Ghana Day 9 032112 Ghana Time

Ghana Day 9 032112 Different Clocks – Strangers in a Strange Land

I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about being a Western white person dropped into this rick African culture. Penny and I selected Ghana as our first volunteer destinations, in part, because we found that their culture was welcoming and hospitable. In that regard, we have no regrets and certainly made a great decision. Still, there is no easy way for us to blend in here, and that creates some interesting issues and dynamics.

These cultural clashes and interchanges fall into three different types, I think – being Western in an African culture operating at a different pace, being white in a world of black skinned people, and sometimes, just being ignorant that we are doing or saying something stupid. I'll try to address each of these in a separate blog.

The Western clock in us, especially living in the somewhat fast-paced Northeast US culture (Connecticut, midway between New York and Boston), brings some cultural clashes of its own. Our own lives lean towards the scheduled, the impatient and the hurried, three values that are not a part of Ghanaian culture. Nothing good or bad or judgmental, mind you, just different than our time oriented instincts from back home.

As best as I can tell, Ghana has its own clock and pace that is more relaxed than ours. I recently was reading, I think in a book called Einstein's Dreams that was discussing the elements of “time” in our lives, that some people are schedule oriented, and some people are more experiential. The “schedulers” are constantly checking their watch, and day planners to see what comes next. To generalize about them, they might check their watch, see that it is noon, and feel that they “should” eat, because it is time to. The “experiencers” however, will feel hungry and, without caring about the time, eat to satisfy the urge. I found it interesting to step back and examine activities in my life that I get engaged with, not because I needed the experience, but because it was “time” for it to happen. Think about your own life and examine how many “times” you might have. Time to rise, time for lunch, time for a coffee break, time to eat, time for bed. None of these “times” have anything to do with our body's need for the experience.

Here, the main means of public transportation is a shared van system, known as the tro-tro. It is a large cargo van with five rows of seats, potentially carrying about 20 passengers, and the fare is fixed from point to point, per head. We took a “tro” yesterday on a 25 minute, 20 mile ride that cost the equivalent of about a dollar (1 cedi, 50 pesewas). They are run by a team, the driver and the “conductor”, who collects fares and is constantly “hawking” and screaming the destination as they pass pre-established stops on the route, flying by at 50 mph, watching for interested roadside passengers to raise a finger, indicated that they want to board. The goal is to overfill the van, maximizing income for the trip. Like a subway car at rush hour, I've seen a full tro, carrying 14, impossibly “absorb” an additional 5 passengers. Sometimes the door closes, sometimes not quite.

Related to time, these vans don't depart from their origin until they are full. We rushed to get to the departure point of a tro on Sunday morning, and our group of five got comfortably seated in an empty van. About 35 minutes later, when the van was filled with 18 passengers, it left. The trip was about 90 minutes, the departure was delayed (to us) by another 35 minutes because it wasn't full. Kind of the opposite of a scheduled bus or train in the Northeast US. I've missed a train back home from New Haven to New York by being 30 seconds late, and it was nowhere near full.

The aspect of Ghanaian culture that we anticipated, friendliness, also impacts anything scheduled. It is of primary importance for people to stop and greet. Unlike the fixed stare that one might adopt in New York, to avoid being harassed by strangers, it is just plain rude not to acknowledge another human being in your path, and doubly insulting not to stop and greet someone that you know. People talk, meet eyes, exchange greetings, and arrive everywhere late.

We ate our 1pm scheduled lunch at around 1:30, because both we, and our host, stopped to talk along the way. Our Internet cafe session, which is billed by the hour, was interrupted by a power outage and the need to start up a gasoline generator and re-boot everything, so we settled for a negotiated rate. Our morning trip to the local market was extended by a few hours, in order to introduce us to several vendors. Our host canceled a meeting with his client because our “field trip” to visit local kente-cloth weavers, (a kind of Amish, blast to the past, traditional wooden loom process) was extended by a few hours to also visit a dressmaker in the area, who offered to measure Penny and Hannah for a dress.

To a highly scheduled person, who values productivity over personal contact, these values of timing can clash. After participating in the adaptation process to slow down, the change is actually quite refreshing, although different. One important way that we can blend in and integrate into Ghanaian society is to just slow down, and that has been nice and richly rewarding. It wouldn't work too well back home, leaving salon and medical appointments unattended, but the underlying basis for this is rooted in valuing human contact above all else. That is truly refreshing.