My Love of Numerology or #233moments

I am not sure how it started, but it feels like I have always had a love for numerology or finding meaning in numbers. For instance, it makes me happy to see the time is 12.34 (AM or PM does not matter). 

Further, I feel good about facts like:

  • The date having an interesting sequence like the 11th of December did a few years ago, 11.12.13.
  • The city Tema (where I live) lies smack on the Greewich Meridian and hence on longitude 0.0…the centre of the world. A good place to live for a numerologist!
  • I am born on the 7th in a month – as 7 is an age-old magical number (like 3, 13, and 21).
  • I graduated from high school the year 2000.

In Ghana, as most of readers of this blog will know, the weekday of which you were born is important and many Ghanaians have a first name relating to it. This also gives rise to beautiful parallels:

  • My husband is the third Kweku or Wednesday born on his father’s side. Hence his father and grandfather are both Kweku as well.
  • Our first daughter was born on a Thursday, just like the first born daughter of my husbands grandfather (Kweku the 1st), and inherited her name, Nana Aba Adua.
  • The same daughter had two different nannies, both born on a Thursday, just like her! My second daughter is born on a Monday and when she was born, our previous nanny had quit and we had to find a new one. Only after she was hired, I realised she is also born on a Monday.

A problem with this love of parallelism, is when it does not occur and the deep discomfort it brings. For instance, when we were getting married, the date 29th March, 2008 was decided on for a number of practical reasons. Twenty-nine-zero-three-two-thousand-and-eight. It was so random. So non-special. It had no parallelism. I just did not “feel” the date! Almost considering rescheduling for a “better” date, suddenly my mother-in-law pulled me aside. She told me that the 29th of March, 1967 was the day of her first date together with my husband’s father! The parallelism had been found! I never reconsidered the date again.

When our second child was born on the SAME DATE as our first born, as an avid numerologist I was ecstatic! The birthday, is also a beautiful number as the 21st of the 7th month! It is hard to explain, but in my numerology brain that makes it feel like it was somehow meant to be. On top, the water broke at 2.33 in the morning, I’m not joking, the quintessential #233moment (hashtag created by Ato Ulzen-Appiah for all things Ghana). Our second child’s birth was almost on the hour exactly three years later from the first. On top, my first born is born 30 years after I was born, and my second born, 30 years after my younger and closest sister.

Maybe it is a human thing, this looking for meaning and symmetry in a chaotic world. While I enjoy numbers looking neat and organised around me, at the same time, I can of course see that so many other things were not beautiful, numerical coincidences, but have worked out anyways.  I do not officially subscribe to any numerology faith, I am definitely an atheist. But coincidences, numbers and parallelism do have an impact on my emotions.

Recently, I realized I have never really discussed this with anyone. Do you think the same way? Or do I seem mad to you?

 

This post is part of my new series of more personal posts to be posted on Fridays, Personal Friday

 

 

 

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My Week: Typically and Specifically

A typical week: Mondays and Wednesdays are teaching days. This semester I teach Ashesi’s introduction to academic writing and presentation: Written and Oral Communication. I leave home early, arrive to campus just after 9 AM, I see students and prep before class, eat an early lunch, teach between 11.50 AM and 3 PM and then have office hours with students in need of help, meet colleagues, and do grading.

Tuesdays often end up as recuperation after the long and winding Monday, but I also use them to catch up on longer term planning and check mail on this day. Thursdays are my grading and reading days and Fridays are my meeting days, sometimes on, some times off campus.

On Saturdays, I take my daughter to drama class and myself attend yoga. Sundays are mostly spent around the house and garden with family.

Specifically, this coming week: I know we have a birthday party in the weekend, there is also an interesting concert. On Friday, there is a faculty meeting on campus on Friday, which means I will be on campus three days this week (tomorrow Monday depending on the well being of my child with malaria!) My main project outside of work is BloggingGhana and working with the GhanaDecides team to find money for next year’s project. That means proposal writing and meetings, likely both, this week!

 

 

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When your child is sick with malaria

The blog posts you had in mind to write is the last thing on your mind. I mean, in tropical Africa on the one hand, it is just another day with play at home, plenty fluids, and ice cream in the afternoon – not so much different from a weekend without play dates. 

On the other hand, it is a time where I deeply connect with parents in this region who feel a hot forehead and it means more than a few days of recuperation at home. I think of families who live much further from a clinic than we do, cannot travel there in the comfort of their own air conditioned car, and do not simply hand over their health insurance to the nursing station before seeing the doctor.

