World Cup in Ghana

Ghana's Black Stars may go far in the World Cup. They may not. But yesterday afternoon, they beat Serbia in their first match of the World Cup finals, and that was enough for Accra. An explosion of color, passion, and friendship enveloped the capital city in a spectacle of life that made good on the promise of our first three months here.

Ignoring the rain clouds above, thousands of people crammed the central Oxford Street near our house - hanging halfway out of speeding cars, dancing to Ghanaian hiplife music as if it would be forgotten tomorrow. Everywhere and always was the monotone, epileptic blare of the Soccer Horn.

On Monday morning as I write this, the party is still going. Last night, finally collapsing into bed after sharing in the city's revelry, we had to drown out the party filtering in from Oxford Street to get to sleep. This morning, two radios and one TV, glued to the World Cup or its commentators, are audible at all times from my second-floor office above the street. My staff in the office are happy beyond their capacity to explain.

It's going to be a good month.


A few pictures from the celebration yesterday: Facebook is a faster upload tool than this blog, hence why I keep redirecting you there. Sorry for the inconvenience!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=450092&id=533250187&l=4d9057282e

A few pictures for your viewing pleasure

I'm taking some time off from the blog to finish my last requirement to graduate from business school: a white paper on "any subject related to international business," according to my friendly academic adviser. The paper is intended to fulfill the school's vaunted international requirement, which can be addressed by: A) this paper, or B) an alcohol-infused, one-week trip to a business school outside the US.

The reader will note two things from these stipulations: first, that I chose the option with the least alcohol, and second, that the school expects a drinking vacation with a few business lectures to create a globally-aware graduating class.

Neither of these points, it may be said, sits very well with me. I couldn't go on the international business exposure trip because - get this - I actually took a job internationally. To add insult to injury, though, this year the trip was destined for Santiago, Chile - rocked by an earthquake five days before the trip was due to leave. Understandably, school administrators decided to cancel the trip and waive the requirement for my those of my classmates who were due to travel there. Equally understandably, in my view, I wrote from Ghana to ask for my requirement to be waived as well, so that I could get on with the work of serving as a school ambassador in my international work.

The administrators didn't budge - so, instead of another blog posting, you get pictures for now, until I finish my little project. Enjoy!

(FYI - if the links below aren't clickable, just copy and paste them into your browser.)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=437020&id=533250187&l=86ea3f3a38

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=410046&id=533250187&l=c02bfab88b

It's in the Container

So Jessica got here a week ago, with Bock in tow. We're all adjusting, and the start of the rainy season has made things much easier.

Let's take a side road here on "the rainy season." We don't use the term in the A-murr-ican South, ostensibly (I thought) because our rain isn't ever heavy enough to justify describing an entire part of the year. So - when someone from Africa or Asia or Seattle talks about "the rainy season," I imagine a deluge - walls of wind and water, umbrellas collapsing under gale force, ducks swimming across flooded roads.

"The rainy season," at least in Ghana, is a quick rainstorm in the afternoon. And boy, is it nice...drops the temperature about 15 degrees and gives the plants and buildings a nice washing. In Atlanta, this is called "August." So, I suppose congratulations are in order, America - you officially have a rainy season.

Anyway - the rainy season is here, along with Jess and Bock. Our container, on the other hand, is taking its sweet time: 1360 cubic feet of worldly wealth just yawing its way, starboard-port, port-starboard, from Savannah to Tema. It's been in transit for just under 3 months at this point. I won't be surprised if it ends up arriving on a raft with Huck Finn at the helm.

Ok, maybe Huck isn't involved...but seriously - it's been out of our possession for a long, long time, since early February. So now that we're here, "it's in the container" has become the default answer of the season:

"Where is my hairbrush?" (It's in the container.)

"Have you seen my gray t-shirt? (It's in the container.)

"What happened to my sanity? (It's in the container.)

We packed the infamous container on February 6th in Atlanta, with an expectation that it might ship by February 20 or so and then get to us in Ghana around April 15. That was the plan.

What happened was not the plan:

1. January 20 - survey of house, they tell us everything should fit.

2. January 22 - shipping coordinator tells me no alcohol can go on the container, so we "better drink up. After all, there's nothing like a relocation to drive you to drink!" Uh-oh.

3. February 6 - house packed up, they tell us (again) everything should fit.

4. February 8 - Jess and I head to Ghana for a househunting trip.

5. February 9 - Ghana contact says my work permit needs to be filed before they can ship the container from the US.

6. February 18 - Jess and I leave Ghana, without my work permit filed because the guy that I'm replacing is still in the job.

7. February 19 - Guy I'm replacing is relieved of duty.

8. March 20 - I return to Ghana.

9. March 24 - I file my work permit.

10. March 31 - they try to load the container. Everything does NOT fit. When I ask why they didn't load the container earlier so that we could have avoided this, I get the e-mail equivalent of a shoulder shrug.

