Relational Responsibility

I was in the middle of a run this afternoon (on a treadmill--you know it's August when the Midwest is hotter than West Africa) when a number with a familiar country code flashed on my cell phone screen.  It was Victor, the Roman Father of the village of Asaam, where I spent a month working at the Asaam Health Center, just calling to say hello, so I paused my workout and we chatted for a minute and before he hung up.  A few minutes later, another call came in, also from +233, but before I could pick it up my phone stopped ringing.  I had been flashed--a term that is initially disorienting to Americans but is completely innocuous and means, at least in Ghana, that someone has called you long enough for you to see they've called but that they've hung up before  you can pick up.  They have "flashed" you.  This indicates that you should call the original caller back, since presumably you have phone credit to spare and although all incoming calls are free, you'll pay per minute for each call you make.  Without widespread voicemail and with very few things (including attending church or a funeral, or having a face-to-face conversation) that take precedence over an incoming call, once you've been flashed, you're pretty much expected to call back in a few minutes, otherwise you're likely to be flashed again.  Not having rushed upstairs to look at my notebook of Ghanaian phone numbers and find my international calling card in the middle of my workout, I heard my phone ring at 2:55, and 2:58, and 3:05.  

The first time I went to Ghana, I went with several warnings: no greeting or eating or paying or receiving with the left hand, remember to take your malaria prophylaxis, and don't give out your home phone number.  I made sure to hold whatever I was carrying with my left hand to prevent any mishaps, gave my tall bottle of pills a prominent spot on my floor so I'd be forced to see it each morning, and became quite adept at explaining that, no, I couldn't give my US number because, you see, when I get back I'll have to get a new phone, so I don't know what the number will be yet, but how about you give me your number and then I can call you and give it to you once I have my new phone.  Not so bad.  I only broke the last rule with four of the many people I met over those 9 months (two of whom were my program directors and one of whom was my host mother, for goodness' sake), and that calculated lapse resulted in a phone call every three or four weeks--comfortable, and nice for keeping up my Twi besides.

All that caution went out the window this time.  Within a month, I managed to give my American cell phone number out to at least 15 people, a clear break from my previous digital stinginess.  

By now I've been away from Ghana for almost a full week, and back home in the Midwest for five days.  And my cell phone call log looks quite a bit different than it ever has, including the week after I got back from Ghana round one.  When I reached home July 28, I put my international phone card through an intense workout, using it to place 17 calls--"Akua, woaduru ho?"  "Onyame adom, aane, afe na maduru fie nti mafr3 wo aka kyer3 wo"/"Jessica, have you arrived?" "Yes, by God's grace, I just got home so I'm calling to let you know."  And since then, of the 35 calls I have received, 26 of them have been preceded by +233 and several of the remaining calls have been from a woman I met on the flight from Accra to Casablanca and then helped to catch the Amtrak from New York to DC.  

And then there was that third call from +233 at 3:05 this afternoon.  It was Alice, I figured, a fiery and boisterous (and, according to some of the disapproving adults in the village, somewhat disrespectful in her audacity) soon-to-be-7th grader from Asaam, who during the course of a month of casual friendship had explained to me her very literal definition of teenage pregnancy (i.e., that it would be fine if I were to get pregnant, despite the fact that I'm not married, because I'm 21 and therefore no longer a teenager, while a 19-year-old who got pregnant would be contributing to a societal vice); insisted that she was not an "obibini," an African/black person, but rather "kokoo," or red, despite the fact she shared her complexion with her family, whom she dubbed abibifo), Africans/black people; convinced me that she was a Presbyterian so that she should go to church with me despite the fact that she'd always gone to the Methodist church across the road; and told me that I was unlike any of the whites who had come to stay in Asaam for brief research stints a few years ago because 1) I speak Twi, 2) I know how to do my laundry by hand, and 3) I know how to greet so I'm not self-absorbed.

Alice.  I'd talked with her the day before yesterday, and she'd promised to call me yesterday, which she had done (if you count flashing me as calling me, which I guess I will).  We said a lot of the same things over and over, that everyone in Asaam including her family is fine, that everyone in Wisconsin including my family is fine, that she's missed me, that I've missed her, and 10 minutes later hung up.  And when she called me today, I didn't quite know what to do, because I was starting to feel like maybe 15 people was a few too many.  Because those 15 people aren't just people who randomly have my American phone number; they are 15 people with whom I built relationships.  I bought bread or apples (imported from South Africa, and conveniently available from a hawker through the window of your tro-tro, provided you don't try to pay with your left hand) or chocolate (I've heard rumors that you can buy chocolate in Kofiase, the town about 15 minutes down the road, but certainly not in Asaam) or Don Simon or ripe plantains (it was early in the season, but I snagged some in Effiduase since there weren't any in Asaam, or Kofiase or Mampong for that matter) or whatever was requested by these people, these friends, on the few times I went to town.  And on more than a few occasions I was given raw peanuts, fresh corn, a pile of yams, or some cocoyams to take home for my mother by these same friends.  

