Heart to Heart

The ICHA Blog

The challenges that lie ahead by Sujatha Sankaran on September 6, 2009 | 3 comments

With less than two weeks remaining before we depart to Elmina, our team has been busy working on preparations for our upcoming outreach.  In less than one week, we will throw a fundraiser gala to raise money and to introduce ICHA to the bay area community through song, dance, and food.  A week later, we will leave for Ghana.  As things slowly come together, I find myself contemplating the challenges that lie ahead.

Though I’ve had some experience working in other cultures, I still find living and working in a foreign culture a difficult and complicated journey.  The process of entering a distant culture, apart from it and yet a part of it, is both jarring and moving.  When we are in Ghana, we must learn to reconcile the many inconsistencies inherent in what we’re doing.  We have a strong belief in the power of community, the ability of a group of people to identify issues in their own community and bring about their own change.  Yet, we are a foreign organization going in with specific notions about what needs to change.  We go to Ghana to teach, but we also go to Ghana to learn.  And we must somehow learn to navigate these two roles.

As Americans, we grow up believing in the power of self.  We all strive to actively create our lives, to live the lives that we imagine.  In contrast, in many developing countries, acceptance is valued, and the good of a community and a larger purpose are valued over individual desire.  The last time I was in Ghana, I would marvel at the ability of people to allow themselves to be carried away by the breeze of communality. And as I watched them submit, the fight in myself would melt away as well. People seemed to respect the order of the universe in a way I had never learned to. The question of whether the choices I was making were good enough lost importance. 

Yet, with time, this peace was tempered by the frustration of helplessness. I watched the same elderly African woman who lived by the rhythm of the ocean waves allow herself to be subjected to the cruelty and abuse of others, relegated to a life of powerlessness. I saw patients who accepted circumstances not out of choice, but out of a lack of choices. 

Perhaps this is what makes ICHA so promising.  We are educators.  Through education comes choices.  And with choices comes the freedom to live a life devoid of illness. 

As clichéd as it may sound, I think we are all keenly aware that we are getting just as much out of this process as we are putting into it.  This is why we feel that a foreign organization like ICHA can go into a distant community to help institute change.

Because, as we gain understanding of the nuances of this foreign culture, we all know that what we will gain in the process is a more profound understanding of ourselves and our own culture.