by Malaika Thorne, MBA '09

We traveled from our hotel in Accra to Tema on the motorway in diming sunlight. The quiet humming of the air-conditioning kept us cool inside the bus but outside it was hot. I still hadn’t adjusted to being in the tropics, having left the chill of Boston just 33 hours earlier. The landscape outside the window was foreign, but not at all what I had expected to find in Ghana. Beyond the fields surrounding us on the highway were the bright yellow and orange lights that described an industrial landscape.

The Tema motorway is one of the distinctive marks remaining of the country’s first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for Ghana’s development. The 16 miles (25 Km) of paved highway we traveled from Accra to the industrial city was smoother than most Boston area roads which are cracked and cratered by continuous use, the material expansion of the tar due to extreme cold and hot weather, and the salt, sand and snow ploughs of New England winters.

Tema is a city located in the southeastern part of Ghana with a manmade harbor built in the 1950s. The city was the country’s leading industrial and seaport center for many years, and the most exports still leave for other harbors from there. The industries in Tema, now mostly foreign-owned, include aluminum, petroleum refining, chemical, food products, steel and other building materials. The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) also has its headquarters there. Another 3 kilometers from the Tema township, north of the road between Accra and Tema is the Sakumo Ramsar wetland: a lagoon, 7 square kilometers of floodplain and a freshwater marsh—the third most important habitat for coastal shorebirds.

We arrived at the U-shaped driveway to the Adjei family’s house in darkness and stepped off the bus into the calm humming of insects and heat. The large two-story house was lit warmly from the outside and the front door was ajar. In the doorway stood a smiling older man and woman whose ages were hard to discern, and a younger woman with a 1 or 2 year old child. As we passed through the door and into their homes, they shook each of our hands, still smiling warmly at each one of us. The Adjeis are the parents of one of a friend of one of the trip organizers. They had kindly agreed to host us on our first night in Ghana by opening up their homes and treating us to a traditional Ghanaian dinner.

A series of round tables and chairs were laid out in their large backyard, which was surrounded by a high fence and anchored at each corner by tall trees. The food was waiting for us on a long table on the patio that extended beyond the living room, around the corner from the bar. The patio was surrounded by screens and beyond the screens was a smooth concrete platform that led to the yard. One of the students seemed reminiscent as he noted that, like in India, there were no windows or doors to obstruct the weather from the house. “Everything is open.”

Among the vegetarian food options were long-grain rice, a paste made of cayenne pepper and shrimp, stewed vegetables, a fresh salad and a corn-based finger food. The drink options included orange and mango juices, and Guinness Ghana Breweries Limited’s non-alcoholic Malta Guinness. They also served “The Nation’s Favourite Beer,” Star Lager, which was introduced in 1960 by the Heineken International subsidiary.

Before dinner, we formally introduced ourselves to the Adjei family and their other guests—friends of Mrs. Adjei from the Advanced Information Technology Institute. Surprisingly, large proportion of the Sloan students on the trip had backgrounds in banking and finance. Mr. Adjei was warm and funny in his introduction, and encouraged us to feel at home. A conversation with him later that night revealed that he had retired from a career working for one of the large aluminum producers in Tema, and that he was an investor in Club Beer, the other alcoholic beer served at the party.

After two servings of food and ice cream desert, Mr. Adjei’s son-in-law turned the volume up and three-fourths of the students started dancing on the deck. Our formality quickly deteriorated and we shook, shimmied, wiggled, cheered and skipped our way into the start of an amazing experience in Ghana.