In The Village
part one of a two-part interviewby Joshua Settles
Joshua Settles is an InterVarsity team leader in Knoxville, Tennessee. After two years on the Pilgrimage for Reconciliation, including last year’s visit to South Africa, he helped lead the 2005 Global Project in Ghana. This is part one of a two-part interview.
Why did you go to Ghana this summer?
First of all, my supervisor [Jeannie Musick] asked me to go with her. It jumped out at me. It’s a new and strategic project for us. Jeannie was looking to build a team with people she trusted, and I was game to go. I was interested in going back to Africa after last year’s trip to South Africa. I wanted to have another, different view of life on the continent. And as I looked over the project description, I knew it would challenge and stretch me.
What challenges are you talking about?
This particular project is very much in the proclamation vein of evangelism, which is not exactly my cup of tea. I knew that would be a challenge. Of course, I would also have to be available to the students, to help them deal with whatever issues came up for them. Most of them had never been out of the country before.
What did you do in Ghana?
For the first part of the summer, we were with the local GHAFES students for their national conference. [ed. Note: IFES is the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, of which Inter-Varsity Canada, InterVarsity/USA and GHAFES are but three of over a hundred independent national student movements.]
Following the national conference, we spent three weeks with them in what is called SICE – Students in Church Evangelism. This is their equivalent to an urban mission project, except it’s rural. We were out in the villages, some of which have electricity and running water, and some of which do not; all of which are much poorer than the urban areas.
While we were there, we did a lot of preaching. We went to the churches, to encourage them. We did house-to-house evangelism, we organized prayer meetings, and we did some teaching in the public schools. Sometimes we conducted chapel services for the schools. We (the Americans) participated with the Ghanaian students in this project. We were split up among the nineteen villages.
How did language issues work out?
The Ghanaian students are all fluent in English. In the area where we were located, the dominant language was Twi. Many of the Ghanaian students knew how to speak Twi, and most could at least understand it. They translated for us. I had to learn to preach with an interpreter. At different points it was frustrating, because we were very dependent on the Ghanaian students for basic communication. But for the most part it went well. It was a very immersive experience. For most of the trip we weren’t with the other Americans. We were with our partners – one other American and two or three Ghanaians.
We worked with all the local churches, through contact persons from World Vision, and with the permission of the local chiefs. But other than those structures, our team was on its own to develop our program for that particular village.
Getting the chief’s permission – what does that look like?
Ghana has a two-layered authority structure. The chief has real political power. So on the first day, our contact person from the village took us over to the chief’s compound. We made our formal introductions, greeted all of them, and they greeted us. We sat down, and they asked us why we’d come. It’s kind of the way you do things. We explained and asked permission to go through the village and do our activities. After they granted us permission, we asked them if they could get the church leaders together from the town.
They just summoned the church leaders?
The chief is really a chief. He runs the village. You can’t do anything in the village unless you have his permission. Our chief was around fifty or sixty. Every village has a chief. But there are also paramount chiefs, who supervise several villages, and so on, up the ladder, until you get to the Asanteman – the chief of the Asante people [Ghana’s predominant ethnic group].
How do you address them?
It’s formal and respectful. The Chief is there with the Queen Mothers. These women are usually sisters of the chief, or his aunts. The Asante people have matrilineal succession. So the Queen Mother exerts significant influence on the chief. She actually chooses the next chief. It’s not an automatic passing from father to son.
What religion did the chief confess?
They are Christian, but I am not sure how Christian they are – I’ll put it that way. Most people we met in the villages categorized themselves as Christian. So there’s a lot of Christian history in Ghana. But a lot of people are Christian in name only. It’s always hard to tell.
Did you run into fervent practitioners of other religions?
We met one Muslim gentleman, but there were few Muslims in the villages. But in the city, Islam is present in some communities. Islam is much stronger in the northern part of the country.
There is a backdrop of traditional religions going on. There was one young woman who previously had been a practitioner of another religion, but had become a Christian. But she had earlier had dealings with witchdoctors. Very real stuff. Spiritual warfare and demon possession and those sorts of things are not abstractions for the people. They deal with experiences like that on a regular basis. It was a challenge for us to have these experiences. But they were good, and true, experiences. To see God’s power at work to bring people out of bondage, into freedom, was tremendous. Students were able to see the result of their prayers on behalf of people. It was a huge faith booster.
How did it feel to be on the ground in Ghana?
I felt calm. It was a bit of a homecoming, even though I’d never been to Ghana before. The entire time I was there I felt quite content. It was just a normal, natural feeling, like this is where I should be.
Why?
It helped that it wasn’t my first trip to Africa. Some of the emotional weight of a black American going to Africa wasn’t as heavy for me this time. But also, the Ghanaians’ hospitality was extremely disarming. For example, we were taking a bus in the capital city, and I asked somebody to tell me at which stop we should exit. He then stayed on the bus, past his stop. He got off the bus with us, carried our bags, walked us to our destination, and showed us how to get back to the place we were staying. This was just a random guy on the bus! That sort of hospitality happened over and over again, until I realized: it’s part of the culture. It’s a normal part of life in Ghana.
Are you going to take any of that back to America?
It was a challenge to my faith, because showing hospitality to all is a Biblical principle, and the Ghanaians inadvertently put into question the ways in which I practice hospitality.
How did it feel to come back to the States?
The racial difference here strikes you immediately. In Ghana, I was often mistaken for a Ghanaian. It made some things easier for me. It was hard for some of the other black Americans, who are fair-skinned. They were often lumped in with the white Americans. In the villages, the people could not tell that they were not white. They called them white. That was really frustrating for them. I didn’t have that problem.
Coming back was really interesting. After two trips to Africa, North American culture is generally more uptight. There is a bit of posturing that goes on here – almost at a subconscious level. Particularly for the men, there is a way in which we interact as performance. We’re always trying to present an image, by the way we talk, and walk, and even by the way we stand.
It’s much less that way in Ghana. It’s a real close and physical culture. People are crammed together all the time, so you’re always touching somebody. You don’t even think about it. I got really used to that, so it took an adjustment to come back. I can’t hold people’s hands here when I’m talking to them.
Another thing that struck me upon returning is that the U.S. is a real indoor, closed culture. Everyone has their space. But in Ghana, partly because of poverty, but partly because of culture, everyone is outdoors a lot more. Things happen outside. People walk around, the streets are full of people. When I got back here, driving through Atlanta, it felt like the town was abandoned and empty.
Being outdoors among the people – it’s a bit of a social skill that we’re losing here.
I’ve seen it diminish here in the South of the US. The South has had a culture of front porches, but houses are oriented toward the backyard now, rather than toward the street. In Ghana, on the other hand, at the place where we stayed in the village, there was a little path running between our house and the neighbors’, but people walked by all the time. Most of what we did took place on the porch. Everything happens outside. It’s not unusual for people to just drop by. The public life looms much larger in Ghanaian culture.
Part 2 of this interview will address, together with our feature article for the week, a visit to a slave-trading station on the Ghanaian Coast.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register