The Northern Lights Part Two: Finding a Silver Lining

 I saw “The Silver Linings Playbook” last year with two of my friends that go to arts school at NYU. Afterword, they explained to me how great of a movie it was due to it’s character development, thematic construction, and all that fancy stuff they teach you at film school while I stood by my negative review. Despite all of the positives, I found it counterintuitive that Bradley Cooper’s “silver lining” was running off into the sunset with Jennifer Lawrence in a leotard.

To me that sounds like every male over the age of 15’s fantasy, but of course to the dreamy Bradley Cooper and his irresistible 5 o’clock shadow, this was merely his silver lining when everything else fell through.

 

(For those of you that had enough self-respect not to go to the movies to see this with two other guys:

 

Now before I tell the story of my time in the Arctic Circle chasing the Northern Lights, I’d like to tell what I find to be a real silver lining story. His name is Elder Jordan, a Mormon Missionary that I met in Ghana last year while I was volunteering at an orphanage. Jordan was the only  white person other than the orphanage volunteers that ever visited the small village of Dodowa that I called home, so we quickly became friends.

When I got around to asking him where he was from and how he wound up in Ghana, he gave an amused chuckle and proceeded to tell me that he grew up in Utah in a Mormon family. When the time came for him to do his mission work, Jordan was nervous and unsure of himself; he liked life in the states and really didn’t want to leave his home to go to some faraway country for two years. The night before his letter of placement was scheduled to come, he had a dream that God had answered his prayers and that he was to be placed in Chicago. He says when he woke up that morning he felt like a million bucks, that God had recognized his dedication to the Church and rewarded him with a placement where he felt he could really make an impact. Jordan went as far as to say that he felt one with God that morning, and when the letter came saw no use in opening it, that surely his placement was Chicago. When he finally got around to opening his letter, where Chicago should have been instead was the five letters that brought his world crashing down: Ghana.

After many minutes studying a globe trying to figure out just where this place was he finally realized the gravity of those five simple letters.

 

He paused for a long while after this until I prodded him further by asking how he’s liked his placement so far, expecting a Bradley Cooper-esque answer that once he got here he realized this is where he was meant to be all along and now he’s truly recognized God’s infinite wisdom. Instead he chuckled again and said, “You know what, to be honest, so far it kinda sucks.” He then justified this by saying he’s allowed no internet access outside of checking email once a week, and is allowed to call home only twice a year: Mother’s Day and Christmas.

His days are spent walking around the equatorial climate of Ghana in a full shirt and tie, handing out the Book of Mormon to villagers and asking if they need help around the house. He told me that at the moment his faith has been questioned and he’s not really sure how he feels about the Church or God, but that he’s here and maybe someday that will change. Maybe not overnight or maybe he won’t recognize it until much later in life, but Jordan’s still hopeful that he’ll find a silver lining.

 

The story of Jordan came back into my head as a stared up at a disheartening, cloudy sky on my last night in Tomsø, Norway. A heavy brick of disappointment by this time had fully settled into the pit of my stomach as I thought about all the effort and energy put into this trip. The only way I had been able to afford the flights were to break up them up into individual one-way tickets from budget airlines at obscure times. This meant five total flights and departure times ranging from 11:00 pm to 8:00 am and an overnight stint at Gardermoen airport in Oslo. Once in Tromsø, I “couchsurfed” and cooked my own meals in order to save money in one of the most expensive countries in the world. Finally, to assure myself the best chances of seeing the Lights I used one of the city’s “Northern Lights Chase Tours”, where a group of tourists hop on a bus with a guide and spend 6 hours driving to the best spots for seeing the Lights, and resulting in an 85% sighting percentage. While I was never great at math, I think having two chances at 85% is about as good of odds as a guy can get.

Unfortunately, my first night I learned 85% is by no means 100% as a storm cancelled the tours for the night. My second and final night was promising; decent weather and great solar activity left the guides optimistic at our chances. Yet after 6 hours of driving through remote areas of the Arctic Circle to some of the best viewing sites in the world, as we re-entered the light polluted Tromsø the guide solemnly offered his condolences for this rare miss. As I made my way off the bus alongside my 15 fellow Asian and 3 Italian tourists, I found my disappointment start to slip away thinking of the last few days.

For while the goal of the trip may not have turned out exactly as planned, I had my own silver lining up in the Arctic. For one, I caught glimpses of the Northern Lights, albeit not at their usual glory but I saw something nonetheless.

Also my short time couchsurfing made me some incredible friends from previously unknown places. I got to spend two days walking around the fascinating arctic city of Tromsø, where it was completely dark by 3 pm due to its proximity to the North Pole and got to visit the northern-most Burger King in the world.

 

So as I bid farewell to my predominately Asian brethren after the “unsuccessful” tour, and began my long walk back to where I was staying, I did so with a smile. For maybe my miss of the Northern Lights will cause my to return someday, where I’ll bump into Jennifer Lawrence in a leotard and dance away with her into the sunset. Or maybe I’ll see nothing but clouds.

And that’s the beauty of life.

 

 

My best shot of the Northern Lights

 

 

 

 

A shot of Tromsø from a Gondola Ride

 

Would have been a much nicer picture without all those clouds

The Northern Lights Part 1: Why

“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view.  Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”

 

 

At 19, most would consider me too young to have a bucket list. Sure, it’s normal enough as a teenager to have dreams of far off mythical and mysterious lands to someday visit, awe-inspiring and breathtaking sights to someday see, and stupid and crazy things to someday do, yet most wait for a mid-life crisis or a death sentence to ever get started on these lists. This is by no means intentional, for something to make the hallowed bucket list it has to be something far out of the norm and therefore incredibly inconvenient to accomplish. So we wait to get started checking things off our bucket list until a time that’s comfortable for us, which the vast majority of the time ends up being never.

 

Personally, the top spot on my bucket list is reserved for the Northern Lights. As someone always enthralled by celestial beauty, one could call the Northern Lights the mother ship. And since I’m currently in Western Europe, a relatively close distance to Scandinavia, which is widely considered the best location in the world to witness the Northern Lights, I figured that just maybe I could make this dream into a reality.

 

Then reality set in, as the matter of planning a trip to my destination of Tromsø, Norway, which lies well within the Arctic Circle, for a solo American teenager proved an equally daunting, expensive, and unrealistic task. For while I was relatively close, the distance was still almost 2,000 miles to one of the most expensive countries in the world, at which I knew neither the language nor a single person.

 

My dilemma provides a perfect situation to invoke the story of Laura and David, the managers of my favorite hostel in Ghana. I came to meet Laura and David my first trip to Ghana when I first patronized what would come to be my favorite beach. I was there with a few other volunteers when I stared talking to David about what brought him to Ghana. David then explained to me that he and his wife lived a comfortable life in the Netherlands, surrounded by family, friends and stable jobs when they decided to sell their house and most of their possessions, buy a van, and road trip from the Netherlands to Ghana to manage a hostel a long time friend of theirs recently built. To make the story all the more extraordinary, they did all of this with a one-year-old son.

 

David justified this act of insanity by saying it was no midlife crisis or mental breakdown, but a deliberate materialization of a deep seated dream he and his wife shared to live a more simple life somewhere on a beach. Back in the Netherlands, David found himself frequently working 70 hours a week at an unfulfilling job to support a lifestyle he and his wife weren’t satisfied with. The first year of his son’s life passed with little presence of a father and while they were a deemed an incredible successful couple by our societal norms, they were unhappy with how their lives were playing out. So when the opportunity presented itself to make this drastic change, they took it.

