JuneJuly

In the Upper West, June and July are often referred to as one month: JuneJuly.  The JuneJuly compression evokes the lean season—the period before harvest when farming households endure incredibly tight food budgets.  Farmers have invested all of their money in their crops that are still in the fields.  Stored food from last year’s harvest is finished.  Money for buying food is pretty darn hard to come by, but people manage to different degrees.

Maize reserved for planting in July

This year JuneJuly is extending into JuneJulyAugust. The first harvest period has been derailed by drought that killed a lot of the maize that was planted at the start of the rains.  People have replanted this staple, but there are still 2 more months to go before it will (hopefully) be harvested. To add insult to injury, with no new local maize integrating into the food system to compete with maize from other regions of Ghana, those who sell foodstuffs can set high prices.  Last year at this time, with fresh, local maize in the markets, a bowl of maize (enough to feed a family of approximately 5 people approximately 2 meals) cost approximately 2 Ghanaian Cedis, which is approximately $1 when the Ghanaian Cedi is not deflated (as it currently is). Right now a bowl of maize is hitting 3.50 Ghanaian Cedis a bowl.  With the sudden and recent cessation of a government subsidy on fuel, fuel costs have recently soared and with the rise in fuel comes an additional blow to food costs. This is not a trivial series of events for most families in Ghana, where food costs make up a high percentage of the household budget. However, coping with JuneJuly, just like food insecurity anywhere in the world, is not a homogenous experience. 

Being food insecure in one of my research communities means skipping meals because money is so tight that even maize porridge and a proper soup is not always guaranteed. It means having to beg for some pieces of fresh maize from family members so you can eat for the first time in 24 hours.  It means carefully doling out roasted bambara beans to your children and not offering any to the visiting anthropologist, a rarity in a culture that always invites strangers to partake in their food. Here people laugh when I question whether they’ve lost weight in the past month because this is seen as a given for JuneJuly.  This question results in people sharing “funny” stories about pants falling off.

Being food insecure in my other research community is not about skipping meals because of lack of food, but fatigue with having to eat the same foods over and over again because they are the most affordable foods.   It means selling your rice harvest to buy more maize for the household because even though everyone is sick of the maize porridge, the porridge that can be made from one bag of maize lasts a lot longer than the equivalent bag of rice. Maize is cheap.  Rice is not.  In this community people laugh when I ask them if in the past month they’ve ever had to forgo eating a whole day. This is an unfathomable scenario here. But people also express enough malaise with a routine, non-changing diet that their appetites diminish and they skip meals not out of necessity but choice. They express disappointment for not being able to satisfy their cravings for foods that satisfy certain taste and health preferences. 

Fresh tomatoes and peppers are often cited a ingredients desired for soups but sacrificed because of cost

These are different types of hunger that exist within a 5 kilometer radius.  Both deserve compassion and comprehension of causation. Hunger is a complex function of the human experience. Hunger doesn’t just exist in the stomach, but also in the mind, where our cultural notions of food and what it means to eat and be satisfied are met depending upon our different types of hunger.  After a day of mental overload at the conference I recently attended in Scotland I announced to a companion that I was famished and wanted something hearty to eat.  She laughed at this announcement but in her laughter I knew she knew what I meant. That was the night I finally gave vegetarian haggis a go.  It was hearty.  It was satisfying.  It was exactly what my mind and body wanted to eat.  Food doesn’t just have to be present, it has to be appealing and considered satisfying by the eater. 

When Sharing Really is Caring

I’ve traveled away from my field site twice.  The first time I returned, the community gatekeeper (a man who serves as a liaison between community authorities and outsiders such as myself) asked me where his bread was.  I laughed his request off.  Later, my research assistant pulled me aside and said that bread is, in fact, expected of returned travelers. Irritated by this anticipated but belatedly learned cultural transaction, I substituted a box of tea for the bread and made a mental note to not forget the bread next time.  Given the community gatekeeper’s political pull, I budgeted future bread costs as an insurance premium against the potential sabotage of my research efforts.   

Apparently my research assistant also made a note.  He made a note that anthropologists are inherently eager to learn about culture and are not, in fact, culturally clairvoyant.  Upon my most recent return from travels, my assistant pulled me aside to let me know that because Ramadan had started it would be a very nice token if I would recognize the community’s celebration by providing a bag of sugar so as to gift people with an item valued for its sweet contribution to the sour porridge taken to break the daily fast. I think this was suggested because it was correctly presumed that I did not possess the knowledge or skill to prepare my own porridge and engage in the nightly porridge exchange that occurs at sunset, when porridge made in one home is sent to another home and vice versa.   So, two weeks ago I returned to the community laden with a 50 kilo bag of sugar for the community and 2 loaves of bread for the community gatekeeper.  I spent the afternoon of my return making the rounds and paying it forward.  I even acquiesced to my assistant’s assurance that the most appropriate thing to do would be to deliver the sugar to the Imam before Friday prayers so he could announce that I brought the community a bag of sugar.

