Ghana

Ghana was interesting from the beginning. Semester at Sea organized a shuttle service between the ship and the city since it was a 45-minute drive. However, they were only able to take 120 people at a time, and the shuttle only ran every hour. With a ship of over 700, this proved to be a problem. I knew that I didn’t want to hang around so I headed for the door as soon as they cleared the ship even though the group I was planning on going with wasn’t ready yet. Luckily, some of my friends were on the same bus so they adopted me.

 

The ship was docked in Tema, an industrial city, and the port reminded me a lot of Chennai. The drive between Tema and Accra passed some very nice houses, and billboards (all in English) were everywhere. The shuttle dropped us off in Accra at a big purple building on Oxford street which we discovered later was a nightclub. It was easily the nicest and newest building in the area, which I thought was very odd considering its purpose. At first, it seemed that they had left us in a random suburb but we soon realized that this was the city center.

 

Five friends and I crammed into a taxi to go to a cultural center. On the way, we passed Independence Square where Barack Obama spoke last year in his first visit as president to Africa. I learned that Obama chose Ghana due to its stability, economic prosperity, and democracy. There was a beautiful arch in the area that commemorated Ghana’s independence in the late 50’s, and the ocean was not far in the distance.

 

The cultural center turned out to be more of a huge and crazy craft market. The things they were selling were awesome, from drums to paintings to fabrics to wood carvings, but the vendors were unbelievable. First they would shake my hand and smile and ask me my name and where I was from and then they would guide us around and say that they were being our “bodyguard” and then whisper to us that they would give us a special deal at their shop. But they wouldn’t prevent us from going into other places, and they would start talking in another language to the vendor. It was rather mysterious how the whole operation worked. Then other people would come up to me and talk… I probably met forty people in the place. I met Henry and Joe and George and Papu (he was my main bodyguard) and many more.

After a certain point I decided that I was done shopping and while I was waiting for my friends to finish everyone was still trying to sell me things. After they realized I was “not shopping, just looking” we had actual conversations. I learned how to properly shake hands, a procedure that involved snapping with the other person’s fingers. I got an African drumming lesson from Papu and met a guy who made drums for the University of Kentucky basketball team, which was pretty awesome.

 

We returned to Oxford Street, where we looked for lunch. My friend Misha and I decided to go to a traditional Ghanaian restaurant a few blocks away but since everyone else was so hot and thirsty they decided to stop at a Western restaurant. As soon as we reached the place I was really happy we decided to split off—African music blasted from a speaker in the corner and I didn’t recognize anything on the menu. I ordered “red-red” which turned out to be plantains and beans cooked in a somewhat spicy red sauce. The plantains were especially mouth-watering. Misha got an entire fish on her plate, and we worked together to pick it off the bones.

 

After lunch it was already three in the afternoon. We reunited with our friends, who had heard that a soccer game was going on at the stadium, so we hired a taxi to go to the game but it turned out there are no games on Sundays. We had another mix up with the driver on the way back because he thought we wanted to go to this big posh beach resort, so when we arrived there we had to retrace our steps. Even though everyone I encountered in Ghana spoke English, their accent was different so sometimes it was impossible to understand each other even though we were both speaking the same language.

 

On the street I met a guy who went to the University of Louisville and who is a professor now. When I told him I was from Kentucky he hugged me and kissed my neck and said “yes now I see that is why you are so pretty. Everyone from Kentucky is so sweet and pretty.” It never ceases to amaze me how connections are made around the world, and how excited people in these other countries are to see us.

 

We visited Global Mamas, a fair trade shop where women are employed to make various products from bags to necklaces to clothing. More interesting than the shopping to me was the fact that I saw Warner, the librarian, outside of the shop and he introduced me to his Ghanaian friend that used to go to UVA. We had a very nice conversation.

 

We walked along the streets of Accra and after deciding there was not much more to see  and it was also starting to get dark we stopped at a restaurant. While we were there for all of thirty minutes, the building lost power twice, which apparently is normal. We returned to the purple building to catch the shuttle back to the ship.

