being in nothing...

Coming back...

I Dont even know where to start, there's so many beginnings and so many endings, one right after the other, all at the same time, overlapping, and gaps in between where it feels like nothing is happening at all. Like it's all on pause.. as if right now, there's no traffic on Dorval Avanue, theres no running water in Otuam, there's no sea ice on Ungava Bay and there's no way I'm here right now. I dont know where I am.. well, I'm in Montreal at Wini's.. but i'm just staying here, lying here watching sex in the city, having supper with friends, painting my fingernails.. All of this is happening but im not really there to experience it. I'm watching it all happen, i'm there but i'm not. But at 2 in the morning... there really IS no traffic on dorval avanue, 7am, no running water in Otuam --someone's probably walking home from the well right now, big metal bowl of water on their head. I remember my first week in Otuam, I was helping get water, and the would always give me these little buckets, then i was getting impatient with how long it took the tank to fill so i grabbed the HUGE metal bowl and started carrying it to the well, as if i were capable of carrying that on my head full of water. as if.... my host mother and her freinds all yelled at me... no no no nno... you'll die!... but no, I decided i was going to (try). obviously I failed, but i tried.

then when i was in toronto, in my hotel... i went into the bathtub and turned the tap on.. it was hot. I took a hot shower. A Shower, with a shower hose (or whatever that thing that drips water in called).. it rained on me... no flash floods, no hard labour, no cold shock. and then again the next day i took a shower.. so now i take showers. I dont need my dettol or my small purple pail.

but anyway, I've been sick a lot.. I cant eat anything without it coming back up. Has anyone else experienced this after 3 months in a tropical place? but maybe its just needing time for my body to adjust.. I'm supposed to stay in Montreal for the week and go to toronto for the weekend for a couple more CWY debriefings, but i just need to go home. So tomorrow Im going home. When i first went to Ghana I hated it. I was hot, sweaty, smelly, irritable and hungry, all I wanted was a cup of coffee, an air conditioned room (or at least wintertime), and a SHOWER... none of those things materialised in Ghana. But theyre here now. In ghana, my feet were dirty, so dirty they actually looked tan, i was hot and sweating like a motherfucker and it took me forever to get used to having kids follow me around in the streets. Now in Canada, I look at someones kid sideways and they freak out, mama bears all over the place, apparently I'm really menacing looking. Now in Canada, my feet are wet and cold from the slushy sidewalks, my shoes stained with salt, instead of shit. I'm cold, I have been cold since i got off the plane in toronto. What kind of Inuk am i? how do i expect to survive when i go back up north?

Umm.... anyway. I'm ok. I just dont know what i'm doing anymore.

To Ghana Men... you know the ones..

"Obruni koko, what is your name?
Are you from US? Germany?"
No, I'm from Canada, call me Abena
"Abena, all the beautiful girls, they come from Canada"

"Girl You shaped like a bottle of coke, I love your teasing bones"
Like coke? I'd be a hard habit to break... I know.
"Baby girl you got a phone?"

I got a phone. I'll give you my number, it's MTN
054-fuck-you-very-much
Call me sometime, maybe we can do lunch..

Then you'll take me home to meet your mom

"Ma this my wife
Ma this the girl who changed my life
I'm gonna buy a ring for her"

A ring?
Thanks, but you can put that on my middle finger

I'm flattered by your complements
But boy, dont touch me, let go of my fucking wrist
I dont need you to hold my hand
I have a boyfriend, a fiance and a husband.

"But you can still be my lover girl"
No. You have no chance in the world.
No chance in hell no chance on earth

I'd peel the skin off my own legs,
before i'd be your 'lover girl'
Just the though of all of that
makes my fingers want to curl
and clench my fists and...
and...
and...

Sorry! Are you bleeding? Poor baby.

landmarks

So, our time in Otuam is soon coming to an end. By February 27, we'll be back on Canadian soil... I'm so so ecited to go back home... yet I dont want to leave this place... this amazing place. It's so nice to walk down the road or through the paths and see fammilliar faces, people who dont call me Obruni any more. "Abena!".. or... "Araba!"... or even "Janiii... atisaine?!"...:) 'E-ye'

it's going to be strange going back to Canada, especially for my first few weeks back i'll be in the city. From the bush in Ghana to the concrete jungle. The cold city streets are so far from anything i could even imagine. Not only the cold, but just.. back to the grids, to the world of squares and sharp corners. "How do i get to this place?" will have such a different kind of answer over there than it would here. "So, if you go up Maple street to the corner of George, there's a CIBC there. Turn right four blocks and you'll see it on the other side of the road" as opposed to "Ok, go down that path just off the Mosque, then you'll see the well... go left on that path thats more up the hill, past the pink house with the blue bird painted on. You know the one with the mango tree over there? There's usually an old man sitting on the bench, just keep going straight and you'll see my house"...

