18 July 2007
Ghana: The Drama of Cooking, Week Three Blog Entry
Posted by acardec under: Women Studies In Ghana .
Mix fourteen people from different cultures and experiences together, simmer in the African sun, broil without electricity, and serve. The dish served comes out with a different taste daily. Sometimes the dish smothers you with spices, giving you heartburn, making you yearn for the smoothness of your favorite dishes at home, where people know your tastes. Other times the dish serves you bitterness and your face sours; the dish is too much and you shriek back from what it has asked of you, shown you about yourself, shown you about others. Mostly, the dish hits places in your mouth and heart that you did not expect could feel, and it fills you with ideas of who you could be and what the world would be if everyone tried something new.
Group dynamics of a study abroad trip add another layer onto the intercultural exchanges you are making in a new country. And, as the videographer for my group I see that “all the world is a stage and men (and women), merely players.” I see that everyone has many faces and costumes that they wear for different occasions. Here in Ghana, we are with fourteen other people all of the time and it brings out the best and worst of people. Many times it does both, because when someone falls often you find that other people help to bring you back up.
But, the group is not the only place that I have found players. I see that the people in the market change their masks when our large group arrives. They jack up the prices, believing that as foreigners we will not know the price. They call us sister, tell us we are beautiful, beg us to let them show us around, and they speak English, for they think they know what we want to hear. They do not let us see as they see, for we are a part of Ghana only in how much they let us in. And, part of the beauty of the trip stems from breaking down of these barriers, of getting to know the people and the land for what it is and not for what others would have us believe, for we want to see as they see so that we may change how people view Africa and its people.
On Saturday we saw an actual play, “The Fifth Stage Landing.” The beating drums pulsed through my body and the large group of dancers beat their way across the stage in unison as if forming one heart. The set spoke of a small African village and the players spoke in an accent so that their English was not my English. This theatre was not my theatre but I knew it, understood the messages and the people. I did not always laugh or understand as the other members of the audience did, for I lack a nuanced understanding of their culture that creates humor, but I realized as I sat their watching the same play as they did that life here in Africa is fundamentally the same as it is in the U.S. Yes, sometimes the heat here makes it feel unbearable, the food tastes different, and the cultures are not the same, but at the core we are concerned with the same things.
Later this week Leandra and I went shopping at the straw market where the women make and sell baskets in kiosks. The last shop we went to was similar to the others, bright baskets of purple, blue, pink, orange and green in intricate patterns lined the walls and hung from the ceiling of the wooden hut. The woman, basket weaver- shop keeper- and mother, showed us her beautiful creations as her small children played around us. Her youngest child, a son of about two, was so taken with us and himself that he twirled around laughing and laughing. He twirled and giggled, throwing the baskets, shrieking from joy, and he did this so long and so hard that he fell to the ground. This young boy had Leandra, his mother, and I in such fits of laughter that our sides hurt. And, there, in Ghana two American Feminists and one native Ghanaian market woman were able to come together, laughing at one small boy who reminded us of the hope of innocence and youth. In that moment my study abroad trip to Ghana had purpose; we are here to learn from one another how to build a better world. The thing to learn about cooking and people is this: you must continue to make the dish, to blend the spices and ingredients together, even if the first hundred tries fail, because eventually you will learn the right combination to make each taste reach its fullest flavor.
- Meredith Tweed
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