Jane, Boys Remand, Groundnut Soup, Shugga popcorn

I have neglected the blog for some time now and I do apologize. Things started to feel dangerously like home so it was harder for me to keep updating!

-Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is good for a couple things. Tuesday is the day that you can buy two for one pizza at Pizza Inn across from campus and Tuesday is also the day that Jane comes to Pentagon with her lovely dresses and seamstress skills. Jane sells pre-made dresses of her own design, and will make custom dresses with your personally selected fabric. This is how the whole dress-making thing works here...Find a fabric of your liking, buy a few yards, find a seamstress, get measurements taken, pick a design, and out comes a dress in a week or so. It really makes a lot of sense...its pretty much guaranteed to fit and its way cheaper than buying something at any store in the US. And it can be quite addicting. Ladies, you will have many a dress to choose from when I get home :)

-Wednesday is the day I get breakfast with my friend Britney before going to the boys remand that I started volunteering at with my friend Malka about seven weeks ago. Malka leads art workshops with boys in a juvenile delinquent center at home, so she wanted to do something similar here. The boys remand we work at is sort of like a juvenile delinquent center, but more like a half-way house. It is a pretty low (non?) security "home" where adolescent boys stay after they are arrested and before they go to court. They all sleep in one room, are given three meals a day, and have schooling and chores as well. Our time with them is basically a break during the day to do something out of the routine. We play games, read stories, make murals, have dance parties, make forts, paint pictures, draw faces, make paper mache...let them free-style....anything and everything art related. It is helping me understand Ghanaian culture a lot because both Malka and I know activities that work with American teenagers and have to constantly be aware and adapt to the cultural differences that make certain activities more or less relevant to Ghanaian teenagers. Its been really enjoyable as time goes on because the boys really do enjoy getting to do something that is out of the ordinary. Painting and drawing isn't really something they have the opportunity to do very often or at all, and its exciting to see them get excited! Its cool too because we can see different boys take on roles as leaders as time goes on and their community gets to be more cohesive.

-Although we have fun there are definitely struggles. The level to which Malka and I can relate to the boys is definitely limited...we don't know what it is like to grow up in poverty, we don't know what its like to grow up on the street, we don't know what its like to grow up in Ghana, and we surely don't know what its like to grow up as a boy. We have established effective ways to communicate with them, but its hard to answer questions like "I am having so much fun, but why are you spending your money on art supplies for us when you could buy us better food which is what we really want?"
...Its difficult, but we have to explain to them that our role in their lives isn't to feed them. We come in to have fun with them and share new ideas with them but not to give them better food. Of course it has made us think, "well shit, if that's what they really want, why don't we just give it to them?" But we know that trying to create a community in the setting they are currently forced to be in wouldn't happen with bringing fried rice twice a week.
...Discipline is very different in Ghana as well. Children and young people are expected to be well behaved and RESPECTFUL to elders and there is a LOT less tolerance for any divergence from this. So when Malka and I stepped in with our soft American "Okay class, please sit down while I count to three" routine..not much got done. This was definitely an area that needed adjusting.
^As harsh as all that seems, the amount of temper-tantrum and fit-throwing children I have witnessed on a day to day basis is drastically less than in the US.

-Sunday is groundnut soup and rice ball day. This is in an excellent day as groundnut soup and rice balls is probably my favorite Ghanaian dish. Groundnut soup is like a spicy peanut butter based soup with a big ball of rice in it. I always get a piece of chicken thrown in there, too.
...I learned how to make it as well so I won't have to leave it behind.

-Mondays are the days that promise a free box of sugar popcorn along with a twelve cedi movie ticket at the theater in the Accra Mall. It is unfortunate that one has to sit through an over-priced mediocre movie to indulge in the pure bliss of sugar popcorn, but if you've saved up, its more than worth it.

-As I said above, Ghana has started to feel so much like home that its a little scary to think of going back to the US. I WILL explain this in my next entry.