 

My second day in Ghana I went on an FDP to the Shai Hills Game Reserve and the Akosombo Dam. The tour had a rocky start since the bus was an hour and a half late. If it had taken thirty minutes longer, the tour would have been cancelled and we would’ve all had to make alternative plans. The bus came, and we headed to the Game Reserve. We passed through several villages that had shops selling anything and everything outside. I saw kid’s toys, bed frames, cell phones, underwear, and lumber all for sale. The shops were generally named something religious, such as “God Loves You Electronics” or “He Lives On Barber Shop”. One of the professors on the ship talked about how Africa was surpassing first world countries in Christian zeal, and now missionaries from Africa were actually going to the states to convert people. I also learned later that Ghanaians believe that they will continue their professions in the afterlife, so they construct coffins to reflect their jobs. I saw coffins that were looked and colorfully painted as fish, airplanes, and beer bottles. It was very peculiar.

 

The first thing we saw at the game reserve was the baboons. I was very excited to see these monkeys but when we arrived at a trash pit with baboons picking at the village’s garbage I was a little less thrilled. It was still interesting to watch their behavior and compare it to a human, but the whole situation seemed very surreal. A bathtub was amongst the garbage, and a baboon perched on its edge, while other baboons picked through plastic looking for food. There were probably twenty baboons all told, and they got up quite close to us, obviously comfortable being around humans (and all their trash).

 

After the baboons we got back in the bus and drove to a bat cave. It was a short hike up to the cave but we knew we were close by the smell. It smelled awful because of all the bat poop. We also started to hear screeching of the bats. I was first behind the guide to see the bats and when we shimmied through to a clearing we could see the bats between two boulders—hundreds of them. We could hear their wings move the wind as they fluttered around. This experience made me realize that I am not a huge fan of bats.

 

We retraced our steps back to the bus and went to lunch at a nice hotel on the river. We ate rice, chicken, and turkey with slightly spicy red sauces. I also got an ice cream as it was boiling outside; Ghana is located approximately at the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian.

 

After lunch we continued to the dam. The Akosombo Dam was constructed shortly after independence, and was seen as a symbol of Ghana’s emergence as a new nation. It created Lake Volta, the largest manmade lake in the world and one that covers 3.6% of the total land area of Ghana (which is about the size of Indiana and Illinois combined). The lake is long and narrow so it didn’t seem that huge from the vantage point of the dam. We toured the control center and saw the six operating turbines, but it was hard to understand the guide over their noise. Then we went to the top of the dam and walked down part of it. Our guide said it was a “natural dam” because it was made out of sand and rocks but personally I think that anything that created the largest manmade lake in the world is not really natural.

 

The third day in Ghana I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. We left around seven, drove for a couple hours, and worked between 10 and 1 and 2 and 3. The drive itself was interesting because in many places the roads weren’t paved, so the bus bumped over the dirt. These weren’t back country roads, either; these were main roads to the interior of the country. Like the previous day, I enjoyed looking out the window at the shops who used God as their major marketing technique.

 

Once we arrived on site we met Raymond, who worked for Habitat for Humanity. He told us a little about the village. It had just under a hundred houses, and a school. The school was small and lacked funding so most children only went for half a day, either in the morning or the afternoon. He also said that the well was drying up but to build a new, deeper well it would cost $8,000, about the same price it takes to build a house in Ghana.

 

After the introduction, Raymond split us into three groups. My group was building a house for a man named David, who had one four year old son and was so nice. Our task was to move dirt into one of the rooms to fill a foundation. It was very time consuming because we only had one wheelbarrow and two of those carry-on-your-head metal bowls. It was hard work and I was sweating profusely, but loving to help out. Even though we only completed a fraction of the total work that had to be done, it was wonderful to work alongside a man as compassionate as David.

There were lots of kids around helping out while we were working. These two named Joseph and Bismark were so into it - they were running between the dirt pile and the house and working twice as hard as any of us. On the one hand I was impressed by their work ethic but I was also sad that they had to grow up so fast and did not have an opportunity to just be a kid. I also met a boy, Ishmael, and as soon as we met he put his arm around my waist and started taking me around. He really wanted to have my camera and would say things like "baby, I beg you. Please give it to me." A few minutes later, he told me that I was going to be his wife. This, by the way, was before he knew my name. I asked him how old he was (12) and told him that I thought he was too young for me. He asked me how old I was and when I told him he said "okay, I am twenty." He was a character. On top of everything he was holding his baby brother the whole time on his hip.

 

We said goodbye to Raymond, David, and all of the children. I gave my remaining water that I had bought for the day to one of the girls. She also asked if I had a pen, and I regretted not have something as simple as that to give to her.

