Naama

Two weeks in an Asante village is like stopping time. The world kept moving the last 13 days but you could have fooled me. While Obama was winning the Nobel Prize (can someone explain to me why or was Bush just THAT bad?) I was meeting children and mothers living in a level of poverty that I have never seen with my own two eyes. I interviewed farmers for a paper I have to write and got an itemized breakdown of the expenses and income of farmers in a remote village in Ghana's Ashanti Region.

I must say that my experience in the village was a cut above anything I've seen thus far in Ghana. In fact, my brief career in Ghanaian film is far out of my mind already. What I saw wasn't pretty, and in fact a lot was quite ugly, but I know now that the things that have shaped me the most in my life have been on the ugly side. This was just another layer of skin put on me. It's probably not a coincidence that the past two weeks in the village led me to decide with another student in the village that we would come back this summer to build another school building.

My interviews with villagers led me to realize just how crippling the "free market" is for Ghanaian farmers. When rain season is bad, the farmer gets poor quality crops and low yield, and therefore (s)he gets less money. When rain season is good, the market gets flooded with cash crops and the price is so low that the farmer gets little anyway. Either way the farmer loses, but one way is just losing more slowly. In fact, the only time the market beneficial is during dry season when crop supply is low and prices are high. Of course, farming with no rain is much more difficult and time-consuming.

Yet this was just the only the aspect of rural poverty that I studied in depth. I can't ever hope to convey the devastation I felt when realizing how little the children in the village of Naama eat. In fact, the children are probably the most searing memory I hold of Naama. The adults speak little English, and most hoped for some sort of compensation for my presence in their village. The children in Africa, however, are its most heartwarming and heartbreaking feature at the same time. When you meet the children, you see the smart ones, the bullies, the shy and quiet ones, the sweet ones, the troublemakers, and every other typecast you can imagine. Then you realize your seeing your own childhood, and without even remembering the names of the people you went to school with you remember the personalities that are being resurrected from long-dead memories by these children. Then you realize, and then you understand, these children are you. Or rather, in the terms dictated by reality and not imagination, these children could be you. But your imagination, that part of the brain not bound by reality, believes these children are in fact you. And all that comes before you realize that they go to bed starving every night.

I saw the learning conditions of the primary school in Naama, and it was indeed beyond anything I've ever seen as well. There are five teachers (including the headmaster) for seven classes, and most days the teachers arrive to the remote village late. They practice corporal punishment, but that is the least of the problems of the schools (indeed I have no problem with it, and caned a few kids as I was teaching classes). The families are so poor they can barely afford uniforms, pencils, and notebooks, and many families don't send their children to school precisely because they can't afford those things. The parents barely speak any English and in most cases no English, but their children must learn the language in a village far away from any cosmopolitan area. The children are hungry yet are expected to learn, and the teachers are exhausted, overworked, and underpaid. And there only four classrooms, including the one outdoors. Some parents send their children to go to school in the next village, and that prevents the government from sending the teachers needed since the school can't meet the minimum number of pupils for a grade, which is 20.

It is indeed a vicious cycle of poverty and poor education facing Naama, and the children, parents, and teachers have led me to the resolution that I will return to Naama this summer to build another school building. Soon I will have to begin raising the money with my colleague, and our minimun is $20,000. We're also considering taking a camera to film a documentary. It may seem an impossible number, but I know it isn't. Naama taught me what impossible really looks like. So any donations or suggestions from the world where time moves forward are greatly appreciated.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm very grateful that I was born in the United States. I know it goes against all my political beliefs, but I know a privilege when I see one. Being an American is a privilege, albeit one built on the backs of poor laborers both at home and abroad. On a stranger note, in Naama I also slaughtered a chicken. I cut its neck, or rather cut half of it. The blade was dull, so my friend Kwame finished the job, but I did indeed feel the life leave the chicken beneath my feet. Tomorrow we head to Tamale, in the Northern Region on the southern edge of the Sahara, so rest assured my next post will have something new once more.