Greetings, from Ghana!

I finally committed to writing a blog about my time here in Ghana because I thought that the exercise of recounting my experiences and telling them in some sort of reflective, even comedic, way might help me to feel more accepting of them myself.

First, a little background for those who don’t know. In August, I began an eighteen month assignment working as a senior research associate with an organization called Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). I plan to write a separate post explaining more about the work they do and my role specifically but for now, check out their website if interested in learning more. I am currently based in Tamale, the third-largest city in Ghana, which is located in the northern region of the country.

Tamale is an incredibly interesting place to live. There is a small but very vibrant community of expats (since much of the development work in the country is based in the north, there are numerous NGOs based here). Overall, the population is around 350,000. There is no mall or movie theater or sidewalks or public transport (aside from shared taxis and yellow yellows). To buy groceries you have to visit the central market in town or purchase from vendors selling at street-side stands. There are goats everywhere, with a sprinkling of stray dogs and cats, cows, chickens, and guinea fowl. It is extremely hot, and now that we are entering the dry season (called the harmattan), it has become very dusty as well. And since the majority of people are Muslim, almost anywhere you go you can hear the call to prayer emanating from mosques all throughout town.

Over the course of the three months in which I have been living here in Ghana, there have been innumerable ups as well as downs. Some moments have been tremendously rewarding or humbling; others have been so frustrating or bewildering they have brought me to a near (or sometimes, actual) meltdown points. Reflexively, I always tried to move past the unpleasant experiences as quickly as possible, but I am starting to think there’s actually something productive, even therapeutic, in revisiting them to try to better understand and sometimes make light of the situations.

Just to give some examples of the things I’ve encountered so far:

• Trying to startle a lizard on the wall so it would scurry away, but instead it got scared, fell off the wall and landed on my bed
• Losing power in 100 degree weather and soaking my clothes in the shower in a desperate attempt to stay cool
• Having our office get flooded by rains
• Waking up in a hotel to find my arms and legs covered in bed bug bites
• Traveling for hours in a car with no A/C (almost no cars here have working A/Cs)
• Walking past burning heaps of garbage in my neighborhood – very few people use actual trash collection services and instead just burn their waste
• Trying to give directions to a friend’s house – since there is no formal address system in Tamale, finding new locations can be a real adventure! It usually requires a mix of having a pin location on Google maps, knowing the nearby landmarks, and asking at least two people for directions along the way

All of this is to say that living in Tamale is not without its challenges, and I have had to learn very quickly to manage my expectations and make peace with the fact that there will sometimes be discomfort. Nonetheless, I have also had many enjoyable moments since being here, and it seems only fair to share some of the more funny/heart-warming stories too:

• Passing through town with random people calling out to me by saying “Siliminga, hello!” (Siliminga is the Dagbani word for a white person/foreigner)
• Getting ponded my first week at the office – ponding is a tradition the IPA Ghana office has where they put you in a chair in the front yard and then everyone proceeds to gather buckets of water and they drench you
• Finding random imported goodies in street-side convenience shops, like Aunt Jemima pancake mix or Kirkland brand almond milk
• Heading to Chucks on Friday nights for pizza & beer with friends – Chucks is the main expat hangout spot in town, and pretty much everyone goes there on Fridays since there are so few restaurants in Tamale
• My personal favorite story (and the reason behind the name of this blog): traveling to the field with my colleagues and having the local children run up to us because they had never seen foreigners before. They looked at my supervisor Erin, who is also American, and said in the local language, “Hey, a white lady!” Then they looked at me and my brown skin and exclaimed, “Hey look, this one is ripening!”