Seemingly familiar, yet so different.
It’s been about 2 weeks since we have been in Ghana and the advice the past fellows about “expecting the unexpected” is so incredibly accurate.
Starting when we landed in Accra at around 7:00 pm, Brooke, David, and I were lucky enough to meet up with my aunt’s old friend, Love, who lives in Accra to help guide us in getting a hotel for the night and finding our cab driver Innocent.
When we walked out of the Accra airport, the 98% humidity, huge mosh pit of people, and lack of signs brought me immediately back to walking out of the New Delhi airport whenever I go to visit family in India. There are so many similarities between Indian culture and Ghanian culture, I was shocked and excited at the same time. The food is spicy, there are way more Indian restaurants than I expected, Indian soap operas are dubbed in Twi, and there is a pretty sizeable Indian population both in Kumasi and Accra. I ended up making friends with the hotel owners who coincidently grew up in the same area as my parents.
After our short stay in Accra, we embarked a relatively comfy, 5-hour bus ride to Kumasi. We are staying with Bernice, the founder, and CEO of Bright Generation so I felt immediately extremely welcome and comfortable staying in her house. Once we were all settled in the house, after a couple of days of wandering around the neighborhood we ended up meeting up with some students from Davidson College who were staying down the street from us! Another coincidence that helped remind me of home.
Although certain aspects are seemingly familiar, living and working in Kumasi is a whole different situation. While I love the food, the food often doesn’t love me back and my stomach has definitely been pretty angry with some of the food that I’ve eaten (I’m still gonna eat the food though because it's so good). Rolling electricity blackouts at work and at the house are common and are to be expected now, they can come at absolutely any time. Running water can also be shut off from time to time forcing us to shower with buckets of water and flush the toilet manually. The smells are also quite interesting, with fried tilapia being a staple of the diet and sold literally everywhere, I’ve become immune to the funky fishy smells of the streets. Oh also, the weather app is always wrong. The climate in Kumasi changes at least 3 or 4 times a day between rain, clear skies, and gloomy clouds. We take shared taxis and tro tros (large communal taxi vans) to work every day and, as a group, we are constantly “hissed” (for lack of a better term), the Ghanian version for getting people’s attention, to buy from street vendors. All very different from the US.
Ghanian work culture is not at all what I’m used to. Having worked at multiple startups, a law firm, and in a research lab, I’m used to having more structure and directed tasks first then having the freedom to branch out and be more self-directed. There is also minimal collaboration so far, but that’s because David, Brooke, and I are all working on totally different projects. For the first week and half of work, we had no real direction and everything moved pretty slow. We were just expected to do something with the vague descriptions that were given to us before we came. Now that we had some sort of review of the work we produced, we all have some more work to do.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed every part of my 2 weeks here so far and it already has been an unforgettable experience. Everyone we have met and seen is extremely happy and friendly to us. We say hi at least 10 times a day to random strangers because they say hi to us first. Something that would never happen in the US. People want us to learn about Ghanian culture. Especially when we took our first independent (without our main contact Louis) trip to Bonwire, the home of kente, the beautiful, colorful handwoven cloth native to Ghana. We randomly stumbled upon this guy named Richard, who at first just wanted to sell us his kente (which we bought), but then generously offered to take us around his hometown and understand all parts of Bonwire. We even got to go into the forest a bit and I tried fresh cocoa for the first time.
I’m psyched to continue working on my project of trying to export some of the bamboo bicycles they are making to a foreign buyer and also pitch the company to some Ghanian VC’s to attract more sources of funding. Everything is starting to slowly come together.
— Sahil Sagar
