And the Little Pig Said…

So, when writing that title, I was under the mistaken impression that it would mean the same thing to you, my readers, as it does to me and (I hope) my parents. But a quick google has suggested to me that you won’t know what the little pig said, and so I am forced to explain my obscure cultural reference of a post title before even telling you about my recent move.

My Energy Crisis, 6 Weeks On

I’m still at it! This week’s column was published here (with a typo in the headline), and can be read below:

Since my arrival in Ghana, the energy crisis has been a constant feature of my (and everyone else in Ghana’s) daily life. I have had a lot to say on the subject, in GO’s pages and my everyday conversations. I haven’t ridden this particular hobby horse in print for a couple of weeks, though, and some developments have made me think it finally warrants a full column of its own.

The first development was the “relaxation” of the load shedding schedule.

FYI 2

Let the backfilling begin! Yesterday I finally began to fill in my blogging blanks. I’m still getting the hang of WordPress, so it hasn’t been the speediest process so far, but I should have this thing up, running, and up to date within the next two weeks (it would be faster if the January batch of JHR folks weren’t leaving this week; I have a lot of goodbye parties to attend…). In the meantime, definitely check in, as there will be stuff going up, just bear with me if the organization isn’t exactly perfect. YAY blog!!!

A Heaping Problem

My fifth assault on the eyes and minds of Ghana’s newspaper reading public was published here, and is posted below:

When I arrived in Accra, I couldn’t wait to get to the beach. I grew up in a city next to the ocean, and consider dipping my toes in the sea the best way to calm my soul. Not only that, I had been living away from any coast for 8 years, so Accra’s proximity to the Gulf of Guinea had been a major selling point.

My dreams of pristine sand lapped by rolling breakers were not quite fulfilled, however. The sand and waves were certainly there, and both were lovely, to be sure. Rather than calmed, though, I was distracted. Distracted by the amount of litter: in the water, on the sand, blowing in the breeze. I simply could not understand why Ghanaians would allow their beautiful coastline to be marred by black plastic shopping bags, empty water sachets, and disintegrating newspapers.

A month into my stay, I understand a little better.

I Have Spots!

There isn’t much more to say about them really. I woke up yesterday morning with spots on both feet and calves. They mysteriously stopped at my knees, and just as mysteriously didn’t itch. They couldn’t be mosquito bites with that lack of discomfort. And bedbugs didn’t make sense, as I’d been sleeping on the bed for a month (in a sleeping bag liner on top of a sheet) already, with no such developments. Today they itch, and as a result of my scratching are more red and swollen than they were, but I’m assuming once I manage to leave them alone they’ll fade away. Or I’ll get malaria. Or another dread disease. I dunno. I think they’re just spots. But if they get more exciting I’ll let you know.

On the Camp

What a week! I got back from Tarkwa on Sunday night, and went straight into work at GO Monday morning. No time for a post-working-weekend “weekend.” Monday and Tuesday were business as usual at the office, but Wednesday big plans were afoot. Mark and Renee have been working for months with the staff of The Vision, the newspaper at the Buduburam Refugee Camp north of Accra. I had spoken to Mark about going out there with him one Wednesday before he left Ghana, and time was running out. Next week he’ll be up north doing workshops in Wa, so despite being worn out from the Tarkwa trip, this Wednesday was the day to go.

I’d arranged with Mr. Asante (Edmund Smith-Asante, our managing editor and boss of all day-to-day operations) to bring one of our senior reporters, Gertrude, to the camp with me. We’d sit in on Mark and Renee’s workshop, and then report a story. The obvious news hook was going to be that this weekend is the four-year anniversary of the signing of the Liberian peace accord here in Accra. We figured we would talk to refugees on the camp, and get a story about why people are still there, and how/if they’re planning to go back, four years after peace had been declared.

That didn’t happen.

My Full Immersion in Ghanaian Religiosity

This week’s column is published here, and posted below:

God is everywhere in Ghana. I don’t mean that literally; that would be a whole different article. Rather, I mean that the idea or concept of ‘God’ is everywhere in Ghana, and to a Westerner it takes some getting used to.

In Canada, the U.S., and Europe, religion is considered, for the most part, a private affair. People’s religious beliefs are not typically professed or discussed publicly, but kept for church (if you go to church) and home. If an enterprise’s name refers to God, a religious figure, or scripture, it’s a reasonable assumption in the West that that business is religious in nature – a Christian bookstore, a Jewish butcher, a Muslim social service agency.

Not so in Ghana.

Informed Consent

So, I totally forgot to mention something else that happened while I was in Tarkwa. Well, maybe happened is the wrong word. After the days’ workshops, Afua (my hotel roommate) and I would invariably collapse exhausted back in our room and watch tv. One of the nights, I don’t remember which now, we were watching GTV (the government owned television channel) and the news came on. One of the big stories was that a group of about 20 women from villages in the north had traveled to a major city for fistula examinations. A fistula (at least in the cases of these women) is a tear in the vaginal wall usually resulting from childbirth that results in a passage of sorts between the vagina and other organs, for instance the rectum or the bladder. Not nice.

As a public health awareness raiser, I thought the story was well motivated, but I was squeamish that these village women were talking about their fistula examinations on national television. I didn’t necessarily get the sense that they knew they didn’t have to share their private medical information with Ghana’s TV watching audience if they didn’t want to.

And then it got worse.

Digging up the Dirt on Ghana’s Gold Mines

On Monday afternoon, my boss sat next to me as I worked on the sofa in our office (picking up wireless from the house next door on my laptop), and asked “So, do you still want to go to Tarkwa?”

“Still” wasn’t quite the right word, since I had entirely forgotten about the trip to Tarkwa, it hadn’t come up in about a week, and it had been a busy week. He had first mentioned it to me during my first week, a trip to this Western Region town for “some human rights thing.” He had never gone into more detail, so though I had gotten as far as figuring that it would be related to the mining that goes on all around there, I had no idea whether this was a story assignment, a press conference, or what.

On Monday, he handed me a two page document explaining what the trip was about: A four-day workshop on mining and human rights in Ghana for 60 journalists and stakeholders, hosted by the Wassa Association for Communities Affected by Mining (WACAM).

A Career in Journalism?

My third column for the Ghanaian Observer is published here, and posted below:

I thought journalism was a career. A career in journalism was a goal I worked toward, planned for, and focused on for years. The friends I made once I entered the field had similar goals and had followed similar paths: working for student newspapers, taking journalism classes or degrees at university, interning during the summer.

Once we parlayed those experiences into real journalism jobs, we had new goals: to edit magazines, to write for major newspapers, to win Pulitzer prizes for our investigative reporting.

Now I am in Ghana, and I still have those goals. But I find that I am no longer part of a community of young people planning to conquer the world of journalism over the course of lengthy careers. I have met many young journalists from a number of stations and publications since I arrived, but to a large number of them journalism is not a career. It’s a stop along the way, an interlude before their ultimate career in another field. I’ve met cub reporters with plans to go to law school, promising investigative journalists with dreams of jobs in public relations, corporate communications, and human resources.