Sugar for all!

I do not enjoy feeling pushed into sharing when such sharing is seemingly more about accumulating public and political esteem.  This is sharing that seems not so much about enacting care. This is sharing that I find annoying.  It’s interesting that I’m invited and/or expected to participate in public distributions of material goods as an act of sharing, but what I find more interesting is sharing that does seem more about mutual caring.

Collective farm labor is emerging a relevant context of such sharing within my research. One of my field sites, one that can be described as less integrated into the wage labor economy proffered by a nearby urban center, is reliant on collective farm labor.  Men of a similar age cohort form groups of 5-10 that work as a rotating unit to plow and weed members’ farms.  The other field site, a community that is more integrated into the wage labor economy, has fairly effectively disintegrated this custom.  With more community members spending their time in wage labor jobs (largely in construction work), there is less time to devote to collective work as well as more cash to compensate for that lack of time.  Attitudes about shared labor may also be changing.  One man in this field site recently reported that he helped a friend on his farm and was unexpectedly paid.  Though its conjecture on my part to suggest that cash integrated into this equation was a way to buy out a reciprocal act, the negation of the reciprocity is worthy of attention.

As the share economy buzzes its way through the media in the US, elements of the share economy fizzle in Ghana.  This death is painful to watch because share economies, as they most fully exist, are about more than eliminating cash.  They are about building and sharing knowledge as well as social relationships.

Women at work in their own collective planting efforts

As I continue to learn about the causes and consequences of distress as it relates to mental health, I’m finding that people present a lot of worries and a decent amount of poor mental health symptoms.  However, very few people report actually acquiring worry sickness, a context specific illness that is similar to conditions of anxiety or depression. In inquiring as to the ways that people manage to avoid getting worry sickness—how they avoid letting their worries dictate their mental health—I’m learning that social spaces are crucial.  Men identify farming collectives as not only sources of labor, but as sources of empathy and shared experience.  Collectives are social units that help motivate individuals to think beyond their futile thoughts.  For farmers who have invested all of their economic, social and physical resources in their crops, when those crops suffer in a drought and that drought coincides with an existing phase of pretty severe food insecurity, futility is an easy mindset to fall into.  Farmers express that the collegiality and shared experience of fellow collective members can help ameliorate those feelings.  Every time I hear a man share his experience with enduring the financial and ecological constraints of farming so as to at least attempt to feed his family for at least part of the year, Johnny Cash’s Worried Man streams through my head.  Here in this corridor of Ghana, collectives, in part with other social spaces, help ease the worried man syndrome that Johnny sings so true. 

Another common way that men gather to talk about the serious and non serious are tea spots such as this one, where the hanging wire mesh stove is used to heat water for shots of strong, sugary green tea. 

Farmers under distress are not unique to this part of Ghana. India continues to endure a higher than normal rate of farmer suicides associated with high levels of debt acquired through the purchase of expensive inputs. Farmers who fail to pay such debts back due to their inability to successfully navigate an economic system that is built off of their exploitation are unable to face the shame of failure that should not be theirs to bear.  A similar situation is also captured in the ethnography Troubled Fields, a holistic analysis of how the effects of the political and economic reforms that resulted in the 1980s farm crisis resulted in increased mental health issues and suicide rates amongst men operating family farms in Oklahoma. Given such precedence, it will be distressing to watch how illnesses and behaviors associated with the distress of constrained farming  manifest beyond the worried man syndrome as things like collective farming in rural Ghana go by the wayside.

Fieldwork Without Borders

I’ve crossed a lot of borders of late: Ghana-Burkina Faso-Ghana-UK-Turkey-Ghana.  In a touristic (and anthropological) sense, it’s easy to perceive borders as nodes of red tape.  What’s more challenging is interpreting why these nodes are structured (or unstructured as the case may be) the way they are and how these nodes are negotiated by social actors. Ghana has a pretty notorious reputation for being a challenging beaurocratic context for obtaining and maintaining a visa.   I’m convinced that it’s a system that is intentionally convoluted so that an informal economy can build around the management of the confusion.  In my most recent visa renewal effort I made the decision to take action like a Ghanaian would take action against red tape; I called a friend who had a friend who works in the immigration office.  And then I did the exact opposite of what the large poster board at the immigration headquarters messaged--I handed over a little extra money for the processing of my visa.  I used informal formalities to becoming illegally legal.  Perhaps most telling about the extent to which this is the norm is that my friend kindly enacted, but slightly smirked at, my request to put the extra money in an envelope so that it didn’t appear visible. That slight smirk relayed how unnecessary this step actually was.

