We’re in Accra, Ghana for this week, and I’m delivering 360Life training to some of the Good News Global Ghana team of prison chaplains. I’ll write about that another day, but for now I thought I’d just share a few reflections from my limited time here. Bear in mind that I’ve not made it out of the city, so it is somewhat limited in its scope, but I hope there’s something of interest all the same.
I think the first thing that I noticed when we got here from Nigeria was that it all just felt more relaxed. The traffic isn’t so frenzied for a start. There isn’t the continuous honking of horns, and there is a lot more willingness to give way to other drivers, and to pedestrians. Just as well, as there aren’t many pavements except on the really main roads, and with big, open drainage ditches down the sides of the roads, the pedestrian and the car are often quite close together! But people drive at a sensible speed, they wait until there is a proper gap rather than forcing one to appear, and they go in straight lines a lot. None of the weaving of Lagos, none of the haring down the highways, and a better respect for the number of lanes in a road! The driving generally feels less aggressive and forceful, with no fighting for every inch of space.
That’s not to say the roads system is all wonderful – some of the roads have big piles of sand or other building rubble encroaching on them, just to add to the challenges of navigating safely along them. And despite the presence of sand and rubble, there often doesn’t appear to be much active building works taking place – it feels like things have just been left from a while ago, and never quite cleared up. Or maybe it is in anticipation of the owner having enough money to do the next bit of building works. Potholes feature as well – but hey, find me a place where they don’t feature! From the roads I’ve been on in Accra, they’ve definitely got the situation under better control than South Gloucestershire!!!
Ghana as a country is perceived as safe and so we have been able to go out for walks in the local area. It’s lovely to be able to just walk around the neighbourhood, seeing the explosion of colour as the children in their bright uniforms all pour out of school and walk home together, chatting and laughing. There are little ‘shack shops’ everywhere, all selling basic commodities which seem to be the same as all the other shops around. I’m not sure how one decides which shop to go to, as I imagine everyone is selling at the same price. I guess you just go to the one where your friend works, or that you’ve always been going to. There are lots of stalls selling street foods as well – samosas, meat on sticks, vegetables, doughnut-type things, bags of nuts…… All so vibrant and friendly and welcoming, and very different from our stay in Nigeria when we were strongly discouraged (in Uyo) and told absolutely not (in Lagos) to go out for walks.
One of the things that is more noticeable here in Accra than was apparent in Nigeria is the number of people who appear to be homeless and living on street corners – both adults, and children. It’s not huge numbers, and certainly not as many as I’ve seen in some other African cities, but definitely more than in Lagos. Apparently, many of these are informal refugees who have fled to Ghana from one of 5 nearby countries (including Senegal, Liberia and Mali). Their presence here is in part an indicator of Ghana’s reputation as a friendly and welcoming nation, although it is sad to see that the infrastructure for supporting them is perhaps not all that these displaced people might have hoped for.
Way back in my past, when I worked for Christian Aid, I remember that there was a campaign for trade justice, and one of the feature stories was to do with tomatoes from Ghana. Local Ghanaian tomato growers were struggling to sell their tomatoes in Ghana because the market was being flooded by cheap imports from Italy, that had been subsidised by EU support. The Ghanaian government, when it tried to subsidise it’s own farmers in the same way, was told that to do so would jeopardise their access to international development funds. A total trade injustice that I remember getting very bothered by and speaking out about whenever I could.
Today on my walk I went through the market, and saw many women selling tomatoes. Obviously I can’t confirm that they were Ghana-grown tomatoes, but the women were certainly local farmers, and I like to think that that particular trade injustice is a thing of the past, and that the tomatoes I saw being sold today are testimony to that.
Staying on the theme of food, my final little reflection is that, based on my limited experience of one hotel in Ghana and 3 hotels in Nigeria, Ghana is better able to cope with vegetarian diets! Both nations do very delicious jollof rice, but Ghana just has the edge on providing dishes that don’t seem to have little bits of fish or offal snuck into the veg, even when you’ve said that you don’t eat meat, or chicken or fish. But maybe I’m doing Nigeria a disservice on that one!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment