It has suddenly come to my village’s attention (and the rest of Ghana it seems) that I don’t have any children.

I’ve been hassled from the beginning about being married… or not actually being married. I’ve told my village that I have a husband and he lives in Ghana doing other development work, and they’ve bought that… for the most part. And I’ve had few villagers remind me that I need to start having kids soon… yeah right.

But when my counter part asked me a few weeks back if I would stay for a 3^rd year in the village I was touched. Knowing that my village likes me, and wants to have me around means a lot (I’ve heard stories from other volunteers that their village didn’t like the last PCV that lived there, etc.) But I told my counter part that I needed/wanted to go back to the US without giving a reason. He came back to say that it’s probably good that I go back because I need to start having babies, because I’m getting past baby bearing age (at the ripe old age of 25, right.) I had to remind him that I’m not married (he knows the truth, but yet can’t comprehend it) and that I need to get married before I can even have children. As I tried to laugh it off, I told him the old childhood rhyme that we used to always sing to kids on the playground when we assumed someone had a crush on some one else… “First come love, then comes marriage, then comes baby…” My counterpart just shook his head at this… foreign concept.

The second time someone in my village brought it to my attention that I don’t have any children they made it more clear that I shouldn’t leave Ghana without having at least two babies… and they want them to be black (not trying to be politically incorrect). I always just laugh, because they don’t realize the jokes on them… I’m not having any babies (at least not in the next 5 years…)

The last concern that I don’t have any children came from a young female Ghanaian. She started the interrogation with asking, “where I’m from” and “what I’m doing in Ghana”. Then the topic suddenly changed to “how many babies do I have”? I responded with the usual “none”. And she came back to bite me with “why”? I gave the usual response “because I’m waiting till I get back to the US, finish getting my masters, get married and blah, blah, blah” (thinking that another female would understand.) She again responded with a bite in my face, “that it doesn’t matter if I haven’t finished my education, or that I’m not married, but I need to have at least 3 or more babies to keep me company, to pass on my genes, and because it’s a women’s job to have many, many children” (yeah well, not this woman.)