Fiona Afia Nyarkoah

I am not unconditionally amazed. I think having travelled before makes things lose their ‘wow’ element. On the way to work on Tuesday, the streets were dusty, the heat teased my intolerance and small clouds of car fumes hovered just below the car ceiling.

Soon after arriving at HQ I was told I would be going out on the field. On Mondays Field Officers wear white polo shirts with “Financial Republic” across the chest, and Tuesdays to Thursdays the shirts are ‘lemon green’. I hadn’t heard that expression before but since the lemons here really are a bright green with a waxy bobbly texture there isn’t much to argue about.

On the field means going to visit clients to collect savings, which are carefully noted on a clipboard. At the market wooden shelves were stacked high with tropical fruits which gave way to bags of corn, millet, pounded cassava and cocoa. Medium sized crabs squirmed in buckets, reaching out as if pockets of air could be grabbed with their legs. Fish lay drying in the midday heat, blackened by the sun, but looked unappealing. Chickens clucked at table legs as chicks darted around them. There were giant land snails to purchase and goats ate rubbish and food remnants in the market square.

I made friends with one lady who gave me my African name, Afia Nyarkoah; ‘Afia’ because I was born on a Friday, and ‘Nyarkoah’ because she liked it. I’m having trouble remembering the pronunciation of my second name. Kofi Anan, the UN Secretary General, was also born on a Friday, but since he’s a man he’s named ‘Kofi’. People also tend to have a Christian name that come first, like Dorothy, Maxwell, Eric Brian and Mr. Thomas Martin.

In the market they sell palm oil which is as red as strawberry Ribena. I had some more red red- the beans, spicy sauce and palm oil with some ground corn sprinkled on top. It’s like baked bean’s rich and spicy cousin with a crunchy topping. It was so good that when the flies saw it, they wanted some too.

That afternoon in the office we had a computer training session. The technology is more advanced than at my school in Japan. The table was spread with hi-tech equipment and state of the art laptops but it was 2 and half of the most tedious hours of my life, whereby someone with a foreign accent explained every detail of the new software from some unknown location through headphones as we all sat studying the screens. It was made worse by the fact that the ins and outs of the work are not yet relevant to me. Every detail was explained with an example which took ages to load. As I sat, an enormous millipede wiggled past my chair. Thankfully by the end we were all in the same boat and managed to ring off the call laughing as the speaker asked for the 10th time, "any questions?".

In the car on the way home I was accompanied by Nana’s father. Nana is the lady in the UK who founded FR, but her father has returned to Ghana for retirement. He’s a serious man; his countenance deserves the kind of authority of a King or African chief. An accountant in the UK, he now chairs Financial Republic. I asked him if he’s happy to be back in Ghana, “Ohh yes”, he replied, “England is a Police state. They are always watching with CCTV and even with the tube passes ... There is no place like home”. I pondered this for a moment. As the car turned the corner, I saw a man urinating in the street. Freedom comes in many forms.