11. April 3 - Jessica comes back from a trip Kenya, goes to warehouse to approve taking a bunch of stuff off the container.

12. April 16 - stuff taken off the container arrives back at our house in Atlanta. A couch cushion from a couch that's ON the container is included in the stuff that arrives back at our house...meanwhile, I brought a separate cushion from a couch that was taken OFF the container in my suitcase to Ghana. We ask them to DHL the cushion to us. I doubt we'll be seeing that cushion again.

13. April 20 - container finally ships from Savannah

14. June 1 - date container is expected at House F2, Doku Ogana St, Accra

15. August 15 - date container will probably arrive at House F2, Doku Ogana St, Accra

16. Never - date we will trust a pre-shipment survey again.

- PG

Ghana: Free Chickens, Man!

Ghana makes you ask a lot of questions of the universe. One of the recent ones is, Why are chickens and goats running around everywhere, untended, in the middle of a city of 3 million people? At first I thought they were accidentally lost or abandoned, but there were far too many for that explanation, and besides - these are productive assets, unlikely to be misplaced. A goat can provide milk and meat; a chicken, eggs and a decent alarm clock. So why no chicken coops or goat pens?

It hit me - they're let out all day to forage for food. I guess the farmer's logic is, why buy feed yourself, when you could let nature re-distribute its resources equitably through a peck here and a graze there?

Of course, this system requires no small amount of community trust...I wouldn't let my animals out, even for free food, if I thought they were unlikely to come back to me at the end of the day. I can only do so if I trust that you - and everyone else within munching distance - will leave them alone. And here, that seems to be exactly the case.

I think a few economists out there might call this sort of community ethics "irrational," in that people are avoiding their own self-interest by NOT stealing these wandering animals for themselves. As the logic might go: not everyone is a chicken or goat farmer...if they were, then the incentive to steal would be decreased in order to avoid tit-for-tat...but since everyone does EAT, and goats and chickens are pretty good at meeting that need, the theft incentive seems to be pretty high. Basically, it would seem to be in the interest of a whole lot of individual poor folks to steal a chick every now and then that darted across the yard. In a way, the proof that theft doesn't really happen lies in the abundance of the opportunities to would-be thieves.

So, why does this phenomenon exist? (Discuss.)

PG

Beer, Tro-Tro’s, and the Meaty Ghanaian Goat

As you might have surmised, I haven’t put my arms far enough around this place yet to tell many good stories. So, in lieu of actual stories to tell, you get the little mind-scratchers that cross my path. Here are a few of the latest:

In plenty of upstanding establishments, a large beer is cheaper than a large water. Accra may have a few faults...this is not one of them...

As for the food: I’d like to say that I’m used to it by now, but as much as my neo-socialist, inner-anthropologist, eat-it-and-say-thank-you soul desires to be, I’m still heading for the Indian and Lebanese spots pretty often. Overall, Ghanaian food is good, but a lot of goat is served here. And by a lot, of course, I mean not much at all. Goats aren’t exactly the muscle-bound of the animal kingdom, and especially not in Ghana…but they are plentiful. Anyway, the goat usually arrives in various bone-only forms in dishes with spicy red sauce and onions and more spicy red sauce, and is intended, I think, to serve as meat. Of the 18 individual pieces of “goat meat” I have been served, I think I've been able to extract actual meat – I’m using a 2-chew minimum here – from exactly three pieces. Now, I didn’t even bother with about the last six pieces, so maybe I’ve shortchanged the Ghanaian goat and its meatiness. At this point, I feel British in my apathy towards the Ghanaian goat, but I’m determined to show some old-fashioned American perseverance...

Emanuel, the affable security guard at our office building, asked me for an Easter gift. I asked him what he would like, and he said he’d like to go to Papaye with me: a joint near our office that serves up huge portions of rice and chicken for $4. A decent, cooked meal - that’s what Emanuel wanted for Easter. At lunch, I learned that Emanuel has been in Accra for ten years, during which time his wife and two small children continue to live in his home village, which is four hours away. This helps me deal with being apart from Jess for just the last month. For Emanuel, every month is like last month - and the payoff of his sacrifice is a life where a $4 meal is still a luxury? If his wasn’t the story of 100 million migrant men in cities all over the world, I might be tempted to ask what’s wrong with Emanuel. But because that IS the case, I find myself asking what’s wrong with the rest of us...

I reviewed the HR files of my employees, and found that my lowest-paid employees make $60 per month, or the proverbial $2 per day. This means that my employee is my target client. Not comfortable with this...

