What's in a name? In Ghana... quite a lot!
In addition to your day name, you have a traditional name - let's take my coworker's name as an example: Obinewa.
Then you have the name that you tell people like me who can't seem to pronounce or remember most things in Twi (I'm studying hard though!): e.g. Sarah.
Through a top-secret, highly-technological and sophisticated investigation on Google, I discovered that I was born on a Sunday (Mom, can you attest to this?). This means my "day name" is Akosua (pronounced "Geoffrey"... just kidding, it's pronounced "Ako-zia").
In addition to learning this fun piece of information, last night I met with a man named Emmanuel who is the assistant-head of sound production at a major TV station in Ghana. We had met earlier in the week at Abantu's "Forum on Gender Implications of Climate Change" where quite a bit of media showed up to report on the major issues.
Emmanuel and his cameraman were a big disgruntled when I met them as the forum was running late. I decided to take the opportunity to ask them about their work and... oh who am I kidding? I used the opportunity to tell them that I'm looking to do a very short documentary film project here and wanted to know if they had any suggestions on where I could go for crew, production equipment etc. I cut to the chase pretty quickly.
Turns out they were both quite enticed by the idea. I was very clear that I have absolutely zero budget, so this would just be for the experience. That seemed fine with them! Especially Emmanuel who tends to work on film crews outside of work. We decided to meet last night and it went very well!
I started by telling Emmanuel some of the ideas I had for documentaries, and the limitations I would face doing this alone - being a foreigner, it is hard to earn strangers' trust if you ask if you can film them. I am also not in a position yet to know what some of the most intriguing stories are in Ghana - what are the major issues people want to know about here? What are the stories on people's minds?
We discussed several ideas, I pushed Emmanuel to give me some ideas he would like to see in a documentary. I mentioned my idea of following a day in the life of Tro Tro drivers and the Mates. I thought that would be a really fun short documentary (though I would have to find some kind of point to the film). This reminded him of a group of women called (excuse my Twi) "kayayo." These are women who generally come to Accra from poorer rural areas who, for money, carry heavy loads on their head for people at the market (essentially transporting goods for people who don't want to carry the products and goods themselves). Emmanuel said he sympathized for these women, and we talked about making a documentary about their story and to investigate how kayayos in the past have moved on to different, less laborious work.
[Five Seconds later...]
Well, folks and Emmanuel... unfortunately after googling the term Kayayo, it appears a film has already been made about the issue and has won a prize - check it out here. Don't you hate it when people travel through time to the future, eavesdrop on your conversation in a bar, and then go backwards in time to make an award-winning film with YOUR idea??? Me too.
Well, we have some other ideas in the bank. (Luckily with THIS bank I can access my resources whenever I wish as opposed to my actual financial bank account that seems to only work once a week if I'm lucky and only at the bank near my work during the day... but I digress) I'll keep my ideas to myself for now for fear that someone else will come from the past, read my blog, and then go back to their time and make the movie and become famous and never credit me (in the future). Stupid timetravelling thieves!
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