Fever

I always preface my conversations about this sort of thing with a disclaimer. I know next to nothing about football. I even slip up some times and refer to it as soccer, which is a specifically North American blasphemy.

There's a party in the streets every few days. I see motorcycles draped small children waving flags. People (before the last match anyway) keep asking me who I support. Ghana is the obvious answer. Occasionally I point out that I'm not American, which counters an assumption that I have realized is rarely made. Canada's pretty involved in the NGO sector out here and we've got a reasonable number of expatriates. We've hold about as much mental space out here as the States.

I admit that I wanted to see the USA lose. I compare the Canada-USA relationship with Ghana-Nigeria. This is more or less a lie, but it's like the lies they told you in your younger Science classes - a simple explanation to a complex problem and maybe we'll get into what's actually going on in some indeterminate future. I saw Bill Clinton on TV, next to Mick Jagger. I have a nice image of them sitting in a Joburg bar. Bill Clinton is crying softly over his beer and muttering about ball control. Mick Jagger has his arm around the ex-President's shoulders. They commiserate.

In any case, the USA lost. The crowd in the bar went nuts, just like they went nuts when Ghana scored. Or had a free kick. Or subbed in a popular player. I learned what a vuvuzela is. It's a long horn, popular in South African football tradition. It blows a B flat and can cause hearing loss.

Ghana is now the only African team left in the cup. If they beat Uruguay in the next match, they'll be the only African team to have ever made the semi finals. I wonder what that party'd be like?

No Longer At Ease

There's a book by Chinua Achebe called No Longer at Ease about corruption in Nigeria circa 1960. It's about a Nigerian educated in England, who comes back to a government job and a cultural disconnect fromhis family and tribe. He eventually loses all hope and becomes hopelessly corrupt.

I had a conversation today with a man who used to know Shannen back when CC was just getting started. He picked me out because of the motorbike - marked with a logo on either side. He told me the story of how he lost his job, working as a security guard for the Volta River Authority which is the main power company here.

The way he tells it, he was one of the few security people who weren't helping themselves to company property. He made an issue of it, and was ostracized by the rest of the crew. His boss reassigned him to a new posting with only one other coworker who was also considered 'difficult'. The hope being that they would screw up, which more or less happened. The other guy stole a motorbike, which was a pretty stupid move.

The police found it quickly enough, and arrested the coworker. The corrupt boss wrote to Accra, saying essentially 'we had two guys there and a motorbike went missing'. The man I was talking to subsequently lost his job.

He makes a point of emphasizing his commitment to principle. He repeats that he can't stand to watch stealing. His kids are in Bolga now, being taken care of by their grandmother while he tries to find work in Tamale. He talked about trying to take up his court case again. The first time, he says, someone bribed his lawyer not to show up. He blames Africans in general, and thinks that they are universally corrupt.

I'm not really sure what to make of this relatively common attitude. I've seen it from villagers and urbanites, people who are relatively well educated and people who aren't. Often it's a phrased as a joke - oh, you know Africans. It sounds like Canadians joking about being the 51st state. Uneasy. It's hard to argue against history, and there's just no standout theories.

I was at Taha community today, filming the installation of a piping project we're working on. The work stopped around two o'clock because one of the children of the Assemblyman of the community had died of malaria. I was with a man named Dawuda, who (as one job among many) is in charge of collecting birth and death data from communities in the area. He has been working to try to get people in these areas to take sick children to the hospital. They say they have nomoney, and aren't willing sell a precious cow to pay the doctor. They have many children, and they are often sick. Dawuda would like them to sell the cow.

He's fighting against a culture, in the same way that the Volta Authority man was. It's an uphill battle in both cases. Cultural practice seems to exist in a self-perpetuating state. It normalizes itself.

So Achebe's protagonist finds. Initially he resists, of course, and stays clean for a while. Eventually, his personal life falls apart, and he sinks into a despair from which he emerges a corrupt and unprincipled bureacrat. We're chameleons. We match our environment or sometimes we get eaten.

A Change of Pace

I've never understood what Marshall Mcluhan meant when he said "the medium is the message". I've asked a lot of people. I asked the Quebecois prof who first introduced me to the term outside of its pop culture context. I once spent a day asking customers at the cafe what it meant, by way of making conversation. I've never gotten a good answer. It's too bad, but I'm beginning to suspect that Mcluhan is an academic, doing something that academics do. He has come up with a good quote, and he not going to weaken it with qualifiers.

I think he meant that the medium is pretty important to the message. Admittedly, that sounds pretty weak.

But it has a pretty significant effect on the videos I'm making. All this week, as I tore around town, trying to catch up on our video pitch for next year's Girls' Project (www.createchangenow.ca/donation/ghana-girls-education-2010) I was struggling to find a way to include a brilliant segment that I'd gotten from one of our sponsored students. She gave a really nice five minute answer to my vaguely-worded question about her family's background. Unforutnately, it didn't cut up well (few pauses, lots of pronouns) and in the end, the quote didn't fit. It was, after all, as long as the entire video was supposed to be.

So I'm thinking about turning this blog into a repository for material like this. Quotes, explanations, etc. that are interesting (at least to me) but don't fit in well with whatever I'm cutting together for Creating Change. I might even try to turn this blog into a subset of the video projects - a sort of special feature, and move the personal stuff (the boring stuff) off someplace else.

That's the idea, anyway. Here's the video in question. Apologies for heavy compression but I'm not sure about the upload capacity of the internet connection here.

The Riot

I would kill for a picture to go with this posting.

Seriously, though, there was a riot at Ghana Senior Secondary (Ghanasco) last Friday. We first heard about it when trying to schedule an interview with the head teacher there. They couldn't do it, they were busy with damage control. Fair enough.

The rumours have already been circulating. In the first version I heard in the office on Monday, students were reacting to a new ban on mobile phones in the school, and had torched a master's (teacher's) motorbike. Samson lamented the students' shallowness. They are surrounded by issues worth a riot. Why a ban on mobiles?

We have several sponsored students at Ghanasco. One of them, Aziz, dropped by the office this afternoon, and we grilled him about the riot. The students, he said, were rioting over an increase in tuition fees, which the school had raised from 500 to 900. (I'm assuming his figures were annual, and in Ghana Cedis). The students protested at the school, but were driven off by police with teargas. The masters followed, beating several students. The students, in turn, followed the masters home, where they blew up a motorbike.

Kaboom.

Aziz was hoping we could pay for some extra courses. There's no word on when the school will reopen.