Short Story Time

I wanted to share a small collection of funny and interesting stories that happened to me during Pre-Service Training (PST). Hopefully the stories are entertaining, but I also tried to make each relevant to the overall goal of giving you guys a better idea of what it’s like to be a volunteer. Also, keep in mind that all of these stories happened to me – you can only imagine the stories that I hear daily from people in my cohort and the other volunteers I’ve met so far in Ghana. Also a quick note that I continue to upload photos to the photo page, so if you're interested definitely check it out - I'll add more captions as I'm able.

The First Mistake

The first couple of days in country are a bit of a whirlwind. We flew in around 8am, got to our dorms by 10am and were in a class before lunch. There’s no internet and our phones weren’t working but my roommate Eric and I were determined to try and test out our appliances. A couple of nights in, Eric decided to go first – he plugged in his extension board and completely blew out the fuse on it. Must be a cheap product, right? Not to worry – I bought a nice one on amazon that I made sure was surge protected before I left and we’ll give that one a try. Into the outlet it goes and “Pop! CRACKLE! Pop! Szzzzzz.” I dropped the extension board for fear of being electrocuted and starred silently at Eric with the smell of burnt plastic in the air. Our moment of mixed horror and laughter lasted only a few seconds because just then all of the lights went off in the dorm area… Whoops. They were back on by morning and it was a couple of days until we were able to fess up to our cohort about why the lights were out for an entire night during training. Lesson learned – extension boards have voltage limits too.

First Day at Homestay

There a few experiences in my life that I was so in awe of the moment I was basically frozen in time, and this was one of them. I was so struck by what happened, I started a journal and I will simply post an abbreviated version of what I wrote that day (now more than 3 months ago).

I’m lying in bed at about 8pm on my first night of homestay trying to gather myself and reflect on what just happened.

Going into today I was extremely nervous about homestay for many reasons, namely my social awkwardness. Living in someone else’s house of whom I’ve never met who could have kids that I might now how to interact with is so far out of my comfort zone, I was concerned this could go very poorly. Plus – what if I didn’t like my Mamma’s cooking?! Could I handle that?

My nerves were not calmed at all when I first my new Mamma either. When we walked across the floor to meet, the whole room immediately noticed the height difference. She wasn’t 5 feet tall on her tippy toes. She was clearly a little startled by my height and what was supposed to be a warm embrace mostly involved her trying to hug my upper thigh.

We were then told to go find our new homes and were on our own till the morning. I met her son and he greeted me with a huge smile and helped me with my bags. More kids joined in too. My Mamma, Ama, my brother Yow, and another girl all carried my bags on their head as we walked down a street lined with half built houses, pot holes and animals. We turn right and if I hadn’t already felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, this was basically a smaller dirt road barely big enough for a bicycle. More kids joined in now as we passed roaming goats, sheep and chickens. It was around this point Yow asked me, “Do you know Obama?!” with that same enthusiastic smile on his face.

We are basically walking through the rain forest as 6-7 kids ask me questions and skip around me. It was one of the most surreal moments of my entire life.

We get to my new house and it’s clean and large and actually quite cozy. There’s even a fridge in the corner (note: that didn't last long). We all begin to put up the mosquito net and it’s pretty chaotic. Everyone wants to help and is shouting different instructions, only half of which I can understand. At one point one of the kids – maybe 7 or 8 years old – wanted to use my brand new razor-sharp pocket knife and when I checked with Mamma Ama for permission, she was confused – so I handed the kid the knife and there was zero objection by anyone.

After the net was up, the kids dispersed and I took a bucket shower. Yow was asking about the baseball I told him I had and I took it out to show him. I put my mit on my left hand and he tried to put the mit on his right hand. Unsure of how he’d react to having to use his left hand (in Ghana, your right hand is used for everything but the bathroom), I ditched the gloves and played catch barehanded from about 15 feet. He was actually quite good. A few minutes later, Ama had my food ready. Yow asked to keep playing with the ball – later I realized he just wanted to keep it. I had to ask for it back but I’ll give him one of the 3 I have before I leave (note: and I did!). I did give him a small piece of candy when he returned it – a Snickers mini, which he didn’t know how to eat. At point he started sucking on the wrapper – I was worried he was going to eat it so I helped him finish peeling the wrapper and Ama broke off a piece and threw it in her mouth. Yow ate the rest and both seemed to enjoy it, especially Yow.