My body aches for the parents who maybe have to go door to door, knocking, to look for the money needed for transport and care of their little one, increasingly weaker by the minute. In Ghana, malaria is endemic and has affected history and continues to shape contemporary life. It kills, and according to WHO Ghana reported more than 2500 malaria deaths in 2014, but it also cast its net wide as more than 1.5 million people were reported ill with malaria over the same time. That means, malaria is seen as nothing more than a bad cold. “Take your meds and rest”.

Now my malaria-ridden kid (or maybe it is not malaria, the test came back negative, but the zealous doctor still wanted to do the treatment) is sleeping here next to me and I feel mostly calm and grateful. When she wakes up, I will give her more paracetamol. I have food in my fridge and money in my bag. I have the doctor’s cell phone number if her condition is not better by tomorrow.

Can you tell I am still worried?

This post is the second in my new series of more personal posts to be posted on Fridays, Personal Fridays. Although, I have to admit today is Saturday. 

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What do you have in common with your spouse?

Holding Hands

You know these couples who you can see about town together – busily chatting while driving to work, shopping for the weekend, elegantly dressed and smiling at an evening event? Clearing the farm silently side by side, donning matching funeral blacks, walking the beach hand in hand? Mr and Mrs, enjoying each other’s company? Well, I don’t have that and I am not sure its what makes unions last.

I do envy the “Mr and Mrs”-couples (or the “Mrs-and-Mrs” or “Mr-and-Mr” as the case may be), especially when I am at an event on my own and drive home alone. Or do I? Because at the event, I will stay as long as I find it fun, socialize with new people,  and in the car home, I will play the music I love, on high volume and sing along. Is that really bad?

I am in a relationship since 13 years and married for about half that time. When we first met, I bragged to anyone who wanted to listen (and probably a few more) that I had found someone who was just like me, a twin-soul. I believed that the “Mr and Mrs”-coupledom was equal to happiness and planned my week around time with my man.

However, soon I could not hold back a yawn when watching football with my spouse and he could not keep his eyes open for yet another art-exhibit. We discovered one of us was more of an extrovert and the other more introvert in personality. Where I have made a name out of my blog and social media presence, my husband belongs to the few who never even got on Facebook! (He does like LinkedIn, the one social media site that does not interest me much). My husband is big on Ghanaian traditions; funerals, family sit-downs, and chieftaincy politics – I enjoy keeping my weekends open to cooking/baking, house parties and time with close friends and family.

After 13 years together, my spouse and I have accepted we are different people. We do converge around late night talks on politics or “Sunday”-special type meals in our garden. We have our children, bank accounts (sort of, but that’s another post), and some future plans in common. But when it comes to interests, we are like night and day. My spouse simply says “opposites attract”, but I think we actually have some key values in common, like freedom, joie-de-vivre, and not-wanting-to-pretend, that we honour by following our own path. That means more often than not, you will see one of us in town alone or with friends, later going home with much to tell.

Photo: Soulascriptura.com

This post is the first in my new series of more personal posts to be posted on Fridays, Personal Friday.

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I’m Back! With a Life Crisis, Post-PhD Blues, and Blog Fatigue

Vacation is over. Work has begun. I am back.

However, the sweet hopefulness of new beginnings that surround each start of a new school year has this year eloped me. Sadly, instead of feeling triumphant and light about my submission of my manuscript, I now feel rather lost and blue.

I don’t know what goal to aim for.

I don’t know where to go from here.

I don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life!

Is this the post-PhD blues people talk about? Or a full-blown life crisis?

I don’t even know what to blog about. Ghanaian politics seem more opaque than ever. Should I be more of a lifestyle blogger, perhaps? Showing you my (perfect) kids, my (well intended) DIY-projects, and my (always failed) herb garden? Or more like my fav academic blogger Chris Blattman, wittily summarising the interesting research debates I engage in, mixed with lists of links to great reads? Should I join other bloggers and start a podcast and simply talk to you, dear reader?

Well, for now I am lost. Or as it is put as the textbook chapter I happen to teach next week, I am “learning to wallow in complexity”. If someone out there has an opinion on what I should do with my life (or blog!), I’d love your input.

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Dissertation Completed!

 After eight years with this topic, five years at University of Ghana, countless notebooks, redrafts, and seminars, my manuscript is now finished, printed and submitted!
The feeling is indescribable.

