes are on you and you can guess what they are thinking about you. Its either they have a lot of money, which in part is true, or they wonder what we are doing here. I have gotten a lot of questions about why I would choose to study in Ghana when I can study in the US. There are also a lot of misconceptions about westerners and Americans. Some Ghanaian students think that we have to come here because the universities at home are over crowded, others think that because we carry water bottles like nalgenes and sigg’s that we import all the water we’ll need for the year and they think its different water than the water they drink. Some think that we don’t pay anything to get into the university here or that we don’t need/pay for our visas here. it is also a known fact in Ghana that there are no black people in the western world and that there are only white and black people. Trying to explain to one male student that my friend Rita was in fact Indian and therefore neither white nor black but brown proved very difficult. He didn’t believe me when I said that most of the world is neither black nor white but somewhere in between and that in the western world Rita would not be considered white. I can’t even begin to understand the experience of African Americans here in Ghana because Ghanaians too call them white. Anyway its been awesome, and difficult here but I would not change where I am for anything in the world….maybe some veggies and a feel good sandwich.

In the words of kanye

2008-08-26T23:32:00.000+07:00

I am not brave for me but for other people. For me I am a scared, doubting little girl who is afraid most of the time. I am always afraid that I’ve pushed myself too far, that I’m in fact not ready not mature enough for the situations I put myself in. I’m afraid that I dont know what I’m doing even when I know I look like I do. That’s just it. I’m not brave enough for myself not to be scared, not to be afraid.
But for other people, I am a brave, take-charge almost-a-women kind of girl. I tell people that I’m ok and then I feel ok. That if they know I’m fine then I am fine. And I really will be. And that’s enough brave for me right now.
If I think about being here, being away from everything I know for too long I’ll freeze up in the scared petrified thoughts that flow into my mind. But here I’ve learned that you have to be in the now and here. And I know that I can do this. Its just for those few fleeting moments after lunch or before I go to bed that I could really lose it. I know this is just what happens and I do miss everyone a lot but its kind of like I got myself into this and I did it for a reason.
It doesn’t make it any easier that I had the time of my life at the refugee camp (am I a bad person for saying that? I don’t think so but maybe) It was hard, the most intense pressure cooker I have ever experienced. There were real desperate people there, for which the systems put in place by men in countries thousands of miles away were fundamentally failing them. They saw us, the international volunteers as a chance to change the outcomes of their lives. I was and am still hardly equipped with any of the training knowledge or resources to help refugees work around the systems that the UNHCR has put into place. I was able to help one girl and her baby get back to Liberia, which was productive. But it was a lot of money to spend on one person at the camp and I’m still not sure whether the money could have been used to buy medical supplies and would that be better? Prince, who I wrote about before could have been saved in a second. All he needed was salt and water. That’s it, and that I can do. I can recognize when someone is dehydrated and walk to the pharmacy on the main road of camp and for 20 cents bought a re-hydrating salt mixture. That’s all the effort required and I know I could have done it. The problem was I didn’t and I didn’t because I had no way of knowing.
Do I go to school to help people later or do I go to school to help myself? I’ve often thought about this before but there has never been a time where it is more tangible that by going to school and not straight to working, to helping I am wasting four years of my life. Its like this: yesterday I was working at a refugee camp and helping teach kindergarten to 50 children who have been born on the camp and that’s all they know. Today I am going to lectures about the structure of the UN and learning about the history of NGO’s in Africa. Who is that helping? Me. Nobody else but me. Can I excuse it by saying that I really know nothing about helping refugees and that the courses and next 5 yeas of my life are worth spending away from the field and locked up in classrooms so that I can actually know what I’m doing and really help people? That’s what they say. It still doesn’t stop my gut feeling that there are so many incomplete people up in high places (believe me, I’ve meet a far few here and back in the states) that I could still be more helpful elsewhere. That’s big of me and I know it. I can’t help it. That’s how I feel. Maybe I’m just going to turn into one of those incompetent people by thinking that, its possible.
Maybe I wont.
I just know that this transition is hard. Really hard and while I am excited about school and getting to live here I do miss Burlington, and everything that goes with it. But I’ve had a great adventure so far and this is just the next step on the way to… whatever it is that I am doing. Which right now is procrastinating hardcore a shower. At the ref camp bucket showers were a blessing. It was hot as hell and they were cold. Here I live on the 4th floor (they say its it 3rd but I know better, they cant trick these eyes) there is a massive wind tunnel and the showers are more like your younger brother has turned the garden hose on you and you cant run away and the water is freezing.
It doesn’t help that I lost my towel and all my clothes smell like musty ref camp. Not pleasant. And my bra broke. Normally this isn’t a big deal but now I only have 2…must remedy that situation soon.

