Ghana Dec09

Ghana

Eriye, the wife of David who used to be a volunteer here in Akwanga, has been waiting to get a call for an interview regarding her visa to follow David to Canada. Unfortunately, the office for Canadian visas for West Africa is in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Well, she got the call in September for an interview in December and I went with her to Ghana a few days ahead of it. She was travelling from Port Harcourt (down south) so I flew from Abuja to Lagos to Accra. It was a straight forward journey and when I landed in Accra in the evening, it was very muggy. The airport is right in the city and just a short taxi ride from where we stayed, so pretty easy. We were kindly hosted by Laurie and John, some Canadian missionaries with a church called the Church of the Nazarene that David had known when he used to live in Port Harcourt.

Apart from the sticky weather (highlighted by the fact that the dry season was already underway in Nigeria so I was used to dusty skin and a dry nose), one of the first things that struck me about Accra was the advertisements. In Abuja and the 2 Nigerian airports that I had travelled through, advert hoardings are either bare or taken up with domestic bank or mobile phone promotions. Now I was seeing images for Vodaphone, fashion designers and Pepsi towering over me. For good or bad, it just made the place seem more vibrant and desirable. The roads were also very neat, with trimmed bushes and proper pavements. As we drove through the back streets to a place called Nima, where we were to stay, street vendors seemed familiar, as did the smells.

We saw quite a bit of Accra by jumping in taxis to the market and combined this with sitting by the swimming pool. There was a lovely area down in the southern part of the town called James Town where we enjoyed some chicken and chips by the sea. Laurie’s food was also a treat n we enjoyed Chilli con Carni with real cheese!

Eriye was very anxious about her interview. She didn’t know quite what to expect but was hoping that she would pass so that she could soon travel to Canada. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. She came out upset because they had doubted the validity of their marriage certificate that had been issued in Akwanga a year and a half ago. So it’s a case of back to the drawing board and I’m going to see what I can do this end to try and verify their marriage. Who knows how long the process will take. It’s a very big deal moving so far from home to somewhere so different. It’s not something to be taken lightly and something that Manga, my colleague who has just returned from a 3 month placement at a University in London discovered (I’ll come to that at a later date).

Anyway, to add the disappointment of the day, after leaving the Canadian Embassy, Eriye got her handbag stolen in the market. I hadn’t seen her put it down next to me and a few minutes later it was gone. It had her passport, phone, diary and money in it. Not a good day. We then went on a tour of the town trying to put work out how she was going to get home after the fiasco. We went back to the Canadian Embassy and got the photocopy that they had of her passport and made our way to the Nigerian Embassy (I’m sure one or both of those places is called a High Commission rather than an Embassy due to the Commonwealth, but I can’t be bothered to interrupt my flow to check). It has to be noted at this point the differences between the two embassies. The Canadian has a thick gate with guards and when a car enters it has to open its bonnet and have its undercarriage checked with a large horizontal mirror thing on wheels before it can enter the next security guarded fence. We also had to leave our electronic devices at the gate and be sweeped with an airport beepy stick. The Nigerian embassy, on the other hand, allowed us to walk in to find a sleepy looking woman in the security office who asked us to leave our bags. Anyway, it must be nice not to have anyone wanting to blow you up. Back to our mission. The long and short of it is that they couldn’t do anything until the morning but did suggest that the bus company who she travelled with to Ghana might be able to help. At their office, they said that it’s possible to pass through the border but that the photocopy and a police report would help. Next stop was the police station, where they told us that we’d have to get the report from the police closest to the crime due to jurisdiction. We sighed, a lot, and I can’t remember what worked, but the nice desk sergeant (I don’t know if that was actually her rank, but that’s what they’re usually called in The Bill) wrote a report while a big group of male prisoners leered and whistled at me through the bars the separating us from them at the back of the station house.

So that was that. We’d also met up with another friend of David’s called Yaw, who is a policeman, and he came along to assist too.

On the last day of the holiday we went our separate ways – Eriye to shop and me to sightsee. I did my usual thing of walking my feet off, but visited a great little museum of West African relics and art and the cultural market.

It was nice to land back in Nigeria, to be back amongst the familiar and the warm smiles that I’m used to, despite the lack of organisation here. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that there’s so many more people, which makes me wonder what form of radical reform from above could possibly focus the burgeoning population.