  
    

 

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Reference on Dumsor

My colleague Steve (by the way he has a blog with beautiful photos) informed me my blog post from a few weeks back was a reference in the Wikipedia article on Dumsor!

Here is the evidence!

Screenshot 2015-03-26 17.47.26

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Lights Out in Accra: Dumsor Gets Worse

Since many months we have had a schedule for planned electricity cuts, or dumsor as we onomatopoetically call it here (due to the sound when a whole neighbourhood goes off DUUUM and comes back ‘SOR!)  (dum is Twi for “turn off” and sor for “turn on” I have been informed by a reader, thanks!) I didn’t want to believe the rumours of a new schedule with 24hours of no light and 12 hours with light? But alas it is true.

Just a few days ago my favourite author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a piece for the New York Times called Lights out in Lagos. Much in her story resonates with the Ghanaian situation. Ngozi Adichie laments: “I spend more on diesel than on food!” What is even more painful for both Ghanaians and Nigerians is:

“how many medical catastrophes have occurred in public hospitals because of “no light,” how much agricultural produce has gone to waste, how many students forced to study in stuffy, hot air have failed exams, how many small businesses have foundered. What greatness have we lost, what brilliance stillborn?

 

Comments on the worsening situation in Ghana is also worrying. Some comments on social media (it seems all of them are about power these days):

I never thought I would say this, but this new 24 hour load shedding schedule makes me seriously want to flee Ghana for other shores.

24 hr load shedding is the limit! It goes from being a fond talking/joking point between Ghanaians to becoming a health and safety issue.

 

One of my friends, talented health blogger Kobby Blay wrote a list begging Ghana’s now two ministries dealing with power (all with the same staff?) to consider his plight. He wrote:

 Please give me electricity at home so:

  1. I will always be happy going home
  2. My wife don’t have to call me from the house [saying] we do not have light
  3. Our baby can sleep without waking up oftenbecause of the unbearable heat
  4. We can avoid the mosquito and malaria that come with it
  5. Our foodstuffs wont have to go badbecausse our fridge depends on power
  6. My online business can continue to earn me some extra income to fend for my familt
  7. My phone can be reached in case of calls from work

The problem is of course costly to solve and promising steps have been taken. Meanwhile however, many Ghanaians will not get a good night’s sleep. 

 

 

 

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Interview for Social Media Week Lagos

Screenshot 2015-01-27 11.31.23Today I am interviewed for Social Media Week Lagos on how BloggingGhana started , what has happened since and my view on social media in Ghana. 

Q: Against other major countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya where a majority of its youth are using digital and social media to grow, strengthen their businesses, and to move the country forward. Where does Ghana square up? 

A: Yeah, the same thing is happening in Ghana. I think the development is best described as revolutionary; now you can run a successful business from home powered by Instagram, through applications such as Google Maps you can find things you could not find before, by using Facebook and Twitter young people in Ghana are increasing their political engagement. Maybe a difference to the African countries you mentioned, Ghana is much smaller. It has several advantages, one is the tech scene is like a family. We all know each other.

I am happy to see that social media communities are really taking root on the continent, there is a SMW for Copenhagen, London and LA and many other places as well, and in Ghana, we have our BlogCamp that launched last week Friday.

See all of my answers here.

 

 

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My Blogging Year 2014

It has been a sad year in many ways. A year of death, disease and loss for me and many others. I have also worked hard on my four careers – social media, research, teaching and family life!

Screenshot 2014-12-30 00.14.03(2)
Sad moments
The year started on a sad note for me, my blog had gone missing. I learned to do more regular backups.

End of the Word?

Then people died. People that were amazing, successful and well-known or I just knew well. Komla Dumor died in January, Shirley Temple (who had a surprising link to Ghana I found out) in February, in April my favourite author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in August Emmanuel Okyere, in November my dear Godmother who had been sick for some time passed away. In December, I lost fellow obruni blogger Mad in Ghana. Ebola hit some countries in West Africa but affected us all.


Blog scoops
Getting to debate on Twitter with a sitting minister of state was amazing, although I was smashed pretty hard over the head by Hanna Tetteh, Ghana’s minister of Foreign Affairs in a debate about the tourism policy. Another citizen journalism highlight was when I broke the news on the hole in the Accra-Tema motorway on my blog.


