Entering my fourth week at my internship at Citi Fm I am starting to notice that my coworkers are treating me more like they treat each other rather than the new obroni intern. With that comes more honesty regarding the state of Accra, and further, Ghana.
At the beginning, of my time at Citi, I noticed many declarations of love for their country. Before coming here I was told that Ghanaians have a great sense of pride in their country. I experienced many people say, “I hope you are having a great time so you will come back”. My boss even said, “Do whatever will make you happy here so that you will look back fondly of your time in Ghana!”. I was astonished! By the third time a taxi driver had told me I needed to come back, I realized that it must be a very common trend of Ghanaians. I wondered if American’s do the same thing to traveling foreigners? I thought about it more I figured that outsiders probably didn’t feel very welcomed in America due to our current harsh immigration policies and the difficulty of getting a visa/ citizenship in the U.S. I have often times thought that I probably wouldn’t pass the test for citizenship.
Anyway, the tone regarding Ghanaian pride has taken a slight turn over the weeks. One of my coworkers, Nana, often cries out “I hate this place!” and “Why is the food so bad!” From my understanding, Nana is from a wealthy family and has had the opportunity to travel around more than I imagine other Ghanaians are. Other spurts from Nana include. “Our leaders are useless”, “where are my taxes going” and “our country is corrupt”.
Until today I didn’t hear outbursts like this from anyone else in the office. But today was different. One of the main stories on the news today is regarding taxes helping impoverished schools. I then heard a loud outburst from my boss. This is what he said, “What do I pay taxes for?! I drive through useless roads, through useless cities, and I can’t even breath clean air. You know what *insert friend’s name that I don’t remember* as we got out of the car today? We said it smells like poo! Human poo – and it is! These politicians are asking for our money, saying they are going to build toilets for these people yet I still smell poo.” Although I agreed with him I did not say anything. The roads here are very bad, (it took us 7 hours to travel the same distance of Eugene to Portland) the air here is literally the worst in the world (coming before Chernobyl, Ukraine) and you are able to smell human sewage and burning trash most of the time.
My boss goes on to say things that really surprise me, “Can you imagine living on the roadside in those wooden kiosks? What do those people do when they wake up in the morning? Where do they clean themselves? Where do they clean their young?!”
When my boss said this and my room full of coworkers nodded their heads in agreement. I was seriously astonished. These people who have lived in Ghana their whole life seem to not know the lifestyle of the millions of people without running water, living in poverty, all around them. Even surrounding the Citi Fm offices is a whole community of these “wooden kiosks”! Although I understood that the people I worked with were fortunate enough to get an education and to have a job as a journalist, I did not realize how far removed they were from the overwhelming majority of their own population.
According to the International Water and Sanitation Centre in Ghana, only 27% of Ghanaians have access to “potable” water. Potable water is defined by medicaldictionary.com as water fit for drinking. With the population of Ghana being 27 million, that means 2/3 of the country is without drinkable water. This leaves me wondering if although I have interacted with MANY Ghanaians every day since being here— have I only interacted with the more fortunate 1/3 of the population? This leads me to believe that even though I find myself deeply immersed into the Ghanian culture, am I really experiencing it if I am not understanding/interacting with the majority of the population?
My curiosities continue to develop as I consider the implications for Ghana as a whole if each economic class is so far removed from one another that they cannot even begin to fathom how the other one lives. I realize my research is seriously lacking and could be completely wrong as I am only hearing these beliefs from the 15-20 people I share an office with, but it just got me thinking and wondering.