Learning Small Small

This is a geek post. If you don't want to read some pretty nerdy content (seriously, verb conjugation figures fairly prominently in this), then instead you can go to www.google.com, type the word 'fart,' and click the search button. You can come back here when you're done.

I'll give you a minute to make up your mind.

Now, for those of you still here, I'd like to begin today with a brief discussion of the Romans (hey, you were warned). So, the Romans didn't write spaces between words. This is, of course, because the Romans were stupid. I mean really, other than rule of law, and the aqueducts...

That last part was a Monty Python reference. Are you sure you're in the right group?

Anyway, I was sitting under a tree today reading Tristram Shandy and a man approached me. He leaned down to me and said:

'Agbeleklem'

I flashed him my signature look (confused, apologetic stare), and he pointed at my book. 'Gbele.' he said. Then he pointed at his eyes. 'Klem.' Then he walked away.

And I sat there for a minute, sort of puzzled, and then somewhere in my brain two neurons gave each other a little fist bump and I went 'Ohhhhhhhhhh!'

'Agbeleklem' is 'A gbele klem' and that means that suddenly, after three weeks here, *all of the phrases I've learned are made of words.* I spent the next half hour rifling through my notebooks for Ewe phrases and rewriting them with spaces. 'Come back soon' isn't 'Nagbokaba;' it's 'Na gbo kaba,' with 'gbo' meaning 'return' as in 'Magbo,' which is actually 'Ma gbo,' 'I'm back.'

THIS IS AMAZING!

'See you tomorrow' isn't 'Etcho miadogu,' it's 'Etso mia dogo,' 'Tomorrow we meet.' Because 'dogo' is meet. And 'mia' is we!

Ma gbo, I'm back, a gbo, you're back, e gbo, he/she is back, mia gbo, we're back!

'Mie gbo,' Dickson corrects me.

Wait, what?

'Well, we came back together. Mia is for things that we each did individually, mie is for things we did as a group. So if we leave together from somewhere, it's "Mie dzo," but if we leave and go our separate ways, it's "Mia dzo."

'OH YEAH dzo like how goodbye is "Ma dzo!" so that means "I'm leaving!"' I say, crossing out 'Majoo' in my notes. Wait. I have it written down that 'dzo' means 'to fly.' I have this written down because earlier I was asking about the high school motto, 'Dzo lali,' which means 'Fly now' (as in 'or never').

'No, "fly" is "dzo." This is "dzo."' He repeats the two words for me so I can hear the difference, but all I can think is that he sounds sort of unsure about the second one but really definitive about the first one.

And then I realize that Ewe has tones.

(Shit.)

And that's bad enough, but then he starts explaining how the together/individually distinction somehow also applies to the first person *singular* pronoun, and he tries to clarify this with some example about eating an orange, but I am really not having an easy time seeing which of my actions are things I am doing *with* myself and which are things I am doing as an individual. If that is even the distinction, which it probably isn't.

My hosts see me struggling and comfort me. 'You will learn small small before you go,' they say. 'Congratulations! You are trying!' It's totally sincere and not at all condescending, which I think you have to be Ghanaian to pull off.

So, in the end, I had about an hour of feeling like I suddenly was really getting the hang of this Ewe stuff, followed by a heartbreaking realization that languages are hard, and that in all likelihood, every time I've left a room for the past three weeks, I've been telling people that I'm flying.

On the upside, I now know that if you mispronounce the high school motto, it means 'LEAVE RIGHT NOW.' I've got to remember to ask someone whether that's as hilarious to a native speaker as it is to me.

Delightful.

Hey, So, How About This Weather?

Yesterday I woke up at 4am. I've been doing this a lot, and I started to wonder what's wrong with my sleep cycle that I keep waking up in the middle of the night. And then I remembered that I go to bed at about 8pm every night. So actually that's probably why.

After lying in bed staring at the ceiling for a little while, I heard raindrops pinging into the roof. Then it started raining a little harder, and then a minute later it was, as they say, pissing it down, coming down in sheets, straight up somebody ticked off Poseidon and we're all about to be washed out to sea kind of weather. This lasted for half an hour, then it stopped. The compound was flooded and thousands of tiny black almond-sized frogs had come out from wherever tiny black almond-sized frogs stay when they are waiting for it to rain and were jumping around having the time of their lives.

