A Family Affair
We borrowed a truck from the MoFA office and transported my mattress from the Shangrila to my new home. We were greeted by all of the neighbors as they were about to settle for the last OIC training session before we install the communities cassava processing unit.
As the truck came to a halt outside the family compound, we were joined by dozens of children from all over the community. They seemed to be everywhere. Immediately, they hopped onto the back of the MoFA truck and grabbed my bags. I got out just in time to pick up the mattress. Surrounded by the neighborhood kids, we walked to my room as the women greeted me.
"You are welcome"
"You are welcome"
I dropped my mattress in my room, ensuring there were no kids in its path, and headed back outside into the courtyard of the house. The first wall of the house is a straw interweaving mat which spans about 15 feet to provide some privacy to the compound. Two other walls consist of the existing house structure. Six rooms each with their own access point to the courtyard, sharing the same corrugated steel roofing structure and porch area. Along the rugged edges of the roof are partially rusted steel drums to hold the water that the women transport from the borehole each morning. In the rainy season, the all-purpose water is provided compliments of the slanted roof which pour the water into the drums in large amounts, decreasing the need for the women to trek the 500m to the borehole.
I sit on a wooden bench in the middle of the courtyard, while a flurry of activity takes place around me. The young girls painstakingly wash piles of dishes and prepare them for our dinner, while the boys are moving around furniture, checking water levels, playing with the radio or tinkering with the bikes in the corner.
My Ghanaian mother, Atomi, sits over a charcoal fire preparing the soup we will enjoy, while my senior Ghanaian sister pounds and prods a boiling hot cauldron of maize and ground cassava. She is preparing TZ, a popular starchy dinner meal shared by almost every Ghanaian I have experienced in the evening. The TZ is served in ceramic pots fresh from the stove, and begins to settle immediately. It forms a consistency of JELLO, but is still quite hot. I am served and I dig my fingers in quickly, form a ball, dip it in the stew, made from ground nuts and cassava leaves, and heave it into my mouth before my fingers burn. The food is served so hot, that the options are to either drop the food on the floor to prevent burning your fingers, or tossing it into your mouth, which from Louis' advice, has a higher heat tolerance than fingers. So I toss the TZ into my mouth and let my tongue deal with the heat, and I fan my fingers to cool them before going for more. The process creates a stream of sweat down my face in the cool evening breeze, but I wouldn't have it any other way. We wash and I listen to stories from the family. They are all in Gonja, the local language, but from the body language I can pick up the jist of the story, the helped along by Ali, my senior brother, who speaks English.
As soon as dinner ends, the sun begins to set, and all of Damongo is sent into darkness because of a power-outage. We sit and continue to share stories anyways, and eventually are joined by a ceiling of a billion stars. The black silhouette of the courtyard's date tree, and the corrugated roof provide a blackened border to a sky with so many stars it would seem we have left earth's polluted atmosphere.
The rooms of the house, after baking in the Ghanaian sun for twelve hours under a metal roof, are far too hot for sleeping even though the evening is cool. So the entire family lays in the courtyard of the house under the starlit sky. I join them, and we sleep through the night interrupted by the occasional goat or crying baby. This is the quietest it has been since I arrived in Ghana. a peaceful serenity I am sure to enjoy whenever the power goes out.
At around 10pm, the lights flicker on, the neighborhood cassava grinder returns to normal pace, and the sounds of Gonja music mixed with the occassional Bryan Adams return to the air. The sounds are back, but we stay and sleep in the courtyard anyways.
As the truck came to a halt outside the family compound, we were joined by dozens of children from all over the community. They seemed to be everywhere. Immediately, they hopped onto the back of the MoFA truck and grabbed my bags. I got out just in time to pick up the mattress. Surrounded by the neighborhood kids, we walked to my room as the women greeted me.
"You are welcome"
"You are welcome"
I dropped my mattress in my room, ensuring there were no kids in its path, and headed back outside into the courtyard of the house. The first wall of the house is a straw interweaving mat which spans about 15 feet to provide some privacy to the compound. Two other walls consist of the existing house structure. Six rooms each with their own access point to the courtyard, sharing the same corrugated steel roofing structure and porch area. Along the rugged edges of the roof are partially rusted steel drums to hold the water that the women transport from the borehole each morning. In the rainy season, the all-purpose water is provided compliments of the slanted roof which pour the water into the drums in large amounts, decreasing the need for the women to trek the 500m to the borehole.
I sit on a wooden bench in the middle of the courtyard, while a flurry of activity takes place around me. The young girls painstakingly wash piles of dishes and prepare them for our dinner, while the boys are moving around furniture, checking water levels, playing with the radio or tinkering with the bikes in the corner.
My Ghanaian mother, Atomi, sits over a charcoal fire preparing the soup we will enjoy, while my senior Ghanaian sister pounds and prods a boiling hot cauldron of maize and ground cassava. She is preparing TZ, a popular starchy dinner meal shared by almost every Ghanaian I have experienced in the evening. The TZ is served in ceramic pots fresh from the stove, and begins to settle immediately. It forms a consistency of JELLO, but is still quite hot. I am served and I dig my fingers in quickly, form a ball, dip it in the stew, made from ground nuts and cassava leaves, and heave it into my mouth before my fingers burn. The food is served so hot, that the options are to either drop the food on the floor to prevent burning your fingers, or tossing it into your mouth, which from Louis' advice, has a higher heat tolerance than fingers. So I toss the TZ into my mouth and let my tongue deal with the heat, and I fan my fingers to cool them before going for more. The process creates a stream of sweat down my face in the cool evening breeze, but I wouldn't have it any other way. We wash and I listen to stories from the family. They are all in Gonja, the local language, but from the body language I can pick up the jist of the story, the helped along by Ali, my senior brother, who speaks English.
As soon as dinner ends, the sun begins to set, and all of Damongo is sent into darkness because of a power-outage. We sit and continue to share stories anyways, and eventually are joined by a ceiling of a billion stars. The black silhouette of the courtyard's date tree, and the corrugated roof provide a blackened border to a sky with so many stars it would seem we have left earth's polluted atmosphere.
The rooms of the house, after baking in the Ghanaian sun for twelve hours under a metal roof, are far too hot for sleeping even though the evening is cool. So the entire family lays in the courtyard of the house under the starlit sky. I join them, and we sleep through the night interrupted by the occasional goat or crying baby. This is the quietest it has been since I arrived in Ghana. a peaceful serenity I am sure to enjoy whenever the power goes out.
At around 10pm, the lights flicker on, the neighborhood cassava grinder returns to normal pace, and the sounds of Gonja music mixed with the occassional Bryan Adams return to the air. The sounds are back, but we stay and sleep in the courtyard anyways.
posted by Kyle at 06:08
1 Comments:
absolutely amazing...
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