On Saturday, me and bf were on our way to the Grand Sales at the Trade Fair Center in Accra. On the way, bf stopped at an electrician who had a little kiosk on the road side to fix his laptop charger. There I saw two great things that would have made nice pictures which I didn’t take. On the cement floor next to the shop, two young boys were playing some kind of intricate game (I thought). They had emptied a trash can and made small squares of paper which they placed all over the floor. It seemed to have a system though. They used the small pieces of paper to shoot a little pebble around on the floor, and they had a really neat technique to make the pebble go far. On each side they had put two stones and in the middle of the two stones, a big paper triangle was standing. I then realized it was the goal keeper and the boys were playing football. It was so cool and ingenious. A woman was opening her shop next to the boys, and while opening the gate of the shop, she walked all over the football field, messing up the boys’ team line up. She didn’t bother to say: can you move your things so I open the door, or simply MOVE!, she just walked over it and kicked it all around. The boys didn’t seem to notice. Fast and efficiently, they put all their players back in position and continued the game, totally ignoring the woman’s destructive footsteps. I just had to think to myself what some Norwegian kids would have said if a grown up came and destroyed their carefully and tediously built up game just like that. They probably would have cried and screamed. Then again, they probably wouldn’t be playing football with paper squares on a little patio of cement squeezed in between two shops along the main road. And the grown up would probably treat the little angels with the uttermost respect and politely asked them to move their things so that the person could pass…
The other cool thing was the electrician’s shop. He has one of those container shops, and his office is a table outside the container, where he was soldering and fixing irons, computers, car speakers, water boilers, fans etc. His container was full to the brim of broken electrical appliances. They were so many, they were coming out of the door. And there he had components he could use again and again. And in 5 minutes he had fixed bf’s laptop charger with some cutting of wires, some soldering and paper tape. It would have cost him 200 dollars in Norway, and he wouldn’t get his old one fixed, he would have to buy a new one. The re-use of things in Ghana never cease to impress me. And I wish I had a great photo of his shop and the boys.
