Internship Adventures

Around the third hour of sitting in a chair, quietly reading a book and waiting for my boss to arrive, I began to wonder what I should do if he failed to show up at all. Several people had walked by me and murmured “Good Morning,” one man had yelled “Oburoni!” and waved cheerfully from the front desk area, and Claudia, a woman I would later learn is the intern supervisor (I think) had stopped to introduce herself and tell me she hoped to see me soon. Still, I was waiting for Mr. Banful to arrive, and no one seemed quite sure when or if that would happen.

Finally, at around 12:30, a man dressed in the nicest suit I had seen that day (which is pretty impressive, because no one in this office is a slouch) strolled past me, stopped back peddled and introduced himself. He apologized for my wait and explained that he had told the man he spoke to last night not to bring me until one (thanks Sonny).

After that, he spoke to me briefly about what he expects me to work on for the next five weeks, which includes updating the website with new content and archiving old projects that GSMF has worked on (as he explained twice, just because you change your name doesn’t mean your whole life has changed–I could tell from nearby reactions that his coworkers are quite familiar with this metaphor). After I gave him an Oregon T-shirt, he joked with me about how his daughters would be unhappy, as they both attend east coast universities in the U.S. Then he took me around and introduced me to everyone in the office and showed me where my desk is. I’m sharing an office with Claudia and two other interns, and I have my own computer!

Not too long after that, we ate lunch. Huge portions of waakye (a rice and bean mixture) were served with spaghetti noodles, a pile of spicy orange bread crumbs, a hard-boiled egg, black pepper sauce and a chunk of beef in spicy tomato sauce. I ate everything but the egg, and it was delicious.

The rest of the day went smoothly, although I didn’t really do any work. I didn’t feel too bad surfing facebook though, as my coworkers themselves seemed to be occupied with watching the Vampire Diaries and blasting songs like “Black and yellow.”

Then it was closing time. Claudia had told me I could go home with her, so I wasn’t too worried. My mistake.

I had described where I lived to her at lunch, and she told me she thought she knew the place. She didn’t ask me for any directions, but as we came to American House Road, she turned to me and said ominously “I hope you know the route to your house.” I told her it was near the Adasa Royal Hotel, which she didn’t know. We asked a few pedestrians, who were clueless as to the location of the hotel. Then Claudia informed me she had to meet someone, so I told her it would be O.K. to drop me off at a trotro stop and I would find my way home.

Not knowing how to explain where I lived to the trotro drivers, I decided to see if I could just keep going in a straight line down the street and find our house. As I walked along I tried to figure out if I had seen a woman at an orange stand before, or if the blue bar was the same blue bar near our house. As the sky got dark and nothing seemed particularly familiar, I began to worry and tried to dispel panic. Just as I was getting up my nerve to ask about the trotros, my phone started to vibrate.

Jolene’s wonderfully familiar voice told me the bus would come pick me up, but my adventure was not quite over yet. As the bus pulled up across the street from me, I worked myself up for a mad dash across the street in Accra’s rush hour traffic. People honked angrily at me, so tried to start jogging. My feet tangled with each other and I face-planted in front of a furious taxi driver and the entire bus of my classmates. With scraped knees and wounded pride, I hobbled towards the bus to the “ssss”-ing chorus of onlookers, until I finally realized they were trying to tell me I had dropped my phone. I collapsed onto the bus, and the first day of my internship came to a close.

Day two, here I come.