Heat coming through the rusty floorboards of our dilapidated van burned the bottoms of my feet as we clattered through the crowded shantytowns of Ghana’s capital, Accra, up the poorly maintained, potholed streets and down a dirt road, stopping only to wait for the goats, chickens, and children to clear the road before heading to the office of the Ghanaian Chronicle. My in-country coordinator introduced me to the editor of the newspaper, a man I would answer to but rarely see for the next two months. When told I was a journalism student at the University of South Carolina, he was pleased to hear I had any training at all.

I came to Ghana as a volunteer journalist to work for an independent newspaper in a part of the world where free speech is not a right and governments are known to shut down media outlets that challenge the status quo. The Chronicle earned its reputation in the West African nation under the previous government, when J. J. Rawlings was the president and the country was rife with corruption. The paper reports a circulation of 150,000, but my experience in Ghana has led me to believe that most statistics are fairly unreliable. The Chronicle is said to cater to the range of social classes in Accra, but the poverty in West Africa is so great the lower

classes spend most of their time finding food, water, and shelter. The average income in Ghana is about $1 a day, so buying newspapers is not a priority or even a possibility for most of them.

When Mr. Ohene, the editor asked me about the stories I was interested in writing, I told him I wanted to be a travel writer. He raised an eyebrow to indicate a more serious journalistic endeavor would have been a more appropriate response. I quickly recovered, if only momentarily, by telling him my minor is international studies and that I am interested in politics and social issues.

He fired a series of questions at me about local politics, and it became quickly apparent that my knowledge of Ghanaian goings-on was woefully inadequate. But he welcomed me aboard, nonetheless, and I was shown to the newsroom.

We walked outside and up a spiral staircase. The door was propped open to a small room with two metal desks, four computers and no air conditioning. The overhead fan provided the only respite from the heat as a dozen reporters perched on window sills and atop desks for lack of chairs, reading papers, writing stories, waiting for a computer, listening to the news on a small portable radio, and chatting in the local dialect. I introduced myself, spoke briefly with some of the reporters, and told them I would start Monday morning.

Getting to work on Monday proved to be an interesting start to a long and disorienting day. From the house I shared with other volunteers, I walked through the roundabout of Asylum Down, my new neighborhood, and followed a wide, open sewer down a street lined with market stalls to the main road where I waited for a tro-tro, the primary mode of transportation in Ghana. The stripped down minivans, usually with a rope holding the door on, can reasonably seat 12, but generally carry twice that many Ghanaians.

Everything nonessential to the operation of the vehicle usually has been sold, including interior panels, head rests, seatbelts and some windows. Fold-down jump seats in the aisle help accommodate the overflow of people.

The driver is assisted by a younger man who operates the door and leans out the window soliciting passengers and shouting the name of the tro-tro’s destination.

In Ghana, there are no addresses or postal codes, only landmarks. I was going to Kwame Nkrumah Circle, and I realized after taking the wrong tro-tro that my destination was called “Circle”, or was simply indicated by hand motion that resembles the action one takes to turn a sticky doorknob.

To board the tro-tro, you flag it down, pay 8 cents and hope you are headed in the right direction. To alight, you shout “bus stop” (baz stope with a Ghanaian accent, lest you be misunderstood), and 25 people with all their wares shift around to let you out.

After arriving at Circle, I made my way through a bustling market and into the Kokomlemle neighborhood, boarding another tro-tro to Newtown and the Chronicle’s office.

The tro-tro ride was a fabulous introduction to Ghanaian culture. It seems that driving an automobile in Ghana is an inalienable right of any man with a heartbeat who can get his hands on a car. Women almost never drive. There is a blatant disregard for traffic laws, and I had serious doubts as to whether any laws were enforced at all. The tro-tro bounced and weaved over bumpy roads as the vibrant and dusty and altogether bizarre aspects of my new world passed by the window. These rides would come to be one of my favorite parts of the day.