 

Before you start vying for the movie rights to this perfect story, it does not have a storybook happily-ever-after ending once arrived in Ghana. As can be expected, serious problems arouse as the young family got settled into their new African life. They live in a small, primitive home with no running water, and they have electricity for only 4 hours a day. Their access to the closest road is a mile long, unpaved, pothole ridden road that is nearly impassable during the rainy season (I found this out the hard way when my friends and I were forced to make the long, wet walk after our cab driver refused to embark down the treacherous path). Finally, their livelihood depends on the revenue generated by a hostel that charges $6 a night.

 

Outside of the physical obstacles, their transition to Ghana had its emotional valleys as well. Friends and family were seen maybe once a year as the trip back home was difficult due to their new responsibilities in Ghana and their newfound lack of financial security. David’s mother took the move especially hard, as now instead of seeing her young grandson almost everyday, his early years are now passing with them being reunited only once a year.

 

Yet the young family is currently enjoying a sense of peace and happiness few of us ever do. Their days are spent watching their young boy, now three, grow up in front of their eyes while their nights are spent on a beautiful beach with new friends, watching captivating sunsets. They do without a great deal, however they have each other as well as a priceless sense of fulfillment that they have from actually living out a dream.

 

As all great things surely do, this dream at some point had to come to an end. David and Laura are realists, and are aware of how unrealistic it is to continue this life indefinitely. As their son continues to grow, reality sets in with regard to the boy’s education and social life, and money will soon become a daunting problem, as the hostel isn’t large enough to really support an entire family. In December they had begun to look for a house and jobs back home in the Netherlands, by my next visit in March they had made their plans to move back home and found a school for their boy to start in the fall, and by my final visit in September they were already gone.

 

“When we were getting ready to leave the Netherlands two years ago, all my friends told me how much they wished they could do something like this, how lucky we were that we had the chance. I always thought that was interesting, because I think anyone can do something like this. This situation is never going to be perfect the transition is never going to be seamless and there’s always going to be challenges, but at some point you just have to do it and figure the rest of the stuff out as you go.” This was the last conversation I had with David last spring, and by far the most profound. For he’s right, we make excuses for not doing the things we love, saying that the time isn’t right, sure that a better opportunity will arise later.

 

The stark reality is that dreams are cheap, and the only ones that matter are the ones we have when we’re awake. So while I will most certainly spend every penny I made working over the summer, freeze my rear end off, and possibly not even see anything, I’m on my way to the Arctic Circle to make my own dream come true.

 

 

 

 

Hitting the 1,000 Milestone

 

Up until now, I can’t remember any milestone I have hit with the numerical value of 1,000. The first thing that came to mind was number of days spent at RHAM Junior and Senior High School (7-12^th grade, 182 days a year for six years), yet due to a sporadic and shoddy attendance record my senior year, I’m afraid to say that, unlike most of my classmates, I never reached the revered mark. 

My next hope was total wins in my college football video games, where I set up historic dynasties at universities ranging from Baylor to Ole Miss and of course my beloved Florida Gators. Yet under closer inspection even that has an asterisk next to it due to the high amount of games I simulated (let the computer play for me), and of course the infamous console swap of 2007, where I switched from a Play Station to Xbox, will also raise doubts about the validity of my claim.

Today, however, I can now say I’ve joined the 1,000 club as this blog just topped the milestone of 1,000 total views. Even if you just skimmed through the pictures, thank you to all the people who took the time to give it a look.  It’s quite flattering to think that my life is interesting enough for people to want to read about it (or at least look at the pictures.)

 

As a thank you for all the support, I will save everyone the task of excessive reading and tell the story of my two weeks on a horse-breeding farm in Holland through the copious amounts of pictures I took, with as few words as possible.

Hopefully you all stay tuned, as the next stop on my adventure takes me inside the arctic circle, to the Northern Norwegian city of Trømso, where, hopefully, I will bear witness to one of the great natural phenomenon of our world, The Northern Lights.

Most of my free time was spent exploring the landscape the way signature Dutch way: on a bike

 

 

 

 

Some other pictures taken while biking

 

What Dutch Horses Taught Me About Animals

I’ve never been too sentimental towards animals. I have a psychotic dog and a ferocious cat that I both love dearly, but to be honest I would by no means consider myself an animal lover. I’ve always been rather cynical towards animals, much like the cynicism most of my female peers feel towards men; that they’ll only like me if I can give them something. Call me a sappy teenage girl, but I just want a dog, cat, or Irish dairy cow to like me for me, my personality, my adventurous and fun loving disposition, and of course my baby blue eyes, and not leave me whenever the next guy offers them an extra treat.

I’ve decided to sprinkle in some pictures of the horses to spice things up a bit

So now here I am in the Netherlands working on a horse-breeding farm, asking innumerable questions to Leonie, the director, about the ins and outs of horse breeding.

How do you know which horses to keep with which?

When do you start training a horse and how do you know when they’re ready?

How do you know when a horse will give birth and what type of assistance they’ll need?

After a day of this barrage she finally stopped me and told me a lesson she learned when she first got into this business. She said growing up when she heard people talking about how they felt they had a strong enough bond with their pets that they believed they could have some non-verbal communication with them, she thought they were full of it. Yeah, that’s cute that you think your golden retriever puppy is mindful of when you’re depressed and will be extra cuddly, but realistically at the end of the day, he’s a dog and much more concerned with his kibble then you’re mental health.

But the more time she spent with horses, the more her sentiment changed. Admittedly there was no Disney Channel moment like I had with my amazing Irish horse Charlie, but after spending between 5-9 hours a day with these horses 7 days a week, 365 days a year she told me she just started to pick up on things.

Some mares she’s noticed have a much better temperament when they have a foal and if they aren’t bred for a year will become stubborn and difficult.

Others really can only handle the responsibility of being a mother every few years otherwise they become disinterested in their foal and are poor mothers.

Some horses can’t handle the stress of training until the age of 4 or 5, while others are completely ready by 2.

The most important thing for me to understand about horses and especially the breeding process isn’t stock book answers to these questions, (knowing all the necessary information is necessary still of course) but to recognize that each horse is different and have the patience and the dedication to recognize these separate personalities if you will.

For Leonie, all this time with her horses has changed her skepticism on just how close a relationship between a human and an animal can get. Last year, for example, she started training her breeding stallion to become her show horse, an especially difficult task due to the fact that this guy, Sam, not only had more hormones running through him than a high school boy, but he had been neglected by his previous owner who never was able to get anywhere close to riding him. After spending serious amounts of time with Sam and many hours of training, she concluded that Sam’s major issue was one of trust. He never felt trust from his owners, and therefore never trusted anyone enough to ride him.

To be fair I just stumbled across this guy while taking a bike ride and snapped the picture

Leonie then focused her training with Sam on exercises pointed at gaining his trust, every time allowing him more and more freedom. Ultimately, this culminated with her first attempt at riding him being done bareback, with only reins to aid her in order to show Sam that she truly trusted him. The result was for the first time in his life Sam was ridden successfully.

This debate over how deep a relationship between a human and an animal can go is most definitely not black and white, and there are so many extraneous variables to account for that a definitive answer is unrealistic. My time with these horses, however, has partially quelled some of my cynicism. After all, they say that 90% of all communication between humans in non-verbal, so is it really that far-fetched to think that the all important communication of feelings like trust, companionship, and love could be done without the 10% that we get from our language? Sure a horse won’t understand if you tell him your boyfriend just dumped you and be able to offer you advice off a Hallmark card, but is it that crazy to think that they could pick up on the fact that something is off and respond with those feelings of trust, love and companionship.

