WHATCHYA GHANA DO?

Last Monday Adam and I came home from a morning jog on which we were relieved of our phones and the small amount of money were were carrying on us.  An annoying experience, but we never have to look far to be reminded how good we've got it...

After spending a good half hour dissecting the event with Sammy, the gym instructor at the small gym inside our compound, he asked us if we had heard the news about our neighbour.  We hadn't and asked for more detail.

While we didn't exactly know her well, Adam and I had chatted with her and her family around a fire in her front yard, across the road and down a property from our own place, one evening a couple of months ago.  As I was walking home in the afternoon, I had been making small talk and quizzing her sister about the ingredients she was carrying, and ended up with a dinner invite.  While it's hard to decipher between courtesy invites ("Please, you're invited") and genuine ("Please I actually want to share my food with you") invites, we decided we might as well try and make friends with the neighbours, but hedged our bets and ate first.  That was a good thing as it was indeed a courtesy invite, but they were happy to chat to us for a while.  Theirs was a house typical in this new part of Accra, a strangely large but incomplete shell that families camp in until they save up enough to have the next stage built.  We sat on wooden benches and chatted in broken Twi and broken English, family members translating for each other, and while we missed some of the conversation, I'm certain that the pointing to my legs and the reference to the colour of cow bones were linked...

Sammy explained what had happened.  The girl, maybe late teens, early twenties, had died.  She was trying to give herself an abortion.

No matter your standing on abortion, it's an absolute tragedy; at every point in the series of events that led to our neighbour's death, there were actions that could have been taken to save at least one young life, and perhaps even two.

The need for sexual and reproductive health education, including family planning, is huge here.  I recently read a statistic that 750,000 teens end up with unplanned pregnancies every year, and deaths from unsafe abortions account for 11% of all maternal deaths. In 2008, the risk of maternal death was a 1 in 66 chance in Ghana, while it was 1 in 7400 in Australia.

While there's a lot of poverty here, it was the first time someone's story and the broader situation had really touched me.  I know things like this happen all around the world.  But somehow it's so easy to think of it in abstract.  In a remote location.  Out of sight.  Not across the road from my house.

What a way to put my new job in perspective.

Later I shared the story with my colleague at work, trying to make sense of it all.   An, awful, awful  tragedy, he agreed, but then enlightened me some more. People are ashamed, and don't want to talk about the issue.  Then it happens to them, and they try any old wives tale they've heard - herbs, chemicals, Guinness with lots of salt, but the most common?  Swallowing ground up glass.  Such a violent thing to do to yourself.

"Eh! Ghana-ooo..." he said sighing and slowly shaking his head. "Do you know, you are lucky, Renee, sooo lucky.  If I had my time again, I wish I could have been born in a place like Australia".

So many people here want to leave (we hear "Oburni! Take me to your country!" all the time) and my go-to response usually is to focus on the positives, the culture here, and potential for people to change their country's direction ("but chale, if all the people who think like you leave, then who will make Ghana a better place?").

But this time, I had nothing.  "I do know, I'm very lucky."