This time last year I really didn’t know what to expect. I arrived in Ghana expecting Christmas, my birthday and other such occasions to trigger the bouts of loneliness that sometimes accompany living here.

I certainly expected that to be the case last year, although I had amazing friend in my community I was still missing a connection with home. I was pleasantly surprised to have the arrival of two new volunteers from Canada and my friends Levi and Sam both independently coming to Ghana from Benin all coincide with my B-Day. My Canadian and Ghanaian friends (in equal portion) joined me in borrowing the drum kit at a local bar and drumming and dancing our way into the early hours of the morning. What was expected to be the loneliest birthday yet, turned into the best of my life so far.

So when my birthday rolled around this year my expectations were raised. I knew it couldn’t quite match last year, Tamale just doesn’t breed the same kind of spontaneous craziness, but with a girlfriend a great group of friends and my wonderful Ghanaian family I knew we were in for something good.

Anyone who knows me will tell you how much I hate to plan social occasions, I was still holding back on doing any sort of organising the night before. Saturday was supposed to be a work day for me, but by 10am I found myself trying to get the whole thing in order. After spending the day buying minerals (pop), all the ingredients for dinner and a not so quick side excursion to try and save my brother’s love life (or lack thereof) we were ready for the big show. Getting everything you need for a party isn’t difficult here, but it is certainly more involved than running to the corner store back home.

The highlight of my day was negotiating with my brother in order for him to let me buy locally grown rice. The influx of heavily subsidised US and Asian rice into a country perfectly able (and wanting to) grow its own rice pains me to no end. I detest the ‘I love USA rice’ propaganda and the slick marketing to promote foreign rice as something magically superior. I don’t do the cooking in my house and it’s really difficult to find dishes made of locally grown rice out on the street – I had been unintentionally supporting this evil enterprise of imported rice for a long time and this was finally my chance to make a stand. Of course my brother thought otherwise – ‘don’t you see the rocks and dirt’, he says. Of course I did, but it didn’t matter. I had a battle to fight; regardless of the teeth breaking rock content in the local rice (it’s really not so bad).

I was lucky enough to have my wife Huziema, who happens to be the best cook I know, offer to do the cooking. I used to make the mistake of calling her my sister until my brothers finally corrected me – for the Dagombas your brother’s wife is not your sister, she is your wife. My western sensibilities had me wondering what exactly this means, but when it comes down to it Huziema is my sister in law in the same way she would be back in Canada.

So we had the food, we had music and beverages – all was left is the people. Hosting a party here, can be an interesting experience for a westerner. We are all used to people being fashionably late for a party, but in Ghana fashionably late is the norm – it’s what most people call Africa time. I learnt my lesson last Christmas when my friends in Accra (who knew you need to be fashionably late for a party) didn’t even start to show up until almost 3 hours after I had asked them to come. This year I was ready – luckily the promise of food (the first come first serve concept is very much alive here) and the fact most of my Ghanaian guests live within a shouting distance of my house helped. I have a feeling the folks in Tamale don’t know about being fashionably late either.

Luckily my ex-pat friends came nice and early – helping build the critical mass to get the party started. One minute it was just me, my family and my five Salaminga (white) friends and the next the room was packed with 30 very happy and excited Ghanaians. There are definitely benefits to being the only Salaminga in the neighbourhood.

The party started as expected, with everyone sitting and watching American music videos from the 80’s and early 90’s. Old school Madonna, Whitney Houston and Elton John kept everyone content until the real party began. I still can’t explain it but Ghanaians love pop music and especially pop music from the 80’s and 90’s. I will never forget being interrogated for hours on end by my 23 year old friend Kwaku-Poku after admitting I don’t like Celine Dion.

Half way through dinner I got Lukeman to put on some Ghanaian music and before I could count to 10 our house was transformed into an impromptu dance club. Give any group of Ghanaians a beat to dance to and you have an instant party. I look around the room and smile thinking how much I love this country, this town and these people.

A birthday cake only slowed the party down long enough for a very jubilant happy birthday song. Luckily for me most of the Ghanaians were too interested in dancing to take any interest in the cake.

My Ghanaian friends drag the ex-pats out to the floor. As much as I want to dance I sit back and smile, I love the fact there is no separation, and no perceived difference between the people here. It doesn’t matter that I grew up half way around the world, It doesn’t matter that all the ex-pats are Christian (at least by heritage) and my Ghanaian friends are Muslim; the money in my bank account, my education, the colour of my skin, my nationality – none of it matters – as my friends in Ghana say WE ARE ONE.