On the other hand, maybe the answer is just human beings habitually personifying these emotions onto their pets, mistaking acts of companionship, love and trust for simple animalistic responses.

I’m still far off from my own conclusion of the matter, but my sentiment towards animals has changed over my last month and a half of wading in their fecal mater. Regardless of what they can or can’t comprehend about us, I’ve been able to take away something quite important from how they feel towards us humans. If you provide the basics of food, shelter, and even go as far as to love your animals, they will not only be content but fulfilled in life, and will exude this appeasement in their relationship with you.

Your dog doesn’t need to win the Super bowl or Nobel Prize in order to reach a sense of inner tranquility and satisfaction and doesn’t expect that out of you in order to gain his or her affection. Not only are our animals prime examples of being able to enjoy the little things in life, but also how we should treat our loved ones (humans that is) as well. For unlike our bestial pets, far too often are our relationships bogged down by the trivial measuring stick that we so often judge each other by, and we often lose sight of the essence of our relationships; that as long as someone provides us with the basics of trust, companionship, and love, then it shouldn’t matter if they’re flipping burgers or curing cancer, they’re as good a pal as any.

How I Became an Irish Cowboy

The first time I rode Charlie was on a sunny afternoon my first week in Ireland. I found him grazing in the beautiful green pasture behind the house, overlooking rolling hills dotted with sheep that made up the surrounding farms. When we met he was timid at first, yet with every brushstroke his fear melted away and we became connected by that special non-verbal bond that connects those lucky humans and animals that are open enough to recognize it. I saddled him up and climbed onto my noble steed with the sun at my back and nodded at Celine and Des, acknowledging how special a moment this was and how lucky they were to watch it. All that was left was to dig my heels into Charlie and ride off into the sunset and it would have been most perfect story since “The Notebook”.

Unfortunately, Charlie didn’t move. I followed what all the cowboys do in the movies down to a tee, a grabbed the reins, gave Charlie a kick and shouted “Ya”, but still, nothing. I tried again, figuring Charlie was simply too caught up in this perfect moment and needed a jolt back to reality, but still nothing. Over the course of just a few moments my transcendent moment reduced from me trotting off like Ryan Gosling to finding myself in full view of locals sitting and screaming on a completely stagnant horse.

I should have known better, for Des had warned me that Charlie hadn’t been ridden in over a year and had grown quite fond of his new life of eating grass and lounging around all day and may not be overly excited to change his lifestyle for some American teenager whose seen too many cowboy movies. Not this or the fact that I had only ridden a horse once before in my life swayed me from thinking that this would be a walk in the park, or a leisurely gallop through the pasture if you will.

So there I was, absolutely humiliated sitting on a stuck up horse over 2,000 miles from home with clothes still stained with cow shit. In this trying time I thought back to all the Disney Channel movies I watched as a kid, classics like The Cheetah Girls, Cadet Kelly, and of course Johnnu Trunsami. Inspired by the courageous acts of my kid heroes, I was renewed with determination to show the world (or at least the fewer then 200 residents of Clough, Ireland) just what this misfit duo of an inexperienced American teenager and a stubborn clumsy horse could accomplish.

I made up my mind then and there that I would be the first person in eastern Ireland to heard cattle on horseback, and I would do it riding my pal Charlie.

For the remainder of my three weeks Charlie and I followed a training regiment that consisted of me riding him every few days when my free time wasn’t spent playing 2 on 2 soccer outside or mercilessly destroying Dieormet at Fifa Soccer on his Xbox. The first week passed without any progress, the only time he really moved was when one of the dogs, Rex, nipped at Charlie’s heels causing him to buck and nearly sending me flying into next week. The dogs made my riding sessions infinitely more difficult, as the two dogs Rex and Ray (aka Rex Ryan and Sugar Ray) got along with Charlie about as well as I did with my sister in elementary school, which is to say not at all. It wasn’t until the second week when Sugar Ray was too slow and suffered a brutal kick to the sternum when the two sides finally came to an understanding. Unlike his namesake, Sugar Ray was down for the count.

The showdown

Sugar Ray

Sugar Ray down for the count

By the beginning of the third week, Charlie and I were finally able to sustain a galloping lap around a field, much to the surprise of Des’ highly skeptical family. My dream was almost crushed on a dark, raining evening (not the best time to ride a horse I found out) when Charlie and I were finishing up riding for the day. We were riding in the field behind the house, which posed a major problem due to the fact that whenever we got close to the porch, Charlie would stop whatever grove we were in to walk right up to the railing and sniff it. God knows why Charlie picked a railing to be his muse, but he did and I learned early on to just let him have that one. This day, however, the cows had been grazing behind the house so we had put up a wire about 30 feet around the house to prevent the cows from doing what they do best, poop, on the nice clean porch. On my last lap on Charlie I took him in a circle that passed close to his forbidden love, the railing. Unfortunately, due to the impending darkness Charlie was oblivious to the wire that separated him from his angel and ignored my pleas to turn. At about five feet from the wire going full speed his realized the problem, and turned the brakes on in the soaking wet, slippery grass. The result was Charlie pulling off quite possibly the greatest drift since Vin Diesel in the Fast and the Furious, dropping to his front knees and sliding 90 degrees before hoping back up again and resuming his trot. I was dumfounded, I had fully accepted my fate of going head over teakettle into a fully electrified wire fence just to have Charlie pull a drift straight out of Mario Kart. Forget training, all you need to turn Charlie into the world greatest horse is stick him in front of that railing and watch as he puts the moves on for it.

My final day in Ireland the moment had finally come to put Charlie to the test. I set out with my assistant, Des’ oldest daughter Darvla, to the pasture to fulfill my destiny. I’m not sure if it was our training, the railing watching as we passed by on our way out, or just the opportunity to go anywhere outside of his small field but on that gray morning Charlie shinned. We were like Jordan and Pippen (myself being Jordan of course since I hadn’t broken my habit of sticking my tongue out), a well-oiled cattle herding machine. Darvla helped us out with the gates while Charlie and I herded the cows into the milking parlor in record time, passing by numerous locals stricken with befuddled looks that screamed “what on Earth is this American lad doing” but hid their secret envy and admiration.

When we shut the gate behind the cows in the milking parlor, it was a moment that would’ve made Johnny Tsunami himself burst into tears. But even this beautiful moment couldn’t delay the impending heart wrenching goodbye that was in front of Charlie and me. As I took off his saddle and gave him one final brush I consoled Charlie, reminding him that goodbyes are just a lamentable byproduct of this too-big world we live in and assured him we would meet again in this life or the next, and herd cattle in a land filled with beautiful pastures surrounded by tall, sturdy railings.

And just like that I was gone, driving off to the bus station and away from the magnificent green hills of Ireland. My three weeks in Ireland now complete the first chapter of my European adventure, and now I find myself shipping off to Holland where more horses, delicious cheese, and windmills await me.

A Week In Ireland

It was a beautiful Irish morning, with the sun shinning on the green picturesque landscape when my luck finally ran out. To be fair I was surprised I had even made it this far without it happening, I figured that my small amount of Irish blood had bestowed some good luck onto me, yet I recently learned that Blake is actually a British name not Irish, an omen to my upcoming catastrophe.

