Trash Talk

There’s a scene in Mad Men where Don and Betty are so close to ripping the damn Bandaid off their marriage, but are instead pretending to be happy at a picnic with the kids.  As they leave their brief contented scene, they simply lift their blanket to let the picnic trash float away into the park.  Because by this point in the series it’s impossible to be shocked by the boozing and overt misogyny, I was shocked by this act of blatant littering.  Though my mom assures me that people did not have such regard for littering in the 1960s, and in retrospect I assume this scene is more metaphor than historical marker of American behavior, trash and how we relate to it is weirdly cultural and definitely invokes our social and political systems.  In other words, even trash talk can be anthropological.  

Perhaps the most striking symbol of Ghana's trash problem-a place where two tiny bins are supposed to exist but do not in fact exist. This fake garbage receptacle just so happens to exist in front of Flagstaff House which is the presidential palace. 

In Ghana littering is a norm.  Places to deposit trash in public settings, like garbage cans, are virtually non-existent in the country because a haul away trash system is non-existent save for well to do residential parts of the major cities. Instead, the system of waste management is to toss the trash when and where you need to in anticipation that someone else will sweep it up and burn it.  This works decently well, especially in areas where the only waste management company, called Zoomlion, operates. You still see a lot of trash, but not the amount there would be without any kind of management.  

In my early stages of existence in this country I would diligently hold onto all of my trash until I found a rare trash can to deposit the trash. On public transit I’ve had seat mates rip the trash out of my hands and toss it out the window on my behalf, practically rolling their eyes at my ineptitude as they do so. I simply was not capable of throwing trash helter skelter.  As long as I put the trash where I thought it was my responsibility to deposit it, I had peace of mind even though I knew that the trash I deposited in a bin could very well be emptied in the very helter-skelter way I was trying to avoid. 

This cartoon by the Ghanaian Black Narrator, demonstrates that garbage is a concern on the socio-political landscape. 

As my time here extended,  I’ve found myself able to take on this behavioral norm, especially in moments where something about the country angers or frustrates me.  In such instances, I vengefully throw my trash on the ground.  I turn into a petulant woman seeking solace in a perfectly contextually appropriate act that is only anti-ethical to my own social rearing. 

However, now that I’m not a nomad in the country but a permanent settler in a small community that does not have Zoomlion service, I am again having trash anxiety.  I produce more trash than the average community member because I rely on buying purified drinking water contained in plastic bags and also purchase more packaged food items. Instead of getting into the daily Ghanaian habit of piling my trash outside and burning it, I fell into the daily American habit of compiling my trash inside.  Now every 3 weeks or so I embarrassingly carry my bag outside and try to burn it with the help of very eager kids.  But because it is so much trash (and mostly empty plastic bags that still contain remnants of water) the trash is hard to burn and instead becomes a heap that is 25% burned and that beckons kids to excitedly dig through looking for the bizarre things like sunscreen bottles.  Though I guess I’m creating a trash midden that could potentially challenge some future archaeologists, I feel a lot of guilt for creating and not managing waste that is left visible to my eye and not hauled away to some landfill or recycling plant. 

While I feel shame with my obvious contributions to creating visible trash, disposability is perceived differently here.  Disposability is about being “more hygienic” and being socially mobile.  When I first came to Ghana in 2002 plastic bottles were rare. Now plastic bottles are becoming a norm even though the drinks sold in them are more expensive than the same drink sold in the reusable glass bottle. So as this country becomes hungrier for items that can be used and tossed in the name of social mobility (and in a move reminiscent of Don and Betty Draper’s picnic clean up),  it relies on the lower classes, those Zoomlion workers to wade through, sweep and burn that disposability.  Those lower classes also become informal recycling centers, sifting through trash to find reusable items.  

This can be on the benign level of a kid picking up a plastic Coke bottle to give to their mom who will wash it and use it to sell homemade beverages. But it can also take on a more disturbing (and potentially malignancy inducing) form.  In Accra there is an area known as Agbogbloshie  that collects the world’s e-waste at the Ghanaian government’s approval. Here, Ghanaians eager for some kind of livelihood, dig through antiquated and not so antiquated Western technology coming from Western countries to pick off valuable metal scraps that can be re-sold.  Needless to say, this is an atrociously toxic condition under which to  make a living. 

Here gas is being funneled into old plastic drink bottles.  Most "gas stations" in the Upper West are simply bottles of fuel on a table by the roadside. 

