Monday, June 15, 2009

what i learned at cvs last weekend

the cashier at cvs had a different kind of accent, so i asked him where he was from. i thought he might have been from brazil. he was from ghana. he asked me what i knew about ghana - i said not much - so he began to give me an education about his country. very interesting. i guess this is what happens when you run errands late at night. people aren't in a rush. there was nobody in line behind me, and a bad thunderstorm going on outside, so i just stood there and learned about ghana. world geography and history and sociology is so much more interesting outside of a book.

there's gold and diamonds there.
it's on the western coast of africa, so that's where a lot of the slave trade happened. he said it's very hard to talk about there. he says he might see one of his relative here in the states, but would never know because families were separated. sometimes when a child was misbehaving very badly, the parent would sell them to the slave trade. wow! i wonder if they knew what they were really doing to their child.
it is a democracy.
they like the British because they brought the Bible to their country and because of that, there are many Christians there.
they learn the Bible in school and have signs on storefronts that say Jesus Christ Saves, so that no one will have an excuse when the end comes.
many of the surrounding countries were (colonized? i guess) by the French - they did not have a Christian influence. on the weekends, they drink a lot of alcohol.
then he said something interesting - that those people from the other countries know that the people in Ghana are wiser than they are.

so there's a real life perspective from Ghana.

No comments:

Post a Comment