Grant Dobbe

It’s Sunday evening. Ghana just got into the semi-finals of the Cup of African Nations, I have successfully prepared my lesson plans and exercises for the week, and now, I’ve got nothing left to do but use the Internet. Or study Esperanto.

Yes, I’m learning Esperanto. I want to learn a bunch of languages, and I might as well get the one everyone will laugh at out of the way. There are practical benefits to it; there are studies that suggest studying Esperanto before studying other languages greatly reduces the amount of time and effort needed to learn subsequent languages. AND: there’s an international directory of Esperantists who are willing to open their homes and host other Esperantists who are traveling in their country. Any language with people who are willing to host complete strangers can’t be all that bad. My plans are to get a good grasp of Esperanto, and then move on to French, followed by Spanish.

Next up…

*deep breath*

I’m going to run a marathon this year.

There. I said it.

My plan is to run the Twin Cities Marathon in October, or an equivalent one depending on what travel plans Caroline and I have after our COS (Close of Service). I’ve been thinking about running one for a long time, and now I expect all of you to hold me to it.

Speaking of COS: I’ve started to mentally prepare myself for the whole idea of coming back to America. The truth is, America scares me a bit. Grocery stores, freeways where the traffic laws are enforced, a 10:30 appointment starting at 10:30; there’s a lot of things I’m no longer very familiar with. Then again, there are a lot of things that I am very much looking forward to: cheese, fast Internet access, cheese, libraries, cheese, bookstores, cheese.

At the same time, I’m really going to miss Ghana. I love going out and having banku and groundnut soup after my Saturday morning run. I love the look of understanding that dawns on my students’ faces. I enjoy dickering for cloth and furniture in the market; the way that the kokoo and koose lady always dashes me an extra koose; the way that a tro-tro that takes two hours to fill can leave the station in 10 seconds flat.

I feel more wonderfully alive and aware of myself here than I’ve ever felt before. Despite the setbacks and the delays that come with every day life here, I feel like I’ve accomplished something meaningful. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve found something that is more important that I am, and while coming back to the U.S. for a while is probably in order, I don’t think I’m done working in the developing world.

Anyway, I promised a breakdown of my Christmas vacation. I’ve decided to do this in installments so as to get the maximum blogification value out of it. If it worked for Charles Dickens, maybe it can work for me. Today, we’re talking about Kristo Buase.

Caroline and I, along with our friends Jennifer and Vicki, decided to spend Christmas this year at Kristo Buase Monastery. Kristo Buase is a Benedictine monastery that was founded in the late 1980s at the request of the Archbishop of Sunyani. The community was founded by the Prinknash, Pluscarden, and Ramsgate Abbeys in Scotland, though eventually it is hoped that it will become an entirely Ghanaian community.

Caroline and I arrived at Kristo Buase on Christmas Eve; Vicki and Jennifer went early so as to avoid the crazy Christmas travel and to confirm that, in fact, we had a reservation to sleep there. The monastery is located just north of Techiman, outside of the village of Tanoboase. It is surrounded by over 80 acres of cashew trees, undeveloped forest, and some of the most beautiful rock formations I’ve seen in Ghana. Caroline and I dropped at the entrance to the monastery grounds and had a delightful 20 minute walk to the monastery cloister itself. We were greeted by Brother Gabriel, who showed us to our rooms – all guests sleep one to a room. The rooms were very spartan – a desk with a chair, a bed, a small closet, and a shower area with a sink – but very well kept.

One of the things that strikes you about the monastery is how well things are kept in order. There is no chipped plaster, no flaking paint, no crumbling bricks; everything is kept up very well. That’s not something I’ve see very often in Ghana, because many people either don’t have the money or don’t care enough to repair their houses. The gardens and orchards surrounding the cloister are well-tended, and full of wonderful, delicious things like star fruit, oranges, papaya, lemons, avocado, and grapefruit. It was very wonderful to see everything taken care of in such a considered, deliberate fashion.

The monestary does a lot of work with cashews, including working with local farmers to do education on how to best maintain their cashew plantations. The brothers also make several tasty jams and chutneys that they sell in a small shop just off the cloister. We ended up buying several jars of jam from Brother Patrick (the chief jam-maker), which is not only cheaper than the stuff for sale in grocery stores, but much better tasting. Cashew apple and star fruit jam… mmmm.

The brothers were all very warm and inviting, and we not only enjoyed celebrating mass with them on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but also enjoyed playing a number of games of Scrabble and shared several wonderful meals with them. Caroline and I spent a great deal of our time talking to the prior, Father Giles, who is originally from Scotland; he has a great deal of interest in technology, and I promised to send him several CDs of software and public-domain books. When not relaxing or spending time with our friends, we went and climbed in the gorgeous rock formations that surround the monastery. I have several wonderful pictures of the climbing, and was sore for several days afterward.