Plenty Politics
Current debates in Ghana covered on my blog included if a government university should be allowed to charge a toll to enter its campus, the State of the Nation address, race, women in electoral politics, inflation, the world cup, power problems and corruption. Many times we laughed and cried at the same time at our issues…


I worked hard!
My work was covered on my blog as well. For instance, my writing process and a one month stay at the Nordic Africa institute, teaching social theory at Ashesi University College. I wrote an article about Nigerian political protests and tweeted in English from Almedalen in Sweden. I also attended a conference, seminars and a workshop.


BloggingGhana stuff
We had a fast year! We were mentioned in The Guardian, got our own office or hub, organised BlogCamp and BlogAwards…


Personal
I also branched out into Instagram and Pinterest and had the most active year ever on Twitter.
But most importantly, I became the mother of another girl! 


Thank you for reading my blog in 2014! I will be back in 2015 with much more…


See earlier yearly summaries: 2012, 2011
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Ghana-Time and Clifford Owusu

The other day I wrote a tweet about how Ghana-time is not always coming late…

I think it has been one of my most retweeted tweets ever. However, not at all as popular as Ghanaian YouTube comedian Clifford Owusu’s latest clip – which has been watched 250 000 times. I can understand why …

 

If you want to know more about Clifford Owusu, OkayAfrica recently did a nice interview with him. He talked about his motivation:

– Honestly, I really do enjoy just making people happy—that’s really it, no other motive. That’s what inspires me. I like to see people smile. Do you know how powerful a person is that can people smile? They can get whatever they want.

Happy holidays!

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Extra Toothbrushes in Ghana: AIDS, Orphans and My Daughter’s School Uniform

As I came across the Varje Tugga Gor Skillnad (“every Bite Counts”) campaign for dental health education in Ghana, run by a chewing gum brand in Sweden, my mouth opened with surprise at an image of my daughter’s school SOS Tema as the recipient of education and free tooth brushes!

Children at SOS Nursery School in Tema, Ghana. Photo credit: Extra
Children at SOS Nursery School in Tema, Ghana. Photo credit: Extra
IMG_6904.JPG
My daughter on first day of school. Photo credit: Me

I think what just happened was “them” and “us” melted into one. When aid projects are initiated, an important aspect is to create that difference between “us and “them” so that people will see why giving is necessary. Now when I think of that last month, I went to buy just that school uniform for my daughter, of course I find it difficult to see why those kids need a toothbrush!

Where I was expecting to read about dental health, the campaign states further that:

“Drygt en miljon barn i Ghana har förlorat en eller båda föräldrar, 160 000 av dem på grund av aids. Dessa barn är särskilt utsatta för barnarbete och människohandel, något som utgör allvarliga problem i landet. Majoriteten av människohandeln drabbar fattiga barn från landsbygden.”

(“More than one million children in Ghana have lost one of both parents, 160 000 of them due to AIDS. These children are especially vulnerable for child labor and trafficking, something that constitutes serious problems in the country [Ghana]. The majority of the trafficking concerns poor children from the country side.”) (my translation)

I felt tired that orphans and AIDS was what was on campaign makers minds – was this not about toothbrushes? – and felt their numbers were a bit high. Ghana’s population is 25 million and one million are children without one parent? 160 000 due to AIDS? Anyway, its a good opportunity to learn more about HIV/AIDS in Ghana. The Ghana AIDS Commission reports for 2013:

“The National HIV Prevalence in 2013 is 1.3%

An estimated 224,488 Persons made up of 189,931 adults and 34,557 Children (15%) are living with HIV in Ghana. There were 7,812 new infections, 2,407 in Children 0-14years and 5,405 in adults. There were 10,074 AIDS deaths being 2,248 in Children 0-14 years, and 7,826 adults Estimated Children Orphaned by AIDS is 184,168.”

This suggests, despite the horror hidden in these numbers, that Ghana still reports one of the lowest rates of HIV in Africa. The number 160 000 mentioned above is a total number for all years since AIDS was discovered. Currently, many individuals diagnosed with HIV are also on retroviral medication, which means the virus is slowed down and life expectancy goes up again.  (By chance, a famous HIV ambassador in Ghana this week told media she never even had HIV! But that is a different story…)

This campaign has been a very interesting learning opportunity for me: I have meditated on “us” and “them”, learned about the low HIV rate of Ghana, but I am also saddened my new home country has to be portrayed in this sad light, just for a chewing gum/ toothbrush campaign.

What do you think, is it right to highlight the worst to make people donate?

Read also WHO: 10 facts about HIV and this article explaining why a HIV-infected man was acquitted of charges of unprotected sex – he posed no threat to the women he slept with.

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