by Aaron Barlow
The lepers, consequently, had chosen a good place to pass the day. Three or four of them would sit in a row on mats outside the doors of the supermarket as we shoppers with shrimp chips in our baskets and chocolate bars melting in our hands dropped coins into their fingerless palms. They didn’t pay us much attention. Unlike the beggar on the post office steps they seemed happy, cheerful even, as they talked quietly amongst themselves. They had a good view, from where they sat, of people coming and going into town, of the Lebanese markets, of the Moslems praying in front of the mosque.
I suspected they even knew who’d made a strike at the diamond fields, if they didn’t employ miners themselves. One of them, it turned out, owned most of the taxis in town. It made sense really—not that that particular leper owned taxis—but that if a man did own taxis that he couldn’t drive, and if he happened to be a leper, what better place was there to pass the time?
Karen Hlynsky, who served in Sierra Leone from 1974-75, has been a program and curriculum developer for high school teachers and students with a special interest in teaching young people about environmentally sustainable development.
Time
Patricia Owen
Understanding the music of the spheres is lost in a land of clocks, regained only with patience, and easily lost again.
The heat was dissipating as I drew water from a well for my evening bath in Saare Kutayel, a village in Senegal. Sherife, a little boy about ten years old, stood next to me, chatting away about the cows he had been herding and helping me haul up heavy buckets.
Suddenly he grew quiet, softly touched my arm, and said with wonder, “Look.” He pointed up in the western sky, over the heads of a small knot of villagers peering in the same direction. Between the thin layers of parting clouds was the smallest curve of silvery light cradled in the vast darkness. This new moon signaled that Ramadan, a month of holy fasting for Muslims, would begin in the morning.
Living in Africa for over a year by that time, I’d already developed a whole new respect for the sun, moon, and cycles of time. More than once I’d awoken in the middle of the night to what I thought was a shining flashlight, only to groggily discover that it was the full moon. Having made its trek over the top of the big mango tree, it was now blasting into my mosquito net. And I’d long since learned to time my arrivals back to the village before dark on moonless nights.
I once got a late start from a faraway village. I rode my bike miles in blackness over a bumpy trail, with pounding heart, reassuring myself that the sinister clumps of trees around me were familiar patterns leading me home. Just the week before that, under a full moon, everything had been lit up like a fairyland. I had no idea that a chunk of cold rock over 200,000 miles away could make that much difference.
In the African language that I learned, Pulaar, the word “lewru” means “moon.” I was stunned one day when a native speaker told me that he was going to visit his relatives “si lewru mayii,” when the moon dies. I had to give this long thought before I understood that he meant “the end of this month.” The word lewru works perfectly for both because, naturally enough, the phases of the moon define the month. When the moon has passed through its waxing and waning, of course, the month is over.
In conversing with African friends about future plans, they referred to “lewru tubako,” tubako meaning white person. If I said a training event was going to be happening “next month” for example, they would clarify, “Lewru tubako?” which means, “the month (or moon) of the white person.” Though meant kindly, and for clarification, the question would inevitably make me cringe. It was like having to admit, “It’s true, we are arrogant enough to cast aside the whole natural order of things, the innate rhythm of the universe, and rely on an artificial, arbitrary system for keeping track of the passage of time.”
Solar time presented a similar disparity. There were no clocks, and having a watch was mostly just a status symbol. For written communication about time, pictures worked best. Often, I’d sit with people who just returned from the clinic with their paper bags of medicine, and I’d make little drawings, indicating when they should take each pill. If the directions said three times a day, I’d draw a picture of the sun rising, the sun centered high in the sky, and the sun setting.
