A Visit to Accra

May 2014 Kathy and I went to Accra, Ghana, on a work-related trip.  For details on that part of the visit see www.gsogeneva.ch  regarding  contributions to the United Nations Scaling Up Nutrition initiative.  We were able to find some free time, not much, before heading back to Geneva, our home base at the time.  In Accra we were driven to the  downtown market for a brief visit there, and later strolled around the neighborhood surrounding our hotel.  These photos depict some scenes we saw there.

The market was bustling with vendors of all manner of fresh food items, jewelry, clothing and housewares.  It was dominated by women, both as sellers and as buyers. The main market was more for household consumers.  Out in the streets around the market we found an even broader range of eclectic  wares, geared as much to retail and wholesale businesses as to household consumers — things like manikins and hardware goods.

In our walk around the hotel neighborhood we got a sense of daily life in Accra. — the ubiquitous cell phone, popular foods, traffic and entertainment., and progress in economic development.  People everywhere were friendly and quick to stop for a chat, especially the younger ones.  We were struck by the abundance of color in commerce and clothing and food.

A note about the photos — shortly after our visit to Accra, we were victims of a robbery, not in Ghana but in France, at a highway rest stop, where we lost computers and back-up hard drives among other items.  As a consequence we lost ALL copies of our photos taken between September 2013 and April 2014.  These pictures from our visit to Ghana had been posted to social media from whence they were retrieved; hence the slightly lower quality.  Gone forever are other photos from our Ghanaian experience, including sadly, those of a visit to a charity school for street urchins.

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