It’s Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas: Christmas on the Equator

-X-mas [pronounced “x” and “mas”] is in the air. Can’t you feel it Obaa yaa?
-It’s really hot this week – I can barely even sit at a computer for more than an hour. This is the hottest week since I’ve been in Ghana. To me, Christmas is inseparable from snow. The only thing I feel in the air is the Hamatan.
-Exactly! The Hamatan means X-mas is just around the corner!

The Hamatan is a fog that blows in from the Sahara desert during the month of December and lasts about a month. Though it is far more noticeable up north, away from the mitigating effects of water and forests, where the desert air is transformed during the Hamatan season. While I was up north for two weeks, my nose was bleeding, my lips were chapping, and my eyes would dry up easily. Not exactly Christmas-inspiring.

I think I always imagined the Equator kind of like a red clay Arizona desert, where the ground is cracking, vegetation – and signs of life in general – is lacking. Though where I live in the mountainous jungle is actually closer to the Equator, the north of Ghana really looked like how many people imagine desert savannah [and poverty] in Africa. And much like how the rain is blamed for everything during the rainy season where I live, anything that goes wrong in the month of December is blamed on the Hamatan.

-I keep forgetting to write Christmas cards because it’s too hot to remember that Christmas is around the corner.
-You are not a Christian. You can’t send CHRISTmas cards!
-Well, I’ve had no luck finding ‘season’s greetings’ cards. What must I do?
-I don’t think you should send X-mas cards if you won’t accept Jesus Christ as your saviour.
-You are intolerant.

As usual, Personnel Officer is testing my belief system, systematically trying to find holes in it so that he can pounce with a Christian explanation. He has recently enlightened me to the fact that capitalism is indeed a Christian construct, and we are still in heated debate regarding how much of an influence Christianity has on democratic values of equality and the Enlightenment.

-Evelyn, don’t invite Obaa Yaa anywhere for Christmas. If she’s not a Christian, she shouldn’t celebrate Christmas. What do your people celebrate anyways? Do you worship the sun?
-Yah, kind of. In the bleak mid-Winter, I usually go somewhere hot to soak in some vitamin D, and my sister and I try to remember to celebrate the winter and summer solstices. I also celebrate Hallowe’en and Thanksgiving. And for Easter, I try to eat rabbit. Oh, and I celebrate Buy Nothing Day.
-What’s that?
-It’s a day you don’t buy anything. It’s intended for us to re-think our consumption-based economy. In my culture, everyone’s trying to buy their way into happiness. If I have this, I can do this, and be happy. We’ve completely lost sight of what is supposed to be the end goal, distracted by all the stuff we’ve forgotten we don’t need.

Last week I was doing field work with my boss Michael, going to villages in our municipality and inaugurating Community Implementation Committees for the European Union’s Micro-projects programme. Between inaugurations, I found myself in the village of our driver, Mr. Ankara [who also happens to be my Ghanaian father], drinking palm wine and shopping for goats at 10 am. I, of course, got no explanation about what we were doing.

-I’m certainly happy to sit here drinking palm wine all day, but I must ask, what the hell are we doing here?
-I’m looking for a goat for my father for Christmas.
-How much does a goat go for?
-Depends on the size. He wants 500 000 for that one, I’m giving him 350 000 [$50 and $35 respectively].
-Can you get a female? Then I could come over and milk it.
-Why would you want to do that?
-I’m allergic to cow milk and the store hasn’t had any soymilk in almost a month. It’s such a waste that there are so many goats everywhere, yet no one seems to drink their milk. Every morning I wake up to a goat belting at my window from my front porch, yet I still have to drink my coffee black!

He bought one male goat for himself and made plans to come back for three more goats for family members. We took the goat in the boot of the truck and went to inaugurate some more committees. I sat in the truck delighted by what had just happened – a goat! As a Christmas present.

Every year around this time, I compile a list of alternative holiday gift ideas. Eventually, I turned this list into a website, but apparently I don’t have a website anymore. The list is nothing original – plenty of websites exist that are all advocating for a more reasonable and responsible way to exercise the spirit of giving. Some argue environmentally-friendly giving, some argue socially-responsible gifts, some argue to give services rather than stuff, and others say not to give anything at all

I have been very fortunate to be constantly inspired by ideas and discussions that happen at my dinner table back home. I remember when I was a teenager, my sister, brother and father finally had enough consensus to democratically defeat my mother and my traditional values of having a real Christmas tree, and we have had an environmentally-friendly fake Christmas tree ever since. Over the years of birthday, Christmas, and travelling presents, we have grown to a position where we are allowed to give each other things only if it’s something that really leapt out and struck us as being something the receiver would enjoy, or if it was some sort of service.

An example is that last year for my father’s birthday, we all chipped in and had the piano tuned for him. My father loves to play the piano, and anyone who knew me in Vancouver is familiar with the sound of a piano playing in the background whenever they spoke to me on the phone. Rather than contributing to the pockets of some multi-national corporation who needs our money less than we do, and rather than contributing to the mass amounts of wastes that are produced annually from consumerist goods, we contributed to the local skilled-labour economy and hired a service. [And having the piano tuned also has obvious selfish benefits for the gift-givers too!].

So, next time I feel like it’s Christmas, you’re all getting goats, as long as you don’t mind if I come over to milk it every now and then. Under certain conditions, it can be as good to give as it is to receive, and livestock is certainly a gift that keeps on giving.

Easy isn’t a place on this Earth.

This is something un-intelligent that I wrote in a moment of frustration, which embellishes a little. It's more of a letter to all people who approach me on the street as if I can just hand out visas to whatever country they assume I come from. I have much more interesting things to say on this subject, especially after reading about the recent conference on migration and the Lybian president's comments on migration being a natural right of humans. Once I've settled into a new home, I'll hopefully have the opportunity to write about it. In the meantime...

I come from North America, a continent whose current shape was built on immigration. When my family arrived in America from a refugee camp in Eastern Europe, the “American Dream” of coming to a young country, working hard, and making a good life for one’s self was still viable within a generation.

The world is a very different place now. The middle class has been filled and the only vacancies left are at the foot of the social ladder. People who were doctors and university professors in their home countries come to North America and are the lucky ones if they find work as taxi drivers or janitors. For people who come from situations where their basic security as human beings was being comprised – coming from war-torn countries, desperate poverty, political prisoners – immigration may be a necessary transition for them. But for people who live a secure, safe, and relatively comfortable life in their home countries, who hope to immigrate for an imagined “better” life abroad, I hope to un-veil some of the realities you should expect if you were to go to the North American countries of the United States of America or Canada.

Every country seems to suffer from youth unemployment these days, and North Americans seem to be dealing with this problem by spending their 20s in universities rather than learning a trade and being almost immediately employable. People who are competing for white collar jobs are extremely educated in North America, and you will find that many North Americans who sell shoes and serve food have Bachelor degrees and even Master’s degrees sometimes. Arriving immigrants have to compete for good jobs with people who: (1) are experts at local social and cultural norms; (2) have an average of 2 years more education than their job requires; (3) speak the local language with perfect clarity; and (4) have more connections to the higher rungs of the social ladder. Many immigrants feel they need to lower their salary demands just to compete in the North American job market, adding to the existing financial obstacles that they had not anticipated, but that come with life in highly developed countries.

The cost of living. Highly developed countries are nice places to live because people spend most of their money on them. In Ghana, most people’s income goes towards food. In North America, someone who earns a decent wage of $40 000 per year will pay roughly half of that to taxes. Rent in major cities usually costs another half of your monthly income. In the winter, your heating bill can cost as much as half of your rent. That leaves about $80/week for food, entertainment, clothes, and lifestyle. That’s $11/day. A coffee costs $2, a very cheap lunch is $5, and a Guinness is about $8, not including taxes and tipping your waiter. When you add all the costs of living, at the end of the month you won’t have enough money to access the lifestyle you came to North America for. The lifestyle you seek will still be some distance away.

It’s not an easy life. I have a friend who is a European-Canadian with an English name who has a Master’s degree in the fastest growing field in the UK. He went to London equipped with all of these assets and, after struggling for 8 months, has decided to go back to Canada so that he can enjoy a proper meal and have enough money to have some sort of lifestyle.

The social ladder. A person’s lifestyle largely depends on the context they live in. In peaceful countries like Ghana, where the most basic human needs are generally provided for, the bulk of society has a relatively comfortable lifestyle. The lifestyles of my work colleagues here in Ghana are roughly comparable to the lifestyles of my work colleagues in North America. They live in houses, some of them have cars, they can feed their families and take care of some desperate relatives, but can’t afford too much travel. How we judge ourselves is always relative to where we place this bar of what we consider to be “normal”.