At some point the party dies a quiet death, I head with a few people to town, but for me the night is already complete. I fall asleep stick basking in the love of my friends and family, lonely is one thing I am definitely not.

“The scientists say that elephants are descended from Dinosaurs”….laughter erupts. “But the bible says God created all the animals at the same time”, Charles always makes a point of driving home exactly why something is funny.

I say something about how dinosaurs have been extinct for a long time, but tip toe around any conversation about evolution and creation…there seems no point, no use and no common ground for discussion.

As far as I am concerned Galileo killed biblical literalism 500 years ago, but I guess not. Sure Darwin put another nail in the coffin, but that doesn’t seem consequential at this point. I laugh thinking of the apology the Catholic Church just issued for Galileo for all of these years. None of my friends are Catholics, and they probably haven’t heard about the apology but I have a feeling it wouldn’t matter anyway.

I usually feel like I fit in well, have culturally integrated, but conversations like this always make me feel that no matter how much I do there will always be a space between us…the space between belief and science.

The earth is around 5 billion years old, dinosaurs became extinct around 60 million years ago and humans evolved from ape’s in Africa. To me these are facts, proven time and again by science – there is no question, no doubt – Carbon 12 tells me everything I need to know about how far back our past goes.

My co-workers also believe - God created the world in seven days; it’s in the bible, it’s a fact, indisputable. Perhaps what makes this situation more difficult, more uncomfortable and more confusing for me to understand is that fact that I am sitting with a group of well educated people, many of whom have scientific backgrounds.

We both believe, believe in something to be infallible and factual. I am a believer in science and my friends are believers in a higher power, the God of Christianity and most importantly for this story they are believers in the absolute truth of the Bible.

In the west many (most?) avoid this conflict; most Christian Theology has given up on strict Biblical literalism, allowing the bible to be interpreted allegorically, at least where science has effectively disputed its grip on ‘the truth’.

For an atheist the answer is easy – this absolute belief is silly, illogical, backward and harmful. A few of my friends who have come to Africa express this view.

For me it’s more difficult. I consider myself a spiritual person, not religious - I can’t say I’m a believer in any theology as such, but I believe in something – more than anything in searching for this mysterious thing we call truth. For me spirituality is about this search, about challenging myself and my own beliefs and learning about other ways of thinking about the world.

Ghana is a country of believers – people not only believe (and believe unshakably) in the absolute truth of Bible or Koran, but also in spiritual powers, or in the common parlance ‘JuJu’ (better known to the west as voodoo). I have yet to meet a Ghanaian who doesn’t believe in the power of Juju, that people can and do curse, maim and kill through spiritual means. Most of the local movies deal with Juju related ills and it is very much a subtext to daily life.

I was surprised that when I asked my co-worker to come with me to see a river just outside of Tamale a few weeks ago and he turned me down. Manan is always complaining that I don’t hang out with him outside of work, so I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to come or what was so important that he couldn’t come.

I found out later that he had made an appointment with a spiritual ‘advisor’ to solve a problem for him. I figured it was just a minor health problem, but I later learned that he was seeking spiritual protection from his step mother, who he believed was trying to kill him.

This to me is incomprehensible – your step mother is trying to kill you and this spiritual advisor can arrange protection in the spiritual realm? The story may seem wild to a westerner, but what makes it strange to me is that this somehow fits in right alongside Ghanaians very devout belief in either Christianity or Islam. My impression is that these beliefs would be incompatible with the idea of an omnipotent, creator God. Most belief that prayer to God can help protect you form these spiritual, but even that seems a pretty wide interpretation of monotheistic religion in terms of accepting the existence of other spiritual powers.

It seems to me that most of my Ghanaian friends and colleges more than anything ‘believe’, in most cases the more belief the merrier. I remember driving down the highway in a chartered Van with my co-workers, watching a little whirlwind cross the highway. As we approached our driver violently swerved and grazed the edge of the whirlwind, everyone starts yelling and screaming at our driver. I figured they were mad because he almost drove us off the road, but it soon became clear that they were angry at the fact he hadn’t done more to avoid the whirlwind. You see the whirlwind is actually a dwarf running across the road. You can’t see him of course, but he was there and we very well might have hit him – which is very bad luck.

Mystery and Magic are very much alive here. One can certainly write much about the effect of belief on the development of this country, but for me the issue at hand is how I can interact with my friends while staying respectful to beliefs which I must admit I find often incredulous. The gulf between the believer grounded in…belief and the searcher grounded in science can be hard to gap – at least this Obruni has yet to figure out how to build a bridge.

