Closing Thoughts

What an incredible adventure that was. After a few days, it still seems strange to be back in a place without tro-tros, street food, dirt roads, and stifling heat. Everything is so clean, so well-maintained; everyone is so neatly-dressed. And have you seen Vancouver? The buildings are all huge! It's going to take me a little while to re-acclimatize.

As the title says, here are some general thoughts about my time in Ghana that I didn't manage to squeeze in anywhere else. I've tried to arrange them in a roughly logical order.

I think the strangest thing of all was being a visible minority. Wherever I went in Ghana, people knew I was an outsider as soon as they saw me. What they did with that knowledge depended, of course, on the individual. Some Ghanaians see white people as gullible fonts of cash, and would try to sell me things at absurd prices, or offer to carry things or lead me where I was going so that they could ask for payment afterward. There are also those who see white people as a chance at a green card. On more than one occasion, I had someone approach me and ask me to help them get to my country; if it was a man, there was a good chance he'd ask me to give him my sister. As a man myself, though, I got off relatively easy. The girls on the trip were deluged by marriage proposals and professions of love from strangers or near-strangers. And then there were those who seemed just to want to say hello and exchange phone numbers. Sadly, due to my experiences with the second group, I found that I grew suspicious of these people. I started to wonder if they were genuinely friendly or if they were only interested in befriending me so that I could vouch for them to the Canadian immigration authorities.

It's hard to blame people for wanting to come to the West. There's a widespread perception in Ghana that the West is a land of great wealth, and there's some truth to that. Many, perhaps most, want to go there and work not to become rich themselves, but so they can send money back to their families in Ghana. A wage that is modest by our standards is ample by Ghanaian standards, since money goes much farther there. In most places, street vendors sell substantial meals for fifty pesewa, or about thirty-five cents Canadian, and that's eating out. I'm not sure it's possible even to cook for yourself that cheaply in Canada. To put it further in perspective, the minimum wage in Ghana is seventy cedi per month. That's about forty-five dollars, or about as much as a Canadian minimum-wage earner makes in five hours.

Speaking of food, it may be much cheaper than ours but it's just as tasty, if somewhat lacking in variety. Seasoned rice dishes such as jollof rice are common; more exotic, by our standards, are a family of dishes which consist of a fist-sized ball of dough sitting in a bowl of soup. One picks pieces of dough off the ball with their fingers and scoops up some soup with it, and then sucks the whole thing off of their fingers. Eating this way is pretty messy, but worth it as these dishes are all really good. They are differentiated by the kind of dough involved. Banku and kenkey are made with fermented maize, while fufu is boiled root vegetables. People could often be seen making banku in large batches, kneading the dough in a giant bowl or cauldron using an enormous wooden spoon. I've found a recipe for banku online, which fortunately doesn't require these implements, and though it seems labour-intensive I'm definitely going to try making it myself.

There were a few things about Ghanaian culture that bothered me. On a handful of occasions I encountered some innocuous racism. The most egregious example was a guy who insisted that, because I was white, I could tell whether some old British Guineas he had were gold or silver. Sexism was more common and more abrasive, manifesting most frequently in the assumption that I could give away my sister. And while we didn't encounter it ourselves first-hand, there's also a lot of homophobia: homosexuality is illegal in Ghana, and at one hotel we stayed at, the curiously paranoid rules list dictated that two men were not allowed to stay in the same room unless they were father and son and one of them was under eighteen.

Doubtlessly these things will change, though it may take a long time. And these kinds of negative experiences were outweighed by all the positive ones we had. We saw people at their best when we were in Sandema. We spent enough time there to become part of the community in a small way, enough that those around us didn't see us as naive rich people to be exploited, if they ever would have to begin with. I've talked before about the friendliness and openness of the people here, and this was most evident during our time in this small farming town.

One of the most fascinating and wonderful parts of the trip, for me, was exploring the most remote parts of the country. The lifestyles of the people living there were, I imagine, not much different than they had been for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. The architecture in particular was what struck me. In Kadema, a farming community near to but much smaller than Sandema, we saw a number of marvelous and elaborate mud compounds, and in the small village of Ewe people just east of Princess Town, the buildings were all constructed of wooden sticks and palm leaves, and thatch. Often the only signs of modernity were occasional pieces of heavily-worn Western clothing. Exploring these otherworldly places made me feel as if I'd traveled back in time. This is an something I intend to seek out more of.

Some recognition is in order. To Taha and Kelly, our fearless leaders; to Joe Abobtey and the kids of the HCC; to Beatrice, the SRC manager whose work I've probably made a lot busier; to all my fellow OG travelers; and to everyone else I lived and worked with in Ghana: thank you all for making this one of the greatest experiences of my life. With luck we may see each other again. In any case, we'll be in touch.

And that's about it! Well, almost. There's one more post coming, and it should be up in just a few days. It concerns one more of our companions in Sandema, whom I haven't yet mentioned in these pages, so stay tuned. Much appreciation to those brave few who read all or part of the ponderous tome-fulls of text I've been leaving about on this blog. Thanks for reading, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.