My mother once said that when she was growing up in America in the 1950s, they had nothing compared to what children in America have today. But since everyone was under these same circumstances, they didn’t feel like they had anything less than what was needed, and everyone was happy. A child today with the same standard of living as my mother in the 1950s would be considered deprived and would feel ashamed of their few possessions, being aware of the many possessions their classmates have. The norm of what we “need” is now higher, but we certainly don’t consider ourselves as being any happier. After providing for basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, and security, possessing a higher standard of living has no ceiling – both the developed and the developing world keeps “needing” more things, and I hate to think how much plastic will be wasted just so that children in 20 years can keep pace with their friends.

When immigrants come from a comfortable lifestyle in their home country to a new life in North America, they loose their standing as being in the same financial condition as everyone else. Immigrants often work more hours, do much more labour-intensive work than they are accustomed to, and at the end of the day all their struggles still result in a lower than “normal” standing on the social ladder. Immigrants may need to struggle like this for an entire generation before attaining “normal” standing in their new country. The only respite from this cycle is when they can send their surplus $50 per month (about 500 000 cedis) back home so that somewhere, someone can benefit from their labours. Many Ghanaians who live abroad don’t come back because they can’t afford the plane ticket.

People work hard all over the world. Immigrants who have been very successful in their new countries worked very hard to get there – they were innovative, smart, entrepreneurial types who probably struggled for years before reaching any success. Easy is not a place on this Earth. You can’t get a visa there and making friends with foreigners won’t buy it for you either. Foreigners may seem rich to you while in Ghana, but most of us have a comparable life in our home countries to yours here in Ghana. It’s only when we take our currency across the border into countries with weaker currencies that we can feel big about ourselves.

That’s something that’s very un-fair. Currencies and passports from the “developed” world can get you into most countries in the world while currencies and passports from the “developing” world cannot. When one country’s economy is stronger than another, the stronger economy country does not want everyone to flood into the country and burst their economy, so they limit the access of people from poorer economies to come to their country. People from the world’s strongest economies pose little threat because they are un-likely to want to work in a country with a weaker economy than their home country. We are welcomed with open arms into most countries because we come to spend our money, not to earn money that would otherwise be earned by a local national. But currencies fluctuate, economies grow, and new resources can suddenly become extremely valuable on world markets, changing people’s access to the rest of the world.

You may still want to experience all of this yourself, and maybe your immigrant experience would be different than what I have just described, but I think it’s important to leave with appropriate expectations. Ghana is a peaceful, friendly country, where people enjoy more personal security than many cities in the developed world. A “better life” is not necessarily geographic or across the Atlantic Ocean.

Aspiring to be a Piece of Meat

It’s really sad that the current condition of the world is such that some people have a lot while others have so little. It makes a situation that is uncomfortable for both the haves and the have nots, and the larger the gap, the larger the discomfort. Where people are desperately poor, rich people need to build a wall around their material and human assets, protecting themselves and their families with bodyguards, security systems, or, if you’re in Africa, a 6-foot concrete wall embedded with broken glass perilously sticking out of the top. The more obviously valuable you are (i.e. the more obvious the gap is between you and "them"), the more devices you need to protect yourself.
When traveling, you are constantly being sized up as a potential source of political, economic, social, and/or cultural gain, as well as a source of escaping a current condition for some imagined easy life elsewhere. The list of questions tourists are relentlessly asked represents this: "Where do you come from?", "What do you do?" and "Are you married?" This sizing up exercise is, of course, not restricted to travelers in developing countries – in our home cultures we ask a similar line of questioning and how we introduce people also reflects these values. This is how we construct our social world, how we understand our position in comparison with others, revealing at best potential sources of intriguing conversation, at worst, opportunities to advance one’s own status through a new connection in their network. Eco-tourism is one approach to lessen the negative aspects of the visitor-visited dialectic, claiming to offer a more genuine and beneficial experience to all parties concerned.
I am the second Canadian to be working in my office of 80+ employees, most of whom are men. It has been very easy for me to make friends at the office because the last Canadian made an excellent impression on everyone, and I was almost instantly welcomed into the office family. The half-dozen women in my office live a very different reality than I do though, and my closest friendships have been with some of the men. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union sponsored many Ghanaians to study in Moscow, and I enjoy discussing Soviet Russia, socialism, capitalism, religion, belief systems, culture, and society with these colleagues. After work, I never have any trouble finding someone to join me for a beer so we can continue our intriguing conversations.
After a few weeks of familiarizing themselves with me and the history of each of the five rings I wear on my fingers (ie. learning that none of them is a wedding band), I was suddenly being very actively pursued by some of the men at my office. Everything seemed under control though, as I insisted that I would never be involved with someone I work with. I even explained that, as a woman, it can be difficult to be taken seriously as a professional sometimes, and so we must insist on maintaining professional boundaries and not give any ammunition to those who would suggest that our achievements were due to something other than our own merit.
This week, I made some discoveries about the nature of some of office friendships though:
1. After failing to secure the affection of the first year’s Canadian, the men in my office settled on a queue for who would have first dibs on the second Canadian at the office. This queue was roughly decided on before last year’s Canadian had even left Ghana.
2. The order of the queue exactly conforms to the order of people who have been obviously pursuing me in the last few weeks.
3. Some of the strange middle-of-the-night phone calls I have been receiving were coming from these pursuer’s suspicious wives.
4. All of these efforts were in the pursuit of wanting the freedom to travel.
There’s a lot I could say about this. In fact, there’s a lot I did say about this to my Canadian colleague in Ghana who is doing on a similar assignment as me, though he’s male and is in a different district.
-Do you see what I have to deal with? If it wasn’t difficult enough strategising ways to avoid these discomforts from strangers on the streets here…
-Wow. How does it feel to be such a piece of meat?
-Piece of meat? I was prepared to be a piece of meat! I endured being a young 6 ft blonde living in Italy and Turkey. At least as a piece of meat, you can construct some idea of what’s behind the flesh. Someone could like your style, the confidence in how you present yourself, the sincerity in your eyes. This apparent list of romantic hopefuls was decided on before I even arrived. I don’t even get to be a piece of meat – I’m a piece of paper!
Later in the week my informant asked me how I felt about these four pieces of information I had learned:
-I guess mostly I’m disappointed. There are so many people traveling around the world who want a more genuine experience than the façade we are offered as tourists. We care about people and want to better understand realities of the human condition. So we work hard and come to countries like Ghana to offer our time and services in exchange for a more sincere and authentic experience. But in the end, it’s just another misleading façade that we get to see, except that we were deceived to a deeper, more personal level.
But maybe that’s fair. We have the freedom to see virtually the whole surface of the geographic world. Why should we also consider ourselves to have the right of access to all of its depths too? The freedom to leave comes with a limit to how much you get to see. A Ghanaian passport won’t get you into many countries, and the financial condition of a typical Ghanaian will get you into even fewer, but Ghanaians can have a much deeper experience in their travels in West Africa than that which is afforded to the visible minority foreigner who additionally doesn’t understand the subtle gestures and changes in tone characteristic of West African cultures.
You can see a paper-thin version of the world, a slightly meatier version of the world, or a deep and profound version of a few familiar places. Unfortunately, the choice isn’t’ always yours.

Cultural Lesson #8 – Public Transit

Taking a tro-tro and going to the market are two of the most impossible topics to do justice to in print. If you ever feel yourself approaching a mid-life crisis, or need to snap out of the dullness and monotony that can be office life, just take a tro-tro. You will not only feel alive, but you will also be thankful for every living moment, suddenly find yourself thinking “there must be a God” because you’ve spent the last 3 hours defying death and have arrived to your destination safely. You still run the risk of developing lung cancer from all the fumes you’ve inhaled en route, and I’m unaware of the long-term effects of exposure to goat feces in a closed environment, but you’ll kiss the ground if/once you arrive safely. Despite all of this, sitting as a passenger on a moving vehicle viewing a landscape is probably my favourite activity to do while travelling. Here is my best attempt at capturing the experience in Ghana…

As far as I understand, Ghana does not actually have a publicly-run transportation company, but what I am trying to capture in the title is that I have been using the same cheap transport that locals use. Not the air-conditioned, safe-like, comfortable modes of transport usually associated with foreigners travelling in developing countries. Ghana does have two bus companies with this class of travel available, and if I lived along a route that was served by a safer means of transport, I would definitely use it. Unfortunately, I live in the mountains where only tro-tros seem available.

According to my guidebook, a tro-tro is “pretty much any passenger vehicle that isn’t a bus or a taxi…ranging from crowded minibuses to customised covered trucks with densely packed seating, a pervasive aura of sweat, no view, and not much more chance of finding an escape route should you be involved in an accident.” All the tros I’ve taken here are between 14- and 22-seater vehicles which could be described as military vans, where the only seatbelt present is for the driver, although the coveted front passenger side seat sometimes also has a seatbelt. Generally on the tro you pay for your seat, but leg room and head room are not guaranteed, and you will inevitably need to concede part of your seat space to the two or three people in your row who exceed their own seat’s capacity.

