Independent Study Presents New Difficulties: Pink Eye Ensues

April 5th found me sitting in the back seat of a parked Tro-Tro with Ariel, Ali, and Izzy having a hypervention anxiety attack as we were poked, prodded, and harrassed by a crew of Ghanaian men for a good 20 minutes without let up; and we were stuck in the Tro-Tro waiting to get to Klikor village from Accra. Feeling trapped and powerless is how I've been feeling more and more often and heightened anxiety persists.

The average day in Klikor consists of interviews with community leaders and people associated with water systems in the area, as I'm studying people's access to water around the Volta region. I've gotten to interview chiefs and people associated with them, community members trying to make a profit on selling their water from ground wells, water pumping stations, the Ghana Water Company location in Kilikor/Agbozume and all women and children in between.
*please note that if you ever conduct interviews in Ghana, make sure that you alot time for having to greet every single person you see and are often taken into people's compounds to be presented and stand akwardly for some time. You may have to greet up to 15 people before you are able to interview the one you are after. Oh, and always refuse the food that 'you are invited to take.' (unless it's coconut).

Oh, and my translator is an asshole.

His name is Philip and he doesn't take me seriously because I am a woman researching a natural resource issue/science related issue and hard science is something that only men should study. So there's that.

One of the msot eventful interviews I had was when Philip took me on my first motorcycle ride about 15 minutes away from Klikor to the primary school he teaches at. Being a village school, consensus was that the teachers could have cared less about the students and since it was the last day before the students would go on their 3 week summer break, the teachers did not even bother to greet or teach the students. The highlight of these student's day was when I interviewed 20 of them, while the other 200 or so other students just stood watching admiringly.

While the teachers had a meeting, I drew a hopscotch with chalk on the cement floor of a classroom for the students to play and then taught the 200 student crowd that formed 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.' It was difficult to know how able and willing these students are to learn, but because of complex issues and teacher salary issues etc, they just are not giving the education they deserve.

The students sang me some church songs they knew, and then one by one, a brave few would curtsey in front of me and say something like, "Excuse me. Please. Hello, my name is Faustina and I am in Class 3. Please. Let me recite to you this poem called Ghana, Ghana, Ghana, We Love Ghana," and then they would recite it, curtsey again, and walk back to join the circle around which I became the center of. It was the most endearing gesture.

The oldest student I interviewed was 20 and in the equivalent of 8th grade.

I asked the students whether they are late to school because they are getting water, if their water is clean, and if they help their mom or their dad with getting water for their families. Nearly all of the students helped their mothers and said the water is not clean. Some said they were late for school; but punctuality is not one of Ghana's strong points, especially at a school where it seems like very little is taught; so this could be some research error.

Philip came in during one of the classrooms I was in with a student and mumbled something to me that I did not understand. He then proceeded to whip the student relentlessly with a bamboo stick, as I stood there, not able to do anything about it. I talked to Philip and told him how upset that made me and told him it made no sense to punish a child who had hit another student by hitting him back. Philip asked me how we discipline our students in the states and I told him teachers sit and talk rationally with them so that they understand what they did wrong, and Philip seemed surprised by this.

Then Izzy got pink eye. So Ali and I did, too. Ariel survived getting it. When we walked into town to the Chemical Store which is also a pharmacy, the woman told us that there were no more eyedrops for pinkeye, so we had to walk to neighboring towns in the heat for a while until we found the right bottle with the red eye on the front.

The day my pink eye was the worst was my favorite interview day, when I got to go to a dam about 30 minutes away from Klikor to carry water with the women and children that were fetching it that day. The pictures of me, Harry Potter Glassses fogged in the heat, puffy-eyed with a metal basin of water on my head are awesome. The dam that so many fetch from is a multi use area where people are using to wash motorcycles in, laundry soap suds 'n all- is being done just a few feet upstream, and there's fishing, too. The water is not clean, but it's used for drinking, washing, and cooking.

One of the other sites I got to tour was a village that had 3 main ways of getting water: well, hand pump, and solar powered pump. The well was so deep, you could barely see to the bottom and it took me a total of 3 whole minutes to lower a kalabash in and get a tiny bucket's worth of water back to the top of the well. My hand were covered in popped blisters from doing this only once; I could not imagine retrieving water this way.

The solar powered water pump that pumps groundwater into a tank reminded me of Maddy's solar panneled backpack, but unfortunately this one was no longer working and the chief who ran it just wanted electricity and did not like the solar because you also had to pedal bicycle pedals to power the groundwater up into the tank and he said the capacity was more than the solar and people-powered pedaling could muster. NGOs need to remember to check in on the facilities they provide to make sure that they are still in working condition instead of just setting things up and leaving!

I'll end with a funny story:
After meeting most of Philip's family doing interviews, I decided to show him the photo album I brought here. Every picture he would say, "Oh, Erica, Erica, you've changed." I don't know what this means, but Philip also mistakenly identified me as my friend Peter Hong in a picture of my GUY friends as a barbershop quartet. Thanks, Philip. I understand that Ghanaians think all people with light skin look alike, but come on.