Food comes from Somewhere

One thing that being here has taught me is that food comes from somewhere. It doesn't come wrapped in cellophane from supermarket shelves or mysteriously appear in a box or can. People who have grown up on farms understand this, but most people these days are city dwellers or suburban residents and so it is easy to forget.

Our neighbor downstairs told me that the turkey I naively named Henry because he gobbles away every morning is to be Easter dinner for his children when they come home from boarding school. So now when I hear the crow of the rooster outside our window at 4 AM (dueling roosters actually, one in front and one in back), I resign myself, as I know that he is soon to be some one's Sunday dinner.

The fish we eat at lunch were caught by the some of the hundreds of fishermen and women that I see lining the beach at Elmina. In the morning, you can see the fishermen floating in log canoes about 500 yards off shore - casting their huge blue nets. Later in the afternoon, families begin to arrive with pails and basins perched on their heads to help with the catch. They sit in the palm groves until it's time to haul in the net, long lines of people tugging on a single rope in unison. Afterward, everyone helps with cleaning the fish. Some of the fish get salted and dried in the sun on large bamboo racks and some may be sold fresh. I know this because I saw them. So no matter how attached I get to the little goats in the pen by our clothesline, I know they have a practical and life-giving purpose. We are immersed in and surrounded by that which sustains us.

The problem is... I love those goats. They are tiny...and cute. They have an overbite. They are curious. They hold my gaze when I look at them as if to say, “Where's my dinner?” or “Would you pass me some of that elephant grass over there?” The white goat had tiny white twins but one died. The black goat had had her kid in the week before we came. A tiny soft gray new creature with a black stripe down its back, you can hear the baby goat's “me-e-e-e-e-” when it's time to eat.

As we walked through the market yesterday there was a man half leading, half carrying a shaggy brown goat up the road. He had fashioned a rope out of twisted rushes and made a halter lead from it. He was walking along quickly and purposefully. When the goat veered off course, the man never broke his stride, but just picked him up by his “handle” and set him back down along his path. Goats roam free here, even in the city, so seeing the goat restrained in this way was unusual. Craig said, “That's the last you'll see of that goat.” I realized he was right. The man was taking him into the market to be sold or killed and dressed so his family could eat.

I am not a vegetarian, so I have to accept that this is where my food comes from. But it changes my perspective. Animals, albeit not willingly, give up their lives so we can eat. Craig said something that comes to my mind as I fret about this. When you say grace over a meal, you are thanking the Creator, but you are also thanking the creature that gave its life so we could have food. There is the price I paid for the food at the grocery store. But there is another price more important to remember – a much higher price paid by the animal. So there is great sadness and at the same time so much gratitude - one with the other, inseparable if we are to be honest. And why should we be otherwise? So when I say grace over a meal – not only do I thank the Creator of all things, but I remember His creature and acknowledge its life, understanding that it is by God and the world He created I am sustained.

Fanta

The new word in our vocabulary is Fanta, the fizzy drink in a bottle or a can visible at a hundred yards due to its neon orange color. I'm not sure how they get that color and I'm not sure I want to know, but to a traveling person with traveling problems, if you get my drift, Fanta is a Godsend. Where nothing else appeals to the appetite, the libation holds powerful curative properties. Having an almost mesmerizing attraction for us, we dole out the magical elixir in small doses like medicine and it never ceases to deliver on the promise of a settled tummy, if for only a little while. It has become the cure-all for everything, sort of like Windex, but better tasting. In fact, few things send Craig into transports of joy like Fanta.

On the look-out for Fanta, Craig spotted the first bottle on a foray into Cape Coast. A touristy cafe advertised drinks. As we looked over the menu, we spotted the cases of empty Fanta bottles stacked by the door. On inquiring we discovered that yes, indeed, Fanta was on the menu. We decided we'd split one because of the sugar whallop, but that was a great drink-cold where nothing else was and hydrating for the moment. We drank our Fanta with the obligatory straw and finished it off in nothing flat, returning the empty bottle to join its mates in the case by the door. We never even sat down.

Since then I've discovered a tiny shop outside the gates that sells the drink, but I've cleaned her out for the moment. The guard at the school gate said one of the students sells Fanta as a side-line, but I haven't seen any Fanta selling students yet. Nancy, our wonderful Matron produced 7 bottles miraculously one day. We have been rationing those bottles for our last week here in Cape Coast.

