The Adventures of Eleanor

I promised I would get them water. They walk hours before school every day hauling it home.

2009-10-23T08:49:00.000-05:00

The ceremony for Nana Kwesi's enstoolment as Peggy's regent

2009-10-23T08:48:00.000-05:00

My interpreter, 22-year-old Elijah

2009-10-23T08:47:00.001-05:00

Peggy Opening the first bank account in Otuam and depositing fishing fees

2009-10-23T08:45:00.000-05:00

Peggy's nephew Ekow

2009-10-23T08:43:00.000-05:00

The handsome king

2009-10-23T08:39:00.000-05:00

My little friend Janet with the 1000 watt smile

2009-10-23T08:38:00.000-05:00

The little girlburst into tears when she saw me, the big white scary monster. Her brother is protecting her.

2009-10-23T08:37:00.001-05:00

Fisherpeople

2009-10-23T08:35:00.000-05:00

Kids Playing with a Broken Down Wheelchair

2009-10-23T08:33:00.000-05:00

My neighbor, who loves to lounge

2009-10-23T08:32:00.000-05:00

Peggy's Gazetting Ceremony

2009-10-23T08:29:00.001-05:00

Breakfast in a Pineapple Field with the Farmer

2009-10-23T08:27:00.000-05:00

School Kids

2009-10-23T08:24:00.000-05:00

1: The beautiful 16-tear-old queen mother 2) Cape Coast Slave Castle was built over an ancient ancestral shrine. Today a tsiami pours libations

2009-10-23T08:20:00.003-05:00

My friends at the school

2009-10-23T07:55:00.000-05:00

The two kids I am sending to school, Kweku 5, and Esi, 6. Below, Kweku. Bottom, Tsiami the Priest and me

2009-10-23T07:51:00.001-05:00

Little Boys Wear Ladies Panty Hose with Shoulders Cut Out

2009-10-23T07:50:00.000-05:00

King Peggy and her Soul at her Gazetting Ceremony

2009-10-23T07:49:00.000-05:00

Pumping Water to Carry on Their Heads

2009-10-23T07:48:00.000-05:00

What They Wanted to Feed me for Lunch

2009-10-23T07:47:00.000-05:00

Children at the Drumming and Dancing Party Welcoming Us

2009-10-23T07:46:00.000-05:00

A Wistful Boy

2009-10-23T07:44:00.000-05:00

The king protected by her Soul, an innocent little girl who keeps the evil spirits away

2009-10-23T07:43:00.000-05:00

Peggy's Cousin: Bone Structure!

2009-10-23T07:42:00.000-05:00

Peggy's Uncle

2009-10-23T07:41:00.000-05:00

A Tyical Royal Council Meeting at the Dining Room Table

2009-10-23T07:40:00.001-05:00

Cape Coast -- the door to the slave dungeon

2009-10-23T07:38:00.000-05:00

Cape Coast Slave Castle

2009-10-23T07:37:00.000-05:00

The First Royal Counci Meeting after our Arrival, held on the patio of the royal palace, currently under renovation

2009-10-23T07:36:00.001-05:00

King Peggy and Nana Kwesi, her cousin and right-hand man, who will be ruling in her absence.

2009-10-23T07:35:00.001-05:00

The Chief Priest, Tsiami, Pouring Schnapps to the Ancestors living in the stool behind the door

2009-10-23T07:34:00.001-05:00

Uncle Moses blowing the Cow Horn to Let the Ancestors Know we are there

2009-10-23T07:32:00.000-05:00

The Harvest Festival: shooting guns on the beach

2009-10-08T11:48:00.000-05:00

The house where King Peggy and I are staying

2009-10-08T11:45:00.000-05:00

King Peggy and Me at her Gazetting Ceremony

2009-10-08T11:42:00.000-05:00

2009-10-08T11:35:00.003-05:00

Once again, I can't upload any photos And I have so many great ones. Oh well.

I will be home one week from today. I miss home so much, but I will miss Otuam, too.

King Peggy has shaken up all the elderly men, and is adding younger people and women to her Council. She has opened up a royal checking account at the new bank, the first one to open in Otuam just a few days ago. All income and expenses will be done with checks now. She had to explain the concept of checks to many people, but they like it a lot so that all the money can be kept track of.

My stomach has settled down, and I have the bucket in a bath thing down pat. I don't like it when the power company cuts off the electricity in the heat of the day. Without fans, the house is like an oven, baking us. And it's not like you can take a shower to cool off!

