Introduction / Before leaving (Week -1)

 
This blog is written and updated by me, a Finnish fourth-year-student in development geography, fresh BSc (You just have to put it everywhere when it’s a new thing!) and football fan. I am spending the summer in Kumasi, Ghana doing an internship that also is my first “real” job in that it actually has something to do with what I have been studying for quite some time.

In the blog I will, over the following three months or so, try to present and comment on life in Ghana, football, maybe some community development practice, and anything else I can think of from the point of view of a young guy from a northern welfare state without much experience of life in what back home is called the third world (My only earlier trip to Africa consisted of what I now realize was a very protective cruise in Gambia, Senegal and Cape Verde a few years back).

About Ghana and Kumasi, I know practically nothing. A leading star of Sub-Saharan Africa, a remarkably stable and secure country in its region, the home of Michael Essien, Asamoah Gyan, John Paintsil and many more great footballers. The country is also a big exporter also of cocoa and coffee. But the few people that I’ve heard of that have actually been there tell only of beauty, nice people, security and all god things, so I am expecting much! Oh yeah, Kofi Annan is from the place where I am going! Has to be a good place to grow up… Regarding the whole region, my main source of actual understanding is some literature (not academic!) by the kinds of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Juha Vakkuri.

The posts in this blog will also be published in the AIESEC HY Exchange blog (http://aiesechyexchange.blogspot.com/), where you may or may not read posts also by other relatively young people doing other stuff somewhere else in the world. This is also why I am writing in English (Not my native language, excuse me…): Someone not Swedish or Finnish might actually read this!

Finally: If anyone out there is reading my blog, please do comment. Especially if the stuff I am writing is unbelievably uninteresting, I would like to know in order to make changes. Of course, I can draw some conclusions if no-one is reading or commenting…

So that is just something I felt I had to write down in order to provide a background for what I should be writing this summer. I promise to try to make my future posts more interesting and shorter.

All in all, this should be a fun ride. Before I left Finland, I asked my contact in Ghana if there’s anything special I should pack with me. He didn’t tell me anything but to bring a football.