We westerners like to depend on signs and other forms of print rather than on people when we travel. Deal with it – in Africa, you just need to accept that you are always at the mercy of strangers. Once you find the station, everyone will start asking you where you’re going – at first, I walked straight past these people, because years of travelling has taught me that anyone who approaches you in tourist areas like stations are trying to cheat you – in Africa, these people are your best source of the most accurate information. Expect it to take about an hour to find your tro-tro, and then expect another hour or four for your tro to fill up.

As you and the other 21 people sit baking in the oven atmosphere characteristic of an un-moving vehicle sitting in the equatorial sun, every crevasse of the vehicle which could otherwise act as a passage for wind to ventilate the suffocating interior of the tro, is instead occupied by someone trying to sell you things. Since the competition is so fierce, vendors need to be creative with their attention-grabbing tactics. They also need to have eyes on the backs of their heads as hundreds of tros are being shuffled around the station to maximise parking space.

I’ve never seen organised chaos like in a tro-tro station, or any Ghanaian street intersection for that matter. My first time in a busy tro-tro station in Accra seemed like a cartoon version of real life. The nerve of the tro-tro drivers and their skippers – the intimidation tactics and parking manoeuvres used to assert their right to a space in the station, in the intersection, along the bank of the highway – is quite remarkable. Every centimetre of the station/intersection/road not occupied by a vehicle is filled with a 14 year-old carrying products on their head while shouting “aaaa-eeeee-sssss-uuuuu-wwww-aaaa-tttt-a”, “mmm-eeeeeeeeeee-ttttt-ooooo pp-eye-wa”, “beeeeeeeee-sssss-kkk-it-wa” and my favourite, “o-rrrrr-e-n-g-eeeeeee” [ice water, meat pie, biscuit/cookies, and oranges].

It’s a toss-up – is it better to get one of the last seats on the tro, meaning you don’t have to sit uncomfortably in the heat waiting to depart, or whether it’s better to be the first on the tro, affording the opportunity to choose your seat. You often have to choose between time and comfort, though I have had one or two tro-tro skippers ask people to offer the front seat to me because I couldn’t actually fit my legs into the only seat left available in the back. However, I also spent 6 hours on a tro-tro where my knees didn’t fit between the seats, so I had to sit on an angle with a tiny sliver of space for my legs, my luggage on my lap, and a goat under my seat. A few times when my legs began to cramp and I had to bend them under my seat to stretch them, the goat started to pull at my shoes.

Once the entire floor surface area and air space of the tro is finally filled, your driver will begin the journey of ploughing through people and vehicles to exit the station. My tro yesterday from Accra took 15 minutes to get out of the station and another hour to get out of Accra. At every bottle neck, a group of vendors is gathered waiting for their prey to get stuck in the web of traffic. On the road to Kumasi, there are 3 construction zones where only one lane of traffic can pass, and a community of about 100 vendors has formed at each one to sell to vehicles waiting for on-coming traffic to pass through the only available lane. What an entrepreneurial spirit – collectively there must be about 300 people who have set up these temporary communities along the highway construction schedule, who arrive every morning from their communities with their goods to sell. I should also note that along the Kumasi-Koforidua corridor, I saw the remnants of an oil truck that had vered into on-coming traffic and into a house on the other side of the road, and evidence 5 other severe car crashes.

The journey is spent with Ghanaian music blaring from the speakers, interrupted by passengers yelling at the driver for not being more careful, or for going over a pothole too quickly. Most of the main roads are paved, but since traffic is such an issue drivers often take one of the many clay road “short-cuts” which zig zag through quiet communities, trying to catch enough speed to both intimidate locals out of crossing the street and to be air-born over the potholes. When the drivers play lively Ghanaian pop music it can really add to the thrill of the ride. I’ve also been on tros which played calm and peaceful Ghanaian gospel music – it was quite surreal being enveloped by smooth, serene sounds while you're clinging to the dashboard in front of you, trying to prevent yourself from going through the windshield into the people and vehicles flying past you .

But these are also the moments I am most inspired. It’s on the tro that I saw my first real African slums, saw the roaming hills by moonlight, and most of the thoughts I’ve contemplated here first struck me while sitting on a tro-tro, hoping our vehicle doesn’t strike someone else.

Cultural Lesson # 7 – Asking for money

[This particular entry is not very Politically Correct, especially in terms of terminology used here, which is based on my conversations with my Ghanaian colleagues. My objective is to humanise some taboo topics regarding poverty, which might even scratch the tip of the iceburg of international development in general, in an effort to better understand how to cope with poverty, my objective is not to offend everyone]

The most difficult cultural barrier I’ve faced here is how to pay a bill.Two months, and I still don’t understand how to smoothly instigate a social activity, how to understand what you’re expected to give whenever there is food or drink present.

I have described Japan as the anti-America – Japan may be considered a highly westernized capitalist society, but you quickly see the other face of Japan when you work in the school system there. Yes, you can describe Japan in western capitalistic terms, but underneath this façade, Japan is also one of the best living examples of principles of communism and socialism.

When I began getting frustrated by cultural differences here in Ghana, my first instinct was to tap into the knowledge of the international support network of people I’ve met over the last decade of travelling. Collectively we have experience about being a clear visible foreigner, being an invisible foreigner where you’re expected to conform because they think you’re a local, being a woman in a society that has less respect for women, being a man in a society that expects you to always command and take charge, what religious conversations to avoid, etc., etc. But none of us had really lived in a “developing country” though, and I have been over-confident that my international travelling experience would take care of most serious cultural differences here. I was wrong.

When you’re in the “developing world”, as a representative of the “developed world” – whether you be Canadian, Japanese, or Danish – you are different from people in the “developing world”. You may not wish to wear that label, but it will be planted on you by.

When I was doing seminars for Education and Social Change at York University, some of my students started talking about an expensive ring that Poof had bought J.Lo, and what they would do with the money instead of squandering it away on some ring. What would you spend it on? A new pair of Nikes? Highlights? It’s all relative to where you fit on the financial scale. To us, they’re all rich. In their world though, I’m sure Bill Gates would scoff at how cheap D.Piffy was for only spending $5 million on a ring. In fact, 80% of the world is having the same conversation about how we misuse our money right now.

Here, anyone from the developing world is Bill Gates. I’ve met international volunteers who spent every penny they had to join a program to come to Ghana and work in hospitals, and they really need to eat rice and beans to survive here. Even those of us who are paid to be here are under different financial pressures, depending on whether accommodation and flight were included, or whether we have outstanding student debts to pay while we’re here. I was taken for dinner in my third week by someone who was staying at a $200/night hotel. According to the locals, we’re all in the same, uh, yacht.

How to approach spending money here?
On one hand, a little for me goes a long way for whomever I give it to. On the other, everyone is constantly asking me for money – well dressed healthy-looking children, shopkeepers who ask me to give them my change instead of returning it to me, whoever is standing next to me whenever I buy anything, close friends here, bosses, and the rare disabled person who actually depends on begging as their main income. I’ve gone through several phases regarding how I feel about it:

1. It was a shear act of luck that you happened to be born in the developed world, the least you can do is buy this woman twice your size the meat pie she has asked for.
2. I don’t appreciate being targeted as a foreigner, and if I give whenever asked I’m asked, I’m setting an un-fair expectation of the next foreigner they meet, so I will only give things to people who do not ask.
3. Rather than complaining that you’re hungry whenever I’m around, why don’t you do something about your circumstances? I’m only here for six months – who will buy you snacks after I leave?4. Charity breeds dependence. By throwing money at people without a plan for how to spend it in such a way that it will ultimately improve their situation, you are reinforcing their subservience to you.
5. People ask for things because people give them things when they ask, and it’s easier than getting things for themselves. By not contributing to this cycle, you’re encouraging them to take matters in their own hands and demand the means to provide for themselves.
6. I wouldn’t think twice about lending $20 to any friend of mine back home, so why does it feel really really wrong when one of my friends here asks me for 200 000 cedis [about $20]?
7. I won’t buy things for friends that are basic needs, but periodically I’ll buy them a luxury item. That way, you’re not creating a dependence, but every now and then you’re just making their lives a little rich for an hour or so, without making them accustomed to those things.
8. Don’t give anything to anyone when anyone else is around. This is obvious when you’re in a busy station or market, where you could be seriously injured by the mob you would create, but even in someone’s office, make sure no one else is around or your gift will be expected to be shared.
9. I don’t want anyone to help me. I don’t want to owe anything at unexpected times, or be told I’m un-grateful when much of what is given to me here is actually useless to me.
10. I will always share things that I already have. I would much rather be left hungry because someone asked me to share my lunch with them than to refuse someone just because they waited until I had already returned from buying my one-person lunch and don’t have enough food for two.
11. The truth is, people will get what they can. Don't let them hide behind your insistence on being polite. People who cheat you are not your friend -- your taxi driver can't smile and ask your name or learn what country your from, then say you're the one who's unfriendly, when he's the one who insisted on cheating you by 4 times the actual cost.
12. Relax. This is fun. Beer costs 1/5 what it does in Canada, so you can treat 3 people and still get a discount.
It’s much more complicated than it sounds, because it’s not the people or the occasions that you expect to be asked for money. Also, it’s not a simple matter of learning what the cultural rule governing paying for things is, because there is no developed-developing cultural rule, and in the developing world you’re not allowed to play by the same rules as everyone else.

