More than two weeks between blog entries. Faithful readers (you know who you are, all three of you) may wonder whether there’s nothing happening, or we’ve grown tired of recounting our adventures, or the internet has crashed. A brief word of explanation.
The last—poor internet service—was a huge problem in my first month here, and to some degree in the weeks after Susan arrived as well, but much less so now. The USB modem we have for use at our flat is of relatively little use (always slow, sometimes completely nonfunctional, usable only with my computer and not Susan’s). But at the Calvin office at IAS I have now installed an effective system for my use and the students’ (involving a 10 meter cable to the one Ethernet port that works and a wireless router). During class breaks (and once in a while during class, I fear) students can even do high-bandwidth activities like post photos and update Facebook. Between classes someone is always streaming a favorite song or sharing a Youtube clip.
All the previous Calvin groups had to go out and find public cybercafés where they paid by the hour for poor connections. The IT person here at IAS had recommended that I install a wireless system for to use, since there’s now a fast Ethernet port in the seminar room, but I wasn’t sure it warranted the expense, so I asked the students to do as they had til now—buy time at cybercafés and pay to print their essays there. But then my very first experience using one of the print shops—the one that had been recommended—left me with an infected USB drive and many hours of work to salvage its contents and clean up my hard disk. So the wireless system looked like a very good idea, and I have also allowed them to give me papers on a Calvin USB drive that I print at home. (There’s a printer here in the office but it’s very temperamental and demands to be fed one sheet at a time—and even that sometimes causes digestive problems.)
Each of the students brought a laptop, and nearly every graduate student at UG, and some undergrads, now carry laptops around with them as well. Technology availability has advanced enormously here since 2005, and this is just about the only area I can identify where prices have remained steady or decreased a bit. And faculty are very skilled at getting grant agencies to buy them machines. Osman, our faculty coordinator, was sitting in his office the other day typing on his laptop, which was set up in front of the large flatscreen monitor of his desktop, next to his large laser printer, with his video projector beside it – all of them the fruit of grant-funded activities.
But our silence should not be taken as a sign that life here is boring. The main reason is our always unpredictable but usually overfull daily schedule. New demands pop up constantly that many hours trekking from office to office to obtain forms, writing letters, making phone calls, and trekking back to the office to get the right form. The latest was our discovery this week that, where Ghana Immigration had always granted each arriving visitor 90 days’ stay in 2004 and 2005, this has been reduced to 60 days for most—and not even that some of them. Four of our students, for no discernible reason at all (three from the US, one from Canada, two with multiple-entry and two with single-entry visas) were granted only 30 days’ stay. On top of that, the renewal fee used to be about $25 US for up to three more months, and now, we have been told, it is $40 US per month.
The 2009 Ghana director’s report warned that it took two weeks to get the necessary support letters from the International Programmes Office for the students, five weeks to get the separate letter from the Registrar for him and Marty, but it made no mention of the urgency of a task that previously didn’t come due until our last month in Ghana. (Policies must have changed before 2009 or he would have flagged this.) The upshot is: four of our students are already in the country illegally. But I’m happy to report that I found a way to fast-track the process: I got an appropriate letter from IAS to the registrar, certifying the need for renewals for Susan and me and for all 16 students, in just one day, and the registrar’s assistant assured me Monday that his letter would be ready on Tuesday! (Postscript: it wasn’t.)
The days do not look all that full on the calendar. I teach my class in Ethics and Development on Monday and Wednesday, attend the Peoples and Cultures lectures on Monday and Wednesday, and listen in (I sit in my office with the door open but don’t take notes) to most but not all of the African Literature classes and some of the Politics and Development classes. I haven’t been attending the drumming and dancing classes regularly this year, though I plan to make more regular visits in the future—to brush up my skills (as if I remembered anything useful in an area of human activity for which I am so woefully prepared by nature and nurture). Every Monday morning Susan and Charles go shopping in the morning, and then we have some preparations while Charles is cooking for the dinner we serve to the students and a few guests. But I have no departmental or committee meetings, no lengthy commute, and few other times blocked out, and Susan has even fewer. I spend a lot more time in informal conversation and counseling with students than would usually be the case on campus, and here this involves Susan no less than me.
And then there are the periodic medical crises—too frequent in our first weeks here! Already four students have made use of the Nyaho Medical Centre for urgent problems, some of them requiring an emergency trip in the middle of the night. Four more have been down for a few days—missed classes, feeling miserable, nothing more serious—with digestive ills of one sort or another. Immune systems and digestive tracts need time to adjust to new challenges, I think, and a few students have been knocked down again and again.
Susan and I have been fortunate. Our only illness has been a severe head cold that had me in its grip for most of last week, but that cleared up before it spread to my chest. Susan felt as if she was getting it for a few days but is better now. She also suffered a fall last Friday—stepping back from an opening car door she put her foot in the deep gutter that runs alongside most roads here, suffering scrapes and bruises to her lower right arm. But those are healing up now too.
But there has been little time to write—and less time for each of us to read what the other has written and make comments. I wasn’t able to finish my account of our travels in Uganda last May til late summer, and Susan is still polishing up her account of Ethiopia trip. She has been in Akropong since Tuesday with the students, observing activities related to the Odwira Festival there, and as soon as I post this short entry (if I delay and let her review it we wouldn’t be able to post it til next week) I’m headed up there too for the rest of the week. (So all the errors and infelicities of this post are to be blamed on me alone.)
So please stay tuned, faithful readers. Our lives are very full of challenges and interesting experiences, and you will read about many of them in due time! In the meantime we would love to have emails from you with questions and responses and just general chitchat. Write to dhoekema@calvin.edu or sbhoekema@gmail.com – we would love to stay connected in a personal way as well as by posting notes on our experiences for you to read.
