First Impressions of Ghana

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Greetings!! Akwaaba!! Maadjo from Ghana!

I will be using this website to post stories, experiences and general thoughts about what is going on for me here in Ghana, Africa over the next 3 months. I have now been in Ghana for two and a half weeks and I have had the opportunity to travel to many different places since my arrival. I am now in Accra, the capital, on the coast of Ghana where I will spend most of the next few months working with a Non-Governmental Organization(NGO) called EnterpriseWorks (EW). I’ll be writing more about my work here later, but for now it should be enough to say that the idea behind my journey to Africa is to gain a view of development and perhaps have small impact with the people and the community you are working with. For starters I am going to write about my first impressions of Africa because it will be quite long in and of itself and you can get the news about everything else later!!

First Impressions of Africa
Sitting in an airplane on the last leg of my 14 hour journey across the globe I was beginning to wonder what I had gotten myself into. Here I was, completely exhausted, hungry for something other then plane food and only slightly anxious about what was in store for me once I landed. I knew there was no turning back, and although I was excited to experience the African culture, part of me knew it would have been much less complicated had I said no to this amazing opportunity and stayed in Canada. Then, as we neared our destination one of the other overseas volunteers looked out the window and saw our first glimpse of Accra. I am surprised to say that it was lights, not in an organized fashion like we see when landing in the dark into a North American city but specks of light with no rhyme or reason or pattern to them. Here and there you could find trails of straight lights that we assumed was the potential for some sort of main roadway. In the final descent I remember the anticipation of just getting there and realizing it was real. Our plane taxied in and stopped outside a small airport, where upon exciting you could feel the large change in temperature and more so the humidity. The two long sleeve shirts I wore while doing a brief tour of Amsterdam could have been left on the plane. To this day I still have not worn either of them. Fortunately, they were the only two that I brought, and one comes in handy as a pillow when traveling long distances by bus! Customs line was long, but gave us no troubles and everyone’s baggage arrived in one piece. We were met by 4 long term overseas volunteers with Engineers without Borders who had arranged a place for us to spend the night. The small hotel was quite nice for what my mind has imagined would be the sort of lodgings we would have but the neighborhood was shocking to say the least. After dropping off our luggage we decided to go and find some food, so walking down the street beside open sewers was quite an eye-opening experience. The fact that it was dark, and there were young boys raking through the sewage to take out plastic bags of what they call sachet water or pure water sacks only added to the eeriness of the place.

Our next adventure was to climb on a tro-tro.(.more details to come but for now it’s an old van turned into a bus that runs at anytime of the day, no schedule- just leaves when it’s full) to a market to take money out of the bank and find some food. First off, the area we got dropped off in was a small taxi and tro-tro lot where locals have set up stands to sell all sorts of things from eggs, to oranges, to soap and clothes etc. It looks quite slummy particularly when you walk out onto the main road and are immediately confronted with a Total Station and an On the Run convenience store like you would find in every sub-urb in North America. Later on down the road we saw…..a Shell Station. For those who know my family my Dad has been working for Shell for over 20 years and they have employed me for two summers between semesters at school. Let’s just say it was a weird taste of home.

Taking money out was also an experience. The way the system works is that we use our Canadian TD accounts to draw out local currency. In order to reduce the massive bank charges the idea is to try out the maximum amount of $110 Canadian. This amounts to 800 000 cedis, which is quite the stack and even saying the numbers makes you feel rich. Buying a 500 mL plastic bag of pure water costs 300 cedis which sounds insane until you do the math and realize it’s less then a 1/21th of a dollar. Don’t even know how many cents that makes! The worst part is when you are looking at budget numbers for a project and say you want funding around $1000 to do training…then you are talking in tens of millions!! It took awhile to get used to the difference in currency but now I find myself haggling to bring down the cost of the taxi or fruit in the marketplace 5000 which doesn’t even amount to a dollar! However, when it will buy your next meal it somehow becomes important. The sad part is that I have a safety net of $10/day, which may not seem like much in Canadian terms but when over half the population of Ghana is living on less then $3 it puts things into perspective, particularly when there is more then one mouth to feed! The other hard part is the security I have in knowing should anything happen to me I can afford to go get proper medical care, or in a worse-case scenario there is money through insurance that will get me out of Ghana if something more serious happens. Ghanaians don’t have that safety net. The other hard part with life in Ghana is the sense of the perfection and wealth that people have of North America. The trouble is the view is in a large way quite correct until you start telling them about the poor living on the street, on welfare, or the husbands that beat their wives and leave their families, or the violence and murder that occurs in all major cities. Even then, they might not believe you! As far as the money aspect is concerned I’ve tried to explain to many people that just because a Canadian income is higher then theirs doesn’t mean they are more well off in their own country. A upper class person here would lead a very similar life to a middle class person in Canada, if not even better. The problem is that someone with a Canadian income who comes to Ghana is extremely well-off because everything is so cheap! I’ve tried to break a few stereotypes in telling them how much things cost in Canada in comparison to here. For example, I got my hair braided on Friday..I know a typical thing for someone traveling in a tropical country to do, but it was fun..and it only cost me $10 to get super long braids. I’ve never tried to get my hair braided in Canada but I explained it’s not uncommon to find a salon that charges anywhere from $50-100 for a simple hair cut! Here that’s equivalent to $4.They get really big eyes and open mouths when you tell them the difference in prices! I think it’s important that they have a real vision of what North America is like, in a way even just to narrow the span of perspective as to what they think their life could be like if only they lived someone else. Anyway, some more stories will inevitable surround this topic so that’s good enough for now.

