Not because I don't like to travel

I am living in a building so called "International Student Hostel I" (We called ISH One). It is not a real hostel, but a dormitory for foreign students. I usually joke that this is the place with the highest concentration of white people in the entire country. Living inside sometimes made me forget the fact that I am in Ghana. Most of the foreign students are Americans in our building. I think that is because American schools love to send students abroad for studying, or people in Africa afford and are inspired to do exciting things such as traveling in a place where none of his/her friends have been. For that reason, every weekends I saw backpackers from our dorm gathering in the lobby, and preparing for their future trips to Northern, Eastern and Central regions in Ghana, or to Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin.

Backpacking is also my favorite, but my research about Chinese community in Accra usually occupies my weekends. I think the biggest challenge is to find Chinese people here. Although data shows there are over 20,000 Chinese living in Ghana, many of them do not live close to each other. Rich people live in houses where I cannot be access to; working class lives in staff dorms built by their Chinese bosses, and some of them are not allowed to step out after 6pm due to some security concerns. Luckily, many Chinese people come to University of Ghana and play basketball on the afternoons of every weekend. That at least provides me some opportunities to stretch my personal relationship for my research(social networking is critical because Chinese people usually do not feel comfortable to reveal their feelings to strangers). But at the same time I lost many opportunities to travel outside.

It is possible that I could not really explore other regions in Ghana and foreign African countries much, but I believe I will know Accra and Tema really well through searching for the scattered Chinese people. Fortunately, most of the Chinese I have talked to are cooperative and friendly. They are interested in helping a novice researcher like me, thanks to the fact that I belong to their culture to some extent.

Makola Mall

I stood on the street of the Makola mall in the central area of Accra. In front of me there was an unbelievably huge and congested market. On a narrow street, the vehicles were sharing the road with hundreds of people. I believe if I can overlook this place from the air, I would see a huge scrambled salad in a heavy and dark color. I say dark not only because of the color of the skin of many people, but also because of the aged signs and advertisement of shops, through which I can hardly identify their original color. Along the road, numerous shops occupy the buildings that are two floors to four floors high in general. The shops are not only on the ground floors as I usually see in China and US, but the balconies on the floors above were opened as shops that sell medicine, shoes, furniture and so on. Exterior stairs allow people to go upstairs to see what is sold. Because there is such a concentration of shops in a limited space, every shop-owner managed to attract the passerby by all means. For example, many shops removed their gate, making me clearly see what was sold here. Some owners even extended their commodity shelves onto the street, so that the passerby needed to look at these shelves in order not to clash them. I felt the Ghanaian government does not pay much attention on how a shop should be operated, and let the owners do whatever they want. This has made the street appeared to be extremely crowd and messy.


There is saying that desperate people do desperate things. I think it is applicable to describe a country in which people are anguishing and struggling along the poverty line. I realize that urbanization has created many problems in this country. The opportunities of the city allure countless people to emigrate from the rural area. However, no one will be ensured to have food once the capacity is reached. People need to compete each other more fiercely in order to add some more rice on their plate, or they have to put down their dignity, and beg money from others, especially the Oburoni (white people). I heard from Chinese people commenting that blacks are poor because they are lazy and greedy for money. But I think that this problem is more complicated than that. It could be brought up by urbanization, which may reinforce people’s search for money regardless of the ways they use.

The third US visa

To me, this summer is the "dealing-with-embassy" season. Back to May and June, I have been to Chinese Embassy in New York for at least 3-4 times. After, I sent my passport to the Embassy of Ghana in Washington to get permission to go to Africa. Before I leave for Ghana, I was rejected at the airport and was told to get a UK visa through the Consulate of UK in NY. Now I am in Ghana, I also need a visa to go back to US to continue my education in US.

To be honest, I hate dealing with the government agencies like Embassy. Unlike companies, they never put the concerns of the customers into consideration. They are slow and sometimes arrogant. A friend of mine needed a German visa to go to Europe in this summer, the German Embassy rejected her because she had no "letter of good conduct". In the history of her education abroad program, she was the first one who was asked to get that, due to a very pale reason. She had to travel between Penn State and New York, back and force, to get this done.

Among all the Embassies, US is probably the hardest one to deal with. One of reasons is that they require to interview every student visa applicants. In China, tens of thousands of people want to come to US for study. In front of the visa officers, they needed to defend themselves like a plaintiff, to prove they have no attempt to migrate to US. Years ago, two-thirds of the student visa applicants may be rejected due to the reason of being labeled as "potential immigrants". Thus, by the time I was admitted by Penn State, my important daily life is to practice how to deal with a visa officer and not make him suspect me. Now that I have been issued US visa twice, I am quite good at that. Before leaving for Ghana, I have obtained every single document that I can think of to persuade a visa officer.

The Embassy of US in Ghana allows the first 100 applicants for the visa interview to enter at 7:30am every Wednesday. I arrived at 6:30 am. I realized I was the only non-Ghanaian applicant. We were called in around 7:45, and the visa officers started working on time at 8am. I felt I waited for a long time on my chair because I fell asleep and had several dreams.

Once I was called, I walked into the window with full confidence. I opened my document file and took out a pile of documents, and waited for my "trial". The officer was a amicable guy around 30 . To my surprise, his questions were "How was Penn State?Do you like Ghana?"But I still anticipated him to ask for the documents. I picked up my documents and showed him without being asked, "This is the letter written by the ISS officers","That is my transcript", "Oh, I also have my bank certificate. Do you want to have a look?" He looked at me and smiled, "Ok, ok, calm down. I trust you. You are fine." And without researched on my paperworks, he just asked some simple questions and told me to pick up my visa on Friday.

I have realized that the general characteristics of the visa officers may be different in different countries. Maybe the busy and chaotic metropolitan environment has affected the officers in New York or Shanghai? But at least here in a relatively poor place, I felt some kindness through dealing with the government workers in Accra.