God I'll miss this place. I'm gonna miss walking by the well, greeting all the people collecting their daily water. I'll miss the puppies that live at the pink house, and the old man on the bench. I love Ghana.

Can I tell you something?

'You can keep a secret right?

Yea, you can trust me.

ok............'

In CWY,nothing you do is a secret. No matter how hard you try to keep something under wrapps, chances are, pretty much everyone else in the group already knows about it. I wont get into all the scandelous things we do as a group and as individuals (maybe after the program ends;)... but let's just say no angels came to Ghana this year, at least not to Otuam...... Or Saltpond for that matter.

Anyway.....

You know when you've done something 'bad', or exciting and your first reaction is to want to tell somebody. To give out all the juicy details of how you did _________ with __________ all afternoon and didnt get caught. Or like, when someone is your friend, but something they said really bothered you, you dont want to really confront them so you take your frustrations out by telling someone else. _______ Is my really good friend, but she does this thing that seriously annoys me sometimes.

In group of 18, seperated by nationality and again by personaity, you only really have a few good friends at a time, if at all. Everyone else, you're just kind of nice to... like, pleasant and polite, then all of a sudden it all turns around and everyone is friends with different people again, so the pleasant and polite really works in your favor. If you stop being close with one person (for whatever reason) and you need someone else, people arent going to want to be your friend if you've been a total bitch in the past. Ok, enough of this... what I'm trying to say is..

Here, you feellike you can only trust a few people, so you confide in whoever it is you trust at any given time. you say things like "___________ was being so irritatng today. fuck, she's such a dumbass".... or "I went to ______________ with ___________" and it usually ends with "I trust you not to tell anyone" so you tell that person because you're under the impression thatyou completely trust them with the darkest, most incriminating details of your temporary 6 month life. Then of course, alliances change and trust shifts. Sometimes even if you stop being friends with someone, you can still trust them, but it gets complicated when they trust someone else. Someone you may not necessarily trust...

it's like "________ came to visit me, but _________ dosent know. Dont tell anyone ok?... I can trust you?.. I dont want the whole group talking about it" "Of course you can trust me".....Then it goes "So I was talking to _________ yesterday, she said ___________ came to visit, can you believe it? she told me not to tell anyone, but I'm telling you because i trust you, ok? she'll be really mad if she hears about it" "Oh yea yea, of course you can trust me. Wow, so _____________ really went to visit her? I wonder what they talked about?... probably feelings? haha... weird they hang out.. _______________ wouldnt be happy to hear about it" "I know right!".... Then again and again and again til the story's gone around 9 or even 18 times; sometimes it even comes back to ou completely different.

Anyway... There's no closure to this blog. Just another experience of Canada World Youth, another life lesson to learn, another thing we deal with day to day.

new friends... o_O

We've been in Ghana for just over a month now, and almost everyone has been sick in some way. Wether it be diarhea (I cant spell that word o_O) or something else, each canadian in my group has been ill here, except me. I always boasted about always being fine, I've never had trouble with the food or anything. and then BAM. I get a fucking parasite. Just like that. 4 Days, no appetite, no food, vomit pretty much everything i do consume and not being able to explain to my host mother why. In 4 days, I've lost so much weight that i can feel my ribs, my clothes dont fit proerly and the beads i wear around my waist can come of if im not carful.

I tell my counterpart i threw up, "Are you pregnant?"... "No I'm NOT (*&^%$) pregnant"..."When was the last time you were dewormed?".... "Ummmmmm... NEVER?!"

So I went to the clinic this morning, to ask for deworming treatment (which, needless to say I've never had to do before) and the nurse, who's actually really cool.... new friend of mine -Fred.. helped me. But, I have to say, I'm not sure i trust their judgment completely. They asked if I have malaria (Everything you go to the clinic for, you get treated for malaria. You have a fever = Malaria. Your throat closes up and you cant breathe = Malaria. YOu have an infection on your skin, but you said yes when they asked about headache = Malaria. You test negative for the malaria parasite, you still have malaria. If symptoms persist and the malaria treatment dosent work come back and we'll actually try to figure out what's wrong. Anyway, I insisted that i do not have malaria, and thankfully wasnt given treatment for it. Typhoid however was one of the things i got in my cocktail of treatment... I wasnt sure how to argue against it (esp considering I've been vaccinated against typhoid) so ijust took the pills but never intended to take them. Then I asked my CP to ask the nurse what they were, and then he told her it was for general infection. riiight. ok. I'l TOTALLY take those pills. I did get a deworming treatment tho, which i will take. as much as i talk about wanting to lose weight sometimes, once it actuallyhappens it freaks me out (esp considering the circumstances)....