Am currently trying to figure out how to upload a lot of pictures because facebook is too slow here. I’ll let you now.

Mom- Eat a spoonful of peanut butter for me!

HAlf way point...kinda

2008-08-26T20:23:00.001+07:00

So i've been away for 15 weeks so far and i figuired out that i have another 15 weeks until he1st semester is over and I fly to the UK. Since leaving home home, I've vounteered at an orphange in Uganda, helped to open a school for girls in Sudan, and lived for almost 3 months in a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana. Something tells me that this next 15 weeks might go a little slower than the last. I'm takign some realy cool classes here tho, one on refugees and international aid, ones on peace and post-conflict resolution, ones on gender studies and then arabic. I'm very excited for arabic because I can now add it to he list of langauges that i have studied but wont be able to communicate at all in which includes chinese, german, hebrew, spanish, french, latin and now arabic. Well done me.

2008-08-22T19:14:00.000+07:00

2008-08-22T18:54:00.000+07:00

school and classess

2008-08-16T22:11:00.001+07:00

So i have yet to have a class here at the university of Ghana becuase in true Ghanaian fashion all of the teachers are on strike..becuse they want a raise in wages. So i've had A LOT of free time to get my stuff in order which has been nice, but now i would like to actually have a class. This probably wont happen until next week at the earliest. I also am having some difficulties with the residencey permit becuase the international office doenst understand that i've already been here for 3 months and thus my letter of introduction is a higher protirty than those that have usarrived as my visa is up in 2 weeks. it will all work out but its causing unwanted stress right now. I've also has to throw away some of my clothes because they were too torn/discusting, so i'm left with not much and will enventualy have to go shopping sooner than later unless i really want to give all of my western ideas abotu cleanesnes away...not a big streech as most of you know....
I miss the kids at camp alot and i think I will be going back to camp at least one weekend out of the month. there are alot of internationals here that want me to take them to the camp as well, which is something that could be really cool. It will be fasinating to see how the camp changes over the next year as they are supposed to "close" in October...I wonder who will be left in may.

