This whole huge house is vibrating with the sound of the students practicing their african drumming. They are good, the teachers great and all that sort of thing is going very well. Let me start by telling you about the final telephone installation: Over a month ago we paid a bribe of about $30 us to a man at the telephone company and were assured that now it would be possible to get the phone in quickly. Quickly took over another month when late last week the men came to install the phone in the house. When I came home last Thursday from Abidjan I learned that only the final hole in the wall needed to be made to connect the last wires and “Whalla” we would have a phone. Four hours later the man who had the equipment to make the hole in the concrete wall finally arrived at the house. I expected some sort of drill, however, to my surprise, the equipment consisted of a hammer and two chisels which were used to punch a hole through a foot of concrete in an upstairs bedroom wall where one of the students was sick in bed (five students in that room). They managed to make the hole with much exertion on the part of the hammer person. I then went outside to take a look at how they were going about connecting the missing wires. Here is what I saw: On the ground below where the hole was punched in the second story bedroom was a 12 inch high rectangular stool (kitchen variety) with another exact same stool on top of that. Perched on the top of the two stools leaning against the house wall was a ladder made from two extremely crooked branches with boards nailed at each end to both of the branches at random intervals. At the top of this make shift ladder was a nice looking yound black man wearing “flip flops” on his feet holding a kitchen knife with which to strip the plastic from the wires that needed connecting. The precarious nature of this whole set up boggled my mind, and I began to realize why it had taken nearly eight months to get our phone. Things are done differently in this part of the world.
This morning in class, all but three of the students (the three absent students left for Ghana at 6:00 A.M. for a week of exploration) told about some of the important changes that had happened to them since coming to Africa nearly six weeks ago. They talked about the necessity of learning to be patient, about adjusting to a different sense of personal space (there is none here), about getting used to the garbage in the streets, the flies and the humid heat, functioning without knowing what is going on around them, and learning to trust others to make important decisions for them. They also talked at length about learning not to place a value judgement on things they would view as “wrong” in their own culture, but seems to be acceptable here (some inhumane treatment of dogs was one example of this). We are all learning. Kathryn Roe.