So, so many things have happened in the past few weeks that I
find myself with neither the right words nor the right place to start. There
have been so many moments, both big and small, profound and subtle, that I
continue to reflect upon as I pass through these tropical days and nights. I am
reminded of my time in Peace Corps where such a disposition was my daily routine.
During those times, I led a life that, while seemingly infinite and often
quiet, was always teaching me something and was always on the verge of erupting, pushing me, challenging me even further.
It is in such times (the calm as well as the storm) that you
find yourself. It is in such times that you dig to your core and uncover who
you really are, underneath the bullshit and the facade that society seems to
thrust upon us. Such time was this past month. I now
know, even more so than before, that I am in the right line of work. It
is work that I don’t think most people would choose and it is often work that I
don’t think most people understand. And for good measure, it isn’t noble or
sophisticated either--in fact it is quite the opposite. But still, it
allows me to see things, to do things, to have experiences and more importantly, to share my time and my life with communities that most people could not even
imagine.
In a way, it is my dream job--as much as you might consider
pooping in a hole next to 5 strangers a dream, but also as much as you might consider fishing in the wild and warm waters of an early African dawn a dream
as well. To me, the rewards far outweighs the inconsequential discomforts. If you
want a Hilton, be a fucking tourist. If you want a genuine experience, you’ve
gotta earn that shit.
The stories in the next couple blogs will not be in any
chronological order and some may be redundant, but I have to begin typing somewhere
or else my giardiasis-enfeebled mind is going to implode. Hang with me--its
late here in Ghana and its hot and my typing fingers are feeling loose, so here
we go…
The truck picked me up at 5 am and carried me along as it
crawled through the un-ordered side streets that connect the outlying communities
surrounding Donkokrom. With one more sleepy passenger in tow, we began the journey
along the winding dirt road that leads to the northern banks along the southern
branch of Lake Volta. When we arrived, a grey morning lay over the lake as women and children gathered buckets of water in the muddy shallows, crowded between a shore of human and animal tracks and the hollow,
dead trees that inhabit the bay.
We proceeded to unload our gear: food for several people for
3 days, fuel for 4 (just in case), solar chargers, personal luggage, and two
motorcycles fresh from the local mechanic. As we loaded this equipment onto the
back of a 20 foot skiff with the help of the boat’s captain and two shipmates,
the dark clouds which had hung promisingly over a rain-starved savannah began surrendering
to the rising sun without yielding so much as a drop. As we set off with only one of our two outboard motors operating,
we chased the straggling bit of clouds south until they had left the sky
completely. There has been such little rain this year.
The boat ride was long. Despite assurances from the crew to take
only 3 hours, some mechanical issues and a strong current helped to stretch
this leg of our trip into a generous 4 hours. Our breakfast was taken on
board--a feast of fried fish, Ga kenkey, and hot pepper--between communal stints of water bailing (if you recall from previous stories, many of
the hand-made boats on Lake Volta, whether big or small, are anything but
watertight). When we arrived at Dwarf island it was almost mid-day. The farmers working in their rice paddy fields at the edge of the waters seemed curious at
our arrival: not many people wander here (a fact that will be re-visited again
later) and certainly not any awkward-looking yevus (white people).
Our landing was followed by another hour or two of unloading
gear and portaging it up the bare, rocky shore, though low groves of bim and
acacia trees, and into the nearest community. It was here, with the family of a
local school teacher, that we would make our basecamp to visit other areas
along this massive island for the next few days.
Before I continue, perhaps I should briefly explain what exactly it
is I am doing here, and who I am here with:
For my fieldwork, I have been working with the help and contacts of the Afram Plains Development Organization (APDO), an amazing NGO that has a stellar reputation across Ghana for working (and working well) in some of the most remote and isolated parts of this country. To explain why they pick such places to operate, Modoc--the organization’s jovial, white-haired and wizened founder/executive director--simply says, “There are people in those places too.” I had been invited on this trip by Modoc in order to accompany a small team while they monitor one of the projects they have been establishing on Dwarf island. The island itself is a chronically under-served and isolated area that is home to somewhere between 47 and 100 communities (the number is still unclear, but at anywhere from 100 to 500 people each, that is a lot of people).
For my fieldwork, I have been working with the help and contacts of the Afram Plains Development Organization (APDO), an amazing NGO that has a stellar reputation across Ghana for working (and working well) in some of the most remote and isolated parts of this country. To explain why they pick such places to operate, Modoc--the organization’s jovial, white-haired and wizened founder/executive director--simply says, “There are people in those places too.” I had been invited on this trip by Modoc in order to accompany a small team while they monitor one of the projects they have been establishing on Dwarf island. The island itself is a chronically under-served and isolated area that is home to somewhere between 47 and 100 communities (the number is still unclear, but at anywhere from 100 to 500 people each, that is a lot of people).
The program APDO is running is called CBE, which stands for Complimentary
Basic Education. The gist of the project is such: APDO identifies children in
impoverished communities who are not going to school (either because they are busy
helping their families to farm or because they have fallen behind and dropped-out).