There are also gender issues, because it’s usually women depending on the charity of men for things. Sometimes it bothers me that they accept that condition. Sometimes I’m ashamed to be so judgemental about it. Am I a woman first? Or a rich foreigner first? Some men consider me the former, some the latter, meanwhile I’m left trying to assess what to do when the bill comes, trying not to offend anyone.
It became very clear to me when I spent a weekend on the East Coast with some foreigners and a Ghanaian Rasta man. He had joined us without an invitation [an invitation always means the inviter will pay for everything], but we started to pay for everything anyways because it’s understood that we have more money than him. Very early in the trip though, he started buying us things – a round of water, one of the shorter trotro rides, a pineapple – and it was so refreshing. In the end, he cost us a lot more than what we cost him, but that is completely outside of the point. By contributing to the pot, he was asserting himself as an equal member of our team. We were not separate from him, he was not depending on us, we were all on a trip together. I think I expected Africa’s colonial history to demand that from me while I’m here – not to want to depend on me or put me on a pedestal only because I’m a foreigner.

Yesterday, I walked into an office of women to throw something in the rubbish bin. Someone in the room recognised that among the many things I was carrying, one happened to be a half eaten loaf of bread, and it immediately became a major issue about what was expected of me to share with these women. Half eaten bread, with nothing to put onto it, to be split among five of us? You are not pigeons! I don’t understand.

In my first month here, after not seeing any foreigners for 3 weeks, I spoke with a 3-member team from the Japan International Cooperation Agency as if I had gone to elementary school with them. Over lunch they asked me what strategies I had for coping with the incessant “Obruni!” calls that every person walking by feels the need to bark at foreigners as they pass, they asked me if I was still on bottled water, or if I had moved to sachets yet. I was at ease throughout the meal because I understood the expectation of me when the bill came. You would never know that we came from two starkly different parts of the world because we both came from a common financial expectation found in the developed world.

There are so many different ways to draw lines between cultures. I’ve seen East-West, capitalist-socialist, Muslim-Christian, vegetarian-omnivore, and collective-individual cultural divides, but the developed-developing/North-South cultural divide seems like an ocean to me sometimes.

The Bigger Picture

My sister and brother in law have a parrot. When I’m in Vancouver visiting, I often baby-sit their parrot. The parrot wakes, squawks until someone lets him out of his cage, squawks to be fed, cleans his feathers, sharpens his beak, and then squawks to be put to bed. By my second day babysitting the parrot, I start to think about what kind of a life a caged animal has, and by the third day…well…it doesn’t take much imagination to draw parallels with one’s own life.

Here in Ghana, much of the work conducted at my office involves socializing, interrupted by mundane work tasks. Even in my department, one of the most important and active departments in the Municipality, I often feel like I’m meant to fit a circle into a square, then into a triangle, then into a rectangle, only to find out all three files were replaced by an older version of the file by one of my work colleagues who’s still learning how to use flash drives. One hour meetings are spent waiting for 2 hours for people to come, another hour re-capping what was missed by participants who were 3 hours late, and most of the presentation is spent reading out loud what’s already been provided for us in written form, which we’ve already read while waiting for participants to arrive. Despite constant emphasis on presenter’s need to summarise their points, the narrative word-for-word reading of the document being presented continues.

When I ask what people do on weekends, it usually involves going to a funeral on Saturdays and church on Sundays, preferring to socialize en masse instead of the dinner party or going out for beer style of socializing I’m accustomed to in Canada. Ghanaians don’t really have vacation time, so they also don’t spend much time traveling. In fact, with the exception of Accra, there really isn’t anywhere to spend your money – there’s no infrastructure for Western conceptions of leisure, and Ghanaian leisure costs only membership into their social units.

My first reaction to all this was to constantly emphasize the end goal – what is the objective of what you’re doing, and is your method of achieving that objective actually effective? Common examples are presentations that use too many slides or speeches that lack a hierarchy of information so that an audience can extract the message from the words. A specific example was the Public Hearing I attended last week, where opening speeches and Department Head presentations were so long that by the time the public had the opportunity for discussion, they were worn out. That meeting lasted 7 hours in a room without air conditioning – you can hardly blame the public for their lack of enthusiasm when their time to speak had come.

My leisure time follows a plan I drew with some fellow sojourners here, a plan whose objective is to allow us to see as much of Ghana as possible on weekends and National Holidays while we’re here. I have only stayed at home three weekends since I’ve been here, and that was only because I was sick with “malaria”.

I find it difficult to complete tasks which I can’t determine the larger reason for, and have been much happier at work and in my leisure time here since drawing a new work plan and settling on a rough travel schedule.

This is my bigger picture.

Since a great deal of my time at work is spent socializing, I spend a lot of time talking with Ghanaians. I have mostly found that there are two main themes of conversation: gossiping and flirting; and society and beliefs. Contrary to what you’d expect though, the gossiping and flirting seems largely instigated by the married men in my office.

The society and beliefs conversations are usually instigated by someone discovering that I’m not Christian or Muslim.

-I’m agnostic. It means I sit on the beliefs fence, not even committing to an answer regarding if God does or does not exist.
-But what do you believe then?

But what do you believe then? Are people allowed to just ask you that? How are you…fine…what’s the purpose of you being on this Earth? These are questions I have spent the last decade trying to escape/answer by fleeing to different parts of the world. Beliefs are not a place on this planet.

The Personnel Officer has particularly taken an interest in discussing this topic with me.

-Obaa Ya, how do you manage to wake up everyday and carry about your life if you don’t have beliefs about what happens to you when you die?
-But what difference does it make – I’ll be dead. I demand satisfaction and justice in life rather than trusting it in someone else’s hands at death.
-Do you see justice occurring in life?
-No, but that doesn’t mean we should be complaisant to injustice. Powerful people are benefiting from your acceptance that their wrongs will be righted after they die. Meanwhile, people continue to suffer while living. No, you’re absolutely correct that we can’t expect justice in our lifetime, but we can still demand improvements for the living.

Our conversation continued along the usual trajectory of evolution vs. creationism. By the time it was 5 o’clock and time to go home, he brilliantly summarized his view as follows:

-Obaa Ya, you are clearly knowledgeable about the physical world, and I appreciate your sharing with me what you know about it, but you fail to recognize that your arguments are limited to the physical world. I’m talking about something outside of the physical world. You’re assuming explanations from the physical world can be applied to the non-physical world.
-But then you’re assuming that there is a non-physical world.
-Of course there’s a non-physical world. Otherwise, what is there to think about?
-Well, I like thinking about the physical world. Maybe that’s why I travel so much. Maybe when I’m satisfied with what I know about the physical world, I’ll start considering this spiritual one you like so much.

And there it was – I assumed Ghanaians lead mundane lives because I don’t see them constructing a bigger picture for their lives in the physical worlds. But, what I entirely failed to appreciate was that Ghanaians think I lead a mundane life because I haven’t constructed a plan for my life in the spiritual world.

Cultural Lesson #6: Bucket Culture Etiquette

Everyone knows that the Japanese are freaky about shoes. People go to Japan expecting this, and Japanese people expect foreigners to fumble on proper shoe etiquette for the first month or so. Eventually though, foreigners learn to understand the logic that guides shoe etiquette, even becoming disgusted by how we blend the shoe-wearing, indoor-slipper-wearing, bathroom-slipper-wearing, and only-bare-feet-or-socks worlds back home.

Nobody told me about what I can only describe as “Bucket Culture” though, and no one told my housemate to expect me, and the whole foreign world that I seem to represent to her, to fumble on proper bucket etiquette during my first few weeks here.

My first introduction to bucket culture was in Thailand. Toilets there lack flushing mechanisms, and toilet patrons are instead expected to use a small bucket to pour water from a larger bucket filled with water into the toilet until the toilet bowl seems adequately flushed for the next patron.

In Ghana, big-bucket-small-buckets are found more commonly next to the sink in WCs fancy enough to have sinks, for times when the water isn’t running and people want to rinse their hands. At our house, the water usually runs for about one hour every week, usually in the middle of the night on Sunday. At the first sound of running water, I leap out of bed and proceed to fill our 3 huge 11L buckets, our 5 medium-sized buckets, our 20 water bottles, and 2 small buckets with water before the tap stops running. This is the one reality that Canadians seem unable to grasp – I don’t have running water. Not just that I can’t drink or cook with tap water, but that there isn’t any tap water. Not in the toilet, in the kitchen, in the shower, nor in the bathhouse sink.