hello goodbye

2008-08-16T01:27:00.000+07:00

Its my last week here at Buduburam camp. It has not really processed with me however because I’m not really leaving leaving, I’m simply moving about an hour and a half down the road. I think one of the things I will miss the most will be the kids. When I’m at university there will just be other “adults” there doing adult things. At camp you could spend a whole day just wasting around with the kids.
Today is especially hot and I’m sitting outside guesthouse 1 to try and cool down. Because you get dirty and then sweaty here when you cool off you can literally rub the dirt off of your arms. Its quite gross but really effective to get clean. It kind of makes me feel like a roman except much less glamorous.
I think I have an ear infection or ear ach but I don’t really know because I’ve never had one. I hope it goes away as it’s a bit painful and I’m not sure what to treat it will.
In recent camp news: We’ve had a new batch of international volunteers come for the month of august and then just one more in September because GVN (the organization that supplies cbw with the volunteers) has pulled this program off of the website. They are doing this because of the changing nature of the refugee camp and the bad advice they have been given about the numbers of Liberians being repatriated. The UNHCR wanted to be repatriating thousands per week instead of the hundreds that it has been in the past few months. The “closing” deadline for the camp in October is a joke. There is simply no was possible for all of the refugees to be off the camp and back to Liberia by October when there are still around 20,000 registered and about 15,000 unregistered whom the Un has not even taken into account and have no solutions for.
Its all very irresponsible of GVN to pull out now of a situation like this where they have made their relationship with CBW the sole income of the organization. Maybe they did not intend to set it up this way but the volunteer’s fees are the only source of money and GVN is well aware of it. Thus by pulling out they are in effect throwing CBW into financial crisis and not giving CBW substantial amount of warning about the end of volunteers and their money, GVN is crippling any chance CBW has of finding new ways of supporting themselves because they will be without money by September.
Its all rather sorted and bureaucratic, welcome to Ghana the locals would say. Along with that is the whole other portion of my life here, which is transitioning from the camp to campus. Because I didn’t want to leave on the 10th which was the time they wanted me to have everything set I’ve had to go back and forth between camp and campus a couple of times now so that I can leave camp on the 13th. The trip is quite long, taking over an hour and a half but I want to be at camp for as long as possible. However, at campus, which is beautiful by the way, I’ll put up pictures later, there are more hoops to jump though which is quite annoying and frustrating. No one seems to know exactly everything I will need so I keep being asked for other things. some things are easy to get by like I don’t have my medical insurance here yet but I needed it for registration so I just photocopied the back of my insurance card for home, which they took. Others, like getting the tuition receipts has been a hassle, as my parents know well. Hopefully I’ll get all the classes I want but that’s also done by paper so I have to wait in long queue at each department of the classes that I want to sign up for. There is supposedly a online academic registration but no one I have talked to has used it and you need a pin number that no one has provided me yet. I’m also looking into getting a job on campus so that when I go to England for a month I’m not completely broke.
I’m sorry this has been a litany of complaints but life here is really good, the days are hot, the nights are hot and the food has almost stopped screwing with my stomach, although I wont touch cooked tuna for a good long time. Both the Liberians and Ghanaians I have met have been very nice or complete assholes. We could interchange those two categories with women and men. Women here are nice, always welcoming, and work the hardest and often bear the brunt of the horrid past crimes of the Liberian civil war. The men I meet on camp save a few seem to be more interested in the fact that there are white women on camp than anything else. After 10 marriage proposals or so and many more offers of whatever else I find I have little patience for anyone who tries to crack onto the international volunteers. It’s a status thing to be seen with a white woman or walking with one but grabbing our arms while we are walking and calling out “babygirl babygirl” is hardly the way to get into our good graces and despite what one gentlemen tried to convince us its not “the African way”. Its just bored mans way of spending his time. Both men and women don’t have much work on camp but because women who have families always have work it’s the men who sit about all day and have to find ways to keep the days moving by.
True some things are different because of the refugee state, like men carry water sometimes and they do cook when they have to, like when their wives have left them with small children to care for. There is also the largest number of all ages of pregnant women, from the tragically young to the way too old. Its difficult to think about all of these babies and how much it will take for them to live to adulthood. For a single mother who is already eating only once a day if that its hard to picture her with the added difficulty of a baby.

backtracking

2008-07-24T00:24:00.000+07:00

Today, July 26th is Liberian Independence Day, which means that the camp is up even earlier than usual. I’m not sure what to expect today but everyone is real dressed up and all the women and girls have the most fanciful hair. People were also cleaning up the camp a bit which is a nice change from what usually happens. Even CBW employees who have been in the sanitation department still throw trash on the ground. Its very frustrating.
Work has been going well and we started a free summer school. There are about 400 kids because we have a feeding program attached. So I teach a class of 50 kindergartners every weekday from 8 to 12. Some days there is little teaching going on but I’m happy the kids are there because the reality of the situation is that the best thing we are doing for them Is giving them one more meal a day. It is hard to get the local “volunteers” to realize that the summer school is not school. Its not adverbs, nouns and long division. Its storybooks, and gym and crafts and I think it’s difficult to translate that.
I’m feeling very blah about university right now and I think its because I am comfortable at camp and I have good friends here. This will change when Ann leaves in a week from Monday so that should help me want to make the transition. But I want to be here in august and I have to be at university. Which is fine because its what I wanted to do, and I’m very excited about being able to spend a good amount of time here. I think I’m just in a bit of a funk though it will be cool to see what the conditions are at the international dorm. Bucket showers for a year? I could do that, but if they have as crappy beds as they do at camp I’m buying a mattress.

