In an interview at the Ghanaian orphanage, 9-year-old Ama answered many questions with a simple "Sais pas." "Don't know." She told me that ampe was her favorite game, and that jollof was her favorite food. Yet when I asked this young girl, initially from Togo and abandoned by her parents, whether she was happy at the orphanage, or whether she would prefer life with an extended family member, she whispered, "Sais pas."
I was in Ghana on a Stanford in Government stipend, a program that offers students an opportunity to explore public service. I had come to work with KaeMe, an NGO founded by Michael McCullough, '88, Marci Kirk Stevens, John Stevens, MD '87, and Jennifer Miller, '04, that partners with the Ghanaian Department of Social Welfare. True to the meaning of KaeMe ("remember me" in Twi), the foundation was creating a database of the nation's orphans with the goal of moving the country from an institutionalized-care system to family care or foster care.
For two months, our team visited orphanages throughout Ghana, often in rural villages. Institutionalized care is a flawed remedy to a vexing problem. No matter how well intentioned or well funded, an orphanage can never replace a loving family. And many of these places are far from nurturing. My heart ached every day as I encountered signs of abuse or the effects of emotional abandonment: wounds on children who had been whipped; blank-eyed babies lying in their own excrement.
One weekend, my colleague Abi invited me to his village of Kuntanase. The compound of Abi's extended family bustled with 40 men, women and children who were gathering firewood, hauling water from the village pump and hand-washing laundry. After a festive meal, people broke into a spontaneous party, with young and old alike teaching me how to azonto—dance. In Kuntanase, I experienced the kinship structure that has animated Ghanaian life for centuries.
That kinship structure is under siege. We're quick to blame the ravages of AIDS and the pervasive effects of urban migration for undermining this traditional way of life. But I learned last summer that more than 80 percent of Ghana's orphans are not, in fact, parentless. Orphanages built by Western philanthropists have incentivized family abandonment of children with a vague promise of better education and sustained care. Even if a few of the orphanages I visited came close to meeting that ideal, they all have torn apart the traditional fabric of Ghanaian life.
Donors have been convinced that this Western institution serves the best interests of Ghanaian children. Admittedly, life outside the orphanages is not always a dance party. Some children were abused by their parents or extended family, or sold into slavery as child laborers. Some children told us that they never want to go back home, nor should they. Others speak of relatives living nearby; still others long to look beyond the barbed wires that now confine them. To look into the eyes of many orphans—our team interviewed 449—is to become less certain about what policies serve them well.
I leave Africa humbled: knowing the questions might be more important than finding the answers. On my way to the airport for my flight home, I see outside the car window a new orphanage being built by a British philanthropist. Its bright orange paint signals a conviction that it will help Ghana's children. Will it? Sais pas.
Stefan Norgaard, '15, is a public policy major from Boulder, Colo.
