This topic has been pressing on me for the 5 weeks I’ve been here so far. I’ve heard many stories from my fellow students over here from the UO and seen many instances of it in my work life. Girls are treated much different to guys in a large respect in many different ways in Ghana. At first I had a glimpse of it my first few weeks of my internship but I wanted to wait a while to talk about it and hear from my other students what their experiences were as well. My first week at my internship I was sitting at my desk and across from me I saw an interaction with one of my guy and girl co-workers. It started out normal with them talking about their day and what they were up to later. Then the guy started to kind of flirt a little bit, and he started laying his hands on her that would definitely not be appropriate in America. Nothing physical or crazy like that, but just a pushy playfulness going between the two of them. I started notice that and a lot more as time had gone on. Another thing I noticed is that the guys spoke very misogynistically to their female co-workers often and the ladies seemed to be fine with it. These things bugged me at first but then I came to realize that I was judging from a different cultural perspective. I needed to back out from my own views and how I view how men and women should act in a culture and didn’t see it from a Ghanaian viewpoint. I’m definitely not justifying that behavior and I still think it’s wrong and doesn’t sit well, but I took the time near the end of this week to really try and shift my view to something more productive versus judgmental. I found myself constantly sitting back silently and watching these occurrences happen and in wonder of why they are.

Then around week 3 of the internship I started hearing stories of girl students I was with on the trip having similar experiences. There was no cases of sexual harassment or physical anything with them which was fantastic to hear, but there were still subtle and not so subtle remarks that threw the girls off a bit. Such remarks included stuff about their clothes or how they looked beautiful every day, and this amongst other things that just came off creepy to them. All the co-workers these girls had seemed to respect personal boundaries at least but the comments and marriage proposals never seemed to end. We have a few more weeks here and I’m curious to see how these experiences will revamp up and get more intense when these students turn in their two-week notice. Will it get more intense with their co-workers now that they know the girls are leaving back for America or will they back off and give some breathing room. I really hope it’s the latter but I’ll be keeping a close eye on it to see and help anywhere I can.