The End

It is winter!  For the last week, I woke up feeling quite chilly (although I later found out at the hospital that it was only 75 degrees…) and there has been a fog-like haze.  Every year, the Harmattan (northern winds from the Sahara) sweeps up the dust of the desert and carries it over West Africa.  But the severe reduction of visibility is more than compensated by the relatively cool weather.  I am a little upset that this weather began just as I will be going back – it would have saved a lot of sweat.

Tomorrow, I go to America!!!  The nurses at the ward, as well as my host family, gave me a kente (traditional Ghanaian) shirt.   Initially, I did not think that I would have very many occasions to wear the African man-dresses in America unless I convert to Islam, but the outfits that were given to me were western modified, complete with a collar, buttons, and separate trousers. 

The hospital work became monotonous after the first month or two, but I will miss the people who I worked with.  I particularly enjoyed sociological discussions with the head nurse, a sixty-year old man (although he seems a lot younger) who was second child of the second wife of a man who fathered eighteen children with five wives. 

It is truly amazing how much one can become used to in four months.  As I looked out of my plane window to the disorderly and dimly lit Accra four months ago, I already began wishing that I had simply gone to college.  It is hard to explain why I felt like this, since I already had a good idea of what Ghana would be like through extensive research.  But after living in the organized and predictable first world, from Seoul to Oahu to Miami to Johnson City to Augusta to Pensacola, simply seeing the dim lights of disorderly low-rise dilapidated houses from the air first hand was enough to make me wish I had never undertaken this trip. 

But after the initial shock of the first week, the life in Ghana became perfectly normal.  I have ridden on tops of vehicles, eaten food that I would have previously considered inedible such as rats, insects, fish bones, animal bones, intestines, etc, climbed a thirty-foot coconut tree for a snack, stepped on human feces on a beach, took multiple showers in the rain, and many other experiences that I would have certainly considered unusual, if not impossible, in America.

From what I could see, there is little positive correlation, if there is one at all, between a society’s material wealth and the society’s general happiness.  Ghanaians, on the whole, seem very content and happy with their lives.  One Ghanaian friend asked me why there is such a high suicide rate in America --- he could not fathom why a society with as much material wealth as America would have unhappy citizenry.  Perhaps Ghanaians’ religious devoutness gives them a sense of certainty of the world.  Or perhaps one does not miss what one never had.

After four months in a developing country, I am not most thankful of the material good that I have in America, but of my parents.  Once, my mom could not contact me for two days and thought that something horrible had happened to me, so she called my volunteer office repeatedly in the middle of the night until she finally could talk to me.  While on one hand, this was exasperating (you'd better not do this when I go to college..), it truly moved me how much she cares.  I could especially put this into perspective, as the kids at the orphanage would probably have given a dozen years of their lives for such parental care.

Before Ghana, I flatly was not ready to excel in a hyper competitive research university.  In high school, I was plainly lazy and unmotivated - how many people get the highest SAT score in the surrounding dozen counties but don't even place in the top quartile of his class??!! - but ironically, the free time that I have had in Ghana made me more focused and a better planner.  Most days, I set a strict schedule for studying, exercising, and reading - all of which I kept - and I discovered that I am fascinated in the physical sciences.

As much as I appreciated my stay in Ghana, I am very much looking forward to coming home to enjoy the fruits of my parents’ hard work.  It is weird thinking that 'tomorrow will be my last tro tro ride,' 'I will probably never see anyone I have met in Ghana again,' but I think it is the right time to return home, refuel, and prepare for my next leg of my year in China. 

Thank you

Thanks to the generosity of August Prep students in an effort led by Nolan Brandon, the kids at the orphanage have new clothes! Before, the children only had about two pairs of ill-fitting clothes that were ragged and patched.  When we received the money, the host mother was able to spend a happy day shopping in Accra.  She returned with new outfits that fit - at least two articles of clothing for each of the ___ kids.  My mom's whimsically functioning camera refused to take more pictures, but this picture is a good way to go out for the venerable and well-traveled camera. The total money received, although it may not go very far in when of our malls in the US, exceeded the monthly salary of a teacher and doubles the monthly salary of a manual laborer in Ghana.  The kids are very happy, and the host mother is most appreciative.  Thank you for helping.  For those who participated, and even though you will likely never meet the sixteen young orphans in Akwatia, Ghana, you can know that you made a positive difference in their lives.

Korea and Ghana

It has been over a month since my last post, and my time in Ghana is winding down. I will leave Ghana on the 15th of December, which coincidentally falls on the ninth anniversary of my arrival to the United States from Korea.

Speaking of Korea, Korean is the second most common language on bags, t-shirts, and cars after English in Ghana (currently, I am typing from a second hand Korean keyboard). Seeing second-hand Korean materials on Ghanaians fills me with pride in my birth country and hope for the development of Ghana. It was not that long ago that the average Korean was tilling his misty rice paddies while being brutalized by the Japanese, a proxy-war, and various military governments. The fact that it is now in a position to donate things to the developing world marks remarkable economic development.

