Things are a little bit different – (A work in progress)
I love it when I am traveling and I come across so many little differences between here and home that are really amusing. It could be a rude street sign, a strange food or something that we haven’t heard of in Australia. Ghana seems to be a place full of funny and strange little experiences that are not important on the grand scale of things, but deserve a mention for the humour that they bring. So, unlike my other journals, I will continue to add to this journal with any other ‘strange’ things Ross and I uncover.
The idea of a town is a little different over here. Where a town in Australia is a community isolated by usually at least a short distance, this rule doesn’t apply here. Our house appears to be just of the main street in the middle of town. However, that is not the case. Our town ends at our street. If we walk to the house across the street, we are in a different town. This might not sound that strange, like the two halves of town just have different names, however it doesn’t end there. Amazingly enough, they speak a different language on the other side of our street. One side of the street speaks Twi, the other side speaks Ewe. These are not different dialects, they are different languages. Its incredible.
The festival of the Yam. The yam is one of the main foods here. For those of you unacquainted with this food, the closest relative we have is the potato (although the yam is pretty huge in comparison). Anyway, the huge festival we have in town is the festival of the yam, which attracts people from all over the country. We are not allowed to eat yam for the next 6 weeks in the lead up to the festival, and then when the festival arrives we can get out the yams and eat as much as we want. We, however, have been going across the street (to the next town) to by yams on the sly, because it is only our town that cannot eat yam. Other restriction such as no loud music until the festival also do not apply on the other side of the street. Yep, its pretty crazy. The festival will last for a week, with such highlights as the locals guys dancing to reggae and firing their guns into the air. Stay tuned for wild photos. The local hairdresser (who is dead keen for me to marry her) is going to braid my hair for the occasion.
For some reason many of the kids have photos of Princess Diana on their books, I don’t know why.
The people here are so religious that they name all there shops after something biblical. However the craze has also spilt over onto the naming of children. Two children who sit together in my class include ‘Blessed’, a boy, and ‘Perpetual’, a young girl.
As in all the countries I have been so far, there is no shortage of funny names and slogans for products. Favourites in Ghana so far include the brown savoury sauce called ‘Maggi Shito’, and a chocolate bar called Yorkies who's catchy, if sexist, slogans include ‘Not for girls’ and ‘Do Not feed the Birds”.
I was teaching my social studies class about the urban-rural distribution in Ghana, and we were reading from the textbooks about reasons why more people live in the country areas. Reason number 1 was, “There are less entertainment activities in the rural areas, which makes people go to bed earlier at night, resulting in large families”. Blessed and perpetual didn’t find it as funny as me. Bless them.
Stay tuned for more odd things as I encounter them.
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