First and Last days

My first full day in Africa I went to Saviefe Deme, the village I worked in for the next three weeks. I had only seen Accra in the daylight since I arrived late the day before, so the taxi ride from Ho to Deme was a breathtaking introduction to another side of the country. First, we drove through Ho which had a constant sound and movement to it; music, honking taxis, shops, the market, and people everywhere carrying their goods in huge baskets balanced on their heads. The women had their children tied to their backs with cloth and there were goats and chickens everywhere. Soon, the landscape turned to a beautiful jungle as far as you could see on both sides; there was endless varied vegetation and mountains obscured by screens of fog. Every now and then the jungle was punctuated by an isolated village where people stared from the doorways of their small tin-roofed, concrete homes. We arrived in Saviefe Deme after navigating a weather-beaten dirt road, where we were instantly welcomed by several members of the community. That day I got to help carry dirt in a bucket on my head to fill in the foundation at the dig site for a new school, see a pig farm, play with the school kids on break, hop on a truck to Bogami (the next village), hold a baby, take palm wine, and try grasscutter. It was the first of many incredible days in Deme.

On my last day I found myself in Bogami again, the village I had visited once three weeks ago. A member of the community had died and the village was preparing for the funeral. Three days compose an African funeral; on the first the women prepare the food and the men dig the grave, on the second they have the burial and other services, and I think the third holds a memorial and continued services. It was the first day of this man’s funeral, and Charles left me among the women. They were preparing banku with okra and fish stew for the funeral, so the women were divided up with different tasks of breaking up the dough for kinkey into a finer consistency, scaling fish, frying fish, husking corn leaves, cooking the kinkey, and wraping balls of cooked kinkey in the leaves. They would finish preparing the meal the next morning. I did not know any of the women because it was not my village, but they showed me what to do, talked to me, lent me a cloth to wear, and gave me boiled groundnuts and akpeteshi. The whole time they were singing and dancing and laughing; they wore bright colors (red and black are funeral colors, but I saw this more strictly followed in city funerals) and the mood was one of merry working. It was pretty much the polar opposite of an American funeral in every way.