Prince and Prosper

2008-07-17T22:16:00.000+07:00

Sometimes its easy to se the smiling faces of the children around me and forget that these people, these refugees lead hard lives that can often be short. Its hard to see that under their school uniforms the children I teach are starving. Its only when you grab their arm to scold or cuddle them do you realize that mo of the kids on the refugee camp eat once a day and get none of the required vitamins for healthy growth and development. While I should’nt be blind to this every day it is today that I am thinking about it because a 2 year old I know on camp died this morning. Like me he was just a kid and like me he was a twin. Now in a couple of months his 2-year-old twin sister will have a hard time remembering what her brother looked like. The international volunteers often hung out with these two, Prince and Prosper and it will be hard to tell the IV’s who have left that prince died. He didn’t look sick and was always happy to see us. He died of dehydration cause by diarrhea. I don’t know if that’s a painful way to die or not. But I do know that its extremely curable and more importantly here, cheaply curable. I’m not sure what I think about what we could have done or should have done because the reality is that this is just someone I knew which is why I am upset. It’s a common occurrence in the greater lives of many peoples around the world. Its just so fixable that its hard to make it seem ok and that’s ok because its not. Its not ok. In fact, its pretty crap.

I have a love/hate relationship with the UN...as it should be...

2008-07-16T22:03:00.001+07:00

Hi all
I’ve just been woken up by the sounds of Liberia Camp. There was a full on brawl right outside our house this morning and because everyone is so bored on camp it became a 50 spectator affair which did not help cool down the situation. There was little we could do once we found out what the noise was and why they were fighting. Now that our while house is up and moving around I’m sweating too much to go back to bed so I thought I’d give you another update.
The new International volunteers (IV’s) who came on July 1st are halfway done with their time here, which seems strange to me. If I had left after 1 month I would have felt very unfulfilled s I’m just really now getting comfortable and into some kind of routine. I also wish that CBW or GVN would have told us that while we should fundraise for us to come over we should also fundraise another chunk of money to be used to fund people at our own discretion. But I’m managing to help a few people, most want to go back to Liberia and the UNHCR really screws over the Liberians who have come over here in the last 5 years because they don’t get ID cards which means that according to the UNHCR they are not refugees. Sometimes I see why this rule is in place but it really doesn’t make sense because the final outbreaks of the Liberian violence didn’t end until late 2003. So that means anyone fleeing from that conflict cant go back home now until they can find $130 for themselves and then more money on top of that for children and possessions. It’s again the system that is in place that doesn’t really work for the goals of the UNHCR.

Facts and figures about buduburam:
40,000: number of refugees who lived here
20,000: number that are here now
6: number of marriage proposals
7: number of cockroaches killed by yours truly
2: number of mice that fell on my mosquito net last night
1: number of cell phones recently bought by me! Yay. If you want the number contact me-envick@uvm.edu

miss everyone
EM

hot mess in africa

2008-06-30T22:27:00.002+07:00

Hello everyone
Sorry I have been so delinquent in posting here. I’d like to say its because its hard to load and post up these big programs on the poor dial-up that is available at the camp but I have a lingering feeling its simply because I’m lazy. So here is a first attempt at recapping my time since my half-assed last post.

Clarification: I have gotten into my yearlong program at the university of Ghana at legon. (yay, me! And finally----screw you international office of ed. Fuck the system J (hi mom) don’t pay for anything you don’t have to, and beee happier! and have happier parents. Don’t ever ever let them tell you no. cause they are wrong an you are right, always. Unless it comes to long division (more on that later) if you think it can be done and they (as in the man) say no for no damn good reason, then fight like hell.)
Sorry for that rant-----------This means a couple of things. I wont be back in the states until at least the end of may 2009. I will be traveling up to London to see my fab sister and hopefully parents/maxx in December. I’m toying with the idea of going back to Sudan after I’m done in Ghana because when am I gonna be just a flight away from Uganda again? Yep, never eva. So I’m missing everyone a lot but having a blast (see below). I miss camp, the lake and my bed! I wont be able to tell if I have meningitis here because I always have a sore neck from sleeping on the crappiest foam slab ever.

