Re-connecting with a lost love

Sorry if I disappoint, but this post is not about my romantic past. It is about another kind of passion: dance. I have recently resumed Senegalese dance classes with the Kai Fech group. I haven’t done dance classes for about 20 years, so like reconnecting with other kinds of lost love,  it’s a challenge. But a joyful one.

I have been passionate about dance ever since I can remember, since the long ago days when I twirled around our lounge room to my Dad’s records of Swan Lake and Saint Saens March of the Animals. Living in a small country town it was hard to find dance classes but I made do with whatever short term classes became available: Ballet, Scottish Country and Highland dance, even Jazz one year.  But the most exciting dance discovery of my teens was when an enlightened – or possibly hippy, but at any rate very cool – teacher introduced my PE class to the truly astonishing beat of African drummers.

Looking back, I suspect it was the music of Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Or something quite similar. It doesn’t really matter who it was, it was the music – and the dance style – I had been waiting for all my life.

For a few short and blissful weeks, that teacher had us all stomping around the school oval to complex, powerful rythms. It made a welcome change from netball, I can tell you. I’m not sure how authentic the style was, but my dim recollection is that it was earthy, dynamic and rythmic. These are all qualities I’ve since learned are characteristic of African dance, so she must have had some idea of what she was doing.

Those PE classes were the first time in my life I had contact with any remotely genuine African culture. All I knew of Africa at age 15 was what I’d learned in social studies classes about tribes that ate only blood and milk, wildlife documentaries of course and possibly a bit about early hominid fossils (thanks to Dad’s armchair interest in archaeology). All a bit exotic really. Well, so was the music and dance. But it also felt much more real. I connected to it intensely, physically. But after our PE classes moved on (or back) to more conventional activities, I didn’t hear or dance to African music again for a good ten years more. Sob. I missed it. I didn’t know where to find it. At long last, it found me. More on that in a future post.

If it hadn’t been for that deep sense of connection I have felt to African music and dance, my life would be totally different today. I probably would never have met my son’s father. I wouldn’t now have our gorgeous boy, or all of our wonderful extended Ghanaian family. I probably would never have travelled to Africa. My comfort zone may never have stretched very far. I don’t know if I’d have the same passion to end racism, or the same commitment to figuring out, and helping others figure out, how to build and strengthen cross-cultural relationships. Well, maybe I would. My passion for social justice isn’t necessarily connected to my desire to dance. And I probably would still have had a great life. But I’m really glad I had this one!

Sickle cell awareness day

Abrantie's 9th birthday

Ok, ok, I’m a bit late with it, but I wanted to take note of the very first ever World Sickle Cell Awareness Day on 19 June and Hey! I’m I’m only a week late.

The day has come about as a result of a resolution passed at the United Nations last December that recognised sickle cell as a public health problem and called for a day to be set aside each year to raise awareness of the condition internationally. The resolution was proposed by the Delegation of the Republic of Congo Brazzaville and co-sponsored by 24 Member States. You can read more about it in the 19 June UN Press Release.

As I’ve mentioned before both AM’s Dad and his half brother Abrantie have a variant of sickle cell that’s severe enough to affect their lives in a major way.  We don’t know anyone else in Australia who has this condition, although there must be someone, especially since African migration has increased. So as far as I can tell there was absolutely no awareness of World Sickle Cell Awareness Day in Australia.  So this blog post is my two cents worth.

And here’s a quick update on my latest foray into pain management with Abrantie. It was a few weeks ago now that he started to feel pain on the way home from an afternoon in the park playing basketball with me and his brother 50 Cedis and some friends.  (50 Cedis, BTW, is very pleased with his blog name but somewhat disappointed that my whole blog is not about him).

We tried something new. The last time it happened, I’d got him to vocalise the pain – make a lot of noise: “Ow, ow, ow!” This time we tried some righteous anger, with me giving examples of what he could yell at his pain:  ‘How dare you!’ ‘Get out of my life’, ‘I’m not putting up with you any more!’ He did a bit of yelling himself but mostly my no-holds-barred attack on pain got both him and 50 Cedis laughing and laughing all the way home. Which I think is a good thing because it got his attention off the pain and suffering and isolation that comes with sickle cell. I won’t claim it’s a miracle cure, but he got to feel powerful,  not a victim.

