Grace and Hope

(Media update: I posted some videos of the New Year’s Eve event on Vimeo. Worth a look:

http://www.vimeo.com/8637884
http://www.vimeo.com/8648069
http://www.vimeo.com/9066958 )

I’ve seen the light and my path is clear. The Grace and Hope orphanage is the reason I’ve come to Ghana. The home is a small, private facility on the outskirts of Kumasi situated well off the road, across a field, down a hill, through some tall grass and around a 2 – 3 acre courtyard. It’s owned by a KNUST professor whose father started it some years back. It does not get nor does it seek public funding – the prof. is the main supporter. There are 14 kids aged 5 – 15, a matron, and a “senior older brother” (16 or 17) who helps the kids with their homework and does most of the heavy lifting.

There’s no electrical service at the site and a gas-run generator supplies power when needed. The kids walk to school, just a few hundred yards down a path from the site, and seem very happy and secure.

I do different activities with the children each visit (2 to 6 pm, 3 x per week). Last week I took about 100 still photographs of them, turned them into a slideshow with some Ghanaian pop music (Ofori Amponsah – highly recommended!) in the background, and burned it onto a DVD. I then brought the disc and a DVD player to the orphanage but there was no gas for the generator – so we waited a bit until some was acquired. When I showed them the 10-minute video, they were enormously delighted. Each new face appearing on the screen prompted a massive roar of recognition with shouting of the child’s name. Next week I’ll bring the video camera and make a movie of them singing, which they often do spontaneously. No doubt that DVD will also delight.

Some of the kids are behind in their reading skills, so I try to practice reading on every visit. We also do other group activities, such as one where I brought a book of Kente weaving images and asked them all to make drawings of their favorite patterns. I’m hoping we can arrange a field trip to Bonwire, the national Kente weaving capital, which is just a 60-minute ride from the home.

Like all Ghanaians we have met, the children are huge soccer fans, so the arrival of a new “football” that I got in Kumasi received thunderous applause. One of the older boys cut an opening in an old deflated rubber soccer ball they had and placed the new one inside it. He told me this would insure that the new ball “stayed fresh” for a while to come. Sometimes while the older kids are playing, 5-year old Fortuna (Mawu) sits on my lap and just rubs my skin. I wonder if she thinks that if she rubs hard enough, the paint will come off. ;-)

The trip to the home takes about 30 minutes, and I have befriended a cab driver who is my daily escort. “Mr. Emmanuel” is helping me with my Twi and has a habit of letting other drivers know what he thinks of their skills. The ride is an old Kia (late 80s/early 90s?) and so far, it has been up to the task.

So much more I could report, but the pix speak for themselves:
http://www5.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=1016147028/a=2091206028_2091206028/
(If you need a password to log in, maybe create a bogus account.)

Media
I enjoy reading the Daily Graphic, a national newspaper out of Accra. Each issue combines major national issues with very local events and reports. There’s an extensive Letters to the Editor section – one writer writes regularly to provide details on correct English grammar, and the editorial on the same page is very socially conscience, for example, alerting citizens to the benefits of buying locally and exhorting the recently elected (new party) government to keep its promises in funding school uniforms and supplies. One recent article detailed the destruction of several thousand bogus Samsung flat screen TVs, complete with a picture of a completely blank brown box with an arrow pointing to it that said “Fake” and another picture of a fully logoed Samsung box, extensively decorated with an arrow that said “Real.” Wonder where the plastic “Sony” logo on our DVD player (which just fell off) was actually made (China, no doubt).

While following Ghana’s activities in the recent Africa Cup of Nations tournament on local television, I noted a number of public service announcements in the form of colorful cartoons. In addition to the expected advice about the benefits of hand-washing and using mosquito nets, another explained why a family should refrain from selling their children. Speaking of TV, along with the DVD player, we purchased a number of DVDs, each of which has between 10 and 12 complete movies on it; they sell for $1.50 and are made, like nearly everything else that is cheap and of poor quality, in China. We were watching a film called 2012 when I noticed a strange round object at the bottom of the TV screen. A minute later, we watched as someone from the audience got up and left their seats – the DVD we were watching was obviously made by someone sitting in a movie theatre with a video camera.

Some of the movies are in English but have new “English” subtitles intended for Ghanaian audiences. The “translations” can be hilarious or at the least, curious: “Oh, God” was translated as “Oh, Days,” “Yes, Sir” became “Yes, Executive,” and “You won’t get to heaven that way” appeared in the captions as “You won’t arrive in Western Paradise with your actions.” (I thought that was a Muslim thing??)

In the classroom
Sue started teaching last week – her class consists of 67 undergraduate Bio majors and she gives one two-hour lecture per week and supervises a 3-hour lab on another day. So far, so good. She gets along well with her TA, and has given the students a project that involves collecting and classifying the lizards found everywhere on campus. She’s also making new buddies from among the Science faculty and continues to Skype with her lab at UMass a few times each week.

I gave my first lecture in my Digital Media Production class on Monday and ran into some serious cultural differences. After I showed an entirely abstract 5-minute animation, the students asked me how they should “understand” the film; one of the profs clarified by saying that the students needed to know the “significance” of the colors that were used, and that they wanted some background on the artist. They also asked what the artist “expected” them to think about the film. I tried to make the point that the work was completely open to personal interpretation, but that was a tough one to sell. I’ll be looking for more common ground as the semester continues. I teach a second section to students from the Communication Design department on Fridays.

I’m taking a class on drumming that is split into two 2-hour sections. On Tuesday we have drum theory, which is mostly cultural context, history and classification. The Thursday section is on practice – meets for the first time today (last week Ghana was in a soccer match at class time so we did not meet). On Wednesday, I’m in a Performing Arts Traditions of Africa class that I believe will focus on West Africa in general (hope so) and Ghana in particular. I am also meeting privately with a textile technician who is introducing me to Kente traditions of strip weaving and will have regular sessions with a prof. in that same area to cover the research side of the story.

At Home
The bungalow is shaping up nicely and we make a bi-weekly trip to the largish supermarket in Adom plus near-daily stops at fruit and vegetable stands both on campus and on the way to the orphanage. Sue and a guard discovered that we have a major pineapple “farm” in our backyard, with seven rows of about 10 plants each (there are multiple pineapples per plant). We’ll have a ton of fruit on our hands in a month or so when the rains come; from what I hear, they will all ripen at nearly the same time. We’ve also discovered garden eggs (eggplant), red chilies, and a very large mango tree (;-)). We harvested our first bunch of bananas this week, about 40 of them, and tasted the cocoa nuts that fell from our tree (the taste is not easy to describe, but it was refreshing).

We learned that the Food Science Department runs a farm close to the house and we bought a very fresh chicken that Sue cooked up. If we get the nerve, we’ll buy a live one and do the deed ourselves; live chickens are available from roadside stands on the main road to Adom and of course everywhere in the Central Market.

Happily, the only visitors we’ve had in the bungalow are lizards, centipedes and of course the ubiquitous ants. (One of our neighbor’s chickens did come to the back door to have a look around, but he was not invited in.) Mosquitoes come with the rains next month, and we’ll double check that the mosquito nets we sleep under are intact.

If you haven’t done so already, have a look at the pictures of the kids from the home. Can’t explain how much pleasure they bring.

--DHM