Girl Goes Ghana

If you showed up in Ghana with no knowledge of the culture and accidentally walked into a funeral, I imagine you might get the impression you had walked into a particularly raucous party. People drinking, dancing, singing, and hanging out? Seems like a good time. Funerals in Ghana are different than a typical American funeral in many ways. They typically do not take place until several months after the death, in order to give the family time to raise money and get organized. In the meantime, the body sits in the morgue. When the big day arrives, pretty much everyone who has ever known the deceased arrives. The family of the deceased will often post flyers and even billboards around town announcing the death and giving information about the funeral. So when my community has a funeral, our population booms from a couple hundred people to somewhere around a thousand or so. A thousand people I don't know roll into town, dressed in the traditional Ghanaian funeral colors of black a...

One of the things that has been hardest for me to get used to in Ghana is my utter lack of privacy compared to what I was used to at home. One of the weirdest ways that this lack of privacy manifests itself? People dig through my trash. There is no garbage man in Ghana who comes around weekly to collect waste. In my community, there aren't even garbage cans. A few people burn their trash, but most (including me) throw their garbage into a specific spot in the bush which has more or less been designated a community dump. It actually works much better in my community than it does in many others; there is very little trash scattered around the village. This is a little stream in Ho, my market town. It smells about like it looks. Luckily, my community is nothing like this. However. The day after I threw away my first bag of trash, I was stunned to see kids running around town playing with things that I had thrown away. An empty floss dispenser, bits of paper, a piece of a br...