See, relationships are complicated, and the funny thing is, as much as we curious oborunis (foreigners/white people) like to remember with fondness all the cute babies we got to see at the clinic where we were working or how quaint those days when we had to do our laundry by hand were, I think we like to forget relationships.  It's usually easier to remember our time as visitors in other cultures in strokes of static, remembered relationships--or at least not to let the vibrant streaks of dynamic relationships interfere too much with the tidy picture we'd like to paint about our experiences with people in AN AFRICAN VILLAGE.  About our one FRIEND WHO CALLS US FROM AFRICA so we can practice speaking THE LOCAL LANGUAGE and the rest who we've sort of forgotten.  We emphasize the parts that make us look like good, compassionate volunteers and humanitarians, and are prone to whittling the rest (including people) down into sound bytes that curious people back home can digest.  In the world of international friends, one is comfortable, and predictable: a phone call every three or four weeks; 15 doesn't let you forget, and refuses to be made into a neatly packaged sound byte.

Of course every relationship that you begin cannot be sustained, at least not at the level of friendship (which, despite the fact that many Ghanaians "afa m'adamfo"/"have taken me as a friend," is a pretty intense commitment, as a very dear friend has reminded me).  

I stumbled across this quotation from an article about a Princeton grad, Shivani Sud '12, who won a fellowship to work in India next year.  Perhaps what I've written thus far has been colluded by the emotions of coming back home when I'm not quite sure whether I'd rather still be in Asaam, so if it is, perhaps this will help to clarify my intentions for writing:

While interviewing a female patient, the woman told Sud that academics and government workers often come to her community and take a lot of notes, only to leave after the obtain the information they need for research purposes.

Boom, our indictment: Using relationships when they suit us, and throwing them away when they don't.  Taking lots of notes and leaving lots of unfulfilled relational expectations.  (Sorry for all the parenthetical clauses, but no this is a complex thought in my head and there are no footnotes for blog posts, so, to clarify... I know that expectations are not obligations.  And I don't much believe in obligations, anyway, but that's for another post.  But I think expectations, if not met, should at least be acknowledged between the parties whose relationship has created expectation, and certainly not ignored.)  Honestly, this is why it quietly pleases me to hear from Alice that I am different from the other oborunis who have come to Asaam: I hope she is right, and that what Shivani Sud's interviewee has experienced will not mark the way I move about in and engage with other cultures. 

One of my best friends, in a hurried (did you know it's more than 3x more expensive to call Tanzania than the US from Ghana??  I didn't either...) conversation a few weeks ago--ironically, about some money matters related to a mutual friend from Ghana, where we did the Bridge Year Program together a couple of years ago--, mentioned that she feels she might have made a mistake in the way she handled relationships while studying Swahili in Tanzania this summer.  She speculated that by worrying so much about failing to keep up her end of relationships with Tanzanian friends after returning home to the US, she pushed almost everyone away without giving much space for even a fledgling relationship.  And we agreed that by all means, yes, she may have mishandled the opportunity to forge relationships.  But we've both seen enough pictures of American college kids hamming it up on camera with some African friends whose names they'll soon forget in the name of having a great Facebook picture that I think we're right to be wary about how we conduct relationships--after all, we don't excuse ourselves from Facebook temptation.  Especially now that, after our respective leaves of absence, we're back online in hopes of doing better to keep in touch with friends far afield.

I don't know what I'll do when Alice calls again tomorrow, as I'm sure she will.  I expect I'll call her back, and she'll ask how the people of Wisconsin and my family are, and I'll ask how the people of Asaam and her family are, and she'll say she misses me, and I'll say I miss her, and we'll hang up.  But it will be more than that, too, at least more than those words.  Because as silly as it seems for a college kid thousands of miles away from a tiny village that most Ghanaians have never heard of to keep in touch with a middle school student who lives there, I am going to try as I wrestle out this question: What does it mean to be responsible in these relationships?

To close, let me send a shout-out to my new, true friends Evelyn and Gloria.  Now that I'm home in Wisconsin, we don't get to be home in Asaam together, cooking together, washing Evelyn's laundry together,  eating together "abom," laughing together about how often I say, "3firi s3..."/"because...".  But I've promised that when I get married someday, they'll be invited, and I'm quite looking forward to our future reunion, by God's grace, "daakye, Onyame adom."

God, make me a good steward.