Three weeks ago today I was back at Safari Beach Lodge. The day was hot and bright. Pamela and I walked a couple miles down the beach to the point, climbed around on the rocks, and walked back. We ate as well as ever and after dinner Saturday we went for a short stroll. The night was very dark and the foam from the breaking waves rolled in and spread smooth arcs down the beach like bunting of rich white velvet. It seemed to glow. Phosphorescents in the sand set off pinprick flashes of green light with every step that burned and died quickly in our footprints.
If it seems like a dream, maybe it was. Safari is a real place, but the times I’ve been there the elements have always conspired to make it seem otherwise. The fact is that all you have to do is show up; then sometime during dinner once it’s dark you look up from your kingfish and see the paths winding through the palms from the main building to the bungalows, and all along the paths are little posts with oil lanterns hanging on them. Beyond the lanterns’ light there might be nothing at all but the soft rumbling of the waves and the clatter of palm fronds in the breeze. Your thoughts haven’t ventured beyond the ends of the long, curved beach since you arrived. It could just as well be an island in your mind.
We were back in
The real purpose of this entry is to say a little bit about my friend Aziz Mohammed (at right above). He is a member of the Africana dance troupe, which I’ve written about before. I knew him only in that capacity until Cathy came to visit in the spring. The two of them were fast friends and they kept in touch after she left. When I returned home in July Cathy gave me some money to take to him. She said it was a contribution towards his AIDS education program.
That was the first I had heard of it. Aziz explained it to me when I next saw him: for the past 18 months he has been working with a group of about 30 kids (mostly teenagers) from a section of
Most of the kids come from Nima, a predominantly-Muslim neighborhood. Two-thirds of them are girls. According to Aziz, some of them, and many of their peers from the neighborhood, have been pulled out of school early—or never attended at all—so they could earn money. Typically such a girl would spend the day at the roadside walking up and down with a tray on her head selling fruit or water sachets. Most of them will marry young and start having children in their early twenties. They will spend most of their young-adult and adult lives contributing to
Aziz isn’t a doctor or a public health professional, though—he’s a dancer (see above). Fortunately, the kids prefer dancing to lectures on sexual health. So that’s what they do for a few hours, a couple afternoons each week. They meet at the Nima/Mamobi Learning Center, a spiffy new building recently erected by a Canadian NGO. Inside is a performance space with a stage, a sound booth controlling two powerful speakers, and a full backstage area. The Center’s director agreed to let the group use the facility for free. At a typical weekday meeting, small subgroups learn and rehearse dance routines that Aziz choreographs. Mostly they dance to recorded music, but sometimes Aziz (who is also a drummer) is joined by some percussionists from Africana to provide a live soundtrack. Many of these are “dance dramas”—stories told in words and movements—that illustrate issues in sexual and reproductive health.
Every few months Aziz puts together a program to give the group a chance to perform and to try and spread the word to the community at large. Normally he picks a theme for each program. The last one was about AIDS. Hoping to draw a large crowd, he put up posters around town and asked the principals of local schools to mention the program to their students. He wrote an invitation to his District Assemblyman (a local elected official (roughly the equivalent of a borough president) and went to the Ghana AIDS Commission to request that they send a representative to speak, or at least provide some of the pamphlets and booklets they had given out in the past. In order to avoid any suspicion that he was out to make a profit, he was adamant about asking for non-financial support. (The money to put on the programs comes out of his own savings, plus voluntary donations.)
His District Assemblyman never replied to the invitation, but Aziz visited his office in person and was assured that he would attend. The AIDS Commission also agreed to send someone to give a short lecture on AIDS prevention. But when the day came, the Assemblyman didn’t. Neither did the speaker. Watching the room fill up with neighborhood kids, Aziz tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with the AIDS Commission and eventually dashed across town in a taxi to the office, where he was told that they had never heard of his group or its request.
This all came as a crushing blow. Here was a completely homegrown and genuine effort to improve the community, ignored by the very institutions whose job it is to encourage and support such programs. Through Africana’s interactions with (mostly do-gooding) foreigners, especially its close relationship with the Canadian volunteer placement organization Volunteer Abroad, Aziz knows how much support there is (in word, if not in deed) in the broader development community for programs like his own; but this was a local project, and he had hoped to show that the local community was behind it. No number of well-meaning foreigners can stand in for a District Assemblyman. Advice about AIDS prevention plainly sounds different when it comes from someone who knows the environment in which her audience lives. (It could also be given in Twi.)