But I will miss the people, and the children. They have such fun, playing with sticks and stones. No one here would ever hurt a child. The mothers send them out to play and they come back at dinner time. Like I used to do in the 1960s. It's so sad that modern kids have to be kept locked up watching TV and playing video games.

Well, I will keep trying to upload a photo until my time on the computer runs out. Bear in mind this computer must be 20 years old! Eleanor

Update from Otuam

2009-09-26T08:44:00.002-05:00

I can't seem to upload photos on this ancient computer, and I have such wonderful ones! They might have to wait until I come home.

Suffice it to say that there is no running water here. Children fetch it at 5 a.m. in a bucket on their head from the bore hole about a half an hour's walk out of town. After my initial horror and burst of tears = my favorite two things in the world are a hot shower and a hot bath = I have learned to adapt quite well. I can bathe my whole body and wash and condition my hair in one bucket. A second bucket is a guilty pleasure, bearing in mind the poor little kid who had to fetch it on her head before school = and I pour the water with a smaller bucket down my back and feel cool the only time all day. bearing in mind there is no air conditioning.

Though i have given up many conveniences, I am learning so much about these people who, by our standards, are dirt poor, yet they have such dignity, honor, humor, and hospitality. I have fallen in love with Otuam and its people. I have promised to bring water to them. The pipes are already there, and our house has a shower and toilet. There's just no water in them since the pipes died a few years ago, so it's not like they have to dig hole for new pipes. I think some of them are broke, or the water pressure is bad. I am not sure.

Peggy and I have received an astonishing offer for movie rights, and if this all comes to pass, our first job will be to bring water to Otuam, in the form of several more bore holes scattered throughout town so the kids don't have to walk so far, while we have engineers study the piped water situation. That is our vow. Peggy says the ancestors living in her royal stool know this, they have heard us say it, and they will be doing everything in their power to make it happen for the people of Otuam. Given the offers we are getting in the media world, I don't doubt it.

Yesterday was Peggy's gazetting, the occasion where her kingship is made official in front of the house of chiefs, a stern looking group of toga clad elders on a platform. They had just sacrificed a goat, thank God before I came on the scene, and its blood was flourescent red by the door. We had brought a goat as a gift of thanks to the chiefs. It was tied to a post on the platform, and I was praying I wouldn't have to see its throat cut. I wanted to untie it and run away with it, but I don't think these people would have liked that.

Luckily, there is only one goat sacrifice required a day. So i didn't have to see anything awful.

Peggy's brother killed two chickens in the kitchen this morning that villagers had brought yesterday as a gift, and that was bad enough. The cook was sitting on a stool plucking them.

That's all for now. more as soona s possible! Love from Ghana, Eleanor

Welcome to Otuam

2009-09-18T12:12:00.004-05:00

So here I am in Otuam with the new female king, Peggielene Bartels. Actually I am in Winnaba, a few miles away at an internet cafe with ancient huge computers. There is no running water in Otuam - one of the many things King Peggy wants to fix. For the next month my shower will be pouring a bucket of cold water over my body. I was horrified to learn this last night, when i arrived after 24 hours of traveling, grimy and sweaty. I almost cried. But I did it, dipping my head straight down in the bucket to get the hair wet first, hoping no microbes would swim into my ears, mouth, or nose. And it actually worked. I felt really clean afterward using only two buckets. I have to bear in mind these buckets are carried from the next village on the backs of children.

We had a council of elders meetin today, outside, as King Peggy presided. There are many issues she must address, as she says again and again, "I have a lot of work to do."

Off to Ghana with the king, Peggielene Bartels!

2009-09-16T12:36:00.003-05:00

I am leaving soon for Ghana with my friend, King Peggy of the Otuam. Perhaps you read about her story in today's Washington Post Metro section.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/15/AR2009091503393.html

It will be a fabulous adventure, probably the most wonderful of my life. In addition to a different culture, religion, and traditions, I will be able to witness firsthand the challenges of a female ruler fighting prejudice and chauvinism.

The Washington Post Magazine will run my article as a cover story some time this winter, and they are sending a photographer for two or three days to capture images of colorful royal ceremonies. And, of course, there will be a book.

So far the only bad news it that I lost my malaria pills. They were so important, life or death important, that I put them in a very special place last week, and I forgot the special place. I had to get more, and insurance won't pay for a second batch if you were dumb enough to lose the first. $240 later, I now have malaria pills.

Well, I have to finish packing and leave for the airport. You can keep in touch with me through the comments section of this blog. I look forward to hearing from you. I am not sure how often I will have internet, but at least once or twice a wekk, I hear. We have to drive to another village an hour away from King Peggy's village.

