Swarm Creativity Blog

I had already been involved in a project getting computers to Kenyan schools for a number of years. When I was visiting Ghana for the first time, my friend Marlene and I went to see the Akosombo dam, which is holding back the Volta river to create the largest man made lake in Africa, and the second largest globally - as I was told. On our way back we were looking for a hotel to spend the night. When we came through the fishermen’s village of Anloga at the coast of Ghana towards Togo, we noticed a large and clean looking building in Western style among all the fishermen’s houses in native style. Our curiosity aroused, we came to the “Pin Drop Inn”, a neat little hotel. Quite unexpectedly, each of the rooms was up to Western standards, offering its own bathroom – with shower, toilet, and running water, air conditioning, and satellite TV. And most surprisingly, everything worked! I then started talking with Jerry, the owner of the hotel. His bright 11-year-old son offered to take me throu...

Usually I get along really well with the Ghanaians. Most of the time they are friendly people who are helpful and go out of their way to make guests feel at home. Occasionally, however, there seem to be clashes of cultures. I am still trying to make sense out of two tumultuous encounters with Ghanaian authorities where I only got what I needed after serious yelling, screaming, and threat of force. The first one occurred when I was applying for my visa for Ghana, the second one happened when we tried to check in for our flights back from Accra to Zurich. When I applied in June for a visa for my two children and me with the Ghanaian embassy in Berne, Switzerland, I was expecting a smooth process. After all, I had done the same thing last year, and had gotten back my passport with the visa stamp three days after I had sent it in. This time, however, things were different. I got the first warning, when, ten days after having sent in the passports, I got back a form asking for missing infor...

The state-run Ghanaian electricity company is periodically turning off electricity because of power shortages. One night we had no electricity in the house of my friends in Accra. As a precaution they had recently bought two Chinese-made lamps with battery chargers, each giving light bright enough to light a room for reading. That night, unfortunately, one of the freshly charged lamps went out after 5 minutes. I opened the lamp, and fiddled with the electrical contacts between bulb and battery. The light went on again. My friend then decided to go to bed and took the working lamp with her. My children and I were left with the temperamental lamp, which went out again after 3 minutes. Opening up the lamp cover under the weak light of another flashlight and fiddling with the contacts got the lights back on for another 3 minutes. After having repeated this process 4 times, my kids and I decided to give up on reading and went to bed. Next morning both lamps worked fine again, as did the ele...

Yesterday morning our houseboy killed a poisonous snake in our garden. The property of my friend is not that big, it has a small, but well-tended garden. The garden is fenced in, and the fence is lined by overgrowing flower bushes. When the houseboy was cutting the bushes, he suddenly got really exited and called us to show us a pretty large snake, about 1.2 meters long, with dark green and yellow stripes. The snake was resting high up in the bushes, right within the flower bush which had overgrown the side door where all the visitors were passing through. It was a pretty eerie feeling that we might have come and gone for some days right underneath a poisonous snake. The fix of the houseboy to this problem was as radical as it was short and brutal. He called another man from the neighborhood for help. With a long stick the houseboy threw the snake out of the bush on the street, and then the other man shattered the snake’s head with a large stone – Risk management by eliminating the ris...

While the driver and I were standing outside the car and waiting to have our inflated tire repaired (see previous post), my children inside the car were eating candy. When they saw a few kids approaching, they threw them out some of the shrink-wrapped candy. First, the kids did not know what to do with the little square pieces wrapped into glittering aluminum foil, but once the first one had unwrapped the candy and put it into her little mouth, a delighted smile lighted up all over her face. More children started flocking to the car, and then even some half-grown-ups joined them. My children were busy throwing candy out the car window. But then things started getting out of control. The swarm of kids became more aggressive, banging at the car door, so I started getting worried for my friend’s car. I took the bag of candies and stepped away from the car. Now the entire swarm, about 20 children, aged from probably three to sixteen years, was surrounding me. I could not get out the candie...

At the end of our beach holidays we drove back from Axim to Accra. Our friends had sent their SUV with a driver to pick us up at the beach resort. Suddenly, we were near the old capital of Ghana Cape Coast, our driver pulled the car in a filling station, telling us that he had noticed a strange sound. I then walked around the car, and noticed that one of the tires was flat. At the filling station, however, they told us that they were only equipped to pump gas and could not exchange our spare tire. Suddenly, and without comment, our driver disappeared, taking the car keys with him. We could do nothing but wait in the hot sun and make sure that our belongings left in the unlocked car stayed where they were. We were very relieved when 15 minutes later our driver came back, bringing with him a powerfully built young man in a mechanic’s overall. The young man then searched for our car jack, which, as it turned out, was not working. The young man disappeared again, and 20 minutes later, came...

Yesterday we went to the small town of Axim. Axim is an old town with a similarly old historic slave castle. My children and I walked around in the small town, looking at the slave castle and the street vendors and their stalls lining the sides of the street. While I was quite fascinated by the bustling street live, I was surprised to learn that my kids were less than taken with the colorful scenery. They found the streets and houses very dirty, and the smell coming from the open sewage canals disgusting. While the kids were right in that the red dust was indeed everywhere because the streets are mostly unpaved, and the canals indeed, well, stank, I found the scenery so full of life that I could have watched it for a long time. Not so my kids. After a ten-minute walk, and after quickly drinking a cold coke from one of the street vendors, they insisted to take a taxi and get back to the hotel as quickly as possible. It seems that becoming immersed into a new swarm is a long learning exp...

I frequently noticed in Ghana that while my opposite was trying to do the best for me, his failure to explain me his reasoning converted the result into the opposite. Sometime this can go to some extremes where the motivations on both sides are not really clear. Our experiences in the beach restaurant at the romantic Axim beach resort set an excellent example. It is no easy thing to get ice cream in Ghana. Electricity breaks down all the time, and frequently it is turned off for half a day which means that it is hard to keep ice cream in its icy state for extended periods of time. The more pleasant our surprise, when the menu of our beach hotel in Axim offered ice cream. When we ordered our ice cream, the three of us chose chocolate and strawberry from the waiter. We were slightly surprised when the restaurant manager himself proudly brought us mixed strawberry and vanilla ice. When we informed him that we had ordered strawberry and chocolate, he deeply apologized and promised to bri...

Our adventures started well before boarding our flight for Accra. Seven days before we were supposed to get on the Lufthansa plane from Zurich to Accra – I was still in Boston at that time – I got a phone call in the middle of the night from the travel agent, telling me that the flight to Accra had been cancelled by Lufthansa. He could not explain why. I then started calling around, and in the end the travel agent was able to book a flight for the three of us one day later than planned from Alitalia, through Milan instead of Frankfurt. The reason Lufthansa could not fly was that it had started a squabble with the Ghanaian government about landing rights. As it was flying from Frankfurt to Accra with a stop in Lagos on behalf of Air Ghana, the Ghanaian government wanted compensation for these flights, which Lufthansa refused to pay. After a week of squabbling, the two parties came to agreement, and our flight back to Zurich should now happen with Lufthansa as planned. Our flight with Al...

This summer we (my son, 14, and my daughter, 15 years old, and I) are spending our holidays in Ghana. The “official” purpose of our trip is to install 12 computers and set up an Internet cafe for the secondary school of Anloga, a fishermen’s village at the coast of Ghana close to the border to Togo. Unofficially, we are also visiting friends in Accra and spending sunny days at the long Ghanaian beaches.