I was herding the cows out of the barn and back into the field, enjoying the beautiful view in front of me when it happened. A cow, frightened by my imposing masculinity, slipped on a heaping pile of fresh poop, kicking the mess up in her wake. I was mid whistle, in the act of opening my mouth to inhale for my big melody when the poop projectile rocked clean into my mouth and on my face.

My action of literally eating shit capped over a week of experiences that led myself to the conclusion that I could now officially recognize myself as an Irish dairy farmer. My week started off, quite fittingly, with more cow shit as my work outside of milking was to prepare the barn for winter when the cows would be living there full time. Some of the cows had gotten the disease mastitis, which meant that I had to go through every cubicle and unbolt the mats, power wash the two-year old dried shit off of them and then bolt them back down. Before this, I had an extremely romanticized view of what power washing was, thinking of lethargically cleaning off a wall on a hot summer day, welcoming the ricocheting water as a great way to cool off in the heat. Reality was far different, my hours were filled coaxing the stubborn cow shit from its hold on the mat and when it finally relinquished its grip, that usually meant it came flying directly into my face. Like I said this job hadn’t been done for two years, so the amount of cow shit was colossal, the floor of the barn had a coating ankle deep of the stuff.

One day while power washing Des offered me a reprise from my monotonous struggle and offered me another so-called easier job. I gladly accepted and was in high spirits until he casually mentioned that he hoped I wasn’t afraid of heights. My next hour was then filled with cleaning out the gutters on the roof of the barn, a simple enough task if not for the fact that the roof is almost 30 feet high and is comprised of only corrugated tin roofing sheets laid across beams. I perfected a method of hoping along the reinforced areas that had beams underneath and was able to escape unscathed.

That evening when milking the cows the injury bug struck when I attempted to slide open the door to the milking parlor. This door is quite heavy, so I got it about halfway before I had to stop to readjust my grip. The cows outside the door saw the crack of daylight and barged ahead using its 1,500-pound body to push the door the door it’s remaining distance. All would have been fine, except for the fact that my finger was still grasping the door and was then wedged between the cow and the sharp edge of the door, your classic rock and a hard place scenario.

Stupid Cow

Much of the work however was far more glamorous and I found a great deal of my time spent in rolling pastures tending to sheep and cattle. The lambs were starting to become old enough to be sold to the factory for meat, so we began the process of herding them in, weighing them, and tagging the ones that weighed enough to take into the factory. Tagging proved to be one of my least favorite jobs initially, as the sheep clearly didn’t enjoy getting their ears pierced nearly as much as we humans do. My first attempt was a colossal failure, I went in much too tentatively and only got the plastic halfway through and therefore had to go and give the poor guy a second tag to go with the botched gash I gave him the first time. After awhile I convinced myself that the sheep all had personalities of teenage girls and secretly relished accessorizing with these piercings, making myself feel much less guilty. Once the sheep were all weighed and tagged, we took them to the factory where we sold them to the slaughterhouse. My co-worker Celine had a keen interest in how the sheep were actually killed, yet her grasp on English wasn’t great so she asked if I would accompany her to the back room to ask to see how the sheep got killed. I reluctantly agreed, I enjoyed my Irish lamb chops and wasn’t overly thrilled to risk losing my taste for them. I’ll leave out the details for those of you who don’t wish to be scared into vegetarianism, but let me tell you, it’s not pretty. I figured watching the operation would make me lose my appetite for meat for at least a few days, but a few hours later during lunch I still shamelessly devoured my lamp chop.

My most lasting memory of the week came when Des and I went out to one of the pastures to bring in a sick calf from the herd. This was the same herd I took the tractor to the week before, the one with the aforementioned bull. This time I had a partner, Des, but was unfortunately on foot and unprotected. Now apparently word had gotten back to the big guy that I had been going around feeling up his ladies because this time around he didn’t go nearly as quietly. When Des and I brought the cows up he gave me the stare but complied with my request to move. About halfway on he decided that he had enough and turned, planted himself, and stared me down. I called out to Des and he came over and instructed me to stand my ground and look him right back in the eye to show him that I was the boss. This fact was debatable since the bull had well over a thousand pounds on me, but Des seemed unfazed. After a few tense moments the bull decided he had enough and lowered his head and began stomping the ground with his front hoof. I’m no bull expert, but I’ve seen enough movies to realize that this isn’t a great sign. I looked over to the fence about 20 feet away and figured that I could make it over it before the bull overtook me, given that I didn’t slip on one of the mounds of cow shit that dotted my path. I decided to stand my ground and not run like a 3^rd grade girl at least until the bull took it’s first step and after one of the longest 15 seconds of my life the bull finally gave in and joined the rest of the herd, officially recognizing me, Anthony Blake, as the big man on campus.

My weekend on the farm offered me a nice hiatus from all the excitement of the previous week. On Saturday morning I for the first time met the acclaimed “Potato Man”. Des had previously explained to me that they actually get their potatoes delivered to them by an old, slow-paced man every few days who always stays and talks for ages and brings the children lollipops. I obviously thought this was complete BS until a white van rolled up Saturday chock full of potatoes, candy, and a nice old man who deemed that I was unfortunately too old for a lollipop. After that it was time to set up the Halloween decorations, so the kids and I made the trip up to the attic to bring all the spooky decorations down. The kids had a special “Halloween Hike” at the school in the morning and were still all dressed up in their costumes (except for Diermot who was too cool for school).

The whole gang

Later on in the day Des, the kids and I took a trip to the cattle market to sell 4 of his calves (don’t worry, Marcus and Marquis weren’t among them), which proved to be one of the most interesting experiences of my time in Ireland to date. What they do is bring the cattle out in this big circle and old, hat-wearing Irishmen bid on the cattle while an auctioneer calls out the current price faster then any I’ve heard in America. Most sellers will bring the family, buy a few hotdogs, and make a day of it, spending the afternoon watching what the different cattle go for.

Sunday morning found myself in Church along with the rest of the O’Sullivan clan, an enterprise that takes much less time then in the states, with a full mass lasting less than a half hour. This Sunday was special for multiple reasons, the first of which was the Harvest Bake Sale. This meant that the kid’s school (located adjacent to the Church) was having a bake sale to raise money for the school, and also that I would be able to have a look around the classrooms. Since this part of Ireland is very rural, there’s on average only about 5 kids per grade at the school, and Darvla, Diermot, and Diolyn all learn in the same classroom from the same teacher. After I finished impressing all the kids by telling them I had 300 students in just my grade in High School back home, Des, Deirmot, Dioyln and I went to the big county final Hurling match between the local underdog Ferns and the 5 time defending champions Onerlts (no idea what that means). I quickly became engrossed in the fast paced, hard-hitting sport and apparently it was a game for the ages, as the Ferns missed a penalty as time expired that would’ve won them the county title.

It was quite the week in Ireland, I can only hope of more to follow.

My life as an Irish Milkman

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth”

After a 4,000 miles trip that comprised of a plane, bus, train, and ferry ride I finally found myself on a bench in my final destination of Gorey, Ireland waiting to be picked up by the man I would be working for during my stay in Ireland, Des.

After departing Ghana I arranged my connecting flight from Amsterdam to New York to be two and a half months later then my arriving flight from Ghana (a “multiple destination” trip as the airlines call it), leaving my backpack and me over 11 weeks in Europe. I’ve always had a deep-seeded longing to have one of those romantic journeys where you go out with no real plan and limited money and go wherever the winds take you, yet due to the fact that I was alone, 19, and in Europe for the first time I felt that this type of adventure may be a bit too brash for someone in my shoes. I compromised by registering with some organizations called workaway and helpx that act as middle men between travelers such as myself and “families, individuals or organizations who are looking for help with a range of varied and interesting activities.”