While Ghana struggles to manage trash coming from daily consumer goods, and deals with the e-waste of other countries, it excels at managing and reusing larger consumer durables that are given a chance at re-birth before being sent to a dump.  In Kumasi there is a place called Suame Magazine where old, supposedly dead cars are re-born as new vehicles. Electronic goods are treated similarly. Before my departure to Ghana I had a hell of a time trying to find a place in St. Louis that would repair a broken netbook screen for less than the cost of the netbook.  In Ghana, getting your laptop, or any other electronic good fixed is not only possible, but usually easy and affordable.  So just as I hope that someday soon there is a more formal and consistent form of recycling all of the disposable plastics that are increasingly used in this country, I hope that one day, the US will return to a system in which our stuff can be fixed and not just tossed out for the world's poor people to pilfer through because a new one is cheaper anyway.  And on a personal side, I'm going to buck up and start boiling my drinking water so that I can avoid buying the plastic bags and partake in the first rule of waste management: reducing. Hopefully this will also reduce my trash anxiety. 

A library of old laptops used for their parts

A Ham Talks Protein

With my whacky appetite of late, I’ve been allowing my body’s cravings for chicken to win over my mind’s reluctance to eat chicken.  I’m not a meat eater in my home context.  For the past 5 years I’ve lived in Georgia, a state that often reminds me why I don’t eat chicken in Georgia or any other US State. Semis stuffed with crates upon crates of chickens are a constant presence on GA highways, signaling the fact that chickens come from factories, not farms.  Where I live in Ghana, I’m surrounded by chickens that know nothing other than the open range and a diet of grains and termites.

Dried cow dung used to attract termites to feed to chickens

However.  Most of the chicken that is consumed in Ghana does not come from local farmers. Most of the chicken that is consumed in Ghana is consumed in urban areas and has been imported from abroad and frozen for eons.  I know this because I’m aware of Ghanaian food politics. But because I live amongst roaming chickens and the factory farms that produce mass produced, juiced up chickens don’t exist here (and therefore don’t serve as visible signs of an industrial food system), it’s a lot easier to ignore the source of the chicken I’m eating.  I could go and buy a chicken from any farmer in my community, but I haven’t because I know I will then be likely to witness the slaughter of the chicken, a sight I’m still not comfortable with even though I’m only 2 generations removed from a livelihood of raising and killing chickens.  Instead I’ve been buying chicken at one of the numerous cold stores in a nearby urban center. Cold stores sell frozen fish, chicken, sausages and so forth.  This is the meat that is coming from abroad and the very meat that I protest against by NOT eating back home. Two weeks ago while I was waiting to buy some of this frozen chicken, I finally got the visible sign that is putting me back in the no chicken camp.  Underneath the counter was a box collecting scraps of the butchering process.  On the box was the emblem: “Georgia Grown.”  This, I can only assume, indicates that some of the very chicken I abstain from eating in Georgia is in fact the chicken I’m eating in Ghana.  And that makes no sense, but is the very essence of how weird and global and the food system is today.

Meat from the bush 

Advertisement for grasscutter, a very popular bush meat, in Accra, a metropolitan city that also enjoys Pepsi

People in the community where I live rarely eat large, distinguishable pieces of meat even though they rear livestock.  Goats, sheep and cattle are rarely used for household consumption because they are more valuable as assets that can yield cash or be used as in-kind in transactions. Bush meat (meat that is hunted from the wild) remains quite popular throughout Ghana, but is considered more of a luxury than a daily protein source.  Fish is more widely consumed as it is easily smoked to enhance shelf life and it is comparably much cheaper than meat.  Pieces of smoked fish add great flavor to soups and are often complimenting tiny dried herring that are ground and added to soup in a powdered form. 

Dried herring ready for pounding

With the arrival of the rains and the increased availability of green things for cows to forage upon comes the increased availability of milk.  With the increased availability of milk comes the increased availability of a locally made fried cheese called wagashe.  Yes.  Fried cheese.  Nothing is better. 

Fresh milk with maize porridge

The most interesting protein sources, however, are those that are plant derived. I’ve already written about the importance of cowpeas. Bambara beans, an indigenous crop that produces a legume similar to the peanut, are also a valued source of protein.  Bambara beans can be boiled or roasted, much like peanuts.  Bambara beans are also ground into flour that is combined with maize flour to produce a steamed dumpling that is awesomely similar to a tamale.  

Bambara beans

Peanuts (groundnuts as they are known here) are roasted and used as a snack food, but perhaps gain most of their culinary esteem in the pulverized paste form.  Groundnut soup, made from groundnut paste, is a popular soup right now as people are processing last year’s groundnut crop for sale and re-cultivation.  When combined with biri, a wild green vegetable that is currently thriving with the rains, a pretty divine soup is created. 