At times, confronted with the level of ignorance and incompetence that many uneducated Ghanaians show, I have concluded that it would never, or maybe in a century, achieve a level of education and living standard comparable to the West. But I remind myself that many American soldiers, upon seeing the stinking paddies and the utter destitution of the Japanese ravaged and war destructed Dae-Han-Min-Guk thought the same thing.

But clearly, there are many differences between Ghana and developing Korea. Life in developing Korea was hard.  Koreans suffered malarial summers and Siberian winters, and were almost entirely dependent on the climate to keep them from starving while tottering under massive debt.  Ghanaians benefit from great abundance of natural resources – in the villages that I passed by while beach-hiking, the only work that the Ghanaians (the men, at least – the women have a lot more work to do: drying the fish, cooking meals, bearing children) do is setting the village net in the morning and then bringing it in chock full of fish – the total work time can’t be more than 45 minutes daily. Obviously, it would be idiotic to make a sweeping generalization that the lives of all Ghanaians are easy, but in general, life in Ghana is easier than it was in developing Korea, and consequently, the incentives for education and betterment differ.   

One of the essential themes of human civilization is competition.  Whether it is the hunt for souls in the form of the crusades and jihad, whether it is the competition during the Cold War for world supremacy between the USA and the USSR, or whether it is that chase for that elusive place in an elite university, competition is the inherent precursor to success, macro or micro, big or small.  Those that don’t, or can’t compete and don’t have anyone else competing for them invariably become unfortunates from Korea that refused to compete in the “Hermit Kingdom” era, to an orphan who can’t compete in an African village.

I dislike saying that there is necessarily a “moral obligation” to help people, but I think everyone deserves a chance to compete, or better themselves, and this is what the orphanage provides for the kids.  Without the orphanage, the kids currently living there would never have had a chance to rise above their circumstances.

Some behaviors of the kids at the orphanage provide a window to their dark, dark past. When food spills on the ground (the same ground where the livestock urinate and defecate), the kids gather around the soiled food like animals and begin eating it with their hands.  Also, the reasonless brutality of the older kids toward the younger ones is terrible.  I do not think that caning or spanking is necessarily bad if it is structured and predictable – I fail to see the essential difference between physical disciplining and material disciplining – but physical disciplining is far more likely to be abused than other forms of discipline.  One time, I found an older orphan caning and yelling at all the young kids like a madwoman without discrimination and without any regard to where the lashes landed.  The offense?  The children did not nap.  The brutality of it was so severe to the point where I couldn’t even look at the abuser of age and size for two days.

Ghana has a reputation as West Africa's most friendly country.  This title should be revised as West Africa's most friendly country toward white people. The way that some Ghanaians treat the more unfortunates in their society is shocking.  Today, while walking to the Internet Cafe, I saw kids throwing rocks at a garbage pick-up man in front of their indifferent parents. I lost my temper at the kids because that type of behavior is just unacceptable, particularly on the part of the parents - it's just not how a person treats another person in any society. The kids, seeing an angry and fit Asian man, probably thought that I was going to assume a Jet Li Kung Fu stance and avenge the garbage man, and promptly ran away as fast as they could.

I might have saved a kid's life by taking him to the hospital - the kid had an abscess about the size of a golf ball near the mastoid process (I’ve been reading an anatomy book) as well as various other spots of infection from a two week old wound. Although it took eight hours of waiting at the hospital, a doctor finally saw him and agreed that it needs to be removed promptly.  I participated in the surgery, which was a fairly simple incision and drain. His mom didn't quite understand the seriousness of the boy's condition and made a comment in Twi (she didn't think that I understand Twi, but I caught a little of it) after seeing her boy delirious and vomiting from anesthesia, that the boy was fine before the surgery but now, he is sick.  But eventually, she understood that the abscess had to be removed.

The material discomforts of Ghana do not bother me very much anymore. Yes, in some areas, the conveniences lag behind the West by more than a century, but after an adjustment period, these are manageable.   The thing that I cannot live with anymore is being called “ching chong” or “shon fu young” or whatever Chinese sounding gibberish anywhere between five to fifty times a day.  More than once, it has taken all my emotional restraint to keep from lashing out.  It is stupid that I should be offended by these remarks.  After all, throughout seventh and eighth grade, I heard them daily from my classmates in the Deep South and I know that there is no rational reason why I should be angry about them, but it still fills me with barely controllable rage from head to toe.  Maybe it is because my classmates in Middle School who called me those things did not regard me as acutely human but instead, as an exotic alien who talks funny.  I see the same thought process in Ghanaians, albeit with less condescension.

Wow!  This blog is gravely depressing and I probably made more than one idiotic sweeping generalization thus far, but, this is what is currently on my mind.