that's what she said

So, there are currently 3 Canada World Youth groups in Ghana right now,

Ghana 1- Women's /exchange. Moncton/Otuam
Ghana 2- Mixed exchange. St. John's/Saltpond (?)
Ghana 3- Mixed exchange. Fredericton/Northern Region (i dont actually know the town)

Ghana 1 is my exchange, lucky, lucky (fuckmylife) me, I'm in an all women's program. Ihavent had a lot of contact with the other two exchanges, especially the Fredericton group, but throught the grapevine, I've heard that each of the groups has problems of their own. none of which i'm really going to talk about, because I'm not sure how reliable the grapevine is, and it would all be speculation. I just wanted to tell anyone from those groups what ours is like, and then you can decide how much your lives suck in compareison. Because as awesome as this experience is (omgitsfuckingamazing), its not without its challenges.

first off, we're all girls. 18 girls. 18 females, all living with eachother, forced to do activities together, building a micro-community together. It can be great, there's so much freedom and a level of comfort that you can only attain in a gender specific group. We have become so close to eachother that we can talk about anything, from sex and penis size, to heartbreak and grief, to diharrea and vomit. In fact, as a group (at least with the canadians) we've got a long running "Thats what she said" joke,and we giggle whenever someone says the words "big" 'hard' or 'juicy'..... you should see us compareing coconuts. lol...anyway, yea so we're tight. but you can imagine the drama and bullshit that comes from 18 super hormonal, estrogen rich, sex deprived, incredibly intelligent ladies. fake friends, talking behind your back, tired of seeing your face, god she's such a spaz, at least i'm not a whore, i hate how much she flirts, that dress is really short, she gave me dirty looks, i dont know why shes mad at me, does she have hickies?, shes such a mooch, can i borrow 1cedi? you owe me 5, she really gets on my nerves, fuck my life. fuck my godforsaken life. Thats our group, that's a large part of our experience with CWY. I'm not gonna lie, it fucking sucks sometimes... you know,when you reach the end of your rope and you just want to slap a bitch? At least one of us gets that feeling each day. but it's all good...it's all cool... cuz somehow, through all the backstabbing, trash talking, gossip fuled days,at the end of the day, we are one big family. Each one of those 17 girls is my sister, and i've come to love her dearly. I go through days wishing i didnt have to see her face, but thinking about it, under what other circumstances would i have had the chance to meet this amazing young woman? and here, not only have we met, but we've cried, laughed, and lived together. We've seen eachother naked and not cared, we've talked about our deepest secerets, our seceret wishes and desires, we sit at the edge of the atlantic ocean, in a completely different world, we trust 100% the girls, even though its hard sometimes. This sisterhood is something that could never be created outside of a CWY context. As much as i whine and complain about this group, i seceretly love all of the girls from the bottom of my heart. I want to go home, to see my friends and family more than anything... but that only means seperating from these wonderful women, possibly never to see some of them again. Makes me want to cry just writing this.

Linda, Zarpa, Zankhna, Ania, Elisa, Laura, Jaz, Steph, Sheba, Grace, Anette, Vicky, Deborah, Bernice, Vivian, Patricia, Nomotey... <3 love love love. And Junie and Lydia too, awesome supervisors (even though we dont always see eye to eye).


xoxoxox

Obruni, what is your name?

Obruni how are you? Obruni where are you going? Go and come ok....

Every single day, since we arrived in Otuam, people ask me those questions whenever i go out. Mostly little children, who dont know any other english... the same kids everyday go "Obruni what is your name?"... "My name is Janice"... "Chalice?".."No, Jaanice"..."Janet?"... "JAANICCEE".... "Jani?!"..... o_O "Yes, Jani"

I'm starting to get used to it, i feel like a tape recorder, with a script that i have to read and repeat day in and day out. I can walk down the paths "Hello"... "I'm fine"... "afternoon"... "My name is Janice"..."How are you?"..."buh byee" its so predictable that i dont even need to hear the question, one of those statements will most certainly answer anything people ask me. It's funny tho, whenever people ask "How are you?" the answer that we all expect is "I'm fine"... its a combination of not really caring how someone is and here, in otuam, not having a mutually intelligible language to communicate fully. Somebody asks how i am, I'm not going to say "I'm not fine. I'm hot, sweaty, tired, hungry because the stew sucks and i have a million mosquito bites that came out of nowhere. I need a shower, a cup of coffee and a day where the goddamn roosters dont wake me up at 4am, so I'm not fine ok. I'm not fine".... but no, "I'm fine. Just fine thank you. How are you?"..."fine!"

But, in all... I do like it here. Dont think that i hate it or that im complaining... its just that those questions get really old, really fast. and yet, everyday, every. sinlge. day. i have to smile and wave, smile and say im fine, my name is Janice, buh bye... to every person i see on the street.

but i'm learning fante, so the conversations should become more interesting as time goes on.