We started off our last full day of the internship with a
meeting about our experiences and our perspectives of sustainable development
work as shaped by our internship and interaction with The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty by Nina
Munk, which was required reading us. Anyone who has an interest in this type of
work should read at least a little bit of it because it really has some great
information about how one of the most influential professionals in the field
has failed in some of his work.
Honestly, I’ve read less than half of the book at this point
(and I do plan to continue because it’s incredible interesting and relevant to
my goals for the future), but I enjoyed having a more skeptical perspective on
the importance of working on the ground and closely with the peers of the
community to change practices that have been in place for longer than the
United States has even been a country. This was my sentence about what I think
sustainable development is when Deanna asked us to come up with one:
Sustainable development is ensuring that community members
have the knowledge to know how they can improve their current standard of
living for the indefinite future and how the resources they already have can be
used to achieve it.
Building on that, it seems as if each person in our group
has, to some degree, an interest in global development work. I thoroughly
enjoyed our conversation about many of Sachs’ attempts to improve health and
educational standards in his Millennium Villages Project program because The Idealist made him seem to be a very
idealistic but somewhat ignorant champion of his initiatives; his background is
in economics, and he seems to assume that people think the same way that he
does. With the MVP program, he was managing millions and millions of dollars of
funding but seemed to fail to understand basic considerations of culture and
uniqueness of communities he was working with. He antagonized hundreds of
experts and ground officials with his stubbornness and his inflexibility,
driven by confidence after major successes early in his career fixing Bolivia’s
economy in1985 and driving down inflation rates. His plan in Bolivia was great,
but it was a simple solution because it was impersonal and didn’t require changes
in the fundamental behavior of everyday citizens, which is the part that makes
development work so complex and difficult.
The plans that he wanted to implement to improve his
Millennium Villages Project communities were complex and he seemed to believe
that his charisma would be enough to motivate people into doing what he thought
was right. Obviously, he’s not, or else the Millennium Development Goals that
expire in 2015 would have been surpassed by now, but keeping his perspectives
and failures in mind as I continue to explore this career path should only help
me out in the future.
After our conversation, we piled into the van with the
German team and headed to Mankessim to buy ingredients for the dinner that we
were going to prepare for our last night at the lodge. It was fun to walk
around a little bit and great to see the everyday fruits we could buy; I bought
some of the tiger nuts that I liked and ginger cookies, my group tried some of
the peanuts some ladies were selling (they were roasted to perfection!), and
had some more bread. One of the first stands we stopped by had really great
avocados – large and ripe enough to eat plain. It seems as if that’s the norm
(at least in southern Ghana), so when the stand owner offered each of us a
little piece of it, I took it. It was admittedly really great, but it was a
little weird to eat it plain.
As per usual, our group heard “Abroonie!” over and over,
especially by the children and aggressive shopkeepers, but I only heard “你好” once. Another lady asked me where I was from, so I assume that she was
trying to figure out whether I was from the United States or Asia.
One of the coolest things we did today was go through a
supermarket on the outskirts of the market. It was nothing like supermarkets in
the US, obviously, but it wasn’t too different. Before we went in, we had to
leave all our bags outside on a shelf with a store employee who guarded it and
gave us a cardboard piece with the number of our little cubby on the shelf. Inside,
there were rows of different types of food and freezers in the back for ice
cream. I thought it was hilarious to see just how many types of alcohol they
sold – wine, rum, beer, vodka, whiskey, etc. I guess people around the world
just really enjoy drinking.
There was one employee that grabbed me, asked me my name,
and then proceeded to tell Noah that he was a bro. Another employee tapped me
on the shoulder and told me that he’d call me if I would give him my number.
LOL. Interesting experiences indeed.
When we looked around, the store sold sugar in plastic bags,
smaller versions of the bags that you use to carry produce at the grocery store
in the US and tied at the top. They only had one kind of chocolate, which
apparently wasn’t very sweet anyways. The back half was completely storage
only, so the shopping part itself was not much larger than a standard classroom
of an elementary school or so. We had to carry our items outside to an employee
who checked everything and our receipts before giving us bags and directing us
back to the entrance of the supermarket to retrieve the items that we had left
there.
As we walked back, I wanted to stop and buy plantain chips,
but each time I saw a seller (they are much rarer than bread-sellers), we were
in a part of the street where we had to keep walking or risk getting lost.
Darn.
When we got back to the lodge, we had lunch and some time to
chill before starting to cook dinner for ourselves. I’m a little disappointed
that we only got to see the kitchen resources on the last night of our trip
only because there are is not much room to store all the dishes and pots and
pans, especially when the staff is cooking for a large number of people. When
the Loyola brigade was living in the lodge with us, we didn’t see a decrease in
the quality of food served even though the staff almost tripled their output
for every single meal. I’m not a huge cooker and don’t spend much time on a
regular basis doing it, but our group’s fruit salad was easy enough to make.
Here’s a look at everything that we had:
Not everything was as delicious as I could get it at home,
but for the cooking of college and med students, it was pretty good. There were
some dishes that the staff we cooked for (read: Aziz and Frances, the
interpreter) made a face at trying (more specifically, the guacamole and the
seeds for our tomato dishes), then lied and said they liked it. It’s a crucial
part of Ghanaian culture to do that, but it’s difficult for Americans to
understand that fundamental cultural gap. We’ve come to accept it by now, but
it doesn’t make the practice any less weird. Plantain chips used for the
guacamole was a genius idea, even if the dip needed more salt.
We decided to make banana splits only after everyone
finished eating to prevent the ice cream from melting. We wanted to flambé the
bananas and used the rum that we’d bought from the supermarket to cover the
bananas. Our many attempts to set the rum on fire in the banana pan were not
very successful, but it actually was pretty cool to have a faint alcoholic
taste in the sweetness of the banana split; I think that the bitterness of the
bit of rum was excellent in bringing out the sugar of the chocolate spread,
which I was worried about because it wasn’t very sweet to begin with.
Between the meal and dessert, the seamstress that had come
to take our cloths and measurements on Thursday night brought back our clothes,
and we looked so, so cute in our custom-made Ghanaian clothes!
We ended up hanging out pretty late after that, and the
Germans were being great sports in playing games with us. The saddest part of
the night was the fact that Rachel, who is the US-born in-country director of
GB Ghana, was staying at Aaba Lodge tonight, and she didn’t allow loud music to
be played. Kwame, one of the cleaners and managers of our lodge, had specially
gone to his house to bring his speakers to play loud music for us to dance to,
and was really disappointed when Rachel came because that meant he couldn’t use
them. It was emotional to think about how our relationship with him (and the
other GB staff!) had evolved and developed so much over the course of the three
weeks we’d been in country.
It would have been a great day if it had ended there, but it
didn’t; the reality of having to go back to our lives and responsibilities in
the States hit some of us, especially one intern who found out that her
boyfriend had cheated on her with her best friend right before she left for
Ghana from a third party. It turns out that alcohol has its merits – it can really
connect people in a way that nothing else really can, and empower people to
make decisions that they would otherwise be too timid to make otherwise. But
tonight, it was clear that it is often an escape – something that allows the
consumer to get away from problems and reality and just have a good time. She
drank way too much and threw up. Luckily, someone else was really great at
making sure it was cleaned up and took the rest of it into the bathroom, but it
just makes me remember the risks you take when you decide to pursue happiness
for yourself. The happier you are, the more it kills you when (or if) it falls
apart. At one point in the night, she said that best friends don’t exist. I
can’t even imagine.
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