Student life in Ghana: school and food

Last weekend, I had my first chance to see Accra, outside of the Unite for Sight arena. On the Saturday, a friend that I made while in Ghana, Osman, and his cousin, Wendy, took us around their university, where he is currently finishing his final year of a Business and Communications program. The University of Ghana Legon is a very beautiful university with pretty much all the regular departments that you would find in a Canadian University. University education is free in Ghana, if you choose to live in government-built housing, but students do have to pay "facilities" and "academic" fees. I was astonished at how little space the students had in the government-owned housing units. Rooms that were originally made for one person now housed 5 students - 4 in bunk beds, and the senior student, in a single at the back. It is obviously very cramped, but reasonable given that the alternative would be to pay for your own housing in privately-owned units, which are much more expensive.


That day, we also visited a crafts market, and an American-style mall, complete with fast-food restaurants, and giant supermarkets where an orange costs approximately $1 CDN (no kidding). Speaking of food, the cuisine here is delicious! And street food is incredibly inexpensive. For example, I had my first meal at a "chop bar" which serves the basic kinds of Ghanaian cuisine and has some indoor (although not air-conditioned) seating, last Friday. I paid 80 ghana pesewes (approximately 80 cents CDN) for it, and even though I tried very hard to finish it all, I could only eat about 2/3 of it. Generally Ghanaians eat a lot of starch, among them, rice (which has only been eaten in Ghana since the 70s or so, when they began importing it), fufu, and banku. Fufu and Banku look like balls of uncooked dough, but are really made from mashed up roots (like cassava and maize - which are high in fiber), and something else that makes them very sticky. They are generally eaten with a mildly to super-spicy stew like groundnut soup, perhaps mixed with beef or fish. You are supposed to eat it with your hands and swallow it whole instead of chewing it, but I have mastered neither of these things...so I will elaborate on the process in a later entry. Another favourite of mine, so far, are Waakye (pronounced wa-che), which is basically rice and black-eyed peas, and red-red, which is fried plantain with bean stew. The only dissappointing thing about Ghanaian Cuisine is that most people here do not eat dessert after their meals! For breakfast, eggs, bread and jam, oatmeal and cereals are common, and Milo (a kind of powdered chocolate drink) is immensely popular here. Needless to say, I am not going hungry here! In fact, I have to remind myself not to eat so much!


Today, we visited Dr. Gyasi's medical school in Kumasi, called the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and he took us to eat a wonderful meal at a guesthouse on campus. I was surprised to learn from Dr. Gyasi that medical training in Ghana, and in Australia for that matter, are very different than in Canada and the US. In Ghana, like in many developing countries, because of the immense need, every medical specialist can double as a general internist, and provide life-saving surgeries, like cesarian sections and the like, if needed. Their medical training provides them with this experience, by requiring that their residencies cover general, pediatric, and obstetric medicine, before they get further practical training in their chosen specialty. In Canada, you are exposed to the different types of medicine during undergraduate training, but your residency is only in your chosen medical specialty. The reason is because in developing countries, there is such a serious shortage of doctors, that it is often necessary for doctors to know far more than their own specialty. Just in terms of opthalmologists, there are only 50 in the country, 25 of which are in Accra. In Bawku, where our medical team came from, there are now only two. Dr. Gyasi used to be the third. It is just so mind-boggling how few doctors remain in Ghana, and yet Ghana is doing quite well. In fact, Ghana is well on its way to achieving the WHO's Vision 2020 (eradicating cataracts, glaucoma, trachoma, onchocerciasis - i.e. river blindness by the year 2020). So far River blindness has been eliminated, and only a few trachoma cases now exist in the North.

Ok, I think that is enough for today. Yes...I started talking about school, and ended talking about school, and put food in the middle. I could not end with food, or else you would all suspect that I am a greedy person who loves to eat, and only came to Ghana because of the cuisine. Anyways, I will close for the night. I hope you are all doing well, and stay tuned for the rest of my adventures!

Christine