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.
09 November 2006
05 November 2006
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.
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.
02 November 2006
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 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.
01 November 2006
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.
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.
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