Poor Man Will Never Eat Grass

This is one of the many slogans I’ve seen painted on stores and food stands (stay tuned for a whole post on these if I remember), and the other day I had the opportunity to inquire into the meaning of this saying. I was sitting and talking with some younger guys and asked them about it. They said it’s related to hospitality, people in Ghana help each other out, and if a poor man is hungry people will feed him so they will never have to eat grass. I have no doubt that this sort of hospitality is practiced, but I’m unsure about how often to what extent. I have seen both extremes: where clearly blind old man was being ushered around by a teenage girl collecting money and a couple of Ghanaians gave some money, I don’t want to share the other because I don’t understand what was happening due to language barriers but it involved someone who appeared to be mentally ill but causing a nuisance.

I relaxed with the two younger guys for quite some time discussing a wide range of topics: Barack Obama, the WWE and if it’s real or fake, special effects in movies, cocaine in Columbia and the West (the problems, the money, the demand and some moral issues around it), poverty and homelessness in Canada and Ghana, why some people in America don’t like Christopher Columbus (an anthropology can of worms), California and rap artists, Arnold Swartzenagar, English speaking skills, how Kasem is not valued or taught very much anymore, and so on. They mainly asked questions about these and I gave them my opinions, basically they had many questions about the West. It makes me realize how much access to information we have in comparison to many people in the world. 24 hours a day 7 days a week I have a world wide web of information at my finger tips, a privilege that’s simply not widely available here.

During our conversations I had the opportunity to express some thoughts about world issues with the intent of providing some different perspectives they might not hear too often - I kind of felt like a biased small encyclopedia. My perspectives, thoughts, opinions, and feelings are different, not better, worse, or enlightening, but different due to my location in the world, background, education, and so on. When I think of positive changes in my own life, what comes to mind is hearing new and different perspectives, and that’s what the three of us shared that afternoon.

Pounding/preparing a fufu feast

These aren't the guys I talk about in this blog, some of them live

in the same compound. For dessert we watched some football