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on Richard in Koforidua (Ghana), 22/Jul/2009 09:32, 34 days ago
Volunteers in Ghana are told that greeting is hugely important. The handshakes, sometimes with the special clicks, and the‘how are you/I am fines’ come thick and fast as you go about your daily business. If you do not greet, you can upset people and you may get picked up on that at some later date. We are also told that it is customary to say you are fine even if you are not.The effect of all these greetings, the smiles, the waves and even the salutes is to lull you into a feeling that all is well in the land of Ghana. It can come as quite a shock, then, whenever you realise that Ghana, in line with everywhere else, is not always like that. The theft of my bicycle, within weeks of my buying it, was an annoyance, but something I put down to experience. It led to a curious meeting under a mango tree with the parents of the suspected thief, with our case being argued by one of Dan’s colleagues in full black toga funeral outfit. Unlike the tree, the meeting was fruitless. It also got me a lot of sympathy from friends and colleagues, the former generously providing a replacement as a birthday present.The incident clearly stayed in the mind of one of my colleagues. Recently he asked me if I had many friends in Ghana. I said I had a few, but that I mainly socialised with other volunteers. He said that it was good that I didn’t have a lot of friends. He went on to say that the problem with friends is that they think that they treat your possessions as if they were their own. As part of the cocoa project, each of the district agriculture offices had received a motorbike. My colleague was responsible for the bike inour district. He said he had divided his bedroom with a sheet on a line so that the bike could be kept there at night. That way it would not be visible and would be less likely to be stolen. However, he genuinely felt that the more people he knew, the greater the chance that the motorbike would be taken.On a less gloomy, more superficial but related matter, I have stopped breaking at least one local bye law. I might be inadvertently breaking others but I would have to plead ignorance if accused. Yesterday morning I purchased a bicycle licence. For the princely sum of two Ghana cedis, the cash office at the New Juaben Municipal Assembly provided me with a piece of thin metal adorned with licence number and a small Ghana flag, which I should attach to my bicycle. My name and the bike’s frame number were entered into vast ledgers and I was issued with a carefully written pre-numbered receipt. The accountant in me suspects that the effort involved in producing this licence will have entirely absorbed the two cedis I paid, but I have done my duty. Most people do not have licences. They know that nobody is interested in catching offenders. The same applies to TV licences here. They are very cheap, but almost nobody buys one because unlike the UK they are not enforced.