A woman in Seva pouring ground kasaba root.
This weekend was incredible. Tuva and I went to Seva, a remote village in the Volta region (to the East and a little North). We took the bus with the Norwegian Dada– who, I can now say after getting to know him better, is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. He’s a vegan who makes exceptions for ice cream, a spiritual man who loves sentimental alternative country songs and listens to Sera Cahoone (and knows that she’s from the Seattle area!), but also loves rock and gangster rap.
And the project he’s with is pretty incredible, too. There are two major things happening at the Ananda Marga Seva clinic right now:
First, the clinic itself (where we stayed) is treating local people, training homeopathic doctors, and also acting as a training center for TBA’s (Traditional Birth Assistants, aka midwives). Lisa, a volunteer from West Virginia, is the current midwife-in-residence. Our last night in Seva, we got to watch her and two local women deliver a beautiful, healthy baby girl. I’ve never seen a live birth before– it was mind-blowing. I almost had tears running down my face. And the mother was so unbelievably brave and quiet. It took my breath away.
And second, Dada’s main project is setting up water pumps around the area, fed from a dam (that the local people built) that runs into a filtration system (that the local people built) and is then pumped to the top of a mountain (through pipes that local people buried and installed on the mountain’s face). It runs back down with enough pressure to feed a number of different sites. It’s pretty incredible, and I’m horrible at describing it. But that’s the basic idea. And the most important part is that the people from the area are getting invested in the project– the hope is that they’ll maintain it when Dada and the other volunteers eventually leave.
Dada shows off his water pump.
We got to climb to the top of the mountain to see the water tower, too– and the view was outstanding. (I feel like I’m using a lot of words like that in this post. Sorry.) Tuva and I rode around for all of Saturday in the back of the clinic’s pickup truck, through the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen, accompanying Dada on his water-project errands and waving back to all the kids in the villages we passed, who yelled “Yavu! Yavu!” to us (“white person” in Eve, pronounced “Eh-way”, the language of the Volta region). I felt so alive in the back of that truck. And that’s not something you can say every day.
The view from the top! The kids on the rock are from Kpokopa (the village next to the mountain)– when they found out we were planning on climbing, they ran up ahead of us.
Seva is an absolutely magical village. Literally, magical. Most of the people there believe in spirits and practice voodoo. Second to the birth, the best parts of the weekend were the two voodoo ceremonies we got to attend. The drumming and dancing were so great. The second ceremony we attended was done by a warrior cult, and while the women sang, the men pretended to cut their tongues and stomachs with knives (the idea is that if you practice this cult’s traditions intensely enough, you’ll be invincible). Apparently some boys have accidentally wounded themselves pretty horribly at some of these ceremonies. We didn’t see any blood.
However, at the first ceremony, the cult sacrificed a chicken. They slit its throat and then threw it down on the ground to see which way it would land. It lay there for a few moments, then suddenly spazzed out and flew right towards me. It landed in between my feet, staring straight up at me. All of the women on my bench were so startled that the whole bench fell over backwards, and one of the local women ended up on the ground.
…Oops! I’m taking it as a sign that I’m supposed to be a vegan.
I have so much to say, especially about teaching– we’re really digging into it now. But I’m exhausted, and I’m sure you are too, now. I miss you all!
Somewhere in Accra 