The 6th of March is Independence day in Ghana and they do this celebration right. There was no school, but the school children put on their uniforms anyway and at about 9:30 each class of each school marched down to the football pitch where most of the community was waiting, including the chiefs in dress (wearing traditional outfits). After the national anthem, pledge, prayer, and flag raising, a few of the older students gave speeches in English about the importance of education, urging all of the parents to send their children (male and female) to school.
Then the assembly man and some other important people stood in front of the flag and each class marched all the way around in the field in turn, stopping to give a salute in front of the important people, chiefs and elders. For the salute, each class tried to outdo the one before it with impressively choreographed stunts, chants, dances, and moves. It was brilliant to see. Then it got silly, as a group of grown women marched and attempted an improvised salute, and the best--the guides marched and as their salute, 3 of them pulled out bananas and 'called the monkeys' while the rest got on the ground and ate them out of their hands. We even had a few guys attempt to ride bikes over a 'ramp' (a plank of wood on either side of a school desk) which was very funny and mostly disastrous.
After all of that (which lasted until almost 2:00 pm), the football matches began. The first one was the JSS girls against the "community youth girls", which seemed to be any un-married female in the village. Then a few, more serious, boys teams played, and the last match was the teachers against anyone in the community. Everyone played barefoot and had a great time. All day, there were women selling fruit, water, biscuits, rice, and other goodies (Mo, they even had groundnut cake!).
It was a great day to live in a small village in Eastern Ghana. Two new things I observed about Ghanians: they make marching look like dancing, and their applause has a definite rhythm to it. Rhythm and dance are in their blood here, and there is nothing in the world that compares to it.
Sadly, I will leave village life next Thursday, which is very quickly approaching! Though I know I made the choice to leave early, as my time in Tafi Atome comes to an end, I have more and more sentimental moments and I find myself wishing I could stay longer. But that is how I know I made the right decision; I will leave craving more, which will leave me with a good taste and bring me back as soon as I can come.
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2 comments:
I like that you touched on community. The community in Ghana seems like it has amazing interaction, and I only wish our block parties went so well. As our societies have grown and become more complicated, our communities have also changed. We dont walk to work anymore, we drive with our windows up and we miss out on meeting the people right around us.
But we have expanded our community in different ways with technology that has become a necessary part of our lives. We can now turn to our friends on facebook, our contacts on linkedin, the people in our phonebooks, or our email address books. Our community stretches past our neighborhoods and, in this case, across continents.
I can't profess to know whether these developments are good or bad. In some sense they have to be good because they let us stay in touch over incredible differences and may perhaps lead paths which may have been naturally divergent to cross, but at the same time they seem to lack the personal touch that community activities seemed to hold before these developments.
Alright, let me swim over here to the shallow end and finish by saying that we're really excited to see you. ;)
Hmmm groundnutcake, my dentist loves it! ;-)
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