I was a little surprised by this whole series of events, because I had thought this was the dry season. I mentioned this to someone and was told that, no, the rainy season ended in June but the dry season won't start until October and this is an entirely different season known as 'not the dry season.'

Stupid, stupid equator.

Upgraded!

So I am no longer merely Yavu.

Some of the kids have started calling me 'Yavu Yavu Gaibo.'

I'm not totally clear on the translation, but I think basically it's 'Whitey Whitey Beardface.'

I mean... I can't argue that it's not accurate.

Specifically, these kids.

Earning My Gold Stars

The way to eat most soups and stews here is to dip a ball of dough into it. Depending on the kind of dough (and the local language where you are), this is called akple, banku, fufu, kenke, or any of a dozen other things I am useless at keeping straight. It is always served with a little basin of water, and the idea is that you wash your hands in the basin, pull off a piece of dough, dredge it through your food, and eat it.

One of my first times eating akple (at least, I think it was akple), I pulled off a hotter-than-expected piece of fresh dough and burned my fingers. Fred, who I was eating with, saw this happening and said 'Oooh, quick, put your fingers in the water.'

This was a sensible solution, and I feel kind of silly for not having come up with it myself. At home, if I ate a piece of food that was too hot, I would reach for my drink without thinking about it. But I remember this happening when I was a little kid, and having to have my mother tell me 'Oooh, quick take a drink take a drink take a drink.'

This is what fieldwork feels like a lot of the time. It's a reversion to childhood, where you have to be explicitly taught the things that any reasonably competent adult knows instinctively. Blunders are patiently corrected. Small triumphs, like doing my laundry or knowing the proper way to shake hands, feel like major accomplishments, and are basically treated as such by others. 'Very good, Yavu!' they seem to almost be saying. 'You did that all by yourself?' And then I squeal with delight and trip over my shoelace.

I should say that this is to the enormous credit of my host communities, both here and in Bolivia. If I hadn't had the good fortune both times to stumble upon people willing to adopt a fully-grown special needs child, by now I probably would have accidentally set myself on fire or shot my eye out or something.

On Being Famous

It took me about this long to put together that the word I thought meant 'hello' actually means 'white man.'

Every day here, when I leave my compound and walk the 15 minutes or so to the district hospital, or the 20 minutes or so to the internet cafe, or wherever, I am stopped at least a few times by people calling 'Yavu! Yavu!' I smile, and I wave, and sometimes we chat a little and I try to speak some Ewe and they laugh at me. This was a much more idyllic scene before I realized they were SHOUTING RACIAL EPITHETS AT ME. The fact that this is done in a consistently friendly manner is, in its own way, all the more unsettling.

Also, apparently the women who live in the compound have nicknamed me 'bread.'

So here I am, a genuine curiosity of the first order and a local celebrity. Walking down the street to constant cries of 'hey whitey!' I always knew someday I would be famous. I had... well, I had just hoped it would have more to do with the content of my character, I guess.

Today an old woman with no teeth told me 'White man, I will marry you.' What can you say to that? You're all invited to the wedding.

The Importance of Being Perfect

On my first day back in Keta, Perfect introduced me to Success.

Wait. Let me explain.

The British give Americans a hard time for being overly earnest, but man. We have nothing on the Ghanaians. In addition to their local names (Korshie, Gobah, Kofi, etc. depending on what day of the week they were born), everybody has an English name, some of which are actual English names but a lot of which are just English words being used as names. A lot of them also have religious overtones. So you'll meet people named Perfect, or Success, or Innocent, or any of these other things that we would never use as a name because we believe in irony and we believe in jinxes and we know that when our children grow up to be flawed, underachieving or guilty then having a name that proclaims the opposite is just going to invite mean jokes.

While the names given to children might display a simple, heartfelt religious devotion, the names given to businesses are pious beyond any consideration for relevance. For some reason this is especially true for hairdressers, which all have names like God's Grace Barbershop or All Things From Jesus Hairstyles or Thy Will Be Done Beauty Saloon.