I guess it would be considered as insulting my intelligence, like the equivalent of teaching a newcomer to Canada how to take a shower, but I actually wish someone would have taught me strategies of how to master taking a shower with a bucket. There are two dilemmas which your bucket shower technique must face: how to ensure the most surface area is covered by the water coming from your bucket; and, how to use as little water as possible, because you never really know when the taps will next run. Taking the lead from washing scenes in period films I’ve spent half my life watching, I thought to myself “How would Jane Austen do it?”

Just when I was finally gaining confidence in how to effectively use my buckets, my housemate catches me pouring water from one of the huge buckets into one of the medium-sized buckets.

-No! No! You’re not allowed.
-Snuh?
-This bucket is for kitchen.
-But the big bucket in the shower is empty and I need to do my laundry.
-This bucket’s not used in shower. You can’t use kitchen bucket in shower.
-Why?
-Because it’s the shower, and this is the kitchen bucket.
-But the shower and the toilet are separate rooms. The shower represents the clean world. It’s not like I’m cooking in the toilet.
-No. You must use this tiny bucket to fill this medium bucket, and then you must take this medium bucket to the kitchen.
-But I need to wash my clothes.
-NO KITCHEN BUCKET IN THE SHOWER.

I am considered to be a very clean person. Exceptionally clean people describe me as being quite clean, clean people describe me as being very clean, and messy people describe me as being borderline compulsive obsessively clean. Yet suddenly, I am the most hideously disgusting creature my housemate has ever seen.

-No! No! You’re not allowed.
-Snuh?
-You must not paste in the kitchen.
-I’m not brushing my teeth in the kitchen. I just brushed my teeth in the bathhouse sink. I’m only washing my cup in the kitchen.
-Oh. Sorry. Your people and African people do things very differently.
-Well, no. I do things differently than you because I haven’t been taught how to do things under these conditions. Teach me how ‘your people’ do things, and I can learn.

I proceed to explain that everything always works in my world, that a whole generation of Canadians is clueless as to how to adapt to changes such as water and power outages, that no one under the age of 50 knows how to fix anything, and that people are not born with an ability to know the best techniques for washing a sink full of dishes using only a bucket and half a cup of water. All water is the same in my world – the water in your toilet, the water in your kitchen, the water in the shower. Technically, you could drink the water in your toilet basin, before it reaches the bowl, and that in Japan the water runs through a miniature tap on top of the toilet before it runs into the toilet bowl, so that you can wash your hands in the clean water before it enters the dirty world of the toilet bowl, thus conserving water.

I should have stopped before suggesting “my people” drink toilet water. I think I lost my bucket-etiquette-aficionado-housemate forever at that suggestion.

So I must continue to develop my own bucket strategies, written-off as a student of bucket culture by my would-be instructor. As the world’s water resources dry up, bucket culture might eventually prove to be a more essential skill than shoe etiquette.

Cultural Lesson #5: Going to the Hospital

It’s almost poetic – shortly after writing “feeding oneself”, my apparent over-confidence regarding food in Ghana has bitten back. After suffering from what would otherwise seem to be really bad heartburn plus the flu, I decided to stop being a tough girl and took my guidebook’s health advice regarding symptoms of malaria. Rest assured, I don’t have malaria.

Malaria is the diagnosis of choice for foreigners in Africa.
Fever? Malaria.
Aching back? Malaria.
Heartburn? Must be malaria.

The hospital was much more beautiful than I expected – a big open courtyard filled with plants, lizards, and paths linking together the different wings. Much like in Japan, many of the “indoor” spaces like hallways are actually covered outdoor spaces. It breathes life into what would be an unimaginative, static, air-conditioned space in North America.

-So what’s the problem?
-Something I ingested is upsetting my stomach, and this afternoon I had a fever, headache, and dizziness, so I think it’s upgraded to an infection.
-Malaria.
-No, I really think it’s my stomach. I started feeling this way after I accidentally used some tap water in something I ate.
-Malaria has many symptoms.
-I haven’t had a single mosquito bite, but I have drunk tap water and my stomach has been sore ever since. I don’t have malaria.
-Would you like to be tested for malaria? Or should we just go straight to treating you for it?

Two hours later, the malaria test comes back negative.

-Must be typhoid.
-No, I was inoculated for typhoid…
-Must be….
-And inoculated for yellow fever. Really. I get sick from food in Canada too. I like Ghanaian food, I promise. I don’t have malaria. There’s something in my stomach that’s…
-Please take this to the lab.

One hour later, the typhoid and yellow fever tests come back negative.

-Obaa yaa, take these tablets to relax your stomach, and come back Tuesday if you’re not feeling well.

Two days of being unable to eat and one feverish night later, I decide it’s time to go back to the hospital after my stomach swells the size of a bowling ball after taking some juice.

-Hi, I was here on Sunday, and…
-Obaa yaa! How’s the malaria?
[Shake hands, pull, and snap]
-I don’t have malaria, but I was told to come back Tuesday if I wasn’t well. It’s Tuesday. I’m not well.
-Your doctor has gone home.
-Is there another doctor available?
[Yells something I can’t understand in Twi across the hospital to another wing.]
-No, everyone’s gone home. Why didn’t you come this morning?
-I’m sorry. Clearly my stomach hasn’t adjusted to the time change yet. I’ll make sure I get sick earlier in the day tomorrow.
-Let me get directions to your doctor’s house.
-Please no, I wouldn’t want to bother him. I guess 2:00 pm is rather late in the work day to be coming to the hospital. Why don’t I just come back tomorrow at 9:00am?
-Please sit and wait.

Despite my protestations, they phone another doctor to come in and see to me. He looks at Sunday’s negative test results, looks at my swollen stomach, listens to my long history of getting sick from food all over the world, and provides his expert opinion on my medical woes:

-Malaria.
-Really sir. I don’t have malaria. I just think my stomach is disagreeing with something I ate.
-Malaria has many symptoms.

I tire of arguing with him and eventually agree to be treated for malaria, mostly so that I can go home and lay down.

-You need to trust your doctor. Your doctor knows more than you.
-Yes, of course sir.

The malaria treatment involves taking medication also used to treat stomach infections – or at least the “malaria treatment” I was given involves taking medication used to treat stomach infections. My insurance company rings me the next morning from Philadelphia to check up on me.

-Hi Bonnie. Just wondering what dsfjdlfadlf is?
-That’s the medication we were going to recommend your doctor prescribe to treat your stomach infection.

In the end, my insurance company and I had a good chuckle, our phone bill well exceeded my hospital bill, my doctor’s pride wasn’t injured, and the only mosquito bite I’ve sustained since coming here occurred while waiting in the outdoor waiting area at the hospital for my malaria test results on Sunday.

At least I didn’t have malaria.

Cultural Lesson #4: Feeding Oneself

Questions about Ghanaian food have been among the most frequently asked of me, but I’ve been hesitant to write about how I’m meeting this basic human need because I feel like I should know more before I write anything authoritative on the subject. But here I go…

As far as I understand, Ghanaian food is essentially a mushy thing, in a stew, eaten with one hand which you cup together like a spoon. Ghanaians eat meat boiled into a soup, usually chicken or fish, though I’ve also had beef feet and goat. The soup is often red and really spicy, and then a dough ball of either fufu, banku, rice balls, or kinkey is put in the soup. I only recently began to be able to tell the difference between these four – they are made of different combinations of corn, cassava, and rice flour which are pounded together until they look like goo.

I find the portions in Ghana to be massive, and it’s been embarrassing filling the stereotype that skinny people don’t eat enough. I’m finally able to go out with my Ghanaian friends without embarrassing them now, but for my first two weeks, I literally could only finish a third of my plate. When I cooked with my roommate once, she said “That’s too small even for Ghanaian baby”.

Cooking at home, one can really appreciate how Ghanaians manage to consume such large portions – cooking is some serious exercise in this country.

My roommate always starts cooking by pulling a stool into the middle of the kitchen and peeling vegetables onto the concrete floor. The first time I caught her doing this I immediately realised why there is a complete lack of counter space in our kitchen. Also, unlike my love of cutting things into tiny bits with a variety of different knives, my roommate seems to hack away at her food at an appropriate rate considering the size of our only knife.

She periodically stands up, hollers something through the window, sits down, and moments later a child appears in our house with a bag of something for her.

“OH” [strong Ghanaian women seem to belt an impressive “OH” at least every few minutes]
“So…you can just call young children to go fetch you things?”
“OH!”
“Do you…pay them or something?”
“NO-OH!”
“And they’ll just…do that for you?”
“OH!”

She stands up and hollers something else through the window. I hear an “OH” from another woman outside, and three children enter the house with a huge pounding bowl and a 6 ft pounding stick.

I, of course, get no explanation.

Three Ghanaian minutes later our neighbour enters, and the ladies begin pounding mashed yams into goo. I am amazed at how easily these women can work together – one stands and pounds the yams with the heavy pounding stick while the other slips the ball of yams underneath the pounder, ensuring there is always yam under the surface of the stick.