I was immediately drawn to these programs as they allowed the chance to truly immerse myself into another culture, by not only traveling through it but working and living in the country as well.

To me the idea of bouncing around different countries in Europe, working for my meals and bed doing real, manual jobs seemed about as perfect of a way to fulfill my pent-up wanderlust as I could get.

Sure, the work may not be glamorous (especially not in my case since I narrowed my search down to farms), the homestays may not be perfect, and the cultural adjustments may not be seamless, however I fully realized and even embraced the premonition of the discomfort I would encounter over the next few months. I believe that one flaw of our youth is that we are completely removing discomfort from our lives. We strive for each phase of our life to pass with known, comfortable results and for nowhere along the road for their to be uncertainty, loneliness, or adversity. Granted this is rarely the case, yet my point is that for most an ideal life path is like an American highway, straight, well paved, and with signs all along the way. I believe that the road of life should more mirror the ones I’ve recently left in Ghana, predominately unpaved, ridden with unforeseen potholes, and at any time could completely disappear under recent floods or severe degradation leaving the only certainty being that you never know where you’re going to end up.

As they say a challenge in which a successful outcome in ensured isn’t a challenge at all.

So while I was no longer bouncing away crammed into a tro-tro on the roads of Ghana, my current road of life looked just as uncertain as I was sitting on that bench. A booming “Ey there Anthony!” from behind me abruptly interrupted my metaphorical thinking and I turned to return the firm handshake of Des. In classic Irish fashion the first thing Des did was offer to buy me a pint of Guinness at the pub, of which I respectfully declined, due to my attire, hygiene, and energy level I would not have made a great first impression for myself in my new stomping ground.

He gestured to get into his car (at which point I tried to get in the wrong side due to the fact that in Ireland the steering wheel is on the other side, which Des thought was hysterical) and proceeded to drive me the 5 km to his farm nestled on the outskirts of town.

“How’d you find me so easily,” I asked him on the way back. My workaway profile offered a picture of me, but I tried to impress my potential hosts by picking a picture in which my back is turned and an elephant is in the background so I didn’t think it would provide much help.

“You said you were American, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard, eh? Turns out I was right,” Des giggled.

The view from the trailer on a misty morning

The next day ushered in my first day of work in the land of the leprechauns. On our walk down to the barn Des asked me if I had any experience with working on a farm, milking, driving tractors, etc. to which I replied truthfully that I had little, a friend of mine growing up lived on a farm so I had milked a goat and held the wheel on the tractor once before. Des nodded and he spent the next few hours teaching me the in’s and out’s of his milking operation, an enterprise that milks almost 100 cows twice a day.

After a few days, I had the whole thing pretty much down, and now feel comfortable relaying “How to Milk Cows the Des Way” (feel free to skim (pun intended), unless you wish to follow in my footsteps and become an Irish milkman most of the information is extraneous.)

• First herd and bring the cows in from the field into the barn.

Bringing the cows in

• Prep the milking parlor: turn on the milking machine, air duct, water cooler, insert the filter, tighten the pressure knobs, pull up all the buttons on the clusters up, and put the hose in the milk tank.

• Clear the cow entrance into the milking parlor allowing the first 18 cows in (9 on each side).

The milking parlor fully loaded up

• Milk the cows: first go through with a paper towel and clean off each of the cow’s teats. Then push the button down on the cluster, starting the suction and place each of the four milk suckers on their destined teat, being sure to watch out of any cows marked with orange signifying that they had a damaged or diseased teat that wasn’t to be milked. Once the cluster is on, wait a few minutes for the cow to be sufficiently milked before pulling the button back up, removing the suction and allowing for the cluster to be taken off. Finally, spray each teat with a disinfecting spray that doubles as a catalyst causing the teat to close up again.

A cluster

• Open the gate at the far side allowing the milked cows out.
• Open the bar at the other end of the milking parlor, allowing 9 more cows in to get milked (unfortunately the bar is much too high and the cows can easily duck under it, which poses a huge problem as the un-milked cows then try to exit the parlor with the milked cows. I saw this happening on my second day and tried to be a hero by jumping out in front of the un-milked cow like Gandalf in the first Lord of the Rings movie shouting, “You shall not pass!” Unlike my wizard hero the 1,500 pound cow lowered it’s head and gave me the Madden truck stick like Tim Tebow used to in his old days at Florida. Des of course just giggled and I never tried that again).
• Pull the levers down, giving feed to each cow.
• Milk the new cows, and repeat the last few steps until every cows has successfully been milked (except for the one “joker” heifer as I call her who doesn’t get milked and is marked with orange tape).
• Once all the cows are milked, begin “washing up”: first push down all the buttons on the clusters, and adjust the 4 swtiches on the milk tank. Then turn off the water cooler, remove the hose from the milk tank, and suck up a half a bin of water into the milking machine to wash the milk out. After half the water is gone, remove the filter and suck up the other half bin. Once the water is all gone, suck up a full bin of cleaning acid allowing it to circulate for between 5-10 minutes, or until the water bin fills up. Then suck up another bin of water into the machine, washing out the acid. Once all the water is through and out the hose, put the 4 switches back to their original position, turn the milking machine off along with the air duct.

The back room of the milking parlor

• Wash down the milking parlor, sweeping away all the fresh cow waste our heifer friends recently deposited.

Along with memorizing these steps, after my first few days I picked up some valuable tricks of the trade. For one, I originally put the clusters on the teats Michael Jordan style, with my face knotted in concentration and my tongue sticking out. Youth sports coaches always told me that sticking my tongue out was a bad habit, yet they never made enough of an impression to make me buck my habit. It wasn’t until my third day when a heifer decided that the appropriate time to unload its seismic load of manure was when my coworker, a French girl named Celine, was positioned directly underneath her. Now in America we toss around the term “shit storm” rather loosely (sorry for the profanity, I think here it is necessary). For me, sports analyst Stephen A Smith comes to mind when the term gets brought up, as he fancies himself as someone who can unleash quite a shit storm on someone when the time is right. Yet the substance that came out of this cows rear end and plummeted down directly onto the face and hair of poor Celine was a shit storm the likes of which would have undoubtedly send Stephen A Smith running for the hills.

What I looked like milking my first few days

Couldn’t decided what picture of Stephan A Smith I liked the best, so I took them all

After watching poor Celine suffer this fate, I decided that when my day of reckoning comes and I wind up in said position, I want to meet my shit storm with my mouth securely closed and my tongue stashed safely in my mouth.

Just a few hours after the colossal dump cascaded down onto Celine’s French face Des asked me to take Celine and herd the cattle in the pasture down the road up to water. It was an easy enough task except for the fact that the pasture was 3 km away and among its ranks was a fully grown bull, the kind that has the big piercing on it’s nose and will charge you if you mess with his ladies.

Des told me to take his tractor to avoid getting trampled like a Spanish matador, the only problem was I wasn’t very skilled driving a manual car, let alone a manual tractor. This was no baby, lawn-mowing tractor either; this was a big boy tractor. Des was unbothered by this, and told me to take it up and down the driveway a few times to get a handle of it and from there I would be fine driving it 3 km down the road through traffic.