Eleanor

2009-06-30T07:42:00.000-05:00

I've always felt I never quite fit in. I am colorful and eccentric. My admirers call me inspirational, a creative free spirit. My detractors call me crazy. I look on life's duties as stage acts requiring appropriate costumes -- the corporate costume, the church costume, the gym costume -- and appropriate role-playing, which I never could quite master. No matter how hard I try to hide it, at some point a seam in the costume rips open and Myself pokes out, generally to mixed reviews.

The adventures of my life have taken me all over the world, into a variety of cultures and religions, and deep into the past, with my writing. I stride from century to century, from civilization to civilization, with a feeling of great exhilaration. Medical care and civil rights aside, I feel that I would be happier living in the past, a time of greater beauty in dress and architecture, with time to think undisturbed by electronic beeping.

I have this thing about beeping. It's a kind of Chinese water torture. My refrigerator beeps when it's not completely closed. My microwave beeps when the food is done and keeps beeping. My husband's laptop beeps as it's shutting down, which takes some time. He has not one but two cell phones that beep and chirp and twitter and jiggle, sometimes at the same time and towards each other in a kind of mating dance. I am afraid that one night, when we are not looking, these phones will have phone sex and spawn more beeping electronic devices to drive me insane. I have violent fantasies of taking a heavy mallet to all the beeping, tweeting, annoying, noise-making electronic devices and smashing them back into silent molecules.

People are usually so excited when a new cell phone-radio-camera-television-dishwasher comes out. They wait in line for hours as if it's the Second Coming of Christ. I am baffled by this fascination with beeping things. All I want to do is sit under a tree and read something and think. And you wonder why I feel I don't fit into this society?

Imagine my shock when I find myself married to a man with FOUR children (How did this happen?) living in a lovely white wealthy suburb with no culture other than the PTA, Boy Scout meetings, and Little League games. (What is a white suburban housewife costume like? I don't OWN anything that looks like what the other women wear. My stepkids won't let me wear my feathered velvet hat and floor-length leopardskin coat to their sporting events.)

The white suburban culture doesn't allow for much individuality and frowns on eccentricity. It insists you buy a Sherman tank to ferry all the kids around to games, blocking the view of all drivers behind you and defecating carbon monoxide proudly into the suburban air. It advises you to slap on a bumper sticker that states smugly, My child is smarter than yours. It tells you it is okay to yell at the referees at the Little League games. Sometimes I sit there wincing in real pain.

Looking around the bleachers, I think, Help! I have landed on Mars and need to get out of here! Or maybe I'm the Martian and these are the normal people. Either way it's not good. ET phone home.

This year my business took me to Cameroon to work on a promotional project with the government. It was my first Sub-Saharan journey, and it was less organized and well-kempt than most of the US. But I have never experienced such genuine warmth, friendliness and hospitality. And imagine this -- the women wear what look to us like evening gowns to the office! At nine A.M. there they are, on their way to work, wearing robes of chiffon and silk and printed cotton with stunning head wraps and loads of jewelry.

In Africa you don't dress to fit in to some cookie-cutter boring asexual suburban look. You dress to look good. No matter what you wear at any time of day, if you look good, you will get compliments and applause. Men wear dignified robes of various colors with intricate embroidery. This is a place with less judgment for those who are a bit different, and more appreciation for individuality.

A couple of months after my return, I met five Cameroonian Fons, or kings, at an embassy party. They invited me to their Fons Council, which I attended, and they made me their Yah or queen. A large part of the Council's work is to raise money for their villages back home -- money to send kids to school who would otherwise grow up pasturing goats. Money to bring fresh water to town. It is very strange that I am the only white person and the only woman on a council made up of African men. I should feel that I don't belong, but instead I feel completely at home. More at home than at the Little League right up the street, with people who look like me but wear variations of Hefty trash bags and yell at referees.

African kingship is painfully hierarchical. Where you sit has great import. If an important visitor joins the meeting, someone of less importance will be kicked out of his chair near the kings so the more important visitor can take it. But for all the hierarchy, everyone, even the least in status, is respected, honored, and thanked for what they bring to the group. Everyone is given the chance to speak. Everyone is acknowledged. I have never experienced this in meetings of white people.

I am delighted because after nearly half a century on this earth, I feel that I have found a place where I truly belong and am valued. I don't have to be a loner, trailblazing through life in eccentric costumes all by myself, leaving a perplexing mixture of criticism and applause in my wake. It's strange for a person who has spent much of her life studying, visiting, and writing about Europe. But now Europe leaves me cold.

I am much happier now that I have become an African.