That last one is not a typo, and it's not just one place. There is a whole group of hairdressing establishments here that advertise themselves as Beauty Saloons. Which is amazingly great. Because, firstly, once it's pointed out, salon and saloon are totally the same word. Or once were, certainly. Plus, it suggests any number of bad jokes about beer goggles. 'My wife looks good when she's been to the salon, but she looks better when I've been to the saloon.' That sort of thing.

Here's the rule: Anything that combines etymology, booze and jokes gets an automatic thumbs up.

My Weekend With The Geeks and the English

After Monday's double scoop of clusterfudge ice cream (extra nuts), the rest of the week's research time was spent interviewing hospital staff, which was entirely successful and therefore not very interesting to write about. So I won't bother.

I spent the weekend in Accra, kind of because MakerFaire Africa was in town but kind of because I really wanted to get out of the village for a few days. Having said that, MakerFaire! What a strange and surreal thing. For those who don't know about it, MakerFaire is sort of a Bay Area institution in which weirdo hobbyists get together to show off all their DIY projects. In San Mateo it's a kind of 'hey look at this bike I made out of hemp and an old Nintendo' atmosphere but it's an entirely different beast in the developing world where small-scale innovation could actually be Kind of a Big Deal. I made a few good contacts, basked in the air conditioning and free wifi, and fell a little bit in love with this girl I met. This was probably just because I hadn't spoken to a white person or an American in two weeks, and she was both so it seemed like we had *an incredible amount in common.* Anyway I'll never see her again so let's assume she was a lesbian.

The other surreal event of the trip was stumbling into an English pub (well, walking in, stumbling out). This was not an Irish pub, which usually seems to be the only kind that gets widely exported, but an actual, honest-to-god bangers-and-mash carlsberg-by-the-can watch-the-manchester-city-match have-a-portion-of-chips-and-rest-a-while English pub full of drunken English expats.

Mind you, they didn't have pints. Right. No pint glasses at all. Other than that I have no complaints. And I guess you've got to leave something out or what would be the point of actually going to England? I'll be there in under seven weeks now.

Weird.

A Place To Put Such Things.

Ok, you bastards, you got me. After years spent adamantly resisting any urge to dip my toe into the blogosphere, I've decided to shut my eyes, clench my fists and jump bodily into the … well, if not the 21st century, at least the mid-1990s. I have found myself, not for the first time, in a situation where I just keep thinking 'you know, this would really be a blog entry if I had anywhere to put such things.' So here I am, finally expending the activation energy to begin what will, I hope, become a self-sustaining process. At this rate, I should be actively using Twitter by 2016.

So. Here is the situation in which I find myself. I am in Ghana! Fieldwork. Research. The important features of this will become clear if and when they become interesting. The relevant facts for the time being are: I have been here for three weeks, I have another six to go, and also this: in previous experience, I hate fieldwork. Hate. It.

You guys! This is the dramatic tension! What is this trip going to be like? Is it going to be scary and depressing and painful like getting punched in the face by your mom? Or is it going to be a fantastical adventure in faraway lands like joining the crew of a pirate ship with your mom? There's only one immediately obvious way for you to find out.

(By the way, Mom, I do not mean to accuse you of assault, much less of leading a secret life of swashbuckling and thievery on the high seas. Thanks for reading my blog!)

I Should Get You Caught Up.

I arrived in Ghana on Sunday the 26th of July, and my first 11 days in the country were spent in Accra at the Hotel President (not as luxurious as it sounds) making contacts, watching African TV and getting pretty good at spider solitaire. I wrote an entry about this at devstuds.blogspot.com, the group fieldwork blog for Development Studies at Oxford. Here is what I wrote to my classmates:

So, I am officially on day 3 in real live honest-to-god actual Ghana. I've been spending my time so far dealing with what most of you are dealing with - finding a place to sleep, figuring out how to change money on a Sunday, trying to understand the rules of haggling and tipping, and taking utterly terrifying taxi rides - and later this week I have my first Ministry of Health meeting which in theory will be the first step toward my running a bunch of focus groups next week in a village way off to the east. By myself. Which I still find hilarious.

