My friend, Becca, and I shared a room in the home of a woman named Auntie Mary and her adult daughter, Jemima. The house is situated within a white wall that opens out to the street to town on one side and the playground of a primary school, beyond which is the beach, on the other side.
About ten kids, from the age of one to fifteen, hung around the house. About half of them lived with us, and the others, well Becca and I weren't sure where they lived, but they were around a lot.
The house itself was similar to the one in Cape Coast; the architecture was similar, there was a toilet, running water, and we did laundry by hand (this colorful clothesline is the result of close to three hours of hard work by Becca and me).
And there were adorable goats around.
However, the experience of living with this family was, in some ways, vastly different from living with Auntie Hettie and Georgina in Cape Coast. The main difference, for me, was the lack of privacy. Starting around five o'clock in the morning until we went to sleep, our family members, especially the kids, were through the windows of our bedroom or coming inside to hang out, invited or not. Also, the adults in our family communicated with each other mainly by yelling. Even though the kids could be annoying when I preferred to take a nap without being observed, they were also a lot of fun and always ready to strike a pose.
One of the things I noticed during my time in Komenda was that more people called me "Broni" than do in Cape Coast. In Komenda, it was adults and kids of all ages who would yell at me "Broni" or "Bra!" ["Come here!"] or "Iro ko hen?" ["Where are you going?"], whereas it's typically just the little kids who haven't been to school yet that call out in Cape Coast. Komenda is beautiful, but it's not a tourist spot, so the people who live there see a lot fewer white people, which I think is the main reason for that difference. On a few occasions, Becca and I made the mistake of going out after our post-lunch nap, around two o'clock, when all the kids were getting out of school. We became a spectacle, with a crowd of about twenty kids following us and shouting at us. Mostly, I think they were curious. One of my friends in Komenda told Becca and me that when he was a kid, he thought that white people were ghosts. So if the kids living in Komenda didn't see white people very often, then maybe they had ideas like that, too. For me, being noticed as much as I was in Komenda was taxing.
At thebeginning of the week, I felt really motivated about my research topic. I wanted to study how people of different religions interact, but I let a few things get in my way. First, when I made a list of questions I would ask in interviews, I had a difficult time getting beyond my assumption that it's usually difficult for people of different faiths, especially Muslims and Christians, to get along and accept each other (an assumption I didn't even realize I had). In Komenda, a member of the Methodist Church was practicing dawn evangelism, which I found to be obnoxious the morning it woke me up around five o'clock to voices so loud it sounded like they were in our room. I think I projected my annoyance onto the people I interviewed. It was hard for me to imagine that the Muslims, or even the Catholics, would think that that was an acceptable practice. But the people I spoke to, who were Catholic, Muslim, Christian, and traditional religion leaders, didn't admit anything but acceptance of and peaceful coexistence with people of other faiths. Perhaps my results would have been different if I had included members of the religions who were not in positions of leadership, although I've heard nothing from my friends and family here in Ghana would lead me to believe so.
The second thing that got in the way of my research was that all of the Christians I spoke with tried very hard to convert me. I had experienced this before with my peers in Cape Coast where "What church do you go to?" is a getting-to-know you question, to which "I don't go to church" is not an acceptable answer. For a while, I would try to explain my beliefs, but I ended up feeling exposed and frustrated. After experiences I had in Komenda where my interviewees wanted me to read and interpret Bible passages and wouldn't take "This is your belief, and that's okay, but it's not mine" as an interpretation, I have gradually stopped engaging in these kinds of conversations with Ghanaians.
Despite these setbacks, there were a few major highlights of the week. A few days before we left Komenda for Cape Coast, Becca and I visited the classroom of a teacher friend. He had asked us to teach his Level One students something, he said it didn't matter what. So, we spent a few minutes drawing a map of the United States and showing them where we were from, and then spent the next few hours teaching them the "Itsy Bitsy Spider," Limbo, Macarena, and Red Rover. They also taught us a dance and then laughed while we tried to perform it. It was a lot of fun.
My other favorite part of the week was a hike out to a beach cave with a few of the people we befriended. The view was gorgeous and the beach was nice, especially compared with the one near our house, which is a public toilet. More photos from the hike are at the bottom of my first post. Or click here and here.
