The coast!! Yay! I’m finally to the coast. After three full nights and days on a bus, I finally arrived in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Even though it would still be considered poor by most of you, Ghana is worlds apart from Mali in so many ways and oh, what a relief it was to go there!
Just as a little reality check for myself, every now and then I go back and read my post about the differences between Segou, Mali and Aspen, USA. I haven’t looked at the statistics for Ghana, but within a few hours of driving down the road there, a few things jump out at you.
For one, the people seemed to be more aware of their situation in relation to poverty and development. Sure, in Mali, I can talk to Malians about development and trying to improve their lives but only a very select few and of those only to a limited extent (forgetting for a moment about the language barrier which I’ll get to later). For the most part, they are so concerned with making ends meet – the present, rather than the future, is what is most important. Talking about or planning for more than a few years down the road is almost unheard of. The discussion is usually more focused on what season it is (dry/hot season or rainy season) and what will happen between now and the next, a year or less away. This short-term vision makes development and change quite difficult.
Somehow, Ghana amid ultra high inflation, relatively similar resources, and a colonial past has been able to move forward and actually dig itself up out of extreme poverty. This is not to say they are free and clear with nothing to worry about but they are, as I said before, worlds apart from some of their neighbors with relatively similar starting points.
Some of the little, simple things tell of the large amount of progress attained in the last few decades. For instance, while driving down the road, there are the usual vendors on the side of the street trying to sell various items like nuts, fruit, tissue, water, newspapers, juices, etc. Sounds normal right? Did you notice newspapers? Does that stand out at all? It should.
If vendors are making money selling newspapers that implies the people buying them are able to read. Remember the statistic about Mali – 81% of the population is illiterate? Just the simple fact that vendors are able to make a living selling newspapers to the passing motorists tells a lot. People can read! They can conduct real businesses, access the internet, etc.
In Mali, very few people own a motorized vehicle let it be a car, truck, motorcycle, or moto – at most they might have an old beat-up bicycle (I’m referring to the total population). Of the few who do own something (which is largely limited to cities and large towns), they own a moto and rarely more than one per family. I wouldn’t say motos are cheap, but they’re a lot less expensive than a car. If a family owns a car, it is a big deal. In small villages, usually only a few families might have motos with nobody owning a car. Even in Segou, a large regional capital, it is still a pretty big status symbol to own a car.
When I arrived in Ghana, while driving around, I noticed right away that something was different. There were no motos! Pretty much to the same extent it is rare to own a motorcycle in the US; it was about the same in Ghana. People have that much more disposable income to have the ability to own and maintain cars! (I will add that the traffic was considerably worse there as a result, reminding me of Dakar, Senegal – which now that I think about it, had relatively few motos too but not nearly as few as Ghana nor was the phenomena as widespread outside of the capital).
Lastly, Ghanaians, when they want to reach you on your cell phone, call you. They don’t send you a text message or ‘beep’ you – a practice which means you call someone, let it ring once, hang up and thereby ask the other person to pay to call you back. In Ghana, people call each other! It was great, when you needed to tell somebody something, you just called them. There was no sending incomplete, complicated and coded messages but just simple straight-forward communication. You’d be surprised what a difference it makes; things become much more efficient – this all on top of being able to speak English came as quite a welcome relief.
My French has improved significantly since arriving in Mali. Everyday I conduct my life in French (aside from the time spent with other volunteers – which is probably more frequent that it should be). My proficiency isn’t to the point I would like to achieve before leaving here, but still better that when I arrived. I’m discovering I am going to need to put in a lot more effort if I am going to attain fluency. However, being able to talk to just about anyone in English was so nice you can hardly imagine – I just wanted to remind you all that life is conducted in French and that isn’t easy. I can’t just jump into any conversation on any topic. I am limited to my vocabulary which always is less than desired. Simply being able to converse with Ghanaians freely was great.
I think about all these differences and then about how different my life would be right now if I had been placed in a country like Ghana. The different relationships I would have with locals and how much further developed they might be. How my work and potential projects would have had that many less hurdles to jump over. Then again, where I am, to a degree is what I wanted. I wanted a challenging place where I could learn French. I didn’t want life to be easy, in fact if you really look at it, I wanted life to be harder than it is. I requested a small village where there would be no running water or electricity – but then in that setting, I wouldn’t be able to practice my French and would need to learn the local language.
Everything has its different trade-offs and in the end you just have to accept and make the best of your given situation. I’m doing my best to do precisely that. Only the end will tell and even then, not really. One must simply accept the fact that every Peace Corps experience is different – from continent to continent, region to region, country to country, city to village, and so on.
I don’t know exactly what I am trying to say here, other than that every experience is different, just like everyone’s lives anywhere and everywhere are different and in many ways incomparable, so is Peace Corps service. I’m going to wrap it up here and hopefully get another entry up soon to finish the details of my trip (like how I got the privilege to stay in a nut rehab center). Till then…
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