November and December were busy months for me. Work made it seems like I had to be in three places at any one time and somehow I only had 3 days off in a four week period. Normally not a problem, but combining the work situation with a new girl friend, things got a little out of hand. In any case I was preoccupied enough that even my last election mishap didn’t get me thinking about how to go about voting in the federal election.

A few days before Christmas I went to visit my fellow EWB volunteer, Robin and happened to notice an official looking glossy brown envelope in her possession. So I ask ‘Gee Robin, what’s that shiny officially looking envelope all about’, wondering if another one of my friends has been invited dinner with the high commissioner without me. ‘Well Tom’, says Robin, ‘This envelope is just what I need to fulfil my civic duty as a Canadian citizen by voting in our federal election’. ‘Oh’, I say, ‘How do I get one of them purdy brown envelopes’, thinking I surely wouldn’t want to miss out on the wrenching decision between voting for the party I despise the least, one who’s values I like, but don’t feel is ‘quite ready for prime time’ or the party most likely to keep the dark side (for the political neophyte I speak of the Reform....ahh, er Canadian Alliance…I mean Conservative party and the ever so engaging Stephen Harper) out of power. As an aside can anyone think of a more boring, yet scary political leader?

In any case I really really wanted to vote. Of course the answer was to get in touch with Nancy, the chief Canadian in these parts (these parts being Tamale). Of course I forgot about it and next thing you know it is Christmas Eve…the last thing I want to do is call this lady up on Christmas Eve and ask her how to vote. So I tucked my head between my tail and headed out for a vacation in Mali. Knowing full well the double edge sword of forgetfulness and procrastination had caused me to shirk my civic responsibilities for a second time.

I returned from Mali a week before the election…I had left Ghana reading about a comfortable Liberal minority and possibly majority and returned to hear that the Conservatives were rounding the corner to a solid victory.

Well like all the other bleeding hearts volunteering in Ghana I couldn’t stand for it…so I headed to elections Canada’s home on the web and looked up how to vote….ahh easy after all I could even fax in the forms…if only I had know before I could have……aaarggg and grrr.

So I missed voting in another election, I do believe that every vote should count (yes a backhanded support for proportional representation), but at least in this case I could be well assured that even my vote couldn’t stop the Conservative landslide in my riding. Too many angry old folks up lining up to vote in good old Parksville for anyone near progressive to win.

Another disappointing election, another consolation prise…at least it wasn’t a majority! Let’s see the conservatives try to kill the Kyoto protocol with a minority in parliament!

This week I made the long awaited journey from Accra to my new home in the north of Ghana, Tamale. Coming from the metropolis of Accra, Tamale was in many ways a welcome relief. Cars have been replaced with motorbikes and bicycles, boisterous and brash greetings with friendly smiles and smog with dust.

All in all it seems like a good trade. There are many things I love about Accra, but I can’t say I’m so much of a big city boy. A friend once described the difference between Accra and Tamale as being like the difference between Toronto and Victoria, it’s one that seems to fit well.

Life in Tamale is very relaxed and laid back, but the city core is fairly dense so there is a fair amount of excitement (there is actually a nightclub 150 feet from my hotel room).

In the north there is a much higher population of Muslims, I would say even a majority of people here are Muslim. With the call to prayer coming from the grand mosque every morning just before 5am I hardly need to set an alarm.

The most striking things about Tamale so far is cabdrivers and obrunis. After about 5 cab rides I would guess the average age of the cab drivers here to be 16….the 20 year old helped even things out for the two 14 year old who were driving me around. It definitely changes the way you bargain…‘Small Boy don’t try to play these silly games with me’.

The other change from Accra is how many white people are here. Tamale is the capital of the northern region, the most impoverished area of Ghana, sometimes it feels like there are more white trucks and SUVs from all of the non governmental organisations than private cars driving around town. Coming from Accra where I would be surprised to see any Obrunis (whites) in my neighbourhood to Tamale where I see at least one on every block is a bit of a change. Whether it’s the number of Obrunis or the laid back attitude of the people here I have definitely enjoyed being about to wander around the streets without attracting too much attention.

A few days into life in Tamale and so far so good – now for the first real challenge, finding a house.

Ghana is a country as crazy about football (soccer to linguistic revisionists) as Canada is about hockey. Now Ghana hasn’t lacked success in the football world. They have been African champions as well as under-17 world champions on a few occasions, but to the shock of this newfound football fan they had never made it to the world cup.

This is a source of embarrassment, anger and shame for the average Ghanaian football fan. Luckily for Ghanaians this year they finally looked like they might make it.

