The Ghanaian remote control

This title is about the family situations that I’ve been exposed to lately. The other day, Gladys was sitting on the couch watching TV with Nadia. When it cut to an ad break, the volume went incredibly loud so Gladys called out something in Ga to Sarah. Sarah runs in from the kitchen 3 rooms away, goes to the TV, turns it down, grabs the remote control, hands it to Gladys and goes back to whatever she was doing in the kitchen. Another example is from Kevin’s household. His host mum, aptly called ‘Big Mama’, was sitting in the living room. Her mobile started ringing on the opposite side of the table in front of her. She called out something to her niece, Annie, in Twi. Annie runs in from the next room, picks up the phone, pushes the answer button, hands the phone to Big Mama and goes back to whatever she was doing. This sort of thing happens everywhere, so we have named it the Ghanaian remote control. Great name huh?

The Ghanaian culture sure is an interesting one. I realised the other day that every thing I see or hear, I immediately compare it in my head to home and it’s almost always the complete opposite to the norms that I’m used to. I’m particularly interested in family dynamics. I spoke to Nadia about this the other day because I needed to understand what the deal is, and this is what I got from it. Males do basically nothing in the house. Males don’t cook or clean (unless they’re cool like Tiko, who sometimes whips something up in the kitchen). In fact, she told me about her friend’s dad who seriously only bathes, eats and brushes his teeth by himself! The females of the family organise his food, carry water upstairs for him and clean his clothes. If there is a young boy in the family, he will probably clean the car every day or carry water, but that’s about all. I think I’m lucky that I’m living with Tiko, who’s lived in England before and seems pretty chilled out about putting in some work, because otherwise I’d be going crazy. Most adult men work outside of the house. Females on the other hand have it a bit worse. Young females start doing work around the house pretty early. It’s the females’ job to cook and clean. Once they become mothers however, it seems that they get their children to do a lot of the work (like in the above situations), and only few work outside of the house. I also had to ask if this meant that when Nadia gets a boyfriend, she will be cooking and cleaning for him. She said that before they get married it won’t be like that because he’ll have to be doing things to win her over, like taking her out and so on. When they get married or move in together though…

Today I went to visit the bakery group of The Almond Tree to teach them some English. I’m quite proud of myself for this because I’ve never taught people before! Kevin and I went together and there were only 2 people there today so we had one-on-one sessions with them, which was lucky. They never went to school as children, so although they know how to speak English, they’ve only been learning how to write it for the past month from the Canadian volunteers. The guy I worked with was up to the letter H, so I got him up to M, which was very exciting. It’s really frustrating work. We were teaching them how to write the letters, how to say them and also how to sound them out. The letter ‘I’ was a killer. We sounded it out about 15 times, saying just the letter I, then saying ‘singing’, ‘Ibrahim’, ‘itchy’, etc to put it in context. I asked him to just say it one last time and he sounded out the letter ‘L’. Why?