Verbal communication about time required a different vocabulary. Among old people, all times hinged on the five daily prayer times. Since we were close to the equator (latitude 14 degrees north), the sun was in about the same place throughout the day all year around. This meant that the correspondence between the position of the sun and the time of day was always about the same. Even if people in my village didn’t personally practice the Muslim tradition of daily prayer, this rhythm of the day was clearly ingrained. Once I said to Aawdy, an older man, that I’d be by his hut “bimmbi law” (early morning) to go with him to look at his fields. This resulted in a discussion, as to whether that meant subaka (6:30 a.m.) exactly, or just sometime before mid-morning.
Arm waving also worked well to convey time of day. My villagers taught me that, instead of struggling for the words or concept of a particular time, I could say “I’ll see you tomorrow when the sun is here” and throw my arm up.
My neighbor Mariama loved learning anything new, so we often had discussions about time. During slow afternoons she’d say, “Let’s do the calendar.” I’d retrieve the little boldly colored calendar that an American friend had given me for a Christmas present. As we sat shoulder to shoulder on a woven mat, she would look at each page, clarify the name of the “lewru tabako” and count each date in that month, her finger running over the numbers in each row.
Mariama was fascinated about how Westerners tell time and liked to compare the time on her watch with mine. I knew we had made progress in cultural exchange one day when we were discussing a meeting I had the next day in another village. “I’ll be leaving when the sun is about here,” I said, pointing over the cornfields and toward the river. “Oh,” she said, barely looking at my earnestly positioned arm, “about ten in the morning?”
When I left Africa, I spent a few weeks in France, a dip into luxury. One day I was sitting in soft chair in a big house on Cezanne Avenue in Aix-en-Provence, reading a book and drinking tea. A wave of anxiety pulsed through me. I put my book down and wracked my brain; I had no deadlines, no appointments, nothing forgotten. And then I realized. I didn’t know where the sun was. Or, what phase of the moon we were in, or which constellations marched across the sky. I got up and looked out the window to get my bearings and realized that this was no doubt the first of many recalibrations my body and spirit would be making as I returned to the Western world.
Patricia Owen dutifully went to work every day as an executive for a nonprofit organization for twenty-five years and then gave it all up to go to Senegal to be a sustainable agricultural extension agent with the Peace Corps from 2003-05. She now lives as an artist and peace activist.
Learning to Play the Game of Life
Lawrence Grobel
Many lessons are learned in foreign lands—including the one Dorothy Gale learns in The Wizard of Oz: We needn’t ask questions of strangers, for the answers lie within.
When the Peace Corps sent me a letter of acceptance and told me my country assignment was Ghana, I was disappointed. I had indicated I wanted to serve in Africa, not South America.
Then I realized that Ghana was not Guyana; disappointment turned to joy.
I knew nothing about Ghana other than the fact that it was sandwiched between Togo and the Ivory Coast in West Africa and not between Suriname and Venezuela. But it was 1968: the year the Vietnam War was in full rage, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the year Mayor Richard Daley let loose the Chicago police on anti-war protestors outside the Democratic National Convention.
It was a good year to join the Peace Corps.
When I got off the plane, along with the
thirty other Volunteers that summer—the first group to be trained in country—I found out just how different Ghana was. I saw men walking around in wool suits when it must have been 100 degrees. Women balancing huge, carefully stacked trays of produce—papayas, oranges, plantains—on their heads while they carried babies on their backs. All the officials in their varied uniforms were black. White faces stuck out in a crowd, children stared and called us obruni. Mosquitoes descended upon us as if we were pure sugar. Local traders and prostitutes saw us as fresh meat.
We had come from the land of plenty, and it was expected of us that we’d share what we had with those who didn’t because they would do the same if positions were reversed. They even had an appropriate saying, one often seen on the local tro-tro’s: “All Die Be One Die.” They had sayings for almost anything, painted on walls, on mammy wagons, on the sides of lorries, at eating and drinking establishments known as chop bars: “Skin Pain,” “Time is Money,” “Book No Lie,” “And So What,” “Poor No More,” “Why Worry Drinking Bar,” “Loose Your Belt Chop Bar,” “Don’t Mind Your Wife Chop Bar,” “Life Is a Game Store.”
