Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Ghana Day 56

A couple anecdotes I forgot to share earlier:

Sunday I was walking down my street, which is a residential-type street (paved, no sidewalks, trimmed on either side by a deep gutter, about the width of 3 cars), when a huge monster truck hauling something or other came down the road. I stepped to the side to let it pass, but the driver stopped next to me and shouted down from 15 feet up, “I love you!” I told him thank you, that’s nice, I’m going somewhere now, bye” and started walking again. This big truck followed me down the road at about 3 miles an hour for about 20 or 30 feet so the driver could repeat his wooing. It was very surreal.

Monday evening, the time it’s normally hard to get a tro-tro, I joined a small pack of people who ran after a van to get in. I was too late to get in (it packed up fast), but then immediately after another van drove by (not really slowing down) and the mate shouted Nungua out the side. I think they like watching people run, the mates definitely seem to get a kick out of it. Anyway, since it didn’t slow down most of the people in my diminished pack gave it up, but a group of young men all ran, and I followed. I was the only girl to make it to them when they finally stopped (although I was last to arrive), and definitely the only one in 2 inch (chunky) heels. They were all very amused by me.

Tuesday at work I was not planning to have any exciting adventures, since there were very few assignments in the morning and they were all double booked. But as I was going for old newspapers, the news editor called me over and said, I know how excited you are for your inside spread today, how would you like to make the front page tomorrow? So of course I said that would be lovely, and he assigned me to get comments on the major story of the day from bigwig governance experts. Fortunately I was not assigned it alone—I got to go out with two other reporters. The only phone that makes calls outside the office is broken (I have no idea, don’t ask), so we went to track people down by car. I got left at a training conference on ethics and code of conduct for a handful of MPs to hunt down the head of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, a Mrs. Anna Bossman, who was making a presentation there. We lucked out and the Executive Secretary of the Transparency branch here (the Ghana Integrity Initiative) was also there. Mrs. Bossman had not seen the report yet (since it just came out), but the GII guy was happy to make a statement, and that was one of 3 interviews we got. Sure enough, the article and my name made the front page today, and my copy is actually kept in several parts. Very exciting.

The story itself is somewhat interesting. The outgoing administration had established a committee to determine what the end of service benefits would be for a particular class of civil servant that is politically appointed. They came up with a pretty exorbitant package (two houses for the prez plus 6 new cars every few years), and there was a pretty big outcry over it in January. The new admin set up a committee to review that committee, and just came out with their report. They said that the first guys had put out two “final reports”, the second of which after they would be pretty sure they weren’t winning the election. Also, parliamentary approval was sort of shady, rushed, and they didn’t specify which report they were approving. So that’s what we were looking for comments on.

After getting our interviews and writing our story, I had to go confirm my flight at British Airways. I was ecstatic to discover that the Graphic driver and car were free and able to take me over, so it was a pretty painless endeavor. Good thing, too, because the BA office moved and I had still been thinking it was at the first location, because they haven’t taken down their signs yet. So my flight is confirmed and I’m definitely leaving, barring another Congo situation.

In the evening I hung out with the neighbors and Sabrina for about an hour, which I was impressed with because it meant I stayed awake past 8:30. Tony’s very excited about his picture credit in the paper.

The only bad point in the day was that I ate something that disagreed with me and had to wake up at 2am to use the bathroom. Even through two immodium this morning, I’m still having some trouble, so I’ll probably be taking some heavy duty antibiotics before I get on the plane tomorrow night. Wonderful way to celebrate my last couple days : P

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