Its a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

I have been heard to say to my fellow African senior missionaries, when something is just completely different than it would have been somewhere along the Wasatch Front, “remember, you could be on a mission in Cleveland.” One of the things which distinguishes our mission to Africa from a mission to Cleveland is our neighborhood. What follows is a guided tour of our neighborhood. The pictures were taken on one of our morning walks.



This is our back gate. All upscale properties in Accra have large gates, usually with razor wire or glass on the top of the wall. Our guard house is on the right side of the gate.



Though drivers complain of potholes in the roads Accra does have some very solid infrastructure. This is a picture of the gutter on our walk. Many of the gutters are covered with the cement slabs you see here. Some are not. This picture shows the gutter in a place where the slab has been removed. You can see that the underlying gutter is concrete and about four feet deep. A very good investment for a city which gets equatorial rain storms.




This is my walking companion in front of a construction project which is temporarily on hold. There is a lot of construction going on in Accra, some of it high rise construction as seen in the next picture.



The construction workers can eat at this road side café. These folks show up every morning with their cooking equipment and put their business together and sell food to the construction workers and to anyone else who passes by and then take their equipment back home at the end of the day.



I am guessing that if you go for a morning walk in Cleveland you don’t run into a chicken or to a man going to work with his man wagon.


Here is a man under a tree with his belongings. He and his stuff are there every morning we walk that direction. I think he lives under the tree at night even though it looks like he has a job. In Accra you never have to worry about getting snowed on.



This is the final view of our walk.