My ride

During my practice drive I managed to make it up and down the driveway three times, stalling twice which to Des was more then enough to qualify me as a competent tractor driver. On the road, I started out fine, I went a respectable speed, pulled over to let cars pass me, and managed to come to a complete stop and then back up to speed again at a stop sign. Right as a started to get in a grove I saw a car in the distance driving on the wrong side of the road, which struck me as rather odd. It took me a few seconds to realize that out of that stop sign I had turned onto the wrong side of the road and was now cruising into oncoming traffic. Luckily I realized this before any cars came and nonchalantly made the transition over to the correct side of the road, telling Celine that I actually meant to do that. When we actually got the herd of cows, I had my first standoff with the bull as I brought them through the gate, which again luckily I turned out victorious. As it turns out this bull and I would develop quite a history by the end of my time in Ireland, but more on that later.

My time spent not covered in cow waste is usually spent hanging out with the Brady Bunch that is Des’ family. Learning the names of his five children was infinitely more difficult then mastering the milking parlor: Daryl (2 girl), Dieren (5 girl), Dieolyn (6 boy), Dieormet (8 boy), and Darvla (10 girl).

After a few afternoons playing soccer with Deirmot in the backyard he convinced his dad that my afternoons should be spent playing soccer instead of working, which successfully gave me a few hours off every day to organize a 2 vs. 2 match that pitted Dieren and myself against the dynamic dup of Dieormet and Dieolyn.

Dieromet, Dieolyn and Rex

Outside of the little munchkins, Des’ mother, Betty, and I also quickly became friends. After introducing myself, her response was “Ye have beautiful color” and pointed at her eyes. Quite possibly the easiest way to get onto my good side is to compliment me on my eyes, and Betty wasted no time. Celine, Des, and I report to her house next door every morning for poached eggs, Irish pudding, and tea, a real breakfast of champions, and we immediately bonded over cholesterol ridden meals about our shared dislike of the Tea Party in America and how shameful it was that no one in politics could get along.

So now my stay in Europe is officially under way. I’m covered in cow shit the vast majority of my waking hours, have already confronted both a bull and driven a tractor down an Irish road and befriended a stubborn horse and my time in Ireland has just begun. I can now officially say that my European adventure is underway.

Some more pictures:

Charlie my steed

So much cow poop

Betty’s Garage

My second favorite calf, Marquis

My favorite calf, Marcus

My Final Adventure in Africa

“For what its worth, it was worth all the while”

My single favorite picture from Ghana: Dancing with the lovely Beauty

With my departure from Africa looming and this undoubtedly being my final blog post from the great nation of Ghana, I was quite torn on to what I should dedicate this post to. Due to my lack of knowledge of the inner workings of WordPress I have been unable to make any headway in the task of changing the name of this blog for when I am no longer residing in Mama Ghana, which to be honest I’m not overly upset about. I will admittedly become a fraud as I blog under the title of a kind volunteer braving Africa while I instead venture around Europe, however I will afford myself the luxury of being able to tell girls I meet in bars that I am a world renowned blogger, and oh yeah said blog is about all the time I spent working with cute kids in Africa. I just can’t pass that up, and I think I earned that one after having to dig a parasitic bug and its gang of eggs out of my foot last week.

The parasite, known to the locals as the “jigga” that I pulled out of my foot:
This guy set up shop in my foot for about 3 days before I noticed him laying eggs in my foot. My friend in the village, Zapato had to go in with a filled down piece of wood and carve the sucker out.

As I have eluded to I will be departing Ghana shortly and spend the next few months in Europe working on farms in exchange for free room and board. My itinerary for now looks like I will have three weeks in Ireland on a dairy farm, and three weeks in both the Netherlands and Belgium on horse breeding farms before I return home for Christmas.

Before any of that however, there is still one last legitimate post I must make. I figured I would write it about setting the filters up in the second village of Agona, but after a few lines I bored myself with this repetitive story and felt like it fell under the category of “SSDD”.

Also since my last piece was the longest thing I’ve written since my Junior year book review of Huckleberry Finn I concluded that a light, picture heavy overview of my journey through Ghana would be the best for all.

So without further ado, Anthony Blake’s Adventures in Africa:

September 2012-December 2012: Orphanage Work

I arrived in Ghana 17 years of age to volunteer providing child care at an orphanage in the village of Dodowa with some of the most amazing kids I’ve ever met. Along the way I….

• Celebrated my 18th birthday at a hostel on the beach (and therefore missed my first opportunity to vote in America)
• Decapitated, dressed, prepared, and ate the most amicable chicken I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting
• Had a splendid visit from my parents
• Experienced a democratic presidential election in a third world country
• Learned how to pound fufu
• Was for the first time showered in diarrhea by little Bebe
• Found my favorite beach

My 18th birthday, and where I first met my friend Babs who I would remain friends with and scored me many free drinks over my three trips

My dearest Bernie

Bernie and Bebe

My beautiful mother and I with papa behind the camera

The queue for the polling station just across the road from where I was staying at the orphanage

My man Bebe before he doused me in diarrhea

One of my favorite kids from the orphanage, Lucky

The epitome of swag

Another one of my favorite kids, Courage

Found my beach

February 2013-May 2013 Teaching, Water Filters

On my return back to Ghana I volunteered first teaching  language arts for 5th, 6th and 7th graders and then installing water filters in rural schools. In between the two I was visited by my dear friend Brendan during his spring break and then finished the trip off with a killer hair cut. The highlights included:

• Being referred to as “Sir Antony” by my students
• Befriending monkeys, elephants, and a misogynistic, beer drinking German man named Ansghar during Brendan’s visit
• Becoming a part of a government recognized NGO in Ghana, the Get it Right Foundation founded by my friend KB
• Watching “Tangled” and “How to Train Your Dragon” 7 times each with my two favorite children and housemates in the world, KB’s children Joshua and Joel
• Installing my first water filter at Eguafo primary school
• Become the first obroni in Accra to spend a friday night on the city streets selling palm wine
• Becoming the first obroni in Accra to rock full on corn rows

My favorite students and me

Brendan aka “Da Truf” with Higgins the monkey.

Haggin’ with Higgins

Quality picture taken by Brendan

Joshua and Joel after performing their daily ritual of waking me up at 6am

The corn rows

 

September 2013-October 2013

My final trip to Ghana was the busiest, as there were 16 filters to be set up across 10 different schools. As a result, I never found myself in the same place for more then 4 days the whole stay, yet regardless I was still able to make some final memories:

• Get a parasite in my foot (had to say it again)
• Have the honor of Joshua remembering our secret handshake after almost 4 months
• Live solely out of a backpack for over a month
• Ride a horse on a beach
• Stay in a kings palace in the village of Agona
• Make friends with a gang of stray puppies
• Meet a cobra killing kitty
• Watch “Tangled” and “How to Train Your Dragon” another 5 times each
• Work with 2,500 students and over 100 faculty members in some incredible schools

Horseback riding on the beach

Some of the great students I had the pleasure of working with

Puppies on the beach

One final picture from Ghana

 

This concludes my adventures in the fascinating country of Ghana. I’ve made great friends, had unforgettable experiences, and seen some of the most beautiful sights of my young life. I consider myself very fortunate to have had these incredible experiences at such a young age and want to thank everyone along the way that made my experience what it was. Most importantly, I cannot say how grateful I am to all of those back home in Connecticut and elsewhere who donated to my cause. Because of your generosity I was able to first provide some basic aid to the orphanage I was at my first visit, but also, with the unfailing help of my great friend KB Tandoh under the banner of our NGO, the Get it Right Foundation, work with 10 schools and provide access to safe, clean drinking water to 2,500 students 100 faculty members, and 300 community members. This undoubtedly wouldn’t have been remotely possible if not for the generous donation of my family and friends who entrusted their money in the hands of a 17 year old. In addition a very special thanks to KB for welcoming me into his country of Ghana and acting as a mentor, co-worker, and friend and any accomplishments made during my time in Ghana are just as much his as they are mine.

