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.