However it’s the second time he’s had pain after late afternoon basketball at this cooler time of year, so I guess we’d better not do that anymore, and keep it for the middle of a sunny day.

While I was looking around the web for info on Sickle Cell Awareness Day I came across an interesting blog by a ‘28 year old, fabulous and feisty female’ who also defies sickle cell and won’t tolerate being a victim. The title says it all:  Sickle Cell can kiss my A**!!! She is fabulous too. It’s a great blog with lots of interesting info and insights on living with the condition.  She’s also done a short post on her swimming experience – an issue close to my heart as you’ll know if you’ve read my previous posts on this.

And that inspired me to do a search on ’sickle cell wetsuit’, cos I wanted to know if they are useful. I managed to find one post,  about five year old Atreyu, who has a wetsuit and can swim for up to 30 minutes at a time.  There’s no more info about swimming than that, but still, it’s hopeful. And the article has some good info about kids and sickle cell.

To end my post I’ll quote from Atreyu’s Dad: `We try to live a normal life as much as possible, but the disease is always at the forefront of your mind … But you have to stay positive and enjoy every day with your child.’ Here here!

“Its not going to work if we keep hating each other”

These are the words of a boy called Ali, who burned an Australian flag during the Cronulla race riots four years ago. I’m quoting from a documentary about Ali’s life changing walk on the Kokoda Track last year. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, I only just discovered it today, but I have plans to sit down with a box of tissues and watch it all soon – it’s emotional stuff. Even the first few minutes show the changes in Ali’s life, from a youth angry enough to burn our flag, to a young man holding out his hand in reconciliation. If anything makes me proud to be Australian (I’m very suspicious of nationalism), it’s people like Ali. Well, perhaps that’s what make me proud to be human.

I’ve just embedded Part 1. You’ll need to go to You Tube for the rest.

I found this doco online because I had heard that some boys from Punchbowl Boys High School were walking Kokoda this year,starting on Anzac Day(April 25). I was impressed and wanted to know more. I always think of Anzac day as being just about the (mostly) Anglo Aussies who have fought in wars, and it has meaning for me because my father is a veteran of Kokoda. But I think these boys at Punchbowl are on the money:  to understand  the skippies* you need to understand our history. And war has had a huge impact on how we live and how we think. More than 65 years on since Kokoda,  Australians are more diverse, but we all have wars to heal from. The quote from Ali recognises that.

(* Skippies, or skips, is a slang term for anglo-celtic Australians. It’s not what we call ourselves … you probably won’t find it, ironically, in a dictionary of Aussie slang. It’s derived from the 60’s TV kid’s show about a “Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo”).

Not only did I find Ali’s story, I also discovered that the Punchbowl group is actually a mixed group of Lebanese Australians from Bankstown and life savers from Cronulla. I am pleased and proud that those community leaders are so committed to building respect and understanding between their communities. I imagine it wasn’t an easy trek emotionally, (it certainly wouldn’t be, physically) but I hope that both groups have learned a lot from each other.

Punchbowl boys is developing quite a relationship with Kokoda. I also discovered that in 2004 a group of ten boys, most of them Australian-born Lebanese Moslem, walked the track “as a rite of passage to Australian adulthood”. Here’s trek leader Major Charlie Lynn’s report to Parliament. The walk was apparently in response to media headlines that Punchbowl Boys was the worst school in Australia. Well I don’t think it could be the worst any more.  I think other schools could learn a few things from Punchbowl Boys.

I’ve just embedded Part 1. You’ll need to go to You Tube for the rest.

AM taps his foot

One of the difficult things lessons of parenting adolescents is that they still need you in the background of their lives but the moment you take up some space in the foreground, you become anathema, and sooo embarrassing.

This is one of the reasons I missed out on the Rokia Traore concert a couple of weeks ago. Rokia Traore is a singer from Mali who was in Australia for the WOMAD festival in Adelaide. I hadn’t quite got to the  point of organising to go see her, when AM got an invitation. A (mixed) friend of his, whose father is a musician, had free tickets to Traore’s only Sydney concert and was inviting his four best friends to come with him, as a way of celebrating his 14th birthday. So I decided I wouldn’t go to it myself. I didn’t want to jeopardise AM’s fun – perhaps by dancing in public. Anyway, the idea of a quiet night in without him was pretty attractive.