Next time: the Tale of the 39-Cedi Hippo Snouts — or Hungry, Hungry Park Service.

Now, it’s Esperanto time. Ĝis revido!

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7

Happy New Year, everybody! I’m back at home after a nice, relaxing, and expensive vacation. I’m spending the day working on a bit of housekeeping and organizing, so you can expect a more complete write-up of my holiday travels soon. For now, I’m going to talk about something that is frozen solid for most of you: your lawn.

That’s right, I’m going to talk about lawns.

Lawns suck.

I mean, seriously. It requires large quantities of water and fertilizer to keep a lawn in good condition, it takes up a lot of time and effort, you can’t eat it, and it takes up arable land that could be used for things that you can eat. Unless you’re going to do something fun with that green grass, like play football or Frisbee on it, why not put in a garden?

One of the cool things about Ghana is the way the government is going about the issue of food security. About 10 years ago, they started a program called “Operation Feed Thyself” in which they encouraged everyone — not just poor villagers — starting small personal farms. The program was very successful; it’s difficult to find people who *don’t* have a farm, and there seldom outbreaks of famine or wide-spread malnutrition. Recently, the government decided to expand the food security push into the area of urban agriculture: specifically, the use of arable land that would otherwise be planted in grass or left to grow weeds.

Very rarely do you see a large patch of land near a house, office, or school that is used as lawn space; more often than not, people will plant maize or cocoa yams (which require very little supervision) or put in a more conventional urban garden with tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and plantain trees. It may not seem like much, but a 10 foot by 5 foot patch of tomato plants puts out a lot of tomatoes. The same is true of maize, and doubly so for plantain trees. And especially in urban areas, where not everybody has access to enough land for a traditional farm, it makes sense to use the boundaries, medians, and otherwise open, wasted patches of land for something useful.

These little urban agriculture experiments not only help to feed people and reduce the amount of money spent on food, but they help communities take ownership of the land around them, and beautify an area where there would otherwise be nothing. And it’s just plain cool! Can you imagine how awesome it is as a kid to grow up in a city and get to play hide-and-seek among the rows of corn next to your apartment building? To taste real tomatoes — not crappy, unripe, flavorless supermarket tomatoes, but real tomatoes — that you picked yourself, right off your balcony? To plant a tree as a kid and watch it grow as you grow up?

It fascinates me that such a simple idea — plant vegetables instead of grass — can have such a big impact. And it’s an example of something the developed world can learn from the developing world: when in doubt, plant things that you can eat.

Alright, time to go do other things. Until next time…

There is a neighborhood in central Accra called Osu. It’s very popular among expatriates due to a proliferation of Western-style stores — one can get hamburgers, pizza, sushi, Levi’s jean, and home appliances — and high-level businesses. Most of the major mobile phone networks have their headquarters there, and several banks operate major branches in Osu. A lot of hawkers also try to sell cheap, Chinese-made “Ghanaian” arts and crafts. It’s half Obruni-town, half tourist trap, and mostly annoying.

However, near the Koala supermarket on the outer edge of Osu, there used to be a corridor of ad-hoc chop stalls. Instead of going into the “authentic” African restaurant to pay GHC10 for a plate of food and GHC2 for a beer, you could go to the chop stalls to get much better food for about a tenth of that, with infinitely more flavor and a much more interesting experience.

The place used to be like this: you walked into a space no wider than a garage door, and immediately you were surrounded by a thousand vibrant colors of vendors selling handmade batik and tie-dyed cloth. Walk 10 feet, and there are at least 4 people selling fresh-cut pineapple, mangos, bananas, and oranges. Walk another 10 feet, and you’re now surrounded by a million different wonderful, tasty smells, and about as many different types of local food. Delicious banku with groundnut soup and chicken; fufu with light soup and goat meat; jollof rice with fried chicken and salad (think coleslaw); all of it cheap, and all of it delicious. And to top it off, every primary school child in Osu ran and played while their mothers and fathers sold you food and drink. The place was clean, well-kept, and relatively safe, because the people who were there were willing to make it their own.

I say “used to” because as of last Monday, the Accra Metropolitan Authority cleared out that corridor and destroyed 90% of the chop stalls. Not only can you no longer buy really good banku, but now there are a large number of unemployed street vendors who formerly had a steady income with which to support their families. Needless to say, I liked this corridor. I liked it not only because I could get really good jollof rice and fried chicken for GHC2 (nearly impossible on a PCV salary in Accra), but also because it represented for me the way development happens in Ghana and other developing countries. I mean this: If there is no good chop, you get some boards and sheet metal, set up your coal pot, and start cooking. Over time,you get neighbors, and what was formerly a dark, empty, dangerous alley becomes a clean, open, inviting, lively place.