To what would shock pumpkin loving Americans, pumpkins here are valued not for their flesh but for their seeds and leaves. Seeds from gourds are ground and strong protein value to soups and stews.  

Pumpkin seeds at market ready for grinding

The yellow, fleshy looking part of this dish is ground gourd seed

Another seed based protein source that is very popular here, and throughout Sahelian West Africa, is dawa-dawa.  Dawa-dawa is a fermented product made from the seeds of the Africa locust bean tree.  The pods of this tree contain yellow, pillowy fruits that fall into the Dr. Seuss camp in my ongoing quest to categorize all trees in the Ghanaian savanna as either Dr. Seussian or Tim Burtonian.  

Pods from the African locust bean tree

Removing the fruit from the pod

The Seussian yellow fruit

The fruit is either eaten off of the seeds or washed off with water.  The seeds are roasted and pounded to remove a hard outer shell.  Finally, the seeds are pounded into a paste.  The paste is rolled into balls that are used in just about every soup that is cooked in this region.  Dawa-dawa gives a very distinct smell when it is added to hot oil.  If I had enough money to be well schooled in fine cheeses, I would be able to say which fine cheese dawa-dawa smells like.  But I’m not well schooled in fine cheeses.  I just know it smells like a pungent cheese and that is a sign of its culinary prowess.  It adds a distinguishable and nice flavor to soups in addition to its 40% crude protein content.

Dawa dawa in its final form, ready for being plopped into soup

As the world's growing economies become hungrier for meat, and as an not very environmentally friendly industrialized meat system continues to provide the majority of the world's meat, now is the time to celebrate the protein sources that do not ride so high on the food chain.  So here’s to dawa-dawa.   May it contribute to fixing a craving that I don’t want chicken from Georgia to solve anymore.  

Childhood and the Politics of Representation

Interacting with kids between the ages of 2 and 16 is probably my only daily guarantee during fieldwork.   Kids make me laugh.  I make them laugh.  I’m getting to know them and they’re getting to know me.   I don’t want to deny the relevance of children to my fieldwork experience, nor negate what I learn about their lives here.  However, neither do I want to contribute to a narrative of an outsider talking about the needy, but happy and resilient African child.  It's complicated to be an outsider in Ghana or any other country where the collective “developed” world’s imagination thinks of inhabitants as poor, in-need, or un-developed.  How I position myself as an anthropologist who is witness to life (including childhood) in Ghana in 2014 is challenging.

There is an entire Tumblr devoted to mocking women who, in their adventures traveling or volunteering abroad, take and publicly post pictures of themselves with children. This site draws attention to how a conglomeration of such publicly posted images, without any kind of context, reinforces a classic narrative of the good-willed white person bringing joy and good deed to the non-white person who needs their joy and good-deed. As Rafia Zakaria wrote about voluntourism in an online debate:

“The photo ops, the hugs with the kids and the meals with the native are part of the package; the helpers can see and touch those they are saving and take evidence of their new mobility home with them.”

The Onion is less harsh but no less biting in nailing why such a trend is problematic:

So I while I will be taking pictures of myself with children who, by the end of 12 months spent getting to know them, will be nothing other than friends, I will likely not publicly post such pictures.  But I will talk about what I observe about childhood here because it’s really not different from childhood anywhere. 

I watch kids get lost in their own fictional and fantastical worlds of play, where all that is needed is a large tree branch to serve as some motorized vehicle and some vocal cords to make engine sounds. I watch kids make their own toys. I watch this and relay this with the very careful and important acknowledgement that such scenes are not to be filed under the “They are so poor but so happy” category.  They’re simply creative like kids tend to be when left to their own devices. 

playing with natural resources-making a clay TV

don't worry-she also made a remote control

at work on a car made from recycled goods

car in progress

car in its final stages--the wheels are old flip flops

I also watch kids learn the roles of adulthood.  I’ve seen a 15 year old kill and clean a duck.  I’ve seen a 13 year old cook enough rice for 15 people in the rain. I’ve seen 7 year olds build bricks. I’ve seen 3 year olds carry tiny bowls of water on their heads as they follow their mothers from the borehole with their much larger basins.  I watch these scenes and relay these scenes with the very careful and important acknowledgement that such scenes are not to portray childhood as a drudgerous and laborious life phase in Ghana. Children bear large responsibilities here, but they still go to school, still get time for play and are still loved by their mothers and fathers.

These are universal aspects of childhood with contextual variations. Childhood is about learning in play and learning in work. Childhood, whether composed of homemade tin cars or an i-pad, is still childhood.  And yes, I think we should all work to ensure that all children are equipped with environments that lead to enlightening, nurturing and healthy childhoods.  But we don’t need to patronize vulnerable children to accomplish that.