But this isn’t a sob story, though Aziz did get heated when he told it to me. After the AIDS program he considered disbanding the group but decided against it. “The kids love it,” he said. He is certainly not a martyr—he really enjoys teaching dancing and watching the kids improve. Above all, he completely avoids the extremes of cynicism and self-righteousness. He speaks with Zen-like clarity and directness about the whole situation. “I know it is a good thing we are doing. We are helping each other. Even though we can’t get the support we need, we will keep trying.”
Two weeks ago Saturday we sat together in the
Everyone wanted to get it right because they were preparing for another program coming up in a week. This time the theme was “Send the Girl Child to School” and Aziz wasn’t relying on any external assistance (though he made good use of Cathy’s and my donations). He hand-wrote flyers on the backs of glossy posters he found around town and put them up in the neighborhood. Because no one was coming to speak, he added an extended drama piece about girls’ education. He also took me up on my offer to make copies of a half-page typed handout about the importance sending girls to school. In order to increase the participation and get the word out, he personally invited dance groups from local schools.
Last Saturday was the big day. I arrived at the Center around 10am, the advertised starting time, and found the performance space filled with rows of empty wooden folding chairs. There was room for at least 200 people to sit. The program hadn’t started yet, and by 11:30 there were still only a few seats filled. The emcee finally took the stage and announced that the show would be starting soon. But while we waited, wouldn’t we like to see a little dance contest? For the next 45 minutes audience members took the stage three at a time and danced to blaring, fuzzy music (mostly it was P-squared’s “Al-haji”, an Ivorian song that, to me, is the aural equivalent of getting hit square on the head over and over with a mallet). Winners were declared by the applause and hollering of the sparse audience. It seemed like a wash-out.
Once the contest ended I roused myself from the stupor induced by the repetition of that awful song and got my bearings. Many more seats were filled. Aziz was introduced and talked for a couple minutes about the program and its message. Considering the way I’ve seen him throw himself around a stage during Africana rehearsals and performances, he seemed remarkably shy speaking in front of an audience. “Let’s get to the dancing!” he said, and out they came.
Most of the next four hours were filled with hip hop and R&B numbers, with a few notable exceptions. Three girls read poems they had written. There was a longer dance drama about a girl taken out of school to sell pineapples who is then raped by some delinquent boys from her class; the story ends when she discovers she has AIDS. There was also a more uplifting short play in which a mother recounts to her daughters her own struggle to get an education. When her father insists on sending her dimwitted brothers to school instead of her (reprimanding her that she should be in the kitchen), she and her supportive mother walk out. She endures her mother’s untimely death and the prejudice of both her teachers and her classmates, and through a mix of patience and tenacity finally becomes a doctor. Both the dance drama and the short play were shot through with comedy, and the audience—which by that time had grown to over a hundred people, mostly teenaged girls—was thoroughly engaged throughout.
After an incredible ballet piece by Aziz and some of the Africana dancers (where did they learn that?), the program was over. When I walked out, most of the 200 handouts were gone, hopefully bound for the audience members’ homes.
Aziz was also in a hurry, rushing across town to the Trade Fair to perform with Africana at a “Fit for Life” program. But he stopped to thank me for coming and to invite me to an Awards Dinner that night. “The kids have done such a great job. We want to recognize them,” he said.
At 8pm back at the Center, after an hour-long performance at Trade Fair and another mad dash across town, Aziz was exhausted, nearly asleep but running around making sure the food was arriving, popping caps off bottles of soda, joking with the kids, sliding across the stage lip-syncing to an R&B ballad. I didn’t see him sit down once. By the end of the night his energy, and his savings, were utterly depleted from the events of the day. But his spirit was plainly not. Instead he seemed to be fueled by the expression of gratitude for others’ efforts. He thanked the kids and gave out awards to some of the dancers and thanked the Canadian woman for the use of the space and even thanked me, “our special guest from the
I have often been told that those fortunate enough to have plenty should give some back. Among other things, it has engendered some sense of obligation to share some of mine with them. I think it is different with Aziz. What he gets is ours before it is his at all. But this analysis fails to capture the spirit of what he’s doing; at any rate he doesn’t articulate it in these terms. He makes it simpler. Here are some good kids and I have an opportunity to share something nice with them. They might even come out better for it. So let’s do it. What’s so complicated about that?
Do you love Aziz yet? I will be happy to forward any questions, comments, responses, expressions of admiration, etc, his way. Just email jacob.appel@gmail.com.
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