The End of the Beginning

As some of you may have noticed in my previous post, my main non-academic or career-related goal for the semester was to become a better swimmer. For those of you who haven’t tried to swim laps since you were forced to take YMCA lessons as child, swimming is HARD. It works muscles that most people don’t know they have and it’s just generally an exhausting sport. I decided that I wanted to improve my swimming skills after enviously watching the lifeguards at the camp that I worked at over the summer swim lap after lap, while I played round after round of Sharks and Minnows with eight year olds. After some encouragement from my swimmer boyfriend and discovering that a close friend shared my swimming dreams, I was on my way to the Palladium pool, all decked out in my one-piece.
The swimming itself actually went well. My boyfriend gave us a simple workout to do, and we were able to complete it without dying, which constitutes success in my opinion. But there was one thing that put a damper on our aquatic adventure – the lifeguard. Now don’t get me wrong – I feel for this guy. His job is probably as boring as it gets – he has to just sit in his chair for hours without a books, friends, or even Facebook. But when my friend casually mentioned to him that we were both pretty new to swimming, he proceeded to give us a “what the hell are you doing here” look for the rest of our workout. He even asked my friend if he could swim two lengths of the pool “without dying.”
Before I heard about my friend’s exchange with the lifeguard, I was so proud of our accomplishments that day – after all, we had successfully completed a workout in a sport that we were both pretty unfamiliar with. But simply knowing that this lifeguard was judging our mediocrity and had no respect for the fact that we were putting ourselves out there by trying out a new sport made me never was to swim again.
Later that day, after I vowed to stick to yoga as my workout of choice, I began to think about our relationship with the lifeguard in terms of social work. I realized that this lifeguard had made mistakes social workers can easily make with their clients. His first social work mistake was his difficulty accepting us at the level where we were. Because the lifeguard was so used to spending his day observing members of the swim team and other individuals with a great deal of experience, he seemed to be confused about what his role was when working with swimmers of a completely different level. In retrospect, I definitely don’t think this guy was trying to be rude at all – he was simply trying to make sure that we would be safe. He just went about it in a way that was patronizing, which was frustrating – after all, even though we are new to swimming, my friend and I are still rational adults who are mature enough to not put ourselves in dangerous situations. Like our lifeguard friend, it’s likely that social workers go through similar internal dilemmas when working with adults who are trying something new for the first time, like applying for a job or looking for an apartment. While you want to be as supportive as possible, you don’t want to make your client feel as though they can’t control their own lives – a feeling like that certainly doesn’t encourage the long term autonomy that social workers hope for their clients to achieve. But at the same time, a social worker, like a lifeguard, doesn’t want to see his or her client get hurt. Sometimes it may seem easier to encourage the client to avoid situations that may result in failure. However, the true role of the social worker isn’t to make decisions for the client, but to support them in their process of making their own mature decisions.
Although I haven’t been back to the pool since my initial plunge (give me a break, it’s the first week of classes) I’m going to try to go back soon, this time with a greater respect for first timers everywhere as well as a realization that all lifeguards aren’t social work students.

“OH! Who are you?”
“Tina! Who are YOU?”

It was this first silly exchange with Uncle Tagoe, a security guard at NYU in Ghana’s academic center, that led to one of the most unexpected yet meaningful friendships that would be created during my time in Accra. For the next four months, I grew closer to Uncle Tagoe every day. We were the unlikeliest of friends – he was more than old enough to be my father, worked long hours every day guarding the academic center, and had spent his life living by Labadi Beach in Accra, while all I had to do in Ghana was enjoy the freedom of being nineteen in a country that I knew nothing about.
There was something about Uncle Tagoe that just made people, including myself, gravitate towards him. He would tell me about politics in Ghana while I would babble about our weekend trips or the students at the school where I volunteered. We would discuss my boyfriend, who Tagoe soon began referring to as his “in-law.” We laughed about his irrational fear of airplanes and tall buildings and my hatred of snakes. He helped me plan my spring break backpacking trip around Ghana, pointing out all the places where he knew my friends and I could see “big animals.”
But some of the best times that I shared with Tagoe were the hours between my classes where I would sit with him outside the academic center and we would barely say anything at all. We would just be there. It is one of the things that I miss most about being with Tagoe and being in Ghana. It seems like here, even with our friends, we are constantly trying to fill those gaps in conversation, hoping to avoid any awkward silences, or rushing to say everything on our minds, since the time we can spend with friends always seems to have a limit.
We are constantly trying to get something out of our relationships with people. Love, advice, fun, connections, money, laughs, a social life. We focus so much on trying to justify the time that we spend with people by figuring out what they can do for us that we forget the power behind the simplest forms of human interaction.
Just being with a friend like Uncle Tagoe and having no expectations about the time that I spent with him made me understand more than ever how easily our lives are impacted by the people we are around. It’s a lesson that many of us have learned well in social work – the ability to just be there and listen to someone can help him or her more than any other therapy. I wish so much that I could sit in the sun right now with Uncle Tagoe, not worried about better things that I could be doing or what he and I could talk about. One of the things that I miss most about Ghana was that it was so easy to not feel lonely there. For some reason, it felt like someone always wanted you around and people always had time for each other, while in New York we seem to get so caught up in our own lives that we forget about the people in our lives that truly keep us going each day. Seeing Uncle Tagoe’s smile all of my days in Ghana was something so simple, but something that I know will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Here’s a few challenges for your week:
1) No matter how busy you and your friends might be this week, get everyone together for dinner, breakfast, a midnight snack, whatever. Try to keep up a tradition of seeing each other weekly for the entire semester. Believe it or not, your buddies may be able to get you through your classes a lot better than those books.
2) Stop for a few minutes and say hi to the security guard in your building, or workplace, or somewhere else on campus. It’ll be a little reminder that you can find social support all around you, in some of the most unlikely places.
3) Have a wonderful week :)