I wonder if Fanta counts as a fruit. Sort of like ketchup counts as a vegetable.

Polyester is for shopping bags

I've written a lot about the heat. There are many things more worth mentioning, but there is nothing more stressful for us in adapting to our physical surroundings. And you have to learn to adapt to your physical surroundings before you can do much else, so please forgive the frequent obsession with the heat in the blog. It's great to hear from you all and we appreciate the encouragement and sometimes even the smiling faces on the blog follower photos!

So far I haven't worn many of the things I brought. Granted, I didn't expect to need the turtleneck five degrees north of the equator. But I thought that maybe the knit top would work, or the skirt. Let's face it, so far my wardrobe planning has been a disaster. Now I'm not willing to pan it completely – we still have 3/4ths of the way to go, but I think the writing is on the wall... I should have listened to my brother. He said no matter what you do, you'll forget something. Well how about everything. It wasn't so much about forgetting as about choosing the wrong things. Even the non-cotton red and black dress I brought won't work here because in Ghana, you only wear red and black to funerals...... on Saturdays. So if I wore that dress, which I wouldn't, on a week day people would look at me oddly and if I wore it on a Saturday, they would ask me who died.

I've analyzed the problem. There were two failures here. The first was a failure of imagination on my part. I never imagined that I could be this uncomfortable all the time in clothes that I had worn with great comfort in fairly warm weather. The second and most important miscalculation was made in ignorance. I had no idea how important it was that clothing be able to breathe and wick moisture away from your body. I knew cotton was preferable in the heat, but I had no idea how critical it was. I now know that polyester and nylon are the enemy and should be reserved for shopping bags and sailboat sheets.

Students here wear full length white cassocks to class and to services, morning, noon, and night. Faculty teach in them. Indeed faculty sometimes leave campus in them when they go to take care of their churches. They are much more comfortable if they are made of cotton. No washing machines, either. They are immaculately clean and white, and it's all done by hand.

I went in search of cotton clothing on my first day in Cape Coast. I found an overpriced and not very flattering blouse and an equally unflattering granny skirt. I should have been tipped off about the blouse. I entered the only air conditioned store I have been to in Cape Coast, then or since. The racks were distinctly Euro looking. I bought Craig a cotton Ghanaian shirt whose repeating stamped design was a word, a symbol really, that I was told meant “freely given” I thought that sounded alright. But when Craig put it on, our two jolly flat mates, members of the faculty here, intimated it might have something more to do with “Luv” than any pretty idea or altruism. Oh well, we're cool now.

The rain here is nothing compared to the rain in Cameroon

I saw a pillar of water the other day.

It was night actually– about 1 AM and I knew it was raining. It was the sound that woke me up. Over the whir of our ceiling fan, the sound was not the patter pat of drops hitting the ground, but the hiss of water poured from a bucket. The rain came as a welcome relief from the previous two days of punishing heat and humidity. The sky simply couldn't hold any more water, so when the sun set and the air cooled, down the rain came in a torrent. There was no wind blowing to distract the water from its headlong trip to the earth. Straight and quick as an arrow, sheets of rain came down. Not a drop of rain hit the sill, so mercifully we did not have to close the windows. The only thing we could see was the street lamp outside our window, its shape lost, but its light diffused to a vague orange glow.

I crossed to the back of the flat to look in the opposite direction and saw dimly and at quite a distance from the building, a pillar of water standing straight and disappearing into the night sky. It didn't move, but sort of scintillated in the light cast from our window. It was just puzzling enough that I woke up a bit, moving to another window to get a better look. I hoped the downpour wasn't hurting the animals in the pen below, the new mama goat and her kid, the chickens and the turkey and his mate. After I had ascertained that the column of water was well off to the side, I concentrated on the source of the strange sight.

Now I've seen downspouts before, but they usually run down the end of a building, depositing their water in a drain or onto a back splash that leads the water away from the foundation. When it rains at home, there is a pleasant gurgle of water running down from the roof gutters, but there was no way one of my downspouts could handle this rain. The only thing I could figure is that in this part of the world, they didn't bother with the “down” part of the downspout. Water from the roof collected in channels that launched the rain like a water cannon far into the night. While the rain was heavy, the water acted like a stream suspended between the spout and the earth. The next day as I was coming back from the hill, I noticed the long spidery spouts sticking far out from the roof like the naked spines of a blown umbrella. I hadn't noticed them before.

