Relatively Speaking!!!
on The Ghana Experience (Ghana), 07/Jul/2010 06:59, 34 days ago
5 July 2010The entire day went by openly or secretly comparing the conditions between Ghana (and sometimes Africa) with India.Today I met a very nice person with whom I am sharing my room. His name is Samuel and he is from Kenya. He is currently placed in the northern part of Ghana and has spent almost 18 months in the country. I learned many things about volunteering, living at the remote locations, managing the expenses etc. He has came as a volunteer representative and shall be helping during the training. From each region they have invited some volunteers who have spent considerable amount of time in the country. In the entire day we came to know about many intricacies of our lives as volunteers through them. There are two Dutch, two British and one Philipino woman in this group of experienced volunteer representatives.In the whole of the day what I found that I could relate more to the experiences of African volunteers than the European volunteers. Conditions through which most of the African volunteers are coming from are poorer or middle class background. Similar to them, even if my conditions of living in the Indian middle class is better than the African standards, it is certainly nowhere near to the European middle class standards.Today when everybody was enjoying their meat at the time of lunch and dinner, I ate only vegetarian things which were available on the menu. I just got fed up of seeing those big pieces of meat after eating my breakfast today. Probably the real Indian vegetarian inside me came out today. On the food front, one preparation which I liked a lot was Kelewele. These are fried half ripe banana chips. They are just delicious and I am going to learn some day how to make them.Another striking thing to me was the two subjects about which I know very little and most of the Africans and Europeans just loved to discuss. These subjects were Football and liquor. This is again because of built in Indianness. In India, Cricket just dominates the entire sport scenario and football is just some fun to watch and nothing to be seriously discussed. We are here at the time when Ghana had to leave the World Cup in the quarter finals and every where, international volunteers not being the exception, the subject of football is just very hot. Sometimes I found out that I could not understand many sentences just because of lack of knowledge about the game. At the dinner time when many people ordered some liqour, they were very much surprised when they heard that I have not even tasted beer which is supposed to have the least alcohol content.After finishing the training part of the day, I and Raj went for a stroll which is typical of most of the Indians. We walked almost for two hours and went upto the market. I wanted to buy a shorts for the purpose of swimming. Although being sold on the street, it was priced at 5 G. cedis (160 Rs.), comparing it to the Indian prices it should have costed only Rs.45 therefore I dropped my plan of buying it. Of course I may buy it tomorrow as I desperately want to take a dip in the swimming pool in the hotel and I don't have any shorts with me right now.Most of the market was filled with all types of old things. Two wheelers, clothes, mobile phones, furniture, TV sets, refrigerators etc. Strangely not much of buying was on and although there were many people in the market, many of them seemed to be just walking here and there. Sellers were not busy dealing with the customers. Two very young girls who were standing at a side of the road were openly eyeing us and I had a feeling that they were prostitutes trying to lure some customers. The overall market scene was surely not encouraging.An interesting incidence happened during the stroll and it is the one after which I want to name this post" Relatively speaking". We were curiousely looking towards things which were on sale on the sides of the street. One old lady was selling something and we were looking at those items. The women started shouting"Akwasi Akwasi". We could not understand it and told her"thanks, we don't want to buy anything." The youth, who was passing by, told us that by Akwasi she means White Man. So, that black woman perceived our brown Indian colour as White. It was very funny and we had a good laugh over it. Most of us after all do think in relative terms it seems.