When I was in JFK airport catching my connecting flight to Accra, I spoke on the phone to a friend who just (quite to her own surprise) found herself accepted to business school. She'll be starting in autumn. "I feel like the universe really called my bluff on this one," she said.

Indeed.

After getting some sleep on my flight, I woke up and watched the path of the plane on my little display screen until landing, and any encroaching sense of panic I had was mitigated by looking at that map and seeing how I was flying just over the heads of Kerrie and Ganle and stopping just short of Georgie and a bit south of Chloe, and this is not to get all misty-eyed or anything; it is more to point and laugh and say ha! you suckers are all in the same boat with me!

Best of luck and keep up the pokerface
Ryan

Update: Nothing has changed. I am still bluffing. However after Accra I traveled to the municipality of Keta, where I will be doing the bulk of my actual fieldwork at the district hospital in a town called, charmingly enough, Dzelukope. Jel-OO-ko-FWAY. Yep!

Keta Day 1 – August 6.

It is at certain moments in my life, like the one in which I am offered a shot of gin in the backyard of an Ewe chief at 9 in the morning, that I find myself thinking 'Well, I don't know what I expected my life to be like, but it wasn't this.'

'African wakeup,' the chief says to me, grinning.

In fairness, it's not a full shot that they give me. They're taking full shots themselves, but out of deference, I guess, for my presumed limited ability to drink hard liquor before breakfast, what they give me is really just a sip, but I still manage to kind of gag on it and end up with gin in my lungs. So even when I am presumed incompetent, I exceed expectations.

I am staying in a kind of semidetached bungalow on a compound owned by Fred, the contact in Keta I got from Alex, the contact at the Ministry of Health I got from Dennis, the contact at the NGO I got from Kataneh, the contact at my old job. I am always kind of amazed by how networking works. The compound was completely flooded by a heavier than usual rainy season. The rains stopped the day before Barack Obama arrived in the country last month. Which seems about right.

Because of the flooding, the compound has had to be completely repainted and refurbished. I try to help the men move furniture, and when it quickly becomes apparent that I'm getting in the way, I help the children move buckets of sand instead. Six years ago in Mizque, Bolivia, I helped out on a farm for about ten seconds before the men decided it would be better for me to go inside and help the women and children make biscuits. When there is masculine physical labor to be done, I seem to pretty often fall into the category of 'women/children/exempt' without meaning to. I would like to blame this on the clueless foreigner thing, but let's be honest, it happens at home too.

I learned today that because I was born on a Sunday, my name is Korshie. I start introducing myself as such, consistently to howls of laughter. This is what anthropologists call 'building rapport,' and in my case seems to usually involve letting people laugh at me.

Keta Day 2 – August 7.

Went to the hospital today and got the full tour. The hospital administrator and I had a talk about data collection methodology that made me feel like this is going to work out just fine. I am also learning a few words of Ewe – not enough to be useful for communication, but enough to be useful for breeding goodwill.

There are moments when I feel isolated and stir-crazy and when I wish there weren't ants and sand on every surface of everything I own, but at these moments I tell myself 'Unclench, jerk. You're having an adventure.' And that seems to usually sort it out.

Keta Day 3 – August 8

I find myself saying 'mm' a lot in response to what people say to me. It's kind of like an 'oh' and kind of like a 'yes' without a lot of yes in it. It seems like a safe thing to say.

I went to the beach today and almost lost a sandal, but it washed back on shore a minute later. I watched crabs running around and helped some fishermen push their boat into the water. Into the Gulf of Guinea.

Not bad, Ghana. Not bad.

Keta Day 4 – August 9

Dear Ewe villagers: If you thought it was funny when I told you my name was Korshie, just wait until I show up at church in a chiefly kente shirt. Pure comedy gold, apparently.

Looking mildly uncomfortable to have my photo taken after not having seen a mirror in a week.