After all the excitement, I went back to bed and for the first time here, I needed covers. The following day was cooler and breezy. I was glad to know that such a day could come. The students, although happy for the relief, began recalling how a month ago it had gotten as low as the 70's and everyone fussed that they weren't equipped for the cold. It had happened during the Harmattan - the dry hot wind that comes from the Sahara bringing with it hot days and cool nights. I thought of Samuel and his first overcoat and everyone back home in February weather....

A day or two later we were talking with some teachers. They said the rain here was nothing compared to the rain in Cameroon..

Fufu

The first thing many Ghanaians say when they come back to Ghana is, "I really missed fufu."  Like mashed potatoes or biscuits and gravy, fufu is comfort food and the only ones who can make it right are those who love it as much as you do.  If you saw a portion of fufu you might think someone had made bread dough and placed the satiny ball in an over sized bowl to rise before baking.  In southern Ghana, a "light soup" is poured over the top and fufu sits in its bowl like a rotund butter colored island rising up through the lake of fragrant stew.   

Eating comfort food in Ghana is no different from eating comfort food at home and even the most proper Ghanaians eat fufu with their fingers.  I think this is to honor the way that it is made and its status as home cooking -like fried chicken or chips and salsa or corn on the cob.  Before the fufu is eaten, a bowl of water is passed for rinsing the fingers of your eating hand.  Then you pinch off a bit of the fufu, scooping up some of the stew with it.  Some of the stew is absorbed by the fufu, so at the end all is finished.  

The making of fufu takes special equipment and teamwork. Fufu is made with a large mortar and pestle. The pestle is made from a tree limb or sapling about as tall as a person and as big around as can be comfortably grasped by an adult hand.  The pole is smooth, stripped of its bark and pounded on one end to look like a frayed mushroom cap.  This is the end that crushes and mashes the vegetables into just the right consistency, working them until the dough sticks together and forms a smooth ball. The mortar is a large flat bottomed bowl mounted on a low stand.  One person, standing above the mortar, pounds cooked wedges of cassava and chunks of plantain together with the pole while a second person sitting on a low stool next to the mortar moves the vegetables around the bowl in between strokes.  As the vegetables turn to paste the person sitting next to the bowl gathers and folds the dough, adding water as needed, until the mass turns into the smooth dense food ready to be called fufu.  The person sitting beside the bowl has only a tiny window of time to stir the dough before the beating stick comes down again.

Making fufu takes teamwork--and not your ordinary teamwork.  The person making the fufu is most often the woman in charge of making the meal.  The person pounding the dough is often a son or husband, student or helper happy to help with its creation.  There is a great deal of trust between the person folding the dough and the person pounding with the pestle.  The strokes are not anemic.  They are full of force and once begun are irretrievable.  If the stick isn't brought down in the same spot or in an even rhythm, there is danger of crushing the fingers of the person folding the dough.  Yet if the stick were not brought down sharply, it would take forever to make something that already takes awhile to make.  So together the pounder and the folder develop a rhythm and a functional trust, stopping occasionally to rest.  

Like many simple things we do in life, there is often a lesson within them. We share and trust every day. But the sharing and the trusting are so woven into the fabric of our life we are unaware of them. Seeing them in the light of an unfamiliar activity makes me think.  Sharing and trusting in most cases is incomplete. We share only so much as we can afford without discomfort. We trust only to the degree that we are willing to expose ourselves to risk of a bad consequence. So when we do not share, are not trusting or are not worthy of trust, we are perhaps made uneasy, but the cause of the unease may not be obvious. Surrounded by familiar things and routines, the chinks in our armor are not easy to see. They are lost in the gloss of the unremarkable routine surrounding them.

But when I see one person risk having her fingers crushed, trusting the person holding the pestle not to falter or mis-aim, the consequence of a mismatch between trust and fear is direct and clear. I know it's only fufu, but it makes me think about what complete trust in God might look like.  If my life with God is a work in progress, and if God will never falter, why should I snatch my hand away too quickly? What do I risk by mistrusting? Moving from familiar surroundings to an unfamiliar place, the hows and the whys of life aren't so obvious. Yet in our relationships we all recognize joy and can point to it. Maybe joy is in the life of freedom God gives us to trust him completely without worrying, to work with God at making a life without fear.

