Obruni in Ghana

Upon arrival to Ghana, the immigration officer asks you to give him/her your address in Ghana. Simple, right? Well, not really, as houses here don’t have addresses. So you try to write the P. O. Box address you have, knowing that, well, they probably know you’re not going to live in a P. O. box, but what can you do? I didn’t know until I got here. Actually, I found out only a couple of days after I went through the immigration process. I found out after I told my family the address of my office and they started laughing. I was confused – did I pronounce it wrong or what? No, they said, but nobody uses addresses here. Ha, that’s interesting… so I asked more about it. And I was told that streets here don’t have names because people give them names randomly and these names can change. So let’s say that one year, you live on Nkrumah Street, because maybe Nkrumah set his foot there once and it was a big deal, but the next year, you can live on Kingson street, because Kingson lives there now and won the World Cup with the Black Stars (as he deserved, if you ask me :)).

For people like me, it means some difficulties. Because we’re used to know the address of the place where we’re going, that’s what helps us know where we are. But it’s amazing how everyone knows where places are here anyways, and Accra is pretty big! So how does it work? You simply have to know something relatively important in the area where you’re going. For example, when I go home by taxi (which happens almost never because I love trotros, see the next post), I ask the taxi driver if he knows where St. Peter’s Mission School is and if he does, I tell him to go there and then navigate him from there (which, after I managed to get home like that for the first time, impressed my family, because it’s not so easy from the beginning).

I was told that people are starting to use addresses, but that’s probably going to be a very long process. Not only because people aren’t used to it, but also because the city is growing way too fast. And while I don’t consider it strange anymore, I remembered watching “Voices of the Poor” earlier today and the Mexican (I think) lady who was saying that being poor means not having an address and thus not having access to things. Well, not in Accra. Here, you can have a car, you can have a house, but still don’t have an address. I wonder if things like that are mentioned in travel guides. :)