Government Work, March 2004

I got a job with the U.S. government here in Ghana. I signed up for long hours, a painful pay cut from my last full-time job, and the challenge of helping George W. Bush look good overseas. In other words, I was desperate.

The job working in the economic department for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s West Africa Office (USAID/WARP) was the best one I've come across in six months of actively looking. I’ve often wondered what goes on in the offices of USAID, and why the organization’s personnel always seem so guarded. I'm tired of hustling consulting gigs and filling the days with self-improvement activities. But will accepting this job make me tone down my off-hours, anti-Bush administration ranting and raving? I hope not. Just because you work for the U.S. Government does not mean you have to be silenced, right? Isn't that what democracy is all about? I assuage my hypocrisy (working for the government when I am very much against many of its policies) with the fact that I am just a temporary government employee on a one-year contract, with the opportunity to extend, one of the U.S. government’s many "Personal Services Contractors". I also like my friend’s take on working for the government under the Bush Administration; "Don’t think of it as working for this administration, think of it as working for your country”. I can live with that.

This new job means I have less time to do my Ghana updates, even though now I feel like I have more substantive information to include in them. Just this last week while I was sitting in my painfully long, government-mandated training on gender in trade and agriculture, I had plenty of time to daydream about the things I wanted to share with all of you.

I learned that in Ghana, both matrilineal and patrilineal societies function. The Asante (of the “Fabulous” Porcupine Warriors soccer team) are a matrilineal society, so when it comes to passing down land, houses or other forms of inheritance, the family will give everything to a woman. In the patrilineal societies, like those in the predominantly Muslim North of Ghana, inheritance goes to a man. In those societies, if a woman’s husband dies and she has no male heirs, she must give up her house and land. As per the trainers of my course, Muslim women can become destitute like this, so many quickly marry again, often to a relative of the husband. I’m not a fan of either system, but recognize that changing the status quo is a challenge when thousands of years of culture are at stake.

I also learned about how the rates of HIV infection in Ghana are low in comparison to other parts of Africa, and how transmission here is mostly through heterosexual contact. The trainer also mentioned how male schoolteachers are large culprits of passing HIV to female students in Ghana’s boarding schools (a holdover from English colonial days). And I found out how female circumcision (or female genital mutilation) for girls is banned in Ghana, but how the practice reportedly continues in the North, where people sometimes cross borders into Burkina Faso or the Ivory Coast to practice it.

The trainer also provided statistics of how women make up the vast majority of Ghana’s self-employed, and how very few, formally salaried workers in Ghana are women. Most self-employed women work in some form of agriculture, and they are critical to the agriculture-based economy of Ghana. Unlike in Latin America, women in Africa are heavily involved in many aspects of agriculture, from planting to harvesting. And African women tend to focus their efforts on traditional crops for consumption, not export. As such, many pro-export, agricultural development programs funded by governments like ours inadvertently target almost exclusively men. The trick is to figure out how to change this, again, no easy task in a traditional (and let's face it, a sexist) society.

Here is just one example of what I mean by my sexist comment. In my first week at work, I attended a workshop in Togo for representatives of agricultural traders from all over West Africa. Given that women dominate the agricultural sector in West Africa, how many women do you think were represented at the conference? I think two out of forty participants were women. The agency I work for now was funding the workshop. One day in a small group session, I walked into a room full of conference participants. One of them, before he sat down next to me, couldn’t resist making a crack in French to all the rest of the guys in the room, saying something about sitting next to the "lovely lady." Everyone laughed. I just smiled my “screw you” smile, and fantasized vindictively about how I wished I could make it possible so that none of the jerks in the room could ever get their hands on any more U.S. government money.

Throughout the conference, people were curious about who I was. One after another participant, including grantees of USAID (who often lead towards ingratiating themselves to representatives of the agency), kept on asking me about my background, my experience, my qualifications. I can’t remember the last time I had to quote my resumé so frequently. At first I thought it was a West African thing so I mentioned it to my new boss (who is male and incidentally younger than me) and he was surprised. No one had ever asked him about his qualifications. The whole experience brought back in force how lonely it can be to be a woman doing economic work overseas, but also made me realize how much more it must stink to be an African woman working in a traditional society. They must be questioned, underestimated, and talked down to constantly.

If you think too much about living or working in Africa, it can really bring you down. So I'm trying to milk the humor I see in everyday life here, of which there is a lot. I've been eyeing Kente cloth for months now, comparing patterns and prices between dealers. Kente is the beautiful, hand-woven fabric that is original to Ghana, the craft being centuries old. Each pattern has a different significance as do the colors, and Kente is still the preferred clothing for Ghanaian chiefs in traditional ceremonies. You can’t buy Kente in stores though; it is only available in markets and on the street, or via direct-purchase from weavers. Like carpets, the older the Kente, the more valuable. It is not cheap, and like for most things, “Obrunis” typically pay more. Rather than spend half a day fighting traffic to make it downtown to the market, I took a quick trip to the guy with a little, wooden, lean-to shack of Kente just a few blocks away from my house. I haggled him down to what I thought was an appropriate price for the number of Kente strips I was buying, something like $8 per strip. After we agreed on the price and I started taking out my money, he exclaimed, “I love Americans…TOO MUCH!” Damn, I thought, I overpaid. Then he followed with, “Bush…he is OK!” Seriously overpaid.