Now as it happens, AM is going through an anti-African phase at the moment. His bad memories of our trip to Ghana have completely over-ridden the good memories and he shudders theatrically whenever anyone mentions the country or even the continent. Whenever I talk about this to (usually white) parents of younger mixed race children they get very, very worried. Many of us have put a lot of time and effort into trying to connect our children with Africa, so they don’t want to imagine it all evaporating after their child turns 12. I am less worried. A friend of mine with a son in his late teens went through a similar experience but her son now appears to have ‘come out the other side’ and is again prepared to contemplate, and perhaps even appreciate, his African heritage and connections. So I’m hoping AM will be the same. But yes, I still worry too.

So it was in this context that AM got invited to the concert and I held my breath – wondering if he would turn down the invitation when he realised Traore was (shudder) African. But the allure of going out on a school night with friends proved far stronger than his aversion to all things African. It also – to my relief – proved stronger than his prejudice against all music that is not Eminem.

And off he went. And I’m told he enjoyed it. True, the other boys all jumped around yelling right in front of the stage, whereas AM sat quietly in his seat and just tapped his foot. True, he didn’t come home raving about it. But he didn’t come home groaning about it either, and said it was “ok” when asked – which from an adolescent Australian male is high praise, really. So perhaps there is hope. Hope that AM will rediscover a wider world of music than Eminem, and hope that he will remember that Africa really isn’t all bad.

Harmony Day

Saturday 21 March is Harmony Day in Australia, a day to celebrate our diverse society. It is also the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This is not a coincidence – it’s just that our government, in their wisdom, didn’t want to have a day that had the “R” word in its name. Instead they decided to call the day something that emphasised the positives about living in a multicultural society. Well, I’m all for that, but let’s not forget that racism’s still out there.

The date chosen in fact commemorates what came to be known as the Sharpeville massacre – when in 1960 police opened fire gainst a peaceful demonstration against apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 people. That’s  something we should never forget, although nearly 50 years on we can look back with pride and relief at the changes in the world, and the progress we’ve made against racism, since that shocking event.

Australians for Native Title and Reconcililation (ANTaR) have not forgotten the true meaning of the day and are are celebrating – if that’s the word – with a cute gimmick. By clicking on the lovely faces at left you can go to their site and get a sticker like this one (or smaller) to put on your facebook page, blog or website. You can also sign a pledge against racism.

Black comedy

I’ve often thought that AM and/or his brother 50 Cedis could have a great future in ‘ethnic’ comedy. They can do the accents, they know how to be irreverant and outrageous, and they’ve got plenty of material to draw upon in our mixed up bicultural family.

Ethnic comedy in Australia – at least in public – started in the 80s with Wogs Out of Work and in the past few years we’ve seen  comedians surface like Arj Barka and Akmal Saleh. I’m thinking that in a few years,  African Australian kids who’ve grown up in Australia – mixed or not – will take to the stage and give me a good belly laugh. Comedy as a way to relieve the tensions of intercultural families – I can’t wait.

And it seems I don’t have to – well, at least, not for an African-Australian comedian. Mujahid Ahmed is a Sudanese comedian by night and refugee resettlement worker by day who lives in Adelaide. (I know this because he said his mum washes clothes in the Torrens River … heheh). A profile of Muj is the lead news story on African Oz this week. Okay, some of his jokes are sexist, but he still had me rolling on the floor laughing. Even though he didn’t grow up here he has some spot-on observations about the African experience in Oz and – make sure you watch both parts of his show –  living in an intercultural relationship.

Check him out . Part 1:

Part 2:

I hope he’ll inspire a whole new generation. I know there’s plenty of jokes just waiting to be told.

No more blood chocolate?

Eaten these recently? Ghanaian cocoa beans.

I hear that Cadbury have decided to use Fair Trade cocoa in their dairy milk chocolate bars and hot chocolate powder in the UK. This is very good news.