It’s my go – I can barely bring myself to pound at the yams, because all I see are my roommate’s fingers slipping just under the head of the pounder. They let me pose for a picture, and then they resume doing it properly without my interference.

“So…you can just ask your neighbour to come help you prepare your food?”
“Why must you ask so many questions? Wouldn’t you help your neighbour in Canada?”
“But my neighbour would never ask! We must always say yes, and so we have to be careful about asking.”

[I’m always careful to explain myself in an effort to encourage people to explain things to me]

When all is done, my portion is about 1/3 the size of hers, and the nightwatchman’s portion is about twice the size of mine. She’s so embarrassed about offering such a tiny portion to him that I offer to give it to him on her behalf. I figure he’ll assume that I don’t know any better because skinny people don’t eat enough.

Cultural Lesson #3: Seasons [or lack thereof]

I’ve heard all sorts of theories to explain various cultural work ethics – back in my archaeology days, it was minimal energy output for maximum energy input, I’ve heard theories about how the heat slows people down, religious theories such as the protestant work ethic, and even a theory that simply states “the closer you get to the Mediterranean, the less people obey traffic laws”. What I’m proposing though [and I’m sure it’s too obvious for me to be the first to think of it] is the seasonal theory of variations in work cultures.

Ghana has no real seasons, just short bursts of downpour during the “rainy season”, but nothing that really affects anyone’s daily behaviours. The sun always sets around 6pm, all year round, and there’s always something to eat in season.

In the west, especially in Canada, we have an incredible range of temperatures and weather across the year, instilling a sense of urgency in our culture. Having grown up in Vancouver, I certainly try to optimise every sunny hour that’s made available to me, and considering the 4pm sunsets in the winter, you certainly won’t catch me indoors during daylight hours.

Our culture is clearly constructed around time management, where time is understood as being linear – it can be spent, but never acquired. In Africa, time is considered circular, almost endless and always available.

What’s interesting though is that Africans have some of the shortest life expectancies in the world. Life expectancy in Ghana is 47 years, hence their inability to understand why I haven’t gotten myself married yet [though considering how accepted cheating on one’s spouse is in Ghana, marriage doesn't seem to have quite the same weight as it does elsewhere. I told some Ghanaian women that in Canada, if your husband cheats on you, you get everythingin the divorce settlement -- they loved that.].

Japan, on the other hand, has the longest life expectancy, and yet the Japanese might just have the most heightened sense of urgency of anyone on the planet. Japan and Toronto are two of the most punctual places I’ve ever lived, and they happen to be the two most extreme climates I’ve experienced. [Another very interesting thing about Japan is that they also have the highest suicide rate in the world – connection between long life and suicide?]

Today, for example, is Friday. Due to rotating power outages, our office doesn’t have power every Friday from 6am to 6pm [yes, I’ve tried mentioning to have the central business district trade with another neighbourhood to be without power on Sundays from 6am-6pm when everything’s closed anyways, but people just laughed at me for that crazy suggestion]. In North America, when the tools to do your job are stripped from you, you would hardly be expected to waste your time coming to the office. In Ghana though, one of my friends at work was actually reprimanded for being one hour late last Friday, despite the fact that she is entirely unable to do her job without electricity. Ghanaians seem to distinguish between “working” – mostly composed of socialising - and completing “work tasks” -- a small proportion of "work".

It’s an entirely different way to construct one’s world, and it can be tricky trying to explain to my work colleagues why I get frustrated when at 4:30pm they give me a 3 hour “urgent” task to do, meanwhile I was at work at 8:00am waiting for 2 hours for someone to come to the office.
Luckily for me though, an unscheduled power outage occurred at 5:oopm that day, and I got to go home on time afterall. They may expect a circular understanding of time from my linear self, but I can always count on a power outage to bail me out, no matter what the season.

Cultural Lesson #2: The Benefits of Homesickness

Not that I even have a "home" to begin with, but fine. I’ll admit it. If you couldn’t tell from the amount of time I spend writing, I will spell it out for you: I AM HOMESICK.

I had no problem surviving the lonely birthday, I’ve never complained about the complete lack of water, toilets, lack of lighting in both my bedroom and the living room when I don’t turn on the light before 6pm [tonight I turned on both lights at 6:10pm after getting home from playing football with the neighbourhood kids, and neither light is working, so I only have the glow of my laptop for the rest of the evening, unless I want to hang out on the concrete floor of my kitchen], plus the weekly scheduled power outages.

But what I didn’t survive is opening my iTunes for the first time since I arrived. Specifically “Your ex-lover is dead” by the Stars.

Should I torture myself and listen to Buena Vista Social Club too?

I thought I was too old for homesickness. When I was 21 and moved to Japan for the first of three times, homesickness almost killed me. But then I learned to treat it like an emotional experiment. I started tracking my bouts of homesickness and realised that they generally followed a four week cycle – the cycle started the day I realised I hadn’t even thought about home in a long time. The next day I would wake up almost de-capacitated from homesickness, barely able to drag myself out of bed or deviate from conversing about the mountains, the ocean, and what northwest coast rainforests look like.

When I next settled down after leaving Japan, I was in Montreal and had mostly gotten over homesickness, despite Montreal still being 5000 km from where I grew up, and unfamiliar in terms of language and culture [I spoke French when I moved to Montreal – I still had to learn Quebecois]. I had few friends to distract me from myself, I was experiencing the effects of seasonal depression for the first time, and I was even quite lost about what exactly I was doing in Montreal. I soon realised that the same cycles of homesickness I had had in Japan were being manifest as even less desirable emotions in Montreal, and I had a minor epiphany:

When you’re away from home and homesick, everything that’s bad is experienced as homesickness. When you’re settled in a normal life, everything that’s bad is experienced as terrifying things such as…oh, ho hum….grappling with your own meaninglessness in the world….loneliness…..boredom from the monotony of normalcy.

It was around this same time that I developed a philosophy that I have chosen to live by for six years now, and counting:

Life’s a distraction. Go get distracted.

[Life’s a distraction? From what you ask? Insert issue here. I invite questions/challenges on this one…it’s more simple/complex than it sounds]

Today, my life’s a distraction from homesickness.

Two Faces of Accra – fun in the sun, pollution and poverty

Pictures from this trip are at: www.photobox.co.uk/lgudaiti@alumni.sfu.ca
I have fun and entertaining material for sixteen [and counting] "cultural lessons" [including one specifically inspired by my trip to Accra: Cultural Lesson #16 – experiencing intercity public transit, Ghanaian style], which I am in the process of slowly fleshing out into words, but I'm going to take a minor detour and talk about my weekend in Accra for a moment while it's still fresh in my mind.

I reunited with three fabulous ladies I met at an intercultural workshop in Toronto, just a week before I came to Ghana. We enjoyed a brilliant weekend of pristine beaches, some of the warmest hospitality I've experienced over the course of my extensive travels, and some great laughs over beer. However, we were also exposed to some harsh realities of poverty and the more disturbing effects of urbanisation which need to be reflected upon as we thrust ourselves into the 21st century and begin to witness what our new globalised world is going to look like.

Ghanaians are some of the friendliest and most welcoming of people, who tolerate religious differences and co-exist peacefully across tribal, religious, and linguistic lines. Ghana is a constitutional democracy which enjoys a relatively free press. Ghana is also doing much better economically than most of its neighbours. The four year development plan I am working on at the municipal scale is part of a national effort to elevate Ghana's economy to being one of "middle income" status among the world's national economies in an effort to officially climb the ladder of development [as defined by Ghanaian authorities’ interpretation of the standards set by the Millennium Development Goals] rather than continue to be compared with the world’s most desperately poor economies.

Like in most countries, young people in Ghana are moving out of the countryside and into the cities, uninterested in the agricultural livelihoods of their parents. On a national scale, this contributes to food security issues, unemployment, HIV/AIDS rates, drug abuse, and other consequences of sudden changes in population movements that the socio-economic infrastructure cannot keep pace with.

But what does this actually look like? How does it smell? How does it sound? How is this actually experienced in the lifestyles of people?

People don't often see photographs of African cities, and I think I understand why. Accra seems to me like a village sprawled across a huge landscape of 3 million people. But it never feels like you've arrived. You see a tall concrete wall to your left, a dirt path to your right, and signs indicating that you're in the centre of the city. In the less prosperous neighbourhoods, you see dilapidated roads with paved open-air ditches [sewers?] separating the road from a row of 2 metre wide by two metre high vending structures made out of aluminium siding. In the more entertainment-oriented neighbourhoods, there are more permanent structures with two levels set back from the road, often with terrasses carefully fenced from the traffic, with sidewalks lined during the day with tables selling mobile phone units, roasted plantains, or other edibles. Between these neighbourhoods are the major roads that connect the city, and there's no chance of getting anywhere without a vehicle.