These kids are given a 9-month program, taught by individuals from their own
community that are trained by the NGO (it is very hard to convince state-trained
teachers to serve in such remote areas), in order to catch them up and
re-insert them into the national educational system. The program has been
incredibly successful, serving almost 1,000 children each year. At the end of
its 4th year, it is to be expanded yet again, this time into other areas of the
country. CBE combines community buy-in with realistic developmental goals and is
supported by the amazing commitment of the APDO staff. It is grassroots; it is
sustainable; it works.
The next few days are spent on the back of a
motorcycle, getting lessons in geopolitics, philosophy, and development ethics
from Modoc himself. We spend hours navigating and getting lost in an maze of small footpaths that criss-cross this island in search for communities buried in the endless sea of the Africa bush. Most communities need to be found using GPS coordinates as there are no signs
and no maps, only vague instructions gathered from previous visits and the
memories of our two other APDO companions, Paulina and Grace. Our efforts lead
us through dense vegetation, down irrigation channels and across dried river valleys.
More than a few times, as we weave through the shoulder-high grasses of rolling
savannah, we are greeted by a sweet smell: the hoppy, crisp
aroma of marijuana fields boasting a plenty and a purple-hue that sends shivers
down my legs.
“No one comes here,” offers Modoc, “If police come here, they [the farmers] will take care of them and put their
bodies in the lake. No one will find them.”
This is a potentially worrisome realization, especially as
we find ourselves stumbling though quite a number of these glorious fields, but my apprehension is undue: the work APDO has done here has earned them a great amount of respect and appreciation from the local people. Here on Dwarf island, the state is all but absent in regards to almost all services or support; what hypocrisy it would be for them to show up only to enforce some asinine drug policy. And once again, Modoc explains the situation best--I paraphrase his words below:
“People need to eat. They want a
better future for their children. The state has forgotten them, or ignored
them, or maybe doesn’t even know they exist. So they do whatever they have to
in order to secure food and make a living in a harsh environment--no running
water, no electricity, no roads, maybe a few schools and a medical clinic here
or there but nobody to staff them. These are not criminals and it would be
ignorant and shameful to treat them as such. They are honest, good people who
are making the best with the few cards that they have been dealt.”
And he is right. So right. Like many peasant communities all
over the world, they are occupying a tricky space between legality and
illegality, but an even trickier space between life and death, nutrition and
starvation. With the rains dancing always on the horizon but never visiting the
soil, these are lean times--a phrase that takes on new meaning when working
with people who are living in the midst of food insecurity. People need to eat
and weed is a hell of a cash crop thanks to healthy demand from the developing world (let’s
not forget that little detail of the story now).
But still, despite hectares of marijuana plants the size of small trees growing happily in the open, it is the people amaze me most:
children walking 5 kilometers, twice a day for school only to come home and
help with the farm work they missed. Men toiling in a wicked hot
sun to tease life from water-less pastures. Women with babies on their backs still carrying
water, caring for children suffering from malaria and working in the fields but, seemingly always
with a song on their lips.
It is not idyllic or romantic, like some bucolic country
life on the back of a postcard or a made for TV movie. It is a hard life. It is
unforgiving. It is unimaginably challenging. But just the same, it is a testament to shear
human endurance and a capacity for love and perseverance that few people (myself
included) from privileged backgrounds can ever, ever begin to fucking imagine.
And so for days, this motorcycle and this forgotten island became my school as well--an
educational experience that will always be lacking from the pampered classrooms at the universities (no matter how much money they spend and despite the
glamorous financial gifts that rich alumni dump back into the fond memories of their
youthful excess). For days, I was blessed with a living, breathing forum in which to engage with and
come to appreciate a completely different part of this world. For days, I was
allowed so many moments to wonder at how many untold numbers of forgotten
little villages populate our world, at how many silent struggles people must
endure, and yet, at how many dreams they still manage to conjure and hold close
to their hearts. But also, I wondered at the dreams deferred, or forgotten, or
never even realized at all.
Modoc’s philosophy is simple enough: even if these children must
follow their parents into a life as peasant farmers, even if the 9-month CBE program is all the education they ever receive, at least it will help them be better
farmers, or farmers with a little more knowledge in their heads. At the end of the
day, it is these small changes that make a difference anyway. They don’t change the
world, mind you--this world is fucked regardless and if you just wanna sit
around and wait to make big change you’re only making a tiresome excuse to continue
complaining and do nothing about it--but they do create fertile soil from which
better things may someday grow.
And as long as there are people in this world willing to put in the effort, the energy, the love and the sacrifice to try and fertilize those grounds, whether poor farmer or development worker or otherwise, there is still a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
There is the old woman who, though she has no children of her own, walks her village daily to make sure the kids go to school so that they might make the community better.
There is the farmer risking his freedom to grow pot so he
can make enough money to send his children far away to the closest secondary school.
There is the child, unable to read or write, who works the rice fields with her family all morning, studies all day in a school built from trees and thatch, and who returns to the fields at night to work again--day-in, day-out.
And there is also the community that has come together and built that
schoolhouse with what little money and resources they have for their children and for their collective future as well.
These are all real people. These are all real stories. And
there are millions more just like it.
So here’s to good people doing good work, not because of hardship but because life happens everyday. Here’s to APDO. Here’s to the peasant farmer.
from the island,
-mario