Ghana!

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Yeah, sorry that I didn’t update for a while.  Been busy and stuff.  Just played a lot of guitar and typing feels really funny when the calluses on your fingertips are aggravated, fun fact.  I actually kind of like it better though.  Anyway, this group of posts will be the same as the last ones.

 

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I don’t really even know where to start with Ghana.

 

People sell things on the roads all the time.  It’s pretty crazy.  Just during traffic jams and whatnot.  Traffic is really really bad pretty much all over Ghana for a number of reasons.  One, a lot of the roads are really bad and so it’s slow-going no matter what.  Two, the cities are getting more and more populated and the government can’t keep up with construction of roads.  Three, the roads that have already been built are too small to handle the traffic.  Four, as people get more money, they’re buying less cycles and more cars.  So anyway, like I said, this combines for really awful traffic, and wherever you go, there are people walking up and down the roads trying to sell things to people in cars.  Examples include food, superglue, and flip-flops.

 

These people are taken very seriously, the road-side salespeople.  My cab driver one time stopped and got some food from one of them.  Our tour bus driver even stopped to get some food from one of them.  Once a kid on a tour bus looked at a guy selling some crazy-looking flip-flops and pointed at them excitedly.  The guy hopped right on the bus and came to the kid’s seat, trying to sell to him.  He didn’t want any, he just thought they looked cool.  That guy was pissed when he got off.  But that’s how roadside sales go in Ghana.

 

I never went to a market because I hate them, but apparently the people there are incredibly pushy.  If you walk in and look at their stuff and don’t buy anything, they try to block you on your way out and grab your wrist and try to pull you back in and guilt you for not buying anything for a long, long time.  Often they’ll say they’re giving you something for free, and then they say, “It’s free, just give me what you think you owe me.”  And then they get mad if you think that means you owe them nothing.

 

English is the lingua franca but there are like a hundred different languages floating around and mixing with each other all the time.  Gha is the one spoken in Accra.  Other nearby languages include Twee and Ewe.  They’re all in the same family and the people there refer to them only as “dialects” but they’re all quite different, really.  Like French and English.

 

It’s really really hot in Ghana.  Like 100F or so on most days.  It’s very close to the “center of the Earth” (0 longitude and 0 latitude) and they’re very proud of that.  Kids will play soccer with a black ball at noon on those 100F days though like it’s no big deal.  They say that it only takes you a week to get used to it.  We didn’t have a week.  We did see a lot of people walking around with pants and suits on though, wondering how they could do it.

 

The political system is pretty good there.  It’s listed as the second-best government in Africa by some NGO – only Mauritius is listed as having a better one.  There are a number of parties, but there are just a few main really strong ones, and power often switches hands between them peacefully at election times.  Since there’s at least three main parties – I think one guy I talked to listed up to six big competitors – the parliament has to form coalitions.  Recently they built a “Seat of Power” for the government, and it cost a crapload of money, but they’re yet to move into the building and sort of refuse to do so…

 

Everyone in Ghana is quite in love with Barack Obama.  The bus driver we had for our village stay had a picture of him fist-pounding Michelle taped to his windshield and that was the only picture he had.  No wife, kids, mom or dad, just the Obamas.  There are a lot of American flags hanging around that have Obama’s face planted right in the middle of the striped area.  A lot of people wear Obama shirts regularly, the way people in the US wear American Eagle shirts.  People in Ghana are actually quite aware of American politics in general, and a lot of kids were asked how the health care bill turned out and what else was going on, and then asked if a number of other characters were still on the scene (“Is McCain around?  Will Joe Biden be president next?  What about Hillary?”).  Pretty impressive, really.

 

There are really strange advertisements for Ghanaian movies posted up all over the place.  I can’t tell if they’re porn or not, but they certainly look like it.  They have names like “I Need a Husband” and “Love & Sex” and “Secret Love” and the posters are always fairly suggestive and sometimes include a topless woman (covering herself with her hands, or turned away).  They’re so up-front about it that I really can’t believe it might be porn, though.  My one friend Andrew took a pretty close look at a few of them, he said, and didn’t think they were.  I guess I’ll believe him for now.

 

Family is everything in Ghana, as it is in most of West Africa.  The economy isn’t great and in each family, chances are that only one person is probably going to make a good income, and they’re expected to use it to support everyone.  So families live in “compounds” instead of houses, and perhaps the oldest brother will be a business owner or a preacher or something, and his income will support his wife/wives and their children, his brothers and their wives and their children.  Numbers can get up to about 20 or so.  This isn’t to say that no one else does anything at all – everyone tries to do some sort of work, whether paid or just growing food for the compound – but if you have a good income, you’re probably in charge of a compound.  There’s also an understanding that your family will do anything for you pretty much no matter what, as long as its within their means.  If you get sick and can’t work, they come to cook and take care of you.  If you need to buy a suit to go to a job interview, they help you out.  If you need help constructing your house, you call them.

 

Religion is huge and interesting in Ghana.  Pentecostal Christianity is taking a really strong hold, which is kind of scary to me, but they love it.  There are advertisements everywhere for people running “fellowships,” which are basically just charismatic preachers running churches and masses or whatever.  I mean everywhere.  Billboards, posters, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet, whatever.  People get really into it, and a lot of people, when I asked them what they did for fun, included going to services.  Of course they can get involved in service, and so they’ll spend time to practice singing, dancing, speaking, playing, etc., before every service, and that makes a group of friends, too.  So that’s the Western part of religion there.  There’s also still a strong traditional influence on “religion” in Africa.  Ancestor worship has been huge there since forever ago and it still is pretty much that way.  If something bad happens to you, it might be because you angered your ancestors and they stopped protecting you.  Ancestors are resistant to change, and thus so is much of society, because when you need their protection, you have to live the way they did.  There’s also still belief in “witchcraft.”  Not like casting spells, just that there isn’t really another word for it.  People can become “cursed,” often caused by someone cursing them (the “witch”), and then bad things will just keep happening to them.  Cures range from herbs to vomiting to prayer to exorcisms.  Witches are usually women.

 

It’s hard to describe this.  It’s kind of just like… someone is out to get you, but instead of physically doing something to you, they just curse you with supernatural force.  When someone dies, this is often used to explain it, even if they were killed in a car crash or something.  Why were they in that place at that time?  Because the lady you dislike down the street cursed them.

 

The cities are pretty modern, but like 70% of Ghana is still rural.  They’re getting modern too, and water access and electricity is spreading slowly, but currently most villages don’t have clean water or electricity.  Most of these places survive on subsistence farming and fishing with a little bit of market revenue from women who produce some sort of good that the village may specialize in.

 

Foofoo is the big food in Ghana.  It’s okay.

 

They make a lot of cocoa.  #1 cocoa producer in the world.  It’s, again, pretty okay.  They sell it in a solidified powder with no butter/milk/etc., so it’s chalky.  But the taste is pretty good I guess.

 

Okay, we’re at 1600 words again.  You can Wikipedia the rest.  I think I’m gonna move on to stuff I did.

 

Peace out.