So much of development work is about building infrastructure — roads, utilities, buildings, services — and often, we consider the informal structure that springs up in place of formal, official structures to be a type of malignancy. If it wasn’t officially sanctioned, it must be cleared out in the name of progress. I think that’s the wrong way to go about development. Instead of eradicating the existing infrastructure because it doesn’t meed certain requirements, why not find a way to make it meet the requirements? If the chop sellers are illegally connected to the electrical grid, why not offer them an amnesty period to get connected legally (and safely)? Instead of demolishing and setting back the development of a neighborhood, why not find a way to work with what’s already there?

In any case, I’m back to wandering around Accra in search of good jollof. If anybody knows where Baby Girl Fried Rice and Jollof Special has gone to, please let me know.

The universe has a sense of humor.

There are 49 periods in a week on our school’s timetable. I was teaching 10 of them.

God saw this, said “What? NO! That Dobbe kid isn’t working hard enough! Give him the most out of any teacher on the staff!”

And thus, I went from teaching 10 periods a week to teaching 40 periods a week.

Joy of joys.

Luckily, that time table had some problems, and (surprise, surprise) because I was in charge of the timetable software, I cut myself down to 32 periods a week by introducing the concept of study hall. American culture for the win.

I actually don’t mind teaching 32 periods a week. It’s enough to keep me busy, and not so much that I can’t get out and do stuff like eat or brush my teeth. It’s nice.

So, I was going to talk to y’all about my daily routine. Having had one for almost a month now (it’s nice not to travel all the time), I’d like to spend some time going over what exactly it is I do during the day.

 5:30am – Wake up. Get out of bed (run a comb across my head…). No stairs, so that’s it for obscure song references. Make the bed, throw on some trousers, stumble into the kitchen and start boiling water for tea. Let the cat in, feed her something, and turn on the radio. Once the water has boiled, I make tea, scrounge up some breakfast, and read a bit while waiting for the tea to kick in.

 6:15am – Make self presentable: wash face, brush teeth, shave, finish dressing. Listen to the BBC and go over my agenda for the day. Tidy up the house, if time permits and I feel industrious.

~7:00am – Head for school. Morning assembly starts around this time. Required for masters on duty and students, otherwise optional. I will observe if I have nothing pressing to do. Otherwise, I run minor errands, print my lesson notes, and open the computer lab.

 7:30am – The timetable rolls into action. If I’m scheduled for class, I teach. If the students have practicals, they come to the lab. Otherwise, I work on lesson notes/projects, fix hardware problems, run errands, or just sit and talk to people.

~11:30am – Lunch! If it’s a busy day, I go buy kenkey and beans (or send a student to bring it back for me) and eat at school. Otherwise, I go home, warm up some leftovers, tune into the BBC or Voice of Nigeria, and eat. The cat usually insists on covering me in cat hair while I do this.

~12:30pm – Head back to school. Wash, rinse, repeat.

 3:10pm – School closes for the day. If there’s staff class or Open Lab scheduled, I stay and take care of that. Otherwise, I go home, exercise, do chores, go into the market, or visit people. If it’s been an especially mentally taxing day (read: Oh, by the way, we need you to spend 4 hours programming the timetable software. And the power keeps going out. Have fun!) I do nice, mindless chores, such as dishes, sweeping the floor, etc.

~6:00pm – The sun is down, so I start cooking dinner. More house chores to the dulcet tones of the BBC. If it’s lights out, I light candles and kerosene lamps.

 6:30pm – Dinner is served. Cat eats hers, then comes and bugs me while I eat mine, eventually falling asleep and/or bathing in my lap. I usually read *and* listen to the radio while eating. (Attention Deficit Disorder: Hey, this book is really interesting, and so is that story on the radio. By the way, that car needs a new muffler and your fly is unzipped. Where am I?)

 7:30pm – Bath time. Listen to the news, brush teeth, floss, do stuff.

 8:00pm – Read, write, plan, review the day, play the harmonica, watch a movie, or something along those lines. I really try to empty my head during this time, which helps me sleep better. I’ve also been trying to meditate more often, which helps with the ADD and the sleeping.

 10:00pm – Cat goes out, and I go to bed.

That’s the basic gist of it, anyway. On Saturdays and Sundays, replace “school” with “whatever I feel like doing” and/or various and sundry chores like laundry and dusting. There’s also a nice long bike ride in there somewhere as well.

Sunday mornings are my church service, which consists of me getting up and going for a nice 10km walk. I can hear all of the local churches from my house, which is impressive because the closest one is 1/2 a mile away. That kind of hearing damage doesn’t interest me, and I can’t really understand it that well because it’s in Twi. So, I go play Unitarian for awhile. God’s just as much out there as he is in any building.

Anyway, that’s a day in my life. Until next time, stay classy.