I’ve been a supporter of fair trade products for many years, even before I married into a family of Ghanaian cocoa farmers, and well before it was easy to buy fair trade products.  It just made sense to me that people should get a fair price for their product and their labour. So it’s been good to see the slow growth of awareness, the appearance of the fair trade logo on supermarket shelves, and to reach a point where chocolate giant Cadbury takes such a progressive step is very, very hopeful.

Although I’ve been interested in the issue for a long time, I actually wasn’t fully aware of the extent of corruption and exploitation that have characterised the production of and trade in cocoa. I thought it was bad enough that my son AM had a two year old cousin with scurvy, and that I’d seen children in his grandmother’s cocoa-farming village carefully rescue a broken egg from the ground so that they could eat it. But thanks to a newish book on the subject, Bitter Chocolate, I am now much better informed, and the importance of a fair go for producers is clearer to me than ever.

Bitter chocolate, by Canadian journalist Carol Off, records both the violent and corrupt history of the chocolate industry, and exposes more recent horror stories in relation to what most of us think of as an innocent treat (apart from the calories!) A more apt title might be Blood Chocolate. I’m not the only one to imagine an action movie of this name – Richard Stubbs in his ABC radio program was actually able to suggest it to the author. The book, which I couldn’t put down, has all the right ingredients: child slavery in Cote D’Ivoire, the disappearance of a journalist investigating the disappearance of cocoa profits into the pockets of corrupt politicians, war over access to cocoa producing territory, purchase of weapons with cocoa profits, greedy multinationals turning a blind eye to the violence and injustice, and deliberately keeping prices low. If only it were fiction. But it is the reality behind our chocolate bars.

So it’s in this context that Cadbury’s announcement is particularly welcome. all me naive if you will, but I think the goal of the fair trade movement should be obsolesence, because all consumer goods and raw materials will be traded fairly in some better, future world. But because I don’t really trust multinationals, I think there will also be a role for watch dog organisations – to keep the bastards honest.  But with this vision in mind, Cadbury’s commitment is an enormously significant step.  And I hope, just the first step of many for this company, which was started more than 100 years ago by a Quaker family. Well done. And pay attention, you other cocoa giants – this is the way of the future.

Other stuff

This is the place where I’ll put links to blogs and sites that interest me that are not related to parenting in bicultural families - in no particular order. 

And here’s the view from my kitchen window last November, when the red flowering gum and the Jacaranda were in flower.

http://www.solidariti.com/ Technology and social change – tips and discussions.

http://www.handinhandparenting.org/index.html Building close conenctions with your children.

http://www.greenfoot.com.au/ Living green in Sydney.

http://www.triantan.com/ A trio of great singers – who sing mostly in Gaelic.

http://tinyurl.com/ysvuwc The sounds of space – meaning outer space.

More on the way.

Getting the beat

At gym this morning I was suddenly reminded of a sound I heard almost every morning when in Kumasi. The percussion intro to a piece of music was very like the druming at assembly time at the primary school on a neighbouring hill.

Each morning all the students would march and form into their lines to the lively beat, which I suspect owed as much to British military bands as to traditional African rythms. Whatever, it was great. My perception was that most schools did this in the mornings, plus an occasional “march past” where the entire school marches through the village or suburb. I’ve seen this a few times – its fun to watch and I bet even more fun to participate.

It occured to me, as I mused on this phenomena while pushing my weights, that Australian primary schools would benefit from this. Instead of everyone crowding into the school hall at the end of each term to passively sit and listen to the school band’s sometimes squeaky offerings, a daily march, with lots of students getting a turn to bash away on drums, would get everyone’s circulation going in the mornings, start the day with a bit of fun,  and improve our sense of rythm no end.  I reckon it would do as much for the school’s musical development as any formal lessons.

Sadly, I can’t see it taking off. We are too self-conscious as a culture, and too cynical. Ah well, a girl can dream.

Swimming and sickling update

G Ketewa at the beach

Last Friday my brother (The World’s Best Uncle – TWBU) and I took AM and his siblings 50 Cedis, G Ketewa and Treasure to the beach. It was a gorgeous day, the waves were just right, the water was sparkling, translucent and a perfect temperature, we had fish and chips for lunch, ice creams on the way home, and everyone had a fantastic time. Except for TWBU, when he had to eat the Bart Simpson ice cream that Treasure licked once and then rejected.

