Welcome to Africa

You know that dream where you go to school/work with no clothes on? One of my friends just called to tell me that she keeps having that dream over and over again. I've had it a few times and am convinced it prepared me for the real life equivalent. When I was living in Ghana, my host-father asked if I wanted to go to visit his mother in a remote part of the country with him. Considering the alternative was to hang out with the rest of his non-English speaking family, I obliged. It took us a little over 6 hours to travel the 100 miles to his mother's village. Her home was a traditional compound, an open courtyard between a few mud hut rooms and a primitive kitchen with no running water or electricity.

Within a few minutes of our arrival, I realized we were not just there to visit his mother but rather to attend the funeral of an old friend. I had no choice but to follow along. I was wearing a bright pink polo, a jean skirt, and flip flops which would not be appropriate for a funeral in America, let alone in Ghana where there is a specific traditional cloth for funerals. One of my host father's sisters, without speaking any English, tried to convince me I should borrow one of her dresses. Imagine my pale ass trying on this black and white tribal printed dress (it even came with a head wrap thing, which I refused to even try on). I obviously looked ridiculous, but might have been willing to just bite the bullet and wear the dress had it not been 5 sizes too big for me. This poor woman spent a good half hour trying to pin and tie the dress tighter but to no avail; despite my rather sizeable ass, I am scrawny compared to most Ghanaian women.

So off to the funeral I went in my pink polo and jean skirt. Funerals in Ghana are held outside usually in a blocked off street or courtyard. They are a huge deal - this one had around 200 people present. The extended family of the deceased sits in a large semi circle; upon arrival each group goes and shakes the hands of those sitting - around 50 at this one. After you shake their hands and express your condolences, you sit down, and each of those people gets up and comes to shake your hand, thanking you for coming. So here I am, white as can be in my pink polo, in a sea of dark dark Africans in what look like black and white togas. I can't speak the local language yet have to go shake all these people's hands. What I didn't know before hand was that more than half of the people at the funeral had never even met a white person before, ever. The one word of their language I did know was "Obruni" which means white person (literally it means Sunday - they equate white people with Christianity). People were pretty much shouting it at me - not at all in a mean way, just completely fascinated. The older people at the funeral would shake my hand for minutes laughing and talking to each other about me... no clue what they were saying.

I go through the whole line and finally get to sit down. Then I notice my following. No joke about 25 kids were surrounding me, following me everywhere I went. Some were running off shouting "obruni! obruni!" to get their friends to come out and see the white girl. As I sat there, some kids would sneak up and touch my skin or my hair - to see if it felt different, to check if I was real, who knows really. Most of them just stared at me watching my every move, in a way a marine biologist would analyze the behavior of a new species of sea turtle or something. Every once in a while a grown up would come shoo the kids away, but they would just come back within minutes in a larger quantities. After what felt like eternity but was likely only an hour or so, we finally got up to leave. The kids followed me to the car - touching me the whole way. As we drove off they were literally chasing after us- shouting "obruni!"; my host father who hadn’t said a word to me all day just laughed and said "Welcome to Africa.”