Sliding Doors, Death, and Public Urination

High Society

I emailed “Nana from Ghana,” a Yalie who graduated my year, but whom I didn’t know personally, before arriving. It turned out that she would be in Ghana for 3 weeks when I first arrived and we agreed we should meet up. Sitting in a taxi in Osu, with traffic backed up, I looked out the window and made eye contact with a girl walking past. We stared at each other…she certainly looked like the facebook picture I had seen and a girl I’d remembered passing by on campus. And it was! A moment from Sliding Doors.

A few days later, I went with her to her house, which is in a really nice gated community in Airport East. Her home was beautiful and she had “servants.” She said that back in the US, people never understood that it was cheaper to have a gardener than to buy a lawn mower, cheaper to have your wash done than to buy a washing machine. There is certainly a wide gap between the haves and the have-nots here. It seems most of the rich people have spent time abroad, either studying or working. But to be able to afford to go abroad, you have to already be rich, so I’m not sure how that all works out yet.

Nana is currently at Yale Med, but wants to end up working in Ghana. I read in the newspaper that doctor and nurse salaries are among the lowest worldwide (doctors make $230/month and nurses just$92/month). Nana said that there is a joke that if the slave ships were to come again, all the doctors in Ghana would be the first to rush aboard. A joke about the slave trade?

I saw a Ghanaian tele-drama on TV last week called “Home Sweet Home.” Nana’s younger sister is actually in it! The one who couldn’t cook. Sounds familiar…

Funeral Party?!

I heard music from my office Friday and went out to the street to see what it was. About a dozen people where clapping and dancing in front of an ambulance, followed by a tro-tro full of people. It was a funeral procession, I was told. The body was being moved, from where to where I don’t know. I also learned from Nana’s mother that people wear different colors to funerals, depending on the reason of death. I think this is it: if sudden, black; if after an illness, where there was suffering, so maybe it’s better that the person has died or the person is old and has lived a full life, white with some black; some clans also add red to the outfit, but I don’t have the specifics on that yet.

I asked my boss’ husband about the funerals and he said that it was the low class that did this clapping and dancing bit and that there are proper, somber funerals at churches for respectable people. He said that those who are clapping and dancing are often drunk and “riff raft.” I could smell the classism oozing out of his statements.

FYI: I saw those elaborate coffins on my first day here, on the road from Teshie to Osu! A rooster, a cow, a bottle, a plane.

Mishmash

A few observations over the past two weeks: I’ve never seen so much public urinating in all my life combined! There is also no problem with breast feeding in public. And not that many people smoke it seems. Also forgot to mention in a previous post that kids in schools must shave their heads, even the girls (a hygiene thing).

The government just eliminated petrol subsidies, so the price of fuel went from 20,000 cedis/liter to 30,000. Taxi and tro-tro prices have increased and it is likely that the prices of goods will also, given that the cost of transporting them will increase.