We had arrived in a third-world country and were about to enter their game store with their rules. We were shuffled off to a training college in Winneba to learn them.
It was once the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, where Chinese and Russian envoys came to instill their ideologies on those who ran the country, until Nkrumah was toppled and the communists kicked out. Now it was America’s turn, and we were her ambassadors: a group of carefully selected college graduates about to be placed in secondary schools and field positions throughout the country, to help undo whatever muck was done before, and to show by example why democracy had it over group-think. At least that’s what Washington presumed.
In fact, we were a bunch of draft-dodging, dope-smoking, well-intentioned idealists who preferred the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver. We were coming with open minds and hearts, looking for adventure and new experiences. If we could pass on knowledge, that would be great; but many of us were unsure what knowledge we had to pass on, and were far more aware that, in the give-and-take, we’d be taking more than giving. After all, we were the strangers in this strange land and we had a lot to learn.
We didn’t get much chance to explore Winneba initially because the training was vigorous. There was language (Twi) in the mornings, group interactions in the afternoons, and sleep in small dormitory rooms at night. A psychologist observed our behavior and veteran Volunteers told us what we could expect. A nurse patted our bites with calamine lotion and warned us to take our anti-malarial pills, boil our water, and stay away from rabid dogs. If we ever got bitten we’d have to undergo a series of painful injections in our stomachs unless we brought the animal to be tested. If we were in some distant village, we’d have to kill the dog, cut off its head, and put it on ice until we were able to get to Accra.
The annual Deer Hunting Festival brought the entire town into the streets. It rivaled anything I’ve seen in Pamplona during the running of the bulls, the Palio di Siena, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. We found ourselves dancing in the streets with fat Ghanaian women who laughed at us and put white powder on our faces.
Beer was plentiful and came in bottles much larger than the Coors and Buds we were used to. It was strong and cheap and, after a few rounds, you could get very friendly with those more interested in what you had in your wallet than in handshakes or pats on the back. I remember sitting with another Volunteer and a trader who was trying to sell him a Rolex watch for forty cedis, which was the equivalent of forty dollars. The Volunteer wasn’t interested, but I was and got him down to fifteen and two beers. When the thing stopped working an hour later, I opened it up and saw an aluminum band holding cheap parts in place. We were in the Peace Corps, but we were on our own. This was the price of admission.
“Have you been warned not to come into town on Wednesdays after dark?” an English doctor asked at a local bar.
“Yeah, something about a giant evil spirit who roams the streets.”
“It’s true, you know,” the doctor said. “I’ve seen it.”
This spirit, in the form of a seven-foot man, left his beach cove to visit his wife on Wednesdays. Everyone knew who the wife was, but no one claimed to have seen the spirit-husband. If he saw you looking at him, you would be frozen in position for the rest of the night. It sounded like a tale to keep people off the streets one night a week. But this doctor said he had been attending a patient on the forbidden night and, when he went to his car after midnight to return to Accra, he locked eyes with the spirit. His car went dead and the doctor sat glued to his seat, hands on the wheel, until the morning. “Then the damn car started and I was on my way.” He had our attention; though even with the beer, we hadn’t been in Ghana long enough to take him seriously.
It was impossible to get used to the bugs, but you did learn to ignore them. It was harder to ignore the children when they peeped through the holes in the tin bathhouse, stifling giggles as I tried to bathe with my large bucket of cold and small can of boiled water. It took a few attempts to get the hang of it, wetting my body down, soaping up, then mixing the waters and pouring it over me to get clean. Washing my hair was the real challenge, the kerosene lamp providing the only light.