Fred asked the preacher (umm... Presbyter? Pastor? Vicar?) to do part of the sermon in English for my benefit, but he decided it would be better to pull me outside and witness to me directly while the congregation sang hymns. So we sat in white plastic chairs under a tree and he asked me if I believed that Jesus came down from heaven to save us all. ('The Jews don't believe,' he explained to me). The next time somebody asks me this question, I've got to remember to lie. Instead I told him I don't know. Well I don't! I was diplomatic enough not to add 'but I think probably he didn't.' Still, the preacher was pretty dissatisfied with my answer and now he wants to come see me at the hospital to discuss the matter further. Which is neat.

Keta Day 5 - August 10. Day 1 of Data Collection Rhymes With Blustertruck.

So I was reading H. Russell Bernard's Research Methods in Anthropology yesterday (which is as useful for making last-minute changes to your research plan as it is for killing cockroaches, which is very), and he says you should always ALWAYS plan to pretest your questionnaires because there is inevitably going to be something stupid about them that you didn't realize would screw everything up. So I thought, well, I think this questionnaire will be fine, but we'll see how it goes today and maybe make some changes if any issues come up. And I used it today and I didn't make any changes afterward. I didn't make any changes because the questionnaire is completely irreparably useless from beginning to end.

Basically, things get off to a bad start when I can't for the life of me convince the nurses that what I want is to survey every fourth patient who comes in. Despite repeated explanations, the nurse helping me (we will call her 'Clementine') consistently sends in each and every patient because she is either trying to be helpful or just trying to screw up my day so that I leave and she doesn't have to help me anymore. The latter would be kind of excusable, because she's actually the night nurse, and the staff shortage means that at 10am she's still here to ruin my survey.

But the sampling problems are kind of immaterial because it turns out that of all the pregnant women coming in for antenatal, nobody speaks English and most are also illiterate. I had actually anticipated this, asked about it, and been assured that it was not the case, but so it goes. The fact is I don't have an Ewe version of the survey so Clementine has to translate for me on the fly, and I have no idea what she is saying to the patients but she is definitely conversing more than necessary. At one point I can tell she is arguing with a patient and making her change her answer. Awesome, Clem. If this wasn't bad enough, there's this moment about a half hour in:

Clementine and patient chatting in Ewe
Clementine: She says yes. She knows where to go.
Ryan: Wait. The question is does she have a PROBLEM knowing where to go.
Clementine: Oh. Right. So the answer is no.
Ryan: ...

How long had we been reversing the yeses and nos? No way to be sure. So... there goes the last shred of legitimacy in what was already some pretty unusable data. Making day one of data collection a complete

and unmitigated

failure.

These things happen. And I feel better after getting my first internet time in about a week and speaking to Alex at the Ministry of Health, who basically fixes everything and gives me some advice that will allow me to do some actual useful work with the rest of my week.

Sadly, I am running low on is reading material. After having spent over a year reading Tristram Shandy, I'm blowing through the remainder at a pretty breakneck pace. After that all that's left is the Lonely Planet guide to West Africa and a bunch of books that are no fun to read because they're relevant to my work.

Keta Day 6 – August 11.

I'm taking mefloquine to prevent malaria, and while I don't get the psychotic episodes or hallucinations that some people experience as side effects, I do get the weird vivid dreams. Last night I dreamed

a) that my dear friend Zoe, while in India, had started dating Ed Asner, the announcer on the Tonight Show, who was about 50 years her senior. Apparently they met while taking a Hindi class together. Please note that Ed Asner is real, but he is not the announcer of the Tonight Show. He is an entirely different famous old person. The announcer on the Tonight Show is somebody else. Probably Don Pardo.

b) that I was recording a song I had written, to which the first two lines were

Well I took a Train to Tulsa
Starry Oklahoma

This was sung roughly to the tune of 'Why Don't Women Like Me,' which like Ed Asner is real and not my invention. I don't know how the rest of my version went though because after the first two lines my alarm went off.

A few nights ago I dreamed that I had a cookie jar that made a sound like a rooster when you lifted the lid, and that this was THE KEY to sorting out all my research problems. Even while dreaming that one, I was thinking 'Oh come on. A rooster? I'm just dreaming this because of the stupid roosters outside my window.'

Well look, you're not caught up yet, but I think I'm abusing the conventions of the medium by making such a lengthy post. Which is high-falutin' for 'I'm tired of typing.' So I'll fill in the rest at a later time.