six months

I wrote this for our Foreign Correspondence site (I've been a bad girl and haven't posted anything in like, a month.) This is a slightly sugar-coated version of how I actually feel about things, nicely sanitized and packaged for CIDA and their ilk. Mind you, I love my colleagues at work and will cry like an idiot when I leave. But my tongue is bruised and swollen from being bitten so often, so many months in a row.

It all feels like a very long time ago.

We stumble groggily off the plane. We walk into Kotoka International Airport past a sign that warns pedophiles not to enter the country. We go to the luggage area only to discover that most of our luggage has been left behind in London. We wait two hours to sort out the various forms and queues and lineups. We are then met by Ato Kwamena Dadzie, a man who up to this point I’ve only known through an email or two, and thrown into a tro-tro, riding through the black hot night, the air thick and always smelling like something is burning.

We get to the hotel. I revel in the fact that my bag was the only one that wasn’t misplaced, only to open it and find out someone’s gone through it and stolen all my toiletries and bug spray and spilt my jumbo bottle of hand sanitizer over all of my clothing. A few of us sit on my bed and start half laughing, half crying. I feel completely alone.That was six months ago.

I can’t really say I’ve gotten used to things here. On paper it looks like I’ve done a lot and seen a lot since our last little group arrived on Ghanaian soil half a year ago. I’ve fallen in a sewer, ridden to Kokrobite on the back of a motorcycle, licked the inside of a cocoa pod, played with kids amidst piles of garbage and filth in slums. I’ve listened to the stories of domestic violence victims and psychiatric patients whose families haven’t visited in more than twenty years. I can keep a drum beat (but like most white people here, I still can’t really dance.) I’ve done the 14-hour bus trek to Tamale and back, I’ve swam around Lake Bosumtwi and not contracted a water borne parasite, I’ve climbed to the top of mountains in the Volta Region.

But there’s still times when I get on the wrong tro tro and end up in a part of Accra that’s completely new to me. I don’t fall down as much as I used to, but still I occasionally trip over Accra’s uneven roads once in awhile - because my shoes are all falling apart. There’s still times I’m sitting at work while people are telling jokes around me and I realize I just don’t get it. There’s still times I realize I am sitting out at the bar talking to someone whose parents operate mines in the Western Region and are probably indirectly responsible for polluting people’s water supply – and here we are, sitting, laughing, sharing a drink. I’m not sure if these experiences will lead to some big revelatory event that I won’t realize until I get home. More likely, they are colourful moments, situations of interest resonating with various degrees of profundity and eventually folding over and into the tapestry of that grand old thing, Life Experience.

Then there is work. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never know what my co-workers truly think about me, that some of my questions about their intentions and ideas will never be fully answered, and that some cultural practices have seeped into journalistic practices and have limited the way journalism is practiced in my newsroom.

I was trying to get in touch with Ghana’s gay and lesbian advocacy group, GALAG. I made a few phone calls to numbers connected with the group’s leader, Prince. I got a few suspicious “No, Prince is out of the country” responses. Then I sent an email explaining who I was and that I worked for JOY. I received this response two weeks later:

No one serious will talk to Joy FM from the Gay and Lesbian Scene in Ghana. Most of their journalist are full of hypocrites. They never work based on professional ethic of journalism and do not in any way respect nor grant fair and hearing when its comes to the issues of gays and lesbians. Prince.

I felt terrible. For awhile. Then I thought to the way the reporters in my newsroom joked and tittered like thirteen-year-old boys when I tried to broach the topic of lesbianism in Ghana. I thought about the fact that my general manager is rampantly homophobic and has said to me, “How can you believe in God and also believe in the gays?” I am not surprised that JOY has ostracized this community. And the worst part is that there is little I can do to undo this. I can argue with my GM till my throat goes raspy (and I have!) about why gay people should not be thrown in prison for being gay. I can tell stories about how in Canada, we have gay pride parades – to the interest of some colleagues and the complete horror of others. There are some things you can’t change at JOY. The newsroom mentality on homosexuals is only one of the more obvious examples. It is very difficult to realize that despite the goodwill, the hospitality, and the level of comfort I’ve grown to experience at JOY, I am still a guest, and only a guest. Due to my culture, the culture of my workplace, our stubbornness, and our egoes, there are some bridges I won’t be able to cross in the remaining time that I have here.

And that is simply something that I will never get used to.