I’ve also had experiences that make me inclined to think that the red tape is not just about the development of an informal economy that helps underpaid government workers.  I think it’s also about making sure the outsider gets a taste of their own medicine.  It’s retributive.  Ghanaians desiring to go to the US must endure an endless (and in most cases hopeless) process to obtain a visa to the States.  The US embassy in Accra always has a line of Ghanaians waiting outside the embassy building to have an opportunity to sit down inside with an embassy official to face questioning on why they want to go to the States and who will vouch for them.  Unless they have a large bank account in combination with a powerful connection in the States, their request for a visa will inevitably be denied. Even for Ghanaians who have never attempted to obtain a visa, the narrative of the experience is one that runs strongly and structures Ghanaians’ understanding of their position on the world stage.  

Posters such as this one are prolific in enticing Ghanaians to part with money for a service that promises to get them a work or student visa to the states. 

This makes me think that the experience I had of being illegally detained and verbally harassed by a Ghanaian immigration officer was a way to remind me of my position on the world stage.  I can only interpret this diatribe as a frustrated Ghanaian wanting to remind me, a US citizen, of my ability to move about the world.  I felt profiled by the immigration officer.  And it was a pretty wretched feeling.  Anthropology prides itself on participant observation—doing the best you can to live and feel the experience of the society you are trying to integrate into.  This was participant observation I did not sign up for and the medicine was pretty bitter. But it is still relevant data for my attempts to understand the social and economic climate of this country. 

Borders don’t simply represent different nations. Borders represent different political, social and economic opportunities.    Our world is one in which historically, and contemporarily, borders are often physically imposing places that protect one population’s resources from another population’s resources.  Sometimes that protection is warranted against acts of aggression, as is the case with the remnants of a wall built in Gwollu in the Upper West Region of Ghana.  This wall was built in the early 19^th Century to protect the inhabitants of Gwollu against slave raiders.   Sometimes these physical boundaries are really more about reactions to a neoliberal age that creates great disparities.  These disparities push populations to seek better opportunities. This is why thousands of Central American children are waiting for “processing” at the US/Mexico border.  

Gwollu wall built to protect against slave raiding

I think as well of the hundreds of Muslim Ghanaians who legally traveled to Brazil for the World Cup but have just applied for asylum to escape what they are calling religious persecution in Ghana.  Though they claim that their persecution is tied to religious differences within the Ghanaian Muslim community, I’m not so sure this tension even exists, let alone does it serve as the most pressing factor pushing these Ghanaians out of their home context. Religious persecution is a much smarter card to play on the international stage than the political economy card.  Ghanaians want to leave Ghana because of structural violence—an instable economy that includes a deflating national currency, no job opportunities, and rising fuel, electricity and water costs that leave the majority of the population struggling to get by.  The region of Brazil that these Ghanaians have applied for asylum is an area known to have plentiful employment opportunities that have attracted many foreign workers. 

These are issues that not only affect the Hondurases and Ghanas of the world, but also the so called developed nations.  In Scotland, where I recently traveled, discourse is building towards a vote for independence from or ongoing dependence on the UK.  The debate, from what I was able to gather, is one largely centered around improving Scotland’s socio-economic indicators that are seen as oppressed by UK leadership.  Instead of feeling pushed out of their homes and across other national borders, Scotland has an opportunity to redefine what its borders with England mean in terms of political and economic authority.  If contemporary Scotland can mimic the social protection services of the days of yore (see photo below), Scotland might have a knack for creating a more equitable and healthy life for all of its citizens without its citizens having to flee to another place.

The tagline for wooing Scots to vote yes for independence

Butter Up

From mid April to mid May, it was challenging to be a researcher.   With the start of the rains, my opportunities to beg/goad/charm people to talk with me were greatly constrained. Everyone was on their farm prepping the land for planting and then planting the land. The community became a ghost town from 8 AM to 6 PM, a place that outsiders would assume is populated and ruled by children between the ages 2 and 10.

Fortunately for the anthropologist, but unfortunately for crops and for farmers, the last 2 weeks in May went by with no rain.   This has been the pattern for quite a while now in this region: The rains start with a bang, then take a break, and then return—but often without the frequency or duration that they should.  Though the region has always been guaranteed a rainy season and that the rainy season always involved potential uncertainty, a changing climate ensures that the uncertainty now involves certain uncertainty.