Ama Comes out of her Shoes

February 15^th, the Second Sunday before Lent, Elmina

Ama was born on a Saturday. In Ghana everybody has a day-name. I was born on a Saturday, so my day-name is Ama. We are twins, except that I am almost a half century older than she is. Ama is a slip of a girl.  At 7 or 8, she is the youngest of five children.   She has the inquisitive and winning smile of her father and the beauty and graciousness of her mother.

The first time I saw Ama, she was playing with her brother and sister. Standing on the wall in the shade of her back porch calling after them, the impression I had and still have of Ama is one of perpetual motion. Not fidgety or anxious, she is weightless like a feather. Unlike a feather, she has direction and purpose, not all of it clear. There is some internal spirit rather than logic that moves Ama, She moves without regard to the ground under her feet and that is why she comes out of her shoes.

There was the time she and her sister carried an impossibly heavy aluminum wash basin full of wash water by its handles from the front of the house to the back porch. Stopping every 10 yards or so to rest and giggle, they finally neared their goal. Once Ama reached the cement, her feet lifted out of her sandals without breaking the rhythm of her steps. I didn't see them come off; one second they were on, and the next they weren't. That was all. Her will and and the momentum of her load propelled her forward and the sandals were holding her back. So they stayed there atop the earth, each sandal a memory of a girl who, rather than wearing them, had passed through them on her way. When she reached the safety of the smooth cement of her porch, she didn't need them really, except to protect from stones.

Craig and I are staying with the faculty and students at here during our month in Ghana. The seminary is a haven like Ama's back porch where we are known and where we can come to know not only the students and faculty, but a culture and way of life unfamiliar to us. As Craig teaches and as we venture into the town, we learn more and more. Many times we learn by being disabused of our assumptions. Although everyone here is here to learn and teach, it is the layer underneath our common pursuit from which we learn the most. We are child-like in that we do not understand the timing and phrasing of words, the distance between people, the seriousness of small things, and irrelevance of big ones. It is those things that make us conscious of how fast we at home move and how we barely listen to one another. How we are only loosely connected to our families by Ghanaian standards and there are few ties to bind us to the place where we were born.

I hope that one day Craig and I will be seen not so much as the foreigners in the midst of them, but that the momentum of our common burden will propel us forward and we, like Ama, will simply come out of our shoes.

It's not Walmart

Where Americans are used to large stores full of shelves stocked with an infinite variety of shiny new merchandise, Ghanaians shop in streets full of open air markets packed with an infinite variety of tiny stalls. Carts parked on the sidewalks make it difficult to walk there so the crowds walk on the roadway dodging honking taxis. I love the carts that sell used shoes hung on strings falling like a beaded curtain - each shoe unique -brightly colored high heels, neon colored sequined sneakers, and sandals all blowing in the breeze. The markets continue everywhere you look. A red dirt street off to the right is lined as far as the eye can see with farmers sitting next to their sacks and piles of green hued oranges. Further down the street, we see glimpses of market tables and awnings covered with food through an eyelet of an opening between two 19th century stone buildings. As we pass through the slot, a narrow path winds between stalls packed so claustrophobically close together that their roofs touch overhead. The women sit with their wares. Some of them smile at us, some ignore us or speak Twi which we can't understand. As we thread our way along, 3 children run headlong and laughing around our legs out toward the eyelet opening through which we had entered. At every turn, grain and beans, meat and vegetables, brilliant red palm nuts and pale yellow fragrant parched corn are mounded or stacked or spread out to sell. We come to a fork in the path. One way leads deeper into the bazaar and the other back to the street by a different way than we had come. A woman resting her head on the table in front of her never moves. Her wood and burlap display is covered with palm nuts so brilliantly red and purple they seemed magnetic.

I was feeling the heat and sun so Craig and I made for the street. The pressing, riotous profusion of smells and colors gave way to the relative calm and openness of the street. I hadn't realized how still the air in the bazaar was until we were out on the sidewalk again. Craig was ready to keep walking through the city, one thing making him more curious for the next. I told Craig I was done. Too much sun, too much heat and not enough water... We flagged a Taxi to take us the mile and a half back to the Seminary. Eventually we got there but not before we had gone to the wrong part of the city, had a 5 minute discussion with 3 perfect strangers, one of whom was able to understand us and explained our needs to the driver. I'm not sure if the driver was irritated or if he was just trying to get some breeze going in the car, but the weaving darting taxi ride back to the Seminary would have made a New York Taxi driver proud.