The Little Things
There’s a lot of subtlety in Ghanaian communication. This was a little hard at first for us Americans to navigate. However, as a group we picked up a lot of skills and precautions over the course of the Dialogue.
Taking pictures can be difficult. In general, it’s a good idea to not take pictures around anyone who looks like a security guard. We had an incidence where an officer threatened to take a memory stick because it looked like a student was taping them. There’s also the occasional moment where a passerby isn’t okay with their picture being taken, and will scold at anyone with a camera. However, I’ve never felt particularly unsafe in Ghana. There are certainly different standards for interacting with others, but there’s little threat of violence.
A lot of our cultural skills were most developed in restaurants and markets. The restaurants we went to would often say they were out of the food we were asking for, and seemed to have an unspoken, restricted menu for travelers. One way to hack the local menu is to build up a rapport with a server. We did this at one of our favorite restaurants in Accra — the Med Diner. We became really close with our server Ivey, after going to the same place for lunch a few times. By the last meals, we were definitely not being restricted and got our deserved local treatment.
In the markets, there’s a flood of stimuli. You can go from walking by a shop with sleeping vendors to being grabbed by three people yelling out all the deals you can get at their shop in a matter of seconds. It’s necessary to be able to be calm and break down all your options if you want to get a good deal. I think I probably got ripped off when I bought a leather hat — but, I still don’t regret it. However, after that I was able to swing a great deal on fabric. I somehow brought around 15 people into one small fabric shop. They all shopped and probably paid the vendor’s salary for the month. After they all left, the vendor was happy to name my price on fabric, and I ended up getting a quarter of what the price would have been normally.
In general, Ghana seemed to rely on verbal communication to getting what you want, whether that’s to take a good picture to get a good fabric deal. As people who want to continue traveling, this group learned a lot, particularly in our ability to cross-culture communicate.
