Ghanaian food includes several dishes that are very accessible to newcomers. My favorite so far is red red, a dish comprising spicy tomatoes and beans served with fried plantains. Jollof rice, a simple fried rice dish, is also very easy to like. Beyond prepared dishes, a variety of very good tropical fruits and vegetables are cheap and easy to find on the streets, including mangoes, papaya, pineapples, bananas, and avocados.
However, as is common when adjusting to a new diet, I am having cravings for a number of odd things, among them, tortilla chips, cherry pie, sweet and sour chicken, parmesan cheese, ice cream, and anything dairy—there is very little dairy here. I have heard that lactose intolerance is common here, but I do not know if this is true. I am used to drinking milk and eating cheese and yogurt regularly, so dairy cravings are not unexpected. I know from experience that eventually I will adjust, and start craving locally available foods, but till then, expect facebook updates professing my desperate desire for red bean buns.
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I’ve been in Tamale, Ghana for 15 days now. This is my first blog post since I’ve arrived, for several reasons. First, I haven’t had good internet access until now. Second, the website I use to blog, Weebly, blocks access from Ghana. Their explanation is that users in Ghana have set up a large number of fraudulent websites. Happily, however, since I was an existing user, Weebly was willing to make an exception for me so that my account could be accessed from Ghana.
Tamale is actually a lot like my hometown of Clarkston, WA. It is the center of a poor, rural agricultural area, and the town is about the same size as the Lewiston-Clarkston metro area. The air quality is bad, because most people burn their garbage. Religion is an important part of life. In Tamale, people speak of shopping in Accra with the same reverence Clarkstonians reserve for shopping in Spokane. Public transportation is much better in Tamale, though. My life since I have been here has been a mix of surprisingly modern conveniences and a surprising number of challenges in obtaining and maintaining those conveniences. I arrived just as IPA was moving into a new office and a new house for its employees, which means that I am lucky to have really nice places to live and work, but I am also experiencing the glitches that come with moving. We still do not have internet at the office, and we just got our furniture delivered there. At the house, I have electricity, a western-style shower and toilet (I even have hot water!), a propane stove, and fans in three rooms. However, since I have been here, the toilet tank has overflowed twice, we have had the stove fixed four times, and the other day half of the electricity went out. (Literally—some lights worked, others didn’t; my fan would only go half speed, and one of the overhead lights was even on on one end and off on the other. Our place must have some interesting wiring.) The takeaway from all this is that in places like Ghana and Senegal, you can have a life very similar to what you might in the United States—it’s just a lot more trouble to get it. I am only beginning to scratch the surface of Ghanaian culture, and I while the advent of internet is helping me to move forward with work, I still feel that I am just starting to get my feet wet. As my life here progresses, I hope to have a lot of interesting stories, observations, and insights for you. I miss you all, and I hope that you will keep in touch by email, Facebook, or replies to my blogs over the next two years! April 20, 2010
Washington, D.C., and New York, N.Y. I’m not even out of the country yet, and my trip is already proving to be eventful. Who would have guessed a volcano in Europe would prevent me from getting to Ghana? An eruption in Iceland has dispersed ash throughout the Gulf Stream region. The ash is concentrated at 20,000 feet—roughly the altitude at which passenger jets fly. Airspace over the UK is completely shut down, and unfortunately, I was scheduled to fly through Heathrow to Accra. After arriving at JFK in New York, I spent two hours in line waiting to talk to a British Airways agent. Most of the other people in line were Europeans, trying to get home. I suppose Americans going on vacation had wisely decided to throw in the towel. The group directly behind me was French, and the French clearly have a different idea of personal space than West Coast Americans. (In Idaho, an intimate greeting is honking your car horn. I don’t know what’s with you Easterners who insist on actually touching each other.) I tried to inch my luggage cart forward with every opportunity, but they persisted in compromising my personal bubble. A child in their group bounced around, occasionally ricocheting off of me. After 30 minutes in line, I felt uncomfortably like a single-celled organism being engulfed by an amoeba. If amoebas spoke French. After an hour in line, they were leaning on my cart and using it as a book stand for their New York City tourist guide. I finally gave up and ceded my cart and cultural norms to them, and started chatting with them about travel conditions. However, it was with relief that I was able to extract my cart and myself from their group to speak with the gate agent, who was mercifully separated from me by a nice wide desk. I’m one of the lucky ones. I was able to get a flight directly to Accra on Thursday on Delta. Passengers trying to get to Europe were booking tickets for mid-May. British Airways apparently has almost no planes left in the U.S. (They’re bringing them back to the UK and keeping them there; what purpose this hoarding serves, I have no idea.) Other airlines are struggling to accommodate their own backlogs, and aren’t taking British Airways rejects. I heard that British Airways was putting passengers on flights to Morocco, to drive from there to European destinations. The French amoeba wanted to know if they could go to Ghana too. The moral of the story is, clearly the movie 2012 was right: when natural disasters strike, go to Africa. |
About Liz
I have worked in economic policy and research in Washington, D.C. and Ghana. My husband and I recently moved to Guyana, where I am working for the Ministry of Finance. I like riding motorcycle, outdoor sports, foreign currencies, capybaras, and having opinions. Archives
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