Obruni in Ghana

People in Ghana are very religious. You see evidence of this everywhere. Most stores have names mentioning God, Jesus, or quoting the Bible. Thus you can see “Jesus is great fashion”, “God never fails beauty saloon”, or my personal favorite “You shall not want repairs and sharpening”. And these are just three out of many.
Every meeting (at least where I work, but I’ve been to a meeting of the Ghana AIDS Commission, too, so I guess it’s pretty much everywhere) begins and ends with a prayer. People thank God for everything. And honestly, I find Ghanaian people extremely nice and helpful. Is that related to religion? I don’t know. Maybe. But maybe it’s just because they’re peaceful people in general. The truth is that there are things that are rather ironic, given how much people believe in God. I was told (by Ghanaians) that people here don’t tend to help each other if it could mean that the person receiving help could get (thanks to the help) further than the one who is helping. For example, if you’re really smart but can’t afford to go to school, there’s a chance that your richer relatives wouldn’t help you out because you have the potential to get further than them. I find this extremely ironic. It’s not only somewhat against the Bible, but it doesn’t agree with the fact that people here are generally very nice, polite and helpful.
However, what probably is related to the niceness of local people, is that they don’t judge when it comes to religion. They ask you if you go to church and if you say no, there’s no negative reaction (unlike in some parts of Southern Africa where people are also very religious). There, nevertheless, some issues related to religion and something that Westerners (but definitely not all of them) would call basic human rights. I’ll get to this later, when I tell you about my first two weeks of my internship.