During the time Yow had the ball, Mamma Ama took me to fetch water and introduced me to at least a dozen people on the way. Once I get back I set up and organized my room a bit – I’ve got two touch lights and the mini fan going and they make all the difference. Otherwise I’d be hot, tired, bored and unable to sleep. Instead I’m enjoying hearing the goats outside my window, the sounds of the forest and the mystery that awaits ahead of me. Lying here in bed I can’t help but feel like this is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I realize that this is a peak in a journey sure to have many valleys but I’m enjoying the high while I have it.

The Greak Spider Freakout Incident of 2016

During training, I lived in a house that used a small room with nothing but a drain for a shower. A few weeks in, I had seen my fair share of bugs and small spiders and usually I just avoided them, showering with one eye open. One fateful evening I stepped in, put my bucket down, and undid the towel around my waste as I turned to close the door behind me. The door doesn’t shut on its own but there’s a nail on the door frame that can be twisted out when the door is shut to keep it closed. As I went to twist the nail, I glanced up and saw a spider as big as my face above the door and I instinctually jumped back. Terrified, I scrambled quickly through the door frame with my towel still in my hand and got as far away as possible before stopping to cover myself. Unsure what to do, I had to call on my 13-year-old “brother” (Ghanaian’s use this term loosely and in this case it means the boy I was living with) to come and help. He took a small Ghanaian broom – a bundle of dried grass – and swatted it down before brushing it out of the shower and into the grass like it was nothing, chuckling the whole time. I told my Mamma about it the next day and she told me, “Spiders here aren’t dangerous. But black snake bites you, you die. Red snake bites you, you die. Green snake bites you, you die. That’s how witches kill the people they don’t like – they turn into snakes and bite you while you’re sleeping.” Thanks Mom - good to know.

Traveling to Site Visit

After meeting the designated Contact Person (CP) from my village at site announcement, we spend a couple days in training with them at a workshop before visiting our village and dropping off all our luggage there. Getting to my particular village from our CP workshop involves a taxi ride in Accra from one bus station (for lack of a better term) to another. My CP gets the cab and negotiates the price in a language I don’t understand – it should also be noted that his native language (Ewe) is not the most common language spoken in Accra (Twi). While sitting in traffic, the driver says something to my CP and they quietly started arguing. Slowly it escalates to the point that they are screaming at each other in noticeably different languages and all I can make out is the taxi driver saying in English, “Not for a million Cedis (Ghanaian currency)! Not for a hundred million US Dollars!” over and over. Then all the sudden, my CP gets out of the taxi and disappears while the driver continues to inch up as traffic moves. Eventually, my CP comes back with a cop. As the police officer tries to manage the situation, I start to gather that the argument is about where we will get dropped off, the drivers case being that it is too crowded to enter the bus station for the agreed upon amount. After a couple minutes the cop leaves but it doesn’t seem to have changed much. My CP starts taking out my bag that is in the trunk and putting it on the very crowded sidewalk. But I’m still in the back seat with my other bags as the taxi continues to drive in the traffic. Before I have a chance to get my other bags out of the taxi, a girl takes my bag sitting on the side of the road and puts it on her head and starts to walk away so now I’m unsure whether to stay with my large suitcase in the taxi or get out and follow the girl. In the craziness I’m able to point out the girl to my CP and he gets her to stop. And all the while he’s continued his screaming match with the taxi driver. After another girl grabs my other suitcase and puts it on her head, my CP crumples up some money and throws it through the window of the taxi at the driver and starts walking away with the girls following him. We walk through a mess of people and reach the bus station, find a tro-tro (a large van used for transportation in Ghana) going in the right direction and get in to wait for it to fill up. My CP gives the girls, who apparently he hired when I wasn’t looking, a couple of cedi and evidently this was not enough for them. They stood outside my window for 30 minutes asking for more and at one point started recruiting people to petition me and my CP for more money, to which he refused. Eventually, he got out to stretch his legs and I bought something from a vendor through the window for 4 Cedi. I handed them a 5 Cedi bill and gave the change to the girls, which instantly resolved the situation. 1 cedi is equivalent to about 25 cents.