Lets see- my time in Sudan now feels a very long time ago and I have to reconcile with myself that it really was less than a month ago. While I a slowly getting to know and like many aspects of Ghana and the Liberians who I send most of my time with, I really miss the people I was traveling with to Sudan and the people I meet while there. I feel somewhat more connected to those people than I do the Liberians who I come across every day here.
First impressions- Living in a refugee camp that’s not a refugee camp anymore (as the UNHCR declared it a refugee settlement some years ago and since the “recent crisis” as the Liberians call it, where the Ghana police came in and deported about 50 women for protesting the “voluntary repatriation” which now has a deadline of October, which is point blank not going to happen and everyone here knows it.) is quite bizarre. Everyone studies the makings of a refugee camp, the conflicts that came about to cause these people to become refugees or IDP’s but I’ve read little lit on the death of a refugee camp.

These Liberians, some of who have been living here for the last 18 years, most often closer to 12 or 11 years, have made Ghana a home and at the same time, there are very much not integrated. Most of the Ghanaians I talk to call the camp ‘Liberia’ as do most of the international volunteers and the Liberians who live here seemed never to have any intention of integrated into the Ghanaian culture, they are much more Americanized than the Ghanaians and I wonder stupidly perhaps how their perceptions of the US are changed by their history. Most of the Liberians here are the decedents of the African Americans who founded their country. Their flag is unmistakably connected to ours, identical in every way except that instead of 50 stars there is simply 1. I don’t know how the Liberians feel about their unique history, I haven’t asked yet and I wonder how many of them are aware of it.

The social problems on camp seem more to be about poverty and their status as immigrants in general rather than the refugee factor. There are definitely rough relationships between the Liberians and Ghanaians and a lot of distrust between the two groups. The hardest parts so far has been saying no to fifteen people a day asking for money, or food. The requests for sex and marriage have been definitely easier to answer, even if the pursuers are more stubborn, but the food part is hard. Its like when we have leftovers from lunch we can literally give them to starving people here. The little kids with the skinny legs and huge bellies never gets any easier to see. There are some prostitutes on camp and one in particular who hangs out around our house often. She’s practically harmless to the girls, though she tries to get with any guy iv, but she’s is strangely a very good guide to the camp and helps out a lot when she’s not asking for money or other things. We have little to no privacy as a house, there are always some people, mostly children around our door at all time until our guards come around 8 and tell them off.
It’s also hard to know who to help and who is trying to scam you. At some points though, because most of the people we interact with are refugees, it feels like, yeah they are scamming us, but should we care? In the long run that answer is yes, we should care but its very tempting to just say nah, its ok.

What I actually do at the camp- so I wanted to help in the micro-lending programs because its what I’m interested in and I think it has the potential for great impact and fits in with my women’s empowerment kick. However, because so many people are leaving back to Liberia, some of the women were just leaving the country without paying back their loans therefore CBW shut down the programs. Bummer for me but once a week I go into the office and I get to dissect the entire infrastructure that they had in place for the program and I am slowly seeing how I can implement the program in conjunction with the nesei schools. On another note I’ve also meet a girl who is doing the kiva fellowship here in Accra, which is where I think I want to be doing after college. She’s a good contact and very nice. So I’m actually teaching the 1st grade. Yes, reading and writing and arithmetic (not long division because I can barley do it now on paper, let alone teach it). I’ve mostly been working on phonics because my 1st graders can copy down notes or years but when you ask them what it says they don’t know. So all of the notes they have on mammals and reptiles do them little good. I work with another teacher, Dixon and he has a much better handle on the kids than I do. Whenever he leaves they basically go crazy and its very frustrating to get them to do much of anything. Because corporal punishment is used everywhere except at the CBW school (or its supposed to not be) it’s hard to discipline because the kids all know that white people don’t hit anyone. Its not very rewarding on a day-to-day basis but I know (or rather I keep telling myself) that it will be later. The class is made u of 6 to 12 year olds so its hard to judge where they are especially because everything is done in groups. I try to get one on one time with all of them but they way the system is set up its simply really hard to get everyone to have enough time.