In the capital city of Accra, luxury cars and Internet cafes coexist with shantytowns and market stalls. Men in suits talk on mobile phones and they walk down dusty potholed streets lined with open sewers and 6-year-olds work all day in the sun selling chewing gum to help feed the family. High-level officials in designer clothes make deals with the World Bank in ultramodern glass office buildings while women outside in traditional clothes walk for miles with just enough water for the day balanced perfectly on their heads. But the city seems to serve as a benchmark, a potent expression of what a modern Africa has become, where the distribution of wealth is fiercely unequal and communal life has given way to competition for resources.

I spent the first couple of weeks at work reading the local papers; getting briefed on current issues; getting to know the terrain, the customs and the locals; and a whole lot of copy editing. I was only mildly surprised to find that no one in the office could type with more than two fingers and that many articles were written by hand before they were turned in. The computers had Windows 98 and no Internet access, but most of them worked most of the time.

While English is the official language of Ghana, the reporters communicated in Twi or Ga, two of approximately 70 tribal languages. They were paid per story, but I never sensed the fierce competitiveness that I suspect would have occurred under similar circumstances in America. There is an intrinsic kindness and generosity in the Ghanaian people that seems impossible considering the remarkable poverty in which they live.

Every time I would enter the newsroom one of my colleagues would say, “You are welcome,” to which I would always respond, “Thank you” but I was left wondering what favor they had done for me that I had forgotten to thank them for.

I later realized they meant “You are welcome here.” It was an expression of hospitality, a greeting that exhibited the warmth and openness of the Ghanaian people.

I began attending news conferences, most of which had to do with economic reform and monetary policy. The government of Ghana is democratic and stable, but lacks the money to get things done. I wrote mundane articles based on government news conferences and press releases and realized I could not understand Ghana until I left Accra and visited smaller cities and villages, in the same way that a traveler to New York City would not understand America until they saw more of it. And the disparity I encountered in outlying areas in Ghana are as profoundly different from Accra as New York is from rural America.

Traveling outside of Accra is like going back in time. I traveled east along the coast to Ada Foah with some friends, where the waters of Lake Volta flow downriver to meet the ocean. We arrived riverside and hired a canoe to take us downriver to the estuary. They were handmade wooden boats that came equipped with bowls for bailing, as the leaky canoes take on water, and we rowed an hour and a half under the equatorial midday sun.

Where the river meets the ocean I found a place of astonishing beauty, a white sand island with giant spindly palm trees, a couple of huts, some hammocks, and little else. After spending the afternoon there, we took canoes back upriver to the town center and crossed the peninsula to spend the night in beach huts on the ocean side of town.

In the morning, I walked to the shore to find 50 men from the village standing in a long line pulling in the fishing nets. They worked together, hands on the rope, singing and chanting rhythmically, hauling in the nets and rocking back in forth in time to the song. It was a snapshot of the original Ghana, where everyone cooperates and everyone benefits.

A week later I was back in Accra, my visions of the sense of collective responsibility and community that I experienced among the fishermen drifting away from me like the tide going out. In its place came the bustle of city life, like a whirlpool that draws everything to the urban center, the sense of individual survival pushing against the current.

That night I passed by the British Embassy and found hundreds of Ghanaians lining both sides of the road. They would spend the night in the street in hopes of getting a visa in the morning to leave the country. I had a painful realization: They do not want to be here. Ghana, for all its beauty, is easier to leave than to change.

From the street, I could hear a man preaching, chanting rhythmically, proclaiming the possibility of better days. His voice rang out in the night air, echoing through the dark, bouncing off the gates and high walls that separate the embassy from the street, the expats from the locals, Africa from the West. He paused and there is a moment of quiet, his words settling on the crowd. Then they start clapping, the sound rising like a wave; I am reminded that the people of Ghana are happy to be alive. Despite their troubles, they have hope.

This man’s song, his rhythm, is the same song as the fishermen in Ada Foah. And for all their struggle, there is solidarity and somehow happiness. This is the rhythm of Ghana.