On special occasions, I did my best to be clean. An invitation to dinner at the home of the town’s only doctor was such an event. Dr. Ampofo was a university trained medical doctor, as well as a renowned sculptor whose works were exhibited in galleries around the world. He had studied in the U.S. and England and was head of the Tettah-Quarshie Hospital. He participated in a program with the Smithsonian Institute where he would send them interesting local flora rich in medicinal value to be studied. The doctor told us that he often used the services of the surrounding fetish priestesses to help him cure patients that didn’t respond to Western medicine. He never told his patients, he said, because once they journeyed to the hospital, they were putting behind their beliefs in juju and ancient practices.
“You should go to Larteh,” he suggested over wine. “That’s the home of Nana Oparibia, the fetish priestess whom Kwame Nkrumah used to consult before he made any decisions. She’s a very powerful woman, and she trains many others in the art of healing and prediction.” As Larteh was only a few towns north of Mampong, and since I had the draft still very much on my mind, I thought it might make for an enlightening excursion into what truly was the Africa of my imagination.
The hills leading to Larteh were steep, and markers along the way had become part of the legend of the town. A large red anthill shaped like a pregnant woman was really not an anthill at all, a man sitting next to me on the lorry told me. It was the remains of a stubborn pregnant woman who was told by a fetish priestess not to walk into Larteh with sandals on her feet. She didn’t listen. As one of the chief reasons women came to the shrine at Larteh had to do with conception, this story made perfect sense: the priestess’s feet were never to touch the ground, thus, out of respect, one must approach the fetish compound barefooted.
The place was not a tourist attraction, but one of business. Women who went into “possession” throughout Ghana and found themselves speaking in tongues were often sent to Larteh to become trained in the fetish arts. On the white walls leading to the compound were large wasp nests, which were symbols of good luck. The wasps, which lived in pairs, were lean, long, black, and scary. In one corner I saw a broken toy doll placed against a large black cauldron, where barren women made their offerings. Off to the side were the bones and skulls of animals that had been sacrificed. Inside the cave-like rooms were various carved stools painted white, symbolizing the deified spirits of ancestors. In the open square of the compound were a dozen women all wearing white cloths, their bodies covered in white clay, their hair plaited and coated with a red powder. Opposite them was Nana Oparibia, the head honcho, sitting on an elabor
ately carved stool, her sandaled feet resting on a white goat skin. Her advisors sat on simpler stools on each side of her. There was no mistaking the woman’s imposing presence, and when she saw me, I knew I had to lower myself before her.
“Get on your knees,” one of the trainees who could speak English whispered to me. “Make your offering.”
I did as she instructed and crawled before the high priestess with the bottle of gin I had been told to bring. She took it from me, twisted off the cap, and poured three drops on the ground before pouring some into a clay cup and handing it to me. I assumed this was her way of insuring the gin wasn’t poisoned, and I swallowed it in one gulp. The Nana said something and her advisors laughed. She poured more gin into the cup and handed it to me again. I drank it, there was more laughter, and she did it a third time. The gin was strong, and I didn’t like it. If she insisted I drink the damn bottle I was going to get sick, so I waved my hands trying to say it was enough, but she pushed the cup at me and I drank. Later I found out that I was supposed to drink the first offering in three sips, but as I had done it in one she was only following tradition by having me down three large gulps.
My head swimming I started to ask her if she could answer a question, but Nana Oparibia didn’t speak English and the woman next to her, who did, said I must stand and greet the twelve women in training. I went around shaking hands with each of them. The fourth woman I touched took my hand in both of hers, locked eyes with mine, and started to shake. I tried to withdraw my hand but she held it tight and words that sounded like “Antay Antay Antay” came out of her mouth. She let me go when her body seemed to lose control, and she began jumping around like a soul possessed, which she was. The other chalked women began clapping their hands and singing as she hopped around, her arms waving as if she was a bird in flight. Then a second woman got the spirit and joined her, their heads bobbing up and down like lizards, their cloths unraveling as they danced. Their exposed breasts showed their ages: one was long and wrinkled; the other small and firm. They whirled and shouted for fifteen minutes as the others encouraged them. When the spirits left they collapsed to the ground, were covered with their cloths, and left alone until they recovered.
