Sacrificing Goats, Celine Dion, and Finding my Life Calling

The Cape Coast is Ghana's version of Miami, sort of. Well, not really. But with the ocean always in view, we treated it like a much needed spring break vacation. Maybe MTV could come and do spring break here and infiltrate so that all culture can be consumed by westernization.

Sarcasm aside, the Cape Coast is BEAUTIFUL and we really appreciated the ocean breeze that helped to cool us off. We got to go on a canopy walk; feeling as though we were walking on the trees, high enough that we were not able to see the ground amidst all of the foliage and canopy coverage. We walked on teetering 'bridges' if you could call them that, which were narrow and held together by rope and swayed back and forth with each step. How these rope walks were installed or the validity to their safety are both questionable.

In my Heritage and Tourism Anthropology class I took last semester, unbeknown to me to actually be a class on dark tourism, we studied the Slave Castles on the Cape Coast in depth. Coming here and touring the Cape Coast slave fort and the Elmina slave fort; I do not think that anyone should refer to these institutions as castles; for that alludes to these tourist destinations as something no more than a Disney World Attraction; which is the last thing these torture chambers are.

Actually seeing the confined, dank, windowless spaces where thousands upon thousands of men and women were kept and stripped of all of their human-ness until nothing was left except the pooling of their own excrement was unbearable to experience. You could see reminders of the horrors that occurred all over the walls that were coated in blood and etched with scratches of slaves trying to escape.

We spoke with an African Rabbi afterwards (if you are as shocked about finding a Jew in Ghana- we were too), one of the most brilliant people I've had the privilege of hearing lecture, and the most heartbreaking reality he expressed with us is that most Ghanaians are unaware of what slavery in Europe and the United States really means; or that many African Americans in the United States have roots to slavery, or what slavery even is. Even more shocking was learning from the Rabbi that the people giving the actual tours of the slave forts are unaware of the harsh realities of slavery and that millions of Africans were traded like cattle or embargo to places around the United States and Europe. It is no doubt that the 'successes' of agriculture and the booming economic gains in America are largely due to unimaginable torture and human atrocity and I cannot help but wonder about what Africa would look like today if slavery had not occurred since it limited their economic growth immensely and created an unjust dynamic of power that in many ways still persists.

With these images forever ingrained in our brains we attempted to wash away some of the intensity we felt by getting swept away by the strong tides of the ocean that carried us far from shore. One of our beach excursions was early enough that I was able to watch all of the men (and unfortunately many children who are not in school) cast out their nets into the ocean to try and make a catch. Being able to watch the physical labor of hauling in these enormous nets and ropes while singing traditional songs in Twi, scorching sun on their backs, was both beautiful and all the same disheartening.

Celine Dion, a best of CD on a loop, was always playing over our meals at the hotel we stayed at. Jake Loamy Soil Brougham loved this. Actually, his tortured ears looked as if they would implode as I sang my own heart out to Celine's 'My Heart Will Go On.' I love Titanic- sorry.

We left the Cape Coast after 5 days and we made our way on yet another tro tro ride to the Eastern Volta region, where we are now. Celine Dion followed us here, too. Why do Ghanaians love her so much? I don't get it.

Without a doubt the most eventful part of our first stay in the Volta region was visiting the shrine in the community. People all over Ghana come from places near and far to have the opportunity to sacrifice animals there.

I did not know this until I got there.

A group of maybe 15 people kneeling in a semicircle holding chickens and goats prayed with their animals in front of the priest and chief of the community. Each individually announced to the shrine why they were there to sacrifice the animals they brought. After an hour or so of this, the sacrificing was drawing near and the goats' cries began sounding like they were crying out, "MOMMM, MOMMM." That was enough for me. Myself and 4 other queesy, vegetarian-minded individuals were out of there before you could say, 'we're having chicken and goat for lunch.'

I feel like it's hypocritical for me to eat meat if I'm not OK with the process of watching an animal get slaughtered. At the same time, I'm an advocate of eating meats if they are not factory farmed and you know where it's coming from. And really if something has meat in it and is getting thrown out, I'm game to eat it so it doesn't go to waste. And meat in Ghana, where you're eating the family goat from the yard, is so much different than the meat industry in the states; so there's that, too. (by the way; the slaughtered animals at the shrine were all eaten, so the carcasses did not go to waste if you were concerned). When it comes down to it, I'm an environmentalist that drives an SUV in Vermont, a feminist that sings along to demeaning song lyrics and am a product of countless other hypocrisies, but I've yet to meet someone who's not.

And today, my life fell into place in the strangest of places. We moved on to our newest location in the Volta region, and at a pottery workshop where we were hand building and shaping the tops of vases and vessels on the sandy ground with the help of women pottery masters; I realized that I would be able to incorporate pottery into my month long independent study on rural women's access to water. Women are usually the ones doing the craft of pottery and are also the environmental stewards of the land that are the ones trekking kilometers upon kilometers to bring water to their families; using the pottery vessels they make. This connection of so much of what I am passionate about, following the phone call I had with my mom the night before where she told me about POTTERS FOR PEACE, an organization I had not heard about (and may not for a while with the inability to check email on these snail paced computers from circa 1984) is working on making pottery that are used to hold and purify water with silver (from my limited understanding?). Excited to look into this further. And work with them? That'd be the dream. And pending internships with The Association for Rural Development in Burlington still looms as another pending prospect as they work with getting clean water to Ghanaian Women. In just a week from now I'm on my own researching and studying women's water access and pottery- woo!