Hours Going Slowly, Days Passing Fast

According to the tracker on the iPhone Health app, it takes about 1500 steps to get from our house to the research center — a short stroll up Rahmah Street to the junction with the main road, a few hundred yards down Dodowa High Street to reach Hospital Street, and then a (slightly uphill) stretch on Hospital Street past Word of Faith School, a few small houses, and one lottery stand to arrive on Research Street (the street names here are very literal, which is helpful for getting around but definitely a far cry from the art-and-literature inspired street names of my hometown in Maryland). At the beginning of last week, those 1500 steps more or less circumscribed my life here; the few ventures we made off that beaten path were almost all with Irene or in the safe space of Ema’s taxi. So one of the best things about the past few days has been gradually adding new routes to my daily routine and expanding my territory, from the first time I made the 30 minute walk to Auntie Esther’s house for dinner to my solo excursion yesterday to the (somewhat functional) gym at the nearby Forest Hotel.

The further I venture and the more places I see, the more complex and multi-faceted my ideas of Ghana become. Last Tuesday, Chizzy, Shradha and I began our attachment with the DHDSS unit at the research center. The DHDSS (Dodowa Health and Demographic Surveillance System) is one of three such projects in Ghana. It’s really the core work of the research center, and it’s basically a continuous longitudinal survey carried out in the districts of Shai Osudoku and Ningo Prampram. Each field worker employed by the DHDSS works in 15 or 20 communities, returning to each community every 6 months to record demographic events like births, deaths, pregnancies and migrations. The amount of data they’ve collected since the beginning of the program in 2006 is absolutely amazing — especially considering that initially, every interview was recorded on paper and then had to be entered into a computer back at the research center. Now, each field worker has a PDA, and the DHDSS staff go out into the field once a week to meet up with the field workers and back up the information from their PDAs. (The PDA even has GIS capacities, so now the research center can make spatial maps of the population, of pregnancies, of stillbirths…I’m so excited to work with some of those visuals!)

For our first day with DHDSS, we were told we would be accompanying the team into the field. We slathered on sunscreen and made sure to wear sensible shoes in preparation for all the time outside and interaction with community members that we were confident lay ahead of us. These expectations were quickly dashed when we learned the day would consist primarily of driving — even when we stopped to meet a fieldworker, we would all stay in the car and he would just hand his PDA over through an open window. But it was still an eye-opening day because of how much of the two districts we got to see in six hours of driving. We drove past mud huts with thatched roofs or roofs made of corrugated tin, and then we drove past large houses with gates and guards. We drove on beautiful paved roads that even had a line down the middle separating the two lanes, and then we drove on dirt roads barely separated from the high grasses. We saw fishermen mending nets and carving new boats out of wood in Ningo, we saw members of the Ghanaian military roaming the streets in Dawa, we saw a chicken that had the longest legs I’ve ever seen in Osuwem — I had no idea chickens could be so tall!! We saw typical roadside stands and churches…and then we saw a cluster of houses on the side of the road by a sign that said “Ghallywood: An American Film Village.” I Googled it when we got home, and it is indeed a site for producing Ghanaian movies and TV shows! It also hosts an academy for aspiring filmmakers and actors. Who knew?

When we got back to the center that afternoon, I was doing some preliminary research for my health systems paper and looking up country statistics from the WHO, World Bank, and Population Research Bureau. But my usual procedure for writing an International Health paper was thrown off by how disorienting it was to look at the 2015 PRB Fact Sheet and see a single line of figures reducing Ghana to a total fertility rate, life expectancy, and average income. Having just a few hours earlier seen the vast variations that lie from one road to the next, it was hard to reconcile those summary statistics with the different Ghanas I’ve been seeing every day.

Of course, there are a few things that would be present in any of these Ghanas. The first is a propensity towards (and incredible patience for) extremely lengthy formal gatherings. I’ve seen this in a wide variety of forums now: the four hour district health administration meeting we attended, the three and a half hour church service we went to with Irene last weekend, and most recently, an almost four hour graduation ceremony (for kindergarteners). Auntie Esther’s granddaughter Kayla was performing at her school’s graduation ceremony, so the family invited us to attend with them. When I was in Kenya last summer, we visited a lot of schools and were always welcomed very formally, so I expected some student performances, and multiple gracious speeches from the school headmaster and chairman. Maybe if we were lucky, they would pass out Fanta and Coke in the middle. But this ceremony surpassed them all. The 26 items on the program included speeches from the proprietress, chairman, headmaster, and Ministry representative, a flute display by the primary department, a salsa dance by the nursery department, recitals in English, French and Twi, and best of all, a “Drill Display.” Let me first say that the kids had changed their outfits about twelve times already by the time we reached the Drill Display, but these costumes were the pinnacle. The children were outfitted in full military dress (size XXXS, probably) and proceeded to stand at attention, do some about-faces, and vigorously march up and down the yard for an extended period of time. I would highly recommend that more elementary schools in the U.S. incorporate this into their graduations — it was the most hilarious and adorable thing I’ve ever seen. (They did pass out sodas in the middle of the ceremony, but it wasn’t Fanta or Coke. Instead, I had my first Alvaro, a pear-flavored soda that was surprisingly extremely good!)

After the graduation was finally over, we went back to Auntie Esther’s daughter Bridget’s house for lunch. Shradha, Chizzi and I had planned to make a stop at the Accra Mall on our way home, but we hadn’t accounted for how long the ceremony would be, the time to prepare and eat lunch, or that we would have to wait to leave until Bridget got back from running an errand so that she could drive us part of the way there. It got to be 2 o’clock…and then 3 o’clock…and then almost 4 o’clock, and I had to consciously tell myself to stop focusing on the time, that we would get to the mall when we got to the mall, and I should just enjoy the opportunity to play with Kayla and Lovelyn. The general pace of life is just so much slower here — people don’t build their days and lives around plans and schedules aren’t much more than flexible guidelines. As someone who has an unhealthy love of detailed plans and schedules even in the United States, I have some serious adjustment ahead of me! But I’ve found that the slow pace hasn’t made the days go by slowly. Usually when hours go by slowly, so do the days. Here, hours often do go by slowly but the days have been passing incredibly quickly. Hoping my second full week brings more exploration, a few new words of Twi in my vocabulary, and another Pear Alvaro!