A Great Week: Wednesday

I awoke early because we were to arrive at the Red Cross’s office by 8 that morning. Nadia made a breakfast of fried eggs and sausage and showed me how she cuts vegetables in her hand – no cutting board, just in your palm. I also had Milo for the first time, which is Nestles version of hot chocolate. Nestle has quite the monopoly on dairy products here. The hot chocolate was delicious, but difficult to drink in 80 degree weather. The Red Cross office consisted of a single room with a large table that took up the majority of the space and two small desks at the far side of the room. There was very little open space in the office and you had to slide from chair to chair to move about. The goal of the meeting was to go through the questionnaire question by question to discuss the proper translation of it and the answer choices and to make sure everyone was on the same page for what they would tell the girls. I thought it would take 45 minutes at the most, but ended up taking over two hours. Finally, we finished and had to head out to the school where all of the girls were to meet.

We arrived to find approximately 60 girls there on time. The program is expecting to train 250 girls, so it was very discouraging to only see 60. By the end of the day though, a total of 132 had taken the survey at varying time. Let me back up though, we gave introductions and explained what was taking place today. It took an hour and 15 minutes just to register everyone and get them to sign consent forms. The lack of literacy makes everything take much longer. For girls who can’t sign their name at all, we have to use ink pads so they can stamp their thumbprints. Many did not have phones either, so we had to get house numbers to be able to contact them in the future. I started getting nervous that if something as simple as registering took this long, how long was the survey going to take. Well, we started the survey at 2 and ended at 6. Four hours for an eight page survey in a school with little air circulation. Many of the girls had babies and toddlers and I was truly amazed at the patience of these little ones. Really, I was amazed by the perseverance of the girls and the moderators as well. We had divided the girls up between those who could read and write and those who could not, but really when it came to writing sentences they all needed help. There were about 2 moderators for 20 girls and we could have used twice as many moderators. We were lucky that all 250 didn’t come because it would have taken twice as long. Everyone stuck it out though and seemed to be able keep up their interest in the survey questions during the long four hours. At the end, the girls were all given a small stipend for transportation costs to the school and were given packets of drinking water.

Mary invited us all out to join her friends at a bar for dinner and a few drinks. I couldn’t wait. It was my first time going out with people to a bar and I would be with all Ghanaians, so I would get the local experience. There were about 15 people around the table outside of the open-air bar, lights in the distance and highlife music playing in the background. I ordered a Club beer and Mary took out some friend chicken and onions prepared by ones of her friends. Nadia and I ran to the bathroom where I was hoping to be able to wash my hands before touching the chicken. There was no light and no actual seat for the toilet. How I miss the California toilet seat cover law! I used my handy little blue flashlight, but of course was totally out of luck with washing my hands since there was no running water in the bathroom. I would just not touch any of the food. As soon as I picked up the chicken leg though I realized this would be difficult. I am just a bad meat eater. When I am faced with having to eat meat, I pick it apart to ensure that the only pieces that go into my mouth are perfect tiny pieces of white meat. This is not easy to do with no utensils and very little light. I noticed the others were eating everything down to the bone. How do they do that? The one saving grace is that it was so dark that they could not see me discard the fried pieces of skin onto the ground. I managed to eat a few and tried to eat as many onions as possible and then Mary called me up to dance. She had wanted me to dance all day with her, even at the school. So, just a quick side note… it has been difficult for me to get used to the loud volume of everything. Mobile phones go off all the time and not at normal volumes, they are all on loud and they all are unique songs not ring tones, so when a phone is ringing there is no break from the sound until someone decides to finally answer. Similarly, there are often radios or TVs on during meetings and a few of the Red Cross staff wanted to play music while the girls were trying to take the survey. This has been especially difficult for me because the accent is so difficult for me to understand that they may as well be speaking another language, especially when you add the noise of a radio announcer speaking Twi. OK, so back to the dancing. Mary had me show her some of my fantastic moves at the school, which I have really just one or two and then insisted that I do more dancing at the bar. The music wasn’t bad to dance to; it was no hip-hop, but it was sort of an 80s version of hip-hop. They have something called hip-life here which combines the “poppy” highlife with hip-hop. We all danced and Nadia joined us too. It was fun. Mary kept saying “Heather, get low” which meant that she wanted me to slowly bend my knees and wave my arms. For those of you who know him, I felt like I was dancing like Joel. They loved it though and I was told that I dance like a Ghanaian – which is hard for me to believe, but it is nice that I have found out who I dance like. At night, I introduced Nadia to the show Aliens in America, which I am able to download on iTunes also. I was a little nervous about the themes presented in the show and really emphasized that all Americans are not like these people. She loved it and thought it was hilarious – I wonder if we found the same things funny.