The Nightmare

You get 3 options for Malaria Prophylaxis when you join the Peace Corps; 2 of them you have to take daily and one is only weekly. Given that I’ve never had to take a daily medication and didn’t completely trust myself to remember every day, I opted for the weekly one (called Mefloquine) and boy was that a mistake. At first, I simply had very vivid dreams, which was cool in a way but mostly a bad thing because too often they involved family and friends. I’m here to tell you that your subconscious has no boundaries and doesn’t care about the things or people you’d prefer not to dream about. I’d wake up feeling like I had just spent hours with people before recognizing my reality – I won’t see any of them for months or maybe years. Anyway, I had been considering switching – there were potential anxiety and heart-related issues with Mefloquine as well that started to play games with my mind – and then came the final straw. I was having a dream that my head had been given a buzz cut and for some reason this was the end of the world to me – a terrible nightmare. Sweating profusely, I managed to wake myself up and immediately ran my hand through my hair a few times to be sure it was still there (I recognize now how funny and ridiculous this sounds but remember, these were really vivid dreams). My sense of relief was short lived though because I genuinely couldn’t remember who I was. For a solid 10 seconds my heart raced as I tried to figure it out. Eventually, I saw my mosquito net around me and started to remember I was in Ghana. Then it occurred to me I was in the Peace Corps and I snapped back to my senses and remembered everything. 10 seconds may not seem like a long time but it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I switched prophylaxis as soon as I could and a month or two later, someone in my cohort sent out this article to our group encouraging anyone still using the drug to switch as well: __________. I’ll also add that nearly a month into taking one of the daily medications, I’ve only missed it once and my vivid dreams have stopped completely.

Election Night Party

Quite unfortunately, my phone was broken for about 3 weeks during PST so I don’t have any pictures from this crazy event and I’m worried my words won’t do it justice. A couple of weeks after the U.S. election, Ghana had an election of its own. And unlike the U.S., there’s always (however unlikely) a real threat of violence and unrest based on who wins. Ghana, to its credit, has the oldest unbroken democratic government in Africa … a whopping 23 years old. Anyway, the point is everyone was a little on edge and the community we were living in largely supported the challenger who, by all accounts, was the underdog. Election day went by peacefully but it takes 2 to 3 days to get results here. So a couple days later when they announced that their man, the challenger, had won the election, they partied HARD. A large group of people amassed in the main (read: only) village junction, which they lit by car headlights and had what seemed to be an infinitely long dance party complete with fireworks and a paper-mache sarcophagus of the current president (and loser of the election). And while even so much as holding hands with the opposite sex in public is basically unheard of in Ghana, people were all but having sex in the middle of the street. Some of our female PCT’s can attest to the aggressiveness of the Ghanaian men after the election results came in. But our homestay village definitely had fun that night, and the next night and the night after. They even marched the sarcophagus around the town each of the next 3 afternoons as well.

Prophet Isaac

I routinely get asked by Ghanaians to bring them back to America with me, sometimes joking, sometimes not. As is culturally appropriate here, I usually respond with a lighthearted joke like “Okay, I’ll give you a piggy back ride – hop on!” or “Okay, but I’ll need 100 lions in exchange by tomorrow.” One day I was walking to language class and was on a small trail that led to the house we used to study that week. Seemingly out of nowhere comes this guy who stops me and explains that his name is Prophet Isaac and he is the only son of God. He tells me that he is the only person designated by God to interpret The Bible and that the day and the hour of the end times is upon us. He insists that we must go to the righteous place to be saved when it happens and so we must travel to America immediately. I’m not sure if he was ill or just really creative but that was definitely the most interesting way someone has asked me to take them back to America. Safe to say, I didn’t make a joke in this instance and just tried to get out of there as quickly as possible without angering him. I told my teacher when I got to class and he seemed to think this was as strange of behavior as we’d deem it to be in the U.S. and that I should avoid him going forward – luckily, I never saw Prophet Isaac again.

A Story for My Poker Friends

My cohort played A LOT of cards, Spades being the most popular game. One evening, I mentioned to the player on my right that at one point in the hand we just finished playing “my jack was the nut spade so I wasn’t sure if I played it at the right time.” She looked at me very confused before I remembered to explain that “the nut(s)” means the best possible or available hand, in this case it meant the Ace, King and Queen of Spades had already been played so the Jack of Spades was the most valuable card left to be played. She burst out laughing and said “Ohhhh, I thought ‘the nut’ meant you played it prematurely.”

“The Club”

In the Peace Corps, there is something fondly referred to as “The Club” and you become a member of “The Club” by pooping your pants. According to our staging trainers, typically about 2 out of 3 volunteers join the club during their service. During PST we had 5 cohort members out of 26 admit to having joined – one of whom refused to share the story with us so you know it must have been bad. We have one woman in our group who was a PCV in the 80’s for nearly 4 years and she gave us some sound advice: “Never trust a fart.” Truer words have never been spoken. For the record, I don’t consider myself a member although admittedly it depends on your definition. I promise it’s a story no one wants to hear.