ethnographic

When doing fieldwork, everything is data. So when E and I headed to a place a few weeks back that looms large in my memory—Anomabo—I shouldn’t have been surprised that I left with insights into my project even though the trip itself was intended as a bit of leisure before the ‘real’ work began. 

Anomabo is a seaside resort just outside of Cape Coast where E and I were put up while staffing a workshop six years ago.

The NGO we both worked for back then was contracted to the Ghana Education Service (GES), a large branch of the sprawling bureaucracy that undergirds the Ghanaian government. The whole enterprise was an intensely exasperating jumble of people who knew their stuff and genuinely wanted to accomplish and improve things, and those (in the majority) for whom the work seemed to be an exercise in opportunistic credit-seeking and strategic obfuscating in turns. Even one of our senior consultants, who had worked on similar projects across Ghana and West Africa all of her adult life, nearly threw up her hands and walked away. 

Staying in Anomabo was a beautiful respite from all those tensions at the time. We woke and slept to the nearby ocean roar and took our meals on an open wooden patio on stilts just above the water; in the evenings, we ate delicious mouthfuls of the fish we’d watched fishermen row out for in the morning. 

One night I sat with Esther Goody (Jack’s widow—yes, *that* Jack) in the lamplight of that seaside patio, swatting moths and mosquitos and quietly dying inside while she shot holes through all of my research ideas. She told me the next morning, inexplicably, I should feel free to request a letter of her by post at her UK address whenever the need arose. (I never did.) Another night, one of the senior consultants read my palm.

She told me in her Franco-German lilt that the work would always come first for me, that my career was destined to be a strong and successful one, but that the love of true partnership would not come until my 40s. When you are young and fragile from emotional strain and the politicking of your would-be colleagues, sitting in the lamplight over an unfamiliar ocean, such things can break your heart. 

I got a lot of thinking done out in Anomabo, wandering the line between ocean and sky and taking pictures of the strange detritus that washed up on shore, arduously working through feelings about why I was there and what kind of use and purpose I wanted to put myself to, dreading returning to Accra.

Ultimately, full of an ambiguous mix of guilt and self-preservation, I applied and interviewed for the job that took me out of Ghana earlier than planned and back to New York on a long distance call from my beach hut out in Anomabo. 

I’ve lived with all the strangeness of that time tucked away in my heart for a long while. Returning was uncanny. Everything was the same, almost as if they had been waiting, suspended, for us to come back and resume it. Nothing was worn with age or sea air; nothing seemed newly replaced or markedly changed. The same taxi driver who used to take us into town was there, just inside the gates.

The Chinese say you can never step in the same river twice, but with every step I felt I was me and the me that I was six years ago, walking among the palms and coconut husks with the same mix of reprieve and sadness, relief and guilt, coursing around inside. 

We only stayed one night, and nearly made ourselves sick eating all the lobster and fish we could afford and staring, staring, staring at the inexhaustible ocean. By the time we left I felt I was just me again, feeling what I was feeling in the present alone. And in that present-ness came a realization:

For years, I've harbored the fact that I left before the year was out as a kind of secret guilt, proof that I couldn't hack it, that I’d cut tail and run again if pressed. The truth is it was an already difficult situation—the exigencies of a seemingly intractable bureaucracy running up against a foreign aid system working at cross-purposes with itself, all caught up in an old, old song and dance spanning the Atlantic—made impossible by the particular individuals playing out their parts. It’s a wonder I didn’t leave sooner. In my more generous moments, I’ve chalked it up to experience and tried not to feel like the whole thing was a waste. But sitting with my thoughts out in Anomabo, it struck me how very deeply the experience that I’ve been thinking of as my own private failure is implicated in changes underway in Ghana right now, and how significantly that long-buried experience has been coloring my understanding of those changes without my realizing it. 

Five years ago, Ghana announced its discovery of oil, beginning a slow and subtle but significant shift in the economy. I left before oil was struck. At the time, I felt—and realize now, a lot of Ghanaians close to my age also felt—that trying to work towards anything genuinely beneficial was doomed to be stymied over and over and over again. If you wanted to change the system, the choices seemed to be: stick out the frustrations, or burn out and leave. But most Ghanaians couldn’t just up and leave like I did. What seems to be different now is that the disaffected are being absorbed into the private sector, a private sector that simply didn’t exist on the same scale or in the same configuration before oil. I’ve heard people say a lot recently that people in private contexts care about their work, care about helping people, are committed to speeding up the pace of progressive change, are accountable, and much more besides. And the public sector? Young people speak of it in a way that sounds deeply familiar: exasperatingly slow, full of people who care more about being seen doing things than actually accomplishing things, complicit with a dysfunctional global aid industry, doomed to stymy the efforts of the well-meaning over and over and over.

Here I am, having vaulted myself from LA to DC to Istanbul to Accra: after a long hiatus making use of this space for anthropological musings on the exotic faraway village of Los Angeles, it's time to turn my bloggerly ethno/graphic gaze back to Ghana.

And since it's Ghana, a prayer at the outset seems appropriate. (Unlike most prayers in Ghana, though, this one will be non-denominational and thoroughly agnostic):

Considering we didn't think any of our seeds were going to germinate, I think you could say the first planting season in the courtyard garden was a success.

A big success. BOOM!

A snackerel of carrots and a glory of beets kind of success.

But I'll let you in on a little secret: turns out there are seasons in LA after all. If you are a wee seed, it comes down to To Hot or Not Hot Enough.

Time to gather up and sort through the Too Hots and nudge the Not Hot Enoughs along.

...radishes are totally rad.

Our first harvest...look at those colors!

I wish I had taken shots of the first haul with something for scale, because our second harvest was just b.a.n.a.n.a.s.

Just look at that honker in the middle!

We're very proud. :)

Everything is up! From the bottom towards the wall: spinach, beets, radishes, carrots, peas. Alas, something has been digging up the beets...

But the radishes are pretty, well, rad!

Now, D and I don't eat much meat, but when a dancing cow gives you 20% off antibiotic-free angus prime (and poses coyly for a photo!), it's just too strange to say no.

Woah, pro-cyclodestrian* signage in WeHo!

(It's nice when the rights of pedestrians and cyclists are affirmed and the rules of sharing contested space are made explicit--especially since knowing where you can and can't legally ride on the sidewalk for safety and sanity's sake in LA County is really complicated.)

Recommended: St. Nick's Pub's solid jukebox, cheap drinks, plethora of board games, divey atmosphere transcendent of place and time, and dim red light.