Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Read Free Book Online Page B

love.
    My first camp found me building teachers’ quarters in the village of Afranguah, in the Central Region. Unlike some of the projects I’d heard about, this one had the full support of the villagers and seemed destined to reach completion. The village women worked enthusiastically beside us, carrying buckets of water on their heads, pulling up weeds, hammering nails. Though the doors and window frames were made of wood, our primary building material was cement, which we mixed ourselves and molded into bricks, then left overnight to dry. At first it was unclear to me who was in charge—people just seemed to know what to do—but gradually a kind of hierarchy emerged. The camp leader could be seen from time to time consulting a piece of graph paper and instructing some of the experienced Ghanaian campers, who then passed on instructions to the more skilled Western volunteers. If I was assertive, some task or other would eventually trickle down to me. I soon discovered that I could just as easily sit in the shade doing nothing all morning without anyone caring or even noticing. I did my best to avoid this temptation.
    On the second day, I approached a volunteer called Ballistic, who was planing some wooden boards.
    “Can I try that?” I asked.
    “You cannot do it,” he said, without looking up.
    “I’d like to try,” said I, bristling.
    At which he reiterated, “You surely cannot do it.”
    I got on his case then, asking him how he’d like it if he asked me to teach him an English song, as he had the previous day, and I responded that he couldn’t learn it? After that he became my committed teacher and remained so for the next several hours, resulting in numerous uneven boards and two very sore arms.
    It was the month of June, right in the middle of Ghana’s long rainy season, ostensibly the coolest time of the year. Even so, the midday sun was so excruciating for us Westerners that our workday had to be arranged around it. On an average day, we rose around five-thirty, started work by six-thirty, and broke at eleven-thirty. If it was overcast, or breezy enough to be tolerable, we’d return to work around two for a couple more hours. The rain usually hit in the late afternoon, washing away the heat and leaving the evening fragrant and cool.
    Every afternoon, as soon as we finished work, I’d tear back to the schoolhouse where we slept, grab a bucket of water and a calabash bowl, and duck behind the woven reed screens we’d set up for privacy. There, I’d shed my clothes and dump calabashes of water on myself while I soaped off the day’s grit, leaving a few inches in the bottom of my bucket for a final whoosh of cool. Then, while the other foreign volunteers hung around the camp trading travel stories, I’d scoot down to Minessi’s hut to spend some time with baby Yao before the evening meal.
    Afranguah was a village of several hundred souls, with neither running water nor electricity. The inhabitants were poor, but not destitute. The children were bright and energetic, thin and scrappy, without the swollen bellies and patchy, red-tinged hair that signal malnutrition. The village had a deep borehole with a pump attached which yielded clear, sweet-tasting water, thanks to a far-reaching cooperative effort between the Ghanaian government and several international aid organizations.
    An unpaved road ran through the center of town, surrounded by rectangular cinderblock houses smoothed over with stucco and topped off by corrugated tin roofs. Paths leading away from the center led to more cinderblock houses, interspersed with rectangular mud huts. My favorite of these huts had big yellow flowers growing out of its thatched roof. The surrounding countryside was lush and verdant, thick with vines and a jumble of deciduous trees. The jungle, a European volunteer told me, had been chopped down hundreds of years before and replaced by this secondary growth. The landscape was lovely, with its fecund red-brown earth,