Just another Passover...

This past weekend a group of us traveled to a rural Jewish community in the village of Sefwi Wiawaso.   I think I mentioned this in a previous post but if not here is a website that explains how what why when of the Jewish community: http://www.kulanu.org/ghana/visit_to_ghana.php

After traveling from 5am-7pm which included 3 hours waiting, 2 bus rides and 2 taxi rides, we arrived at the village in time for dinner and the evening service. Upon arriving we met this group of 5 gap year students that had been in Ghana since September. They spent the first few months in Accra and since January they've been teaching in a rural village outside of Kumasi. Although they are getting such an amazing cultural experience, they are having issues with their directors and are really cut off from other American students. We also met a student who is on the NYU Ghana program, which is very different from CIEE. They have their own campus near Accra and have all of their classes on site, which would seem very structured, but apparently they have very little programming after orientation. It was interesting to see how different each program is and it definitely made me appreciate how wonderful CIEE is - both the programming and the staff!

So after chatting with the gap year students, who I think were really happy to talk to other Obrunis for a change, we went to the seder. The village itself is beautiful. It was so interesting to see what parts of Judaism are practiced by this community and which aren't. Unlike seders I'm used to, this seder was with the whole community, so it was more like a service with a seder plate. The plate had the egg, but everything else was different. Instead of horseradish there was pepper sauce, instead of charoset it was honey, instead of parsley and salt water it was this spinach-like vegetable in dirt-tasting water (I'm not even going to try to figure out what it was) and instead of the lamb bone it was legit lamb/goat/sheep. We never got a straight answer when asking what the various livestock were wandering the village. The village has a very large children to adult ratio. There were about 30 children to maybe 6 adults, 4 of whom were men, so it was a big mystery whose children they were.

I feel weird complaining about this but I was really excited to do a rural home-stay: I saw us staying with families and carrying buckets of water on our heads etc. However I was mistaken and we stayed in a very nice guesthouse for the price of the average hotel, which was equipped with running water and electricity. Despite my initial excitement, I quickly got over it when I didn't have to pee in a hole in the ground but a lovely (usually) flushable toilet.

The next morning we had passover services, which I have no idea how closely resembles American passover services since I've never experienced a conservative service in my life, but our more Jewish friends had to read the Hebrew parts of the service, so I know that Hebrew is not often used. After 3 hours we retired to our guesthouse with the instructions to return for the 2nd seder at 3pm. And surprise surprise the seder was not until 8pm, but there was a reason for this bout of Ghanaian untimeliness - they needed to slaughter a goat/lamb/sheep first! And of course, silly us, showing up at 3:30pm for the seder, got front row seats to the slaughter show. I will refrain from posting photos or going into detail, but it was really cool from the wanna-be-nurse perspective, but really sad from the animal-lover inside me. One interesting thing is that they follow the kosher law that the lamb is supposed to die in one knife stroke. However this tribe does it a little bit differently, purposefully not killing the lamb instantly. The butcher (probably not his real title) told me through a translator that they do this so the animal is "giving its life voluntarily" and so the spirit/energy remains in the animal instead of leaving the body when it dies instantly. So we stood there watching this poor animal die slowly for five minutes (it felt like an hour), but the process of roasting and cutting the meat was really cool!! The whole weekend was realy interesting, especially to see of how their Jewish practices have altered to fit their cultural context without the influence of the global Jewish community. I'm sure I am leaving stuff out but this post is already getting long. Leave a comment if you want to know more!