Free time- my basic schedule during the week is get up around 6, (I know its awful but its so hot its hard to sleep in here, plus your so tired from the day, everyone gets to bed around 9) get to school around 7, and then school gets out around 12, sometimes later. On Wednesdays I go into the CBW office after lunch around 1:30 to work on the micro-lending stuff, other days we hold arts and crafts day or story time at the library in the afternoons. The 2 days I have the afternoons to myself are the best. I’ve taking to wandering around the camp and meeting and talking to people. This has both its benefits and disadvantages (like the 6 marriage proposals I’ve managed to rack up), but I think the benefits heavily out way the nuisances of walking around at camp alone.

Some of the people I’ve meet are wonderful and full of strength and resilience while others seem to be merely subsistence-ly living. ( meh, that’s def not a word but it should be) I have lunch some days with Tenma, a really spunky 21 years old with a 4 month old, Radi the cutest little boy. I go over and baby-sit some times too if she’s feeling tuckered out. She lives with her much older sister, who has 6 kids of her own, all boys, they are 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 12 years old and really nice kids but they definitely are a handful. I haven’t asked yet about their refugee history and its sometimes easy to forget that most of these people are traumatized as they put up a brave front most of the time. I’m not sure about the men in these children or their mothers lives as I’ve not seen one guy at the house the whole time I’ve been there. They have enough food most of the time I’ve been there and its hard explaining to them about why I wont eat the food they made. They always try to serve me these huge portions first before they give any to themselves or their kids. So we’ve compromised and now I have to bring a dish to lunch with me to share before I let them give me any food. I don’t know if that’s good enough but I find that here is all about balancing what we should be doing and what is realistic to do and in the end does it really matter?

On the weekends- most of the time the international volunteers (IV’s) take trips to other parts of Ghana and sometime the Ivory Coast or Togo. I’ve stayed in Ghana because my summer visa is only for a single entry, when I get my student visa I’ll have more freedom to move around West Africa. I’ve been all around Accra, to Cape Coast, Kakum National Park, did the canopy walk which was fantastic, went to Boti falls and Akaa falls, and Ann and I swam under them which has been my favorite thing so far. (no worms yet!) we Also when to the botanicals gardens in Aburi and Koff-town which are about 2 and 3 hours northeast of accra. Traveling around is relatively easy, but not hassle free. Its hard to get a good non-obruni price (that mean “white person”) and we lose money that way but the tro-tros, which are just like the matatus in east Africa are the cheapest way to travel and you have more fun getting to know the people on the tro-tros than taking a expensive private taxi anyway.
Besides the waterfalls and getting to know people in the camp I really love just walking around the smaller towns in the north of greater Accra and really being there without a guidebook telling me what to do. There has been some conflicts between our traveling group about how much should be planned out on these weekend excursions and how much wandering around should be done rather than getting to where we need to get to. I think its one thing to live with people and a whole other function to travel with them. Some people seem to be more care-free about their traveling while others need more structure and guidance. This can work but it becomes a problem when the ones who need more structure and guidance rely on those others who just want to wander around and are very reluctant to separate from the others, even though traveling together is making things more difficult. Oh well not everyone is going to get along the whole time. Ann and I are going to Kumasi next weekend and 4 volunteers are leaving, including 2 from our house, Nadina and my roommate Sarah along with Becky who has been 2 months and jp who is going to Liberia.

