Baby Steps in Ghana
Stepping out of the airplane in Accra, Ghana gave me a whiff of surprise and familiarity. The surprise was due to my having very little knowledge of what Ghana would be like. Obviously, it’s hard to predict how the first few moments of any unknown experience will be. However, the familiarity probably came from my time spent in India. There was a similar feel to the air — a mix of gasoline, dust, and humidity. And I made a similar observation of the people — for every one staff member at any position, airport runway attendant, construction worker, or security staff, there seemed to be three just hanging out and talking to passers by.
As the day went on, the group went to our University of Ghana Guest House to check-in and hang out for a bit. After check-in was a pretty interesting dinner experience. The service was pretty good, but the server had a very relaxed tone to the work; he was definitely not worried about our time frame for dinner. Later in the dinner, there was a seemingly inordinate amount of ‘moths’ (we’re not sure what type of insect that actually was) circling the fluorescent lights above us. To my surprise, the server actually turned off the lights and said “Sorry,” to apparently to funnel the ‘moths’ to insect zapping fixtures on the wall. Eating dinner in the dark while unknown insects were getting electrocuted around us was a pretty cool, and maybe unsettling, intro to the Dialogue.
The actual orientation at the International Student Services Building for University of Ghana was pretty informative. I learned some general tips, was given cultural advice, and was taught the cool way to shake hands in Ghana: a little handshake followed by a cooperative middle finger snap. After this orientation and later in the day, we experienced definitely the most surprising situations so far. We went to a market where bargaining and customer harassment was the norm. A lot of the initial shock here was funny. Vendors would pester everyone to buy there stuff, and would pull out every little tactic from showing off US knowledge (one vendor said he’d give us a free wooden elephant if we could name a state he didn’t know the capital to — we couldn’t.) and giving out free drum lessons. All in all, this is a pretty good start to Ghana. But, it really is just a start. I like to think as a group these first two days on the ground have just been baby steps. We ate in the dark with moths and got a generous dose of in-your-face sales tactics, and I’m really hoping this is just a start.
