A bit of Culture

Power outages: Yep that’s a thing in Ghana.  Ghana Electric is the electric company that provides electricity to the Ghana population.  Their methods right now does not allow them to supply everyone with electricity at they’ve come up with a strategic form of power outages.  Ghana is gridded into sections and every three days certain sections will have no electricity while the rest continue to have electricity.  It rotates day and night: for example if you don’t have power on Sunday night you can expect not to have power on Wednesday morning and Saturday night…  Many people are accustomed to this and just have lanterns and flashlights lying around so that there will be light.  I too came prepared with a powerful LED lantern and flashlights too!  It’s actually not that bad…I’ve experienced about three so far and you just go about your business as usual.  The one downside during power outages during the daytime is it gets really hot and sticky in the house because the ceiling fans can’t run.  The power outages can last from 30 min to a couple of hours.  Ghana Electric is trying to change their methods and supply constant electricity to all and they hope that this plan will go into effect soon.

Water:  Most people do not have running water.  In my instance we have a tank that the water company comes and refills.  There are a ton of buckets in the house so that you can fetch water from the tank whenever you need it.  Since a lot of people use tanks most people’s water bills will show the water they’ve used from the tank.  Although sometimes the water companies are able to have a surge of water flow through the pipes connected to the water sources and this allows for water to flow through people’s taps.  Even though this is rare, when water is flowing through the taps people have to pay for that regardless of if they are not using it (so it’s better to use it when it happens).  The reason why tap water does not run continuously is because the water companies are still working on getting a solid route so water can travel from water sources into the cities and villages so people can get water directly from their taps.  It’s interesting to see how easy it is to manage without running water.  If you want hot water for a shower or bath, you just pour water into a kettle and then mix it with cold water in a bucket and tada!  When using the toilet you just pour water in the toilet to flush it because all you need is water pressure!  These are all things I didn’t think of often before I came to Ghana and now it feels like second nature.

School:  It’s interesting to see the amount of kids that go/want to go to boarding school.  In Ghana, going to boarding school is the norm and most kids want to leave home and have fun in boarding school.  It’s a way to leave your parents and get involved in more school related activities and clubs since you will be housed at your school.  Sometimes kids who go to day schools but don’t live close by may not have the urge to get involved with school activities and clubs because by the time that finishes and they travel home, it’s pretty late and they still have to do schoolwork—boarding school affords them the luxury of staying on campus.  Here they have primary school, junior high, and senior high.  High school is the equivalent to Senior High here.  It is broken up into four “paths” you can take: Science, Business, General Arts, and Visual Arts.  Based on what path you decide to take, it restricts what electives are available to you.  For instance if you do the Science path you can have the options of elective Physics, Elective Biomedical…  Visual arts would be Computer graphics, photography…General Arts would be government, economics… Business would be marketing, public speaking…