A Passionate Voice for Africa

Sometimes, when he's sitting at an Italian restaurant in the United States and the hot garlic breadsticks are flowing and he's staring into a bottomless bowl of finely spiced pasta, a thought crosses Thomas Awiapo's mind: I'd rather be back under the tree in my Ghanaian village, eating millet porridge with okra sauce.

From San Diego to Baton Rouge, the vittles are scrumptious, says Thomas Awiapo, who works for Catholic Relief Services in Ghana but often travels to the United States teaching Catholics about Africa. But he prefers to be here in Wiaga: flat on his back in his undershirt, on four logs buffed to a shine by a thousand backsides, staring up into the arms of the knotty neem tree.

This is home, the place he grew up. Where women glide by with basins balanced on their heads and dusty kids loll in the dirt. Thomas can lie here for hours, the hot breeze rolling over him. Guinea fowl cluck nearby. Then silence, and the hiss and whiffle of the wind in the trees.

When he's talking to crowds in the United States about the hunger in Ghana, this is the place he brings them back to. It's also where the nightmare started.
Here's the kitchen where the food was cooked that he fought over with his step-siblings. Often, it was the only meal of the day. Over there are the fields where he hoed millet to earn extra money.

That's the schoolyard where he'd trade salt and spices for extra food, knowing the students needed to put something on the bland boiled sorghum they were served for lunch.

"Most of my earliest memories are not good things," he says. "What sticks so clearly in my mind is all about the treatment that I got."

Painful Memories

He remembers the day his father died, how he ran to find his mother at the grinding mill. By the time he got back, his dad was gone. Soon his mother fell sick, and a medicine man arrived at the house. He went searching for the soul of his mother, following his family's tradition that it had been taken away to the bush. Goats were killed as sacrifices. But she didn't get better. Soon, they took Thomas away. "I still remember standing at a different house, seeing them bury my mother," he says. "At that point, I didn't cry. I just felt something was missing. I shed tears later."

Not long after this, the insults started. Certain members of his extended family whom he lived with said he was worthless, that he'd amount to nothing. What would he grow up to do for them? Nothing.

He remembers how hard they caned him when he broke the clay pots playing hide-and-seek. He remembers how their children were favored over him. "As a child, I don't know why you didn't give me food. I didn't care. All I know is that I'm hungry."

He doesn't want to talk about that. It's over with. It's in the past.

His childhood story unfolds like thousands across Africa: He and his brothers were orphans and shunned by some family members. After his parents died, one of his younger brothers passed away. He doesn't remember how, but guesses it had to do with malnutrition. Then his youngest brother died: the one he carried around on his back and cared for because nobody else would. His older brother soon ran away. To this day, Thomas doesn't know where he is. After his brother fled, Thomas was alone, living with a family who didn't really love him.

For a time, he bounced between relatives. He quickly learned how to fend for himself. Sometimes that meant fighting other kids. But he was equally adept at charming his way into a seat at the evening meal of a neighbor or a distant relative. An aunt who lived in an outlying town would treat him as if he were her own son. And his uncle, who lived two miles away, would give him peanuts and millet flour (he didn't dare ask for anything at home). At this uncle's, he could eat as much as he l