Settling In

In one of the curiosities of living abroad, we have been given a house that is quite a bit larger and well-appointed than our own back home. It has more bedrooms, more bathroo
ms and sits on a well-manicured piece of land surrounded by high walls and a guard-controlled gate. It comes with basic furniture and some essential appliances, cutlery, etc.

Oh, and watch out for those open sewers.

Aside from what we brought in our luggage, it does feel like we are living in someone else’s handsome, but fairly sterile home. We are waiting for our personal effects to arrive via both air (soon) and sea (not so soon). In the meantime, we are trying to slowly get the essentials set up:

FOOD: In the time since I departed, Accra has become host to several international grocery stores, including a mall, so getting Western-style food and other expat “essentials” is easier and a fair bit less expensive. Our fridge is slowly looking less and less empty as we stock up. Asking my family to eat roadside "chop" eventually becomes a bit unreasonable for the other parties, although we did have jollof rice on our first night.

PREPARING FOOD: This sounds straightforward, but we currently have few kitchen appliances and utensils. Plus, local produce needs to be washed with a chemical solution to ensure that it does not contain any bacteria that would upset our delicate little western stomachs. This means preparing a meal for a family can take an entire afternoon.

PEOPLE TO PREPARE THE FOOD: Between shopping, cleaning food, preparing food and putting on a meal, you’ve got most of the day booked. So we have engaged the services of a local professional – also known as “The Help”. She comes in a few days a week to do most of the above-mentioned tasks as well as some light cleaning. It feels very strange to have a stranger in the house, but it’s worth it for the butter chicken and jasmine rice dinner.

PHONES: We have brought a couple of unlocked cellphones with us from Canada and have local numbers. The telephone is perhaps the only thing that is cheaper and easier to use in West Africa than in the country that invented the damn thing. Even our guards and help have BlackBerries.

INTERNET: Back in the day, if you wanted internet, you went to a café. Now, you’ve got it on your phone or in your house and it is fairly essential these days for the modern comforts of Youtube and Netflix. Our house is old enough that it has one of the country’s few landlines, which is now used solely for the net. In spite of this, access can still be spotty, with long stretches of outages. Until ours is installed, my merciful neighbour lets us steal his wi-fi.

TELEVISION: This qualifies as an essential for Mrs. O. She immediately got the best satellite package and have been rewarded with an assortment of US, UK and South African television. Still, the only channels that get watched are TLC, E! and the Food Network, allowing Mrs. O to retreat from this harsh tropical environment to seek comfort in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and Master Chef. I assumed that by moving my family to Africa, the Kardashians would not be able to follow. Alas, I was mistaken.

Family Flying (or the case for drugging your children)

Traveling with children is equal parts art and science.

This is why we can't fly business class.

The science component is fairly straightforward: what do you need to survive a long-haul trip? How do you establish a sleep pattern? How many time zones are you traversing? What “sleep aids” can assist you? 

The art component is trickier: how do you talk to your child about where you’re going? How do you keep the child entertained? How are you going to convince them to sleep in a strange place? How are they going to react to the experience? It’s about knowing what makes your kid tick.

We had the science down – we booked the red-eye flight so that Little Miss could sleep through the flight and had some children’s Gravol as an insurance policy. (Fun tip: drug your children)

As for the art, we had done some flying with Little Miss and she was excited to go on a plane to Ghana. So there was no kicking and screaming. And Little Miss’ grandmother had insisted on purchasing a portable DVD player with her favourite kiddie programs, which helped when we wanted her to sit in one spot and eat some dinner at the airport.

Then there are the things you just didn’t factor in: we had a few hours before the main flight where Little Miss needed to burn energy, which occurred in the form of running up and down the moving sidewalks for a solid hour. This concerned other passengers imagining tomorrow’s headline reading “HYPERACTIVE CHILD SWALLOWED BY AIRPORT MACHINE”, but we took it as a calculated risk with the payoff being a peaceful flight with a sleeping toddler.

 
In retrospect, we should have considered the X factor of other children on the flight (including two wee Ghanaians directly behind us) and passed around the Gravol. But we got a few hours of sleep and Little Miss slept from take-off almost to touchdown. Mission accomplished.

In Transit

Our house was full of boxes. So many boxes. Three lives’ worth of stuff to be either stored or moved halfway around the world. We said goodbye to our boxes and left the house to visit with family for a few days to let the grandparents of Little Miss spend some quality time and say their goodbyes. In the meantime, we did our rounds with family and friends.

We somehow got onto the airport and onto our flight with a ridiculous amount of luggage – basically the maximum allowed weight + stroller + child’s car seat (it’s amazing what you can squeeze on a flight as a parent).

We will write later about flying with children. Several long hours, airline meals and in-flight movies later, we touched down in Accra. Stepping onto the runway, Mrs. O exclaimed how flat the place looked. The airport had not changed in seven years.

However, once we were processed and came out into the parking lot, it was stepping into a very different city. The area surrounding the airport is now filled with new development, mostly in the form of pristine business towers, lining up next to each other with glittering corporate logos. This is the new commercial hub of the city: tech companies, supermarkets, boutiques, shiny SUVs. It’s the new Accra and a visitor to the country could be forgiven if they thought that the entire country was undergoing a China-like economic leap. Ghana has recently classified itself as a “Lower-Middle Income Country”, as it has the highest Gross Domestic Product per capita in West Africa, but that is really a math trick: money is highly concentrated and much of the country chips along in dignified poverty as it has for decades (with cell phones, of course).

My memory of Accra was one of an overgrown town – a city of two million people, but sprawling with compounds and one-and-two-story buildings and a very small international/business district. It felt like a place that had been more or less the same for a few decades, but was slowly moving towards some sort of change.

Accra now is in the slipstream. The North American and European economies have faltered since the 2008 crisis and although China seems to be slowly running out of steam, Sub-Saharan Africa is booming as the new frontier of business. The awakening of the world to the opportunities mixed with an abundance of resources (and offshore oil) is making the place a lot shinier and a lot more expensive.

Driving through this was a bit of a mindwarp for me. Expats returning to their own countries after time away experience “reverse culture shock”, re-adapting to the changed place they once knew. This is now how I am feeling about Accra and I find it quite disorienting.