The Black Stars, named after the shipping line Marcus Garvey started to help Africans living in the Americas return to the mother land, had positioned themselves in second place in their pool with 3 games remaining. Only 2 points (a win) stood between them and first place South Africa. With a game in South Africa Ghana, had a change, but winning on the road in Africa is considered something akin to a miracle. But somehow Ghana conjured some magic that Saturday afternoon winning 2-0 in front of a hostile crowd.

The stage was now set for September 4th. Ghana was playing a match against Uganda and the day before our neighbours from Burkina Faso had defeated South Africa – a win would guarantee Ghana their first entry into the World Cup.

I couldn’t miss out and decided to take a trip to Kumasi to watch the match in person. After surviving at least one attempt to pick my pocket, a lot of pushing and a fair amount of yelling we finally made our way into the stadium, none worse for wear. Or so it seemed - a few steps after making it through the gate I felt a drip on my leg. In all of the pushing two plastic bags (the normal form that you carry water in Ghana) of water had burst in my backpack. My camera got it the worst and wasn’t up and running again until more than 4 hours later (more than half way through the match).

With two hours still remaining before the match Kwaku Poku and I wandered looking for some prime seats. Little did we know the two spots left on the stairway were the last chance we would have for seats of any sort. Kwaku Poku ended up hanging off a fence in the corner of the stadium and I carried a large stone into the standing room area to get a few inches above the crowd.

The match started out with a flurry of action, both teams getting scoring chances in the early minutes, but it was clear from the outset that Ghana was on a mission and in control and it was only 10 minutes into the match that Ghana put one into the Uganda net. The crowd went wild, I’ve been to football matches before but I had never seen anything like this – even the armed police and army personnel were jumping up and down and hugging each other, Ghana was on the verge of something amazing and everybody could feel it.

The nail in the coffin came only five minutes later when Michael Essien drove a ball into the back of the Uganda net. The match was over with few exciting point and a lot of sloppy play filling the last 75 minutes.

But as the match ended nobody cared as the Black Stars players all fell to the ground and fans rushed the field. After a few minutes of watching and finally a call from a police officer to jump the fence and join the celebration on the field, I joined what had to be one of the biggest parties in this country’s history. Everyone was dancing and celebrating with the exception of the team captain for the Black Stars who was weeping as he was carried around the field on the shoulders of the fans. He knew the magnitude of what they had accomplished and there was no holding back the pride and joy in this moment.

I’m not normally one to place much importance in sports as a focal point of national pride. But looking at the passion and the pure joy of the players and fans, of everybody in Ghana in fact, after the match, I could see just how much this meant to Ghana. It’s not necessarily just football, for a lot of people this match and making it to the world cup is symbolic of the progress Ghana is making as a national and the place they now see their country taking in the world. In any case Sunday September 4th was biggest celebration Ghana has seen in a long time.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I am a political junkie of the first rate. So being overseas for the BC provincial election was a little bit tough for me.

Intent of voting despite my Geographic disability, I did what I normally do before important deadlines…procrastinate (any potential employers reading this please ignore the last sentence). I finally got my act together, bit the bullet and paid the long distance bill to call my riding’s electoral office from Ghana…after the usual miniature run-around (“Your calling from where”…people in Nanaimo don’t tend to get off the island much let along the continent) it was all arranged, my father could pick up my voting package and courier it to me, I would be able to fill out my ballot and mail it back just in time to have my precious vote counted.

I could see it in my mind, my vote would tip the balance in my riding and help boot those dirty Liberals out of power. OK that was only in my dreams, but I did feel it important to officially register my extreme displeasure with the current administration and their criminal leader.

And then everything crashed down to reality…..my Dad had emailed me, everything is under control – he called the office and they are mailing the package to me…no pick up, no courier….something is missing here…MY BALLOT.

To add insult to injury my ballot arrived on election day! Well at least there is significantly less than 72 Liberals sitting in the house this time.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Kumasi to check out the final game of the two game Confederation of African Football finals between Kumasi Kotoko and the Accra Hearts of Oak. Breaking with the obruni tradition I have decided to become a Phobian as all Hearts of Oak supporters are called….I’m wondering whether I will make it out of the stadium tomorrow especially if the Hearts win….at least the harmatan has come so a rain induced stampede can be ruled out….

It’s going to be crazy the first time two Ghanaian teams have played each other for the championship. Ghanaians are so passionate about football they decided to postpone the series until after the election to avoid any problems.

The Phobia cheer song…. ‘We are the Accra heart of Oak, until out bones are rotten, we NEVER SAY DIE’….certainly rings true after goal in the last 10 seconds to earn a tie in the first game of the series.