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 liked. He became an expert at wolfing down large quantities of food because he was never sure when he would eat again.
A Taste for Learning
One day he saw kids passing by his house with containers of sorghum; he knew he had to find the source. He traced it back to the local school. He started going daily for the sorghum and powdered milk, but soon he acquired a taste for learning. That bland and boiled sorghum changed the trajectory of his life. The food kept him in school. He excelled.
His childhood finally caught up with him when he got to Notre Dame High School. When he heard his classmates talk about their parents, the memories that he had buried for so long resurfaced. “When I was in high school and I’d hear people say, ‘My mother has done this. My father has come to see me.’ I couldn’t use those words because I’ve never had them. Constantly, I cried.”
The priests from St. Francis Xavier parish could sense that Thomas was special. He would paint the inside of the church and cut the brambles around it. He became an expert at washing and ironing cassocks. They paid him for this. They also gave him shoes and t-shirts. They became father figures for Thomas, and soon he came to believe what he heard at church about men named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and turned away from the traditional beliefs that he grew up with.
After he graduated from high school, and against his family’s wishes, Thomas enrolled in the seminary.
“I went there as a way of thanking God,” he says.
He formed deep friendships with the other priests. He loved the preaching and the parishioners. During the homily, Thomas regaled the congregation with that soaring voice and his electric personality. “Fellow Christians, fellow lovers of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” he’d boom. They opened their souls and let Thomas fill them with the good word.
But after six years, he made the difficult decision not to go into the priesthood. He had met a woman who was gentle and soft-spoken as she organized church outreach activities. Felicia, he soon realized, was someone he couldn’t live without.
He and Felicia married and started a family. Thomas enrolled at Legon University in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where he studied philosophy and religion. He then earned a post-graduate teaching degree from Cape Coast University and, after receiving a scholarship, he went to the country Africans dream about: the United States. In the Golden State, he received a master’s degree in administration from California State University, Hayward. During this time he started to work for CRS, telling Catholics about his life growing up in Ghana, how the wheat and sorghum and powdered milk that CRS provided his school kept him attending.
He now travels across the United States every year, promoting solidarity with the poor overseas, usually during CRS’ Lenten Operation Rice Bowl program, which encourages faith communities to pray, fast, learn and give. As a beneficiary-turned-staff member, he teaches American Catholics about challenges and issues in Africa.
And even though he left behind early plans to join the priesthood, Thomas can still pack a parish. He thrills crowds — many of whom know close to nothing about Africa — with his brio and charisma. He tells them what a difference “that little snack” — provided by his school with CRS funding — made in his life. He encourages them to stay engaged with the continent.
With that melodic Ghanaian accent and staccato laugh, the one where he bends in half and slaps you on the back, he sucks them in. It’s contagious. He’s contagious. Crowds can’t get enough of that glowing personality and wrenching story. Thomas sears the importance of CRS’ work into their minds, the importance of Africa.
