One Year Plus One Day

its been one year and a day since i moved to this country. its been such a learning experience. the people are an enigma. the dark skin color and environment portends a typical african country yet the order and the behaviours are very european. i have been waiting a whole year for the scales to fall off so i can see the real ghanaians but every time i've been surprised day in day out. if the term peace loving could ever be attributed to an african country ghana is the country. well of course they have the usual problems african countries are bound to have like the fights over chieftaincy in the north which involves some body count. somehow they contain it and keep it from being too much of a problem, they do it better than the british handled northern island in the hay days anyway its not about secession.

this piece wont be complete without mention of the ghanaian election. i daresay, i expected it to be peaceful but yet still i was shocked at the level of peace. an african country carrying out elections without any controversy? well there was one, on the news this young man who looked barely out of secondary school was complaining to the news reporter about being disenfranchised. his problem was that the electoral official at the polling booth said he couldn't vote because he carried an outdated voter's card. he said he's been voting for over four years and hadn't been told there was a change. well the electoral official suggested he take his case to her boss. there were complaints by voters that they had to wait too long to vote. well voting was to start at about 7.00am and voters went to wait and queue as early as 3.30am! you should have seen the queues, order in africa! i began to propose the theory that though ghanaians had black skin their dna was probably european.

the election itself was held on a sunday, the turnout was over sixty percent. unlike my home country, voter apathy isn't a problem in ghana, the only problem is voter education. a number (though not sizable) of votes was lost because some voters didn't exactly know what they were supposed to do. a friend put it down to illiteracy comparing it to the home country. i pointed out that in the home country people didn't really vote so we couldn't know, most of the votes were cast for them (assisted voting a.k.a rigging).

talking about free and fair elections. the radio stations and tv stations were collating results as they were counted. it was as close as one could get to the us elections. an interesting point of note was that when the electoral commission finally came out with the official results the radio station i was listening to had missed the mark by 0.8 on one of the candidates. there was no doubt about credibility. although however, the election didn't produce a presidential candidate, the votes were too close so there's to be a run off in a couple of days. however, another interesting fact is that the parties accepted the results, no lawsuits pending.

let's do some statistics, in the year i have spent here i have only been aware of about 19 power outages. i had problems with water during a two week period in january and since then water has been stable. these comforts don't come free though but in comparison power is cheaper yet more available than in home country. fuel moves with the oil market. every two months the price is reviewed in comparison to what crude sells at. so pump prices 'actually' drop. in fact with the recent drop in crude prices, fuel, gas and transportation costs went down. in home country, the excuse for increasing pump price is the rise in crude but when crude falls everywhere is silent. the taxes here are heavy though. well i figure that if they give water and power then its relative. in home country where taxes are lower you have to provide your own generator and dig a borehole if you want similar comforts so in essence you are paying for it anyway.

generally, life is simpler here which brings me to other side of this place. i know i said in previous posts that they are a laid back people. i think they are sometimes too laid back that it can come close to laziness. a friend needed grass cut and it took a whole month to get someone to come and do it. they kept promising to come. the one that showed up looked at the grass and asked my friend to get some other labourer to remove the tough ones first then call him back to come with his machine and mow the lawn. i had an electrician whom i called to come do work for me on a saturday by 8.00am , he came a week later on a saturday by 8.00am apologising for his absence the previous saturday. there's this favourite of mine, a meshai (bread and egg) seller who had an interesting business strategy. when he was broke, he would borrow money buy tea stuff and bread, work feverishly for a week or so , make enough money plus profit to last him another week or so. at the end of the week, he pays back his debts, spends the next week spending the profit and by the upper week he's broke again and goes back into the cycle. that's how laid back they can be sometimes.

yeah and life on a saturday starts from 11.00am. i am yet to figure out if its because of partying till the wee hours of the morning from the previous friday or they just start their day at that time. still on the laid backness. there are taxi drivers who don't work on saturdays and sundays its their rest days. there are traditional saturday businesses in home country that don't operate on saturdays over here. for businesses that open on saturday , the general closing time is 3.00pm

sure while i may not always get the service when i want it but when you do get the service its usually properly done. my plumber studied plumbing as a vocation, my cook went to catering school. i find that here, they still seem to be living in the good old days when standard 6 could get you a job. at junior secondary, students can either decide to continue on to senior secondary with the aim of getting into university or pick a vocation and fly with it. so here you hardly find an electrician who got to be one by becoming an apprentice. i guess that's why their houses are well finished because they go to school for it.

in summary, after a year of living here, though its not like home but its peaceful and relatively safe ( my walls are still low) though a friend living in another area got attacked by armed robbers. the best combination i see would be to work in home country and live here. i do have worries though of how long this calmness will last. the younger generation are a trouser-sagging-mtv-biased generation and there's a high influx of people from the home country like myself. i hope these factors don't change their landscape. and of course there's now oil!