Funny/sketchy things that happen to me on a reg. basis-
Marriage/sex proposals
Being asked if I’m a Christian every day
Being berated for laughing at church (I cant help it!!)
Being told people like my status (yet to know what that means)
Having little kids run up to me on the streets at all times
Making babies cry because of my white skin
Every time I trip or fall (often) everyone always says “sorry”
Still getting lost at camp and having random people come up and point me in the right/wrong direction
Still cant get over being hissed at to get my attention (rude Italian men always pop up in head every time)
Having random people touch my hair/face/skin

And for Anne and others- the first (I guess second) of many a-rant. Take it as you will, I’ll probably feel different tomorrow-
Africa is not a magical place where I finally feel alive or some place that I with I could stay forever its not. It’s a place with all of the same problems as in the rest of the world but its magnified here. These people are different around me but also the same. I guess I think its important to clarify that there are parts about Ghana that I love and parts that I don’t like as much. There is nothing I hate because I’ve only been here for 2 months and I just don’t know yet. This is also a bunch of crap anyway. Long speeches and writings about “Africa” a place that besides geographically does not really exist are always full of crap. I know nothing about the complexities of where I am. And even though I’m here for a year I have no idea what it is I want to accomplish except help a handful of good people and work out some ethic about why it is that I want to do. Also want to learn how to balance water on my head but have little faith in myself that it as a realistic goal for the next 10 months….we’ll just have to see.

hot mess in africa

2008-06-30T22:27:00.001+07:00

2008-05-30T17:08:00.000+07:00

Hi all

So its been a roller-coaster since i got back from Sudan. British Airways lost all of our groups bags on tuesday when we arrived at JFK. This was fine for everyone except me since I am shipping out later today for Ghana. It was a real hassle but i'm happy to say that this morning i got them! yay!

speaking of Sudan, it was fantastic, we left uganda on the 15th and got back there on the 24th so we were there about 9 days. As most people know, small airplanes and I are NOT friends but i stuck it out on the tiny plane and landed safely in Yei, Southern Sudan where we were greeted by the sudan side of NESEI, and it was really great to see the co-director of the sudanese side, Lauren, who I lived with last summer with Sasha while we were interning.

The roads in sudan are incredibly terrible and every time we were driving i felt like i was on the Indiana Jones ride at disney. It takes over an hour to reach the school site which is only 13 km away from Yei town. someone was clever enough to film the drive and put it up on youtube so if you want to see how crazy it is go here.

I'll write more about sudan later but I have to say the best thing overall were the girls. They came little by little at first until we had about 30 girls at the school when I left on the 24th of May. They shown such promise and are very eager to learn.

more to come later as I repack and maybe if the other volunteers i'm meeting tomorrow in Ghana are lucky, i'll even do some wash while i'm here.

lots of love to everyone,

Emma

whats really happin'

2008-03-03T22:04:00.000+07:00

so yes,
heres the real plan:
I am going to Sudan in may to help open the first NESEI school, all very excting. Its going to be a health sciences high school with a concentration on girls enrollment.
Then i'm off to ghana for a year (hopefully)
basically I am vounteering at a refugee camp for 3 months about an hour outside of accra and then I plan on studying at the univeristy of Ghana for 2 semesters.....but because the univeirsties systems are so different from the ones here in the states....I don't find out if i get in to the program until the first week in june...at which point i will already be in ghana. this has the potentional to be very depressing but i'm hoping that they see i am already there and just let me in, yeah thats a great plan....
Also have to get though finals and SUDAN WEEK before any of this can happen
lots of work ahead but i'm very excited!

ho'k so here is the plan

2007-09-13T20:35:00.000+07:00

Alright anybody who does not get that reference please improve your life by going here

Anyway, this is the plan:
Finish this year at uvm
Go to Ghana at the end of May
Volunteer at refugee camp for three months
Go the University of Ghana for a year
Get back in May
Intern for NESEI
Finish senior year-thesis on Ghana women and children (DUH)
GRADUATE!
Go to graduate school in NYC (hopefully SIPA)
Start own nonprofit training young women of different rural communities to become certified PA's creating a network of women and communities across cultural boundaries
Training to include HIV/AIDS, prenatal, hospice (!) and general sex Ed.
(Maybe orphanages attached, who knows)
OR continue with NESEI
Hard to tell

Suggestions?

words to live by

2007-09-10T07:58:00.000+07:00

The lyrics to Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen, by Mary Schmich:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.