Komenda

I'm back in Cape Coast after an incredible week in the fishing village of KOMENDA!!! I was half excited, half dreading this last week...I just didn't know what to expect, and had felt like I was just settling into my life in Cape Coast when we had to pick up and leave again. But, it was actually my best week so far. We arrived at homestay families in the village (my friend Leigh and I shared a room at the same house), and our family lived about a one minute walk from the ocean!! We could see it from our bedroom window! It wasn't the picturesque setting you might imagine, because in Komenda, the beach is used as a public restroom...people just squat on the beach and go about their business. I wasn't prepared for this when I wandered down there on one of our first days, journal in hand, hoping to write a poem. There were at least four men using the bathroom within my view. But anyway! I didn't mean to start my blog entry talking about THAT! Basically, the town was very small, with about two paved roads and the rest just sandy. We lived within easy walking distance of our program director (he lives there permanently and travels to Cape Coast every day usually). My assignment was to look into something related to health, both in Komenda and a tiny village called Kyiase, over the course of the week. I promptly decided to research fetish priests and their methods of healing people; I hadn't realized it, but these priests are everywhere, and many people rely on them as the most effective way of getting cured of diseases. Generally, there is one or more priest located near any particular god, which can be a tree, a body of water, or some other landmark. The priest that I spent the most time talking to lived in Kyiase (Chee-ah-see) and worked through the gods in that village, namely a huge tree and a small pond. He accepts payment in the form of bottles of Schnapps, and can cure people with anything from malaria to worms to life problems, like constantly losing your job, and things like that. A big problem, he says, are witches and wizards who decide to put curses on other people. That's one way you can get HIV, is if a witch or wizard decides to curse you. Some, he says, can even turn into mosquitoes, bite you, and give you HIV. All this was just fascinating to me, especially after reading Paul Farmer's book last year, about AIDS in Haiti, which talks a lot about the importance of sorcery in the social scene created by the existence of AIDS there. I'm thinking about possible ISP ideas (for my project at the end of the semester), and something related is seeming potentially amazing to look into. Most of my days were spent walking around with one of the Fante translators that were allotted to us, Daniel, who would help me find priests to talk to and then would help me translate the questions I had for them.

One amazing thing happened on Friday. The fetish priest in Kyiase had told us to go on that day with a bottle of Schnapps, and he would perform a small ritual to demonstrate how he helps sick people who go to him. We went, and watched while he set an egg (which we had just bought at a store for him) in the center of the concrete floor, prayed to the specific gods I mentioned for about two minutes, asking them to cook the egg. There was no fire or heat in sight, and it was literally two minutes later (I timed it) when he handed Daniel the egg and told him to throw it on the floor. He threw it on the floor, and lo and behold, it was hard boiled. I have absolutely no explanation for this. Daniel and I basically looked at each other and started laughing -- there was no other way to respond. We both remain astounded by what happened. One thing I thought was very interesting was that the priest told us that day that part of his prayer ritual involves asking the Supreme God to help the lesser gods (the tree and the water) in cooking the egg for us. I asked him naively who the Supreme God was, and he answered, shocked that I didn't know, Jesus Christ!!! I had no idea that traditional religions and Christianity had blended to this extent.

By the way, apparently the egg ritual helps him determine whether the sick person who has come to him is able to be cured or not; an uncooked egg indicates that a witch or wizard has stolen your soul, and he'll have to try to get it back from them; if he can't, you're doomed to die. So it is really very fortunate that the egg did cook!!!!

So, that was my week. The living conditions at our homestay family weren't as comfortable as in Cape Coast; there was no running water and the power was out for over twenty-four hours during the week. There was also a rat in our room that would jump on our beds during the night and once nibbled through an unopened bag of water (here they drink water from bags, not bottles) that I'd left on top of my Fante notebook...my notebook is still drying out! But it was a good experience, definitely. I was grateful to come back to the relative luxury of my house in Cape Coast! (And I'm sure that if I spent a week living in even simpler conditions at some point, Komenda would also feel luxurious.) So, it was a really good week. Now we're back in Cape Coast and doing our last week of Fante classes. I'm hoping to hang out this week with a few friends I've made here...Matthew and Champion, two soccer players I made friends with a few weeks ago, Kwame, this really nice guy I met at a club last weekend, and Fred, our tour guide during one of the first few days at Kakum National Park...the guy I might play the piano for in his jazz band! Haha. We'll see how much of this ends up happening!

I'm feeling very content, excited about spending lots of time this week with my host family, and then going to big, noisy Accra next week! Hope everyone's well!!! Thank you for reading!

Love,
Sara