Despite the fact that we all seemed to have hit the ground running with the fall semester, I am still very much obsessed with my semester abroad last spring and will jump at the chance to do anything and everything West Africa related. (Speaking of NYU in Ghana, there are still several spots available for the program this spring! Find out more about it here or please feel free to ask me anything you want to know about the program.) Anyway, when I found out that NYU's Africa House had invited Jerry John Rawlings, one of Ghana's former presidents, to speak at the Kimmel Center this past Tuesday, I literally ran there from work to meet my NYU in Ghana friends for the event. (Did I cause a scene running down Fifth Avenue? Yes. Do I regret it? No.)
A little background about good old J.J. and his presidency (clearly he and I are on a nickname basis) - He is considered by many to be one of Africa's most revolutionary leaders and a true advocate for the "common man" - some of his achievements include restructuring secondary education across the country, developing the northern, more rural areas of Ghana with regard to healthcare, technology, and education, and generally defining his leadership by an era of political and economic stability that was rooted in democracy. Despite his developments, Rawlings is viewed as a rather controversial leader among Ghanaians, primarily because of his questionable "house-cleaning" practices which attempted to rid Ghana of corrupt political leaders.
Despite the various opinions surrounding Rawlings (some of our professors in Ghana despised him) my friends and I decided to put aside all the things we had heard to see what Rawlings had to say about "Mobilizing African People for Economic Development", and I am so glad that we did. Although I definitely disagree with some of the brutality that he may have involved in his leadership, he was able to share with us so many insightful ideas about what needs to be done in Africa. He was also an incredibly passionate speaker and seemed to have a genuine desire to educate westerners about life in a region that is unfortunately a mystery to most of us. Rawlings didn't want to leave the stage when the event was over and tried so hard to answer as many questions as possible. It was amazing to see a leader who wanted so badly for everyone to understand his people. To me, that genuine concern for the people around us is what is absent in so many institutions in the United States, such as healthcare and within the job market. Rawlings was a wonderful speaker and has a gift for making complex political issues accessible for all to understand.
One of the most powerful ideas that Rawlings shared was the negative effects of linguistic diversity in politics. He believes that the English language has been used as a "weapon" against some of the wisest leaders in the developing world. Because these traditional chiefs and rulers do not have a good grasp of the English language, they are essentially ignored by global politics and the generations of political knowledge that they have to share are silenced, simply because they can't tell us their ideas in English. Rawlings is enraged by this unnecessary ignorance and asserts that "the sense of what you say can be translated." He proposes that language barriers should never be the reason why global politics fail to advance.
In both my Human Behavior in the Social Environment and Ethnocultural Issues classes this semester, we have been discussing oppression and the various human qualities that seem to bring about oppression. It seems to me that language abilities can clearly create an in-group and out-group, especially with regard to the intellectual world. While I think multilingualism is incredibly admirable and certainly a mark of intelligence, a person's knowledge shouldn't be disregarded if they can only express that intellect in one language. Last year through America Reads I had the amazing privelege of teaching ESL to two international students in ninth grade. Their teachers told me that they were having a lot of trouble in math, but when I tried to help them, they already knew how to do everything. They were amazing at math. They couldn't do their math homework because they didn't understand the directions in the math book. The vocabulary was obviously very different from what was used with math in their home countries. Just because they didn't know English, the teachers assumed that they were unskilled in math. And this doesn't make them bad teachers - when working with non-English speakers it is so easy to assume that, simply because they can't express themselves clearly in English, they have nothing to offer intellectually.
When working with our clients, it's important for social workers to realize that these people are going to vary in their abilities to express themselves, even if they are not immigrants. It could be because they had little education or went to underdeveloped schools or maybe because they're just shy or embarrassed. Social workers need to remember that all people have something to offer and it is our job to help them bring it out.