Oranges are the only fruit

Afternoon, readers! (Always wanted to say that.)

Allow me to take you back in time before Christmas to a very simple moment etched in my memory.

I watched the pink sun set behind the trees, my legs caked in mud from an afternoon of football. In my hands I was carefully eating an orange which had taken a whole 20 minutes of preparation before I could take even one bite!

Even after four months here I still have sudden snapshots of a situation that make me think “wow, I’m actually in Africa”. This was one such moment. It was beautiful.

It got me thinking about the orange… and I think I can sum up my experience here with a single piece of fruit.

The first thing you need to understand about African oranges is that they aren’t orange. In fact, they vary from yellow to green depending on ripeness, each is bigger than a fist and is protected by a thick skin. To eat one you need a sharp knife and a good amount of patience* (see below.) The reward, however, is delicious - hands down the best fruit I’ve ever tasted.

This illustrates average life for the Ghanaian - without hard work, you'll get nowhere. Or my personal favourite: The Only Place Success Comes Before Work Is In The Dictionary.

Let me explain.

Something as basic as doing the laundry leaves callouses on your fingers, but that grubby shirt is now whiter than white. The women all have arms like tree trunks from hours of pounding cassava to prepare the evening meal for the family. To have a house to call your own, you must first buy a plot and build the house brick by brick yourself, saving small amounts of money to paint and furnish it over painstaking years. The daily life of buying, selling, buying, selling seems to involve such tight margins that often I wonder how they survive. 

For the luckier minority, there are bad teachers and lecturers to be overcome to become a graduate - and that's before we've even considered the corruption at most levels of society. Even then there may not be a job at the end of the road of higher education.

That's not to say it's all doom in Ghana - it's just a far more unfair way of life, where opportunities are limited unless you have money. Those who do succeed do so because of sheer hard work.

As a semi-tourist, I've found the same "hard work" principle to work the same for myself!

For example, greeting people is a big effort in Ghana. Especially for a boring guy like me. Everyone wants to shout "White man! White man!" "How are you?", which, as you can imagine, is tiresome after a while... But from these conversations I've made some really good friends here who I hope to keep in touch with for a long time. (I've also met my fair amount of nutcases, but you take the rough with the smooth.)

I met one man in Cape Coast who was completely deaf. Using makeshift sign language and lines in the sand I found out about his life, and it was one of the longest yet most amazing conversations I’ve had. 

Ghana lacks the means to adopt our materialistic culture which relies on the immediacy of everything. Hard work is the currency of the country.

That said, it's now under 3 weeks till I'm back in the UK, and it goes without saying that I'm looking forward to clean clothes and hot showers! Not to mention the food... Nom Nom Nom.

*Back to the orange…

Step 1: Use a sharp knife to slice off the outer layer of skin, taking care not to cut any deeper than a millimetre or so.

Step 2: Decapitate a small portion from the top, leaving ¾ or so of the orange remaining

Step 3: With your mouth over the opening, suck out all the juice you can

Step 4: Turn the orange inside out and peel away the remaining flesh to eat.

Enjoy!