-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.
08 December 2006
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.
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.
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