Perceptions

One of the headlines in the press today is 'World Bank Paints Ghana Black'.

Apparently the World Bank used photos in a display which seemed to indicate that Ghana was making little progress.

Often people do have a negative image of life in Africa and consider it a place of conflict, hunger and poverty. And while those things are to be found, the other side of the coin is often overlooked.

When I first became a volunteer and went to Papua New Guinea people would ask me if I wasn't afraid of being eaten as their only knowledge of the place was of cannibals.

In my first few months there I found myself living in a beautiful setting, cruising the coast on the school boat and eating fillet steak brought by some pilots who would come for the weekend. One of the other voluteers 'complained' to the VSO field office that they had painted a very different picture of what to expect as a volunter from the life he was living and the field officer told him she could supply a hairshirt if he really wanted to suffer!

Yes, there are problems in PNG but in my time there I met genuinely nice people who liked you for who your were and not what you had. There were times when there was no water or no electricity and you couldn't just go out and visit the mall or the cinema but there were so many other compensations those things didn't matter.

I often wonder what perceptions the student I was teaching in Hong Kong before I came here have of my life in Ghana. Some of their comments or questions were quite telling. One wanted to know if I wasn't afraid of all those black people. Another was surprised when I was chatting to him online as he didn't believe I could use the internet in Africa.

There is still a lot of suffering in Ghana and people have to work really hard to scratch a living. People who live in rural Ghana have little in the way of services but it isn't the only life here and I think the officials were right to complain about the photos as they only gave one side of the story.