So back to my first day in Ghana; after a restless sleep, in a very hot and sweaty bed, (which fortunately enough had a make shift overhead fan that helped the heat factor, but added a weird noise factor) we woke up early to head to the bus station to take a bus to the Northern region where 4 overseas volunteers will be working for the summer. I am partnered to work with a long term volunteer Louis Dorval, who will be pursuing a project in Tamale while I hold down the fort in Accra. He was our guide through the whole affair and we arrived safe and sound after 13 hours in a rickety bus with no air conditioning and 5 people abreast. Take a normal bus and put in a fold down seat in the middle aisle. That’s the buses you’ll find in Ghana, and they won’t travel unless they are full. Many of my first impressions of Ghana were from the bus! The reason the bus ride wasn’t so bad was because we rode with all the windows open and because everything we saw was new and fascinating. I was sitting beside a farmer who had just had an interview to do his masters in English in a university outside Accra. He was really friendly and we shared stories and he taught me some of the language spoken in the Northern Region called Dagbani. It’s quite a tricky one to learn but the best part is whenever someone says something to you in greeting even if you don’t know exactly what you are saying you can just answer…Naaaaa and they’ll smile and laugh because you are trying! It’s kind of a one word answer that fits as fine, okay, good and yes all at once. Thank heavens for simplicity in that sense.

Another aspect of Ghana that I feel is important to share is the way things are sold. Take a strip mall in North America. Make each store a sort of open front shack made of wood and place them right next to the roadway. This is how the majority of Ghana’s streets look like. Now fill these shacks and the area between the shack and the roadway with any material item you can imagine. It is not uncommon to be driving down the road and see couches, in one shack, next door to a metal shop, next door to a hair salon, next door to a plastic bucket place, next to a tire shop, next to a bed frame store, next to a mango stall, next to a spare car parts place. I remember seeing a section of the road where they were selling large trucks, and then right next door was a place where they had little baby carriages!! It still is amazing and exciting to see what other strange item will be sold on the roadside. On top of that, take any women, child or young man and place a large metal bowl or tray on their heads. Fill this with practically any food item you can think of from green oranges, bread, boiled eggs, fried fish, frozen yogurt, sachet waters, etc etc and have them run along side the numerous cars, or buses as they exchange money for goods. Any place known for traffic delays you will find tons of these people waiting for someone to get hungry and buy something. The strangest part is that you can have 5 people selling the same style of bread, but for some reason they don’t seem to fight about who gets the person who is asking for a loaf. Whoever gets asked, gets the money and no one fights or gets into spats about their customer which is something I would have seen happening in that sort of situation. It’s almost like they believe in the luck of the draw and that’s just how it’s going to have to work. This aspect of Ghana might be my favorite part of Ghana so far. Anytime you come to a town as you are traveling you can just stick some money out of the window in response to one of many chants of 5 thousand, 5 thousand, 5 thousand for any of the various food items available to you. The variety is not quite the same as the grocery store in Canada but it serves its purpose all the same! For some reason I find it super exciting! If I could describe the people in Ghana on looks along it would be these women carrying these trays of food on their head, wearing their skirts and tops with their baby wrapped in cloth attached to their backs. It’s a picture that I don’t think I’ve taken specifically yet but will make sure to add to the list!

Arriving in Tamale was something of a culture shock more then anything I’ve experienced so far. We climbed off the bus to be met by every single Ghanaian taxi driver running up to us and saying: OBRUNI where are you going? Where are you going? As I had no idea where we were staying I could only try and make my way to the place where we could gather the luggage while shrugging off what felt like 10 hands trying to get you to come with them to their taxi. It was all a little too much to handle after a 13 hour bus ride. I was super frustrated that night with the way we were automatic easy targets for big money deals for the taxi drivers. I guess it’s a sort of racism in a way, or more a societal ‘ism’ that places a rich stereotype on all white people. This is something that I am still struggling with and I’m sure will be a topic of many more updates to come. Fortunately, since that night I have learned to deal with the onslaught of taxi drivers trying to get the RICH white person into their cab and certainly how to reduce the price for arranging the fair in the first place!

The food in Ghana is something I thought I would struggle with but am quite enjoying actually. Besides the road side vendors you have traditional meals that come in a few varieties but contain a high concentration of starch. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so many carbohydrates in my life. Don’t be surprised if I come back 2 times the size as when I left!! I think I’ll save the food explanations for a later time.

I spent the first week in Tamale in the north where I stayed with the family of a colleague who used to work for EnterpriseWorks. He lives in a small village with his mother, his two brothers, their wives and children. I was able to spend some time hanging out with the kids and taking pics…they love having their picture “snapped” and would juggle for places to have the best shot or the best idea for a picture. It quite amused them. I also played their version of duck, duck goose..which instead of racing someone for a seat, involved hiding a show behind an innocent victim and hoping they don’t notice until you make it back to them and get to steal their spot!! All quite enjoyable and surreal, it was my first real experience with rural Ghana and will share more stories later. I just wanted to introduce the idea so that some of the pictures make sense!

I feel as though this is enough information to overwhelm everyone for the time being. I’ve plenty more to say so you’ll just have to look forward to the next posting! So far I’m healthy, happy and trying to learn as much as possible!

I hope everyone is well and enjoying their summer wherever you are.

Bye bye from Africa!

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Photos

Sebasien, Kate, Me and Linda
Some African friends I met while spending the weekend in a village called Fodome

Gilbert and Louis
Gilbert is the security guard for the office and my home. Louis is my partner from Engineers without Borders.

Me and the Kids
Me playing with the kids in Nyampala. This is their verison of Duck-Duck goose!

My room in Nyampala
This is where I stayed in Nyampala

Eating a Ghanaian Meal
Eating a mid-day meal of Banku with Ocra stew with friends. Check out the new do!!