The World's Friendliest People!

Luke and Ryan’s Perspective

For us, Ghana was an exciting and different place. There were two things that were really weird – people carried tons of stuff on their heads (platters full of things they wanted to sell, water, anything), and that people stood in between cars on the road and tried to sell things during stoplights! Some things were the same – pizza, chicken nuggets, kids played soccer – but mostly we saw things that were very different. The roads were very bad and bumpy and it took a long time to drive anywhere. When we got to the village, everything was different. Some people just slept in the grass, some houses were made of mud and the toilets were holes in wood over big pits in the ground. But the kids were very happy, and we had a lot of fun chasing tons of goats in the village and playing soccer with an old soccer ball on a dirt field. Except for the soccer ball, they had almost no toys. We are really lucky to have so many more things than they do. We gave the kids crayons, coloring books and Lego’s.

Jay and Christy’s Perspective

Well, we are six days out of Ghana and are just finishing digesting it (literally and figuratively – lots of tummy trouble aboard the MV Explorer!). We had a wonderful time and leave with very favorable impressions of this country and its people, although it’s not without its challenges. This is a very complex country. On the one hand it is the success story of West Africa, independent since the 1950’s and the poster child for democracy in the region. On the other hand, this is a very poor country, with abundant natural resources but virtually no infrastructure, with the wealthy shopping in Western style malls but the poor living in mud hut villages, and the world’s friendliest people but petty graft among its police force. Of course the real test is whether we would return and the answer is a resounding “Yes!”

We spend four days here. The first day we visited a private school in the capital city and shopped the stalls of the main market street. The school visit was impressive and provided a stark contrast to things we saw later in the trip. Shopping and bartering were entertaining and we will arrive home with numerous Ghanaian souvenirs and memories, including new "football" jerseys for the boys. The Ghanaians are proud to be the first African team to qualify for the World Cup next year in South Africa.

The second and third days provided the true highlights of the stay. We joined a Semester at Sea trip to a rural village called Tormonge for an overnight stay. This post will be a little longer than most since there is so much to record about that visit. When we arrived, hundreds of villagers welcomed us with drums and dancing that continued for over 3 hours in the stifling heat. Through various ceremonies, songs, dances and recitals, we were each given our African names (first name dictated by the day of the week you are born and the second name selected by our hosts). To help us with our short term memory issues, we each received a locally made pot with our new names written on them.
 

Luke and Ryan were huge entertainment for the villagers. We later learned that the village had seen about 20 tour visits over the last ten years – always by classes of university students. We were fairly certain that the village children had never seen white children before so they were very curious about Luke and Ryan. They wanted to touch them and followed them everywhere. When Luke and Ryan saw the baby goats in the village, they started a game of goat chasing. They would chase the goats and the village children would in turn chase Luke and Ryan. This provided hours of entertainment and thoroughly tired out our kids and their goats. We asked one dad whether the kids always chased goats and he paused, cocked his head and said “Not until your boys came here”. So Luke and Ryan have created a new sport, although one that we think may have been heartily discouraged once our bus left the village.

Tormonge was a fishing and pottery village. Their homes were mostly made out of clay – the same as their pots. While there were electrical wires strung throughout the village, it appeared usage was quite low. Grain was milled at the communal milling hut. They had very little and their way of life was a mix of space age and stone age, as one of our profs likes to say. They wore T-shirts with Western logos but wove their kente cloth by hand with crude looms, made their pots without pottery wheels, and fished from boats carved out of trees. In contrast to the school we saw in the city, the school here was bare – only desks and a blackboard in a concrete building. They had a library started by an African American but it appeared to be little used despite having children’s book in their native language. There were two flush toilets by the village center but it appeared they were reserved for visitors or leaders, as most of the village used the outhouse erected over a deep dark pit. The school kids played with a half deflated soccer ball, while the village team players each had their own ball.

In the afternoon of our visit we toured the village and saw everything in action. The boys continued their goat chasing, which resulted in a visit to the clinic for Ryan after he took a tumble. Then off to our family homestay, where we believe we may have had the nicest accommodations in the village. We had two rooms for the five of us, fans in the rooms and an open air shower in a detached structure. The highlight of the trip for Jay occurred in the shower as he stepped in with Luke. Luke spontaneously looked up at him and said “Daddy, we’re really lucky that we have so much - these kids have so little”. And so in a nutshell, Luke has already internalized what the highest goal of the entire trip is – we are very lucky to live in the place that we do, with the things that we have and none of us should lose sight of the advantages we have that most people in the world can never even aspire to.

That night we enjoyed a traditional Ghanaian dinner, accompanied by drumming and dancing. The slightly uncomfortable part of the evening occurred when we sat down to dinner in the center of the village and most of the villagers sat around the square watching us eat. While no one in the village seemed to be lacking the basic necessities, it had hard not to feel the huge divide between what we would consider a typical meal and what might be the usual dinner for most of those in the village.

On our third day, we ate breakfast with the villagers, and then returned to the ship.  On the way back, we made a pit stop in a national wildlife reserve, climbed a small peak, visited some caves, and saw two baboon troops and a herd of antelope.  A highlight was climbing through one of the caves to pop out the other end through a narrow opening.  The second highlight of the day was pushing our bus in order to get a rolling start after it refused to start!  The Shay Reserve is only about 2 hours drive from Accra and provided a lot of entertainment. 

Day four was a new adventure as we arranged a car and driver and headed to the beach. Ghana’s target is to multiply their tourism business in a matter of years and we got to see first-hand what they will have to work with. The natural setting was spectacular, although a little rocky for a swimming beach. The chief issue they will have is cleaning up the beaches and the water, as it was obvious that there is a very limited effort to do that at the current time.

All in all, we leave Ghana happy to have made the trip there and encouraged by possibilities of the country!