 

Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and I hope my voyage in Europe can be just as entertaining.

 

Mi daa se

 

For more information of the Get it Right Foundation, go to thegetitrightfoundation.org or check out our video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkhwpXilkso

 

(Note that this blog is slightly delayed, as my access to internet isn’t always constant and therefore am not always able to post, so it usually follows about a week or so behind my actual life)

A Beached Whale

“Cruelty is a tyrant that’s always attended with fear; better yet an inability to truly understand what we fear.”

 

 

I was walking down the beach, a task I performed often in Ada on my trips back to check up on the filters (in a remote village with no electricity entertainment isn’t exactly a strongpoint) when I saw one of the most extraordinary sights of my young life. There a little way down the beach was a young boy, standing at the waters edge starring with a combination of awe and wonder at a defeated beached whale.

It was a truly a remarkable sight, as this boy was the first from the village to come across the animal, and due to his upbringing in this isolated area had never heard of or seen a whale before.

He starred at it with an inherent innocence, his mind completely uncorrupted by any outside forces or opinions on what this creature was or what its purpose was on this planet. His reaction was simply amazement; he was mesmerized and fascinated by the creature. Admittedly, there was a twinge of fear as the boy kept his distance but as I watched him for several minutes he didn’t run home to tell his friends, he didn’t try to hurt the whale, he just stood and watched it.

After a while I walked up to him and he asked me in surprisingly good English what the creature sprawled before him was. I explained that it was called a whale, yet he returned my explanation with a quizzical stare and asked “fish?” No I responded, and I proceeded to try and circumvent the world “mammal” by explaining that it gave birth similar the way we do and all that jazz until he finally began nodding and said, “oh, mammal, like dolphin!” Turns out the kids do learn something in school. He then asked me many questions about whales such as what they ate, which turned out to be very difficult to explain to someone who had never seen “Spongebob” or “Finding Nemo”. After he finally ended his barrage of questions, I asked him if he had ever seen one before, to which he shook his head. I decided to go out on a limb and ask if he knew how it got here, and he said that he had been watching it for a while and it was hurt, dying. I asked if he knew why and he nodded his head and said “fisherman” then made a gun out of his hand and said “bang bang”.

I took this with a grain of salt (sand if you will) assuming that this kid just wanted to act tough in front of the white kid by talking about guns and shooting.

Over the course of this conversation, a few more villagers had passed by, evidently bringing news of the alien into town because by the time the boy and I had finished talking a crowd was starting to form. The other villagers shared the boys ignorance of the whale, and were doing there own assessment of what this intruder was that had washed up on their beach.

By this time I was able to examine the whale for myself, and realized that the boy had some truth to his claim. I counted seven holes on his front and four exit wounds on the back (I watched enough CSI to properly conduct this autopsy) all of which looked to me like they were inflicted by bullets. The whale was still alive, occasionally attempting to flop around when a rather large wave would reach him (I’m going to refer to the whale as a “him”, I got a C in biology in high school I was by no means qualified to assign a gender) but was clearly morbidly injured.

At this point it looked like the dozen villagers or so that were present by this time had succeeded in acquiring a rope and were attempting to tie it around the whale’s tail and pull him up to shore. I heard one of the men say something in English, so I went up to him to try to get the inside scoop on what was going on. He said that these shua (the word for the whale in the local tribal language) were very rare to come to the beach. Only a handful of people had ever seen one before, and most of those were fishermen who saw them out at sea. He said they found one a long while back, but it was in an unpopulated area and by the time anyone stumbled upon it there was little left. He said he wasn’t sure what they were going to do, as he didn’t live in the village he was just visiting his family there (hence the good grasp on English) but he assumed they were dragging it onto the beach to kill it. I asked him why they were going to kill it, surely there was another alternative to which he just shook his head and said the sea has a way of getting rid of things that no longer belong there. This didn’t sit too well with me, as it was fisherman who killed the whale, not the sea, which he admitted was true yet didn’t sway his opinion.

 

This is where I think it’s important to justify my own action, or inaction for that matter. In my eyes this was wrong, the whale was still alive and regardless of whether or not it would’ve survived dragging it up to shore and doing what the villagers then proceeded to do was cruel and inhumane, clearly not in the best interest of the whale. While I realized this, there was little to nothing I could do in this situation. For starters, no one present outside of the man I just spoke to spoke more then a few phrases in English, so attempting to explain that this 12 foot long several ton beast was actually an innocent mammal just like them would have been nearly impossible to communicate. More importantly, this was a situation that presented itself quite often in Ghana, and the best way to make sense of these situations is understanding what my grandmother always used to say, “you’re not in Kansas anymore.” I never truly grasped the gravity of that phrase until my first week ever in Ghana over a year ago when I was talking with teachers about what school supplies the children at the orphanage I was at would need. She rattled off some books and supplies, and finished by saying “oh yes, don’t forget the canes.” Turns out the children at that school were required to provide their canes that they would be hit with if they misbehaved. Every morning, the children who did not present a cane were given one strike with another student’s cane (a very light punishment in Ghana) and told to bring one in the next day. The children at the orphanage had been going to school without a cane for years before we were able to supply them with it.

 

It’s important to recognize the differences in cultures around the world, and things that may seem cruel and barbaric to some are how life has gone on for generations. After 8 months total in Ghana, I had come to terms with this simple yet paramount fact, however this whale business was too far for me. I touched this living being; ran my hand over his slimy tail, watched him struggle in the minimal water, and most hauntingly, saw the fear in his eyes. It wasn’t necessarily the same fear as I felt after two of my friends bet my five dollars each to watch “The Exorcist” when I was twelve and didn’t sleep for a week (let the record show to this day I have never received any payment), or the fear I feel the night before I leave home for an extended period of time, but it was fear nonetheless, maybe just in a more primitive form.

 

This whale was gripped by fear for the same reason the villagers wanted to kill him, a fundamental lack of understanding. This whale was in an environment he didn’t belong with creatures he had never interacted with before, and therefore was terrified. And now he was going to be killed, slowly and inhumanely, become the victim of futile cruelty because the two sides simply didn’t understand one another.

After I realized the whale’s fate had been sealed, I began walking away back to my hut rather disgusted and with much less faith in humanity then I had a few hours before. The final dagger was as I took one last look back I saw the boy I had been talking to earlier again, only now he wasn’t awestruck at the whale, but instead laughing with the other children jumping up and down on the whales back and poking it with sticks, edging each other on to see who could get closest to the eye.

 

For the next few days I couldn’t shake the sentiment of disgust and disappointment at the events that transpired with the whale. I understood that this whale could be frightening to someone who didn’t know what it was, but to treat another living being like that required a mob-mentality type of cruelty I thought the villagers were above. Yet it was after those few days that I went back through my camera and saw the first picture I took of the boy who first stumbled across the whale and remembered his initial reaction, the reaction he had before anyone else told him what this creature was or what its purpose was. I remembered his sense of wonder, and how there was no premonition of hate or cruelty in him towards the whale, that it was after everyone else came and told him that he should fear this creature and that they should kill it that he joined the crowd.