In Accra, I spent about 3-4 hours a day sitting in traffic. It's very difficult to take photographs in Ghana, and the only instances I took out my camera were when I could subtly sneak it through the window of my taxi. Not only are Ghanaians very apprehensive about having their photograph taken, once you pull out your camera it puts you in an awkward you-are-my-subject role, and I haven't felt comfortable taking photos much here. In one occasion, I narrowly escaped a potentially violent encounter with a Ghanaian who opposed my taking a photograph of someone else. A man had waved at me, I had asked if it was alright that I take his picture – an excellent representation of the tire district of Accra, he was one among a hundred men covered in black exhaust with stacks of tires waiting to be sold behind him – and he seemed pleased that I was interested in capturing this moment. As I pulled out my camera, a neighbouring man began sharply screaming "stop that!", and even got up and started running towards me making violent gestures at me, at which point the light conveniently turned green and my taxi took off down the road. For the next 15 minutes, neighbouring vehicles were asking my taxi driver what had happened, because they had seen how violently the man reacted towards me.

What I was unable to photograph from my taxis were dried up river beds, flowing only of garbage and sewage, lined with shacks where the shore line once stood. Wide 10 lane major thorough ways, with concrete dividers to separate directions of traffic, decorated with barbed wire to discourage jay-walkers. The five lanes each direction were actually occupied by 7 or 8 columns of traffic, so tight that I saw two fender benders [and one fist fight to decide which driver was at fault for one of the traffic accidents]. On the edge of the five lanes of traffic stood stalls selling products that were tinted black from exhaust fumes, and overhead were pedestrian overpasses so over-crowded that people looked as though they were being crushed while waiting to exit the overpass. There were people in the process of urinating everywhere -- in the ditches along the road, along fences, and even in the dried up river beds now filled with rubbish. At least every minute in the taxi -- whether I was along a major road or in the middle of a posh neighbourhood -- I saw someone whipping it out to take a leak. The walls defending the more official buildings in town often had spray painted writing on them which read "Do Not Urinate Here". Most of the schools in my municipality don’t have toilets, and I haven’t been able to ask my colleagues what happens when nature calls during class.

There are fun parts about the traffic too though. A great entrepreneurial infrastructure has been set up such that you can buy almost everything you need from the comfort of your taxi on your way home from work. At particularly busy intersections, it gets very exciting approaching the red light as hordes of vendors prepare to pounce. Queued up along one foot wide concrete dividers, hundreds of vendors with baskets of products on their heads are almost spilling into busy traffic, waiting for the light to turn red.

From inside the taxi, you hear the FM radio blaring talk radio, the sounds of horns honking everywhere, the wind blowing into your face from the window, cooling your skin from your last 10 minute wait at a major intersection. And then as the car slows down, the sound of the wind in your ears quiets, the honking horns begin to cease, and you are giddily anticipating the sounds of 100 people all demanding your attention at once.

I even saw a book on how to learn Twi for English speakers being sold at one of these intersections. I've been looking for one of these books all over the Eastern Region where I live, and yet some 12 year old boy offered to sell me one without even needing to step out of my car at Nkrumah Circle.

Accra seems to be full of extremes, something I am generally fond of in urban centres. I tend to fall in love with cities that enjoy a heightened sense of excitement, usually as a consequence of some conflict in the city -- Montreal, where francophone and anglophone Canadian culture coalesce to form a rocking social scene; Hong Kong, where capitalism meets communism and space is vertically-derived, rather than the usual horizontally-derived; Istanbul, where the east meets the west. Accra is alive with all the excitement of West African cities, yet this excitement exists spread across a seemingly village landscape, with rivers that have pre-maturely exceeded their best-before dates, yet the beaches are pristine and beautiful [and privatised].

How are cities preparing to meet these demands? Why are people fleeing the countryside? How are we planning on feeding ourselves when no one wants to tend the crops? How can cities in the developing world possibly be re-oriented to be more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly? How come music videos are essentially the same all over the world?

Cultural Lesson # 1: Work Culture

I’ve spent some time thinking about how I could possibly explain the African work culture in a meaningful way that could actually result in some sort of understanding rather than a dismissive attitude that Africans are “lazy”. I don’t quite understand it myself, I just feel like it’s not entirely bad, and that we could actually learn something that might enlighten how we view work in our various work cultures. In less than two weeks, my last two years of stress have been erased, and I am remembering what it’s like to be laid back productive, rather than stress-case productive.
My work colleagues tell me Ghana is 150 years "behind" Canada. I disagree. I think somewhere between desperate poverty and desperately trying to compete for excessive riches well beyond what is necessary so that you don't "fall behind", there is some sort of happy median. Somewhere between having a 47 year life expectancy versus the breakdown of collective responsibility and community, there must be something we can all learn from eachother.
I’m going to describe four days of my work here.

Friday. I am told that we will be working at one of my colleague’s houses because it’s our office’s neighbourhood’s turn to be without power for the day, and so we’ll go to a house in a neighbourhood with electricity so that we can work on our computers. I am told to wait at my house for the car to pick me at 9. At 9.30, they phone and say they’ll be another hour. At 11.30, I phone them and say I’m going to the internet café and to phone my mobile when they’re ready. At 12.30, in the middle of uploading something important, they ring me and say they’re ready for me, so I tell them to go take lunch and pick me after. I go home, pick up some Guinness en route, and at 14.45, they phone me and to say we won’t be working today because our colleague, whose house we were going to work at, wants to work on his car.

Sunday. At 7.oo, my phone rings but I ignore it, anticipating that it’s a church invite. At 8.oo, it rings again, so I answer. After asking me if I had any plans, my work colleague tells me he will be going to the office. I, of course, offer to join him, and we spend Sunday at the office productively working on the 4-year Development Plan.

Monday. Work starts at 8.oo. I live with a work colleague who has a car, but I take a taxi in the morning because at 8.oo, I haven’t even seen her yet.

I get to the office at 8.05, and I’m one of only two people on my floor. One of my colleagues arrives at 8.25, and by 9 there are four people in our office all talking at each other at the same time. He says one sentence to one of them, then turns to me and dictates something I should add to the report, and then offers a joke to another, and then in all seriousness officially greets the Assembly woman who has joined us – basically, he’s dealing with all five of us at the same time, taking turns ignoring us, then addressing us, dealing us his deck of cards. This is how I find most important people here deal with business, an intriguing variation from North America’s linear time allocation system.

At 9.30, my other colleague walks in and says to pack everything, we’re working at his house because there are too many distractions at work. Since we’ll be working on two different reports, I should bring my laptop.

It takes us two hours to get to his house, mostly because we keep running into people and socialising with them – something that’s considered more important to a work environment than accomplishing work tasks. When we get to his house:

-Obaa yaa, have you taken breakfast?
-Yes I have, but if you’re having tea and bread, I’d be happy to join you.
-Have you had Guinness and bread?
-Tea will be fine thank you.

After he has taken an hour to go buy bread and prepare everything, we eat. When we finish, I get back to working with my other colleague and ask if he would like me to switch to using my laptop to free up his computer.

-Not now. I’m tired from eating.

And he proceeds to take a nap on his couch next to the table we are working at.

While my other colleague and I are working on the development plan, his phone is ringing literally every 10 minutes. He generally talks for about one minute, and then returns to work with me. At one point, he answers his phone and then gets up to talk in another room. As I’m waiting for him to return, I see him pull out of the driveway and take off, without saying anything to me.

He returns 1 hour later.

My description of this day continues much like this, but I think I’ll stop here. We decide that the next day, since one of my colleagues has to go to Accra to buy a car, two of us will work at the house again. I should go to the office and get the soft copy of the budget so that I can input it into the action plan, and then come to the house. As the car is pulling away I ask:

-What time should the driver come pick me then?
-Come at 8.oo
-If I come at 8.oo, you’ll still be sleeping!
-Uhh…8.30.

Tuesday. I’m at my house waiting for the driver. It’s 8.30. I start doing some sudoku puzzles from my calendar. At 9.45, my colleague who’s in Accra phones me:

-Obaya, you won’t be working at the house today. Our colleague is going to be at the Water and Sanitation Dept all day. The driver is coming to pick you, and you must go to Water and Sanitation to get the document for inputting
-What time is the driver coming?
-He’s on his way

Since the driver is already on his way, I figure there’s no use reminding my colleague that there’s a soft copy of the document at the office and that I’ll be picking it from the Budget department anyways.

We pick up the document from Water and Sanitation.
Chat, greeting, welcome, fine thank you.

I get to the office at 11.45. Before I’ve even had time to turn on the computer, someone comes in and asks me if I’ve taken lunch.

On turning 27.

