Culture Shock and Rural Realities

This week, I want to talk about the realities of living in a foreign country. Moreover, I want to contrast different phases that appear to come and go in a sequence. I believe that the fundamental principal which is guiding these is probably the psychology of culture shock and the waves of motivation or level of comfort which can result at various stages. 

To explain the diagram, Position A would be the initial arrival in the new foreign country. Often, then the level of motivation and positive energy are high and climbing because the new sights, sounds, customs and processes are exciting to experience and because it is new, it is a positive experience (Position B). Then, after some time, usually a period sets in when the person may come to see all the differences that were at first so exciting to be quite overwhelming and troubling because of the lack of familiarity (Position C). Then, after some time, usually the person recovers and is now on a more realistic level of excitement as he/she accepts the different environment to be normal and gradually acclimatizes to the surroundings (Position D). There may be periodic sways in motivation and energy after Position D but these are customarily only small in nature when compared to the initial significant increase and decrease in motivation.


In my own experience, I can attest that my energy and motivation has definitely undergone a similar progression as indicated in the curve. As open-minded, multicultural and diverse I consider myself, I have experienced Position C, but have since then gone beyond Position D. 


Position A to B was definitely the first 2 months or so. I was immersing myself in the local village and culture intensively. I was excited to be living there and it was like I had a positivity filter for some of the things. Of course, there were also some low days but overall, my motivation was high. Learning the local language, the daily life of the family, roaming around the village and helping my family with their work. (See picture: I am unloading a bucket of manure from the animal pen on the field to spread it as fertilizer)

The decline came around the same time that the incident with my host family occurred that I blogged about last week where I came face-to-face with the stark poverty that existed around me. I realized that even though on an interpersonal level I had great connections with many people, and felt a bit like a child to my host-mother and a brother to the children living in the compound, on some other dimensions like the amount on my bank account, the educational opportunities I have been fortunate to enjoy, and the outlook I have for the next year and the next 5 years. For me, living with the family is a temporary experience that I personally want to have in order to understand the realities of rural farmers. However, it was during this time that no matter how well I learnt the local language, immersed myself in the culture, lived according to local customs and made friends with the people in the village, my experience in the village would always be from a position of financial security and safety. I will never know what it is like to be sick and to have no money to pay for a doctor and no health insurance. I will never know what it means to farm for one season and to have part of the harvest destroyed by a drought or pests and to face the reality that I will not be able to feed my family for the next months. Even though these conclusions may seem obvious from the start, I believe that initially, I was acting on the assumption that if I did all of these things very well and immersed myself completely, then perhaps I could place myself almost directly in the shoes of a rural Ghanaian farmer.

So, how have I managed to reconcile these ideal expectations and the reality?


On a daily basis, I believe that I am now much more conscious of the differences but also of the similarities between the people in the village and me. I can see my mother doing her best to take care of her children just like any good mother around the world. I can see love, caring, support and generosity alongside the daily struggle to attain a good harvest for the next year and to keep everyone fed and happy. I have come to realize that whenever I can let go of those things that I cannot change and focus on those that I can, I am much happier. When I accept that I cannot alleviate poverty in this family, this community or in this country but that I can do the best work in my job and help my family as best as I can, life becomes quite a bit easier. In moments when I am successful in doing this, I can feel at peace with my immediate surroundings and even draw energy from it. 

Generosity and Poverty (Synonyms, right?)

Dear Readers,


This blog entry will be part letter to all of you part regular blog entry.


First of all, I owe all my regular readers, family, friends and colleagues an apology for my long absence from this major communication outlet which I hoped would help me stay connected to everyone. Unfortunately, I have allowed myself to become absorbed in the day-to-day routine, distracted by the stresses of my job here and caught by the fear that what I may write, may not be good enough. Fortunately, in recent weeks I have been doing a lot better and after some encouragement from my family and friends, I have decided to recommit to the goal of one blog entry per week. Last week was supposed to be the first week but just when the blog entry was being pushed down on the To Do list, I received a gentle reminder and am now writing to all of you.


I want to thank all of you who are reading this post for continuing to check my blog and for having faith that I will return despite my absence. I hereby re-commit to the one post per week goal (with pictures now too)


Yours,


Reynaldo


 
Generosity and Poverty (Synonyms, right?)

Having much to talk about, I hereby begin with the most important personal realization I have had over the past months. I just spontaneously came up with the title because I want to talk about the family that I have been living with for the past 3 months and about the curious combination of juxtaposed adjectives that come to mind when trying to describe them: generosity, poverty, cold, warmth, hunger, hard working.