AM took to the waves at the back for five hours, 50 Cedis showed surprising confidence and competence in the smaller waves at the front, and G Ketewa and Treasure grew more and more bold in the shallows.

I mostly left AM to himself – he’s safe in the deep water. The World’s Best Uncle watched the littlies, and I was able to get very wet splashing about in the smaller waves making sure that 50 Cedis didn’t get over-confident and drown himself.

50 Cedis on the boogie board

It was a happy day, and since then Treasure has demanded a return to the beach every time she sees me. She may get lucky, I’m hoping to take her on a few excursions once her brothers are all back at school this week. And it’s very hopeful that she didn’t show any signs of sickle cell pain afterwards (she’ s never been tested for it). She certainly got cold enough to have brought on a crisis, if she had it.

The following day I took Abrantie to a heated indoor pool. This was his compensation for missing out on the beach. We hadn’t taken him because we knew it would be hard to keep him out of the cold water and also because we felt that having responsibility for four non-swimmers at once was a bit too much. Plus I think his frustration at not being allowed to boogie board with 50 Cedis would have far exceeded his disappointment about being left at home.

The pool excursion was a mixed success. Abrantie loved playing in the water and had a great time. But he was very much aware that the friends we went with would really have preferred to go in the big, cold outdoor pool right beside it. Being good friends though, they mostly stayed and played with him in the warm, small pool and one of them even tried to teach him to swim – what a hero.

Typical Aussie beach scene.

To a non-sickler on a scorching day (42 degrees C) the water in both pools felt pretty tepid, but Abrantie’s red blood cells obviously felt differently about it because by the end of the afternoon he was complaining of pain in his leg. Either he’d spent too long in the water or the water wasn’t quite as warm as usual. I felt terrible: guilty that I’d let it happen, sad that  it seemed like taking him to the pool was just too big a risk.

Fortunately, the pain didn’t develop into a major crisis. On the way home in the car I encouraged him to yell and scream and moan as much as he could. I joined in the yelling myself, in Twi and English. Ow, ow ow! Omigod, the pain! Na me adom, awurade, adjee adjee (forgive the spelling, no idea how to write some of these words). He seemed to enjoy this, perhaps because making a fuss about his pain is not really alllowed at home. But I believe in expressing it loudly, providing you don’t frighten other people. It’s not the noise of yelling that’s hurting you, after all.  

Once we got back I cuddled him for a while, then massaged his leg with a hot ointment and gave him some nurofen. His mum, Obaapa is in Ghana at the moment – for Nana’s funeral and also the one year celebration for her own mother’s death – so I reckon he needed a bit of mothering.

Well, one or all of the above strategies worked. I was very relieved the next morning to find out that he had slept ok and the pain had receded. Phew.

Poolside attire for defence against sickle cell. 42 degrees and Abrantie was cold!

I’ve had another look around the web and rediscovered the Sickle cell information centre. This site is a fantastic resource which answers a wide range of questions about sickle cell. Here is some of what they have to say about why swimming in cold water causes sickling crises:

“Cold increases the use of oxygen by the muscles and this reduces the amount in the red cells. Shivering is an example of the extreme of this effect. Cold also causes the blood vessels to contract down and become smaller to preserve body heat. This directly reduces blood flow and any sickling of red cells causes further slowing of flow. The slower blood flow also reduces further oxygen in the blood and low oxygen causes increased sickling.”

 This is good information. However what I’d really like to read is stories from people about their swimming experiences. Is it something people have given up on doing? Or have people found the optimum indoor pool temperature? Can you swim in tropical seas, which are so warm? Perhaps a trip to North Queensland is in order. Sickle cell is bound to become more of a problem in Australia as more Africans migrate here (It’s most common in people of African descent). Perhaps it’s here, where swimmimg is a national obsession, that we’ll come up with some solutions for swimming with sickle cell? Or perhaps I just have to accept that this is one pleasure Abrantie may have to always forego. It’s not easy. For either of us.