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.