 

I realized that the only difference between this boy and myself was nothing more than circumstance. I’ve always hated spiders for no reason other then as a kid whenever I saw one in a book or on television they were harming people or looked really darn scary. Therefore, for my entire life the vast majority of the time I’ve seen a spider I’ve proceeded to terminate its innocence existence, whether by the clean and efficient tissue, the reliable flip-flop, or the atomic bomb of a dictionary. This war I’ve waged is completely unwarranted, these spiders (especially the ones in Connecticut) can’t hurt me, and are simply trying to survive in this world of ours the same way we are. I attack them because I fear them, and I fear them because I never really look the time to understand them. I allowed my opinion of them to be formed by movies like “Arachnophobia” and that hideous spider in the third Lord of the Rings movie and have never taken the time to understand that they’re simply another creature trying to survive, just like we are.

 

Furthermore, I found myself thinking that maybe this philosophy could be applicable to more then just different peoples’ relationships with animals, but also our attitude to other societies around the world. Many people in America have an engrained fear of undeveloped places such as Africa due to our lack of understanding. We’ve seen commercials on television about starving children, heard news stories about endless warfare, and seen movies with gun toting child soldiers and from these stories have drawn conclusions that lead us to fear. Now you may say it’s not fear I feel, it’s pity or amazement or shock, however I’d challenge anyone to imagine themselves magically transported to this perceived “Africa” and not shudder at the thought of it. When we really think about, our attitude toward Africa is a lot of ways is quite similar to those villagers and that whale; there’s an ingrained fear due to a lack of understanding.

 

The big difference, you would say, is that our “fear” of a place like Africa doesn’t lead us to be cruel, like the villagers were with the whale, however I would argue saying that may not be entirely true. We only have to go back a few decades to the Rwandan genocide to see just how cruel this fear and lack of understanding can make us. In the book “Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda” (a great book recommended to me by my beautiful sister Samantha) force commander for the UN Mission in Rwanda, Romeo Dallare cites the American governments consist blocking and sabotaging of UN proposals to provide assistance to stop the genocide as one of the vital reasons the genocide was allowed to transpire. During this time, American government officials were quoted as saying that we were only willing to risk the lives of one of our soldiers for every 80,000 Rwandans that died. By no means did America orchestrate the acts of violence, but it’s a prime example of our fear and lack of understanding of another society compelling us to commit an act of cruelty by shying away during a time of need.

 

One can draw a wide range of conclusion from an event like this, all I know that for me the next time I see a spider I may sit and watch for a few moments and do my best to refrain from the habitual squish.

A Day at the Farm

 

There’s no better way to gain appreciation for the luxuries of development then to spend a day clearing land with a machete in the rainforest with buckets of rain pouring down.

I was in the village of Agona (located about 25 kilometers from the capital of Ghana’s central region, Cape Coast) installing some more water filters in the local schools when I found myself with a free day. The first president of Ghana and I share the same birthday, September 21^st, so the following Monday the schools were closed and therefore there wasn’t any work that could be done with the filters. Consequently, my community guide, Mr. Kwabena, nominated that we spend our day off at his farm, where he would show me the ins and outs of Cassava farming, the trade that 9 out of ten villagers in Agona base their livelihoods off of. I figured that it might be rewarding to gain some perspective into how the people here live, and if nothing else get a good story out of it so I decided to give it a whirl.

 

(The path to the farm)

 

So in the early hours of this Ghanaian holiday Mr. Kwabena and I began the 3-kilometer walk out into the jungle and to his farm. I thoroughly enjoyed the walk, the scenery of the rainforest was enchanting and I confounded quite a few Ghanaians working on their own farms, shocked to see a white guy in these parts. I was oblivious to the dark clouds slowly forming on the horizon, a premonition that my walk back would not nearly be as serine. By the time we arrived at Mr. Kwabena’s farm, a few innocent rain drops had begun to fall, so we stopped at his makeshift farm shack to wait it out and have a little of food to give us some energy for the day.

(The preparation of the “fried maize”)

 

The dish of choice that gray morning was Mr. Kwabena’s signature “fried maize”. To prepare the recipe Mr. Kwabena takes an ear of corn and scrapes the cornels into a pot and then lets it cook over a small fire. The American equivalent would be leaving a bag of popcorn in the microwave too long, then throwing out all the popped pieces and eating only the burnt un-popped cornels. Not a Ghanaian recipe I’m going to bring home with me.

(The final product) 

After we finished our meal the rain had subsided and we began our work of clearing Mr. Kwabena’s two acres of land for his Cassava plants. He handed me what he called a cutlass (I prefer the term machete, it strokes my male ego much more to say I’m wielding a machete then a cutlass) and instructed me how to begin clearing he two acres in front of us. The goal was chop away any unwanted weeds, leftover stalks, or otherwise invasive beings so the tiny cassava plants could have ample space and sunlight.

(Mr. Kwabena sharpening the machete before we begin)

 

I initially figured this was a pretty simple task, so I came out guns blazing, mowing down everything in my path. It wasn’t until I had decapitated a few of the innocent cassava plants I had sworn to protect that I modified my technique, employing some finesse to match my raw power.

 

As the day wore on, more clouds had moved in and eventually the innocent raindrops became too much and we were forced to return to the farm shack for a lunch break. After some banku and crackers, the rain had let up enough for us to continue so back we went to the fields. The rain hiatus was short lived however, only this time it returned with a vengeance, pouring buckets of water down on us.

 

(The farm shack nestled amongst some larger cassava plants)

 

Up to this point I had gotten away with my selection of flip-flops as my choice in footwear for the day without any real consequences. The more traditional choice are a pair of knee high rubber boots, but since I didn’t have a pair of these I was forced to go with a distant second of flip-flops. My farming up to now had been slightly more difficult due to my flip-flops, but it wasn’t until the pouring rain turned the ground to mud that it really came back to bite me. Within minutes my feet were caked in a layer of mud, however that wasn’t my primary concern at that point.

(My feet after the rain washed away some of the mud)

My mind kept going back to what I had always been told about snakes in Ghana and how when it rained hard, they were washed out of their homes in the ground and came out in droves.

Mr. Kwabena assured me I had nothing to worry about, that his cat had killed three cobras just over the last few months, and surely if there were any more his cat would have given them the same fate. It seemed easy enough for him not to worry, as his legs were covered in snake-proof rubber.

 

(Mr. Kwabena’s cobra killing cat)

 

At least some of my troubles were put to rest when Mr. Kwabena produced a rather large palm branch and taught me how I could use it as an umbrella, and keep myself dry even amid this rainforest deluge. My initial reaction was awe at the ingenuity and creativity of it, and how superfluous us westerners are with our technology when we could really just use some basic things found naturally around us. This sentiment lasted for about 5 steps after which I was sufficiently soaked from water dripping through the various holes in the inconveniently shaped branch, at which point I would have greatly appreciated a nice umbrella.

(The long, wet walk back)

 

45 minutes and 3 kilometers later we had arrived back to the place where I was staying, completely drenched yet free of any snakebites. I bid Mr. Kwabena farwell for the day, and made a mental note to stick to water filters.

 

Saying that the luxuries of development that are enjoyed back home in America, such as some power or an umbrella are excessive and redundant is perhaps legitimate, yet at the end of that day, I sure could have used a hot shower.

(My unsuccessful umbrella)