I took my first ride in a tro-tro over Easter weekend. Tro-tro’s are 12-passenger minibuses that serve as the extremely affordable public transport method for most residents of Accra. (These 20+ passenger vehicles will be familiar if you've traveled elsewhere: East Africans call them matatus, and Mexicans call them motorcycles.) Anyway, for 20 cents, you can take a 30-minute tro-tro ride all the way across town. I only had to go up the road, and I’m glad for it – my first tro-tro had 24 passengers. And the roof was low. And I'm enormous...


PG

Easter Slumday

On Easter Sunday morning, I went to a small church in a slum in Accra. Tin roofs, containers for houses (and those were the nice ones), the whole bit. Chickens and kids all barefoot in the dust, both shouting at me when I rolled into town. One of my favorite things is to hear the kids that would normally shout, “Obruni!” at me, instead use English…so they point at me with a mixture of glee, horror and mystification, and say, “White man!” It’s great.

Anyway, so I went to this church. The church is held upstairs in a school that some entrepreneurial person likely built as a second-floor, rent-out portion of their residence. School desks, stacked precariously on the 2-foot-wide porch outside, looked as though a strong wind might bring them down. I went to the church with my Ghanaian pastor friend John, who had been invited to preach there. He had me start the preaching, so I got up (it being Easter and all) and said something about the scandal of Christ’s resurrection, how we shouldn’t get used to it and all that.

Then John got up to preach. And John started in the most logical place, of course – by talking about MicroEnsure. Part of it was to explain why this White Man was here, but most of it was to talk about God’s work in the world, and how it's ongoing, active, practical, and deliberate. And for John, microinsurance is part of that work. John explained a basic product to the people assembled in the church: for $1.40 (2 Ghana cedis), very poor people can have their loan with a microfinance bank paid back in case of death or disability, property covered in the event of a fire or flood, AND (not “or”) a lump sum funeral payout of around $175 in the event of a death of any family member, including the children. We can do all this because we serve 3.5 million people around the world, so we know the pricing and benefits and all pretty well in order to get a low-price, high-value product.

I was as surprised as you might be at what happened next. When John finished his very basic explanation of the product and its benefits, the people stood and cheered: shouting, clapping, hugging. It was like Ghana had won the World Cup.

It goes without saying that this experience showed me, in a new way, the power of our work. The poor know the risks they face – the evidence is everywhere. They want to be protected, and they will pay a little bit of money to get that protection through a sustainable mechanism. Problem is, no one thought until now that a range of insurance products could ever work among the poor...but it is working.

I’ll never forget that moment when they stood and cheered - certainly not as long as I’m in this job, maybe for as long as I live. The hope and joy that I saw that morning wasn’t a feel-good moment…it was a moment to observe the power of the poor: their capability, diligence, awareness, sacrifice, passion. Who am I to respond to their honest expression with my typical dose of self-serving do-gooderism? No, the moment made me think that all they need of me is to be good at what I do. They can handle the rest.

Week 1 in Ghana

Been in Ghana for a week now, and sad to say, I haven’t done much. Maybe it’s Jess being gone (in Kenya for now), maybe it’s the backlog of work that greeted me here. But a few things have taken place…

I have been given a warm welcome by my team: Naa, Oko, Naa Shika, and Naa Shormeh. Ghanaians are just fine, it seems, using about twenty names: roughly one name per million people. Might sound a little draconian in a land of baby name books, but look at it this way – at this rate, they’ll never get to Missy or Jazzmine.

I have learned the economics of driving a taxi while sitting in traffic: $6-10 per day paid to the taxi owner, $15 for gas, and then anything left over for you. Which, on an average fare of $1.50 and a glut of taxis in the city...

I have been amused that the steps up to my office are of random height.

I have met the Commissioner of Insurance, and lived.

I have become fascinated by Ghanaian hip life music, and the Ghanaian tendency to dance whenever music is playing, anywhere, at any time.

I have won $7 in a poker game.

I have passed an old Muslim woman in the street with two scarred Christian crosses carved into each cheek.

I have become accustomed to daily power outages in a town that is bursting at the seams. All the more interesting given that yesterday was Earth Hour, announced on the CNN website by this mind-bending headline: “AROUND THE WORLD, PEOPLE CHOOSE TO GO WITHOUT POWER.” My cynicism is quickly taking root.

I have perfected the ‘click’ at the end of the Ghanaian handshake, but have not yet been able to persuade a soul to speak Ga or Twi with me - or, rather, to return my Ga or Twi greetings with anything but a giggle and a response in the Queen’s English.

I have learned to be productive while soaked in sweat.

I have been to three church services – two voluntarily. The other one was an all-night service (10 pm – 5 am) at a large Pentecostal church outside my hotel window. If you can’t beat them…

I have paid $5 for a small grapefruit, and $2 for a huge draft beer.

Ok, that’s all for now. Thanks for your emails -


- PG