13 September 2006
Rather anti-climactic really.I’m sitting here, Kenny G does “What a Wonderful World” playing in the background, remembering what I thought 27 would be.
When I was 15 years old, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. He was 27. I realised then that all the greats seemed to have not made it to their 28th – Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and now my dear Kurt! Clearly, life peaks at 27. In the words of Neil Young “it’s better to burn out, then to fade away.”
I’ve since decided that, at least in my case, life only gets better. I love knowing myself one more year, I love every year of experiences, every year of discoveries, and every year of learning something I didn’t think before.
Sitting alone in the restaurant of the hotel, where I presume I am the only guest, in a town where I am essentially a zoo animal, I certainly hope my life hasn’t peaked on this day.
If anything, I feel much younger than I did last year on my birthday. Here in Koforidua, I am entirely dependent on other people. I literally can’t eat, pee, drink water, go home after work, get to work in the morning, or do anything except sit in my room alone writing blog entries which I will still need someone’s assistance in order to find an internet café to post them onto my blog.
I have been super laid back about it all. It’s no secret that I am definitely someone who enjoys my independence, especially in terms of being given the flexibility to manage my own time, and having the freedom to explore the world that surrounds me. So far, I have been given a total of 15 minutes of my own time and the comfort [ie. daylight] to explore my world. It only took about a minute for me to be surrounded by children screaming.
“Obruny! Obruny! Can I have your number?”
“You can’t even reach my elbow.”
“But I will grow!”
“Are you even old enough to operate a phone without parental supervision?”

When I finally shook off the first round of kids, I noticed a football field where spectators were sitting along the edge watching. As I approached the game to join the spectators, the whole game stopped, and everyone turned and stared at me. I decided, in the interest of the sport, to continue walking instead, where I was shortly met by the next pack of roaming children.
I realised then that the closest thing I have to autonomy is my peanut butter. The one meal of the day that I chose when and where is breakfast – I pull out my Swiss army knife, my jar of peanut butter, and the loaf of bread that I was able to ask my driver to find for me because I didn’t know where to find bread. I don’t even have a napkin or a plate to eat from, and when I offered my driver some bread with peanut butter so that he could taste Canadian food, I had to present it on a sudoku puzzle. I think he enjoyed the sudoku puzzle more than the PB.
NB. For anyone who ever goes to a developing country, I cannot stress the importance of a Swiss army knife, a jar of peanut butter, and, most crucially, a couple roles of toilet paper. I’m not going to elaborate on this note in too much detail, but please, for the love of God, bring a role of toilet paper and a couple of ziplock bags. TRUST ME.
So my Ghanaian name is “Yaa”. I can also go by “Yaayaa” and “Obayaa”. In Ghana, your name is the day you were born. I may as well confess now that I have been lying to everyone for the last 27 years, telling them that I was born on Friday the 13th. I was actually born on Thursday, September 13th, which gives me the lamest of all the days-of-the-week-female-Ghanaian-names. Other days of the week include: Akosua, Asi, or Ese (Sunday); Adwoa, or Ajao (Monday); Abena, or Araba (Tuesday); Akua (Wednesday); Afua, Afia, or Efua (Friday); and, Ama (Saturday). Despite this repertoire of beautiful Ghanaian names, my name is Yaa.
My most common activity at work is to respond to enquiries at the door of the Municipal Planning Office.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Yah?”
[since it’s a female voice, and I am the only female on my floor, they instantly know it must be…]
“Yaa!”
“Yah.”
Even the boy names for Thursday birthdays are better: Yao or Ekow. Considering that my world is 100% male right now – I haven’t even really spoken to a woman in almost two weeks, and there’s no rubbish bin in any of the toilets on my floor – I should at least get to choose between Yaa, Yao, and Ekow.
But there’s no choice here in Ghana, social rules dictate that my name is Yaa. This relates to how I’ve been explaining Canada to my colleagues here in Ghana.
In Canada, you’re generally free to do whatever you please, as long as it does not infringe on someone else’s freedom. You can eat dinner alone, you can go to the bar alone, you can explore the streets alone. But, the other side of the coin is that you always feel alone.
In Ghana, everyone’s your sister, everyone’s your brother, and you are always loved and cared for. But you cannot do exactly as you please, and, as I learned this afternoon when I went for lunch alone, you’re never to do things alone. As no one was in the office and I was hungry [never stand between a skinny person and their lunch!], I was too hungry to care and decided to fetch my own lunch in the form of crossing the street and buying a minced meat pocket. My office colleagues were dumbfounded by my behaviour, and I remembered similar reactions from people when I lived in Italy, France, Japan, and Turkey.
Mostly, I was just surprised I was able to find a place to buy a small quantity of food. Not only is it difficult to distinguish between…say…a hair salon, a CD shop, and a restaurant [it’s not like they have neon signs here, when you’re used to commercial establishments fighting for your attention, it’s hard to recognise those that don’t leap out of the landscape at you. How to make a distinction between rows of undistinguishable shacks? In Japan, it was rows of undistinguishable shacks that had red lanterns out front, and you needed to find someone who read kanji to know if it was a restaurant]….it’s also impossible to find anything less than a huge meal in Ghana. So far, I’ve not been able to finish more than half of a meal, and there’s no such thing as doggy bags.
I just can’t wait to have my own space…where I can cook for myself…live without burdening my colleagues and driver…maybe even exercise a small degree of independence….remembering that I am indeed 27, not 7.

Taste of what’s to come? Bucket “showers”, Guinness, and rotating power outages

11 September 2006

My friend Sarah made so much fun of me when she saw how freakishly small the flashlight I had brought with me to Peru was.

Seeing that the candles –- my only other source of light this evening since the power has apparently gone out -- can also go out at the whim of even the mildest breeze through my window, I’m very thankful for a flashlight that is so small I can wear it as a necklace. As an unexpected gust of wind blows through my window, I know exactly where to expect to find my flashlight.

I came home from my first day at work a mere hour before sunset. After quick bucket “shower”, I took to the “streets” to “explore” – though most of the exploring was done by the scores of little boys approaching me as I took a turn around the “block”.

I came “home” eager to read some of the documents I had brought with me which should better prepare me for my job/life here, only to discover that the electricity had gone out, probably for the rest of the night.

“We’d better drink all of the Guinness before they get warm!”
[guest hotel staff laugh at my “joke”]
“No, seriously. May I have a Guinness?”

It’s quite remarkable how much Guinness Ghanaians seem to drink actually. Last night, when I was picked up by my colleague, the Municipal Planner of the New Juaben Municipal Assembly, the first thing we did in Koforidua was to have a Guinness. Today, my first day at work, and at the house of my other planning colleague he insisted I drink a Guinness while we discussed the framework for the Municipal Development Plan.

“Why Guinness? Why not Leffe Brune, or Newcastle Brown?”
“There’s a Guinness factory in Ghana. Though they used to say that it was ‘black tonic’.”
“Snuh?”
“It turns your skin darker.”
“I think the lager producers began that rumour.”

So far, I’m already averaging two Guinnae a day, and I actually suspect I’m getting lighter-skinned [though that’s more likely due to the fact that I haven’t actually seen the sun since I got to Ghana].
I was given a Sudoku calendar over Christmans, and have been doing the puzzles and then using the completed ones as coasters for my Guinness. Tonight, as the melting wax from the candles competes with the Guinness bottles for sudoku puzzle coasters, I can barely keep up with demand. Especially with the added obstacle of having to do the puzzles by candlelight.

At 18:45 the chanting begins. I heard this last night too, and what I don’t know yet is that I will continue to hear this chanting every night while I stay in the guest hotel in the poor part of town.
The visual obstacle posed by the bars across my window are symbolic of my own struggle to better know my environment – my six feet of obvious foreigness prevent me from getting any clear, unobstructed view of the world I am surrounded by. They also prevent me from seeing the source of the chanting.

What is all the chanting?My wild imagine starts flying and I'm thankful that at least those same bars that obstruct my view also prevent the locals from sacrificing me to the Gods of Ghana Hydro Power.
So far my work colleagues have been no use at explaining the sounds of the neighbourhood to me.
“Those are provincial noises. When we move you to the guest house, they won’t disturb you anymore.”

But I love the sounds! I only would like to better understand what they are. Where is that drum coming from? Is it a bar? Or just a dwelling? And from the other window I hear bass and people clapping to the beat. Is this occurring in the street? Or should I be drinking my Guinness next door instead of in my candlelit room? And the chattering from the other direction, which has a beat of its own. I can only imagine the source of this life which the bars across my windows and the darkness are hiding. These sounds of the neighbourhood seem be compose of a collective entity – a creature that chants, laughs, and raps by night, and crows like roosters as it wakes in the morning.

Like 100s of parties you are not invited to.

And then a thought occurs to me:Those same bars that are visually preventing me from entering their world also physically prevent me from escaping mine in the event of a fire –- a relative likelihood considering the make shift emergency lighting system the “hotel” staff have implemented in our state of powerlessness. As I sit strategising my escape route, either via removal of the air conditioner [assuming it would leave a me-sized whole via its removal] or through my room door [the most likely source of the fire in question], I add one more to my list of travel essentials.

1. Toilet paper
2. Swiss army knife
3. Freakishly small flashlight
4. Peanut butter
5. World map
6. Pictures of snow in Canada [when travelling to tropical climates]
7. Portable smoke detector