I’ve struggled of late to contend with why anthropologists have to spend soooo much time in the field.  I’ve met students from other disciplines doing research in the area and am always a bit jealous when their 6 weeks of fieldwork are over or they get to fly home for a break in-between research periods to recover from the emotional drought that is fieldwork.  What makes day in and day out life in the community where you are doing the research worth it?  Because patterns and not isolated incidents emerge. Patterns in economy and patterns in mental health are what I seek to trace.  And to see how these patterns interact, I have to endure the wet spells and the dry spells, be it in rain or data.

When the rains take a break and people are no longer on their farms, what people decide to do in place of farming is just as important as the farming.  Once households decided to hold off on planting more crops until the rains returned, women began diverting a good chunk of their time and energy to collecting shea nuts, the tree born fruit that leads to that product known as shea butter.

Shea butter is primarily used as a fat for cooking and is, thankfully, the primary and preferred fat used even though more expensive vegetable oils are in the market place. It is added to the litany of local food ingredients that come from the local environment.  In its final form it looks and feels thick and rich, as if a twin of Crisco.   Though it may look like Crisco, it tastes like buttah.  It took me three different meals to realize that shea butter is the awesomely rich ingredient that was fooling my palette into thinking it was eating dairy butter.  Shea butter melted with tiny fragments of scotch bonnet pepper turned a very dry and filling-less corn meal dumpling into a divine meal.  Luckily, licking the bowl with your fingers is culturally expected here.

She butter is also used as a skin care product.  If ever there was a region that was destined to rule in the skin moisturizing industry, West Africa is that region.  In the tropical forests zones, there’s cocoa butter, a byproduct of the cocoa industry that is used in skin care creams and lotions.  In the savanna zones, there’s shea butter, a distinct product of its own that is used in its purest form as a skin care product.  You can moisturize and cook from the same blob of shea butter. Before the importation of industrially manufactured lotions, shea butter was the thing that people in this region to moisturize their skin.  People still do, but the “luxury” of foreign goods often prevails. A shopkeeper in Accra pulled out her best show to try and sell me on a bottle of lotion baring the Family Dollar logo, a US based retailer emphasizing low-cost products that continues to thrive in the US economic slump.  Already familiar with the Family Dollar line of products, I politely declined and bought the cheaper cocoa butter lotion made in neighboring Ivory Coast.

Despite outside ingredients that are a threat to the local usage of shea butter, shea butter remains a very widely used product in the Upper West, so the manufacturing of shea butter is an important activity in women’s economic activity.Shea nuts take a lot of time and labor to process into butter.  First the fruit (which resembles avocado in texture but tastes perfumey) is removed either by eating or by stomping on or by laying out and letting the livestock go to town.  The nut is then exposed and left to dry in the sun before it is roasted.  Once roasted, the nut is then pounded to remove the shell and get to the meat.  The meat is then boiled and the nutty boil mixture is then processed by arm strength mimicking an industrial mixer to instigate the separation of fat from non-fat.  It’s a process that takes days. 

 As anthropologist Brenda Chalfin has well-outlined, most definitively in her ethnography Shea Butter Republic, shea butter is a product that has risen immensely on the global scene. It’s a commodity. There’s an international market demand for it. But unfortunately, the links for getting the producers of the nut and its product remain weak throughout Sahelian West Africa. Though there is the occasional artisanal scale market in a community adopted by an NGO, most communities lack the resources to develop a localized shea butter industry that can produce enough product to entice a fair price from a wholesaler.  Women therefore manufacture the butter on a household level basis and middle men/women make the profit on the way to the wholesaler.  As the initial producer and processor of the product, women throughout savanna West Africa usually get pittance for shea butter that will end up in a luxury cosmetic. 

Because women are actively engaged in helping on their husband’s farm as well as planning to start their own farms, while still maintaining their ventures into processing shea nuts, I’ve been asking them if it is helpful to have so many activities running at the same time.  The social science research from this part of the world continuously emphasizes that diversification of livelihoods-- not putting all of the eggs into one basket--is what keeps households afloat.  I’m getting similar responses here. Women don’t indicate that they want to rely solely on their own farms for supporting the household nutritionally or financially.  Also, they don’t want to rely solely on shea nuts.  As one woman put it, all of her activities pay her small money, so it’s best to keep doing all of the small money activities.  If she does her own farming and shea nuts, she is a buffer for the potential failure of the husband’s farm.  If her farm fails, her shea nut business is a buffer against that failure.  In a place where crop insurance doesn’t exist and there’s no social safety net that even pretends to help those who need help, this is risk management—a very important pattern indeed.  

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.