 

A few days after the trip, I talked to one of my friends on the ship. He said that Raymond took him to a nearby stream and told him that that stream used to be their life. Then, gold miners came and disposed all of their waste in the water when they left so the stream was completely polluted.

 

The last day in Ghana I took an SAS trip to an Electronic Waste Market. My first semester of college, I did a research project about electronic waste. I learned about how developed areas such as the United States and Europe exported their useless computers, cell phones, televisions, and more to poorer countries like Ghana. It operates, in essence, like an international not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon; first world countries don’t want the waste to remain in their country and third world countries don’t have the regulations or wealth to say no. I knew that people worked at the electronic waste dumps disassembling and reassembling the usable equipment, and burned material to get to more valuable components like copper. I learned that burning plastics released carcinogens, and often hazardous material leached into the soil and groundwater supplies. But for all that I knew from studying, I was unprepared for the electronic waste FDP in Ghana.

 

We drove through Accra to reach this market. The whole time I wondered where it would be located because some of the neighborhoods were very affluent, as evidenced by their high walls and barbed wire protection. We drove down the most industrialized street I had encountered in Ghana, with glitzy car dealerships, cell phone headquarters, and Westernized factories lining both sides of the road. From this street, we turned left, drove a mere two blocks and turned left again—we were now driving parallel to the modernized street and could still see their buildings. But looking the other way, I saw the poorest, most polluted area that I had come across so far in my travels. Black smoke filled the air from what seemed to be a burning TV, a river probably thirty feet wide was edged on both sides by trash, but worst of all was the realization that people lived near this horribly polluted area. People from the community looked up at our tacky lime green tour bus with confusion and distrust.

 

We parked the bus and split off into groups of seven, each accompanied by a faculty member, to explore the area independently for thirty minutes. My group got a little off track and wound up in the residential area, where ramshackle, degraded buildings ran together. The soil was black and trash was everywhere, but somehow everyone seemed to be going about their daily lives. After a few minutes of walking around, a local man came up to us and wanted to know how we had arranged to come here and told us we had to leave. We tried to explain while walking in the direction of the smoke, but the man was persistent and followed us to the waste site. There, he met Dan Sprau, our trip leader and my Water for the World teacher, and told him a similar message. He was a community representative so he wanted our visit to include a stop at the community center. Our whole group returned to the bus and Dan and two other faculty members followed the man into the community to hear his case while the rest of us continued the tour with our guide.

 

We went back to the place we had been shooed from, where the electronic waste was located amongst heaps of other trash along the river. We met a local businessman whose job was to take electronics apart and then sell the components individually, and then a second man who put computers back together. They said their business without hesitation, and even seemed to take pride in what they were doing. They said they burned the insulation off of copper wires and when someone asked if that was bad to breathe they said that people got used to it since they were working in the fumes as soon as they realized the value of money. When someone else asked when that was, they replied five years old.

 

The longer I stayed in the area, the more uncomfortable I felt. It was hot and I could feel sweat dripping down my back and my eyes burned from the smoke and I felt like I was going to throw up because of the smell of acid. I looked at the water and saw a white bird land on the trash that had accumulated in the middle of the water.

 

We walked back to the bus with the two men we had talked to and I asked one of them how long the electronic waste site had been there. He guessed that it had existed for fifteen or twenty years, but said that he had only lived there for four years. He said he moved from northern Ghana, a twelve hour drive away, because the work opportunities in Accra were greater. It made me squirm to think that working at an electronic waste site is so desirable as to attract people from their villages. Another thing that I realized while on site was that I had not seen any people older than forty, due to the low life expectancy of the community.

 

When the professors rejoined our group on the bus, they said they had visited the men at the community center and had the opportunity to learn more background about the area. Dan said that between 35,000 and 60,000 people lived in the settlement. In the area, there were no schools, no hospitals, and virtually no infrastructure. It was a developmental disaster. The Ghanaian government had moved to relocate the people several years ago but they refused to move. The reason why they didn’t want to move was never completely clear to me, although I can only guess that they didn’t think they could make as high of a living in an alternative situation. Therefore, solving the issue of electronic waste is not as simple as taking away the supply. Providing the people who work in the electronic waste market is just as important. I was only there for two hours and couldn’t imagine having a life in such a hell. I was relieved to return to the ship and reenter into a world of comfort.