Ghana Electricity

I sat around doing nothing today waiting for the electricity to come on at 6pm so that I could do some work on my laptop. The battery would only last so long and I know I needed to do more work than the time the laptop battery could provide. I started doing my work around 4pm knowing that I had about 2.5 hours of battery on the laptop. As expected the power came on at 6pm, but went out again at 6:30pm. It is 6:45pm right now and I have about 15 minutes of battery left. Constant (even consistent) electricity is a blessing and a luxury. It is no wonder why getting something done or accomplished takes so much more time and effort here in Ghana than it does back in the U.S.

*EDIT*

It is 11:30pm and they decided to turn the power back on…

The Cost of Soap

I don’t understand how Ghanaians decide to price things sometimes. There are 2 sizes of Lux soap that you can buy here in Ghana. The 80 gram bar and the 200 gram bar. The 80 gram bar costs 2000 cedis. The 200 gram bar costs 6000 cedis. Usually in America if you buy the bigger size or in bulk the price is usually less and you get a better value. But in Ghana it doesn’t seem to be the case for anything. With 6000 cedis I can buy three 80 gram bars of soap and have 240 grams of soap rather than spend 6000 cedis on a 200 gram bar of soap.

Things like this boggle my mind and at the same time it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that most businesses have such low profit margins if at any. Hardly any cost seems to be applied for labor, packaging, and/or transport which is also a problem. I would understand if a person or store in a rural area didn’t understand these concepts, but there is no excuse for a supermarket in Kumasi. I can’t blame the supermarket totally for this issue because it may be the manufacturer setting the prices in this way. The Lux soap brand is made by the multinational corporation Unilever and if they are the ones setting prices, then I just give up…

Am I just being stupid/ignorant? Can someone please explain this to me?

*EDIT*
The 80 gram bar of soap actually costs 1800 cedis, which makes it even worse...

The People/Things I Want to Bring Back to America

As I get to know the people in my town better as well as get to experience more I realize that I will actually miss some people/things here in Ghana. Every time I think of something or someone I want to bring back with me I will write about it.

The first person I want to bring back is my barber Bunso. I don’t really keep my hair long anymore because it is just way to hot and hard to deal with here in Ghana. So I just get my head shaved. Bunso my barber gives me some gangster haircuts though. He has an electric buzzer he uses, but once he gets the amount of hair he wants off he then uses a comb and a razor blade to give my head any even closer shave. It was pretty scary to be getting a haircut with a razorblade and comb, but now I can’t imagine getting my head shaved any other way. When I was rocking my moustache he would take the time out to shape it up. And now he even shapes up the soul patch that I am growing. And all of this costs around the US equivalent of 50-60 cents. I doubt I will keep my head shaved once I get back to the states, but it would be nice to have Bunso there just in case I ever wanted to start shaving my head again.

The Art of Letter Writing

The act of writing a letter I am beginning to realize is an art form of sorts that has lost its appeal and beauty since the advent of email. I find myself struggling to bring myself even to fill a single page with words in proper prose. The style that I write reply back to people with seems more like the emails I use to send back and forth at work getting only the essential information and points I needed to get across in the fewest amount of words possible. In other words I have lost my ability to write a letter. I have lost the ability to properly convey the way I am feeling with a pen onto a piece of paper.

Some of you have been writing me letters instead of sending me emails and I want you to know I really appreciate it. I really appreciate the fact that you actually took the time to sit down and hand write a properly thought out letter, which I seem to have lost all the ability to do. I need to practice. So I encourage you who have been writing me to continue to do so either by snail mail or email, but I want you to know if you send me an actually hand written letter through the mail I will make it worth your while.

I found a new post card I am going to start sending to people. It is a picture of a group of African women doing some sort of tribal dance topless, with beads surrounding their waist and buckets on their heads. It reminded me of something you would see on the pages of National Geographic and not on a post card. When I saw them selling this at the post office in Kumasi (Adum) I was pretty shocked and proceeded to buy 12 of them. So for a limited time if you send me a hand written letter I will reply back with another hand written letter along with this postcard enclosed in the envelope. Act now, supplies of this postcard are limited. My mailing addresses are listed below.

Mailing Address for Letters

John Park
P.O. Box KS 8309
Kumasi, Ashanti Region, Ghana
West Africa

Mailing Address for Packages

Chong Hun Park, PCV
Peace Corps Ghana
P.O. Box 5796
Accra-North, Ghana
West Africa

The Start of a Good & Bad Day in Ghana

I know it is going to be a good day for me here in Ghana when my morning shit comes out solid.

I know it is going to be a bad day for me here in Ghana when my morning shit comes out as diarrhea.

Flooding

It started raining really hard this morning. After the rain died down I went into my house and realized that my bedroom flooded. I spent all morning cleaning up all the water that got into my room. While I was cleaning up all the water I really wanted to go back home to the U.S. so I wouldn’t have to deal with things like this. To make matters worse the electricity was out so I had to clean up in darkness. This was one of those classic “I hate Ghana” moments for me.

Rain in Ghana

I know I wrote an entry about the rain in this country before, but I just can’t seem to get enough of it. The sounds, the smell, and the breeze after the storm is a pretty amazing feeling.

The Plague of Locusts

In the story of Moses, God performs some miracles such as turning a staff into a snake and parting the sea so that the Israelites can escape the Egyptians. One of those miracles I experienced first hand and realized that is can really happen here in Africa as it did in the days of Moses. In the bible The Plague of Locusts followed The Plague of Hail, but here in Ghana the plague of locusts follows the rain.

The locusts come out right around twilight these days and are usually a lot more severe if it rained anytime that day. When you go outside around this time you will find them surrounding any source of light. The locusts mostly follow the lights, but they are everywhere and there is no way to avoid them. You can’t walk down the street without having some of them fly into your mouth, ears, nose and any other orifice you leave exposed. My favorite part of this experience is when they fly in the space between your foot and sandal as you walk. So essentially as you are walking, you are stepping on them and getting all their sweet juices covering the bottom of your feet followed by the crunching sound of their bodies getting smashed. It is quite invigorating. It’s actually pretty disgusting. I took a couple of pictures of this, but they did not come out so great because when they come out, it is basically night time. When I get a chance I will post some pictures that I took on one of these nights.