Upon returning to Accra, I continued my work at the Chronicle, and while my daily commute became more mundane, I never stopped feeling surprised, shocked, and at times enlightened by the vastly different culture that I had immersed myself in. The Ghanaians are extremely religious Christians for the most part, and each news conference started and finished with a prayer. Afterward, the journalists were given a takeaway lunch and money that would usually cover a taxi fare to anywhere in the city, but the journalists always took the tro-tro and saved the two or three US dollars.

I was lucky to be in the office of the sub-editor, Kojo Omaboe, when Gregg Zachary from the Wall Street Journal came by with his newly arrived interns. He was heading a project called Journalists for Human Rights, which was intended to bring human rights issues into the media to promote positive social change within the country.

He seemed to think I was fairly entertaining as I briefed his new recruits on the way of life in the wilds of Africa. They had arrived a day before and had questions about getting around, talking to the locals, and whether they would get sick. By then, the answers were perfectly clear to me: the tro-tros are death traps, we may never fully understand the local culture and of course you will get sick. This is Africa.

Zachary introduced me to Kofi Coomson, a journalism legend in West Africa. He founded the Chronicle and is revered as one of the best journalists to come out of the region. He was imprisoned during the Rawlings era for seditious libel for implicating the government in illegal activities. Coomson is something of a celebrity and now lives in London. He tries to keep a low profile when visiting Ghana, where the streets are filled with people who either love or hate him.

Zachary invited me to attend a weeklong conference on reporting on human rights issues in Ghana. The conference was intended to be a workshop for journalists to help them understand the power that media wields in setting a public agenda for social reform. It also focused on trying to broaden the horizons of the journalists to get them interested in writing human interest and feature stories to elicit human compassion and empathy. Much of the reporting in Ghana tends to center on news conferences by the ministries and releases by various non-governmental organizations, and while they may talk about social problems, the human side of the stories is missing.

Gender inequality and female circumcision, child labor, allegations of witchcraft that lead to exile and torture, and discrimination against persons living with HIV or AIDS were among the important social problems facing Ghana that were discussed at the conference.

Plenty of space in the papers is devoted to reporting on commissions appointed by government ministries and launched to tackle these social issues, but little work is done to humanize the issues and challenge people to think critically about social mores and norms. It is one thing to say a nongovernmental organization has received a grant to do AIDS awareness work, but quite another to visit the Fevers Ward in the hospitals and speak candidly with AIDS patients about how they have been run out of their village and shunned by their families. This particular issue presented a twofold problem: in Ghana, the people living with AIDS are reluctant to go public about their condition, and reporters are reluctant to spend time with these people and devote energy to stories about them.

I found it particularly disheartening that many reporters harbor the same biases and prejudices as the public. They are products of their social climate, and in light of the unstable political situation in West Africa, political reporting gets all the press while social issues tend to fall by the wayside.

Furthermore, in places where poverty is widespread and the population is largely uneducated, critical thinking gives way to authoritarianism. In my experience, people are taught to defer to their superiors in most instances, hence the heavy reliance in the media on the words of the government ministries. Several reporters and locals told me that if I wanted a story, I should talk to the ministries.

There is a consensus that those in power are worth talking to, the average person’s plight is largely ignored. Despite the warmth of the Ghanaian people, there seems to be a discrepancy between their kindness and their lack of compassion and empathy for the sick and disenfranchised.

I found my experience to be an invaluable lesson in journalism, as well as international politics and social issues. It helped me realize that spending time in the newsroom and trying to emulate the style and tone of the Ghanaian media was taking away from the things I could be learning and seeing outside.

I had the chance to meet a young reporter from Public Radio International who would come to be a good friend and a helpful colleague. We went to the Liberian Peace Conference and got to meet with the delegates and other interest groups. But my time in Ghana was coming to an end, and I had already extended my ticket. I would spend several days at the airport trying to get out of Africa and not really wanting to leave at all.

But I learned that a lot of great stories start at the ground and move up. The media really have a tremendous responsibility to tell the public what is happening and to give people choices.