When I first moved at the beginning of April, I was under the assumption, that while the family was definitely not the richest, they were managing quite well. The compound, was well-kept, the rooms clean and clean, the food tasty, the people smiling and my host-mother, sister and brother, being incredibly welcoming. Added to this was the novelty of taking baths under the open sky in a garden, eating food with the hands, helping and observing things around the house which were all strange and foreign to me. There were occasional hiccups in this image such as when one girl told me that her stomach was paining because her mother had not cooked food. Going on the positive assumption that perhaps her mother was perhaps too occupied with other chores to cook on that day, I moved on. On a different occasion, I also noticed that my sister (young girl maybe 10 years old) always had a bandage on her one leg and when I asked her about it one day, she replied something in Kassem. It wasn't until much later that she removed the bandage and let me see what was a significant indention in the flesh of the muscle which apparently she has had for several years and which is not healing. She mentioned that she saw the doctor but apparently the diagnosis had not turned up anything.

In hindsight, these indications seem to clearly indicate the poverty among my family and the relatives around. 

However, I did not pick up on these clues at the time. It was not until about one month ago when I was having my breakfast and overheard a conversation between my host-mother and my sister which I guessed was about money (given my limited command of the local language, Kasem). Fortunately, a girl from a nearby house was there who speaks excellent English and I asked her what the conversation was about. She then informed me that my sister was asking my host-mother for money to buy lunch at school. I innocently asked why, and learned that it was because my host-mother could not afford to pay the 50 pesewas that her daughter needed to pay for the food at school for one month. Dumbfounded, I continued to probe and discovered that not only could my host-mother not afford to pay the 1 cedi to pay for lunch for both children for one month, but before I had arrived, the family had only eaten every second day. Since I had been there, I had been served plenty of food in the morning and evening that was prepared by my host-mother and another sister. While I had been generously giving gifts in the form of food mostly to contribute back to both, I realized then and there that all my gifts were essentially useless because the shortage of funds was so severe. I felt ashamed, embarrassed and a bit lost. I had been living in an illusion of apparent wealth for over 2 months that had been made possibly by the family using all their food stores to feed me a meal every day to make sure I was not hungry and doing everything to make sure I was ok. This stark juxtaposition of such poverty and such generosity really surprised and moved me deeply. I immediately gave them the 1 cedi to pay for the food and made a plan to contribute back in more useful ways to the family than buying food.


Ever since that day, I have looked at the family with different eyes and have been much more observant of the things around me. While this process has been very insightful and definitely tumultuous, the consequences for me have also been very significant. I realized how incredibly rich I was with my stipend here which allows me to maintain a motorcycle, eat good food, buy telephone credit regularly and give gifts to the family. These things are all normal to me but completely beyond reach for my family and most of our neighbours. For me, a trip to the nearby town of Paga (which is 5 km away) is only a maximum 15 minute motorcycle ride whereas for my mother, it is probably at least a 45 minute walk. For me, buying a meal for 2 cedis every day is completely affordable whereas my mother could not afford to spend 1 cedi to buy lunch for her two children. Eating meat or fruits to me is a necessity because I know that the body needs protein and fresh produce to stay healthy. For my family, eating meat and fruits are a rare luxury. For me, when I am cold or when a shirt is torn, I simply go to the store and buy a new one. For my family, they are often quite cold at night now. I have already given away one of my hoodies to my mother but this is where the interesting question comes in, who do you help and can you help everyone? Of course, the answer to that is: no you cannot help everyone because even when I look beyond my immediate family's compound, the problem becomes bigger and in the scale of the village, impossible for me to solve on my own.


One colleague illustrated this dilemma quite well in a story. Imagine that one morning you were driving your car along the river and you happened to see a baby drowing in the river. Of course, anyone would slam the brakes, dive in the river and save the child. If the same situation happened the next morning, probably the reaction would be the same. However, if it occurred day after day or the number of children became too many to save all at the same time, saving the children becomes impossible and the question then becomes, why is this happening, what is the root cause. This is what I have come to realize over the past few months and even though the challenges remain, it now becomes easier to see how my work with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture is hopefully helping to alleviate some of these problems in the long-term. 


As I now finish with this blog post, I am getting ready to ride my moto home to my family where I know, I will be received warmly, will feel completely safe, secure and like part of the family. It's been a good day and I feel very grateful for the opportunity of being here.


This image shows my mother Abapa, my small sister Alice with the blue-yellow dress and a girl from another part of the compound called Ama having breakfast and drinking tea. Missing in this picture is my brother Kuesi.