A fine mess of contradictions

Things that make you go hmmm.

I don't want to forget a single thing that I learned in Ghana. Everything was so different and when something is so dramatically different from what you're used to it is a great way to contemplate the way that you live your life. There were a lot of things I noticed, from fashion to food patterns and I would love to share them with whoever is interested, but I'm just laying them out more so I can think them over.


Fashion in Africa. Ghanaians sure know how to dress. Gill was right, we did look like tools in our Western outfits that were mainly composed of sporty camping gear. A quick-dry shirt might keep you from being really sweaty but you kind of look like an idiot there. The batik tie and dye, kente and GTP clothes were so gorgeous and most women had full outfits made out of them. A full outfit costs 30,000 cedis to make. Thats about 3 dollars US. I got some outfits made by the end but seriously felt under-dressed all of the time. Also, I think every shirt I've ever given away ends up in Africa somewhere. They ship large containers of clothes there from North America, women buy them in bulk and then sell them in the market. I passed so many people with shirts from the Toronto Blue Jays, random American universities, charity runs, and hilarious shirts from somewhere at home.

Shopping here is another interesting dilemma. It's been said that you can find anything in the Kejetia market in Kumasi. It is the largest open air market in West Africa and the longest I was ever in there was maybe 3 hours and I was still in the clothing section! The problem is if you are looking for something specific it could take hours. Instead of walking into Wal-Mart and finding the aisle you want, you have to roam and hope that you might encounter the product you need. Bargaining is another hard tactic. I am really really bad at it. I hate bargaining down some woman who probably needs the money more than I do from 3 dollars down to 1 dollar for a shirt. I'm horrible- I just feel so bad. But after a while you realize that as an obruni you're a walking dollar sign and if you don't stick up for yourself you're going to get ripped off every five minutes. So I tried to learn. I ended up shopping with my host sister one day and it was so weird. You pick through a giant pile of clothing and find random things that you can't try on and then just buy hoping they fit. It boggled my mind how anyone could find anything nice to wear, but people really do! It must take more skill than I have because I was always a little too intimidated.

Food. My sister sent some magazines with my mom to give me in Italy to help me catch up on the cultural scene at home. What struck me first was the models. They were so thin, and so sickly looking. There were also a few articles focusing on anorexia since there has been a lot of publicity about models dropping dead from anorexia -related heart failure lately.

People in Ghana are not thin. Yes, there are definitely people who do not have enough to eat, but I don't think I would say that I saw a lot of people who were starving. An attractive Ghanaian woman is fat. Not obese, but has a healthy appetite and eats a lot of food. It doesn't take much in Ghana to make you fat. All they eat are hydrogenated oils, heavy meats, and tons and tons of carbohydrates. Femke said she gained so much weight, but it's really hard not to. You can't really exercise (people here work all day in the sun) but if I did that I would probably have heat stroke and die. Victoria, staff at the hospital, implied that she felt almost insulted when people thought they were going to lose weight in Africa. "We're not all starving you know," she said. People here eat because you have to eat a lot in the heat to keep going. To have the energy to work for twelve hours a day you have to eat what you can get. The kids at the school would never turn something down that they were fed. Food is precious. I really didn't think twice about the hundreds of loaves of white bread I consumed there, except to note that I didn't really think I was getting any vitamins anymore. You don't think, man is this fufu making me into a big cow, you think, man I'm glad I don't feel sick today so I can eat this whole meal. It was nice to have a break from the stress in Western society that is around every corner about dieting and cutting carbs.

Saskia was talking to her host family about how some people in Western countries starve themselves and they didn't understand it at all. Why would someone do that they asked? She tried to explain that there are these mental disorders where people try to become thinner and she kept trying to tell them the many reasons why and the kids just didn't get it. It doesn't seem to be a concept that people understand. It was so weird to come back to Canada and think, wow I never really think over why I do some of the things I do, in the sense that I have the option to do so. I am obviously not trying to downplay the seriousness of eating disorders- they are very complex and horrible- I'm just trying to illustrate how our society feeds such illnesses (for lack of a better word) while others have very different societal issues. We have so much food. We can just pick out whatever we want and eat it whenever we please. The kids at the school get rice for lunch. If they don't get fed they won't come to school. If Agnes doesn't provide food at the PLWHA meetings, she told me people won't show up. It is an important part of their culture to eat and eat a lot.

The only people that I saw that literally looked like they were starving to death were the AIDS patients at the clinic. In stage 3 or 4 of HIV/AIDS people start losing more than 10% of their body fat. Many of the patients had severe diarrhea or vomiting every day so we would encourage them to try to gain as much as they could because it was very hard to hold on to. The blood pressure monitor doesn't work on people if their arms are too small, and many times we would try and try and their arm would be only bone and the machine would fail to give us a reading. Being thin is not a goal in Ghana, and I hope that their society stays that way.

Their society just worked so differently than ours and in many ways they have many positive societal norms that North Americans could learn from. I'm just rambling now and this is too long, but I'm trying to just think things out before they disappear into normalcy again.

posted by Kate @ 3:35 AM