So much blogging to catch up on!
I've been in Ghana for more than four weeks now, and the biggest surprise of the trip has been how easy it has been to acclimate to living in a new country. There are two reasons for this: I'm living like an expat, and I'm surrounded by other expats. Before I arrived, I knew that this is the lifestyle I wanted to experience, since it closely resembles the life I will lead if I move to a developing country post-graduation. Observing it from the outside before I tried it this summer, I always found it insular and insulated; and now that I'm inside, I find that I was right. It would be easy to exist as an expat for a moderate length of time: I have all the comforts of home (for example, at the moment I'm sitting in an air-conditioned cafe eating a doughnut and drinking a mocha) and the community is easy to find and join (a lot of the people we hang out with are expats we randomly met through friends of friends or in expat hangouts like this cafe). Unfortunately, the things that make it comfortable also make it easy to stay within it and never to see the real Ghana, and I'm thankful for my past experiences of roughing it here.
Work and play are both going well. I won't talk about work in detail since I can't divulge too much about the research I'm working on (IPA policy) but it's a perfect balance of data analysis, which allows me to develop my Stata skills, and project development, which allows me to think about what work will be interesting for IPA to take on in the future. Day to day, I'm usually sitting in front of my computer either working on Stata or writing project proposals, but I actually really enjoy both. Next week I'll be traveling out to the Eastern Region of Ghana to visit one of our clients and the week after I'll be doing field research for a new project in Greater Accra; so I feel like I'm getting a lot of variation in my work, certainly more than some of the other interns. Definitely got lucky!
In terms of play, we've been taking intern trips almost every weekend. Three weeks ago we went to Cape Coast to check out the slave castles and the Kakum canopy walkway and (of course) Hans Cottage, which is a restaurant and hotel built in the center of a crocodile-infested pond. None of the activities we did in Cape Coast were new, since I had gone there in 2008, but Hans Cottage took things to a new level. A few years ago, I was amazed at how blasé the Hans Cottage staff were about tempting the crocodiles with raw meat on the ends of sticks. This time I could not believe my eyes when they were letting entire school groups of children stand around a particularly vicious-looking beast and take turns sitting on its back (I'm not joking). We were just waiting for the crocodile to realize, “Hey, wait a minute...I'm a crocodile!” and then take a bite out of one of their legs. But then we though that it's unlikely that crocodiles can self-actualize, so we stopped waiting and ate our lunches.
The climax of the afternoon came when one of the staff members, who was particularly casual about the whole crocodile taunting scenario, decided that one of the crocs was misbehaving and actually threw a chair at it. I have never in my life seen such a scene. It was equal parts stupid (because she threw a chair at an animal that evolution has favored for 200 million years and believed that it wouldn't do anything to defend itself) and sad (because it didn't do anything to defend itself, probably because it couldn't self-actualize). Instead of defending itself the thing just turned and jogged back into the water. I don't know about the others who were watching, but I was hoping for a fight, and I was rooting for the crocodile.
Last Sunday I went back to Kpeleho to visit everyone in the village. David, another IPA intern, came with me to check it out because I told him how wild it would be, and I think he concurred after he saw it. It was incredibly heartwarming being back in the village. I have never seen anyone's face light up the way I saw the faces of Gloria, Christopher, Paster Martin, Cecilia, Alfred, and so many others light up when they saw me. I'm sure I was beaming as well. I had waited three years to see them and during that time had never realistically thought I would make it back. That's the trouble with loving people in all corners of the world, I suppose; opportunities to touch each others' lives are so few and far between and sometimes only present themselves once.
So, news from the village! Everyone seems happy and healthy. The honey business is still in operation, though Pastor Martin hasn't expanded it, but it's providing a small income for his family at least. All the Gabianu children except Ema have moved out of the village to Ho. Gloria is hoping to go to nursing school in the fall. Christopher is working at a rebar factory. Meanwhile, Ema has taken over Christopher's place in the church as emcee, which gave me a big shock when I went to the church for an hour. I'm hoping to go back to the village sometime this summer and maybe bring some other interns with me. Oh, and I took a ton of village scene photos, which I didn't have last time!
We've been exploring a good bit within Accra as well, as you can tell from the Google Map blog entry (which I am trying to continually update). Next place to explore: somewhere they have barbecue, since tomorrow is the Fourth of July!
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