The world in 2013 is a tricky thing to wrap one's head around. We are a long way from home and in many ways a long way from those things that we are accustomed to in our western-middle class lives. The gap, though, feels like it is shrinking for a growing segment of the population.
We arrived in Hohoe (pronounced ho-wei) on Saturday and have been getting aclimatized (both to the weather and the customs). Today we visited our placements (more on that in a future posting) as well as the market. Mondays and Fridays are market days in HoHoe. The market is everything you expect it to be in a developing country. Chaotic, colourful and cacophonous.
While in town for the market, a few of the other volunteers bought disposable phones to use while they're here (burners, for those fellow Wire fans). They cost about 25 cedis plus more for the minutes. About 20 dollars Canadian. Within minutes they were on the line to the US with their friends and relatives. On our way here we were talking about past overseas trips and Alice was remembering what it was like to call home when she was in Nepal and India in the early-nineties: line up at a central phone-centre, have the operator dial the number for you, talk for five minutes and have the line die when your five minutes was up (if you got through at all).
Everybody here seems to have a cell phone and the Vodaphone store was as comfortable and as air conditioned as Barklay's Bank. You can't help but wonder what effect it is having on the country and the ability to move forward. All the kids texting in my classes grew up with reliable telecomunications; most Ghanians didn't. Cell phones it seems to me are, to use last year's CBC's hackneyed phrase, a game changer.
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